Well, that's what it says here:The concept involves comedians driving around Europe and users (viewers) can decide where they go and what they do. In Where Are the Joneses comdedians drive around, trying to find their fictional siblings.
Users have a full arsenal of ‘open tools’ to engage with the site and campaign: a wiki to influence the script and also a twitter integration.
This is the best introduction to virtual worlds so far: comprehensive, link-rich, and well written. Do read it if you can - it's time well spent.
Good point here about a big problem with the apparently welcome Peer to Patent project:Helping patent trolls with their QA is like going through bandits' ammunition and throwing out the dud rounds for them before they try to rob you.
And sensible advice, too:
If you have Prior Art, print it out and put it in your safe deposit box. Make sure that the source is verifiable, but don't tell anyone what the source is. Don't say it's from "the June 1997 login;" or "comp.sources.unix in May 1986". If you want, borrow a tactic from Tim O'Reilly and tell people that you have prior art for a certain patent, but don't give attackers any more information than you have to.
More generally, perhaps the free software community should set up a shadow scheme that tracks all of these patent applications, and works to find prior art, which it then stores safely against a rainy day.
Following the recent launch of Fedora 7, I spoke to Max Spevack, Fedora Project Leader, about how Fedora and Red Hat work together, and what lies ahead.
Glyn Moody: What's the nature of the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat?
Max Spevack: It's very symbiotic, obviously, because Red Hat offers significant financial support to the Fedora Project. I really believe that the Fedora Project represents sort of the soul of Red Hat. It's the place where, as a company, Red Hat devotes its effort to truly working with and embracing the larger open source community, and giving power and access to the distribution, to the engineers and programmers and contributors who are not a part of Red Hat.
At the same time, Fedora represents, from an engineer's perspective, an upstream for all of Red Hat's other products; like, for example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is built about every two years. Fedora is a distribution that we try to release twice a year, and we try to always focus on the things that are important to the larger Fedora community, while at the same time allowing Fedora to be a place where things that Red Hat engineering groups are working on can also make their way into the distribution.
Glyn Moody: What about the day-to-day dynamics: to what extent do people at Red Hat say, "Gosh, we'd really like this particular feature at some point. How about working on it?"
Max Spevack: When we try to sit down and plan out what a version of Fedora is going to look like and start to make a feature list of thing we'd like to get into any given version of Fedora, one of the groups that we go and talk to is the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product guys and engineering managers. And we say, "Well, what are the things that your teams are working on that you would like us to include in, say, Fedora 6 or Fedora 7 or Fedora 8, based on when you think certain things are going to be ready?" And so that is one person that we talk to.
And then, at the same time, we go out to the larger Fedora community and we say, on our public mailing lists and on our wiki: "We want to try to put together a release of Fedora that'll come out five months from now. What are some of the features that you guys think are important? Or what are some of the places that you think need more work?"
And we get that whole list, and then we can kind of build out and say, "Well, all right, here's the thing that Red Hat wanted to work on. And, well, Red Hat's got five guys working on it, so that's taken care of. The community was asking for X, Y, and Z. And, well, there's a programmer in the community who has volunteered to lead the development of that feature, and so it's going to happen."
"This other feature is something that everyone thinks would be great, but there isn't really anyone with free time to work on it, so let's go and talk to the Red Hat management and see if we can maybe find an engineer who can get some of their time to spend working on that feature."
Glyn Moody: Is there ever a tension between what Red Hat wants to do and what your community wants to do.
Max Spevack: Well, it comes in cycles. I would say 90 percent of what's in Fedora 7 is all stuff that's really, really important to the Fedora community. Part of the reason why that was possible for Fedora 7 is because RHEL 5 was just released a few months ago, and so there isn't really any new RHEL kind of stuff ready to go yet, because that's a two-year release cycle.
If you back up, though, six months, to when we were finishing Fedora Core 6, Fedora Core 6 was the last version of Fedora that was coming out before a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. RHEL 5 was based very significantly off of the Fedora Core 6 upstream, and so if you look at the development cycle leading up to Fedora Core 6, I would say that it was slightly less community-focused and slightly more Red Hat-focused.
And so the give and take happens based on where we are in relation to a Fedora Release and a RHEL release, and how their two-year release cycle and our six-month release cycle overlap with each other.
Glyn Moody: What kind of developer wants to work on Fedora rather than on one of the other distros?
