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Archive for: July, 2009
July 31st, 2009
Educators climb open source Operation Matterhorn
The University of California is using $500,000 in grants to build an open webcasting platform dubbed Operation Matterhorn, designed to automate the production and distribution of courseware.
The project wiki lists almost 40 people actively involved, with six being from UC-Berkeley but five active developers from the University of Osnabruck in Germany.
The goal is a simple, open source podcast creation platform with a great user experience. Meanwhile, an early version of a system called REPLAY is being made available through ETH Zurich in Switzerland, which is a participant in the main project.
In addition to the Wiki the project’s members are trying to communicate in a variety of ways, including newsletters, mailing lists, videoconferences, even a Twitter group.
At the shared blog, Olaf Schulte described some of his own difficulties in publishing the above video on YouTube, expressing the hope that Matterhorn will make this process easier. “Video is certainly not an easy object to work with yet and open video probably even less so,” he writes.
It is one thing to deliver a project, and this one is due for early delivery within a year. It is another thing entirely for professors to use it. And it is yet-another thing for colleges to accept the use of such technology as providing credit for real courses.
But given the recent explosion in online colleges, big-name schools realize that their big names won’t be enough forever. So this is a start. Has it started in time?
It’s true that schools like Walden University, the University of Phoenix and Capella University may have no status, but with real schools like Troy State and Central Michigan now actively engaged in the business, the clock is ticking.
How long will it be before graduates of online colleges start claiming that their coursework is as good as that offered by “real” schools like those in Project Matterhorn? How long before such graduates attain status in the real world? How long before their coursework really is just as good as what “real” schools offer?
Major universities claim they offer a “true” liberal arts curriculum, that on-campus living has real value, and that the friendships you make at college last a lifetime. But many of these online schools have offices in major cities, and their cost to produce a product is much, much less.
With many U.S. colleges in the last lap of preparing for a new college year, something to think about. Should your alma mater be worried?
July 31st, 2009
A Linux credit card
The Linux Foundation has rolled out an affinity card that will be managed by UMB Financial of Kansas City.
Affinity cards have been around for many years now. They usually bear the imprint of a tax-exempt group, like a college or charity.
The Linux card, bearing the image of Tux the penguin and now available in the U.S., will earn the Foundation $50 when it’s activated plus an unspecified share of the fees.The money will go to community technical events and travel for open source community members to technical events.
Most affinity cards are managed by either MBNA America, which pioneered the field or US Bank of Minneapolis. The Linux card, however, is managed by UMB, a Kansas City company run by Mariner Kemper.
A 2008 profile of the bank in American Banker describes UMB as a family operation — Mariner is the sixth Kemper to run it in its 95-year history — and praises the quality of its portfolio. Mariner’s brother, Alexander Kemper, was CEO of Perfect Commerce (formerly eScout), which now bills itself as a real-time spend management company.
It seems likely that the Foundation was brought the deal by CardPartner, a New York company that has launched over 100 affinity programs in the last year, all managed by UMB, and is pioneering affinity deals with smaller charities like Gilda’s Club New York and Guide Dogs for the Blind.
For those interested, the card offers a 0% teaser rate for six months, no annual fee, and a points program so you can get cash back from participating merchants.
Plus there’s that cute penguin.
July 30th, 2009
Ending DNS abuse with European open source
A collection of European Internet insiders have announced OpenDNSSEC, a project aimed at managing the security of domain names on the Internet.
The group notes that DNS caches are no longer secure, and a white paper says the automated checks will make the creation of secure zones automatic, combining DNS records and digital signatures.
Sponsors are in Europe include the English registry Nominet, NLnet Labs of the Netherlands, the Internet Infrastructure Foundation .SE in Sweden, the Swedish Kirei AB consultancy, SIDN, which maintains the .NL Netherlands domain, and SURFnet, which handles the same country’s university network, and English DNS consultant John Dickinson.
Secure domain name abuse is one of the main tools hackers have for getting past security systems, and making domains tougher to forge is something that is devoutly to be wished. The announcement of OpenDNSSEC follows an Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Sweden.
The poisoning of DNS cache has become commonplace since Dan Kaminsky demonstrated how the DNS security model is flawed two years ago.
