OpenMoko

iPhone? We don't need no stinkin' iPhone. We need this:

OpenMoko today announced the immediate availability of a completely integrated open source mobile communications platform in partnership with FIC, a world leader in motherboards, graphics cards, mobile solutions, and electronic devices. The announcement of the OpenMoko mobile communications platform coincides with the unveiling of FIC’s Neo1973 smartphone, which utilizes the full OpenMoko platform and will be available in January 2007.

Until now, mobile platforms have been proprietary and scattered. With the release of OpenMoko, which is based on the latest Linux open source efforts, developers now have an easy way to create applications and deliver services that span all users and provide a common “look and feel”. OpenMoko also offers common storage models and libraries for application developers, making writing applications for mobile phones fun and easy while guaranteeing swift proliferation of a wide range of applications for mobile phones. With such extremely high quality open frameworks, developers will be armed with exactly the tools they need to revolutionize the mobile industry.

(Via LWN.net.)

Star Trek's Second Life

Open source client, and now this:

After Rosedale's portion ended with an Electric Sheep Company produced Machinima featuring Star Trek Fans, Moonves announced that would be partnering to build a Star Trek environment within Second Life.

Second Life is clearly unstoppable....

The Open Source Bathroom

You know you're a geek... when you're running Cat5 cable in the bathroom:

Yes, that's Cat-5, and it's everywhere in this place. Everything in the new bathroom is going to be computer controlled or sensed, and I mean *everything*. The window winders will be electric, as will the curtains. Sensors will include ambient light, humidity, temperature, motion, door position, toilet flush, water flow, flowing water temperature, bath water temperature, and anything else I can think of. There won't be a single electrical item cabled in the usual way with a manual switch in line with the device: everything other than basic power points is cabled from a central termination point where it can be computer controlled, and switches themselves are replaced with home-made touch sensitive control surfaces that communicate via Cat-5 back to the automation controller.

Which will run Linux, of course.

(Via The Inquirer.)

Love and the Long March Spirit

John Battelle calls search engines "databases of intentions"; in this respect the top ten lists of queries say a lot about us. Interesting, then, to compare the top Western engine with the leading site for the East - Google vs Baidu.

Here's the Google list for "What?"

1. what is hezbollah
2. what is carisoprodol
3. what is acyclovir
4. what is alprazolam
5. what is tramadol
6. what is ajax
7. what is hydrocodone
8. what is vicodin
9. what is xenical
10. what is xanax

I think we can spot a certain trend here. Meanwhile, here's Baidu's list:

1. What is love?
2. What is the Long March spirit?
3. What is a blog?
4. What is dual-core?
5. What is 3G?
6. What is harmonious society?
7. What are futures? (stocks)
8. What is a trojan horse? (software)
9. What is happiness?
10. What is an ecosystem?

Maybe that's what we need in the West: more people searching for love and the Long March spirit.

Hardcore Coding

I've never really had the urge to hack on the Linux kernel (not least because I am the world's worst programmer - Fortran, anyone?) but if I did, I'd certainly be using Greg Kroah-Hartman's Linux Kernel in a Nutshell. To both his and O'Reilly's credit, you can download a copy (cc licence), but obviously buying one would be a good idea, too, for all the obvious reasons.

The Other Thunderbird

No, not that one, this one:

Sandia National Laboratories’ 8960-processor Thunderbird Linux cluster, developed in collaboration with Dell, Inc. and Cisco, maintained its sixth position in the Top500 Supercomputers by achieving an improved overall performance of 53.0 teraflops, an 18.5 percent increase in efficiency from last year's performance.

(Via Technocrat.)

Afforesting the Dell

Blige, I thought, Mikey's seen the light:

In a speech today at the Consumer Electronics Show here, Mr. Dell urged the electronics industry to foster the planting of trees in order to offset the impact of their devices’ energy consumption on the environment.

Bless yer, guvnor, you're a gent.

Oh, but wait:

He said Dell, the computer company he founded, would begin a program called “Plant a Tree for Me,” asking customers to donate $2 for every notebook computer they buy and $6 for every desktop PC. The money would be given to the Conservation Fund and the Carbonfund, two nonprofit groups that promote ways to reduce or offset carbon emissions, to buy and plant trees.

...

Dell intends to cover the administrative costs of the program. Mr. Dell was not able to estimate those costs.

