OLPC XO-1 Exposed

The OLPC XO-1 project has been something of a roller-coaster ride. Widely praised when it launched, and then progressively pooh-poohed (including by me) as the wrong solution, more recently praised once more for the execution of the underlying idea, and finally put in doubt following Intel's rather suspect ship-jumping.

For what it's worth, in the light of the reality, rather the idea, I've changed my view: the OLPC XO-1 really seems to serve its intended audience well, and to be a well-desinged bit of kit. Confirming that is this splendid deconstruction by arch-hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang , founder of the similarly-spirited Chumby project:

If I were to make one general comment about the OLPC XO-1, it’s that its mechanical design is brilliant. It’s a fairly clean-sheet redesign of traditional notebook PC mechanics around the goal of survivability, serviceability, and robustness (then again, I’ve never taken apart any of the ruggedized notebooks out there). When closed up for “travel”, all the ports are covered, and the cooling system is extremely simple so it should survive in dusty and dirty environments. Significantly, the port coverings aren’t done with rubberized end caps that you can lose or forget to put on–they are done using the wifi antennae, and the basic design causes the user to swivel them back to cover the ports when they are packing up the laptop to go. That’s thoughtful design.

If you're interested in what makes innovative hardware tick, don't miss this fascinating exploration. (Via Boing Boing.)

Searching for Free Software's Shared Space

Sharing lies at the heart of free software, so I was naturally intrigued to read about the concept of "shared space" traffic management in WorldChanging:

The premise of shared space is that people pay more attention when they're not distracted by "highway clutter," in the words of its founder, traffic engineer Hans Monderman. Shared space relies on environmental context--in this case, a landscape unlittered by signs--to influence human behavior. "Our behavior in a theatre or a church differs from a pub or in a football stadium as we understand the signs and signals through years of cultural immersion," Monderman told an interviewer in 2006. "Likewise if we see children playing in the street, we are more likely to slow down than if we saw a sign saying 'Danger, Children!'"

Put less diplomatically, shared space makes people confused. People who are confused slow down, calming traffic and reducing accidents. That's exactly how it has worked in Bohmte, where city officials plan to gradually expand the program to include other public spaces where pedestrians and cyclists share roads with drivers--roads, in other words, other than highways. The changes have had the added benefit of improving the experience of walking or cycling down the road, as a maze of unattractive signs and lane markers have given way to a single stretch of red-brick-colored pavement and as drivers have moderated their speeds.

Fascinating. But I can't quite work out what it all means for free software: anyone have any suggestions?

Open Hardware: Soon to be Boring

The New York Times has a feature on the Neuros OSD (for open source device):

The Neuros OSD connects to your TV or home theater system and allows you to archive all of your DVD and video content.

Plug the Neuros OSD into your TV, connect your DVD Player or VCR, and hit play. Your movie will be safely and legally transferred into a digital library! It works with home movies too. Just plug your video camera into the OSD, push play, and your memories are digitized.

With the Neuros OSD, you can store hundreds of hours of video in one location (like an external hard drive), get rid of those bulky cases, put an end to DVD damage, and instantly access any of your videos with the push of a button on a remote. You can even transfer your video content to a portable device (video iPod, PSP, mobile phone, etc.) to watch on the go, or email your home movies to friends and family.

It runs GNU/Linux (of course) and Samba, but also features hackable hardware, as detailed on the company's wiki (where else?).

What's remarkable about all this is not so much that a company should be adopting openness in both hardware and software (though that's good), but that it should be pointing out the fact that it is doing so, and that the New York Times picked it up. That open meme is certainly spreading.

Fearful Symmetry

I've noted before that Microsoft is in difficulty over the ultra-mobile machines like the Asus EEE PC; now it seems that the other half of the Wintel duopoly is also in trouble because of the new triple-P (price, performance and power) demands these systems make:

Two days before Intel CEO Paul Otellini would unveil the Classmate 2 or the Intel-powered XO at the CES, Intel announced that they are quitting the OLPC board.