Max Spevack: What Fedora offers that I think a lot of other folks don't at this point in time is the complete transparency into the entire build process. What I mean by that is everything, from you writing your code and checking it into CVS, through your code going into the build system and producing an RPM, to a compose tool taking a whole collection of RPMs from various repositories and turning those into an actual CD or installable tree - every step along that path is completely free software, is completely external and community-based. And anybody in the world can use that same toolchain, or work from it, to build a version of Fedora that is completely customized to their environment.
[For] the older versions of Fedora, the Fedora code was in two different repository. One repository was the one that was owned by the community, and the other repository was the one that was owned by Red Hat, and we didn't like that. And we have blown that whole idea up, in Fedora 7, and turned it all into one community-owned repository, which is what has allowed us to then also make sure that all the tools that build the distribution out of that repository are also completely community-owned.
Glyn Moody: It sounds to me, to paraphrase a little bit what you're saying, that you've moved towards the Debian model and taken, in many ways, the best bits of their approach. But you have the advantage, which perhaps they don't have, in having a company with reasonably deep pockets behind you, as well. Would that be fair?
Max Spevack: I think that is a pretty good way to look at it. Certainly, having Red Hat as a big corporate sponsor of what we do with Fedora doesn't hurt, because it helps us make sure we have the ability to hire the best contributors to Fedora every now and then.
Over the last year or so, we've hired probably three or four of some of the leading community contributors to Fedora, and we've said, "By the way, we've noticed that over the last two years you've spent 30 hours a week - somehow, in your spare time, when you're not doing your actual job - working on Fedora. What do you say we give you a paycheck and let you spend 50 hours a week doing it just for us?”
Glyn Moody: Looking forward a little, how do you see Fedora evolving?
Max Spevack: There's a few things that I see happening in the next nine or 12 months. All of the change that we have put in the last six months into the Fedora is going to need a little time to let the dust settle on it. As people start to use some of these tools more frequently, there's going to be complaints, and we're going to make them better.
I think there is a lot of potential in the live CD arena. One of the things we have got working for Fedora 7 is the live USB key, where you can put the whole distro on a USB key and boot it up. I think that there's a lot of work to be done there to make that feel a little more like a full product - making sure that the extra space on that USB key can be encrypted, making it really easy to upgrade.
Glyn Moody: What about things like support? Outside Red Hat, what structures do you have in place for directly supporting your users?
Max Spevack: The main way of getting support for Fedora is the Fedora community. It's the Fedora mailing lists; FedoraForum.org, which gets tons and tons of traffic; Fedora IRC. It's a very grassroots kind of support structure right now.
I think there is definitely a space there to offer a more formalized support of Fedora. And when I make my own personal list of goals that aren't engineering related, for Fedora, that's certainly one of the ones that I have been spending a lot of time thinking about. Is there a way that we - meaning Red Hat or the Fedora Project - can offer a more formal kind of support around Fedora? Even if it's like five bucks a month, is there a way we can see if there's people out there who would like a more formalized support of Fedora? And if there's a market for it, we can figure out a way to offer it.
Important news:The bottom line: I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues. Why and what are explained in the extended entry below.
Good luck, Larry: whatever you do in your new field, I'm sure it's going to be pretty damn good.
This will end in tears:Although the ability to conduct a home DNA test and get the results with relative ease are tempting, the thought of sitting across the kitchen table with a distant cousin-husband may be little too weird to down with the morning coffee.
Signs of the times:As explained on BuzzMonitor's "about page" -- "Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple platforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it."
The World Bank contracted with the software firm Development Seed to build the new program, with additional input from the World Resources Institute. Development Seed relied on the popular open-source content management system Drupal for its core code. Last week the bank announced that version 1.0 of BuzzMonitor was available for free download to all comers, and suggested that it was particularly applicable to nonprofit organizations interested in monitoring what the Web was saying about them.
Sounds cool:James Boyle ... announced that a new project, called “CC Learn”, has been launched, to work on lobbying all the open education projects to use open licenses, and to be interoperable and reusable. Hewlett has now funded this project, and a Director has been hired. I’ve got some inside information I can’t disclose (sigh) but I can say that there are really big things happening inside CC Learn and that they’re getting a huge amount of traction...
News that Granger is abandoning the sinking ship that is NHS Connecting for Health is hardly a surprise. The £12 billion project was doomed before it started, because it tried to apply an unworkable, 20th-century, closed-source software methodology - one that not only does not scale, but that actually gets worse the bigger the project (hello, Fred Brooks).
