EU's Standard Failure on Standards

Let's be frank: standards are pretty dull; but they are also important as technological gatekeepers. As the shameful OOXML saga showed, gaining the stamp of approval can be so important that some are prepared to adopt practically any means to achieve it; similarly, permitting the use of technologies that companies claim are patented in supposedly open standards can shut out open source implementations completely.

Against that background, the new EU report “Standardization for a competitive and innovative Europe: a vision for 2020” [.pdf] is a real disappointment. For something that purports to be looking forward a decade not even to mention “open source” (as far as I can tell) is an indication of just how old-fashioned and reactionary it is. Of course that omission is all of a piece with this attitude to intellectual monopolies:

The objective is to ensure licences for any essential IPRs contained in standards are provided on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory conditions (FRAND). In practice, in the large majority of cases, patented technology has been successfully integrated into standards under this approach. On this basis, standards bodies are encouraged to strive for improvements to the FRAND system taking into consideration issues that occur over time. Some fora and consortia, for instance in the area of internet, web, and business process standards development have implemented royalty-free policies (but permitting other FRAND terms) agreed by all members of the respective organisation in order to promote the broad implementation of the standards.

This is clearly heavily biased towards FRAND, and clearly hints that royalty-free regimes are only used by those long-haired, sandal-wearing hippies out on the Well-Weird Web.

But as readers of this blog well know, FRAND is simply incompatible with free software; and any standard that adopts FRAND locks out open source implementations. That this is contemplated in the report is bad enough; that it is not even acknowledged as potential problem is disgrace. (Via No OOXML.)

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Can You Make Money from Free Stuff?

Well, of course you can – free software is the primary demonstration of that. But that doesn't mean it's trivial to turn free into fee. Here's an interesting move that demonstrates that quite nicely.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Red Letter Day for ACTA in EU: Let's Use It

This week is one of the magic "plenary" ones in the European Parliament:

Only during the plenary weeks of June 14-17 and July 5-8 the MEPs will have an occasion to pass by the written declarations table, on their way to the plenary, to sign WD12 (at 12:00 on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the vote sessions, where every MEP should be present). It is therefore crucial that they are properly informed about the importance of signing it, right before moving to the plenary.

That WD12, to remind you:

Written declaration on the lack of a transparent process for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and potentially objectionable content

The European Parliament,

– having regard to Rule 123 of its Rules of Procedure,

A. whereas negotiations concerning the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) are ongoing,

B. whereas Parliament’s co-decision role in commercial matters and its access to negotiation documents are guaranteed by the Lisbon Treaty,

1. Takes the view that the proposed agreement should not indirectly impose harmonisation of EU copyright, patent or trademark law, and that the principle of subsidiarity should be respected;

2. Declares that the Commission should immediately make all documents related to the ongoing negotiations publicly available;

3. Takes the view that the proposed agreement should not force limitations upon judicial due process or weaken fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and the right to privacy;

4. Stresses that economic and innovation risks must be evaluated prior to introducing criminal sanctions where civil measures are already in place;

5. Takes the view that internet service providers should not bear liability for the data they transmit or host through their services to an extent that would necessitate prior surveillance or filtering of such data;

6. Points out that any measure aimed at strengthening powers of cross-border inspection and seizure of goods should not harm global access to legal, affordable and safe medicines;

7. Instructs its President to forward this declaration, together with the names of the signatories, to the Commission, the Council and the parliaments of the Member States.

So now would be a good time to contact your MEPs. If you want to find out who is still sitting on the naughty step as far as WD12 and ACTA is concerned, there's a good list from La Quadrature, complete with email and telephone numbers.

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Are Software Patents Patently Dangerous Enough?

Earlier this week I wrote about a useful study of the economics of copyright, pointing out that we need more such analyses in order to adopt a more rational, evidence-based approach to drafting laws in this area. Of course, precisely the same can be said of patents, and software patents in particular, so it's always good to come across work such as this newly-published doctoral dissertation [.pdf]: “The effects of software patent policy on the motivation and innovation of free and open source developers.”

On Open Enterprise blog.

Shame on Ofcom, Double Shame on the BBC

Readers with good memories may recall a little kerfuffle over an Ofcom consultation to slap DRM on the BBC's HD service:

if this scheme is adopted it is highly unlikely free software projects will be able to obtain the appropriate keys, for the simple reason that they are not structured in a way that allows them to enter into the appropriate legal agreements (not least because they couldn't keep them). Of course, it will probably be pretty trivial for people to crack the encryption scheme, thus ensuring that the law-abiding free software users are penalised, while those prepared to break the law are hardly bothered at all.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Abundance Obsoletes Peer Review, so Drop It

Recently, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Cameron Neylon, probably the leading - and certainly most articulate - exponent of open science. Talking with him about the formal peer review process typically employed by academic journals helped crystallise something that I have been trying to articulate: why peer review should go.

