01 April 2008
The Problem Isn't Infringement, it's Indifference
One of the interesting side-effects of the increasing number of artists making their work freely available with great success is that it demonstrates a deep and hitherto unappreciated facet of creativity: that the main problem is never "infringement" but simply indifference. That's why artists should be making it as easy as possible for people to access and share their work.
If any domain needed to understand this, it's poetry. Now don't get me, wrong, I love poetry: I am probably one of the few human beings alive who has read all of Spencer's The Faerie Queene, Byron's Don Juan and Wordworth's The Prelude (don't ask), but the sad fact is practically nobody reads poetry today. So what's the solution? Why, making it freely available: By now, Poetree.coop has probably been shut down.
While it lasted, it was the best-designed, richest source of p2p poetry sharing available online. Only a typical lunk-headed heavy-handed ploy by the inner circle of poets was able to shut it down.
All the classics were there: Rod McKuen, Roald Dahl, even the Dr. (Seuss) himself. In addition, you could find the complete poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and even Thomas Moore.
So, amidst all of these gems, what happened? Why the controversy?
Alisha Grant, spokesperson for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, had this to say, "We applaud the work of the FBI in shutting down this travesty of copyright. If we want great poetry, America, we're going to have to pay for it."
Oh, of course, it doesn't matter whether anyone *reads* your poetry, so long as you get paid for it. The idea that a real poet might be more concerned with the latter - and worry about the dosh later - is clearly an outmoded idea.
Maybe that's why nobody reads poetry.
Update: OK, so apparently this was an April Fool's Day joke: shame on me. What I *really* meant to write about was this, where the above comments still apply.
31 March 2008
Google Squirms
Google seems allergic to the AGPL:So, first AGPL was not good enough for Google because it was not OSI-approved. That limited its popularity... Now it is OSI-approved. Still, it is not popular enough to be accepted in the Google closed open source hosting site?
...
C'mon Chris, give developers the ability of using AGPL for their own projects in Google Code. Your fight for no proliferation of licenses is something I subscribe to, but AGPL is the license of the future, no matter if Google likes it or not. And I can guarantee you it will become even more popular if it is accepted in Google Code...
The Marvels of Modularity
One word that has cropped up time and again on this blog is "modularity". It's one of the prime characteristics of the open source way - and one of its greatest strengths. Now wonder, then, that Microsoft has finalled cottoned on - helped, no doubt, by the abject failure of its Vista monster:
When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft's most "modular" yet. Having never really been comfortable with the idea of a single, monolithic desktop OS offering, Microsoft has offered multiple desktop OSes in the marketplace ever since the days of Windows NT 3.1, with completely different code bases until they were unified in Windows 2000. Unification isn't necessarily a good thing, however; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS.
A singular yet highly modular OS could give Microsoft the best of all possible worlds: OSes that can be highly customized for deployment but developed monolithically. One modular OS to rule them all, let's say.
Modularity has another huge benefit for Microsoft: it will allow it to address the nascent ultraportable market, something that it finds hard to do with its current operating systems.
Needless to say, though, even in making this sensible move, Microsoft manages to add a touch of absurdity:
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft already has a patent on a "modular operating system" concept.
A *patent* on modularity? Give me a break....
More Wisdom on Intellectual Monopolies
Good to see that I don't have a, er, monopoly on outraged posts about intellectual monopolies:
This is why the idea of Intellectual Property is utter nonsense. We cannot purge our minds of what we already know. That which we can perceive with the senses cannot, and should not, be controlled, but the Intellectual Monopolists plainly think it should. Orwell's predictions have turned out to be startlingly accurate.
O Hypocrisy, Thy Name is Sony
Do as I say, not as I do, seems to be the case with Sony:
PointDev, un éditeur français, attaque la maison de disques en justice pour avoir utilisé sans licence un de ses outils d'administration : Ideal Migration.
[PointDev, a French software publisher, is taking the record company to court for having used one of its administration tools, Ideal Migration, without a licence.]
