Browser Ballot Screen: Time to Prepare

It looks like it's happening:

The European Commission will on 9 October 2009 formally invite comments from consumers, software companies, computer manufacturers and other interested parties on an improved proposal by Microsoft to give present and future users of the Windows PC operating system a greater choice of web browsers. The commitments have been offered by Microsoft after the Commission expressed specific concerns that Microsoft may have infringed EC Treaty rules on abuse of a dominant position (Article 82) by tying its web browser (Internet Explorer) to its client PC operating system Windows, and are an improved version of the proposals made by Microsoft in July 2009 (see MEMO/09/352 ). The improvements concern greater information to consumers about web browsers, the features of each browser, an improved user experience as well as a review by the Commission to ensure the proposals genuinely work to benefit consumers. Interested parties can submit comments within one month. The Commission welcomes Microsoft’s proposal as it has the potential to give European consumers real choice over how they access and use the internet. Following the market test, the Commission could decide to adopt a decision under Article 9 (1) of Regulation 1/2003, which would make the commitments legally binding on Microsoft.

It's hard to comment on this until we see what form the ballot screen will take, but I'm prepared to accept that this may be done in a fair manner. Assuming it is, what might the implications be?

Perhaps the most important one is that Firefox needs to be prepared for a massive onslaught when this goes live. I have heard the slightly tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Microsoft is hoping to bring Firefox's servers to their collective digital knees by allowing such a ballot screen; even assuming that's not the case, it's certainly true that Mozilla must start planning for the sudden peak in interest that is likely to follow the implementation of the ballot screen idea. It would be a terrible shame if people tried to download Firefox and failed because the Mozilla servers keel over.

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Meet Microsoft, the Delusional

This is hilarious:

Jean Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft Europe, described the company as an underdog in Paris today.

He said Bing had between three and five percent market share in search and could only grow - although he admitted it could take a long time.

...

Despite Microsoft having to live with open source software for 10 years, it had retained its share in the market place, he said.

Er, what, like the browser sector, where Firefox now has nearly 24% market share worldwide, and Microsoft's share is decreasing? Or Apache's 54% in the Web server world, where Microsoft's share is decreasing? Or GNU/Linux's 88% market share of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, where Microsoft's share is static?

Microsoft the underdog? Or just a dog?

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Becta Says: Teach Us a Lesson...

...which is surely a offer we can't refuse.

For many years, Becta was one of the main obstacles to getting open source used within UK schools: it simply refused to budge from an almost pathological dependence on Microsoft and its products. Today, the situation is slowing improving, but it will take years to undo the harm caused by Becta's insistence on propagating the Microsoft monoculture in education.

At least Teach Us a Lesson seems to be starting off on the right foot:

Becta’s Teach us a Lesson competition launches today, Wednesday 7 October, following the speech that Kevin Brennan, the Minister for Further Education, made at the Learning Revolution Expo yesterday.

The competition seeks to find the brightest and best ideas for developing online resources for people to find informal learning opportunities that interest them. This will happen by having entries submitted to the competition website, where they will be commented on and rated by other site users.

This, then, is about opening up in terms of drawing on ideas outside Becta. More specifically:

There are some things we are trying to avoid:

* Using proprietary products which will not permit open sharing or which run counter to Government policy on open standards

At long last, Becta seems to have learned its lesson...

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Postcodes: Royal Fail

Here's a perfect example of why intellectual commons should not be enclosed.

The UK Postcode data set is obviously crucial information for businesses and ordinary citizens - something that is clearly vital to the smooth running of everyday life. But more than that, it is geographic information that allows all kinds of innovative services to be provided by people with clever ideas and some skill.

That's exactly what happened when the Postcode database was leaked on to the Internet recently. People used that information to do all sorts of things that hadn't been done before, presumably because the company that claims to own this information, Royal Mail, was charging an exorbitant amount for access to it.

And then guess what happened? Yup, the nasties started arriving:

On Friday the 2nd October we received correspondence from the Royal Mail demanding that we close this site down (see below). One of the directors of Ernest Marples Postcodes Ltd has also been threatened personally.

We are not in a position to mount an effective legal challenge against the Royal Mail’s demands and therefore have closed the ErnestMarples.com API effective immediately.

We understand that this will cause harm and considerable inconvenience to the many people who are using or intend to use the API to power socially useful tools, such as HealthWhere, JobcentreProPlus.com and PlanningAlerts.com. For this, we apologise unreservedly.

Specifically, intellectual monopolies of a particularly stupid kind are involved:

Our client is the proprietor of extensive intellectual property rights in the Database, including copyright in both the Database and the software, and database rights.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about these "database rights":

The Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases is a European Union directive in the field of copyright law, made under the internal market provisions of the Treaty of Rome. It harmonizes the treatment of databases under copyright law, and creates a new sui generis right for the creators of databases which do not qualify for copyright.