A recent blog post has drawn some attention to the cost - to academics - of running the peer review process:

So that's over £200million a year that academics are donating of their time to the peer review process. This isn't a large sum when set against things like the budget deficit, but it's not inconsiderable. And it's fine if one views it as generating public good - this is what researchers need to do in order to conduct proper research. But an alternative view is that academics (and ultimately taxpayers) are subsidising the academic publishing to the tune of £200 million a year. That's a lot of unpaid labour.

Indeed, an earlier estimate put the figure even higher:

a new report has attempted to quantify in cash terms exactly what peer reviewers are missing out on. It puts the worldwide unpaid cost of peer review at £1.9 billion a year, and estimates that the UK is among the most altruistic of nations, racking up the equivalent in unpaid time of £165 million a year.

Whatever the figure, it is significant, which brings us on to the inevitable questions: why are researchers making this donation to publishers, and do they need to?

The thought I had listening to Neylon talk about peer review is that it is yet another case of a system that was originally founded to cope with scarcity - in this case of outlets for academic papers. Peer review was worth the cost of people's time because opportunities to publish were rare and valuable and needed husbanding carefully.

Today, of course, that's not the case. There is little danger that important papers won't see the light of day: the nearly costless publishing medium of the Internet has seen to that. Now the problem is dealing with the fruits of that publishing abundance - making such that people can find the really important and interesting results among the many out there.

But that doesn't require peer review of the kind currently employed: there are all kinds of systems that allow any scientist - or even the general public - to rate content and to vote it up towards a wider audience. It's not perfect, but by and large it works - and spreads the cost widely to the point of being negligible for individual contributors.

For me what's particularly interesting is the fact that peer review is unnecessary for the same reason that copyright and patents are unnecessary nowadays: because the Internet liberates creativity massively and provides a means for bringing that flood to a wider audience without the need for official gatekeepers to bless and control it.

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The Economics of Copyright

One of the problems with the debate around copyright is that it is often fuelled more by feelings than facts. What is sorely lacking is a hard-nosed look at key areas like the economics of copyright. Enter "The Economics of Copyright and Digitisation: A Report on the Literature and the Need for Further Research” [.pdf].

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why GNU/Linux is Unmatched – and Unmatchable

Users of free software are nothing if not passionate. Most of them care deeply about the code they use, and will happily plunge into the flamewars that flare up regularly across the Web. The core focus of those arguments is well established by now: against Mac fans, it's about the virtues of true openness and freedom; against Windows fans (do they still exist?) it's about those, as well as security, speed, stability, etc. But there's another aspect that rarely gets discussed, and yet it represents one of GNU/Linux's greatest strengths: the breadth of hardware platforms supported.

On The H Open.

Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?

Last week, I met up with Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO. He gave a very fluent presentation to a group of journalists that ran through Red Hat's business model, and explained why – unsurprisingly – he was optimistic about his company's future growth.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why the iPhone Cannot Keep up with Android

Although I have never owned an iPhone, nor even desired one, I do recognise that it has redefined the world of smartphones. In that sense, it is the leader, and will always be historically important. However, as my title suggests, I don't think that's enough to keep it ahead of Android, however great you may judge the feature gap to be currently. Here's a good explanation of why that is:

Through a bevy of handset makers, Android can offer a variety of phones that will make it difficult for Apple to beat with just one hardware release a year. While it is hard to ever go wrong with an iPhone, Android offers a ton of alternative form factors, price points and carriers: Sprint (NYSE: S) has released the first 4G phone on Android; T-Mobile has a new competitive Android phone with a slide-out keyboard; the HTC Incredible sold by Verizon has been flying off store shelves; and even Google’s Nexus One still boasts some of the latest hardware. Not to mention new Android phones from Samsung and LG (SEO: 066570) coming later this summer.

The thing is, no matter how amazing any given feature of the iPhone, in any iteration, sooner or later (and probably sooner) there will be an Android smartphone that matches it. And alongisde that handset will be dozens of others offering other features that the iPhone hasn't yet implemented - and may never do.

It's an unfair race: iPhone iterations, even blessed by Steve Jobs' magic pixie dust, can only occur so fast; Android innovations, by contrast, are limited only by the number of players in the market. Want a new Android handset ever week? Easy, just wait until the ecosystem grows a little more.

