31 December 2007

The Netscape Story: From Mosaic to Mozilla

On Open Enterprise blog.

Coming Through Loud and Clear?

if everything you hear is always recorded, if your phone can be active with no external indication, if your main lines of communication can be tapped or hacked, the potential for Big Brother abuse grows exponentially. privacy concerns loom, piracy is facilitated, and safety issues escalate (hopefully, by the time earpods replace cell phones, cars will be driving themselves!) new forms of public and private behaviour will develop; work and personal relationships will evolve based on previously nonexistent modes of communication; new digital divides (those that can iHear vs those that can't) will deepen.

Imagine if this stuff is only closed source: let's get some open source hackers working on it fast. (Via O'Reilly Radar.)

Microsoft's Future Product: Emacs

Someone at Microsoft has a sense of humour:

Developers are puzzling over recent clues blogged by a few Microsoft employees regarding a new “Emacs.Net” tool the company is building.

Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division (the folks who developed the Windows Communication Framework, a k a “Indigo”) is hiring developers to build a product that team member Doug Purdy described as “Emacs.Net.” Purdy hinted that Microsoft will divulge its Emacs.Net product/strategy plans at the company’s Professional Developers Conference in late October 2008.

Emacs is a text editor used primarily by the Unix community (though versions of Emacs that work on Windows systems already exist). Richard Stallman is credited as the father of Emacs, the name of which was derived from “Editing MACRoS.”

Er, Richard, why is there smoke coming out of your ears?

Open Source Unoriginal? - How Unoriginal

Here's a tired old meme that I've dealt with before, but, zombie-like, it keeps on coming back:

The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip—and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.

So let's just look at those statements for a start, shall we?

There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases.


There's only one iPhone because the business of negotiating with the oligopolistic wireless companies is something that requires huge resources and deep, feral cunning possessed only by unpleasantly aggressive business executives. It has nothing to do with being closed. There are hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions because there are even more different kinds of individuals, who want to do things their way, not Steve's way. But the main, highly-focussed development takes place in the one kernel, with two desktop environments - the rest is just presentation, and has nothing to do with dissipation of effort, as implied by the above juxtaposition.

chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law

Chips do not get better because they are closed, they get better because the basic manufacturing processes get better, and those could just as easily be applied to open source chips - the design is irrelevant.

The iPhone is just one of three exhibits that are meant to demonstrate the clear superiority of the closed-source approach. Another is Adobe Flash - no, seriously: what most sensible people would regard as a virus is cited as one of "the more sophisticated examples of code". And what does Flash do for us? Correct: it destroys the very fabric of the Web by turning everything into opaque, URL-less streams of pixels.

The other example is "the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines", which presumably means Google, since it now has nearly two-thirds of the search market, and the page-rank algorithms of Microsoft's search engine are hardly being praised to the sky.

But what do we notice about Google? That it is built almost entirely on the foundation of open source; that its business model - its innovative business model - would not work without open source; that it simply would not exist without open source. And yes, Yahoo also uses huge amounts of open source. No, Microsoft doesn't, but maybe it's not exactly disinterested in its choice of software infrastructure.

Moreover, practically every single, innovative, Web 2.0-y start-up depends on open source. Open source - the LAMP stack, principally - is innovating by virtue of its economics, which make all these new applications possible.

And even if you argue that this is not "real" innovation - whatever that means - could I direct your attention to a certain technology known colloquially as the Internet? The basic TCP/IP protocols? All open. The Web's HTTP and HTML? All open. BIND? Open source. Sendmail? Open source. Apache? Open source. Firefox, initiated in part because Microsoft had not done anything innovative with Internet Explorer 6 for half a decade? Open source.

But there again, for some people maybe the Internet isn't innovative enough compared to Adobe's Flash technology.

Spicing Up Thunderbird

As I've noted before, one of the key features of free software is its modularity. From this and the underlying licence flows the ability to mix and match different elements to produce new applications.

Here's a good example:


Synovel, a startup based on Hyderabad, India founded by a group of International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) graduates, has released a preview of Spicebird, a Mozilla-based collaboration suite.

Spicebird is built on Thunderbird and Lightning, the powerful extension that adds calendaring functions to Thunderbird. Additionally it seems to integrate SamePlace, a Firefox extension that provides instant messaging capabilities based on the Jabber protocol.

