Speaking of Monsanto and Gene Patents...

And right on cue, like the catastrophe of the old comedy, comes some fresh news about Monsanto and its gene patents:

Monsanto Co., facing antitrust probes into its genetically modified seeds, may benefit from previous court rulings in which intellectual property rights trumped competition concerns, antitrust lawyers say.

Got that? Intellectual monopolies, as well as being inherently bad, are also a "Get Out of Jail Card" for companies breaking anti-trust law. Broken, or what? (Via @schestowitz.)

Where Do I Stand on GMOs?

I'm conscious that I've written a lot of negative posts about genetically-modified organisms on this blog. That might lead readers to believe I'm against them. That's not the case: I am naturally pro-technology, and GMOs are potentially an important tool for addressing many of the world's most pressing problems. But I have my concerns, and I was pleased to find that Salon's Andrew Leonard not only shares them, but has expressed them rather well:

I don't actually have a position on whether GMOs are by definition good or bad for the environment or human health or even the challenge of alleviating hunger in the developing world. My basic stance, in fact, is pro-science: I believe technological advances have greatly advanced human health and affluence, and will continue to do so, if properly regulated. My concern re GMOs has always stemmed from a profound skepticism that profit-seeking corporations can be trusted to responsibly serve the public good. One need look only at the constant stream of reports detailing unethical and criminal behavior by major pharmaceutical companies to realize that this is hardly a hypothetical concern.

In the case of GMOs we are dealing with a remarkable concentration of intellectual property ownership in just a handful of corporations. Like all well-endowed corporate actors, these companies do not shy from vigorously lobbying governments in favor of putting into place place legal frameworks that are designed to maximize profits and minimize caution.

Exactly: what worries me is the way that global companies are using GMOs, and the intellectual monopolies they represent, as instruments of power - particularly over poor farmers in developing countries - purely to bolster their market and financial positions. The sooner we can de-fang companies like Monsanto - for example by revoking gene patents - and explore the potential of GMOs in an objective and scientific manner, the better.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Time to Learn from China on Open Standards?

One of the major battles under way in Europe is over open standards. As its name suggests, an open standard is one that is open to all, without restrictions or obstacles; anything less than that is just window-dressing.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Beethoven by Numbers

One of the reasons I am so excited by Spotify is that it is asymptotically approaching an online library of All Music. Even in its necessarily incomplete state, it offers amazing possibilities. For example, one of the key advantages of having all this stuff on tap is that it's possible to create playlists that mix and match in interesting ways.

Here's a great example: a playlist of Beethoven's works ordered by opus number. Now, I already have the Brilliant Classics boxed set of Beethoven's complete works on CD, but that's rather different. In particular, I can't move through the works by opus number easily.

Why might I want to do that? Well, it's an interesting journey through Beethoven's works - not strictly chronological, but historical in terms of what came out when. In particular, it lets me see at a glance all those odd little works that usually get overlooked - the opus 42, 105, 128 etc. that rarely pop up.

The other great thing about services like Spotify is that they let people share in interesting ways by passing on their playlists. It's a level above simply sharing the files themselves, and adds a richness to listening that is not otherwise easy to replicate. It's a hint of a world where all content is freely available online, and we can share and build on each other's insanely stimulating mashups.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Does Quebec Hate Free Software?

I haven't been following all the ins and outs of this saga, but it looks like the Quebec government is getting unnecessarily heavy against the free software association FACIL ("Facil, pour l'Appropriation Collective de l'Informatique Libre" - nice: recursive acronym, too):

Quelques jours avant le début de la requête en audience opposant Savoir-Faire Linux et la Régie des rentes du Québec, le gouvernement Charest et le Centre des services partagés du Québec (CSPQ) a mandaté la firme d'avocats Tremblay Blois Mignault Lemay pour exiger le remboursement de 106,000.00 $ de frais de justice par FACIL, suite à une demande en justice qui a été rejetée par la Cour Supérieure et la Cour d'appel. Ce geste pourrait éventuellement entrainer la mise en faillite de FACIL.

[Via Google Translate: A few days before the start of the request for hearing opposing Savoir-Faire Linux and the Régie des rentes du Quebec, the Charest government and the Shared Services Center of Quebec (CSPQ) mandated law firm Tremblay Blois Mignault Lemay demanding reimbursement of $ 106,000.00 in legal fees by FACIL, following a judicial demand which was rejected by the Superior Court and Court of Appeal. This gesture might possibly cause the bankruptcy of FACIL.]

