Becta and Becta

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mighty Mike vs. Nugatory Nathan

As readers of this blog may have gathered, I am not the biggest fan of Nathan Myhrvold. I am, however, a big fan of Mike Masnick, especially when he writes posts like this:

And here Myhrvold is either outright lying or he's ignorant (he can let us know which one). First of all no one has ever said that patent litigation is threatening to stop all innovation. They've just said that it is slowing the pace of innovation. And there's plenty of evidence to support that, despite Myhrvold's claim that there's none. James Bessen and Michael Meurer just came out with a whole book detailing much of the evidence, and David Levine and Michele Boldrin also have a book with even more evidence. Did Myhrvold simply not know about these? Or is he lying to PC World?

Go on, Mike, tell us what you *really* think....

Is Microsoft Poisoning its Sea of Troubles?

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Art of the Open Source Release

Mark Shuttleworth writes about another advantage that free software sets enjoys over monolithic, proprietary code collections:

An update on the long term plans for Ubuntu release management. 8.04 LTS represented a very significant step forward in our release management thinking. To the best of my knowledge there has never been an “enterprise platform” release delivered exactly on schedule, to the day, in any proprietary or Linux OS. Not only did it prove that we could execute an LTS release in the standard 6-month timeframe, but it showed that we could commit to such an LTS the cycle beforehand. Kudos to the technical decision-makers, the release managers, and the whole community who aligned our efforts with that goal.

As a result, we can commit that the next LTS release of Ubuntu will be 10.04 LTS, in April 2010.

This represents one of the most extraordinary, and to me somewhat unexpected, benefits of free software to those who deploy it. Most people would assume that precise release management would depend on having total control of all the moving parts - and hence only be possible in a proprietary setting. Microsoft writes (almost) every line of code in Windows, so you would think they would be able to set, and hit, a precise target date for delivery. But in fact the reverse is true - free software distributions or OSV’s can provide much better assurances with regard to delivery dates than proprietary OSV’s, because we can focus on the critical role of component selection, integration, testing, patch management and distribution rather than the pieces which upstream projects are better able to handle - core component feature development. This is in my mind a very compelling reason for distributions to focus on distribution - that’s the one thing they do which the upstreams don’t, so they need to invest heavily in that in order to serve as the most efficient conduit of upstream’s work.

Why is Microsoft Poking the EU in the Eye?

On Open Enterprise blog.

How Microsoft Uses Open Against Open

To my shame, Peter Murray-Rust put up a reply to my post below in just a few hours, where it had taken me days to answer his original posting. So with this reply to his reply, I'm trying to do better.

Peter includes this disclaimer:

Before diving in I should get a potential conflict of interest out of the way. We are about to receive funding from Microsoft (for the OREChem project (see post on Chemistry Repositories). This does not buy an artificial silence on commenting on Microsoft’s practice, any more than if I accept a grant from JISC or EPSRC I will refrain from speaking my mind. Nor do I have to love their products. I currently hate Vista. However I need an MS OS on my machine because it makes it easier to use tools such as LiveMeeting (a system for sharing desktops). I’ve used LiveMeeting once and I liked it. OK, Joe did the driving because he knows his way round better than me, but I can learn it. Not everything MS does is bad and not everything it does is good.

Now, I have not the slightest doubt about Peter's future independence, but I do think it's an interesting comment.

It shows that even such a key defender of openness as Peter finds he "needs an MS OS on my machine because it makes it easier to use tools such as LiveMeeting (a system for sharing desktops)". I presume that Microsoft's money comes without strings, but inevitably its availability will make buying its own software easier. Where a cash-strapped project would cast an interested eye over free alternatives, and be willing to pay the price of grappling with new software, those with enough funding - from Microsoft or elsewhere - may well just opt for the familiar.

This is doubtless happening all over the place in science, which means that many simply forget that there are alternatives to Microsoft's products. Instead - quite understandably - they concentrate on the science. But what this implies is that however open that science may be, however much it pushes forward open access and open data, say, its roots are likely remain in the arid soil of closed source, and that Microsoft's money has the effect of co-opting supporters of these other kinds of openness in its own battle against the foundational openness of free software.

