Open Access Astro-Observatory Runs GNU/Linux

Montegancedo Observatory is the first free open access astronomical observatory in the world. It is located in Building 6 of the School of Computing. The dome is equipped with a computer-automated, robotized 10” telescope, and several computers operating as a web applications server. The observatory also links and broadcasts images and videos captured by the webcams arranged around the dome... All servers run on GNU/Linux systems.

Providing open access to facilities, mediated by the Internet; providing (presumably) open access to the results in real-time; using free software to run the whole thing: this is the future of science. (Via Open Access News.)

The Naming of Parts/Property/Privilege

Words matter, which is why one of the shrewdest moves was the labelling of copyright infringement - an act that, when carried out by individuals (not criminal gangs), is so innocuous that it's almost boring - as "piracy". This elevates that trival velleity to blood and guts on the high seas, typhoons ripping the mainsail, the rigging cracking, and - well, you get the (exaggerated) picure.

But another of the more subtle acts of subversion was pushing the warm and fuzzy label "intellectual property" to describe the utterly boring legal concepts of copyright, patents and trademarks. As readers of this blog know well, it's not a term I'm prepared to accept, for many reasons. And I was pleased that another defender of software freedom, Sun's Simon Phipps, also has problems with "intellectual property":

The term is used widely in the business and legal communities, and it becomes second nature to speak of patents, copyright, trademarks and trade secrets collectively in this way. The problem with doing so is that the expression is factually wrong, and a legion of open source developers (you know, the ones working on free software) take the use of the phrase "intellectual property" as a genetic marker for "clueless PHB-type" at best and "evil oppressor of geeks" at worst.

Why is it wrong? Well, none of those things is really "property". In particular, copyright and patents are temporary privileges granted to creative people to encourage them to make their work openly available to society. The "social contract" behind them is "we'll grant you a temporary monopoly on your work so you can profit from it; in return you'll turn it over to the commons at the end of a reasonable period so our know-how and culture can grow."

Using the term "intellectual property" is definitely a problem. It encourages a mindset that treats these temporary privileges as an absolute right. This leads to two harmful behaviours:

* First, people get addicted to them as "property". They build business models that forget the privilege is temporary. They then press for longer and longer terms for the privilege without agreeing in return to any benefit for the commons and society.

* Second, they forget that one day they'll need to turn the material over to the commons. Software patents in particular contain little, if anything, that will be of value to the commons - no code, no algorithms, really just a list of ways to detect infringement.

Spot on, Simon. He then goes on to ask what we might use instead:

Various suggestions have been made, but each of them seems to me to be so slanted to the opposite agenda that there's little chance of practitioners using them.

However, the term "intellectual privilege" seems to work. It's got the right initial letters, which is a huge win! But it also correctly describes the actual nature of the temporary rights we're considering.

Hmm, I'm not so sure that backward compatibility with "IP" is such a virtue here. Indeed, choosing the same initial letters might actually make it harder to get the important point that Simon is making across.

I also think calling it "intellectual privilege" is confusing in another sense. He's correct that it *is* a privilege, but it's easy to imagine the forces that rebranded copyright infringement as "piracy" would have a field day spinning this new "IP" to mean that it's a privilege for *us* consumers to have access to this wonderful stuff.

Far better, in my view, to tell it as it is, and to pick up on Simon's description that this is nothing less than "a temporary monopoly", granted by the state in return for the eventual release of this stuff to the public domain. Calling it an intellectual monopoly also has the advantage that it includes the "intellectual" part of "intellectual property", so it's clear what we're talking about - not anything remotely *physical*.

Moreover, bringing people face to face with the reality that these things are monopolies, generally recognised as bad things, is one of the fastest ways to convince the general public and politicians that we need to shorten their terms, not lengthen them, as has been happening time and again over the last century. After all, who wants longer monopolies - apart from monopolists?

