The Library as Knowledge Commons

When the going gets tough, the tough...go to the library:

Fewer people bought books, CD’s, and DVD’s in 2008 than in the year before. The number of moviegoers and concertgoers shrank last year, too, though rising ticket prices in both cases offset declining sales. Theater attendance, overall, is also down.

We usually hear about these declines in isolation. But taken together, they seem to suggest that cultural pursuits across the board are on the decline. Indeed, if nobody seems to be out buying books, movies, and music, what are they doing with their leisure time instead?

Apparently: going to the library. The Boston Globe reports that public libraries around the country are posting double-digit percentage increases in circulation and new library-card application

This highlights the *increased* importance of intellectual commons like libraries during times of financial hardship, when people can't afford to own so much stuff. It also suggests why we need support libraries through thick and thin.

He/She Speak de Troof

This is something that has often struck me, too: that installing/updating programs under GNU/Linux is hugely easier than under Windows.

This is how you install and update software on Windows:

1. Open a web browser.
2. Download an executable file from an (often un-verified) source.
3. Press next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next, finish.
4. Launch your software.
5. Wait for each individual piece of software to nag you about the latest update. (”Logitech is going to look for updates…,” “Adobe PDF Reader version 8.4 is available. Please install it now,” “QuickTime needs an update (hey, mind if we sneak Safari in there, too? *wink*)”)

On Linux, on the other hand, it works something like this:

1. Open Add/Remove programs.
2. Press a check mark and hit apply.
3. Launch your software.
4. Sit back as your software is automatically updated.

We really need to beat the the drum more about this kind of stuff.

How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer

Not my words, but the subtitle of a book that apparently has wise words on the harm inflicted on society by intellectual monopolies:

It is heartening to find more and more critics of our intellectual property regime, partly as a result of growing knowledge but more importantly, the growing critical reaction to the extreme excesses of the application of the law. A new voice for me is that of Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. whose book, THE CONSERVATIVE NANNY STATE; How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer, is available for download on line link here under a Creative Commons license. The book is about much more than IP, as the subtitle indicates, but this review focuses on the IP issues Baker covers. He calls the chapter, "Bill Gates Welfare Mom: How Government Patent and Copyright Monopolies Enrich the Rich and Distort the Economy".

He begins by examining the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, and Microsoft, noting that it was not Gates hard work or brilliance, or the superiority of his software, but his government provided monopoly based on IP law that made him today's Croesus.

Sounds my kind of book; moreover, it's freely available as a download (kudos). Our numbers are swelling every day....

Behold the Biohackers

This is clearly getting serious:

Katherine Aull's laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lacks a few mod cons. "Down here I have a thermocycler I bought on eBay for 59 bucks," she says, pulling out a large, box-shaped device she uses to copy short strands of DNA. "The rest is just home brew," she adds, pointing to a centrifuge made out of a power drill and plastic food container, and a styrofoam incubator warmed with a heating pad normally used in terrariums.

In fact, Aull's lab is a closet less than 1 square metre in size in the shared apartment she lives in. Yet amid the piles of clothes she recently concocted vials of an entirely new genetically modified organism.

There's no stopping this now; great and terrible things will come of this....

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

Is Phoenix about to Enter GPL Violation HyperSpace?

If ultraportables were last year's big surprise success for GNU/Linux, one of the potentially exciting technologies for this year is the instant-on pre-operating system that loads in seconds when you power up a desktop or portable. DeviceVM’s Splashtop is probably the best known example. These are highly relevant to the free software world, since such instant-on systems are usually based on GNU/Linux, and once people start trying them out, they may simply stay there using the free software apps available, rather than wait minutes for the full glory of Windows Vista to chunder into its vitiated life.

On Open Enterprise blog.

GNU/Linux from...Marks & Spencer

As I've just written on Open Enterprise, the rise of the ultraportable/netbook was one of free software's biggest successes - and surprises - last year. It was particularly important for getting GNU/Linux into the hands of punters, many of whom were quite happy with it, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

Looks like things are going to get even better for free software:

Laptops will soon go on sale in Marks & Spencer and Next for less than £100, in the latest sign that the consumer electronics industry is tackling the recession by selling ever-cheaper products.

Elonex, a small British computer maker, will start selling its ‘net books’ in the two fashion chains from February, in an attempt to win over a new generation of female shoppers to cheap computers.

