Ode to an Expiring Blue Frog

I suppose every frog has its day, but I hope that this doesn't mean the end for Azureus as we know and love it:

Azureus, maker of the popular peer-to-peer client, has revamped its software to include video publishing and distribution tools with a much slicker and user-friendly interface. To support the new platform, called Zudeo, the company has raised a $12 million second round of funding.

This space is hot; BitTorrent last week said it had raised $20 million from Accel Partners and Doll Capital Management. Much like BitTorrent, Palo Alto-based Azureus incorporated, took venture money, and came up with a business model only after the massive success of its open source software.

After all, it's well known that bloat is bad for frogs and software.

Saint Johnomics

Sir John Sulston is one of my heroes, right up there with RMS. Indeed, Sulston can reasonably be called the RMS of genomics (or maybe RMS is the Sulston of software). More than anyone else, it was Sulston who fought for and won the free availability of the human genome's digital code. Without him, I suspect that the company that once seemed set to become the Microsoft of molecular biology, Celera, would "own" the human genome, with all the appalling things that this implies.

I mention this because there was short piece by him in the FT recently. It's an edited extract from a talk he gave; the editing and extraction are not very well done, and it certainly doesn't do justice to the man or his ideas. For that, you should read his book The Common Thread - significantly, subtitled "A Story of Science, Ethics and the Human Genome".

Great literature it ain't, but it fair bristles with the same sense of mission and moral imperatives that makes RMS's stuff such fun to read. If RMS is St IGNUcius, perhaps Sulston is St Johnomics.

Open Provenance Architecture

Interesting:

Ultimately, our aim is to conceive a computer-based representation of provenance that allows us to perform useful analysis and reasoning to support our use cases. The provenance of a piece of data will be represented in a computer system by some suitable documentation of the process that led to the data. While our applications will specify the form that such a documentation should take, we can identify several of its general properties. Documentation can be complete or partial (for instance, when the computation has not terminated yet); it can be accurate or inaccurate; it can present conflicting or consensual views of the actors involved; it can be detailed or not.

Open Science or Free Science?

The open science meme is rather in vogue at the moment. But Bill Hooker raises an interesting point (in a post that kindly links to a couple items on this blog):

should we be calling the campaign to free up scientific information (text, data and software) "Free Science", for the same reasons Stallman insists on "Free Software"?

Interestingly, there is another parallel here:

Just as free software gained the alternative name "open source" at the Freeware Summit in 1998, so free open scholarship (FOS), as it was called until then by the main newsletter that covered it - written by Peter Suber, professor of philosophy at Earlham College - was renamed "open access" as part of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in December 2001. Suber's newsletter turned into Open Access News and became one of the earliest blogs; it remains the definitive record of the open access movement, and Suber has become its semi-official chronicler (the Eric Raymond of open access - without the guns).

Brits Get the Net - and Net Ads

I remember well during the heady Web 1.0 days worrying about business models (I know, this made me something of an oddity). Because it was clear to me that the banner advertising then in vogue just wasn't going to cut it. Net advertising - it'll never catch on, I thought.

Close. Not.

The second Net boom/bubble has been largely driven by Google and its targeted ads. The knock-on effect is that Net advertising is thriving, and no more so than in the UK, apparently. This article has some interesting figures on the differences between the UK and US markets, tying them in to techno-socio-economic factors.

Towards a Post-Copyright World

One of the heartening things about fighting the inequities of the current system of intellectual monopolies is that there are a growing number of like-minded people and sites doing it. One, for example, is Moving to Freedom, and from here I learned about another, called Questioncopyright.org.

I can particularly recommend the essay there entitled "The promise of a post-copyright world". As well as a thorough, and unusually illuminating history of copyright (yes, it's all the fault of us Brits again), it closes with this important insight:

As the stream of freely available material gets bigger, its stigma will slowly vanish. It used to be that the difference between a published author and an unpublished one was that you could obtain the former's books, but not the latter's. Being published meant something. It had an aura of respectability; it implied that someone had judged your work and given it an institutional stamp of approval. But now the difference between published and unpublished is narrowing. Soon, being published will mean nothing more than that an editor somewhere found your work worthy of a large-scale print run, and possibly a marketing campaign.

Bill Gates's Virtual Wealth

Here's a very sharp post from Urizenus Sklar, which is a comment on Wagner James Au's post, which in turn was commenting on the news that Second Life has its first (dollar) millionaire:

Anshe Chung has become the first online personality to achieve a net worth exceeding one million US dollars from profits entirely earned inside a virtual world.

