Net Radio: Death or Dishonour?

Well, look at this. After all the high drama about the imminent death of Net radio because of the exorbitant licensing rates being demanded, we have an interesting twist:

SoundExchange announced yesterday new terms of a proposal to address the concerns regarding the minimum fees for webcasting set by the Copyright Royalty Judges (CRJs).

Under the new proposal, to be implemented by remand to the CRJs, SoundExchange has offered to cap the $500 per channel minimum fee at $50,000 per year for webcasters who agree to provide more detailed reporting of the music that they play and work to stop users from engaging in “streamripping” – turning Internet radio performances into a digital music library.

In other words, we won't kill you provided you enslave yourself and your listeners through DRM'd music. (Via Ars Technica.)

Good Code, Ugly Code, Open Code

And talking of 0.01 code and self-deprecation:

I have released AjaxLife’s (very ugly and hackish) code under the revised BSD license. :D

You can find it at http://code.google.com/p/ajaxlife/. As it says, the code is messy. But eh.

That’s what you get when you throw something together over the weekend in a language you don’t know. And for added fun, part of the code was lost at some point (file corruption) and had to be recovered by decompiling. So, as I said. Ugly code. :p

Well done Linus, er, Katharine.

Not Really Patent At All

Hmm, I'm not really clear what's going on with this "European Interoperability Patent" (EIOP) stuff:

Essentially, it is an idea that is based on what he calls the concept of “soft IP”, which, he says, is encapsulated within the Blue Skies strand of the EPO’s Scenarios project. The EIOP would be an EU-wide patent granted by the EPO that would be “open”. In other words, EIOP owners would not be able to get injunctive relief – either preliminary or permanent in cases of infringement; instead, EIOP owners would effectively be signing up to the concept of licences of right, so that anyone who wanted to use a patent would be able to do so as long as an appropriate licensing fee was paid (it is a concept that exists under the laws of some European countries already, including the UK). If a fee could not be agreed, then the matter would go to the courts, which would adjudicate on what amount would be reasonable.

Actually, I can understand where IBM is going with this, but I'm less sure about the FFII on the basis of the following hints:

“The FFII has a new leadership and we think that it has changed, and become more mature. The FFII is critical if Europe is going to develop as somewhere in which to build a patent system that can exist in a more facilitative and less conflicting nature with open innovation models … the FFII has influence and a strong voice; something it proved in the CII debate. We feel there is now an opportunity to engage and have a constructive dialogue.”

CII refers to the dreaded "computer-implemented invention", and is basically a trick to get European software patents in through the back door. I do hope that the FFII is not going to do something silly. I obviously need to investigate further. (Via The Inquirer.)

This is GOOD SCIENCE!

"Open notebook science" is a great term devised by Jean-Claude Bradley - great, because it makes explicit exactly where you can find, read and hack the source code that underlies open science. One of the best observers of that world, Bill Hooker, has an interesting comment on a fellow researcher's adoption of the open notebook approach:

It's also, to be honest, just plain fun to snoop around in someone else's lab notes! I was amused to note that Jeremiah talks to and about himself in his notebook, the same way I do -- "if I weren't so stupid I'd...", "next time load the control first, doofus", etc. I wonder if everyone does that?

Now, where have I heard this sort of thing before?

This is GOOD CODE!

Yeah, yeah, it's ugly, but I cannot find how to do this correctly, and this seems to work...Most of this was trial and error...Urghh

The programming comments of a very young Linus Torvalds as he hacked version 0.01 of a little program called Linux during the summer of 2001. Coincidence? I don't think so....

Open Source and Happiness

What has this got to do with open source and openness in general?

"Countries that have most closely followed the Anglo-Saxon, strongly market-led economic model show up as the least efficient," commented Nef's policy director, Andrew Simms.

"These findings question what the economy is there for. What is the point if we burn vast quantities of fossil fuels to make, buy and consume ever more stuff without noticeably benefiting our wellbeing?"

(Excercise left to reader).

Eee - I Want One

This looks very tasty:

The Asus Eee PC 701 notebook

* Display: 7"
* Processor: Intel mobile CPU (Intel 910 chipset, 900MHz Dothan Pentium M)
* Memory: 512MB RAM
* OS: Linux (Asus customized flavor)
* Storage: 8GB or 16GB flash hard drive
* Webcam: 300K pixel video camera
* Battery life: 3 hours using 4-cell battery
* Weight: 2lbs
* Dimensions: 8.9 in x 6.5 in x 0.82 in - 1.37 in (width x depth x thickness)
* Ports: 3 USB ports, 1 VGA out, SD card reader, modem, Ethernet, headphone out, microphone in

Even tastier is the price: with the dollar delightfully weak these days, we're talking just a smidge over a hundred quid each. Put me down for a brace.

