Earlier this year, I called open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) the “Cinderella of the business free software world”. But even then, I was aware of considerable activity in this sector, and that it was a matter of “when” rather than “if” ERP made its big breakthrough into the mainstream....
On Open Enterprise blog.
Last week I was talking at the Open Everything meeting in London, where I went through some (most) of my tropes about openness and the creation of a commons, about enclosure (of land, creativity and ideas), how today's open movements are based on the economics of abundance, not scarcity, and are actually a return to a pre-lapsarian state, rather than something inherently new.
What was particularly heartening about the occasion was meeting so many other people with similar viewpoints, albeit coming from slightly different starting positions. Indeed, one of the most positive signs that something is afoot is the broad-based nature of this growing unanimity around the world.
For example, I came across a reference to the paper "Undermining abundance (Counterproductive uses of technology and law in nature, agriculture, and the information sector)", which also ties together the enclosure of many different domains:Technology and law are increasingly used to undermine processes of abundance intrinsic to nature, agriculture and the information sector. A number of examples are reviewed here. Such counterproductive use of technology and law is traced to corporate profitseeking. The relationships between the phenomenon of abundance and the related concepts of scarcity and commons are explored. Finally, approaches are proposed that harness abundance for the human good.
This led me to the blog of the author, Roberto Verzola. He's based in the Philippines, which has provided me with interesting insights into what's happening in that part of the world in terms of openness.
Here's a taster of his original thinking, from a posting provocatively entitled "The piracy of intellectuals":We’ve seen people who come from or work for Western software firms. Well groomed, in business coat and tie, they look the antithesis of the pirate they hate so much. They come and visit this country of pirates, and perhaps make a little study how much they are losing from piracy in the Philippines.
Quite a number of them, however, come to the country to do some pirating themselves.
But they don’t pirate software, which is apparently beyond their dignity. They pirate people. They pirate those who write the software. They pirate our best systems analysts, our best engineers, our best programmers, and our best computer operators.
The advanced countries of the West routinely pirate from the Third World our best professionals and skilled workers, but begrudge us peoples of the Third World if we engaged in some piracy ourselves. They accuse the Third World of “piracy of intellectual property”, yet they themselves engage in the “piracy of intellectuals”.
In truth, there is quite a difference between pirating intellectual property and pirating intellectuals.
For example, it costs our country perhaps ten thousand dollars to train one doctor. Training a second doctor would cost another ten thousand dollars. Training ten doctors would cost a hundred thousand dollars. In short, given an ‘original’ doctor, it would cost us as much to make each ‘copy’ of the original. When the Americans pirate our doctors, they take away an irreplaceable resource, for it takes more than ten years to train a new doctor. The Philippines has approximately one doctor for every 6,700 citizens. When the U.S. pirates this doctor, it denies 6,700 Filipinos of the services of a doctor. And every year, the U.S. takes away hundreds of our doctors. How many Filipinos died because they could not get the services of a doctor on time?
What about a computer program? Whatever amount Lotus Corporation spent in developing their spreadsheet program, it costs practically nothing to make a second or third copy of the program. It would take a few seconds for them to make each copy. When we Filipinos pirate their program, we have not stolen any irreplaceable resource, nor will it take Lotus 10 years to replace the program, nor have we denied any American citizen the use of the spreadsheet program. It is still there, for Americans to use. We make a copy of their program, we don’t steal it, because we have not taken anything away. We have made our own copy, but they still have the original.
Pirating a computer program is quite different from pirating a doctor. When the U.S. pirates our doctors, it doesn’t take a copy and leave the original behind. Instead, it takes the original and leaves nothing behind.
Strongly recommended.
Recently, Russia announced that it was pushing Microsoft out of its schools in favour of open source. Now, it's going even further by joining with Cuba to write free software that can be used instead of Microsoft's products in other areas:Россия и Куба договорились о сотрудничестве в области информационных технологий, причем одним из его аспектов станет совместная работа по развитию свободного ПО. Отказ от продукции Microsoft — одно из направлений ИТ-политики Острова Свободы.
В каких конкретно проектах найдут выражение намерения сторон, пока не определено, прокомментировали CNews его подписание в Минкомсвязи, но эксперты полагают, что этот пункт соглашения имеет серьезную политическую подоплеку.
