Tripped up for Want of a Commons

I'm not a poddie myself, but the idea behind Griffin Technology's iTrip - being able to broadcast your MP3 files to nearby FM radios - is a great one. A pity, then, that's it's currently against the law in the UK because it "trespasses" on someone else's "property" - the radio spectrum that has been allocated for their use.

The current fix, apparently, is to use the 2003 Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) Regulations Act. But the real solution is to create a much broader spectrum commons where people can start trying out all sorts of wireless innovation - without having to jump through these kind of hoops.

Update: Wow, that was quick. Here's Ofcom with a consultation on Wireless Telegraphy Licence Exemption that amends the 2003 Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) Regulations Act. Powerful things, these blogs. (Via openspectrum.info.)

Microsoft the Translator, Microsoft the Traitor

Since I sank to the (oceanic) depths of linking to a fisheries story on the basis of an irresistible headline, I don't see why I shouldn't do the same for this post, winningly entitled "Traduttore, Traditore" - Italian for "Translator, Traitor".

It's an interesting examination of the reality behind Microsoft's much-ballyhooed support for ODF, but what really grabbed my attention was the fact that this translator/traitor word pairing is always close to the surface of my mind whenever I use either: I'm always teetering on the brink of swapping one for the other. Which would be unfortunate. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

Making All the Right Connexions

A couple of months back I had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Baraniuk for an article about open content for LWN.net. As I wrote then:

Just as open source avoids re-inventing the wheel by building on existing code, so open courseware aims to save time, effort and money by making educational material freely available for others to re-use, extend and improve.

The first such project, Connexions, came from Rice University. It was the brainchild of Richard Baraniuk, professor of electrical engineering, who was directly inspired by the example of open source. Connexions uses a content creation platform called Rhaptos, which is released under the GNU GPL.

Connexions is a fascinating exercise in re-inventing university course materials, but Baraniuk told me that they were planning to go even further. Now Rice has announced that it is to use print-on-demand technologies to produce academic textbooks in a completely new way. As the press release explains:

Rice University's innovative Connexions today announced an on-demand printing agreement with QOOP Inc. that will allow students and instructors anywhere in the world to order high-quality, hardbound textbooks from Connexions - in most cases for less than $25.

The deal positions Connexions to take the lead in open-source textbook publishing as soon as it completes software needed to feed each of its titles to QOOP's on-demand publishing platform. Connexions plans to offer more than 100 titles for online purchase by year's end.

"From its inception, Connexions has used the Web to go beyond print," said Connexions founder Richard Baraniuk. "Connexions lets pupils and instructors make cross-disciplinary intellectual leaps with a simple mouse click, following knowledge wherever learning takes them.

"But being Web-based is also about access, and because our materials are freely available to everyone, we needed an easy, low-cost way to let people use a book if that's the medium they are most comfortable learning from," said Baraniuk, the Victor C. Cameron Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

QOOP's on-demand service will allow Connexions users to order customized course guides and a variety of fully developed Connexions textbooks. Standard paperbacks will take just 3-5 days to produce and ship, and traditional hardbacks will take about a week to produce. QOOP ships directly to customers.

No other publisher of open-source educational content can match Connexions offerings. This is partly due to Connexions early adoption of Creative Commons open licenses. Because all content on the site is authored under these licenses, there are no copyright conflicts to negotiate.

Open content, open source - sounds like all the right connexions are being made.

Why Hackers Do It

If you've ever wondered what makes hackers (not crackers) tick, you can relax: somebody has now submitted a doctoral thesis on the subject (in German) to give us an academically-rigorous answer.

It has as its title "Fun and software development: on the motivation of open source programmers," and includes, in an appendix, an email from RMS, whom the doctorand unwisely addressed as an "open source developer". To which Stallman inevitably (and rightly) replied:

Thank you, but I do not consider myself an ’open source developer’, and I don’t like my work to be described as ’open source’.

My work is free software (freie Software, logiciel libre).

One result, noted by Heise Online, is particularly striking:

Only about half the programming work is thus undertaken by the developers in their free time; for 42 percent (in temporal terms) of their engagement with open source the programmers are being remunerated -- an astonishingly large percentage. On this point the author of the dissertation Benno Luthiger Stoll remarks that this figure is likely to be even higher when the big picture is taken into account: The developers most likely to be paid are those working for large open-source projects; projects that in many cases have their own project infrastructure, he notes. Those active open-source programmers questioned, however, had come from Sourceforge, Savannah and Berlios, which in general tended to host less elaborate projects, he adds.

Happily, it also seems that

When compared with some 110 developers working for Swiss software companies, those engaged in open-source projects were seen to have more fun.

But maybe Swiss software companies are particularly boring.

