06 February 2006

Mozilla Dot Party 2.0

For me, one of the most exciting chapters of Rebel Code to write was that called, rather enigmatically, "Mozilla Dot Party", which described the genesis of the open source browser Mozilla.

Thanks to the extensive historical records in the form of Usenet posts, I already had a pretty good idea where GNU/Linux came from, but the reasons behind the dramatic decision of Netscape - the archetypal Web 1.0 company - to release its crown jewels, the code for its browser Navigator, as open source, were as mysterious as they were fascinating (at least insofar as they went beyond blind despair). So the chance to talk with some of the key people like Eric Hahn and Frank Hecker, who made that happen, and to begin to put the Mozilla story together for the first time was truly a privilege.

But it was only the start of the story. My chapter finished in April 1999, at the point where another key actor in the story, Jamie Zawinski, had resigned from Netscape, despairing of ever seeing a viable browser ship. (Parenthetically, his self-proclaimed "gruntle" and blog are some of the most entertaining geek writing out there. His "nomo zilla" forms the basis for the closing pages of my Mozilla chapter.)

What I didn't know at the time was that Mozilla would eventually ship that browser, and that from the original Mozilla would arise something even more important for the world of free software: Firefox. Unlke Mozilla, which was always rather a worthy also-ran - fiercely loved by its fans, but largely ignored by the vast majority of Net users - Firefox showed that open source could be both cool and populist.

Given this background, I was therefore delighted to come across (via Slashdot) chapter 2 of the story in the form of a fascinating entry in the blog of Ben Goodger, the lead engineer of Firefox. What is particularly satifying is that he begins it in early 1999 - at precisely the moment that mine stops. Is that art or what?

05 February 2006

Fixing the Fox

I love Firefox. It really does everything I need, in the way I need. I've been using it since well before it was called Firefox (judging by the names it has gone through, it seems to have a serious identity problem).

But.

Every single version I have ever used on Windows has had one, near-fatal flaw: a massive memory leak. Even the latest version, currently 1.5.0.1, has sucked 182 Mbytes out of my system (the GNU/Linux version seems fine), and it's still going up.

True, I like to have lots of windows open, with lots of tabs in each window - but isn't that point of the Internet? So, every day or so, I have shut down all of them, wait for the memory to suddenly remember itself, and then off we go again. Thanks to Firefox's tabbed bookmarks, such shutdowns are not too painful to cope with. But it does mean I tend to lose those transient, interesting pages you come across and leave open for later perusal - but which aren't quite important enough to bookmark or add to del.icio.us.

I was therefore heartened to find that people are seriously working on this problem (still): this entry at the excellent site from Jesse Ruderman goes into what's been happening, and what's being done. If you're a Firefox user (and if you're not, you should really give it a whirl), this is a blog that's well worth keeping an eye on. Maybe even bookmarking.

First Meta-Blogs, Now Meta-Podcasting...

I can understand why there are blogs about blogs, but podcasts about podcasts? Where will this meta-madness end?

04 February 2006

"I Am Not a Number - I Am a Free Man!"

Tagging objects with unique, artificial DNA sequences that act as a barcode is not new; but I had no idea that it had progressed to the point where it was almost routine, as in this collectibles tagging service. It works by marking the object with an invisible ink containing small quantities of a synthetic DNA tag.

Although the collectibles story mentions using lasers and fluorescence to authenticate the tag, a more scalable approach would be to read the DNA directly: that requires fast, cheap DNA sequencers, and there's plenty of those under development.

As the cost of DNA synthesis and sequencing plummets, so this kind of barcoding is likely to become common. It's easy to apply, does not disfigure the object as a conventional barcode does (to say nothing of an RFID chip), and so does not need to be removed when the customer takes the item home.

But there is a dangerous downside to this ingenious approach. It will make the idea of DNA tagging uncomfortably mundane. And once people are used to the practice in their daily lives, it's only a short step for companies and governments to move on to identifying people by some very special sequences of DNA - their own.

The big advantage is that you don't even need to apply the invisible ink: practically every cell in our body already has the DNA tag. That tag is unique (modulo the odd identical twin), and you can't change your underlying genomic sequence (local mutations aside). In effect, this DNA forms your very own permanent identification number - written in the quaternary digits A, C, G and T - that is ideal for key documents like passports, driving licences and health cards. What government could pass up the opportunity to adopt such a logical approach?

