How to Save the Commons: Compute

There aren't many commons bigger than the atmosphere, nor one whose existence in something near its present state is so critical to our own survival. But in the face of the indisputable scientific consensus that global warming is taking place, it is hard to know what to do.

Well, short of rugby-tackling your elected representatives to the ground and refusing to let go until they do something about the climate crisis, you might at least join this project. It's pretty standard distributed computing stuff: your PC (Windows only, alas) does calculations in the background during idle time, and contributes its bit(s) to the greater whole - in this case making more accurate predictions about climate change.

It hardly requires much commitment from you, just a quick download, plus some electricity (pity that the latter will make the global warming worse). In fact, it's worth taking part just to get the ultra-cool screen-saver, which shows your model - your earth - and its climate, evolving before your very eyes.

Are O'Reilly Still Really the Good Guys?

Apparently not.

Update 1: See Jack Schofield's wise words on the matter.

Update 2: And this is Tim O'Reilly's response. Dunno: seems a bit hectoring, to me.

Welcome to the 20th Century

Region coding on DVDs is an old throwback to when the world was disconnected, and different parts of it could go their merry ways. But since the arrival of that curious thing called the Internet, we all live in the same county, which makes country codes pointless.

Alas, somebody forgot to tell the DVD Forum, who look likely to push through the same stupid approach for HD DVDs. Good job nobody is buying them. (Via the Reg.)

Google Does Picasa for GNU/Linux...Almost

In the light of an earlier post wondering whose side Google was really on, the news that it has come out with a GNU/Linux version of its Picasa image management tool is interesting - particularly because of the way it has chosen to do it.

Rather than release a completely re-written version for the GNU/Linux platform, it has chosen to "cheat" by using WINE, which lets it employ the Windows code that is then mediated by WINE. So while it's good to have Picasa for GNU/Linux, it would have been nicer to see Google going all the way, rather than cobbling together this makeshift version.

However, to be fair, Google's decision has resulted in some patches for WINE, which may well help other porting projects. Apparently, a GNU/Linux version of Google Earth is also coming, but this won't be using WINE. (via Ars Technica.)

A Quantum Mechanic Writes

How could anyone fail to love a project called Dirac? It's named after one of the most modest of quantum mechanics' pioneers. He once said that he was fortunate enough to have found himself amidst the Golden Age of quantum mechanics, when even second-rate minds could make first-rate discoveries.

If you're uncertain what this all means in practice, try this:
Dirac is a video codec that provides general-purpose video compression and decompression tools comparable with state-of-the-art systems.

All distributed under an open source licence by those kind people at the BBC.

A Tiny Victory?

This is all deeply abstruse stuff, but the bottom line is that there seems to be a glimmer sanity in the European Commission's attitude to the European patent system, in the clash between the competencies of the European Union and the European Patent Office (which have little to do with each other), and even with regard to the patentability of software. Or are we being too optimistic?

Open Filmmaking

After collaborative books, here comes collaborative filmmaking. A film in 28 parts, made by 28 different groups, the whole released under a CC licence. (Via eHub)

Creators' Rights in the Digital World

As something of a "IP minimalist", I obviously need to think about how creators are rewarded for their work in a world with little or no copyright. This post offers some possible answers, and links to an interesting document (available as both an HTML or PDF file).

The latter is by no means perfect - some of its facts are wrong - but it provides an excellent recent history of interwined worlds of open content and copyright, as well as plenty of links to important further materials. (Via LXer.com).

The Future of the Book?

The site Institute for the Future of the Book is certainly pushing the concept of the book hard in an effort to explore the idea and related issues. For example there are blog posts about a vaguely open content book, real collaborative fiction, even some thoughts on Linux kernel development. But the really interesting stuff is to be found in the site's projects.

There's Sophie, an open source, multimedia, interactive authoring tool (not out yet), and there's The Gates, which attempts something I've also fantasised about: gathering together and somehow amalgamating thousands of images of a particular place and event to create a kind of vast, multi-dimensional tapestry of people's memories.

