Polishing the Firefox 3.0 Download Pledge

Pledging to download Firefox 3 tomorrow is clearly a totally pointless activity (yes, I've done it, anyway), and yet some interesting factoids can be gleaned from the relevant page.

For example, despite - or maybe because of - its dismal showing in overal installed base, the UK's pledges stand at a decent 54,000 currently. This compares fairly well with Germany (55,000), Italy (56,000) and France (69,000). The real surprise, for me at least, is Poland, currently on 90,000: impressive.

BECTA and the Groklaw Effect

Ha!

Right now Becta ( [the UK agency that snubbed the free software community] http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/community_posts/uk_agency_snubs_free_software_community) ) is in the process of being Groklawed by the free software community. A source close to the events right now told me quite clearly that Freedom Of Information Act requests are hitting Becta in flurries.

The Sense of Microsoft's Open Census Move

I predict we'll be seeing a lot more of this:

Microsoft has become a sponsor of The Open Source Census, a project started earlier this year that aims to track and catalog the use of open-source software in enterprises worldwide, the group announced Monday.

Call it the "loving to death" strategy: Microsoft entwines its tentacles around more and more of the open source world until it becomes almost - almost - an indispensable part of it. Result: the person on the Clapham omnibus is confused about what is and what isn't open source....

The Bang-on Blogosphere

Further proof that things are shifting in media-land:

as Iain Dale, the Tory blogger who ran Davis's ill-fated leadership campaign, points out, while newspapers scorned the resignation the blogosphere largely embraced it: political chatrooms are overflowing with right-wingers offering to start a fighting fund, and left-wingers agonising over whether to support him. Even the Daily Telegraph's Saturday letters page was two to one in favour of the former MP for Haltemprice and Howden.

Could David Davis somehow have stumbled across something the establishment has missed, an untapped anger with what the public sees as a snooping, heavy-handed state that spies on it through speed cameras and CCTV and microchips on its rubbish bins, that tramples its freedoms and makes sloppy mistakes with its private data?

Update: Related thoughts here.

BECTA Rubbishes Almost the Entire UK Open Source Industry

On Open Enterprise blog.

In Praise of Government Leadership

On Open Enterprise blog.

Associated Press Decides to Look Stupid

I'm currently engaged in a legal disagreement with the Associated Press, which claims that Drudge Retort users linking to its stories are violating its copyright and committing "'hot news' misappropriation under New York state law." An AP attorney filed six Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown requests this week demanding the removal of blog entries and another for a user comment.

The Retort is a community site comparable in function to Digg, Reddit and Mixx. The 8,500 users of the site contribute blog entries of their own authorship and links to interesting news articles on the web, which appear immediately on the site. None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles -- ranging in length from 33 to 79 words -- and five of the six have a user-created headline.

So that's about 99.999% of the blogosphere that's violating copyright according to AP. How about if we help Associated Press by never linking to any of their stories...that should make them *really* happy. (Via Scott Rosenberg.)

More Unspeakable Acts

Michael Geist has been warning about this for a while, and now the beast is out:

Today the Government of Canada introduced long-overdue and much-needed amendments to the Copyright Act that will bring it in line with advances in technology and current international standards.

"Our government has committed to ensuring Canada's copyright law is up to date, and today we are delivering by introducing this "made-in-Canada" bill that balances the interests of Canadians who use digital technology and those who create content," said the Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry. "It's a win-win approach because we're ensuring that Canadians can use digital technologies at home with their families, at work, or for educational and research purposes. We are also providing new rights and protections for Canadians who create the content and who want to better secure their work online."

The phrase "made-in-Canada" would be funny if it weren't so pathetic: this bill has been dictated down to the last comma by Hollywood, and it would be hard to imagine anything less "made-in-Canada". Moreover, despite the misleading stuff about "win-win", this is simply a loss for Canadians, as Geist explains:

1. As expected, Prentice has provided a series of attention-grabbing provisions to consumers including time shifting, private copying of music (transferring a song to your iPod), and format shifting (changing format from analog to digital). These are good provisions that did not exist in the delayed December bill. However, check the fine print since the rules are subject to a host of strict limitations and, more importantly, undermined by the digital lock provisions. The effect of the digital lock provisions is to render these rights virtually meaningless in the digital environment because anything that is locked down (ie. copy-controlled CD, no-copy mandate on a digital television broadcast) cannot be copied. As for every day activities like transferring a DVD to your iPod - those are infringing too. Indeed, the law makes it an infringement to circumvent the locks for these purposes.