Well let's hope these scurvy Sony dogs feel the full force of the law. (Via Planet Creative Commons.)
30 March 2008
Understanding Openness
About that open business:We start with the adjective lexeme OPEN, which is a pure stative; The window is open doesn't require that it was ever closed (it might have been built that way), and The restaurant is open doesn't require that it was ever closed (it could be one of those restaurants that are always open). The adjective can serve as the base for deriving two verb lexemes, the inchoative OPEN 'become open' and the causative OPEN 'cause to become open'. The story of the PSP opened then goes much as for the PSP closed, but with an important difference. The PSP opened has a passive use, as in The gate was opened by the guard at dawn. But the stative adjective use is hard to get: The gate is opened at the moment is decidedly odd. Why?
Because English already has a way to express this meaning (and a way that's shorter and less complex than the PSP opened): the adjective open. The PSP opened in this use is PRE-EMPTED (or, if you will, PREEMPTED) by the simple adjective open. (Pre-emption is a perennial topic in morphology and lexical semantics. A textbook example: English has no causative DIE alongside inchoative DIE because it's pre-empted by causative KILL; in a sense, KILL got there first, so there's no point in creating causative DIE.)
But... in special circumstances, the PSP opened could be used as an adjective -- with the semantics of the passive, as for disputed above. In particular, The envelope is opened could be used if the envelope was not merely open (rather than closed or sealed), but gave evidences of having been opened, say by slitting with a letter opener. This is a case where open might not be specific enough, so it doesn't automatically pre-empt opened.
Got that?
29 March 2008
Truly, Gloriously, Bananas
After taking a nice long shower to remove the white sap like emulsion covering his body, Mr. Gestalt sat down and began jotting down the schematic of his banana time machine, the specifics of which had come to him spontaneously while splitting double-stuff Oreos to lick the insides. Although he lacked any formal training in physics and had been home schooled by rabbits who lovingly raised him in the wild, he felt that he was on to something. Papa Cottonballs would be proud, he thought to himself as he drew something between a trapezoid and a parallelogram with something looking like a snail shell coming out of it.
What would Krapp have said about all these bananas? (Via Read/Write Web.)
28 March 2008
Sick Idea: Using Patents to Kill People
How, er, sick is this?Of all the exclusions from patentability, most poignant is the bar on patenting methods of surgery, therapy or diagnosis practised on the human or animal body. While it seeks to release medical practitioners from the shackles of commercial monopoly and legal liability when choosing how best to treat their patients, many argue that its true effect is to stifle the creation, publication and promulgation of new techniques that save lives or improve their quality.
Poignant? It's basic human decency. Imagine being unable to use a life-saving technique on a patient simply because it was "patented", and the licensing fees were exorbitant. Imagine, indeed, the situation in developing countries that can't even afford medical equipment, much less absurd, intellectual monopolies.
There's a reason we don't have patents on such things: they represent basic human knowledge of the kind whose invention and transmission down the generations lies at the heart of our civilisation and humanity. The day we start charging for this kind of thing is the day we as a race are in deep, deep trouble.
Is Amazon Getting Greedy?
I'm a big fan of Amazon - actually, make that a big addict. But when it starts throwing its weight around, I can't help thinking it is starting to act like a certain other large company that wants it all:
Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off."
"POD" is Print on Demand, an exciting and increasingly popular way to publish books, especially those with small runs (most of them); Lightning Source is a big POD publisher, while BookSurge is Amazon's rival version.
Come on, Amazon, you don't need to do this: you can become the central point where people buy books, without insisting you print the bloody things too....
27 March 2008
Mapping the Power of People
Leaving aside Terminal 5's little teething problems today, and independently of the fact that the only way they will get my fingerprints is if they cut my fingers off, here's a heart-warming tale of how the people beat The Man/Men when it comes to providing up-to-the-minute maps:
Heathrow’s terminal 5 is a major high profile new development. On it’s own it is bigger than any other airport in Europe except Frankfurt. It will generate, from today, more car journeys than a decent sized town. Yet most of the on-line mapping sites don’t seem to be capable of having a decent map ready on the day that it opens.