It's based on Flickr (of course), but clearly requires something more: a new kind of tool for building such a open, collaborative work. The ideas for this are sketched out here. Fascinating.

Pin the eTail on the eDonkey

I thought that the Germans were tech-savvy, and then they go and do this. Still, people must be relieved that there is so little crime in Germany that their police have nothing better to do than acting as the heavy mob of the "entertainment" industry.

Strange, though, that eMusic is doing so well despite that fact that its music is completely defenceless in the face of cutlass-wielding piratical types, while the German recording industry, which spends most of its time trying to protect its monetized corporate intellectual property assets - sorry, music - fares so badly. Now, why could that be? (Via TechDirt.)

Eee by Gum: Now That's What I Call (e)Music

This Ars Technica article makes a good point: that Apple's refusal to license its DRM system means that only non-DRM'd music can be sold by anyone other than Apple to iPod users, now the largest slice of the digital music sector. And that's just what eMusic has done with great success: it claims to be the world's number retailer of downloadable music.

What particularly interested me is that among its million tracks are many from the Naxos catalogue. Naxos is the biggest-selling classical label, and by no means just cheap and cheerful, even if it started out that way. It now has an enviably-wide collection that includes many rare and obscure masterpieces, with more being added all the time.

No DRM, reasonable prices (25 US cents or under per track) and an increasingly good classical catalogue: bravo, eMusic.

More "Piracy" Poppycock

The Business Software Alliance has published another of its misleading propaganda efforts directed against the threat of so-called "piracy". It claims that a quarter of the software used in the UK is pirated. Now, I'd be willing to bet that this "research" doesn't take into account the growing use of free software, which can't be pirated, by definition. There are two ways in which this would affect the the 25% figure.

One, is that including free software reduces proportionately the share of closed software, which therefore makes the level of "piracy" go down too. Similarly, if any open source software is included in the overall total, so-called "pirate" copies may well include copies of free software that have not been bought - which are therefore perfectly legal, and should not be included in the "piracy" figure.

Aside from these methodological issues, there is an even bigger problem with the BSA document. From the BBC report on the story:

The impact of pirated software was felt very widely, she said, as it took cash out of the UK's technology culture and stunted money available for innovation.

"This is a serious issue. It's not affecting just businesses but everyone down the line," she said.

She added that reducing piracy significantly would mean a boost for the UK economy.

This is of course, complete poppycock and balderdash. Any extra money obtained would go straight into Bill Gates' pockets, and would do very little for the local economy. Indeed, cynics might argue that "piracy" is actually good for the UK's economy, since it reduce imports and hence outflows of cash. Personally, though, I'd just like more people to use free software so that the entire pseudo-issue of "piracy" disappeared.

Microsoft is Virtually into Virtualisation

This story about Microsoft moving deeper into virtualisation is interesting for a number of reasons. First, because it reveals one of the worst names for a product that I've heard in a long time:

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager

If you think about all these grey terms too long, your brain begins to deliquesce.

It also contains a good summary of the current state of play in virtualisation:

Virtualization, which today generally refers to the ability to run multiple operating systems simultaneously to make a computer more efficient, is a hot area and one in which Microsoft lags rivals. Even as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices add virtualization hardware support to make the technology mainstream, market leader VMware is exerting price pressure on Microsoft while the Xen project is giving rival Linux a major lead over Windows.

But one thing it doesn't explore - and which will be interesting to follow - is that fact that there are some very interesting licensing issues here. With open source, there's no problem: you want to bung 83 virtual copies of GNU/Linux on a box, you go ahead. But if you do that with Windows, do you have to pay for one copy, or 83...?

SOA, Web 2.0, SaaS, and...?

There's a fine flurry of activity in the blogosphere at the moment, dissecting the relationship - and occasional antagonism - between two great buzzphrases: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0.

Both draw on the older SaaS idea - that software is provided as a service across the network, with the twist that the software services are now merely components of a larger, composite application - a mashup of sorts.