[Via Google Translate: Russia and Cuba have agreed on cooperation in information technology, with one of its aspects will work together to develop free software. Waiver of products Microsoft - one of the areas of IT policy Islands Liberty.
One of the priority items of joint work will also introduce free software in government and fiscal institutions. In what specific projects will express intent of the parties, has not yet been identified, commented CNews his signature in Minkomsvyazi, but experts believe that the paragraph agreement has serious political overtones.]
Why the move? According to the same article:Так, генеральный директор компании ALT Linux Алексей Смирнов отметил, что распространение свободного ПО как на Кубе, так и в России, является стратегическим приоритетом, связанным с обеспечением суверенитета стран, поэтому стороны «легко нашли общий язык».
[Via Google Translate: For example, the CEO of ALT Linux Alexei Smirnov said that the distribution of free software as in Cuba, and Russia is a strategic priority related to the sovereignty of countries, so part of «easy to find a common language».]
If that's the case, we may be seeing much more free software coming out of Russia and its friends.
Alongside all the high-profile wins for free software, there are what might be called guerilla gains happening in the b
ackground – small conceptual victories that point to greater things. Here's two....
On Open Enterprise blog.
I wrote below about Microsoft's rather desperate BizSpark. It all seemed pretty transparent to me. But not to the BBC, apparently, which has fallen hook, line and sinker for the Microsoft line:"The rising tide of people building new companies, building successful companies using our product is good for us because we share in that over time. The goal is to remove any barriers to getting going." he told BBC News.
Except, of course, there are no barriers to getting going as far as software is concerned, because the LAMP stack has always been there, always free and always excellent - as evidenced by the fact that it's currently running 99.9% of Web 2.0.
But it's obviously too much to expect a technology reporter in Silicon Valley to mention such trivia in the face of the *real* story about Microsoft's perfervid altruism.
This is something that I've been thinking in the context of the wretched "three strikes and you're out":The internet is a right. We have reached the point at which enabling and assuring open, unfettered, and universal access to the internet should become a hallmark of civilized societies. The Global Agenda Council stands in a position to make this the goal of nations.
In civilized societies, universal education is a right. In some nations, health care is a right. Some other services provided in the common good may require payment but in developed nations are nonetheless considered rights: access to clean water and electricity. In the United States, even telephones are a right, as users pay fees to subsidize the cost of getting lines to all people. In the United Kingdom, television is a right insofar as the government levies a tax to support it. Such rights may be met publicly or privately.
Access to the internet – and open, broadband internet that is neither censored nor filtered by government or business – should be seen, similarly, as a necessity and thus a right. Just as we judge nations by their literacy, we should now judge them by their connectedness.
...bribe them:
Microsoft BizSpark is a global program designed to help accelerate the success of early stage startups by providing key resources when they need it the most:
* Software. Receive fast and easy access to current full-featured Microsoft development tools, platform technologies, and production licenses of server products for immediate use in developing and bringing to market innovative and interoperable solutions. There is no upfront cost to enroll.
Fortunately, people don't choose the LAMP stack predominantly because it's free, but because it's better.
What next - *paying* people to use Microsoft's products? Oh, wait....
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation hase probably done more than anyone else to further open education, and it's at it again, this time with a centralised site for Open Educational Resources (OER):To ensure that all the valuable knowledge created about OER and the OER cause is readily accessible to a broad audience, the Hewlett Foundation partnered with IssueLab to create a comprehensive OER document repository. This web site is the result of that partnership.
The vision for this web site is, in essence, a knowledge management center where the materials and documentation that we all use in our work to further the cause of OER are easy to share and access. This web site is not the place to share OER resources such as syllabi or course modules. A great place to share those types of materials is the OER Commons.
This repository is a joint project of the OER community and is managed by IssueLab, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), and the Education Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Radio spectrum is inherently a commons, a resource that is owned by no one or by the state, but available to all. Too often in the past, that commons has been enclosed – sold off to the highest bidder. Now, it seems, some of the fences are being torn down, in the US at least....
On Open Enterprise blog.
More sanity from the House of Lords:The government has been defeated in the House of Lords over the issue of keeping peoples' DNA and fingerprints on the police national database.
Peers backed a Conservative amendment calling for national guidelines for deleting material by 161 votes to 150.
Ministers said the safeguard was not needed and could hinder anti-terror operations but critics said innocent people should not be stigmatised.