It’s examples like this that demonstrate how well OpenStreetMap can produce accurate and timely maps. Further vindication of the effectiveness of the OpenStreetMap approach.
(Via James Tyrrell.)
OOXML and Porn: What's the Connection?
Talking of Document Freedom Day, here's an amusing - and symptomatic - story:
anonymous supporters of OOXML use Domains by Proxy registar in order to register a site with a very similar address of Document Freedom Day's. The OOXML support site is Document Freedom Day **dot com** and redirects to a well known astroturf site which pretends to be a community of OOXML supporters.
This technique is a redirection scam which, according to the explanation given by the Online Internet Institute, takes place
* when you go to one URL and are automatically transferred to another URL. It further explains that it
* doesn't always send you to a porn or gambling site and that
* it could be a scam to lure you to places you had never intended to go.
Which is clearly the case here: to confuse users who expect to check out the Document Freedom Day event page, and lure them into their own OOXML astroturf site.
26 March 2008
Eee PC SDK
I don't normally blog about heavy developer issues, because that's not the focus here. But I think this news is important:Asus has launched a software developer kit or SDK for the Eee PC. Let's ignore the fact that the Eee PC uses open source software, so you shouldn't really need an SDK to develop applications and just focus on the fact that this kit includes tools and instructions for writing applications that can be easily added to the Eee PC's easy mode interface.
...
the SDK includes the following components:
* Xandros Desktop Open Circulation Version 4.5
* QT
* Eclipse
* QT plugin for Eclipse
* Debian packaging wizard developed by Xandros
The user guide also includes detailed instructions for creating applications and icons that will work in the Eee PC's Easy Mode interface.
Against the slightly worrying background of increased focus by Asus on Windows XP for the Eee PC, I think (hope) this confirms that the company remains committed to the original platform.
Free Our Bills
One of the great unsung heroes of British democracy (such as we have left) is MySociety, which provides indispensable free services like TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem. These have transformed the way I interact with my local MP.
And now they have a new wheeze: Free Our Bills:Writing, discussing and voting on bills is what we employ our MPs to do. If enough MPs vote on bills they become the law, meaning you or I can get locked up if they pass a bad one.
Bills are, like, so much more important than what MPs spend on furniture.
The problem is that the way in which Bills are put out is completely incompatible with the Internet era, so nobody out there ever knows what the heck people are actually voting for or against. We need to free our Bills in order for most people to be able to understand what matters about them.
As they say:This campaign can only succeed if normal internet users like you lend a hand. Please sign up and we'll send you easy tasks (like emailing your MP, or coming up with some ideas). Together we can improve Parliament!
So please do (well, if you're a Brit, anyway.) (Via Amused Cynicism.)
Gobsmacked by Microsoft
I wrote before about Microsoft's attempts to "encourage" India to vote in favour of OOXML. That gambit failed, and what do we find?
At the meeting held on 20th March 2008, we were informed that Microsoft has complained to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and to the apex office of the country about the constitution of the committee and also cast aspersions on the impartiality of the chairperson of LITD15, Mrs. Neeta Verma. The chairperson was furious and offered to step down from her post. She pointed out that the committee has met numerous times and Microsoft never brought this issue up in front of the committee nor did they check the facts with her or her organization before complaining to the apex office.
Are there no limits?
Happy Document Freedom Day
Today is Document Freedom Day. So, why should we care?In a world where records are increasingly kept in electronic form, Open Standards are crucial for valuable information to outlive the application in which it was initially generated. The question of Document Freedom has severe repercussions for freedom of choice, competition, markets and the sovereignty of countries and their governments.
In other words, document freedom is about your freedom: if your documents are in chains, so are you.
25 March 2008
How Sad is That, Microsoft?
