Open Hardware is...Hard

The Economist does one of its periodic "what's going on in that wacky world of open source" pieces, mercifully not as fundamentally flawed as earlier ones. This is about open hardware (OpenMoko, Chumby, Bug Labs, RepRap), and why it's, er, hard:

In addition to publishing all the software code for a device, for example, makers of open-source hardware generally reveal the physical information needed to build a device, including schematics, materials and dimensions. This is not something manufacturers normally do, and takes time and effort. Supplying open-source hardware is necessarily, therefore, more time-consuming and complex. “It can’t be as simple as open-source software,” says Peter Semmelhack, the founder of Bug Labs, a company based in New York that sells open-source hardware modules to put into other devices. “It has chips, schematics and things coming from many sources.” And suppliers of those many parts are not always interested in going open source, which further complicates matters. OpenMoko tries to use chips with open specifications, says Mr Moss-Pultz, though some chipmakers are reluctant to play along. “It’s like they’re taking their pants off in public,” he says.

Bill Gates' Closed Source World

Here's a frightening thought: Bill Gates is not so much giving up on his misguided closed-source approach to software as moving on to apply it to all the world's most pressing problems:

Finally, Bill Gates got me thinking a lot. His speech on what he is doing next was well worth attending. Bill's thesis is that if we can apply the principles of capitalism to solving the world's problems, we can eradicate hunger, poverty, disease, lack of power and climate change. Market and financial incentives alone are insufficient. We should all acting based upon self-interest and incentivized to work in that self-interest. Governments can help with tax incentives, but giving recognition to those companies and individuals are potentially more powerful. Companies should also be incentivized not to give money, but talent, which in turn provides recognition of the individual and organization making a difference. This recognition can be its own market-based reward since it will benefit the company in the competitive marketplace. This approach can be used to provide not just manpower, but solutions to accessibility of information, medicine and healthcare.

The Vista solution to hunger, poverty, disease, lack of power and climate change? Eeek.

Expensive Oil and the Analogue World

Fascinating stuff:

We usually think about technological improvements in productivity as benefiting the highly skilled and educated, and disenfranchising the poorly skilled and uneducated, but what I find most interesting about globalization in an era of $127 dollar-a-barrel oil is that blue-collar workers who make physical things in the West will stand to benefit, newly protected from foreign competition by energy tariffs, while white-collar workers who live off their wits will still feel the immense pressure of competing with everyone else in the world.

Asus the Unstoppable Innovator?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mozilla Dot T-shirt

This is why Firefox is unstoppable: T-shirts.

Welsh TV over IP: Yeah, But Why?

As someone who has a Welsh name and not a little Welsh genetic heritage, I'm a big fan of expanding the provision of material in Welsh. But spending lots of dosh on yet another TV over IP platform ain't the way to do that:

Welsh-language broadcaster S4C (hardly rolling in it, thanks to digital TV launches and falling audiences in the multichannel era) has teamed with VC house Wesley Clover to invest £9.5 in Inuk, an Abercynon-based TV-over-broadband operator.

Inuk packages channels under its Freewire brand, including Freeview stations and some premium channels. Inuk also does VoIP. Both are targeted at student halls of residence (now up to 100,000 students), old people's homes etc.

S4C, which operates in place of Channel 4 on analogue platforms, is funded from advertising and a £97 million annual public grant. The investment comes via its S4CDM commercial unit.

Bizarre how normally sane broadcasters lose their marbles over IP-based solutions.

What's Wrong with this Picture?

Ignoring the parodistic language, that is:

Essentially, with the Internet, capitalism gifts the masses with a false commons where people can work, off the clock, creating information and relationships that the ruling class can enclose, appropriate, commodify, and sell back to us at a later date. It’s a way of letting the process of primitive accumulation work as a perpetual, and because of the stagnation of the economies in the advanced capitalist countries, vital, supplement to the mechanism of exploitation, and one that should be seen alongside the other forms of primitive accumulation that are occurring right now and are, for sure, much more important: the direct seizure of Iraqi resources, the copyrighting and commodifying of the material of our bodies, and most obviously, the accumulation by dispossession that is occurring in Africa, in China, in Latin America, as capitalism pushes to its limits and attempts to expunge from the earth any trace of commonly-held land.

What's wrong with it? Well, centrally, it looks at things purely in monetary terms: that everything has a price, and that everything has to be paid for. In many ways, the central insight of commons-based activities is that there are things of worth beyond money, things that capitalism really can't capture (luckily).

Or as Michel Bauwens puts it in his own reply in the same post:

The last thing we want and need to do is the be so mentally colonized by the logic of market exchange that all we can and want to ask is just for a bigger piece of the pie. The key question is: how can we both preserve the social achievements of participation and peer production, and make a living at the same time. Out of the answers to this question will come the new social forms.

Where's Walt? On Firefox 3

Walt Mossberg wields much power in the US, so the following is significant:

My verdict is that Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user.

Openness in the Middle Kingdom

The most senior Chinese official jailed for sympathising with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests has urged the leadership to make public the events that led to the government's decision to crush the pro-democracy movement.

