NUN Better?

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

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

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

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

Windows Media for Windows - Really

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

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

Big Blue Turns a Deeper Shade of Penguin

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

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

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

What Took Them So Long?

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

They only just realised?

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

OA and Collectivisation

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

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

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

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

After Darknets, Brightnets

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

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

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

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

Anyone who can write

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

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

It's all very well to say

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

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

Mathematics is not, alas, the only law.

Heroes of the Healing

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

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

Welcome to the Darknet

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

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

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

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

Get it while you can.

Signs of Bubbledom, Part 43

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

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

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

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

Gecko Turns into a K-Meleon

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

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

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

The Wiki-God Speaks...Mysteriously

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

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

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

Saudi Censorship, Saudi Wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

History Repeats Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just What We Don't Need, Honest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hewlett and Packard, Meet Deb and Ian

Things are getting interesting on the enterprise distro front. The two front-runners, Red Hat and SuSE are being joined by a couple of newcomers. Well, Debian is hardly a newcomer, since it was one of the earliest distributions, but it's not well known as an enterprise system. That may change with HP's announcement that it will offer Debian support.

The other one, in case you were wondering, is Ubuntu, which is also coming through strongly, not least thanks to Sun's increasing interest. Via Linux and Open Source Blog.)

Windows Live Writer - Half Open?

Microsoft's Windows Live Writer, which allows you to post to blogs directly from a WYSIWYG desktop app, is hardly open in the traditional sense, although it is free. However, it's half-open in the sense that it supports non-Microsoft blogs like Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress.

I've not been able to try it, because it requires the .Net framework which I prefer not to have on my Windows boxes since it's huge and really just adds to the software spaghetti. But credit where credit is due: Microsoft is slowly getting the hang of this openness lark. (Via Ars Technica.)

Now in Pre-Production: Free Software

I wouldn't normally write about software designed for the world of film and TV industries, but this seems pretty noteworthy. Celtx (pronounced "keltix") provides

the film, TV, theatre, and new media industries with an Internet compliant tool for writing, managing and producing media content.

The film and TV industries traditionally use large binders filled with paper and taped-in Polaroid pictures to manage the production of movies and television shows. "It is incredible how little attention has been paid to the pre-production end of the business.", Celtx co-founder and company CEO Mark Kennedy stated. "Lots of time and effort have been spent introducing digital technologies to the production and post-production phases - digital cameras, digital film and sound editing, CGI software - but nothing to help those working in pre-production. Celtx is the first application to do so.

It is, of course, open source (or I wouldn't be writing about it), and is apparently based on Firefox, which is pretty amazing given the complexity of the program that has been developed as a result. It is also cross-platform and available in many localised versions. It comes from a company located in Newfoundland, about which I know nothing other than that they have laudably outrageous ambitions.

What might seem an incredibly specialised piece of code is, I think, of broader significance, for several reasons. First, it shows how the open source approach of building on what has been done before - Firefox in this case - allows even small companies to produce complex and exciting software without needing to make huge upfront investments other than that of their own ingenuity.

It also demonstrates how far free software has moved beyond both basic infrastructural programs like Linux and Apache and mainstream apps like Firefox and OpenOffice.org. As such, Celtx is a perfect example of what might be called third-generation open source - and definitely a story worth following closely. (Via NewsForge.)

ATI = A Total Idiot

Against Intel's clueful release of open source drivers for its graphics chips, the following statement from ATI is, well, extraordinary:

"Proprietary, patented optimizations are part of the value we provide to our customers and we have no plans to release these drivers to open source," the company said in a statement.

Presumably, this would be the same kind of "value" that handcuffs add.

Free Software: As Approved by Buddhists

Choose free software, and keep the Five Precepts. (Via LXer.)

Spectrum's White Space as a Commons

If you've ever wondered how spare electromagnetic spectrum can be used to form a commons, here's a good explanation of the issues in the US. It even mentions Armenia's greatest contribution to the field. (Via OnTheCommons.org.)

