The Netscape Story: From Mosaic to Mozilla

On Open Enterprise blog.

Coming Through Loud and Clear?

if everything you hear is always recorded, if your phone can be active with no external indication, if your main lines of communication can be tapped or hacked, the potential for Big Brother abuse grows exponentially. privacy concerns loom, piracy is facilitated, and safety issues escalate (hopefully, by the time earpods replace cell phones, cars will be driving themselves!) new forms of public and private behaviour will develop; work and personal relationships will evolve based on previously nonexistent modes of communication; new digital divides (those that can iHear vs those that can't) will deepen.

Imagine if this stuff is only closed source: let's get some open source hackers working on it fast. (Via O'Reilly Radar.)

Microsoft's Future Product: Emacs

Someone at Microsoft has a sense of humour:

Developers are puzzling over recent clues blogged by a few Microsoft employees regarding a new “Emacs.Net” tool the company is building.

Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division (the folks who developed the Windows Communication Framework, a k a “Indigo”) is hiring developers to build a product that team member Doug Purdy described as “Emacs.Net.” Purdy hinted that Microsoft will divulge its Emacs.Net product/strategy plans at the company’s Professional Developers Conference in late October 2008.

Emacs is a text editor used primarily by the Unix community (though versions of Emacs that work on Windows systems already exist). Richard Stallman is credited as the father of Emacs, the name of which was derived from “Editing MACRoS.”

Er, Richard, why is there smoke coming out of your ears?

Open Source Unoriginal? - How Unoriginal

Here's a tired old meme that I've dealt with before, but, zombie-like, it keeps on coming back:

The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip—and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.

So let's just look at those statements for a start, shall we?

There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases.

There's only one iPhone because the business of negotiating with the oligopolistic wireless companies is something that requires huge resources and deep, feral cunning possessed only by unpleasantly aggressive business executives. It has nothing to do with being closed. There are hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions because there are even more different kinds of individuals, who want to do things their way, not Steve's way. But the main, highly-focussed development takes place in the one kernel, with two desktop environments - the rest is just presentation, and has nothing to do with dissipation of effort, as implied by the above juxtaposition.

chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law

Chips do not get better because they are closed, they get better because the basic manufacturing processes get better, and those could just as easily be applied to open source chips - the design is irrelevant.

The iPhone is just one of three exhibits that are meant to demonstrate the clear superiority of the closed-source approach. Another is Adobe Flash - no, seriously: what most sensible people would regard as a virus is cited as one of "the more sophisticated examples of code". And what does Flash do for us? Correct: it destroys the very fabric of the Web by turning everything into opaque, URL-less streams of pixels.

The other example is "the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines", which presumably means Google, since it now has nearly two-thirds of the search market, and the page-rank algorithms of Microsoft's search engine are hardly being praised to the sky.

But what do we notice about Google? That it is built almost entirely on the foundation of open source; that its business model - its innovative business model - would not work without open source; that it simply would not exist without open source. And yes, Yahoo also uses huge amounts of open source. No, Microsoft doesn't, but maybe it's not exactly disinterested in its choice of software infrastructure.

Moreover, practically every single, innovative, Web 2.0-y start-up depends on open source. Open source - the LAMP stack, principally - is innovating by virtue of its economics, which make all these new applications possible.

And even if you argue that this is not "real" innovation - whatever that means - could I direct your attention to a certain technology known colloquially as the Internet? The basic TCP/IP protocols? All open. The Web's HTTP and HTML? All open. BIND? Open source. Sendmail? Open source. Apache? Open source. Firefox, initiated in part because Microsoft had not done anything innovative with Internet Explorer 6 for half a decade? Open source.

But there again, for some people maybe the Internet isn't innovative enough compared to Adobe's Flash technology.

Spicing Up Thunderbird

As I've noted before, one of the key features of free software is its modularity. From this and the underlying licence flows the ability to mix and match different elements to produce new applications.

Here's a good example:

Synovel, a startup based on Hyderabad, India founded by a group of International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) graduates, has released a preview of Spicebird, a Mozilla-based collaboration suite.