Interesting to see that this is coming out of India - not currently a hotbed of such open source startups, but an area I'm sure we'll be hearing more from in the future.

And as David Ascher, who heads up a new company that aims to build software based on Thunderbird, points out:

There are lots of young companies in the same space, each promoting their own angle on solving the problem that they’ve identified. There are companies playing within the Outlook/Exchange framework. There are companies coming at it with Exchange replacements. There are companies focusing on collaboration rather than communication. There are companies with a web focus, others with a mobile focus, others with a social network focus.

But as he also notes, there are very particular advantages to working in the open source space:

From the project health point of view, I think it’s good to have various companies building products off of the Mozilla codebase in general. At the very least, it means that the platform won’t get too tied to any one product’s requirements. I don’t think there’s a huge risk of that happening, because Mozilla already supports several active products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Komodo, Songbird, Miro, Joost, etc.). But having more people care about the mail/news bits should at least help with the engineering work we need to do there which is product-independent. There are long-standing architectural problems with the system which haven’t been fixed because of a lack of resources. With several companies betting on this platform, as long as the discussions happen in public and in good faith, we should be able to work together to improve things for all.

30 December 2007

A Bit of a Shindig

One of the great things about open standards is that anyone can implement them - including those in the free software world. An obvious candidate for this treatment is the new OpenSocial set of APIs from Google, and here's an Apache project doing just that:

Shindig will provide implementations of an emerging set of APIs for client-side composited web applications. The Apache Software Foundation has proven to have developed a strong system and set of mores for building community-centric, open standards based systems with a wide variety of participants.

A robust, community-developed implementation of these APIs will encourage compatibility between service providers, ensure an excellent implementation is available to everyone, and enable faster and easier application development for users.

The Apache Software Foundation has proven it is the best place for this type of open development.

The Shindig OpenSocial implementation will be able to serve as a reference implementation of the standard.

29 December 2007

How Hated Does the RIAA Want to Be?

The recording industry is an extraordinary example of not learning from experience. You would have thought that the backlash against its heavy-handed response to people downloading music would have been enough to teach it a lesson, given the negative image it earned as a result. Apparently not:

In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

This is beyond a death wish.

28 December 2007

2007 By Numbers

It's been a great year for free software, which just keeps on getting better and more widely adopted. And if you can't quite remember who, what, when, why or how, try these excellent listings from Matt Asay and Tristan Nitot for open source and Mozilla respectively.

27 December 2007

A Three-Dimensional Approach to Content Sales

One of the recurrent themes on this blog is the transition from a world of analogue content to one that is purely digital - and hence trivially copiable. The refusal of the media producers to recognise this shift is at the root of most of the problems they face in terms of declining sales and increasing unauthorised copying. Another recurrent idea has been the solution to this problem: to give away the digital but make money from the analogue.

Here's someone else with a nice observation that meshes with this perfectly:

Last Friday I was at a movie preview for a concert movie called U23D, which, as you will correctly surmise, was a U2 concert filmed in digital 3D.

A few weeks ago I saw the new film Beowulf, also in 3D.

As I look out the office window to the AMC Loews on 84th St, I see that the marquee is already pitching Hannah Montana 3d, not due out until February.

And outside that same theater is a 3d movie poster for the upcoming Speed Racer movie.

Suddenly everything is floating in space, after decades of flatness. What gives?

The answer?

Could it have something to do with the fact that a 3d movie cannot be pirated?

According to IMDB, the LA premier of Beowulf was on November 3, 2007 and the film was officially released in the US on November 16. On the other hand, according to vcdquality (a news site that announces the “releases” of films into various darknets) it was already available for file sharing by November 15.

Isn’t it just possible that the studios were thinking: Hey guys, I know you could just download this fantasy flick and see it on your widescreen monitor. But unless you give us $11 and sit in a dark theater with the polarized glasses, you won’t be seeing the half-naked Angelina Jolie literally popping off the screen!

Open Access's Big Win

Now here's a nice way to end the year - and to start the next:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

That's just been signed into law in the US, and even though the choice of 12 rather than six months is slightly pusillanimous, it's still a huge win for open access in the US. It will also have a knock-on effect around the world, as open access to publicly-funded research starts to become the norm.

For more details see Peter Suber's post, with links to more details and background.