July 30th, 2009
Microhoo lessons for open source
On the surface the tie-up between Microsoft and Yahoo means nothing to open source.
It’s not a merger. Yahoo’s open source projects remain Yahoo’s. This is in contrast with the Oracle-Sun deal, where Sun’s open source projects were said to be behind Oracle’s interest.
But look more closely. Yahoo’s open source projects are now held by a company that is cash poor. The company will be under enormous pressure to monetize its software assets, and the for-sale sign is already out.
Just this year most crown jewels in the corporate open source crown have changed hands. Java. Hadoop. Open Office. The Yahoo User Interface Library. All just pawns in bigger corporate games.
This may be hard for backers of the corporate open source model, like our own Matt Asay, to explain away. But when you support a corporate open source program, your community efforts are subject to the corporation’s strategic whims.
I return again to a favorite open source analogy, Tom Sawyer “painting” his Aunt Polly’s fence in Mark Twain’s 19th century classic. Who winds up painting the fence? Who gets the credit? Twain meant the tale as a satire of Gilded Age capitalism, the eternal struggle where you knead and bake the bread but I eat it.
Contrast this with corporate community projects such as Eclipse or Apache. What happens with one contributor there has only a limited impact on the community as a whole. Not only does the code abide, but so does the governing structure. That’s protection which goes beyond what you’ll find in a mere software license.
This lesson may prove hard to swallow. Communities can be starved, but corporate projects can ignore community members’ wills if they want. Those who don’t like the terms can fork it, out in the cold cruel world, or they can suck it up.
What Microsoft is saying to open source here, what Oracle said to open source in the Sun deal, was said perhaps most famously by Tom Friedman in regards to the Iraq war.
The polite paraphrase of Friedman’s statement is this. You don’t count.
July 29th, 2009
Was 4chan block about censorship, security or net neutrality?
AT&T insists its temporary block of 4chan was about security, that the site was hosting a Dedicated Denial of Service (DDoS) attack aimed at one of its customers.
Others aren’t so sure.
The Inquisitor calls it censorship. Writers at The Daily Kos call it an attack on net neutrality and predict it will backfire before the FCC.
Tristan Louis combines it with the Kindle “1984″ erasure and Apple’s control of iPhone apps, writing “a dark cloud” puts all technology trends into question.
It’s clear this is not a one-off. It is part of a growing trend, corporate attempts to enforce law remotely against property people consider their own.
This is especially relevant as we move into an era of cloud computing, where resources we consider our property are, in fact, dependent upon computing environments owned by others.
It doesn’t matter in this case whether the software in question is open source or closed source. What matters is the remote control of that software exercised by a service vendor, and the legitimacy of that control.
Can people trust clouds, or devices dependent upon clouds, if cloud owners act as judge, jury and executioner, zapping what we consider our own? Wouldn’t a book be more ours, or a simpler, voice-only phone? Should we perhaps only use modems to reach the Internet, and shut the connection when we’re not behind the keyboard?
In the case of 4chan, AT&T’s story is fishy. DDoS attacks come from botnets, not specific sites. While sites may control botnets, and users may launch botnet attacks from sites, those are almost always throwaway URLs today, not popular, well-known sites like 4chan.
Moreover if 4chan were hosting malware then all security professionals should have been made aware of it, and the block should have been universal, backed perhaps by a government warrant.
Corporations are individuals under U.S. law, and subject to legal authority, but they are not law itself. They are not law enforcement agencies. They should not act as such without clear legal authority.
For cloud computing to succeed we need national and international policies that define when companies can act, and how they can act, so those who are acted upon have legal recourse.
Private law enforcement without legal recourse just won’t cut it. The opposite of government is not freedom, but anarchy.
July 28th, 2009
Novell delivers SUSE appliance kit
It may be the most important thing Novell has done for software shops in decades.
The SUSE Appliance Program consists of a Web-based appliance construction tool called SUSE Studio Online, a mini-Linux called SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS (Just Enough Operating System), support for Amazon’s EC2 cloud, plus marketing support. It’s aimed at Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).
Software appliances are cool because they provide everything an application needs to run. Installation can be a matter of a few keystrokes.
