The Empire (No Longer) Strikes Back

One of the most worrying moments in recent open source history was when it became clear that Microsoft was determined to wrench away Apache's crown as top Web server. This began in early 2006, and was soon showing dramatic results, as the April 2006 Netcraft survey commented:

This month's survey brings one of the largest one-month swings in the history of the web server market, as Microsoft gains 4.7 percent share while Apache loses 5.9 percent. The shift is driven by changes at domain registrar Go Daddy, which has just migrated more than 3.5 million hostnames from Linux to Windows. Go Daddy, which had been the world's largest Linux host, is now the world's largest Windows Server 2003 host, as measured by hostnames. The company said it will shift a total of 4.4 million hostnames to Windows Server 2003.

This was a staggering shift, and I feared it might presage a real effort by Microsoft to achieve a major PR win. Things reached their nadir in September 2007:

Apache gains over 3 million hostnames, and around 0.9 million active sites this month. But this is not enough to prevent its market share declining closer to the 50% mark, as Microsoft also gained over 3 million hostnames (a large part of which come from MySpace and Live Spaces, both of which use its Internet Information Server.

At that time, the gap between Apache and Microsoft's IIS was just 15%, down, from 50% just a couple of years earlier.

But since then, Apache has gradually pulled ahead; today the gap is around 18% - still far smaller than it once was, but increasing. I feel that the danger has passed, not least because Microsoft has realised that it was fighting yesterday's battles.

Tomorrow's fight will be about owning the cloud, and the main threat there is not so much Apache, as customised versions of open source software, of the kind employed by Google for its vast server farms: in the latest Netscape survey, Google has around 5% of the Web server market. It's still open vs. closed, but not as we know it.

The crucial point is that Microsoft failed to displace Apache, despite its almost limitless resources. This is the crucial lesson for the future, more important than any particular percentage market share: that Microsoft's attacks can - and have been - beaten off.

Openness is Good for Everyone – Even MPs

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I believe that openness is a pretty good thing, pretty much everywhere. Strangely, the UK Government doesn't agree with me: it seems to think telling members of the public how MPs spend the public's money is a Really Bad Thing. As mySociety explains:

Ministers are about to conceal MPs’ expenses, even though the public has just paid £1m to get them all ready for publication, and even though the tax man expects citizens to do what MPs don’t have to. They buried the news on the day of the Heathrow runway announcement. This is heading in the diametric wrong direction from government openness.

Yes indeedy. MySociety also has some helpful suggestions on what you might want to do about it:

1. Please write to your MP about this www.WriteToThem.com - ask them to lobby against this concealment, and tell them that TheyWorkForYou will be permanently and prominently noting those MPs who took the opportunity to fight against this regressive move. The millions of constituents who will check this site before the next election will doutbtless be interested.

2. Join this facebook group and invite all your least political friends (plus your most political too). Send them personal mails, phone or text them. Encourage them to write to their politicians too.

3.Write to your local paper to tell them you’re angry, and ask them to ask their readers to do the above. mySociety’s never-finished site http://news.mysociety.org might be able to help you here.

I've already done the first two (not quite sure about the third), and I urge you to do the same. Remember: it's not about the money, it's about the openness.

For those who are interested, here's my letter:

I am writing to you to express my profound disquiet that the Government is about the go back on its decision to make detailed information about MPs expenses available to the public.

As the Government likes to remind us, those who have nothing to fear have nothing to hide, and the request that the British electorate – the people that ultimately foot the bill of MPs' expenses – should be allowed to see the costs claimed by MPs is simply a question of justice.

It is also a question of fairness: at a time when ordinary citizens are being asked to give up more and more information about themselves to the Government, it is only right that politicians should do the same if they are not to be branded as hypocrites.

Moreover, it is a question of good sense: much time and money has already been spent preparing this information. To throw it away now, at a time when many families are struggling to make ends meet, would be a real slap in the face for the general public, and a clear sign that the Government is contemptuous of their everyday problems.