Before 1996, these sui generis "database rights" did not exist; they were created in the EU because lobbyists put forward the argument that they would offer an incentive to create more databases than the Americans, whose database publishers strangely didn't seem to need this new "right" to thrive, and so make the mighty EU even mightier - at least as far as those jolly exciting databases were concerned.

Rather wisely, afterwards the EU decided to do some research in this area, comparing their creation before and after the new sui generis right was brought in, to see just how great that incentive proved to be - a unique opportunity to test the theory that underpins intellectual monopolies. Here are the results of that research:

Introduced to stimulate the production of databases in Europe, the “sui generis”protection has had no proven impact on the production of databases.

According to the Gale Directory of Databases, the number of EU-based database “entries” was 3095 in 2004 as compared to 3092 in 1998 when the first Member States had implemented the “sui generis” protection into national laws.

It is noteworthy that the number of database “entries” dropped just as most of the EU-15 had implemented the Directive into national laws in 2001. In 2001, there were 4085 EU-based “entries” while in 2004 there were only 3095.

While the evidence taken from the GDD relies on the number of database “entries” and not on the overall turnover achieved or the information supplied by means of databases, they remain the only empirical data available.

So, the official EU study finds that the sui generis protection has had no proven impact on the production of databases; in fact, the number of databases went *down* after it was introduced.

Thus these "database rights" have been shown to stifle the production of databases - negating the whole claimed point of their introduction. Moreover, the Royal Mail's bullying of a couple of people who are trying to offer useful services that would not otherwise exist, shows the danger of entrusting such a critical data commons to commercial entities who then enclose it by claiming "database rights" in them: they will always be tempted to maximise their own profit, rather than the value to society as a whole.

Giving the Royal Mail a monopoly on this critical dataset - one that for all practical purposes can never be created again - is like giving a genetics company a monopoly on the human genome. That was attempted (hello, Celera) but, fortunately for us, thwarted, thanks largely to free software. Today, the human genome is an intellectual commons (well, most of it), and the Postcode data should be, too.

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Blogger's Massive Fail

I can't believe this. When posting the previous entry, I got this message:

Blogger currently allows a maximum of 10 labels per post, and 2000 labels per blog. To get rid of this message, you will have to correct the appropriate label counts.

It seems that I have exceeded my quota of 2000 labels per blog: how insane is that? How can I limit myself to a set number of labels given that the world moves on and new ideas come along that need new labels.

Time to explore those export options....

Open Source and the Fear of Failure

Yesterday I took part in an interesting event organised by BT called "Accelerating Enterprise adoption of Open Source Software" (disclaimer: filthy lucre was involved.) One topic that elicited much comment was why the public sector has singularly failed to deploy open source. As well as political issues (Tony Blair was and presumably still is manifestly in awe of (Sir) Bill Gates), there's another important issue to do with a fear of failure.

Nobody in government wants to take a chance on something new, so they stick with the old suppliers and the old solutions. When those (almost inevitably) fail, this causes people to be even more cautious, and so the vicious circle continues.

That's clearly bad news for open source, but here's a particularly good articulation of why the fear of failure is bad for governments more generally:

When I’ve spoken with government people, they confess a phobia of failure. Yet without the opportunity to fail, government – like industry and media – cannot experiment and thus innovate. We must give government the license to fail. That is difficult, especially because it is the citizenry that must grant that permission. I think government must begin to recast its relationship by opening up pilot procts to input and discussion, to smart ideas and improvements. I’m not suggesting for a second that every decision be turned into a vote, that law become a wiki. Government still exercises its responsibility. But it needs to use the new mechanisms of the web to hear those ideas. I would look for examples to Dell’s Ideastorm, Starbucks’ My Starbucks Idea, and Best Buy’s Idea Exchange.

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Korea Cottons on to the Microsoft Monoculture

I've written several times about the extraordinary situation in South Korea - otherwise one of the most advanced technological nations - that maintains an almost total dependence on Microsoft's ActiveX technology for banking and government connections. Now it seems that the Koreans themselves are finally waking up to the disadvantages - and dangers - of that situation:

The bizarre coexistence of advanced hardware and an outdated user environment is a result of the country's overreliance on the technology of Microsoft, the U.S. software giant that owns the Korean computing experience like a fat kid does a cookie jar.

It is estimated that around 99 percent of Korean computers run on Microsoft's Windows operating system, and a similar rate of Internet users rely on the company's Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser to connect to cyberspace.

