Opening Up Google

Google exerts its fascination in part because it so opaque. A quintessential Web 2.0 company, owner of Blogger, it also has few outward-facing blogs - and none really worth reading. So any insights into what makes the company tick are always welcome, especially when many of them hinge on software issues, as they do in this Information Week piece.

This is particularly interesting because much of the code that makes Google tick is open source. Surprisingly, this turns out to mesh with that desire for opaqueness rather well:

In fact, one of the things Google likes about open source software is that it facilitates secrecy. "If we had to go and buy software licenses, or code licenses, based on seats, people would absolutely know what the Google infrastructure looks like," DiBona says. "The use of open source software, that's one more way we can control our destiny."

Pointless Exercises of Our Time

So what is IEs 4 Linux?

IEs4Linux is the simpler way to have Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Linux (or any OS running Wine).

No clicks needed. No boring setup processes. No Wine complications. Just one easy script and you'll get three IE versions to test your Sites. And it's free and open source.

Right, so it's an easier way to install inferior software on your GNU/Linux system. I'm sure it's done with all the best intentions, but I can't help feeling this is not a good use of hacker time. (Via TuxMachines.org.)

After Open Access - Open Discourse?

This is not exactly a new idea, but it's a further sign of how things are moving from basic open access to a more participatory, bloggy kind of world:

How often have you asked yourself how a certain study was published unchallenged, without the results of a key control? How often have you wondered whether a paper’s authors performed a specific procedure correctly? How often have you had the opportunity to question authors about previously published or opposing results they failed to cite, or discuss the difficulties of reproducing certain results? How often have you had the opportunity to command a discussion of an internal contradiction the referees seemed to have missed? The haves of science, who benefit from the status quo they shepherd, have seldom felt the need to redress such grievances. The have nots have basically been stuck with their lot – until now.

Enter JournalReview.org (1), a website forum for open peer review and discussion/criticism of medical literature. Essentially an online journal club with free membership, JournalReview.org provides a venue which will improve communication among physicians and scientists and foster comment and criticism about published scientific research.

(Via Open Access News.)

ODF Heats Up in Chile

One of the ironies of the free software world is that it is global - development is carried out around the world, 24 hours a days - and yet there is a terrible cultural bias in terms of the news that is reported, which tends to be almost exclusively about anglophone developments.

Take Chile, for example: how much do we know about free software activities there? Speaking personally, I have to admit, nothing. But that will change, because I've come across this great site called Hombros de Gigantes (Shoulders of Giants), written by Jens Hardings, a full time researcher and professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Here's a good example of the stuff it runs:

Many eyes are paying attention to what is happening in Massachusetts with the Open Format requirement.

...

One of the things I would like to spread a lot more than it is known is the fact that we have very similar requirements in Chile to the ones being put forward in Massachsetts’ Enterprise Technical Reference Model.

Hot news from Chile indeed.

On Faking It in the Web 2.0 Era

This is so true:

One interesting thing is - while its ludicrously easy to fake a resume, its actually pretty hard to fake a blog, because sustaining a pretence over time is much harder than doing so with one static document.

Right: that's why they're such bloomin' hard work.

Books Be-Googled

I've not really been paying much attention to the Google Book Search saga. Essentially, I'm totally in favour or what they're up to, and regard publishers' whines about copyright infringement as pathetic and wrong-headed. I'm delighted that Digital Code of Life has been scanned and can be searched.

It seems obvious to me that scanning books will lead to increased sales, since one of the principal obstacles to buying a book is being uncertain whether it's really what you want. Being able to search for a few key phrases is a great way to try before you buy.

Initially, I wasn't particularly excited by the news that Google Book Search now allows public domain books to be downloaded as images (not as text files - you need Project Gutenberg for that.) But having played around with it, I have to say that I'm more impressed: being able to see the scan of venerable and often obscure books is a delightful experience.

It is clearly an important step in the direction of making all knowledge available online. Let's hope a few publishers will begin to see the project in the same light, and collaborate with the thing rather than fight it reflexively.

Fighting Global Warming With Our Forks

One of things I love is understanding how things fit together. Here's an interesting little, ah, tidbit:

What many people do not know, however, is that the production of meat also significantly increases global warming. Cow farms produce millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane per year, the two major greenhouse gases that together account for more than 90 percent of U.S. greenhouse emissions, substantially contributing to "global scorching."

And not only that, but:

Additionally, rainforests are being cut down at an extremely rapid rate to both pasture cows and grow soybeans to feed cows. The clear-cutting of trees in the rainforest -- an incredibly bio-diverse area with 90 percent of all species on Earth -- not only creates more greenhouse gases through the process of destruction, but also reduces the amazing benefits that those trees provide.

