I Have an Intuition

Of all the complaints about open source - there's no support, poor security, lack of a business model etc. etc. - the one that still has a semblance of truth is that it lacks certain key applications on the desktop. Prime among these is Intuit's QuickBooks personal finance software. It looks like that final obstacle is about to fall. Not only has it set up a Linux Business site, but there are indications it is aiming to break its dependence on Microsoft technologies:

We are actively working on making our product compatible with other browsers (including Safari). We have a large product that currently uses ActiveX and was initially tuned to work with Internet Explorer. Therefore, it will require a large amount of work and will take some time on our part to accomplish. As you can see from the iPhone application, we have passion for Mac within our team!

Additionally, we too would like to use Firefox. We are in this with you; we just need some time to make it all happen.

(Via Jim Zemlin.)

Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and...Vista

One of the things I like about Roy Schestowitz's Boycott Novell site is the way it brings back the Golden Oldies - statements from documents that Microsoft would really rather you never knew about.

One of my favourites is a series of documents about Windows Evanglism. These are really extraordinary, because they prefigure practically everything slightly dodgy that Microsoft has done over the years. But sometimes, Fate can be cruelly ironic.

Here's a statement about how you should kick a competitor when it's down:

Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, “he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2.” Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition’s technology part of the mythology of the computer industry.

Or, as we would say nowadays: “he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and...Vista.”

Act Now on ACTA

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why Open Access for Textbooks is Inevitable

Nice summary here:

With high up front costs and (relatively) low marginal costs, textbook publishing is like other media: the big winners are obscenely profitable and the losers have no hope of turning a profit. Thus, textbook publishers are exactly like record labels: they grew accustomed to high profit margins on winners both to cover their losers, but also to transfer wealth to shareholders and executives.

Without practical or legal protection, that business model will be as extinct as the dodo bird. It happened to CDs, it’s happening to textbooks, and movies are next. The publishers’ anti-piracy czar said “It is troubling that there is a culture of infringement out there.” No duh.

Unfortunately the author then goes on with a complete non-sequitur:

I’m really furious at both the publishers and these student self-appointed Robin Hoods, because together they are creating a generation of information pirates. To all these students studying organic chemistry: would you really prefer a world without IP — that instead of having a job producing information, you will instead have a job making things, delivering personal services or digging ditches? Is that really your nirvana?

A "world without IP" does not imply that everyone ends up digging ditches: it simply implies that business models are not based on exploiting one-sided intellectual monopolies.

I (and many others - hello, Mike) have written much about the alternatives to the "eye-pea" mentality, but if you want a single counter-example you could do worse than consider how open source companies make money. Hint: it's not by locking up their code. Although the GNU GPL *does* depend on copyright law to function, that's simply - if paradoxically - to make it available for all, not to forbid such re-use, which lies at the heart of the traditional copyright system.

Open Domotics

Marc Fleury has already written computer history once when he set up JBoss with a new model of holding all the copyright in the code - hitherto the coders usually owned their own contributions, as is the case for the Linux kernel - and a bold move up the enterprise stack into open source middleware. That paid off very nicely for him - and why not? - and now he's back with what looks like another very interesting move:

I have been studying a new industry lately, it is called Home Automation or Domotics in Europe. It is really a fancy name to describe the age old problem of "why can't my mom operate my remote". Every self respecting geek has one day felt the urge to program his or her house. Home Automation in the field is lights, AV, AC, Security. Today it is a bit of an expensive hobby, even downright elitist in some cases, but the technology is rapidly democratizing, due to Wifi, Commodity software/hardware, the iPhone and the housing crisis.

Although Fleury is a hard-headed business man who speaks his mind, he's also a true-blue hacker with his geekish heart in the right place:

We are an Open Community in Domotics, product design is rather open. We provide a hardware reference implementation on Java Linux it will help us develop but also provides the physical bridge to IR/RS/Ethernet/wifi. On the software side use JBoss actually as the base for our server leveraging packaging and installation. It is an application of JBoss in a way. We use Java to map protocols.

Open domotics - worth doing for the name alone.

India's $10 Laptop

Apparently:

"The government aims to provide 10-dollar laptops to students and research in this direction is on," said D Purandeshwari, Minister of State for Human Resources Development in New Delhi.

