John Wilbanks on the Knowledge Web

Here's a nice meditation from Science Commons' John Wilbanks on openness, access and innovation, which includes the following thoughts on the "knowledge web":

Just to be clear, here’s what I mean by a knowledge web: it’s when today’s web has enough power to work as well for science as it currently works for culture. That means databases are integrated as easily as web documents, and it means that powerful search engines let scientists ask complex research questions and have some comfort that they’re seeing all the relevant public information in the answers. A knowledge web is when journal articles have hyperlinks inside them, not just citations, letting systems like Google do their job properly.

A knowledge web is predicated on access, and not control, of knowledge. There will never be a competition to provide the best single-point query to the full-text of journals without access- unless the journals all merge down into one company. That’s the only way a controlled system covers the whole world, through monopoly. There will never be a knowledge web where the entire backfile is hyperlinked to databases for relevance based indexing without access. Scientists won’t get to use the newest and best technologies until those companies that control knowledge decide to adopt those technologies. Control is the enemy of testing the newest technologies, of building one’s own system to suit one’s own needs. We have to have access to build a knowledge web, at least if we hope to replicate the success of the regular Web and the Internet.

GPM on LWN.net

In the spirit of passing on vaguely useful information, I notice that LWN.net has put together a handy master index of external contributors, including yours truly.

SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access

This is something that I've thought a good idea for a while; now, it seems to be taking shape:

SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), a leading organization of European research libraries, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Lund University Libraries today announced the launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access journals. Growing numbers of peer-reviewed research journals are opening-up their content online, removing access barriers and allowing all interested readers the opportunity of reading the papers online, with over 3300 such journals listed in the DOAJ, hosted by Lund University Libraries in Sweden.

However, the maximum benefit from this wonderful resource is not being realised as confusion surrounds the use and reuse of material published in such journals. Increasingly, researchers wish to mine large segments of the literature to discover new, unimagined connections and relationships. Librarians wish to host material locally for preservation purposes. Greater clarity will bring benefits to authors, users, and journals.

In order for open access journals to be even more useful and thus receive more exposure and provide more value to the research community it is very important that open access journals offer standardized, easily retrievable information about what kinds of reuse are allowed. Therefore, we are advising that all journals provide clear and unambiguous statements regarding the copyright statement of the papers they publish. To qualify for the SPARC Europe Seal a journal must use the Creative Commons By (CC-BY) license which is the most user-friendly license and corresponds to the ethos of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

The second strand of the Seal is that journals should provide metadata for all their articles to the DOAJ, who will then make the metadata OAI-compliant. This will increase the visibility of the papers and allow OAI-harvesters to include details of the journal articles in their services.

One of the greatest dangers is that the term "open access" be diluted by unscrupulous misappropriation. With luck, the new seal will help to provide an official definition of what is and isn't open access. My only concern is with the name: the "Europe" bit makes it sound like it doesn't apply elsewhere....

Patron Saint of Computing on Free Software

During the writing of Rebel Code I had the privilege of talking to nearly all of the world's top hackers. Among those, Donald Knuth is pretty much at the apex, certainly in the world of computer science.

His interviews are all-too rare these days, not least because he is racing against time to write as much of his magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming, as he can. So I was pleased to come across this one, in which St Donald has these wise words to say on the subject of free software:

The success of open source code is perhaps the only thing in the computer field that hasn’t surprised me during the past several decades. But it still hasn’t reached its full potential; I believe that open-source programs will begin to be completely dominant as the economy moves more and more from products towards services, and as more and more volunteers arise to improve the code.

For example, open-source code can produce thousands of binaries, tuned perfectly to the configurations of individual users, whereas commercial software usually will exist in only a few versions. A generic binary executable file must include things like inefficient "sync" instructions that are totally inappropriate for many installations; such wastage goes away when the source code is highly configurable. This should be a huge win for open source.

(Via tuxmachines.org.)

The Hidden Success of Linux

Embedded systems are something of an iceberg: most of the activity is happening invisibly, so it's easy to overlook how far Linux has come in this sector:

Laut einer Studie des amerikanischen Marktforschungsunternehmens VDC ist Linux das meistgenutzte Embedded-Betriebssystem in der Industrie. 18 Prozent aller Ingenieure aus dem Embedded-Umfeld, die an der Studie teilnahmen, verwenden eine Linux-Firmware für ihre Geräte. Weitere fünf Prozent bedienen sich bei anderen freien Embedded-Systemen wie dem Real-Time-Projekt FreeRTOS, TinyOS oder eCOS.
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Gründe für den Einsatz von Linux im Embedded-Bereich sind, dass es viele Entwicklungs-Tools kostenlos gibt und für die Linux-Firmware auch keine Lizenzkosten (Royalties) pro produziertem Gerät anfallen. Als weitere wichtige Vorteile nannten die Ingenieure die große Flexibilität von Linux durch die offenen Quellen, die jederzeit beliebig angepasst werden könnten, sowie eine gewisse Vertrautheit mit Linux allgemein.