The article points out the obvious security issues with this approach:

This is a risky arrangement, since Active-X controls require full access to the Windows operating system and are often abused by cyber criminals who spread malicious programs to direct the browser to download files that compromise the user's control of the computer.

But it seems that the problem goes *much* deeper:

Even Microsoft seems ready to bail on Active-X, looking to phase out the program over security concerns and compatibility issues. However, in Korea, where most Web sites rely on Active-X to enable a variety of functions from online transactions to simple flash features, the program is abundant and critical as air.

This leads to awkwardness whenever Microsoft introduces a new product here. The release of Windows Vista caused massive disruption when Active-X used by banks and online shopping sites didn't function properly.

And the Korean Internet users sweated over Microsoft's initial plans to reduce its support for Active-X in IE8, the latest version of the company's Web browser. Although IE8 did end up backing Active-X, strengthened security features have made its use more complicated.

The reliance on Active-X has locked Korean computer users into a depressing cycle where they are prevented from venturing off to other operating systems and browsers, and stuck with an outdated technologies their creator can't wait to dispel.

That is, by instituting a monoculture, and becoming completely dependent not just on one manufacturer, but on one particular - and very unsatisfactory - technology used by that manufacturer, the Koreans find themselves trapped, left behind even by Microsoft, which wants to move on.

There could be no better demonstration of why mandating one proprietary technology in this way, rather than choosing an open standard with multiple implementations with the scope for future development, is folly.

Unfortunately, the article quoted above doesn't seem very optimistic on the chances of openness breaking out in South Korea any time soon, so it may well be that all its superb Internet infrastructure will go to waste as it remains locked into aging and increasingly obsolete technology on the software side. (Via Mozilla in Asia.)

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What Light on Yonder gov.uk Site Breaks?

The first glint of hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

From today we are inviting developers to show government how to get the future public data site right - how to find and use public sector information.

The developer community through initiatives such as Show Us a Better Way, the Power of Information Taskforce, MySociety and Rewired State have consistently demonstrated their eagerness and abilities to "Code a Better Country". You have given us evidence and examples to help drive this forward within government.

We have an early preview of what the site could look like; we are now inviting interaction and comment from the developer community. With over 1000 existing data sets, from 7 departments (brought together in re-useable form for the first time) and community resources, we want developers to work with us to use the data to create great applications; give us feedback on the early operational community; and tell us how to develop what we have into a single point of access for government-held public data.

We know it is still work in progress, and there’s still a lot to do. That’s why we need you to help us get this right. Let us know what features or changes would make the site better for your and what other data sources you would like to see here.

Now there's an offer you can't refuse...get stuck in, people. (Via Glyn Wintle.)

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Thanks for Keeping us in the Picture

Although e-petitions don't often accomplish much (the apology for Alan Turing being a notable exception), they do have the virtue of forcing the UK government to say something. In response to this:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to remove new restrictions on photography in public places.”

we got this:

It is a statutory defence for a person to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for eliciting, publishing or communicating the relevant information. Legitimate journalistic activity (such as covering a demonstration for a newspaper) is likely to constitute such an excuse. Similarly, an innocent tourist or other sight-seer taking a photograph of a police officer is likely to have a reasonable excuse.

Since most people can't *prove* they had reasonable excuse for taking a photo - is "because it was a nice shot" *reasonable*? And how do you *prove* it was reasonable at the time? - this very high legal bar obviously implies that non-journalistic Brits had better not take any snaps of Plod because, otherwise, you're nicked.

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Freedom is Slavery, Slavery is Freedom

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is always good for a laugh thanks to its transparent agenda (the use of the weasel word "competitive" gives it away), and it doesn't disappoint in the following, which is about the evils of net neutrality and openness:

Consider the Apple iPhone. The remarkably successful smartphone has arguably been a game-changer in the wireless world, having sold tens of millions of handsets since its 2007 launch and spurring dozens of would-be “iPhone killers” in the process. If you listen to net neutrality advocates’ mantra, you would assume the iPhone must be a wide open device with next to no restrictions. You would be mistaken. In fact, the iPhone is a prototypical “walled garden.” Apple vets every single iPhone app, and Apple reserves the right to reject iPhone apps if they “duplicate [iPhone] functionality” or “create significant network congestion.”

Why, then, has the iPhone enjoyed such popularity? It’s because consumer preferences are diverse and constantly evolving. Most users, it seems, do not place openness on the same pedestal that net neutrality advocates do. Proprietary platforms like the iPhone have advantages of their own– a cohesive, centrally-managed user experience, for one– but have disadvantages as well.

Which is fair enough. But it then goes on to say:

But under the FCC’s proposed neutrality rules, the iPhone and similar devices that place limits on the content and applications that users can access would likely be against the law.