Spicebird is built on Thunderbird and Lightning, the powerful extension that adds calendaring functions to Thunderbird. Additionally it seems to integrate SamePlace, a Firefox extension that provides instant messaging capabilities based on the Jabber protocol.

Interesting to see that this is coming out of India - not currently a hotbed of such open source startups, but an area I'm sure we'll be hearing more from in the future.

And as David Ascher, who heads up a new company that aims to build software based on Thunderbird, points out:

There are lots of young companies in the same space, each promoting their own angle on solving the problem that they’ve identified. There are companies playing within the Outlook/Exchange framework. There are companies coming at it with Exchange replacements. There are companies focusing on collaboration rather than communication. There are companies with a web focus, others with a mobile focus, others with a social network focus.

But as he also notes, there are very particular advantages to working in the open source space:

From the project health point of view, I think it’s good to have various companies building products off of the Mozilla codebase in general. At the very least, it means that the platform won’t get too tied to any one product’s requirements. I don’t think there’s a huge risk of that happening, because Mozilla already supports several active products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Komodo, Songbird, Miro, Joost, etc.). But having more people care about the mail/news bits should at least help with the engineering work we need to do there which is product-independent. There are long-standing architectural problems with the system which haven’t been fixed because of a lack of resources. With several companies betting on this platform, as long as the discussions happen in public and in good faith, we should be able to work together to improve things for all.

A Bit of a Shindig

One of the great things about open standards is that anyone can implement them - including those in the free software world. An obvious candidate for this treatment is the new OpenSocial set of APIs from Google, and here's an Apache project doing just that:

Shindig will provide implementations of an emerging set of APIs for client-side composited web applications. The Apache Software Foundation has proven to have developed a strong system and set of mores for building community-centric, open standards based systems with a wide variety of participants.

A robust, community-developed implementation of these APIs will encourage compatibility between service providers, ensure an excellent implementation is available to everyone, and enable faster and easier application development for users.

The Apache Software Foundation has proven it is the best place for this type of open development.

The Shindig OpenSocial implementation will be able to serve as a reference implementation of the standard.

How Hated Does the RIAA Want to Be?

The recording industry is an extraordinary example of not learning from experience. You would have thought that the backlash against its heavy-handed response to people downloading music would have been enough to teach it a lesson, given the negative image it earned as a result. Apparently not:

In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

This is beyond a death wish.

2007 By Numbers

It's been a great year for free software, which just keeps on getting better and more widely adopted. And if you can't quite remember who, what, when, why or how, try these excellent listings from Matt Asay and Tristan Nitot for open source and Mozilla respectively.

A Three-Dimensional Approach to Content Sales

One of the recurrent themes on this blog is the transition from a world of analogue content to one that is purely digital - and hence trivially copiable. The refusal of the media producers to recognise this shift is at the root of most of the problems they face in terms of declining sales and increasing unauthorised copying. Another recurrent idea has been the solution to this problem: to give away the digital but make money from the analogue.

Here's someone else with a nice observation that meshes with this perfectly:

Last Friday I was at a movie preview for a concert movie called U23D, which, as you will correctly surmise, was a U2 concert filmed in digital 3D.

A few weeks ago I saw the new film Beowulf, also in 3D.

As I look out the office window to the AMC Loews on 84th St, I see that the marquee is already pitching Hannah Montana 3d, not due out until February.

And outside that same theater is a 3d movie poster for the upcoming Speed Racer movie.

Suddenly everything is floating in space, after decades of flatness. What gives?

The answer?

Could it have something to do with the fact that a 3d movie cannot be pirated?

According to IMDB, the LA premier of Beowulf was on November 3, 2007 and the film was officially released in the US on November 16. On the other hand, according to vcdquality (a news site that announces the “releases” of films into various darknets) it was already available for file sharing by November 15.

Isn’t it just possible that the studios were thinking: Hey guys, I know you could just download this fantasy flick and see it on your widescreen monitor. But unless you give us $11 and sit in a dark theater with the polarized glasses, you won’t be seeing the half-naked Angelina Jolie literally popping off the screen!

Open Access's Big Win

Now here's a nice way to end the year - and to start the next:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

That's just been signed into law in the US, and even though the choice of 12 rather than six months is slightly pusillanimous, it's still a huge win for open access in the US. It will also have a knock-on effect around the world, as open access to publicly-funded research starts to become the norm.