23 December 2007

Beaten to the Blog

News that IBM was buying Solid Information Technology, a company with close ties to MySQL, set off a distant bell ringing in my head in connection with something I'd written a while back, but I didn't have the time to pursue it.

Now, it seems, I don't need to:

When [Monty Widenius] started MySQL, I worked for this other small database company, Solid Information Technology. I told Monty that his project was just going to fail, and that it was a stupid thing to do, and that he didn't have a chance because we had a chance.

GM: What was your view of the Free Software world when you were at Solid--were you even aware of it?

MM: I was getting more aware of it, and I was getting excited about it. At Solid, I drove an initiative of not open-sourcing the product, but making it very popular on the Linux platform--and that was why I was an advertiser in Linux Journal, because we were the leading Linux database in the world in 1996. We gave it away free of charge, so we had taken a step in that direction.

Then Solid decided to cancel the project and just focus on high-end customers, and that's when I left the company. So in that sense, when I got to MySQL, I had some unfinished business. By that time, I had completely bought into the notion of code being open.

Thanks, Matt, for beating me to it....

22 December 2007

What's Up, UOF Doc?

The battle for the soul of the document is usually presented as a two-horse race between ODF and OOXML. But that's a very parochially Western view of things - there is, after, a third format available: UOF, China's "Uniform Office Document Format", which I've written about several times before. If, like me, you were wondering what's happening in that world, he's a short update from Andy Updegrove.

Citizendium Goes CC-BY-SA

Good news:

In a much-awaited move, the non-profit Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) encyclopedia project announced that it has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-sa) as the license for its own original collaborative content. The license permits anyone to copy and redevelop the thousands of articles that the Citizendium has created within its successful first year.

The license allows the Citizendium to join the large informal club of free resources associated especially with Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation. Wikipedia uses the FSF’s GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which is expected to be made fully compatible with CC-by-sa in coming months. Therefore, Wikipedia and the Citizendium will be able to exchange content easily. A minority of Citizendium articles started life on Wikipedia and so have been available under the GFDL.

Avoiding a Balkanisation of the digital content commons through incompatible licences is critically important.

21 December 2007

Kids Today - The People Tomorrow

Nice story here:

I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids' morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, "O.K., let's try one that's a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don't want to pay for it. So you download it."

There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.

"Who thinks that might be wrong?"

Two hands out of 500.

Now, maybe there was some peer pressure involved; nobody wants to look like a goody-goody.

Maybe all this is obvious to you, and maybe you could have predicted it. But to see this vivid demonstration of the generational divide, in person, blew me away.

I don't pretend to know what the solution to the file-sharing issue is. (Although I'm increasingly convinced that copy protection isn't it.)

Er, David, it's called changing the business model. It is just not sustainable to try to enforce analogue-type laws on digital content, and ultimately it's counterproductive - as the music industry is finding to its cost.

Samba's Big Step

On Open Enterprise blog.

Pootling Around with PDFs

I'm no big fan of PDFs, but if you've got to use them you may as well do it properly with some open source tools, such as those included here.

Hypocrisy, Thy Name is Gambling

John Naughton points us to a nicely-written piece by John Lanchester about the way the City - and its global mates - work using derivatives to the tune of $85,000,000,000,000 (sorry, no mistake in that number of zeroes.)

It's a long piece because it's describing something that's complicated - sometimes made intentionally more complicated by the banking industry for the purposes of obfuscation - but at its heart it amounts to a very simple thing: gambling. As Lanchester writes:

The list of individual traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short: Robert Citron of Orange County, Toshihide Iguchi at Daiwa, Yasuo Hamanaka at Sumitomo and Nick Leeson at Barings, just to take examples from the early 1990s. In Leeson’s case in 1995, it was a huge unauthorised position in futures on the Nikkei 225, the main Japanese stock exchange. Leeson had been doubling and redoubling his bets in the belief/hope that the index would rise, and hiding the resulting open position – a gigantic open-ended bet – in a secret account. (Incidentally, Leeson’s big bet was on the Nikkei holding its level above 18,000. At the time of writing, 121/2 years later, the index sits at 15,454 – proof, if it were needed, that when prices go down they can stay that way for a long time.) The loss eventually amounted to £827 million, and destroyed Barings, Britain’s oldest merchant bank.

