Portuguese Schools Learn About Open Source

It's always seemed to me one of the biggest problems for free software that it's not well known in schools. As Microsoft understands - and as Apple first learned - if you get them young, you've pretty much got them forever. So it's good to see efforts being made to spread the open source word in the educational world, like this new effort by the Portuguese Ministry of Eduction:

Potenciar a utilização de software livre nas escolas, aumentando as oportunidades inerentes à sua adopção, é a base para a criação deste portal.

Procuramos divulgar e apoiar as Escolas na utilização de software livre para os vários Sistemas Operativos.

O Portal estará em constante actualização, pelo que convidamos todos os utilizadores a enriquecer este projecto submetendo novas ferramentas, notícias e hiperligações, assim como, estão também desde já convidados a participar no fórum.

[Via Google Translate:

Strengthening use of free software in schools, increasing the opportunities inherent in its adoption, is the basis for the creation of this portal.

We disclose and support schools in the use of free software for the various OS.

The Portal will be constantly updated, so invite all users to enrich this project by submitting new tools, news and links, and are now also invited to participate in the forum.] (Via Softwarelivre.)

Is Google Summer of Code Fizzling Out?

I've always assumed that Google's Summer of Code, a generous if self-interested offer to pay for students to do some directed open source coding during school/university holidays, was wildly popular - after all, who *wouldn't* want to get paid for hacking? But maybe there are the first signs of momentum being lost in this post, which suggests that the recent deadline extension hasn't led to a flood of applications:

Extending the deadline has, for us, only resulted in six or seven more applications, and the number of applications is about 50% of what it was last year. I'm not sure why that is - persuading people to apply is not really within my power, at least. In the next few days, I guess I'll find out whether we have quality rather than quantity :-)

Anyone else with positive/negative experiences?

Bye-Bye Biofuels...

When are people going to wake up to the fact that biofuels are not the solution, but actually exacerbate the world's problems?

A global rice shortage that has seen prices of one of the world's most important staple foods increase by 50 per cent in the past two weeks alone is triggering an international crisis, with countries banning export and threatening serious punishment for hoarders.

With rice stocks at their lowest for 30 years, prices of the grain rose more than 10 per cent on Friday to record highs and are expected to soar further in the coming months. Already China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia have imposed tariffs or export bans, as it has become clear that world production of rice this year will decline in real terms by 3.5 per cent. The impact will be felt most keenly by the world's poorest populations, who have become increasingly dependent on the crop as the prices of other grains have become too costly.

...

Analysts have cited many factors for the rises, including rising fuel and fertiliser expenses, as well as climate change. But while drought is one factor, another is the switch from food to biofuel production in large areas of the world, in particular to fulfil the US energy demands.

And this is just the beginning....

I Fear Microsoft, Bearing Gifts for the Greeks

They're at it again:

Η Microsoft είναι η πρώτη εταιρεία που θα προσφέρει δωρεάν εργαλεία ανάπτυξης και σχεδίασης λογισμικού στην ελληνική ακαδημαϊκή κοινότητα μέσω της νέας υπηρεσίας «Αναφανδόν» του Εθνικού Δικτύου Έρευνας και Τεχνολογίας (ΕΔΕΤ). Οπως ανακοινώθηκε την περασμένη εβδομάδα, πρόσβαση στην υπηρεσία έχουν αυτή τη στιγμή οι φοιτητές και καθηγητές του Εθνικού Μετσόβιου Πολυτεχνείου, ενώ σύντομα αναμένεται η σταδιακή ένταξη όλων των ιδρυμάτων της τριτοβάθμιας εκπαίδευσης και των ερευνητικών κέντρων.

[Via Google Translate:

Microsoft is the first company that will offer free development tools and design software to the Greek academic community through new service Anafandon of the National Research and Technology Network (GRNET). Microsoft is the first company that will offer free development tools and design software to the Greek academic community through new service Anafandon of the National Research and Technology Network (GRNET).]

Paying the Price of Windows

I've written variously about the implications of the arrival of the ultraportable sector (at greatest length here), notably that as the price of systems fall, so the chasm between Windows and GNU/Linux pricing deepens - at least relatively (can you have a relative chasm?). Against that background, this is interesting:

However, our source told us that there would be two new SKUs, the Eee PC 900 Win and Eee PC 900, with the former featuring Windows XP pre-installed, 1GB RAM and a 12GB SSD for just £329 inc. VAT. More intriguing, though, was the latter new Linux edition, which we were told would house 20GB of storage and retail for the same price as the XP version.

