Open Knowledge, Open Greenery and Modularity

On Saturday I attended the Open Knowledge 1.0 meeting, which was highly enjoyable from many points of view. The location was atmospheric: next to Hawksmoor's amazing St Anne's church, which somehow manages the trick of looking bigger than its physical size, inside the old Limehouse Town Hall.

The latter had a wonderfully run-down, almost Dickensian feel to it; it seemed rather appropriate as a gathering place for a ragtag bunch of ne'er-do-wells: geeks, wonks, journos, activists and academics, all with dangerously powerful ideas on their minds, and all more dangerously powerful for coming together in this way.

The organiser, Rufus Pollock, rightly placed open source squarely at the heart of all this, and pretty much rehearsed all the standard stuff this blog has been wittering on about for ages: the importance of Darwinian processes acting on modular elements (although he called the latter atomisation, which seems less precise, since atoms, by definition, cannot be broken up, but modules can, and often need to be for the sake of increased efficiency.)

One of the highlights of the day for me was a talk by Tim Hubbard, leader of the Human Genome Analysis Group at the Sanger Institute. I'd read a lot of his papers when writing Digital Code of Life, and it was good to hear him run through pretty much the same parallels between open genomics and the other opens that I've made and make. But he added a nice twist towards the end of his presentation, where he suggested that things like the doomed NHS IT programme might be saved by the use of Darwinian competition between rival approaches, each created by local NHS groups.

The importance of the ability to plug into Darwinian dynamics also struck me when I read this piece by Jamais Cascio about carbon labelling:

In order for any carbon labeling endeavor to work -- in order for it to usefully make the invisible visible -- it needs to offer a way for people to understand the impact of their choices. This could be as simple as a "recommended daily allowance" of food-related carbon, a target amount that a good green consumer should try to treat as a ceiling. This daily allowance doesn't need to be a mandatory quota, just a point of comparison, making individual food choices more meaningful.

...

This is a pattern we're likely to see again and again as we move into the new world of carbon footprint awareness. We'll need to know the granular results of actions, in as immediate a form as possible, as well as our own broader, longer-term targets and averages.

Another way of putting this is that for these kind of ecological projects to work, there needs to be a feedback mechanism so that people can see the results of their actions, and then change their behaviour as a result. This is exactly like open source: the reason the open methodology works so well is that a Darwinian winnowing can be applied to select the best code/content/ideas/whatever. But that is only possible when there are appropriate metrics that allow you to judge which actions are better, a reference point of the kind Cascio is writing about.

By analogy, we might call this particular kind of environmental action open greenery. It's interesting to see that here, too, the basic requirement of modularity turns out to be crucially important. In this case, the modularity is at the level of the individual's actions. This means that we can learn from other people's individual success, and improve the overall efficacy of the actions we undertake.

Without that modularity - call its closed-source greenery - everything is imposed from above, without explanation or the possibility of local, personal, incremental improvement. That may have worked in the 20th century, but given the lessons we have learned from open source, it's clearly not the best way.

Which Future for Adobe's Apollo?

I have mixed feelings about Adobe's new Apollo:

Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s [Rich Internet Applications].

On the one hand, it has the F-word in there, and as readers of this blog may know, I am totally allergic to Flash. On the other hand, this seems promising:

We spent a considerable amount of time researching a number of HTML rendering engines for use in Apollo. We had four main criteria, all of which WebKit met:

* Open project that we could contribute to
* Proven technology, that web developers and end users are familiar with
* Minimum effect on Apollo runtime size
* Proven ability to run on mobile devices

While the final decision was difficult, we felt that WebKit is the best match for Apollo at this time.

We shall see (now, if only the Delphic oracle were still around....)

Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything: 326

Forget about 300, this year's hot number is 326:

On this day, we learn from IBM's attorney, David Marriott that the "mountain of code" SCO's CEO Darl McBride told the world about from 2003 onward ends up being a measly 326 lines of noncopyrightable code that IBM didn't put in Linux anyway.

On the other hand, SCO has infringed all 700,000 lines of IBM's GPL'd code in the Linux kernel.

Goodbye, Darl, it was vaguely fun while it lasted - well, not much actually - but now, it's over. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

But Is It Cricket?

This raises some interesting issues about what exactly copyright covers:

A cricketing website has found what it hopes is an inventive way to bypass copyright laws to show users action from the Cricket World Cup.

Despite the fact that Sky Television has the exclusive rights to broadcast the live action from the West Indies, Cricinfo.com is using computer animation to provide ball-by-ball coverage to non-Sky viewers.

...

Wisden said it had carefully consulted lawyers before going ahead with the simulations in this week's World Cup. "Cricinfo 3D is based on public domain information gathered by our scorers who record a number of factors such as where the ball pitched, the type of shot played and where the ball goes in the field," said a Wisden statement. "That data is then fed as an xml to anyone who has Cricinfo 3D running on their desktops and the software generates an animation based on this data."

The issues is whether the information about the match is in the public domain, and can thus be fed into a simulation, or whether the rights that Sky has bought cover that information in some way.

I'd say not, because you generally can't copyright (or patent) pure information: for intellectual monopolies to be granted, you need to go beyond the facts to add artistic expression in the case of copyright, or non-obvious inventive steps in the case of patents. Cricinfo 3D seems to be a new artistic interpretation of pure data, independent of Sky's own "artistic" images of the game (i.e., the camera shots they take).

