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links for 2010-03-12
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Responding to the request for action, Open Source for America has published a strong refutation of the position IIPA has taken on open source. "Open Source for America (OSFA) believes the IIPA's request to be both irresponsible and misleading in its characterization of OSS. OSFA strongly urges the USTR, and all government agencies, to firmly reject such unfounded pressure to blacklist or penalize any country for policies allowing or encouraging the use of OSS."
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We desperately need some well-funded lobbyists who are working for, rather than against citizen rights and digital liberty like the shameless, customer-hating BPI. ORG is making a reasonable try but they are no EFF. Freedom needs a posse.
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Nothing very radical here, apart from the appearance of ™ on the logo and the appendage of Oracle ownership of that mark.
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"A remarkable example is the London Underground mosquito. It is believed to have evolved from an above-ground species which moved into tunnels being excavated to construct the London underground rail system in the 1850s."
(From Wild Mink on Fri Mar 12 12:07:46 GMT 2010)
✍ Change at OSI
§ I gather that the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative met on Sunday to elect the board for their 2010-11 financial year. I am both honoured and delighted to discover that they have elected me as a Director, with effect from April 1st.
That’s an auspicious date 
. One or two friends have asked why on earth anyone would want to commit time to OSI. They point out that the OSI has had a much lower profile over the past few years as the more notable founding members have moved on. It has been criticised for allowing too many licenses to be approved – including some of questionable merit. It’s easy to find people ready to criticise – some apparently just for the sake of it – and hard to find much more than grudging respect.
But the OSI still plays a very important and relevant role in the world of software freedom. Some points:
- Many government and business policies around the world point to OSI when defining what is acceptable as “open source”. The OSD remains the “gold standard”.
- There is still a substantial authority connected with the organisation when the time comes for an abuser to be challenged to back down from describing their freedom-impared activity as “open source”.
- License approvals have become a much more onerous process, with the emphasis on avoiding creation of new licenses, updating old or flawed ones and encouraging the retirement of redundant ones.
There’s no question that the “open source” concept and brand remain powerful forces for positive change. That green logo carries weight.
I think it’s time for change, first at OSI and then more widely. OSI needs to move from a “supreme court” model to a member-based model. I’d like to see activities promoting software freedom around the world both encouraged and represented by OSI – education, policy development and perhaps organisational support for open source projects. And if there was any way at all to be a more uniting force or have a scorecard – well, I can dream!
My goal as a Director will be to facilitate that change, a change that is already well under way following recent face-to-face discussions and the great work that Andrew Oliver and Danese Cooper have already put in. Expect to hear more on this subject as the year progresses.
(From Wild Mink on Thu Mar 11 12:45:18 GMT 2010)
☞ Networked Society
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In the closest thing we’ll see to a unanimous multi-partisan vote in any modern democracy, the European Parliament resolved that ACTA negotiations must be transparent, must be limited to existing EU law and must not make three-strikes and other sociopathic ideas mandatory. This is the first big obstacle to the secret corporate juggernaut that has been rolling to trade our freedoms for corporate profits and it’s fantastic news.
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A complete browser-based collaborative meeting system, all built from open source components. I’m in the process of downloading and building it for my test server, but the demo makes it look ideal for community meetings like the GNOME Board, OpenSolaris Governing Board and OSI Board, all of which I’ve participated in and which have struggled to find a solution that is both free software and one-click-easy. This looks like it’s both.
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Mitchell Baker announces the revision of the Mozilla Public License. This is a welcome development; if it had been done 7 years ago we wouldn’t have the CDDL today.
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Great posting from the CEO of the company that runs WordPress on the benefits of a distributed organisation. Having been part of a distributed organisation myself I do wonder how well this scales; doing so certainly needs enlightened management.
(From Wild Mink on Thu Mar 11 12:08:36 GMT 2010)
☞ Time For Intervention
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This is an excellent motion, placing restraint on the ability of the European Commission to conduct opaque negotiations that will effectively bind the European parliament before they have been exposed and reviewed. Looking forward to reading the highlights of the debate. If you have a fast-track to your MEP, this is worth mentioning to them.