PortableApps.com - Open Source on a Stick

One of the many benefits of open source is that it allows people to experiment. In particular, it lets people try out all sorts of whacky ideas that would simply be stifled at birth had they involved closed source. A good example is Portable Firefox, which consists of a slightly-modified version of the free browser such that it can be placed on a USB drive and run from it, without needing any further installation.

I knew that this had spawned things like Portable Thunderbird, which does the same thing for Mozilla's email client, but I hadn't realised that things had gone much further. For there is now a site called PortableApps.com, run by the person behind Portable Firefox, John Haller.

And what a cornucopia of a site it is. In addition to portable versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, you also find "ports" of OpenOffice.org, the IM client GAIM, the Web site editor NVu and the anti-virus program ClamWin. There's even a mini LAMP stack - though this is without the GNU/Linux part. However, the PortableApps site indicates that portable operating systems are on their way.

The software on this site represents quite a significant achievement, because it means that you can literally carry around in your pocket all the main apps that you need on a USB drive. Provided you can find a PC with a USB socket you can start working as if it were your machine.

Some Microsofties See the OSS Light

I don't know whether this is big enough to call a trend yet, but it's striking that several ex-Microsofties are setting up new companies based around open source. The latest one is Ohloh, whose site explains:

We're mapping the open source world by collecting objective information on open source software. Search our site for the most current software metrics and project information on open source software projects.

eWeek has some details on the ex-Microsoft people involved:

Collison and Jason Allen, a former development manager for XML Web Services at Microsoft and now vice president of engineering at Ohloh, co-founded the new company. Other former Microsoft executives involved in the startup include Paul Maritz, who served as a member of the executive committee and manager of the overall Microsoft company from 1986 to 2000. Maritz is an investor in the company, along with Pradeep Singh, who spent nine years at Microsoft in various management positions and left in 1994 to found Aditi Technologies, an Indian outsourcing company, Collison said.

I think one of the reasons for this move from the dark side can be found in another quotation from the same story:

"unlike 1999 one can do a startup on very thin capital, and that is the way we are going about it," Collison said. "One would have to be insane these days to take a traditional Series A round [of venture capital funding] with the open-source software and outsourcing opportunities that are out there."

In other words, it is the open source infrastructure that makes low-cost startups possible; and once you start using open source yourself, you begin to find that it's rather good, and realise that potential customers might think so too....

SAP's Success is Being Sapped

SAP is a strange company. Largely unknown to the general public (at least outside its native Germany), it is large, and until now, hugely successful in its chosen field of Enterprise Resource Management. It is also a dinosaur and doomed. Indicative of this is its very ambivalent attitude to open source, which some of its executives show little sign of understanding.

This story from the Reg confirms my suspicions: that its power is being sapped by rival closed-source companies. Just wait until the up-and-coming open source ERP companies start hitting their stride....

Open Source Evolution

Carl Zimmer is one of the best science writers around today. He manages to combine technical accuracy with a writing style that never gets in the way of his argument. So I was delighted to see this piece on his blog, entitled: "In the Beginning Was Linux?", which includes the following section:

Biologists have long recognized some striking parallels between genes and software. Genes stored information in a language of DNA, with the four nucleotides serving as its alphabet. A genetic code allowed cells to translate the information in genes into the separate language of proteins, which used an alphabet of twenty amino acids. From one generation to the next, mutations introduced slight tweaks to the software. Sex combined different versions of subroutines. If the software performed better--in the sense that an organism had more reproductive success--the changes might become incorporated into the genome across an entire species.

Now, this is amusingly close to the opening chapter (and central idea) of Digital Code of Life, but Zimmer goes further by drawing on the theories of Carl Woese, one of the most original thinkers about how life might have evolved in the earliest stages. It would take too long to explain the details to non-biologists, so I won't attempt it here - not least because Zimmer has already done with customary clarity in his post. Do read it.

EU Software Patents Battle 2.0

Florian Mueller, who did more than most to rally people against the software patents directive in the European Parliament, has flagged up the next - and potentially even more serious - threat from software patents.

This time, though, it's couched in rather obscure terms. The battle is not about allowing software patents "as such" - since they are explicitly forbidden in Europe - but about how litigation over patents should proceed. The point is, if the current proposal for something called the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) goes through, the European patent offices, many of which are happily handing out software patents, would have enormous influence over the litigation of such questionable patents, which is hardly right, methinks. As Mueller explains:

The legal status of software patents in Europe is contradictory. While the existing written rules, which go back to the year 1973, disallow patents on computer programs “as such”, the European Patent Office (EPO) and various national patent offices have granted tens of thousands of software patents. However, European patents, even if granted by the EPO, can only be enforced country by country as of now, and national courts declare many EPO software patents invalid when their holders try to use them against alleged infringers. Critics argue that the EPLA would create a new court system that would be under the control of the same group of government officials who already govern the EPO, and that the judges appointed by those people would support the EPO’s granting practice and its broad scope of patentable subject-matter with respect to software and business methods.