The only way to address these kind of mammoth undertakings is by using a lightly-coupled, decentralised approach. And that means open standards at a minimum, and ideally full-bore open source. The equation is simple: the more openness, the greater the scope for componentisation, the greater the flexibility - and the greater the chance the damn thing will actually work.
Sadly, NHS Connecting for Health will go down in history as the perfect demonstration of this fact. - Sadly, because I shall be paying for some of it.
I seem to be one of the few people on this planet unaffected by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field; indeed, I find the Fake Steve Jobs more, er, authentic. Desptie this, I have to confess I much enjoyed this Jobs profile by John Heilemann.
But in all its shrewd and witty analysis, it seems to miss the key thing about the iPhone: that it is not just expensive, but obscenely expensive in a world where many people earn less than $500 per year. In other words, the iPhone - rather like Jobs - is supremely narcissistic.
Perhaps that why Apple's products stick in my craw: with their self-assigned exclusivity and implicit sense of superiority, they are the antithesis of free software, which is inclusive and fundamentally egalitarian. The fact that MacOS is built on free software only adds insult to injury.
Another thought-provoking post from Jamais Cascio:In fact, the Book & Seed Vault may prove to function better as a model and instructions than as an actual vault. We'd need more than one site for any kind of disaster recovery system to be truly useful; we have to assume that many of the eventual locations will be unavailable, so the more the better. The right scale for something like this is probably the "community" -- a bit bigger than your neighborhood, but smaller than a city.
Think of it as open-source disaster prep -- a site and set of resources offering detailed instructions (which can be updated by the users, of course) showing you how to build a recovery vault for your community. What are the physical specs for the facility? Which seeds are appropriate for your regional climate? What are the key instruction manuals and guidebooks to include? How best to store and protect the vault's contents? I could see this done as a wiki and mailing list, probably with some YouTube videos demonstrating various techniques for proper seed and book storage.
As I've noted before, if WIPO is to avoiding turning into a huge ball on chain on the international community, it needs to change; specifically, it needs to rethink its attitude to intellectual monopolies, and embrace the larger idea of the intellectual commons.
Amazingly, there are some small signs that this is beginning to happen:Members of a World Intellectual Property Organization committee addressing proposals for a WIPO Development Agenda last week potentially rewrote the UN body’s mandate, pending approval.
Negotiators concluded a weeklong meeting with agreements on a wide range of proposals for new development-related activities - some hard to imagine for WIPO two years ago - and a recommendation to set up a new committee to implement the proposals.
“This is a major achievement,” said a participating official. “It’s a complete overhaul of the WIPO concept, broadening it to reflect society’s growing concern with ownership of technologies and knowledge, and its effects for the future, both in developed and developing countries.”
However, there is a rearguard action being fought against this by - guess who? - yup, the US:The United States, meanwhile, moved quickly to emphasise the inclusion of IP protection and that the recommendations are within the existing WIPO mandate. It also sought to tie the outcome to its hope for a renewed effort at harmonising national patent laws.
Fortunately, developing countries and emerging powers like Brazil are becoming sufficiently strong and self-confident to fight this kind of recidivism.
Interesting:Now's not the time to mince words, so let me just say it... we blew it.
Great piece by Mr Julian "Tiny Life" Dibbell about the gold farmers of China, and beyond:There was a lot of shouting involved, at least in the beginning. Besides the orders called out by the supervisors, there were loud attempts at coordination among the team members themselves. “But then we developed a sense of cooperation, and the shouting grew rarer,” Min said. “By the end, nothing needed to be said.” They moved through the dungeons in silent harmony, 40 intricately interdependent players, each the master of his part. For every fight in every dungeon, the hunters knew without asking exactly when to shoot and at what range; the priests had their healing spells down to a rhythm; wizards knew just how much damage to put in their combat spells.
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez may be barking or worse (his totalitarian tendencies keep peeping out), but he's certainly innovative:The Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez announced the launch of their "Bolivarian Computers" last week, consisting of four different models produced in Venezuela with Chinese technology. The new computers will run the open-source Linux operating system and will first be used inside the government "missions" and state companies and institutions but eventually are expected to be sold across Venezuela and Latin America.
This will make Venezuela an interesting laboratory for the wider sale and use of GNU/Linux-based PCs within a country. (Via Slashdot.)
Here's a dangerous development:“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.”