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Lovely narrative around various patent activities from Jonathan Schwartz. Love the irony of using Google to link to Sun's search patent…
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Jay with an explanation of why the whole Drizzle team (working on the refactoring of MySQL to suit cloud computing) has moved to Rackspace (a cloud computing supplier). Makes perfect sense to me.
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What could /possibly/ go wrong? Can anyone remember cane toads in Australia? Usually it's only the software industry that releases dangerous bugs.
(From Wild Mink on Wed Mar 10 12:07:34 GMT 2010)
✍ OpenSolaris Governing Board
§ I am standing in the election for the OpenSolaris Governing Board one last time (this would be my third consecutive term if elected, so it has to be the last time). Each term has been quite different to the others, and I have no doubt this next year will be very different again for the OpenSolaris community.
Since I no longer work at Sun, I’d like to make clear what my “platform” is in this election in addition to my candidate statement.
- I have been involved in the OpenSolaris project right from the start. While I know where all the bodies are buried, I believe it is better to act on that knowledge by looking to the future.
- I have no corporate affiliation of any kind at present. However, I have previously worked for corporations for nearly 30 years and have an excellent grasp of their metabolism.
- I am a free software advocate and activist, with connections to all parts of the free/open source software movement.
- While I have been a prominent advocate of OpenSolaris and believe the technology it contains is the best available, I am actually platform agnostic and believe in open standards, open source and open communities. Which is good, since OpenSolaris represents an eclectic aggregation of technologies rather than a monoculture…
- My goal at the OGB this year will be to help OpenSolaris become better integrated in the wider open source landscape, rather than standing alone as it has so far.
I encourage you to go vote right now if you are eligible to do so, and most especially to ratify the new OpenSolaris Constitution which I believe is essential if the new OGB is to be able to focus on anything other than bureacracy.
(From Wild Mink on Tue Mar 09 19:32:26 GMT 2010)
☞ Maintenance required
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European Parliament Written Declaration 12/2010 is now ready for signature. The Declaration establishes principles by which ACTA will be judged when it finally uncloaks and we discover how it is in fact armed. It’s time to use your preferred means to contact your MEPs and ask them to sign it.
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Maybe if they do a good job Oracle would consider retiring CDDL and using this instead?
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Paul Carr with a relatively fair and balanced view of the Digital Economy Bill – seductively so. But I don’t agree with his conclusions.
While the social contract behind copyright has merit (creating a protected ’space’ where a copyright creation can be monetised in exchange for its dedication to the public domain), the digital age has driven a switch from a control-centric (‘hub-and-spoke’) society to an emergiunbg peer-to-peer society. There are no ‘fixes’ we can do to copyright to make it work right; we need to start again and invent a copyright for the digitial age.
The Digital Economy Bill is well intentioned, but there are no fixes available to make analogue copyright law work for a digital society and I fear the Bill will just make things worse, unleashing a “sorcerer’s apprentice” effect of unintended consequences the way the US DMCA has done. The Bill has to be stopped, not patched.
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A great potted history from Dries Buytaert, timeline-style.
(From Wild Mink on Tue Mar 09 12:08:45 GMT 2010)
Days In The Sun Over
After nearly 10 years at Sun, and 5 years as Chief Open Source Officer, I have now left Sun. You can read my reflections on those years on my new personal blog (to which you may wish to subscribe).
(From Java Mink on Tue Mar 09 12:06:34 GMT 2010)Sundown
After nearly 10 years, I've now left Sun. Thanks to everyone for following my blog for all these years. Please follow my new blog, Wild Webmink, where I have posted a career retrospective.
(From Sun Mink on Mon Mar 08 17:37:00 GMT 2010)✍ Last Day At Sun
Today is my last day of employment at Sun (well, it became Oracle on March 1st in the UK but you know what I mean). I am a few months short of my 10th anniversary there (I joined at JavaOne in 2000) and my 5th anniversary as Chief Open Source Officer. I hope you’ll forgive a little reminiscence.
