04.28.10
Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Office Suites, OpenOffice, Windows at 4:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Who can port Chem4Word to OpenOffice.org?
Summary: Chem4Word is an example of Free software which is trapped deep inside Microsoft’s proprietary cage and needs rescuing
From an academic and scientific point of view, Chem4Word’s developer does the right thing by becoming a Free software proponent and choosing the Apache licence for the project (not GPL, which would have been better). The only problem is that Chem4Word helps sell Microsoft Office, which means that any user of Chem4Word (even as Free software) will be pressured to buy a standards-hostile and closed-source office suite. Those who are close to this project are aware of the issue.
A while ago, I asked whether we are seeing a trend to promote shallow layers of “open source” on top of a deep proprietary software stack. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action. [PMR: This refers to Microsoft’s funding of the British Library and the City of Edmonton; the phrase (from Goldfinger) argues that there is a concerted campaign by Microsoft to use Open Source to create lockin to its products].
As a lapsed chemist, it saddens me to criticise a project with such a worthy goal. But this software spreads proprietary lock-in, not freedom. Those wishing to use it can only do so by first buying a stack of proprietary software. Those receiving documents created using it may well not be able to open them unless they have the same software and the same plug-in. Those who distribute the software, or documents created using it, are making science less free.
[...]
First, to answer the questions:
1. There is currently no Microsoft funding to our group to translate Chem4Word into OpenOffice, but I will transmit the request to them and probably suggest they reply directly (although I can carry the message). Whether we are the best group to do it will depend on the scale of the project and what elements of research there are in it.
2. I cannot answer this from my personal interactions with Microsoft (I deal primarily with MSResearch). Microsoft has only fairly recently become active in the Open Source world. It has now joined the Apache Foundation. That means the issues will be more public and will be debated more openly. I would expect that Apache would be very concerned if it were to be converted to supporting “embrace, extend, etc.”. I am an optimist and believe that the influence is just as likely to be in the opposite direction where OSS successes get fed back into the culture of Microsoft and change it.
We have already remarked on Microsoft’s relationship with Apache in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]. This is yet another example where Microsoft is using (as in exploiting) Free software to sell its proprietary software.
Supporting Microsoft software is bad for a variety of reasons, not just because it’s proprietary and standards-hostile. Here for example is a new explanation from Omar, who exemplifies what Microsoft is doing to developing countries where cost matters a lot.
But then the grief doesn’t end here, because the problem will seem even worse if you ponder the fact that most people, around the world, who use computers can barely afford to pay their monthly bills, and that all these people are using pirated software because:
* A) That’s the only software they’ve ever known.
And:
* B) They cannot afford to pay for the annual licensing fee of a genuine copy.
These people have been mass-hypnotized, they’ve been indoctrinated into believing that whatever MS gives them is right, and that MS software is the only software on Earth that actually works. Now, take under consideration that MS is a for-profit organization after all (Actually, MS is a for-nothing-but-profit organization, but ya know), and that sooner or later, MS will start collecting money in all ways possible.
Let us hope that Chem4Word gets extended (or forked) to support Free software further down the stack. It can support all major platforms if it gets ported to office suites such as OpenOffice.org. █
“I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows.”
–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
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Posted in Courtroom, GNU/Linux, Novell, SCO, UNIX at 4:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: SCO is trying to claim ownership of UNIX and it may also want a new trial
ACCORDING to this post from the afternoon, there is danger that with new funding from former SCO executives [1, 2], the SCO case will carry on until Novell is sold or whatever.
SCO has filed its “renewed” motion for judgment “as a matter of law”, with its supporting memorandum. They ask the judge to rule over the heads of the jury and decide that the jury “simply got it wrong” when it ruled that SCO didn’t get the copyrights in 1995 from Novell. In the alternative, they’d like a new trial.
This post is Groklaw’s followup to an attempt by SCO to get UNIX back (although it never owned it). From the Utah press:
The SCO Group is asking a federal judge to order Novell Inc. to turn copyrights to the Unix computer operating system over to SCO despite a jury verdict that said a 1995 sales agreement did not include those assets.