Not that intellectual monopolies are known for their strict adherence to the laws of logic....

Mapping Social Networks

Social networks lie at the heart of Web 2.0 - and of the opens. So it is surprising that more hasn't been done to analyse and map the ebb and flow of ideas and influence across these networks.

Here's an interesting solution for enterprises, called Trampoline. There are clear financial benefits for companies if they can understand better how the social networks work within (and without) their walls, so it's a good fit there too.

In a sense, all this stuff is obvious:

We humans spent 200,000 years evolving all kinds of social behaviour for accumulating, filtering and passing on information. We're really good at it. So good we don't even think about it most of the time. However the way we use email, instant messaging, file sharing and so on disrupts these instincts and stops them doing their job. This is why we waste so much time scanning through emails we're not interested in and searching for documents we need.

Trampoline's approach is so refreshingly obvious it seems radical. We've gone right back to the underlying social behaviour and created innovative software that harnesses human instincts instead of disabling them. We describe this process of mirroring social behaviour in software as "sociomimetics".

Trampoline's products leverage the combined intelligence of the whole network to manage and distribute information more efficiently. Individuals get the information they need, unrecognised expertise becomes visible, the enterprise increases the reuse and value of its knowledge assets.

Given the simplicity of the idea, it should be straighforward coming up with open source implementations. And there would be a double hit: a project that was interesting in itself, and also directly applicable to open source collaboration. (Via Vecosys.)

The Other Open Source Java

Sun's Java is not the only one going open source:

In spite of a deal with the U.S.-based software giant Microsoft, the government pledged Wednesday that it would continue promoting the use of open-source software.

State Minister for Research and Technology Kusmayanto Kadiman said that open-source software would greatly benefit Indonesia's technological development.

QualiPSo: EU OSS and Acronym Madness

This sounds great:

Leading European, Brazilian and Chinese information and communications technology (ICT) players announced today that they have joined forces to launch QualiPSo, a quality platform to foster the development and use of open source software to help their industries in the global race for growth.

The aim of QualiPSo is to help industries and governments fuel innovation and competitiveness in today’s and tomorrow’s global environment by providing the way to use trusted low-cost, flexible open source software to develop innovative and reliable information systems. To meet that goal, QualiPSo will define and implement the technologies, processes and policies to facilitate the development and use of open source software components, with the same level of trust traditionally offered by proprietary software.

Er, yes, and how will it do that?

Developing a long-lasting network of professionals caring for the quality of open source software for enterprise computing. Six Competence Centres – running the collaborative platforms, tools and process developed in this project – will be set up to support the development, deployment and adoption of OSS by private and public Information Systems Departments, large companies, SMEs, end users and ISVs.

Yes, yes, yes, and that will be done how?

Defining methods, development processes, and business models to facilitate the use of open source Software (OSS) by the industry.

Can't they just get stuck in and try it - you know, download, install, give it a go? Anything else?

Developing a new Capability Maturity Model-like approach to assessing the quality of OSS. This model will be discussed with CMM’s originators, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), with a view to formalising it as an official extension of CMMI.

What? Maturity? What's this got to do with getting people to use the ruddy stuff?

QualiPSo is launched in synergy with Europe’s technology initiatives such as NESSI and Artemis, and will leverage Europe’s existing OSS initiatives such as EDOS, FLOSSWorld (http://flossworld.org/), tOSSad (http://www.tossad.org/) and others. The project will also leverage large OSS communities such as OW2 and Morfeo.

Oh, now I see: all this is just an excuse for more acronym madness. So it's basically just a waste of money, and a missed opportunity to do something practical.

But wait:

QualiPSo is the ever largest Open Source initiative funded by the EC.

OK, make that the biggest waste of money, and biggest missed opportunity yet.

Why couldn't they invest in a few hundred open source start-ups across Europe instead? Or, easier still, simply mandate ODF for all EU government documents? That single act alone would jump-start an entire open source economy in Europe. (Via Open Source Weblog.)

Webly Openness from the Horse's Mouth

Sir Tim has been talking to a bunch of boring politicians. Here's my favourite bit - a neat distillation of why Net neutrality matters:

When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone's permission. The Web, as a new application, rolled out over the existing Internet without any changes to the Internet itself. This is the genius of the design of the Internet, for which I take no credit. Applying the age old wisdom of design with interchangeable parts and separation of concerns, each component of the Internet and the applications that run on top of it are able develop and improve independently. This separation of layers allows simultaneous but autonomous innovation to occur at many levels all at once. One team of engineers can concentrate on developing the best possible wireless data service, while another can learn how to squeeze more and more bits through fiber optic cable. At the same time, application developers such as myself can develop new protocols and services such as voice over IP, instant messaging, and peer-to-peer networks. Because of the open nature of the Internet's design, all of these continue to work well together even as each one is improving itself.

Red Hat Exchange: Apotheosis of the Stack

I've written several times on this blog and elsewhere about the rise of the open source enterprise stack. Its appearance signals both the increasing acceptance of a wide range of open source solutions in business, as well as the growing maturity of those different parts. Essentially, the rise of the stack represents part of a broader move to create an interdependent free software ecosystem.