More Evidence that File Downloaders Buy *More*

One of the central fallacies in the argument that sharing is bad for business is the idea that every file downloaded is a sale lost. In fact, there is growing evidence that the contrary is the case - that people who share stuff, buy *more* stuff. Here's some more:

The Institute for Information Law in the Netherlands reports that the average downloader buys more DVDs, music, and games than people who never download. Illegal downloaders represent 45 percent of consumers who purchase content legally, the institute recently reported.

The Institute estimates some 4.7 million Dutch Internet users 15 years and older downloaded hacked and pirated DVDs, games, and music in the last 12 months. This would imply a staggering 25 percent of the Dutch population (from the 2008 figure of 16.5 million) who view illegal downloading and sharing as socially acceptable, even as they're also legally acquiring content in parallel.

So that seems to say that 25 per cent of the Dutch population share stuff, but that they represent 45 per cent of the sales. In other words, they are buying quite a lot more than people who don't.

Perhaps one day the content industries will realise that they should be *encouraging* sharing, becuase it boost their sales: it's called marketing.

The Net Net of Netbooks

Netbooks have been one of the surprise successes over the last year. They have also been one of the most contentious areas of computing. There are conflicting reports on most aspects of the sector – in terms of market share, rate of returns etc. - and it is easy to assume that it's all fad and fashion. Against that background, it's good to have some figures – any figures – that might throw a little light on this promising sector.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Academic Earth's Global Academy

One of the interesting applications of openness has been to education. The potential is plain: why re-invent the wheel when it comes to creating educational materials? It's not as if the facts change much from year to year. Moreover, when there are acknowledged experts within a field, it makes sense to draw on their work so that as many students as possible have access to top-flight teaching.

This has led to opencourseware, most famously at MIT, but increasingly, elsewhere. It takes two main forms: the texts of lectures, and recordings of the same. There's now a good body of such videos, enough to allow for the creation of a site dedicated entirely to them: Academic Earth.

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

Most of the videos are issued under a Creative Commons licence, with varying options in terms of what you can do with them.

Interestingly, Academic Earth is not, despite its name, an academic institution, but a start-up. As its founder, Richard Ludlow, told me:

I was originally starting this as a non-profit project (I previously started a non-profit public health organization and magazine), but switched to for-profit when I decided I would have an easier time raising the initial funds and recruiting people as a for-profit. In addition to the non-commercial content, we plan to host some videos we will commercialize, though the hope is to always keep everything free.

Certainly, an idea to, er, watch.

Take this Survey: It's the Law

As I've noted before, free software stands in an odd relationship with the law that governs it. On the one hand, free software could not exist sustainably without copyright - the GNU GPL depends on it for its power. On the other, copyright - and, even more, patents - are intellectual monopolies that represent the antithesis of everything that free software stands for.

Given that tension, it's clearly a good idea to understand how that works out on the ground, among the people who have to negotiate the legal minefields hemming in the act of coding. Sadly, there's not much research in this area, an omission that Thomas Otter hopes to remedy:

I’m labouring away at what must be one of the longest part-time PhDs ever. My research is looking at how software code and law work or don’t work together. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. In order to add a bit of empirical juice to will be a rather dry theoretical legal tome, I’ve decided to do a survey.

He's particularly keen to get people from the world of free software participating in order to complement those from more traditional areas. You can find the survey here: it's not very onerous, and doesn't delve too deeply into anything heavy (I've filled it in and lived to tell the tale). And if you're looking for an incentive to do so beyond adding to the cairn of knowledge, both the raw results of the survey and Otter's analysis will be freely available later this year.

The Water Commons

One of the most valuable functions of the concept of "the commons" is that it reframes the terms in which we think of resources. For example, think of water as a commons, and you begin to realise why it really must be shared, and never owned:

One clear lesson emerges from the struggles of the world’s water warriors — water management remains a leaky endeavor unless it adheres to the principles of the commons — the gifts of society and nature that are shared by all, for generations to come. Effective water management must be based on such water commons principles as community control, democratic participation, ensuring the earth’s right to water, public water delivery and accessibility for all.