I know you as an MP who has always conducted a laudably frank and open dialogue with your constituents, and so I hope that you will agree that making politics as transparent as possible can only strengthen our democracy, while creating exceptions for MPs will only increase the public's cynicism and lead to an ever-great alienation from the political system.

For these reasons, I urge you to vote against this measure to conceal MPs' expenses.

Open Source Microblogging and the Enterprise

One of the easy predictions for 2009 is that it will be the year that Twitter breaks through into the mainstream (for some suitable definition of mainstream.) The good news is that Twitter uses lots of open source and plans to use even more....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Adieu, Michel Rocard - et Merci

Free software loses a good friend in the European Parliament: Michel Rocard, fierce opponent of software patents, is resigning. Sad day, but thanks, mon vieux.

The Digital Preservation Coalition

New one to me:

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is a not-for profit membership organisation whose primary objective is to raise awareness of the importance of the preservation of digital material and the attendant strategic, cultural and technological issues. It acts as an enabling and agenda-setting body within the digital preservation world and works to meet this objective through a number of high level goals. Its vision is to make our digital memory accessible tomorrow.

These sound promising:

Principles of the Coalition

The activities and members of the Coalition will operate by the following principles:

Openness: The Coalition and its members commit to promoting and disseminating information and sharing outcomes so that we can all learn and benefit as quickly as possible from transferable lessons and experience (both positive and negative).

Collaboration: Digital preservation has become so significant a phenomenon (in scope, complexity, and investment), that no single organisation can address all the challenges alone.

The Coalition provides a forum for members to identify relevant issues and support to pursue collaboration across organisations and sectors to mutual benefit.

Collective benefit: Core Coalition activities supported by resources from its membership must be of common interest and benefit to them. Projects or the activities of individual members may have narrower collective benefit and can contribute to the wider goals of the Coalition but are separately funded.

Vendor neutrality: The goals of the Coalition are generic and will be vendor neutral. It will support the development of standards and generic approaches to digital preservation, which can be implemented by a range of hardware, software, and service vendors.

Well, that's got open source, open access and open data written right through it, hasn't it?

Why Open Source is Eclipsing Everything Else

A name that I don't know as well as I should is Grady Booch:

chief scientist at IBM's Rational Software unit and an IBM fellow who also holds the title "free radical." His software development approach and the Unified Modeling Language, which he helped create, have been used to build the software that runs pacemakers, avionics in certain large airliners, antilock brake systems, and financial trading systems in the U.S., Europe and Asia....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Solaris is Big...in Afghanistan

Interesting post about Open Solaris and its user group in Afghanistan - and why GNU/Linux hasn't made much impact:

I'd like to propose an OSUG for Kabul, Afghanistan. It could be called "Kabul OpenSolaris User Group" or "Afghanistan OpenSolaris User Group". We don't want to lay claim to the whole country, but I'm pretty sure there's no-one apart from us who does UNIX here.

The initial participants of the OSUG are Abdullah Ghaznawi, Said Adil Hashemi and myself, Said Hakim Hamdani. We all work at the same place (http://www.medical-kabul.com/) and since I brought OpenSolaris with me to Afghanistan, I was able to get both of them interested enough that they are going to make their systems dual-boot with OpenSolaris and WinXP

...



We are located in Kabul, Afghanistan and as far as I know we're the only Solaris users around. The computing infrastructure in Afghanistan is still pretty much in its infancy and I am doing what I can to get people to try out UNIX (best of Solaris of course) and use it for their daily computing tasks. There's some Linux around here, but I'm not too fond of that and having seen a single (!) copy of Solaris 10 in the software market the other day, I sat down with Abdullah and Adil and we decided to try and get people more interested in OpenSolaris.

I'd be surprised if Open Solaris managed to remain more popular than GNU/Linux, given the latter's momentum; but it may be that the situation in Afghanistan is so exceptional that personal recommendation of the kind mentioned above is more important. An interesting space to watch.