Intel claims that they are quitting because of Nicholas Negroponte wanting them to stop the promotion of the Classmate/Eee to education in third world countries, but I think that the real reason is that Intel does not have a good enough processor for the OLPC project to use as an alternative to the AMD Geode LX-700.

Intel has not been able to develop a processor to match the price, power consumption and performance requirements of the OLPC project.

Bye-bye Wintel, hello Linmd?

Spreading OpenID

On Open Enterprise blog.

Less Dosh for OSS...And So?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Google: Don't Be Evil, Be...God

Eeek.

Thunderbird the Phoenix?

As a keen Thunderbird user I've voiced my concerns that it was turning into the Cinderella of the open source world. That's why I've been watching the moves of the new company that's been set up to oversee its development - and the postings of its head, David Ascher. He's now published his Thoughts on Thunderbird's Evolution, and they're well worth reading.

In the light of certain suggestions, I was comforted to read the following:

Mozilla is unique in that among all of the “vendors” of messaging technology, it is the only organization driven by the public benefit. This should allow us to meet the user’s needs directly, without having to get distracted by exit strategies, analysts, etc. It also makes it easier to recruit volunteers!

Indeed.

What Henry Blodget Just Does Not Get

Here's one of the barmiest - and saddest - things I've ever read, from a certain Henry Blodget:

When Will Firefox/Mozilla Go Public?

Mozilla's earnest Mitchell Baker and friends will, of course, publicly say "NEVER!" But let's be serious. Why wouldn't the Mozilla Foundation, which presumably exists to do good for the world, want to be the proud possessor of several billion dollars worth of public company stock? The Google Foundation, also a good-doing 501c3, certainly hasn't done badly with its own stash of GOOG. And, over time, like any smart foundation, Mozilla and Google will likely want diversify their holdings so they can continue to do good for decades.

Also, as well as Firefox is doing as a part-time love project, it could do even better with some major marketing, deal-making, and distribution power behind it. Every company in the world (save Microsoft) should want a Microsoft (and Google) competitor to succeed. So every company should want to at least consider a partnership with Firefox.

Mozilla Corporation was set up with one aim in mind: to further the open source code produced by the Mozilla Foundation, and the ecosystem around it. It was not set up to make money, or to have money as is its raison d'être. If it went public, money, not the users of its code, would dominate its decisions - and would have to, or shareholders would sue the management. (Google Foundation is a private foundation, and hence doesn't worry about shareholders: Google does, but it isn't trying to promote open source, it's trying to make money.)

Mozilla depends, not incidentally but critically, on those users: its programmers could write the code, but they couldn't debug it on their own, as open source history has often shown. And the amazing SpreadFirefox marketing effort made up of hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts giving their time and even money to further Firefox would evaporate the instant they realised that they were doing it to make other people rich. The moment Mozilla goes for the money, it cuts itself off at the the legs.

And even if in some moment of suicidal insanity all this did happen, the code would be forked faster than you can say "GNU": all the best - because most passionate - coders, beta-testers and marketing people would leave. This would split Firefox's marketshare and destroy any power that it currently has - and with it most of its revenue.

Mozilla Inc would promptly implode, and the "new" Firefox would steadily rise from the ashes, just as the old did from the original Mozilla. We could even call it "Phoenix"....

Update: From the horse's mouth.

Who's Got the Right Idea? Dave Sifry Has

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Source: A Question of Metrics

Here's a characteristically thought-provoking post from Chris Messina:

I’ve probably said it before, and will say it again, and I’m also sure that I’m not the first, or the last to make this point, but I have yet to see an example of an open source design process that has worked.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to wager that “open source design” is an oxymoron. Design is far too personal, and too subjective, to be given over to the whims and outrageous fancies of anyone with eyeballs in their head.