[According to a study from the American market research company VDC, Linux is the most-used embedded operating system. 18 per cent of all engineers in the embedded world who took part in the survey use Linux for their devices. Another five per cent use other free embedded systems such as the real-time project FreeRTOS, TinyOS or eCOS.

Among the reasons for adopting Linux are the many development tools that are freely available and that no royalties need to be paid per device. Engineers cited Linux's great flexibility as a result of its open source nature, allowing it to be modified in any way, as well as a certain familiaty with Linux in general as further advantages.]

The Ultimate Ultraportable List

Lost in the deluge of GNU/Linux ultraportable announcements? Me too. Here's a consolidate list that might help.

Poor Little Rich Intellectual Monopolies

Here's a droll piece about poor, little unloved intellectual monopolies:

At the highest level, there are those who no longer believe that all property is theft but appear to make an exception for IP. Since every newly created work builds upon the words, the thoughts, the ideas, and the knowledge created by countless others in their furtherance of humanity, any attempt to ring-fence an item of IP, and exclude others from it is an attempt to misappropriate part of the common intellectual heritage of mankind. Since knowledge and information can be shared with others without depriving oneself of them, there is no loss to oneself if such an act of sharing takes place.

At a lower level, there are those who accept the existence of IP rights, but reserve their criticisms and their hostility for specific manifestations of it: the enforcement of copyright against large-scale private copyists, the use of trade mark rights to carve up markets so that genuine goods cannot be imported from a country where they are sold cheaply for resale in another country where they fetch a better price; the theft of traditional knowledge and culture which is then repackaged as copyright- or patent-protected property; the patrolling of industry by unproductive patent trolls, intent upon securing a rent where they create no value; death by patent monopoly for millions in the developing world who, in the unlikely event that they can even access vital medicines, cannot afford them.

Sounds like a fair summary. It concludes:

attitudes toward IP rights focus principally upon their negative qualities and do not connect them with that which is positive. Thus, new medicines save lives, while patents kill; music is cool, while copyright is a clamp; brands are brilliant, while trade marks are tools of trade manipulation. It is too much to hope that the public at large will wake up one morning, enlightened at the beneficial, positive, and above all necessary role played by IP rights, but we can at least aspire to teach that, between that which they praise and that which they condemn, there is a powerful causative connection.

To which I would reply: Why bother? Given the problems with intellectual monopolies nicely summarised above, isn't it time to admit that in fact there are no benefits, that it is all a hideous con, a house of cards that needs to blown down once and for ever? (Via IPKat.)

Microsoft on the Rocks?

Hardly, with a quarterly profit of $4.39 billion, but this is interesting:

Sales in the division selling Office and other business applications fell, hit by lower demand.

As was this:

One factor denting profits was a $1.42bn fine imposed by the European Commission for breaching competition rules.

Put like that, the fine was a significant chunk of Microsoft's profits. Maybe it actually felt it this time.

Lost in the Clouds

Here's a piece about cloud computing that ask a pertinent question:

Why isn't the world's biggest and most powerful software company taking the initiative here? For all of Microsoft's chest beating about internet delivery as the next phase of its development, we've seen precious little in the way of action.

There are so many reasons that it's hard to pin down. Perhaps it's with Ray Ozzie, the successor to Bill Gates, who is still settling into his job. Or perhaps it's just the stifling bureaucracy of a corporation that stretches as far as the eye can see.

But there's also something missing from this analysis of cloud computing. Nowhere is it mentioned that an essential prerequisite for creating huge server farms to keep the clouds afloat is free software: if Google or Amazon had to use proprietary software, paying for each instance clouds would never, er, get off the ground.

Just as the open source LAMP stack created the current wave of Web 2.0 companies, so free software will run the magic machinery keeping clouds aloft.

Radical Openness

It's the new buzzword:

Yahoo Inc. is swinging the doors of its Web platforms wide open to let outside developers create applications across its network of sites and is radically stitching together its online services under the social profile concept.

The idea is to let the hundreds of millions of people who use its Web mail, instant messaging, calendar, photo management and other online services replicate the social experience that social networks like MySpace and Facebook have made so popular.

O(SS) Canada! Our Home and Native Land!