I see: Mike Dell thinks planting trees to offset the energy that computers consume is such a great idea he's asking his customers to pay for it. Of course, it's not that Dell's company causes any damage to the environment independent of the energy its computers use.

But there again, I suppose poor old Mikey couldn't really afford to put his hand in his own pocket since he is getting a bit short of a bob or two, now that he's down to his last $17 billion.

Scratching an Icon

Who is this Steve Jobs whereof they speak? I just don't get the mindless adulation of this person (try reading "The Journey is the Reward" to get some perspective).

Take the iPhone: a large mobile phone that has the whizzo idea of making the screen - the most vulnerable part - cover the entire surface, so that it will get scratched to kingdom come in about a week in most people's pockets (remember the iPod Nano saga?).

I suppose it will drive a huge aftermarket in phone protectors: maybe all the Jobs fanboys sell third-party add-ons to his products.

All the World's a Stage/Film/MMORPG/Virtual World

More signs of the times:

Disney CEO Bob Iger showed off the revamped Disney.com during his CES keynote yesterday, but there was little "hard news" on offer—except for the announcement that Disney is bringing its hottest properties into the virtual realm. Iger announced that the company would launch a massively multiplayer Pirates of the Caribbean later this year.

And

James Cameron, the director whose “Titanic” set a record for ticket sales around the world, will join 20th Century Fox in tackling a similarly ambitious and costly film, “Avatar,” which will test new technologies on a scale unseen before in Hollywood, the studio and the filmmaker said on Monday.

...

The film, with a budget of about $200 million, is an original science fiction story that will be shown in 3D even in conventional theaters. The plot pits a human army against an alien army on a distant planet, bringing live actors and digital technology together to make a large cast of virtual creatures who convey emotion as authentically as humans.

First Open Access Journal on Open Access

It seems hard to believe, but if Peter Suber, Mr Open Access, says so, it must be true:

Open Access Research is a new peer-reviewed OA journal sponsored by the Georgia State University Library. It's the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to OA itself.

Microsoft Vista: "Checked" by the NSA

News that the US's official eavesdropper, the National Security Agency, has had a hand in Vista is going to go down really well with the governments of China, Russia, India, etc. etc.:

For the first time, the giant software maker is acknowledging the help of the secretive agency, better known for eavesdropping on foreign officials and, more recently, U.S. citizens as part of the Bush administration's effort to combat terrorism. The agency said it has helped in the development of the security of Microsoft's new operating system -- the brains of a computer -- to protect it from worms, Trojan horses and other insidious computer attackers.

Interestingly:

Novell, which sells a Linux-based operating system, also works with government agencies on software security issues, spokesman Bruce Lowry said in an e-mail, "but we're not in a position to go into specifics of the who, what, when types of questions."

But at least you can look at the code to find out what they did - unlike with Vista.... (Via The Inquirer.)

Chinese Whispers About Dell and GNU/Linux

As this Reg article points out, Dell's attitude to GNU/Linux has always been somewhat ambivalent. So news that a Dell box running the Red Flag distro is available in China is interesting.

Lost in Translation

I wrote recently about the goings-on at the Council of the European Union, and their strange reason for not supporting GNU/Linux users. But now, it seems, everything has been explained:

The European Union has blamed a translation mistake for its claim that it cannot legally support Linux.

Oh, that's OK, then. But, er, what exactly happened?

A spokesman for the Council of the EU, the Union's representative body, told ZDNet UK: "It was originally written in French, and the French version has no such statement. So it is a mistake."

Hm: the statement didn't exist, and then a "translation error" made it come into existence? How odd. But wait, there's more:

The spokesman explained that the service was only fully launched in September, and there was a need to get the service up and running, even if that meant not supporting all operating systems. He also said there was a cost, and complexity, of supporting additional operating systems such as Linux. And he added: "If we change, it is not only for Linux, we would have to open up to all open sources."

Now, hang on a minute: supporting GNU/Linux just means making RealAudio feeds available, since these can be played by open source systems as well as on proprietary systems. That's one more format, not an infinitude of "open sources" - just like many Web sites provide.

This is beginning to get fishier than the EU's fisheries policy....

Google Reaches for the Stars

One of the most important shifts in science at the moment is towards dealing with the digital deluge. Whether in the field of genomics, particle physics or astronomy, science is starting to produce data in not just gigabytes, or even terabytes, but petabytes, exabytes and beyond (zettabytes, yottabytes, etc.).

