Free Knowledge Institute

More reinforcements are arriving all the time:

The Free Knowledge Institute (www.freeknowledge.eu) is an initiative from three Amsterdam-based professionals who currently work for Internet Society Netherlands. In the past years ISOC.nl coordinated a large-scale EU-project SELF which embraced the same objectives. The need to share knowledge freely has become so important that the institute now turns into an independent organisation.

"More and more governments realise the benefits of free knowledge and free information technology", says Wouter Tebbens, the president of the new institute. The Free Knowledge Institute intends to be a knowledge partner helping to show the way in available free knowledge and technology. "That way, we can elaborate on the existing pool of free knowledge and free software, which is growing enormously. Look at projects such as Wikipedia, Linux, and the internet itself", Tebbens states. "Why reinvent the wheel yet again?"

Its main lines of activity are Free Knowledge in technology, education, culture and science. Free Knowledge in education focuses on the production and dissemination of free educational materials; Free Knowledge in IT mainly refers to free software, open standards and open hardware; Free Knowledge in culture includes open content; and Free Knowledge in science includes open access and anti-privatisation of scientific knowledge.

The actionplan 'Netherlands Open in Connection', initiated by the Dutch ministries of Economic Affairs and Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK), reflects the momentum of sharing knowledge. State secretary Bijleveld from BZK emphasized in December 2007 that sharing of knowledge is essential for further progress and development of society. The statesecretary committed to pay more attention to the valuable use of free software and open standards in education, government and business.

It's happening, people, it's happening.

Airheads

I'm a not a Apple fanboy - no, really. So the announcement of the Macbook Air left me, well, underwhelmed. But I was having difficulty putting my finger on what exactly the problem was. And then I read this:

Thinness is an aesthetic criterion, not a utilitarian one. Art triumphs over usefulness yet again, driven by Steve “One Button” Jobs.

Yup.

Extinguishing LAMP: Sun Buys MySQL

On Open Enterprise blog.

Openads Who?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Fighting for Open Access in Russia

The UK is apparently not the only country where there is a fight going on for open access to government information:

The Institute for Information Freedom Development (IIFD) fighting for the state standards to be available in the internet has managed to persuade the Russian government in its rightness. On the eve of the New Year’s holidays the decree of the RF cabinet of ministers setting the procedure to publish the national standards on the site of the Federal Agency for Metrology and Technical Regulation (Rostehregulirovanie) has been enforced. The document foresees the standards to be open and available free of charge. However, the officials do not intend to give up.

...

The institute hopes if will be hard for the officials to question the official document. ‘The public servants, who are used to selling the state standards, have no loopholes this time, as the document highlights the access should be free of charge. The term ‘open access’ left some room for manoeuvre. However, now many will have to accept the fact that their profitable business exists no longer’, - Ivan Pavlov says.

In fact, it sounds as if things are rather better in Russia than in the UK....

Whatever Happened to the GFDL?

With all the excitement last year over the GNU GPLv3, the Cinderella of the FSF licences, the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL) has been rather overshadowed. And yet, as this post reminds us, the GFDL is being revised too:

Although quiet, the consultation for drafting the next version of the GNU Free Documentation Licence, plus the new GNU Simpler Free Documentation License, are still ongoing:

* http://gplv3.fsf.org/doclic-dd1-guide.html

The online draft of GFDLv2 still has Invariant Sections. The proposed GSFDL is a documentation licence without Invariant Sections.

I don't have information about the timeline for the GFDL and GSFDL, so all I can recommend is that comments be made as soon as possible.

Adding Some SPARQL to the Semantic Web

On Open Enterprise blog.

Freeing The Future of Ideas

Larry Lessig's The Future of Ideas is one of the key books of the open content world, so it's particularly appropriate that it should now be freely available as a download.

Read it. Now.

Open Politics

One sphere where openness is generally acknowledged as indispensable is politics: true democracy can never be opaque. In the past, providing that transparency has been hard, but with the advent of Web access and powerful search technologies, it has become markedly easier. Despite that, there are still very limited resources for searching through the raw stuff of politics.