Some impressive official stats about open source use in Canada:

"Open source" software is rising in popularity, according to survey data. Open source software is software for which the underlying source code is readily available for modification by any interested person or firm.

In 2007, an estimated 17% of private sector firms reported using open source software, up from about 10% just two years earlier, when this practice was first measured.

As in previous years, about one-half of organizations in the public sector reported using open source software in 2007.

An advantage of open source software is flexibility, allowing users to customize or modify the software to their specific needs. In 2007, 3% of private firms and 13% of public organizations reported customizing open source software.

That's damn good growth: 10% to 17% in just two years.... (Via Michael Geist.)

52 Million Brazilian Mini-Penguinistas

That's what will soon be reality, according to this:

until the end of this year there will be already 29,000 labs deployed, serving approximately 36 million students. This number grows to more than 53,000 by the end of 2009, and at that time 52 million students will have access to them. You can also see in the slide a solution that is being developed for classrooms: a single hardware unit with integrated projector, cpu, bundled content and DVD player. With it, digital content will no longer be restricted to the info lab, and will be usable by teachers in the traditional classrooms as well.

Each info lab contains a server and 7 CPUs, providing 15 access points via a multiterminal hardware and software solution

There is also a different lab configuration for schools in rural areas. These schools usually have only one or two rooms, and very weak infrastructure. So a solution that minimizes power consumption was devised, and it allows 5 seats using a single CPU, with no server required

What's the betting that Brazil soon becomes a hotbed of open source hackers? (Via tuxmachines.org.)

Is Cheating in Microsoft's DNA?

Seems so:

I was looking to see what search sites might have a particular bug that I (ahem) came across and was trying the search for the number 0 in various places. There is a pretty good Wikipedia page about zero. Zero has a rich and interesting history and there are many other potentially reasonable results.

But I was surprised to see MSN search had demoted their good results below some crappy ones from MSDN

All's Well That Googles Well

I was worrying that Google's Summer of Code might be fizzling out. Happily, it seems that things are fine:

Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Over the past three years, the program has brought together over 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. This year, we're welcoming 1125 student contributors and 175 Free and Open Source projects into the program.

Sounds pretty healthy.

Russkies Under the Radar

Russia is one of the countries I try to follow as closely as I can in terms of free software because it is both (a) potentially a huge market and (b) rather overlooked. Here's an excellent summary of an important official government document that looks at open source and the issues it raises in Russia:

Russian Ministry on Information Technology and Communications published recently a document entitled Concept of development and usage of Free Software in the Russian Federation (Russian). It is a 29-page text, which is by far the most detailed roadmap of government involvement in Free Software. The legal status of this document is not very strong: in the recent Russian governmental tradition a ‘concept’ is a kind of a detailed policy declaration, which may not be fully observed or may even be rejected or forgotten after a short period of time. However, it may serve as groundwork for future projects and more specific policy measures. Thus, even though a concept document does not create anything by itself, its availability is necessary for creation of good things.

Open Enterprise Interviews

On my other gig, at Computerworld UK, there's now a handy page bringing together the growing collection of interviews with open source luminaries. Here's the list so far:

Denis Lussier: Postgres

Rich Guth: Actuate

Jeff Haynie: Appcelerator

Ismael Ghalimi: Intalio

Mary Lou Jepsen: One Laptop Per Child founding CTO

Howard Chu: OpenLDAP chief architect

Ivo Jansch: PHP

Stefane Fermigier: Nuxeo

Javier Soltero: CEO Hyperic

Jono Bacon: Canonical's Ubuntu Community Manager

Fabrizio Capobianco: Funambol founder

Tristan Nitot: President Mozilla Europe

Dominic Sartorio: President Open Solutions Alliance

Mark Taylor: President Open Source Consortium

Lots more in the pipeline.

Humour of the Week

"There's free software and then there’s open source," he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.

Spotted by the eagle-eyed Mike Masnick, who, for the sake of younger viewers, explains the obvious.

Well, Well, WALS

Now that's what I call open content:

WALS is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than 40 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject).

WALS consists of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and "hand"/"arm" polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1110 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether 2,650 languages are shown on the maps, and more than 58,000 datapoints give information on features in particular languages.

WALS thus makes information on the structural diversity of the world's languages available to a large audience, including interested nonlinguists as well as linguists who would not normally read grammars of exotic languages or specialized works by comparative linguists. Although endangered languages are not particularly emphasized, they are automatically foregrounded because of the large sample of languages represented on each map, where each language (independently of its number of speakers) is shown by a single symbol.

(Via Languagehat.)

OLPC is Dead...

