Behold the IceWeasel

It's GNU's Firefox. (via Ian Murdock's Weblog.)

Locking Down the Digital Cat

This is what happens when the genetic code of an animal matters, as here, with "the world's first scientifically-proven hypoallergenic cat":

Purchaser shall not sell or transfer any Cat purchased hereunder to anyone other than an immediate family member, and shall not offer to any person the purchase of a Cat or any genetic material from a Cat, the rights Purchaser may have under this Agreement, or any other right related hereto, without the Company’s express written authorization.

In other words, you don't really own the cat, you just have a licence to use it, like any other software. And don't even think about giving a copy of the genome to a friend.... (Via BoingBoing.)

Stop Press: Google Book Search Sells...Books

Now there's a surprise. (Via Techdirt.)

OECD Gets Open Source, Open Content and Open Access

The OECD Information Technology Outlook 2006 is remarkable for three things. First, for the fact that you can browse it freely online. Secondly, for choosing to highlight GNU/Linux in its press release:

The ICT industry is expected to grow by 6% in 2006 and, looking ahead, highest growth will be driven by Internet-related investments, Linux servers, digital storage, personal digital assistants and new portable consumer products.

And thirdly, by the degree to which this august institution is starting to get it. To wit:

* "Linux" occurs 15 times

* "Wikipedia" occurs 18 times

* "open access" occurs 21 times

Impressive.

Common Justice for the Commons

Here's a perceptive thought from Alex Steffen on the dangers inherent in the success of the movement to get global warming recognised and dealt with:

What is worrysome, though, is the idea, which one is beginning to hear all over the political map, that climate change trumps every other environmental issue, or, even more, that climate change is not an environmental issue at all. These arguments usually precede a call for some action which reduces carbon output but has other demonstrably negative environmental impacts, whether that's damming a river for hydropower, launching into a massive nuclear energy program or seeding the ocean to produce a plankton bloom.

In other words, we can't repair one commons - the atmosphere - by destroying others like the oceans or the land. We cannot solve global warming by simply transferring the ecological deficit from one commons to another. We need a "global" global warming solution, not one restricted to a single domain. It's all connected, people.

Open Music Lives Happily Ever After

Now here's a heartening tale of musicians doing all kinds of creative things with CC music and getting their just desserts - including 15 minutes of fame with a certain lonelygirl15, and heaps of dosh.

Vladimir in the Belly of the Whale

Now here's a thought: Firefox developers being invited to visit Microsoft. They went, and, yes, came back without any obvious implants. One of them - Vladimir Vukićević - even blogged about it. Fascinating.

Leveraging Levy

I was pleased to see that Steven Levy, author of the definitive Hackers book on where it all started, has declared himself on the side of the angels when it comes to the Net neutrality discussions (I won't dignify the misinformation put about by those with vested interests with the name of "argument"). It's short but definitely sweet. (Via SmartMobs.)

ODF La La!

France really seems to have something about ODF. I wrote before about one initiative to bring in ODF, and now here's another that's even more promising.

That's because the report is to the French prime minister - no messing on this one. Moreover, its recommendations are very broad in their sweep. So, not content with proposing

Introduire, par voie réglementaire, l'usage obligatoire de ce format par l'administration française pour la création et la diffusion de tout document administratif.

the obligatory use of the ODF format for the creation and distribution of all administrative documents of the French Government, it also suggests

Proposer à nos partenaires européens de favoriser systématiquement les standards ouverts et, comme premier exemple, d'imposer le format international ISO «odf» pour la création et la diffusion de tout document officiel échangé dans le cadre européen.

proposing to European partners to do the same for all official documents of the European Union.

It's well-worth reading the whole document, which ranges widely - the GNU GPL and Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks are both discussed - and offers a uniquely French perspective on the modern world. It reminds us yet again that if France did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

Open Source Radio

I mention this for the sake of completeness, since I can't imagine many people will be interested in buying one of these high-end software-defined radios. But the idea of a device - any device - totally controlled by software, preferably open software, rather than through physical buttons and knobs is clearly the way of the future for certain classes of systems. (Via Digg.)

