More on Lessig

As I have hinted heavily, I interviewed Larry Lessig recently; you can find the result in today's Guardian or here.

What this doesn't convey is the four-hour journey it required to meet him, including several trains and a 30-minute taxi ride that took 15 minutes at the hands of sexagenarian who fancied himself as a rally driver (and who insisted on using his mobile while driving, just to add to the challenge). This was to reach Hay-on-Wye, where Lessig was giving a talk as part of the festival there.

The result also fails to convey anything of the experience of listening to that lecture, whose style was in striking contrast to the one-to-one interview (conducted partly in the back of a car) itself. Where Lessig is quiet almost to the point of timidity in private, in public he soars.

His oratory - for it is nothing less - is built from two elements: a powerful rhythmic sense that drives forward inexorably the logic of his lecture, and a strangely-effective sing-song voice that shifts between a set of frequencies according to the points he is emphasising. Impressive.

The Last Tree of Ténéré, the Last Tree of Terra

Why do I have a horrible feeling this is a symbol of something? (Via BoingBoing.)

eIDs - Nein Danke

Here's something interesting: a survey on Trust and Interoperability of eIDs in Europe. Now, it's news to me that we're even thinking about "eIDs" - that's electronic ID cards - but already they're talking about linking them up.

If you're European, you can make your views felt here.

European Software Patents - The Novel

Well, not quite: but it's a book on the same, by the bloke who probably did more than anyone to scupper the attempt to push through a deeply-flawed software patent regime in Europe last year. As his blog explains, Florian Mueller is making the book freely available under a CC licence. You can choose either the original German, or else an English version.

Sadly, while the battle may have been won, the war is far from over. The next threat is something called the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA): Florian has some background, plus a link to a fuller document. Time to gird your loins again, folks.

O Copyright, Thou Art Sick

This is "only" in the US, but as we know, like the plague, these things have a habit of spreading. It's proposed new legislation called SIRA. As the EFF site explains:

SIRA's main aim is clearing the way for online music services by revising the current mechanical compulsory license set out in Section 115 of the Copyright Act to accommodate "full downloads, limited downloads, and interactive streams." So far so good, but the devil is in the details. This license specifically includes and treats as license-able "incidental reproductions...including cached, network, and RAM buffer reproductions."

By smuggling this language into the Copyright Act, the copyright industries are stacking the deck for future fights against other digital technologies that depend on making incidental copies. Just think of all the incidental copies that litter your computer today -- do you have a license for every copy in your browser's cache?

This is the key point: every time you view a Web page you make a copy; every time you play a CD, you make a copy. As the wise Larry Lessig put it to me recently: "in a digital age, copying is as natural as breathing."

Indeed, we need to take the copy out of copyright: it's not about copying, it's about publishing. But this SIRA thing is going in the opposite direction, explicitly making even incidental and evanescent copying something that needs to be regulated and approved. Bad news, people. (Via BoingBoing.)

Update: Not looking good so far.

Google Does the Numbers

I try not to comment reflexively on Google's every move, but this news that it's coming out with a Web-based spreadsheet just fits too nicely with what I was saying about ajaxLaunch. It really is a case of Why Microsoft is Doomed, Part 460....

The interesting question is whether the new Google spreadsheet will be able to read OpenOffice.org files (and they'd be fools not to).

Copyrights, Copywrongs

It may just be that I've been spending too much time reading Larry Lessig's books (and even meeting the man himself - of which more anon), but copyright issues really seem to be getting seriously central these days.

First, there was the action against the BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay. If they think they need to take out The Pirate Bay, then Google, Yahoo and MSN will have to be next on the list. There was also quite a bit of reaction.

Now there's some promising noises from the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group, who have noticed that there's a lot of nasty DRM stuff floating around these days - and that most punters aren't even aware of it. It's true that they're hardly advocating ripping it all out, but making people aware of DRM and what it does is an important first step, as Larry has already shown us.