Call me elitist in this one aspect, but with all due respect to code artistes, it’s quite clear whether a function computes or not; the same quantifiable measures simply do not exist for design and that critical lack of objective review means that design is a form of Art, and its execution should be treated as such.

What interests me is that he's actually articulating something deep about the open source methodology: it can only be usefully applied when there is a metric that lets you judge objectively when things get better.

That's why free software works: you take some code and improve it - making it faster, more compact, less buggy - or, ideally, all three. It's why collaborative novels and symphonies rarely work. There's no clear way to improve on what's already there: anyone can tinker, but there will always be different views on whether that tinkering works. It's also why why Wikipedia more or less works: although based on facts and their citations, there's still plenty of room for disagreement over how they should be presented.

A Peach of an Apricot

I wrote previously about the open source film "Elephants Dream", produced the Blender Foundation. Recently it's been working on Peach:

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange’s “Elephants Dream”, the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a small team of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam from October 2007 until April 2008 on completing a short 3D animation movie. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period.

But this time, it's going even further:

After Orange and Peach Blender Institute continues with a new open project: Apricot. This time it isn’t a movie but a 3D game!Starting february 1st 2008, a small team of again the best 3D artist and developers will develop a game jointly with the on-line community. The main characters in the game are based on the short 3D animation open movie Peach.

Once again, Blender will lie at the heart of the project, and the intention is to do much more than produce an open game:

The team will work on a cross platform game (at least Linux, Windows, OS X), using Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together. It is not only the purpose to make a compelling 3D game experience, but especially to improve and validate the open source 3D game creation pipeline, with industry-standard conditions.

The last point is important: what open source needs is not a good game, nice as that would be, but a framework for producing hundreds of them. It's great to see Blender and the open source 3D engine Crystal Space stepping up to that challenge.

Afghanistan Digital Library

There's something both forlorn and yet hopeful about the Afghanistan Digital Library. Forlorn, because its collection of scanned images of 170 books emphasises the fragility of the printed word there, hopeful, because once digitised, these books can be copied infinitely.

Remembrance of Things Past

One of the key issues in the battle between ODF and OOXML is access to documents over long timeframes. It's not just a matter of which format is better now, but which will be better in a hundred years time (assuming all the computers haven't melted by then).

Against that background, the following is interesting:

After you install Office 2003 SP3, some Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2003, and Corel Draw (.cdr) file formats are blocked. By default, these file formats are blocked because they are less secure. They may pose a risk to you.

Leaving aside the fact that Microsoft is trying to protect you from its own earlier formats, there's an important issue here. Most people will blithely apply this and other Service Packs, trusting in the great god Bill to do the right thing. And then one day, they will need to access some old - but crucially important - file saved in the earlier format. All the previous versions of Microsoft Office may well have been discarded: then what?

Well, you could always edit the registry, bearing in mind:

Warning Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall the operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk.

Important These steps may increase your security risk. These steps may also make the computer or the network more vulnerable to attack by malicious users or by malicious software such as viruses. We recommend the process that this article describes to enable programs to operate as they are designed to or to implement specific program capabilities. Before you make these changes, we recommend that you evaluate the risks that are associated with implementing this process in your particular environment. If you decide to implement this process, take any appropriate additional steps to help protect the system. We recommend that you use this process only if you really require this process.

Er, maybe not.

There's no reason to suppose that things will be any different for OOXML, which may - who knows? - turn out to be just as dangerous as those risky old Office formats. And so there you will be, with an XML file legible only in part, with an admixture of effectively random 1s and 0s, a vague memory of its original form and contents, and a deep sadness in your heart.

Vista's Problem: Microsoft Does Not Scale

It is deeply ironic that once upon a time Linux - and Linus - was taxed with an inability to scale. Today, though, when Linux is running everything from most of the world's supercomputers to the new class of sub-laptops like the Asus EEE PC and increasing numbers of mobile phones, it is Microsoft that finds itself unable to scale its development methodology to handle this range. Indeed, it can't even produce a decent desktop system, as the whole Vista fiasco demonstrates.