A new pilot project, called Hansard Prototype, may help to change that:

This site is generated from a sample of information from Hansard, the Official Report of Parliament. It is not a complete nor an official record. Material from this site should not be used as a reference to or cited as Hansard. The material on this site cannot be held to be authoritative. Material on this site falls under Crown and Parliamentary Copyright. Within these copyright constraints, you are encouraged to use and to explore the information provided here. We would be especially interested in requests for functionality you have.

Even though it's still limited in its reach, playing with it is instructive. For example this search for "genome" not only throws up various hits, but also shows graphically when they occurred, and ranks the names of speakers.

It's also got the right approach to code:

What technology has been used to build and run this site? Code: Visible Red, Moving Flow. Hosting: Joyent Accelerators. Server OS: OpenSolaris. Database: MySQL. Web server: Apache. Application server: Mongrel. Code framework: Ruby on Rails. Source code control: Subversion. Search engine: Lucene, Solr. Backup: Joyent Bingodisk. Development and deployment platforms: Mac OS X, Ubuntu.

The source code for this site will be made available under an open licence.

More please. (Via James Governor's Monkchips.)

Ohloh Opens Up

On Open Enterprise blog.

Bring on the Ferrets

A dissertation on copyright in 19th-century America may not sound exactly like beach reading, but the fact is that US law in this area affects the rest of the world - not least because of the US's heavy-handed attempts to extend its application around the globe:

With the rise of digital reproduction and the expansion of the Internet, copyright issues have assumed tremendous prominence in contemporary society. Domestically, the United States is awash in copyright-related lawsuits. Internationally, fears of copyright violation strongly influence U.S. foreign policy, especially with China. Hardly a week goes by without some new copyright-related headline in the news. In a globalized world with cheap digital reproduction, copyright matters.

That law has been shaped by the 19th-century experience. And what a century:

The bill in substance provides that […] copyright patents shall be granted to foreigners; they may hold these monopolies for forty-two years; the assigns of foreigners may also obtain copyrights; all postmasters and customs officers throughout the United States are constituted pimps and ferrets for these foreigners; it is made the duty of postmasters to spy out and seize all books going though the mails that infringe the copyrights of foreigners; if an American citizen coming home brings with him a purchased book, it is to be seized on landing unless he can produce the written consent of the man who owns the copyright, signed by two witnesses. Who the said owner may be, in what part of the world he lives, the innocent citizen must find out as best he can, or be despoiled of his property.

The source of this heated prose of pimps and ferrets? The May 19, 1888 issue of Scientific American.

Novell's One Big Thing

On Open Enterprise blog.

Linux-Powered Toasters?

Well, not quite, but here's a Linux-powered picture frame:

Sagem Communications and Freescale Semiconductor today announced the deployment of the new AgfaPhoto AF5080W digital photoframe, the latest product from their broad collaboration based on Freescale’s i.MX multimedia processors and Linux multimedia applications.

(Via Linux and Open Source blog.)

Wackypedia: the Wikipedia fork

On Linux Journal.

The Real Big Switch

An eloquent statement by John Wilbanks about the commons, sharing and solving complex problems:

One of the reasons I believe so deeply in the commons approach (by which i mean: contractually constructed regimes that tilt the field towards sharing and reuse, technological enablements that make public knowledge easy to find and use, and default policy rules that create incentives to share and reuse) is that I think it is one of the only non-miraculous ways to defeat complexity. If we can get more people working on individual issues – which are each alone not so complex – and the outputs of research snap together, and smart people can work on the compiled output as well – then it stands to reason that the odds of meaningful discoveries increase in spite of overall systemic complexity.

He concludes:

It is not easy. But it is, in a way, a very simple change. It just requires the flipping of a switch, from a default rule of “sharing doesn’t matter” to one of “sharing matters enormously”.

That's what it's all about, people.

Mark My Words

On Open Enterprise blog.

OBOOE Makes a Noise about Open Source

On Open Enterprise blog.

De-Commodifying an Enclosed Commons

Confused? You will be:

in today’s world, the crush of branded meanings has become overwhelming. The cultural space is too cluttered with signifiers, and words are losing their credibility. And marketing itself is so ubiquitous that it is difficult for a super-elite establishment to convey that it is “above it all” -- grandly indifferent to the market. Clearly the next step is to de-commodify the product or service that was sold in the market, and previously belonged to the commons, and make it a proprietary gift! Ah, now that’s really luxury!