Microsoft's Advertising Framework

This says it all, really:

An advertising framework may reside on a user computer, whether it's a part of the OS, an application or integrated within applications. Applications, tools, or utilities may use an application program interface to report context data tags such as key words or other information that may be used to target advertisements. The advertising framework may host several components for receiving and processing the context data, refining the data, requesting advertisements from an advertising supplier, for receiving and forwarding advertisements to a display client for presentation, and for providing data back to the advertising supplier. Various display clients may also use an application program interface for receiving advertisements from the advertising framework. An application, such as a word processor or email client, may serve as both a source of context data and as a display client. Stipulations may be made by the application hosting the display client with respect to the nature of acceptable advertising, restrictions on use of alternate display clients, as well as, specifying supported media.

In other words, every app running on Microsoft's advertising-enhanced OS will spy on you so that those nice advertisers can push junk in your face. Thanks, Microsoft. (Via Slashdot.)

A World Without Intellectual Monopolies...

...would be fine. And look, it's not just me:

The repeal of IP might create for it an additional cost of doing business, namely efforts to ensure that consumers are aware of the difference between the genuine product and impersonators. This is a cost of business that every enterprise has to bear. Patents and trademarks have done nothing to keep Gucci and Prada and Rolex impersonators at bay. But neither have the impersonators killed the main business. If anything, they might have helped, since imitation is the best form of flattery.

That was always true, but now there's another reason for believing it:

The Internet age has taught that it is ultimately impossible to enforce IP. It is akin to the attempt to ban alcohol or tobacco. It can't work. It only succeeds in creating criminality where none really need exist. By granting exclusive rights to the first firm to jump through the hoops, it ends up harming rather than promoting competition.

But some may object that protecting IP is no different from protecting regular property. That is not so. Real property is scarce. The subjects of IP are not scarce, as Stephan Kinsella explains. Images, ideas, sounds, arrangements of letters on a page: these can be reproduced infinitely. For that reason, they can't be considered to be owned.

BTW, the Stephan Kinsella paper referred to above, called simply "Against Intellectual Property", is also fantastic stuff. Good to know that the we few - we happy few - are growing in number. (Via Against Monopoly.)

IBM Opens Up AIX....Well, the Beta

What does AIX say to you? Correct: big, old, proprietary. And yet:

Openness, such as compliance with open standards, has always been an integral part of the AIX operating system (OS). The next release of AIX, Version 6.1, extends this openness to the product release process with the first ever AIX open beta. The open beta will allow a broad set of IBM clients to download and gain experience with AIX 6 before it becomes generally available.

An "open" beta for the next AIX release differs from the traditional beta in three key areas:

* Almost anyone who is interested will be able to download and install a pre-release version of AIX 6. By contrast, only a few clients would have the opportunity to test a new AIX release in a traditional beta.
* Participants in the open beta will not receive traditional support from IBM. Instead, you access a Web forum to discuss questions and issues.
* The only legal document required for participation in the open beta is a "click to accept" license agreement that clearly states all program conditions.

Well, I suppose that's progress. (Via The Inquirer.)

No EU Software Patents?

Hm, were this not on the European Patent Office's own site, I might have doubted its authenticity:

Where do we stand in the discussion about patents on computer-implemented inventions (CII patents) two years after rejection in the European Parliament? This was the perspective under which the EPO had invited members of the European Parliament, representatives from industry and enterprise, NGOs and IP specialists to review developments since the rejection of the CII directive.

The bottom line (literally)?

All speakers welcomed unequivocally the opportunity to discuss the issue at a high level and made clear that a new CII debate followed by legal modifications was neither necessary nor desirable.

Wearing my cynical journalist's hat, I suppose this might mean that companies in favour of software patents (like SAP, which emerges once again as the Big Baddie of Europe in all this), think they'll be able to squeeze through their wretched computer implemented inventions under the present scheme.

Still, the EPO story's headline "No revival of software patents debate" is a good marker to have. (Via Slashdot.)

The Language of Freedom

This is yet another reason why free software is so important: it lets people take their control of their linguistic destiny, liberating them from the money-based decisions of companies who have no interest in such matters.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 is scheduled to be released in early September and will include locales for:

* Sango - Marcel Diki-Kidiri
* Lingala - Denis Moyogo Jacquerye
* Luganda - Martin Benjamin (and others)
* English (Ghana) - Paa Kwesi Imbeah

For speakers of these languages, an estimated 5,5+ million people, this work has impact in that they can for the first time correctly choose dates and times for their language and country and adjust the behaviour of OpenOffice.org to cater for other cultural conventions.

