30 April 2008

But They Can Spell "Intellectual Monopoly"...

British-based music industry umbrella the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is now rapidly acquiring the reputation the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has in the US for heavy-handed but thinly-veiled anti-piracy measures. It’s produced a booklet it’s distributing through schools and colleges, libraries, record stores, teaching portals and websites in 21 countries that “aims to help young people use the Internet and mobile phones safely and legally to download music”.

Thank goodness British yoof don't read books nor booklets no more.

Is The Lack of Open Source Drivers Driving You Mad?

On Open Enterprise blog.

What's in a Name? Strong and Weak Open Access

A few months ago, I had the temerity to suggest the following:

Definitions matter. If you want to see why, compare the worlds of open source and open access. The very specific definition of what is open source - having an OSI-approved licence - means that it is relatively easy to police. Open access, by contrast, does not have anything like a tight, "official" definition, with the result that less scrupulous publishers try to pass off their wares as open access if it's vaguely open or vaguely accessible.

This brought down upon me the wrath of Mr Open Access himself, as the comments to the above post bear witness. Happily, I survived the thunderbolts, and therefore lived to see the following declaration from the same presiding OA oracle:

The term "open access" is now widely used in at least two senses. For some, "OA" literature is digital, online, and free of charge. It removes price barriers but not permission barriers. For others, "OA" literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. It removes both price barriers and permission barriers. It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use.

There are two good reasons why our central term became ambiguous. Most of our success stories deliver OA in the first sense, while the major public statements from Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin (together, the BBB definition of OA) describe OA in the second sense.

As you know, Stevan Harnad and I have differed about which sense of the term to prefer --he favoring the first and I the second. What you may not know is that he and I agree on nearly all questions of substance and strategy, and that these differences were mostly about the label. While it may seem that we were at an impasse about the label, we have in fact agreed on a solution which may please everyone. At least it pleases us.

We have agreed to use the term "weak OA" for the removal of price barriers alone and "strong OA" for the removal of both price and permission barriers. To me, the new terms are a distinct improvement upon the previous state of ambiguity because they label one of those species weak and the other strong. To Stevan, the new terms are an improvement because they make clear that weak OA is still a kind of OA.

On this new terminology, the BBB definition describes one kind of strong OA. A typical funder or university mandate provides weak OA. Many OA journals provide strong OA, but many others provide weak OA.

This was partly what I was trying to get across, in my own, 'umble and clearly not very successful way: the fact that "open access" was being used for quite different things - now named "strong" and "weak" open access - which confused matters no end, not least for people who were coming to the concept for the first time.

As a result of this new nomenclature, we now have precisely the "tight" definitions I was looking for:
"Weak OA" literature is digital, online, and free of charge. It removes price barriers but not permission barriers. "Strong OA" literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. It removes both price barriers and permission barriers. It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use.

There, that wasn't too hard, was it?

Has the BBC Duped Us over iPlayer?

You may remember that a little while back there was a bit of a kerfuffle about the BBC's decision to go with a Microsoft-based DRM solution for its download service. Initially we were told that only six people and a couple of mangy dogs ever accessed BBC sites with GNU/Linux, and therefore it wasn't worth supporting, but the BBC later admitted that what they really meant was that the audience ran to six *figures*. The story then was: trust us, we'll get round to GNU/Linux support as soon as we can. And you know what? Silly old me believed them.

So what do we have here?

Today was a big day for BBC iPlayer: it's the day that it first became available on a portable device. BBCiPlayer is now available on iPhone and iPod touch.

Really groovy. Er, now could we have GNU/Linux, please?

Then this:

If you have a Nintendo Wii, it's already connected to your TV, and now you can play iPlayer programmes directly on your Wii.

Amazing. But what about the GNU/Linux you promised?

And now we have this:

Today is another significant day for BBC iPlayer as it launches on its first TV platform: Virgin Media.

Totally far-out, man. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE BLOODY GNU/LINUX VERSION?

I wonder how that complaint about the BBC providing state aid to Microsoft is coming along....

The Free Web: 15 Years Old Today

It was exactly 15 years ago that the Web was made free:

Heute vor 15 Jahren erhielten Tim Berners-Lee und Robert Cailliau vom Genfer Kernforschungszentrum CERN die offizielle Erlaubnis, den Code der ersten Web-API und Webservers libwww als freie Software zu vertreiben.

[It was 15 years ago today that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau received official permission from the Geneva research centre CERN to distributed the first Web-API and libwww web server as free software.]

I somehow doubt whether things would have come so far, so fast if Sir Tim or CERN had tried to make money from this whizzo Web idea.