According to a report published on Thursday by technology newswire Tectonic, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the minister of public service and administration, told the Idlelo conference in Dakar, Senegal, that free software and open standards were intended to encourage competition, while patents were exclusive and anti-competitive by their nature.
"Whereas there are some industries where the temporary monopoly granted by a patent may be justified … there's no reason to believe that society benefits from such monopolies being granted for computer programs [and inventions]," she said in a pre-recorded speech delivered at the conference.
Right on, sister - glad to see that intellectual monopoly meme. But, wait, what do we have here? Why, Microsoft's response to this idea, exposing its very own Weltanschauung:But Paulo Ferreira, the platform strategy manager at Microsoft South Africa, said: "There is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity."
He added: "For innovation to continue, there needs to be value - and even open-source applications have some form of market model, which incentivises them to continue innovating."
So there we have it: Microsoft's world, there is no such thing as disinterested generosity, no such thing as altruism. Which means, of course, that Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Tim Berners-Lee - to name but a few of those so-called "altruists" - are, in Microsoft's opinion, nothing but liars or utterly self-deluded....
What a sad, cold, lonely little circle of hell Microsoft inhabits.
Something in the Air
For those readers (assuming I still have any) who wonder why I witter on about topics that seem distant from that exciting free software stuff, here's someone else doing it. Andy Updegrove is the best writer about standards, bar none. He's particularly sharp on the subtleties of the ODF vs OOXML ding-dong. But here he's on about something else:Our modern shelters, it seems, are becoming more seductive than ever. Not only are on-line and other electronic entertainments negatively impacting television and print journalism, but use of public parks in the US is falling off as well, even as population continues to rise. Apparently, our affinity for the out of doors is fighting a losing battle against the delights of our electronically-enabled cocoons.
It strikes me that this is an especially inauspicious time for mankind to become less connected to the natural world. That world is increasingly under attack – by us. The more insulated we are from it, the more abstract that impact will seem. Already we know that the opportunity to brake global warming before it has catastrophic effects is rapidly slipping away. And yet we know that we are doing too little to avoid such consequences.
What we do to the earth will certainly have profound effects on humanity. But the earth is ancient and patient, and able to recover in the fullness of time – without us - from the worst that we can inflict upon it. What would be at most a slight fever for Gaia would be at best disastrous, and at worst fatal for modern civilization. There is no doubt who the winner and loser in this conflict will be.
It’s easy to think such thoughts, gazing at the stars on a windy night in the high desert. Perhaps the earth does us a favor when it holds us in the unseen grip of the wind, reminding us of our proper place in the natural order of things.
What's interesting about this for me - aside from the fact that it's beatifully written - is that it is cognate to my tangential stuff. Coincidence? I don't think so.
A Splittist War of Words
As I've noted before, the Chinese position on the events in Tibet is seriously undermined by the fact that it won't allow observers in to see for themselves. If it were confident of its position, it would welcome such reporting.
Instead, we have reporting in the West that is seriously hampered, and thus inevitably inaccurate at times, simply because of those difficulties. Meanwhile, the Chinese news agencies are putting out rather different versions. Take the following, for example:"Many reports were not accurate," said Tony Gleason, field director of Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund, an American organization which helps poor Tibetans through skill training and small sum of financing.
OK, that sounds interesting: a Western eye-witness. So let's hear what he has to say:
"I never saw police open fire to the mobsters," he added.
Er, come again?
"Open fire to"? Sorry, me old china, that ain't English. And "mobsters"??? Nobody uses the word "mobsters" these days. In fact "mobsters" clearly belongs to that select vocabulary that includes "capitalist roaders" and "splittists" that no native English speaker would be caught putting their chops around.
Bit of a giveaway, that....
Update: Interesting development, here: I wonder what it means....
24 March 2008
Tibet, Cyberattacks and Open Source
There's nothing like a mature response to criticism, and this is nothing like a mature response:Human rights and pro-democracy groups sympathetic to anti-China demonstrators in Tibet are being targeted by sophisticated cyber attacks designed to disrupt their work and steal information on their members and activities.