Last Chance to See: Modern Liberty...

The Convention on Modern Liberty was launched last night. I may be foolishly optimistic, but I do feel that this is our best hope of stopping the techno-surveillance state that is being created today in the UK.

The speech made by co-director Anthony Barnett has just been published, and it's a good summary of the perils facing liberty, and the questions that need to be addressed before we can come up with a way to halt this madness:

something does seem to be going on behind the theatre of parliament and government. Both Henry and Helena have referred to the constant stream of measures, violations, outrages even, which have little popular support. There is a connection between the spread of uncontrolled surveillance, detention without trial, the right of bailiffs to enter homes and seize property without a warrant, the ongoing, across the board destruction of our liberties.

We don’t have a name for it yet. NO2ID – and big thanks to Phil Booth its National Coordinator especially for his work on the Convention - have developed the term I use and find helpful, ‘The Database State’. This may describe it. But where is the motivation? What’s the driver pushing it onwards?

Is it a governing class who, since it supported the Iraq War, knows that the people are wiser than they are (a crucial moment this) and, in its bad faith, wants to secure its control by whatever means it can?

Is it a hardened grouping in the Home Office whose attitude is that if you stand upright and call yourself a “citizen” you immediately become a suspect - to be pre-emptively invigilated and controlled?

Is it corporate lobbying eager for the juicy deals – after all, if you have the contract on a whole country to make its ID cards or support their software and technology just think of the cashflow.

Or is part of what is happening simply a permission from a public that has not woken up to what is going on?

How these questions are answered is just as important as the answers. The answers need not be spoken in fearful whispers and anxiety. They need to be rooted in confident public debate. This is what this Convention on Modern Liberty is all about.

The Convention itself takes place on 29 28 February; you can buy a ticket here.

I shall be going, and I urge everyone else who cares about liberty and who can make to come too. We need to support this as fully as we can; if we don't, I fear it may be our last chance for a very long time.

Google Chrome to Support ActiveX

I've written before about the parlous state of online computing in South Korea, where practically everyone uses Microsoft's ActiveX technology. As this post explains:

Despite security short-comings, ActiveX had been welcomed into the community and flourished. Surprisingly, more so in banks where security is a top priority. Believe it or not, ActiveX is so widely used that the South Korean government decides to make it compulsory for all banks to have it.

That's bad enough, but the post goes on:

Other major browsers have resisted supporting ActiveX. Until now. Google Chrome has now decided to support ActiveX, but only in South Korea.

OK, so Google wants to increase its market share, but it might do that more usefully by sponsoring a few studies into the poor security that using ActiveX implies. Following sheep-like is not the solution.

Talking of Rights and Wrongs...

...one of the bigger wrongs in the field of copyright is the proposed extension for sound recordings. I've written extensively about why this is nuts, but have pretty much given up hope that we'll see any rational decisions here.

Fortunately, the indispensable and irrepressible Open Rights Group (fighting the Closed Wrongs Group, presumably), has not, and has not issued the following call to arms:

How you can help the campaign:

1) Come to an event on 27 January in the European Parliament in Brussels to hear academics, musicians and activists discuss the Directive with a roundtable of MEPs.

2) Invite your MEP to attend the 27 January event on your behalf (you can get their contact details here: UK residents; Other EU residents)

3) Invite your MEP to sign the Sound Copyright petition

4) Ask your MEP to watch the Open Rights Group’s cartoon “How copyright term extension in Sound Recordings actually works”

See the original post for full details and links.

No, It's a *Wrongs* Agency

From The Reg:

Following its failure to foster voluntary solution between ISPs and rights holders, the government will create a new agency and regulations to clamp down on copyright infringement via peer-to-peer networks, it's reported today.

A proposal for a body called the Rights Agency will be at the centre of anti-internet piracy measures, according to the Financial Times, which cited sources who had read a draft of Lord Carter's report on Digital Britain. The Rights Agency will be introduced alongside a new code of practice for ISPs and rights holders, to be overseen by Ofcom, according to the leaked draft. The final report is due out by the end of this month.