Net neutrality has nothing to do with the edges - which is where the iPhone resides - and everything about the wiring that connects the edges. It is about preventing those who control the networks from blocking innovative services - like the iPhone - being offered across them. It would only apply if Apple owned the network and refused to allow third parties to offer rival services to its iPhone - clearly not the case. It does not forbid Apple from choosing which apps to run on the iPhone, any more than it forces Microsoft to go open source.

Painting the freedom of net neutrality as a kind of slavery in this way is really a tour-de-force of topsy-turvism, even by the high standards of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

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Won't Someone Please Think of the, er, Plants?

I've tweeted this, but it's so good, I just have to blog it too:

CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 makes Earth green because it supports all plant life. It is Earth's greatest airborne fertilizer. Even man-made CO2 contributes to plant growth that in turn sustains humanity and ecosystems.

CO2 Is Green is working to insure that all federal laws or regulations are founded upon science and not politics or scientific myths. No one wants the plant and animal kingdoms, including humanity, to be harmed if atmospheric CO2 is reduced. The current dialog in Washington needs to reflect these inalterable facts of nature. We cannot afford to make mistakes that would actually harm both the plant and animal kingdoms.

Oh lordy, those poor little plants and animals - deprived of the life-giving CO2. How could mankind be so cruel and insensate? How could we have overlooked such an obvious thing until now?

Update: Don't miss Adam Pope's super-sleuthing in the comments that suggests this site just might have something to do with the gas and oil industries...

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More Evil from the Intellectual Monopolies Mob

One of the best windows into the otherwise dark and murky world of backroom deals among proponents of intellectual monopolies can be found in the reports on the U.S.-EU IPR Enforcement Working Group (doesn't that word "enforcement" really say it all?). Here are a couple of the highlights of the latest one:

The U.S. and EU both expressed a desire to engage labor movements in delivering a “positive and constructive message” about IPR protection and enforcement. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and IIPA (International Intellectual Property Association) were both very enthusiastic about this proposal.

Basically, the IM mob are desperately trying to con unions into doing their dirty work by pushing out propaganda on intellectual monopolies. I just love the line "The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and IIPA (International Intellectual Property Association) were both very enthusiastic about this proposal": you bet they are. Their own ham-fisted efforts have backfired so spectacularly that they are desperate for someone else not tainted by their inept approach of punishing consumers to try.

The following is also significant:

The discussion on future work mostly focus on climate change. General Electric and Microsoft were particularly outspoken in highlighting their fear that some current negotiations over green technology and IPR would weaken IPR. They also denounced the inclusion of proposals that limit patentable subject matter and recommend compulsory licenses or licenses of rights.

As well as Microsoft's usual bleating about not being allowed to patent software in some jurisdictions, it's interesting to note that both it and General Electric seem to rate the preservation of intellectual monopolies rather higher than the preservation of our planet. Pure evil. (Via Ray Corrigan.)

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Cracks in the ACTA Wall of Secrecy

I've lamented many times the totally unjustified secrecy of the ACTA negotiations: these affect billions of people who have a right to know what their elected representatives are up to before this stuff is simply imposed on us. Hitherto, there's been no suggestion of any dissension within the ACTA ranks; so this comment in a blog post from Jamie Love about a lunch meeting of civil society NGOs held by the UK's Intellectual Property Office during the WIPO meeting is intriguing:

The UK IP office said it had complained frequently of the secrecy of the ACTA negotiations.

Perhaps if we can get a few more of the insiders moaning about this unnecessary lack of transparency, things will finally start moving.

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Big Win for GNU GPL in France

One of the fallback positions for purveyors of FUD is that the GNU GPL may not be valid, because it hasn't been properly tested in court. That's getting increasingly implausible as a stance. After being upheld in Germany a few times, here's a big decision in its favour in France:

In a landmark ruling that will set legal precedent, the Paris Court of Appeals decided last week that the company Edu4 violated the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) when it distributed binary copies of the remote desktop access software VNC but denied users access to its corresponding source code. The suit was filed by Association pour la formation professionnelle des adultes (AFPA), a French education organization.

...

The events of the case go back to early 2000, when Edu4 was hired to provide new computer equipment in AFPA's classrooms. Shortly thereafter, AFPA discovered that VNC was distributed with this equipment. Despite repeated requests, with mediation from the Free Software Foundation France, Edu4 refused to provide AFPA with the source code to this version of VNC. Furthermore, FSF France later discovered that Edu4 had removed copyright and license notices in the software. All of these activities violate the terms of the GNU GPL. AFPA filed suit in 2002 to protect its rights and obtain the source code.