A Word in Your Ear

A little while back I gave Peter Murray-Rust a hard time for daring to suggest that OOXML might be acceptable for archiving purposes.

Here's his response to that lambasting:

My point is that - at present - we have few alternatives. Authors use Word or LaTeX. We can try to change them - and Peter Sefton (and we) are trying to do this with the ICE system. But realistically we aren’t going to change them any time soon.

My point was that if the authors deposit Word we can do something with it which we cannot do anything with PDF. It may be horrible, but it’s less horrible than PDF. And it exists.

There are two issues here. The second concerns translators between OOXML and ODF. Although in theory that's a good solution, in practice, it's not, because the translators don't work very well. They are essentially a Microsoft fig-leaf so that it can claim using OOXML isn't a barrier to exporting it elsewhere. They probably won't ever work very well because of the proprietary nature of the OOXML format: there's just too much gunk in there ever to convert it cleanly to anything.

The larger question is what needs to be done to convince scientists and others to adopt ODF - or least in a format that can be converted to ODF. I don't have any easy answers. The best thing, obviously, would be for people to start using OpenOffice.org or similar: is that really too much to ask? After all, the thing's free, it's easy to use - what's not to like?

Perhaps we need some concerted campaign within universities to give out free copies of OOo/run short hands-on courses so that people can see this for themselves. Maybe the central problem is that the university world (outside computing, at least) is too addicted to its daily fixes of Windows and Office.

In Praise of the Public Domain

I write a lot about licensing here. Indeed, licensing arguably lies at the heart of free software. But there's another important way of looking at things, which is essentially licence-less, as John Wilbanks reminds us:

It is a damn shame that we no longer think of the public domain as an option that is attractive. It’s a sign of the victory of the content holders that the free licensing movements work against that something without a license – something that is truly free, not just just free “as in” – is somehow thought to be worse. We’ve bought into their games if we allow the public domain to be defined as the BSD. The idea of the public domain has been subjected to continuous erosion thanks to both the big content companies and our own movements, to the point where we think freedom only comes in a contract.

The public domain is not contractually constructed. It just is. It cannot be made more free, only less free. And if we start a culture of licensing and enclosing the public domain (stuff that is actually already free, like the human genome) in the name of “freedom” we’re playing a dangerous game.

How true. Which means that those of us in the free software world must be careful that we don't play into the hands of those who want *everything* to be licensed.

Another Pebble on the Open Driver Cairn

I've written elsewhere about the signs that things are finally moving on the open source drivers front. Here's one more pebble on the cairn:

VIA has released over 16,000 lines of code that provides a frame-buffer driver in the Linux kernel. This code is licensed under the GNU GPLv2 and appears to be crafted by VIA's Joseph Chan. Supported by this driver is VIA's Unichrome CLE266, K400, K800, PM800, CN700, CX700, K8M890, P4M890, P4M900, and VX800 IGPs. We're still pouring over the code, but it seems to be in pretty good shape and does support digital connections (and does seem to support HDMI already) -- in other words it appears to be further along then when the RadeonHD driver started out.

...


Kudos go out to VIA Technologies this morning for this code dump, but the work isn't over. They still have a lot of work left to do to mend relations with the Unichrome and OpenChrome projects and focusing upon 3D and video playback work, etc. However, this is a step forward in showing that VIA may actually come around this time and play ball with the open-source community.

(Via James Tyrrell.)

Has Thunderbird Finally Taken Off?

There's an interesting set of data on TechCrunch derived from the consolidated activity of users of the RescueTime service. This shows you exactly how long you are spending on each app; the aggregrate results therefore provide fascinating insights into what people in general - or at least RescueTime users - are doing

One caveat is that the service seems to be aimed mostly at Windows and Mac users (although a GNU/Linux version is available), and so results are necessarily skewed. Despite this, there's an amazing result amongst the data: the ninth most-used app is Thunderbird.

Now, its usage (2.26%) may only be around a sixth of Outlook's (12.44%) but that still seems to me to be astonishing. It also suggests that Thunderbird is doing rather better than many - myself included - assumed. The received wisdom is that Firefox is storming away (unfortunately, there's no breakdown by browser in the RescueTime set: things are shown by site, rather), Thunderbird is miles behind. That seems not to be the case if these figures are at all representative of the wider world. And even if they're not, it suggests early adopters are, well, adopting Thunderbird in significant numbers.