Well, at that price, it won't be running Windows - unless Microsoft prices it *negatively*, which it might be driven to.... (Via Valleywag.)

Update: A real bargain: only $10, free misprint included.

Should We Fear the (Microsoft) Geeks, Bearing Gifts?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Paying the Price

One of the problems with handling the issue of greenhouse gases is getting countries to accep their responsibilities. The difficulty is that there are lots of ways of looking at things. For example, although the developing countries like India and China are clearly soon going to be the main culprits here, they can - with justice - point out that countries in the West have been polluting for longer, and have therefore already contributed far more to global warming. The obvious solution here is to use a time-integrated output, which takes that into account.

But it turns out that things are even more complicated:

Economists now say that one-third of China's carbon dioxide emissions are pumped into the atmosphere in order to manufacture exported goods – many of them "advanced" electronics goods destined for developed countries.

That is, in some sense a third of China's current emissions are "ours", and should be added to our already swelling debit.

The good news is that such things can be calculated to come up with fair ways of allocating future cuts; the bad news is that not many countries are going to be mature enough to accept them.

Perhaps the easiest way to handle this would be through economics: if a green tax were applied to every product, there would be strong incentives to reduce their carbon footprint (and environmental impact generally). In this case, China would no longer be producing pollution on the West's behalf unless it could do it as "efficiently" as elsewhere. Unfortunately, that, too, requires a certain maturity on behalf the world's nations to accept such a system. It also probably requires more time to set up than have at our disposal....

Real Dan Lyons: Really Good

As so often, I'm with Matt on this one: good as he was when the Fake Steve jobs, Dan Lyons is even better as himself. This is particularly sharp analysis - not just of Apple, but of the twisted thinking of the PR people behind it:

If Nocera had simply refused to go off the record, the burden would have remained on Jobs to get his message out and to do it openly or suffer continued hits to Apple stock. By going off the record, Nocera let himself get played by Jobs and Apple. Consider this. What if Jobs is lying? I’m not saying he is. But gods have been known to lie, especially when dealing with mere mortals. Think of how Zeus looked upon humans and you get an idea how Jobs views pretty much everyone in the world who isn’t Steve Jobs.

If Apple lies in a press release, or if its CEO lies in an on-the-record statement, the company has problems. But if everything was off the record, who’s to know? Or maybe you don’t exactly lie but you kind of hint at something and shade the conversation and lead someone to believe something even without explicitly saying that thing.

If down the road it turns out Steve was lying and someone from the SEC or some lawyer in a civil suit wants to find out what was said in that conversation, they’ll have to subpoena Joe Nocera, and the New York Times will fight that request. Even if Joe Nocera wants to tell the world what Steve Jobs told him, he can’t. He made a deal. He went off the record. Even if Steve turns out to be lying, Joe Nocera is stuck.

More generally:

One of the many ironies and contradictions about Apple is that while the company presents this hip, open, cool image to the world, its PR machine is the most secretive, locked-down, hard-assed and disciplined of any company in tech, including IBM.

This is one reason why Apple sticks in my craw. As what Lyons has nicely dubbed a "freetard", I just find the company too keen on closed for my liking. That said, I think Shuttleworth is absolutely right that Apple is now the one to beat....

EPO Wins Patent for Jesuitical Casuistry

Wow, there are some clever bunnies up at the EPO these days. Try this for size:

Relying on a well-known and widely used definition, a computer-implemented invention is an invention whose implementation involves the use of a computer, computer network or other programmable apparatus, the invention having one or more features which are realised wholly or partly by means of a computer program. The term software, on the other hand, is ambiguous. It is generally understood as the implementation of an algorithm in source or object code, but without distinguishing between technical and non-technical processes.

As with all inventions, computer-implemented inventions are patentable only if they have technical character, i.e. solve a technical problem, are new and involve an inventive technical contribution to the prior art.

Right, so let's just go through that.

As the EPO says, software does not distinguish "between technical and non-technical processes". The reason it doesn't distinguish is because it is a completely factitious distinction: it doesn't exist. Software is just a bunch of algorithms working on data, outputting data; it doesn't solve "technical" problems, it solve mathematical ones. Software is mathematics.

