If I had to pinpoint major open source trends in 2008, one of them would be the rise in the foundation as a major force in free software. The best-known examples of these are probably the Mozilla Foundation and GNOME Foundation, both of which have expanded their ambitions recently. Here's what each has to say about its aims...
On Open Enterprise blog.
Matt has some thoughts on blogs - including this one:my primary interest is in digging up what's not already "popular." Unfortunately, I'm as guilty as anyone of recycling "news," but real traffic comes from breaking new ground, and I find that by scouring Digg and much lesser-known blogs.
...
no Drudge Report for me. Instead I'll be reading OpenDotDotDot and other "lesser" blogs. Hopefully this will keep translating into rising Open Road readership in 2009. Maybe we'll break the top-5,000,000 by 2012. One can dream....
Thanks, Matt...I think.
Actually, I feel exactly the same way: I'd much rather read Matt's informed writing on The Open Road - born of real analytical intelligence *and* hands-on experience - than the frothy nonsense served up by "leading" blogs.
The latter are most interested in traffic and in maintaining their position as blogosphere personalities: famous for being famous. They rarely contribute a deeper understanding of the world they write about.
That's what we "lesser" blogs are for.
This is just a jokette, right?The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone's calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.
I mean, not content with attempting to put into place a total surveillance system, old Jacqui now seriously wants to out-source it? Which will effectively means that it can be owned by anyone - including a foreign entity - that buys the company with the contract.
I can see the political advantages of doing so - "oh no, *we* didn't lose all your intimate data, blame the company" - but this is stupidity squared.
Most people in the free software world know that before he wrote Linux, Linus was using the Minix operating system. To run it, he had to acquire his first "proper" PC - his main machine until then was the Sinclair QL (remember that?). As he told me a few years ago, the PC arrived early in 1991....
On Open Enterprise blog.
Those of us who are city-dwellers rarely see much in the sky at night; we have lost the commons of darkness. As a result, to view the terrifying multitude of stars out in countries with little street lighting is an almost mystical experience.
Against that, er, background, here's an interesting idea:
2009 has been designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Astronomy (IYA), marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope. The excitement is starting early, with Galloway Forest Park in Scotland announcing its plans to become Europe’s first “dark sky park.”
The forest, which covers 300 square miles and includes the foothills of the Awful Hand Range, rates as a 3 on the Bortle scale. The scale, created by John Bortle in 2001, measures night sky darkness based on the observability of astronomical objects. It ranges from Class 9 – Inner City Sky – where "the only celestial objects that really provide pleasing telescopic views are the Moon, the planets, and a few of the brightest star clusters (if you can find them)," to Class 1 – Excellent Dark-Sky Site – where "the galaxy M33 is an obvious naked-eye object" and "airglow… is readily apparent." Class 3 is merely "Rural Sky," meaning that while "the Milky Way still appears complex... M33 is only visible with averted vision."
(Via A Blog Around the Clock.)
There is a long journalistic tradition of looking back at the end of the year over the major events of the preceding 12 months - one that I have no intention of following. But I would like to point out an important development in the world of openness that has occurred over that time-span: the rise and rise of Wikileaks....
On Open Enterprise blog.
Here's a detailed and important piece that looks at the economics of scientific collaboration. One concept that may be of particular interest to readers of this blog is that of collaboration markets:There are good reasons it’s difficult to set up efficient collaboration markets in expert attention. Creative problems are often highly specialized one-off problems, quite unlike the commodites traded in most markets. Until very recently, markets in such specialized goods were relatively uncommon and rather limited even in the realm of physical goods. This has recently changed, with online markets such as eBay showing that it is possible to set up markets which are highly specialized, provided suitable search and reputational tools are in place.
To the extent such collaboration markets do exist in science, they still operate very inefficiently compared with markets for trade in goods. There are considerable trust barriers that inhibit trading relationship being set up. There is no medium of exchange (c.f. the posts by Shirley Wu and Cameron Neylon’s on this topic). The end result is that mechanisms for identifying and aggregating comparative advantage are downright primitive compared with markets for physical goods.
Perhaps the best existing examples of collaboration markets occur in the open source programming community. No single model is used throughout that community, but for many open source projects the basic model is to set up one or more online fora (email discussion lists, wikis, bug-tracking software, etcetera) which is used to co-ordinate activity. The fora are used to advertise problems people are having, such as bugs they’d like fixed, or features they’d like added. People then volunteer to solve those problems, with self-selection ensuring that work is most often done by people with a considerable comparative advantage. The forum thus acts as a simple mechanism for aggregating information about comparative advantage. While this mechanism is primitive compared with modern markets, the success of open source is impressive, and the mechanisms for aggregating information about comparative advantage in expert attention will no doubt improve.