And don't even get me started on the fact that the Android code is already starting to appear in totally new segments, bringing yet more innovation, yet more players....

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Grokking Green IT - and why Open Source Helps

One of the pardoxes at the heart of computing is that for all its power to improve the world, in one respect it is doing the opposite, thanks to its apparently insatiable appetite for electricity. As we are becoming increasingly aware, most electricity produced today has serious negative consequences for the environment, and so the more we use and depend on computers for our daily lives, the more we damage our planet.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why Sharing Will Be Big Business

As you may have noticed, one of the central themes of this blog is the power of sharing. Mostly, I talk about non-rivalrous goods like software or music: here, sharing is a no-brainer, because copies can be made for almost zero cost, allowing everyone to share a digital resource. But what about the world of analogue *rivalrous* goods - the traditional kind of stuff we are most used to in everyday life?

Here, sharing is harder to arrange, since you need someone to lend something to another party, which requires organisation in the physical world. And where there is friction, there is a business opportunity in terms of making reducing that friction. Here's a perfect example of that:

Chegg may very well be the fastest-growing, most successful, second-generation e-commerce startup that you hardly ever hear about,except maybe for the fact that it’s raised more than $140 million. Chegg is the “Netflix for textbooks.” It lets students across 6,400 college campuses rent from a virtual bookstore containing 4.2 million books. Based on my analysis (which I get into more detail below), the company is on track to generate $130 million in revenues in 2010, up from $25 million in 2009, and $10 million in 2008. During the January, 2010 semester, I estimate the company made close to $1 million in revenue a day, up fivefold from $200,000/day the previous January, and it should double that this coming September. My analysis suggests Chegg will do close to $50 million in revenue this September alone. It is underappreciated, to say the least.

The article goes on to point out the larger implications of Chegg's success:

Chegg is disintermediating the $5B+ college textbook market by providing a low-cost, short-term, nationwide rental alternative to the high-priced university bookstore. This disruptive model will likely shrink industry revenues by half in the coming years, with Chegg in a leadership position to command 80%+ market share. The key questions, of course, are: 1) Is this a winner-take-all market, 2) What can Chegg do to fend off the likes of the major bookstore owners, Barnes & Noble and Follet, as well as Amazon and Apple, and 3) Is Chegg a harbinger of a new age of startup rental services?

In answer to that last question, no and yes: I don't think we should regard this as old-style rental over the Internet, but a new kind of sharing where people spread the cost of rivalrous goods. However you look at it, though, it is going to be big.

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What's the Point of Hacktivism?

Thanks to the Internet, it's easy to engage in big issues - environmental crises, oppression, injustice. Too easy: all it takes is a click and that email is winging its way to who knows where, or that tasteful twibbon has been added to your avatar. If you still think this helps much, try reading Evgeny Morozov's blog Net Effect, and you will soon be disabused (actually, read it anyway - it's very well written).

So what's the point? Well, there are various things that such hacktivism can achieve, nicely laid out in this piece by Ethan Zuckerman called "Overcoming apathy through participation? – (not) my talk at Personal Democracy Forum". But there was one idea that I particularly liked - not least because I hadn't come across it before:

If we assume that activism, as with almost everything else online, has a Pareto distribution, we might assume that for every 1000 relatively passive supporters, we might find 10 deeply engaged activists and one emerging movement leader. And if the contention that participation begets passion, this particular long tail might be a slippery slope upwards, yielding more leaders than the average movement.

Astute readers will have noted that this is one of the reasons why the open source methodology is so successful: it allows natural leaders to emerge from participants. We've seen how amazingly powerful that is, not least in empowering people who in the past would never have been given opportunities to show what they can do. And that, for me, is reason enough to carry on with this hacktivism lark, in the hope that something similar can happen in other spheres.

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Please Help Fight EU Search Engine Surveillance

Just the other day I wrote about the foolishness that was the Gallo Report – which, alas, seems to have gone through with all its excesses. And as if that weren't enough, here's yet another problem that we need to address:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Does the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Get the Web?

Bill Gates's decision to move away from day-to-day running of Microsoft was doubly shrewd. First, because it allowed him to leave when his company was at its apogee, and to avoid association with its current - inevitable - decline (notice how the meme that Microsoft is irrelevant is becoming widespread?) And secondly, it enabled him to help Microsoft extend its reach - especially in developing countries - by other means, while earning plaudits for his charitable work.