So, basically, with every mouthful of meat, we are destroying not one, but two commons: the atmosphere and the rainforests. Time to pass the tofu, methinks....

A Blogalicious Roundup

With all the frenzied blogging activity that is going on, it's easy to lose track of who's doing what and why. That makes this Business 2.0 feature all-the-more valuable. Despite it's rather vulgar title - "Blogging for Dollars" (yes, shocking, I know) - it's actually one of the best mini-histories of the big-name bloggers.

For example, I've always wondered how TechCrunch's Mr Arrington managed his stratospheric rise from zero to blogger hero in a bare 12 months; now I learn that he comes with quite a pedigree:

Arrington, a 36-year-old entrepreneur behind a long list of unrecognizable startups, has suddenly become one of the rising stars of Silicon Valley.

...

Arrington also stumbled into the blog business. He was tossing back drinks at a bachelor party in Belgrade in 2005 when another Silicon Valley entrepreneur called with an idea for a startup based on the new technologies that have come to be lumped together as Web 2.0. Arrington began doing research about the emerging tech trend. He couldn't find one comprehensive source, and as he compiled his information, he decided to post it on a blog. "It was purely a hobby," he says.

This also explains what I see as TechCrunch's biggest problem: its reluctance to call a dog a dog. Too often reviews end with some mealy-mouthed cop-out along the lines of "well, I can't quite see what the point of this me-too video Web 2.0 site is, but it's not bad and maybe somebody will like it", which is less than helpful. (Maybe this is why I love The Reg - there's nothing like a bit of sarky Brit journo bile.)

The rest of the piece has other useful backgrounders on the alpha bloggers. Do read it if you care about any of them. If you don't, well, er, don't. (Via TechMeme.)

Why ID Cards Are Idiotic: the Internal Attack

Sigh.

When are people going to learn that creating super-databases simply makes them super-irresistible - not least to the people authorised to use them? For example:

Office staff are hacking into the department's computers, putting at risk the privacy of 40million people in Britain.

The revelation undermines Government claims that sensitive information being collected for its controversial ID Cards scheme could not fall into criminal hands.

The security breaches occurred at the Identity and Passport Service, which is setting up the National Identity Register to provide access to individuals' health, financial and police records as part of the £8billion ID card scheme scheduled to begin in 2008.

(Via TechDirt.)

Security Engineering - the Book

I've mentioned Ross Anderson before in this blog, and my own failed attempt to interact with him. But I won't let a little thing like that get in the way of plugging his book Security Engineering - especially now that it can be freely downloaded. If you want to know why that's good news, try reading the intro to said tome, written by the other Mr Security, Bruce Schneier. (Via LWN.net.)

OpenOffice.org Premium

Now here's an idea. Take something that's free, and add value to it without adding to the price. Enter OpenOffice.org Premium:

What's new?
* Clip Art (currently more than 2,800 objects)
* Templates (number varies by language)
* Samples (number varies by language)
* Documentation (if available)
* Fonts (more than 90 fonts)

It's bigger, and it may be better for some. In any case, it's free. (Via Linux and Open Source Blog.)

Why Analysts Are a Waste of Skin, Part III

Because they admit it themselves. (Via TechDirt.)

Enter the Chumby

A glorified alarm clock is not what you might expect to meet on this blog, but Chumby is rather different:

Introducing chumby, a compact device that can act like a clock radio, but is way more flexible and fun. It uses the wireless internet connection you already have to fetch cool stuff from the web: music, the latest news, box scores, animations, celebrity gossip...whatever you choose. And a chumby can exchange photos and messages with your friends. Since it's always on, you’ll never miss anything.

Interesting that wireless can now be taken for granted. Even more interesting that the system is hackable in just about every sense:

For the true geek, the electronics are "hackable," the case is removable. Your chumby can look however you like (bling-it-yourself or choose from 3rd party options). Stay tuned — who knows what creative programmer-types will make it do?

And, of course, the code is hackable too. And hackable code means one thing: a GNU/Linux core.

Whether the world needs Chumbies remains to be seen, but it's clear that the world needs free software to make them. (Via TechCrunch.)

The UK Biobank Time-bomb

It sounds so exciting, so good:

UK Biobank is a long-term project aimed at building a comprehensive resource for medical researchers. The full project will get underway in 2006, when it will begin to gather information on the health and lifestyle of 500,000 volunteers aged between 40 and 69.