Visualising an Ordered Universe

We live in an ordered universe. Or rather, we would like to believe we do. And even if we don't, we try as hard as we can to make it ordered. You only have to look, on the one hand, at Wikipedia, which is nothing less than an attempt to create a systematic collection of human knowledge, or, on the other, at Flickr groups, each which views the collection through the often obsessive prism of its defining principle.

So it comes as no surprise to find that there is a Web site that aims to combine a whiff of Wikipedia with a flash of Flickr. It's called The Visual Dictionary, and it is interested not so much in words as containers of meaning, but as pure visual symbols. It's still quite small, but strangely pleasing. (Via Digg.)

Fireproofing Firefox

There are already lots of good reasons to use Firefox - the fact that it is more stable, more compliant with Web standards and just more fun to use. But add one more: according to this report, Firefox code is now being vetted for bugs automatically:

The company has licensed Coverity's Prevent to scan the source code of the browser and help detect flaws in the software before its release, Ben Chelf, chief technology officer at Coverity said Thursday. Coverity and Mozilla plan to jointly announce the arrangement on Monday, he said.

Even though the announcement isn't coming until Monday, Mozilla actually licensed the Coverity tool about a year and a half ago, Chelf said. The companies held off on the announcement until Mozilla felt comfortable with the product and it actually yielded some results, he said.

A year and a half ago? Now that's what I call circumspection.

Is That All Human Knowledge in Your Pocket...?

...or are you just glad to see me?

This is hardly rocket science, but it's nonetheless potentially highly useful. Apparently the German company Sevenval has stripped Wikipedia down to its bare essentials, making it suitable for access via a mobile phone.

The end-result is rather attractive even in a standard browser, but its real importance is that it puts a large chunk of human knowledge (albeit with some dodgy bits) at your disposal wherever your mobile can hook up to the Internet. (Via Openpedia.org.)

OpenCyc: Wikipedia with Intelligence

One of the long-held dreams of computer science is to create systems that "understand" the world in some sense. That is, they can respond to questions about a knowledge domain and produce answers that aren't simply restatements of existing information. Or as Cycorp, probably the leading company in this field, puts it slightly more technically in describing its main product:

The Cyc Knowledge Server is a very large, multi-contextual knowledge base and inference engine developed by Cycorp. Cycorp's goal is to break the "software brittleness bottleneck" once and for all by constructing a foundation of basic "common sense" knowledge--a semantic substratum of terms, rules, and relations--that will enable a variety of knowledge-intensive products and services. Cyc is intended to provide a "deep" layer of understanding that can be used by other programs to make them more flexible.

If this is your kind of thing, the good news is that there is an open source version called OpenCyc. The president of the associated non-profit Cyc Foundation has an explanation of what the software does that is slightly more user-friendly than the one above:

Foundation president, John De Oliveira, compared the Foundation's "Cyclify" effort to the Wikipedia project. He said, "The Wikimedia Foundation asks us to 'Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.' In the Cyclify project, led by The Cyc Foundation, we ask you to imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to programs that reason with the sum of all human knowledge."

(Via Slashdot.)

TRIPS Tripped up by Doha?

Here's a hopeful analysis. It concerns the pernicious Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which is often used by Western nations to force other countries to pass harsh laws that control intellectual monopolies.

The piece claims that TRIPS was accepted by developing countries as a quid pro quo for obtaining fairer treatment for their agricultural goods. But the recent collapse of the so-called Doha round of trade negotiations means that such fairer treatment is unlikely to be forthcoming. So, the logic runs, maybe developing countries should give TRIPS the heave-ho in return. Interesting.

Wikimanifold

Say "Wikipedia", and you probably think of an almost ungraspable quantity of undifferentiated text, but it's much more than that. A good way to appreciate its manifold glory is to take a close look at the Wikimania Awards Finalists page. Me, I'd vote for the diagram showing Han foreign relations and the animation of the Geneva Mechanism. (Via Lessig Blog.)