As Au points out, Chung doesn't really have this million dollars: her ability to realise it is contingent on all sorts of factors:

If Anshe Chung gradually sold all her Second Life assets over the span of a year or two to prevent market devaluation, and if all the assets actually in the inventory of various avatars working for Anshe were successfully transferred back to her, and if throughout that time the in-world economy remained stable and the population continued growing, and if Second Life did not suffer any serious interruptions of service either through hacking, scalability failures, sale of the company, or other unforeseen acts of God-- why, Anshe Chung's account holder would have, at the end of that long and arduous process, well over $1,000,000.

But as Sklar brilliant notes, Bill Gates's wealth is equally chimerical and contingent:

If he started slowly selling his stock, but not so fast that the value tanked, and IF open source software doesn’t wipe him out before he sells and IF Google doesn’t wipe him out before he sells, and IF a lawsuit doesn’t wipe him out first, and IF his business doesn’t get dismantled for anti-trust violations, and IF he doesn’t get shot, and If as soon as he gets his money out he doesn’t put it in financial derivatives and they tank and IF as soon as he gets it out his wife doesn’t make him spend it on starving children in Africa before he gets to stuff his mattress with it, then I suppose he is a billionaire. But what are the chances of that?

Beyond the wit, what this post serves to underline is that there is no substantive difference between "virtual" wealth made in the "virtual" world, and "real" wealth made in the "real" world.

The Big IP Lie

A very interesting transcript of a conversation between Reuters and Warner Music Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman. The latter is clearly trying to come across as a hip, reasonable chap:

Adam Reuters: How has the music industry, from production to marketing to distribution, changed in the MySpace, YouTube era we find ourselves in?

Edgar Bronfman: It really is all about the sense of community. There used to be a sense of community if you remember a really great record store where you could go through all the albums and talk about your records. Now you can have that sort of sharing in a virtual community or on an Internet community, and therefore do it much more broadly.

But later on, he is revealed for what he is when he slips in the Big IP Lie:

Intellectual property is intellectual property, whether it’s in the form of an avatar or a song or any such thing. These are the creations of someone’s mind, and it’s property as real as real estate.

No, Ed, no, no, no. What you call "intellectual property" is really an intellectual monopoly: it is a limited privilege, granted by the state, to encourage creativity. It is not property, however much you might like to claim it implicity. It is a bargain, with a quid pro quo: it has to allow reasonable "fair use", and it has to be given up after a reasonable time. You and your industry seem to have forgotten both aspects.

Might I suggest you start talking about intellectual monopolies rather than "intellectual property" to help remind you about your obligations under this bargain?

Fight for Net and Mobile Neutrality

As if it isn't enough having to fight for Net neutrality, now it looks like in Europe we've got to do the same for Mobile neutrality:

This study undertaken by Booz Allen Hamilton, on behalf of the UMTS Forum, considers the impact on mobile consumers and the overall industry ecosystem of two alternative spectrum management scenarios for wide area communications. Firstly, continuation of the current harmonised approach, which is based on internationally agreed band plans using a designated group of technology standards. Secondly, the liberalised scenario, which advocates flexibility through generalised technology neutrality.

The report concludes, through qualitative and quantitative analysis, that consumers and the overall industry ecosystem are best served through continuation of the current harmonised approach. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that in a harmonised environment consumers benefit from the increased penetration of end-user services due to the speed of innovation and network effects (i.e. Metcalfe’s Law); while the industry ecosystem benefits from the improved cost structure provided by the large market size, and scale effects resulting from a harmonised environment. Finally, the quantitative analysis suggests that spectrum harmonisation will benefit end-users through greater usage of end-user services, at lower ARPU, with a larger consumer surplus.

So, a report commissioned by opponents of mobile neutrality - the "liberalised scenario" - comes out against it: what a coincidence.

But all the arguments in favour of Net neutrality - level playing field, the ability to introduce new services without asking permission from network operators etc. etc. - apply here too. Don't be fooled by this arrant nonsense: long live the wireless commons. (Via openspectrum.info.)

Enter the WikiMatrix

Confused by all the wikis out there? You will be, once you've worked your way through the dozens listed on this amazing site, which lets you compare them in minutest detail. (Via Quoi9.)

Brum Not So Glum

Some fine reporting from Matthew Broersma on Techworld has dug up some interesting stuff about the so-called "failed" open source desktop implementation in Birmingham:

Birmingham City Council has defended its year-long trial of desktop Linux, claiming it to be a success, despite an independent report showing it would have been cheaper to install Windows XP.

In an exclusive interview with Techworld, head of IT for the council, Glyn Evans, argued that the higher cost resulted from the council having to experiment with the new technology and build up a depth of technical understanding, as well as fit it with the complex system already in place.

