11 July 2007

Stamboul Train of Thought

Interesting Turkish delight from the second OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy, held in Istanbul on 27-30 June:

Official statistics are a key “public good” that foster the progress of societies.

...

To take this work forward we need to advocate appropriate investment in building statistical capacity, especially in developing countries, to improve the availability of data and indicators needed to guide development programs and report on progress toward international goals

Steady on, chaps, this is getting perilously close to calling for open data:

the OECD is thinking of creating an Internet site based on Web 2.0 “wiki” technologies for the presentation and discussion of international, national and local initiatives aimed at developing indicators of societal progress. By making indicators accessible to citizens all over the world through dynamic graphics and other analytical tools, this initiative would aim to stimulate discussion based on solid and comparable statistical information about what progress actually means.

Will the Next Linus Be Female?

Here's a classic story.

Hacker gets tired of missing functionality; hacker thinks "it can't be that hard"; hacker takes a bit of open source code as a starting point, knocks up something over the weekend; next day, the revolution begins - in this case, being able to access Second Life from a browser (that is, without needing the stonking SL client or upmarket video cards).

But where things get even more interesting is that the hacker in this case is just 15 - and female. Katharine Berry's blog posting on her AjaxLife hack is here, and there's already an interview with her. Let's hope she isn't too put off by the media circus that is sure to descend on her (not me) to carry on honing the code.

Happy hacking.

The Secret World of S5

Hm, I'd somehow missed this before:

S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It's totally simple, and it's totally standards-driven.

Pity I don't have any familiarity with CSS....(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)

IBM Does the Decent Thing

Well, partly:

IBM is extending this leadership role to further the adoption of open specifications for software interoperability and to simplify implementation of those specifications by open source software organizations. Toward that end, IBM is offering a patent non-assert pledge to include the software specifications identified in the following list. IBM intends this pledge to include specifications for software interoperability for which it has made a royalty-free patent licensing commitment. No action is required by users of these specifications to invoke this non-assert commitment.

What this means is:

IBM irrevocably covenants to you that it will not assert any Necessary Claims against you for your making, using, importing, selling, or offering for sale Covered Implementations. However, this covenant will become void, and IBM reserves the right to assert its Necessary Claims against you, if you (or anyone acting in concert with you) assert any Necessary Claims against any Covered Implementations of IBM or of any third party. This covenant is available to everyone directly from IBM, and does not flow from you to your suppliers, business partners, distributors, customers or others. So, if your supplier, business partner, distributor, customer or other party independently takes an action that voids the covenant as to itself, IBM reserves the right to assert its Necessary Claims against that party, even though this covenant will remain in effect for you.

Now, if it could just do the same for the other N thousand patents it has squirrelled away....

Why "Nothing to Hide" Has Nothing to Do With It

Openness, privacy and surveillance are locked in an eternal, complex dance. One of the commonest ploys of the surveillance mob is to invoke the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" idea. Here's a detailed, if slightly legalistic, picking apart of that trope - noting, rightly, that the question itself is skewed. (Via Slashdot.)

Berkman's Legal Education Commons

The partnership will establish the Legal Education Commons – known as eLangdell for Harvard Law School’s first Dean and the Law Library’s namesake, Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell – where law faculty can share and use openly-licensed course materials to offer students free or low-cost course packs, casebooks, podcasts, and video. Berkman and CALI will also research and develop innovative teaching tools to advance practice skills like client interaction, negotiations, and trial advocacy.

Makes sense. (Via Open Access News.)

10 July 2007

Microsoft, China, Piracy, the Future

Sometimes the truth will out in the most surprising contexts. Like here, in this article about Microsoft's growing success in China:

Today Gates openly concedes that tolerating piracy turned out to be Microsoft's best long-term strategy. That's why Windows is used on an estimated 90% of China's 120 million PCs. "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not," Gates says. "Are you kidding? You can get the real thing, and you get the same price." Indeed, in China's back alleys, Linux often costs more than Windows because it requires more disks. And Microsoft's own prices have dropped so low it now sells a $3 package of Windows and Office to students.

That, in a nutshell is the future. Not just for proprietary software, but for all digital goods. It doesn't matter if stuff is pirated, because it seeds the market. Money can be made later, once the market has reached a critical point. It's slightly worrying for free software that Microsoft has made this discovery, albeit by chance. The upside is that it will prove an important proof point on Microsoft's larger journey to opening up. (Via The Open Road.)