Take the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, for starters:

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a proposed ground-based 8.4-meter, 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky, night after night. In a relentless campaign of 15 second exposures, LSST will cover the available sky every three nights, opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. The superb images from the LSST will also be used to trace billions of remote galaxies and measure the distortions in their shapes produced by lumps of Dark Matter, providing multiple tests of the mysterious Dark Energy.

How much data?

Over 30 thousand gigabytes (30TB) of images will be generated every night during the decade-long LSST sky survey.

Or for those of you without calculators, that's 10x365x30x1,000,000,000,000 bytes, roughly 100 petabytes. And where there's data, there's also information; and where there's information...there's Google:

Google has joined a group of nineteen universities and national labs that are building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).

...

"Partnering with Google will significantly enhance our ability to convert LSST data to knowledge," said University of California, Davis, Professor and LSST Director J. Anthony Tyson. "LSST will change the way we observe the universe by mapping the visible sky deeply, rapidly, and continuously. It will open entirely new windows on our universe, yielding discoveries in a variety of areas of astronomy and fundamental physics. Innovations in data management will play a central role."

(Via C|net.)

UKPMC: A Name to Remember

If, like me, you're a fan of PubMed Central, and you live in Europe, here's some good news: UK PubMed Central has just opened, providing a local mirror. And if you're not yet a fan, do take a look at the large and growing holdings of biomedical titles, many of them fully open access. Here's what the press release says:

Initially UKPMC mirrors the American PubMed Central database (hosted by the NCBI at NIH). From today, UK scientists will also be able to submit their research outputs for inclusion in UKPMC. Through 2007, and beyond, the partners will develop innovative tools for UKPMC to further support biomedical research. In this way, UKPMC will grow into a unique online resource representing the UK’s biomedical research output.

(Via Open Access News.)

Second Life Opens up the Client

Fantastic news: Linden Lab has released the source code for the Second Life client under the GNU GPL v2. Nice historical context, too:

In 1993, NCSA released their liberally licensed, but proprietary, Mosaic 2.0 browser with support for inline images arguably heralding the start of the web as we know it today. In an act of either acceptance of the inevitable or simple desperation, Netscape Communications released the bulk of the Netscape Communicator code base to form the foundation of projects as Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

We are not desperate, and we welcome the inevitable with open arms.

Stepping up the development of the Second Life Grid to everyone interested, I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL version 2.

This is a great move by the Lindens, and a major step towards an open, standards-based virtual world. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. Sad, though, to see the deeply ignorant comments on the Linden Lab blog post lamenting this move because of the increased griefing they claim it will cause - as if security by obscurity ever worked.

Coders of the (virtual) world, unite!

Of Sears and Seers

People often ask: "but what's Second Life for?" Maybe this is the answer:

IBM, which recently set up a business group to explore possibilities in virtual worlds — and earmarked millions of dollars for the effort — is now bringing mega-retailer Sears to the virtual world of Second Life in a project to be announced today, 8 January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

...

each of the floors will present different possibilities for taking advantage of a 3D online world like Second Life for showing off Sears products and giving consumers more functionality than they could get from a flat Web page.

...

The plan is to allow a customer to import their own kitchen design to the virtual space, fit it out with Sears products, and be able to move around in it as they would a real kitchen in order to get a feel for how the products would work in their kitchen at home.

Visionary stuff indeed.

From Code Re-use to Stuff Re-use

One of the strengths of open source is that you don't have to re-invent the wheel; instead, you can re-use what others have done. A key element of this is the existence of the Net to make the operation frictionless. It's harder to do this kind of thing in other spheres, but it seems that the Chinese are trying - once again, thanks to the Net:

huan ke (literally the person who exchanges) is very hot in cyberspace in China where people are famous for their thrift and known for not throwing anything away. This means there are closets full of unwanted stuff that can be traded for others' unwanted stuff.

(Via Smart Mobs.)

The More Than Middling Middle Kingdom

The news that the Chinese Lemote Technology Corporation has released its first PCs based on the Loongson/Godson chip is interesting for a number of reasons. First, because the chip was designed and made entirely in China, making the country independent of Western chipmakers; and secondly, because as a non-standard chip architecture, the new chip can't run Windows. Which, means, almost inevitably, that it runs GNU/Linux. If China wants to be truly independent, free software is the quickest and easiest way to do it.