See what they've done? Rather selling the GNU/Linux version for less than the one running Windows XP, Asus has upped the spec for the former, and kept the price the same. That doesn't seem very logical: after all, GNU/Linux actually needs *less* memory than XP, so it would have been more sensible to keep the memory the same, and cut the price.

The cynic in me can't help feeling that Asus has been leant on here by Microsoft, and "persuaded" not to sell the GNU/Linux system for less than that of Windows XP. The assumption being that most users won't care about the difference in RAM, and will just go ahead and stick with familiar old XP when given the choice between what seem to be similar systems.

Nice One, NYT

I'd not noticed this feature in the New York Times before:

To find reference information about the words used in this article, double-click on any word, phrase or name. A new window will open with a dictionary definition or encyclopedia entry.

Cool: I'm suprised it's not used more widely.

The Other Side of the Open Access Coin

I write quite frequently about open access - the idea that people should have free online access to research that they have paid for, and ideally even where they haven't. But alongside the issue of getting stuff out in the open, there is the problem of where you put it so that everyone can find it and access it. The answer is in what are rather off-puttingly called "institutional repositories", and it turns out that open source has been there from the start:

What was needed was a custom-built software platform to allow universities to create a dedicated repository in which faculty could archive them. And as the emphasis shifted from central subject-based repositories to smaller cross-disciplinary repositories, it was realised that a low-cost solution would be needed. In 2000, therefore, the UK's University of Southampton released EPrints. The first dedicated repository software, EPrints was made available as freely downloadable Open Source software.

If you want to find out more about the, er, exciting story of repositiories, don't miss the latest of Richard Poynder's elegant interviews - although I do wish he'd get rid of the donation bit.

Microsoft on the Side of the Angels

No, really:

In recent years Microsoft has shown every sign of knowing which way is up when it comes to identity management. The company already has on board Kim Cameron, its chief architect of identity and one of the key thinkers in the field, and with the arrival of Dr Brands - who joins Cameron in the company's Connected Systems Division - it adds a second. Cameron cleared up the mess and set the new rules after Microsoft's monolithic, centralised and panoptical Hailstorm ID management policy collapsed under its own weight. Dr Brands is author of the seminal Rethinking public key infrastructures and digital certificates, and the developer of 'blind' or 'minimum disclosure' credentials.

Together, these support a privacy-friendly and user-centric view of identity management - the antithesis, effectively, of the controlled, centralised vision that's currently crashing and burning at the Home Office.

Now all we have to worry about are the patents....

Anyway, great article - worth reading all of it.

KDE + Wikimedia.de = Wikkimedia.DE?

Interesting:

KDE e.V and Wikimedia Deutschland have opened a shared office in Frankfurt, Germany. As two organizations that share similar goals and organizational challenges, they hope that working out of the same space will strengthen and expand their links to the Free Culture community, as well as allowing them to share resources, experience and infrastructure.

"We believe that the combination of Free Software and Free Content is not only beneficial," remarked Sebastian Kügler, a KDE e.V. board member, "but the next logical step towards a mature, organized Free Culture community." Kügler explains the idea behind opening the shared office: "Being able to tap into the expertise of an organization in a different field, but with very similar goals and principles, provides us with an opportunity to grow and gain experience that I hope to see more often, both within our projects and those of our peers."

Open Media Now

OMNow is a foundation dedicated to the development, support and empowerment of an open media infrastructure. Upon this infrastructure stand companies and individuals who need free media solutions. Free media solutions save companies money and give them control over product technology. Such solutions support individuals by offering them legal ways to create, distribute and display their creative works. Our foundation opens the media market by actively developing operating system-agnostic and cross-platform solutions.

Pity they're starting with bloody Flash/Gnash....

The US Fashion Industry's Death-Wish

Another great post from Mike Masnic:

The fashion industry got jealous of the entertainment industry's ability to crack down on innovation with copyrights and pushed Congress to introduce new legislation that would add a copyright for fashion design. Recently such laws have been getting a big push from politicians who are pandering to the fashion industry. Of course, studies have shown that the very reason the industry has thrived was because the lack of IP protection. In fact, one bit of research showed that adding IP protections to fashion could kill the industry.

Meet the New Governor: Open Source

Everyone knows that government is dull - dull, but very, very important. So a couple of recent moves in this dull but important world seem pretty significant to me.

First, there's this:

European public administrations that want to use software that is offered for free, such as Open Source software, do not need to organise a call for tender.

This is the conclusion of the Dutch government project NOIV, after studying European rules on tenders. The NOIV published an English translation of its guide for ICT buyers in the public and semi-public sectors, 'The acquisition of (open-source) software', on its website this week.