But what seems to be overlooked by many is that all these ideas were first explored by free software. Or rather open source, since it was Linus who really refined them: Stallman may have come up with the idea of free software, but the defining development methodology evolved in Linus' Helsinki bedroom.

Indeed, it was the isolation of that bedroom, where the Internet was the only connection to the growing band of hackers that rallied around the Linux kernel, that helped drive that evolution.

Linus had to make it as easy as possible for others to join in: this led to a highly modular structure, which allows coders to work on just those areas that interested them. It also makes the code better, because the modules are simplified, and the interfaces between them are well defined.

It allows people to work in parallel, both in terms of different modules, and even on the same module. In the latter case, a kind of Darwinian selection is employed to choose among the various solutions. Moreover, the Net-based open source development structure is flat, almost without hierarchies - archetypal social software à la Web 2.0.

Blogs as...Information

Now here's a novel thought: blogs, not so much as inchoate, self-indulgent, solipsistic witterings of the socially disenfranchised, but rather, as sources of information.... (Via Open Access News.)

Hardly A Load of Old Rubbish

Not something I'm into, personally, but perhaps a variant of this Gmap mashup could be a way of oiling the process of passing on stuff you don't want, as well as that which you happen upon. (Via BoingBoing.)

Hard Cheese, Wallace

Talking of legal waste of times, it seems that an anti-GPL suit has been dismissed - for the second time. Hardly A Grand Day Out, eh, Gromit?

Good News Patently Comes in Threes

I've written often enough about patent absurdities, so it's been a real pleasure to observe this last week not one, but three promising decisions that might start to undo past idiocies.

First, the US Supreme Court ruled that patent owners do not have an automatic right to an injunction that could take out another business accused of infringement. This is fantastic news, because it delivers an extremely long-overdue kick in the corporate goolies to patent trolls, whose entire business method is to use the threat of such injunctions as a way of extorting money from companies who would really rather just get on with their business.

Next, the US Patent and Trademark Office agreed to a re-examination of Amazon.com's 1-Click patent. This is an example of an obvious idea that should never have been graced with a patent, but now it seems that there is even prior art that would argue against it. A plucky Kiwi, Peter Calveley, not only dug up the prior art, but also raised some dosh to apply for a re-examination.

Finally, one of the most idiotic patents given in recent years - for pretty much the entire idea of e-commerce, would you believe it - has finally been declared invalid. There's bound to be an appeal, but at least sense is starting to seep into the septic tank that is US patents.

More Moore

There's an interesting discussion going on about the cost of film-making - and whether we are likely to see huge falls from the exorbitant $200 million level for typical blockbusters.

This is particularly relevant in the context of copyright, since one of the principal arguments for copyright - especially in its more Draconian forms - is that huge sums are at stake. Once the production costs are not so huge - as is the case with texts, and increasingly music - then it is possible to contemplate other ways of generating revenue without needing to sell the right to read/view materials as in the past.

As the example cited - the Star Wreck films - shows, the key to reducing costs is to do as much as possible using virtual sets, and ultimately virtual actors. Once the analogue film-making becomes digital, Moore's Law kicks in, and things just get cheaper and cheaper.

This is already evident in children's cartoons, many of which are computer generated. Similarly, many major films depend heavily on computer-generated special effects. Both of these just get better all the time - presumably for the same up-front costs.

Sweet News for Sweden - But Not Only

A programme to promote open access in Sweden might seem of interest only to Swedes (or those who like to read Swedish academic papers), but it's actually good for everyone. Because, like open source, the more open access there is in the world, the greater the momentum behind the idea, and the more open acess there is.

As I've pointed out before, the opens are truly additive. Whereas traditional competition is just winner takes all, and losers get nothing, open endeavours are both winner takes all and everyone's a winner.