But that's a bit of issue for the EPO, because that would mean that it could never, ever give patents for anything even vaguely software-ish. To get round this, it invents a mystical essence called "a computer-implemented invention", which is basically hardware plus software, with the magical property that the addition of the hardware makes the software patentable, even though the software is still inputting data, applying a few mathematical algorithms, and then outputting data. But to do this, the EPO has to dismiss that embarrassing concept known as "software" as "ambiguous" - by which it means "awkward for the purposes of its arguments".

You can tell that the EPO is not really convinced by its own logic here, since it goes to make the following emotional appeal:

Try to imagine a world without mobile telephones, refrigerators and washing machines, DVD players, medical imaging (X-ray, NMR), anti-lock braking systems (ABS) for cars, aircraft navigation systems, etc., etc.

We take many of the above items for granted in our everyday lives. Still, we realise that they contain highly complicated components. And, indeed, they all make use of computer-implemented inventions, frequently implemented by software. Nowadays such inventions can be found in all fields of technology, and in many cases the innovative part of a new product or process will lie in a computer program. Our lives have been immeasurably changed by these inventions and the benefit to individuals and society is enormous.

Think for a moment how much effort and investment has been put into the development and commercialisation of these products. Then ask yourself if the innovators would really have made that effort if they had not expected to benefit economically. Finally, ask yourself if these same innovators would have invested all the money and resources required to develop new or better products without the possibility of patent protection. The reality is that many important innovations have reached the market place with the help of the patent system.

Now, of course, what's really interesting about this argument is that it's been used before:

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it got paid?

...

One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?

Bill Gates wrote that in 1976, never dreaming something like free software could not only exist, but thrive to the point of underming his own company. And so it is with all these wonderful inventions.

Today, more and more companies are routinely making available precisely this kind of system and embedded software as open source; patents are completely unnecessary to encourage this kind of innovation, and the EPO's argument here, as elsewhere, is specious. Indeed, it is downright wrong-headed: it is becoming clear that the best way to promote innovation and provide benefits to society is to make information freely available so that others can extend your work unhindered.

And so the argument for "computer-implemented inventions" fails both at a theoretical and at a practical level: such patents are worse than unnecessary, they are impediments to innovation and progress (as, most probably, are *all* patents.)

But I have to say, the EPO would have made fine Jesuits.

One Strike and They Miss the Point

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Church of Openness

In Digital Code of Life, I explained at length - some would say at excessive length - how the Human Genome Project was a key early demonstration of the transformative power of openness. Here's one of the key initiators of that project, George Church, who wants to open up genomics even more. Why? Because:

Exponentials don't just happen. In Church's work, they proceed from two axioms. The first is automation, the idea that by automating human tasks, letting a computer or a machine replicate a manual process, technology becomes faster, easier to use, and more popular. The second is openness, the notion that sharing technologies by distributing them as widely as possible with minimal restrictions on use encourages both the adoption and the impact of a technology.

And Church believes in openness so much, he's even applying to his sequencer:

In the past three years, more companies have joined the marketplace with their own instruments, all of them driving toward the same goal: speeding up the process of sequencing DNA and cutting the cost. Most of the second-generation machines are priced at around $500,000. This spring, Church's lab undercut them all with the Polonator G.007 — offered at the low, low price of $150,000. The instrument, designed and fine-tuned by Church and his team, is manufactured and sold by Danaher, an $11 billion scientific-equipment company. The Polonator is already sequencing DNA from the first 10 PGP volunteers. What's more, both the software and hardware in the Polonator are open source. In other words, any competitor is free to buy a Polonator for $150,000 and copy it. The result, Church hopes, will be akin to how IBM's open-architecture approach in the early '80s fueled the PC revolution.

War on Terror = War on Thinking

Oh look, you start down the slippery path of declaring war on abstract nouns, and you end up with pusillanimous mindlessness like this:

An 82-year-old woman in Southampton, UK was told she couldn't take photos of an empty wading pool because she might be a paedophile. Because, you know, anything that children touch regularly becomes part of their souls, and if a paedophile looks at those objects, it's just like sexually assaulting a child.

Open Source Skype Scuppered

I don't use Skype much, so news that it probably has a backdoor that lets others (hello, secret services) eavesdrop doesn't much concern me personally. But it's regrettable for several reasons.