Looking back, we’ve achieved some amazing things. We’ve:
- Got some of the most important software in the computer industry released under Free licenses that guarantee software freedom for people who rely on them, regardless of who owns the copyrights. Unix, Java, key elements of Linux, the SPARC chip and much more have been liberated.
- Guided and fed the quiet revolution that has restored competition to the productivity software market through Open Document Format.
- Kick-started the corporate blogging revolution at Blogs.Sun.Com, so that at any time you could have checked there have been around 1200 Sun employees sharing their enthusiasms with maximum trust and minimum oversight. In the process we created policies that have enabled many other companies to start the same journey and gave employees ownership of their work.
- Changed Sun’s attitude towards open source so that early, bitter critics have become people willing to defend – or even join – the company.
- Participated in the wider community in useful ways, such as retiring old licensing, sponsoring the FSF and helping the GPL v3 come in to existence.
- Worked with an amazing, once-in-a-career team that has gone on to play key roles elsewhere in the industry.
I didn’t do any of that alone, plenty of it wasn’t my idea, and without the groundwork of others before me it would have been impossible. There are far too many people to attempt to thank here – each “we” above represents a bunch of smart people of whom I was the least. You all know who you are, thank-you so much for the privilege of working with you.
Of course, no story with highlights like that can be without disappointments too. I’m sad that Apache did not get the TCK license they requested. I’m sad that we didn’t get the code for some of those projects permanently outside the sun firewall. I’m sad we never got to a place where co-developers become a priority for various product teams. And I’m sad that, despite the success of the open source software businesses, it still wasn’t enough to rescue Sun in the end. But overall, I am amazed and humbled to see what the open source team at Sun has achieved.
I’ve not decided what to do next (well, apart from sell photos and other shameless commercialism!), but I see so many friends finding exciting opportunities that I’m not especially concerned for now. I intend to keep blogging, so I doubt anything I do will be much of a secret.
(From Wild Mink on Mon Mar 08 16:00:08 GMT 2010)
♫ Music To Soothe A Wild Mink
§ I’m still listening to new music and it seems the proximity of SXSW is triggering a cascade of releases. Here are some samples from this week’s listening.
| Loc | Title | Artist | Comments |
| UK | Need Love | Dr Meaker | Laid back jazz-blues-funk with female vocals, rather than the dance track you might expect. |
| USA | The Deep and Lovely Quiet | SubtractiveLAD | Dreamy, slightly metallic echo-acoustic of the shoe-gaze, Engineers variety. Would not be out of place in a Robert Rich concert. |
| USA | Culpa De La Luna | Rupa and the April Fishes | Pretty delicious stuff – imagine early Madness as world music with female vocals and you’re maybe close |
| USA | Let The Riverrun | Carly Simon | Verging on gospel, this is a great track from Carly Simon as she is now (rather than the blast from the past you usually get from her Best-Of fodder) |
Let me know what you think – I’ll keep listening and if people like the reports I’ll keep posting too.
(From Wild Mink on Sun Mar 07 23:42:58 GMT 2010)
☞ End-Times?
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The news here is actually that Disney has opened a new site to hold all its future open source projects. Disney doing open source has to be one of the signs of the end times.
(From Wild Mink on Sat Mar 06 12:08:13 GMT 2010)
Blog Moved - Reminder
Just a reminder that this blog has now moved to Wild Webmink where you will be most welcome to join me from now on.
(From Sun Mink on Sat Mar 06 02:55:00 GMT 2010)☞ Fighting For Freedom
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Official statement from OSI denouncing the IIPA’s warped view of the world that says developing nations should not be mandating open source while the US states and federal agencies get right along with the same thing. Very welcome statement that I know we’ll see Open Source For America reacting to – I hope other countries will also flag the issue with their US diplomatic contacts.