Red Hat has been active in this area, notably through the acquisition of JBoss, but now it has gone even further with the announcement of its Red Hat Exchange:

Red Hat has worked with customers and partners to develop Red Hat Exchange (RHX), which provides pre-integrated business application software stacks including infrastructure software from Red Hat and business application software from Red Hat partners.

RHX is a single source for research, purchase, online fullfillment and support of open source and other commercial software business application stacks. Through RHX, customers will be able to acquire pre-integrated open source software solutions incorporating infrastructure software from Red Hat and business application software from Red Hat partners. Red Hat will provide a single point of delivery and support for all elements of the software stacks.

Through RHX, Red Hat seeks to reduce the complexity of deploying business applications and support the development of an active ecosystem of commercial open source business application partners. RHX will be available later this year.

It's obviously too early to tell how exactly this will work, and how much success it will have. But it's nonetheless an important signal that the open source enterprise stack and the associated ecosystem that feeds it are rapidly becoming two of the most vibrant ideas in the free software world.

IT's Got to be Local and Open

Nice story in the Guardian today about a local UK health system that works - unlike the massive, doomed, centralised NHS system currently being half-built at vast cost. It makes some important points:

Next week the annual Healthcare Computing conference in Harrogate will buzz with accusations that the national programme has held back progress. There are two reasons behind this charge. First, under the £1bn contracts signed early in the programme, hospitals have to replace their administrative systems which record patients' details with systems from centrally chosen suppliers. As this involves considerable local effort for little benefit, progress is painfully slow. The second problem is the potential threat to confidentiality arising from making records available on a national scale.

Quite: if there is no local benefit, there will be no buy-in, and little progress. Think local, act local, and you get local achievement. The other side is that if you impose a central system, security is correspondingly weaker. Hello, ID card....

Of course, there are many areas where you want to be able to bring together information from local stores for particular purposes. That's still possible - provided you adopt open standards everywhere. Hello, ODF....

Infoethics, Open Access, ODF and Open Source

Now here's something you might not expect from UNESCO every day:

The Infoethics Survey of Emerging Technologies prepared by the NGO Geneva Net Dialogue at the request of UNESCO aims at providing an outlook to the ethical implications of future communication and information technologies. The report further aims at alerting UNESCO’s Member States and partners to the increasing power and presence of emerging technologies and draws attention to their potential to affect the exercise of basic human rights. Perhaps as its most salient deduction, the study signals that these days all decision makers, developers, the corporate scholar and users are entrusted with a profound responsibility with respect to technological developments and their impact on the future orientation of knowledge societies.

It touches on a rather motley bunch of subjects, including the semantic Web, RFID, biometrics and mesh networking. But along the way it says some sensible things:

One primary goal of infoethics is to extend the public domain of information; that is, to define an illustrative set of knowledge, information, cultural and creative works that should be made available to every person.

Even more surprising, to me at least, was this suggestion:

UNESCO should meanwhile support open standards and protocols that are generated through democratic processes not dominated by large corporations.

The use of OpenDocument Format and other open formats should also be encouraged as they help mitigate lock-in to certain technologies. Other initiatives to consider include pursuing free and open software, as well as the “Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems” developed last year.

(Via Heise Online.)

What Open Access Can Do for Open Content

One of the central ideas behind openness is re-use - the ability to build on what has gone before, rather than re-inventing the wheel. And yet, as this fascinating article demonstrates, there is sometimes surprisingly little sharing and re-use between the various opens:

This study demonstrates among a sample of 100 Wikipedia entries, which included 168 sources or references, only two percent of the entries provided links to open access research and scholarship. However, it proved possible to locate, using Google Scholar and other search engines, relevant examples of open access work for 60 percent of a sub-set of 20 Wikipedia entries. The results suggest that much more can be done to enrich and enhance this encyclopedia’s representation of the current state of knowledge. To assist in this process, the study provides a guide to help Wikipedia contributors locate and utilize open access research and scholarship in creating and editing encyclopedia entries.

I can't help feeling that there is a larger lesson here, and that all the various opens should be doing more to build on each other's strengths as well as their own. After all, it's partly what all this openness is about. Perhaps we need a meta-open movement?

Wisdom of the Mindless Sports Fans

Although PicksPal, a fantasy sports betting site, interests me not a jot, this is truly fascinating:

It’s all for fun, but the company started selling the top picks of its best users in October. For $10, you can get the collective picks of the top 30 users on five games. The idea was that people could use these for-fun picks to win bets in Vegas. The question was, would PicksPal be able to consistently beat Vegas odds, and the spread, with these picks.

So far, yes. By a lot. PicksPal’s overall record, against the spread, has been 562-338, or a 63% win rate. In college basketball, the win rate is 66%. In pro football, 62%. They are even getting a 52% win rate in pro hockey, their worst sport.

These look like incredibly strong results; it would be interesting to see how the results are in other areas where this idea is starting to be applied.

Dastardly DRM Plans for Digital Video Broadcasting

Alas, not many people care enough about the threat posed by DRM. But I suspect that quite a few care about their TV viewing, and the traditional freedoms they enjoy in that sphere. So maybe this chilling news will wake up a few people from their digital slumbers:

Today, consumers can digitally record their favorite television shows, move recordings to portable video players, excerpt a small clip to include in a home video, and much more. The digital television transition promises innovation and competition in even more great gadgets that will give consumers unparalleled control over their media.