Death of a Meme: GPL Wins in Court Again

On Open Enterprise blog.

UX: Usability, Productivity, Enjoyment

I'm happy to announce the new logo of the User Experience Team.

The main goal of the logo is to penetrate core values of the project:

* Usability,
* Productivity,
* Enjoyment

The three terms summarize in a very short manner what the User Experience Team's overall goals are.

What's interesting about this is that usability, productivity and enjoyment have traditionally been rather neglected in the open source, so it's good to see them getting some respect in the OpenOffice.org project. And a shiny new logo.

Microsoft Gives a Big Hug to ISO SC34...

...and some dosh.

Intellectual (Monopoly) Ventures

Mike Masnick is a truly fantastic writer, because he begins a piece thus:

Malcolm Gladwell is a truly fantastic writer

...only to end up proving that Gladwell may be a great writer, but he doesn't actually understand the implications of what he's writing about. No, don't worry, I'm not going to draw the same conclusion for Masnick, since he *does* know what he's writing about, pace some trolling in the comments to the above piece.

Indeed, I think the posting in question is doubly fine: it not only calls into question the extremely odious business model of Nathan Myhrvold's "Intellectual Ventures", but it hammers home the "M"-word:

Gladwell uses this to talk up what Myhrvold is doing, suggesting that Intellectual Ventures is really about continuing that process, getting those ideas out there -- but he misses the much bigger point: if these ideas are the natural progression, almost guaranteed to be discovered by someone sooner or later, why do we give a monopoly on these ideas to a single discoverer? Myhrvold's whole business model is about monopolizing all of these ideas and charging others (who may have discovered them totally independently) to actually do something with them. Yet, if Gladwell's premise is correct (and there's plenty of evidence included in the article), then Myhrvold's efforts shouldn't be seen as a big deal. After all, if it wasn't Myhrvold and his friends doing it, others would very likely come up with the same thing sooner or later.

This is especially highlighted in one anecdote in the article, of Myhrvold holding a dinner with a bunch of smart people... and an attorney. The group spent dinner talking about a bunch of different random ideas, with no real goal or purpose -- just "chewing the rag" as one participant put it. But the next day the attorney approached them with a typewritten description of 36 different inventions that were potentially patentable out of the dinner. When a random "chewing the rag" conversation turns up 36 monopolies, something is wrong. Those aren't inventions that deserve a monopoly.

Quite. In a way, what should be renamed Intellectual Monopoly Ventures represents the quintessence and, I fervently hope, the apogee, of a patent system gone mad: a company set up with the express intention of coming up with *ideas* and patenting them so that it can hold companies that might actually create *inventions* based on them hostage. Perfectly parasitic and utterly pathetic.

What Can We Learn from the MySQL Saga?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Gramophone's Unique Record

As a young lad getting into classical music, Gramophone was my bible. I would read it pretty much from cover to cover, and it became an important part of my education, imparting not just the bare facts about music and musicians, many of them deeply obscure, but also a sense of what a critical response to both of those might entail.

So the following news is potentially mind-blowing:

Gramophone, the world’s most influential classical music magazine, is to create an exciting new website that promises to transform the classical music industry. The magazine, started in 1923, today announces its commitment to a bold two stage plan.

By September every word ever printed in Gramophone will be available for free as a fully searchable online archive – that’s hundreds and thousands of reviews, articles and interviews, by far the biggest archive of its kind.

This is clearly fantastic news for all those who love classical music - or who want to find out more. But what's in it for the magazine?

The new website, Gramophone.net, will be created in two stages. The first, the creation of the archive, will live alongside this existing website from early September. The start of 2009 will then see the creation of an all-new state-of-the-art website – where downloading, internet mail order and ticket-buying services will be linked to editorial – so visitors will be able to read reviews and features, listen to music samples and then if they wish, buy CDs or book tickets to live events.

This does all the things this blog and many others have been advocating for a while: giving away core content in order sell all kinds of ancillary materials and services. I can't wait.

Open Enterprise Interview: Mike Milinkovich

On Open Enterprise blog.