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Excellent paper from the EFF provides us with the lessons of history as the UK considers implementing similar bad legislation. It’s not so much the primary objectives of the law that are the problem (although those are pretty obnoxious). It’s the fact that, through careless drafting (or rather drafting with the assistance of the wrong lobbyists), a whole range of loopholes are created which lead to unintended consequences like censorship, anticompetitive litigation and early monopolisation. This really is a document I want my representatives to read.
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“Imagine that, in the Summer of last year, you had been following the MP’s expenses scandal and heard that The Telegraph was publishing a rather less redacted version that MP’s were prepared to give us. Interested, you navigated your way to www.telegraph.co.uk only to find it was not responding. After some searching around and asking friends you discover that the website has been blocked by most major UK ISP’s. It seems a junior official in Parliament had asked them to block The Telegraph for copyright violation.”
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Wading into the “Special 301 list” debate I explored at great length last weekend, this posting introduces the great analogy of asking if the same complaints would apply if they related to an own vs rent model on cars instead of software: “But one argument that doesn’t make sense is to say that government would be ‘distorting the market’ if it decided to buy cars rather than leasing them.”
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If you’re a Carly Simon fan then this free track is a great gift from Amazon, assuming you have a US account with them.
(From Wild Mink on Fri Mar 05 12:07:44 GMT 2010)
Links Feed Turned Off
I've now turned off the automatic posting to this blog from Delicious. Daily links will now only appear over on my new Wild Webmink blog, and I once again encourage you to subscribe to it!
(From Sun Mink on Tue Mar 02 09:48:24 GMT 2010)links for 2010-03-01
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This is a very sad development from the UK's public service broadcaster.
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People have been wondering where I got all my strange ideas about American history. The answer: this great book, which I thoroughly recommend.
OSI Board
webmink posted a photo:
Taken at the face-to-face meeting in Pittsboro, NC. Rishab Ghosh was unable to attend the meeting.
(From Photo Mink on Sun Feb 28 22:33:36 GMT 2010)links for 2010-02-28
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At a recent debate in the House of Lords on the Digital Economy Bill, a number of amendments designed to ensure citizen rights (as opposed to most terms of the DEB that limit citizen rights in defence on corporate rights) were rejected by the UK governmnet on the basis they would upset the delicate balance of UK law. Yet here we see the very same Bill seriously disrupting the delicate balance of rights voters already enjoy. You'll no longer be able to offer your guests easy wifi access, ruining evolving and desirable modes of work and interaction in order to shore up the 20th century monopolies of Lord Mandelson's media friends. I've not heard nearly enough from the opposition parties on this stuff, making me fear they will just do more of the same - not a surprise, it's advance preparation for ACTA ratification. It's election time; we need to make sure the politicians know we care about this stuff.
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UK citizens can sign this petition to the UK government calling for transparency.
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Useful summary from Michael Geist - worth asking your representatives why your government hates transparency if you're in one of the countries opposing it.
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Peter Tribble documents some of the comments made by Oracle's representative in theOpenSolaris annual meeting. Net: Oracle intends to keep going with OpenSolaris.
Blog Moved
A reminder: If you are following me here on blogs.sun.com, please change your bookmarks and feeds to read http://webmink.com instead, as I have moved all my blogging there. I'll be turning of the daily link posts early next week. There are several new posts on the new site, especially on ACTA, so you really do want to move!
(From Sun Mink on Sat Feb 27 15:45:26 GMT 2010)links for 2010-02-27
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While this is all good, it is not sufficient as ACTA will address far more than just "garduated response". This looks to me like a co-ordinated action by the Commissioners in response to obvious concern, to try to prevent the Parliament forcing their hand in the negotiations. It's still important to get MEPs to sign the opposition text.
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Goodbye, Tim - it has been fantastic and a privilege to work with you.
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Decent free jazz track on Amazon.com (US customers only).