Update 1: Whoops, forgot about AllofMP3.com, as this fine piece reminds me. Love the title: Global File-Sharing Whack-A-Mole.

Update 2: Having actually read the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group report (maybe I should have done this earlier...) I must point out one particular recommendation:

#135 We recommend that the government do NOT legislate to make DRM systems mandatory.

which is indicative of the fair and intelligent stance taken by the report.

A Pebble on the Cairn

It's not earth-shattering, but the formation of the Open Source Database Consortium is another tiny sign of a gradual coming together of the various OSS players into something bigger, and the gradual evolution through accretion of an OSS ecosystem.

Ultimate OA: PLoS ONE

Thank goodness for the Web of blogs.

From a comment Pedro Beltrao kindly left on my earlier post Science Wide Open, I went to take another look at his blog, which I'd not visited for a while. And what do I find but this fascinating story about PLoS ONE, from the Public Library of Science. In my annoyance over the Wired piece on Varmus, I must have, um, missed this little nugget.

Not so much a little nugget, actually, as potentially an entire goldmine. The idea behind PLoS ONE is to create what is effectively a huge, open access, peer-reviewed blog journal for science. It is nothing if not ambitious, and on at least four counts.

Inclusiveness

The boundaries between different scientific fields are becoming increasingly blurred. At the same time, the bulk of the scientific literature is divided into journals covering ever more restrictive disciplines and subdisciplines. In contrast, PLoS ONE will be a venue for all rigorously performed science, making it easier to uncover connections and synergies across the research literature.

Personalisation

A key to navigating and unlocking the content potential of PLoS ONE will lie in powerful discovery and personalization tools. Users will be able to set up individual alerts to keep up to date in their areas of interest. Papers within PLoS ONE will contain links to related work in its own database and beyond.

Collaborative annotation

PLoS ONE will empower the scientific community to engage in a discussion on every paper and provide readers with tools to annotate and comment on papers directly.

Interactivity

A paper in a traditional journal is a static marker in an ongoing process. Authors looking back on papers written 6 months or a year ago will see things that they might now have written differently. New data may have arisen to strengthen or alter some of the conclusions. We will provide authors with ways to make those changes and so acknowledge the evolution of their ideas. This doesn't alter the scientific record—the original paper is still the original paper—but authors and readers can build upon it.

The Public Library of Science has already played a crucial role in helping to bolster enormously the academic credentials of open access; with PLoS ONE it looks as if it is going to re-make scientific discourse entirely.

Update: Richard Poynder has conducted a characteristically full and fascinating interview with Chris Surridge, the UK-based managing editor of PLoS ONE.

ZigBee Who?

One of the premises of open spectrum is that if you create a wireless commons, a thousand electromagnetic flowers will bloom. WiFi and Bluetooth are two of the better-known blossoms, but another seems to be ZigBee.

The ZigBee Alliance - "an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard" - puts it like this:

The goal of the ZigBee Alliance is to provide the consumer with ultimate flexibility, mobility, and ease of use by building wireless intelligence and capabilities into everyday devices. ZigBee technology will be embedded in a wide range of products and applications across consumer, commercial, industrial and government markets worldwide. For the first time, companies will have a standards-based wireless platform optimized for the unique needs of remote monitoring and control applications, including simplicity, reliability, low-cost and low-power.

The ZigBee Alliance site has buckets of useful links - as well as some mild untruths. For example, the FAQ claims that the name comes from the following fact:

The domestic honeybee, a colonial insect, lives in a hive that contains a queen, a few male drones, and thousands of worker bees. The survival, success, and future of the colony is dependent upon continuous communication of vital information between every member of the colony. The technique that honey bees use to communicate new-found food sources to other members of the colony is referred to as the ZigBee Principle. Using this silent, but powerful communication system, whereby the bee dances in a zig-zag pattern, she is able to share information such as the location, distance, and direction of a newly discovered food source to her fellow colony members. Instinctively implementing the ZigBee Principle, bees around the world industriously sustain productive hives and foster future generations of colony members.