And yes, it's all about openness, collaboration and respect:companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively.
Perhaps the most neglected pioneer in computing is Ted Nelson, who came up with most of the ideas of hypertext and linking, but got sidetracked for most of his life with the ill-fated Project Xanadu. One of my favourite computing puns is "I fear the geeks bearing gifts". So putting them together is an irresistible combination:Whether you love the computer world the way it is, or consider it a nightmare honkytonk prison, you'll giggle and rage at Ted Nelson's telling of computer history, its personalities and infights.
Computer movies, music, 3D; the eternal fight between Jobs and Gates; the tangled stories of the Internet and the World Wide Web; all these and more are punchily told in brief chapters on many topics such as The Web Browser Salad, Voting Machines, Google, Web 2.0 and much more. These short stories make great reading – it's a book to dip in and out of.
I have to say that's not exactly the book I would have expected Nelson to write, but then he's full of surprises.... (Via Iterating Towards Openness.)
It's pretty obvious why companies in sectors like oil production should be denying so vehemently that their products are major contributors to climate change. It's also pretty clear why many other industries would prefer not to think about the externalities of their business models, and how much they take without replacing from the environmental commons. But there are a few non-green businesses that not only believe climate change and environmental degradation is happening, but that it is large scale - and already hugely expensive:The past year has been one of the most devastating ever in terms of natural disasters, one of the world's biggest re-insurance companies has said.
Munich Re said the impact of the disasters was greater than in 2007 in both human and economic terms.
The company suggested climate change was boosting the destructive power of disasters like hurricanes and flooding.
...
"It is now very probable that the progressive warming of the atmosphere is due to the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity," said Prof Peter Hoppe, head of Munich Re's Geo Risks Research.
"The logic is clear: when temperatures increase there is more evaporation and the atmosphere has a greater capacity to absorb water vapour, with the result that its energy content is higher.
"The weather machine runs into top gear, bringing more intense severe weather events with corresponding effects in terms of losses."
The company said world leaders must put in place "effective and binding rules on CO2 emissions" to curb climate change and ensure that "future generations do not have to live with weather scenarios that are difficult to control".
"If we delay too long, it will be very costly for future generations," said Mr Jeworrek.
Not rabid greenies talking, but hard-headed representatives of a big business sector...
Ever wondered what those Latvians are up to with free software? Wonder no more:Latvia's Minister for Electronic Government Affairs Signe Bāliņa says open standards are key to improving efficiency and transparency in government.
Open technology and open standards are fundamental to efficient communication with the government, the minister argued in her opening address at the Latvian Open Technology Conference in Riga on 12 November. She said the government needs to use open IT systems to allow citizens and businesses to communicate easily with the government. "We think it is very important these systems are open and based on open technologies and open standards."
The conference in Riga, organised by the Latvian Open Technology Association (LATA), drew more than 250 participants from the central government, municipalities, IT firms and universities. LATA wanted to update the attendants on open source developments in the country and the region.
Several Latvian businesses and institutions described their use of open source software. The telecoms company Lattelecom for example presented on the use of open source in their data centres and the Latvian University showed how it uses the open source e-learning system Moodle to offer on-line education. The university also employs open source for its data storage and to create grid computing services.
There's also interesting stuff about Russia - somewhere I've long believed is set to emerge as an open source leader:
Marat Guriev, a representative of IBM in Eastern Europe and Asia, gave an overview of developments on open source software and open standards in Russia. He described how the Russian military has been working on its own version of GNU/Linux, parts of which have recently been declassified by the All-Russian Scientific and Research Institute of Control Automation in the Non-Industrial Sphere (Vniins). According to Guriev, many specialised version of GNU/Linux distributions are produced, often in response to requests by local governments. In three Russian regions, most of the PCs in use in about a thousand schools have been switched over to GNU/Linux. Moreover, Russian science institutes are publishing their work on open source systems, he said, for example on the web site Linux Testing.
I've written about the activity in Russian schools before. If you read Russian, you can read Guriev's presentation here - it has plenty of useful detail about free software in his country.
As the end of 2008 approaches, people's thoughts naturally turn to 2009, and what it might hold. The dire economic situation means that many will be wondering what the year will bring in terms of employment and their financial situation. This is not the place to ponder such things, nor am I qualified to do so. Instead, I'd like to discuss a matter that is related to these larger questions, but which focusses on issues particularly germane to Linux Journal: will 2009 be a year in which openness thrives, or one in which closed thinking re-asserts itself?
On Linux Journal.