So, tell me, what about *our* rights - of fair dealing/fair use, of the ability to create mashups and remixes? Funny that the UK government is only interested in preserving the 18th century rights of business, rather than the 21st rights of its citizens. Every time they come up with daftness such as this, they show just how out of touch with the modern world they are.

Russia to create "National OS" Based on GNU/Linux?

Here's an interesting idea: for Russia to fund the creation of a "national operating system" to replace Windows, based on GNU/Linux:

Отечественное ИТ-сообщество просит президента поддержать идею национальной операционной системы.

Будущие разработчики российской «национальной операционной системы» могут получить поддержку в виде федеральной целевой программы. Во всяком случае, на это рассчитывают авторы письма президенту Дмитрию Медведеву, которое сейчас готовится в Госдуме.

[Via Google Translate: Domestic IT community has asked the president to support the idea of the operating system. Future developers Russian «national operating system» can get support in the form of federal target programs. In any case, the authors expect this letter to President Dmitry Medvedev, who is now preparing for the State Duma.]

Details are still unclear, but the ideas seems to be to build on top of GNU/Linux - described as "open code" here:

Кроме просьбы инициировать подготовку федеральной целевой программы в нем будет обоснована польза от создания «национальной ОС». Хотя подразумевается, что основой для нее станут уже существующие системы с открытым кодом, вопрос о степени ее свободности в письме «останется открытым, чтобы не загружать президента техническими подробностями».

[In addition to the request to initiate the preparation of the federal program, it would be justified benefit from the establishment of «national OS». While it is understood that the basis for the existing system will be open source, the extent of its free, in a letter «remain open so as not to load the president technical details».]

As is often the case, the key advantage that would flow from the creation of such a "national OS" is the control that it would give the Russian government - something it doesn't have with Windows, say, or even generalised free software produced elsewhere:

Смысл создания в России «национальной ОС» для силовых структур и госучреждений прокомментировал гендиректор ALT Linux Алексей Смирнов: «Национальной можно назвать ОС, если государство имеет право ее распространять и изменять, и, как заказчик, влияет на ее разработку. Систем, удовлетворяющих таким требованиям, сейчас не существует ни среди свободного, ни среди проприетарного ПО». Смирнов полагает, что проект «национальной ОС» на первом этапе будет базовым: «Без нее, например, речи быть не может о разработке в свое время “национального железа”». Не надо забывать, напоминает Смирнов, что, если для системы будет принята «свободная» модель, то, «чем больше Россия будет вкладывать в мировое движение СПО, тем больше она на него станет влиять».

[The sense of creation in Russia «national OS» for uniformed services and government commented director, ALT Linux Alexei Smirnov: «National include operating systems, if a state has the right to distribute and modify, and, as a customer, influence its development. Systems that meet these requirements, now there is no freedom of, or in proprietary software ». Smirnov believes that the project «National OS» in the first phase will be basic: «Without it, for example, the speech can not be on the development of its time," National Iron "». We should not forget, Smirnov recalled that when the system will be adopted «free» model, then, «the more Russia will invest in the global movement of the ACT, the more it will have an impact on him».]

Although the proposal is still in its early stages, the attractiveness of the proposal to a government keen to assert its independence at all levels is obvious. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

IBM the Schizophrenic

Bad IBM:

IBM today announced that it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, becoming the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 U.S. patents in a single year. IBM's 2008 patent issuances are nearly triple Hewlett-Packard's and exceed the issuances of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google -- combined.

Good IBM:

IBM used the occasion to announce plans to help stimulate innovation and economic growth. The company plans to increase by 50% -- to more than 3,000 -- the number of technical inventions it publishes annually instead of seeking patent protection. This will make these inventions freely available to others.