The £105,000 saving that the report says would have resulted from going with Windows XP has also come under question as it was calculated using the special discounted licence rate that Microsoft offers councils - something critics argue is a calculated effort to prevent public bodies from building up technical knowledge of open source offerings.

Fishier and fishier - good work, Matthew.

Sun Opts for GNU GPL v2.5

I've written elsewhere about my pleasant surprise at Sun choosing the GNU GPL for Java. But an obvious question that follows on from that news is: which GPL? B

This is a highly political question, with no easy answer. And yet Simon Phipps, Mr Open Source at Sun, has given a good 'un:

the very first question Richard asked me about OpenJDK was "GPL v2 or later" or "GPL v2 only"? I explained that Sun could not in good faith commit to using a license sight-unseen for such an important code-base. It's used on 4 billion devices, there are more than 5 million developers dependent on it for their living, and the risk - however slight - that the GPL v3 might prove harmful to them can't be taken. So while we are very positive about the GPL v3, committing to using it when it's not finished does not seem responsible stewardship. I hope we can use it, but I can't express that hope by committing in advance. So for now, the Java platform will be licensed under just the GPL v2.

Sounds fair enough to me.

The Digital Library of India

There's plenty of noise in the press (and blogs) about the Google Book project, or the Million Book Project. These are all interesting and laudable (well, those bits of it in the public domain, at least), but what about elsewhere?

Here's an interesting piece about the Digital Library of India (DLI) initiative. Here, for example, is an issue I bet you've never considered before - I know I haven't:

Designing an accurate OCR in the Indian languages is one of the greatest challenges in computer science. Unlike European languages, Indian languages have more than 300 characters to distinguish, a task that is an order of magnitude greater than distinguishing 26 characters. This also means that the training set needed is significantly larger for Indian languages. It is estimated that at least a ten million-word corpus would be needed in any font to recognize Indian languages with an acceptable level of accuracy. DLI is expected to provide such a phenomenally large amount of data for training and testing of OCRs in Indian Languages. Many of the contents, besides scanned images, have been manually entered for this purpose. Using this extremely large repertoire of data, a Kannada OCR has been developed.

(Via Open Access News.)

Going All Googly on Copyright

Some people might say I already write too much about copyright; but for those who don't, and are dying for even more of the stuff, here's a blog on the subject. And not just any old blog (like this one); how's this for author credentials:

Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc. Former copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary; Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights; Law Professor Georgetown Law Center (adjunct), Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (full-time faculty member, founding director L.L.M in Intellectual Property program), author of numerous treatises and articles (including one on fair use with Judge Richard Posner), including a forthcoming multi-volume treatise on copyright.

The latter, by the way, is a cool 6,700 pages long.... (Via Against Monopoly.)

Dry Up, Epson

Time to stop buying Epson inkjet printers, it seems.

Finding Our Way to a Third Life

Talking of geography, here's geograph, which "aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of the UK and Eire". That's nice, but I'd like to see this go further.

Imagine if pix were available for a much finer mesh - say, every ten metres (or something). Imagine, then, using some software like Photosynth, a seriously cool piece of software that is sadly closed source (and Microsoft's, to boot), to stitch all those images together into a complete, three-dimensional world - our world - that you could navigate through, while able to see everyone else there doing the same.

Third Life, anyone? (Via Open (finds, minds, conversations)...)

WAYN - Where Were You?

The Internet famously abolishes geographical location, but people are still located. This means that you often want to know where your family, friends and acquaintances are. Where Are You Now (WAYN) lets you provide your present and future locations for interested parties. It's an obvious idea - so obvious, in fact, that I wonder why it hasn't come along before. (Via Quoi9.)

Microsoft: Do You Have to Be So Blatant?

Massachusetts, we know, has had a troubled time when it comes to implementing ODF. But here's some fresh blood on the technical advisory group that will oversee that project. Oh, but wait a minute, who's this newcomer? Andy Updegrove has the details:

That person is Brian Burke, the Microsoft Regional Director for Public Affairs, and if that surprises you, it surprises me as well, given the degree of acrimonious debate and disinformation witnessed in Massachusetts over the last 15 months involving the Information Technology Division's transition to ODF.

Er, Microsoft? As in "not-really-keen-on-ODF" Microsoft? Isn't this a little bit, well, you know - blatant?

WordPerfect Does ODF - Finally

Still hedging its bets somewhat, Corel has finally done it:

Corel Corporation (NASDAQ:CREL; TSX:CRE) today announced that Corel WordPerfect Office will be updated to support new XML-based file formats, the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML).

Better late than never.