29 April 2008

Windows XP Service Pack 3 Good, Vista Bad

Oh look, yet another reason *not* to upgrade to Vista:


The third service pack for XP gives you all the Windows XP performance updates, security updates and hotfixes that have been released since Service Pack 2 came out way back in August 2004. While Service Pack 3 may not be as big of a change as Service Pack 2 was, there are some noteworthy features from Vista that have been included in this release. Namely, NAP, a policy enforcement platform for limiting network access to secure machines, “Black Hole” Router Detection, a cryptographic module for the kernel and a new Product Activation module allows you to install XP without a product key.

Microsoft: The Police State's Best Friend

You can't make this stuff up:


Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

Now, tell me again why you want to run Windows instead of GNU/Linux?

Hello Hayeren OS

One part of the world that has always fascianted me is Armenia. It's an ancient civilisation, but one that today finds itself in a pretty parlous state, not least economically. This makes open source a perfect resource, so it's good to see an all-Armenian distro appearing:

The author of the Hrat GNU/Linux project is Vardan Gevorgyan, who manages a small group of volunteers. The project is open, interested may join. More, we think that the success of the project and the power of considered system mostly relays on the compatriot's support.

And if you want to see what the Armenian page for it looks like, here it is.

27 April 2008

John Wilbanks on the Knowledge Web

Here's a nice meditation from Science Commons' John Wilbanks on openness, access and innovation, which includes the following thoughts on the "knowledge web":

Just to be clear, here’s what I mean by a knowledge web: it’s when today’s web has enough power to work as well for science as it currently works for culture. That means databases are integrated as easily as web documents, and it means that powerful search engines let scientists ask complex research questions and have some comfort that they’re seeing all the relevant public information in the answers. A knowledge web is when journal articles have hyperlinks inside them, not just citations, letting systems like Google do their job properly.

A knowledge web is predicated on access, and not control, of knowledge. There will never be a competition to provide the best single-point query to the full-text of journals without access- unless the journals all merge down into one company. That’s the only way a controlled system covers the whole world, through monopoly. There will never be a knowledge web where the entire backfile is hyperlinked to databases for relevance based indexing without access. Scientists won’t get to use the newest and best technologies until those companies that control knowledge decide to adopt those technologies. Control is the enemy of testing the newest technologies, of building one’s own system to suit one’s own needs. We have to have access to build a knowledge web, at least if we hope to replicate the success of the regular Web and the Internet.

GPM on LWN.net

In the spirit of passing on vaguely useful information, I notice that LWN.net has put together a handy master index of external contributors, including yours truly.

SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access

This is something that I've thought a good idea for a while; now, it seems to be taking shape:

SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), a leading organization of European research libraries, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Lund University Libraries today announced the launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access journals. Growing numbers of peer-reviewed research journals are opening-up their content online, removing access barriers and allowing all interested readers the opportunity of reading the papers online, with over 3300 such journals listed in the DOAJ, hosted by Lund University Libraries in Sweden.

However, the maximum benefit from this wonderful resource is not being realised as confusion surrounds the use and reuse of material published in such journals. Increasingly, researchers wish to mine large segments of the literature to discover new, unimagined connections and relationships. Librarians wish to host material locally for preservation purposes. Greater clarity will bring benefits to authors, users, and journals.

In order for open access journals to be even more useful and thus receive more exposure and provide more value to the research community it is very important that open access journals offer standardized, easily retrievable information about what kinds of reuse are allowed. Therefore, we are advising that all journals provide clear and unambiguous statements regarding the copyright statement of the papers they publish. To qualify for the SPARC Europe Seal a journal must use the Creative Commons By (CC-BY) license which is the most user-friendly license and corresponds to the ethos of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

The second strand of the Seal is that journals should provide metadata for all their articles to the DOAJ, who will then make the metadata OAI-compliant. This will increase the visibility of the papers and allow OAI-harvesters to include details of the journal articles in their services.

One of the greatest dangers is that the term "open access" be diluted by unscrupulous misappropriation. With luck, the new seal will help to provide an official definition of what is and isn't open access. My only concern is with the name: the "Europe" bit makes it sound like it doesn't apply elsewhere....

Patron Saint of Computing on Free Software

During the writing of Rebel Code I had the privilege of talking to nearly all of the world's top hackers. Among those, Donald Knuth is pretty much at the apex, certainly in the world of computer science.

His interviews are all-too rare these days, not least because he is racing against time to write as much of his magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming, as he can. So I was pleased to come across this one, in which St Donald has these wise words to say on the subject of free software:

The success of open source code is perhaps the only thing in the computer field that hasn’t surprised me during the past several decades. But it still hasn’t reached its full potential; I believe that open-source programs will begin to be completely dominant as the economy moves more and more from products towards services, and as more and more volunteers arise to improve the code.