First, obviously, that such a flaw should be built in is bad. It weakens the product - crackers of the world are doubtless firing up their Skype programs even as I write - and suggests an extremely patronising attitude to users. But I think there's another, less obvious, problem with this revelation.

For some time, people have been talking about getting Skype to go open source: you can now forget that. If there really is a backdoor, Skype is not going to reveal it - or let people rip it out of any released code.

Ah well, there's always Ekiga....

BT Calls on Open Source

On Open Enterprise blog.

ActiveX: the Law in Korea?

I've long known that the Korean governmnet is pretty benighted when it comes to *insisting* that people use ActiveX in order to interact with it, but now it seems that opponents of this monoculture have just been seriously slapped down:

Open Web, a Korean web forum led by professor Kichang Kim of Korea University is best known for its fight against rampant use of Active X in Korea, lost a lawsuit against the KFTC (Korea Financial Telecommunication and Clearings Comittee). Professor Kim accused that the Korean government's mandate on the use of Active X programs for the internet banking and other public web services should be lifted, as it is against fair trade and "overly favors technology from a single company (that is, Microsoft)".

Professor Kim has also asserted that as many Korean netizens somehow grew to think that Active X is something they have to download anyway, many of them are exposed to security vulnerabilities. Also, as so many entities including virtually all financial institutes in the nation depend on Microsoft technology in Korea, whenever Microsoft announces an update, the whole nation has to upgrade its internet infrastructure, and this leads to various losses on a national scale - Kim asserted.

But Professor Kim's year-long accusation fell short of convincing the court that the government mandate on the Active X is against fair trade and therefore is illegal.

How can a government lock its people into one technology - one, moreover, whose flaws are now well documented? Even the UK government has never been *this* daft.

Not Just Another Netbook

Rather, a home-grown one with some nice touches:

The webbook is manufactured by the UK electronics company Elonex and is being sold exclusively by The Carphone Warehouse.

The webbook is a high specification UMPC that has a 1.6Ghz Via C7 processor (x86), 512Mb of RAM and [currently] an 80G HDD. The screen has a very usable 1024×600 resolution and it has the usual assortment of USB, LAN and an SD socket, plus built in WiFi too. We have setup a blog specifically for the webbook here so users can get access to all the latest news, tips and advice. Be sure to add it to your feed reader.

The really cool thing about the webbook is the software. The webbok comes pre-loaded with Ubuntu 8.04.1 and some new software written especially for this application that delivers broadband connectivity over 3G Mobile networks.

OpenSim: Virtual Worlds Without DRM

OpenSim. the open source platform based on Second Life's protocols, is shaping up nicely. Here's more evidence of intelligent life in outer (virtual) space:

Frisby and Levine also backed an intellectual property scheme for OpenSim very different from Second Life’s. In Second Life, objects can be set with flags like “no-copy” by their creators, which Linden’s servers enforce. But numerous exploits to Second Life’s copy-protection model are known, and brazen theft abounds in Second Life.

In OpenSim, by default, no copy protection will exist at all. “You cannot know what a foreign piece of software will do with a piece of digital content once it receives it,” Levine said. To insert a digital rights management tool into OpenSim is to invite criminal hackers to find ways to circumvent it and undermine the credibility of the software, he argued.

Why We Must React to ACTA

On Linux Journal.

W(h)ither the UK Database Nation?

Interesting:

The court’s view was that health care staff who are not involved in the care of a patient must be unable to access that patient’s electronic medical record: “What is required in this connection is practical and effective protection to exclude any possibility of unauthorised access occurring in the first place.” (Press coverage here.)

A “practical and effective” protection test in European law will bind engineering, law and policy much more tightly together. And it will have wide consequences. Privacy compaigners, for example, can now argue strongly that the NHS Care Records service is illegal.

To say nothing of the central ID card database that permits all kinds of decentralised access....

Open Access to Drugs (Data)

Here's an interesting confluence of trends:

The Wellcome Trust has awarded £4.7 million [€5.8 million] to EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute [EMBL-EBI] to support the transfer of a large collection of information on the properties and activities of drugs and a large set of drug-like small molecules from the publicly listed company Galapagos NV to the public domain. It will be incorporated into the EMBL-EBI's collection of open-access data resources for biomedical research and will be maintained by a newly established team of scientists at the EMBL-EBI.