Lots of EPA in the EPLA

EPA, the better-known name of Eicosapentaenoic Acid, is associated with fish. This compromise on the EPLA (European Patent Litigation Agreement) also smells very fishy to me.

I hope I'm wrong.

All Hail, Mighty Ajax

As I may have mentioned before, I hate Flash. But this blog post about a report on the state of Web development gives me hope:

Most web technologies will apparently be used more - in particular Ajax, which next year is predicted to surpass Flash for the first time.

Did somebody say nike?

Warming Up Nicely with Firefox

Although it's hard to tell from this singularly unhelpful graph, Firefox continues to storm away. According to these figures, it has notched up 12.46% market share.

But perhaps what is most significant is the non-Microsoft figure, now at 17.90%. This represents the percentage of the Web browser market that Microsoft does not control; I predict that once it gets to, say, 20%, then things will really start warming up as just about everyone realises that coding for the non-standard IE only is no longer an option (who wants to lose 20% of the potential audience?).

Sinking Venice

Those pair of old Skypers, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are at it again. But curmudgeon that I am, I won't be sad if this particular Venice sinks without trace:

While the software turns your PC screen into something that looks a lot like your TV, the capabilities go far beyond anything you'll experience in your den. Jiggle your computer mouse, and a variety of tools appear along the edges of the screen, even as the video continues to play. At the bottom of the screen, there are controls like those on a DVD player, including stop, pause, and fast-forward, as well as a search window to find new videos. An image on the left includes a menu of preset channels. And on the right, there's a set of interactive tools that let you share video playlists with friends or family. An image at the top of the screen identifies the channel and the name of the clip you're watching. All of the images can be expanded by clicking on them with a mouse.

Turn my marvellously metempsychotic, and perfectly protean PC into a tarted-up tub of a TV? No, grazie. (Via IP Democracy.)

Organic Farming Goes Open Source

Now where I have heard this before?

Fears that organic farming is falling victim to commercial pressures to abandon key principles have led to disputes in the Soil Association, the gold standard of the groups that certify "green" products.

...

Claims of the relaxing of key principles in the organic movement come amid pressure from Sir Terry Leahy, the Tesco chief executive, for the British organic movement to become more "professional".

Hm, let's see: a fear that some may be abandoning key principles, while others call for more professionalism. Sounds rather like the "free software" vs. "open source" debate, to me...

Googling for Code

And talking of Google, it's apparently launched a search engine for source code. Not something that I'd ever use, but clearly very handy in the free software world when you're looking for a snippet or routine to study or even borrow.

In Praise of Google Groups

Although people are rightly suspicous of Google's huge power these days, it is also important to remember those actions that are praiseworthy by any measure. One of them was acquiring a company originally called DejaNews, which had the biggest collection of Usenet postings, and making them freely available. Had Google not done so, it is quite possible that great swathes of Internet, computing and indeed modern history would have been lost forever.

To get some idea of the treasures this trove contains, take a look at the Usenet timeline that Google has put together. Highlights include:

* Stallman's announcement of the GNU project

* Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the World Wide Web

* Linus's famous "Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" posting, made exactly 15 years ago today.

* Marc Andreessen's announcement of Mosaic

* The first commercial spam (ah, I remember it well)

* The first mention of Google

and several hundred million more.

Google has just announced a beta version of its new Google Groups service, but the main interest will always be the old stuff. Thanks, Google.

Getting Creative with Money

The standard cry is: How do you make money from free? Well, Jamendo has a few ideas:

Jamendo sells advertising space on the jamendo.com web site and in the low-fi streamed music. We guarantee the hi-fi "peer-to-peer" music to be ad-free. This revenue helps us covering the bandwidth cost.

...

Jamendo drives lots of traffic to the artist's official web site as well, which helps to sell more physical CDs (if the artist sells CDs from their web site). Also, Jamendo's blogging capabilities help artists to spread in the blogosphere.

Finally, we are developing more tools to distribute Creative Commons music commercially. The revenue split will be somewhere around 80/20, with 80 for the artist.

(Via Creative Commons Blog.)

David Who? Oh, I See...

