02 June 2008
Opening the Floodgates
One thing I've never understood is why more low-cost PC manufacturers don't routinely include free software with their offerings. After all, it's the perfect way to provide all the capabilities most users need without increasing the price, or, indeed, taking away the possibility of adding certain other non-free software later.
Perhaps it's simply that PCs haven't been cheap enough for it to matter so much given Microsoft's deep discounts for hardware companies. That's another great thing about the ultraportables: they really do take down prices to new levels.
Against that background, maybe this interesting news will finally signal the opening of the floodgates: a German review of the new Asus Eee PC 900, running Windows XP, that comes not only with the utterly useless Microsoft Works package, but also StarOffice, Sun's supported version of OpenOffice.org. (Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)
30 May 2008
Blender's Big Buck Bunny
Is out:As a follow-up to the successful project Orange’s “Elephants Dream”, the Blender Foundation initiated another open movie project. Again a small team (7) of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community have been invited to come together to work in Amsterdam from October 2007 until April 2008 on completing a short 3D animation movie. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period.
The creative concept of “Peach” was completely different as for “Orange”. This time it is “funny and furry”!
The Blender Foundation and Blender community have been the main financiers for Peach. As for the previous open movie, a pre-sale campaign to purchase the DVD set in advance will be organized.
Additional support from sponsors and subsidy funds has been realized as well.
Peach also was the first Open Project hosted by the new Blender Institute in Amsterdam. This will make the project more independent, without much involvement of production partners, and also will ensure continuity.
Absurdistan Strikes Again
A little while back I was bemoaning this kind of stuff:
Unbelievably it calls itself Digistan, apparently to indentify with the fascist terrorists based in countries and regions using the Farsi-based suffix “stan.”
I see that the Sultana of Absurdistan, Michelle Malkin, has managed to top even that:The US chain Dunkin' Donuts has pulled an advert following complaints that the scarf worn by a celebrity chef offered symbolic support for Islamic extremism.
29 May 2008
Two Poisonous Proposals: Patents and Chlorine
We have a new enemy, it seems. It's called the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC), and here's one sharp analysis of what it's up toTEC which comprises EU and US high level representatives put a substantive harmonisation of patent law on its agenda. Substantive patent law covers what is patentable or not. The attempt to impose the low US standards on Europe via the Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) process utterly failed at the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Also progress in the WIPO B+ subgroup (without developing nations) could not be reached. Now the TEC is used as a new forum to push forward with lowering patentability standards through the back door. The TEC is a closed process, and sits outside the WIPO multilateral treaty talks. Since WIPO participants Brazil, India, and China began to fight EU-US proposals for ever more aggressive patents, the EU and US have begun their own bilateral talks.
Interestingly, the TEC is not content with a metaphorical poisoning of the computer industry, but wants to poison the entire European Union literally, with chlorine-soaked chickens:Members of Parliament from all political horizons have reacted with fury to a Commission proposal yesterday (28 May) to re-allow imports of poultry rinsed with chemicals, stemming mainly from the United States.
Concretely, the Commission wants to allow businesses to use four currently banned anti-microbal substances to decontaminate poultry carcasses.
...
But MEPs, meeting in Parliament's Environment Committee, were incensed by the decision, which they say contradicts Community food production standards. "The chlorination of chicken intended for human consumption is not acceptable for the EU […] Such food production methods are at variance with the relevant Community standards, and threatening to the EU's entire set of food production standards and rules," states an EP press release.
...
If approved, the proposal would effectively lift an 11-year ban on US poultry, which are generally treated with these processes.
The US has been pushing for the ban to be lifted for years but to no avail. However, the issue was recently pinpointed as a top priority in the new "Transatlantic Economic Council" process, which aims to remove remaining regulatory obstacles hampering trade and investment between the two economic giants.
Ah well, at least the TEC is consistent in its aims.
ID Cards: Scandalous as Well as Idiotic
This is outrageous:A Conservative government would have to compensate suppliers of the National Identity Scheme for lost profits as well as costs if it cancelled the project.
"To guarantee these payments knowing that a future Conservative government has already said it will scrap ID cards is improper and quite extraordinary," shadow home secretary David Davis MP told the Financial Times on 24 May 2008, citing the convention that one Parliament may not bind a subsequent one.
Davis wrote to the potential suppliers of the scheme in February, giving formal notice that the Tories would cancel the scheme if elected.
The Home Office told GC News that the contracts include break clauses, which if exercised would mean the government paying costs and an element of lost profits. "It's based on how far the contract has got and various other factors," a spokesperson said, adding that these were standard contractual arrangements following Office of Government Commerce guidelines.