Moreover, because the number never changes, you leave behind in your life a continuous trail of DNA tags - in the form of discarded cells (hair, skin, saliva, blood) - that forms a complete record of where you went. Put another way, for any given event, governments will be able confidently to assign names to most of the people who were involved, as well as to innocent witnesses - sorting out which is which is merely a forensic detail - on the basis of the genomic calling-cards they inevitably leave behind.

So much for freedom, Number 6.

03 February 2006

Open Source's Best-Kept Secret

Ajax is short for Asynchronous Javascript + XML; it enables a Web page to be changed in the browser on the fly, without needing to refer back to the original server. This leads to far faster response times, and is behind many of the most interesting developments on the Web today; Gmail is perhaps the most famous example. Essentially it turns the browsers into a lightweight platform able to run small apps independently of the operating system (now where have we heard that before?).

The news of an Open Ajax project that will simplify the creation of such sites is therefore welcome. However, what is most interesting about the announcement is not the luminaries who are lining up behind it - IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and Yahoo amongst others - but the fact that it is yet another Eclipse project.

To which most people would probably say, Who? For Eclipse is open source's best-kept secret. It stands in the same relation to Microsoft's Visual Studio development tools as GNU/Linux does to Windows, and OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office. Where these address respectively the system software and office suite sectors, Eclipse is aimed at developers. It is another example of IBM's largesse in the wake of its Damascene conversion to open source: the project was created when the company released a large dollop of code under the Eclipse Public License.

What's interesting is how Eclipse has followed a very similar trajectory to GNU/Linux: at first it was ignored by software companies, who preferred to stick with their own proprietary rivals to the Microsoft juggernaut. Later, though, they realised that divided they would certainly fall, and so united around a common open standard. The list of "Strategic Members" and "Add-in Providers" reads like a Who's Who of the world's top software companies (bar one).

This illustrates another huge - and unique - strength of open source: the fact that it represents neutral ground that even rival companies can agree to support together. The mutual benefit derived from doing so outweighs any issues of working with traditional enemies.

Even though Eclipse is relatively little known at the moment, at least in the wider world, it is not a particular bold prediction to see it as becoming the most serious rival to Microsoft's Visual Studio, and the third member of the open source trinity that also includes GNU/Linux and OpenOffice.org.

02 February 2006

The Mesh Behind the Mash

Great article by Jack Schofield on mashups. The journalistic detail it brought to this amorphous and currently very trendy Web 2.0 idea helped me understand something that I'd vaguely realised before, but hadn't fully been able to articulate.

The reason that so many mashups use Google Earth (aside from the fact it's a clever application and freely available) is that to bring together information from different sources you need something in common - a kind of peg on which to hang the data. Location is a very natural peg to choose, since everybody carries around in their heads a representation of the physical world, which they use to navigate through it. Moreover, we instinctively use it for our own mashups - the experiences and knowledge of life that are tied to locations. Google Earth therefore provides a convenient and very natural mesh for mashed-up online data.

In fact, it's hard to think of any other mesh that combines such fine granularity with this ease of comprehension. Perhaps something similar could be done with time (which, anyway, is simply the fourth dimension, and very similar to space) or Wikipedia entries (or subsets of them), since the latter are effectively a mesh for the non-physical world of ideas.

Update: I've now come across this interesting matrix of mashups. It shows that Google Maps is indeed the most popular mesh; others include Amazon, Del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati.

01 February 2006

Spreading Spread Firefox

Most computer users by now have heard of the Firefox browser. This is hardly surprising given the extraordinary rate at which it is still being downloaded and diffused around the world well over a year since its formal launch.

Given that there have now been nearly 150 million downloads (converting that into a meaningful number of users is probably impossible), it is only natural that people think of Firefox as an incredibly successful free browser. It is that, certainly, but it is also much more.

After all, the open source community has shown time and again it can write great code: Linux, Apache, The GIMP, OpenOffice.org - choose your own favourite. But Firefox has done something else - something that has never been done before by a free software project.

It has translated the secret of open source's power - a huge, distributed and connected development team - into the sphere of marketing. The Spread Firefox site has mobilised tens of thousands of users - not as beta testers, as has been the custom previously, but as a guerrilla marketing force.