Closing in on the Tipping Point

If users are a software company's bread and butter today, developers are the future. That's why Microsoft has built up such an impressive developers' programme. Keep them sweet, and you keep tomorrow safe.

Well, that was the theory, but something seems to be going wrong. The latest of the by-now venerable Evans Data reports on developers shows some pretty amazing trends.

Try these for size:

developers said that in the next 12 to 18 months they expect to be developing more Linux apps than Windows apps.

...

developers with Linux chops report that their top two development choices are Web-based interfaces and rich client applications. This was expected because these types of apps have such wide usage.

The No. 3 choice, however, falls under the category of “emerging market”: Linux desktop apps.

...

The organizations that these developers work for (or are aligned with) will be taking a look at many open source applications in the next two years, the survey finds.

A hefty 69% will consider open source browser Firefox, with 70% planning on considering application development software.

Also interesting is the popularity of code re-use:

developers are using chunks of code from the open source library, or open source third party solutions, to complete their own projects.

The survey finds the practice is particularly popular because of today’s tight development cycles. Also driving popularity is the cornucopia of open source choices that are now available. Some 32% of developers say “ease of use” prompts them to use pre-written open source code, with 25% reporting “quality” as their rationale.

Is that the sound of a bandwagon approaching? (Via Tuxmachines.org.)

BitTorrent Falling to Bits?

Bad rumours swirling around BitTorrent: that it's getting lots of dosh, presumably to go corporate and "respectable", and that the man behind it, Bram Cohen, is out of it.

Somehow, I don't think the new BitTorrent strategy will be very popular with its current users. Whether the company can make money by fawning all over the big content monopolists remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath.

Trademark of the Blog

On Technorati's home page, there is a rather witty piece of self-deprecation: "55 million blogs...some of the have to be good." Not only must some of them be good, but you can also expect them to be on any subject. So it should come as no surprise, I suppose, that there is a blog devoted to the subject of trademarks. (Via Luis Villa's Blog.)

OOPS - They Did It Again

I've written about the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative several times. It began at MIT, but is now spreading as other institutions make their courses freely available. However, most of this material is in English, and part of the point of open courseware is for people all over the world to have access. That means it needs to be translated, and what better way than to do it via a kind of open translation process?

That's pretty much what the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS) does:

This site invites volunteers to help transcribe many available Open Educational Resources (OER) video lectures into English. The OERs included in this site are from MIT OCW and many other insitutions. You don't need to be able to speak Chinese to help. Everyone who can understand and type English is encouraged to participate.

The man behind OOPS is Lucifer Chu:

In 2003, Chu, known for translating J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings into Chinese, read an article in Wired magazine that described Asian students trying to use MIT’s OCW.

"I was deeply touched," he says. "After I read the article, I thought, what if?" Chu quit his job at a publishing house and founded the OOPS project to translate MIT’s OCW site for Chinese-speaking people.

He was able to do this because of an rather daring gamble:

His life was set to change in the late 1990s, when he first began reading the English editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic Lord of the Rings. On hearing that a movie version of Tolkien's trilogy was in the pipeline, Chu approached a local publisher and offered to translate the works into Chinese for a minimal fee.

The deal was that if the translated works sold less than 10,000 boxed-sets, or 40,000 individual copies, Chu would donate his translation services for free. If, however, sales surpassed the 10,000 mark he would receive 9 percent of the retail value of each book.

It was a gamble, but within weeks of the release of the first of director Peter Jackson's big-screen trilogy in December, 2001, Chu's translation had become a national bestseller.

The number of boxed-sets sold in Taiwan to date stands somewhere in the region of 220,000 and Chu is now worth in excess of a cool NT$27million.

Now his team of some 700 translators have moved on from the original MIT material and started work on that released by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

A classic story of a do-gooder made good? Maybe, but not everyone is happy with his efforts:

A group known as COER, or China Open Education Resources, which is a paid fulltime crew of university professors and intellectuals in China working on translating MIT courses, have let Chu know that OOPS's volunteers are undermining their work.

Don't you just love human nature? (Via Open Access News.)

Going Nuts over ODF

And not just Brazil:

The OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), a broad cross-section of organizations, academia and industry dedicated to improving access to electronic government documents, today applauded Brazil's decision to recommend ODF as the government's preferred format; India's decision to use ODF at a major state government agency; and Italy's decision to recognize ODF as a national standard.

(Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

Big Blue's Cunning Ploy

Clever:

IBM, the world's largest computer company, has a successful venture capital group operating in the heart of Silicon Valley, yet it makes no investments in startup companies. Instead, it tells VC firms what types of startups it might want to acquire and waits for the Silicon Valley innovation machine to do the rest.