Got that? These are bets, pure and simple, on the way that things will work out. You can dress them up as you will, you can complexify them as you will, but at bottom they are simply gambles.

Now, add that fact to the distasteful sight of the US - a country that probably uses derivatives more than any other, and also probably makes more money from derivatives than any other, trying to stop online gambling with non-US companies - for example by buying off pathetically greedy entities like the EU:

The United States has reached a deal with the European Union, Japan and Canada to keep its Internet gambling market closed to foreign companies, but is continuing talks with India, Antigua and Barbuda, Macau and Costa Rica, U.S. trade officials said on Monday.

Since I'm no expert on derivatives, I don't know the extent to which you can buy them online from anyone anywhere, but I would be utterly astonished if you couldn't (and this suggests you can.) So you have a fundamental cognitive dissonance between the extraordinary use of derivatives worldwide, and the US attempt to ban online gambling though non-US companies.

Maybe the idea is that only the ultra-rich should be allowed to gamble wherever they want.

Steve, the Artful Tagger

Folksonomies - the ad hoc tagging by anyone of anything - sound terribly democratic compared to your top-down authoritarian imposition of taxonomies, but it's easy to see why people are sceptical about them: how can anything useful arise out of something so chaotic?

Del.icio.us is one example of how such folksonomies can be really useful, and here's another (and note the groovy .museum domain - the first time I've seen this):

"Steve” is a collaborative research project exploring the potential for user-generated descriptions of the subjects of works of art to improve access to museum collections and encourage engagement with cultural content. We are a group of volunteers, primarily from art museums, who share a common interest in improving access to our collections. We are concerned about barriers to public access to online museum information. Participation in steve is open to anyone with a contribution to make to developing our collective knowledge, whether they formally represent a museum or not.

Very cool - both in terms of adding metadata to objects, and as far as getting the public involved with art. Indeed, this idea should really be extended to everything - imagine a database of public places that people could tag.

Great idea, then, but why "Steve"?

So Farewell, Then, Matthew Szulik

The announcement that Red Hat's CEO and President, Matthew Szulik, is moving on (back?) to become its Chairman, is obviously pretty big news, since Szulik has led the company for nearly a decade, a long time in the still-young open source world. His valedictory message is well worth a read; I particularly liked the following section:

My early days at Red Hat were sitting in small office with no door in Durham, NC, across from the free soda machine. People by the hour would stop and punch their selection for Mountain Dew or Coke. My challenge was that I was tasked to go and raise venture money for this free software company. And over the phone, in the middle of my sales pitch, corporate types at Dell, IBM and HP and others would hear the constant banging of soda cans dropping in the soda machine and would ask if there were fights going on outside my office. So, after a while, I told the prospective investors that YES there were fights going on. And yes, these fights happened frequently. It’s how people at Red Hat settled technical issues likes software bugs and features in new releases. Red Hat was a real tough place to work. Dell, HP and IBM became investors because they liked the fighting spirit of Red Hat.

Says it all, really.

20 December 2007

RMS Tells It As It Is

Nice to hear it from the, er, horse's mouth:

A patent is an artificial government-imposed monopoly on implementing a certain method or technique. If the method or technique can be implemented by software, so that the patent prohibits the distribution and use of certain programs, we call it a software patent.

Norway's Beautiful Plumage...

...openness:

Regjeringa har vedteke at all informasjon på statlege nettsider skal vere tilgjengeleg i dei opne dokumentformata HTML, PDF eller ODF. Tida der offentlege dokument berre var tilgjengelege i Microsofts Word-format vil med det gå mot slutten.

I particularly liked the last sentence, which is basically a gratuitous kick where it hurts for Microsoft. (Via The Open Sourcerer.)

19 December 2007

Wikimedia, Der Blog

The Wikimedia Foundation has a blog - or, rather, ein blog.

Happy Birthday, Perl

Er, yesterday....

The VC Floodgates Open for Drupal and Acquia

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK To Have Biggest Population in Europe?

Here's a curious thing or two:

The UK population could almost double over the coming 75 years, according to official government projections.

The previously unpublished figures suggest the British population could hit almost 110m in 2081, if immigration fertility and longevity rates are high.

The figures are higher than those released just a month ago by the Office for National Statistics.

In October, the ONS projected the population could go from around 60m today to as high as 77m in 2051.