This comes from the new site Our Water Commons. There's also a freely downloadable report on water commons principles: “Our Water Commons, Towards a New Freshwater Narrative” by Maude Barlow.

It's both fascinating and thorough; drink it up.

Tories Back Open Source Software...They Say

Evidence that open source and the more general concept of openness is becoming trendy: the politicians are bandying them around again. There was a flurry of this stuff last year, and here is the latest effort from the Tories....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Wanted: the First GNU/Linux Distro for the Cloud

As this amazing chart shows, there are basically three great families of GNU/Linux distros: those based on Red Hat, Slackware and Debian. The last of these was created as a reaction to an even earlier distro, SLS, as Debian's creator Ian Murdock (the “Ian” in “Debian” - Deb is his wife) told me a few years ago....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Of Blogs and Microblogging

The eagle-eyed among you (everyone, surely), will have noticed the sudden excrudescence of a widget to the right. Since this represents the rude irruption of that upstart Twitter among the peaceful glades of Blogger, I feel some explanation is in order.

I've only been using Twitter for about a month, but I've found a what seems to me a fairly natural use for it alongside Open... and my Open Enterprise blog: posting stuff that doesn't really merit a full-on blog post, but is worthy of a quick mention.

So the idea of including a few tweets on this blog is to offer a few quick links or ideas that might be of interest to readers of this blog, without them needing to subscribe to Twitter or even leave this page.

It's meant to add, not take away, and nothing else will be changing in terms of what I blog about (except that I probably won't be posting anything really short, since that is likely to end up on Twitter.)

I intend running this page in its present form for a while to see how people like it. Please feel free to let me know whether you love or loathe it. I may also tweak some of its parameters - number of tweets etc. - so thoughts on that, too, would be welcome.

EU JURI Committee Go Mad on Copyright

Oh no: the European Parliament's JURI committee has collectively lost its marbles and produced an incredibly one-side report on copyright. Here are its highlights:

* graduated response: The report recommends "three strikes" schemes against unauthorised file sharing for all Europe, including cooperation with ISP based on denunciations by the entertainment industries (points 31, 37)

* Internet content filtering: The recommendations ask for the deployment of technologies for filtering content "for identification and recognition, [...] with a view to distinguishing more easily between legal and pirated products" that totally contradicts the very nature of Internet. (point 35)

* Internet access providers liability: the report "Invites reflection on the responsibility of internet access providers in the fight against piracy;" including the objective of making service providers liable for content published by their users. (points 32, 36, 37)

* Denial of copyright exceptions: its conclusions on copyright exceptions are anticipating the result of the public consultation launched by the European Commission on "Copyright in the knowledge economy" by stating that any reform of the 2001 copyright Directive is undesirable, that the existing regime for copyright exceptions is undesirable, and that there is no need for new exceptions. This archaic position undermines creativity, interoperability, and innovation. (points 3, 20, 23, 25)

This is massively retrogressive, and takes no account of everything that has happened online for the last ten years.

Please write to your MEPs now, asking them to reject the Medina report when it comes up for a vote. I know from personal experience how effective this is.

What Mr. Lammy *Still* Does Not Get

Surpising - but good - news if true:

Internet service providers will not be forced to disconnect users who repeatedly flout the law by illegally sharing music and video files, The Times has learnt.

Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, said last year that the Government had “serious legislative intent” to compel internet companies to cut off customers who ignore warnings not to pirate material.

However, in an interview with The Times, David Lammy, the Intellectual Property Minister, said that the Government had ruled out legislating to force ISPs to disconnect such users.

The reasoning is notable:

Speaking ahead of the publication of a report on the future of Britain's digital industries, Mr Lammy said that there were very complex legal issues wrapped up in enforced disconnection. He added: “I'm not sure it's actually going to be possible.”