I don't know who this geezer is (clearly my fault), but he's seriously right-on. Not only does he have his own foundation that works

to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that sustains us. Focusing on four program areas – oceans and sustainable fishing, climate change and clean energy, sustainability, and the Nature Challenge - the Foundation uses science and education to promote solutions that conserve nature and help achieve sustainability within a generation.

which is about as right-on as you can get, but he also comes out with statements like

So if you ask me if it bothers me that politicians are stealing the solutions brought forward by my foundation, the answer is no. To use a computer term, we consider this information “open source.” It’s a free buffet; please take all you like. The whole reason why we do the research is to effect change. If those who have the power to make those solutions happen actually use that information, so much the better. This is how change happens.

Blige. My hero. (Via BoingBoing.)

Open Shakespeare Beta

Get your online honorificabilitudinitatibus.

MA ODF: The Soap Opera

You couldn't make this stuff up.

The man who succeeded Peter Quinn, the main engine behind the adoption of the ODF standard in Massachusetts, is also leaving, because of lack of IT funding. The ODF plans seem unaffected by this, but you can't help feeling there's more than meets the eye to all this.

It's a LibraryThing

Quite rightly, everyone raves about Wikipedia's million+ English-language articles as a monument of cumulative achievement. But in the background there's another major collaboration going on that's also talking telephone numbers: LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth.

and

LibraryThing is a full-powered cataloging application, searching the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 45 world libraries. You can edit your information, search and sort it, "tag" books with your own subjects, or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection.

If you want it, LibraryThing is also an amazing social space, often described as "MySpace for books" or "Facebook for books." You can check out other people's libraries, see who has the most similar library to yours, swap reading suggestions and so forth. LibraryThing also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries.

Recently, LibraryThing hit the six-million book mark; one knock-on consequence of this is that it includes works of even the most obscure writers.

The Iceman Cometh

USA Today has a chilling piece about the increasing number of libel cases being brought against bloggers:

Robert Cox, founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association, which has 1,000 members, says the recent wave of lawsuits means that bloggers should bone up on libel law. "It hasn't happened yet, but soon, there will be a blogger who is successfully sued and who loses his home," he says. "That will be the shot heard round the blogosphere."

Just think what it will do to the Technorati graphs.

Shiny Software and Pebbles on the Cairn

Here's an important point that needs making from time to time to encourage newcomers to participate in open projects:

No one takes contributions to an Open Source project and regards them as "substandard". They are simply contributions of varying quality and use.

Be it ne'er so small, a pebble on the cairn raises the cairn: and so it is with contributions to open source and the other opens. Indeed, this is one of many (interrelated) reasons why openness is so powerful.

Socialising with Social Media

Everyone seems to be giving away e-books under CC licences at the moment - and jolly good thing too. The latest comes from Antony Mayfield, the man behind the excellent Open (finds, minds, conversations)... blog.

It's called "What is social media?" and basically attempts to answer that question in words of n syllables, where n is a small number. Readers of this blog are unlikely to learn anything new, but it will be great for giving to Great Aunts to explain why you spend so much time online. Assuming they can read PDFs....

Crunching Nuvvo

I hadn't heard of Nuvvo, but now I have, I'm not surprised by this item from TechCrunch:

We wrote about Nuvvo, a brave startup taking on an open source competitor, last January. However, Nuvvo is now up for sale.

The "open source competitor" is Moodle, a course management system, which is one of the jewels in the free software crown.

As the TechCrunch headline puts it:

Fighting open source competiton may be foolish

Yup.

The Cost of Freedom - Not

"The cost of freedom in the digital age" is a sadly misguided article on openDemocracy that questions whether Creative Commons, open source and open access are "a just reward for creative endeavour", and concludes:

Free dissemination systems such as open access and creative commons are good and should be supported. The most excluded in society will benefit from not having to pay. But creative commons is not the right alternative to rewarding content-creators and innovators. We are still only at the dawn of the digital revolution. It is likely that by the time we get to sunrise, more equitable alternatives will have been found. Until that happens, whoever ends up picking up the bill for content creation, there is little justice in charging the credit cards of scientists or short-changing authors of books and composers of music.

Well, no, actually: scientists do not pay with their credit cards for open access: the cost may be author-side, rather than reader-side, but it is picked up by one of the scientist's sponsors - be it the grant-giver (like the Wellcome Trust) or academic institution.