A *conservative* estimate for 2051 is 77m, while on the high side we have:

According to the ONS, if all of these factors were on the high side over the coming decades, the population across the UK would hit 91,053,000 by the middle of the century

Got that? Between 77 and 91 million?

Now take a look at this table, which shows Germany, with currently the biggest European population, shrinking to 74 million in 2050.

Funny old world, innit? (Via Andrew Leonard.)

Can We Avoid the Great Schism?

At Linux Journal.

18 December 2007

More Icing on the SugarCRM Cake

On Open Enterprise blog.

Wikipedia Goes Open...

OpenDocument, that is:


The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats. "Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom. By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for educators to customize and remix content before printing and distributing it from any desktop computer," Sue Gardner explained.

The first stage, in case you were wondering,

is a public beta test running on WikiEducator.org of functionality for remixing collections of wiki pages and downloading them in the PDF format.

while the second stage is

the deployment of the technology on the projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, including Wikipedia. At this point, users will also be given the option to order printed copies of wiki content directly from PediaPress.com. "The integration into Wikipedia will be a milestone for print-on-demand technology. Users will literally be empowered to print their own encyclopedias", according to Heiko Hees, product manager at PediaPress.com.

Hmm, well, maybe: I think the amount of work involved might make buying an encyclopaedia rather more attractive.... (Via Open Access News.)

New Creative Commons Licences

I mentioned en passant the new CCZero licence, but here's news of yet another:

CC+ is a protocol to enable a simple way for users to get rights beyond the rights granted by a CC license. For example, a Creative Commons license might offer noncommercial rights. With CC+, the license can also provide a link to enter into transactions beyond access to noncommercial rights — most obviously commercial rights, but also services of use such as warranty and ability to use without attribution, or even access to physical media.

Coincidence? I Don't Think So

Here's a nice analysis of what makes today's Internet services tick:

Dopplr can show me when a distant friend will be near and vice versa. Twitter can show me what my friends are doing right now. Wesabe can show me what others have learned about saving money at the places where I spend my money. Among many other things Flickr can show me how to look differently at the things I see when I take photos. And del.icio.us can show me things that my friends are reading every day.

It's all about making connections, creating a community and finding a commonality. The post calls this "surfacing coincidences" but I think that "coincidence" is the wrong word, since it suggests something random and casual; what we're talking about is an action that is much more directed: people looking for like-minded, like-thinking, like-doing people. (Via John Battelle.)

What's the Use of Free Software?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Are Closed Source Databases Doomed?

On Open Enterprise blog.

17 December 2007

Mindquarry Dies - and Lives!

Mindquarry, which

provides a powerful set of collaborative tools for use online and offline to streamline teamwork between information workers in small to large enterprises.

has just announced that it

will stop providing commercial services and products.

That's regrettable, obviously. But there's some good news too:

The Mindquarry GO and Mindquarry PRO products will be discontinued as of today. Our Open Source product will remain publicly available (see below for more information). To those with a Mindquarry GO Beta account, we now offer the possibility to migrate their data to the Open Source version of Mindquarry. This means that they can install Mindquarry themselves and use existing data from their Mindquarry GO Beta instance. Please write to support@mindquarry.com if you want us to extract your data from Mindquarry GO Beta to send it to you.
Keeping our Open Source software alive

Our developers team is currently working on finishing the Mindquarry 1.2beta release, which will be available around end of October. Beginning with 1.2beta, Mindquarry source code will be hosted on Sourceforge as well as the mindquarry.com Web site. Hence, our software as well as all necessary information such as installation documentation and forum discussions will still be available. Further details and links will be available in the next and probably final Mindquarry community newsletter.

This is an object lesson in one of free software's great virtues: whatever happens, the code lives on. This means that even commercial customers can migrate to free versions where they have been paying for other varieties. (Via NetworkWorld.)

Open Access Data - A Question of Protocol

Something calling itself a “Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data” sounds about as exciting as a list of ingredients for paint. But this memo from the Science Commons is one of the most important documents in this field to date. Its scope is explained in the opening paragraph:

This memo provides information for the Internet community interested in distributing data or databases under an “open access” structure. There are several definitions of “open” and “open access” on the Internet, including the Open Knowledge Definition and the Budapest Declaration on Open Access; the protocol laid out herein is intended to conform to the Open Knowledge Definition and extend the ideas of the Budapest Declaration to data and databases.