There's been a certain excitement in the blogosphere around the release of some figures about Firefox's market share in Europe. These show Firefox holding over 30%, while Internet Explorer is below 60%; alongside these, Safari notches up 2.5% and Google's Chrome 1.1%....
On Open Enterprise blog.
Newspapers are dying - or so you might gather from articles like this....
On Open Enterprise blog.
We are grateful to Andrew Pierce for his informative article about how the Foreign Office minister misled parliament with regard to the advertising of the post of Director of the World Service.
...
To maintain the BBC World Service's reputation and credibility, the new Managing Director must be chosen through a fully open selection process, with full consideration of the availability and qualification of external candidates. In addition, a new managing director must be authoritative in news and current affairs, have wide international perspectives, must be capable of resisting pressure both from the UK government and from other governments and should not believe that the World Service can be founded on the perceived importance of marketing. To impose a closing date for applications of January 4, 2009 is to foreclose all these options.
Read it, and weep.
I'd seen that Larry Lessig had written another fine rant about intellectual monopolies, this time in Newsweek. What I had missed in my cursory glance was something in the following paragraph:Since the birth of the Republic, the U.S. government has been in the business of handing out "exclusive rights" (a.k.a., monopolies) in order to "promote progress" or enable new markets of communication. Patents and copyrights accomplish the first goal; giving away slices of the airwaves serves the second. No one doubts that these monopolies are sometimes necessary to stimulate innovation. Hollywood could not survive without a copyright system; privately funded drug development won't happen without patents. But if history has taught us anything, it is that special interests—the Disneys and Pfizers of the world—have become very good at clambering for more and more monopoly rights. Copyrights last almost a century now, and patents regulate "anything under the sun that is made by man," as the Supreme Court has put it. This is the story of endless bloat, with each round of new monopolies met with a gluttonous demand for more.
All good stuff. But what struck me was the "clambering for more": this, surely, was meant to be "clamouring for more". I can't believe someone as eloquent and erudite as Lessig got this wrong, so I can only assume we're looking at a sub-editor attack.
I wonder if it qualifies as an eggcorn?
There is currently a huge bun-fight going on at the WHO over who has the "rights" to "own" key genomic information about pandemic influenza viruses. This is tantamount to arguing over who has the rights to hire out deckchairs on the Titanic as it goes down: the idea that intellectual monopolies have any meaning in a world threatened by hundreds of millions of deaths from a new pandemic strain is beyond obscene.
What makes this spectacle particularly disgusting is the hypocrisy of the West: not content with trying to patent the unpatentable, it wants the developing countries to give up *their* "rights" so that the West's industries can maximise their profit (failing to notice that it is hard to spend all this luvverly profit when you and/or your bankers are dead). Here are some of the sordid details:Several delegates participating in last week's Intergovernmental Meeting on Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (IGM) (under the World Health Organisation) from countries providing influenza viruses to laboratories and manufacturers in developed countries, privately mentioned that the positions taken by developed countries in particular by the US, Japan and the EU on issues such as intellectual property rights and benefit sharing reveals the "double standards" of those countries.
On the one hand, the IGM saw the US, Japan and the EU pushing hard for relinquishment of sovereign rights, an interpretation of the International Health Regulations that obligates the sharing of viruses, text that requires countries to share as "all, as feasible, cases of H5N1 and other influenza viruses with human pandemic potential" with their laboratories in the name of global public health and pandemic preparedness.
However, on the other hand, they appear unwilling to commit in particular their manufacturers and researchers that receive biological materials to any concrete benefit sharing scheme, or to address IP issues in a manner that benefits developing countries' public health and pandemic preparedness. Much of the framework's text that deals with benefit sharing continues to remain in brackets, denoting there is no agreement.
Whenever reference to "manufacturers" and the need to have a better understanding of their roles and responsibilities was made by developing countries at the meeting, the issue was quickly passed over by the Chair of the IGM, Jane Halton from Australia. And countries such as Japan and the US insisted that the framework being developed should not dictate what the manufacturers or the researchers can do with the biological materials, or their roles and responsibilities.
You would have thought that against the background of a financial system brought to its knees by blind greed, at least here at the World *Health* Organisation there would be a more, er, healthy and mature attitude to saving the world from a potentially even greater disaster. Apparently not....
Here's a jolly idea from those wacky burghers of St. Petersburg: some of them want to rename Engels Avenue there to Yandex Avenue, after the leading Russian search engine:Инициативная группа предложила поменять название проспекта Энгельса на проспект Яндекса, заявив, что классик коммунизма сделал для Петербурга значительно меньше, чем известный поисковый интернет-сервис.
[Via Google Translate: The Action Group has proposed to change the name of Engels on Prospect Avenue Yandex, arguing that communism has done to the classic St. Petersburg is considerably lower than the well-known Internet search service.]