Similarly, it is incorrect to say that authors of books and composers of music are "short-changed" just because they adopt a creative commons licence, or to call creative commons an "alternative to rewarding content-creators and innovators". There are well-attested cases of sales being boosted when a book is released under a CC licence (just ask Cory Doctorow or Yochai Benkler): in other words, more reward, not less. And even when sales aren't boosted, there are numerous other ways of making money from the reputation that CC publication can bestow (public appearances, consultancy, etc.).

Looking at new-style content distribution with the blinkers of old-style publishing inevitably misses these facets. Not so much the cost of freedom, then, as the cost of fettered thinking.

Doing the Joomla Mambo

Forks are a particularly intense moment for free software projects, and examining the reasons for and result of a fork throws fascinating light on the dynamics of the open source world.

One of the most famous recent forks is in the world of content management systems, when Joomla split off from Mambo. There's a fascinating - and impressively full - history of how and why that happened. It all seems to have turned out rather well, with both projects flourishing - a textbook case of how to manage a fork.

Good Signals from WIPO

We're not there yet, but things are looking much better on the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty front than anyone could have reasonably expected:

The negotiations have been tough (we hear), but the 2007 WIPO General Assemblies have come to a close with two huge victories for the public interest. On the Broadcasting Treaty, while the GA agreed to convene a Diplomatic Conference in November/December 2007, we now have two welcome safeguards in place

In particular:

It has also been decided that the [Broadcasting] treaty will now take a signal-based approach instead of the messy, dangerous rights-based approach that is used in the current treaty text. This, too, is good news for the Internet community, and reflects the concerns raised by many WIPO member countries at last month's meeting. There's much support for narrowing the treaty's overbroad scope to signal protection. The key question will now be how the next treaty draft reflects this in practice.

Fingers crossed. (Via Ars Technica.)

Feeling Mule-ish

Lots of people seem to be getting excited about Mule and MuleSource. I would too if it weren't for sentences like this:

Mule is a messaging platform based on ideas from ESB architectures. The core of Mule is a SEDA-based service container that manages service objects, known as Universal Message Objects or UMOs, which are plain old java objects. All communication between UMOs and other applications is made through message endpoints. These endpoints provide a simple and consistent interface to vastly disparate technologies such as Jms, Smtp, Jdbc, Tcp, Http, Xmpp, file, etc.

I found this interview with MuleSource's founder and CTO Ross Mason slightly more illuminating. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it all eventually.

Open Journalism, Transparently

I wrote about Jay Rosen and his open journalism experiment a few months back. If you're still unconvinced (or just a bit in the dark) do read this Slashdot interview: it's clear that Rosen has put a huge amount of effort into his answers that are clear, illuminating and packed full of great links.

A sample:

People hear phrases like "an experiment in open source reporting" and they see it immediately: What's open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked "citizen," the paid operative can also go. How do you prevent all of that?

To me this is a puzzle with many pieces. It won't have one solution; it will take many overlapping systems working together. I can't tell you--yet--how we're going to build a fact-checking and verification system into NewAssignment.Net. But I can tell you that the site will fail without one, so we'll have to try to figure it out, with help from a lot of people. To simply pass along unchecked reports received from strangers over the Net would be fantastically dumb. To discount the possibility of people trying to game the system would be dumb, too; the more successful the site is, the more probable the gaming is. Not to mention spam, duplication, all kinds of junk.

DRMnation - Do Something!

It's easy to feel impotent in the face of the mega-corporations' assault on the commons of ideas. They are so big, rich and powerful and you are, well, just you. But there are things we can all do - 30 things to be precise, as this amazing checklist explains. Although its resources are aimed at the UK, its basic idea - that there are a lots of people we can contact to influence - is valid everywhere. Start your wordprocessors....

Update: And if you're looking for more to do, try this impressive list at DefectiveByDesign.

Soonr or Latr?

Soonr is one of the few new startups that seems to be offering a service that's useful; it lets you access your PC from a mobile phone, and place calls via Skype using the computer. There's only one problem: it's not open source. Make that two: there isn't even a GNU/Linux client. Maybe it'll happen, sooner or later.... (Via TheOpenForce.com.)