Following consent, each participant will be asked to donate a blood and urine sample, have some standard measurements (such as blood pressure) and complete a confidential lifestyle questionnaire. Over the next 20 to 30 years UK Biobank will allow fully approved researchers to use these resources to study the progression of illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. From this they hope to develop new and better ways of preventing, diagnosing and treating such problems.

Data and samples will only be used for ethically and scientifically approved research. Issues such as consent, confidentiality, and security of the data are guided by an Ethics and Governance Framework overseen by an independent council chaired by Professor Alastair V. Campbell of Bristol University.

But read the access policy, and you find this:

Access will not be permitted for police or forensic use except where required by court order. It is likely that UK Biobank will take steps to resist access for police or forensic use, in particular by seeking to be represented in all court applications for access in order to defend participants’ trust and public confidence in UK Biobank.

Since court orders can always be taken for granted given the right legislative framework, and since the current UK Government already has such a poor track record for invasive laws that create such frameworks, what this means in practice is that anyone taking part in this otherwise laudable scheme is creating a biological time-bomb.

Inside the main UK Biobank database will be their DNA, just waiting for somebody, someday - perhaps long after their death - to obtain that court order. Then, practically everything genomic about them will be revealed: genetic propensities, biological relationships, you name it. And, of course, it will provide the authorities with a reliable way of tracking them and, to a lesser extent all their children, for ever.

I am sure that the UK Biobank will fight this kind of use; and I am equally sure that they will lose. Which is why my DNA will only form part of such a database over my dead body. Probably literally.

Amazon Goes Virtual

I was deeply unimpressed when Amazon announced its Simple Storage Service (S3), since I am not a developer, but the news that it is now rolling out a sister beta service, called the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), made me sit up and take notice. Not so much for this:

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud. Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

Which is all very well, but what really interested me was something I suspected might be the case:

Q: What operating system environments are supported?

Amazon EC2 currently supports Linux-based systems environments. Amazon EC2 currently uses a virtualization technology which only works with Linux environments. We are looking for ways to expand it to other platforms in future releases.

Think about it: Amazon, not a small or unknown company, is creating an on-demand, virtualised computing facility, and it has GNU/Linux at its heart, just as predicted.

Maybe it won't take off, but if it does - or if another GNU/Linux-based company like Google, say, follows, suit - we will be witnessing yet another serious nail in the coffin of the traditional operating system as the fundamental, underlying platform for computing. And we all know what that means, don't we? (Via GigaOm.)

It's a Bubble, but Not as We Know It.

John Battelle's Searchblog has become a little, er, sparse recently: I fear his other projects are taking up rather more of his time these days. But every now and then he comes out with a wise and succinct discussion of a major issue that makes hanging in there worthwhile.

His piece "Failure to Fail" is one of them, and sums up nicely my own feelings: it's a bubble, Jim, but not as we know it.

Inside a Freenigma

Freenigma is something that I have sought for ages: a way to send encrypted email from my webmail accounts - without having to do all the hard crypto-stuff, or indeed anything, really. Freenigma promises to do all this and more - see the FAQ for details. It's based on GnuPG, only works with Firefox:

In the initial step, we support only the Firefox browser. However, we are already working on an implementation for the Internet Explorer, which we will only release if we receive enough requests for it. To be honest, we would prefer all our users to use Firefox because, due to the open source code, it is more trustworthy than proprietary products. Furthermore, the browser is available for all platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows).

It is, of course, completely free (premium services are in the offing, apparently.)

I've only just signed up, so I can't report on how well it works, but once I've used it in anger, I'll provide an update. As unnecessary government surveillance becomes more common, programs like Freenigma will sadly become more necessary.

Zend, Zend, Zend

News that Zend is picking up a fat bunch of VC dosh is no suprise: PHP is consisently one of the most popular options for the LAMP stack. What's more interesting is what they are going to spend it on:

“The new funds will enable us to expand faster in emerging geographical markets, accelerate our product development and extend the services organization to meet the demands of our growing number of enterprise PHP customers,” said Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the co-founders of Zend Technologies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: but what are you really going to do with it? (Via Matt Asay.)

Desktop GNU/Linux: Hot and Not

If there's a tech meme of the moment, it's the GNU/Linux desktop, and whether it's viable. I've weighed in with my own slightly tangential views on the subject, but what's good to have is something a little more factual.

Surveys are always dodgy because of the scope for manipulation, but the one run by DesktopLinux.com has the huge advantage that it's being run and analysed by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, one of the very best open source journalists around. You can read the first of a series of his analyses here.

Wired's Wikified Wiki Words Work?

This is one of those things that you just want to work.