“This is about helping an ISV access a new market through a new software appliance distribution method,” senior program manager Matt Richards told ZDNet.
“This is about making it faster and easier for ISVs to sell more of their existing product with little additional modification required.”
You might call it SUSE Application Delivery for Dummies (above).
With the Appliance Program a software vendor can quickly create an “evaluation package” of their software that actually runs, either on a client’s hardware or in the cloud. The Program also makes it easier for a vendor to offer Software as a Service (SaaS).
“Software is difficult to install ” added Nat FreemanFriedman, chief technology and strategy officer for Novell’s Linux Business Unit. . “ISVs who distribute software have a challenge whenever customers have problems. This lets them bundle applications pre-installed, tested, stacked, with the operating system, on a CD or a stick. They get a lot of value from that.
Novell said it currently has about 3,600 applications certified on SUSE Linux Enterprise, and many will be joining the program. Its press kit includes testimonials from HP, IBM, VMWare, SAP, Ingres and Adobe, as well as smaller outfits like Adaris Technologies aqnd ZManda.
So is this a game-changer? How long do you think it will take Novell’s rivals to match it?
July 27th, 2009
Could open source have built Silicon Valley?
The failure of OSCON to make a splash in San Jose (expect to see it back in Portland next year) is leading to some general soul-searching which results in this question.
Could we have built Silicon Valley in an open source world?
In other words, to what extent is the wealth of technology a result of legally-sanctioned monopoly as opposed to open competition?
That’s what patents and copyright are, legally-sanctioned monopoly.
Let’s quote again from Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, enumerating the powers of the Congress:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Another term for an exclusive right is a monopoly, and it was with the term monopoly that this power was discussed by the Founders. It’s not intellectual property. It’s an exclusive right to an idea, a monopoly over its use.
But technology has always demanded more than what the Founders granted.
The Microsoft EULA is a direct descendant of IBM contracts from the 1950s, in which buyers gave sellers control over what they were buying in perpetuity. Long before the subject of software patents came up, IBM was fighting against leaks of knowledge about how it did things, and against reverse engineering of its inventions.
Without this power over its customers, could IBM have existed? Could Microsoft have existed?
Open source is really just a different type of contract, one that transfers power from the sellers to the buyers of technology. It places a time limit on those monopoly rents innovators depend upon, one that is earlier than what is offered by copyright, by patent, by other software contracts.
In Silicon Valley, innovation is the fertilizer that makes the crops grow. With open source, software is more like topsoil, and those who nurture that soil believe they will prosper longer than those who just throw fertilizer on it.
Invention is the plant corporations harvest for their profit. Software is the environment on which everyone’s survival depends.
OSCON, I think, is better off in Portland.
July 24th, 2009
Open source advocates still called zealots
“Look out, lobbyists: Here come the open-source zealots”
That’s the lead from a New York Times blog post concerning the open source industry lobbying effort now underway in Washington.
In my post I made the point that the heavy lifting here is being done by one company — Sun Federal — and that this is less about the issue of open source vs. proprietary systems as it is Washington business as usual.
Ashlee Vance dismisses it all as “zealots.”
The word zealot, descended from an ancient sect of Jews who fought both the Roman occupation and Jews who collaborated with the Romans (you know, the People’s Front of Judea, above) is meant to refer to people with an excessive amount of fervor, militants, the intolerant.
Not of our class. Outsiders. Revolutionaries. The mob.
The attitude of newspaper reporters like Vance dismissing people offering to save government money through new business models and development schemes as akin to a mob about to storm the castle has now gone beyond the pale.
Frankly, I find his attitude intolerable.
We are no longer talking about something that is unproven, or risky. The open source model is a decade old. It has already saved enterprises, small businesses, and individuals literally billions of dollars. It has empowered programmers, it has built new fortunes. It’s not communism, but capitalism at its very best.
Taking this good news to Washington so I, as a taxpayer, can join in the savings is celebration-worthy, not an excuse for snark.
It’s the reporters who are out of step with these business values, like Vance, who ought to be watching their backs. While his employers are busy trying to force us to buy their product (and probably eliminating his audience) Jon Stewart is now what Walter Cronkite was 35 years ago.