Spot on. I hope this also means that the UK will be voting against any attempts to bring this in at a European level.

Given this understanding, I was disappointed with the following from Mr Lammy:

Mr Lammy, who has begun a big consultation entitled Developing a Copyright Agenda for the 21st Century, said that there was a big difference between organised counterfeiting gangs and “younger people not quite buying into the system”. He said: “We can't have a system where we're talking about arresting teenagers in their bedrooms. People can rent a room in an hotel and leave with a bar of soap - there's a big difference between leaving with a bar of soap and leaving with the television.”

I quite agree about the difference (and support legal action against criminal counterfeiting gangs), but it's got nothing to do with bars of soap. This metaphor perpetuates the erroneous idea that infringing on copyright is simply stealing - albeit stealing bars of soap. It is not only legally totally different, it is conceptually totally different in the case of digital files, as in the present situation.

If I steal a bar of soap from a hotel (heaven forfend), the hotel no longer has the soap; it incurs a real loss from something being taken away. If I make a digital copy of a file, nobody loses that file; nothing has been "taken".

The correct - and important - question is whether the copyright holder loses at at any point. That comes down to the simple arithmetic of whether people making unauthorised copies of music increase or decrease the number of copies that are later sold.

The evidence seems to be the former - the idea being that unauthorised copies function as marketing for the "real" thing. This means that the music industry should actually encourage such copies, since ultimately they will reap the benefits - just as the Monty Python crew have done:

when Monty Python launched their channel in November, not only did their YouTube videos shoot to the top of the most viewed lists, but their DVDs also quickly climbed to No. 2 on Amazon's Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 per cent.

As has been said before, the greatest loss to artists comes not from unauthorised copying, but from not reaching as much of your potential audience as possible, as easily as possible.

It's great to see Mr Lammy taking a reasonable line here, but it would be even better if he understood the profound difference between analogue and digital, and between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods, that lies at the heart of this whole discussion.

Microsoft's Future: as a Games Company

News that for probably the first time Microsoft would be making significant numbers of its workforce redundant has inevitably been picked up and chewed over widely. In truth, the net numbers of job losses are low – a couple of thousand, allowing for new intakes. What's really noteworthy is the underlying reason for those losses: that the cracks in the Microsoft empire are finally becoming evident to even the most myopic of observers.

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Government *Is* Experian

William Heath on the Experian scandal:

Experian has a “Mosaic” view of the world which involves grabbing as much data as possible and then crudely lumping people into blocks, rather like a fly looking at the world through compound eyes. The danger is they flog this to Whitehall departments and local authorities which rely on this computerised kaleidoscope to make decisions that affect people’s lives.

It's actually worse than that. The "mosaic" view is already deeply embedded within the UK government's mindset: that's why they keep on setting up these huge, unworkable database projects, and then propose linking them together.

It's not a matter of Labour peers allegedly being corrupted by Experian; the problem is that the UK government has gradually *become* Experian.

Seven things people didn't know about me...

...And probably didn't want to. Thanks to that nice Mr Mark Surman, I have been not only tagged but also subjected to fiendishly-clever emotional blackmail in the accompanying email:

I realize this is corny. But corny can be fun. This kind of fun is something I dare you to have.

The rules are:

Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.


Share seven facts about yourself in the post.


Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.


Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Sigh. So, here goes:

1. As I child, I kept frog spawn (still abundant in those far-off days), fascinated by the extraordinary metamorphosis it underwent. Once, among the many froglets that emerged, one had six legs, and two had five (all extra forelimbs.)

2. At primary school, I was one of the ugly sisters in “Cinderella”. I still remember the rather fetching pink and lime-green dress that I wore.

3. I spent most of my free time at secondary school playing bridge. Unfortunately, I used the Blue Club system, which, according to Wikipedia, is no longer popular, making it even more of an utter waste of time.