It's Hard to Be Good

I applaud the way Bill Gates is putting his vast wealth to good use through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, just as I despise the way he gained it. But it's interesting to see that even being good is hard:

In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.

Seems it's not so easy to keep the bad bits from ruining the good bits. (Via Slashdot.)

Mmm, Yes, But

Antony Mayfield points to an interesting piece in the Guardian that worries about what it calls the Mmm, Yes, But culture that blogs can spawn:

They will write: "Mmm, yes, but have you considered ..." To which we will reply: "Mmm, yes, you could be right about ..." And so a wonderfully civilised post-Blairite conversation will ensue. I wonder. There's nothing very civilised about a lot of the posting happening now; it's more like a shouting match-cum-punchup. And that's why it's often so entertaining. There is something about the Mmm-yes-but theory of the blog that is quite disquieting. Even if it became a reality, it could result only in hesitant journalism, bland criticism and writing that is predisposed to dull consensus.

As a journalist and blogger, I too have noticed this practice. Indeed, I adopt myself. But this is not out of timidity, but because I think it is the only way if blogging is to lead to anything of value in terms of online discussions.

If you want to see why the mmm-yes-but approach is necessary, take a look at the comments on Digg or Slashdot. There you will see human nature at its worst, with abusive, ad hominem, logicless attacks on the other posts leading to yet more of the same. If, on the contrary, you answer with the mmm-yes-but technique, I've noticed how it quickly chills the temperature of the debate. Not, let it be noted, the level of the debate, merely the language in which it is framed.

So to the Guardian writer and his points, I can only say: mmm, yes, but....

Google Earth Meets Second Life

Apparently, Google Earth now has a layer that includes user-generated buildings:

What you get is the best of 3D Warehouse's textured buildings uploaded by users, downloaded by default as you zoom in.

But the really interesting bit is as follows:

As speculated on Ogle Earth before, and now confirmed, Google is harnessing the creativity of its users to populate its Earth with 3D textured buildings, whereas Microsoft Virtual Earth is engaging in "central planning", with a concerted effort to map 3D textures onto models using technology from its recent acquisitions. Which is quicker and/or better will become apparent over time.

But what happens when a user deletes a contributed building from 3D Warehouse? I went looking for the answer in the terms of service, and the answer is quite clear (I think): Although you own your content, uploading it to 3D Warehouse gives Google a "perpetual license" to reproduce both the content and derivative works of the content, even if you later remove it from your account.

Which, of course, is precisely the approach that Second Life takes.

Real-time Google Earth

Well, almost.

Coming Your Way: Geoethics

Given the current state of the planetary commons, I fear we are going to be needing these sooner than expected.

London Games Academy?

If you believe, as I do, that there is a general convergence between films, virtual worlds and gaming, then it makes sense to nurture gaming talent in the same way as young filmmakers are promoted, for example at the London Film School. It seems that some in the UK Government get this too:

Woodward suggested that the industry should help to found an academy similar in function the successful London Film School. “The best way for the video games industry to have the talent and the skills it wants is to move into the hot seat itself; to come to the government and say 'we want to put some money into an - academy'”, he said.

Unfortunately, in his haste to dash any hopes of government handouts, Woodward loses the plot somewhat:

The minister appeared to dismiss hopes for tax breaks in the UK, as enjoyed by the film and other creative industries, saying that the games industry had moved beyond an early “rebel period” of “looking enviously at … tax breaks and other state incentives”.

If games are like films in deserving support - not least because they will generate jobs, revenue and tax - why not give them tax breaks just like films? What's the difference - apart from snobbery?

Virtual Copyright: A Palpable Hit

This is rather amusing:

Anshe Chung Studios, Second Life’s biggest property developer, is pressing media outlets to take down photos and video of a griefing attack against its eponymous founder, claiming that reproducing the images violates copyright.

The point is that taking a picture of someone in the real world for journalistic purposes would generally be fine - you don't have a copyright in your appearance, since you didn't do much to create it.

But in Second Life, things are rather different. People spend plenty of time creating themselves, and copyright for that digital creation is explicitly vested by Linden Labs in those creators. So Anshe Chung seems quite within her rights to demand the takedown.

Of course, being within her rights, and being right are two quite different things....