Most famously, that force was mobilised to pay for the double-page ad in The New York Times. Through the aggregation of many relatively small donations it was able to take out some high-price advertising. In other words, the approach scales.

But the real achievement of Spread Firefox is much subtler, and more diffuse. The tens - hundreds? - of thousands of active Firefox supporters are Microsoft's worst nightmare: a completely invisible - because distributed - team of product evangelists that it can never hope to pin down, let alone match.

This is such an important step beyond the traditional open source process that it is tragic not more has been done with it. For example, although there is a Spread OpenOffice.org, it is only now that a Spread KDE site has been created; both seem in their early stages. But where are all the others? Where are Spread Linux, Spread Thunderbird, Spread GIMP, Spread Audacity and the rest?

All these programs have enthusiastic users who could be directly mobilised across the Internet to spread the word about how good these applications are. Relying on old-fashioned, uncoordinated word-of-mouth is simply to throw away everything that has been learned from Spread Firefox - and to discard one of the strongest trumps in the free software hand.

31 January 2006

Contrapuntal DRM

DRM is one of the central themes that has been weaving in and out of many of my posts here; this well-written piece from Sun's Simon Phipps brings in plenty of other related topics too, and provides an interesting take on the issue (via Groklaw).

(It also includes a link that reminds me why I don't have an iPod - and why I hate the word "Podcast".)

Words - Fail - Me

Amazon is being accused of infringing someone's patents.

For inventing a Web registration system.

What can you say?

Microsoft is Right - No, Really

At first sight, the $100 laptop has everything going for it: it is based around open source software, uses renewable energy (you wind it up), and is trying to do something really worthwhile - put computing into the hands of children in developing nations.

But I have to say that, even though it is being done for all the usual wrong reasons, Bill Gates's alternative solution - to use a mobile 'phone to provide the processing power - seems spot on to me. As prices continue to plummet, mobile 'phones will soon be affordable even in countries with very low per capita incomes.

Moreover, today's mobiles are already computers: they play music, take digital photos, and often run office-type software (to say nothing of games). And they just keep on getting smaller and lighter. Convergence from the other end - putting a 'phone into a portable computer - does not lead to the same end-result for one simple reason: there is a limit to how small you can make a keyboard.

Mobiles get round this problem by ignoring it: keyboard entry is done either in a minimalist form (texting) or not at all. As I've written elsewhere, once voice recognition systems are good enough to cope with breathless speech on the move with significant background noises, nobody would even think of using a keyboard; typing will become some ancient art like thatching or dry stone walling.

Better, then, to work out ways of turning what will soon be the ubiquitous mobile into a teaching tool. Better still, if that tool were based on some form of GNU/Linux for mobiles rather than Microsoft's proprietary solutions. But I fear this is unlikely to happen: the MIT project has achieved a technical, economic and political momentum that means it will carry on regardless of whether it is actually the best solution.

ODF Gets Interestinger

Who would have thought file formats could be such fun?

The great battle over whether the OpenDocument format should be adopted in Massachusetts has taken another dramatic turn with the appointment of a successor to Peter Quinn, the man who took most of the flak for introducing the policy in the first place.

What's most striking is that the press release announcing the new CIO goes out of its way to emphasise that he will be "responsible for overseeing the final stages of implementation of the state's new Open Document format proposal, to go into effect in January 2007" (via Andy Updegrove's Standards Blog). In other words, all the talk about how the ODF decision was being rolled back was premature, to say the least.

Microsoft is unlikely to take this lying down - too much is at stake. If it loses Massachusetts in this way, it will create a terrible precedent for the company. It will reveal that that there is, in fact, life after Microsoft Office. And once users start to experience the huge benefits of employing open formats - freedom from vendor lock-in, the ability to deploy a range of different applications on several platforms, easy archiving etc. - the trickle of defections will soon become positively Amazonian.

Expect things to get even more interestinger.

30 January 2006

Open Access and Earwax

Nicholas Wade in the New York Times has an interesting article about earwax. It seems that there are two types, wet and dry:

The wet form predominates in Africa and Europe, where 97 percent or more of the people have it, and the dry form among East Asians, while populations of Southern and Central Asia are roughly half and half. By comparing the DNA of Japanese with each type, the researchers were able to identify the gene that controls which type a person has.