EU vs. MS 2.0?

The European Commission opened a new antitrust probe against Microsoft on Monday into whether it unfairly tied its Web browser to the Windows operating system and made it harder for rival software to work with Windows.

But the good news is:

"This initiation of proceedings does not imply that the Commission has proof of an infringement. It only signifies that the Commission will further investigate the case as a matter of priority," the Commission said.

Oh, that's alright, then.

Gaining Focus

Focus is one of the two main German-language weekly news magazines (the other being Der Spiegel), so the announcement that it is opening up its full 15-year archive for free access is most welcome. Let's hope that Der Spiegel, err, mirrors the move.

Mozilla's Middle Kingdom Mess

Mozilla is a disaster in China:

With more than 160 million Internet users, China is the world's second-largest Net market and is likely to overtake the U.S. as No. 1 by the end of the decade. More than four-fifths of China's Internet users use IE to go online, mostly because it's bundled with the Windows operating system. Homegrown companies Maxthon—a private company based in Hong Kong—and Tencent —the Shenzhen-based operator of China's most popular instant messaging service—both have browsers based on IE kernels that are the second and third most commonly used in China.

Mozilla estimates there are 3.5 million regular Firefox users in China, giving it just 2% of the market. (According to June, 2007, figures by Onestat, Mozilla has a 19.65% market share in the U.S.) Mozilla has set a goal of grabbing a 5% market share in China "as quickly as possible," says Gong.

The problem?

In the West, Mozilla has been able to eat away at IE's market share by promoting Firefox as a free open-source software project. In China, the open-source movement is having a harder time gaining traction because of widespread software piracy. With pirated copies of Windows XP or Vista selling on the street for less than $2, there is little economic incentive for Chinese Internet users to download Firefox.

The solution?

Bill Xu, founder of the ZEUUX Free Software Community, a Beijing group that promotes open source, points out that for Firefox to succeed in China, it shouldn't compete on cost but by stressing its security features. "IE isn't very secure. It's plagued with a lot of add-ons, malware, and viruses. Firefox is more secure, and that's the main reason a lot of users choose it," he says.

Well, I think this may require some more creative thinking. It's not just a matter of saying "security", not least because Firefox has its own security problems, and it will be easy to defeat that tactic. Perhaps we need more Firefox plugins that serve the Chinese market, specific to the Chinese language, for example.

In any case, this is getting serious: failure to make inroads into the Chinese browser market undoes much of the good work in Europe, where Firefox is getting close to a majority share in some markets.

An Intellectual Approach to File Sharing

I've always assumed the Swedish Pirate Party were a bunch of anarchists who wanted to cock a snook at authority by disrupting one of its precious intellectual monopolies, and have some fun along the way.

I was wrong.

It turns out that there is some pretty deep thinking behind what they are doing, as evidence by this fascinating interview with Rick Falkvinge, founder and the leader of the party:

What was remarkable was that this was the point where the enemy - forces that want to lock down culture and knowledge at the cost of total surveillance - realized they were under a serious attack, and mounted every piece of defense they could muster. For the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle.

And it was... nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is "thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief". And shove some poor artists in front of them to deliver the message. Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding.

So now we know what the enemy has, and that they have absolutely nothing in terms of intellectual capital to bring to the battle. They do, however, have their bedside connections with the current establishment. That's the major threat to us at this point.

Intellectual capital? Hm....

And then he goes on to make this important point:

The people who have been led to believe that file sharing can be stopped with minimal intrusion are basically smoking crack.

Early on in the debate, we dropped the economic arguments altogether and focused entirely on civil liberties and the right to privacy. This has proven to be a winning strategy, with my keynote "Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties" being praised as groundbreaking.

The economic arguments are strong, but debatable. There are as many reports as there are interests in copyright, and every report arrives at a new conclusion. If you just shout and throw reports over the volleyball net at the other team, it becomes a matter of credibility of the reports. When you switch to arguing civil liberties, you dropkick that entire discussion.

Obviously I need to pay more attention to these people.