Sound the Trumpet

Talking of trumpets - or not, in Wikipedia's case:

Trumpet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

the trumpet was invented by a young man named theebis faggattus the second in 450 ad....

Catch it while it lasts.

Pegasus Flies Into the Sunset

Sad news: David Harris, creator of the Pegasus email client, has ceased development of the software. During Web 1.0, Pegasus was my preferred email software, running on Windows 3.1 and using good old Trumpet Winsock. It was free, too - at least, free as in beer. I suspect that had it gone free as in freedom early enough the hacker community would have picked it up and turned it into an early Thunderbird. Unfortunately that didn't happen.

Google Earth = Open Earth

Here's an interesting point from Google's Chris Dibona:

Widely Available, Constantly Renewing, High Resolution Images of the Earth Will End Conflict and Ecological Devastation As We Know It

because, as he explains:

With sufficient resolution, many things will be as clear to all: Troop movements, power plant placement, ill-conceived dumping, or just your neighbor building a pool. I am optimistic enough to think that the long term reaction to this kind of knowledge will be the recognition of the necessity, or the proper management and monitored phase out of the unwanted. I am not as optimistic about the short term, with those in power opting to suppress this kind of information access, or worse, acting on the new knowledge by launching into a boil the conflicts that have been simmering for uncountable years.

Openness is the antidote to power's attempt to lock down knowledge and with it the means to contest that power. Google Earth and its ilk are a new weapon in opening up not just the earth but the world too. (Via Ogle Earth.)

Open Fabbers Made Easy

I've written before about open fabbers - effectively 3D printers that can make anything - and how it's crucial for there to be open versions of this important technology. But openness isn't enough: a design that was open but still cost millions to implement wouldn't have much practical impact. What are needed are open designs that are low-cost and relatively easy to construct.

A hint of the kind of thing that may be possible can be found in this video. It shows a mini-fabber that produces cars - Lego cars to be precise. But what's really interesting is that the fabber itself is made largely out of Lego. There's more on this project and on related issues in a fascinating post at Open the Future.

I Want My Virtual London

Imagine:

flying at rooftop height up the Thames. You dive under Tower Bridge, then twist between the Gherkin and Tower 42 skyscrapers. As the London Eye looms, you bank right and dive into a translucent globe which transports you into the middle of St Paul's cathedral.

Yes!

This is an inadequate verbal description of the experience of using Virtual London (though you can click here for a clip). It is a dramatic 3D computer model showing every single building inside the M25 as at least a shaded box; some are in almost photographic detail. The model is being developed, with government money, to help Londoners visualise what is happening to their city.

Yes! Yes!

What Londoners cannot do, however, is experience Virtual London on the web. The reason will be familiar to anyone who has been following Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign: Virtual London is based partly on a database created by Ordnance Survey, a state-owned body which has to generate commercial returns. Although Virtual London was funded by another state body, the computer model cannot be posted on the web without infringing Ordnance Survey's copyright.

No!

As a Londoner, and proud of it, I demand my virtual birthright. If the Ordnance Survey isn't up to providing it, I suggest we place an ordnance under 'em and be done with the wretches.

The Man Who Invented Freedom of Information

Anders Chydenius is hardly a well-known name; it should be:

Last year, the Anders Chydenius Foundation celebrated the 240th anniversary of the world's first Freedom of Information Act. Sweden and Finland were one big empire in those days, and the Swedish-Finnish law -- passed in 1766, two hundred years before a similar law was passed by the U.S. Congress, and ensuring open access to all government papers and other kinds of information under a "principle of public access" -- was largely the product of one man's visionary ethical ideas.

Good news, though: you can read his masterpiece, The National Gain, which seems to be pretty similar to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, but predating it by 11 years, online and in English thanks to the Anders Chydenius Foundation.

Free, of course.

Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary

The title says it all.

Wise Words on Wikia

Here's an example of TechCrunch doing its job well:

I was going through CEO Gil Penchina’s Wikia presentation slides at the Le Web conference in Paris last month and noticed something that made me realize they could be a huge site some day. According to the company, Wikia is producing 2.5 million page views per day and growing steadily, and their new article growth rate tracks the early days of Wikipedia, nearly identically.