Of course, this makes you want to get the full details - not least because it turns out that this is "the first example of DNA polymorphism determining a visible genetic trait." That is, for the first time, researchers have pinpointed a single letter change in the DNA (out of 3 billion), from a G to an A (the "polymorphism"), that alters something directly observable (the "visible genetic trait") - earwax consistency.

You can read the abstract, but - guess what? - only subscribers get to see the all the gory/waxy details. Surely, when it comes to something as quintessentially human as earwax, we have a right to open access?

29 January 2006

Wikipedia: not Right, but Might

If you ever wondered why, in the age of the global Internet, local newspapers still existed, read this. It begins as precisely the kind of small-scale story that someone like, well, me, for example, would have thought unworthy of much attention. It's about some small, local politician somewhere in Massachusetts (don't ask me, I'm British), doing something small and local, right?

Wrong.

The basic story is simple. A US politician (or probably someone on his staff) came across this wacky Wikipedia stuff, and noticed that anyone could edit it freely. So, being a politician (or the hired hand thereof), this person decided to do the obvious thing: edit out all the embarrassing bits in the biography of this politician.

Alas for this individual, in the wacky world of Wikipedia, nefariousness is not so easy. Certainly, you can edit away to your little heart's content - but do remember that you will leave behind a nice audit trail for everyone to see exactly who did what.

Following that trail, this particular enlightened journalist (step forward Evan Lehmann) discovered that more than 1,000 changes had been made by "congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month". So this little local story turns out to be something very big. In fact it turns out to be two very big things.

The first is that traditional politicians do not flourish in an open context: when everything they do can be traced and and tracked they are in trouble. The second is that Wikipedia is now so important even the politicians want to subvert it (or at least try). This makes recent discussions about whether Wikipedia's entries are right somewhat moot: forget right, Wikipedia is officially might.

Update: Wikipedia has now started taking corrective action.

Patently, Absurdly, Patent

This well-written piece about the current legal tussle between Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the Blackberry, and New Technologies Products (NTP), is worth reading - even though it's a long story, and, like me, you probably don't really care about the details of this sorry tale. For what it does serve to hammer home is the unutterable stupidity of the patent system in North America.

So what does the titanic struggle described in the article come down to? - a petty squabble over the "invention" of delivering email by wireless, whose obviousness is only marginally less than that of other deep ideas like that of the sun rising tomorrow, or rain being wet.

If nothing else, this story should emphasise the critical need for an overhaul of the North American patent system, and for a vigorous defence of the European system, which - currently, at least - would never have allowed this judicial folly to proceed in the first place.

Birth of a Meme

First there was Flickr, now there is Flagr (via Jack Schofield): do I detect a trend here?

Is this a new -thon (telethon, walkathon, singathon etc.) of the online world? Could attaching the -r suffix to words be the Web 2.0 equivalent of all those Web 1.0 companies whose names began relentlessly with the prefix Net, from Netscape on?

Update: Jack Schofield has pointed that there is also Flockr, and we also have PICTR: any others?

28 January 2006

Why Openness Will Prevail

A telling story here. A US Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the Broadcast Flag - which threatens to close down various kinds of content fair use - left the tracks when one of the committee suddenly got it.

He realised that the proposal that was being glibly presented to them by the RIAA representative would stop him using his shiny new iPod in the way he had quickly become accustomed to - things like recording from the radio and listening on the road. The RIAA is now in big trouble, at least as far as this committee is concerned, because they have been rumbled.

The key lesson to learn from this is the importance of getting people - especially politicians - to understand, viscerally, what is at stake. Once they do, those pushing to close down our options don't stand a chance.

This is why openness will prevail: it is its own best weapon.

Update: As a result of this incident, there is now a project to give an iPod to all US Senators. Fighting ignorance with education: now there's an idea....

27 January 2006

Personal Genomics...but Not Yet

A new X-prize, this time for exploring inner rather than outer space, has been announced. To win the prize money, all you have to do is sequence the DNA of a 100 or more people in a few weeks. That may sound a little vague, but it is many orders of magnitude faster than we can do it now (and remember, the first human genome took about 15 years and three billion dollars).

Why bother? Well, it will open up the world of personal genomics: where the particular details of your genome - not the human genome in general - will be used to aid diagnosis and help doctors make decisions about treatment.