But as the ever-acute Rupert Goodwins explains:

I checked on a few apiary Web sites. I even emailed a Professor Of Bee Things at a big agricultural institute. Of the 'ZigBee Principle' there is no sign -- although I do note that pictures of bees were used to signal the aiming point in antique urinals. A very dry Victorian pun that: the Latin for bee is Apis.

We are therefore forced to conclude that the ZigBee Name FAQ has nothing to do with reality, but is merely a PR taking the bees. Let's hope the rest of the standard isn't just pith and wind.

Since I've only just come across the said factitious ZigBee, I've not yet found my bearings, and I can't quite tell to what extent all this stuff is truly open. But it does sound interesting - if not quite the bee's knees yet. (Via ARCchart and Openspectrum.info.)

Science Wide Open

Jean-Claude Bradley makes a good point about open data:

I think that the part that we have yet to embrace is the posting of work fresh out of the test tube. As long as scientific research is published in an article format and its value is determined by a popularity contest of citations and peer-reviewed blessing, there will be little motivation to post work fresh out of the test tube. Especially when issues like competition and tenure are at stake.

And he then goes on to note:

My opinion at this point is that publishers or any kind of central repositories are not going to be as effective in communicating this kind of raw scientific data, unless it is readily available on the uberdatabases like Google or MSN. That's why Blogger makes an optimal vehicle to communicate raw experimental data: no cost, no gatekeeper and anyone looking on an uberdatabase will find your stuff.

Yes: Blogger as the ultimate open data conduit. Nice. (Via Open Access News).

Why Microsoft is Doomed, Part 459

Michael Robertson may not be a well-known name, but he's had a remarkable career. Companies that he's founded include MP3.com, the original online music store, and Linspire (formerly Lindows), an interesting commercial distribution of GNU/Linux. Both companies have had huge run-ins with other companies - the music biz and Microsoft, respectively. Now he's got a new venture, called ajaxLaunch - no prizes for guessing what it does.

But what's impressive about the site is that it is concentrating on the core apps: word processing (ajaxWrite), spreadsheets (ajaxXLS) and graphics (ajaxSketch) - though there's also a music app, ajaxTunes, with an interesting concept called sideloading, to keep you entertained during all this hard work. These office apps are consciously imitating Microsoft Office so that most people can do most things they need, but online - and ironically, only using Firefox.

If you didn't get the message about independence from Microsoft - you can use any OS platform for which Firefox is available - Robertson is also coming out with ajaxOS, which seems to be a complete pseudo-operating system that runs on top of the Internet, so that you can access all your office files anywhere, along with the ajax apps mentioned above to work on them.

It's a bold and brilliant vision - and one more nail in Microsoft's coffin. For most people these tools are likely to be good enough, which means that for work on the road, they'll be popular. But once you try them, you might well decided to use them on your desktop. And then you might stop using - then buying - Microsoft Office. Certainly, a few power users will cling to their Excel macros - but we all know how dangerous they are.

And the more that alternatives to Microsoft Office appear - ajaxLaunch, OpenOffice.org etc. - the weaker the Office empire becomes, and the bigger the hole in Microsoft' profits. It looks like Microsoft workers are about to become even more disenchanted.

The Other Singularity

Most people have come across the idea of the technological singularity, when technology goes through a step-change, and becomes something so radically different that it transcends human capacity to understand it (not least because sentient AI will have arisen to do the understanding for us).

There's still plenty of debate about whether such a singularity will ever occur: much scepticism, for example, has been expressed about the likelihood of AI attaining consciousness.

But there's another technological singularity that we are hurtling towards that is certain to happen: the point at which we can sequence anybody's genome for an essentially trivial amount (whether it's £100 or £10 doesn't really matter). And that singularity is not only bound to occur, it seems likely to happen soon, judging by this Guardian report.