What that might mean is that it will be much easier to take the open source route than the proprietary one, since government departments (in Holland, at least) will be able to avoid all the hassle of putting out tenders and then sifting through them, and so more departments will take opt for it.

Then there's this:

The French-speaking Brussels Parliament (PFB) is considering to increase its use of Open Source, said Joël Tournemenne, director of the parliament's IT department, without giving more details.

Tournemenne visited the Solutions Linux conference in Paris at the end of January, where he spoke with the developers of Tabellio, an Open Source projects funded by the PFB.

Tabellio should result in an Open Source suite of applications for drafting, managing and publishing legislative documents and is meant for parliaments and assemblies. The project is a joined effort of two Belgian regional parliaments: the PFB and the Parliament of the French Community in Belgium.

What interests me here is not so much the details, but the fact that something like the open source Tabellio even exists: free software for "drafting, managing and publishing legislative documents" that "is meant for parliaments and assemblies"? You can hardly get closer to the heart of government - and hence power - than that.

Your Private Second Life

It's been an open secret for some time that IBM has been creating intranet-based virtual worlds, but this seems to be the first official news about it:

IBM said on Wednesday it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own computer servers.

...

IBM employees will be able to move freely between the public areas of Second Life and private areas which are hosted behind IBM's corporate firewall.

This will enable the company to have sensitive discussions and disclose proprietary information without having the data pass through the servers of privately held Linden Lab.

You Know Open Source Has Really Arrived...

...when the two main political parties in the UK are squabbling over who is truer to the open source spirit:

David Cameron embraced Linux, open source and bottoms-up decision-making today as he detailed his vision of a Tory innovation policy in a speech at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Cameron pledged that a Tory government would set the UK’s data free – but not in a bad way, like HMRC. Rather, he said, he wanted to ensure people could access information which allowed them to create “innovative applications that serve the public benefit”. This “information liberation” meant ensuring spending data was transparent for example, and that people could easily compare crime figures.

At the same time, he said, “We also want to see how open source methods can help overcome the massive problems in government IT programs”. Cameron said the Tories would reject Labour’s addiction to the mainframe model. Instead, he claimed, a Conservative government would follow private sector best practice and introduce open standards, “that enables IT contracts to be split up into modular components”.

...


Cameron’s pledge to open source comes just days after the minister for transformational government, Tom Watson, claimed that Labour is the party that really, you know, gets open source.

In his speech on Monday announcing the government’s Power of Information taskforce, he referred to an earlier speech where “I talked about the three rules of open source - one, nobody owns it. Two, everybody uses it. And three, anyone can improve it." He then recounted how the Tories immediately sent out an email “laying claim that in fact they are the ‘owners’ of these new ideas. I was accused of plundering policies from the Conservatives.”

Fight, fight, fight.

Happy Birthday, Open Data

The received wisdom is that open source begat open access, which begat open data, and in broad outline that's true enough. But in one respect it's quite wrong: the first, and arguably most important open data store was set up fully 25 years ago, and is still going from strength to strength:

For a quarter century, GenBank has helped advance scientific discovery worldwide. The nucleic acid sequence database was established by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1982. Since its creation, the GenBank database has grown at an exponential rate. Amazing as it may seem, in 1984, the entirety of GenBank’s data was published in a two volume hardcover book. Today, if the current contents of GenBank’s database were printed, it would fill more than 300 pickup trucks with paper.

Unveiled at the onset of the “Information Age”, GenBank has continued to evolve and incorporate technological innovations. The GenBank database has remained on the cutting edge of technology and illustrates the dynamic changes over the past 25 years in quantity and speed with which information is shared.

GenBank joined with sequence databases in Europe and Japan to form the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. GenBank was one of the earliest bioinformatics community projects on the Internet promoting open access communications among bioscientists. In 1992, the GenBank project transitioned to the newly created National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) within NIH where it resides today.

Open Enterprise Interview: Jeff Haynie

On Open Enterprise blog.

Cracking a Hard(ware) Problem

It is a sad but true fact that hardware issues - whether or not a particular bit of kit is supported - still dog GNU/Linux, and remain a major obstacle to its wider use. Happily, a partial solution is available from the community of current users, who collectively have scads of info about what works and what doesn't. Now there's a site that seeks to bring it all together, UbuntuHCL.org:

Our mission is to provide a forum for Ubuntu users to share their experiences with different hardware, to ease the transition of new users to Ubuntu, as well as help users pick the right hardware for their Linux system.

The Russian Experiment

I've always thought that Russia offered very fertile ground for free software. It has some of the best hackers in the worlds (not to mention crackers), a need for customised software (not least because it will be in Cyrillic) and not much dosh to pay for exorbitant licensing fees. So news that Russia was aiming to move schoolchildren to free software seemed promising, even if the cynic in me wondered whether anything would actually come of it.

