You, Too, Can Be a Kernel Hacker

On Open Enterprise blog.

Desperately Seeking Chandler

On Open Enterprise blog.

Federate!

You know it makes sense:

A £13bn overhaul of the NHS records system has suffered so many problems that hospitals have struggled to keep track of people requiring operations, patients with suspected MRSA and potential cancer sufferers needing urgent consultations.

T-Mobile Gets the Open Meme

T-Mobile is working with the industry to foster an open wireless services platform which will provide developers with the tools and information they need to make new, innovative experiences available to T-Mobile’s more than 31.5M customers.

I'm not sure exactly how open their open is, but it's interesting that T-Mobile has adopted this as a strategy to fight back against its bigger rivals.

Online: Slander or Libel?

A nice outbreak of sanity, here:

A High Court judge ruled this week that defamatory comments on internet forums are more like slander than libel, a judgement that could make success in such cases more difficult. Mr Justice Eady found that posts on internet discussion groups such as website bulletin boards are closer to spoken conversations than to published articles, being casual and characterised by "give and take".

Slander is defamation through speech, while libel is defamation through written means, such as a newspaper article. In the UK, it is significantly easier to win damages for libel than for slander.

Towards the Holy Grail of Virtual Worlds

On Open Enterprise blog.

He that Filches From Me My Good Name

Danny O'Brien has an interesting meditation on the difference between controlling who copies something, and controlling who claims to have created it. Cory Doctorow makes an illuminating observation on the same:

I'm reminded of the fact that the original Creative Commons license allowed creators to choose whether they wanted their works attributed to them or not, but after a year or two, it was discovered that nearly every CC user turned the attribution switch on while generating the license -- everyone wanted correct attribution, even when they were giving away free copies.

It's reputation that counts.

The Sun Shines on Asus

What struck me about this article in the Sun about Asus was how it took its readership's acquaintance with GNU/Linux for granted:

Interestingly, it runs Windows XP as an operating system to keep the costs down rather than Vista and a Linux version is on the way.

If that is laid out in menu terms like the Linux EEE laptops, then it's well worth a punt on one as a second PC in a bedroom.

Signs of the times....

Why DNA Databases Are Doomed

I've been against DNA databases for years, but I've always felt that the generic arguments I've been using were a little pallid, shall we say. And now, in what amounts to almost a throwaway comment, the wonderful Reg gives me what I've been looking for:

Although police are keen to bang the drum for cases where DNA evidence has proved vital, there are obvious privacy objections as well as fears that over-reliance on DNA evidence will lead criminals to use it as an alibi - infecting a crime scene with someone else's DNA.

At the moment, there's not much point doing that because DNA isn't regarded as as an indispensable, infallible tool. Put everyone's DNA in a database, and the police are bound to get lazy - that's human nature - using it as a quick and foolproof method for finding perpetrators.

At that point, it will be worth seeding crime scenes with some judiciously-chosen DNA - secure in the knowledge that the rozzers will be able to work out whose it is. At this point, DNA begins to lose its value, as everyone starts sprinkling the stuff everywhere, utterly confusing the DNA bloodhounds.

And so, inevitably, we will be left with a huge DNA database, useless for its original purpose, built at enormous cost, posing an even huger security risk. Great. Not.

Cloud Computing on a Stick

On Open Enterprise blog.

Morphic Resonance?

My thoughts, precisely.

I'm Touched

GigaOM has a post about touch-based computers, noting that the pioneer in this field was HP. Accompanying the article is a pic of HP's trailblazing machine, the 1983 HP-150.

Reader, I marred it!

(To explain, I managed to delete a review of the self-same machine that I was writing on it, by stabbing my finger at the wrong point of the screen. An article I had not backed up. It was the last such article - well, so far....)