It promises its machines, which can fit inside a handbag, offer users all that laptop can – internet surfing, emailing, word processing, storing photographs – but on smaller scale. The screens are just 7 inches wide, the keyboard is slightly smaller than a normal laptop keyboard and the memory is limited.

At that price, they must be GNU/Linux. Free software-based systems as an impulse buy in M&S? 2009 is already looking good....

ARMing GNU/Linux Netbooks for Success in 2009

One of the surprises of 2008 was the runaway success of the ultaportable/netbook form factor. Now that systems running Windows XP are available people tend to forget that it was the low cost and small footprint of GNU/Linux that made this category possible in the first place. Without free software, the new machines would have been forced to run Windows Vista, making them too slow and too expensive - and hence failures. It was only because Microsoft saw GNU/Linux walking away with this nascent market that it executed a massive U-turn over Windows XP, and allowed it to be installed on these systems.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Climate Change Implies Open Access

One of the answers to What Will Change Everything? is - reasonably enough - climate change. But interestingly it focuses on the way that climate change will mean that science itself must adapt and become more interventional:

Climate may well force on us a major change in how science is distilled into major findings. There are many examples of the ponderous nature of big organizations and big projects. While I think that the IPCC deserves every bit of its hemi-Nobel, the emphasis on "certainty" and the time required for a thousand scientists and a hundred countries to reach unanimous agreement probably added up to a considerable delay in public awareness and political action.

Climate will change our ways of doing science, making some areas more like medicine with its combination of science and interventional activism, where delay to resolve uncertainties is often not an option. Few scientists are trained to think this way — and certainly not climate scientists, who are having to improvise as the window of interventional opportunity shrinks.

One consequence of this is that science will have to adopt open access. The pace and seriousness of climate change means that humanity does not have the "luxury" of hiding scientific results for six or twelve months: everything must be out in the open as soon as possible for others to use and build on. Delaying could literally be fatal on a rather large scale....

Vietnam in Open Source Vanguard

Impressive how far and fast Vietnam has moved on the government open source front:

Accordingly, by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software; 100% of staffs at these IT divisions must be trained in the use of these software products and at least 50% use them proficiently.

...

Open source software products are OpenOffice, email software for servers of Mozilla ThunderBird, Mozilla FireFox web browser and the Vietnamese typing software Unikey.

The instruction also said that by December 31, 2009, 70% of servers of ministries’ agencies and local state agencies must be installed with the above open source software products and 70% of IT staff trained in using this software; and at least 40% able to use the software in their work.

(Via Enterprise Open Source.)

On the Wikinomics Paradox

In the long run, what drives the wealth and success of an economy is productivity and efficiency. In my opinion, many of the principles of wikinomics continue to hold the promise of an extraordinary amount of efficiency and productivity to be unleashed, which should/ could have amazing long-term benefits. But in the short to medium term, I see the potential for a very difficult paradox - what makes the economy more efficient and productive as a whole causing a major dislocation of workers, who as we all know are also the consumers, and as they have less to spend the economy potentially shrivels up in a way similar to the paradox of thrift.

Well, yes, but economics doesn't really enter into it (except as a by-product): what we're talking about here is mathematics. Things that can be done in a distributed fashion online, will get done (subject to a raft-load of caveats) because on the Internet - the Great Greaser - there's no friction to stop it. Whether people suffer dislocation doesn't enter into it - however regrettable it may be.

The (Intellectual Monopoly) Biter Bit

The author of a proposed Chilean law to fight copyright infringement was greeted with the warning message "This copy of Microsoft Office is not genuine" when he was making a presentation about it.

Whoops! [Google Translation.]

The Once and Future Economy

Great post by Tim O'Reilly about how we need to junk the idea that the economy can expand indefinitely, and move to a different system - one prefigured in the current sharing of code and content:

The consumption of electronic media perhaps gives a foretaste of an economy in which qualitative complexity might replace quantitative addition as the raw material of exchange. Obviously, we're not there yet, as we're still consuming lots of resources to build the substrate for our increasingly intellectual economy, but I love that he's broken the naive assumption that if we don't have growth, the only alternative is stasis.

This is yet another reason why the lock down of knowledge by intellectual monopolies is simply unacceptable in a world that will be predicated on sharing digital stuff, just as we used to share the physical stuff that Nature gave us a few hundred thousand years ago.