Wired has put up one of its stories - on wikis - to be freely edited by anyone. Or rather anyone who registers: this seems to be a threshold requirement to stop random vandalism as experienced the last time this was tried.

Judging by the results, the registration barrier seems to be working. The piece is eminently readable, and shows no evidence (as I write) of desecration. Maybe the wiki world is growing up. (via Many-to-Many.)

Open Source Audio Books

A nice piece in the New York Times about audio books based on public domain titles. Two points are worth noting. One is the following comment:

While some listeners object to the wide variety of recording quality, Mr. McGuire said, "our take on it is if you think a recording is done badly, then please do one and we’ll post it as well."

Which is classic open source stuff: don't like something? - do it better, mate.

The other point is that these audio books are truly open: since the source code (text) is public domain, anybody could alter it, and then record the variant. Probably best to start with a short text, but it could be an interesting experiment.

Free Software Directory Hits 5000...Almost

The number "5000" may not be a canonical one to celebrate, but the news that the Free Software Directory is about to hit 5000 entries is worth mentioning, if only because it's not as well known as it should be. After all, GNU software forms the backbone of free software, and so the directory is a natural first port of call when you're looking for some cool tools.

Interesting to note, too, the UNESCO co-branding (though I'm sure Richard Stallman wouldn't quite phrase it like that), part of the UN's increasing awareness and involvement with free software.

Testing, Testing....

Normal service will be resumed shortly. Please note that some posts will be in the nature of catch-ups, and hence their content may well already be familiar to you. Thank you for your patience.

Intermission

There will now be a short intermission, during which albatross will be available from the usherettes. Normal service will be resumed on the 30th August, if not before.

A Licence to Print...Licences

Licensing lies at the heart of free software. Indeed, it could be argued that Richard Stallman's greatest legacy is the GNU GPL, since that first showed how to preserve the essential liberty of free software, and how to deal with free-riders. But as well as a boon, licences are also a bane: there are too many of the damn things, which is why I was a little unkind to the Honest Public Licence idea, good in itself.

In a way, it's surprising that it has taken the open source world so long to do some navel-gazing and look closely at the state of open source licences. The result, a draft of the License Proliferation Committee Report, makes fascinating reading.

Originally, the LP Committee started to divide the OSI approved licenses into "recommended," "non-recommended" and "other" tiers. As we met and discussed, however, it became apparent that there is no one open source license that serves everyone's needs equally well. Some people like copyleft. Some don't. Governmental bodies have specific needs concerning copyright rights. As we discussed which licenses should be "recommended," it became clear that the recommended licenses were really the same as licenses that were either widely used (for example the GPL), or that had a strong community (for example Eclipse). Thus, we switched from the "recommended"/"non-recommended" terminology to a more descriptive terminology of:

-Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities

-Special purpose licenses

-Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses

-Non-reusable licenses

-Other/Miscellaneous licenses

We thought that these more descriptive categories may help people initially picking a license to use one of the more popular licenses, thereby helping to reduce the numbers of different licenses commonly used. We realize that the majority of open source projects currently use the GPL and that the GPL does not always play well with other licenses. We also realize that the GPL is a great license choice for some people and not so great a license choice for others. Thus, we can't just recommend that everybody use the GPL.. While such a recommendation would solve the license proliferation problem, it is not realistic.

We encourage new licensors to use licenses in the "popular and strong communities" group if any licenses in that group fit their needs. There are only nine licenses in this group and if everyone considered these licenses first when choosing a license for their project, some of the issues relating to license proliferation would diminish.

What's particularly interesting is that there are just nine licences in the "popular and strong communities" group, and that they are mainly the ones you'd expect:

- Apache License, 2.0

- New BSD license

- GNU General Public License (GPL)

- GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)

- MIT license

- Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL)

- Common Development and Distribution License

- Common Public License

- Eclipse Public License

Most of these are well known; the only "strange" ones are the Common Public License, an early IBM choice, and Sun's Common Development and Distribution License.

Also of note is the Wizard Project:

The wizard assists new licensors in choosing which licenses meet their goals. The wizard also lets licensors find licenses that almost meet their goals. We hope that being able to generate a list of existing licenses that meet defined goals will lessen the need for people to create their own new licenses.

This is very similar to a tool available on the Creative Commons site. Indeed, it's hard not to get the feeling that on this occasion the open source world is generally following developments in the open content world - not necessarily a bad thing, and a sign of the growing maturity of the latter.