There are a couple of important points about this decision. The first is noted in the post quoted above:

"what makes this ruling unique is the fact that the suit was filed by a user of the software, instead of a copyright holder. It's a commonly held belief that only the copyright holder of a work can enforce the license's terms - but that's not true in France. People who received software under the GNU GPL can also request compliance, since the license grants them rights from the authors."

The other point flows from this. The French legal system has many novel aspects, so it's important that the GNU GPL was upheld here, just as it was in Germany. It means that not only is the approach that the GPL takes being upheld by courts, it is being upheld in courts that look at things from different legal perspectives. That augurs well for future rulings in other jurisdictions.

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Microsoft, Monsanto and Intellectual Monopolies

Here's a brilliant, must-read feature exposing some of the hidden agendas of the Green Revolution and the dark side of the Gates Foundation's work in Africa. In particular, it makes explicit the symmetry of Microsoft and Monsanto in their use of intellectual monopolies to make their users increasingly powerless:

The preference for private sector contributions to agriculture shapes the Gates Foundation's funding priorities. In a number of grants, for instance, one corporation appears repeatedly--Monsanto. To some extent, this simply reflects Monsanto's domination of industrial agricultural research. There are, however, notable synergies between Gates and Monsanto: both are corporate titans that have made millions through technology, in particular through the aggressive defense of proprietary intellectual property. Both organizations are suffused by a culture of expertise, and there's some overlap between them. Robert Horsch, a former senior vice president at Monsanto, is, for instance, now interim director of Gates's agricultural development program and head of the science and technology team. Travis English and Paige Miller, researchers with the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, have uncovered some striking trends in Gates Foundation funding. By following the money, English told us that "AGRA used funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to write twenty-three grants for projects in Kenya. Twelve of those recipients are involved in research in genetically modified agriculture, development or advocacy. About 79 percent of funding in Kenya involves biotech in one way or another." And, English says, "so far, we have found over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto."

This isn't surprising in light of the fact that Monsanto and Gates both embrace a model of agriculture that sees farmers suffering a deficit of knowledge--in which seeds, like little tiny beads of software, can be programmed to transmit that knowledge for commercial purposes. This assumes that Green Revolution technologies--including those that substitute for farmers' knowledge--are not only desirable but neutral. Knowledge is never neutral, however: it inevitably carries and influences relations of power.

I fear that with hindsight we will see that contrary to the almost universal view that Gates is redeeming his bad boy years at Microsoft with the good boy promises of his Foundation, Gates will actually do even more damage in the realm of agriculture than he has in the world of computing. (Via Roy Schestowitz.)

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On the Road to Mendeley

Vic Keegan had an interesting article in the Guardian last week about a new site mendeley.com:

The music radio site Last.fm is one of the great ideas from the UK during the first dotcom boom. Users can listen to their own songs and other tracks recommended by Last.fm's algorithms based on their tastes, including iTunes, and those of friends. It could easily have been a one-trick pony. But now a few academics have applied its serendipity to scientific research. Why can't researchers, instead of waiting anywhere up to three years for their papers to jump all the hurdles, be part of a real-time market place – a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science? They pitched the idea, among others, to two of Last.fm's investors: Spencer Hyman and Stefan Glaenzer, newly enriched by the sale of Last.fm to CBS. They bought into the idea of using the site's principles to aggregate users' data (anonymously) while building up a databank of articles. Now the show is on the road and expanding fast. It is free, but a premium version will be added soon.

What's particularly fascinating is to see the cross-over of ideas from arts to science, and that both are driven by the insight that sharing with others brings huge benefits to them and to you.

Even though it's not open source, it's good to see that from the start there's a GNU/Linux version of the Mendeley client. Since the power of the site comes from the network effects of sharing, not the secret sauce hidden in the code, there doesn't seem to be any reason why that code shouldn't be opened up, and plenty of benefits in doing so. Now that Mendeley has started on its journey of sharing, let's hope they go the whole way.

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Analogue or Digital? - Both, Please

Recently, I bought the complete works of Brahms. Of course, I was faced with the by-now common problem of whether to buy nostalgic CDs, or evanescent MP3s. The price was about the same, so there was no guidance there. Of course, ecologically, I should have gone for the downloads, but in the end I choose the CDs - partly for the liner stuff you never get with an MP3, and partly because I have the option of degrading the CD bits to lossy MP3, which doesn't work so well the other way.

So imagine my surprise - and delight - when I discovered after paying for said CDs that the company - Deutsche Grammophon - had also given me access to most of the CDs as streams from its Web site, for no extra cost (I imagine the same would have been true of the MP3s). This was a shrewd move because (a) it made me feel good about the company, even though it cost them very little, and (b) I'm now telling people about this fact, which is great publicity for them.