It's still very early days for the EPLA, but fore-warned is fore-armed.

Moroccan Fisheries Escapes Proprietary Net

Not my title, I hasten to add (though I wish it had been), but the one used by this article. The latter does what it says on the tin - a sardine tin, I presume, since Essaouira is a major centre for fishing said species.

Croats Have a Go at...OSS Policy

It seems that Croatia has joined the Euro-club of OSS enthusiasts. At least that's what I'm told. I really must get around to learning Serbo-Croat....

Update: More details in English here (with thanks to James Tyrrell.)

Towards a Wikipedia Done Properly

Larry Sanger's name has cropped up several times on this blog, so I was delighted to interview him recently for The Guardian. You can read the finished result here. Larry rightly takes me to task for the misleading headline and sub-head, but in my own defence I have to point out that I didn't write them.

A Study in Official Openness

It is probably hard for those outside the UK to appreciate the extent of the secrecy that has pervaded public life here for centuries. The clearest manifestation of this is the pernicious Official Secrets Act, which makes pretty much anything a secret if the Government says it is.

Against this presumption that the public has no right to know anything, the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 2000 was a major milestone, and credit must be given to the current Government for finally making it a reality. This is especially the case since it is clear that the information released by Act is proving a major embarrassment at times, thanks to both an increasingly demanding public and a commendably independent commissioner, Richard Thomas.

As the foreword to his first Annual Report makes clear, he is acutely aware of the central position that his department occupies in today's world, where there is an inevitable tension between his two main tasks: promoting openness and protecting privacy:

Never before has the threat of intrusion to people’s privacy been such a risk. It is no wonder that the public now ranks protecting personal information as the third most important social concern. As technology develops in a globalised 24/7 culture, power increases to build comprehensive insights into daily lives. As internet shopping, smart card technology and joined-up e-government initiatives reduce costs, respond to customers’ demands and improve public services, more and more information is accumulated about us. According to one estimate, information about the average working adult is stored on some 700 databases. New information is added every day. Much of this will be confidential material which we do not want others to see or use unless we say so. There are obvious risks that information is matched with the wrong person or security is breached. The risks increase substantially as information is shared from one database to another, or access granted to another group of users. Real damage can arise when things go wrong – careers and personal relationships can be jeopardised by inaccurate information. Identity theft can involve substantial financial loss and loss of personal autonomy.

The vast majority of information that is held on adults, and increasingly on children, serves a useful purpose and is well intentioned. But everyone recognises that there must be limits. Data protection provides the framework. It raises questions about where lines should be drawn. What is acceptable and what is unacceptable? What safeguards are needed? What is the right balance between public protection and private life? How long, for example, should phone and internet traffic records be retained for access by police and intelligence services fighting terrorism? Whose DNA should be held, and for how long, to help solve crime? What safeguards are needed for commercial internet-based tracking services which leave no hiding place?

All power to Mr Thomas' elbow.

Of FAQs and NAQs

FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions - are one of the characteristic concepts of the online world, born, presumably, of a cheery belief that it is possible for experts to distill any given area into a few pithy questions and answers for the benefit of newbies.

But things are moving on. The Guardian has pioneered what it calls "Newly Asked Questions", and now we have a new kind of FAQ: "Frequently Awkward Questions", aimed at the entertainment industry. I imagine that others will follow in due course.

Why Microsoft Got Thwacked

If you were wondering what exactly the sticking point was that led to Microsoft getting thumped by the European Union, here's a helpful press release from the Free Software Foundation Europe. The central problem is the company's refusal to make documentation available that would allow GNU/Linux to interoperate perfectly with Windows, thanks to the Samba free software project:

"Microsoft is still as far from allowing competition as it was on the day of the original Commission ruling in 2004. All proposals made by Microsoft were deliberately exclusive of Samba, the major remaining competitor. In that light, the fines do not seem to come early, and they do not seem high," comments Carlo Piana, Milano based lawyer of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) regarding the decision of the European Commission to fine Microsoft 1.5 million Euro per day retroactively from 16. December 2005, totalling 280.5 million Euro. Should Microsoft not come into compliance until the end of July 2006, the daily fines could be doubled.

These fines are a reaction to Microsofts continued lack of compliance with the European Commission decision to make interoperability information available to competitors as a necessary precondition to allow fair competition.

Microsoft's refusal to comply - and its willingness to incur fines amounting to hundreds of millions of Euros - is a measure of just how worried it is about Samba in particular, and open source in general.

The release also points out how risible are Microsoft's claims that it cannot easily supply the requested information:

"If we are to believe Microsofts numbers, it appears that 120.000 person days are not enough to document its own software. This is a task that good software developers do during the development of software, and a hallmark of bad engineering," comments Georg Greve, president of the FSFE. "For users, this should be a shock: Microsoft apparently does not know the software that controls 95% of all desktop computers on this planet. Imagine General Motors releasing a press statement to the extent that even though they had 300 of their best engineers work on this for two years, they cannot provide specifications for the cars they built."