This should not surprise. The newspaper industry is completely out of step with the Internet, with open source, with business reality. When you’re trying to change the copyright laws and make people buy what they already deem worthless, maybe the latest business innovations do sound like a pitchforked mob at the gates.
But it’s not the bureaucrats whom the bell is tolling for, Mr. Vance. It’s people like you. If they’re gonna drown, put a hose in their mouth…
July 24th, 2009
Falling profits forced Microsoft's open source hand
I have read a lot of stories lately about Microsoft’s latest moves on open source (even written one). I have read a number of stories about Microsoft’s disappointing earnings.
I have yet to read anyone connect those dots. But now you will.
(Image from Graphicshunt, which claims “the biggest selection of Microsoft XP flag backgrounds and wallpapers on the Internet!” Certainly it has some pretty ones.)
Open source is great for customers, for users, for computing, for competitiveness. But if we have learned anything in the last decade it is that open source is bad for vendors.
The savings from open source flow to technology buyers. Sellers lose out.
Microsoft sells technology. It’s very good at this. The distaste many have felt for it over the last decades has been over the monopoly rents it was able to charge because it was so good at its business.
Open source broke open this monopoly. It drove prices for mature software down to zero. Critics charged that open source could not innovate, but in business models it has innovated plenty.
Some analysts now think Microsoft’s only choice to restore profitability is to get smaller, as the newspaper industry did a decade ago. Software is like cigarettes, the thinking goes. The top line has a ceiling, one that is falling, so get the P/E down and milk the asset for the shareholders until the cow dries up.
Open source offers other ways out. IBM is pursuing services. Google and Amazon are pursuing the cloud. Red Hat is pursuing support. Once the present upgrade cycle is complete, Microsoft must find its own way in this world not of its invention.
The first step in that journey has already been taken. Microsoft is integrating Windows with Linux. Now it must take further steps, and start making serious money from all those things it has been dabbling with over the years — advertising, mobility, interface innovation.
The monopoly days are dead. But better days may yet come, if Microsoft can learn to monetize like its new competitors have.
July 23rd, 2009
Canonical walks the talk with Launchpad release
Say this about Canonical, Ubuntu’s sponsor.
It may not have the cash to push hardware through the channel, but Canonical walks the open source talk.
Even at risk of its business health.
Its release of the source code for its Launchpad “forge” service under the GPL Affero license has our own Matt Asay asking, incredulously, whether it has just given away its business model.
No, Matt, it hasn’t. It has just doubled-down on the open source process.
The creation of project hosting sites, colloquially called “forges” after Sourceforge, the original market leader, may be the most important service a project, or the company behind it, can offer customers and developers.
For companies like Appcelerator, the forge is the business. The company has combined its .com and .org sites into one, realizing that it’s the nurturing of community that builds a company in the open source world.
Plain-vanilla hosting isn’t good enough. You have to have forums, you have to have ways to reward those who participate in the forums and those who offer code. You have to be responsive, so users and developers feel they are part of a shared experience.
The business has grown even more competitive with both Google and Microsoft offering services to third-party developers. So what else can Launchpad bring to the party other than the opportunity to build its own code base?
There is no choice. It must get by with a little help from its friends.
And Canonical has a lot of friends. Its reputation is stellar. When Google, Yahoo and Microsoft decided to embrace the idea of a common tag to reduce duplicate content, the tag name they agreed on was canonical. When I questioned Canonical’s size in June, the post drew 386 talkbacks. (And no death threats either.)
The idea of open source business is that you make it on your reputation. Maybe that idea is flawed. Matt certainly believes it may be. And he may be right, for most companies.
But not for Canonical. Its name remains the gold standard in terms of corporate adherence to the open source ideal.
It has proven again that trust is not misplaced.
July 22nd, 2009
Open source actively lobbies for a piece of the federal pie
A collection of open source vendors, including Sun, Ingres, and Red Hat, joined by the Linux Foundation, have organized as Open Source for America, saying open source deserves a piece of the U.S. government contracting pie.