But what really caught my attention was the following:Van Horenbeeck said the danger with the e-mail viruses involved in the attacks is that they are so hand-crafted and new that they usually go undetected by dozens of commercial anti-virus scanners on the market today.
"Last week, I had two of these samples that were detected by two out of 32 different anti-virus scanners, and another that was completely undetected," he said.
The specificity of information sought in the targeted attacks also suggests the attackers are searching for intelligence that might be useful or valuable to a group that wants to keep tabs on human rights groups, said Nathan Dorjee, a graduate student who provides technology support to Students for a Free Tibet.
Dorjee said one recent e-mail attack targeted at the group's members included a virus designed to search victim's computers for encryption keys used to mask online communications. The attackers in this case were searching for PGP keys, a specific technology that group members routinely use to prevent outsiders or eavesdroppers from reading any intercepted messages.
Dorjee said the attacks have been unsettling but ineffective, as the Students for a Free Tibet network mostly operates on more secure platforms, such as Apple computers and machines powered by open source operating systems.
If you're talking viruses, you're essentially talking Windows (at the moment, at least). So as Students for a Free Tibet is finding, open source is doubly your friend: it's low cost and high security in the face of this kind of mature discussion.
Cringely on Open Education
I've always had a rather ambivalent attitude to Robert X. Cringely, not least because I go so far back that I remember all the messy business with Infoworld when he left, and that strange time when there were several Cringelies knocking around simultaneously.
Anyway, his PBS column is always well written and frequently illuminating. His latest is about education - or rather, about open education, since he muses on the changing way people will learn, and that means open education. There's a very nice insight about halfway through:
Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work?
I remember coming to the same conclusion sometime in the mid-1990s, when I found myself using the Altavista search engine (remember that?) for everything. More importantly, as Cringely notes, I found that remembering how I got to information was the key skill.
21 March 2008
Yahoo and MSN Help Root Out Tibetan Rioters
Yahoo China pasted a "most wanted" poster across its homepage today in aid of the police's witch-hunt for 24 Tibetans accused of taking part in the recent riots. MSN China made the same move, although it didn't go as far as publishing the list on its homepage.
With business morals like that, Yahoo and Microsoft are obviously made for each other. (Via RConversation.)
Larry Lessig's Open Congress
I have a lot of time for Larry Lessig. He's a nice bloke, very bright but disarmingly modest. Nonetheless, when I heard about his plans to give up copyfighting and move on to tackling political corruption, I thought he'd lost it. However laudable, the whole project looked utterly hopeless. Much better, it seemed to me, to try to subvert the system indirectly, using technology - that is, the Internet in all its manifestations and ramifications - to peek and poke.
Well, it looks like Larry had the same idea:Beginning in April, we will launch a second stage to the site: in a Wikipedia-inspired manner, wiki-workers will track the reform-related positions of candidates who have not yet taken a pledge. If a candidate, for example, has endorsed Public Campaign's bill for public financing, we will record that fact on our site. The same with a pledge to forgo money from PACS or lobbyists, or any of the other planks in the Change Congress pledge. And once this wiki-army has tracked the positions of all Members of Congress, we will display a map of reform, circa 2008: Each Congressional district will be colored in either (1) dark red, or dark blue, reflecting Republicans or Democrats who have taken a pledge, (2) light red or light blue, tracking Republicans and Democrats who have not taken our pledge, but who have signaled support for planks in the Change-Congress platform, or (3) for those not taking the pledge and not signaling support for a platform of reform, varying shades of sludge, representing the percentage of the Member's campaign contributions that come from PACs or lobbyists.
What this map will reveal, we believe, is something that not many now actually realize: that the support for fundamental reform is broad and deep. That recognition in turn will encourage more to see both the need for reform, and the opportunity that this election gives us to achieve it. Apathy is driven by the feeling that nothing can be done. This Change Congress map will demonstrate that in fact, something substantial can be done. Now.