But an inter-industry organization that creates television and video specifications used in Europe, Australia, and much of Africa and Asia is laying the foundation for a far different future -- one in which major content providers get a veto over innovation and consumers face draconian digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on the use of TV content. At the behest of American movie and television studios, the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB) is devising standards to ensure that digital television devices obey content providers' commands rather than consumers' desires. These restrictions will take away consumers' rights and abilities to use lawfully-acquired content so that each use can be sold back to them piecemeal.

Dell is Listening...

... apparently:

Dell to Expand Linux Options

Your feedback on Dell IdeaStorm has been astounding. Thank you! We hear your requests for desktops and notebooks with Linux. We’re crafting product offerings in response, but we’d like a little more direct feedback from you: your preferences, your desires. We recognize some people prefer notebooks over desktops, high-end models over value models, your favorite Linux distribution, telephone-based support over community-based support, and so on. We can’t offer everything (all systems, all distributions, all support options), so we’ve crafted a survey (www.dell.com/linuxsurvey) to let you help us prioritize what we should deliver for you.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

It is a truth universally acknowlegded that there is only one thing more stupid than content producers suing little people with nothing in their piggy bank for alleged copyright infringement, and that is content producers suing someone with billions of dollars in their piggy-bank for alleged copyright infringement:

Viacom Inc. today announced that it has sued YouTube and Google in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties. The suit seeks more than $1 billion in damages, as well as an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement. The complaint contends that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Faster, Google. Kill! Kill!

Opening Our Eyes to OpenID

Sign-ons can be a real pain, as you are forced to create ever more accounts at sites. A single sign-on is the obvious solution, but getting everyone to agree on a standard is hard. So it's particularly good to see that OpenID is not only taking off, but an open standard to boot.

Here's one of the best introductions to OpenID that I've come across:

As the most basic level, your OpenID identity is a unique URL. It can be a URL that you directly control (such as that of your personal Web page or blog) or one provided to you by a third-party service, such as an OpenID provider. In that sense, a site's use of OpenID identities is no different than using email addresses as identifiers: they are unique to each user and are verifiable. But you can publicly display an OpenID identity without attracting spam.

Going Qwaqqers About Qwaq

Even though Second Life gets the lion's share of the attention, there are several other virtual world systems out there, including some that are fully open source. One such is Croquet:

Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.

The ideas behind Croquet are undeniably powerful, but it's always looked a little clunky when I've investigated it, more like a research project than anything that you might use. In other words, a solution in search of a problem.

Well, the problem has just turned up, and involves creating a secure virtual workspace for distributed teams. In the corporate context, the Second Life gew-gaws are less important than functionality like security and the ability to collaborate on any application. A new company called Qwaq, which includes many of the key people from the Croquet project, has been set up to meet that need.

It adopts a hybrid approach for its licensing: the core code is Croquet, and hence open source, but Qwaq adds proprietary elements on top. Obviously, I'd prefer it if everything were free code from the start, but it's understandable if new companies are cautious when dabbling with this tricky open source stuff. The existence of Qwaq, which obviously has a vested interest in the survival and development of Croquet, is already good news for the latter, but I predict that in time the company will gradually open up more of its code in order to tap into the community that will grow around it.

Its business model could certainly cope with that: it offers two versions of its product - one as a hosted service, the other run on an intranet. Although it is true that other companies could also host and support the product in this case, Qwaq has a unique strength that comes from the people working for it (rather like the advantage that Red Hat's roster of kernel hackers confers.)

One of the benefits of using Croquet as the basis of its products is that the protocols are open, and this allows Croquet-compatible products to interoperate with Qwaq's. This means that the dynamics of the Croquet ecosystem are similar to that of the Web, which is never a bad thing.

At the time of writing, there's not much to see on Qwaq's site, but I imagine that will change soon, and I'll update this post to reflect that (and also be writing elsewhere about the technology and its applications). In the meantime, Qwaq's arrival is certainly welcome, since it signals a new phase in the roll-out and commercialisation of standards-based virtual spaces. I'm sure we'll see many more in the future.

Update: The Qwaq site has now gone live, with some info and a screenshot of the Qwaq Forums product, as well as a link to a datasheet. There is also a short press release available.

Opening Up the Euro-Augean Farms

Openness and governments go together like horses and horseless carriages, so I was heartened to come across what sounds like a major victory for open access to key information in the shape of FarmSubsidy.org:

Farmsubsidy.org uses freedom of information laws to force European governments to release detailed data on who gets what from Europe's €48.5 billion annual farm subsidy payments. We then make this data available online.

There's a good history of how this happened, which also provides something of a blueprint for further openness. (Via WorldChanging.)

Chilling Freedom of Speech on Polar Bears

Internal memorandums circulated in the Alaskan division of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service appear to require government biologists or other employees traveling in countries around the Arctic not to discuss climate change, polar bears or sea ice if they are not designated to do so.

Like them, I am speechless.

All A-twitter about Twitter

Like many, I've been following Twitter with interest, if a certain bemusement: just what is the attraction of knowing that your mates are drinking a cup of coffee or taking the dog for a walk?