But the issue of scaling goes much deeper, as this short but insightful post indicates:

The world has been scaling radically since the Web first came on the scene. But the success of large, open-ended collaborations -- a robust operating system, a comprehensive encyclopedia, some "crowd-sourced" investigative journalism projects -- now is not only undeniable, but is beginning to shape expectations. This year, managers are going to have to pay attention.

Moreover, it points out exactly why scaling is important - and it turns out to be precisely the same reason that open source works so well (surprise, surprise):

The scaling is due to the basic elements in the Web equation: Lots of people, bazillions of pieces of information, and gigabazillions of links among them all. As more of the market, more of the supply chain, and more of the employees spend more of their time online, the scaled world of the Web begins to set the agenda for the little ol' real world.

Google's Secret Weapon

In Redmond Magazine (no, really.)

An Economist Questions Intellectual Monopolies

Madisonian.net pointed me to a writer I'd not come across before, Dean Baker. He has a nice line in puncturing the economic nonsense published by the press. Like this, for example:

The NYT seems very eager to side with the recording industry in its protectionist question. How else can one explain the constant use of the term "piracy" to describe unauthorized duplication of recorded music. The NYT, which harshly denounces protectionist measures designed to benefit manufacturing workers, again committed this sin today in a column on the University of Oregon's refusal to comply with a subpoena seeking records on its students.

From the article, it appears as though the students had shared music files, which they may have purchased, among themselves. It is not evident that this is violating any law (last I checked, I can lend a CD to a friend), even if the recording industry doesn't like it. Rather than asserting that an act of "piracy" has been committed, the paper could simply substitute the more neutral term "copying." In most cases, it will have room for the additional letter.

That's good stuff, but it pales in comparison to the strong meat found in this essay entitled "The Reform of Intellectual Property." Obviously I'm not wild about the "eye-pee" stuff, but Baker is under no illusions:

It is remarkable that economists, who usually view themselves as advocates of free market transactions, unquestioningly embrace various forms of intellectual property rights, especially copyrights and patents. Copyrights and patents are government granted monopolies. They have their origins in the feudal guild system, not the free market economics of Smith and Ricardo. In fact, at the end of the 19th century, Switzerland and the Netherlands actually eliminated patent and copyright protection, with the intent of promoting free market competition. In spite of their feudal legacy, and their obvious status as forms of protectionism, few economists ever question the merits of the patent and copyright systems.

The paper then procedes to that, concluding:

Clearly there are very powerful interests that stand to lose from reform of intellectual property rules, specifically the pharmaceutical industry, the medical equipment industry, the software industry, and the media and entertainment industries. These sectors include many of the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. But the strength of the resistance to reform does not affect the intellectual argument for reform. It would be difficult to identify more harmful economic policies than the current system of patent and copyright rules. They are few cases where the application of standard neo-classical economics could have such beneficial effects.

Glad to see that the software industry got a hat-tip there.

In a Bit of a Scrape

"Mix and mash" lies at the heart of the power of openness: it allows people to come up with new, often better, uses of data, notably by cross-referencing it with yet more of the stuff to create higher levels of information. But as this Wired feature details, there is a tension between what the scrapers and the scraped want:

there's an awkward dance going on, an unregulated give-and-take of information for which the rules are still being worked out. And in many cases, some of the big guys that have been the source of that data are finding they can't — or simply don't want to — allow everyone to access their information, Web2.0 dogma be damned. The result: a generation of businesses that depend upon the continued good graces of a relatively small group of Internet powerhouses that philosophically agree information should be free — until suddenly it isn't.

Striking the right balance is tricky, but I think there's a way out. After all, if everyone can use everyone's data, there's a quid pro quo. The problem is when some give and others only take. (Via ReadWriteWeb.)

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.