Google Street, anyone?
One thing that is evident is the continuing emergence of the mobile platform as a real alternative to the traditional PC. The iPhone and Android systems are the clearest manifestation of this. But here's another:For many Japanese adolescents, cellphone is inseparable partner of their lives, you might have heard. Different from PC, kids can have their own (not-shared with your family/siblings, not filtered by home-broadband), can bring it with you to school, outside, anywhere (it is important when your writing back within 5 minutes to your friend’s mail is the only way to prove your true friendship). The largest Social Network Mixi already got more page views from cellphone than from PC (and #2 Mobage and #3 Gree are mainly on mobile).
Some are said to write their college reports by e-mail on cellphone. (*1) (*2) (*3)
For those cellphone-adapted youth, PC’s QWERTY keyboard does not necessary be the best input device. They had to use PC keyboard fewer times on their computer class, however, 0-to-9 number pads are more familiar, even faster way for them.
If number pads in cellphone order is more convenient, some youth feel easier to use it even for PC. Yes, there are some solutions.
Keiboard+IE is USB external keyboard having cellphone-keypads, mouse-like joy pad and many short cut buttons (for IE, as its name implies).
I do hope it's not *that* IE.....
There's nothing like a mature, balanced view of the world:
2009, Go China!
Lead: Snowstorm, freely falling down to earth, like western values
Lead: Despair fills the sky, ice covers the earth
Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Olympics were a success! We are victorious!
Lead: Hot blood and iron will of Chinese people, lighten up the dark world like burning the holy flame
All: The rivers and mountains, ever more colorful and beautiful
Lead: Earthquakes, shifting back and forth like the positions of Sarkozy, with his dirty tricks, trying to shake the great China
Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Shenzhou-7 launched. We are victorious!
Lead: Pathetic Europe will never stop the insurmountable force of our great dynasty
All: Just the aftershocks from the earthquake would destroy France!
But wait - there's more.....
Roy's digging has brought to light some interesting, er, hidden treasures:Several weeks ago we received a public message from James Plamondon, who said:
Roy, et al.,
You’re right. Some of the evangelism practices that I taught and executed at Microsoft in the 1990’s were unethical. I didn’t think so at the time — I thought that they were just hyper-competitive — but I agree now.
I am trying to change the error of my ways. I trust that you will agree that even the most hardened sinner can be redeemed.
Assuming that's true, it should make Plasmondon's blog interesting reading....
I'll get me cutlass:
When the Swedish Pirate Party was launched three years ago, the majority of the mainstream press viewed them with skepticism, with some simply laughing them away. Times have changed though. As the government works to introduce harsher copyright laws and others that threaten the privacy of Sweden’s citizens, the party is growing stronger and stronger.
In a recent poll, 21 percent of all Swedes indicated that they would consider voting for the Pirate Party in the upcoming European Parliament elections. Among men in the 18-29 age group, this number goes up to a massive 55% - an unprecedented statistic.
In the beginning, free software was an activity conducted on the margins - using spare time on a university's computers, or the result of lonely bedroom hacking. One of the key moments in the evolution of free software was when hackers began to get jobs - often quite remunerative jobs - with one of the new open source companies that sprang up in the late 1990s. For more or less the first time, coders could make a good salary doing what they loved, and businesses could be successful paying them to write code that would be given away.
On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the central lessons to be learned from free software is that individuals can make a difference. Not many would have given Richard Stallman much chance of succeeding when he launched the GNU project, and Linus's efforts to hack his simple terminal program into an operating system kernel would not have struck a dispassionate observer at the time as likely to go very far. And yet, together, they have changed computing, and indirectly the world, as the ideas of freedom, openness and collaboration they helped to pioneer spread to other domains.
So where does that leave people like me, whose last programming consisted of the world's worst Fortran code (don't ask)? I often pose myself that question, and have gradually come to the view that the best thing I can hope to do is to indulge in a little constructive whingeing. Some recent events have strengthened me in this resolve.
On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the most powerful aspects of free software is that its entire approach and mindset is orthogonal to proprietary software. It's not just better, it's profoundly different. That's one of the most important reasons that *everything* Microsoft has thrown against free software has not just failed, but failed dismally. The company can fight and win against more or less any conventional rival, since it has spent years honing its attack methods. But the latter are simply inappropriate when trying to compete against projects that are profoundly non-commercial: the community cannot be bought off or out; nor can it be undercut by selling goods at a loss against it. In fact, it is striking that along with undeniable strengths, the increasing commercialisation of open source has also brought with it vulnerabilities - notably legal ones - as some of free software's angularity has been smoothed down to make it more "acceptable" to enterprises.
On Open Enterprise blog.
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