Brainstorming with GNOME's Stormy Peters

As I wrote last week, foundations are playing an increasingly important role in the development of free software. I cited Mozilla Foundation and GNOME Foundation - although Matthew Aslett rightly pointed out that Eclipse is a leader, too - but in one respect Mozilla and GNOME are somewhat different. We hear a lot about Mozilla's plans, articulated by Mitchell Baker, now ably abetted by Mark Surman, but GNOME is rather less high profile. The same goes for the head of the GNOME Foundation, Stormy Peters, so I was delighted to come across this very full interview with her....

(On Open Enterprise blog.)

Computational Journalism

I like the sound of this:

the digital revolution that has been undermining in-depth reportage may be ready to give something back, through a new academic and professional discipline known in some quarters as "computational journalism." James Hamilton is director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University and one of the leaders in the emergent field; just now, he's in the process of filling an endowed chair with a professor who will develop sophisticated computing tools that enhance the capabilities — and, perhaps more important in this economic climate, the efficiency — of journalists and other citizens who are trying to hold public officials and institutions accountable.

Sounds like bringing in openness to government willy-nilly....
(Via @timoreilly.)

On Becoming a Twit

In the last three years, I've written just under 4000 blog posts. You might think that is more than enough, but for some time I have been conscious that I don't always blog everything I could or even want to. Often, I've multiple Firefox tabs sitting there holding juicy items that I think deserve passing on; and yet I never get around to writing about them. I've been pondering why that is, and what I can do about it.

I think it comes down to two things. First, it takes a certain minimum amount of time to craft even the simplest blog posting: sometimes I just don't have the spare minutes/spare brain cycles to do that. Often, though, there is very little to say about the item in question - no profound comment is required beyond "take butcher's at this". What I really need, I realised, is a lightweight way of passing on such stories quickly.

Enter Twitter.

One of the interesting trends over the last year has been the steady rise of Twitter. Increasingly, I am finding bloggers that I read referring to stuff they find via Twitter, or to conversations conducted there. Clearly this can be a very powerful medium, if used in the right way. I've always been sceptical about the idea of twittering about every mundane detail of your life, but using it as a kind of micro-blogging tool is an attractive solution to the problems I've been experiencing.

As a result, I've started using Twitter at twitter.com/glynmoody; updates aren't protected, so anyone can follow. Note that I won't generally be posting links to blog posts there, unless there's a particular reason for doing so. In part, that's because the info is meant to be complementary. But it's also because some kind soul (whose name escapes me, to my shame - please get in touch if you want your name up in lights - now revealed to be one Jonny Dover, to whom many thanks) has set up a separate Twitter feed for opendotdotdot (which also includes pointers to my other posts on Open Enterprise and Linux Journal) at twitter.com/opendotdotdot. This means that you can choose whether to follow just the longer-form stuff, or the new, reduced-fat posts, or - for masochists only - both.

A few early observations on the medium.

First, one of the reasons I have held off from Twitter is that its parsimonious format forces you to use a URL shortening service, the best known of which is TinyURL.com. I have inveighed against these several times, largely because of the fact that they obscure the inherently linky nature of the Web. Fortunately, things have moved on somewhat: you can now provide users of the shortened URL with a preview. This means that (a) they can see that structure and (b) they can be slightly more sure you are not dumping them on some manifestly infected site.

Although TinyURL offers this service, I've plumped instead for is.gd, partly because it uses considerably fewer characters than TinyURL.com, partly because it has a shorter preview feature (you just add a hyphen to the end of shortened URL), and partly because it uses buckets of open source:

is.gd runs on the CentOS operating system. The most major pieces of software used are Lighttpd (web server), PHP (scripting) and MySQL (database).

CentOS:

is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free.

The coy "prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor" is Red Hat, in case you were wondering.

The other aspect that has already struck me, after just a few days of using Twitter, is how you find people to follow. For me, at least, it's very similar to how I find blogs: I come across links to new ones in the blogs that I currently read. Similarly, I've found that a good way to find people who may be of interest is to look at whom the people I am following are following themselves. This leads to pools of people who tend to be reading and responding to each other - a micro-community at best, another echo chamber at worst.

I've also made up a few rough and ready rules: no news feeds (I want real people, their opinions and their daily lives - isn't that partly the point of Twitter?) and nobody who can't be bothered posting on a fairly regular basis. I've also avoided most of the Twitter super-stars (you know who you are) as a matter of principle: I don't really want to follow people who are almost totally famous for being famous on Twitter, for the same reason that I read relatively few of the A-list blogs.