Solving the Mono Problem

Alan Lord grapples manfully with Mono:

The nasty taste which has always ‘ever-so-slightly’ tainted my use of Ubuntu is that Mono is there only to support applications written in languages and for platforms which are basically Microsoft’s. It encourages software development using systems that are based on technologies almost certainly encumbered by a whole raft of M$ patents. To my mind, there are many great non M$ languages and architectures out there which are almost part-and-parcel of Linux programming and I see no need to bring .NET, ASP or even Visual Basic to my desktop. If I want to write an application, I could use PHP, Python, PERL, C, C++, Java and, of course, many others. Why do I need to endorse and encourage the proliferation of non-free software by relying on M$’s IP and the smell of their stinky patents?

Interesting discussion of what happens when you rip Mono out of Ubuntu: nothing, it seems....

ACTA's Unspeakable Acts

Since neither the EU nor the UK government has deigned to let us peasants know anything about the current ACTA negotations, I was interested to see New Zealand's government releasing a statement, which contained the following:

Participants agreed to continue consulting with stakeholders through domestic processes, share the results of these consultations at their next meeting, and to continue exploring opportunities for stakeholder consultations in connection with future ACTA meetings.

Ah, right; but I don't suppose the stakeholders in those "domestic processes" include mugs like you and me, do they?

Big Blue is Back

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Trouble with Clouds....

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

Whoops. Open data, anyone?

Blogging and "Sharism"

An interesting perspective from Chinese blogger Isaac Mao:

It's a different mindset that one can feel after blogging for a period of time. I call this philosophy "Sharism", and it can be practised by anyone because the rewards are easy to see. You share one piece of knowledge and then could come a time of returns (maybe not immediately, but with many magic happenings in the future).

The sharism spirit can currently be found in any so called "Web 2.0" phenomena - Wikipedia is just one example, created from the collective intelligence by many people around the world based on their sharing philosophy.

In a more metaphysical view, your blog can act as a halo (to borrow a term from gaming) to shine more lights to the world and coupled with other people's halo at the same time. This has spawned more imaginations in my mind of future society where everyone can be sharist and all the brains are well connected to form a smarter society like a social brain - though given the controls and obstacles that still confront blogging, it is going to be a long road to reach the social-brain dream.

Free Software Adds Some Polish (Schools)

The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source.

The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes. "OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses."

Good to see someone has a clue.

What's in a Number?

One of the long-standing jokes has been about GNU/Linux's imminent breakthrough on the desktop. Against that background, this is interesting:

Linux was starting from a rather small base in traditional sales channels: of all PCs sold in the UK last January through indirect channels, a feeble 0.1 per cent had Linux preloaded, according to numbers given to us by market research firm Context.

The Linux share of this route to market has edged up ever since the Vista launch. Then it broke the two per cent barrier in May after the latest release of Ubuntu, the strain of Linux most capable of kicking Microsoft in the shins.

I'd like to see a few months of consistent figures before crying "Hallelujah", but the latest figure of 2.8% is nonetheless impressive given the context. Or, as The Inquirer puts it:

As most everyone in the UK sales channel sups on Microsoft's marketing teat, Linux hasn't got a hope in hell bar customer demand. So its record of 2.8 per cent of all preloads in June is something to be noted.

Er, quite.

The LiMo Has Arrived

Recently I interviewed Wind River's John Bruggeman, who filled me on the intricacies of the mobile Linux market. At that time, he mentioned that one of the two groups, LiMo, would be launching phones shortly. They've arrived:

The LiMo Foundation, a consortium of wireless-related companies seeking to create an open operating system for cellphones and other wireless devices, has introduced seven new handsets based upon the Linux operating system, bringing the total to 21. One, the Motozine ZN5 from Motorola, which has a five-megapixel camera, can be bought in the United States. The other six phones are available in Japan and, according to Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, a harbinger of things to come.

It will be interesting to see what they're like, but in one sense, it doesn't matter. LiMo phones exist, now, and will only get better. That helps establish Linux in this space, and puts pressure on the other group, clustered around Google's Android.