Again, that may not sound very exciting, but trying to come up with definitions of “open data” or “open access data” have proved extraordinarily hard, and in the course of the memo we learn why:
3. Principles of open access data
Legal tools for an open access data sharing protocol must be developed with three key principles in mind:
3.1 The protocol must promote legal predictability and certainty.
3.2 The protocol must be easy to use and understand.
3.3 The protocol must impose the lowest possible transaction costs on users.


These principles are motivated by Science Commons’ experience in distributing a database licensing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file. Scientists are uncomfortable applying the FAQ because they find it hard to apply the distinction between what is copyrightable and what is not copyrightable, among other elements. A lack of simplicity restricts usage and as such restricts the open access flow of data. Thus any usage system must both be legally accurate while simultaneously very simple for scientists, reducing or eliminating the need to make the distinction between copyrightable and non-copyrightable elements.

The terms also need to satisfy the norms and expectations of the disciplines providing the database. This makes a single license approach difficult – archaeology data norms for citation will differ from those in physics, and yet again from those in biology, and yet again from those in the cultural or educational spaces. But those norms must be attached in a form that imposes the lowest possible costs on users (now and in the future).

The solution is at once obvious and radical:

4. Implementing the Science Commons Database Protocol for open access data
4.1 Converge on the public domain by waiving all rights based on intellectual property

The conflict between simplicity and legal certainty can be best resolved by a twofold measure: 1) a reconstruction of the public domain and 2) the use of scientific norms to express the wishes of the data provider.

Reconstructing the public domain can be achieved through the use of a legal tool (waiving the relevant rights on data and asserting that the provider makes no claims on the data).

Requesting behavior, such as citation, through norms and terms of use rather than as a legal requirement based on copyright or contracts, allows for different scientific disciplines to develop different norms for citation. This allows for legal certainty without constraining one community to the norms of another.

Thus, to facilitate data integration and open access data sharing, any implementation of this protocol MUST waive all rights necessary for data extraction and re-use (including copyright, sui generis database rights, claims of unfair competition, implied contracts, and other legal rights), and MUST NOT apply any obligations on the user of the data or database such as “copyleft” or “share alike”, or even the legal requirement to provide attribution. Any implementation SHOULD define a non-legally binding set of citation norms in clear, lay-readable language.

The solution is obvious because the public domain is the zero state of copyright (in fact, the new Creative Commons public domain licence is called simply CCZero.) It is radical because previous attempts have tried to build on the evident success of the GNU GPL by taking a kind of copyleft approach: using copyright to limit copyright. But the new protocol explicitly negates the use of both GPL's copyleft and the Creative Commons Sharealike licences because, minimal as they are, they are still too restrictive – even though they are both predicated on maximising sharing.

One knock-on consequence of this is that attribution requirements are out. This is not just a matter of belief or principle, but of practicality:

In a world of database integration and federation, attribution can easily cascade into a burden for scientists if a category error is made. Would a scientist need to attribute 40,000 data depositors in the event of a query across 40,000 data sets? How does this relate to the evolved norms of citation within a discipline, and does the attribution requirement indeed conflict with accepted norms in some disciplines? Indeed, failing to give attribution to all 40,000 sources could be the basis for a copyright infringement suit at worst, and at best, imposes a significant transaction cost on the scientist using the data.

It is this pragmatism, rooted in how science actually works, that makes the current protocol particularly important: it might actually be useful. It's also significant that it plugs in to previously existing work in related fields. For example, as the accompanying blog post explains:

We are also pleased to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation has certified the Protocol as conforming to the Open Knowledge Definition. We think it’s important to avoid legal fragmentation at the early stages, and that one way to avoid that fragmentation is to work with the existing thought leaders like the OKF.

Moreover, the protocol has already been applied in drawing up another important text, the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication & Licence:

The Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication & Licence is a document intended to allow you to freely share, modify, and use this work for any purpose and without any restrictions. This licence is intended for use on databases or their contents (”data”), either together or individually.

Many databases are covered by copyright. Some jurisdictions, mainly in Europe, have specific special rights that cover databases called the “sui generis” database right. Both of these sets of rights, as well as other legal rights used to protect databases and data, can create uncertainty or practical difficulty for those wishing to share databases and their underlying data but retain a limited amount of rights under a “some rights reserved” approach to licensing. As a result, this waiver and licence tries to the fullest extent possible to eliminate or fully license any rights that cover this database and data.