But more critically in the long term it means that they can now create documents correctly tagged as having being written in that language. For most Africans who do not have locale support for their language they will traditionally write the document in their language while the computer assumes it is written in American English. While this works it is causing inestimable long term damage; search engines cannot find Lingala documents, we cannot draw text from Sango documents to help build spell checkers or do language research. But now for these languages and for users using OpenOffice.org they can create documents correctly labeled and in the future help researchers and users of their content access it correctly.

The Word on the (Dutch) Street: OpenTaal

This is obviously good news, but I can't help finding the idea of an "official" spelling list rather quaint:

The OpenTaal project (Dutch for "OpenLanguage") has published the first open source word list to be certified by the Dutch Language Union as corresponding to official spelling. Simon Brouwer, project leader of OpenTaal, says, "This is a milestone. Users of open source software can trust their Dutch spell checker now. They have the guarantee that their word list is consistent with the official spelling."

...

In 2005, the Dutch language area got new spelling, which consists mainly of corrections to the spelling of 1995. Starting in August 2006, the new spelling would be mandatory for the government and schools. This revived the project of creating an open source word list. At the end of 2005 the Dutch government program Open Standards and Open Source Software (OSOSS) initiated the OpenTaal project to coordinate the various Dutch open source projects that had an interest in the new spelling, with the aim of developing a Dutch word list conforming to the new spelling. This would give users of open source software like OpenOffice.org, TeX, Thunderbird, and Firefox an up-to-date spell checker. OSOSS contacted the Dutch Language Union, which agreed to assist the project.

A Theory of Optimal Copyright

There have been plenty of arguments over copyright and what an appropriate term for it should be, but, to my knowledge, precious few mathematical theories, especially those that take into account the impact of digital technologies.

Enter Rufus Pollock, with his splendid paper Forever Minus a Day: Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright. And if you get the feeling from the title that this may not be exactly beach literature, you are probably right:

Take any exogenous variable X which affects the welfare function (whether directly and/or via its effect on production N). Assuming that the initial optimal level of protection is finite, if d2W/dXdS is positive then an increase (decrease) in the variable X implies an increase (decrease) in the optimal level of protection.

Go that? Well, get this, at least:

Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fourteen years. This is substantially shorter than any current copyright term and implies that existing copyright terms are non-optimal.

Non-optimal: there you have it in a nutshell. (Via Boing Boing.)

Why Biofuels Are Bonkers, Part 3875

I knew biofuels were environmentally bad news, but it seems that they are even worse than I imagined:

Glub, glub. The plant consumes over a million kilos of corn per day. That’s good news for area farmers especially as the price has almost doubled due to high demand. The bad news is that our current agricultural system is petroleum-soaked. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers, machinery, irrigation pumps, and grain transport all depend on the stuff. Sustainable Table reports that each acre of corn, just in chemical pesticides and fertilizers, requires 5.5 gallons of petroleum .

Glub, glub. The plant uses 275 tons of coal a day, trucked down from Wyoming. Five rail cars, powered by diesel engines, head east with the finished ethanol each day.

Shluurrp. The plant uses 600,000 gallons of water every day to produce 150,000 gallons of ethanol. This water figure doesn’t account for pumped irrigation water (requiring petroleum) during corn cultivation.

So, nominally bio-friendly biofuels actually require lots of concretely polluting petrol and coal in order to be manufactured. So, wouldn't it just be easier to spend a little more time working on electric cars, renewable energy, you know, all that boring old stuff that might actually mitigate things, instead of creating this Escheresque staircase of pointless energy transmutation?

BBC Listens - or Pretends To...

Good to hear:

The BBC Trust has asked to meet open source advocates to discuss their complaints over the corporation's Windows-only on demand broadband TV service, iPlayer.

The development came less than 48 hours after a meeting between the Open Source Consortium (OSC) and regulators at Ofcom on Tuesday. Officials agreed to press the trust, the BBC's governing body, to meet the OSC. The consortium received an invitation on Wednesday afternoon.

Since they had to be shoved into doing this by Ofcom, I somehow can't see the BBC actually doing anything as a result. But I'm willing to be proved wrong.

The Commons of African Cuisine

Behold the African Cookbook Project:

whose goal is to archive African culinary writing and make it widely available on the continent and beyond. A database is being developed and copies of hundreds of cookbooks are already being catalogued at BETUMI: The African Culinary Network. Google has offered assistance in eventually digitizing some of the information.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Stamboul Train of Thought

Interesting Turkish delight from the second OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy, held in Istanbul on 27-30 June:

Official statistics are a key “public good” that foster the progress of societies.

...