Er, could we perhaps make up our minds about intellectual monopolies? Either you're in favour - and want more or them - or against - and want less. You know, the old binary thing. Is it that hard?

Er, Yes, But What Do You *Do*?

More fascinating info on what exactly the increasingly-important foundations do - or, rather, what their directors do:

I get asked a lot what I do, exactly, as executive director of the GNOME Foundation.

First off, I want to say I'm really glad I work for an organization where people feel comfortable asking "what do you do?" It shows they care about the organization and are not afraid to ask tough questions. Have you ever asked your boss what they did, exactly?

Secondly, I have to admit that when I first got asked, that first day on the job at GUADEC, I wanted to go "I don't know!! What do you think I should be doing?" (I did ask the "What do you think I should be doing part" of a few people and I'm always interested in hearing anyone's answer to that question.)

Ok, so to the point, what do I do? I'm going to answer in three parts.

Ah, like Gaul.

Out of Africa Something New - and Bad

Despite the fact that South Africa is at the forefront of open source usage, it seems to be taking a very bad turn as far as open knowledge is concerned:

The Intellectual Property from Publicly Financed Research Bill was signed into law yesterday.

This stems from a mistaken belief that:

the best way to get research re-used for the benefit of the economy is to lock it down, and award a monopoly to one person, rather than opening it to everyone.

This could set South African research back seriously.

OLPC: Out; OLPH: In

As regular readers of this blog may have noticed, I've given up on One Laptop Per Child. Happily, I've now come across something to fill the meme-sized hole that leaves:

Gdium.Com is launching the One Laptop Per Hacker program.

Here is your opportunity to contribute to the Gdium revolution.

The Gdium Team is opening a site and a program centralizing all the developer centric resources for the Gdium.

The OLPH program is supporting developers, contributors, creative artists, and other innovators who wish to:

* Optimize, improve the OS, Human Interface and/or Application stack of an “education centric” netbook.
* Experiment with the look and feel
* Provide and disseminate their new application stacks
* Redesign the artwork
* modify the hardware or integrate some nifty gadgets.
* Experiment with the Gdium to support new vertical markets.

For a limited set of selected contributors the Gdium Team provides a set of materials and services, enabling them to get an early start on this machine.

Gdium, in case you were wondering (as I was), are creating the groovy Gdium Liberty, which rather idiosyncratically uses Mandriva (remember that?).

Trading Up to Open Source

One of the signs that the open source ecosystem is thriving is the appearance of solution serving vertical markets. Here's another one....

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Burney Collection: But, But, But...

The largest single online collection of English news media from the 17th and 18th centuries, the Burney Collection, is now available free of charge for the first time to Higher and Further Education institutions and Research Councils across the UK.

The Burney Collection offers unique insights into two centuries of history through access to over 1,270 newsbooks, newspapers, pamphlets and a variety of other news materials published in England, Ireland and Scotland, plus papers from British colonies in Asia and the Americas.

Digitised through a partnership between the National Science Foundation and the British Library then developed and hosted online by Gale/Cengage Learning4, the digital version of the Burney Collection has been purchased in perpetuity by JISC Collections on behalf of the UK academic and research community at a national level, following an open and transparent procurement process.

Well, that's jolly great...but: given that these are *public* collections, and have been digitised with *public* money, is it really too much to ask if hoi polloi like me might be granted a little bit of access to this great stuff?

UK Outsources Education IT to Microsoft - Again

Oh look, the UK government has effectively outsourced IT in education to Microsoft - again:

Schools minister Jim Knight, who was speaking at the opening of this year's Bett event at Olympia in London, said today that Microsoft has created something he described as a “re-investment fund”. The software maker will “commit to fund a foundation in support of the Home Access programme,” he said.

...

The Microsoft-funded foundation will develop and implement a programme of training and support for teachers, parents, as well as to help create "awareness" for the Home Office programme, said Knight.

Now, let me see: Microsoft is going to give money to raise awareness of free software, yes? Maybe not; which means, inevitably, that it will give money to raise awareness of its own products. Which means that open source will remains shut out of schools yet again.