Jackson Browne’s not involved, but nearly every major luminary in the open source movement is. In addition to vendors, the group’s board of advisors includes attorney Andy Updegrove, SFLC head Eben Moglen, Wired for Change co-founder Chris Lundberg, and publisher Tim O’Reilly.
The key player here, however, is Sun Microsystems. People affiliated with Sun and its contracting unit, SunFederal, dominate the group. This is not obvious just looking at their board of directors, but a little Google work brings it into focus.
In addition to Sun Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps and Federal Systems president William Vass, whose links are acknowledged, the board also has three Sun Federal board members — former DISA CTO Dawn Meyerriecks, former DoD deputy CIO Marv Langston, and Arthur Money, who also sits on the board at Forbes.
There are 17 advisors in all.
The group says its mission is to educate the government about open source, and to change federal policies in order to allow more use of open source.
A press statement puts it this way:
The Obama Administration has expressed its desire to create an unprecedented level of openness in government and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration - all principles of open source.
That’s tasty politics, but the group will still have its hands full with not only proprietary tech rivals but a host of contracting companies that have sprung up around Washington over the years, all with their own lobbyists.
It will also be interesting to see what happens after Oracle’s acquisiton of Sun becomes final. Sun shareholders approved the deal last week, but it still has to gain regulatory approval.
I don’t want to sound too cynical here. It’s important that open source be represented in Washington, and that the movement’s support for Administration goals be underlined.
I just wish the group’s board were a bit, well, broader.
July 22nd, 2009
Kaltura launches open source video platform
At OSCON in San Jose, Kaltura announced the public launch of its open source online video platform, called Kaltura Community Edition.
It is currently available for download at Kaltura.org under the GPL Affero license.
The software lets businesses and other organizations host their own video video collections, which can be integrated with open source community network programs like WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, MindTouch or Moodle.
The platform supports all the functions needed by an online video publisher, including easy import of videos, editing, streaming, and support for advertising. In addition its Kaltura Network includes re-mixable content under the Creative Commons BY-SA license, including 600,000 images from the New York Public Library.
Kaltura, an Israeli company, has its U.S. headquarters in New York City. The business model, as with other corporate open source projects, combines a hosted SaaS version of the software and commercial video services such support packages, streaming, hosting, and backup.
The launch follows an Open Video Conference Kaltura hosted in June in New York. The company is part of the Open Video Alliance.
July 21st, 2009
Is Microsoft's GPL2 support really a big deal?
Microsoft’s decison to release 20,000 lines of device driver code under GPLv2 is viewed as a big deal but not that surprising given the context.
After all, the only technology Microsoft fears more than Linux is VMware’s bare-metal virtualization platform. The release of the three device drivers under GPL2 this week — which will better allow application workloads running in Linux virtual machines on Windows to access storage devices– is designed for one reason and one reason only: to advance Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor.
The code, Â also known as the Linux Integration Components, has been deployed for some time in Novell’s SUSE Linux 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.X. following agreements Microsoft signed with the two leading Linux companies.
The announcement this week — Microsoft’s first support of the GPL2 — will more widely release the code under the leading open source license so that other Linux distributors and potentially Linux itself can incorporate these device drivers, which offer support for iSCSI and network storage devices.
Microsoft’s director of open source said today’s announcement is a big step for Windows-Linux interoperability. It is — but it is only for  Linux Virtual Machines on Windows, not physical Linux servers and Linux desktops.
“It’s relevant because applications in a hypervisor need local storage, networked storage and RPC calls,” said Sam Ramji, senior director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, who has worked with JBoss, Apache, Spikesource, Zend PHP and Novell in an effort to move Microsoft closer to the open source community.
The company issued this statement to the press that acknowledged this fact.
Why open source the code?
“Because this is a requirement of the community, and critical in ensuring that as the Linux Kernel evolves, and as Hyper-V evolves, that the Hyper-V Linux Device Drivers evolve as well.”
Greg Kroah-Hartman, of Novell’s SUSE Labs, who leads the Linux kernel.org’s device driver project, said it’s a big deal because Microsoft endorsed the GPLv2 as a valid license, and the valid license for Linux. And he has Microsoft assurances that the company will continue to contribute to the code.