2. The digital lock provisions are worse than the DMCA. Yes - worse. The law creates a blanket prohibition on circumvention with very limited exceptions and creates a ban against distributing the tools that can be used to circumvent. While Prentice could have adopted a more balanced approach (as New Zealand and Canada's Bill C-60 did), the effect of these provisions will be to make Canadians infringers for a host of activities that are common today including watching out-of-region-coded DVDs, copying and pasting materials from a DRM'd book, or even unlocking a cellphone.

While that is the similar to the U.S. law, the exceptions are worse. The Canadian law includes a few limited exceptions for privacy, encryption research, interoperable computer programs, people with sight disabilities, and security, yet Canadians can't actually use these exceptions since the tools needed to pick the digital lock in order to protect their privacy are banned. In other words, check the fine print again - you can protect your privacy but the tools to do so are now illegal. Dig deeper and it gets worse. Under the U.S. law, there is mandatory review process every three years to identify new exceptions. Under the Canadian law, its up to the government to introduce new exceptions if it thinks it is needed. Overall, these anti-circumvention provisions go far beyond what is needed to comply with the WIPO Internet treaties and represents an astonishing abdication of the principles of copyright balance that have guided Canadian policy for many years.

So far, so bad - and pretty much expected. But what struck me was the following gratuitous comment at the end of the press release:

These amendments to the Copyright Act are part of the government's broader intellectual property strategy, which includes the recent amendments to the Criminal Code to combat movie piracy and the announcement that Canada will work with other international trading partners towards a possible Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

In other words, all this stuff is just a prelude to the even more Draconian, even less democratic ACTA which is beetling towards us. Time to start protesting, people....

Trop de Tropes

Sigh:

the world is not so simple as “open” or “closed.” Most software has both open and closed elements, and thus falls along a linear spectrum of being more open or more closed (or proprietary). But politicians, we know, will often eschew nuance and speak in simple rhetoric. And what rhetoric it is! No citizen should be forced or ENCOURAGED to choose a “closed technology” — this is more befitting of the Free Software Foundation or any NGO, just not a government’s chief antitrust official.

The point is that openness is not a business model: it is an engineering model. It benefits everyone: users, developers, suppliers. Kroes was (rightly) advocating such a level playing field, since it allows everyone to compete on the same terms - something that closed technologies do not.

This trope of openness being "just another business model" is a favourite of Microsoft's, alongside "we need more than one standard for a given area, to promote choice" - when what are needed are *implementations* of a single standard. These rhetorical siblings are rather desperate, if amusingly Jesuitical, attempts to use words to gloss over the reality.

Giving Yahoo the Heave-Ho

One of the key open source people at Yahoo is Jeremy Zawodny.

Was Jeremy Zawodny:

It's been quite a ride, and I'm really going to miss Yahoo. I'll miss the parking debates and all the "random" stuff we're so fond of ranting about. Watching from the outside is going to be a very different experience. But the opportunity to work in a much smaller company recently presented itself and it was simply too interesting to pass up. I'll say more about that in the coming weeks.

The Policeman's Lot is Not a Happy One

You can't make this stuff up:

UK music licensing outfit the “Performing Right Society” (PRS) - the guys that come asking for money when you play any music within earshot of the public - is rolling out the big guns ready for a High Court showdown with a little known group of music pirates, known in the UK as ‘the police’. Not the band of the same name, but that government organization people rely on for keeping law and order.

According to a report, the police in the county of Lancashire have apparently committed a terrible crime and let the whole country down. Rather like the copyright infringing tea-rooms and their carol-singing occupants we wrote about last year, it appears that the police have been recklessly listening to music in stations all over the county - without a license. The PRS aren’t happy.

Another Little Gift from Tony "The Poodle" Blair

One of the illusions that I have been labouring under is that here in Blighty we are largely untouched by the worst madnesses affecting computing and the Internet in the US - things like software patents, deranged punishments for copyright infringement etc. Alas, Rupert Goodwins' laser-like mind has managed to trace out the following extreme bad news:

The [US] PRO-IP bill, H.R.4279, significantly increases the state's power to detect and prosecute IP infringement, carrying with it a whole host of new law enforcement positions and capabilities. It establishes an IP Czar, someone with the job of overseeing zealous action on behalf of copyright and trademark owners, and includes such powers as the ability to seize equipment if it contains just one file thought to infringe.