Blogging has evolved considerably over the last few years, and I expect both it and Twitter to continue to do so - for example, in terms of them working together, fulfilling different functions (along with email, which completes the trinity of one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many interactions online). I've already found that I enjoy blogging more: I no longer feel obliged to blog about everything of interest, since I can push some stuff straight out on Twitter.

Part of the fun of blogging and twittering comes from participating in this huge, collaborative experiment in open writing and open thinking; this means that your comments/tweets on any of the above are even more welcome than usual.

Another Reason to Run GNU/Linux...

And a pretty important one:

The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

So why might GNU/Linux help? Well:

He said the authorities could break into a suspect’s home or office and insert a “key-logging” device into an individual’s computer. This would collect and, if necessary, transmit details of all the suspect’s keystrokes. “It’s just like putting a secret camera in someone’s living room,” he said.

Police might also send an e-mail to a suspect’s computer. The message would include an attachment that contained a virus or “malware”. If the attachment was opened, the remote search facility would be covertly activated. Alternatively, police could park outside a suspect’s home and hack into his or her hard drive using the wireless network.

Er, and how are they going to break into my system to install the keylogger if they don't know the password? Attachments won't work: I'm generally clever enough *not* to open them, and even if I did, they wouldn't do much on a GNU/Linux box. And hacking my hard disc through the wireless network? I don't think so.

Looks like free software is becoming even more about freedom....

Not That Microsoft is Desperate, or Anything...

From the You Can't Even Give It Away department: the Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft - 150 items. (Via @Jack Schofield.)

Major Win for ODF in Brazil

Great news for ODF in Brazil: it's becoming the official format for storing government agency dox:

Já no passado mês de Abril de 2008, o ODF (Open Document Format) tinha sido adoptado como Norma Nacional no Brasil, mas agora sabemos por um comunicado da SERPRO que foi publicada a versão 4.0 dos Padrões de Interoperabilidade de Governo Electrónico (e-PING) que torna obrigatória a utilização do ODF na administração pública federal.

A nova versão publicada pela Secretaria de Logística e Tecnologia da Informação (SLTI) do Ministério do Planejamento adota o Open Document Format (ODF), como formato padrão para guarda e troca de documentos eletrônicos no governo federal.

...

Até a última versão da e-Ping o formato ODF constava com o status de recomendado pelo documento, sendo facultativo aos órgãos o uso, na versão 4.0 o ODF assume característica de adotado, dessa forma, torna-se obrigatório para todos os órgãos da administração direta, autarquias e fundações.

[Via Google Translate: Already in April 2008, the ODF (Open Document Format) had been adopted as national standard in Brazil, but now we know for a release of SERPRO which was published version 4.0 of the Standards for Interoperability of Electronic Government (E-PING ) That mandate the use of ODF in the public service federation.

The new version published by the Department of Logistics and Information Technology (SLTI) of the Ministry of Planning adopts the Open Document Format (odf), as a standard for safekeeping and exchange of electronic documents in the federal government.

...

Until the latest version of the e-Ping the format ODF was recommended to the status of the document, and voluntary bodies to use, version 4.0 in the ODF takes characteristic of adopted thus becomes mandatory for all government agencies direct, municipalities and foundations.]

As ever, Brazil's decision is doubly significant: important in itself, given the size of the country, and important as an example to others.

Project Gutenberg Made Easy

In my view, Project Gutenberg doesn't get the respect it deserves. After all, this effort to make the world's literature freely available in a digital form pre-dates free software by a decade. Partly, I suspect, this is because people don't know much about the process. Here's a great hands-on intro:

Contributing my time, energy, and two books to PG was not my first excursion in UGC, but it is the first time I have allied myself with a high-profile international project. Adding content to PG requires patience, good social skills (for interacting with your proofreader), and the ability to intuit what needs to be done to get your contribution online. Here’s a journal of my recent experience. (See the sidebar Project Gutenberg’s Verions of the Steps on the right for the concise step-by-step directions for getting material into Project Gutenberg.)

DRM as Freedom-Eating Infection

I've often written about DRM, and how it is antithetical to free software. But here's an interview with Amazon's CTO, which provides disturbing evidence that it actively *reduces* the amount of free software in use:

InformationWeek: Amazon is known as an open source shop. Is that still true?

