Mozilla's Middle Kingdom Mess

Mozilla is a disaster in China:

With more than 160 million Internet users, China is the world's second-largest Net market and is likely to overtake the U.S. as No. 1 by the end of the decade. More than four-fifths of China's Internet users use IE to go online, mostly because it's bundled with the Windows operating system. Homegrown companies Maxthon—a private company based in Hong Kong—and Tencent —the Shenzhen-based operator of China's most popular instant messaging service—both have browsers based on IE kernels that are the second and third most commonly used in China.

Mozilla estimates there are 3.5 million regular Firefox users in China, giving it just 2% of the market. (According to June, 2007, figures by Onestat, Mozilla has a 19.65% market share in the U.S.) Mozilla has set a goal of grabbing a 5% market share in China "as quickly as possible," says Gong.

The problem?

In the West, Mozilla has been able to eat away at IE's market share by promoting Firefox as a free open-source software project. In China, the open-source movement is having a harder time gaining traction because of widespread software piracy. With pirated copies of Windows XP or Vista selling on the street for less than $2, there is little economic incentive for Chinese Internet users to download Firefox.

The solution?

Bill Xu, founder of the ZEUUX Free Software Community, a Beijing group that promotes open source, points out that for Firefox to succeed in China, it shouldn't compete on cost but by stressing its security features. "IE isn't very secure. It's plagued with a lot of add-ons, malware, and viruses. Firefox is more secure, and that's the main reason a lot of users choose it," he says.

Well, I think this may require some more creative thinking. It's not just a matter of saying "security", not least because Firefox has its own security problems, and it will be easy to defeat that tactic. Perhaps we need more Firefox plugins that serve the Chinese market, specific to the Chinese language, for example.

In any case, this is getting serious: failure to make inroads into the Chinese browser market undoes much of the good work in Europe, where Firefox is getting close to a majority share in some markets.

An Intellectual Approach to File Sharing

I've always assumed the Swedish Pirate Party were a bunch of anarchists who wanted to cock a snook at authority by disrupting one of its precious intellectual monopolies, and have some fun along the way.

I was wrong.

It turns out that there is some pretty deep thinking behind what they are doing, as evidence by this fascinating interview with Rick Falkvinge, founder and the leader of the party:

What was remarkable was that this was the point where the enemy - forces that want to lock down culture and knowledge at the cost of total surveillance - realized they were under a serious attack, and mounted every piece of defense they could muster. For the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle.

And it was... nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is "thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief". And shove some poor artists in front of them to deliver the message. Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding.

So now we know what the enemy has, and that they have absolutely nothing in terms of intellectual capital to bring to the battle. They do, however, have their bedside connections with the current establishment. That's the major threat to us at this point.

Intellectual capital? Hm....

And then he goes on to make this important point:

The people who have been led to believe that file sharing can be stopped with minimal intrusion are basically smoking crack.

Early on in the debate, we dropped the economic arguments altogether and focused entirely on civil liberties and the right to privacy. This has proven to be a winning strategy, with my keynote "Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties" being praised as groundbreaking.

The economic arguments are strong, but debatable. There are as many reports as there are interests in copyright, and every report arrives at a new conclusion. If you just shout and throw reports over the volleyball net at the other team, it becomes a matter of credibility of the reports. When you switch to arguing civil liberties, you dropkick that entire discussion.

Obviously I need to pay more attention to these people.

Has EMI Finally Heard the Music?

I'm not the biggest fan of private equity companies, but they do have the virtue of being ruthlessly logical: they are not enslaved by history, just by greed. That means they are not frightened of radical thinking or radical solutions if it brings them more of the foldable stuff. Thinking like this:

The record business - in which 85 per cent of artists are lossmaking and EMI pays £25m a year to scrap unsold CDs - "is stuck with a model designed for a world that has changed and gone forever", he says.

His solution is to switch from pushing CDs to pulling consumers towards music in different forms. One element will be focus groups. "People say the music industry is more creative and the customer doesn't know, only the creatives do.

"When you look at which car companies are succeeding it's the ones which work with their customers. Are clothes not creative? Is fashion not creative? Is food not creative? The only real difference is these industries have learnt to work with the customer and not force-feed them," he argues.

So, he seems to get the idea of listening to customers, which is good.

Surprisingly, he says that Radiohead, the band that ditched EMI last year to launch their latest album online, made the right choice. "Radiohead had the right idea. They understand their fans. They realise some of them want the premium box set. I'm one who bought one, and paid the full price. What Radiohead showed the industry was that it isn't one answer for all artists or indeed for every customer."