What's particularly disturbing here is that it looks like the regional government doesn't want anyone to question why it is going with proprietary software, and not giving free software a fair chance - that's doubly wrong. (Via @akaSassinak.)

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Power2010 Picks...Tony McNulty

Power2010 aims to highlight egregious cases of MPs damaging democracy and blocking its reform. For their first case, they have picked Tony McNulty, and I must say it couldn't have happened to a, er, nicer chap:

The former minister tried to hide his expenses from his constituents by voting to exempt Parliament from Freedom of Information. No wonder. His expenses revealed he'd been claiming for a second home, occupied by his parents, just miles from his primary residence forcing him to resign from government in disgrace.

His behaviour was made all the more galling by the fact that when in the Home Office he championed policies, such as ID card, designed to track, monitor and control the population. He has consistently stood for the old top-down politics of command and control and against reforms like a democratic House of Lords. That is why POWER2010 has selected McNulty as its first target in a nationwide effort to highlight the record of MPs who have opposed cleaning up and reforming our political system.

Great stuff. Just one question: why don't you put the letter's text in your Web page, using instead a great big image file? Just asking...

Anyway, there's a form you can fill in if you want to add your name to this letter. Thoughtfully, there's even a little space for that personal comment you've always wanted to send him....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Why I Bother Acting on ACTA

As you may have noticed, I write quite a lot about ACTA. Indeed, I've been doing it for a comparatively long time: my first post on the subject was back in May 2008. So why do I bother?

Well, the fact that two years ago very few had heard of ACTA, whereas today many people know and care about it, is sufficient reason to carry on: it does make a difference, and people are starting to realise how serious this is. Moreover, hints like this suggest that making noise, even in that notorious echo-chamber that is the blogosphere, gets noticed in rarefied and exalted regions of power:

Recent informations have revealed to me that the worldwide anti-ACTA campaign is having an impact on EU officials, a number of which are following closely the highlights of the most well-known blogs and webs. This is a sign of the success of an effective public campaign that has forced the EU out of its bunker and into the open battlefield over the content of this important international agreement.

That's not to say that things are going swimmingly - they're not: the powerful are still powerful and hell-bent on getting their way. But we've come far, and we can go even further if we continue to acta on ACTA....

The Future of Advantage: Sharing and Serving

As I've noted before, I often find Umair Haque's posts a little, er, opaque. But either he's getting clearer (possible) or my brain is improving (unlikely), because I not only understand this one, I find its ideas comfortingly familiar:

The future of advantage is radically different from the past for a simple reason: because it's economically better. 20th century advantage focuses firms on simply extracting resources from people, communities and society — and then protecting what they extract. 21st century advantage focuses firms on creating new resources, and allocating them better. The former is useful only to shareholders and managers — but the latter is useful to people, communities, and society. The old Microsoft was useful to shareholders, but a lot less useful to society — and that's exactly how Google and Apple attacked it, and won.

This is just the open source way: give away your products, and make money from providing services - you know, things that *serve* people.

I do, however, have my concerns about the positive examples he chooses to illustrate his ideas:

The future of advantage:

Allocative. Google's advantage was built on allocating attention to content and ads better than its rivals. Google's real secret? Relevance, media's measure of how efficiently attention is allocated. Match.com is building an allocative advantage in, well, matching people with partners. Allocative advantage asks: are we able to match people with what makes them durably, tangibly better off — and can we do it 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Creative. Apple's advantage is, of course, radically creative: built on creating insanely great stuff that turns entire industries upside down. Next month, the iPad promises to do what the iPhone and iPod did before it. The power's in the creativity, not just the technology: Apple's thinking different yet again. Creative advantage asks: is our strategic imagination 10x or 100x richer, faster, and deeper than our rivals?

But the ones he chooses in contrast are pretty significant:

And the past:

Extractive. Over two decades, Microsoft has honed its extractive edge, coming up with cleverer and cleverer ways to extract profits from customers and suppliers. But Microsoft's just a flea on Wall St's elephant — who mastered extractive advantage by finding ways to, ultimately, extract trillions from you, me, and our grandkids. Extractive advantage asks: how can we transfer value from stakeholders to us, 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Protective. Think Microsoft's the master of 20th century advantage? Think again. Monsanto's Round-up Ready strategy protects genetically modified crops with proprietary herbicide that crops need to flourish. The result? A protective advantage: Monsanto's made sure that farmers are locked in to Monsanto as tightly as possible. Protective advantage asks: are buyers and suppliers locked in to dealing with us, 10x or 100x more tightly than to rivals?

