Slashdotting the i's, Slashcrossing the t's

Far be it from me to slag off a fellow journo who probably had tight deadlines to deliver some tendentious copy, but this column is really way out of line. So out of line that I was going to waste my time rebutting it.

But what do I find? One of those relatively rare instances when the Slashdot crowd stay almost entirely on-topic, and provide incisive analyses and compelling arguments why the aforementioned piece is a load of wombat's. Go Slashdot, go.

Vive La France! Vive L'ODF!

As this post emphasises, they're only asking for comments at the moment - no decision has been made. But simply the idea that part of the French Government could be considering not just using but even mandating OpenDocument Format for document exchange is just astonishing. Even a couple of years of go, it would have been unthinkable.

So, even if nothing happens this time around - remember the firestorm a similar decision in Massachusetts provoked - it is further proof that something major has changed in the world of computing, and that more is about to change.

Microsoft "Borrows" OSS Security Approach

According to the story:

Microsoft is taking a page out of the open-source community's book where it comes to security. In Windows Vista Beta 2, released last week, the company included a feature called address space layout randomisation (ASLR), a method of foiling some classes of attack that has usually been associated with open-source projects.

Strange move, given that open source never innovates, as Microsoft likes to point out.

OA Un-Wired

There's a piece in this month's Wired about Harold Varmus. It begins

Last night, Harold Varmus appeared to me in a dream. Dressed in cycling garb, the Nobel laureate and former director of the National Institutes of Health was on a mission to rid the world of corks.

It's OK about Varmus, as far as it goes, but it completely misses the significance of open access (and downplays the role of Brown and Eisen).

Maybe I'm just bitter that I proposed an article on open access to Wired's editor, Chris Anderson, over a year ago, and he was completely uninterested. Several times.

Perhaps I should have put in something about corks.

Web Zwei Punkt Null

The old Web 2.0 meme is usually presented in American (and anglophone) terms, so it's good to find a whole series of interviews with German exponents of the art. Or, to put it another way:

mit den Gründern und Entwicklern deutschsprachiger Web 2.0 Dienste

The fact that I've never heard of any of them only confirms my thesis that I/we are too parochial. Just don't tell O'Reilly. (Via eHub.)

Think of the Children - Or Just Think

This would be funny if it weren't atrocious. The idea of presenting copyright dogma without any sense of balance - for example of copyright-free alternatives, and why they can function - is pure propaganda. So why is big media allowed to infect children's minds in this way, when anybody else would be rightly howled down?

Update: This just had to happen: your fearless Captain Copyright has been unmasked as - wait for it, yes - none other than Captain Copyright Infringer.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

Red Hat's Mugshot

So, Red Hat is working on a trendy social networking site, called Mugshot. I can't really tell what on earth this is trying to do - either from the site itself, or from Ars Technica's explanation. Time will tell, I suppose.

Update: And now it's come up with something called 108.

No Growser for You

So Eric Schmidt has stated that there will be no Google browser: did anyone really think there would be? It would be a waste of resources for the company, and seriously weaken Firefox, which is doing very nicely as a growing threat to Internet Explorer.

Blogs? Search Me

Given the increasingly central role that blogs play in online life, it's curious that the blog search world is so primitive. Certainly, there's good old Technorati, but everyone knows that this continues to have growing pains. Google's blog search is a joke - and an ugly one - and the other attempts aren't much better.

So it's good to see Bloglines, which has become an indispensable part of my daily online addiction/work, come out with its own search capability. It's too early to tell how it will shape up, but competition is good. Are you listening, Dave?

Update 1: And here's another one: Gnoos. (Via TechCrunch.)

Update 2: And another: Rojo. (Also via TechCrunch.)

Credit Where Credit is Due

I missed this story earlier, but it's important because it addresses two key issues: deforestation and carbon emissions. Clearly, incentives need to be given to those who hold the commons - in this case rainforests - in trust for the rest of us.

If we reduce our deforestation, we should be compensated for these reductions, as are industrial countries.

Compensation for reductions is not ideal - compensation for holding and replanting would be better - but it's a start.

OA=OSS, Elsevier=Microsoft

You know you're on the right track when your enemies start adopting your (much-decried) methods. First there was Microsoft and its "Shared Source", a mickey-mouse version of open source, but without all the benefits. Now here's Elsevier, with its "sponsorship fee" that lets authors make their articles freely available - almost open access.

It's happening, people. (Via Scholarly Communication.)

Update: And like Microsoft, Elsevier has realised that it needs to bend ears in high places in order to keep a dying business model alive. (Via Open Access News.)

Hats Off for Ofcom

Ofcom (Office for Communications), the regulator for UK communications industries, is a grey and rather amorphous body. So it comes as something of a surprise to find that Ofcom is getting positively right-on when it comes to open spectrum - the unlicensed part of the electromagnetic spectrum that has given us things like WiFi, and which potentially could see a tremendous blossoming of ideas, given half the chance.

One step in the right direction is the latest report looking into whether it might be possible to increase the maximum permissible power used in parts of the unregulated spectrum - which would also permit new uses. (Via OpenSpectrum.info.)

The Hive Mind Buzzes - and Stings

The Bubble Generation Strategy Lab (there, and you thought it was just a blog) was recommended to me by Chinesepod's Ken Carroll. It's interesting stuff, but I must confess a certain ambivalence.

Clearly this Umair is a bright chap, it's just that occasionally I cannot understand a word he is saying - and this is not a problem I normally have with, well, much.