The Right Way to Write Online

A great piece by Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen called "Write articles, not blog postings." It's extremely long and detailed - including Monte Carlo simulations - which in a sense is a proof of its own thesis: that experts are better off writing long, detailed features than joining in the mosh pit of the blogosphere.

I don't disagree with analysis, although personally I use blogging in quite a different way - part notebook, part marketing.

Also, am I the only person who finds it slightly ironic that Nielsen's own Web site looks, well, you know, ever-so slightly clunky?

Joining the GPLv3 Samba

So Samba has officially joined the GPLv3 dance. It's certainly a biggie, and I'm sure that over the coming months more and more such high-profile projects will follow suit. As for the Linux kernel, I fear that the difficulty of getting every contributor on board will scupper any concerted move. But for the FSF's purposes, the main thing is that practically everything else moves up.

Sharing the (Old) News About Crowdsharing

"Crowdsharing" has become rather a modish term for what is, after all, an old concept: broad-based collaborative working. It's true that the Internet has made such collaboration far easier and more global, but the idea is fundamentally the same as the one that Richard Stallman had twenty years ago.

Nonetheless, Assignment Zero, a collection of short interviews that dance around the crowdsourcing theme, is well worth wandering through. As well as the big names like Lessig, there's a host of less well-known players who deserve wider recognition for their attempts at applying open source principles in fields beyond software.

It's the Platform, Stupid

If you needed proof that operating systems were really irrelevant these days, try this:

When Facebook announced its platform, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and services that allow outside developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook user experience, Facebook, in essence, became the Social Operating System. Historically, the creation of an operating system, or a platform, has led to a new economy which includes a marketplace of applications.

The AppFactory provides funding, technical and business resources to help entrepreneurs identify, build, and monetize the next generation of applications. Since AppFactory investments are really bets on people and concepts, Bay will use an aggressive timeline and fast-track approach to awarding AppFactory funding. An entrepreneur's time is best spent developing the application and experimenting with variables that affect adoption, virality, and usage, while exploring reasonable theories about monetization.

That is, we're no longer looking at the OS-independent browser as a platform, but as a browser-independent social network as a platform - insulating the user even further from the operating system. What's next, an ecosystem based around a Facebook app? (Via TechCrunch.)

Go OpenMoko

OpenMoko, perhaps the first open source mobile phone, is out. It's sounds like geek heaven, but whether it will sell is another matter....

Update: OK, maybe not quite the first, but maybe the first really cool open source mobile phone....

09 July 2007

Open Government

I predict this will become increasingly common in the future:

Earlier this year, former US senator and presidential candidate Bill Bradley published The New American Story, a book about reforming the American agenda. As part of that process and as a public citizen, he has joined open source activists to produce a Web-based window into the US federal budget.

Jimmy Wales of Wikia.com, Silona Bonewald of the League of Technical Voters, and Taylor Willingham from the LBJ Family of Organizations are others involved in the new initiative. In August, the group will hold a confab in Austin, Texas, to begin development of the ambitious project.

Bradley says, "Democracy is more responsive when people have good information. The purpose of the Transparent Federal Budget is to allow anyone to go onto the Internet and to discover how much is being spent on any particular area such as roads, bridges, breast cancer, missiles, secondary education. You could keyword search to identify specific places in the federal budget where money is being spent on a particular category. Then you could link to the floor debate in Congress about that part of the federal budget and to the votes that were taken about that subject, and who voted which way, and then link to the campaign contributors of that particular congressman or senator. The Transparent Federal Budget would allow citizens to hold elected officials accountable."

Exactly. (Via Linux.com)

Time to Face the Music

I've been rabbiting on about this for some time; now The Economist is saying it too, so it must be true:

Seven years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry's biggest and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.

...

The logical conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more money from live performances than from album sales; he was the industry's top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned, it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape of things to come.

07 July 2007

Everything You Wanted to Know About Eclipse...

...but didn't. Well, almost.

I've said it several times: Eclipse is open source's best-kept secret. So this quick summary of how it got to where it is today from the horse's mouth - Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation - is particularly welcome. And more to come, apparently.

Update: And here is more: Part II, all about ecosystems, a subject close to my heart.

06 July 2007

Deutschland = Digital Dummkopf?