Cotton is spearheading the new effort, christened the “Campaign to Protect America,” as chairman of the newly formed Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy.
This is clearly total poppycock: the figures for the supposed losses due to "piracy" are hugely exaggerated and the result of wishful thinking - as if every copy represents a lost sale, which is patently false, even for analogue goods, never mind digital ones. Moreover, comparing the theoretical loss of revenue because of copying with the very real loss and pain that a burglary causes is a total insult to the victims of the latter.
It's also worth noting that in the "Campaign to Protect America" we have an apotheosis of weasel words: protect it from *what*? I think we need a campaign to protect everyone from the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, who are clearly a bunch of sad and selfish people if they can come out with statements like the one above.
Apparently:Although the idea of discussions on a Treaty on Access to Knowledge appears to have strong support in the African Group, Asian Group and the Group of Friends of Development, Group B is mounting a full court press against even the mere mention of “access to knowledge” in the recommendations of this PCDA as evidenced by the bracketed text.
Paragraph 10 on complementary mechanisms of stimulating innovation reads:
10. [To exchange experiences on open collaborative projects for the development of public goods such as the Human Genome Project and Open Source Softwared (Manalo 38)]
It is quite unfortunate that the intransigence of rich Member States and their allies is hindering true progress at WIPO whether it be on the over-arching principle of a Treaty on Access to Knowledge or examining open collaborative projects.
Dangerous stuff this knowledge: got to keep it locked down. (Via James Love.)
Update: Some movement on the first matter, it seems.
Who needs patent trolls when you've got patent wimps?
If broad patent reform is a lost cause - as seems probable - Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Zafirovski would be wise to spend their energies bulking up their in-house intellectual property teams and hiring good U.S. lawyers.
...
The Canadians may find that it's easier, and significantly cheaper, to swallow their pride and work within the U.S. system, rather than betting on its demise.
Oh, yeah, right: just like it would have been far more sensible for Richard Stallman just to have accepted the inevitability of closed-source, proprietary software back in the 1980s.
Idiotic patents - and indeed the entire, broken US patent system - have never been under such pressure as now; more and more people are realising that patents do not promote innovation, but actually act as a brake on it. As ideas of openness spread, the present system of intellectual monopolies will gradually be exposed for the sham it is. Any suggestion that people should "swallow their pride" is misguided in the extreme.
I like OpenDemocracy. It has some interesting articles, very often on areas about which I know little. But I do have to wonder, sometimes, whether the minds there are quite as open to new ideas as they seem to be:In the example of openDemocracy's articles being available on a profusion of other publications, the choice for a reader between this site or that site tends to the meaningless - indeed, it is often mediated by a search algorithm. What is the significance of reading about the Serbian election on ISN rather than openDemocracy? Is there a defining choice there? So here is the paradox for communities of the digital commons: to build a community is to offer an escape from the arbitrary; but to release material to the digital commons is to add to the conditions of the arbitrary.
Well, no, actually. Since:Today almost all of openDemocracy's articles are licensed under Creative Commons (CC) "advertising" licenses. This is a modification of the ordinary, default, copyright position. Under the license we use, the author and the publication allow reproduction of the article as long as: the receiving publication is making non-commercial use of the material; that it is attributing the material to the original publication; and that it is not making any modifications of the material.
Assuming the licence is respected, this means that there is still a link back to this "community"; indeed, it will drive more people to that "community". Fortunately, OpenDemocracy has a voice of reason in its midst:Becky Hogge, openDemocracy columnist and head of the Open Rights Group, put to me the orthodox position from the Commons (the diffuse movement that sees intellectual property as inappropriate to the digital age). This is just how things ought to work, she claimed: the information gets greater coverage, and, once created, that is all that counts.
Yup: go, Becky, go.
WIPO is at it again, trying to bring in a big, bad broadcasting treaty:In 2006, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was inches away from finalizing a treaty that would have crippled Internet broadcasting. Called the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty, it gave traditional broadcasters and cablecasters new copyright-like rights over their transmissions, including control over Internet retransmissions of broadcasts and cablecasts. Creating these rights is not only unnecessary to incentivize new forms of online communication such as podcasting and videoblogging, but will also inhibit the growth of these new citizen-generated media.
...