The Meaning of Jahshaka

I'm no expert on video editing, but the new version of Jahshaka looks pretty cool to me. Apparently, it's

[t]he worlds first OpenSource Realtime Editing and Effects System. Jahshaka takes advantage of the power of OpenGL and OpenML to give its users exceptional levels of performance. We currently support Linux, OsX, Irix and Windows, and Solaris is on the way! Jahshaka is licenced to the public under the GNU GPL agreement.

For those better qualified than me, there are features, screenshots and a gallery available.

What interests me most about Jahshaka is that fact that open source is moving into yet another area that has traditionally been a bastion of closed, proprietary programs.

Also worthy of note is that Jahshaka is yet another free program that runs on plenty of platforms, as the above quotation indicates. One of Windows' dirty little secrets is that it runs on one and only one platform.

Opening up the Middle Kingdom

Interesting:

The China Open-Source Software Promotion Union (COPU), a government-backed industry group, has established a think tank comprised of 19 prominent open-source executives from overseas to develop a framework for better international cooperation.

Linus Speaks

Linus rarely gives interviews (I hit very lucky some ten years ago). So this one, on CNN, is something of a rarity. Nothing new, but it's not bad as an intro to the man and his methods. (Via LXer.)

More Ineffable Microsoft FUD

It's always fun to track Microsoft's latest contortions when it comes to open source. I've described its past efforts elsewhere, and here's the latest:

Some people want to use community-based software, and they get value out of sharing with other people in the community. Other people want the reliability and the dependability that comes from a commercial software model.

Rather below par, I'd say: Microsoft reliable, dependable? As in reliably bug-ridden and dependably vulnerable to viruses?

They Call It Life, We Call It Lies

There's an interesting trend in the naming of institutes these days.

We have things like the Institute for Software Choice, "a global initiative promoting neutral government procurement, standards and public R&D policies for software!" Strange that this organisation didn't exist and push for choice when Microsoft utterly dominated government procurement, and really strange that the Institute's pronouncements all implicitly seem to be calling for more Microsoft products, and less of that horrible open stuff.

Because, you know, when something is truly open, you have no choice, because you could choose anything, which is clearly impossible, since you must choose something, so the whole thing's a contradiction anyway. Whereas with Microsoft's closed software, you are guaranteed to have just one, easy choice: Microsoft. So that's much better.

And then we have the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), "advancing liberty - from the economy to ecology". Well, you can probably guess how they are going to advance ecological liberty: that's right, by promoting the wonders of carbon dioxide.

You see, as this charming, down-to-earth video from the CEI indicates, all this global warming stuff is pure alarmism. The video proves this by showing two reports that global warming is threatening our planet, and then negating them with two others that report ice in the Antarctic and Greenland is thickening, not thinning. So this proves this idea that greenhouse gas is causing global warming is just nonsense.

Except for the tiresome, inconvenient fact that

the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas" concentrations.

This is the view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme.

But maybe this is just part of the two for, two against situation that the video showed us: perhaps there are other equally impressive reports that say the opposite. Well, no: all the papers on climate change that could be found in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 were analysed for their views on the role of greenhouse gases on global warming. The result was clear:

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

But the video urges us to ignore all this complicated scientific stuff anyway, and just to go with our hearts; as it puts it, so poetically:

As for carbon dioxide, it isn't smog or smoke, it's what we breathe out, and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life.

What a pity, then, that logging companies are cutting down so many of the trees and rooting up the plants: but I suppose that's all part of the economic liberty that the CEI espouses.

Update 1: A little clarifying background on the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Update 2: Larry Lessig on something related that looks pretty important.

What Do You Have to Hide?

Trust one of my digital heroes - Bruce Schneier - to provide a definitive rebuttal to the tired cliché trotted out by all those who would put us under surveillance: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" Basically, it comes down to the fact that

Privacy is ... a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Read the piece for Schneier's paean to the "eternal value of privacy", as he puts it.

