Will Google's Android Lead to HAL 9000?

Google's Android platform remains something of an unknown quantity: until real-life applications of it start to come through, it is hard to know whether it will be fab or a flop. But in one respect it is clearly a breakthrough, in that its openness allows people to try out new ideas that were difficult or even impossible with closed systems:

Nikita Ivanov and his 14 employees are working on an application that would harness the processing power within millions of cell phones to create one big supercomputer. The idea is to enable companies and government agencies to exploit all the idle computing power in their employees' mobile phones and perhaps even handsets belonging to non-employees who have agreed to lease that spare capacity.

To create this "grid" computing application, Ivanov's startup firm has chosen a mobile software platform that doesn't yet run on a single commercially available phone. Rather than Windows Mobile or the Symbian operating system, GridGain is using Android, a platform spearheaded by Google that has drawn scores of software developers with its promise of flexibility to create unusual applications.

GridGain is one of thousands of Android-based projects in the works. Another would enable users to record and share audio tours of museums or galleries. One is a music player that can connect a cell-phone user with people who have similar musical tastes and happen to be nearby. All underscore the ways that developers hope to use Android to take phones in new directions with greater ease than today's prominent wireless platforms.

Welcome to the FOSSBazaar

On Open Enterprise blog.

Lost for Words

The world is poorer today:

Marie Smith Jones, who worked to preserve her heritage as the last full-blooded member of Alaska's Eyak Indians and the last fluent speaker of their native language, has died. She was 89.

(Via Language Log.)

Open Architecture...Spaceships?

Out of this world:

Virgin Galactic on Wednesday unveiled designs for SpaceShipTwo and the WhiteKnightTwo, two vehicles that are designed to usher in private spaceflight. The technology behind the system will have an open architecture “like Linux,” said officials.

Well, if nothing else, it shows how the meme is taking off...

Without Costing an Arm and a Leg

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mark His Words

Here's a post well worth reading:

Yesterday, we saw the most extraordinary failure of economic leadership in recent years, when the US Federal Reserve pressed the “emergency morphine” button and cut Federal Reserve rates by 0.75%. It will not help.

These are extremely testing times, and thus far, the US Fed under Bernanke has been found wanting. Historians may well lay the real blame for current distress at the door of Alan Greenspan, who pioneered the use of morphine to dull economic pain, but they will probably also credit him with a certain level of discretion in its prescription. During Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed, economic leaders became convinced that the solution to market distress was to ensure that the financial system had access to easy money.

Pretty standard Economist-type analysis you might think; but what's interesting about this lengthy piece is that it's written by Mark Shuttleworth, head of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. What struck was not just that it's extremely well written, but that he took the time and trouble to pen it. I don't think there are many CEOs who would be both willing and able to do so.

I think we can deduce from from this is that Canonical - and hence a key player working towards GNU/Linux on the desktop - is in good hands.

From Fair Dealing to Fair Sharing

What's interesting about the site "I Wouldn't Steal" is not so much the message - that downloading files is not the same as stealing handbags - but that a political party, albeit the Greens, has created it, along with a neat little YouTube video to get the message across. In other words, it marks a move from a purely passive resistance to the media conglomerates' continuing efforts to re-write the law to suit themselves, to a more militant one that strives to get alternative viewpoints across.

I think this is important, because at the moment the general public is very confused about copyright (and intellectual monopolies in general). That suits the content companies, and shows that the way forward is by educating people so that they can understand what the deeper issues are.

Alfresco Gets Funding for Growth

On Open Enterprise blog.

An Insider's History of the Metaverse

It was sad news that Cory Ondrejka was parting company with Second Life, but it looks like there's a silver lining:

I think it would be fun to make a semi-regular part of this site different moments from my memories of the first 7 years of Second Life.

Once upon a time,

Around August of 2001, back when Second Life was called Linden World, there was no scripting language in SL. Primitar was about to replace the spaceships and floating eyeballs that were the original avatars and James was doing the first major UI revamp so that we could add to the world without shooting. The entire team had been debating how to add behavior into the system for months, with Philip arguing that we should just use physics. Philip had some really good points, because if we were able to use Havok for all of our behaviors, residents would be able to gauge the complexity of an object by just looking at it -- like mechanical systems in the real world -- and we wouldn't have to divert scarce resources into a project that could take significant time and effort. Mitch was also an advocate of visual complexity representing behavioral complexity, and I think there was something to that idea.

Now read on...

International Journal of the Commons, Vol 2, No 1

Now out.

Microsoft: Trapped in the Web of the Past

On Open Enterprise blog.

Magna Carta and the Commons

Here's an old but wonderful essay drawing out the many connections between the Magna Carta and the commons. Its sweep is broad:

While the Magna Carta is singular, an English peculiarity, its story is one of oppression, rebellion, and betrayal. It has become a story with global significance. We are commoners looking in at it from the outside. We have seen its history from the robber barons who became chivalric knights who became law lords who became “founding fathers.” Having studied their doings in the forest, in Palestine, in the law court, on the frontier, and now in Iraq, we have learned to be suspicious.