Which indicates that he also realises what the record business is really about: selling scarce commodities like analogue objects and unique relationships.

ERC Goes Big on OA

Here's an impressively strong commitment to open access from the European Research Council:

The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication.

Notice that's into repositories immediately, and full open access within six months. But what struck me particularly were two additional aspects.

The first was support for open data that's one of the strongest I've seen so far:

The ERC considers essential that primary data - which in the life sciences for example could comprise data such as nucleotide/protein sequences, macromolecular atomic coordinates and anonymized epidemiological data - are deposited to the relevant databases as soon as possible, preferably immediately after publication and in any case not later than 6 months after the date of publication.

There was also a nice sting in the tail, too:

The ERC is keenly aware of the desirability to shorten the period between publication and open access beyond the currently accepted standard of 6 months.

Translated: you ain't seen nuffink yet.

Tweedledee, Meet Tweedledum

I've noted before that Microsoft and Elsevier are, well, shall we say, kindred spirits. As Peter Suber observes, they're going to be getting even chummier now that Microsoft is acquiring the search company FAST:

FAST is the search technology Elsevier uses in Scirus, Scopus, and ScienceDirect.

BECTA Late than Never

BECTA, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, starts to get it:

UK schools should not upgrade to Microsoft's Vista operating system and Office 2007 productivity suite, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) has said in a report on the software. It is also supporting use of the international standard ODF (Open Document Format) for storing files.

...

"We have not had sight of any evidence to support the argument that the costs of upgrading to Vista in educational establishments would be offset by appropriate benefit," it said.

The cost of upgrading Britain's schools to Vista would be £175m, around a third of which would go to Microsoft, the agency said. The rest would go on deployment costs, testing and hardware upgrades, it said.

Even that sum would not be enough to purchase graphics cards capable of displaying Windows Aero Graphics, although that's no great loss because "there was no significant benefit to schools and colleges in running Aero," it said.

As for Office 2007, "there remains no compelling case for deployment," the agency said in its full report, published this week.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts to this ever-so gentle kneeing in the digital groin.

Hallelujah! An MP Who Groks IT

Many of the UK Government's fiascos - both old ones like the loss of 25 million bank details, or future ones like ID cards - could be avoided if there were people in office who understood IT. After all, the mistakes that are being made - allowing someone to download 25 million records and then send them through the post, or creating a centralised database of everyone's most personal details - aren't exactly subtle.

Alas, these people are rare, but one such is John Pugh, the Liberal Democrat MP for Southport. I've met him a few times, and always been impressed by his grasp of technical issues, and that is demonstrated once more in this letter to Mark Thompson, the BBC's Director-General, a copy of which has been passed on to me. It deals with the thorny matter of the iPlayer, and follows a meeting with Parliament's Public Accounts Committee:

It's worth quoting at length:

I do recognise that [the iPlayer] has an attractive interface,is user friendly and addresses digital rights issues so I stop short of suggesting the BBC has bought a lemon.

The more fundamental issue is its failure to apply open standards and be sufficiently interoperable to work fully (stream and download) on more than one platform. The BBC is funded by licence players not all of whom have or chose to use a computer running Windows XP or Vista. By guaranteeing full functionality to the products of one software vendor it is as a public body handing a commercial advantage to that company- effectively illegal state aid!
The aspiration to eventually ( you said within two years) remove this advantage- does not rebut this charge. A promise of amendment is never sufficient excuse for past sins or indeed much of an explanation.

Most major web based developments of any scale these days work on the presumption that interoperablity, open standards and platform neutrality are givens. It is not clear why the BBC design brief did not specify these requirements or if it did what technical problems-given the expertise available- hinder them being implemented.

So long as the I-Player is bundled in with Windows/Internet Explorer it continues runs the risk of breaching state aid rules - as the benefits it thereby bestows on Microsoft (with their somewhat blemished reputation for fair competition) come via the deployment of the public’s licence money. What might be a pragmatic choice for a privately funded company becomes deeply problematic for a public corporation.

I recognise and welcome the assurances that the BBC and you personally have given on this subject but wonder whether the sheer novelty of the new media has blinded many to the clear commercial inequity in the delivery of it.

Now all we need to do is make sure that John becomes Prime Minister....

KOfficeSource Means Business

On Open Enterprise blog.