Importing and exporting infringing material will attract harsh penalties, and there's a $30,000 per-track fine on music (so that's half a million dollars for an album), The list goes on, and I thoroughly recommend you go out and Google to educate yourself on the many quite overwhelming powers the US government wants to give itself in its apparent determination to put file sharing on a par with drug dealing, gangsterism and other great crimes against society.

Thank goodness we're not in America? That hardly helps. Among the many provisions is the establishment of "five additional Intellectual Property Law Enforcement Coordinators in foreign countries to protect the intellectual property rights of U.S. citizens [...] increase DOJ training and assistance to foreign governments to combat counterfeiting and piracy of intellectual property." -- and if you think their job is just to lead the rest of the world in the way of American righteousness, think again.

In many ways, the worst bit of news is our own fault - or, rather, the fault of the pusillanimous apology of a government that pretends to rule this country:

As a UK citizen, you no longer have any effective defence against a US demand for deportation. Under the Extradition Act 2003 the US can apply for a UK citizen to be extradited without having to present any evidence to face charges of a crime committed in the US – for which the UK citizen need not have been actually present.

So you can be extradited to the US without anybody having to present evidence against you, for something you may (or may not) have done in the US, that is legal in the UK but possibly against one of their crackpot rules. Thanks, Tony, you've certainly managed to dump one hell of a legacy....

Ashamed to be British

Quite.

Foneros, Beware

If you're a user of the clever FON wifi-sharing system, and think you are immune to eavesdropping by UK Government spies, think again. Here's what Martin Varsavsky, Sr. FON himself, has to say on the subject:

Fon has to provide special VPN tunneling technology in the UK for the UK secret services to investigate suspected criminals and terrorists when they log on to our WiFi signal.

Remember Shareware?

You know, that pretend free stuff that was around before truly free software became better known. Well, apparently, it's alive and living in China:

International Summit on Chinese Shareware (ISCS) 2008 organized by the Association of Chinese Shareware (CNSW) and Digital River will be held on 20th June in Shanghai. The organizer said that shareware has actually been in China for over 10 years, this event is to provide a stage where shareware authors, end users and international or local companies can share the knowledge of international market and Chinese market.

The Subtle Art of Open Source Migrations

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mark Shuttleworth on the Future of Ubuntu

On LWN.net.

The True Costs and Benefits of Open Access

One issue that has been repeatedly (and heatedly) debated since 1994 — when Open Access (OA) advocate Stevan Harnad first posted his "Subversive Proposal" — is a question that some might consider to be the most fundamental question of all for the research community in the digital age. That is, what are the essential costs of publishing a scholarly paper? To date, however, no one appears to have come up with an adequate answer.

So says Richard Poynder, who then reviews the situation with his usual thoroughness. However, he concludes:

One thing is for sure: If OA ends up simply shifting the cost of scholarly communication from journal subscriptions to article processing charges (APCs) without any reduction in overall expenditure, and inflation continues unabated, many OA advocates will be sorely disappointed. And if that were to happen, then we can surely expect to see calls for a more radical reengineering of the scholarly communication system.

Well, maybe, but this omits an important point: even if the transition to open access produced absolutely zero savings, it would still achieve something invaluable: making scholarly communications available to all, not just the lucky few at institutions with subscriptions. That alone would make the exercise worthwhile.

Is Apache the Greatest Open Source Project?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Peter Suber Writing Suberbly

Peter Suber is widely acknowledged as the linch-pin of the open access movement, but an ironic consequence of this is that his own writings on the subject can be overshadowed by the torrent of info he provides on Open Access News. So, in an attempt to do justice in this respect, here are a couple of noteworthy - maybe Suberb is the word - contributions.

The first is a stonker:

Here's an epistemological argument for OA. It's not particularly new or novel. In fact, I trace it back to some arguments by John Stuart Mill in 1859. Nor is it very subtle or complicated. But it's important in its own right and it's importantly different from the moral and pragmatic arguments for OA we see more often.

The thesis in a nutshell is that OA facilitates the testing and validation of knowledge claims. OA enhances the process by which science is self-correcting. OA improves the reliability of inquiry.