...and Matthew Aslett is dead-on:

“One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist,” Negroponte told the AP, while lamenting that the focus on open source software had caused technical problems, such as limiting support for Flash. “Negroponte said he was mainly concerned with putting as many laptops as possible in children’s hands,” added the AP.

The focus on laptop sales is laudable, but it is debatable whether it justifies abandoning open source software. This is a matter not of fundamentalism, but of principles.

Sad, but the prospect of Sugar running on other low-cost GNU/Linux laptops almost makes up for it.

Update: Even more on Negroponte's insane embrace of Windows XP, and his apparent lack of understanding as far as open source is concerned, here.

Why Dear Trees Really Are Dear

A year ago, I wrote about the plight of urban trees. At the time, I never imagined we'd have a solution as far-sighted as this:

A plane tree in central London has been valued at £750,000 under a new system that puts a "price" on trees. How?

A six-foot-wide plane in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, is thought to be the UK's most valuable tree.

Large, mature, city trees like this one are being blamed - sometimes wrongly and often fatally - for damage to neighbouring properties.

But it is hoped a new valuation system will make it harder for "expensive" trees to be felled due to doubtful suspicions they are to blame for subsidence.

...

Putting a price on a tree changes people's attitudes and if developers think in financial terms, then a community asset must be valued in the same currency, he says.

So if a developer is in court for illegally destroying a tree, then the fine could be a reflection of the tree's value, says Mr Stokes. Or if a new development replaces a stock of trees then the builder could contribute to the community a sum equal to the value of that lost stock.

Brilliant. Now, if we could only apply that to all the rest - air, water, animals, plants....

Closing MySQL: Marten Mickos Responds

On Open Enterprise blog.

DRM: The Gift that Keeps on Taking

Now, people, aren't you really glad you bought DRM'd music:

Customers who have purchased music from Microsoft's now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers (and OS) they want to authorize forever, or give up access to the music they paid for. Why? Because Microsoft has decided that it's done supporting the service and will be turning off the MSN Music license servers by the end of this summer.

...

This doesn't just apply to the five different computers that PlaysForSure allows users to authorize, it also applies to operating systems on the same machine (users need to reauthorize a machine after they upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, for example). Once September rolls around, users are committed to whatever five machines they may have authorized—along with whatever OS they are running.

Good job nobody's upgrading to Vista, anyway.

How Will Microsoft Cope with Clouds?

One of the central questions for future computing is: How will Microsoft cope with clouds? In other words, when the PC platform becomes almost an adjunct, how will the company maintain its vice-like grip on the market? A typically thorough post here from Mary Jo Foley about Microsoft's Live Mesh provides some important clues. Here's one part that I found particularly interesting:

Even though the Live Mesh team went out of its way to emphasize that Microsoft sees Live Mesh as an open platform, and not just one designed to appeal to the Windows/.Net choir, both Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (Silverlight) are key elements of the Live Mesh developer stack (a diagram of which — here on the left — can be enlarged to full size by clicking on it). Support for Flash, Cocoa, JavaScript and other non-Microsoft-centric technologies is there, too. But given Live Mesh is from Microsoft, I’d wager Silverlight applications and services will look and work better as Live Mesh endpoints than apps/services built on and for Mac OSX/Safari, Linux and Mozilla ones.

This is standard lock-in: provide a nominally "open" platform, but make sure it works better with Microsoft products - a variant on the old "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run." Some things never change....

Open Enterprise Interview: Denis Lussier

On Open Enterprise blog.

May You Live in Interesting Times

And this is certainly interesting:

Last night [Editor's note: Sunday, Apr 20] around 7pm my [American] friend was attacked by a mob of about 150 people outside the Carrefour in Zhuzhou, Hunan (near his placement site). When leaving Carrefour some of the crowd started shouting at him and he tried to say he didn't have anything to do with the Olympics, but 3 men started to push him and then he was hit in the back of the head at least 3 times. He started to run, and the mob chased him. He jumped into a cab, but the mob surrounded the car and started shaking and rocking it. The cab driver was shouting at him to get out. Then they started hitting the car. The crowd was shouting "kill him! kill the Frenchman." He called the Field Director while in the back of the car. The cab driver abandon the car when he saw police coming. Two police made there way though the mob and managed to drive the cab away. The Field Director alerted the Director Shu of the Hunan Department of Education. The police got him another cab and he took it from Zhuzhou to the field director's home in Changsha. He spending the night here in Changsha and is likely leaving China as soon as possible.

Glad I'm not going to the Olympics this year....

Update: Sigh, looks like some over-hasty reporting here.... Why can't people check this stuff out *before* posting?