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This is an excellent and on-target discussion on the ridiculous case where a lobbying organisation acting on behalf of BSA, RIAA, MPAA and others is able to direct the US government to discriminate against governments choosing to prefer open source software.
links for 2010-02-25
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Very welcome - and beuatifully-constructed - from Europe's data protection supremo. While we should not let up pressure on transparency and on three-strikes, it may be time to start spotlighting some of the other evil in the leaked drafts, such as unlimited search powers at borders, criminalisation of infringements, internet access logging and international application of the DMCA.
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Various EU politicians have worked out that "three-strikes" arouses hatred in voters. All the same, the motivation in introducing the legislation is to clear the ground for ratification of ACTA, so we need to stay vigilant as this is almost certainly window-dressing.
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While I expect this will make a bunch of fundamentalists gag (including Dawkinians), I found this discussion interesting and timely. We have spent too long treating "spiritual" and "sacred" as words indicating a response to the passive, but everything I've ever admired in the inner life has related to creativity and creation. Worth reading even if just to disagree!
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I am trying to investigate what is going on here - I do hope this is a mistake.
Blog Move
With the change from Sun in the UK almost complete, I've decided to move my blog. Please adjust your feed, and read on over at Wild Webmink.
(From Sun Mink on Thu Feb 25 09:51:49 GMT 2010)links for 2010-02-24
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Remember I mentioned the "Special 301" list yesterday, that US corporations can use to place pressure on places where they find it hard to compete? Well, it seems that it's being used to get the US to attack states that prefer open source software - places like Brazil and India. I wonder if the US can get added to its own list?
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Full of good tracks, this is a great free download if you happen to have a US-based Amazon.Com account.
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An interesting discussion, conducted on Buzz
☞ Insider Information
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Special 301 is a nefarious mechanism that allows US corporations to request diplomatic action against foreign competitors on the flimsiest of grounds. It's anticompetitive, harms the rights of both US and foreign citizens in the digital age and it should go.
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Sounds plausible, certainly. What the commentators I've seen so far (including Gruber) are mostly ignoring is that Apple would block Flash even if there were no technical issues (and most of them are probably soluble in some way) since their priority is control of the platform so they can control its monetisation. It's business, not technology. That means no Flash, no Java, no virtualisation, no interpreted code. The very interesting question will be what they do with HTML5. My prediction: HTML 5 support will be complete but will lag native apps and be poorly integrated with the overall UI.
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And quite right too. Whatever the political or news motivation, it was obviously wrong for a confidential helpline to in any way identify its clients or their employers to the news media. Worse, the woman involved is busily justifying herself instead of apologising to avoid damage to the charity she founded.
☞ Keys To Growth
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This is an interesting and useful article by a musician (from OK Go) whose work rose to great success through "viral" word-of-mouth video (the one with the people on running machines) but who now can't succeed with the same approach becuase their dinosaur record label EMI insists on "monetising video streams" and thus prevents them letting fans embed their new videos on fan web sites. The failure of the music industry illustrated in cameo. Why would we want to let people who think like this shape our legislative future around the internet and copyright?
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This is an interesting and promising (and open source) approach to data storage that could be built-in to consumer and SOHO devices to give them automatic data integrity by collaborating with other devices over the home or office LAN. It's still very raw as a technology but I'll be giving it a try at home this month.
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I've always treated Myhrvold's company with the greatest scepticism (I call them "Intellectual Vultures") and this report is extremely believable. It fits in with the use of patents - especially software patents - by companies like IBM, who hide their patent shake-downs behind confidentiality, out-of-court settlement and fine language about their community credentials.
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It's now Lent, and regardless of religious orientation I know many of us have the habit of reading a book for spiritual nourishment. This book by Marcus Borg casts a new light on the life and teaching of the apostle Paul and I would very much recommend it as a Lent book if you've moved on from evangelical christianity. If you read it and would like to discuss it maybe we can start a Buzz discussion? (This is the Amazon UK link)
☞ Gaining Understanding
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"This issue is an embarrassment for all concerned, a naked bit of crony-capitalism that has so much more at stake than mere copyright. It needs to stop." -- Great overview, read it.