Hmm, Microsoft and Monsanto, what a combination - and interestingly, it's the latter that is singled out as clearly the worse of the two (which is why I am writing increasingly about the company and its activities.)

Clever chap that Haque; now, if I could just understand him more often....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Hollywood's Post-theatrical Problem, Isn't

There's a great piece in the Washington Post with the headline "The MPAA says the movie business is great. Unless it's lousy." This rightly points out that there is something funny going on in the film industry's view of itself.

On the one hand:

global box office receipts reached an all time high of $29.9 billion, an increase of 7.6% over 2008 and almost 30% from 2005. The U.S./Canada market reached $10.6 billion, an increase of more than 10%, and International receipts increased 6.3% to $19.3 billion in 2009 .... Ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada rose more than 5.5% from 2008, the first admissions increase in two years. Per capita ticket purchases in the U.S. and Canada also increased 4.6% to 4.3 tickets per person, the first significant increase since 2002.

On the other:

you wouldn't know that the movie business was doing so well from other MPAA announcements. Take, for instance, the December press release (PDF) in which MPAA chairman Dan Glickman suggested that unauthorized copies of movies were running the industry into the ground:

"Yet our industry faces the relentless challenge of the theft of its creative content, a challenge extracting an increasingly unbearable cost."

The writer then has the following key explanation:

Asked to clarify, MPAA spokesman Howard Gantman said the industry suffers the greatest damage from fraudulent copies (he said "piracy," but I disagree with that usage) in the post-theatrical markets -- video-on-demand, downloads, DVD and Blu-ray.

I love that "post-theatrical markets" phrase, but what I like even more is this amazingly clear illustration of what is happening in the film industry.

That is, the analogue side - ticket sales in the cinemas - is soaring, while the digital part - those "post-theatrical markets" - are on the way down. And that's absolutely inevitable, of course, because the scarcity is all on the analogue side, while the digital artefacts - downloads, DVDs and Blu-ray - have close to zero marginal cost (not so true for DVDs and Blu-ray, but close enough), so you'd expect their prices and profits to diminish.

In other words, the industry's own figures are a perfect confirmation that it needs to concentrate on the analogue side, and to regard the digital side as an incredibly efficient way to boost it. But somehow I don't think that's the message it's going to be taking home in the near future, more's the pity. (Via @rlancefield.)

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

WikiPremed: Making Money from Free

The virtues of free are pretty inarguable, but advocating the open release of stuff inevitably begs the question: but how do you make a living from it? So it's always great to come across a *thriving* business built on giving stuff away, like WikiPremed MCAT Prep Course, "an open access comprehensive course in the undergraduate level general sciences".

Here's some background:

WikiPremed was created to make it easier for an intelligent, motivated person anywhere in the world to become a doctor. For premedical students in the United States, there is no better learning program than the WikiPremed MCAT Course for securing the level of mastery that earns a superior MCAT score. In addition to improving the accessibility of science education, the WikiPremed MCAT Course is an important contribution to educational design. This learning program teaches the physical and biological sciences within a unified curriculum, an approach developed over many years working closely with college students in small group teaching. The WikiPremed MCAT Course consists of twenty modules. Each module contains fifteen to twenty hours of videos and assignments. The resources here can be utilized as a stand-alone MCAT course or in combination with another course. There are no restricted areas on this website. You can study at WikiPremed for as long as you want. It is often useful to begin WikiPremed several months prior to beginning a live course to establish the conditions for the full realization of the potential of the live course within a more ambitious program.

And here's the key thing:

The WikiPremed MCAT Course is open access. There are no restricted areas. Although registration is free, when you find yourself relying on this site in a significant way for MCAT preparation, please make a one-time $25 Tuition Payment.

But that's not enforced, so there's always the risk that people won't pay. Happily many do, but more importantly, the site generates money from products that are complementary to the online content.