Eyeballs as Micropayments

Here's a post that wraps up a lot of ideas.

I've often wondered why micropayments have never taken off. Personally, I'd be fine with the idea, and I can't believe I'm the only one. But they haven't, even though various technologies have been around for over a decade.

Maybe eyeballs are the solution. That is, the attention economy creates a de facto micropayment system without the need for a complicated infrastructure:

Money is a very important and useful medium of exchange for high-value, tangible products. For small-value, intangible products, the costs tend to exceed the value of the transactions—especially when you add in the overhead associated with making payments at a distance. Fortunately, human beings are clever. We’ve begun to find a variety of substitutes for money that work better in cyberspace. This isn’t the repeal of market economics, but rather an extension of them to deal with changed circumstances.

(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)

ODF Test Suite

One of the key features of the ODF standard is that it can be supported by many different programs. But this begs the question what the standard should look like in practice - i.e., which implementation does things properly.

This test suite, currently under development, goes some way to answering that by providing screen shots of various features in both OpenOffice.org and KOffice. It's both useful and fascinating. (Via An Antic Disposition.)

Oh, the Irony

DVD Jon is one of free software's folk heroes, famous for reverse-engineering the control software used by DVDs, to allow GNU/Linux systems to play DVDs people had bought (a rather reasonable desire, one would have thought). Now he's doing something similar that is so clever it's painful:

DRM-buster DVD Jon has a new target in his sights, and it’s a big piece of fruit. He has reverse-engineered Apple’s Fairplay and is starting to license it to companies who want their media to play on Apple’s devices. Instead of breaking the DRM (something he’s already done), Jon has replicated it, and wants to license the technology to companies that want their content (music, movies, whatever) to play on Apple devices.

So what will Apple do? Sue him for helping to increase their sales? It's true that the music industry does precisely this when it goes after P2P systems, but Apple's more savvy, right? Right???

Open Access in a Nutshell

Talking of open access, here's the one paragraph explanation of its economics:

The central idea of ‘author-side’ payment in order to secure open access for the formally published research literature (and as a side benefit, transparency of the proportionality between the amount of research done and the cost of the literature) is to use the same money now used for subscriptions (reader-side payment) in a different way. Not extra money; the same money.

(Via Open Access News.)

Proof that Open Access is Better

You may not care much about the Poincaré Conjecture - shame on you - but you should definitely be interested in the way in which its proof has been announced.

Most mathematicians would have submitted their paper to some high-profile publication in order to gain maximum publicity. But not old Grigori Perelman. A well-known churl of a genius, Grigori simply posted his proof to the arXiv.org server, and says he has no intention of publishing it elsewhere. So for one of the most important mathematical achievements of recent years, the open access repository has been chosen over all the traditional methods.

The press release from Cornell University has an interesting thought:

"Perelman's choice of arXiv to disseminate his proof is a watershed event in scholarly communications," said Sarah E. Thomas, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. "Although Perelman declined the Fields Medal, perhaps, if offered the Clay Mathematics Institute prize for solving the Poincaré Conjecture, he'll donate the million dollars to the arXiv to enable the global community of scholars and scientists to continue to benefit from this transformative resource."

Knight is Right

Nothing new here, but Sir Tim's wise words on Net neutrality have a weight that few others can match. Pass them on to your favourite telecoms company.

ArXiv from the Horse's Mouth

It can be argued that arXiv is one of the two main wellsprings of the open access movement. This makes an article by Dr arXiv himself, Paul Ginsparg, of particular interest.

Wittily entitled "As We May Read" - a reference to Vannevar Bush's famous "As We May Think" paper - it provides a good explanation of how arXiv works, and why the open access revolution is likely to be completed sooner rather than later. And he makes an interesting point:

A form of open access appears to be happening by a backdoor route: using standard search engines, more than one-third of the high-impact journal articles in a sample of biological/medical journals published in 2003 were found at nonjournal Web sites (Wren, 2005).