4. I was Senior Wrangler in the 1977 Tripos. Barely anyone knows what that means; even fewer care. 100 years ago, it would have guaranteed me a pampered college fellowship for life. I regard it as lucky escape.

5. My first post-university job was as a maths supply teacher for 30+ 15-year-olds in Catford, South London, most of whom were larger than me, but rather less interested in mathematics than I was. I lasted two months before being escaping to publishing.

6. I was taken off a train at near-gunpoint in Belarus for travelling without a transit visa. At 5 o'clock in the morning. I then had to rush to the immigration office attached to the Grodno border station and get a visa before the waiting train left for Vilnius with all my luggage on board.

7. I am powerless in the presence of honey-roasted cashews. An interesting case of where traditional mathematics breaks down, and 1+1=3.

The rules say I must now pass on this poisoned chalice to others, but unlike Mark I won't add any pressure: please feel free to ignore if you wish, or have already been tagged – I did search, but happily Google is not yet omniscient.

The names below are all key people in the UK world of openness in various ways, and I think it would be interesting to find out more about them. They are (in alphabetical order):

OpenStreetMap's Steve Coast

Open data defender Peter Murray-Rust

Alfresco's John Newton

Sun's Simon Phipps

BT's JP Rangaswami

Boycott Novell's Roy Schestowitz

Open government enthusiast Tom Steinberg

The UK Government is at it Again

You would have thought the smack across the knuckles delivered by the public over their attempt to hide MP's expenses from scrutiny would be enough for the UK government's ministers, but oh no, they're up to their old tricks:

Hidden in the new Coroners and Justice Bill [2] is one clause (cl.152) amending the Data Protection Act. It would allow ministers to make 'Information Sharing Orders', that can alter any Act of Parliament and cancel all rules of confidentiality in order to use information obtained for one purpose to be used for another....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Change in How Change Happens

Another cracking post from Kevin Kelly:

Of all the tricks that evolution came up for increasing its evolvability none compare to minds. Minds – and not just human minds – bestow on life a greatly accelerated way to learn and adapt. This should not be surprising because minds are built to find answers, and one of the key things to answer might be how to learn better, quicker. If what minds are good for is learning and adaptation, then learning how to learn will accelerate your learning. Even though most of the learning a mind does is not transferred directly into biological evolution, there are several ways in which minds accelerate evolution (see the Baldwin Effect), even in the lower animal kingdom. So the presence of minds in life has increased its evolvability; the discovery of mindness has driven evolution in many new directions while also creating a new territory to explore – the territory of possible minds.

The most recent extension of this expansion is technology. Technology is how human minds explore the space of possibilities. We power our minds via science and technology to make possible things real. More so technology is how our society learns and introduces change. It is almost a cliché to point out that technology has brought as much change on this planet in the last 100 years as life has in the last billion years.

Ray Kurzweil can provide you with dozens of graphs charting the accelerating change brought about by technology in the last 100 years or so. From the speed of computers, the bandwidth of communications, the power of engines, the yield of crops – all are accelerating in performance. Change is this century's middle name.

But meta-change is not about acceleration itself; it is not about faster change. Rather, the acceleration of evolution or increased evolvability is about the change in the nature of change. The basic mechanism by which our collective minds – as expressed by technology – adapt and produce change is undergoing a shift. In fact the most important change at work in our world right now is "the change in how change happens."

"Change in how change happens": that's a pretty good description of what openness is doing. It has changed *how* we change. It's also what we need to achieve on a *planetary* scale if was are going to save much of the world as we know it. It doesn't get much more profound than that.