This post provides perhaps the best explanations so far as to why Twitter is important:

You use your social network as a filter, which helps both in scoping participation within a pull model of attention management, but also to Liz’s point that my friends are digesting the web for me and perhaps reducing my discovery costs. But the affordance within Twitter of both mobile and web, that not only lets Anil use it (he is Web-only) is what helps me manage attention overload. I can throttle back to web-only and curb interruptions, simply by texting off.

But will I use it? Not yet, although at some point I may dip a cyber-toe, as I have with LinkedIn: not because I need it, but because these social networks are indisputably an interesting trend.

Has Microsoft Blinked on Office formats?

Microsoft Corp's director of corporate standards has conceded that 'legitimate concerns' have been raised in response to its attempt to fast-track the approval of its Open XML format by ISO.

The level of criticism targeted at Microsoft's XML-based office productivity file formats is significant, raising the potential that Open XML might not gain ISO approval, but Microsoft's Jason Matusow insisted there is still a long way to go.

This is interesting: it's the first time that I've come across Microsoft expressing any kind of doubts about OOXML, its rival to ODF, romping home to become an ISO standard. I can only assume that there was a presumption on the company's part that for all the free software world's whingeing, the national bodies who have the right to object, wouldn't.

But they did. As Andy Updegrove explains:

14 of 20 responses were clearly negative, two indicated divisions of opinion, three were inconclusive or neutral, and one offered no objections.

This is very different from Microsoft's own summary:

"Of the 19 submissions, some are very supportive of XML and the process, some are neutral, and some had legitimate concerns that were raised."

Clearly, this is stretching the truth to breaking point. I get the impression the company's really getting worried over this one, as it begins to spin totally out of its control.

Open Geology

Once that open access, open data meme starts spreading, there's just no stopping it....

British scientists are leading an international effort to bring together all the known geological information about every country in the world. By making the data freely available and allowing researchers to track geological features across national boundaries, the project will make it easier to plan international projects, predict earthquakes and locate natural resources such as oil and gas.

Once the project, called OneGeology, is up and running the data will be searchable via the internet. "Geology has no respect for national frontiers," said Ian Jackson, who is coordinating the project for the British Geological Survey (BGS). "The data exists, but accessibility is the key."

Digital Memories of the Tibetan Uprising

I've written before about how digital technology can be applied by the oppressed and disenfranchised to help preserve their identity. It's good therefore to see new-ish technologies like YouTube being pressed into similar service for a mass online protest focussing on March 10:

On March 10, 1959, Tibetans took to the streets of Lhasa to actively resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Tens of thousands of Tibetans risked their lives to protect their nation and their beloved leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They gave of themselves so that future generations could live to continue the fight and regain the freedom of Tibet.

This March 10, we will honor their memory and their sacrifice.

Metaweb, not Betterweb?

Is it just me, or does this sound like a horribly retrograde move?

A new company founded by a longtime technologist is setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which machines will routinely share information.

The company, Metaweb Technologies, is led by Danny Hillis, whose background includes a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering and who has long championed the idea of intelligent machines.

...

The idea of a centralized database storing all of the world’s digital information is a fundamental shift away from today’s World Wide Web, which is akin to a library of linked digital documents stored separately on millions of computers where search engines serve as the equivalent of a card catalog.

A single database for all the world's digital information? Since when did massive, centralised, single point-of-failure systems come back into vogue? Google's holdings are bad enough.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Update: To be fair, it seems to be adopting a sensible licensing policy, so maybe there's hope yet:

We want to make it possible for you to add high quality structured information to your websites, mashups and applications without worrying about restrictive corporate licenses. All data is licensed Creative Commons Attribution. We only ask that you link back to us.

In addition, Tim O'Reilly has a more upbeat (perhaps because better-informed) assessment here. I can see a little better what they're trying to do, but I'm still not convinced by the centralised nature of it. Opinions?

Open Source Business Models

As readers of this blog may recall, in general I'm not a big fan of analysts, since they seem to offer very little other than a re-statement of what was blindingly obvious six months ago. But there are honourable exceptions.

Take, for example, this insightful presentation by Brent Williams, a self-styled "(temporarily) Independent Equity Research Analyst". It's unusual because it manages to combine a good understanding of the open source model and world with some grown-up economics. The result is well-worth reading.

I don't think Williams will be independent for long. (Via Once more unto the breach.)

Urban Forest Tracker = Open Source 2.0?

Traditionally, open source has been most successful when applied to generic, mainstream software categories - operating systems, Web servers, browser etc. Specialised, vertical applications have not generally been thought suitable, because the pool of interested people who can contribute bug reports and fixes is small.

But the appearance of this open source urban forest tracking system suggests we may be entering a new phase:

In urban San Francisco, the public works department and nonprofit organizations work together to preserve and expand tree life as part of that city's efforts to create sustainability. The city today unveiled a new Web portal and open source application that will help those agencies, and the general public, keep tabs on a growing urban forest.

This new project will probably work not so much because there is a huge untapped group of urban forest tracking system hackers just waiting to hit some code, but because there are plenty of tree-huggers who will help debug the system and input data. In other words, these new kinds of open source projects - call them open source 2.0 - only require a small core of coders to maintain, but survive and thrive thanks to the larger group of suppliers of open data.