The spokesperson added that "nothing has been created bespoke" to deal with the Conservatives' intentions, and that the figures involved in cancellation are commercially confidential.
In other words, the UK government is trying to use a kind of financial blackmail to keep its idiotic projects going: continue or cough up. And to add insult to injury, it cloaks its activities in secrecy. What a morally corrupt bunch.
Taxing Intellectual Monopolies
Here's an interesting thought:He also reported research that demonstrates patent renewal fees can be used to improve the innovation incentives generated by patent rights. Professor Schankerman set out an analysis of renewal fees as a tax on the property right conferred by a patent, and proposed that the effective tax rate be adjusted to provide socially optimal incentives. His analysis suggests that existing renewal fees impose a highly regressive tax on patents, and suggested that renewal fees should be very substantially increased, especially in later years, to make the effective taxation rate progressive.
Imposing high renewal fees would be a disincentive to file frivolous patents. It would also usefully shift discussion of intellectual monopolies to a more objective, economics-based analyses. That's good, because the evidence that such monopolies are not economically justifiable is overwhelming (as the Gowers Review noted in the context of increasing the term of copyright for music performance.)
Er, Yes, and What About the AGPL?
Here's a post explaining Google's support for just seven open source licences:The trend around licensing is obvious: GPLv2/GPLv3 represent 42.6% of the projects, and Apache is 25.8%. MIT, BSD, and LGPL are at about 8% each, Artistic at 3.5%, and MPL 1.1 at a mere 2.7%. This follows my own observation about how people license their projects. If they are advocates of Free Software, they will choose GPL; advocates of Open Source will choose Apache (a more modern and thorough permissive license, compared to BSD or MIT). And this is exactly what I recommend to people: choose GPLv3 or Apache v2 based on your personal philosophy.
Well, actually, there's another rather important trend that is conspicuous by its absence: adoption of the Affero GPL. To which Google seems strangely allergic....
28 May 2008
I Love Smell of Private Copying Levies in the Morning
If the media industry wants to make sure that everyone will start copying content and generally handing it around to all their mates, this is by far the best way to do it:Hardware makers meet politicians and copyright societies in Brussels today to discuss introducing a Europe-wide levy on media devices, offsetting revenue apparently lost from personal copying. Since 2001, 22 of Europe’s 27 countries have made technology manufacturers pay the surcharge on products that allow music, books, movies and other copyrighted content to be copied. Despite the companies having fought the obligation for years, the levy reaped €568 million for rightsholders in 2004.
The thing is, if *everyone* is paying a levy purportedly to cover revenue "lost" from personal copying, then surely that means that *everyone* can merrily copy away, morally secure in the knowledge that they have already paid for the pleasure. And even if it doesn't, guess what? That's nonetheless how every Thomas, Richard and Harold is going to interpret it.
Go ahead, chaps, make our day.
OOo, Look: oooPortal
One of the heartening developments in recent years is the way that OpenOffice.org just goes from strength to strength. Reflecting that growth, there are more resources beginning to appear around it, bolstering the nascent ecosystem. Here's another: oooPortal.
El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido
As RMS has always emphasised, free software is political, because it is essentially about liberty. Openness and transparency are also political - just look at how the ruling classes fight them. But beyond that, I find myself wondering how the ideas behind free software can be applied more directly in terms of changing the world.
One way is to take the idea of collaboration, and apply it at the simplest level: sharing information and uniting voices for or against something. That's the basic intent of the site Avaaz.org:Coming together in this way, Avaaz has become a wonderful community of people from all nations, backgrounds, and ages. Our diverse community is brought together by our care for the world, and a desire to do what we can to make it a better place. The core of our model of organizing is our email list, operated in 13 languages. By signing up to receive our alerts, you are rapidly alerted to urgent global issues and opportunities to achieve change. Avaaz members respond by rapidly combining the small amounts of time or money they can give into a powerful collective force. In just hours we can send hundreds of thousands of messages to political leaders telling them to save a crucial summit on climate change , hold hundreds of rallies across the world calling for action to prevent a genocide, or donate hundreds of thousands of euros, dollars and yen to support nonviolent protest in Burma.
It's hard to tell how much good this kind of thing does, but the investment of time is so minimal that it's a bit like Pascal's Wager: worth doing however low the rate of return.
But beyond this kind of Concerned Letter-Writing 2.0, how can the technologies of connection be harnessed to do something more practical? Like this, maybe:When Estonians regained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991 they not only acquired new political freedoms, they inherited a mass of rubbish – thousands and thousands of tonnes of it scattered across illegal dumping sites around the country. When concerned citizens decided that the time had come to clean it up, they turned not to the government, but to tens of thousands of their peers.