Open Source Management

Yes, really. Here's an excerpt:

It is open source software and its social media descendants such as wikis and blogs that are making some businesses ready to consider openness. These tools are a great start, but it's the way you use them that matters. If employers want to encourage a culture of honesty and caring in their work environment, the most important thing for employers to do is to begin with themselves.

Reasonable, no?

Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest: Doing Down the Net

I've not read the article (which is hidden behind a paywall), but judging by this choice quotation

video will become the dominant way people experience the Internet over the next five years

we seem to have a prime example of either (a) somebody who really doesn't get it or (b) somebody with a vested interest who hopes that this dangerous new-fangled Net thing that risks making people do rash things like thinking and deciding for themselves will just settle down to the nice, safe, dumb TV whose effects we have come to know and love.

Openness vs. Privacy

There's an interesting tension between openness and privacy: openness is good except when it might infringe on justifiable privacy. This makes matters of privacy, and hence encryption, a kind of obverse to openness. So legislation like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is something that I've followed even before it was introduced in 2000.

I hadn't realised that part of that Act - that deals with disclosure of encryption keys - was not yet in force. As this news item explains, the UK Government is threatening to make this happen, but, as usual, without really thinking it through.

The justification - of course - is the tired old one of terrorism (anybody notice how this has become a kind of continuous justification for everything these days? - You don't think people have been reading 1984 for ideas or anything?). The "argument" is that the new powers are needed to "force" those evil terrorists to hand over the keys so that PC Plod can read all that incriminating evidence, and they can do their well-deserved porridge.

So, let's consider the various possibilities.

Either these terrorists, who tend to show scant regard for human life, let alone human laws, are suddenly going to become law-abiding, and say: "it's a fair cop, but society is to blame. Here are my encryption keys," and get sent down for the 10, 20, or 30 years they would cop for conspiring to carry out acts of terrorism blah-blah-blah. Or might they possibly just say "I've lost the keys", and get sent down for a couple of years instead?

Which do you think they'll choose?

Now tell me again why we need this legislation, since the only people it can possibly affect are law-abiding citizens like you and me, not law-defying terrorists?

Update 1: Slightly off-topic, but quite.

Update 2: More stupid UK legislation that will weaken, not strengthen people's security.

And the First Shall Be Last

It is done: the last unsequenced human chromosome - which happens to be the first in terms of size and hence numbering - has finally been "completed" (to 99.4%). Even more impressive, you can actually read the full Nature report on the subject. The digital code of the human genome, of course, has always been freely available (well, since 1996).

OK, so we've got the source code of us: all we have to do is understand it. Indications are, there will be quite a few surprises.

Digital Hoplites

I'm a great believer in the idea that one day everything - but everything - will be available online in a digital form. For content that is being created now, the main obstacles are legal, not logistical. But what about all that, you know, analogue stuff out there?

This fascinating Business Week article provides the answer, granting us a glimpse of the content grunts who are doing the digital dirty work, which most us - myself included - too easily take for granted as we wheel around the wonderful Web. (Via TechDirt.)

Gutenberg on Your Mobile

Here are 5000 free Gutenberg texts converted into a format suitable for reading on your a mobile. (Via The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter.)

The Once and Future Lock-In

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is not going to win any prizes for excitement, but it's important: it's a matter of how companies keep all their organisational stuff these days. So this piece warning about Microsoft's attempt to lock users into its standards at the content repository level makes a good point.

And as it also points out, there's now plenty of open source ECM software out there: Alfresco, eZ Publish, Joomla, Mambo, Midgard, Plone - so there's really no reason to take the one-way road to Redmond.

Boingo Goes Open Source

Wow.

Here's Boingo, which

provides software technology and roaming services that help bring the wireless Internet to the masses. The company has assembled a large and rapidly growing roaming system with tens of thousands of hot spot locations under contract around the world. Boingo also invented the world's most powerful software for discovering and connecting to hot spots and 3G wireless networks.