Given that many remain sceptical about the viablity of this approach, I emailed the creator of the site, John Wetzel, who filled me in on how things work:

Basically, the development of the WikiPremed content has been going on since 1994, and at this point, it is a very large body of work. I think it helps to look at the content from an object oriented programming model and think of the various modes of presentation as methods of the content objects. Everything is licensed creative commons attribution, and we make the online methods freely available, so for example, you can find the entire set of Physics Flash Cards online. We offer the printed versions of the things for which print may be appropriate for sale for a very reasonable price, and students do buy them because print has its own advantages. We put the whole set of physics cards online (three years of work!) and the students still buy the printed cards any way. Even if they want to support the work, I think they like to have a commercial arrangement and a simple value proposition.

There is one work, however, the Premedical Learning System, which sells for $32.95, where the advantages of the print version are so great, compared to the online presentations of the content, which are extensive, that we call the printed work 'essential' for the course, and it is definitely a good value. It's also a board game!

Students need printed study materials, and they get sick of the computer, so I definitely think there is room for creative commons educational content supported by print publications. I think there is an ethic to not holding content hostage to purchases, but I think there are commercial advantages to the open model as well. I don't doubt that the average customer at WikiPremed has 1000 page views before purchasing anything.

I am sure that if there were registration walls and missing chapters I would have fewer customers.

I'm not getting rich or anything, at this point, but it is working.

What's interesting here is that once again it's analogue goods that bring in the money, while the digital side does the marketing - a pattern that is emerging in many sectors.

But irrespective of the how, the simple fact of WikiPremed's success is good news: it means that Wetzel is likely to continue to offer his content for free, helping who knows how many impecunious students in the process; it also means that free content has another great case study showing how you can make money from giving stuff away.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Microsoft Proves it Can Go Open Source

One of the technologies I am waiting for would allow me to effect transactions without giving over vast quantities of personal data. After all, what companies really need to know are: can I pay, and do I have the necessary qualities (age, residence) I claim to have. They don't need to know a vast range of irrelevant *details* about me.

Such a system exists; it's called U-Prove:

It was put together by respected cryptography researcher Dr Stefan Brands. He created a company to develop and market U-Prove, Credentica, which was bought by Microsoft in March 2008. With U-Prove, identity information can be used securely, and private data can be safely shared to those parties that need it, without leaking more information than is required.

U-Prove allows the creation of secure ID tokens, which are pieces of data that incorporate whatever information I need for a given task—but no more—along with cryptographic protection to ensure that they can't be forged, reused, traced back to me, or linked to other tokens that I have issued.

In a world with U-Prove, many existing identity management problems would go away. If my credit card company and online music service both supported U-Prove, I could create a token that allowed a single limited electronic money transfer from my card to the music company, without disclosing my name, address, or date of birth, and without that token being usable to make further purchases. Similarly, I might want to buy a computer game from an online store, the same situation as before, but this time with a twist: the computer game is rated 18+. So to make the purchase, I have to reveal my age, as well as the money transfer, to the online store. U-Prove lets me do this, but still doesn't require me to reveal my name, address, or any other irrelevant detail.

An hour-long presentation by Dr Brands describes how U-Prove works and how it achieves what it does (with even more detail available in his freely downloadable book). It builds on existing public key cryptography concepts, but adds to them the important ability to hide data. Normal public key cryptography is something of an all-or-nothing affair—to prove that a particular piece of data was encrypted by a particular person, you need to know the data. U-Prove allows that proof to take place without revealing all the data.

This is absolutely brilliant. There's just one problem: you can't use it in practical situations, because it's not widely deployed. And because it's not widely deployed, nobody uses it...

So, how do you break that vicious circle? Easy - you make it freely available to encourage uptake - and that's just what Microsoft has done:

It is for these reasons that Microsoft has released its U-Prove SDK using the open source BSD license. Source code is available in both C# and Java, and the technology is covered by Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. This is a irrevocable promise by Microsoft that the company will not assert any claims against anyone using the technology that relate to any patents covering the technology. By releasing the technology under a permissive license, and by making a legally binding agreement that patents covering the technology will not be used in legal action, the company hopes that there will be no barriers to using the system for both service and identity providers.

It's really great to see Microsoft taking advantage of open source in a *good* way; it's just unfortunate that the accompanying Open Specification Promise has a big loophole that makes it pretty useless for consideration by serious free software projects.

Now, if Microsoft were to place all the relevant patents in the public domain....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

A Class Act from the European Parliament

One of the most dispiriting aspects of the ACTA saga is that practically everything has been conducted behind closed doors. What we know is largely from leaks and a few, costive hints from officials when they deign to let us little people peak behind the curtain for a millisecond or two.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is Microsoft Afraid to Say the “L”-word?