What's New at Ubuntu

You don't have to be Nostradamus to predict that Ubuntu is well on the way to joining the front rank of distros, along with Red Hat and SuSE. By that I mean not just that it is popular - as the Distrowatch rankings already show - but that it is, or will be, fully capable of satisfying enterprise users too. In part this is a technical issue, but it's also cultural too: Ubuntu is consistently one of the most interesting in terms of how it is approaching the whole process of creating a distribution.

The latest proof of this is the appointment of a "community manager". As Ubuntu's founder and main sponsor Mark Shuttleworth explains, this post is

"uniquely Ubuntu" in that it brings together professional management with community integration. This job has been created to help the huge Ubuntu community gain traction, creating structure where appropriate, identifying the folks who are making the best and most consistent contributions and empowering them to get more of their visions, ideas and aspirations delivered as part of Ubuntu - release by release.

It’s unusual in that it’s a community position that is not an advocacy position. It’s a management position. Our community in Ubuntu is amazingly professional in its aspirations - folks want to participate in every aspect of the distribution, from marketing to artwork to sounds to governance and beyond. And we welcome that because it means we share the ownership of the project with a remarkably diverse and mature team. In the past six months I’ve noticed a number of people joining and having an impact who are mature professionals with great day jobs and a limited ability to contribute in terms of time - but a strong desire to be part of “this phenomenon called Ubuntu”. The job of the community manager will be to make it possible for these folks to have an amplified impact despite having time constraints on their ability to participate.

The job has been given to fellow Brit Jono Bacon, and I wish him well in what sounds like an interesting challenge. (Via DesktopLinux.com.)

Eclipse Becomes Even Healthier

I've written elsewhere about the stunning rise of Eclipse. The news that IBM, the original donor of code, has given some more software to the project, this time in the field of healthcare, is notable. It shows that what began as a rather specific tool for Java programmers is now turning into a general platform. I predict that Eclipse will one day be the main such platform for every kind of development project, whatever the domain. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

Wizard Idea, Wirzenius

Lars Wirzenius is not as well known a he should be, for he more than anyone was both witness and midwife to the birth of Linux. Along the way, he garnered an interesting tale or two about that young chap Linus, his fellow student at Helsinki University. Some of these he kindly passed on to me when I was writing Rebel Code.

I'll never forget the interview, because it was conducted as he was walking along, somewhere in Helsinki, and somewhat breathlessly. The sense of movement I received down the line was quite a physically disconcerting experience.

This memory flooded back to me when I came across this link on OSNews about Lars' current project. As his "log" - not "blog" - explains:

I wanted to know how good Linux, or more specifically Debian with GNOME, is for the uninitiated, or more specifically, for someone who has been using Windows for a number of years, and switches to Linux. I'm specifically uninterested in the installation experience.

To see what it is like, I recruited a friend of mine, and gave her my old laptop with Linux pre-installed and pre-configured. She has agreed to try switching all her computer use to Linux, and tell me about any problems she has. We'll do this for several months, to make it realistic. Anyone can suffer through a week in a new computer.

Of course: why hasn't this been done more often? It's precisely what the GNU/Linux community needs to know to make things better. Reviews by journalists are all very well, but you can't beat in-depth, long-term end-user experience. Wizard idea.

Another Boring Open Source Success. Yawn.

So the open IP telephony company Digium scores $13.8 million in VC dosh. Yawn.

What's most amazing about this announcement is how extraordinarily boring it is. Digium was obviously well placed to get VC money, because it's already a huge success. Investing in it is a complete no-brainer (lucky Matrix that somehow convinced it to accept). And all this sheer and utter boringness is yet another measure of how successful open source has become. Of course it gets VC money, of course it's profitable, of course it will wipe out the opposition.

Next question?

The Price of Everything, the Value of Nothing

One of the reasons it took a while for people to accept free software is that there is a traditional diffidence in the face of things that are free. After all, if something's free, it can't be worth anything, can it? The same infuriating obtuseness can be seen writ large when it comes to the environment: since the air and sea are all free, they can't be valuable, so polluting them isn't be a problem.