So here we have commercial drugs data being put into the public domain - no restrictions - and managed by one of the key public databases.

The transfer will empower academia to participate in the first stages of drug discovery for all therapeutic areas, including major diseases of the developing world. In future it could also result in improved prediction of drug side-effects.

Given that the current, capital-intensive method of drug development, which is highly skewed to coming up with drugs for rich, obese Westerners, this openness to all is important: it means that one of the key barriers to discovering new therapies is down, in part, at least.

And as Peter Suber rightly notes:

Kudos to Galapagos and Wellcome Trust not only for opening these data, but for choosing the public domain rather than a license. This fits with Science Commons' latest thinking on barrier-free research and collaboration in the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data.

Public domain redux....

UK Public Sector Information Unlocking Service

Gosh, this is getting to be a habit:

As the regulator for public sector information re-use, we know that people can encounter difficulty from time to time getting hold of the information they need in the formats they want. Such difficulties can include issues with charging, licensing or the data standards that public sector information is provided in.

These issues are not about access (which are dealt with under access legislation, such as the Freedom of Information Act or Environmental Information Regulations), but all the other pitfalls which can occur when you want to do something with public sector information - copy it, remix it with other data or add value and republish it. If you are trying to re-use some public sector information, but the data you need is locked-up, this service is for you.

(Via Links.)

DYB DYB DYB for Drigg

As rumours swirl about Google buying Digg, spare a thought for the parlous plight of the open source version, Drigg:

I took Drigg this far, but I am fatigued. I wrote Drigg not out of passion for programming, but because I felt that the whole world needed it. I wrote several thousands of line of code in a very short time, and kept fixing bug after bug. I also took the step of splitting Drigg into several sub-module--a painful, bold and much needed move. Not, the big reports are very few and Drigg is very well structured.

I am now looking for a new co-maintainer who can take the lead in Drigg's development. I am not a programmer, and I don't feel I am the right person to push this project any further. There are important features that need to be implemented, and I am just too slow. I am not a very skilled programmer, and it simply shows. The code is good out of immensely hard work, and this means that development is slow. I feel the community deserves better.

I will still be here! People who know me and trust me know that I will hold the hand of the new maintainer and will make sure that everything is going the right direction. I will be here, via email, IM, phone, etc. The new maintainer needs to know:

* PHP
* Drupal modules
* Javascript

If you would like to take over an immensely important, exciting, lively project, please let me know now ("merc" followed my "mobily1" and then ".com").

Someone?

Open Source in European Public Administrations

If you're trying to keep up with the increasing number of public administrations in Europe discovering the joys of free software, here's a handy resource: the Open Source Observatory and Repository.

The OSOR provides a platform for the exchange of information, experiences and FLOSS-based code for the use in public administrations. Your are invited to participate in this exchange and make use of the OSOR services:

* international news on Open Source topics;
* a repository with code and documentation on software for public administrations;
* a state-of-the art forge for working together.

The value and usefulness of the platform will increase with the number of contributors and of contributions that are offered for sharing.

Everybody is welcome as a user. However, if you want to upload code and information or intend to open a community project, you will have to register on the forge. In case you come from the business sector, you will be required to reference a sponsor from the public sector.

The OSOR admits all free, libre, and open source software that is distributed under licenses that are recognised by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and code that is released under the European Union Public License (EUPL).

And remember: it's all about sharing....

Russian Schools A-Rushin' to Free Software

I've written before about a very interesting pilot project to introduce free software into schools in three Russian regions; things seem to be going down a storm:

В более чем 50% школ пилотных регионов, в которых запланирована установка пакетов свободного программного обеспечения (ПСПО), дистрибутивы уже установлены.

На данный момент в общей сложности ПСПО установлены в 572 школах республики Татарстан, Пермского края и Томской области (из запланированных 1084).

[Via Google Translate: In more than 50% of schools pilot regions, where the scheduled installation of free software packages (PSPO), distributions have been installed.

So far a total of PSPO installed in 572 schools in the republic of Tatarstan, Perm Territory, and Tomsk region (of the planned 1084).]