On The Value Of Things You Don't Own

Deep stuff this:

To my mind, the simple idea is that the skills required to operate within networked media are new because no one does - or can - own all the data. It's a bit like a library. You can't really own it because it's actually a system rather than a thing. However, you're very welcome to borrow stuff. And maybe if I recommend some good books and you share them with friends we can get together over coffee as a result. Then we have created a little group (aka social network) that can be valuable to us all and might become a big group. Or not. Alternatively, you can create your own library at home. And put a big lock on it to keep all the value in.

Very nice. (Via James Governor’s Monkchips.)

KDE 4 Goes Forth

Nice:

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with (removable) devices easier and provides tools for better power management.

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well. Visual updates through vector-based artwork, changes in the underlying libraries, user interface enhancements, new features, even new applications -- you name it, KDE 4.0 has it. Okular, the new document viewer and Dolphin, the new file manager are only two applications that leverage KDE 4.0's new technologies.

The Oxygen Artwork team provides a breath of fresh air on the desktop. Nearly all the user-visible parts of the KDE desktop and applications have been given a facelift. Beauty and consistency are two of the basic concepts behind Oxygen.

This free stuff just keeps getting better and better.

The Problems of the Public Domain

Here's an interesting exploration of the perils of putting your stuff into the public domain:

Countries with moral rights protections, the right of the artist to be attributed for their work among other elements, often make those rights inalienable, meaning they can not be given away under any circumstance.

Therefore, in these countries attribution rights still rest with the respective authors and these dedications are little more than a promise not to sue if those rights are infringed. That is a promise that can be revoked at any time.

Second, there are some theories that hold that putting a work in the public domain might be seen as a gift and not a legal agreement. If such a gift were found to be an “unenforceable promise”, it could be retracted at a later date.

Third, the posts themselves were not written by attorneys and are very informal in nature. Though Creative Commons has a public domain dedication system, they both chose not to use it. It remains to be seen how these dedications would hold up in court if ever they were challenged.

Finally, the dedications only extend to existing works. The authors reserve the right in the future to reserve some or all rights in newer works. This could be seen as a block on activities such as scraping that are ongoing and automatic.

So while the dedications certainly are intended to forfeit all copyright protections on their work, they do not do so completely because it is impossible to do so.

Copyright law resists the public domain and favors automatic protection. This frustrates many in the field, but it is the nature of the beast.

The whole post is quite long, but it's well worth a read for the interesting perspective it puts on the public domain. (Via P2P Foundation.)

UMPC from Lenovo, Low-Cost Box from Shuttle

And here's another ultra-mobile PC:

At Lenovo's press dinner the other night there was this unidentifiable handheld placed on display... it runs Linux and uses new 45-nanometer chips from Intel.

Update: And here's an ultra low-cost box from Shuttle:

its $199 KPC Linux PC

...

It'll have an Intel Celeron processor, a 945GC chipset, 512MB of memory and either a 60GB or 80GB hard drive. What it won't have: an optical drive or a PCI Express slot. Despite that, it's a pretty good-looking box, and comes in red, blue, white, and black, each with a different icon stamped on the front.

The Saga of Erik

Saith he:

Finally, I wanted to address some stories that have been spread by a handful of individuals in the open source community. It is true that I worked at Microsoft for a long time and frankly speaking, I am proud of that. Right now, my loyalties are to the BBC and the BBC alone. I will only make decisions that are in the best interest of the licence fee payer. My actions will speak louder than my words...

Well, I look forward to that. But I do wonder how wide the purview will be when deciding what exactly is "in the best interest of the licence fee payer": defending fundamental principles of openness and neutrality, or just going for the cheapest deal in the short term? We shall see....

The IT Department in Cloud Cuckoo Land

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Shrinking Water Commons

Bad precedent:

Historically, the public trust doctrine has assured public access to the bodies of water within a state’s borders. This has usually meant the historic high-water mark for a lake or ocean. But in Ohio last month, a state judge issued a ruling that revises the definition of the public trust doctrine as it applies to the Lake Erie shoreline. The public no longer has access to the high-water mark, but only to the “water’s edge” – a redefinition that could be significant as the water levels of the Great Lakes drop. (Some of this drop, it must be added, will come from mass extractions of water by private bottlers – which means that one act of enclosure will be accelerating another act of enclosure.)

Changing Chandler

On Open Enterprise blog.

Hypercapitalism and Open Source

I noted before that I find some of Umair Haque's posts on Bubblegeneration a little, er, opaque, but this one seems crystal-clear:

I usually make predictions at the beginning of the year. Not this time. I think 2008 is going to be an important year - and it's important for us all to kick it off with more depth.

What's gonna happen in 2008? The macropocalypse.