Again, however dry and legalistic this stuff may seem it's not: we're talking about the rigorous foundations of new kinds of sharing - and we all know how important and powerful that can be.

Update: John Wilbanks has pointed me to his post about the winnowing process that led to this protocol - fascinating stuff.

Browser Wars Redux: Don't Touch That Meme

On Open Enterprise blog.

Who Goes There?

As a sad sack who has been writing about computers for too long well over a quarter of a century, I'm all in favour of facts and getting them checked. But it's a little hard to tell whether this site is going to be doing that out of the goodness of its journalistic heart or not:

This blog has a single purpose: to analyze blog postings about open source, and to do some basic fact-checking where necessary.

I was slightly worried by the following:

This has become more important because there is an increasing number of blogs which have a bias and political view-point they are trying to promote, and that are not being counter-balanced.

This suggests it is more interested in politics than technology. One of the striking aspects of political blogs is how bloody tiresome they are, since they seem to descend into mindless ad hominem/ad feminam name-calling within about two comments to any post. At least technical corrections can be kept objective and civil (well, mostly.)

Nonetheless, I welcome critical and objective coverage of writing about open source, particularly if it is applied even-handedly to *all* the players. After all, inspecting the source code is what it's all about.... (Via Luis Villa.)

Quote of the Day: Erik Huggers

It is my personal goal to use my industry knowledge and foresight to help the BBC create escape velocity and become the world’s leading media organization in the digital age - Erik Huggers

Industry knowledge?. Riiight.

Linus Says It's In Our DNA

Simon Willison has picked up a nice quotation from Linus he made a few years back, but what really interests me are some other things he said in the same post:

think about how you and me actually came about - not through any complex design.

Right. "sheer luck".

Well, sheer luck, AND:
- free availability and _crosspollination_ through sharing of "source code", although biologists call it DNA.
- a rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this "survival of the fittest")
- massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error")

In other words, the open source methodology is hard-wired into us - right down at the level of DNA.

Google Profile Keeps a Low Profile

Google Profile is with us, just about:

A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you're all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you'd like.

And here's the sting in the tail:

Use multiple Google products? Soon your Google Profile will link up with these as well.

In other words, despite its ultra low-profile launch, Google Profile will be the nexus of everything you do on Google.

Eeek.

Can the BBC Trust Butter Some Parsnips?

The Open Source Consortium has prodded the BBC Trust into words, if not action:


The BBC Trust and the Open Source Consortium (OSC) have agreed the promotion of Microsoft by the BBC should end. After a meeting with the OSC, the BBC Trust restated its commitment to a platform agnostic solution for the iPlayer's catch-up service and agreed that the recently launched streaming service was only an interim solution.

The main credit for this should go to the OSC's indefatigable boss, who explained what remains to be done:

Mark Taylor, President of the Open Source Consortium, said: “We are pleased that the BBC Trust continues to engage with us and take our concerns seriously. The seven-day streaming service is elegant and attractive, and most importantly, can be used on any computer and most mobile devices without unnecessary concern with technology. Instead consumers can choose on the more important criteria of price and performance.

“However we remain concerned that the 30 day catch-up service is exclusively provided only for newer versions of Microsoft operating systems and are pleased that the BBC Trust continues to share our concern that iPlayer be made technology agnostic at the earliest opportunity.

“Thanks to the BBC Trust's intervention we met BBC management to outline how they could deliver an open iPlayer that would meet all rights holders concerns. We think it would be easily possible to use the BBC's existing, world leading Free Software solutions in an open iPlayer. We sincerely hope that the BBC will take this further."

This does matter, because if the catch-up service remains Windows only, it turns the BBC into a vector of Microsoft's DRM and products - hardly what the public broadcaster should be doing.

Moreover, fine words butter no parsnips: can we trust the BBC Trust to follow through on this? If they don't, at least we can be sure that the OSC will be there with a sharp stick goading them to do so.