This worries me: we are simply not ready for the knowledge that this will give us. As I've written elsewhere, both in both Digital Code of Life and in other features, cheap sequencing will give us knowledge and extraordinary possibilities, but of kind most may prefer not to have.

Do you really want to know that you have a high likelihood of developing an incurable disease? Do you want to know the true father of your child? Do you want to know which people it would be really foolish to marry, because their DNA combined with yours would increase dramatically the risk of certain diseases? Do you really want other people - your employers, insurance companies, the government - to know your genetic strengths and weaknesses?

I thought not.

Since this singularity is inevitable (assuming civilisation survives the next few years, which is not guaranteed given the current threat of pandemic 'flu), we need to start thinking through these issues now, so that when it happens, legislation has been drafted, and people - all of us - are ready to begin to cope with the consequences.

Update: And there's another point, which I've missed so far. It came up in this thread discussing the worrying growth of the US DNA database.

As the writer points out, it is now easy to make DNA to order: so once you can sequence it cheaply, as described above, you could steal a hair, say, from someone, sequence it, then manufacture as many fragments as you wanted. This could then be used to incriminate that person in all kinds of ways.

Given the belief that DNA is somehow infallible, it will be even harder to disprove this kind of evidence. Your DNA was on the murder weapon (true), so it must have been you (false)?

Open Access: If Not Now, When?

Against a background of growing fears of an imminent pandemic triggered by avian 'flu, the announcement that a new journal, Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, is being launched by Blackwell Publishing to serve precisely this area, is welcome news. As the press release notes, quoting the editor of the new title:

"There is considerable concern among experts working in the fields of influenza and respiratory medicine that there is an urgent need for international collaboration on research and development" says Alan Hampson.

"The development of avian flu and conditions like SARS have given added impetus to the very real concern about the potential risk of an influenza pandemic

"Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses will provide an international platform for information and discussion among experts who will help to shape international responses to any outbreak."

Given this "urgent need for international collaboration on research and development" you might think that Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses would be open access to allow that collaboration to be as wide and rapid as possible; indeed, it is hard to think of another area in medicine today in which free access to the latest information could be considered such a matter of life and death - not just for a few patients, but for entire populations. And yet nowhere does the press release utter the magic words "open access".

It is true that Blackwell announced its "Online Open" last year, whereby authors can choose to pay a fee so that their article is immediately made freely available for all to access online. But this is not quite the same thing, and it places the onus on the author. Far better for Blackwell to make OA the default for this title: it would receive huge kudos for the move, and earn the world's gratitude.

It would be sad, to say the least, if the title were to go down in history as a tragic missed opportunity to mitigate or even avert an influenza pandemic that later cost so many millions of lives.

What Bruce Schneier Didn't Say

The ever-perceptive Bruce Schneier has another interesting column in Wired. This time he raises the question: Why not make vendors liable for software bugs? As he explains:

For years I have argued in favor of software liabilities. Software vendors are in the best position to improve software security; they have the capability. But, unfortunately, they don't have much interest. Features, schedule and profitability are far more important. Software liabilities will change that. They'll align interest with capability, and they'll improve software security.

But one thing he doesn't address here is what will happen to open source. After all, if coders become personally responsible for the bugs they write, the volunteer system is going to collapse pretty quickly.

I asked him about this a couple of years ago, and this is what he said:

I presume there would be some exemption for open source, just as the United States has a "good Samaritan" law protecting doctors who help strangers in dire need. Companies could also make a business wrapping liability protection around open source software and selling it, much as companies like Red Hat wrap customer support around open source software.

MySQL, YourSQL, OurSQL

The MySQL database is one of the better-kept secrets of the open source world. If you come across it, it's likely to be tucked discreetly away as part of the LAMP stack. So it's good to see a little limelight shed upon this interesting set-up.

As this Fortune piece makes clear, MySQL has succeeded in applying the distributed development model that lies at the heart of open source to an entire company built on the same: no mean achievement. Nicely-written feature, too. (Via Slashdot.)