It seems that, having lost its position as monarch of the world of computing, Microsoft has decided to become the industry jester. Last week I wrote about its amusing suggestion that we should all be taxed to clean up the mess its software has caused. Now we have this witty post on Microsoft's Port 25 site, which involves writing about open source software applications and the platforms they run on without mentioning “Linux” once.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Science vs. Closed Companies

Here are some interesting thoughts on open science and how it relates to those working within companies:

Just as secrecy in academia only makes sense within the existing reward structure, secrecy in industry could be at least partly offset by policy decisions that recognize the gains in efficiency that collaboration can bring. I've heard multiple times from multiple sources that industry may close itself off from the rest of the world, but within a company, the teamwork ethic is amazing. Clearly, the value of co-operation is recognized. Why shouldn't that also work for (larger and larger) groups of companies? What you lose by not being the only company to know something from which profit can be made (call it X) is offset by the fact that you might never have learned X without the collaboration -- and in the meantime, the world gets X that much faster.

It seems clear, though, that such top-down decisions are more likely to be made in academia, and perhaps the nonprofit sector, than in profit-driven industry -- at least until there are enough concrete examples of success to tip the perceived balance of risk. If I'm -- if we Open Foo types are -- right, it's actually riskier to compete than to cooperate in the long term. Better to own a share of X sooner than to delay any return on your investment in the hope of owning X outright later. This is especially true when the resources required to try to own X could be used to get you shares in multiple other projects at the same time.

Sharing should not be seen as a problem but as a solution.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

2012 Olympics Win Gold Medal for Liberticide

I always hated the Olympics as a vulgar, corrupt and expensive display of corrosive, narrow-minded nationalism. Later, I came to realise that it is also a splendid example of all that is wrong with intellectual monopolies, as the IOC tries to claims "rights" over everyday word combinations. Now I realise that it links up neatly with all kinds of issues relating to corporate greed and the police state:

Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events.

"I think there will be lots of people doing things completely innocently who are going to be caught by this, and some people will be prosecuted, while others will be so angry about it that they will start complaining about civil liberties issues," Chadwick said.

"I think what it will potentially do is to prompt a debate about the commercial nature of the Games. Do big sponsors have too much influence over the Games?"

Surely not.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

There's Nothing New Under the Sun

One of the many sad aspects of Sun's disappearance into the maw of Oracle is that many will see this as “proof” that its strategy of building on open source was a failure. But as Simon Phipps, Sun's former Chief Open Source Officer, rightly says in his valedictory blog post:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Source Saves the Day (and Lots of Dosh)

It seems every day we hear about hideous cost overruns on public sector projects in the UK. What makes it even more frustrating is that open source, a real no-brainer for many applications, is rarely given the chance to prove itself here. Which means, of course, that there are no case studies to refer to, so no one gives open source a chance etc. etc.

Against that background, a new paper by Darrel Ince, Professor of Computing at the Open University, which rejoices in the deceptively-bland title of “The Re-development of a Problem System”, is pretty exciting stuff. The summary gives a good flavour of why that might be:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Science vs. Intellectual Monopolies

Here's a key section from the new Royal Society report "The scientific century: securing our future prosperity":

Science thrives on openness - the free exchange of idea, knowledge and data. Changes to the way that information is shared are already accelerating developments in certain disciplines and creating new approaches to research. This openness can create a tension with the need to capture and exploit intellectual property. But it also presents an opportunity for scientific collaboration and innovation.

Well, maybe it creates a tension because intellectual monopolies are fundamentally antithetical to science and knowledge. Maybe the scientific community needs to realise this, and ought to refuse to compromise on its basic tenets of sharing knowledge for the greater good, not least because the shift from analogue to digital is magnifying their importance. Maybe the report should have been less pusillanimous in this respect. And maybe, because it wasn't, it will be yet another case of words, words, words...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Bill Gates (Hearts) Openness a Bit More

Here's an interesting project: the Open Course Library. These are its goals:

* design 81 high enrollment courses for face-to-face, hybrid and/or online delivery
* lower textbook costs for students
* provide new resources for faculty to use in their courses
* our college system fully engages the global open educational resources discussion.
* improve course completion rates

Here's some background on the project:

All of the information about the project is online on a wiki. A big part of this project is for our system to figure out what it means to share our digital educational resources. What does it mean to work with publishers in new ways and get them to reconfigure their content into affordable and modular formats? What does it mean to go out and find open textbooks and evaluate them and modify them? What does it mean to understand the different types of Creative Commons licenses vs. copyright? And what do we have to understand re: the legality around how those licenses mesh or don’t mesh? And then how does that affect the final digital thing that we release at the end, and put out in Rice University’s Connexions [repository]?