Playing a Different Kind of Open Game

As the boundary between online games, online worlds, and even the real world all starts to deliquesce, here's an interesting essay on what the author, Jesper Juul, calls "open games":

According to a widespread theory, video games are goal-oriented, rule-based activities, where players find enjoyment in working towards the game goal. According to this theory, game goals provide a sense of direction and set up the challenges that the players face.

However, the last few decades have seen many things described as "games" that either do not have goals, or have goals that are optional for the player: Sims 2 (Maxis 2004) has no stated goals, but is nevertheless extremely popular. The also popular Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games North 2005) is superficially a goal-oriented game, yet the game allows the player to perform a wide range of actions while ignoring the game goal. San Andreas isin many ways as different from Sims 2 as can possibly be: Where Sims 2 has no goal, San Andreas contains an explicit goal. Where San Andreas is infamous for being immoral and violent, Sims 2 is famous for its family-friendliness. Yet San Andreas and Sims 2 are fundamentally similar in that they are top-selling, open and expressive games, games that let the player use them in many different ways, games that allow for many different playing styles, for players pursuing personal agendas.

Not quite the openness that we know and love on this blog, but definitely a kissing cousin.

Opening Up the WebOS

I realise I am a little late to this, but I have to say that YubNub really is the bee's knees:

YubNub is a command-line for the web. After setting it up on your browser, you simply type "gim porsche 911" to do a Google Image Search for pictures of Porsche 911 sports cars. Type "random 49" to return random numbers between 1 and 49, courtesy of random.org. And best of all, you can make a new command by giving YubNub an appropriate URL.

The most important bit is the last: it allows this command-line to be extended in any way; moreover, there is a wonderfully Darwinian element to which of these extensions "survives", in the sense of being used.

I can't help feeling that something really big will come out of this one day. Web 3.0? Web 4.0? I don't mind waiting....

Akkadian and the Opens

Any post that manages to link Akkadian with openness gets my cuneiform inscription.

Virtually a Real Currency

And so the line between what is a "real" and "virtual currency" blurs yet further:

Tencent, QQ.com's parent company, is being sued by an angry user for impersonating a friend and getting him to link through to a contest site. Damages sought: 40,000 Q coins, and 445 5-digit QQ numbers (see previous post on the value of QQ numbers). Is this the first time that a court of law has been asked to award virtual currency in a settlement? It all points to the way that Q coins are increasingly being used as an alternative to the [Chinese] RMB for online economic transactions. It makes sense, given that a) so few Chinese have credit cards with which to pay for online goods and services; b) the vast majority DO have QQ accounts and Q coins with which to purchase online goods and services; and c) You can accumulate Q coins by playing online QQ games.

The post also links to this useful introduction to the world of QQ coins.

Open MMORPGs: Hope Shifts to PlaneShift

So the hope that Ryzom.org might turn into a major open source MMORPG didn't work out (although there are discussions about building on the momentum behind the attempt). Meanwhile, here's PlaneShift, another MMORPG, already releasing code under the GNU GPL.

Mozilla Maketh Mucho Moolah

Free software is not something you associated with money rolling in, but Mozilla seems to be in this enviable position:

In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. $29.8M of this was associated with the Foundation (both before and after the creation of the Corporation). The bulk of this revenue was related to our search engine relationships, with the remainder coming from a combination of contributions, sales from the Mozilla store, interest income, and other sources. These figures compare with 2003 and 2004 revenues of $2.4M and $5.8M respectively, and reflect the tremendous growth in the popularity of Firefox after its launch in November 2004.

But, as I've just written elsewhere, Mozilla needs urgently to spend this money on a big task: making Firefox 3.0 really rock.

Platform-Independent Petitioners

One of the great things about the Internet is that it lets people take the initiative in all sorts of ways. Take, for example, the current brouhaha over the live streaming service of the Council of the European Union - or rather, the lack of it for certain users:

On which platforms can I view the live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union?

The live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union can be viewed on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms. We cannot support Linux in a legal way. So the answer is: No support for Linux.

The question is, what can be done? The answer - maybe not a lot, but petitions have a long and honourable history in the democratic tradition; such things certainly won't hurt, and at the very least provide a practical demonstration that some people care. If you're an EU taxpayer, I urge you to add your voice - all you need to give is a name and an email, and the latter is not displayed.

And remember: the Internet is platform independent, so there's no excuse not to....