One of the most powerful aspects of openness in any field is that it lets people see what is really going on, so that they can make informed decisions. What Larry is trying to do is to open up the engine of Congress to scrutiny. I wish him every success.
FLOSSInclude
FLOSSInclude may sound like a dental hygiene programme, but is in fact yet another heartening exmaple of the EU backing open source:
The FLOSSInclude project aims to strengthen Europe's participation in international research in FLOSS and open standards, by studying what is needed to increase the deployment, development and societal impact of FLOSS in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The project will result in a sound understanding of the FLOSS-related needs of the target regions. It will federate local and regional development initiatives with the support of cooperation with current EU research. It will also provide a roadmap for future EU research cooperation in this area.
(Via FOSSBazaar.)
20 March 2008
The Ultimate Ultraportable List
I've written a number of times about wannabe Asus EEE PCs, but there are now so many popping up hither and thither (a *very* good sign) that it's getting hard to keep them all straight. Happily, Laptop Magazine has put together a handy cheatsheet that saves us all the effort.
It's Déjà Vu, All Over Again
A few months back, I wrote about a petition calling for ERT, the Greek national broadcaster, to make its content freely available. Now it looks like ERT is following in the misguided footsteps of the BBC in terms of platforms:Greek Open Source developers are protesting that ERT, Greece's national broadcaster, will make its online archive available only for users of Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OSX.
The Hellenic Linux User Group six months ago approached ERT, after finding out the public broadcaster was restricting their access to a new archive. ERT is a public organisation, the developers argue, and should not discriminate against users of Open Source.
In some ways, the situation here is even worse than for the BBC:ERT is developing an archive of its broadcast material, digitising film, video, pictures and hosting them online. The archive is going to be developed in a 1.95 million euro project, the major part of which is funded by the European Union, the Open Source developers say.
Since the money is being paid for by the EU, it follows that access should not be limited to a couple of platforms.
German Constitutional Court Backs Privacy
I always did admire those sensible Teutons:
The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has ruled that the identities of file-sharers must remain private and can longer be revealed to media companies who accuse them of copyright infringement. In future, only those accused of ‘heavy’ crimes such as murder, child pornography or kidnapping will be revealed.
This is eminentally sensible, but the content industries will doubtless keep trying to equate file-sharing with those "heavy" crimes - with the result that they will make themselves look even more ridiculous.
19 March 2008
£30 Annual Tax Per PC? You Cannot Be Sirius
Sirius has put up another of its excellent interviews, this time with Stephen Lucey, Executive Director (Strategic Technologies) of BECTA.
The killer section is as follows:This relates to circumstances where schools using Microsoft’s School Agreement licensing model, are required to pay Microsoft licensing fees for computers based on Linux, or using OpenOffice.org. Finding ourselves in a position whereby a school pays (say) £169 for a device only to be faced with for example a £30 per year after year payment to Microsoft, for a system that is not running any of their software would just not be acceptable to Becta. Indeed I don’t think many people would consider that fair.
No, I don't either. Strange, then, that it's still going on.
Microsoft's OOXML Dirty Tricks, Part 78594
Sigh:We have discovered that Matthew Holloway was badly slurred by a Microsoft employee in an email to one of the bodies advising an overseas standards NB. It is worth noting that our own national body, Standards New Zealand (SNZ), took the claims so seriously that they responded to parties who received this email.
We discovered the slur by chance, similar information may be circulating in other countries. If you are aware of this please point concerned parties to this article. SNZ have given us permission to quote this email. I have removed names to protect the guilty parties.
And Micosoft wonders why it is so hated.... (Via Groklaw.)
18 March 2008
Closed Tibet => Boycott Beijing 2008
It's hard to know how to respond to the events unfolding in Tibet. And it's hard on two levels. First, as an outsider anything I do or say is pretty much irrelevant anyway, but that doesn't justify walking on the other side of the street with eyes averted.