But maybe my delight is actually a symptom of something deeper: that having access to both analogue and digital instantiations of information is getting the best of both worlds.

This struck me when I read the following story:

Google will make some 2 million out-of-copyright books that it has digitally scanned available for on-demand printing in a deal announced Thursday. The deal with On Demand Books, a private New York-based company, lets consumers print a book in about 10 minutes, and any title will cost around $8.

The books are part of a 10 million title corpus of texts that Google ( GOOG - news - people ) has scanned from libraries in the U.S. and Europe. The books were published before 1923, and therefore do not fall under the copyright dispute that pits Google against interests in technology, publishing and the public sector that oppose the company's plans to allow access to the full corpus.

That in itself, is intriguing: Google getting into analogue goods? But the real importance of this move is hinted at in the following:

On Demand already has 1.6 million titles available for print, but the Google books are likely to be more popular, as they can be searched for and examined through Google's popular engine.

That's true, but not really the key point, which is that as well as being able to search *for* books, you can search *through* them. That is, Google is giving you an online search capability for the physical books you buy from them.

This is a huge breakthrough. At the moment, you have to choose between the pleasure of reading an analogue artefact, and the convenience of its digital equivalent. With this new scheme, Google will let you find a particular phrase - or even word - in the book you have in your hands, because the latter is a physical embodiment of the one you use on the screen to search through its text.

The trouble is, of course, that this amazing facility is only available for those books out of copyright that Google has scanned. Which gives us yet another reason for repealing the extraordinarily stupid copyright laws that stop this kind of powerful service being offered for *all* text.

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From the GNU GPL to GISAID's EpiFlu

A few months ago, I wrote about GISAID, which takes a rather interesting and - to readers of this blog, at least - familiar approach to sharing genomic data:

Registered users can upload data relating to sequences, clinical manifestations in humans, epidemiology, observations in poultry and other animals, etc. These data will be accessible to all other registered users, but not to others unless they have agreed to the same terms of use. This maintains confidentiality of the data.

This is, of course, the same as the GNU GPL: do as you would be done by - if you want to use the GPL'd code, you can, but you must share with everyone the results of your work if you decide to share it with anyone.

The GNU GPL was radical in its time, and the GISAID approach with its EpiFlu database, containing flu virus sequences, is also challenging - and meeting its own obstacles:

Today, the GISAID database (which is called EpiFlu) features both genomic and epidemiological data on tens of thousands of virus samples. At least until recently, the project seemed to be working. During the H1N1 outbreak, so many sequences were being submitted so quickly that researchers were literally watching clusters of outbreaks in real time.

Then, in July of 2009, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) in Geneva, which has managed the database since 2006, removed EpiFlu from the GISAID Web site, making it available only to users redirected to SIB's Web site. SIB claims that GISAID had breached contract by failing to pay its bills on time, thereby relinquishing its rights to the database.

Let's hope that the SIB comes to its senses before it loses more of its credibility as a modern scientific organisation. Its high-handed claiming of "rights" to a commons created by others is simply not acceptable in the 21st century - which, if it has a future, will be one based around precisely the kind of sharing practised by GISAID.

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Nonplussed by Non-Commercial

One of the vexed issues in the world of Creative Commons licensing is what, exactly, is meant by "non-commercial" use. In an attempt to clarify things, the Creative Commons people have commissioned a study, which has now appeared. Here are some of the highlights according to the press release:

Creative Commons noncommercial licenses preclude use of a work “in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.” The majority of respondents (87% of creators, 85% of users) replied that the definition was “essentially the same as” (43% of creators, 42% of users) or “different from but still compatible with” (44% of creators, 43% of users) theirs. Only 7% of creators and 11% of users replied that the term was “different from and incompatible with” their definition.

Other highlights from the study include the rating by content creators and users of different uses of online content as either “commercial” or “noncommercial” on a scale of 1-100, where 1 is “definitely noncommercial” and 100 is “definitely commercial.” On this scale, creators and users (84.6 and 82.6, respectively) both rate uses in connection with online advertising generally as “commercial.” However, more specific use cases revealed that many interpretations are fact-specific. For example, creators and users gave the specific use case “not-for-profit organization uses work on its site, organization makes enough money from ads to cover hosting costs” ratings of 59.2 and 71.7, respectively.

On the same scale, creators and users (89.4 and 91.7, respectively) both rate uses in which money is made as being commercial, yet again those ratings are lower in use cases specifying cost recovery or use by not-for-profits. Finally, both groups rate “personal or private” use as noncommercial, though creators did so less strongly than users (24.3 and 16.0, respectively, on the same scale).