Open Source and UK Politics

The new dividing line between Labour and the Tories is less about a left-right split than about an authoritarian approach on one side and a more liberal one on the other. And Labour are on the wrong side of it. Many of their social and economic policies may have failed, but where they have succeeded is in developing a targeting, controlling, distrustful state. From the micromanagement of civil servants, teachers, doctors and the police, to ID cards, super databases and the growth of surveillance, the government's answer to too many problems has been the removal of autonomy from individuals and more oversight from Whitehall.

The Conservative analysis is that this over-controlling state is not only disastrously unpopular, it is also one of the key reasons why Labour, despite all its spending, has failed to achieve its goals. Endless supervision has been an expensive distraction, and has sapped energy and morale out of public life.

Amazing how the Conservatives are becoming the party of bottom-up openness - explicitly in the case of open source - and Labour seems determined to become its polar opposite.

Coming Down Hard - in Favour of Downloads

A study about downloading finds:

Music companies need to stop resisting and accept that illegal downloading is a fact of 21st-century life

...

"The expectation among rights holders is that in order to create a success story, you must reduce the rate of piracy," Garland said. "We've found that is not the case."

The authors of the study argue that music rights holders need to find "new ways" and "new places" to generate income from their music, rather than chasing illegal downloads – for example, licensing agreements with YouTube or legal peer-to-peer websites. In other words, they ought to do the musical equivalent of giving away free ice-cream and selling advertising on the cones.

So far, so boring - I and others have been writing this stuff far ages. Except for one tiny detail: the study comes not from deranged bloggers like me, or crypto-communists bent on underming the entire capitalist system, but was conducted

by the MCPS-PRS Alliance and Big Champagne, an online media measurement company.

In other words, *their own research* shows that their *fight* is hopeless. Will they listen? Don't hold your breath....

Welcome to the Open Grid

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mapping the (Open) Future

OpenStreetMap goes from strength to strength:

Earlier this week the project surpassed 50,000 registered users with over 5,000 actively contributing data each month. Historically the contributor base has doubled every 5 months. That means there will be around 50,000 adding data monthly by the end of 2009. That’s a ten fold increase from today.

Right now on each and every day, 25,000km of roads gets added to the OpenStreetMap database, on the historical trend that will be over 200,000km per day by the end of 2009. And that doesn’t include all the other data that makes OpenStreetMap the richest dataset available online.

It's also growing in other ways:

Until very recently we talked about OpenStreetMap being a global project but the reality was that outside of Europe and the TIGER-Line fed USA the pockets of OpenStreetMap activity were sporadic, often just one contributor in each place, or the devoted work of one or two burning the midnight oil tracing over the Yahoo! imagery layer in far flung places. Even that’s changing though. The OpenStreetMap community itself is growing and one of the best examples of that is the proliferation of national websites acting as local language portals for the project. Already there is openstreetmap.ca, .ch, .cl, .de, .fr, .it, .jp, .nl, .se, .org.za and that’s probably missing a few that are on the way.

OpenStreetMap is clearly fast becoming one of the open world's signal achievements. (Via James Tyrrell.)

Why Software Patents Are Harmful

Recently I've pointed to a couple of classic texts about the general undesirability of intellectual monopolies. Here's an interesting counterpoint: a text about why bringing in software patents would be harmful to the Indian computer industry.

Despite this specificity, its points are quite general. For example:

In other industries, research continues up to a point where further research costs too much to be feasible. At this stage, the industry's output merelyconsists of replacing parts that have worn out.

However, in the software sector, a computer program that is fully debugged will perform its function forever without requiring maintenance or modification. “What this means is that unlike socks that wear out, and breakfast cereal that is eaten, a particular software product can be sold to a particular customer at most once. If it is to be sold to that customer again, it must be enhanced with new features and functionality.” This inevitably means that even if the industry were to approach maturity, any software company that does not produce new and innovative products will simply run out of customers! Thus, the industry will remain innovative whether or not software patents exist.

(Via Open Source India.)