And here's Boingo going open source:

Boingo Wireless today announced the Boingo Embedded Wi-Fi Toolkit, an open source software package that enables developers to integrate Wi-Fi connection management to any Wi-Fi hot spot – including the more than 45,000 public hot spots that are part of the Boingo Roaming System – into small form factor devices such as dual-mode phones, VoIP handsets, mobile gaming consoles and other portable devices.

There's a great analysis at Wi-Fi Networking News on what this all means:

This open-source effort for detection and connection coupled with Devicescape’s similarly focused open-source release of its Wi-Fi authentication and encryption package could produce enormously better hotspot support in completely open projects with no connection to for-fee hotspots and in commercial projects that currently lack the finesse, exhaustiveness, or ease of either Boingo or Devicescape’s packages.

What's happening is that all the pieces are starting to fall into place for true, open wireless connectivity, as the open mantra takes over yet another conceptual domain. But more of that anon....

For now, let's just say "wow".

Micropayments? - Just Ask Millicent

Here's an interesting idea for academic publishing: micropayments as an alternative to standard subscriptions or open access. There's just one problem: micropayments have persistently failed to take off. Just look at what the W3C page on the subject says:

W3C has closed its Ecommerce and Micropayment Activity

and I don't think it was because of overwork.

Or take Digital's Millicent. I wrote about this in April 1997, when it looked highly promising. Afterwards, nothing happened, despite its evident cleverness. Today, the Millicent site is still listed on the W3C micropayments page, but so far has steadfastly refused to answer my insistent calls....

Burnished Sun Kisses Pullulating Earth

There are currently two main GNU/Linux distributions for business: Red Hat and SuSE. So it is perhaps no surprise that Sun, which badly needs to start pushing the free operating system if it wants to play in world of open source enterprise stacks, should choose something else entirely - Ubuntu, to be precise.

This makes a lot of sense: in doing so, it guarantees that it will be the senior partner in any enterprise developments, and ensures that it is not drawn into the orbits of IBM (with Red Hat) or Novell (with SuSE).

It also has bags of potential in terms of branding. Ubuntu is famous for its "I am what I am because of who we all are", as well as its tasteful mud-brown colour scheme. Now, imagine an enormous, burnished sun rising majestically over the rich, dark pullulating earth....

Update 1: Interesting interview with Mark Shuttleworth on the enterprise-level Ubuntu.

Update 2: Further confirmation of the alliance: Ubuntu running on Sun's Niagara servers.

P2P Pence

A clever idea: using P2P networks to connect borrowers and lenders, spreading the costs and risks across a distributed, people-based banking pool. What's interesting, of course, is that if this ever took off it would reduce the power of established banks - and the financial system based on them - considerably. There are, though, clearly lots of risks and uncertainties in the approach which may stifle its growth.

Two companies are mentioned in the article: Zopa, which is British, and Prosper, which is American. (Via Slashdot.)

Distant Thunder - from Space

Well, it was bound to happen:

The recording industry sued XM Satellite Radio on Tuesday over its new iPod-like device that can store up to 50 hours of music for a monthly fee, sending to the courts a roiling dispute over how consumers can legally record songs using next-generation radio services.

Time and again, a new technology that allows users to do something novel with content gets attacked by the self-appointed guardians of the sacred copyright flame - and the users' desires and rights can take a running jump. And time and again, it turns out that the new way of transmitting, making or storing copies generates more revenue, not less: think cable television, video cassettes and - soon - digital downloads of music. I'm sure satellite radio will be the same.

If only there were somebody with half a neuron in the content industries that could learn a little from history, and help forge the future, instead of needlessly fighting it all the time. (Via IP Democracy.)

Update: It appears that those behind the new lawsuit, the RIAA, specifically promised never to do this. (Via Techdirt.)

And Now - Open Telecoms

I'm not quite sure what all this means, but it sounds interesting - and has the magic "O"-word.... The details seem to suggest we're talking an open source platform for the telecoms industry - not end-users. More about OpenClovis, the company behind it all, here.

Bird 'Flu vs. Open Source, Open Data

IBM pushes all the right buttons in this announcement of an open source, open data project to predict and help stem the spread of infectious diseases - like bird 'flu.