In open access polls, CC’s global network of “friends and family” rate some uses differently from the U.S. online population—although direct empirical comparisons may not be drawn from these data. For example, creators and users in these polls rate uses by not-for-profit organizations with advertisements as a means of cost recovery at 35.7 and 40.3, respectively—somewhat more noncommercial. They also rate “personal or private” use as strongly noncommercial—8.2 and 7.8, respectively—again on a scale of 1-100 where 1 is “definitely noncommercial” and 100 is “definitely commercial.”

I hope you got all that, for I certainly didn't. All that comes across to me from these figures is that "non-commercial" is so fluid a concept as to be useless.

The Creative Commons people rather created a rod for their own backs when they allowed this particular licence, which was bound to problematic. Indeed, it's striking that the GNU GPL, which doesn't allow this restriction, avoids all these issues entirely. Probably too late now to do anything about it...other than commissioning surveys, of course.

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Wikipedia + Flickr = Fotopedia

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia, one of the greatest achievements of sharing; I also enjoy wandering around Flickr, although its lack of over-arching organisation makes that hard to do. Maybe this is perfect solution: Fotopedia, "the first collaborative photo encyclopedia", which uses text from Wikipedia, but only to provide what amount to extended captions for the pix, which are generally very attractive.

It's not the first to do this - VisWiki has been around for some time - but Fotopedia seems to take a much more visual approach, which I find very pleasing, because it creates more than just a highly-illustrated version of Wikipedia. Articles and their pix are a little thin on the ground at the moment, but with any luck, that won't be the case for long once word gets out - and pictures start pouring in.

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MakeHuman Makes Open Source More Human

One of the canards about open source is that it only produces hardcore hacker programs - dev tools, infrastructural stuff etc. - that have little to offer the general, non-technical, *normal* user. While that may have been true ten years ago, things have moved on.

For example, here's MakeHuman, an amazing program that lets you create photorealistic 3D humanoid characters:

MakeHuman is an open source (so it's completely free), innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional humanoid characters. Features that make this software unique include a new, highly intuitive GUI and a high quality mesh, optimized to work in subdivision surface mode (for example, Zbrush). Using MakeHuman, a photorealistic character can be modeled in less than 2 minutes; MakeHuman is released under an Open Source Licence (GPL3.0) , and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The MakeHuman 0.9.1 Release Candidate was published in December 2007, prompting considerable community feedback.

Development effort is currently focused on the 1.0 Release, based on a new GUI and a 4th generation mesh. This release also incorporates considerable changes to the code base which now uses a small, efficient core application written in C, with most of the user functionality being implemented in Python. Because Python is an interpreted scripting language, this means that a wide range of scripts, plugins and utilities can be added without needing to rebuild the application.

Even the alpha version is incredibly impressive - real drag and drop 3D humanoid manipulation (*very* eerie), with a simple-to-use interface. If you think that free software is only about important but boring stuff, try out MakeHuman, and be amazed.

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Checks Are Indeed Needed - on Reality

Here's an unbelievably shameless attempt by Sir Roger Singleton to shout down the justified concern in the face of the insane UK government vetting scheme, which he heads. Let's consider some of his comments.

It is not about interfering with the sensible arrangements which parents make with each other to take their children to schools and clubs.

Well, except for the fact that if I regularly take other people's children to a club, I have to register. So Sir Roger seems to be re-defining "sensible" to exclude this hitherto mundane activity.

It is not about subjecting a quarter of the population to intensive scrutiny of their personal lives

No, it's worse: it's allowing a quarter of the population to be at the mercy of *unsubstantiated* rumours, without any controls on calumnies, however misinformed, that may be circulating about them.

it is not about creating mistrust between adults and children

Er, apart from the fact that the line now being pushed by proponents of the scheme is that if you don't register you clearly have something to hide, and cannot therefore be trusted with children. Which means that children are now expected to distrust everyone who has not been vetted - a mere three-quarters of the population.

it is not about ... discouraging volunteering

Well, Sir Roger, I agree it's not *about* discouraging volunteering - this is about instilling yet more fear to make people more sheep-like and compliant - but it will certainly be the inevitable knock-on consequence. I, for one, will not be volunteering for anything in future, because I refuse to allow a faceless and largely unaccountable bureaucracy - one that has time and again proven itself to be utterly incompetent with sensitive, personal information - to make judgments about my trustworthiness.

So, all-in-all, your statements are a total disgrace, because you simply dismiss all the deeply-felt concerns of parents up and down the country without addressing them in the slightest. You have simply re-stated your own indifference to what the public thinks - a public you are supposed to serve.