Has EMI Finally Heard the Music?

I'm not the biggest fan of private equity companies, but they do have the virtue of being ruthlessly logical: they are not enslaved by history, just by greed. That means they are not frightened of radical thinking or radical solutions if it brings them more of the foldable stuff. Thinking like this:

The record business - in which 85 per cent of artists are lossmaking and EMI pays £25m a year to scrap unsold CDs - "is stuck with a model designed for a world that has changed and gone forever", he says.

His solution is to switch from pushing CDs to pulling consumers towards music in different forms. One element will be focus groups. "People say the music industry is more creative and the customer doesn't know, only the creatives do.

"When you look at which car companies are succeeding it's the ones which work with their customers. Are clothes not creative? Is fashion not creative? Is food not creative? The only real difference is these industries have learnt to work with the customer and not force-feed them," he argues.

So, he seems to get the idea of listening to customers, which is good.

Surprisingly, he says that Radiohead, the band that ditched EMI last year to launch their latest album online, made the right choice. "Radiohead had the right idea. They understand their fans. They realise some of them want the premium box set. I'm one who bought one, and paid the full price. What Radiohead showed the industry was that it isn't one answer for all artists or indeed for every customer."

Which indicates that he also realises what the record business is really about: selling scarce commodities like analogue objects and unique relationships.

ERC Goes Big on OA

Here's an impressively strong commitment to open access from the European Research Council:

The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication.

Notice that's into repositories immediately, and full open access within six months. But what struck me particularly were two additional aspects.

The first was support for open data that's one of the strongest I've seen so far:

The ERC considers essential that primary data - which in the life sciences for example could comprise data such as nucleotide/protein sequences, macromolecular atomic coordinates and anonymized epidemiological data - are deposited to the relevant databases as soon as possible, preferably immediately after publication and in any case not later than 6 months after the date of publication.

There was also a nice sting in the tail, too:

The ERC is keenly aware of the desirability to shorten the period between publication and open access beyond the currently accepted standard of 6 months.

Translated: you ain't seen nuffink yet.

Tweedledee, Meet Tweedledum

I've noted before that Microsoft and Elsevier are, well, shall we say, kindred spirits. As Peter Suber observes, they're going to be getting even chummier now that Microsoft is acquiring the search company FAST:

FAST is the search technology Elsevier uses in Scirus, Scopus, and ScienceDirect.

BECTA Late than Never

BECTA, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, starts to get it:

UK schools should not upgrade to Microsoft's Vista operating system and Office 2007 productivity suite, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) has said in a report on the software. It is also supporting use of the international standard ODF (Open Document Format) for storing files.

...

"We have not had sight of any evidence to support the argument that the costs of upgrading to Vista in educational establishments would be offset by appropriate benefit," it said.

The cost of upgrading Britain's schools to Vista would be £175m, around a third of which would go to Microsoft, the agency said. The rest would go on deployment costs, testing and hardware upgrades, it said.

Even that sum would not be enough to purchase graphics cards capable of displaying Windows Aero Graphics, although that's no great loss because "there was no significant benefit to schools and colleges in running Aero," it said.

As for Office 2007, "there remains no compelling case for deployment," the agency said in its full report, published this week.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts to this ever-so gentle kneeing in the digital groin.

Hallelujah! An MP Who Groks IT

Many of the UK Government's fiascos - both old ones like the loss of 25 million bank details, or future ones like ID cards - could be avoided if there were people in office who understood IT. After all, the mistakes that are being made - allowing someone to download 25 million records and then send them through the post, or creating a centralised database of everyone's most personal details - aren't exactly subtle.

Alas, these people are rare, but one such is John Pugh, the Liberal Democrat MP for Southport. I've met him a few times, and always been impressed by his grasp of technical issues, and that is demonstrated once more in this letter to Mark Thompson, the BBC's Director-General, a copy of which has been passed on to me. It deals with the thorny matter of the iPlayer, and follows a meeting with Parliament's Public Accounts Committee:

It's worth quoting at length:

I do recognise that [the iPlayer] has an attractive interface,is user friendly and addresses digital rights issues so I stop short of suggesting the BBC has bought a lemon.