“On one hand, this is no different from any other company that I have worked with through the driver project. We are averaging about 2 new companies a month right now, working with them to get their code cleaned up and merged into the Linux kernel tree,” Kroah-Hartman wrote about the deal. ” Stuff like this happens all the time with new companies becoming part of the Linux kernel community every day. But on the other hand, this is Microsoft, so it is a big deal.”
Microsoft’s endorsement of the GPL is viewed a big deal because it is the first time the proprietary software company — or at least one part of the mothership — has backed it as a credible software license.
But did the Linux community really need this backing from Microsoft?
No, not at this point in the game.
The Linux Network Plumber was pleased to post his take on the origin of the problem and how the ball got rolling. And yes, he did “congratulate” Microsoft.
“Nice. Microsoft has released the Hyper-V drivers as GPLv2. I know was a hard step for Microsoft to take, since it means acknowledging GPL and respecting the Linux community. The releasing of the drivers is good news for users, developers, and in the end Microsoft as well. Like most GPL related actions, a lot of work was done behind the scenes to get the offending company into compliance,” he wrote in his blog yesterday.
“This saga started when one of the user’s on the Vyatta forum inquired about supporting Hyper-V network driver in the Vyatta kernel. A little googling found the necessary drivers, but on closer examination there was a problem. The driver had both open-source components which were under GPL, and statically linked to several binary parts. The GPL does not permit mixing of closed and open source parts, so this was an obvious violation of the license. Rather than creating noise, my goal was to resolve the problem, so I turned to Greg Kroah-Hartman,” he wrote. “Since Novell has a (too) close association with Microsoft, my expectation was that Greg could prod the right people to get the issue resolved.
“It took longer than expected, but finally Microsoft decided to do the right thing and release the drivers.”
Getting the Microsoft higher ups to sign off on this was a big deal, no doubt. But don’t get crazy. I would not expect to see Microsoft release much if any significant IP to the GPLv2 for a long time to come. But that’s just me.
Do you think it’s a big deal? will it accelerate Linux development and adoption? Why?
July 21st, 2009
Adobe goes corporate open source against Ogg Theora
It may have been upstaged by Microsoft but Adobe’s strategy with its Open Source Media Framework looks very similar.
That strategy is to co-opt the term open source, make it corporate, and maintain dominance of the future.
Microsoft is supporting Linux tools so Linux can live in a Windows world, and Adobe is delivering an open source project so that open source, as a concept, can live in its world of corporate media.
At stake in this case is the standard for video in HTML 5.0. The World Wide Web consortium has a bias in favor of royalty-free, open source standards. While the H.264 codec had market dominance, it had no open source street cred.
The corporate nature of the Adobe effort is emphasized on this page, where it lists “plug-in partners” from the worlds of advertising, publishing, and analytics. Its goal is to drive the Adobe Flash platform. That means Adobe’s Open Video Player, code-named Strobe.
It has already achieved big success since HTML 5 stopped specifying Ogg Theora in June, meaning no codec is currently specified. Don’t say no is a big step on the way to saying yes to H.264.
In the standards war open source is a necessary coating. We will now see whether open source is just that, a cloak on corporate ambition, or a true bottom-up phenomenon driven by communities like Ogg Theora.
July 20th, 2009
With Microsoft code dump Novell tries to make nice
Microsoft’s release of 20,000 lines of Linux drivers, under the GPL, may be a shocker to headline writers, but it’s actually smart business.
This is about Novell.
Ever since its 2006 arrangement with Novell, Microsoft has accepted the idea of a heterogenous world.
But open source advocates have always seen this as a one-way street, and most have taken out their ire on Novell, because it acknowledged unspecificed Microsoft patent claims on Linux to do the deal.
A Novell spokesman was quick to tout the Novell angle to this story, noting that “Novell Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman, who leads the Linux Kernel Device Driver project, the company proactively engaged with Microsoft to provide guidance and feedback to the Open Source Technology Center.”
True enough.
Before Microsoft can become an accepted ally of the open source movement, Novell has to cease being treated as a second-class open source citizen. This latest deal won’t still the hotheads on the open source side, and it hasn’t stilled the hotheads on the Microsoft side, either.
But Northern Ireland peace wasn’t made in a day, either.