The Writely Way to Work

For a while now, my daily desktop has been filled with almost nothing but Firefox windows, each of which contains a healthy/unhealthy half-dozen tabs. One of these, is Gmail, which takes care of my email. Another is Bloglines, which gives me that reassuringly constant flow of information. For my own blogging, I pour straight into Blogger. In fact, aside from the odd MP3 player, about the only other app that I use constantly is the OpenOffice.org word processor, Writer.

Maybe not for much longer.

For Writely, Google's Web-based word processor, has finally opened its registration to all (I stupidly missed the first round). Having tried it on and off today, I have to say I'm totally impressed.

As a writer, I depend on my word-processor to do the things I need, the way I need, and then to get out of the way. Writely seems to manage this. Since my technical demands are very limited - as a pure word-machine I almost never use anything fancy in the way of images, tables or boxes, although I do demand .odt support, which Writely provides - it may well be that Writely is all I will ever require.

Moreover, it offers one huge and unique advantage for me: it will let me work on any of my PCs, on any platform, without the need to copy across and sync files constantly. In time, I expect that this will extend to things like mobile phones, too; clearly, this kind of platform- and device- independence is the Writely way to work.

Half the Web 2.0 Story

Here's a clever idea: put together a list of the top 1000 or so Web 2.0 sites, ordered by traffic rank. What's included?

For our purposes, my definition is that most of these companies are, as the wikipedia says, sites that "let people collaborate and share information online in a new way." So, Google doesn't make the cut, because most of their traffic comes to their search engine. eBay is an "old" company, but the many-to-many nature of the site means that they do.

Sounds reasonable.

But what about the ranking the site uses? Well, that's according to Alexa traffic rank. Now, I'm a huge fan of Alexa, and even more of Mr. Alexa, Brewster Kahle.

But.

There's a big problem with Alexa's figures, in that they draw on the Alexa Toolbar, and the toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer (Alexa offers some alternatives for Firefox users, but they are not real substitutes). This means that the rankings are seriously skewed towards what the more conservative part of the online world does - precisely the last people you would ask about Web 2.0.

Only half the Web 2.0 story, then, but I suppose it's a start.

Openness, "Terror" and 1984

One of my earliest posts on this blog was about Craig Murray and how he was using his blog to get out into the open ideas and information uncomfortable to the British Government. Well, he's at it again, dealing with issues that the mainstream media once again seems strangely loth to discuss.

This time, he's offering a rather different interpretation of the alleged UK plot to blow up planes. The basic idea is simple: that the revelation of this plot took place when it did because it was politically expedient to do so, not because of any inner necessity based on the state of the preparations. As well as the obviously convenient disappearance of the war in Lebanon from the front pages for a while, it also provided ammunition for Dick Cheney in his attacks on a particular strand of thought in the Democratic Party (read the post for the details).

More generally, the dramatic "thwarting" of the alleged plot provides yet another "justification" for draconian security measures, on the basis that it is better to lose a bit of liberty than all of your life. But of course, this convenient equation only works if the perceived threat is great enough, which requires, in its turn, a steady supply of reminders about the potential horrors of terrorism (which are real enough). The fact that few alleged terrorists have actually been convicted, even among the people that have been arrested, suggests that things are not what they seem.

Similarly, the strange "error" of releasing the names of most of the people held in the current "emergency" - which means that there is no hope whatsoever of convicting them, given UK laws - can be seen as a convenient way to have your terrorist cake and eat it: in a blaze of publicity you get to arrest people that are later quietly released because of some terrible "blunder" by some Bank of England functionary.

The only difference between this situation and the one painted by George Orwell in 1984 is that, today, squaring up to Big Brother we have the Big Blogosphere.

Eric's Saga

Eric Raymond - ESR - is a curious chap.

Interviewing him was definitely one of the highlights of researching my book Rebel Code: there was a thoughtful intelligence behind his replies that seemed perfectly of a piece with his most famous contribution to the open source world, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

And then we have Eric's blog, entitled "Armed and Dangerous." The kindest thing I can say about this is that here ESR comes across as a thinking person's Michelle Malkin.

It therefore comes as something of a relief to see that Eric has posted very little to his blog recently. Indeed, he's generally pretty low profile these days, which makes his appearance at LinuxWorld and the dispensation of traditional non-blog Eric wisdom there all-the-more welcome.

According to The Reg:

Raymond said the community is not moving fast enough to engage with non-technical users whose first-choice platform is either an iPod, MP3 player or Microsoft desktop running Windows Media Player.

With iPod holding a massive market share and Windows Vista coming down the pipe, Raymond warned that Linux risks getting locked out of new hardware platforms for the next 30 years unless it proves it can work with iPods, MP3s and WMP.