AllPeers Goes OP2Pen

I can't help feeling that P2P is so, well, you know, dotcom 1.0. And I must confess that I've never had the slightest urge to use the AllPeers Firefox extension, even though it sounds cool enough:

when we set out to create our Drag-n-Share Firefox extension, we didn’t just take the most direct route to deploying the functionality we felt our users would want. We also built a powerful platform with features that could be used by many types of next-generation web applications: a generic resource framework, a scalable data store and of course a full-fledged peer-to-peer network. By baking the tricky bits into the browser platform, we hope that AllPeers will simplify the deployment of applications that work with structured data (like microformats), store this data where it makes the most sense (whether on the user’s machine or on a centralized server) and make real-time communication between users a snap.

But news that it has seen the light and is going open source is nonetheless highly welcome. It will be interesting to see how it develops as a result.

The Tim O'Reilly of Open Access

I thought I knew open access history pretty well, but to my shame I seem to overlooked Melissa Hagemann:

Hagemann's strategic, behind-the-scenes planning on behalf of the Open Access movement during the past five years set in motion the series of events that have affected scholarship around the globe. It began in the summer of 2001, following critical developments in the Open Archives Initiative; the Public Library of Science petition advocating free access to research; and the establishment of BioMed Central. An environmental scan led her to layer her own assessment of what libraries and researchers needed on top of the varied, independent initiatives for free access underway among players in scholarly communication. She and her OSI colleagues brainstormed on a way to unify the movement under one umbrella – the umbrella of as yet-unnamed Open Access – and OSI gave her the go-ahead to convene the initial BOAI meeting.

BOAI refers to the Budapest Open Access Initiative; it was at this meeting that the phrase "open access" was coined and defined. In other words, it stand in the same relationship to the open access movement as the Freeware Summit does to open source. Which pretty much makes Hagemann the Tim O'Reilly of open access, I suppose. (Via Open Access News.)

Welcome to Topsy-Turvy Land

So let me get this straight: Labour, party of the left, seems locked in a loving embrace with that arch-capitalist, Bill Gates, while the Conservatives, party of the right, is smitten with that commie open source stuff:

The government could save more than £600 million a year if it used more open source software, the shadow chancellor has estimated.

George Osborne said the savings would cut 5% off Whitehall's annual IT bill.

He called for a more "level playing field" for all software companies, and urged "cultural change" in government.

China Virtually Clueless

Oh dear:

Worried that virtual currencies from online games could undermine the country’s financial system, Beijing has taken steps to restrict their conversion into yuan and use to buy real goods, and banned the opening of new Internet cafés.

Beijing is struggling to rein in the hot money flushing around of the country, hoping to keep the yuan from appreciating too fast against the dollar.

The measures against virtual currencies, announced by China’s state news agency Xinhua in a joint communiqué by 14 government agencies, were said to be aimed at preventing them from wreaking havoc on the real-world economy.

Titled, “A notice about further steps in strengthening the management of Internet cafés and Internet gaming,” it says that the redemption of virtual currencies in value exceeding their original purchasing prices will be banned to prevent attempts to realize profits. It also says they cannot be used to buy real goods, only virtual products and services provided by the gaming operators who issue the currencies.

Which means, of course, that as well as being virtual, all this dosh will now go undergound, making it even harder to control.

Remembrance of Sims Past

There's a fascinating post over on 3pointD.com, which exhumes some screenshots of sims as they were three years ago, and contrasts them with their present form. It's impressive to see how far Second Life has come in that time - and exciting to consider how far it might go in the next three years.

But seeing these old sims made me wonder whether we are in danger of losing our virtual past, since these screenshots are the exception, rather than the rule. When the history of virtual worlds comes to be written, vital data about how things looked in those days - nowadays, too - will have gone for ever.

Clearly, what we need is a kind of Internet Archive for virtual worlds that preserves not just the screenshots, but maybe the actual data files for "historic" and representative sims - a Virtual World Archive. Brewster Kahle, are you listening?

On the Social Use of Visualisations

I'm a sucker for anything meta, so I find these meta-analyses of data irresistible. The article is mainly about IBM's Many Eyes, but also mentions Swivel, which I've written about before, and Data360, which I haven't. The more the merrier, say I.

Sun's Darkstar Joins the GPL Light Side

Sun continues its progress through the ranks of open source supporters, hurtling fast towards top-spot as Richard Stallman's Number 1 friend. The latest move is the open sourcing of its Project Darkstar:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced plans today at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to open source Project Darkstar, a ground-breaking online game server platform written entirely in Java technology, at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The company also announced the opening of registration for the Darkstar Playground, which will enable developers to create a wide variety of games that can be provisioned through a single server platform.

...

"Project Darkstar is proving to be an important technology foundation in the exploding multiplayer online game marketplace," said Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer, Sun Microsystems. "By open sourcing Darkstar technology, we will help enable the widest possible market for online game developers and remove their burden of having to build enterprise-grade server solutions, leaving them to do what they do best—build great game experiences."