In an astounding turnaround last year, WIPO Member States told the WIPO Secretariat to rewrite the Treaty and make it focus more narrowly on signal protection. Thanks to the efforts of technology companies, independent podcasters, and activists, the delegates agreed that the treaty shouldn't be premised on creating new rights, which would lead to more litigation that would stifle new technologies and harm citizen-run Web broadcasting activities. Instead, any new treaty should be based on protection of broadcast signals. This was a huge victory for podcasters, their fans, and innovative business that are pushing video on the web.
Then, in May of this year, WIPO released a "new" draft of the treaty that looks disconcertingly like the old one. Sure, there was some tinkering around the edges, but the Treaty still gives broadcasters and cablecasters new exclusive rights, and it still covers transmission over the Internet. Worse, it includes an expanded technological protection measure provision that could ban any unauthorised "device or system capable of decrypting an encrypted broadcast" - which means all modern personal computers!
Don't let them get away with it: sign the Dear WIPO petition.
Business open source just keeps on getting stronger:Openads, a supplier of free software used by Web sites to manage online ad campaigns, has received $5 million in initial funding, bolstering it to prepare for increasing competition globally with Google Inc.
...
London-based Openads was founded as a grassroots, open-source software development project in 1999. It has signed up 25,000 Web site publishers in more than 100 countries and 20 languages.
Photosynth is undoubtedly amazing. But this video indicates that it's even more powerful than previously suggested; specifically, it talks about using public pictures on Flickr to create not only detailed, three-dimensional images of the world, but also to use any tags they have to provide transferable metadata. In other words, it's a product of collective intelligence, that builds on the work of the many.
That's all well and good, but I do wonder whether Microsoft has given any thought to its responsibility to the commons it is making free with here....
Interesting:The SELF Platform aims to be the central platform with high quality educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards. It is based on world-class Free Software technologies that permit both reading and publishing free materials, and is driven by a worldwide community.
The SELF Platform will have two main functions. It will be simultaneously a knowledge base and a collaborative production facility: On the one hand, it will provide information, educational and training materials that can be presented in different languages and forms: from course texts, presentations, e-learning programmes and platforms to tutor software, e-books, instructional and educational videos and manuals. On the other hand, it will offer a platform for the evaluation, adaptation, creation and translation of these materials. The production process of such materials will be based on the organisational model of Wikipedia.
(Via Creative Commons.)
It was early June in 1987 when Richard Stallman announced the release of the GNU C compiler version 1.0.
Interesting historical background from Michael Tiemann. It all seems so long ago, now....
Blender has always been one of my favourite open source projects, not least for the inspirational way money was raised by the common folk to make proprietary code open. Similarly, the open film "Elephant's Dream" was a good example of innovative thinking.
Now they're at it again:As a follow-up to the successful project Orange's "Elephants Dream", the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a couple of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam on completing a short 3D animation movie.
...
As a second open project, the Blender Foundation and Crystal Space community are going to cooperate on organizing an Open Game. This will become possible thanks to the support by the NLGD Conference, the "Nederlandse Game Dagen", the annual conference for the Netherlands game industry.
This project will have as a main target to validate open source for creating professional quality 3d games, with Blender being used as creation and protyping tool and Crystal Space as engine and delivery platform.
All important stuff, because it's taking open source into new areas.
At first sight, news that Apple has released a Windows version of its Safari browser seems fairly ho-hum: it is hardly going to make any more of a dent in Internet Explorer's market share than Firefox already is. Nor is it truly cross-platform like Firefox. It seems likely that the move is to bolster Safari as a platform, since it will form a key part of the imminent iPhone.
But in fact this represents a win for both open standards and open source. Safari is based on Konqueror's KHTML engine; as such, it will help push Web standards, which in turn can only make things easier for Firefox. And anything that helps buck up the browser market, which is beginning to flag again after the excitement of Firefox's earlier irruption, is certainly welcome.
When I was writing Digital Code of Life, I sought to be scrupulously fair to Craig Venter, who was often demonised for his commercial approach to science. Ind fact, it seemed to me he had often gone out of his way to make the results of his work available.
So it's with some sadness that I note that the "Bad Boy of Genomics" epithet seems justified in this more recent case:
A research institute has applied for a patent on what could be the first largely artificial organism. And people should be alarmed, claims an advocacy group that is trying to shoot down the bid.
...
The artificial organism, a mere microbe, is the brainchild of researchers at the Rockville, Md.-based J. Craig Venter Institute. The organization is named for its founder and CEO, the geneticist who led the private sector race to map the human genome in the late 1990s.