I think this is a good point: for many, computers are really just big bits that you attach to an iPod or MP3 player, and so it's vital that GNU/Linux be able to play nicely here.

Fortunately, the WMP side is being sorted, and the MP3 handling was always quite good. The main problem is really Apple, with its wretched DRM. It's hard to see Steve Jobs finally seeing the light (he's probably too blinded by his own aureole), so it's clearly down to the community to come up with solutions.

If Laws Were Secret

This sounds like something straight out of Brazil. The UK Government is rolling out a database of UK laws, and it looks like the people who have already paid for it - the UK public - will have to pay again to access it.

First they make the laws pay-per-view, then they make them secret....

The Comedy of the Neglected Private

Most people have heard of the tragedy of the commons; how about the comedy of the neglected private?

The Land of Lost (Enterprise) Content (Management)

ECM - enterprise content management - may seem like a highly obscure field. It's actually critical important to businesses, but what interests me more is that this is one of four or five fields where open source is going to clean up soon.

So this post by Matt Asay about John Newton's thoughts on ECM consolidation caught my attention. For what it's worth, I shall be weighing in on this subject in due course (but don't hold your breath).

Danger: Blogger in Beta at Work

On Monday, Google finally came out with a beta version of its Blogger upgrade. God knows it's needed it: Blogger has fallen further and further behind its rivals, which is pretty extraordinary when you consider Google's lead in other fields.

The good news is that I will at last be able to add tags easily. The bad news is that there may be some strange sights as I explore new options and generally fiddle-faddle around. Your patience is appreciated.

Monty Python's Flying IDE

The last time I programmed was in Fortran, about 25 years ago. The machine I was using had 2 megabytes of memory - not RAM, but "core": it was an IBM 360, as I recall. I've often thought maybe I should learn a slightly more up-to-date language, and Python has always attracted me.

First, because of the name: I grew up on watching Monty Python when it first came out, and it has shaped my entire Weltanschauung; secondly, because I had the pleasure of interviewing Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, who is a thoroughly nice chap; and thirdly, because the consensus seems to be it's a fine language.

Perhaps I should add a fourth reason: the existence of Stani's Python Editor, which looks to be a splendid open source, cross-platform Python IDE, written, with neat recursiveness, in Python. (Via NewsForge.)

NUN Better?

I wrote recently about Ubuntu's innovative approach to developing a distro, and here's further proof of that. It's called the New User Network - NUN to its friends:

The Aim of the Ubuntu New User Project is to try and help new Ubuntu Users get to grips with Ubuntu. Members of the New User Network will spend a lot of time on IRC, the forums and the mailinglists.

Nothing revolutionary, perhaps, but other distributions could learn a lot from Ubuntu's methodical way of going about things. (Via Linux.com.)

Update: And here's Gentoo also doing something interesting in this space.

Windows Media for Windows - Really

Little things can make all the difference. If there is some audio stream using Microsoft Windows Media Format that you absolutely must listen to, then switching to GNU/Linux is that much harder. So anything that removes such obstacles is to be welcomed.

Such is the case for the news that Real and Novell are working to make Windows Media work out of the box for GNU/Linux.

Big Blue Turns a Deeper Shade of Penguin

When I was writing Rebel Code, which describes the birth and rise of free software from Richard Stallman's initial idea for GNU, I was lucky. I needed something suitably dramatic to provide the other book-end, and IBM kindly provided this with the announcement on 10 January 2000 that it

intended to make all of its server platforms Linux-friendly, including S/390, AS.400, RS/6000 and Netfinity servers, and the work is already well underway.

It's hard now to remember a time when IBM didn't support open source, so it's interesting to see this announcement that the company aims to push even deeper into the free software world. Quite what it will mean in practice is difficult to say, but on the basis of what has happened during the last six years, it should definitely be good for the open source world.

What Took Them So Long?

The study declares that open source software represents the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s.IDC believes that open source will eventually play a role in the life-cycle of every major software category, and will fundamentally change the value proposition of packaged software for customers.

They only just realised?

IDC never was the sharpest knife in the drawer. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

OA and Collectivisation

PLoS Medicine has put together a timely collection of some of its articles on HIV infection and AIDS. Nothing remarkable in that, you might say. But in principle it could have put together a collection of such articles drawing on other open access titles too.

Indeed, I predict this kind of collectivisation will become increasingly popular and important as OA journals gain in popularity. Because this kind of meta-publishing is only really possible in an OA world: traditional publishers would usually rather pull their own heads off rather than allow other rivals to use their texts.