To take this work forward we need to advocate appropriate investment in building statistical capacity, especially in developing countries, to improve the availability of data and indicators needed to guide development programs and report on progress toward international goals

Steady on, chaps, this is getting perilously close to calling for open data:

the OECD is thinking of creating an Internet site based on Web 2.0 “wiki” technologies for the presentation and discussion of international, national and local initiatives aimed at developing indicators of societal progress. By making indicators accessible to citizens all over the world through dynamic graphics and other analytical tools, this initiative would aim to stimulate discussion based on solid and comparable statistical information about what progress actually means.

Will the Next Linus Be Female?

Here's a classic story.

Hacker gets tired of missing functionality; hacker thinks "it can't be that hard"; hacker takes a bit of open source code as a starting point, knocks up something over the weekend; next day, the revolution begins - in this case, being able to access Second Life from a browser (that is, without needing the stonking SL client or upmarket video cards).

But where things get even more interesting is that the hacker in this case is just 15 - and female. Katharine Berry's blog posting on her AjaxLife hack is here, and there's already an interview with her. Let's hope she isn't too put off by the media circus that is sure to descend on her (not me) to carry on honing the code.

Happy hacking.

The Secret World of S5

Hm, I'd somehow missed this before:

S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It's totally simple, and it's totally standards-driven.

Pity I don't have any familiarity with CSS....(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)

IBM Does the Decent Thing

Well, partly:

IBM is extending this leadership role to further the adoption of open specifications for software interoperability and to simplify implementation of those specifications by open source software organizations. Toward that end, IBM is offering a patent non-assert pledge to include the software specifications identified in the following list. IBM intends this pledge to include specifications for software interoperability for which it has made a royalty-free patent licensing commitment. No action is required by users of these specifications to invoke this non-assert commitment.

What this means is:

IBM irrevocably covenants to you that it will not assert any Necessary Claims against you for your making, using, importing, selling, or offering for sale Covered Implementations. However, this covenant will become void, and IBM reserves the right to assert its Necessary Claims against you, if you (or anyone acting in concert with you) assert any Necessary Claims against any Covered Implementations of IBM or of any third party. This covenant is available to everyone directly from IBM, and does not flow from you to your suppliers, business partners, distributors, customers or others. So, if your supplier, business partner, distributor, customer or other party independently takes an action that voids the covenant as to itself, IBM reserves the right to assert its Necessary Claims against that party, even though this covenant will remain in effect for you.

Now, if it could just do the same for the other N thousand patents it has squirrelled away....

Why "Nothing to Hide" Has Nothing to Do With It

Openness, privacy and surveillance are locked in an eternal, complex dance. One of the commonest ploys of the surveillance mob is to invoke the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" idea. Here's a detailed, if slightly legalistic, picking apart of that trope - noting, rightly, that the question itself is skewed. (Via Slashdot.)

Berkman's Legal Education Commons

The partnership will establish the Legal Education Commons – known as eLangdell for Harvard Law School’s first Dean and the Law Library’s namesake, Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell – where law faculty can share and use openly-licensed course materials to offer students free or low-cost course packs, casebooks, podcasts, and video. Berkman and CALI will also research and develop innovative teaching tools to advance practice skills like client interaction, negotiations, and trial advocacy.

Makes sense. (Via Open Access News.)

Microsoft, China, Piracy, the Future

Sometimes the truth will out in the most surprising contexts. Like here, in this article about Microsoft's growing success in China:

Today Gates openly concedes that tolerating piracy turned out to be Microsoft's best long-term strategy. That's why Windows is used on an estimated 90% of China's 120 million PCs. "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not," Gates says. "Are you kidding? You can get the real thing, and you get the same price." Indeed, in China's back alleys, Linux often costs more than Windows because it requires more disks. And Microsoft's own prices have dropped so low it now sells a $3 package of Windows and Office to students.

That, in a nutshell is the future. Not just for proprietary software, but for all digital goods. It doesn't matter if stuff is pirated, because it seeds the market. Money can be made later, once the market has reached a critical point. It's slightly worrying for free software that Microsoft has made this discovery, albeit by chance. The upside is that it will prove an important proof point on Microsoft's larger journey to opening up. (Via The Open Road.)

The Right Way to Write Online

A great piece by Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen called "Write articles, not blog postings." It's extremely long and detailed - including Monte Carlo simulations - which in a sense is a proof of its own thesis: that experts are better off writing long, detailed features than joining in the mosh pit of the blogosphere.

I don't disagree with analysis, although personally I use blogging in quite a different way - part notebook, part marketing.

Also, am I the only person who finds it slightly ironic that Nielsen's own Web site looks, well, you know, ever-so slightly clunky?

Joining the GPLv3 Samba

So Samba has officially joined the GPLv3 dance. It's certainly a biggie, and I'm sure that over the coming months more and more such high-profile projects will follow suit. As for the Linux kernel, I fear that the difficulty of getting every contributor on board will scupper any concerted move. But for the FSF's purposes, the main thing is that practically everything else moves up.