Open Enterprise Interview: Fabrizio Capobianco

On Open Enterprise blog.

This is What the Internet Was Invented For

Who needs television, when you've got WikipediaVision?

WikipediaVision is a visualization of edits to the English (and the German, French, Spanish) Wikipedia, almost the same time as they happen.

Be warned, this is totally addictive. (Via if:book.)

Facebook Does Collaborative Localisations

A novel approach to localisation:

They are picking and choosing markets (Spanish was opened first, two weeks ago; today German and French were launched) and asking just a few users to test out their collaborative translation tool. Once the tool is perfected and enough content has been translated, Facebook will offer users the ability to quickly switch the language on the site, per their preference.

Not hard to see this becoming more common.

Security by Obscurity? I Don't Think So

Great post by Ed Felten about the complete mess the Dutch authorities have made of their new $2 billion transit card system, which, it seems, is wide open to cracking:

Why?

Kerckhoffs’s Principle, one of the bedrock maxims of cryptography, says that security should never rely on keeping an algorithm secret. It’s okay to have a secret key, if the key is randomly chosen and can be changed when needed, but you should never bank on an algorithm remaining secret.

Unfortunately the designers of Mifare Classic did not follow this principle. Instead, they chose to combine a secret algorithm with a relatively short 48-bit key. This is a problem because once you know the algorithm it’s possible for an attacker to search the entire 48-bit key space, and therefore to forge cards, in a matter or days or weeks.

More generally:

Now the Dutch authorities have a mess on their hands. About $2 billion have been invested in this project, but serious fraud seems likely if it is deployed as designed. This kind of disaster would have been more likely had the design process been more open. Secrecy was not only an engineering mistake (violating Kerckhoffs’s Principle) but also a policy mistake, as it allowed the project to get so far along before independent analysts had a chance to critique it. A more open process, like the one the U.S. government used in choosing the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) would have been safer. Governments seem to have a hard time understanding that openness can make you more secure.

Let's hope other governments are listening...

Fighting Words

Here, take this spoon:

In spite of their public opposition to Microsoft’s attempt to get the ISO standardization nod for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, IBM and Google quietly are supporting OOXML.

That’s according to two blog postings from the end of last week by Microsoft execs involved in the OOXML vs. Open Document Format (ODF) standards battle.

Update: Rob Weir offers the customary razor-sharp analysis to sort out what's really going on.

Go Get a (Tiny) Life

One of the best and most important books on the rise of virtual worlds - albeit a text-based one in this case - and the deep issues they raise is now freely available:

I am pleased to announce that my first book, the widely cited but long out-of-print MY TINY LIFE: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (Being a True Account of the Case of the Infamous Mr. Bungle and the Author's Journey, in Consequence Thereof, to the Heart of a Half-Real World Called LambdaMOO), can now be downloaded in its entirety in a handsomely formatted PDF edition, completely free of charge. Or, if you prefer, the fine folks at Lulu will package up a perfect-bound paperback version for you at the shockingly reasonable price of only $17.48 ($5 of which goes straight to me). Either way, you get what for the last eight years or so could not be had for love or money: A brand new and fully authorized copy of MY TINY LIFE, yours to read, lend, dog-ear, shelve, and otherwise make use of in whatever way your heart desires and copyright permits.

And don't miss the author's fascinating explanation of how hard it proved to give something away thanks to the byzantine world of global copyright.

The Joy of Code

Thankfully we seem to be moving beyond the simplistic idea that code written and given away for nothing is worth nothing. But not everyone has gasped the corollary: that the you get better code if you *don't* pay for it. Why? Because passion is a better motivator than pounds and pence.

If you're sceptical, trying this post that reviews the growing evidence that external rewards demage intrinsic motivations:

As many of you know, I'm really interested in the question of "Would you do it again for free?" If you take developers that are working on open source software for free and you pay them, if you stop paying them, will they still work on open source software? This was the topic of my keynote at GUADEC and will be the topic of my keynotes at LinuxConf Australia and SCALE - the story continues to evolve as I learn more. One of the things I started with was a search to see if there was any relevant data out there. I found the following five studies that explore how external rewards affect internal or intrinsic rewards

Those studies tend to suggest that rewarding people for doing something produces less good results than relying on their personal passion or altruism. Creating something and giving it away is not only better for those who receive, it's also better for those who give.

'L' is for 'Linux', Not 'Looney'

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Trolls Done Good

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of wicked trolls. And then one day, they became good. That, in a nutshell, is the free software story of Trolltech, which produces the Qt toolkit underlying KDE.