Open Access...to Search Spam

Open access is usually about being able to read high-value texts that are normally only available for a correspondingly high fee. But, in reality, it's about access for free to stuff. For example, as Open Access News points out, you can have open access to "value-added" search spam data (and note the scrupulously precise use of the CC licence at the bottom).

OpenDocument Fellowship Rings the Changes

ODF just goes from strength to strength, as many posts on this blog attest. One of the main organisations pushing the standard is the splendidly-named OpenDocument Fellowship, even if it tends to keep a low profile (maybe it's just because I'm a member).

It has recently redesigned its Web site, and it's well worth taking a look for the useful ODF resources to be found there. These include introductions to the whole ODF idea, a handy list of applications that support ODF, the latest news and members' blogs with postings on related matters.

Of Sakai and Moodle

Sakai may not be a name that is known to many in the world of free software, but it's one of the leading open source projects in the field of education. IBM has certainly heard of it, having just donated a goodly lump of code to the project. And if Sakai proves of interest, you probably ought to check out Moodle, too.

The (Firefox) Fur Begins to Fly

As Firefox teeters on the brink of the first 2.0 beta, things are starting to get serious. No longer are we talking about a flash in the pan: Firefox is now a real, established rival to Internet Explorer, as these numbers from OneStat.com indicate.

Of course, there's a lot of variation in the degree to which Firefox has been adopted, from highs like Germany, with a stunning 39% using Firefox against 56% sticking with IE, to the snivelling Brits, of whom barely 11.5% use the Fox, while 86% cling to Uncle Bill.

The arrival of IE 7 will have an impact, but there's no doubt that Microsoft has left it far too late to roll back these kind of gains (even in the UK).

Wiki in the City

If you've ever wondered what might befall an innocent little wiki in hands of a serious investment bank, take a look at this. It's detailed, and the case studies are particularly interesting.

Open Access... as Haiku

If you don't have time to read through Peter Suber's full explanation of open access, you could always try his haiku version (this isn't new, but I've only just come across it). A sample:

I love print, paper.
But I love searching, linking,
using, sharing more.

...

They don't pay authors,
editors or referees.
Then they want the rights.

...

Sure, change copyright
and peer review. But OA
doesn't have to wait.

Apache Starts to Patch the Holes

The latest Netcraft survey shows that Apache has pulled back some of the ground it lost to Microsoft's Web server last month. There have been some pretty massive swings recently, as the oscillations in the graph show: these are largely due to switches in the hosting sector, which can often involve millions of Internet names at a stroke. For example, Go Daddy moved over 1.6 million hostnames from Apache to Microsoft's IIS platform in June.

These new gains for Apache are important, because it suggests that Microsoft's relentless campaign to "convince" hosting companies to switch to its products (and who wouldn't love to be a fly on the wall for those conversations?) may finally have run out of steam. It will be interesting to see what happens next month.

How the Stacks Stack Up

The ever-interesting Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who goes back a long way in the free software world, has a fascinating article about a comparison of two application stacks, one open source, the other from Microsoft. The results were surprising:

The tests showed that such vanilla LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/PERL) stacks as SLES (SUSE Enterprise Linux Server) 9, Zope, ZODB, and PHP and a pure LAMP based on SLES, produced "C" results. They weren't bad, but they weren't anywhere near as good as an out of the box .NET stack based on Windows Server 2003, IIS (Internet Information Server), SQL Server 2005, ASP (Active Server Pages), and SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

The results mirror those of the Mindcraft tests back in the late 1990s, when GNU/Linux found itself whupped by Microsoft. But the consequence was a range of improvements that soon took free software past Windows. However disappointing the current outcome for the stack tests may be, I'm sure that the same will happen here.

Remember: every bug report makes open source stronger, and the same goes for adverse benchmarks.

DejaVu All Over Again: Open Source Fonts

Last month I commended Hakon Wium Lie's call for open source typefaces to replace the de facto standard based on Microsoft's fonts. And here's an interesting article about a project called DejaVu that might just do that. The piece has some interesting background information on both DejaVu and its predecessor, Vera.

Microsoft ODF Plugin Story Gets...Richer

When I wrote about Microsoft's announcement that it would be sponsoring a project to create an ODF plugin for its Office product, I said the story was big. But I was wrong: it's actually really big, because of a deeply ironic twist to the story, detailed on Groklaw:

It seems that when Microsoft was looking to build its new ODF plugin, it took a short cut. It seems to have grabbed some code from the OpenDocument Fellowship's program that converts ODF to HTML, written by J. David Eisenberg. His code is released under a dual license, the LGPL and the Apache 2.0 license. Microsoft has put it into its ODF plugin, which is licensed under the BSD license.