Unpicking the complex weft and weave of philanthropy and self-interest at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would require an entire book (and no, don't worry, I won't be writing it). Rather than plunging into that maelstrom, I wanted to pick up an extraordinary aspect of the Foundation's site, spotted by Thierry Stoehr.

It's rather telling that the Terms of Use for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation run to no less than *seven* pages when printed out (who knew that using the Web was such a complicated and risky operation?). But even more extraordinary is the following clause:

Our Links to Other Sites: Our Site may contain links to Web sites of third parties. We provide these links as a convenience, but do not endorse the linked site or anything on it. While their information, products, services and information may be helpful to you, they are independent entities and we do not control or endorse them. You agree that any visits to linked sites are at your own risk and governed by their privacy policies (if any).

Your Links to Our Site: You are not permitted to link or shortcut to our Site from your Web site, blog or similar application, without obtaining prior written permission from us.

Which is worse: the hypocrisy or the cluelessness? It's a tough call....

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Why Patents are Like Black Holes

When a big enough star dies, it generally implodes, and forms a voracious black hole capable of swallowing anything that comes too close. When a big enough company dies, all that remains is a bunch of patents that can have a similarly negative effect on companies whose business models are too close.

He's Mike Masnick's commentary on the area:

It looks like just about all that's left of former telco equipment giant Nortel is a whole bunch of patents, that are now expected to sell for somewhere in the range of $1.1 billion. The big question, of course, is who ends up with those patents, and what they do with them. Generally speaking, you don't see companies spend $1.1 billion on a bunch of patents, unless they're planning something big. It's entirely possible someone will buy them for defensive purposes, but equally likely that they're used to sue lots of other companies (or, perhaps by the likes of Intellectual Ventures, to scare people into paying up to avoid the possibility of being sued).

And of course, in the field of open source, the really worrying dying star is Novell, as Matt Asay points out:

As reported, as many as 20 organizations have registered bids for Novell, most (or all) of them private equity firms. While an Oracle or a Cisco might acquire Novell for its maintenance streams and product portfolio, it's unclear that private equity firms will have the same motivation. For at least some of these, there will be serious pressure to sell Novell's assets to the highest bidder, regardless of the consequences to Novell's existing customers or to the wider industry.

This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Novell has a treasure trove of patents, with at least 450 patents related to networking, office productivity applications, identity management, and more.

Worth noting is that among those patents are some relating to Unix...

These cases show yet again why patents just don't do what they are supposed to - encourage innovation - but act as very serious threats to other companies that *are* innovating. As more and more of these software stars die, so the number of patent black holes will increase, and with them the unworkability of the patent system. Time to reboot that particular universe...

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Why "Naked Transparency" Has No Clothes

Although I have a great deal of time (and respect) for Lawrence Lessig, I think his article "Against Transparency" is fundamentally misguided. And for the same reason I think these concerns are overblown, too:

The coming wave of transparency could transform this in a hugely positive way, using open data on costs, opportunities and performance to become a much more creative, cost-effective and agile institution, mindful of the money it spends and the results it achieves, and ensuring individuals are accountable for their work.

But it might make things worse, frightening senior managers into becoming more guarded, taking fewer ‘risks’ with even small amounts of money, and focusing on the process to the detriment of the outcome. It may also make public service less attractive not only for those with something to hide, but for effective people who don’t want to spend their time fending off misinterpretations of their decisions and personal value for money in the media. And to mirror Lessig’s point, it may push confidence in public administration over a cliff, in revealing evidence of wrongdoing which in fact is nothing of the sort.

First of all, I think we already have a data point on such radical transparency. Open source is conducted totally in the open, with all decisions being subject to challenge and justification. That manifestly works, for all its "naked transparency".

Now, politics is plainly different in certain key respects, not least because hackers are different from politicians, and there has been a culture of *anti*-openness among the latter. But I think that is already changing, as David Cameron's latest billet doux to opening up indicates:

the release of the datasets specified in the Coalition Programme is just the beginning of the transparency process. In advance of introducing any necessary legislation to effect our Right to Data proposals, public requests to departments for the release of government datasets should be handled in line with the principles underpinning those proposals: a presumption in favour of transparency, with all published data licensed for free reuse.

Now, I am not so naive as to believe that all will be sweetness and light when it comes to opening up government; nor do I think that open goverment is "done": this is the beginning or the journey, not the end. But it is undeniable that a sea change has occurred: openness is (almost) the presumption. And the closer we move to that state, the more readily politicians will work within that context, and more natural transparency - even of the naked kind - will become.