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All the arguments about "protecting rights" come to nothing when you realise that a ripped copy of a movie is far better to watch than the spam-laden version you can buy in a store. I have the same gripe about satellite TV in the UK - why should it be stuffed with advertising if I am paying to watch it?
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"When asked about Obama's plan (without being given any details about what the legislation includes), 49 percent opposed it and 40 percent were in favor. But after hearing key features of the legislation described, 48 percent supported the plan and 43 percent remained opposed." -- Why let the facts get in the way of knee-jerk rage, after all?
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If anyone is left out there unaware that flying Ryanair is a false economy by now, they probably deserve what's coming to them.
☞ Legal Breakthroughs
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A crucial and foundational legal finding that establishes violation of open source licenses is not acceptable and that penalties relate to the worth of the work and not the selling price or revenues of the author.
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This is a very important finding indeed. VoIP applications are information services and thus not subject to the access charges that telecoms services have to pay in the US. Could have far reaching repercussions if upheld and repeated in other areas, even the demise of the telco industry as we know it.
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I am speechless. Who could possibly have imagined this even two years ago, let alone a decade ago when we started the work that became ODF.
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Not that this is terribly relevant to me, but the visualisations in this article are great (and perhaps a little surprising). Those sliders under the graphs are live, drag them.
☞ Unexpected Insults and Remedies
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It's bad enough to buy a product and be told by the manufacturer that you can't be trusted to have actually bought it so you must authenticate your purchase (usually with the surrender of your anonymity and privacy). To be told you are trusted so little you have to authenticate every three month is insulting. And to have the breakage installed silently by a mechanism you've been trusting to protect you is downright treacherous. I thought Microsoft was supposed to be changing for the better?
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This is the sort of action that's open to a community when there's a decent trademark strategy in place. If you see other OpenOffice.org scams, report them on the community's marketing list.
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Bravo.
☞ Fact-Based Living
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Yet another illustration why the proposed three-strikes laws are unbalanced and unjust. The onus continues to be on the accused to prove innocence, usually at great cost and after summary judgment. This cannot be allowed to stand; we need to educate the general population about why it's their freedoms at risk and not those of anonymous abusers.
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I've been highlighting this thread of thought (SJVN's post is just an example) to my counterpart at Oracle who tells me the information vacuum is not a guaranteed indicator of bad stuff. Moveover, some of these assertions aren't accurate. For example, Kenai is not being shut down - it is merely being reskinned and rebranded as Java.Net as an act of consolidation. So my advice continues to be to hold on and wait for news rather than assuming the worst.
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Seems Amazon US has started providing a URL for the list of free tracks posted for the week. Very handy. I like all but one of these, well worth a visit.
☞ Ghost In The Machine
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Read this important discussion from the "IP" list, which explores the reasons why the insecure world Microsoft has built for us makes enforcement of laws related to credentialed (or identified) PC behaviour, such as music & movie downloads, spamming and child porn, subject to almost undetectable failure followed by almost unavoidable injustice.
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The house is theirs, they can prove it, yet still the bank proceeds on the basis that it doesn't make mistakes. This is exactly the reason why lightweight, pro-business processes and laws (like three-strikes) are bad. When they go wrong, the victim is considered guilty until they can prove themselves innocent - usually at great effort and expense.
☞ Devil In The Details
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The problem here is that using law against individuals with rules - and penalties - that are designed to address behaviours of companies is sure to lead to injustice. A friend just got a "three-strikes"-style e-mail from their ISP citing music I know they would never listen to as being in some way used in violation of copyright. What can my friend do? Presumed guilty, there's no recourse that is financially viable. Among all the other reasons three-strikes cannot stand as law is the fact that it is beyond the means of any individual to defend themselves and thus justice is unavailable.
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We live in a world that prefers persuasive stories to irritating facts.
[Daily Mink last updated Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:27:02 GMT by Planet Roller]
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