Is that allowed? It's nice Microsoft endorses the value of the ODF Fellowship code, since they are forever telling us their own code is better. But we're trying to parse out which license Microsoft thinks it is complying with. Not the LGPL, I trust. My question, and I'm no Apache guru, is what about Apache sections 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and maybe 4.4, plus the required form of notice in the Appendix? It's certainly possible I'm missing something. But it seems it may be Microsoft that neglected to notice some requirements.

A Straw in the Californian Wind?

Newspapers tend to keep their constituencies firmly in mind when they are writing. So you might expect the Los Angeles Times to be beating the drum for Hollywood fairly unthinkingly. And then up pops this editorial on various US proposals to give entertainment industries even more of a stranglehold over content, which concludes:

As they weigh the entertainment industry's pleas, lawmakers shouldn't assume all consumers are bootleggers and every digital device is a hand grenade aimed at Hollywood.

Very interesting: if Hollywood's local newspaper is daring to write this, maybe a few other people in the vicinity are starting to think this way too. (Via TechDirt.)

It's a Dog's Life

One of the fascinating things that I learned when I was writing Digital Code of Life is that many diseases - such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, certain kinds of cancers and neurodegenerative disorders - are not commonly found in the great apes. As I put it then:

In a sense, the human genome has evolved certain advantageous characteristics so quickly that it has not been debugged properly. The major diseases afflicting humans are the outstanding faulty modules in genomic software that Nature was unable to fix in the time since humans evolved as a species.

Another extraordinary fact is that dogs are even more susceptible to these same diseases than humans are, and for the same reason: the domestic breeds have arisen so recently, and from limited populations through inbreeding. But if dogs are like us, only more so, then they also hold out the hope that by investigating the root causes of their afflictions we might be able to understand our own better.

I see that further steps in this direction are now being taken:

Melbourne researchers are examining the DNA of dogs in a research project aiming at determining the genetic causes of common pet diseases – and to provide a model for combating diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis in humans.

Malodorous Acacia

I've written about what promises to become the patent troll extraordinaire, but here's another, er, specimen. C|net introduces us to the head of Acacia Technologies Group, but don't be fooled by the name. Its patent-based business is anything but fragrant, despite what the interviewee might have you think:

It's the patent system that enabled people like Thomas Edison who actually developed the new technologies, which these companies then want to use to make money without paying for. The invention process is critical to the growth of the US economy and it's the smaller companies that usually come up with the new innovations and disruptive technologies that then the larger companies want to adopt. There's no one forcing them to add these features to their products. Obviously, they're doing it because they can make more money using the new features that were patented by someone else.

For a thoroughgoing refutation of this and other widespread misconceptions about patents and copyright, do read the brilliant Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, freely available from here. (Via TechDirt.)

The Smiley's Sad Tale

The smiley is a defining icon of the online generation. But as this article points out, it is also likely to go down as yet another enclosure of the virtual commons, a victim of insensate corporate greed, as companies battle it out for the "right" to claim this symbol as their "own".

The Other WWW: World-Wide Wikipedia

Wikipedia is deservedly famous, but there is a tendency to conflate Wikipedia with the english version of it. One of Wikipedia's many great achievements - alongside its huge size and the innovative partipation of large numbers of people - is that it is energising communities all around the world to create local versions in languages other than English. There is a list of the main languages at the foot of the main English Wikipedia page.

As Wikipedia explains:

Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions, nor are articles on the same subject required to be translations of each other. Automated translation of articles is explicitly disallowed, though multilingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to manually translate articles. The various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", though they may diverge on subtler points of policy and practice. Articles and images are shared between Wikipedia editions, the former through "InterWiki" links and pages to request translations, and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions.

Given this global diversity, and the lack of appreciation of efforts outside the Anglophone world, it's good to see that this three-way interview with leading Wikipedians includes voices from Germany and Japan as well as the obvious English one.

Microsoft's Open Source Windows

It looks like at least one person at Microsoft gets it:

One of the things that I’d like to see us do as a company is release a free, Open-Source, stripped-down version of Windows. There are so many benefits, IMO. We could cut out much of the “integration and innovation” and ship a bare-bones, essentials-only operating system with source that would allow the Open Source community to take a look at our code and really build on it. As SaaS (Software as a Service) and Web 2.0 apps take center stage, there is less and less motivation for customers to plunk down their dollars for a completely proprietary OS, and I see Linux gaining steam in that environment unless we are able to do something significant.

Now, the interesting question is whether this is an officially-sanctioned bit of kite-flying or not. I don't think it is; but I do think we will see an open source Windows one day.... (Via Digg.)

UK ID Cards DOA?

Regular/long-suffering readers will know that I am an implacable foe of the UK Government's scheme to make everyone in the country carry ID cards. As well as being a huge waste of money (all £19 billion of it), they will inevitably make us less secure (just ask Bruce Schneier).