Well, here's a useful update on what exactly is happening with the project:

First of all, first deliverables have already become available. Openly and publicly (Russian). Among others, you are able to download the specially tailored Linux distributions, including a version tailored for older PCs with 128-256 MB of RAM and P-233-class CPUs and a Terminal Server edition that allows to use older PCs as thin terminals provided a decent server is available in the classroom.Secondly, the information is now coming from more than one source, which indicates that the regional participants of the project have both freedom and willingness to act (Perm, Tomsk, Moscow, all in Russian). The most curious is the website of the Perm region, where a map of the integration progress is available. The numbers in black correspond to the total amount of schools (first number is for city/town schools, second is for rural schools), the numbers in red correspond to the schools where Free Software is already being used.

Attack of the Copyright Were-Rabbit

There is a counter-reformation movement afoot in the world of copyright. The purpose of the movement is to chill the willingness of countries to enact fair use or liberal fair dealing provisions designed to genuinely further innovation and creativity, rather than, as is currently the case, merely to give lip service to those concepts as the scope of copyright is expanded to were-rabbit size.

Another great post from William Patry, one of Google's better hires.

British Library = National Disgrace

I've noted before that there's something rotten at the heart of the British Library, which insists on locking down knowledge in Microsoft's proprietary formats. Now NoOOXML starts to pull all the threads together:

the company Griffin Brown, of which the BRM convenor Alex Brown is the director, sent out a press release 13 March 08 celebrating the 10th anniversary of XML:

Recent moves by Microsoft to standardise its Office products around XML file formats merely confirms that most valuable business data in the future will be stored in XML. … Alex Brown is convenor of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 Ballot Resolution Process, and has recently been elected to the panel to advise the British Library on how to handle digital submission of journal articles.

What's the betting those digital submissions end up in OOXML?
(Via Boycott Novell.)

Signs of the (Digital) Times

Readers of this blog will know that I am fascinated by the analogue/digital divide, and how the passage from one to the other causes all sorts of interesting problems:

Question: Why is eBay requiring sellers of digitally downloaded goods to list their items in the Classified Ads format?

Answer: Most items that require digital delivery, once created, can be very easily replicated. This ease of replication creates the opportunity for sellers to list thousands of the same item in an attempt to manipulate the Feedback system. It also creates a perception that even legitimate sellers of Digital Goods are manipulating the Feedback system. This dynamic -- real and perceived -- undermines trust across the entire marketplace.

We understand that digital goods, by themselves, are not the cause of Feedback Manipulation, but clarity of policy and ease of enforcement require all digitally downloaded items to be offered via the Classified Ads format.

Tricky stuff this business in the absence of scarcity.... (Via Techdirt.)

UK Copyright: Winners and Losers

I often spout about copyight in this blog, but I enjoy the luxury of ignorance. If you want a really balanced account of the situation in the UK, try this excellent talk given by Ray Corrigan recently:

My brief for this morning is to look at current UK copyright legislation – how it compares internationally, and who are the winners and losers. I will be starting with a whistle-stop tour of UK copyright law in historical context, before looking at international comparisons and then focusing on the winners and losers.

Who could ask for more? Well, apart from a more reasonable copyright regime, of course.

Cheeky Bulgars

How dare they?

The Bulgarian government organised a meeting with Open Source companies and developers on 21 March in Sofia. Nikolay Vassilev, the minister for State Administration, told the representatives of software companies, IT services companies and Open Source developers that the government is about to review the state's IT system and that it wants to get a better understanding of Open Source software. The minister admitted he had once worked with Apple Macintosh, but had in the last thirteen years only experienced Microsoft applications. He told the Open Source advocates he would listen to their views on IT: "We have an open mind and will accept reasonable propositions."

Uighur Splittists?

Where will it all end?

Like Tibetans in Tibet, Uighurs have historically been the predominant ethnic group in Xinjiang, which is officially known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. In both Tibet and Xinjiang, indigenous groups have chafed at the arrival of large numbers Han Chinese, the country’s predominant ethnic groups, who have migrated to western regions with strong government support.

Uighurs, like Tibetans, have complained that recent Han arrivals now dominate their local economies, even as the Han-run local governments insert themselves deeper into schools and religious practices to weed out cultural practices that officials fear might reinforce a separate ethnic or religious identity. In telephone interviews, Han residents of Khotan and nearby areas said there was a long history of distrust and tension between Han and Uighur communities. Some Han migrants insisted the atmosphere remained volatile, and said that the Uighurs had been inspired by the recent Tibetan unrest.