After that you might prefer some lighter fare, ending on this upbeat note:

The short-term outlook is turbulent. But long-term, there are good reasons to think that OA will become the default for new peer-reviewed research literature. Support for OA is growing among scholars, universities, libraries, learned societies, funding agencies, and governments. Even non-OA publishers are increasingly willing to experiment with it. We can implement OA today, without reforming or violating copyright law. OA publishing costs less than conventional publishing and even these costs don’t require new money; long-term, they can be covered by redirecting money now spent on non-OA journals. The economics of prestige temporarily favors older journals, and therefore non-OA journals, but high-quality OA journals are inexorably acquiring prestige to match their quality, and new OA journals launch every week. While non-OA publishers can still influence author decisions, they are powerless to stop the rise of lawful OA from those who are determined to seize rather than spurn the opportunities created by the internet.

The Battle of the Non-Papers

For anyone with any lingering doubts about the absurdity of intellectual monopolies and the organisations who peddle them, enter the non-paper:

A small group of countries opposing the inclusion of intellectual property-related issues in World Trade Organization negotiations has issued their response to an earlier “non-paper” that had called for IP issues to be integrated with the upcoming horizontal, or all-inclusive, negotiations at the WTO.

...

The paper is referring to a 26 May proposal, in the form of another “non-paper” seeking to ensure that three major IP issues are on the table for the horizontal trade talks.

Recursive Publics: Hardly a Two-Bit Idea

For some years I have contemplated – and even planned out in some detail - a kind of follow-up to Rebel Code, which would look at the ways the ideas underlying free software have radiated out ever wider, to open content, open access, open courseware, open science – well, if you're reading this blog, you can fill in the rest. Happily, I couldn't find a publisher willing to take this on, so I was spared all the effort (non-authors have no idea what an outrageous amount of work books entail).

Now someone else has gone ahead, done all that work, and written pretty much that book, albeit with a more scholarly, anthropological twist than I could aspire to. Moreover, in true open source fashion, its author, Christopher Kelty, has made it freely available, not only to read, but to hack. The following paragraph expresses the core idea of this (and my) book:

The significance of Free Software extends far beyond the arcane and detailed technical practices of software programmers and “geeks” (as I refer to them herein). Since about 1998, the practices and ideas of Free Software have extended into new realms of life and creativity: from software to music and film to science, engineering, and education; from national politics of intellectual property to global debates about civil society; from UNIX to Mac OS X and Windows; from medical records and databases to international disease monitoring and synthetic biology; from Open Source to open access. Free Software is no longer only about software—it exemplifies a more general reorientation of power and knowledge.

I've only speed-read it – it's a dense and rich book – but from what I've seen, I can heartily recommend it to anyone who finds some of the ideas on this blog vaguely amusing: it's the work of a kindred spirit. The only thing I wasn't so keen on was its title: “Two Bits” Now, call me parochial, but the only connotation of “two bits” for me is inferiority, as in a two-bit solution. A far better title, IMHO, would have been one of the cleverest concepts in the book: that of “recursive publics”:

Recursive publics are publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals. In the cases explored herein, that specific infrastructure includes the creation of the Internet itself, as well as its associated tools and structures, such as Usenet, e-mail,the World Wide Web (www), UNIX and UNIX-derived operating systems, protocols, standards, and standards processes. For the last thirty years, the Internet has been the subject of a contest in which Free Software has been both a central combatant and an important architect.

By calling Free Software a recursive public, I am doing two things: first, I am drawing attention to the democratic and political significance of Free Software and the Internet; and second, I am suggesting that our current understanding (both academic and colloquial) of what counts as a self-governing public, or even as “the public,” is radically inadequate to understanding the contemporary reori entation of knowledge and power.

The arch-recursionist himself, RMS, would love that.

Open Enterprise Interview: Bernard Dalle, Index Ventures

On Open Enterprise blog.

Nearly Perfect Neelie

Looks like Neelie really gets it these days:

“I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels. “No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”

Now, if she could just change "open standards" to "open source"....

UK's Second City in Second Life

Whatever happened to Second Life? Well, somebody's still using it, apparently:

to create a geo-coded map within Second Life that enables you to explore a scaled 3D version of Birmingham, UK in-world, access geo-tagged BBC and CNN World News, and more.

(Via New World Notes.)