On the other hand, some of his postings are right on the button. To wit: this one, on the "New Bourgeoisie". Or is it just because he has the guts to criticise the otherwise untouchable la Dyson?

Shock! Horror! Macro Viruses for OSS

This explains why macros are generally a bad thing to use in word processors or spreadsheets (yes, I know they can be useful, too). It is also a warning to OSS activists not to hit the "OSS is immune to viruses" button: it may be true now, but it sure won't be in the future as OSS enters the mainstream. (Via LWN.net).

Open Nanotech

Normally I wouldn't pay much attention to this story about producing mechanical components with industrial printers:

the company builds components by piling thin, patterned layers of ceramics, metals and other materials on top of each other and curing the individual layers as the structure takes shape.

These printed components, which consist of hundreds of layers, can also contain fully integrated moving parts, hinges or sealed air chambers.

What leant this otherwise routine piece of nanotech fluff some interest was a comment made last night by Alan Cox, for a long time de facto number 2 of the Linux kernel, and still very much a big cheese in the open source world (and a nice bloke too).

He was speaking at a question and answer session arranged by the British Computer Society's Open Source Specialist Group. Also present was Mark Taylor, founder and President of the Open Source Consortium, very plugged-in and switched-on, and a coder-turned-lawyer called Andrew Katz, whom I'd not met before.

Alan mentioned the idea of printing arbitrary objects one day, in exactly the manner described by the C|net piece above. I asked him whether he'd been talking with Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, who espouses similar ideas rather more fervently - indeed, he says that Project Gutenberg's open content is only the start of the the next industrial revolution, when everything - as in every kind of analogue object - will be downloadable and printable.

When two such different individuals have a blue-sky vision so similar, it makes you stop and think.

It's worth noting that open nanotech will have a huge advantage over proprietary versions, since the whole benefit from the technology will be putting together microscopic elements to build something useful. If each sub-part is proprietary and/or patented, it will be a legal minefield. If the elements are open and patent-free, the only limit is your imagination.

Half-Open, Half-Closed

This isn't really open source, but it seems to me that the underlying idea has much in common with the open source development process - call it half-open (or half-closed). Here's TechCrunch's explanation:

Utah-based Logoworks, which just relaunched a major new user interface, has an innovative and inexpensive way of creating corporate and other logos for customers. They outsource the project to interested and pre-approved designers who come up with design concepts. You then pick the concept you like best and iterate from there. Designers are paid bonuses based on having their designs chosen, and so a very efficient and competitive market is created around each logo creation project.

Although TechCrunch frames this in terms of the "competitive market", I prefer to think of it as a Darwinian selection process that is akin to what happens with the larger open source projects. In any case, it's an interesting application of that idea in a general commercial context.

We're All Content Creators, Now (Well, Almost)

The Pew Reports are invaluable for their independent, irreproachable findings. So when the latest one says that 35% of US Internet users have posted content, you'd better believe it. One third down, two thirds to go.

Clueless or What?

You might think this is a typical non-sequitur laden piece of cluelessness about open source. But one of the ever-watchful readers of LWN.net points out the interesting tidbit that the author "previously worked as policy researcher for Microsoft’s Geopolitical Policy and Strategy Group". Now there's a coincidence.

The Future of Free Information

I've written a couple of times about the emerging Digital Universe - an attempt to do Wikipedia "properly", with grown-up editing. Now the man partly behind both Wikipedia and Digital Universe has written a fascinating essay considering the Future of Free Information.

One thing I'd take exception to is his belief that there will never be public information about every single living (and dead) human: since it's possible - indeed only too easy as technology advances - it's almost bound to happen, probably automatically. The other is the idea that

It seems unlikely that all of the world’s information will be open content in the future; as long as authors, artists, and coders perceive no other viable model but traditional intellectual property to support their work, many of them will be opposed to simply “giving away” their work.

We shall see. (Via Open Access News.)

Blogging with Style

Well, more blogging in the style of the Telegraph: this is their blogging guide, which they've kindly made available. And well worth reading too: you can't have too many of these, since they represent a kind of group wisdom as help and hints get passed around. (via Open (finds, minds conversations).)

Vote, Vote, Vote for the EU Parliament

After voting out software patents, the EU Parliament has proved its worth again. It asked the European Court of Justice to block an agreement between the European Commission, EU governments and the US whereby European airline passenger data is meekly handed over to the US authorities, and the wise old court has agreed.

This could get very interesting.

The Decline and Fall of Microsoft

This sounds like a trivial story: morale among workers at Microsoft is low. So what? you may ask.

But this is how the company will be defeated.

Not by the continuing rise of open source rising, not because local and national governments refuse to buy its over-priced, under-performing products. Simply because, like all empires, it will sink down under the weight of its own corporate infrastructure into a kind of vast, irresistible lethargy, unable to summon up the power to fight these and other threats, unable to motivate its workers to produce anything of any real value.

Microsoft will never be destroyed; it will just fade away.

GPL'ed Java

I see that Jonathan is still trying to impress me with tantalising hints that he may take Java open source using the GPL.

Wiki + Google Maps = WikiMapia

As I've said before, every good mashup needs a mesh, and you can't beat a map as a mesh. So here we have the obvious next step: a wiki based on the mesh of Google Maps - WikiMapia, which describes itself modestly as "a project to describe the whole planet Earth". Not much there at the moment, so you know what you have to do.... (Via C|net).

The Bloggable is Political

An interesting story in the New York Times that hints at how gobbets of the blogosphere may be starting to emerge blinking into the strange world of meatspace, with potentially important political ramifications.