Viva El Software Libre!

When you think of groups promoting the adoption of free software around the world, you do not probably think of staid old UNESCO; and yet this organisation is actually quite active in this field. Here's one of its latest moves:

UNESCO Office in Montevideo, Uruguay, in cooperation with the network of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) in Latin America and the Caribbean, published the Guía práctica sobre software libre: su selección y aplicación local en América Latina y el Caribe (Guidelines on free software: how to choose it and apply it locally in Latin America and the Caribbean).

...


This easy to read and practical guide promotes FLOSS contribution to sustainable development. It gives practical advice on the selection of adequate FLOSS solutions with the requested functionality and addresses the issue of migration from proprietary software to FLOSS. To facilitate the exchange of experience, the book offers a list of organizations and country related contacts. It also gives an overview of the thematic and regional landscape of the FLOSS community through the hints on annual FLOSS conferences in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Even for those who do not read Spanish, there are some very useful resources in this (free) guide. For example, there is a very detailed table showing free equivalents of Windows programs, and a good list of the main free software organisation around South America.

So if you ever need to know about free software in Belize or about the Fundación Código Libre Dominicano, you know where to go. Two countries stand out: Brazil (no surprise) and Uruguay (a big surprise, for me at least), which has more than half a dozen organisations supporting free software.

All in all, there seems to be far more going on Latin America than I with my anglocentric bias would have expected. All very hopeful for the future - and great to see UNESCO doing its bit to push things along there.

Open Source Drug Discovery

There's something utterly perverse about the way new drugs are developed. Pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of millions - sometimes billions - of Euros investigating vast numbers of new compounds in the hope that they might treat a particular disease. If they find one that works, they then have to test it extensively for side-effects and the rest. Moreover, most of the negative knowledge they acquire - what doesn't work - is wilfully thrown away, since it represents "competitive" information.

But how about turning things on their head? Instead of trying millions of new substances for one disease, how about experimenting with the tens of thousands of known, safe medicines in the public domain on thousands of diseases? Like this:

The Johns Hopkins Clinical Compound Screening Initiative is an open-source effort to collect and index more than 10,000 known medications and determine which of them are also effective against hundreds of low-profile, Third World killers, such as Chagas disease, cholera and leprosy. The library will function something like a Wikipedia of drug discovery, where scientists around the world can contribute to the database and even provide samples or screen drugs themselves, thereby saving millions of dollars on R&D.

This could save millions of lives. Just one problem: nobody gets obscenely rich in the process....

Microsoft Joins Open Source Business Foundation

Here's another interesting example of Microsoft's attempt to snuggle up to open source:

Die Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF) hat Microsoft als neues Mitglied gewonnen. Die OSBF mit Vereinssitz in Nürnberg ist ein Netzwerk aus Unternehmen und Institutionen, das sich für den Einsatz und die Verbreitung von freier Software in Unternehmen einsetzt und bereits 120 Mitglieder hat. Mit Microsoft Beitritt zur OSBF hat Andreas Hartl, Director Platform Strategy bei Microsoft, einen Sitz im Vorstand der OSBF übernommen. Neben seiner Vorstandstätigkeit wird er außerdem die Aktivitäten der OSBF-Projektgruppe "Interoperabilität" koordinieren.

Hartl sieht den Beitritt Microsofts zur OSBF als konsequenten Schritt im Rahmen der Open-Source-Strategie seines Unternehmens, von dem beide Seiten profitieren würden. Microsoft strebt neue Verbindungen mit Partnern aus dem Open-Source-Umfeld an und will bestehende Kooperationen festigen; die OSBF-Mitglieder können laut Hartl von Microsofts Erfahrung im Bereich der Business-Entwicklung profitieren.

[Via Google Translate:

The Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF), Microsoft has won as a new member. The OSBF association with headquarters in Nuremberg is a network of companies and institutions, for the use and dissemination of free software use in enterprises and already has 120 members. With Microsoft joining the OSBF has Andreas Hartl, Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, a seat on the board of the OSBF. In addition to his board work, it is also the activities of the project group OSBF "interoperability" coordinate.