The safeguard was not needed, presumably, because we no longer have any right to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty - the government's operating principle being that we are *all* potential terrorists, and therefore should *all* be under surveillance at all times and in all ways.
The idiocy of "drill, baby, drill" was evident to anyone with a functioning synapse: it would have led to marginal production of extra oil at the cost of considerable environmental damage. Alas, the EU seems not to have got the memo:Natural areas protected under EU law could be opened for mining as part of efforts to curb Europe's growing dependence on third-country imports of precious minerals and metals, the European Commission announced yesterday (4 November).
"This is the beginning of a natural resources strategy," EU Enterprise Commissioner Günter Verheugen told journalists during the presentation of a new 'integrated strategy' for raw materials.
Well, if it is "the beginning of a natural resources strategy", it is also the end of any serious environmental strategy. What is needed is more recycling and more efficient use of resources and materials that we already have, not a constant search for new places to dig up to meet our unbridled industrial hunger.
Quoth Hazel Blears:"But mostly, political blogs are written by people with disdain for the political system and politicians, who see their function as unearthing scandals, conspiracies and perceived hypocrisy.
"Until political blogging 'adds value' to our political culture, by allowing new voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair."
Well, darling, could it be that bloggers unearth scandals and hypocrisy because that's mostly what you and your chums in the government seem to generate? Could it be that a more affirmative kind of blogging will emerge once your government drops its own unending flood of cynicism and spin and lies?
Because - and here's the shocking truth, Hazel - nobody is stopping "new voices" from emerging in the blogosphere: that's it's beauty, entry is frictionless. The fact that there aren't any such voices, or that nobody reads them if there are, is because of the noxious atmosphere you and your mates have engendered. Essentially, politicians get the journalism they deserve, so you stand condemned by your own observations.
Those nice people at Free Our Bills asked me to Write to Them, so I did:I am writing to ask you to sign Early Day Motion (EDM) 2141, whose text is as follows:
"That this House believes it has a duty to publish Bills in such a fashion that they can be accessed as easily and as early as possible by the public; notes that the non-partisan Free Our Bills campaign is urging the House to publish bill texts in a new electronic format to improve accessibility and public scrutiny of legislation; further notes that the changes requested would have no impact on the content of Bills, nor upon the process by which they are currently made; considers that the new format could be delivered cheaply and quickly; acknowledges that the Leader of the House's office did not accept a prior request for new formatting from mySociety, nor provide an explanation of why the changes could be made; and calls on the Leader of House to ask House of Commons Clerks to work with Free Our Bills campaign staff to commence publication of Bills in the new format."
As you can see, this about making the Parliamentary process more transparent, more useful, and therefore, ultimately, more engaging. This would obviously be beneficial not only for the electorate, but also for politicians.
The new format request is not onerous in the slightest, but would provide a huge boost to democracy in the UK. I hope that you will support it.
Yours sincerely,
Glyn Moody
You might want to do the same if you care about a transparent democratic process - or just want an excuse to write to your MP.
Why do people persist in believing that DRM can ever be effective for long?
A small group of dedicated researchers over on the Doom9 forum have successfully defeated BD+, the Blu-ray copy-protection system. This was the copy-protection mechanism that Richard Doherty, a media analyst with Envisioneering Group, claimed wouldn’t likely be broken for 10 years.
Not that any cares about Blu-ray, of course.
As long-suffering readers of this blog will have noticed, one of my favourite hobby-horses is that the whole idea of "intellectual property” is a trick, designed to plug into the warm and fuzzy feeling most people have about the idea of property, and aiming to cover up the fact that what we are really dealing with here are intellectual monopolies – of which few people are fans....
On Open Enterprise blog.
Opencourseware grew out of the application of open source ideas to education, so it seems appropriate that education should return the favour and offer opencourseware about open source. Here's a list of a hundred such courses, handily grouped by rough area.
This is really cool.
One of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can see who has made edits: this makes the process of accumulation transparent - in theory. In practice, it's often too hard to see the wood for the trees.
Enter WikiDashboard, which offers a visual representation of the editing process:The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.
It's dead easy to use: you just bung in your search term, and the relevant Wikipedia page appears (from a mirror), alongside with a neat graphic that shows who did what when. (Via All the Modern Things.)