Techdirt's Trademark Trenchancy

With customary insight, Techdirt has cut through some of the nonsense associated with trademarks:

It seems that so many trademark holders want to believe that a trademark gives them all rights to whatever they trademarked, rather than just the right to prevent confusion or misleading use of the trademark in specific areas. Perhaps we should stop thinking of trademarks as being intellectual property -- because they're not. Trademarks are really about consumer protection; keeping consumers from being tricked into believing something is associated with a company that it's not. When we call it intellectual property, people automatically jump to conclusions about the level of protection the law grants -- and that leads to numerous wasteful lawsuits.

Open Source Biomedical Research

I'm always on the look-out for new applications of the open source idea, so I was delighted to come across The Synaptic Link. The name - and mission - is explained as follows:

Biomedical science is indivisible. The physical and psychological barriers that divide scientific communities are ultimately artificial and counterproductive. We see online collaboration as a natural way to bridge these gaps and pool information that is currently too fragmented for anyone to use. An open, collaborative research community will find new ways to do science, answering questions that current institutions find difficult or impossible. The Synaptic Leap’s mission is to empower scientists to make the dream a reality.

There are some interesting links at the bottom of the page linked to above. (Via Nodalpoint.org.)

Internet Hunting in the Middle Kingdom

Bizarre social trend in China: is this our future? (via Slashdot.)

Worry, Larry, Worry

OK, it's a survey by an enterprise open source database company that - surprise, surprise - comes out with the result that oodles of enterprisey people can't wait to install an enterprise open source database. Nonetheless, when 50% of maybe a biased sample in maybe a biased survey say they are going to do something, it's indicative, if nothing else. Are you worried yet, Larry?

Google's Summer of Code-Love

I've been a bit ambivalent about Google and open source in the past (because they are). But this year's Summer of Code is starting to have a seriously beneficial impact on the state of OSS. In particular, it is addressing one of the key problems of open source: the reluctance of coders to fix some of the missing twiddly bits in projects.

The Font of all Free Beer?

Normally, I'm more of a free as in freedom man, but I have to say this collection of free as in beer fonts is impressive (all 9,800 of them), so I'll make an exception this time. (Via C|net.)

Digg these Groovy CC Hits, Man

A brilliantly obvious - and obviously brilliant idea: combine Digg with CC music to create a user-generated hit parade. Note, too, that you can't do this with your DRM'd stuff (hello, iTunes), because, for the latter, only those who already own the track can vote. CC Hits, by contrast, lets anyone vote on anything, and allows new music to bubble up the stack, rather than simply re-inforcing commercially-biased tastes. Cool. (Via Boing Boing.)

TCOs: Get the Other "Facts"

I'm not a big fan of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) studies. Their methodology is often dubious in the extreme: frequently, figures are given to a ludricous number of significant figures, even though they are trying to measure things that are hard to pin down even roughly, and then come up with an "answer". This is why Microsoft has placed them at the heart of its FUD campaign "Get the Facts" against GNU/Linux: it's so easy to get the result you want.

Still, it's useful to have some ammunition for the other side, and this report about a migration carried out in Bristol provides that. As the Guardian summarises:

Bristol calculated a five-year total cost of ownership of £670,010 for StarOffice, compared with £1,706,684 for Microsoft Office. This was despite budgeting half as much in implementation and support costs for Microsoft because many users were already on its systems.

The difference may turn out to be even greater, says IT strategy team leader Gavin Beckett. "We discovered that things were simpler than we thought they'd be," he says of the switch. "We always argued that a lot of the risk was perceived risk, rather than real risk."

Update: No TCOs here, happily, but 35,000 users have been moved to OpenOffice.org in Brazil according to this story.

Economics, Not Supersize

This article points out an interesting aspect of personal gluttony: that you actually lose, rather than save money, by choosing "supersize" portions, because of subsequent extra costs this choice implies.

This is further proof that we really need a new economics that takes into account these factors - just as we need a commons-based economics to factor the true cost of environmental destruction into things like wood, beef and soya.