The X-prize announcement is really tantamount to recognising that all those breathless predictions of imminent personal genomes, made by some at the time of the Human Genome Project, were rather optimistic.

I have to say that I, for one, am not too sad. Much as I'd like to Google my genome, being able to do so will also raise considerable ethical dilemmas, as I discussed in my book Digital Code of Life.

As St. Augustine nearly said: "Give me genotypability - but not yet...."

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hacker

Today is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Most people know him as one of the world's greatest composers: a child prodigy, creator of over 600 works, and – if you believe some of the wilder rumours - fatally poisoned at the age of 35 by a rival composer. Few, though, are aware that Mozart was also a hacker.

Computers may not have existed in the eighteenth century, but the musical machines called orchestras and choirs are conceptually identical to synthesisers, which are themselves specialised music computers. Just as programming code specifies how a computer should act (and a MIDI file controls a synthesiser), so musical code – in the form of a score – directs what instruments and voices should do and when.

Conductors are largely superfluous in all this (at least for Mozart's music): they do not create the output, which is specified by the score. All they do is interact with the score “loaded” on the orchestral or choral machine, in the same sense that someone might interact with a video game loaded on a console. The incidental nature of humans in the performance of classical music is shown by some pieces that Mozart wrote at the end of his life for a clock with built-in mechanical organ. Here the scores completely determined the audio output: there was no human intervention once the music had been converted to a kind of piano roll – a forerunner of the punch cards employed a century and a half later by the early commercial mainframe computers.

More generally, though, hacking is a state of mind, a way of understanding and exploring the world, independent of a particular technology (and not to be confused with “cracking”, which is the correct name for the kind of digital smash and grab too often in today's headlines). Richard Stallman, perhaps the greatest hacker of modern times, has defined the essence of hacking as “playful cleverness” - as good an encapsulation of Mozart's genius as any.

The cleverness showed itself early. Mozart started learning the piano when he was three, began composing when he was five, and wrote his first symphony and opera at the age of eight and 11 respectively. Like many top coders, he frequently worked out everything in his head before consigning it to paper at a single sitting (often just hours before a deadline – again, just like some programmers), and usually without the need for revisions (that is, bug-free). He could also multi-task: he is supposed to have written one of his finest works during a game of skittles.

Like any red-blooded hacker, Mozart adored mathematics as a child (and gambling as an adult), found word-play irresistible (email would have been perfect for him) and loved setting himself puzzles. His Musical dice game uses dice throws and pre-composed short fragments of music to form compositions created by random numbers; the challenge was writing fragments that would fit together whatever the throws. At one point in his opera Don Giovanni, in addition to the main orchestra accompanying the singers, there are three more orchestras on stage, each playing completely different music. It all fits together so perfectly that most opera lovers are unaware of the compositional tour-de-force they are witnessing.

Mozart's playfulness was a key facet of his character. The musical form he seems to have enjoyed writing most – opera buffa – is simply Italian for “funny opera”. In several concertos composed for a horn-playing friend, Mozart added jocular comments to the music - “Slowly, Mr Donkey”; “Breathe!”; “Go on!”; “Oh, filthy swine!” - an early example of commented code. He sometimes employed different coloured inks in a score, rather as modern programming tools do to differentiate various elements. Another piece, called A musical joke, includes notes that are blatantly wrong. If the musicians play them as written, they sound incompetent; if they play the “right” notes, they have failed to perform the piece as the composer intended, and so are indeed incompetent.

Significantly, Mozart was a big fan of a key hacking concept known as recursion, whereby something refers to itself to create a kind of infinite loop. For example, a core hacking project started and led by Stallman is called “GNU”, an acronym for “GNU's Not Unix”, which uses itself in its own explanation. (Recursion is another example of playful cleverness).

Recursive music is created by employing a delayed version of a tune as its own accompaniment. Formally, this is known as a “canon” (simpler versions, like the song “London's burning”, are called “rounds”), and Mozart wrote dozens of them, mostly for himself and his friends to sing at purely private performances. They are notable not only for their fine music, but also for the texts Mozart chose to set: “Lick my bum” is one memorable line that crops up more than once. Today's hackers, too, enjoy dubious lyrics, and have an earthy turn of phrase: the injunction “RTFM” - often thrown at hapless newbies - does not stand for “Read The Flipping Manual”.