Central to the effort will be the use of advanced software technologies, elements of which IBM intends to contribute to the open-source community, that are designed to help share information on disease outbreaks electronically and use it to predict how diseases will spread.

And

Ultimately, those plans could include development and distribution of more effective and timely vaccines as IBM taps into knowledge gained through a planned collaborative initiative known as "Project Checkmate," in which IBM and The Scripps Research Institute propose to conduct advanced biological research on influenza viruses. The collaboration is designed to predict the way viruses will mutate over time using advanced predictive techniques running on high performance computing systems, such as IBM's BlueGene supercomputer, allowing effective vaccines to be developed by drug-makers, drawing on the immunology and chemistry expertise at Scripps.

Blue Gene runs GNU/Linux in part, so maybe open source will really save the world. (Via Boing Boing.)

Royal Society of Twits

So, the Royal Society has spent three years putting together a study into the "best practice in communicating the results of new scientific research to the public," and come up with 24 pages of patronising, anachronistic codswallop.

At a time when the prospect of making a large chunk of all human knowledge freely available online is at least feasible (even if there are massive forces of reaction ranged against it - but then I do like a challenge), their Royal Socships can think of nothing better than fretting over whether scientific research is the kind of stuff 'you would wish your wife or servants to read'. As if there were any choice in the matter in the age of the Internet.

The result of those three years of deep cogitation boils down to deciding, well, we'll just keep all this tricky science stuff to ourselves, eh?, and maybe feed a few crumbs to those press johnnies from time to time to keep the public quiet. After all, just because the hoi polloi paid for most of it, doesn't give them any right to see the damn results, oh no. Now, do pass the port - clockwise, mind.

The Joy of Open Source

It's well known that lots of big companies are using open source; but do they really get all this communal effort, contributing back to the pool stuff? Not according to this interesting report, which finds that most of the heavy coding is still done by the passionate solo programmers.

I can't say I'm surprised: as I found when I interviewed most of the top open source hackers for Rebel Code, at the heart of what they do is joy - no other word for it. And joy is not something you bang your shin against much in mega-corporations.

Stumbling after Stumbling upon StumblingUpon

A few months ago I, ahem, stumbled upon StumbleUpon, which I learn has just joined the growing dotcom 2.0 feeding frenzy with some six-figure angel funding.

The idea behind StumbleUpon is simple: you rate pages that other "stumblers" have found and recommended. This feeds back into the pages that are fed to you, as do other pages that you've stumbled upon independently, and rated. All standard social software stuff, with a hint of Google's PageRank thrown in for good measure.

It's a great displacement activity, and when I first stumbled upon it I spent some time wandering around other people's stumbles. Some were genuinely interesting, but as time went on, despite all my approving and disapproving, there weren't proportionately more sites that interested me, just a constant succession of occasional pages that on their own would have been mildly amusing. Ultimately it seemed that there was no pattern in the carpet, just more and more stuff - a kind of drip-feed Digg.com.

Maybe the novelty of stumbling wore off, but I fear it is something deeper: that it's not a very efficient way to find matter that is really of interest - as opposed to vaguely entertaining. For that, the usual news channels - and a judicious selection of hard-working blogs (like paidContent, whose posting told me about StumbleUpon's company of angels) - seems a far more reliably productive way to gather information and sites. To say nothing of Google's PageRank, or even Digg.com - which you can at least skim-read very fast.

So who's stumbling here: me or the stumblers?

Is the GNU GPL in Thrall to Copyright?

A fascinating commentary from a lawyer on an issue I raised in passing a little while back: whether the GNU GPL, which depends on copyright law for its enforcement, is therefore in thrall to "IP"/the intellectual monopolies that copyright implies?

Perhaps these nice people could help us out on this conundrum?

Is the Tide Turning for OpenDocument Format?