For example, open-source code can produce thousands of binaries, tuned perfectly to the configurations of individual users, whereas commercial software usually will exist in only a few versions. A generic binary executable file must include things like inefficient "sync" instructions that are totally inappropriate for many installations; such wastage goes away when the source code is highly configurable. This should be a huge win for open source.

(Via tuxmachines.org.)

25 April 2008

The Hidden Success of Linux

Embedded systems are something of an iceberg: most of the activity is happening invisibly, so it's easy to overlook how far Linux has come in this sector:

Laut einer Studie des amerikanischen Marktforschungsunternehmens VDC ist Linux das meistgenutzte Embedded-Betriebssystem in der Industrie. 18 Prozent aller Ingenieure aus dem Embedded-Umfeld, die an der Studie teilnahmen, verwenden eine Linux-Firmware für ihre Geräte. Weitere fünf Prozent bedienen sich bei anderen freien Embedded-Systemen wie dem Real-Time-Projekt FreeRTOS, TinyOS oder eCOS.
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Gründe für den Einsatz von Linux im Embedded-Bereich sind, dass es viele Entwicklungs-Tools kostenlos gibt und für die Linux-Firmware auch keine Lizenzkosten (Royalties) pro produziertem Gerät anfallen. Als weitere wichtige Vorteile nannten die Ingenieure die große Flexibilität von Linux durch die offenen Quellen, die jederzeit beliebig angepasst werden könnten, sowie eine gewisse Vertrautheit mit Linux allgemein.

[According to a study from the American market research company VDC, Linux is the most-used embedded operating system. 18 per cent of all engineers in the embedded world who took part in the survey use Linux for their devices. Another five per cent use other free embedded systems such as the real-time project FreeRTOS, TinyOS or eCOS.

Among the reasons for adopting Linux are the many development tools that are freely available and that no royalties need to be paid per device. Engineers cited Linux's great flexibility as a result of its open source nature, allowing it to be modified in any way, as well as a certain familiaty with Linux in general as further advantages.]

The Ultimate Ultraportable List

Lost in the deluge of GNU/Linux ultraportable announcements? Me too. Here's a consolidate list that might help.

Poor Little Rich Intellectual Monopolies

Here's a droll piece about poor, little unloved intellectual monopolies:

At the highest level, there are those who no longer believe that all property is theft but appear to make an exception for IP. Since every newly created work builds upon the words, the thoughts, the ideas, and the knowledge created by countless others in their furtherance of humanity, any attempt to ring-fence an item of IP, and exclude others from it is an attempt to misappropriate part of the common intellectual heritage of mankind. Since knowledge and information can be shared with others without depriving oneself of them, there is no loss to oneself if such an act of sharing takes place.

At a lower level, there are those who accept the existence of IP rights, but reserve their criticisms and their hostility for specific manifestations of it: the enforcement of copyright against large-scale private copyists, the use of trade mark rights to carve up markets so that genuine goods cannot be imported from a country where they are sold cheaply for resale in another country where they fetch a better price; the theft of traditional knowledge and culture which is then repackaged as copyright- or patent-protected property; the patrolling of industry by unproductive patent trolls, intent upon securing a rent where they create no value; death by patent monopoly for millions in the developing world who, in the unlikely event that they can even access vital medicines, cannot afford them.

Sounds like a fair summary. It concludes:

attitudes toward IP rights focus principally upon their negative qualities and do not connect them with that which is positive. Thus, new medicines save lives, while patents kill; music is cool, while copyright is a clamp; brands are brilliant, while trade marks are tools of trade manipulation. It is too much to hope that the public at large will wake up one morning, enlightened at the beneficial, positive, and above all necessary role played by IP rights, but we can at least aspire to teach that, between that which they praise and that which they condemn, there is a powerful causative connection.

To which I would reply: Why bother? Given the problems with intellectual monopolies nicely summarised above, isn't it time to admit that in fact there are no benefits, that it is all a hideous con, a house of cards that needs to blown down once and for ever? (Via IPKat.)

Microsoft on the Rocks?

Hardly, with a quarterly profit of $4.39 billion, but this is interesting:

Sales in the division selling Office and other business applications fell, hit by lower demand.

As was this:

One factor denting profits was a $1.42bn fine imposed by the European Commission for breaching competition rules.

Put like that, the fine was a significant chunk of Microsoft's profits. Maybe it actually felt it this time.

Lost in the Clouds

Here's a piece about cloud computing that ask a pertinent question:


Why isn't the world's biggest and most powerful software company taking the initiative here? For all of Microsoft's chest beating about internet delivery as the next phase of its development, we've seen precious little in the way of action.