So, hotheads want to weigh in on this? Why is Microsoft still evil? Why is open source still so socialist? Inquiring minds want to know.
July 20th, 2009
Wikipedia push for Ogg Theora
Wikipedia’s decision to support Ogg Theora for video uploads may be the last chance to break the proprietary video monopoly embodied in H.264.
Microsoft, Google and Apple have all built H.264 support into their products because it readily adapts to Digital Rights Management, without which studios and other video rights owners have been unwilling to make content available online.
Wikipedia’s support of Ogg Theora will place extra steps in front of those who wish to upload video to Wikipedia, but the support of Fireogg, a Firefox plug-in, may alleviate the problem.
Ogg Theora allows downloading, re-mixing and uploading without payment of license fees. It is embedded in the VLC player, which reached Version 1.0 earlier this month.
Our Josh Lowensohn says Google is sniffing that Ogg Theora does not deliver video that is as good as H.264, but now for the first time you can be the judge of that.
Wikipedia is a natural fit for this fight because it supports open source content aggressively, as witness its current battle with the UK’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), which threatened legal action after 3,300 images it digitized were uploaded to Wikipedia.
The response by Wikipedia deputy director Eric Moeller could be summarized as “Nuts“:
The NPG believes that the slavish reproduction of a public domain painting without any added originality conveys a new full copyright to the digital copy, creating the opportunity to monetize this digital copy for many decades. The NPG is therefore effectively asserting full control over these public domain paintings.
That may also be his response to the Hollywood-Silicon Valley embrace of H.264 and DRM. Does Wikipedia now have the heft to win this battle, and give open source video an opening in the market?
July 19th, 2009
Amazon uses 1984 to free e-books
Amazon.com is not a stupid company, nor is it naive.
CEO Jeff Bezos knows that the biggest hurdle e-book readers face are DRM schemes and copyright regimes that differ from country to country.
So in letting Americans download copies of 1984 that were outside the local regime to their Kindles, then having them erased remotely, Amazon created a highly-publicized cause celebre that may finally bring reform.
Sure, Amazon was within its rights. Rights are not the issue here.
Right and wrong is the issue.
We all know that, in the global world of the Internet, a national law is a local ordinance. These ordinances are often complex, contradictory, and exist solely to protect local monopolies.
In this case the monopoly is copyright, which extends practically to infinity in the U.S., thanks to the Walt Disney Co., but is held to a reasonable length in other countries.
It’s America’s penchant of giving corporations greater rights than individuals which is at issue here, and 1984, as a book, is a great place to make that point. Author George Orwell also wrote Animal Farm, whose best-known line, “some pigs are more equal than others,” applies superbly to the case.
If the intent of copyright is to create an incentive for people to create, why should that incentive last 75 years past the life of the creator? There is no reason, except for the fact that corporations now hold copyright in the U.S., and corporations are immortal because when they die they pass their assets on to other companies.
Amazon knows that uniform rules are in everyone’s interest, especially Amazon’s. By enabling this outrage, creating this outrage, then apologizing for this outrage, and promising not to repeat it, Amazon puts pressure on both publishers and governments worldwide to create a reasonable, global copyright regime, so ebooks and books operate under identical principles.
It was definitely the computer industry play of the week.
July 17th, 2009
What open source government data gets you
Early this week I was surprised to wake up and find my wife at the front door.
She likes to leave home early and beat the crowds on Atlanta’s transit system, MARTA.
But on Tuesday, her train was stopped near downtown. It sat on the tracks for an hour before she got out, walked to the other track, and decided to work from home.
I spent the rest of the morning trying to find out what happened. MARTA never released the information, and with local news staffs cut to the bone, no one pressed them on it.
Contrast this closed source attitude with what Portland’s TriMet system has done. By simply releasing their schedules to the public as data files they have encouraged third-party developers to create a host of mobile apps for riders.
The apps, in turn, encourage riders, even regular riders, to keep a link to TriMet on their phones, on their person. Then, if there is trouble, TriMet has a channel through which it can quickly report what has happened, what is being done, and how riders can route around it.
What makes the difference is the transit system’s attitude toward its route data. When you take a proprietary attitude, as MARTA does, riders are left in the dark. An open source attitude, like TriMet’s empowers riders.