If you had any decency, you would resign; but then, if you had any decency you wouldn't be running this divisive, authoritarian scheme that will continue to blight families, education and British society in general until such time as it is consigned to the political dustbin, which can't be soon enough.

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On Opening Up with PHP

PHP is one of the big success stories of open source, so it's great to read this interview with its creator, Rasmus Lerdorf. I was especially struck by these words of wisdom:

in 1997, it basically came to the point where I was going to kill the project, because it was growing so fast and my mailbox was filling up with suggestions, complaints, patches, all these things. Up until then, I had been doing everything myself. Someone would make a suggestion, send me a patch and I'd rewrite the patch the way I thought it should be done.

I would disagree with people, I'd argue back and forth, and I just couldn't keep up any more. I was getting frustrated and sick of it all, [thinking]: "Why are all these people expecting me to fix their code? They're not paying me. What the hell am I doing working my ass off for these folks? I don't even know them – what the hell is going on here?"

So that was the time when I said: "This has to change. Give the guys who have been complaining over the last few years access to the code. The guy who has been complaining about the Oracle extension, he's been a pain in my ass for years, so it's yours now buddy. Any further issues or complaints about Oracle go directly to you." And that really empowered people.

When they felt that they now owned a slice of PHP, they started getting defensive. Instead of complaining to me about things – once they got ownership, and power, the whole atmosphere changed. And it got a lot more fun as well, because I didn't feel like it was just me against the world any more; now it was a real team effort.

That, in essence, is the secret of free software. Putting it into practice is slightly harder...

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Time for MPs to Face the Music on Sharing

Another ill-informed opinion piece from a politician about file-sharing:

Platinum selling artists Radiohead and Pink Floyd have said they are happy to see their music used as a sort of digital loss leader to sell other products, but these groups are the exception rather than the rule. The average musician earns less than £15,000 a year and losing royalties makes the day-to-day struggle even harder for them.

Those average musicians - just like average authors - will tell you the biggest problem they face is getting known, not getting paid. What musicians, and authors like me, struggle with is to get the word out about our stuff amongst the million other offerings out there. Believe it or not, simply having a distributor does not solve that problem: in my experience they pretty much expect *you* to do the marketing.

Paradoxical as it may seem, giving your stuff away is one of the best ways to make money. Not necessarily from the content - although that is possible, too, for example by selling physical CDs/books to people who have digital versions - but from ancillary revenue. This is not to be sneezed at: *all* the top pop musicians make much more from their live appearances than they do from their CDs (which is why an artist like Prince *gives away* CDs to people who attend his concerts).

As the quotation above concedes, giving away stuff isn't a difficulty for the top artists, and as I've indicated, giving it away is precisely the best way for less well-known musicians to break out of their low-income ghetto.

So, really, the only people who lose out from the sharing of music online are the record companies, who find themselves without a role. But the idea that civil liberties should be curtailed simply to keep afloat a dying - and widely-hated, both by artists and consumers - industry, should be self-evidently absurd.

It's worrying that the author of this latest simplistic attack on file-sharing, apparently "a former member of Runrig", is unable to see this. He and other demagogues that attack sharing for whatever reason would do well to look at the facts, and not glibly regurgitate the propaganda of the industry and its lobbyists.

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Russia's New Holiday: Programmer's Day

Russia's President Medvedev has decreed a new holiday for the country:

Президент России Дмитрий Медведев своим указом установил профессиональный праздник - День программиста, который отмечается 13 сентября, если год високосный - 12 сентября, сообщает пресс-служба главы государства.

Неофициально День программиста отмечается в мире уже много лет на 256-й день каждого года. Число 256 выбрано потому, что это количество целых чисел, которое можно выразить с помощью одного восьмиразрядного байта и также это максимальная степень числа 2, которая меньше 365.

13 сентября уже давно стало неофициальной праздничной датой для программистов, напомнили в министерстве. Указ об официальном утверждении праздника был подготовлен Минкомсвязи после консультаций с профсоюзами и отраслевыми ассоциациями и внесен в правительство в июле 2009 года.

[Via Google Translate: Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev issued a decree established a professional holiday - Day of the programmer, which is celebrated on Sept. 13 if a leap year - September 12, the press office of head of state.

Unofficially Programmer's Day celebrated in the world for many years at the 256 th day of each year. The number 256 is chosen because it is the number of integers that can be expressed using a single eight-byte, and also is the maximum degree of 2, which is less than 365.

September 13 has long been an informal celebratory date for programmers, recalled in the ministry. Ordinance approval Minkomsvyazi feast was prepared after consultation with trade unions and industry associations and submitted to the Government in July 2009.]

Russia leads the way again....

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