He concludes:

On the one-decade time scale, it is likely that more research communities will join some form of global unified archive system without the current partitioning and access restrictions familiar from the paper medium, for the simple reason that it is the best way to communicate knowledge and hence to create new knowledge. Ironically, it is also possible that the technology of the 21st century will allow the traditional players from a century ago, namely the professional societies and institutional libraries, to return to their dominant role in support of the research enterprise.

(Via Open Access News.)

Paying the Price

Nice piece in The Independent about a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers on the cost of capping greenhouse emissions:

The cost of curbing the soaring emissions of harmful gases that are blamed for causing global warming has been estimated at $1 trillion by a major study of the cost of climate change.

The volume of emissions of the gases that cause global warming will double by 2050 unless rich countries agree to take significant policy steps to cut energy use, it shows.

The report, byPricewaterhouseCoopers, lays bare the potential damage to the environment of the industrial revolution in China and India. It puts a price of $1 trillion (£526bn) on the cost of sorting out the problem spread over the next generation. The bill is equivalent to a year's output of the economy of Canada, and less than half of the total stock of debt that has been built up by Britain's households. But it is less than the cost in terms of environmental catastrophe and loss of life that scientists fear will happen as temperatures and sea levels rise. "It is implicit from our findings that a trillion dollars certainly is a cost worth incurring," said John Hawksworth, the chief economist at PwC and author of the report.

As the surprisingly intelligent thread on Digg points out, these figures are amazingly doable. For example, one trillion dollars is only three times the current spending on the war in Iraq. Similarly, it is only 40 times the cost of one small global-warming induced weather disaster, that caused by Katrina. There are going to be rather more than 40 Katrinas if things carry on as they are.

What's most heartening about this report is that a terribly respectable outfit like PricewaterhouseCoopers is taking the exercise seriously. This is what we in the trade call a Good Sign: it means those in power are starting to realise that it will actually be cheaper to prevent rather than cure. And once the rich get behind moves to preserve this particular commons, we are almost there.

And Now, by an Amazing Coincidence...

A little while back I pointed out at some length how flimsy was the logic found in a white paper that claimed Microsoft's Vista would bring "benefits" of $40 billion to six European countries - conveniently forgetting the fact that those $40 billion of "benefits" were actually a cost.

And now, what do we find, but a study from the US film industry that purports to show:

movie piracy causes a total lost output for U.S. industries of $20.5 billion per year, thwarts the creation of about 140,000 jobs and accounts for more than $800 million in lost tax revenue.

But fortunately, there's someone else on hand who isn't taken in by this Vista-like logic:

It's important to remember, however, that even though piracy prevents money from reaching the movie industry, those dollars probably stay in the economy, one intellectual property expert said.

"In other words, let's say people are forgoing paying for $6 billion in movies by downloading or consuming illegal goods but end up spending that $6 billion on iPods, computers and HDTV sets on which to watch the movies, which leads to $25 billion in job creation in the computer/software/consumer electronics field," Jason Shultz, staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an e-mail.

Quite.

European Digital Library, European Archive

Some time back I wrote about the European Digital Library. But it seems that this isn't enough: now we have the European Archive, too, which seems even more ambitious. For as well as providing access to digital versions of traditional content, it seems to be aiming to become a European mirror of the wonderful Internet Archive:

The European Archive is a non-profit foundation working towards universal access to all knowledge. The archive will achieve this through partnerships with libraries, museums, other collection bodies, and through building its own collections. The primary goal of collecting this knowledge is to make it as publicly accessible as possible, via the Internet and other means.

...

As the web has grown in importance as a publishing medium, we are behind in bringing into operation the archiving and library services that will provide enduring access to many important resources. Where some assumed web site owners would archive their own materials, this has not generally been the case. If properly archived, the Web history can provide a tremendous base for time-based analysis of the content, the topology including emerging communities and topics, trends analysis etc. as well as an invaluable source of information for the future.

The foremost effort to archive the Web has been carried on in the US by the Internet Archive, a non-profit foundation based in San Francisco. Every two months, large snapshots of the surface of the web are archived by the Internet Archive since 1996.

This entire collection offers 500 terabytes of data of major significance in all domain that have been impacted by the development of the Internet, that is, almost all. This represent large amount of data (petabytes in the coming years) to crawl, organize and give access to.