So I was delighted to come across this fantastic scoop by The Sunday Times, which suggests that the scheme is much closer to collapse than even I might have hoped. This is based on some killer emails that were leaked to the newspaper by senior civil servants involved in the doomed project.

A sample of their candid views:

This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date rather than reality.

...

I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail.

...

Just because ministers say do something does not mean we ignore reality - which is what seems to have happened on ID Card

And don't miss John Lettice's usual lucid analysis of what all this really means.

A Defence of the Intellectual Commons

Use rights over cultural and scientific information are of fundamental political importance to citizens everywhere. These rights will be deeply affected by the kinds of intellectual property rights we allow to develop. This article argues for positive intellectual commons as a means of increasing freedom and diversity in information societies. Selforganized, positive intellectual commons will become more prevalent as citizens conclude that governments, will not deliver the institutions of knowledge that citizens want.

Which is of course what I have been saying for a while in this blog. But this paper by Peter Drahos puts it rather well; moreover, his background makes him rather better-qualified than I am to give some serious academic justifications for the ideas we share. Do read it. (Via Open Access News.)

The Rules of Open Source Marketing

Over on LWN.net I've an article grandly entitled "The birth of the open source enterprise stack", which has generated a fair amount of comment on the site. At the end, I write:

a subsequent feature will explore the surprising richness of the upper layers of the emerging open source enterprise stack, in areas such as systems management, customer relationship management, business intelligence, enterprise content management, enterprise resource planning and communications.

One of the companies I shall be discussing in the context of enterprise content management is Alfresco, so I was intrigued to come across an extensive think-piece by that company's marketing director, Ian Howells.

It, too, has a rather grandiose title: "10 Rules of Open Source Marketing". It draws heavily on Geoffrey Moore's ideas, but contains some interesting insights of its own. The one that I particularly liked was the following:

Rule 9: Your Software Infrastructure is Key
Dell transformed the PC industry not by selling cheap PCs but transforming the whole value chain and supply chain for PC production. From an operational perspective Open Source isn't about cheap software but about transforming the whole value chain for software across development, testing, translation, product management, marketing, sales and support.

The number of people downloading your software, asking questions, accessing your Web site, accessing demonstrations, trialing the product, discussing in forums, updating the wiki ... is massive compared to a traditional software start-up company. The extended infrastructure has to be able to support contributions, bug reports, and fixes from other individuals/companies, take feedback from forums and surveys, and be able to support hundreds of thousands people downloading your software. In amongst this, you have to be able to identify those who want to buy support, patches, and updates for a mission-critical environment and those who want to use the open source as part of the community. Open Source companies have to be masters of the whole Open Source software value chain to support the massive growth potential.

I really think this idea is the key to why open source will ultimately prevail: it represents a thorough-going re-invention of the entire process of creating, distributing and supporting code. Responses by traditional software companies are necessarily partial - unless they convert to open source themselves - and so by definition insufficient.

Google's Deep Search

We tend to think of Google as an engine that finds matches for concepts, since that's how we frame our searches. But in fact, it's simply matching patterns - just try typing a few random characters into the Google box and searching for them: you'll be amazed what can turn up.

As this article indicates, those patterns could just as easily be binary sequences that go to make up executable files - which are simply a pattern with a different kind of "meaning". This seems to indicate that Google is not just indexing the manifest content of the Web, but the entire - and much larger - binary universe that is accessible in some way online.

A Third of a Million eBooks - Free

I have been rather remiss in not pointing out that the World eBook Fair started last Tuesday. In celebration of the 35th anniversary of the founding of Project Gutenberg:

The World eBook Fair welcomes you to absolutely free access to a variety of eBook unparalleled by any other source. 1/3 million eBooks await you for personal use, all free of charge for the month from July 4 - August 4, 2006, and then 1/2 million eBooks in 2007, 3/4 million in 2008, and ONE million in 2009.

You can either just bung in a search term on the home page given above, or - probably better - go to the full listing of the constituent collections.

I have to say these are pretty impressive. As well as practically every Western classic you could think (already well-covered by Project Gutenberg) there's some interestingly specialist stuff here: for example, Asian classics (don't miss "Response to a Question on the Five Degenerations of the Eon of Strife" - in Tibetan, of course), seriously deep ancient middle eastern texts (Egyptian, Sumerian etc.), tens of thousands of multilingual editions, 8,000 English poems and sheet music.

It's true that these are not all completely open content: many exist in new "editions" which are copyrighted. They also tend to be PDF files, and some scans from books are not very accurate. But it would be churlish to dwell on these deficiencies (none of which applies to the original Project Gutenberg, which is completely open, in the public domain and highly accurate): get downloading and enjoy.