Of course, you might point out that these same publishers will be able to include OA materials in their own collections, whereas PLoS, say, won't be able to draw on commercial titles. But that's fine: it would be an implicit recognition that OA journals are the equals of traditional titles, and would provide buckets of free publicity.

That's the great thing about openness: even freeloaders help the cause, whether they mean to or not. (Via Open Access News.)

After Darknets, Brightnets

The Owner-Free Filing system has often been described as the first brightnet; A distributed system where no one breaks the law, so no one need hide in the dark.

OFF is a highly connected peer-to-peer distributed file system. The unique feature of this system is that it stores all of its internal data in a multi-use randomized block format. In other words there is not a one to one mapping between a stored block and its use in a retrieved file. Each stored block is simultaneously used as a part of many different files. Individually, however, each block is nothing but arbitrary digital white noise.

Owner-Free refers both to the fact that nobody owns the system as a whole and nobody can own any of the data blocks stored in the system.

It's a fabulously clever approach, a simplified explanation of which you can find on Ars Technica.

Anyone who can write

Traditional rules do not apply. Mathematics is the only law.

is clearly on the side of the angels. But I fear that all this cleverness is indeed a matter of digital angels dancing on the head of a digital pin. The maths is indubitably delightful, but it wouldn't stand a chance in any court, which would simply dismiss the details and concentrate on the result: that copyrighted material is being accessed in different places.

It's all very well to say

No creative works, copyrighted or not, are ever communicated between OFF peers. Only meaningless blocks of random data. No tangible copies of creative works are ever stored on OFF peers.

But this cannot be literally true. If it were meaningless data, it would not be possible to access the copyrighted material; even if it is disembodied slightly, that meaning has to be present in the system, and transmitted between different users. Therein lies the infringment according to current copyright laws.

Mathematics is not, alas, the only law.

Heroes of the Healing

Java is something of a festering wound in the open source community. Simon Phipps has a nice piece about the "heroes of healing" who have tried to do something about this, as well as some background to Sun's current moves to make Java open source, in an as-yet undefined way.

Update: Matthew Aslett has some information about Phipps's latest thoughts on opening Java.

Welcome to the Darknet

Darknet: it's got a lovely feel to it as you roll it around your mouth. But I wonder if it will leave a sour taste with governments around the world. The idea is bold:

Today, the Swedish Pirate Party launched a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged. In technical terms, such a network is called a "darknet". The service allows people to use an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified.

"There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet," says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. "If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check. The right to exchange information in private is fundamental to the democratic society. Without a safe and convenient way of accessing the Internet anonymously, this right is rendered null and void."

I wonder how long The Man will allow this sort of thing to continue before the full weight of international law, treaties et al. will be brought to bear upon the Swedish government to "do something about it".

Get it while you can.

Signs of Bubbledom, Part 43

As an old-timer going back well over a decade into the mists of Internet time, I recall shaking my head over some poor fool paying $7.5 million for the domain business.com; the argument was, if I recall correctly, that it would "obviously" become the single most important site for business. If you visit the site today, it is a totally anonymous business search engine that Alexa currently assigns the staggeringly high rank of 1,860. Well, that was a bargain, wasn't it?

But as they say, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and here we go again:

John Gotts recently committed to purchasing Wiki.com for $2.86 million. Powered by MindTouch, Wiki.com provides further validation that wikis are moving into the mainstream. With its easily identifiable name, thousands of people are visiting the site daily without the aid of a search tool, signaling increasing interest in the technology and the value of a domain that drives natural traffic.

I don't think so, John. Still, look on the bright side: you could always sell the domain to Business.com. (Via TechCrunch.)

Gecko Turns into a K-Meleon

One of the great things about free software is that anyone can build on the work of others. For example, the Gecko engine lies at the heart of plenty of projects, from Firefox down, and it seems that someone else has joined the club.

Called K-Meleon (think about it - it only took my a 20 minutes to get it), it claims to be "an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform". Here are the screenshots.

At the moment it's hard to tell what purpose K-Meleon serves, but then the same could have been said about Firefox in the early days. Except that it was called Phoenix then - and note the interesting reference to another browser called, er, K-Meleon on this page. (Via Lxer.)

The Wiki-God Speaks...Mysteriously

While Wikipedia seems always in the news (as the previous post indicates), the man who started it all - no, not Jimmy Wales, but Ward Cunningham - is surprisingly low profile. So it's always good to come across an interview with him. I found the following particularly interesting:

The Creative Commons Attribution license is the "technology" we need to save patterns. If we'd known this 15 years ago we would not be in the mess we find ourselves in today. Instead creative individuals would be retelling the patterns in a way that resonates with every developer while still preserving a thread back to the analysis that led to each pattern's initial expression.