Hm, what's this: an analyst starting to say downright nice things about ODF? From the article by Ingrid Marson:

There is a 70 percent probability that ISO will not approve multiple XML document formats [i.e., Microsoft's rival to ODF], according to a research note published by Gartner last week. It also predicted, with the same probability, that "by 2010, ODF (OpenDocument Format) document exchange will be required by 50 percent of government and 20 percent of commercial organizations."

Cynical old dog that I am, these probabilities look a little rosy to me. Nonetheless, what is astonishing is not the numbers themselves, but that Gartner - never one to stick its neck out on open source - made the prediction. Maybe the tide is turning?

Update 1: Hardly a surprise to learn that IBM will be supporting ODF in Lotus Notes, but nonetheless welcome news, since it can only add to the momentum building behind the new standard.

Update 2: The Gartner document can be found here.

Update 3: And now KDE has joined the ODF Alliance.

Will Java Ever Explode?

Some fifteen years ago I found myself in a café near the top of Merapi, just outside Yogyakarta in central Java. As now, this was at a time of considerable seismic activity there, with lava flows in some places. It was a very strange experience, because I had the feeling that, at any moment, the whole thing might lift into the air.

You could say the same about Java - not the island, but the language. For years it has seemed on the brink of erupting in spectacular pyrotechnics, but it always falls back, to smoulder some more.

The obvious way of adding some deep, magmatic oomph to the Java market is to release the code as open source. Once again, people are whispering about this, making Java something of a litmus test for Sun's new CEO, Jonathan Schwartz: will he, won't he? Is he, isn't he?

At least, to his credit, Schwartz has kept the blogging faith....

Update: C|Net says "Sun promises to open-source Java": me, I'd like to see the details before I throw my hat in the air....

UK Copyright Laws "Absurd"

Nope, not what I say (well, I do actually), but what the terribly grown-up and sensible National Consumer Council says. But wait, there's more:

Whether for films, literary or musical works, sound recordings or broadcasts, the length of all copyright terms should be reduced to fit more closely the time period over which most financial returns are normally made. The current campaign by the music industry to extend copyright terms for sound recordings beyond 50 years has no justification. Evidence shows that music companies generally make returns on material in a matter of years not decades. Current terms already provide excessive protection of intellectual property rights at a cost to consumers.

The full NCC submission to the Gowers Review can be found here; it's clearly written and well worth a look.

What's interesting is the pressure that is now building up on the Gowers Review to do something sensible about UK copyright. First the British music industry, and now the consumer council: who will be next? (Via paidContent.org.)

Open Access = Obvious Success

Everybody "knows" that open access is better, it's just that the proof has been, er, thin on the ground. No more. This study in the (open access) PLoS Biology offers the first rigorous examination of open access and non-open access papers in the same journal (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). The numbers indicate that open access is demonstrably better for the scientists that use it:

This comparison of the impact of OA and non-OA articles from the same journal in the first 4–16 mo after publication shows that OA articles are cited earlier and are, on average, cited more often than non-OA articles. To my knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study of a cohort of OA and non-OA articles providing direct and strong evidence for preferential or earlier citation of articles published originally as OA. It is also the first study showing an advantage of publishing an article as OA on the journal site over self-archiving (i.e., making the article otherwise online accessible).

Update: More positive news on the use of open access - caution: Microsoft Word format (via Open Access News).

The Karenina Code

Never mind Da Vinci, there's clearly a deeper Karenina Code waiting to be deciphered, judging by the number of (different) spam messages I've received that use it. The latest began:

several successful shots, and in the night they drove home

Amazingly, those words are enough to identify the text, thanks to Google. Content as the ultimate index....

Magna Carta and the Commons

A spectacular riff on the Magna Carta and its relationship to the commons. Along the way it brings in "petro-violence" and the environmental ravages it entails:

woodlands are being destroyed in favor of commercial profit, petroleum products are substituted as the base commodity of human reproduction and world economic development, and commoners are expropriated.

I really must pop down to Runnymede. (Via On the Commons).