Another notable characteristic of hackers is their fondness for science fiction. Overt references to Star Wars may be thin on the ground in Mozart's works, but many of his operas written in the older, “serious” style are based on the same eternal themes of good versus evil and love versus duty that lie at the heart of George Lucas's epic.

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once suggested that any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; the corollary is that magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently-advanced technology. So Mozart's last opera, The Magic Flute - full of other magical objects, too - is, from this viewpoint, a work of science fiction. It is also a Masonic opera, steeped in mysterious symbols and rituals that will be nonetheless be familiar to the hackers who participate in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), where characters join guilds, complete quests and seek to gain experience points - just like the hero in The Magic Flute.

The close links between music and hacking run both ways, and many of today's top coders are highly musical. Richard Stallman – whose dedication to the cause of freedom is positively Beethovenian - carries with him a soprano recorder wherever he travels. The profoundly-religious and frighteningly-cerebral Donald Knuth – a kind of hacker J.S.Bach - was moved by his love of music to have an 812-pipe baroque organ built in a specially-designed room in his house. Appropriately enough, Knuth's life-work is called The Art of Computer Programming (Bach called his The Art of Fugue). Representing a different musical tradition, Brian Behlendorf, the prime mover behind the Apache Web server program that runs two-thirds of the Internet, DJs ambient and dub music. And it is well known that for most hackers the crucial first step when they start working is to fire up some particularly loud and inspirational music on their computer. Mozart would have approved.

26 January 2006

I Don't Want to Say "I Told You So"...

...but I told you so.

In an act of generosity unparalleled in the history of the universe or something, Microsoft has graciously decided to go "far beyond the European Commission’s March 2004 decision and its legal obligations to provide companies with the technical specifications of its proprietary communications protocols."

Except, of course, that open source projects need not apply - if I've understood the legalese correctly (for example, see section 2.4 of the Microsoft Work Group Server Protocol Program License Agreement). Which means that Microsoft has graciously given very little, since the only serious competitor that it has in this area is Samba, which uses the GPL - forbidden by Microsoft's terms.

(Parenthetically, the first beta of Samba 4 has been released and it's important: it comes with support for the Active Directory logon protocols used by Windows 2000 and above. This is heavyweight stuff, and means that once again, open source software is close to offering all the capabilities of Microsoft's software, but for free.)

24 January 2006

Word (Im)Perfect

Remember when WordPerfect was king of the castle? No, not many people do. But once upon a time, WordPerfect occupied the same position that Microsoft Word does today.

If nothing else, that should teach companies that nothing is permanent (and hence that there is hope even for the underdog), and that they should always listen to their customers (which WordPerfect signally failed to do by not coming out with a Microsoft Windows version alongside the one for MS-DOS).

Unfortunately, Corel, the current owners of WordPerfect, don't seem to have got either message. The latest version of its office suite, WordPerfect Office X3 meekly goes along with Microsoft's dominance of the office sector, and does not support the new OpenDocument format which is fast building into the first serious rival to Office formats since, well, WordPerfect.

This is a pity, both for WordPerfect and for OpenDocument. If Corel wants to be anything other than a me-too product, it needs to support OpenDocument. Its failure in this regard is particularly odd since it sits on the technical committee that drew up OpenDocument in the first place. Somehow, I don't think WordPerfect is going to be king of the castle again anytime in the near future.

DRM's Evil Twin

I wrote below about the escalation of the DRM threat; now it looks like DRM's bigger and even more evil sibling is beginning to stir again. I'm talking about patents, specifically software patents. If DRM wants to put strict limits on what you do with content, patents are about tying down ideas - something even more pernicious.

The bad news is that the usual suspects are girding their loins for a re-run of the EU software patent battle they lost - against expectation - last year. As this Heise article explains (also available in a rather bumpy translation), they are worryingly upbeat about their prospects - not least because they only have to win once, whereas opponents of software patents have to keep on winning.

When I wrote a feature for The Guardian about the previous software patent battle, I exhorted readers to contact their MEPs using the excellent WriteToThem site. Until some concrete proposals on software patents are released, it's probably a little premature to start doing this. But don't worry, when it's time, I'll let you know.

The Poetry of Splogs

After the poetry of spam, the poetry of splogs.