Moreover, shying away from such full-throated openness because of concerns that it might frighten the horses is a sure way to ensure that we *don't* complete this journey. Which is why I think concerns about "naked transparency" are not just wrong, but dangerous, since they threaten to scupper the whole project by starting to carve out dangerous exceptions right at its heart.

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Open Sourcing Politics

“Linux is subversive”: so begins “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond's analysis of the open source way. The subversion there was mainly applied to the world of software, but how much more subversive are the ideas that lie behind open source when applied to politics.

On Open Enterprise blog.

GNU/Linux *Does* Scale – and How

As everyone knows, GNU/Linux grew up as a project to create a completely free alternative to Unix. Key parts were written by Richard Stallman while living the archetypal hacker's life at and around MIT, and by Linus Torvalds – in his bedroom. Against that background, it's no wonder that one of Microsoft's approaches to attacking GNU/Linux has been to dismiss it on technical grounds: after all, such a rag-bag of code written by long-haired hippies and near-teenagers could hardly be compared with the product of decades of serious, top-down planning by some of best coding professionals money can buy, could it?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Transparency is in WikiLeaks' DNA

It is somewhat ironic that the man behind WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is not a fan of being in the spotlight; and therefore perhaps poetic justice that he is increasingly the focus of in-depth profiles. The best one so far has just appeared in The New Yorker, and includes this memorable description:

WikiLeaks receives about thirty submissions a day, and typically posts the ones it deems credible in their raw, unedited state, with commentary alongside. Assange told me, “I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.” Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative.

I'm sure Sir John Sulston had no idea how far his idea of openness would be taken when he drew up the Bermuda Principles....

Urgent: Contact MEPs on the EU's Unbalanced Copyright Report

You would have thought that what with local initiatives like the Digital Economy Act and global ones like ACTA, the copyright maximalists would be satisfied with the range and number of attacks on the Internet and people's free use of it; but apparently not. For here comes the Gallo Report, an attempt to commit the European Union to criminalisation of copyright infringement and a generally more repressive approach to online activities.

A key vote on the Gallo Report takes place tomorrow, so we need to act today and (early) tomorrow if we want to stand a chance of making it more fair and balanced. The best site for information about this is La Quadrature du Net, which summarises the Gallo Report as follows:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Let's Make the Visually Impaired Full Digital Citizens

As I wrote recently in my Open... blog, copyright is about making a fair deal: in return for a government-supported, time-limited monopoly, creators agree to place their works in the public domain after that period has expired. But that monopoly also allows exceptions, granted for various purposes like the ability to quote limited extracts, or the ability to make parodies (details depend on jurisdiction.)

On Open Enterprise blog.

Dual-Screen Tablets: the Next Hot Form-Factor?

As new technologies arrive, and the cost of hardware components fall, innovative designs become possible Here's one that looks promising: a dual-screen Android tablet.

The two screens of the enTourage eDGe interact so that users can open hyperlinks that are included in an e-book text and view the content on the LCD screen, or ‘attach’ Web pages to passages in an e-book to be referenced at a later point. Additionally, as the enTourage eDGe uses E-Ink technology for easy digital reading, images will appear in gray-scale on the e-paper side of the device; however, users can load these in color on the LCD side, ideal for viewing colored charts and graphs from course materials.

Is this really useful, or am I just easily impressed by shiny?

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How They Stole the Public Domain

Part of the quid pro quo of copyright is that works are supposed to enter the public domain after a limited period of monopoly protection. Trouble is, the copyright maximalists and their friends in power have managed to keep jacking up that period, meaning that more and more of our cultural heritage is locked away for decades, released only long after the death of the author.

Rufus Pollock has now quantified how much we are losing:

if copyright had stayed at its Statute of Anne level, 52% of the books available today would in the public domain compared to an actual level of 19%. That’s around 600,000 additional items that would be in the public domain including works like Virginia Woolf’s (d. 1941) the Waves, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (pub. 1951) and Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (pub. 1981).

For comparison, in 1795 78% of all extant works were in the public domain. A figure which we’d be close to having if copyright was a simple 15 years (in that case the public domain would be a substantial 75%).

Imagine what today's artists could have done with free access to all those works: it's not just the past's creativity that's been stolen, but the present's too.

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Goodbye Becta – and Good Riddance

Not quite on the scale of cancelling the ID cards project, the news that Becta would be shut down was nonetheless further evidence of the coalition government's new broom whooshing into action. Although there seems to be a wide range of views on whether this is a good or bad thing – see this post and its comments for a representative selection – for me Becta was pretty much an unmitigated disaster for free software in this country, and I'm glad to see it go.

On Open Enterprise blog.