For more details see Peter Suber's post, with links to more details and background.

Richard Stallman - The Santa of Software

Ha!

Beaten to the Blog

News that IBM was buying Solid Information Technology, a company with close ties to MySQL, set off a distant bell ringing in my head in connection with something I'd written a while back, but I didn't have the time to pursue it.

Now, it seems, I don't need to:

When [Monty Widenius] started MySQL, I worked for this other small database company, Solid Information Technology. I told Monty that his project was just going to fail, and that it was a stupid thing to do, and that he didn't have a chance because we had a chance.

GM: What was your view of the Free Software world when you were at Solid--were you even aware of it?

MM: I was getting more aware of it, and I was getting excited about it. At Solid, I drove an initiative of not open-sourcing the product, but making it very popular on the Linux platform--and that was why I was an advertiser in Linux Journal, because we were the leading Linux database in the world in 1996. We gave it away free of charge, so we had taken a step in that direction.

Then Solid decided to cancel the project and just focus on high-end customers, and that's when I left the company. So in that sense, when I got to MySQL, I had some unfinished business. By that time, I had completely bought into the notion of code being open.

Thanks, Matt, for beating me to it....

What's Up, UOF Doc?

The battle for the soul of the document is usually presented as a two-horse race between ODF and OOXML. But that's a very parochially Western view of things - there is, after, a third format available: UOF, China's "Uniform Office Document Format", which I've written about several times before. If, like me, you were wondering what's happening in that world, he's a short update from Andy Updegrove.

Citizendium Goes CC-BY-SA

Good news:

In a much-awaited move, the non-profit Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) encyclopedia project announced that it has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-sa) as the license for its own original collaborative content. The license permits anyone to copy and redevelop the thousands of articles that the Citizendium has created within its successful first year.

The license allows the Citizendium to join the large informal club of free resources associated especially with Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation. Wikipedia uses the FSF’s GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which is expected to be made fully compatible with CC-by-sa in coming months. Therefore, Wikipedia and the Citizendium will be able to exchange content easily. A minority of Citizendium articles started life on Wikipedia and so have been available under the GFDL.

Avoiding a Balkanisation of the digital content commons through incompatible licences is critically important.

Kids Today - The People Tomorrow

Nice story here:

I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids' morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, "O.K., let's try one that's a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don't want to pay for it. So you download it."

There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.

"Who thinks that might be wrong?"

Two hands out of 500.

Now, maybe there was some peer pressure involved; nobody wants to look like a goody-goody.

Maybe all this is obvious to you, and maybe you could have predicted it. But to see this vivid demonstration of the generational divide, in person, blew me away.

I don't pretend to know what the solution to the file-sharing issue is. (Although I'm increasingly convinced that copy protection isn't it.)

Er, David, it's called changing the business model. It is just not sustainable to try to enforce analogue-type laws on digital content, and ultimately it's counterproductive - as the music industry is finding to its cost.

Samba's Big Step

On Open Enterprise blog.

Pootling Around with PDFs

I'm no big fan of PDFs, but if you've got to use them you may as well do it properly with some open source tools, such as those included here.

Hypocrisy, Thy Name is Gambling

John Naughton points us to a nicely-written piece by John Lanchester about the way the City - and its global mates - work using derivatives to the tune of $85,000,000,000,000 (sorry, no mistake in that number of zeroes.)

It's a long piece because it's describing something that's complicated - sometimes made intentionally more complicated by the banking industry for the purposes of obfuscation - but at its heart it amounts to a very simple thing: gambling. As Lanchester writes:

The list of individual traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short: Robert Citron of Orange County, Toshihide Iguchi at Daiwa, Yasuo Hamanaka at Sumitomo and Nick Leeson at Barings, just to take examples from the early 1990s. In Leeson’s case in 1995, it was a huge unauthorised position in futures on the Nikkei 225, the main Japanese stock exchange. Leeson had been doubling and redoubling his bets in the belief/hope that the index would rise, and hiding the resulting open position – a gigantic open-ended bet – in a secret account. (Incidentally, Leeson’s big bet was on the Nikkei holding its level above 18,000. At the time of writing, 121/2 years later, the index sits at 15,454 – proof, if it were needed, that when prices go down they can stay that way for a long time.) The loss eventually amounted to £827 million, and destroyed Barings, Britain’s oldest merchant bank.