Open Source in Schools: Could Try Harder

A few months back I wrote about open source's big blunder: its neglect of the education sector. So I was naturally curious when I came across a column that began:

I asked for successes at schools using Open Source Software, and I received a wide variety of them.

Alas, the few examples given show a market is that is still, shall we say, learning its ABC. Overall result: could try harder.

The Other Kind of Open Source Languages

I am constantly delighted by the wit and wisdom of TechDirt. The latest example: a nice little meditation on the virtues of "open source" languages like English, where anyone can make up their own words, and that do not have standards bodies à l'Académie française telling people what is and isn't allowed.

It's true that French isn't exactly closed source (I believe you're allowed to write words down across the Channel), but it's a nice conceit.

Where in the World Are...OSS Companies?

If you've ever wondered where all these new and not-so-new open source companies are based, but can't be bothered looking them all up online, here's a nice mashup that shows the physical location of many of them. All we need now is a similar map for all the coders.... (Via Matthew Aslett.)

Reasons Not to Use Closed Source: No. 470

Yesterday I passed on a story about a closed source company unilaterally upping its support prices, and simply locking people out of their files if they refused to pay. Now, here's another good reason not to use proprietary systems.

The UK's shiny new IT system for the National Health Service (NHS) is fast becoming the biggest disaster in the history of computing. The latest area to suffer is that of childhood vaccinations:

Child vaccination rates may be falling to risky levels after a new IT system was installed, a health watchdog says.

Ten out of London's 31 primary care trusts have installed new software to manage the vaccine programme as part of a £6.8bn overhaul of NHS computers

...

Richard Bacon, a Tory MP and member of the Commons' Public Accounts Committee, said: "The national vaccination programme has been one of the NHS's greatest successes."

But he added the IT upgrade appeared to be "destroying it at a touch of a button".

And why is this all happening?

A spokesman for NHS Connecting for Health said the new system was implemented at short notice because the previous supplier "withdrew support for its ageing system from the market".

Had this "ageing system" been open source, the NHS could simply have called in another third-party contractor and given them the code. Since it was closed source, it was doomed when the supplier abandoned it, leaving the health system up to its neck in the proverbial.

Nor is this a matter of simple inconvenience: children are likely to die, if herd immunity is gradually lost as a result of these IT failings.

Why Yell Makes Me See Red

According to Wikinews:

Yell, the world's biggest yellow pages publisher, today threatened to shut down Yellowikis, the wiki-based yellow pages directory.

Yell accused Yellowikis co-founders Paul Youlten and Rosa Blaus (his 15 year-old daughter) of "misrepresentation", "passing off" and suggested that using the name Yellowikis could "constitute an 'instrument of fraud'."

Yell is demanding that Paul and Rosa close down the website, transfer the domain names to Yell and agree to pay damages to Yell for loss of profits. Yell made $2.4bn in 2005, whereas Yellowikis had a loss of $500. The $500 was used to print T-shirts promoting Yellowikis at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt.

Since Yell is apparently a UK company, this makes me ashamed to be British.

Let's look at the situation. You have a multi-billion pound company tied to a dead-tree model - just think of the resources it is wasting - bullying an open, volunteer project that is completely online (and innovative, to boot), through legal threats based on totally outrageous accusations.

Well, guess what?

I am now going to put all my Yell directories in for recycling, in an attempt to undo some of the environmental damage they have caused. And if Yell send me any more (as they are bound to do), I will try to refuse them; if I can't, I will promptly recycle those, too.

Henceforth, I will conduct all of my searches through Yellowikis, with the odd bit of Google thrown in where necessary. When I ring up companies I will make it clear that I never use dead-tree directories, and that they really should go online, maybe with something like Yellowikis, which is completely free. (Via TechDirt.)

Biofuels and the Environmental Commons

Biofuels are much in the news lately. Generally, they are presented as a clever way of getting round oil-dependence, with the added bonus of being environmentally sound: after all, what could be greener than plants?

But step back to look at the bigger picture, and you see that biofuels are no solution; worse, they would actually be disastrous to the environmental commons:

The United States annually consumes more fossil and nuclear energy than all the energy produced in a year by the country's plant life, including forests and that used for food and fiber, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy and David Pimentel, a Cornell University researcher.

...

Corn and soybean production as practiced in the Midwest is ecologically unsustainable. Its effects include massive topsoil erosion, pollution of surface and groundwater with pesticides, and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi River to deplete oxygen and life from a New Jersey-size portion of the Gulf of Mexico.

Sun Gets Stack Love

After Larry "I'd like to have the complete stack" Ellison, it seems that Sun is joining the Club of Stack Love. Not such a daft idea, actually.

Reasons Not to Use Closed Source: No. 469

How about this one?

Some doctors who use Dr. Notes' electronic medical records software say they have been denied access to the program and their patients' medical records because they refused to pay increased technical support fees.

(Via LXer and GPL Medicine.)