Haven't banks learned *anything*?In 2006, the Bank of Communications Beijing Branch began offering loans to Chinese SMEs secured against IP assets. Since then 37 companies have borrowed a total of over 400 million yuan (around $58.5 million) in 44 separate deals. And not one has defaulted.
Yet.When banks start lending money against IP assets, it has to be a pretty positive sign. I know that banks have a pretty poor reputation these days, but they are not going to make cash available to companies if they do not think that they have a very good chance of getting it back; or, if they do not, that they can recover the money in other ways.
Er, because banks never make mistakes, and are never motivated by blind greed? "A pretty positive sign"? I don't think so....
I've written many times about OpenStreetMap, but rarely in the context of the proprietary online mapping services. Here's a post that shows why open is better: in several important locations - such as Baghdad, apparently - it's the *only* option:And when you're done with Baghdad, check out Kabul, yet another place where Google Mapmaker isn't enabled: Yahoo Maps, Virtual Earth, Google Maps vs. OpenStreetMap. It isn't even close.
There is an irony at the heart of the open content world: that the two biggest successes there – Wikipedia and the Creative Commons movement – cannot share content. This is because Wikipedia was created before CC came on the scene, and therefore – quite reasonably – used the best existing open content licence, the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL), which is not compatible with popular CC licences. As the man who did more than anyone to craft the latter, Larry Lessig, explains....
On Open Enterprise blog.
I've written several times about the mysterious Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which is currently being negotiated behind closed doors, with little or no input from proles like you and me. Despite efforts to present us with a fait accompli, it seems that the Very Important People who are working on this are getting slightly rattled by the increasing criticism of both the process and the likely result.
For the fine site Digital Majority has managed to get its mitts on a leaked document put together by the European Commission in a desperate attempt to head off that growing discontent.
You can read the whole thing here, as well as Digital Majority's useful analysis. Basically, it's a case of the lady protesting too much: earnestly assuring us that it doesn't intend to bring in a shopping list of legal nasties - criminalisation of infringement, summary injunctions for those *suspected* of infringing, "three strikes and you're out", etc. - but convincing no one.
But what caught my attention were the closing words of this sad little document:
Fake medicines are reckoned to account for almost 10% of world trade in medicines. Most of these fake drugs are headed for the world’s poorest countries.
Riiiiiiiiiiiight. And why, might one ask, are the world's poorest countries buying all those fake drugs? It couldn't possibly be because of the high prices demanded by the owners of the relevant patents on the "real" thing? And it couldn't possible be the case that much of the counterfeiting this treaty aims to expurgate is caused precisely by those self-same intellectual monopolies?
And yet, strangely, getting rid of monopolies is something that the people working so feverishly on ACTA simply cannot contemplate - despite all the economic evidence that it is the solution to so many of the the problems they claim to be addressing.
Counterfeiting bad, monopolies good.
Here's an interesting point about a new trend in "publishing" inventions directly to YouTube:This is a very good article in the New York Times about publicising inventions via Web 2.0 tools like YouTube. The piece concentrates on Dr Johnny Chung Lee, a 28-year-old inventor who became a YouTube celebrity by posting Wii hacks, including how to make a muilti-touch whiteboard, and the mind-boggling video on generating real 3D gaming experiences. The videos went viral, and attracted 2 million and 6 million views respectively.
...
Something not mentioned in the NYT piece however is the patent implication of Dr Lee's practices. Patenting requires novelty, therefore by making his inventions public before filing for a patent application would invalidate any later request. However, by placing his inventions on YouTube, it also precludes anyone else from trying to patent the invention. This is, for lack of a better word, open source invention.
Indeed, and an interesting example of how openness can help stymie intellectual monopolies.
You've read the blog, now visit the conference:On 6 November 2008, London will host an Open Everything event, a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. The conversation will cover, well, everything. Qualifier: the 'thing' in question is built using openness, participation and self-organisation. There are people coming to talk about open technology, media, education, workplace design, philanthropy, public policy and even politics. These people want to tell you what they’re doing and find out what you're up to.
Look at it this way: for fifteen quid you get a unique opportunity to heckle me....
One of the hottest buzzwords/buzzphrases over the last few years has been Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This is rather good news for open source, since SOA's underlying philosophy of linking together many separate elements fits free software like a glove....
On Open Enterprise blog.
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