Game developers can download the latest version of Project Darkstar at www.projectdarkstar.com. This new release of Project Darkstar features a simpler programming interface for increased productivity; plug-in APIs to facilitate integration of third party extensions; and enhancements for scalability , robust performance, and fault-tolerant operation. The source code for Project Darkstar will become available under a GPL license in the coming months

Aside from underlining Sun's support for the GPL, this announcement is also interesting for the light that it shines on the increasingly mainstream nature of online games. The fact that Sun has such a project is surprising, but open-sourcing it makes a lot of sense in an increasingly competitive market. For one thing, it bolsters Java, which stands at a critical juncture in its development. If Sun can build up enough momentum behind it, Java could well enjoy something of a second coming.

Déjà Lu

See: it's not just me....

Although Microsoft’s attempt to exploit Google’s YouTube problems is understandable, it’s also slightly repulsive and reeks of desperation. The software titan is hoping to build itself up by tearing Google down, never a good long-term strategy for success. Microsoft might damage Google’s reputation in the short-term, but it’s highly doubtful that Google’s incredible usefulness, not to mention its solid legal footing, will slip over time.

In the meanwhile, Microsoft will still be Microsoft, still playing distant second to Google. I would argue that Microsoft has damaged its own reputation with this lambast, showing to the world how it’s willing to tear down rivals instead of building itself up. That’s just not classy.

Second Life's Second Innards

Talking of guts, here's a piece about Second Life's intestines. I've written about this in various places, but there are more details here:

Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller said.

Real Openness, Real Guts

Carl Malamud is one of the original digital pioneers, probably best-known for founding Internet Multicasting Service and Internet Talk Radio. But as well as the technology, he also has the moral side covered too.

Try reading this astonshing letter to the head of C-SPAN, following discussions about fair use of its recordings. It concludes with the following bold offer:

C-SPAN is a publicly-supported charity. Your only shareholders are the American public. Your donors received considerable tax relief in making donations to you. You and your staff were well paid for your excellent work. Congressional hearings are of strikingly important public value, and aggressive moves to prevent any fair use of the material is double-dipping on your part. For C-SPAN and for the American public record, the right thing to do is to release all of that material back into the public domain where it belongs.

I thus write to you today with a specific request and a notice:

1. Your inventory shows 6,251 videos of congressional hearings for sale in the C-SPAN store at an average price of $169.50, for a total retail value of approximately $1,059,544. I am offering today to purchase this collection of discs from you for the purpose of ripping and posting on the Internet in a nonproprietary format for reuse by anybody. I understand your store would take a while to process such an order and am willing to place it in stages.
2. I have purchased Disc 192720-1 from the C-SPAN store, ripped more than one minute of video from the disc, and used it for the creation of a news and satirical commentary of compelling public interest and then posted the resulting work at the Internet Archive. I did not ask C-SPAN for a license and I assert fair use of this material.

Mr. Lamb, C-SPAN has been a pioneer in promoting a more open government. You created a grand bargain with the Cable Industry and the U.S. Congress. When I created the first radio station on the Internet and was asked why I did so as a non-profit instead of going for the gold like many of my colleagues, my reply has always been that I was inspired by your example.

Your grand bargain has served the American people and the C-SPAN organization well. Holding congressional hearings hostage is not in keeping with your charter, and it is not in keeping with the spirit of that grand bargain you made with the American people. Please re-release this material back into the public domain where it came from so that it will continue to make our public civic life richer.

Sincerely yours,

Carl Malamud

(Via Jon Udell.)

Exadel's Open Source Cornucopia

Now here's a real confluence:

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Exadel, the leader in providing rich application components for creating a new generation of enterprise solutions, today announced a strategic partnership that will add mature, Eclipse-based developer tools for building service-oriented architecture (SOA) and rich, Web 2.0 applications to Red Hat's integrated platform, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. This move marks the first time that a high caliber set of Eclipse-based developer tools will be available in open source.

Exadel will open source all of its products, including Exadel Studio Pro and RichFaces, as well as consolidate its Ajax4jsf project under JBoss.org, the community behind open source projects that roll up into JBoss Enterprise Middleware. In turn, Red Hat will work jointly with Exadel to drive development of the projects and their integration with JBoss platform technologies such as JBoss Seam.

So, here we have a company open sourcing its products, through a collaboration with Red Hat. As well as confirming the latter's central position in the open source ecosystem, it also boost Eclipse and Java while it's at it.

That's a pretty powerful payload from one announcement, and testimony to the multiplicative effects of open source, which tends to empower everything within its range, unlike proprietary moves, which are generally subtractive, damaging other offerings.

EU in SL?

Apparently:

The European Union is looking into entering the virtual world and opening up an office in Second Life - an increasingly popular internet-based virtual world - which the Swedish government and the French presidential candidates have already entered.

Some would say the European Union's grasp of reality is already pretty tenuous.... (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

Opening up the Patent Process

Here's a mildly hopeful development:

The government is about to start opening up the process of reviewing patents to the modern font of wisdom: the Internet.

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency's examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.

Whether it improves the quality of patents awarded remains to be seen, but at least they're trying. It also shows how the idea of openness is spreading into even the bastions of the knowledge establishment.

Just Plain Wrong

I've noticed an interesting new meme creeping into UK politics. When the Government is presented with a statement or facts that it doesn't like, it doesn't condescend to refute them; instead it simply states they are "just plain wrong". End of argument, end of story, go away little person.

Call is the anti-open meme.