It's not a credit crunch, or a liquidity crisis. Unfortunately, it's a lot deeper than most of us think.

Let me try and explain what's really going on here.

The real problem is that the firm - the corporation, as the fundamental institution of production - is deeply and irrevocably broken. It's DNA is in shock. The corporation we've created is a monster; a form of organization growing more pathological by the day.

...

But think about how food players have created an obesity epidemic. Or how pharma players have spent billions upon billions - to subvert and replace value creation in healthcare with push marketing. Or how Detroit spent continues to focus on coercing people, cities, states, and nations into consuming car afer car - instead of on durable, sustainable long-run productivity and efficiency gains.

The virus is rotting the system from inside. The hypercapitalist economy we've built isn't about deep, sustainable value creation. It's become about simply shifting value from one party to another.

Whether it's from small towns to Wall Street bonuses, or from Chinese migrant workers to Wal-Mart's income statement - what most firms are doing - what they are actively built to do - is exactly the same: actively and deliberately failing to create value.

But the game is fast coming to an end. The emperor has no clothes. The masquerade of value creation is can't go on forever. No economy can survive where value doesn't get created.

It's time.

The need for fundamental, systemic reinvention has never been greater and more pressing. Tomorrow's revolutionaries are going to face the task of reinventing the institutions of production - and they will unleash tidal waves of new value by doing so.

Sounds like a cue for the open source way to me. But maybe I've misunderstood (again).

More Micro Mobile Computers

I mentioned Everex's imminent Cloudbook a little while back, and now it's here:

The CloudBook, model CE1200V, showcases the Linux based gOS operating system and familiar applications from Mozilla, Skype, Google, Facebook, Faqly and OpenOffice.org. Available January 25th, the computer will be available at Walmart.com for $399.

Slightly different but also small and running GNU/Linux, is the LimePC:

The LimePC devices all run LimeOS, based closely on the LimeFree OS maintained by the LimeFree.org open source community. LimeOS is described as a full-screen HTML rendering environment that runs on top of a single-user Debian Linux OS and server stack. LimeOS and LimePC's LimeSuite applications are said to be designed to support multimedia and Web 2.0.

...

The LimePC products will ship "later in 2008" says THTF. The company expects the tiny M1 model to sell for $300. Although initially targeted at the Chinese market, THTF says the LimePC will appear in U.S. stores for the 2008 holiday season.

They just keep on coming.

Data Non-Ownership

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle over Robert Scoble's run-in with Facebook. In this clear-headed analysis, Ed Felten points out that the problem is everyone tries to frame it in terms of who owns the personal data on Facebook:

Once we give up the idea that the fact of Robert Scoble’s friendship with (say) Lee Aase, or the fact that that friendship has been memorialized on Facebook, has to be somebody’s exclusive property, we can see things more clearly. Scoble and Aase both have an interest in the facts of their Facebook-friendship and their real friendship (if any). Facebook has an interest in how its computer systems are used, but Scoble and Aase also have an interest in being able to access Facebook’s systems. Even you and I have an interest here, though probably not so strong as the others, in knowing whether Scoble and Aase are Facebook-friends.

How can all of these interests best be balanced in principle? What rights do Scoble, Aase, and Facebook have under existing law? What should public policy says about data access? All of these are difficult questions whose answers we should debate. Declaring these facts to be property doesn’t resolve the debate — all it does is rule out solutions that might turn out to be the best.

This is going to become an even bigger issue in the future - which makes sensible thinking about it all-the-more necessary and valuable.

Getting Going with Gowers

The Gower Review was an important document for the UK. It offered a thoughtful and rigorous analysis of the current copyright situation there, and looked at some of the problems the new digital world has with current copyright legislation. It also made a number of pretty sensible recommendations - even if it chickened out of calling for a reduction in some copyright terms, which Gowers himself admits that pure logic calls for.

Now we have the question of how that Review will be implemented. To move things on, here's a consultation document from the UK Government asking for people's views.

The main issues it considers are how to:

* enable schools and universities to make the most of digital technologies and facilitate distance learning;

* allow libraries and archives to use technology to preserve valuable material before it deteriorates or the format it is stored on becomes obsolete;

* introduce a format shifting exception to allow consumers to copy legitimately purchased content to another format, for example CD to MP3, in a manner that does not damage the interests of copyright owners; and

* provide a new exception for parody.

Specifically, it asks how those exceptions should be implemented. And I have to say, it does that with real intelligence. The questions it poses, soliciting input, are spot-on in terms of exploring the ramifications of copyright changes. I thoroughly recommend a slow perusal of the main document, since it provides a wonderful introduction to the thorny issues that copyright in the digital age must deal with.