With the latest Copyright Act, Germany seems to be intent on waving goodbye to the 21st century, with some people wanting to take it back into the digital stone age:

CDU MP Günter Krings emphasized that "the Union holds intellectual property to be an essential prerequisite for prosperity in our society." He therefore praised the agreement reached on the fee to be charged for copyright even though he said that this could not be the long-term solution, adding that "there is no way around DRM." Krings said that "Internet piracy" was "one of the largest attacks on our national economy." For example, he said that a number of jobs had already been lost in the music industry, and the movie industry faced the same challenge. But Krings reassured everyone that "the legal system was not going to capitulate." He said that the Copyright Act should also be further amended so that only copies of the original would be admissible. In addition, Parliament also faces the problem of "intelligent recording software," which records broadcasts of online radios; Krings spoke of such software as "legally tantamount to an illegal file-sharing network" and added, "there must be an end to the freebie mentality in our society." Norbert Geis of the CSU also felt that the "second basket" of amendments does not mark the end of the reform. For him, copyright policy should focus on "making it clear to people that these rights are protected by the Constitution."

"Intelligent recording software": what will the fiends think of next?

Elsevier Begins the Journey to Openness

For all its faults, lovingly detailed in this blog, Elsevier seems slowly to be getting the hang of this Internet stuff:


About Google/Google Scholar: we're making good progress. As you may be aware, we did a pilot with some journals on SD first, and now we are working to get them all indexed. We're making good progress there - it's a lot of content to be crawled, but going along nicely. Both Google Scholar and main Google are gradually covering more and more of our journals.

SD is ScienceDirect, which claims to contain "over 25% of the world's science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information." Not open access, of course, but at least Elsevier realises that opening up its holdings to become searchable is a good idea. Now it's just got to complete the journey.

The Language of Copyright

Even though IANAL, I rather enjoy the intricacies of copyright law. Maybe it's because copyright occupies such a central place for both free software - which depends on it to enforce licences - and for free content, where it's often more of a hindrance than a help. Maybe it's just because I was, am and always will be a mathematician who likes dealing with logical systems; or maybe I'm just sad.

Whatever the case, here's something I've found interesting: a short guide to (US) copyright for linguists.

Why do linguists need to bother about this? Isn’t this what lawyers are for? There probably was a time when individuals involved in scholarly linguistic work, whether functioning as fieldworkers, authors, or editors, didn’t have to concern themselves with such matters, but this is no longer the case. (It is striking—and somewhat embarrassing to me—that the Newman and Ratliff (2001) fieldwork volume, whose preparation began barely a decade ago, doesn’t include a single mention of copyright.) There are numerous reasons why the situation is very different now from before, but let me mention just three. First, copyright protection—what I prefer to call copyright “shackles”—now lasts for any inordinate amount of time, anywhere from 70 to 120 years, as compared with the 28 years that formerly was the norm in the U.S. Second, contrary to what used to be the case, the publishing of academic journals has turned out to be extremely profitable. Putting out journals is less and less a labor of love by dedicated colleagues committed to promoting scholarship in their fields and more and more a money-making enterprise by large often transnational publishers. Nowadays journals and the scholars who publish in them are not necessarily on the same wave length and they often have conflicting interests. Third, and most obvious, the internet presents new threats to traditional publishing while simultaneously providing new opportunities for fast and effective scholarly communication and the commercial exploitation of that scholarship.

The copyright world has changed. Almost daily we discover that the failure of scholars to pay attention to such matters has had serious negative consequences. For example, older classic works in our field that ideally should be an open part of our intellectual legacy turn out to be off limits, and in general copyright restricts our ability to make creative use of previous works, including our own (!). When we fail to pay attention to copyright matters, we inadvertently give up scholarly rights that we would like to have and needn’t have lost, such as the right to post papers on our private websites or the right to duplicate our own papers for students in classes that we are teaching. In the normal course of things, field linguists might not appreciate the relevance of copyright rules to their work, but the fact is that to protect yourself and your scholarly goals and objectives, you really do need to understand basic concepts in copyright law and how it affects you.

(Via Language Log.)

Decoupling Software and Standards

As you may have noticed, there is a big bust-up over office file formats going on at the moment. On the one hand, we have ODF, which is a completely open, vendor-independent standard that is supported by multiple programs, and on the other, we have Microsoft's OOXML, which is a vendor-dependent standard of sorts, unlikely to be fully implemented by anyone other than Microsoft.