Here's a fuller version:

When the K Desktop Environment was first announced in October 1996, it was not greeted with the universal approval that its creator, Matthias Ettrich, had hoped for. Alongside traditionalists who thought that any kind of graphical user interface was “too Windows-like” or just downright “sissy”, there was a deeper concern over the licensing of the underlying toolkit, Trolltech's Qt, which was free as in beer to hackers, but not free as in freedom. As Ettrich told me in 2000:

Everybody joining looked at alternatives [to Qt], and we had a long discussion: Shall we go with Qt? And the result was [we decided] it's the best technical solution if we want to reach the goal that we have.

Since Trolltech refused to adopt the GNU GPL for Qt (at that point: it did later), and since the KDE project refused to drop Qt, many hackers decided that they had to start a rival desktop project that would be truly free. One of the people thinking along these lines was Miguel de Icaza, who ended up leading a global team to create a desktop environment – although that was hardly his original intention:

Initially we were hoping that the existence of the project would make [Trolltech] change their minds, but they didn't. So we just kept working and working until we actually had something to use.

That “something to use” grew into GNOME, a rich, full-featured desktop environment, just as KDE had done, until the free software world found itself with the luxury – some would say liability – of two approaches.

Now it seems that the trolls have really done good:

Trolltech ASA is licensing its Qt cross-platform development framework under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3), with immediate effect.

Qt is already available under the GPL v2 and will continue to be so in addition to the GPL v3.

The GPL v3 license will make it easy and safe for free software developers to use Trolltech’s Qt with the most recent license framework from the Free Software Foundation. Trolltech hopes that its move will inspire free software projects to use GPL v3 when programming with Qt.

The move to GPL v3 licensing reinforces Trolltech’s strong tradition of giving developers the liberty to create and share software in accordance with the “four freedoms” defined by the Free Software Foundation.

"We decided to add GPL v3 licensing after consulting with both KDE e.V. and the Free Software Foundation," explained Eirik Chambe-Eng, co-founder of Trolltech. "I first read the GNU Manifesto from the Free Software Foundation back in 1987 and it forever shaped the way I viewed software. We at Trolltech are proud to continue serving the free software community by allowing software developers to choose which GPL version they want to use."

"I am very pleased that Trolltech has decided to make Qt available under GPL v3," commented Richard Stallman, author of the GPL and president of The Free Software Foundation. "This will allow parts of KDE to adopt GPL v3, too. Even better, Trolltech has made provisions for a smooth migration to future GPL versions if it approves of them."

What a turnaround. (Via Elkosmas.gr.)

Google does Open Data

Here's a further sign of the rise of open data and of huge stores that hold them:

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.

No EU Snooping, Danke

Heise online reports on a very bad idea:

If things go the way the Conservative British MEP Christopher Heaton-Harris wants them to, internet providers will be much more closely involved in the battle against copyright infringements. He has introduced a proposal in the European Parliament under which access providers would not only have to install filters on the network side, in order to prevent misuse of their networks for the theft of intellectual property, but would also be obliged to close down Internet access to clients who "repeatedly or substantially" infringe copyright. Content that infringes others' rights would moreover have to be blocked by providers.

As to why it's a bad idea, here's what I've just sent to all my MEPs using the indispensable WriteToThem site:

First, it won't work. Users will simply encrypt their files before sending them, making them completely opaque to content filters. The power of computers is such that this is an easy operation to carry out, and it will become the norm if the above proposal is enacted. Breaking that encryption, by contrast, is very hard, and access providers will be unable to do this in order to inspect the contents.

Secondly, the proposal requires access providers to examine the full traffic flows of everyone. The scope for abuse is enormous. Most people do not encrypt sensitive information that they include in emails, for example. Sometimes Web transmissions are not properly encrypted, allowing sensitive information such as credit card details or health information to be read. If this proposal were enacted, and access providers were required to monitor all traffic, it would be tempting – and easy – for criminals to infiltrate such companies and extract sensitive data.

Finally, there is a deeper discussion needed about whether sharing copyright material is actually bad for the owners of that material. There is growing evidence that people who download such material go on to make more content purchases than those who do not. This is not really surprising: the downloaded materials are effectively free publicity, and a way to discover new content of interest. When people have the chance to sample and explore new content, they end up buying things that they would never have thought of purchasing, bringing more money to the content owners. It might be that the content industries should really be encouraging this kind of free marketing: more research is needed at the very least.

If you feel strongly about this - and you should - perhaps you'd like to write a quick note to your MEPs.

Trendy Open Source M&A

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Google Generation Don't Respect Copyright

This interesting report from the British Libary and JISC says that the "Google generation" - those born after 1993 - aren't so hot when it comes to Googling. But what really caught my eye was the following:

Findings from Ofcom surveys reveal that both adults and children (aged 12-15) have very high levels of awareness and understanding of the basic principles of intellectual property. However, young people feel that copyright regimes are unfair and unjust and a big age gap is opening up. The implications for libraries and for the information industry of a collapse of respect for copyright is potentially very serious.

Oh yes, indeedy.