Using a combination of global positioning systems and GoogleMaps, two entrepreneurs (Skype guru Ahti Heinla and Microlink and Delfi founder Rainer Nolvak) enlisted volunteers to plot the location of over 10,000 illegal dump sites, including detailed descriptions and photos. That, in itself, was ambitious. Phase II of the clean-up initiative was, by their own admission, rather outrageous: clean-up upwards of 80% of the illegal sites in one day, using mass collaboration.
So, on May 3rd, over 50,000 people scoured fields, streets, forests and riverbanks across the country, picking up everything from tractor batteries to paint tins.... Much of this junk was ferried to central dumps, often in the vehicles of volunteers.
Only connect.
Greenies Go Open
Pretty much a marriage made in heaven:Open source software should be more widely available in order to help reduce the 'digital divide', according to Dr Caroline Lucas, Green MEP for the South East.
Dr Lucas has added her signature to a written declaration in the European Parliament - like an Early Day Motion (EDM) in the House of Commons - recognising the growing disparities in access to information and communication technologies throughout the European Union, and calling for increased use of open source technology.
She said: "The establishment of a digital divide is a new cause of social disparity which risks further excluding populations that are already vulnerable.
"New digital technologies have become an essential tool in all areas of life, including employment, education, and in personal leisure activities.
"European citizens have the right to freely access documents and information from the institutions which represent them, and it is about time that the use of open source software became more widespread.
"The European Union should take the necessary measures to help finance public research on open source software, and Parliament to switch its whole computer network to this type of technology.
Not that this is really a party issue: open source makes sense whatever your political persuasion, as David Cameron's increasing enthusiasm for it shows. Strange that only Labour doesn't get it: perhaps it's just too antithetical to its Stalinist positions on interception, internment without trial, ID cards, DNA databases et al.
The BBC Has Drunk its Brain
Good to see the BBC with its finger on the pulse of computing, bravely serving up the facts without fear or favour here:Microsoft's next operating system (OS) will come with multi-touch features as an alternative to the mouse.
Rather like the Hewlett-Packard touchscreen system I used back in the 1980s.
Give Me a Platform...
...and I will infect the world:
Symantec has warned of a security hole in Adobe's Flash Player that is already being exploited by web sites to install trojans onto users' computers. Adobe is still analysing the bug and has not yet been able to release an update.
...
The malicious code only appears to be attacking Windows at present. ISC reports that it downloads the files ax.exe and setip.exe. However, the vulnerability probably affects Flash Player for other operating systems as well. It is therefore likely to be just a question of time before malware coders are distributing malicious code for Linux and Mac OS X.
Another reason to flee Flash.
27 May 2008
God Bless Patent Trolls....
....for continuing to demonstrate just how mind-bendingly stupid software patents are:SINGAPORE--A local company has laid claims to a technology that Web sites across the globe deploy to link images to other Web pages, and sent out notification letters to several companies demanding to be paid licensing fees.
Dubbing itself "pioneers of visual search technology", Vuestar Technologies said it owns the patent to the technology that enables "Internet searching via visual images".
In sum, the company implied that any Web site that uses pictures and graphics to link to another site or Web page will need a license from Vuestar.
"Those who use visual images which hyperlink to other Web pages or Web sites...whether on the first page or subsequent pages of a Web site require a Vuestar 'license of use'," the company said on its site.
Riiiiight. (Via Slashdot.)
Drupal: Big in Afghanistan?
I love statisitcs about open source - not least because they are still quite thin on the ground. Here's some fascinating stuff from Drupal, the free content management system: statistics on user demographics, including each country's current rank and percentage market share. Here are the main figures:
United States 1 (33.12%)
India 2 (5.68%)
United Kingdom 3 (5.14%)
Afghanistan 4 (4.64%)
Now, India as a growing market I can understand, but Afghanistan about to overtake the UK? Hmm, interesting....
26 May 2008
GNU/Linux and the Digital Textbook
Even though the Altaic family is one of my faves, Korean is still a long way down the list, so I can't do any proper research into what exactly is going on here:
The government-led Korean digital textbook project will adopt Linux. The Ministry of Knowledge Economy and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Korea announced their decision to choose the open software for digital textbook, the key project for the government's digital education policy.
The digital textbook provides the contents of conventional textbooks, reference books, workbooks and terminologies in the form of video files, animations and virtual reality. It is the main learning material for students with various interactive features that cater for the needs of learners with different levels of capability.
This is certainly tantalising:The Ministry of Knowledge Economy says, "If the National Education Information System established in 2006 contributed to the expansion of Linux in the server area, the digital textbook project will bring PC-based open software into wider use."
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