The researchers filed their patent claim on the artificial organism and on its genome. Genetically modified life forms have been patented before; but this is the first patent claim for a creature whose genome might be created chemically from scratch, Mooney said.
This is problematic on a number of levels. For a start, it shouldn't be possible to patent DNA, since it is not an invention. Simply combining existing sequences is not an invention either. There is also the worry that what is being created here is the first genomic operating system: locking others out with patents maans repeating all the mistakes that have been made in some jurisdictions by allowing the patenting of conventional software.
Of course, open genomics is not entirely unproblematic:A new era of genetic testing would leave those who test positive for common serious illnesses open to discrimination from insurers, academics are warning.
A catalogue of genetic markers for common illnesses have been revealed in recent weeks after a breakthrough in genomic scanning techniques. Scientists expect genetic testing for people's risk of diseases such as breast cancer, heart disease and bi-polar disorders to follow.
I live on the Net - well, almost. I certainly like to think of myself as a citizen of that strange, disembodied place. And as such, I welcome ways of thinking about the landscape I inhabit virtually.
And along comes Akamai, one of the best-kept secrets in that land, with something splendid: 20% of the world's Internet traffic is delivered over the Akamai platform. We combine this global scope with constant data collection to construct an accurate and comprehensive picture of what's happening on the Internet. Bookmark this page to check the world's online behavior at any given moment -- How fast is data moving? Where's the most congestion? What events are causing spikes in Web activity?
Previously, only Akamai and our customers had access to this information. Now we're opening that window into the online universe.
Don't miss the wonderful real-time monitor, which shows you things like traffic, latency and attacks in your area. Fascinating.
Here's an important study, called The Power of Information, that is actually all about the power of *open* information:This is an unusual review in that it is a story of opportunities rather than problems. It takes a practical look at the use and development of citizen and state-generated information in the UK. For example, information produced by the government (often referred to as ‘public sector information’) includes maps, heart surgery mortality statistics and timetables, while information from citizens includes advice, product reviews or even recipes.
Public sector information underpins a growing part of the economy and the amount is increasing at a dramatic pace. The driver is the emergence of online tools that allow people to use, re-use and create information in new ways. Public sector information does not, however, cover personal information, such as credit record and medical histories. This is the first review to explore the role of government in helping to maximise the benefits for citizens from this new pattern of information creation and use.
When enough people can collect, re-use and distribute public sector information, people organise around it in new ways, creating new enterprises and new communities. In each case, these are designed to offer new ways of solving old problems. In the past, only large companies, government or universities were able to re-use and recombine information. Now, the ability to mix and ‘mash’ data is far more widely available.
It's important not just for its mass of detail, and sensible conclusions, but because
Cabinet Office Minister Hilary Armstrong commissioned the report to ensure Government acted as a leader in understanding changes in communication and information technology.
The accompanying press release even describes it as "eagerly awaited". Hm, we shall see how eagerly from the Government's response....
I've written about open courseware a few times, particularly the big names. But there's plenty of other good courses out there, freely available. Finding them can be tricky, but here's a useful resource for winkling out a few of them:
The 100 open courseware sources listed below are freely available for anyone to use, whether you're a student, an instructor, or a self-learner. The courses are categorized by subject and listed alphabetically within that subject.
Now, I wonder where that lot over there could have got these ideas:A fully functioning intellectual property system is an essential factor for the sustainable development of the global economy through promoting innovation. We recognize the importance of streamlining and harmonizing the international patent system in order to improve the acquisition and protection of patent rights world-wide.
35. The benefits of innovation for economic growth and development are increasingly threatened by infringements of intellectual property rights worldwide.
...
36. We commit to strengthen cooperation in this critical area among the G8 and other countries, particularly the major emerging economies, as well as competent international organizations, notably the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), WTO, the World Customs Organization (WCO), Interpol, the World Health Organization (WHO), the OECD, APEC, and the Council of Europe. We invite these organizations to reinforce their action in this field.
Sigh. Clearly still lots of work needed here, chaps....
Responsible citizen that I am, I signed an e-petition asking that nice Mr Blair to support ODF:Government documents must be available for tens if not hundreds of years. Currently much electronic documentation is stored in proprietary formats, such as Microsoft's .doc format. In order to allow future generations access to these documents it is imperative that they be in a fully documented standard. Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) is now the international document standard and as such should be supported by the Government.
And here's what he (or just possibly one of his minions) said :The UK Government champions open standards and interoperability through its e Government Interoperability Framework (eGIF). Where possible the Government only uses products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.