The only reason this debate is taking place is because of the huge installed base of Microsoft Office, which is naturally biased towards OOXML. But with the release of Sun's ODF Plug in 1.0 for Microsoft Office, things have changed:

The Sun ODF Plug in for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format. The ODF Plug in is available as a free download from the Sun Download Center (SDLC). Download the ODF Plug in.

The Plug in is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently and the additional memory footprint is minimal. Microsoft Office users now can have seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to and from Open Document. The ODF Plug in runs on Microsoft Windows and is available in English. More language support will be available in later releases.

This is important, because it decouples the file format from the program. Now anyone - including Microsoft Office users - can opt for a truly open format, not one that aspires to this condition.

We can only hope that the UK's National Archives, making an extraordinary amount of noise about solving a problem largely of Microsoft's making, will use the new plug-in to convert files stored in proprietary formats into the safest long-term solution - ODF.

05 July 2007

Google Books Open Up - A Bit

One of the problems with the otherwise laudable Google Book Project is that it's not actually providing access to the texts, just adding searchability. That's useful, but not really want we need. And since many of the the books that it is scanning are in the public domain, there seems no reason not to offer full access.

Google seems to have realised this, finally:

I work on a project at Google called Google Accessible Search, which helps promote results that are more accessible to visually impaired users. Building on that work is today's release of accessible public domain works through Google Book Search. It's opening up hundreds of thousands of books to people who use adaptive technologies such as speech output, screen readers, and Braille displays.

As this notes, one of the advantages of opening up in this way is that the text may be re-purposed for adaptive technologies. Put another way, texts that remain closed, locked up behind DRM or similar, are largely denied to people who rely on those technologies - another reason why closing up knowledge in this way is ethically wrong.

04 July 2007

How Daft Can You Get?

Let me count the ways:

David Cameron has pledged to extend copyright on music to 70 years - in exchange for an effort by music bosses to curb violent music and imagery.

What on earth has one got to do with the other? How will "music bosses" "curb" this stuff? What happens if they "curb" only some of it? Or if only some of them curb it? Do they all get an extension to 63 and a bit years? Or do some get any extension to 70, but the others not? Talk about hare-brained....

DomainKeys Identified Mail: A Certain Thing

I'm amazed it's taken so long to come up with this:

DKIM uses digital signatures to authenticate messages. These signatures allow you, or your e-mail service provider, to verify that a message claiming to be from your bank is really from your bank. Without authentication, if I receive an e-mail saying that my account has been compromised and requesting me to verify my personal details, it's a pretty good bet that I should ignore the message. But if I receive the same message and I can prove to my own satisfaction that it came from my bank, then I should probably pay serious attention.

DKIM can offer this proof, and it has just been published by the Internet Engineering Task Force--the group responsible for technical standards on the Internet--as an official Internet standard.

The Nature of the Beast

The journal Nature is a rather ambiguous beast. On the one hand, it represents the acme and epitome of the current science publishing system - and hence everything that is wrong with an analogue, profit-based, traditional access approach - and on the other, it is clearly an organisation that is trying harder than most to be innovative and engage with new ideas flowing from Web 2.0, social networks, virtual worlds and even - whisper it - open access.

One of the people there who seems to get this stuff is Timo Hannay, Head of Web Publishing for the Nature Publishing Group: maybe he's working within the citadel. In any case, this interview with him on the Confessions of a Science Librarian blog is well worth reading for the insights it offers into Nature and its gropings towards openness, and one of the main protagonists prodding things in that general direction.

Having Your Digital Cake and Eating It

How rich is this?

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a "ticking time bomb", the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.

Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of "losing years of critical knowledge" because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

She was speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats.

Microsoft's UK head Gordon Frazer warned of a looming "digital dark age".


Er, yes, which Microsoft created.

Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British Library, praised Microsoft for its adoption of more open standards.

He said: "Microsoft has taken tremendous strides forward in addressing this problem. There has been a sea change in attitude."

Pity its new-found love of "openness" doesn't extend to embracing the one truly open and independent file format standard, ODF...

03 July 2007

A Declaration of Virtual Policy...

...made by representatives of law, industry, and academia, assembled in full and free convention as the first Synthetic Worlds Congress.

Whereas virtual worlds are places with untapped potential, providing new and positive experiences and effects, we resolve that...

(Via Terra Nova.)