We’ve been trying to be very open about the process, so we’ve got this wiki online with all the [project] information. You’ll see the project budget up there with the goals and the timeline for the project. We’ve been having town hall meetings this fall—not only going out to the colleges and meeting directly with faculty face to face, but we’ve just finished our third online town hall meeting. We use Elluminate and anybody in the world is welcome to come [to these meetings which] are archived and put up on the wiki as well. As questions [and] concerns come in, we address those and put the answers up on the wiki.

As you can read, there's an awful lot of open goodness in there. That's great news, of course, but it's also rather remarkable because of the following little fact [.pdf]:

The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) proposes a partnership between the Washington State Community and Technical College System (CTC) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve access to and completion of higher education for low income young adults in Washington State.

...

The SBCTC requests $5.295 million to implement the Washington State Student Completion Initiative (WSSC). This initiative includes four multi-college student completion projects that will yield long term results by breaking down key barriers to completion throughout the Washington community and technical college system.

One of those projects is the Open Course Library. So good to see Bill supporting all that openness...

Open Source and Security: Are there Limits?

You might think that's a pretty ridiculous question to ask, since the canard about open source being less secure than closed source has been debunked many times. But it seems that some people didn't get the memo:

On Open Enterprise blog.

UrbanLabs OS: Not What You Think...

How about this: an open operating system for a *city*?

Misión: idear, desarrollar, testear, implementar y difundir componentes de un nuevo sistema operativo de ciudad, que mejore los procesos de comunicación, participación y consumo bajo parámetros abiertos, eficientes y sostenibles. Se deberán diseñar y/o reutilizar diferentes tipos de interacciones y de redes entre tecnologías y personas en el espacio urbano, así como mecanismos de visualización, difusión y mejora de cada uno de los componentes del sistema. UrbanLabs OS se puede componer de diferentes proyectos autónomos que obedezcan a estos objetivos, potenciando el desarrollo de los mismos de manera transversal.

[Via Google Translate: Mission: To devise, develop, test, deploy and diffuse components of a city's new operating system, to improve communication processes, participation and consumption parameters under open, efficient and sustainable. Should be designed and / or reuse different types of interactions and networking technologies and people in urban space and display mechanisms, diffusion and improvement of each of the components of the system. UrbanLabs OS can be composed of several autonomous projects which respond to these objectives, encouraging the development of them in a cross.]

Very cool idea.

Update: there's now an English intro.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Open Source Earth

One of the main impulses behind this blog is looking at the ways the ideas behind free software are being applied in other areas. Another major focus is that of the commons in all its forms - all the way up to the ultimate commons, the environment. Well, here's something that combines these ideas:

Open Source Earth is an International Non-Governmental Organization whose mission is to educate people of Earth about Open Source and Resource Based practices, and to get people to use those principles to create what is needed to sustain Human life.

Open Source Earth could also be an answer to what seems to be happening in the global economy today. If we backup our computer data, why not have a backup for how we live. Open Source Earth was formed as a Trans-National Social Movement Organization and has 3,500+ people in it's network around the world. It was formed to use the power of numbers, and increased probability to solve the problems that face humanity today. Sharing knowledge for alternative ways to live and inspiring people to use these technologies where they are in the world to better conditions.

With Open Source Earth, Technologies are Open Sourced, giving the concepts and designs away rather than patenting them for sale or licencing, empowering people with the tools to create what is needed to live and flourish. Technologies such as BioGas Digesters, the effluent of which can be used to grow food, textile, medicine, plants that can be used as building materials, oil producing plants, fuel, plastic or other crops in an organic hydroponics system.

(Via OSBR.)

Hear that Mozilla Drumbeat? No, Me Neither

A few months ago, I wrote about Mozilla's new Drumbeat campaign, "a global community of people and projects using technology to help internet users understand, participate and take control of their online lives."