Against this background, it is no wonder that traditional economics pays scant regard to the value of the environment, and rarely factors in the damage caused to it by economic activities. It is also signficant that the seminal work on valuing all of Nature goes back to 1997, when Robert Costanza and his co-authors put the worth of the planet's annual contribution to mankind at a cool $33 trillion per year, almost certainly an underestimate.

So it's high time that this work was updated and expanded, and it's good to see that the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is providing some much-needed money to do precisely that:

Over the next year, with an $813,000 grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Costanza and his team will create a set of computer models and tools that will give a sophisticated portrait of the ecosystem dynamics and value for any spot on earth.

"Land use planners, county commissioners, investment bankers, anyone who is interested," Cosntanza said, "will be able to go on the Web, use our new models, and be able to identify a territory and start getting answers."

For example, if a town council is trying decide the value of a wetland--compared to, say, building a shopping mall there--these models will help them put a dollar value on it. If a country wants to emulate Costa Rica's program of payments to landowners to maintain their land as a forest, they'll better be able to figure the ecosystem value of various land parcels to establish fair payments.

This is a critically-important project: let's hope its results are widely applied, and that we can use it as a step towards paying back the debt we owe Nature before it - and we - go environmentally bankrupt. (Via Digg.)

Mooch Ado About Something

You can tell its Bubble Time when people start companies based on permutations of other, already-successful concepts. Sites like eHub are chockablock with ideas that you just now are going to crash and burn. But occasionally you come across something that seems a little different.

A case in point is BookMooch, "a community for exchanging used books". That community part is important, because it indicates that this is not just some wet-behind-the-ears MBA who's out to make a quick killing by plugging into a few buzzwords. Indeed, The Inquirer's interview with John Buckman, the man behind the idea, confirms that it's a labour of love, with its heart in the right place:

The idea for BookMooch came came when I was in Norwich, UK, at a local community center, and they had a "leave a book, take a book" area with bookshelves and couches. The shelves were filled and people were chatting about the books, asking for advice, as well as reading. It was a healthy and natural thing. Reading books can be a very social act, but someone has to provide the meeting place.

I saw this great book-share spot in the UK, and thought "this could be done on the Internet", and it shocked me that no-one had done it yet, at least not in the way I thought it should.

What I like about it - side from all this feel-good stuff - is that it is trying to create an analogue version of some of the ideas that are common in the digital space of the opens:

BookMooch is like a giant bookstore, of all the bookshelves in people's homes. By aggregating everyone's home book collection, we should have the best selection of used books on the planet.

...

Many books go out of print and are hard to find. With BookMooch-- and this is important-- they're still available and what's more, free.

Books are emotional, just like music. They are a cultural product and they matter to us. It feels good to recommend a book to someone, to pass it on, so they'll enjoy it.

Will Zhong Guo Kill Eye Pea?

Intellectual monopolies only work if everyone agrees to play the game. According to this piece, the Chinese don't:

"They don't care about intellectual property. We have to develop something that will take two to three years to copy."

In other words, if the increasingly powerful economy of China decides to ignore global "IP" there's precious little the rest of the world can do about it except keep on coming up with innovative products that take a while to copy. (Via Techdirt.)

It's a Hit

I know little about baseball (or, indeed, any other sport), and care even less. But this Techdirt story about baseball statistics has some interesting aspects. The basic issue was whether anybody owns the factual information about baseball games. Obviously, you can't, because you can't copyright facts, but that didn't stop some witless, greedy company from trying (and failing).

What I found suggestive was the following passage:

baseball (and other sports) have made a lucrative practice out of licensing such information to video game makers as well -- and it seems likely this ruling would apply to them as well. Of course, if MLB were smart, they're view this as a good thing. Getting more real info about real players out there in fantasy and video games should lead to more fans and more interest in the overall sport -- leading to many more opportunities to make money.

So, here we have the sensible suggestion that organisations should be happy for certain kinds of digital information - in this case baseball stats - to be circulating in the public domain, because it will drive people to attend the real games in the analogue world.