Copping a Load of COPU

As I've lamented before, open source usage in China is hard for us outside to gauge. Even the open source structures there are difficult to discern. So news that the Linux Foundation is linking up with something called the Chinese OSS Promotion Union is interesting:

COPU now has over 300 members, covering nearly all the domestic enterprises and public institution units in the field of open source, including all the Linux distributions including Red Flag, Co-Create, China Standard Soft, TurboLinux, and Sun Wah, universities (over 200), and institutes for scientific research, standard, law and industry. COPU also has over 20 multinational companies as its members who have their representative offices or branches in China including IBM, Intel, HP, Sun, Oracle, SAP, NEC, CA, BEA, Hitachi, Sybase, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Google.

16 December 2007

They Call It A "Non-Polluting Gas"...

This Open Letter would have rather more credibility if this phrase

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis.

didn't sound suspiciously close to this one:

As for carbon dioxide, it isn't smog or smoke, it's what we breathe out, and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life.

Because that, as I wrote some time ago, was an egregious bunch of propaganda for the joys of pollution provided by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), "advancing liberty - from the economy to ecology".

And oh, look: by an amazing coincidence the Open Letter talks about - guess what? - yes, that precious economy:

While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC’s conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity.

Ah, yes, prosperity - so much more important than little things like trees, a healthy, sustainable environmental commons, or survival. No, let's get our priorities right:

Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems

which are, of course, how to make the rich even richer by exploiting the environmental commons as quickly as possible, before the world is burnt to a crisp.

15 December 2007

Read What They Write

Read/WriteWeb is one of the more perceptive blogs - and I thought that even before they wrote this:

In this post we'll give you our pick for Most Promising for Web for 2008.

Originally we planned to pick the most promising Web company for 2008. But in the end the ReadWriteWeb team decided to follow the example set by Time magazine last year, when it named "You" as its 'Person of the Year'. Likewise we think there is no single Web company that is more promising than... the open source movement. It's a loose-knit group that aims to make a huge impact by tying all Web companies together.

Well, obviously, but it's good to see others getting it.

Free (As in Freedom) Fonts

Most people - myself included - take fonts for granted. But we shouldn't, because, just like software, fonts can be free and non-free. If you want to find out everything there is to know about the subject of free fonts, try this excellent short article.

14 December 2007

ClamAV Gets a Supporters Club

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Art of Saying Sorry - Openly

Interesting piece in Forbes about CEOs learning to eat crow and enjoy it. Take Facebook's Zuckerberg, for example:

When Zuckerberg's apology surfaced, the protest's 70,000 or so privacy advocates still represented a relatively small seed of revolt--less than .2% of Facebook's 50 million plus members. Facebook's apology and changes to Beacon seem to have appeased that angry minority before it could swallow up the site.

That such a small group could pull a contrite message out of a chief executive also shows just how the Web can channel consumers' anger. And tech companies may be especially prone to those backlashes: Not only are tech customers particularly Web savvy, but the tech industry itself frequently sails into uncharted and--from a PR perspective--dangerous waters, says Waggener Edstrom's Neptune.

I think that much of this is due to the Internet culture, which is pretty much the same as that of the free software world. It's one that requires transparency and accountability; and when either of those is missing, it also requires apologies. Remember:

The people are the heroes now, behemoth pulls the peasants’ plow

Open ERP's Big British Chance

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Source's Big Opportunity has a Tiny Problem

I've been extolling the virtues of the Asus EEE PC and its ilk as exemplars of an important new class of computers; but Jono Bacon has spotted a problem:

One of the distinctive traits of EEE PC, and many other sub-notebook, MID and smaller computing devices, is that they run with a smaller screen resolution than typical desktop machines. I am pretty sure that most desktop machines that people are running Linux on will be running on a minimum of 1024×768, and likely a higher resolution. One of the things that I have noticed in recent years is that an increasing number of Open Source applications look terrible on lower resolutions.

Fortunately, it's readily solvable:

We need better testing, bug-reports being filed, and users actively checking and ensuring that software works well in lower resolutions. I also believe it forces us all into a world of more intelligent, usable design - hugely tall windows crammed with a million preferences or super-thick toolbars are not usable interfaces. One could infer that having to be conscious of lower resolutions will make us think more about the usability of our applications and ensure we don’t cram a million-and-one buttons into a window.

Amen to that.

Going (Double) Dutch

How can I not link to this post, since it not only spreads the good news about the Dutch government's move to open source, but even weaves intellectual monopolies into the story?