ObjectWeb of Desire

Unless you're deep into middleware, you've probably never heard of ObjectWare, creators of the JOnAS software. But something interesting is happening: ObjectWare is merging with OrientWare:

an open organization that integrates the mature results achieved by the 863 Program in the domain of middleware by universities and institutes such as Beihang University, Peking University, the Institute of software for Chinese Science Academie and National University of Defense Technology etc. Orientware code base is a collaborative composition of various middleware platforms, such as CORBA, J2EE, TP-Monitor, Portal and Workflow built on open and standard technical specifications. The goal is to provide a comprehensive middleware platform for the Chinese national information infrastructure that could challenge its foreign counterparties with respect to performance and functionality.

Global middleware (globalware?): sounds good to me.

Theonemillion(master)piece

Now, I wonder where they got the idea for this?

We are asking you to draw a small square image using software on our website. You don't need to be an artist or be able to draw - you can make patterns, write words, doodle - what-ever you want. Your image will be one of one million images that will make up the entire picture - The One Million Masterpiece.

You can choose to make your picture fit in with the surrounding pieces, or make it stand out, by using a preview feature that shows your image with the context of your neighbours. You can change your image at any time if you don't feel happy with it, and you can exchange messages with your fellow artists using our community pages.

All in a good cause and that, but it has to be said that pooling a million images does not make an image a million times "better". Interestingly, that Other Page looks rather more artistic.... (Via eHub.)

Public Domain Day

An interesting list of works that have come into the public domain this year - in some places, depending on how idiotic the term of copyright is (50 years after death, 70 years etc.).

Bad to see the UK doing so badly:

Even more sadly, in the United Kingdom, where millions of pages of archival documents on Canada and other former British possessions are held, not one will be public domain, no matter how old it is or when its author (if known) died, until January 1, 2039.

"Only" 32 years to go.... (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

Finding Room for Placeblogs

Given that there are several zillion of the things, it's surprising that more vertical blog segments haven't emerged. One obvious cut is by location, and here's Placeblogger that acts as a central resource for this sector. (Via Boing Boing.)

Second Life Business Communicators Wiki

There's a lot of froth flying around about the business use of Second Life, but not many facts. Here's a good resource in the making: a wiki that aims to pull together concrete information about such activity. There's not much there are the moment, but you know what you can do about that....

Open Source War

The article may be old, but the issue of open source war - the kind currently being waged in Iraq, for example - is sadly bang up to date (so to speak):

It's possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.'s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state's monopoly on violence by using Shiite and Kurdish militias as a counterinsurgency. This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980's and Colombia in the 1990's. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents (this is in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Iraq's paycheck military). This option will probably work in Iraq too.

In fact, it appears the American military is embracing it. In recent campaigns in Sunni areas, hastily uniformed peshmerga and Badr militia supplemented American troops; and in Basra, Shiite militias are the de facto military power.

The link came from a post on the blog of the author of this fascinating analysis, John Robb. Recommended.

Free Thinking about Free Culture

So the Free Culture Foundation has launched. That sounds good, but I can't really tell from the site what it's doing: the philosophy section contain essays that taken together are hardly coherent. Freedom is good, but not when it leads to confusion. Perhaps something will emerge with time.

Word the Day/Year: Computronium

It's not often I come across completely new and unsuspected words/concepts, so it must be a good omen that I happened upon this today: computronium. (Via Open the Future - a cheerful little number for the beginning of the year, I must say, Jamais.)

Welcome the Real and Virtual 2007

I won't add to all the other prognostications for this year - not least because some people have already done it so well:

let me start the year by commenting on a key trend that I believe will similarly take off in 2007 and become more widely accepted in the marketplace as the year progresses. I believe that highly visual interfaces and virtual worlds will become increasingly important for interacting with applications, communicating with people and engaging in commerce, - what we in IBM have started to call v-business.

And Irving Wladawsky-Berger - for it is he - then goes on to explain why:

In IBM, as in many companies, we spend a lot of our day in conference calls with people all around the world. The choice is not whether to have those meetings in person - but how to make the meetings more effective, more human. As many have been discovering, virtual world meetings might be one of the ways of significantly improving the quality and feeling of meetings involving multiple people in remote locations.

He concludes with an important caveat:

In the end, the market acceptance of virtual worlds, - as that of any other technology-based trend, - depends on whether it brings real value to whatever it is people want to do and are willing to pay for.