None is thornier than DRM. Again and again in this document, questions arise about how people can be given the ability to derive the full benefit of copyright material when DRM gets in the way - and to what extent they should be allowed to circumvent it.

Of course, my answer is simple: get rid of the whole damn lot. Even a year or two that might have seemed radical or utopian, but with nearly all the main record labels embracing that strategy - and the film companies about to begin their own slow slouch towards Bethlehem - I think it will soon be seen as the best and most sensible thing to do.

OLPC's Founding CTO Mary Lou Jepsen

OLPC's XO has been much in the headlines recently. If you want to find out it all from someone who knows, there's a good interview on Groklaw with the ex-CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen. And no punches pulled, either:

Q: The world is now very aware of the spoiler role that apparently Intel tried to play. Can you though talk to us about the differences technically between the Classmate and the XO?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Where to start: Classmate is more expensive, consumes 10 times the power, has 1/3 the wifi range, and can't be used outside. Also, the Classmate doesn't use neighboring laptops to extend the reach of the internet via hopping (mesh-networking) like the XO does. So not only is the XO cheaper than the Classmate, the XO requires less infrastructre expenditure for electricity and for internet access. In Peru we can run off of solar during the day and handcrank at night for an additional $25 or so per student – this is one-time expense – the solar panel and the crank will last 10 or perhaps 20 years. Just try running electricity cables up and down the Peruvian Andes for that cost while making sure it's environmentally clean energy. The Classmate isn't as durable as the XO, and its screen is about 30% smaller, the batteries are the type that can explode and only last 1-2 years and can't be removed by the user and harm the environment. The batteries are expensive to replace: $30-40 per replacement. The XO batteries last for 5 years and cost less than $10 to replace. Finally, the XO is the greenest laptop ever made, the Classmate isn't – this matters a great deal when one proposes to put millions of them in the developing world.

I Fear the Greeks, Not Bearing Gifts

As a big fan of the Greek national television channel ERT (available as a stream), I was interested in this campaign to gain open access to the ERT audiovisual archive:

Greek citizens, but also citizens of other countries, we jointly sign this text on the occasion of ERT’s choice to distribute its audiovisual archive non-freely to the public. Our aim and ambition is to publicize our propositions so that they become the starting point of an open dialog among the Greek society, the European and global public audience and to signal the revision of backward policies and the creation of common political wealth.

Few days ago, the ERT administration presented the beginning of the availability, only via Internet streaming, of a part of its audiovisual archive. This move constitutes an important first step, which, however, in our opinion, is tarnished by the fact that the public availability of the archive is not made free, although the Greek and European citizens have paid their money to make the production and digitization of the archive feasible.

To which I can only say: σωστά. (Via Open Access News.)

The Value of Scarcity in the Age of Ubiquity

This is the future:

Just when digital reproduction makes it possible to create a “Rembrandt” good enough to fool the eye, the “real” Rembrandt becomes more expensive than ever. Why? Because the same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Paying the Price for Google

An interesting analogy here between Google and markets - with a nasty ecological payoff that we will all pay for people gaming the system (just as spam games the email system, and threatens to destroy it):

As every web content producer adjusts to Google, its results become necessarily less and less compelling. The joy of Google past was to think hard about the search query and get a first screen result full of relevant but quirky, even obscure material. A Google result today is much less sensitive to the driver, because every content maker is trying to "buy" space that it can't pay for in genuine links. SEO [Search Engine Optimisation] will ossify Google and a better solution will wipe it out with the speed of an epidemic. The web has become over-fitted to Google like a strain of wheat becomes over-designed to a specific ecology. The web is covered in content strategies over-designed to Google, and new mechanism will find a source of meaningful, un-manipulated information---just as the hyper-link was before PageRank made it a gameable commodity.

Is That All? Or, From "e" to "Social"

Here's a sharp observation:

if not Enterprise 2.0, then what? The only other concept that seems to connect is "Social," though I'm conflicted about that prefix. It's obviously just as prevalent as "2.0" and more accurately descriptive, but the word "social" is often met with a raised eyebrow in the enterprise. "Social" sounds like it's about wasting time though I imagine with enough momentum, the term could be redefined (people take the word "Google" seriously). The whole nomenclature debate reminds me of the hype cycle that the prefix "e" traversed in the mid to late 1990s and some of the "e"-words survived. Regardless, it would appear that "Social" is the moniker of our time.