Open Source Trains

Well, we've got the open source car, so I suppose it's only fair that there should be open source trains. Sounds like a brilliant solution to the near-total breakdown of rail transport infrastructure in Cambodia. And I'm sure there's a great PhD in there somewhere, tracing the evolution of design as ideas are passed around. (Via Boing Boing.)

A Time There Was

I've noted before how mashups depend upon the existence of some kind of mesh; typically this is geographical (which is why so many mashups draw on Google Earth), but time is another obvious option. A good example of how that might be applied can be seen in the new site The Time When.

The idea is beautifully simple: anyone can write short descriptions of why certain dates are important to them. Alongside the entries, there is information about what happened that day, who the monarch was and so on. But as Antony Mayfield astutely observes, you could go much further:

the application could be used in all sorts of ways - I guess some bright spark there is already mashing it up with Google Earth or some such so the memories can start to hang out in space as well as time, as it were

adding extra dimensions to the mesh.

It's worth pointing out that this idea comes from the BBC, which is fast emerging as a real hotbed of creativity when it comes to applying Web 2.0-ish technologies. And if you want to see want kind of stuff people put in their entries, you could always try this.

The Behemoth Bends to ODF

Wow: it looks like Microsoft has finally admitted that ODF is now too big to ignore. According to the C|net story:

Microsoft said it plans to sponsor an open-source project to create software that will convert Office documents to OpenDocument, a rival format gaining ground, particularly among governments.

The software giant on Thursday is expected to launch the Open XML Translator project on SourceForge.net, a popular site for hosting code-sharing projects that use the BSD open-source license.

The software, developed by a France-based Microsoft partner, will allow people to use Microsoft Office to open and save documents in the OpenDocument, or ODF, format.

Open source, too.

This is big, not least because it indicates that ODF is now strong enough to bend even the mighty behemoth.

From the Commons to...Managed Parks?

One of the areas where the commons is being increasingly invoked is that of radio spectrum, the idea being that there can be frequencies "held in common" for the benefit of all. WiFi is a good example, and more and more jurisdictions are looking to create spectrum commons of one kind or another in order to encourage innovation with the minimum of regulation.

But here's an interesting twist from New Zealand, which is considering creating both "public parks" and "managed parks" for radio spectrum:

A "public park" is analogous to common land, with complete freedom of entry balanced by a requirement that users do not interfere with the activities of other licensees. In New Zealand, limits and conditions of use are defined by a General User Licence (GUL). A common condition of use is operation on a non-interference basis which means that a (General User Radio Licence) GURL licensee shall not cause interference to, nor claim protection from, other licensed services. As a result, issues of interference are normally resolved between users, as a matter of common interest.

"Public parks" can be used for a variety of other purposes including, for example, security detectors, cordless phones, radio-controlled devices, medical monitors and RFID labels. It is possible that, at a local level, this may continue to be a satisfactory environment for some broadband service providers.

...

The Ministry has also been considering combining the advantages of the "public park" with features of the spectrum licence, by establishing "Managed Parks". If "public park" spectrum is analogous to common land, then the Managed Park is akin to a publicly-owned sports ground, in that there is a gate-keeper, consent is required to gain admission and users can engage only in the activities for which the facility is provided.

Aren't metaphors a wonderful thing? (Via Openspectrum.info.)

Jimbo's Wikipolitics

Jimmy Wales, (co)-founder of Wikipedia has launched Campaigns Wikia, part of his new Wikia site, the commercial arm of Wikipedia. As the mission statement explains:

For more than 50 years now, we have been living in the era of television politics. In the 1950s television first began to have a major impact on politics, and the results were overwhelming.

Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let's be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.

NPOV, anyone?

This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.

Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians.

With refreshing candour Wales writes:

So, I will frankly admit right up front: I don't know how to make politics healthier. But, I believe that you do. I believe that together we can work, this very election season, to force campaigns to use wikis and blogs to organize, discuss, manage, lead and be led by their volunteers.

Which is fair enough.

Pity that, like The Commons Rising discussed below, his vision has a distinctly parochial feel about it - "this very election season", he writes: not here, mate.

Think big, Jimmy, think global. (Via Boing Boing.)

The Commons Rising

A little while back I wrote about the On The Commons site. It's now launched a new introduction to the area:

The Commons Rising is about the profusion of commons initiatives that are defending and invigorating the commons in all sorts of arenas -- the Internet, natural resources, public spaces, information and culture. We can see the "commons rising" in collaborative websites and ecosystem trusts; in innovative legal tools such as conservation easements and Creative Commons licenses; in new types of social networks such as community gardens and time banks; and in new online communities such as Wikipedia, free and open source software, Craigslist and open science initiatives.

There's nothing startlingly new here, but it's well put, if overly US-centric. If you ever need a short document on the subject to pass on to interested parties, I'd recommend it.