Don't ask how, but I ended up here a few minutes ago:

They were all old and once besondern, and all of a fishermanship of moss-green days. This morning, the recessess of the apsara, while I was whisking the drawing-room, I went to the isoude, which was wide open, to shake out my duster, and there, vestito by the gate, stoop'd Accomplish.

etc.


It may not be poetry, but it has a certain charm. Or maybe it's just me.

Open Access, Open Source, Open Dialogue

One of the most important facets of the blog world is the rapid and intelligent dialogue it allows. A case in point is the interview that appeared on Richard Poynder's blog "Open and Shut?". As you might guess from its title, this is a kindred spirit to the present site, and is highly recommended for anyone interested in following the latest developments in the open access and circumjacent domains.

The interview is a fairly specialist one, and concerns the some open access nitty-gritty. But what caught my attention was the response to points made there by Stevan Harnad in his own blog, which has the rather lumbering title "Publishing Reform, University Self-Publishing and Open Access" but the wonderful sub-title "Open Access Archivangelism". This is rather appropriate since if anyone has the right to be called the Archivangelist of Open Access, it is Harnad, who is probably the nearest thing that the movement has to Richard Stallman (also known as Saint IGNUcius).

In his response to the interview, Harnad comments on a point made in the Poynder interview about moving from the Eprints to a hosted system called bepress. Eprints is open access archiving software that not only proudly sports GNU in its name, but runs principally on GNU/Linux (with the odd bit of Solaris and MacOS X thrown in for good measure), but notes "There are no plans for a version to run under Microsoft Windows." Defiantly open access and open source: how right-on can you get?

22 January 2006

VIIV, DRM, and Fair Use: the Big One

The ever-acute Doc Searls reports on the CES keynote from Intel CEO Paul Otellini. Given Searls' position as an alpha blogger, it was inevitable that this was a live, minute-by-minute blog - and yes, it did include the obligatory moan about the missing WiFi connection.

But what is really important about this posting is that it makes plain VIIV's role as the platform that broadcasters and music companies - with indispensable help from a willing Intel and Microsoft - will use in their latest attempt to take complete control of content.

I already knew in 2000 that all this was coming. I knew because Eben Moglen, the legal brains behind the free software movement, and an extremely wise, articulate and modest man, told me so when I was writing Rebel Code:

Let's think of the Net for a change as a collection of pipes and switches, rather than thinking of it as a thing or a space.

There's a lot of data moving through those pipes, and the switches determine who gets which data, and how much they have to pay for it downstream. And of course those switches are by and large what we think of as digital computers.

The basic media company theory at the opening of the twenty-first century is to create a leak-proof pipe all the way from production studio to eyeball and eardrum. The switch that most threatens that pipe is the one that at the end. If the switch closest to your eyeball and eardrum is under your complete technical control, the whole rest of the aqueduct can be as leak-proof as you like, and it won't do them any good. And the switch is under your control, of course, if the software is free software.

So for the great VIIV plan to work, free software has to be shut out from the equation. This means no DVDs, no DRM for GNU/Linux - for the simple reason that truly free software always gives you the possibility of evading the software controls that are in place.

And for those of you who say, well, provided we have our traditional fair use rights, what's the problem? - this is the problem. Draft US legislation would effectively freeze your rights to existing technologies: had this been the case in the past, you would not have fair rights to burn MP3s from your CDs, or even videotape TV programmes.

There is no halfway house in this coming war, no compromise position: either you hand carte blanche to the film and music industries to decide what you can do with the content you buy, or else you fight for the right to decide yourself.

This is the Big One.

A Mammoth Open Genome Project

Open genomics just goes from strength to strength. As this press release reports, there are now over 100,000,000,000 bases (DNA letters) in public databases, all of which may be freely downloaded.

This represents sequences from some 165,000 different organisms. Nearly all of these are living today, but there is an interesting move to sequence extinct animals too. The secret is to find enough ancient DNA, sufficiently well-preserved, that it can be sequenced.

Recently, an important breakthrough in this area was achieved by sequencing nearly 30 million bases of a woolly mammoth. As the relevant paper reports, the sequence identity between this set and the DNA of today's African elephant is a remarkable 98.55%. This means that we are not so far from being able to reconstruct most of the mammoth genome, using the African elephant DNA as a kind of scaffolding. The obvious next step would be cloning a mammoth, using modern-day elephants as egg donors and surrogate mothers.

Do not try this at home.