Interoperability and open standards also support the sustainability of digital information beyond any single generation of technology. New techniques for digital preservation being developed by The National Archives require the periodic transformation of digital information to new formats as technology changes. Such transformations will be simplified by the adoption of open standards.
No single format provides a universal solution for all types of digital information, and The National Archives therefore actively monitors and evaluates a wide range of existing and emerging formats (including OpenDocument Format). A policy on digital preservation, which includes guidance on the selection of sustainable data formats based on open standards, is being formulated by The National Archives, and will help define the standards for desktop systems. The National Archives technical registry 'PRONOM' (new window) supports this through the provision of key information about the most widely-used formats.
So there we have it.
Now here's an interesting thing:Developing the Future is an annual report examining the impact of the software development industry on the UK economy, from both a local and global perspective. The report is a collaborative work with partners from the IT industry and academia. By exploring emerging trends, the report stimulates debate between stakeholders and calls for positive action to support the UK software industry.
It's interesting because:The second edition of Developing the Future not only comprises original research commissioned by Microsoft on these fascinating themes, it also includes independent articles from luminaries such as Will Hutton, outlining unique perspectives on the massive change now taking place in Britain.
You'd pretty much expect this to be standard Microsoft propaganda, along the lines of its risible TCO "studies"; but you'd be wrong. Developing the Future is an extremely interesting look at major issues affecting UK software development in the near-future. It is one of the best-presented digital documents I have seen in a while, with excellent photography, and a nice clean design.
The contents aren't bad either: for the most part, the writing is neutral and fair. Only at one point is it clear that there is a canker at the heart of this rose, when the section on innovation starts wittering on about that mythical beast of "intellectual property", and comes out with this extraordinary self-evident truth:The lack of intellectual property protection for algorithms, software or enhanced business processes are barriers to innovation.
Creating intellectual monopolies in something as fundamental as algorithms is about as sensible as handing out government monopolies on air and water. It's sad to see an otherwise forward-looking document stuck so firmly in the past, instead of promoting innovation and prosperity in the "Knowledge Economy" through the liberation of its wondrous, non-rivalrous, raw stuff: ideas.
One of the central questions around openness is: Who pays? If stuff is freely available, where does the money come from?
In fact, the answer is simple: if the free stuff is valuable to certain people, those people will pay for it, even if it is free. Why? Because if they don't, it will disappear, and they will have lost something they valued.
But what about the free riders? Well, what about them? If you are getting what you want for a price that you consider fair, what's your problem? In fact, it's the free riders who have the problem: after all, who wants to look in the mirror and see a parasite?
Here's an organisation that gets this:But why do our readers give so much to access content that is ‘free to the world’? They value our independence enormously and respect us for our transparency and honesty in requesting funds and the day to day operations of our organisation and they are realising enough real value from our free content that they want to ensure our business is sustainable.
(Via Open Access News.)
Well, I don't want to say I told you so, but I told you so:Microsoft Corp. and LG Electronics (LGE) today announced that they have entered into a patent cross-license agreement to further the development of the companies' current and future product lines. Microsoft has focused on patent agreements in the recent past to develop a best-practices model for protecting intellectual property (IP) and respecting the IP rights of others, as well as building bridges with an array of industry leaders, including consumer electronics, telecommunications and computer hardware providers.
This is partly why we desperately need to sort out the mess that is intellectual property, especially in the US.
I was going to write about Cool Earth before, but the site went down. This is both good and bad news. Bad, because it suggests a lack of planning on the part of the people behind the site, and good because it was caused by the unexpectedly large influx of people wanting to visit and participate.
That's a particularly good sign because the whole idea is about letting ordinary people make a difference to global warming by helping to keep carbon sequestered in the rainforests. Agreed, this is not as good as actually taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but given all the collateral benefits of preserving rainforests, it would be churlish to complain.
Moreover, Cool Earth seems to be recognise that preserving the rainforests is not about surrounding it with barbed wire to keep the baddies out: the local people - the goodies - must not only be taken into account, but actively involved so that they feel it is in their interests to protect rather than exploit by cutting down. Sustainability of this kind is hard to do well, but better than the current alternative.
The other key thing about Cool Earth is that it allows people who chip in to monitor their "bit" of the rainforest using Google Earth (and what a godsend that is in this context). This is absolutely crucial - not so much in terms of checking whether somebody's about to cut it down, since by then it's probably too late, but in allowing donors to feel connected. Without that feedback loop, you don't generate engagement, and the whole thing will just fizzle out.