Brussels Declaration Stinks

It's always a sign that you're winning when the opposition start getting seriously desperate in their tactics. Here's a fine example:

Many declarations have been made about the need for particular business models in the STM information community. STM publishers have largely remained silent on these matters as the majority are agnostic about business models: what works, works. However, despite very significant investment and a massive rise in access to scientific information, our community continues to be beset by propositions and manifestos on the practice of scholarly publishing. Unfortunately the measures proposed have largely not been investigated or tested in any evidence-based manner that would pass rigorous peer review. In the light of this, and based on over ten years experience in the economics of online publishing and our longstanding collaboration with researchers and librarians, we have decided to publish a declaration of principles which we believe to be self-evident.

This so-called Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing is supported by the usual suspects - hello, Elsevier - but it's disappointing to see major university presses like those from Cambridge and Oxford putting their names to this arrant, self-interested nonsense.

The emphasis is squarely on business models, and gives little space to larger issues like the public's right to see the research that they pay for, or of researchers' rights to maximise the credit they gain from their work. Instead it consists of risible claims such as:

Publishers launch, sustain, promote and develop journals for the benefit of the scholarly community

Yeah, right, I can just imagine all the fraught meetings where publishers with furrowed brows mull over ways they can help the scholarly community. Yeah, I bet every waking thought is devoted to the subject. That's why the prices of journals have been rising at multiples of inflation for many years; that's why libraries are being bullied into buying group subscriptions, including titles they're not interested in. Purely for the benefit of the scholarly community, you understand.

The Empire Strikes Back

One of the benefits of open courseware is that it allows developing countries to access high-quality teaching materials for no cost. But in a move heavy with symbolism, India's National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning is now offering course materials itself. Great to see openness becoming bidirectional. (Via Open Access News.)

FDA Denies Evolution

Its seems the US FDA, like the equivalent European authorities before it, has decided to ignore evolution:

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.

The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.

The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals would probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotics, as has happened with other drugs. Those super-microbes could then spread to people.

Open Science Enters the Mainstream

Interesting not so much for what it says, but that it's Business Week that's saying it:

Just as the Enlightenment ushered in a new organizational model of knowledge creation, the same technological and demographic forces that are turning the Web into a massive collaborative work space are helping to transform the realm of science into an increasingly open and collaborative endeavor. Yes, the Web was, in fact, invented as a way for scientists to share information. But advances in storage, bandwidth, software, and computing power are pushing collaboration to the next level. Call it Science 2.0.

Mani Pulite Go Virtual

This probably won't mean much if you haven't followed Italian political history for the last 15 years, but I was intrigued to learn that Antonio di Pietro, perhaps the most famous of the prosecutors during the great Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) campaign to rid Italy of the endemic political corruption by the mafia, has gone Second life - and even blogged about it:

I have purchased an island and planted the banner of Italia dei Valori. On the initiative of Italia dei Valori, the island will soon be fitted out with offices, conference centres and information points.

In the future, visitors to the island will be welcomed by Italia dei Valori personnel through their virtual representation. The island will also be used for internal meetings and for meeting with journalists.

Microsoft Patents "Lack Significant Innovation"

Now here's an interesting little cross-cultural spat:

The European Commission has warned Microsoft that it could impose further penalties in its ongoing antitrust case against the software giant.

The EC claimed on Thursday that Microsoft wants to charge too much for interoperability protocol licences that enable third-party software vendors to develop software compatible with Windows servers. In a damning statemement, the EC claimed that the protocols "lack significant innovation", even though Microsoft has been awarded patents on much of the technology in question.

And what's Microsoft's response? Why, to go running to Mummy:

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith responded that other government agencies had found "considerable innovation" in Microsoft's protocol technology.

"US and European patent offices have awarded Microsoft more than 36 patents for the technology in these protocols, which took millions of dollars to develop, and another 37 patents are pending, so it's hard to see how the Commission can argue that even patented innovation must be made available for free," said Smith in a statement.

Hey Brad, you don't think this might be because the patent system in many countries is horribly broken, and regularly awards patents for obvious, trivial and otherwise inappropriate ideas? Just a thought.

Manage Real Money in Second Life

Why does this worry me?

Denmark’s Saxo Bank plans to offer Second Life residents the ability to manage their real-life financial portfolios from within the virtual world, and may eventually create a market to trade the Linden dollar against real-world currencies.

Googling World of Warcraft

WoW - or rather World of Warcraft - real search for a virtual world:

The Armory is a vast searchable database of information for World of Warcraft - taken straight from the real servers, updated in real time, and presented in a user-friendly interface. Since the Armory pulls its data from the actual game servers, it is the most comprehensive and up-to-date database on the characters, arena teams, and guilds of World of Warcraft in existence.

(Via Clickable Culture.)

BBC Gets Some Things - Like YouTube

Elsewhere, I've criticised the BBC for its all-too eager embrace of Windows DRM. But in some respects, some of its top people understand the new dynamics:

The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube, the web's most popular video sharing website, owned by Google.

...

Mr Highfield said the BBC would not be hunting down all BBC-copyrighted clips already uploaded by YouTube members - although it would reserve the right to swap poor quality clips with the real thing, or to have content removed that infringed other people's copyright, like sport, or that had been edited or altered in a way that would damage the BBC's brand.

"We don't want to be overzealous, a lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us," he said.