As a big fan of Mozilla since its earliest days, I'm all in favour of this - just as I'm in favour of its new Drumbeat site for developers. As Mark Surman explains:

Our main goal with this early version of the site is to get people developing and working on a handful of Drumbeat projects. Which is why we're calling it a 'developer version'. It's intended first and foremost for brave souls with good open web ideas who are ready to a) put their ideas on the table and b) help us figure out how Drumbeat should work along the way.

If that sounds like you (brave soul + big open web idea), check out the site and create an account, then go to the 'create a project' form to describe what you'd like to work on.

Well, that's absolutely super-duper and fab, Mark, but just a teensy-weensy little thing: when something is called *Drumbeat*, as in making a noise, getting the message out etc., you don't think it might be a vaguely good idea to *tell people what you're doing*?

Had it not been for the wonders of Twitter, I would never have known about this latest move, and that's both a pity and something of a concern for the future of Drumbeat...

Update 1: There's now a Drumbeat calendar which gives an indication of the planned crescendo...

Update 2: Mark Surman has fleshed things out with this useful post.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

The Bottom-Up View of Free Software

The charmingly-named "Bottom-Up" is one of those blogs that I may not always agree with, but which I know will be intelligently written and well-worth reading. And sometimes I find myself not only in perfect synchrony with its author, Timothy Lee, but wishing I'd put something so well as he has.

Here's a case in point, a post discussing the view that "the government has an obligation to make its decision based on the characteristics of the software, without discriminating based on licensing or business models." This is the "level-playing field" argument that I discussed recently, and pointed out that there were historical reasons to do with vendor lock-in why such "playing fields" actually favoured incumbents.

But Lee comes up with a brilliant analogy:

Suppose federal agencies had a long-standing practice of obtaining their care fleets by renting them from companies like Enterprise and Hertz (or, more likely, government contractors that charged ten times as much as Enterprise and Hertz would). Now suppose the GSA did a study and found that the government would save hundreds of millions of dollars by purchasing automobiles rather than renting them. Suppose further that many agencies were finding that the limitations of their rental contracts (mileage limits, reporting requirements, slow repair service, whatever) were making it harder for them to do their jobs. So the GSA issues new guidelines saying that government agencies should henceforth prefer buying to renting.

Now, there are all sorts of good arguments on both sides of the renting-vs-owning decision. But one argument that doesn’t make sense is to say that government would be “distorting the market” if it decided to buy cars rather than leasing them. A purchased car is a different kind of product than a leased car. If car ownership serves the government’s needs better than car rental, the government is entitled to purchase cars without worrying about how this affects companies in the business of renting cars.

The same point applies to software. The difference between Windows Server 2008 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn’t just that one was produced by humorless suits in Redmond and the other was produced by dirty hippies in Raleigh. It’s not even that one costs a lot of money and the other one is free. (Support costs will often dwarf licensing fees anyway).

The key difference is that proprietary software comes with a lot of restrictions about how it may be used—restrictions that don’t apply to free software.

...

The freeness of free software is not an esoteric detail about how software was produced, nor is it primarily a matter of ideology. Rather, free software provides direct and tangible benefits to their users. If property rights is a bundle of sticks, free software vendors give you all the sticks up front, whereas proprietary vendors give you only some of the sticks so they can charge you later for the others. And some of the missing sticks are things that actually matter to government agencies. So it strikes me as a no-brainer that the government would—all else being equal—prefer the type of software that comes with fewer strings attached.

It’s absurd to say that the government has an obligation to be indifferent between firms that attach strings to their products and firms that don’t do so. Obviously, there are circumstances where a firm makes such a great product that it’s worth putting up with the associated strings. But it should be equally obvious that software freedom is a factor to weigh in software purchase decisions. And I don’t anything wrong with reminding government IT workers to keep this factor in mind when they make software purchasing decisions..

The key point here is that different kinds of licensing bring with them very different kinds of benefits, and deciding to favour one over the other is a valid decision. What wouldn't be fair would be favouring a particular type of supplier over another where the benefits they offered were broadly the same: that would simply be a distortion of the software market. But here we effectively have two quite different solutions - different markets - like those of car purchase and car rental. It's a great way of looking at things, and one that I wish I had thought of....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Of Android and the Fear of Fragmentation

Many were sceptical when Google announced that it was launching another mobile platform. After all, some said, there are already multiple offerings out there, and Google had precisely no track record in this sector: surely it was heading for a fall? The launch of the first Android phone, the G1, seemed to confirm these doubts. Although capable enough, it was clearly not going to carry Android through into the mainstream.

On The H.