Vogels: Where in the past we could say this was a pure Linux shop, now in terms of the large pieces of the e-commerce platform, we're a pure Amazon EC2 shop. There's an easier choice of different operating systems. Linux is still very popular, but, for example, Windows Server is often a requirement, especially if you need to transcode video and things that have to be delivered through Windows DRM [digital rights management], so there is a variety of operating systems available for internal developers.

Another reason to fight the spread of DRM. (Via @storming.)

Why IPv4 Addresses Are Like Oil

IPv4 addresses are an increasingly rare resource. But I'd not spotted the parallel with oil until this:

the US was still the largest user of new IPv4 addresses in 2008 with 50.08 million addresses used. China was a close second with 46.5 million new addresses last year, an increase of 34 percent.

Although China and Brazil saw huge increases in their address use, suggesting that the developing world is demanding a bigger part of the pie while IPv4 addresses last, what's really going on is more complex. India is still stuck in 18th place between the Netherlands and Sweden at 18.06 million addresses—only a tenth of what China has. And Canada, the UK, and France saw little or no increase in their numbers of addresses, while similar countries like Germany, Korea, and Italy saw double-digit percentage increases.

A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4 addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now.

In other words, the greediest countries - the US and China - are rushing to burn up all the oil while there's some left, and to hell with what happens afterwards....

Happy Public Domain Day...

...er, yesterday:

It is January 1st, which means that this morning at midnight a batch more “life-plus” copyrights expired in those countries — most of them — where copyright expires at the end of the Nth year following the death of the author.

Yes, folks, it’s Public Domain Day! And it’s international! There are little Public Domain Day virtual commemorations going on in places like Poland and Switzerland. Spread the word!

In the life+50 universe, which constitute the largest cohort of countries, including Canada, which collectively have the majority of the world’s population, life-plus copyrights expired at midnight for those authors, or last-surviving of multiple authors, who died in 1958.

(Via Michael Hart.)

Will OpenOffice.org Go to the Ball this Year?

I remain perplexed by the state of OpenOffice.org. After years of using Word 2 (yes, you read that correctly - by far the best version Microsoft ever produced), I jumped straight to OpenOffice.org as my main office software. Version 1.0 was, it is a true, a little on the, er, rough side, but since 2.0, I've had practically no problems - no crashes at all that I can remember. It's reasonably fast, not a huge memory hog (certainly nothing compared to the old versions of Firefox, or even Firefox 3.0, which still regularly eats several hundred Meg of my RAM for breakfast) and does practically everything most people who aren't Excel macro junkies could possibly want: what's not to like?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Dear Mr Burnham....

Tom Watson is that rare thing: a tech-savvy MP. And since he has taken the trouble of asking what people think about Andy Burnham's proposals to adopt cinema-style ratings for the Internet, I think it would be churlish not to respond. Not least because this kind of thing should be the norm, not the exception, and needs to be nurtured.

Here's what I've posted on the site:

As someone who has been writing about the Internet for fifteen years now, I obviously agree with the majority sentiments expressed above: the idea simply won't work at multiple levels. If attempted, it will be costly, and cause great collateral damage in terms of maligning perfectly harmless sites.

But carping is easy: the real issue is what should be done instead.

I think the key to solving not just this problem, but myriad other technology-related issues, is to tap the huge reservoir of expertise that exists both in the UK and elsewhere. It is simply folly to attempt to come up with solutions to complex problems ex nihilo; instead, we need to build on what people already know, and what they've already tried. This means getting people involved, at all levels.

This would help not only in the current case, but generally when the UK government is grappling with the intersection of policy with technology. Sadly, previous decisions involving computers, the Internet and related areas have frequently ignored salient facts that have subsequently vitiated the proposed schemes.

In summary, please don't even think about implementing clumsy classification schemes until more general structures are in place to help arrive, collaboratively, at ones that will work better.

You may want to add your twopence.

Laying Down the Law

Ever since RMS drew up the GNU GPL, code and law have been inextricably linked. Mark Radcliffe provides a good summary of the last year from a legal viewpoint:

Last year was the one of the most active years for legal developments in the history of free and open source (“FOSS”). http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=27 This year, 2008, has seen a continuation of important legal developments for FOSS. My list of the top ten FOSS legal developments in 2008 follows...