Whatever it is paying into this "re-investment fund", it was certainly a good investment for Microsoft.

Al Jazeera Gets It, Most Media Companies Don't

Welcome the Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository

On this site you will find select broadcast quality footage that Al Jazeera has released under various Creative Commons licenses. Through Creative Commons licensing, you are able to legally share and reuse our footage.

What Al Jazeera understands is that you *want* people to copy and share your stuff: that's how you build influence. Locking content away is a sure method to *diminish* your role in the conversation. That's why most Western media companies are doomed to become irrelevant if they don't follow Al Jazeera's lead.

Craig Murray on the Death of Libel in the UK

Craig is in a triumphalist mood:

We have comprehensively blown wide apart the UK's infamously repressive libel laws. Up until now, these have routinely been used not to prevent untruth, but to hide truth on behalf of the ultra-rich. In so doing they have spawned a whole universe of massively wealthy lawyers devoid of any moral values, dedicated only to the service and pursuit of money.

...

But we are living now, so we put it free online, and published some copies privately. After just two days, a Google search on the precise phrase "The Catholic Orangemen of Togo" brings up 1,810 hits. A great many of these lead to a free download of the book. 23,000 copies of Murder in Samarkand have been sold so far, and most of those have been read by more than one person. But readership of The Catholic Orangemen looks likely to overtake in two weeks the readership that Murder in Samarkand achieved in two years.

If "The Catholic Orangemen of Togo" is anywhere near as good as the excellent "Murder in Samarkand" it certainly deserves that success.

As for "busting" the UK libel laws, I think it may be a little premature to declare victory; but actions like Craig's certainly help to undermine these anachronistic and deeply amoral laws. I wish him luck with his book - and his busting.

A Three-Dimensional Win for Free Software

Free software continues to fill in the missing bits:

A few months ago, SGI released a new version of the SGI Free License B. With that change, a lot of code used to provide 3D graphics on GNU/Linux systems was now free software. To make sure that all the code was free software, however, a few developers who worked on code released under a related license, the GLX Public License, needed to grant us permission to release their work under the new terms.

Earlier today I got great news from the X.Org project that they've obtained that permission from all the necessary developers. With that done, all of the code for 3D graphics originally released under one of SGI's licenses is now free software.

(Via Peter Rock.)

Qt Goes LGLP: the Trolltech Saga Attains Closure

There are few commercial programs whose history is more intertwined with the rise of free software than Nokia's Qt toolkit, originally created by the Norwegian company Trolltech. As one of the company's founders, Haarvard Nord, told me nearly ten years ago, when I was writing Rebel Code, Qt began life as a purely proprietary product, but with a free version specifically aimed at free software programmers...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Censorship = Destroying the Past

This is what censorship is about: destroying our memories.

According to multiple customers of Demon Internet - now owned by Brit telecom Thus - the London-based ISP is blocking access to all sites stored in the archive. When they query the Wayback Machine, hoping to retrieve archived pages, customers are met with generic "not found" error pages. But judging from their urls, these pages are generated by a web filter based on the blacklist compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation, a government-backed organization charged with policing online pornography.

Economising with Open Source

Here's an interesting sign of the times. High-profile economist Dean Baker calls for "Funding for the Development of Open Software" as part of a stimulus package:

the government can spend $2 billion a year to develop open source software. This money can be used to further develop and simplify open source operating systems such as Linux, as well other forms of free software. The payoffs from this spending would be enormous. Imagine that every computer buyer in the world would be able to get a computer for which the operating system was free, as was almost all the software that they would ever use.

This would surely save consumers an average of at least $200 per computer. With sales at close to 20 million a year, the savings in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development. Adding in the benefits (and presumably some contributions) from the rest of the world, we will be way ahead by going the route of publicly funded open software open software. The cost would be $2 billion a year.

The message is spreading.... (Via Slashdot.)