The more fundamental issue is its failure to apply open standards and be sufficiently interoperable to work fully (stream and download) on more than one platform. The BBC is funded by licence players not all of whom have or chose to use a computer running Windows XP or Vista. By guaranteeing full functionality to the products of one software vendor it is as a public body handing a commercial advantage to that company- effectively illegal state aid!
The aspiration to eventually ( you said within two years) remove this advantage- does not rebut this charge. A promise of amendment is never sufficient excuse for past sins or indeed much of an explanation.

Most major web based developments of any scale these days work on the presumption that interoperablity, open standards and platform neutrality are givens. It is not clear why the BBC design brief did not specify these requirements or if it did what technical problems-given the expertise available- hinder them being implemented.

So long as the I-Player is bundled in with Windows/Internet Explorer it continues runs the risk of breaching state aid rules - as the benefits it thereby bestows on Microsoft (with their somewhat blemished reputation for fair competition) come via the deployment of the public’s licence money. What might be a pragmatic choice for a privately funded company becomes deeply problematic for a public corporation.

I recognise and welcome the assurances that the BBC and you personally have given on this subject but wonder whether the sheer novelty of the new media has blinded many to the clear commercial inequity in the delivery of it.

Now all we need to do is make sure that John becomes Prime Minister....

KOfficeSource Means Business

On Open Enterprise blog.

On The Value Of Things You Don't Own

Deep stuff this:

To my mind, the simple idea is that the skills required to operate within networked media are new because no one does - or can - own all the data. It's a bit like a library. You can't really own it because it's actually a system rather than a thing. However, you're very welcome to borrow stuff. And maybe if I recommend some good books and you share them with friends we can get together over coffee as a result. Then we have created a little group (aka social network) that can be valuable to us all and might become a big group. Or not. Alternatively, you can create your own library at home. And put a big lock on it to keep all the value in.

Very nice. (Via James Governor’s Monkchips.)

KDE 4 Goes Forth

Nice:

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with (removable) devices easier and provides tools for better power management.

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well. Visual updates through vector-based artwork, changes in the underlying libraries, user interface enhancements, new features, even new applications -- you name it, KDE 4.0 has it. Okular, the new document viewer and Dolphin, the new file manager are only two applications that leverage KDE 4.0's new technologies.

The Oxygen Artwork team provides a breath of fresh air on the desktop. Nearly all the user-visible parts of the KDE desktop and applications have been given a facelift. Beauty and consistency are two of the basic concepts behind Oxygen.

This free stuff just keeps getting better and better.

The Problems of the Public Domain

Here's an interesting exploration of the perils of putting your stuff into the public domain:

Countries with moral rights protections, the right of the artist to be attributed for their work among other elements, often make those rights inalienable, meaning they can not be given away under any circumstance.

Therefore, in these countries attribution rights still rest with the respective authors and these dedications are little more than a promise not to sue if those rights are infringed. That is a promise that can be revoked at any time.

Second, there are some theories that hold that putting a work in the public domain might be seen as a gift and not a legal agreement. If such a gift were found to be an “unenforceable promise”, it could be retracted at a later date.

Third, the posts themselves were not written by attorneys and are very informal in nature. Though Creative Commons has a public domain dedication system, they both chose not to use it. It remains to be seen how these dedications would hold up in court if ever they were challenged.

Finally, the dedications only extend to existing works. The authors reserve the right in the future to reserve some or all rights in newer works. This could be seen as a block on activities such as scraping that are ongoing and automatic.

So while the dedications certainly are intended to forfeit all copyright protections on their work, they do not do so completely because it is impossible to do so.

Copyright law resists the public domain and favors automatic protection. This frustrates many in the field, but it is the nature of the beast.

The whole post is quite long, but it's well worth a read for the interesting perspective it puts on the public domain. (Via P2P Foundation.)

UMPC from Lenovo, Low-Cost Box from Shuttle

And here's another ultra-mobile PC:

At Lenovo's press dinner the other night there was this unidentifiable handheld placed on display... it runs Linux and uses new 45-nanometer chips from Intel.

Update: And here's an ultra low-cost box from Shuttle:

its $199 KPC Linux PC

...