Release of Eclipse Grid/Cloud Computing Tool g-Eclipse

As you may have noticed, one of the hottest buzzwords currently is cloud computing. Eclipse, on the other hand, is *still* one of open source's greatest secrets – hugely ambitious and gaining ever-wider support. Put the two together, and you get g-Eclipse, whose first major release has just appeared....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Intellectual Monopolists on the Back Foot

Given the constant cacophonous blaring of propaganda from the intellectual monopoly lobby, it's sometimes hard to tell whether we're making any progress in opening people's eyes to the evils of this approach. But here's heartening evidence from those same monopolists that we're having a big effect:

In October, US Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue announced that the GIPC, which had previously been focused on counterfeiters, would rise to the challenge of what the chamber characterised as a “second threat [from] a growing movement of anti-IP activists drawn from universities, foundations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), ideologically driven interest groups, and even governments.”

These anti-IP activists, the chamber said, were annually spending tens of millions of dollars on an agenda to minimise intellectual property rights.

This is extraordinary. It equates those who wish - legitimately - to minimise intellectual monopolies as the moral equivalents of counterfeiters. In other words, the intellectual monoplists seem to regard *any* threat to their fat-cat lifestyle as illegal, almost by definition.

The good news is that by identifying those against intellectual monopolies as this "second threat" on a par with counterfeiting is proof of just how successful we are becoming.

We are winning, people: spread the word - and up the pressure. (Via Techdirt.)

BlackBerry to Support OpenDocument Format

One of the biggest barriers to introducing new, open formats like ODF is the lock-in of platforms to Microsoft's dominant Office formats. This makes winning support for as many different environments as possible critically important, because it removes what might be an insuperable obstacle to rolling out ODF within a company.

Against that background, this apparently minor announcement could be quite significant for the uptake of ODF in enterprises....

On Open Enterprise blog.

As I Was Saying...

I just knew this was coming:

Labour and the Tories left the door open today for a future move to exempt the full details of MPs expenses from the Freedom of Information Act.

They just cannot contemplate letting us see what they do.

Against Monopoly: Microsoft's Decline

I'm a big fan of the Against Monopoly site authors; here's a bold prediction from one of them:

Always in the past when software with substantial installed base has finally been supplanted the fall has not been gradual: Lotus and Wordperfect went from world-beaters to also rans in just a few years. I think Microsoft may surprise us by falling equally fast. There may not be much left in two years time.

Mobilising Open Source

I've been wittering on about open source mobiles for ages, but here's someone who actually knows what he's talking about:

Whether it be the proliferation of phone development activity around Google’s Android stack, the phenomenal operator gravitation toward the LiMo Foundation, or Symbian’s intriguing announcement to open source its end-of-life cycle stack, the mobile industry is breaking out of the traditional controlled development environment to favor collaboration that accelerates innovation. The use of open source software in mobile is exploding from the operating system all the way up to the user experience, and Linux-based open source stacks are moving well beyond alpha stage with backing by industry heavy weights.

This post is in the context of the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona in February:

26 years after GSM was created to design a pan-European mobile technology, Mobile World Congress number 13 is set to take place in Barcelona in February. This time around, as they did when GSM World Congress was first held in Madrid in 1995, mobile network operators will dominate the scene.

Next month, however, the topic of discussion will not be new network deployments, or the latest traunch of jazzy new devices, or the next best application. Rather, Open Source will be topic Number 1 on the operator agenda in 2009.

Good to hear it.

Memo to Gordon Brown...from Barack Obama

In the light of Gordon's recent wobbly over our Freedom of Information Act, lets hope he reads carefully the following memo from his new mate Obama:

A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike.

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of
the public.

All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

"In the face of doubt, openness prevails": couldn't have put it better myself. (Via EFF.)

DRM's Deathmarch

Nice post from Ed Felten summarising the slow but unstoppable death of DRM. Telling tidbit:

it's interesting to see traditional DRM supporters back away from it. RIAA chief Mitch Bainwol now says that the RIAA is agnostic on DRM. And DRM cheerleader Bill Rosenblatt has relaunched his "DRM Watch" blog under the new title "Copyright and Technology". The new blog's first entry: iTunes going DRM-free.

If your best friends don't even want to know you, you know you're in trouble....