For me, this has close parallels with music. It seems increasingly clear to me that the best thing for the music industry to do is to regard digital copies of songs as publicity. If they are passed around for free, well and good, because this will drive more people to concerts - the analogue instantiation of that music - which is increasingly where the money is.

The great thing with this model is that you can't copy the experience of a concert - you really have to be there (well, at least until virtual reality technology makes some serious advances). No more "piracy", and no need for punitive law cases. Result: it's a hit with everyone.

Something Rotten in the State?

Far be it from me to read too much into a piece of ego-bloggery, but there are some very interesting hints in this exit piece from a soon-to-be-ex Microsoftie that the Windows Live initiative has a touch of gangrene. (Via Techmeme.)

The Double Bind of the Commons

User-generated content is cool, so big media wants to co-opt it; user-generated content cares little for copyright laws, so big media wants to crush it. So what's a poor multinational to do? That's the thought at the heart of this nice piece from OnTheCommons.org.

UN Calls for ODF in Asia

The ever-alert Erwin has spotted another push for ODF, this time from the UN's International Open Source Network, and aimed Asia-ward:

Sunil Abraham, manager of the International Open Source Network (IOSN) at the U.N., told ZDNet Asia that most governments in the region have already stated their support for open standards, through their respective government interoperability frameworks.

He hopes that governments in the region will now extend that support and "seriously consider" the OpenDocument Format (ODF).

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Matt Asay has an excellent riposte to a singularly wrong-headed post entitled "Open source won't doom traditional enterprise software". As he rightly says, the real question is not the one the above piece thinks to deal with - "Is Enterprise Software Doomed?" - but

"What will be the primary bases for competition once everything is more (or less) open source?"

I believe the answers are also an explanation of why open source does doom traditional enterprise software, because the key differentiators will be things like innovation and serving the customer. Whatever lip-service traditional software companies pay to these ideas, the closed nature of their code, and the fact that customers are locked into their products means that they simply don't deliver either in the way that open source companies will do once they become the norm.

When Elephant Seals Collide

You can't beat a legal battle involving two overlapping pieces of legislation. The sight of lawyers having at each other, secure in the knowledge that the law is on their side, reminds me of nothing so much as two great elephant seals, thwacking each other vigorously, their proboscises all a-jiggle.

We could be in for another of these spectacles, according to this Techdirt article. It seems that the old End-User Licence Agreement (EULA) is being used to trump copyright fair use provisions, and that this might eventually go to the US Supreme Court to sort out (but don't hold your breath for EULAs getting spanked).

Of course, for those of us who use free software, EULAs are but dim memories from some strange, barbaric past, with no question of trumping anything.

Reasons Not to Use Closed Source: No. 471

I've written a couple of times about cases that demonstrate graphically why closed source software is a Bad Thing, but even they pale somewhat beside this story.

The robot that parks cars at the Garden Street Garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, trapped hundreds of its wards last week for several days. But it wasn't the technology car owners had to curse, it was the terms of a software license.

A dispute over the latter meant that the software simply stopped working. And since it was closed source, nothing could be done about it. The results were dramatic:

The Hoboken garage is one of a handful of fully automated parking structures that make more efficient use of space by eliminating ramps and driving lanes, lifting and sliding automobiles into slots and shuffling them as needed. If the robot shuts down, there is no practical way to manually remove parked vehicles.

I bet the garage owners wished they'd chosen open....

Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself

One of the tensions that emerges from time to time in this blog is that between openness and security. In the current climate of the so-called "war on terror", openness is typically characterised as dangerous, irresponsible even, because it gives succour to "them".

Terrorism is not to be trivialised, but it's a question of keeping things in perspective. Magnifying the threat unreasonably and acting disproportionately simply hands victory to those who wish to terrorise. This seems pretty obvious to me, but if you want a rigorously-argued version, you could hardly do better than this one, by John Mueller.