It'll have an Intel Celeron processor, a 945GC chipset, 512MB of memory and either a 60GB or 80GB hard drive. What it won't have: an optical drive or a PCI Express slot. Despite that, it's a pretty good-looking box, and comes in red, blue, white, and black, each with a different icon stamped on the front.

The Saga of Erik

Saith he:

Finally, I wanted to address some stories that have been spread by a handful of individuals in the open source community. It is true that I worked at Microsoft for a long time and frankly speaking, I am proud of that. Right now, my loyalties are to the BBC and the BBC alone. I will only make decisions that are in the best interest of the licence fee payer. My actions will speak louder than my words...

Well, I look forward to that. But I do wonder how wide the purview will be when deciding what exactly is "in the best interest of the licence fee payer": defending fundamental principles of openness and neutrality, or just going for the cheapest deal in the short term? We shall see....

The IT Department in Cloud Cuckoo Land

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Shrinking Water Commons

Bad precedent:

Historically, the public trust doctrine has assured public access to the bodies of water within a state’s borders. This has usually meant the historic high-water mark for a lake or ocean. But in Ohio last month, a state judge issued a ruling that revises the definition of the public trust doctrine as it applies to the Lake Erie shoreline. The public no longer has access to the high-water mark, but only to the “water’s edge” – a redefinition that could be significant as the water levels of the Great Lakes drop. (Some of this drop, it must be added, will come from mass extractions of water by private bottlers – which means that one act of enclosure will be accelerating another act of enclosure.)

Changing Chandler

On Open Enterprise blog.

Hypercapitalism and Open Source

I noted before that I find some of Umair Haque's posts on Bubblegeneration a little, er, opaque, but this one seems crystal-clear:

I usually make predictions at the beginning of the year. Not this time. I think 2008 is going to be an important year - and it's important for us all to kick it off with more depth.

What's gonna happen in 2008? The macropocalypse.

It's not a credit crunch, or a liquidity crisis. Unfortunately, it's a lot deeper than most of us think.

Let me try and explain what's really going on here.

The real problem is that the firm - the corporation, as the fundamental institution of production - is deeply and irrevocably broken. It's DNA is in shock. The corporation we've created is a monster; a form of organization growing more pathological by the day.

...

But think about how food players have created an obesity epidemic. Or how pharma players have spent billions upon billions - to subvert and replace value creation in healthcare with push marketing. Or how Detroit spent continues to focus on coercing people, cities, states, and nations into consuming car afer car - instead of on durable, sustainable long-run productivity and efficiency gains.

The virus is rotting the system from inside. The hypercapitalist economy we've built isn't about deep, sustainable value creation. It's become about simply shifting value from one party to another.

Whether it's from small towns to Wall Street bonuses, or from Chinese migrant workers to Wal-Mart's income statement - what most firms are doing - what they are actively built to do - is exactly the same: actively and deliberately failing to create value.

But the game is fast coming to an end. The emperor has no clothes. The masquerade of value creation is can't go on forever. No economy can survive where value doesn't get created.

It's time.

The need for fundamental, systemic reinvention has never been greater and more pressing. Tomorrow's revolutionaries are going to face the task of reinventing the institutions of production - and they will unleash tidal waves of new value by doing so.

Sounds like a cue for the open source way to me. But maybe I've misunderstood (again).

More Micro Mobile Computers

I mentioned Everex's imminent Cloudbook a little while back, and now it's here:

The CloudBook, model CE1200V, showcases the Linux based gOS operating system and familiar applications from Mozilla, Skype, Google, Facebook, Faqly and OpenOffice.org. Available January 25th, the computer will be available at Walmart.com for $399.

Slightly different but also small and running GNU/Linux, is the LimePC:

The LimePC devices all run LimeOS, based closely on the LimeFree OS maintained by the LimeFree.org open source community. LimeOS is described as a full-screen HTML rendering environment that runs on top of a single-user Debian Linux OS and server stack. LimeOS and LimePC's LimeSuite applications are said to be designed to support multimedia and Web 2.0.

...

The LimePC products will ship "later in 2008" says THTF. The company expects the tiny M1 model to sell for $300. Although initially targeted at the Chinese market, THTF says the LimePC will appear in U.S. stores for the 2008 holiday season.