Hartl sees Microsoft's accession to OSBF as consistent step in the open-source strategy his company, which would benefit both sides. Microsoft is seeking new connections with partners from the open source environment and will strengthen existing cooperation, the OSBF-members may, according to Hartl of Microsoft's experience in the field of business development.]

Why Libertarians Should Love GNU/Linux

Ha!

When software is produced by a commercial company and sold in the marketplace, it’s relatively easy for the state to tax and regulate it. Commercial companies tend to be reflexively law-abiding, and they can afford the lawyers necessary to collect taxes or comply with complex regulatory schemes.

In contrast, free software will prove strongly resistant to state interference. Because virtually everyone associated with a free software project is a volunteer, the state cannot easily compel them to participate in tax and regulatory schemes. Such projects are likely to react to any attempt to tax or regulate them is likely to be met with passive resistance: people will stop contributing entirely rather than waste time dealing with the government.

Hence, free software thus has the salutary effect of depriving the state of tax revenue. But even better, free software is likely to prove extremely resistant to state efforts to build privacy-violating features into software systems.

Czy Spadające Ceny Pamięci Flash Zagrażają Microsoft?

One for my Polish readers (with thanks to Iwo Hencz).

When is a Standard Not a Standard?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Brazil, Free Software and "Castrated Windows"

Like many, I've been keeping my eye on the Brazilian computer market, since there seems to be a lot happening there in terms of free software. Details have been dribbling out here and there, but this is by far the best summary of the situation there:

Brazil imported the anti-Microsoft stance common in American geeks, but on top of the usual arguments Microsoft is foreign. This adds fuel to the flame. To the Brazilian Microsoft hater, not only there is an “evil monopoly”, but its profits are repatriated and its jobs are elsewhere. Practices like the 3-program limitation on Vista Starter further erode good will (Brazilians call it the “castrated Windows” among other colorful names). Add a dash of anti-American sentiment and you’ve got some serious resistance. This fiery mood has a strong influence, from the teenager hanging out in #hackers on Brasnet to IT departments to the federal government. Even in a rational self-interest analysis, one might rightly point out that if free/open source software (FOSS) were to wipe out Windows, negative effects on Brazil’s economy are likely minimal. The wealth, jobs, and opportunity created by Microsoft aren’t in Brazil (productivity gains might be, but that’s a whole different argument). The trade offs of a potential Linux/Google take over are different when there’s no national off-the-shelf software industry, plus Google’s revenue model works beautifully in a developing country. This mix of ideological and rational arguments torpedoes Microsoft’s support.

...

Now people in Brazil can actually develop interesting and widely used programs. We’ve got kernel hackers like Marcelo Tosatti, who maintained the 2.4 Linux kernel series, and Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, who co-founded the Conectiva distribution. There are RedHat employees, Debian contributors, committers on various projects, and so on. Lua, the programming language, comes from Brazil. There’s a practical advantage in being able to, say, tune a distribution for a particular purpose (e.g., the distribution being delivered to public schools). But beyond that it’s inspiring to finally be able to work with talented people in cool projects and have a chance to participate, rather than be handed down a proprietary product built abroad over which you have zero control. People are excited about and grateful for this. By the time you mix up these elements nearly all talented CS students and alpha geeks are well into the Linux camp. Unlike the US, the dynamic economy isn’t there to add some fragmentation. When these people go on to make technology choices in government or industry, guess what they’ll pick?

Reminds me, I must brush up my Portuguese.

Xandros: Good News, Bad News

The good news:

Xandros is known for its Windows-like Linux distribution, which has been dubbed by one DesktopLinux reviewer as "the best Linux desktop distro for Windows users." Currently in version 4, the distro is bundled with the popular Asus Eee mini-notebook. Now apparently, the company plans to go after the even smaller format netbooks and the coming onslaught of tablet-like MIDs based on the Intel Mobile Internet Device spec, which appears to blur the lines between desktop and embedded realms.

And the bad news:

Earlier this week, Xandros announced a beta of its Xandros BridgeWays Management Packs at the Microsoft Management Summit. The new product follows up on a broad collaborative agreement between Xandros and Microsoft in June of last year, which included a somewhat controversial intellectual property assurance, similar to one hatched between Redmond and Novell, under which Microsoft will provide patent covenants for Xandros customers.

Sigh.