Here's a sample, on the issue of perspective:

[I]t would seem to be reasonable for those in charge of our safety to inform the public about how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns out that someone has made that calculation: University of Michigan transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, in an article last year in American Scientist, wrote that they determined there would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, they calculate that an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America’s safest roads — rural interstate highways — one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Microsoft's Gift to Firefox

Firefox has been incredibly lucky. It has taken Microsoft an extraordinary amount of time to face up to the challenge this free browser represents, during which Firefox has notched up a serious market share that won't be going away any time soon.

However, my great fear was that once Internet Explorer 7 came out, the appeal of Firefox to people who wanted a stable, standards-based browser would diminish considerably. After all, good enough is generally good enough, and surely, I thought, Microsoft will get this one right, and produce what's necessary?

If this report is anything to go by, it seems not.

Incredibly, Microsoft will not be supporting fully the Cascading Style Sheet 2 (CSS 2) standard. As the story explains:

The most critical point in Wilson's post, in my mind, is Microsoft's admission that it will fail the crucial Acid2 browser-compliance test , which the Web Standards Project (WaSP) designed to help browser vendors ensure that their products properly support Web standards. Microsoft apparently disagrees. "Acid2 ... is pointedly not a compliance check," Wilson noted, contradicting the description on the Acid2 Web site. "As a wish list, [Acid2] is really important and useful to my team, but it isn't even intended, in my understanding, as our priority list for IE 7.0." Meanwhile, other browser teams have made significant efforts to comply with Acid2.

If you look at the CSS 2 standard, you'll note that it became a recommendation over eight years ago. And yet Microsoft is still not close to implementing it fully, unlike other browsers. Even if you argue that CSS 2 is only of interest to advanced coders, or at best a standard for the future, it is nonetheless a key test of a browser development team's attitudes and priorities.

This is a tremendous opportunity for Firefox: provided it continues to support standards better than Microsoft - and this now looks likely - it will occupy the high ground with all that this implies in terms of continuing to attract users and designers. Thanks, Microsoft.

Capillary Growth

I see my old chums at OSS Watch have come out with a survey of open source use in higher and further education institutes in the UK, and it makes interesting reading.

The extent to which open source is creeping into higher education almost without anyone noticing is striking. From the summary:

Most institutions (69%) have deployed and will continue to deploy OSS on their servers. Generally, the software on servers is a mix of OSS and proprietary software (PS). The use of OSS is most common for database servers (used by 62% of institutions), web servers (59%) and operating systems (56%).

This is particularly true on the desktop. Although GNU/Linux is not much used there, free software apps are:

Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer are deployed by all institutions on most desktops. Other commonly deployed applications are Microsoft Outlook (82%) and Mozilla/Firefox (68%). The latter's use is now considerably higher than in 2003.

Not mentioned in this summary, is the share for OpenOffice.org (23%) and Thunderbird (22%) both of which are eminently respectable. It's also noteworthy that some 56% of further education establishments surveyed used Moodle.

Turning Back Genomic Time

Bioinformatics allows all kinds of information to be gleaned about the gradual evolution of genomes. For example, it is clear that many genes have arisen from the duplication of an earlier gene, followed by a subsequent divergent specialisation of each duplicate under the pressure of natural selection.

New Scientist describes an interesting experiment to turn back genomic time, and to re-create the original gene that gave rise to two descendants. Moreover, that new "old" gene was shown to work perfectly well, even in today's organisms.

What's impressive about this is not just the way such information can be teased out of the raw genomic data, but that it effectively allows scientists to wind evolution backwards. Note that this is possible because the dynamics of natural selection are reasonably well understood.

Without the idea of natural selection, there would be no explanation for the observed divergent gene pairs, and the experimental fact that their putative ancestor does, indeed function in their stead, as predicted - other than the trivial one of saying that it is so because it was made so. Occam's razor always was the best argument against Intelligent Design.

There's No FUD Like an Old FUD

As readers of these posts may know, I am something of a connoisseur of Microsoft's FUD. So I was interested to come across what looked like a new specimen for my collection:

"One of the beauties of the open-source model is that you get a lot of flexibility and componentization. The big downside is complexity," Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's director of platform strategy, said on the sidelines of the company's worldwide partner conference in Boston last month.