They just keep on coming.

Data Non-Ownership

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle over Robert Scoble's run-in with Facebook. In this clear-headed analysis, Ed Felten points out that the problem is everyone tries to frame it in terms of who owns the personal data on Facebook:

Once we give up the idea that the fact of Robert Scoble’s friendship with (say) Lee Aase, or the fact that that friendship has been memorialized on Facebook, has to be somebody’s exclusive property, we can see things more clearly. Scoble and Aase both have an interest in the facts of their Facebook-friendship and their real friendship (if any). Facebook has an interest in how its computer systems are used, but Scoble and Aase also have an interest in being able to access Facebook’s systems. Even you and I have an interest here, though probably not so strong as the others, in knowing whether Scoble and Aase are Facebook-friends.

How can all of these interests best be balanced in principle? What rights do Scoble, Aase, and Facebook have under existing law? What should public policy says about data access? All of these are difficult questions whose answers we should debate. Declaring these facts to be property doesn’t resolve the debate — all it does is rule out solutions that might turn out to be the best.

This is going to become an even bigger issue in the future - which makes sensible thinking about it all-the-more necessary and valuable.

Getting Going with Gowers

The Gower Review was an important document for the UK. It offered a thoughtful and rigorous analysis of the current copyright situation there, and looked at some of the problems the new digital world has with current copyright legislation. It also made a number of pretty sensible recommendations - even if it chickened out of calling for a reduction in some copyright terms, which Gowers himself admits that pure logic calls for.

Now we have the question of how that Review will be implemented. To move things on, here's a consultation document from the UK Government asking for people's views.

The main issues it considers are how to:

* enable schools and universities to make the most of digital technologies and facilitate distance learning;

* allow libraries and archives to use technology to preserve valuable material before it deteriorates or the format it is stored on becomes obsolete;

* introduce a format shifting exception to allow consumers to copy legitimately purchased content to another format, for example CD to MP3, in a manner that does not damage the interests of copyright owners; and

* provide a new exception for parody.

Specifically, it asks how those exceptions should be implemented. And I have to say, it does that with real intelligence. The questions it poses, soliciting input, are spot-on in terms of exploring the ramifications of copyright changes. I thoroughly recommend a slow perusal of the main document, since it provides a wonderful introduction to the thorny issues that copyright in the digital age must deal with.

None is thornier than DRM. Again and again in this document, questions arise about how people can be given the ability to derive the full benefit of copyright material when DRM gets in the way - and to what extent they should be allowed to circumvent it.

Of course, my answer is simple: get rid of the whole damn lot. Even a year or two that might have seemed radical or utopian, but with nearly all the main record labels embracing that strategy - and the film companies about to begin their own slow slouch towards Bethlehem - I think it will soon be seen as the best and most sensible thing to do.

OLPC's Founding CTO Mary Lou Jepsen

OLPC's XO has been much in the headlines recently. If you want to find out it all from someone who knows, there's a good interview on Groklaw with the ex-CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen. And no punches pulled, either:

Q: The world is now very aware of the spoiler role that apparently Intel tried to play. Can you though talk to us about the differences technically between the Classmate and the XO?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Where to start: Classmate is more expensive, consumes 10 times the power, has 1/3 the wifi range, and can't be used outside. Also, the Classmate doesn't use neighboring laptops to extend the reach of the internet via hopping (mesh-networking) like the XO does. So not only is the XO cheaper than the Classmate, the XO requires less infrastructre expenditure for electricity and for internet access. In Peru we can run off of solar during the day and handcrank at night for an additional $25 or so per student – this is one-time expense – the solar panel and the crank will last 10 or perhaps 20 years. Just try running electricity cables up and down the Peruvian Andes for that cost while making sure it's environmentally clean energy. The Classmate isn't as durable as the XO, and its screen is about 30% smaller, the batteries are the type that can explode and only last 1-2 years and can't be removed by the user and harm the environment. The batteries are expensive to replace: $30-40 per replacement. The XO batteries last for 5 years and cost less than $10 to replace. Finally, the XO is the greenest laptop ever made, the Classmate isn't – this matters a great deal when one proposes to put millions of them in the developing world.