By partnering with the Internet Archive, the European Archive is laying down the foundation of a global Web archive based in Europe.

Obviously, all this begs scads of questions to do with access and copyright, but at least it's a start.

Charlie is Not My Darling

'McPatent' McCreevy is at it again:

In the context of the debate about the resolution of the European Parliament on future patent policy the EU Commission will press ahead with an official communication and an action plan of its own and will thereby seek to support the much criticized European Patent Litigation Agreement, Charlie McCreevy, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, told the European Parliament during a plenary session in Strasburg on Thursday.

And there was a telling quotation:

"compared to our major trading partners, Europe is losing ground," Mr. McCreevy, referring to the patent systems in, for example, the United States and Japan, critically observed.

He's clearly referring to the number of patents in Europe (too low), and their quality (too high) compared to those in the US and Japan. But don't worry, Chas'll fix it....

The Benefits of Open Access - for Publishers

Here's an interesting take on open access.

The benefits of this kind of openness for scientists and the public have been rehearsed many times; but this paper by Paul Peters, the Senior Publishing Developer of Hindawi Publishing Corporation, one of the leading open access outfits, presents some pretty compelling reasons why opening up is good for publishers - well, the smaller ones, at least:

While advocates of open access publishing have tended to focus on the benefits that it can offer authors and readers, there are equally important benefits that an open access publishing model can provide for small and mid-sized publishers. Within the existing subscription-based publishing industry there are a number of market forces that work against smaller publishers, and this is making it increasingly difficult for these smaller publishers to stay competitive. However, by adopting a business model based on publication charges, smaller publishers can overcome many of the difficulties that they currently face in the subscription market.

There are three main advantages that open access can provide for smaller publishers. One important advantage is that it makes the growth of both new and existing journals much easier. In addition, a shift to open access will promote more competition between publishers, which will enable many smaller publishers to gain a competitive edge over the largest and most well-established publishing houses. Finally, an open access publishing model will make a journal far more attractive to potential authors, since they can avoid many of the unnecessary limitations imposed by subscription-based models.

BBC + MS = DRM?

Bad, bad BBC:

The BBC has signed an agreement with Microsoft to explore ways of developing its digital services.

The only thing that Microsoft understands is control; if the BBC teams up with Bill Gates' company in any way, we can kiss goodbye to our televisual heritage.

CIOs Will Turn Green...

...because they will have no choice. As this Reg piece explains, the worlds of computing and the environment are inexorably becoming more intertwined. From the story:

"Today, energy costs typically form less than 10 per cent of an overall IT budget. However, this could rise to more than 50 per cent in the next few years. The bottom line is that the cost of power on this scale would be difficult to manage simply as a budget increase and most CIOs would struggle to justify the situation to company board members."

Enough to make anyone go green.

Bill Clinton Recommends Ubuntu

No, really.

Open Energy Technology

Here's another example of open source being invoked in the context of helping to solve environmental problems:

Non-patentable shared "open energy technology" has the potential to have a profound impact on the reduction of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, in the same way that open source software has changed computers and the Internet.

There's an interesting twist, in that it also suggests

Possibly the most ideal person to do it would be South African billionaire, Mark Shuttleworth, who is currently taking on Microsoft's domination of the operating system market through the development of the open source operating system, Ubuntu Linux.

The reason being that Shuttleworth is a local boy for the publication in question. A nice idea, despite the nepotism.

You Say "Direct Economy", I Say "Web 2.0"

The Direct Economy:

In a system of direct democracy, sovereignty is lodged with the citizens - or at least, with those among them that choose to actively participate in the system. They can not only pick among prepackaged options (vote) or candidates (election) but they also can deeply co-shape the policy process. Switzerland is probably the strongest case: here new laws can be put forth, and even the Constitution modified, by citizens’ initiative. Translate that into business terms and we have a description of a system where consumers have a direct influence on what companies develop and produce for them. The more informed, opinionated and wired (socially connected) they are, the more they are likely to make use of this influence and to try to organize it - exactly as in a direct democracy system.

Sounds like a business using Web 2.0 to me. Still, good to see the memes spreading.