But more directly it's hard because of the attempt by the Chinese authorities to lock down every possible information source. It will come as no surprise that I don't think closing Tibet off from the rest of the world is a good idea - or indeed a good sign.
If the Chinese authorities were telling the truth about the violence allegedly carried out by Tibetans, then having external and independent observers is precisely what they would want. The fact that they don't means that their own stories must be viewed with suspicion, especially since they flatly contradict videos and images that have been smuggled out. Moreover, the fact that it won't even trust its own people - who seem inclined to condemn the Tibetans as "ungrateful" anyway - to judge events, and has blocked practically all external news sources, is yet more evidence that there is a massive coverup underway.
The question then is: What can be done? On a personal level, I think the least those of us with bits at our disposal can do is keep spreading the message that all is not as the Chinese authorities would have us believe and that there is likely to be violent repression going on behind that news blackout. The more outlets that point to independent news stories on the subject, and the more blog posts that restate these issues, the greater the likelhood that the Great Firewall of China will just buckle under the strain (or that China will just cut itself off from the rest of the world).
In terms of the bigger picture, I find pleas that the Olympics must go ahead regardless because politics and sport must be kept separate, or that otherwise the poor athletes will be penalised, rather naive. Sport is all about politics - about which nation is "better" than the others. If athletes really cared about sport for sport's sake, for the sake of achieving their best, they wouldn't go to such politicised occasions in the first place, but would be content with the million other sporting opportunities where they could excel.
So the question then becomes what good a boycott would do for Tibet. In direct terms, I think it would do very little, but indirectly it would show one thing above all: that somebody out there cares enough to say "enough is enough, let us at least do something, however symbolic." Maybe the threat of that will help concentrate the minds of the Chinese leadership; maybe it won't. But the more times the phrase "Boycott Beijing 2008" turns up on Google, and the higher in ranking that term occurs in searches for "Beijing 2008", the more they will at least think about it.
Update 1: Shortly after posting this, I've just come across this brilliant analysis of what the Tibetans are fighting for - and why they are fighting, even though it's hopeless.
Update 2: Typically sharp analysis on the same topic from Salon's Andrew Leonard here.
A Sequoia that Hates Sunlight? How Odd
As you have likely read in the news media, certain New Jersey election officials have stated that they plan to send to you one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines for analysis. I want to make you aware that if the County does so, it violates their established Sequoia licensing Agreement for use of the voting system. Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis.
It's not as if they have something to hide, of course....
ODC Public Domain Dedication and Licence
One of the themes of this blog is how the ideas behind open source are seeping into many other domains. One of the latest is that of databases. The question of how you make a database open is prickly, not least because in Europe there is a stupid law that grants a “sui generis” database right, whatever that means. This was intended to stimulate investment in databases; but guess what? It has done precisely the opposite, and actually led to *less* investment relative to the US, where there is no such right. The withering power of intellectual monopolies strikes again.
Anyway, in order to deal with databases, a new kind of licence is required that takes into account these kind of problems, and the Open Data Commons has put one together that has just been released as version 1.0:The Open Data Commons – Public Domain Dedication & Licence is a document intended to allow you to freely share, modify, and use this work for any purpose and without any restrictions. This licence is intended for use on databases or their contents (”data”), either together or individually.
Many databases are covered by copyright. Some jurisdictions, mainly in Europe, have specific special rights that cover databases called the “sui generis” database right. Both of these sets of rights, as well as other legal rights used to protect databases and data, can create uncertainty or practical difficulty for those wishing to share databases and their underlying data but retain a limited amount of rights under a “some rights reserved” approach to licensing as outlined in the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data. As a result, this waiver and licence tries to the fullest extent possible to eliminate or fully license any rights that cover this database and data. Any Community Norms or similar statements of use of the database or data do not form a part of this document, and do not act as a contract for access or other terms of use for the database or data.
Good stuff. (Via Andrew Katz.)
17 March 2008
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