I Fear the Greeks, Not Bearing Gifts

As a big fan of the Greek national television channel ERT (available as a stream), I was interested in this campaign to gain open access to the ERT audiovisual archive:

Greek citizens, but also citizens of other countries, we jointly sign this text on the occasion of ERT’s choice to distribute its audiovisual archive non-freely to the public. Our aim and ambition is to publicize our propositions so that they become the starting point of an open dialog among the Greek society, the European and global public audience and to signal the revision of backward policies and the creation of common political wealth.

Few days ago, the ERT administration presented the beginning of the availability, only via Internet streaming, of a part of its audiovisual archive. This move constitutes an important first step, which, however, in our opinion, is tarnished by the fact that the public availability of the archive is not made free, although the Greek and European citizens have paid their money to make the production and digitization of the archive feasible.

To which I can only say: σωστά. (Via Open Access News.)

The Value of Scarcity in the Age of Ubiquity

This is the future:

Just when digital reproduction makes it possible to create a “Rembrandt” good enough to fool the eye, the “real” Rembrandt becomes more expensive than ever. Why? Because the same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Paying the Price for Google

An interesting analogy here between Google and markets - with a nasty ecological payoff that we will all pay for people gaming the system (just as spam games the email system, and threatens to destroy it):

As every web content producer adjusts to Google, its results become necessarily less and less compelling. The joy of Google past was to think hard about the search query and get a first screen result full of relevant but quirky, even obscure material. A Google result today is much less sensitive to the driver, because every content maker is trying to "buy" space that it can't pay for in genuine links. SEO [Search Engine Optimisation] will ossify Google and a better solution will wipe it out with the speed of an epidemic. The web has become over-fitted to Google like a strain of wheat becomes over-designed to a specific ecology. The web is covered in content strategies over-designed to Google, and new mechanism will find a source of meaningful, un-manipulated information---just as the hyper-link was before PageRank made it a gameable commodity.

Is That All? Or, From "e" to "Social"

Here's a sharp observation:

if not Enterprise 2.0, then what? The only other concept that seems to connect is "Social," though I'm conflicted about that prefix. It's obviously just as prevalent as "2.0" and more accurately descriptive, but the word "social" is often met with a raised eyebrow in the enterprise. "Social" sounds like it's about wasting time though I imagine with enough momentum, the term could be redefined (people take the word "Google" seriously). The whole nomenclature debate reminds me of the hype cycle that the prefix "e" traversed in the mid to late 1990s and some of the "e"-words survived. Regardless, it would appear that "Social" is the moniker of our time.

Open Source Shopping Baskets

On Open Enterprise blog.

ODF Alliance Annual Report

On Open Enterprise blog.

Firefox Users Against Boredom

Statistics show that Firefox Users are more inclined to have rich, exciting experiences on the web and in everyday life. Others, however, find themselves paralyzed by the death grip of boredom. It's not their fault. Many are good people who simply got off to a bad start. It's our duty to show them that the numbers can be in their favor. So spread the word because hope of a more interesting life is only a download away.

Ha! (Via netzpolitik.org.)

Confirmed! Sony is Barking

Sony BMG Music Entertainment on Jan. 15 becomes the last major record company to sell downloads without copy restrictions

which would be great, were it not for that this tiny sting in the tail:

— but only to buyers who first visit a retail store.

Now, why do I get the strange feeling that Sony doesn't fully understand this tubey Internet thingamy-bob?

Noahpad: The Asus Eee Wannabe(ee)

I've written several times about the Asus Eee PC, and how I see it as the start of a new market sector where open source possesses considerable advantages. Here's further proof of that: the Noahpad UMPC:

‧ Smaller than A5 size and only 0.78 kg .
‧ 7” TFT compact design to display 10” window.
‧ Apply Noahpad technology.
‧ Laptop and palmtop two operation modes.
‧ 30G super large storage.
‧ Rich network and wireless connectivity.
‧ External battery.
‧ Over 50 function keys for learning, working and playing…

And, needless to say, it runs GNU/Linux (although it also mutters about "Windows XP compatible" whatever that means.) I predict we'll see many more of these Asus Eee wannabes. (Via Linux Loop.)