Since you ask, the Uighurs actually speak a Turkic language, which means that they have even less to do with the Chinese than the Tibetans, who at least once probably spoke the same language (a few thousands years ago, that is).

Why the Post Office Thinks It's 1998

You may find it hard to believe the Post Office is closing down vast numbers of its local branches that everyone wants to use, but I think I've discovered the reason why: it is so out of touch it doesn't even know what the date is.

It seems to think it's 1998 - you know, those far-off, fabled times, when people wrote Web sites that only worked with Internet Explorer. Like this one, say, which gives the following helpful message when you view it with Firefox:

This website is best viewed on Internet Explorer version 5.3 or above

Watch out, little Post Office, I've heard a terrible rumour that the 21st century is hurtling towards you....

Whatever Happened to Standards?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Linux: Too Much of a Good Thing?

The transformation of the Linux Foundation from a rather sleepy, peripheral player into one of the main voices for open source has been fascinating to watch. It's certainly welcome, too, because one of the problems of Linux in particular, and open source in general, is that the distributed production has tended to lead to dissipation in terms of getting the message across.

Now, in addition to a useful series of interviews with open source luminaires, the Linux Foundation is getting into surveys:

The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced it is publishing a new report written by kernel developers Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman, and LF Director of Marketing Amanda McPherson.

The report titled “Linux Kernel Development: How Fast is it Going, Who is doing it and Who is Sponsoring it?” is available today. The paper finds that over the last three years the number of developers contributing to the kernel has tripled and that there has been a significant increase in the number of companies supporting kernel development.

Even though Linux has achieved near-ubiquity as a technology platform powering Internet applications, corporate servers, embedded and mobile devices and desktops, mainstream users know very little about how Linux is actually developed. This community paper exposes those dynamics and describes a large and distributed developer and corporate community that supports the expansion and innovation of the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel has become a common resource developed on a massive scale by companies who are fierce competitors in other areas.

Among its findings:

o Every Linux kernel is being developed by nearly 1,000 developers working for more than 100 different corporations. This is the foundation for the largest distributed software development project in the world.

o Since 2005, the number of active kernel developers has tripled, reflecting the growing importance of Linux in the embedded systems, server, and desktop markets.

o Between 70 and 95 percent of those developers are being paid for their work, dispelling the “hobbyist” myth present from the start of open source development.

...

o More than 70 percent of total contributions to the kernel come from developers working at a range of companies including IBM, Intel, The Linux Foundation, MIPS Technology, MontaVista, Movial, NetApp, Novell and Red Hat. These companies, and many others, find that by improving the kernel they have a competitive edge in their markets.

But one result seems slightly worrying to me:

o An average of 3,621 lines of code are added to the kernel tree every day, and a new kernel is released approximately every 2.7 months.

o The kernel, since 2005, has been growing at a steady state of 10 percent per year.

Surely that means that Linux is steadily becoming more and more bloated? I've always been of the view that one of Linux's great virtues is leanness, especially compared to a Certain Other operating system. While change can be good, I don't think that more is necessarily is better when it comes to lines of code. Perhaps the Linux Foundation's next project could be to study how much of the kernel could be trimmed away to return it to its earlier, svelte self.

OK, So Adobe Supports GNU/Linux – But How Much?

On Open Enterprise blog.

You Must Be Joking

They can't be serious:

This is a proposal for an integrated National Operational Deterrence and Intelligence Surveillance System (NODISS) strategy to be accomplished over a five to fifteen year period concurrent with the introduction of compulsory Identity Cards and the Tracking Database (“audit trail”) of the National Identity Register. It has been prepared by the Domestic Affairs Cabinet Committee Officials Committee, chaired by the Cabinet Office.

What a scoop - that Arsene Ghia has really got her, er...oh, never mind.

In Praise of Journalistic Scum

On Open Enterprise blog.

oCERT – A Dead Cert for Security

On Open Enterprise blog.

Teaching Blackboard a Lesson About Patents

On Open Enterprise blog.

Now the Fun Begins

Sad - but just the end of the beginning....

The Mighty Atom

Here's another reason why ultraportables are going to take off.

Sophie – A Wise Move for Open Source

On Open Enterprise blog.

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.

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...

Microsoft's Great Besmirching

On Linux Journal.

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.)

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?

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.)

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.

John Pugh, MP, Rides to the Rescue

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Enterprise Interview: Ismael Ghalimi

On Open Enterprise blog.

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....

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.

BSI to Celebrate Document Freedom Day with Chains

On Open Enterprise blog.