The demonstrations, which lured more than a million people on to Beijing's streets, ended in a military crackdown on June 4 of that year. Now a fading memory, the massacre is still taboo in the Chinese media.

Bao Tong, once the top aide to purged Party chief Zhao Ziyang, argued that China has been praised for its transparency in handling the devastating May 12 earthquake and should also reveal the rifts in the leadership that led to the massacre.

"Through this quake ... they have tasted the benefits of openness and should know that openness is better than being closed," Bao told Reuters in an interview at his Beijing home.

Sounds good to me.

Fab(bers)

And talking of fabbers, this is cool (and open source):

Adrian (left) and Vik (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.

That is, a fabber that can replicate itself....

Can the singularity be far behind?

Hacking the Analogue

This digital stuff is all very well, but how can you hack it? Well, maybe along the lines of these hackable T-shirts:

C-Shirt shirts each come with a scannable little QR (Quick Response) code in the corner. If you see a C-Shirt that you like, worn by someone walking around town, you can scan the QR code with your mobile phone. (Especially if you're in Japan where people scan QR codes with their phones all the time.) Your phone then captures the shirt's unique URL on the Nota website, where you can load it up and edit the design however you like.

Each design is given a Creative Commons license (that's what the C stands for) according to the wishes of the creator. Once you've got it how you like it, you can have it shipped to you just like any other T-shirt website would do.

So this is how it would work.

Hackable (physical) objects that had digital blueprints would display (discreetly) the QR code, allowing you to download the blueprint and hack it, before uploading it to the supplier. All we need are some fabbers....

Digistanis of the World, Unite!

On Open Enterprise blog.

TheyWorkForYou Wants YouToWorkForThem

Talking of wisdom of crowds, here's one of my favourite sites, TheyWorkForYou, attempting to harness it in order to make politics more transparent:

Video speech matching

TheyWorkForYou has video of the House of Commons from the BBC, and the text of Hansard from Parliament. Now we need your help to match up the two.

We've written a little Flash app where you can (hopefully) match up the written speech being displayed to what's playing on the video. We'll then store your results and use them to put the video, timestamped to the right location, on the relevant page of TheyWorkForYou.

Web 2.0 at its best.

Harvesting the Wisdom of Crowds

Here's a clever idea: use customer reviews to fine-tune your product description. After all, reviews by their very nature tend to be brutally honest, so it's a great place to find out what customers really think. Moreover, you discover what they really like (great for copy) and dislike (better tell the development people....)

Ace Acer

Computer manufacturers are beginning to see the light:

Acer sees two killer apps with Linux on computers: operation and cost. Its flavour of Linux will boot in 15 seconds compared to minutes for Windows, and the open source operating system can extend battery life from five to seven hours.

At the same time, the company expects that the price differential of Linux will make the offering attractive for consumers at the low-cost end of the market.

"Microsoft's operating system typically costs around £50 per unit," said David Drummond, UK managing director at Acer. "On a £1,000 PC that is peanuts, but on a £200 computer it is a major issue."

And Acer won't be the last, either: first a drip, then a gush, then a raging torrent....

Open Fashion

There is a theoretical framework (at least) around the fashion industry that supports the argument that nothing is an original idea. The fashion industry makes an excellent exemplar microcosm of this concept in action. Fashion trends gain popularity and then wane and over time different trends are re-appropriated (think the come back of fluro right now). When new ideas or concepts emerge if may become the next big trend if other designers analyse it, take influence from it and incorporate elements into their own works. Pretty soon this becomes a trend, and eventually a fashion convention.

But what if designers explicitly allowed this reuse and adaption? What if these kinds of activities and norms were formalised using the law as an instrument? What would this mean for the fashion industry?

Discuss....

The Ultimate Ultraportable?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Microsoft Backtracks Further on Windows XP

This is getting truly hilarious:

Microsoft has further extended the life of Windows XP so that computer makers can include the operating system on low-cost desktop PCs, the company announced at the Computex trade show on Tuesday.

Microsoft has been under pressure from computer makers to provide a version of its OS for an emerging class of very low-cost laptops and desktops. Its new Windows Vista OS is widely seen as too resource-hungry for those machines.

In April Microsoft extended its deadline for selling Windows XP licenses for low-cost laptops like the Asus Eee PC. It had originally planned to stop selling most XP licenses on June 30.

At Computex on Tuesday it said it has now also extended the deadline for low-cost desktops. PC makers can now include Windows XP in those systems until 2010, the same as the deadline for low-cost laptops, said Rob Young, a senior director with Microsoft's OEM group.

What's the betting that in a few months time Microsoft will extend this to yet more PCs? Because if it doesn't, I can see a jolly interesting black market developing: "Psst: wanna buy some hot XP discs?"

Munich Makes Good

On Open Enterprise blogs.

Sifry Rides Again

On Open Enterprise blogs.

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.)

Not Just a Flash in the Pan

On Open Enterprise blog.

Desperately Seeking Paglo

On Open Enterprise blog.

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.