This attitude of convenience also leads to more satisfied customers and greater political support. MARTA would love to expand into other counties, and it needs to push through a fare increase. Imagine what an open source attitude toward its data might make in that effort.
And consider what it might do for your local governments as well.
NOTE: A hat tip here to my late friend, Russell Shaw. After leaving Atlanta for Portland in the late 1990s he liked nothing more than regaling me with tales of how much better life was there. I heard his voice in my head as I wrote today, and it made me smile.
July 16th, 2009
Why Apache is not the bottom of the open source incline
Matt Asay is beginning to remind me of those people who, in the wake of 9-11 or Hurricane Katrina, found themselves questioning their political assumptions and switched sides.
Recessions are hard. Deep recessions are harder. The current recession is not sparing the open source movement. Money and partnerships are harder to come by.
So why, Matt asks, is the GPL still considered the bottom of the open source incline, and not, say, the Apache license?
Then, despite high praise for Eric Raymond and disquiet toward Richard Stallman, he pretty much answers his own question.
Did Stallman simply create an alternative way to release proprietary software?
Well, yes.
Any code you write is proprietary to you. No matter its license, you feel a proprietary interest in it. You may want contributions from others, but you also want protection for your rights as an author. You don’t want someone going around behind your back and turning your open source code proprietary with a tweak here and some marketing there. You want your interest in improvements protected.
If this is your attitude, an attitude both common and natural, then you will likely prefer the GPL to Apache licensing. Under the GPL your interest in getting improvements is protected. The power of others to fork your code and turn it to their profit is limited.
The equation draws a different result if you are a corporation, a group of people with marketing and support, releasing productized code. The code base you are releasing is likely larger and your infrastructure offers protection against rogue competition.
That is why corporate projects are often released under some type of BSD license. Google likes Apache. IBM likes Eclipse. These licenses protect corporate rights well, while the GPL’s focus is on individual rights.
Communities, however, generally consist of individuals, not corporations. If you truly want individual contributions, your best chance of getting them comes if you and they are on the same legal footing, and the same practical footing, regarding the code base. You want the GPL.
When businesses organize, with scaled contributions coming from what are essentially development partners, the protections of an Apache license make better sense. Apache offers better protection to corporate business models than the GPL.
My guess is Matt’s change of heart on these questions has much to do with his job at a corporation, one with infrastructure, marketing, and support functions that need regular feeding from license fees or something, in order to survive.
The size of a corporate code base, the work needed to maintain and support it, may make the protections of the GPL seem redundant, while those of the Apache license attractive.
But the bottom of the open source incline will be where individuals live, not corporations, and that’s where you will always find the GPL.
July 15th, 2009
The grand Google plan against the whole Microsoft stack
With its release of a NeatX server, however buggy and primitive it may be, Google has signaled its effort to go after the entire Microsoft software stack.
Critics may call this more of a Grand Guignol plan, a horror show meant only to immunize both Google and Microsoft from antitrust scrutiny, but it’s a mistake to confuse investment size and intent. In the end Grand Guignol was only a puppet theater.
This looks as serious as a heart attack
With NeatX in the enterprise, Chrome OS on the desktop and Android in the hand, Google is challenging the whole relationship between client and server, offering what might be called a client and cloud paradigm.
As Google’s blog notes, NeatX is an X Window implementation originally created by No Machine of Italy under the GPL in 2003. The No Machine business model included a proprietary server. NeatX is an open source alternative, also offered under GPL V2.
In a client-server environment, PCs on the desk are networked to servers in the back office. The server manages the clients, but it’s still pretty complex and expensive.
In the client-cloud paradigm, all complexity is stripped-out and the server work is farmed-out to the cloud. It costs less, a lot less, but is it secure and reliable? Would you trust your business to it? How about your life? Your privacy?
This is the question Google must answer, at all levels of its stack. Functions must be balanced, between what’s on your desk, your lap, or in your hand, and what’s synced to the cloud. The cloud must also provide a host of software and services we presently assume will remain totally under our personal control. That control must be guaranteed.
There is much to be done, but even at the start the vision seems clear.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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