Got that? These are bets, pure and simple, on the way that things will work out. You can dress them up as you will, you can complexify them as you will, but at bottom they are simply gambles.

Now, add that fact to the distasteful sight of the US - a country that probably uses derivatives more than any other, and also probably makes more money from derivatives than any other, trying to stop online gambling with non-US companies - for example by buying off pathetically greedy entities like the EU:

The United States has reached a deal with the European Union, Japan and Canada to keep its Internet gambling market closed to foreign companies, but is continuing talks with India, Antigua and Barbuda, Macau and Costa Rica, U.S. trade officials said on Monday.

Since I'm no expert on derivatives, I don't know the extent to which you can buy them online from anyone anywhere, but I would be utterly astonished if you couldn't (and this suggests you can.) So you have a fundamental cognitive dissonance between the extraordinary use of derivatives worldwide, and the US attempt to ban online gambling though non-US companies.

Maybe the idea is that only the ultra-rich should be allowed to gamble wherever they want.

Steve, the Artful Tagger

Folksonomies - the ad hoc tagging by anyone of anything - sound terribly democratic compared to your top-down authoritarian imposition of taxonomies, but it's easy to see why people are sceptical about them: how can anything useful arise out of something so chaotic?

Del.icio.us is one example of how such folksonomies can be really useful, and here's another (and note the groovy .museum domain - the first time I've seen this):

"Steve” is a collaborative research project exploring the potential for user-generated descriptions of the subjects of works of art to improve access to museum collections and encourage engagement with cultural content. We are a group of volunteers, primarily from art museums, who share a common interest in improving access to our collections. We are concerned about barriers to public access to online museum information. Participation in steve is open to anyone with a contribution to make to developing our collective knowledge, whether they formally represent a museum or not.

Very cool - both in terms of adding metadata to objects, and as far as getting the public involved with art. Indeed, this idea should really be extended to everything - imagine a database of public places that people could tag.

Great idea, then, but why "Steve"?

So Farewell, Then, Matthew Szulik

The announcement that Red Hat's CEO and President, Matthew Szulik, is moving on (back?) to become its Chairman, is obviously pretty big news, since Szulik has led the company for nearly a decade, a long time in the still-young open source world. His valedictory message is well worth a read; I particularly liked the following section:

My early days at Red Hat were sitting in small office with no door in Durham, NC, across from the free soda machine. People by the hour would stop and punch their selection for Mountain Dew or Coke. My challenge was that I was tasked to go and raise venture money for this free software company. And over the phone, in the middle of my sales pitch, corporate types at Dell, IBM and HP and others would hear the constant banging of soda cans dropping in the soda machine and would ask if there were fights going on outside my office. So, after a while, I told the prospective investors that YES there were fights going on. And yes, these fights happened frequently. It’s how people at Red Hat settled technical issues likes software bugs and features in new releases. Red Hat was a real tough place to work. Dell, HP and IBM became investors because they liked the fighting spirit of Red Hat.

Says it all, really.

RMS Tells It As It Is

Nice to hear it from the, er, horse's mouth:

A patent is an artificial government-imposed monopoly on implementing a certain method or technique. If the method or technique can be implemented by software, so that the patent prohibits the distribution and use of certain programs, we call it a software patent.

Norway's Beautiful Plumage...

...openness:

Regjeringa har vedteke at all informasjon på statlege nettsider skal vere tilgjengeleg i dei opne dokumentformata HTML, PDF eller ODF. Tida der offentlege dokument berre var tilgjengelege i Microsofts Word-format vil med det gå mot slutten.

I particularly liked the last sentence, which is basically a gratuitous kick where it hurts for Microsoft. (Via The Open Sourcerer.)

Wikimedia, Der Blog

The Wikimedia Foundation has a blog - or, rather, ein blog.

Happy Birthday, Perl

Er, yesterday....

The VC Floodgates Open for Drupal and Acquia

On Open Enterprise blog.