Alas, digging deeper showed this is hardly vintage FUD. Take, for example, the prime witness for the prosecution:

IBS Synergy had started developing products for the Linux platform back in 1998 but gave Linux the boot in early 2004, and now builds its software on the Windows platform. Lim said this was because the company's developers were spending more time hunting for Linux technical support on the Web, and had less time to focus on actual development work.

Right, so these are problems a company had two and half years ago: why is Microsoft raising them now? And is it not just possible that things have moved on somewhat in those 30 months?

So really this is the old "there are too many distributions, you can't get the support" FUD that was so unconvincing that I didn't even bother including it in my FUD timeline above. After all, businesses tend to use, well, Red Hat, SuSE and er, well, that's about it, really. (Via tuxmachines.org.)

Wales's World-Wide Wikia

I wrote about Wikia when it was launched a while back. Now we have WorldWiki, a fairly obvious application of wikis to travel guides - with plenty of advertising potential.

I mention it for two reasons. First, this will be a good test-case of the Wikia idea - if Wales can't get this one up and running, he may have problems with the whole scheme. Secondly, the home page currently has a rather fetching Canaletto-esque view of the Grand Canal, taken from the Rialto if I'm not much mistaken. (Via TechCrunch.)

Blogging the Bloggable

No one has a better bird's eye view of the blogosphere than Dave Sifry, which means that his quarterly report on the same is unmissable. One comment in particular is worth noting.

In the context of the 50 million blog mark being reached on 31 July, he writes:

Will I be posting about the 100 Millionth blog tracked in February of 2007? I can't imagine that things will continue at this blistering pace - it has got to slow down. After all, that would mean that there will be more bloggers around in 7 months than there are bloggers around in total today. I shake my head as I am writing this - the only thing still niggling at my brain is that I'd have been perfectly confident making the same statement 7 months ago when we had tracked our 25 Millionth blog, and I've just proven myself wrong.

For the sake of being wrong, I'll stick my neck out and say that I think he will be reporting 100 million blogs in February next year. The reason is simple - literally.

Blogs are so simple to write, that I think practically everyone who has a Web site will convert unless they have very strong reasons - for example commercial ones - to stick with the free-form Web page. Everyone else - and that's billions of us - just needs a suitable bucket for pouring our thoughts into. And the more basic the bucket, the easier it is to use, and the more that will use it. If this thinking is correct, another 50 million - or even 100 million - blogs is not so hard to achieve.

Resolving the Free Content Licence Madness

Although the most famous example of free content is Wikipedia, it is unusual in that it uses the GNU Free Documentation Licence, rather than one of the better-known Creative Commons licences. And that's a problem, because it makes it hard to mix and match content from different projects.

One man well aware of this - not least because he is the cause of the problem, albeit unwittingly - is Larry Lessig. Heise Online have a good report covering what he said on the topic at the Wikimania conference:

"We need a layer like the TCP/IP layer which facilitates interoperability of content, allows content to move between ´equivalent´ licenses," Mr. Lessig declared, "where what we mean by equivalent is licenses where people mean the same thing. So the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license is saying the same thing: Use my content however you want, to copy, to modify, as long as you give me attribution, as long as the modification is distributed under an equivalent license." The legal differences between the licenses should be bridged, he observed. The various types of licenses could compete with one another, thereby protecting against the weaknesses of any particular license, he stated.

As the two worlds of Wikipedia and CC content continue to grow, addressing this is becoming a matter of some urgency.

Crazy Like a Vixie

As I mentioned elsewhere, I did many interviews when I was writing Rebel Code. Very many. But one key person whom I just could not convince to talk to me was Paul Vixie, Mr BIND.

So when I saw that The Inquirer has instituted a new series of interviews called Internet Gods with none other than Mr V, my heart sank. And then rose.

Why ID Cards Are Stupid, Part 294

Because they can be cracked. So, in exactly how many ways does this scheme have to be found wanting before it is finally taken behind the shed and put out of its misery, Mr Blair?