I've no idea whether Cool Earth will make a difference or turn out to be a total flop. But it's an idea worth supporting (I'm certainly going to sign up for a few trees) - for everyone's sake.
Bizarre:The FSF should realize by now their influence is waning. Look at the plethora of alternative licenses. Now they’re really hamstringing themselves with Version 3, taking the license further and further from where industry developers are heading. Developers are still the heart of the open source community, and their support is integral to success. Are provisions concerned with patents and digital rights management really what developers want to see addressed? Do they care when Eben Moglen says "the time is rapidly approaching when the GPL is capable of leveling the monopolist to the ground?" Developers demand more freedom, not less. They want clear, practical leadership, not bombast.
Er, well, no, actually: more and more companies are adopting the GNU GPL; indeed, many that started out with dual licensing end up using just the GPL (for the full half-hour argument see hier.) The plethora of other licences represent background noise in comparison.
What's interesting is how, after years in the wilderness, RMS, the GNU GPL and the FSF all find themselves at the centre of so many debates around freedom and openness - not because they've moved there, but because the debates have moved to them.
Hm, nice:From my personal experience with the nearly complete lack of interest within big government bureaucracies for Paretian thinking that is far more explanatory, actionable, and predictive than what they currently produce, I don't think we will unless we develop it outside the traditional public organizations. In that sense, we will all need to become global guerrillas.
Paretian thinking is essentially open, distributed thinking....
OK, this might not seem much, but the fact that it's being discussed at all is something of an achievement:The proposal for a new five-paragraph Article 29bis to the WTO’s 1994 TRIPS agreement, aims at protecting biodiversity particularly found in developing countries by making it mandatory for patent applicants to reveal where they obtained the biological resources or traditional knowledge in question, and to ensure fair and equitable benefit-sharing of commercial uses, as well as legal requirements in the providing country for prior informed consent to access the resources.
Now we need to move further by turning the WTO into a forum not about protecting intellectual monopolies, but about balancing them with various kinds of intellectual commons.
Open Cities Toronto 2007 is a weekend-long web of conversation and celebration that asks: how do we collaboratively add more open to the urban landscape we share? What happens when people working on open source, public space, open content, mash up art, and open business work together? How do we make Toronto a magnet for people playing with the open meme?
Sounds my sort of place. (Via Boing Boing.)
Well, sort of:Although DRM has failed to accomplish its main goal (stopping piracy), it has been successful at bringing people from every corner of the globe together... in their hatred for DRM. Loathing for the technology has reached such a pitch that consumers around the world no longer whine only in the privacy of homes and apartments. They're taking to the streets, organizing marches and rallies and teaching events to educate the unenlightened. The newest campaign is in South America, where the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade (CTS) at a Brazilian law school has joined forces with consumer group Idec to mount an anti-DRM campaign of its own.
Heavy but important stuff here:some resources should be part of the commons because their physical attributes mean that common ownership and democratic allocation will be more sustainable, just and efficient than private ownership and market allocation. Information, which will play a critical role in solving the serious ecological problems we currently face, is one of those resources. So too are most ecosystem services. The fact is that conventional markets based on private property rights do not work to solve the macro-allocation problem, which in recent decades has become far more important than the micro-allocation problem. Solving this problem instead requires a system based on common property rights and democratic decision making concerning the desirable provision of ecosystem services.
Interesting bit of shin-kicking here:Web sites running Microsoft Corp.'s Web server software are twice as likely to be hosting malicious code as other Web sites, according to research from Google Inc.
Last month, Google's Anti-Malware team looked at 70,000 domains that were either distributing malware or hosting attack code. "Compared to our sample of servers across the Internet, Microsoft IIS features twice as often as a malware-distributing server," wrote Google's Nagendra Modadugu, in a Tuesday blog posting.
Together, IIS (Internet Information Services) and Apache servers host about 89 percent of all Web sites, but collectively they're responsible for 98 percent of all Web-based malware. Google actually found an equal number of Apache and IIS Web sites hosting malicious software, but because there are so many more sites hosted by Apache servers (66 percent versus Microsoft's 23 percent) malicious sites make up a much larger percentage of all IIS servers.
Posts
All Comments
To the extent possible under law,
glyn moody
has waived all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to
this work.
This work is published from:
United Kingdom.