There are so many reasons that it's hard to pin down. Perhaps it's with Ray Ozzie, the successor to Bill Gates, who is still settling into his job. Or perhaps it's just the stifling bureaucracy of a corporation that stretches as far as the eye can see.

But there's also something missing from this analysis of cloud computing. Nowhere is it mentioned that an essential prerequisite for creating huge server farms to keep the clouds afloat is free software: if Google or Amazon had to use proprietary software, paying for each instance clouds would never, er, get off the ground.

Just as the open source LAMP stack created the current wave of Web 2.0 companies, so free software will run the magic machinery keeping clouds aloft.

24 April 2008

Radical Openness

It's the new buzzword:


Yahoo Inc. is swinging the doors of its Web platforms wide open to let outside developers create applications across its network of sites and is radically stitching together its online services under the social profile concept.

The idea is to let the hundreds of millions of people who use its Web mail, instant messaging, calendar, photo management and other online services replicate the social experience that social networks like MySpace and Facebook have made so popular.

O(SS) Canada! Our Home and Native Land!

Some impressive official stats about open source use in Canada:


"Open source" software is rising in popularity, according to survey data. Open source software is software for which the underlying source code is readily available for modification by any interested person or firm.

In 2007, an estimated 17% of private sector firms reported using open source software, up from about 10% just two years earlier, when this practice was first measured.

As in previous years, about one-half of organizations in the public sector reported using open source software in 2007.

An advantage of open source software is flexibility, allowing users to customize or modify the software to their specific needs. In 2007, 3% of private firms and 13% of public organizations reported customizing open source software.

That's damn good growth: 10% to 17% in just two years.... (Via Michael Geist.)

52 Million Brazilian Mini-Penguinistas

That's what will soon be reality, according to this:


until the end of this year there will be already 29,000 labs deployed, serving approximately 36 million students. This number grows to more than 53,000 by the end of 2009, and at that time 52 million students will have access to them. You can also see in the slide a solution that is being developed for classrooms: a single hardware unit with integrated projector, cpu, bundled content and DVD player. With it, digital content will no longer be restricted to the info lab, and will be usable by teachers in the traditional classrooms as well.

Each info lab contains a server and 7 CPUs, providing 15 access points via a multiterminal hardware and software solution

There is also a different lab configuration for schools in rural areas. These schools usually have only one or two rooms, and very weak infrastructure. So a solution that minimizes power consumption was devised, and it allows 5 seats using a single CPU, with no server required

What's the betting that Brazil soon becomes a hotbed of open source hackers? (Via tuxmachines.org.)

Is Cheating in Microsoft's DNA?

Seems so:

I was looking to see what search sites might have a particular bug that I (ahem) came across and was trying the search for the number 0 in various places. There is a pretty good Wikipedia page about zero. Zero has a rich and interesting history and there are many other potentially reasonable results.

But I was surprised to see MSN search had demoted their good results below some crappy ones from MSDN

All's Well That Googles Well

I was worrying that Google's Summer of Code might be fizzling out. Happily, it seems that things are fine:

Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Over the past three years, the program has brought together over 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. This year, we're welcoming 1125 student contributors and 175 Free and Open Source projects into the program.

Sounds pretty healthy.

Russkies Under the Radar

Russia is one of the countries I try to follow as closely as I can in terms of free software because it is both (a) potentially a huge market and (b) rather overlooked. Here's an excellent summary of an important official government document that looks at open source and the issues it raises in Russia:

Russian Ministry on Information Technology and Communications published recently a document entitled Concept of development and usage of Free Software in the Russian Federation (Russian). It is a 29-page text, which is by far the most detailed roadmap of government involvement in Free Software. The legal status of this document is not very strong: in the recent Russian governmental tradition a ‘concept’ is a kind of a detailed policy declaration, which may not be fully observed or may even be rejected or forgotten after a short period of time. However, it may serve as groundwork for future projects and more specific policy measures. Thus, even though a concept document does not create anything by itself, its availability is necessary for creation of good things.

Open Enterprise Interviews

On my other gig, at Computerworld UK, there's now a handy page bringing together the growing collection of interviews with open source luminaries. Here's the list so far:

Denis Lussier: Postgres

Rich Guth: Actuate

Jeff Haynie: Appcelerator

Ismael Ghalimi: Intalio

Mary Lou Jepsen: One Laptop Per Child founding CTO

Howard Chu: OpenLDAP chief architect

Ivo Jansch: PHP

Stefane Fermigier: Nuxeo

Javier Soltero: CEO Hyperic

Jono Bacon: Canonical's Ubuntu Community Manager

Fabrizio Capobianco: Funambol founder

Tristan Nitot: President Mozilla Europe

Dominic Sartorio: President Open Solutions Alliance

Mark Taylor: President Open Source Consortium

Lots more in the pipeline.