Unfortunately, I don't really know what he means. God-talk, I suppose. (Via Creative Commons Blog.)

Saudi Censorship, Saudi Wisdom

Larry Sanger has a useful round-up of stories that are mostly related to Wikipedia. Among them is one that I'd not seen. It's an in-depth investigation into the inconsistent way the Saudi authorities have been blocking Wikipedia. Obviously they find themselves in something of a quandary: there's lot of good content here that they would like to let users access, but there's also material that they are not so happy with.

It turns out that the article provides a solution to this problem:

"The young generation is not fully aware or conscious of the smart tactics some Westerners use to convince people of their views about Islam," said Al-Gain. "It’s the KACST’s or the CITC’s responsibility to make these links accessible to scholars and Islamic educators so that they study, analyze and respond to them. In fact, the KACST or the CITC must alert Muslim scholars to the existence of such links for further research and examination to attack the devious misconceptions that offend Islam."

Admittedly, this is not the most positive way of putting things, but I think the underlying argument is right. In other words, the best defence against things that challenge your views is not to bury your head in the sand and hope that they will go away, but to confront the problem directly, and come up with a good defence.

Call it the innoculation strategy: you don't try to avoid catching something - which is probably impossible - but you do take the precaution of protecting yourself against its effects by training the immune system to deal with it.

History Repeats Itself

One of the pleasures of blogging is the fact that no day is the same: the stories are always different, and the mix changes constantly. Well, usually, anyway. Yesterday I wrote a couple of stories that seemed to have repeated themselves slightly later.

The first, about Microsoft's "half-open" Windows Live Writer was echoed by news that it will be making a development kit for the Xbox 360 available to everyone, in what it claims

will democratize game development by delivering the necessary tools to hobbyists, students, indie developers and studios alike to help them bring their creative game ideas to life while nurturing game development talent, collaboration and sharing that will benefit the entire industry.

Of course, another big beneficiary is Microsoft, which gets more games, plus the commitment of end-users. But it's still interesting as a recognition of user-generated production as an important part of the equation.

The second story concerned the Honest Public Licence (HPL). And now here we have somebody who wants to modify the GNU GPL to forbid military use.

Again, however laudable the intentions here, I think it's misguided - even more than the HPL. First, it will be even harder to police: how are you going to find out if some top-secret army organisation is modifying the code but not releasing it? Worse, though, is the fact that it will simply discourage people from using open source at a time when the US military, for example, is increasingly adopting it.

Let's get the world using free software first, and address the niceties afterwards.

Just What We Don't Need, Honest

One reason why work is going on to produce version 3 of the GNU GPL is that things have moved on quite a bit since version 2 came out in 1991. For example, the idea of providing software as a service across the Internet was in no one's mind at that time.

Today, of course, it's the backbone of companies like Yahoo and Google, and therein lies the problem. As I've written about elsewhere, the issue is that they use a lot of free software to provide those services, but give relatively little back to the communities that write it.

Now, in this they are (currently) quite within their rights, since they are not distributing any code based on free software, which is the trigger for making it open. But the larger issue is whether they should be distributing it anyway.

Someone who thinks they should is Fabrizio Capobianco. And he's come up with what he believes is a solution: the splendidly-named Honest Public License (HPL). As Capobianco explains:

The goal of HPL is to keep the community honest with itself. The use of the name "Honest" is ABSOLUTELY not intended to mean that GPL or any other licenses are dishonest. It is quite the opposite, actually. But some people are taking advantage of a GPL legal loophole and are defeating the spirit of the GPL. HPL is just GPL extended to cover the distribution of software as a service to the public. It does not take away any freedom (i.e. you can use it internally in your corporation), it just covers when someone distributes the code to the public (whether with a floppy or as a service). It is meant to keep people honest with their community.

I think this is a laudable attempt - laudable, but misguided. The last thing we need is another open source licence. In fact the plethora of licences is one of the banes of the free software world. Adding one more - however well intentioned - is only going to make things worse.

There are also practical objections. For example, releasing code under the HPL will discourage companies from using it; or they may use it and fail to open up their code, in which case it will be hard to discover that they are in breach.

I think a better solution is to get GNU GPL 3 right, and let companies that offer software as a service based on open source do the right thing. After all, as I suggested in my Linux Journal column, enormous amounts of goodwill can be generated by giving more than the licence requires, and such a development would be far better for the free software world than burdening it with yet another licence. (Via NewsForge.)