Lindon-based SCO told U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart that the jury did not address the issue that he is to decide when it reached its verdict March 30 in the long-running legal battle over the ownership of software that is used by many businesses.
Groklaw rebuts with many fine details:
I have been quietly working on a project that I now realize would be more fun and more effective if we do it together, annotating SCO’s proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law [PDF]. We were all stunned to read what they filed with the court, and I thought about historians someday reading this document and imagining it to be 100% accurate. I don’t think it is, and so I have begun linking to contradictory evidence from SCO itself and to other materials that can be helpful to anyone someday wishing to know what happened. Would you like to help me?
This is one area where Novell does something positive for GNU/Linux. █
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Posted in Apple, Bill Gates at 4:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Lock your doors and hide your children. The Apple Hype Police is coming.
Summary: Apple’s Hype Police is shown to be connected to the raiding of a blogger who ‘dared’ to show the next hypePhone
APPLE has gotten itself into one heck of a PR disaster, which so far we’ve covered in:
According to this article sent to us by Brandon, Apple does have role in the task force investigating the iPhone case.
The idea was to bring a variety of business interests and police agencies together to help combat identity theft, computer fraud, and the like. The team’s website explains that “high tech companies … provide specialized training, liaison personnel and internal support for task force investigations.”
What’s curious is that one of those high-tech companies providing training, personnel, and support to the task force is Apple Inc., the alleged victim in the Gizmodo case. According to this May 2009 story from the San Jose Business Journal, Apple is one of the 25 companies that sit on REACT’s “steering committee.” Which raises the question as to whether Apple, which was outraged enough about Gizmodo’s $5,000 purchase of the lost iPhone for CEO Steve Jobs to reportedly call Gawker Media owner Nick Denton to demand its return, sicked its high-tech cops on Chen.
Even the EFF is stepping in now. It is “Dissecting the Gizmodo Warrant” thusly:
Federal and California law both protect reporters against police searches aimed at uncovering confidential sources or seizing other information developed during newsgathering activities. Yet on Friday, agents with the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) executed a search warrant at Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home, searching for evidence related to Gizmodo’s scoop on what appears to be a pre-release version of Apple’s next iPhone model. The warrant does not reveal whether Chen himself is considered a criminal suspect, or what alleged crime the police are investigating, but Chen was not arrested. All of his computers and hard drives (among other materials) were seized for further search and analysis.
There is some other negative PR for Apple this week, including for example:
i. Apple Bans Online Sales In Japan
The comments in the Japanese business newspapers suggest that Apple believes online shopping confers an aura of ‘cheapness’ on their products; but surely killing the Apple store’s competition must have entered into the calculation.
ii. Apple Just Says Yes to iPhone Game for Smokers
Blogs and message boards have been lighting up with the buzz about Apple’s family-friendly App Store policy, which bans soft porn and satire — but a game that glorifies smoking somehow got the green light.
So Apple protects its perceived value by banning low-cost Apple purchases while allowing glorification of tobacco (which in turn voids the guarantee/warranty of Apple’s computers). Apple says “no” to politics [1, 2] but “yes” to smoking. Bill Gates just says “yes” to both [1, 2] and it’s not a good thing. █
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Posted in Google, Mail, Microsoft, NetWare, Novell at 3:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Google and Microsoft eat Novell’s lunch and nobody is offering to buy Novell despite its implicit invitation
HAVING taken a quick glimpse at this week’s news, there are many examples showing Novell’s demise, starting with this observation that Novell loses to Google, which is headed by Novell’s former CEO.
One compelling story is that of how the City of Los Angeles, is converting to Google Apps from its internally hosted Novell GroupWise platform.
There are also new examples of Novell being dumped for Microsoft, its so-called ‘partner’.
i. Fayetteville-Perry School District finalizes cuts
In other recent business, the board:
• approved conversion from Novell to Microsoft Network software to be completed during the summer at a cost of $7,045.78. Novell will no longer be supported and all other school districts have either switched over already, or are in the process of changing over. Of the total cost, $4,500 will be taken from the district Permanent Improvement Fund for a new file server to run the software. The remaining cost will be taken from the general fund.
ii. London borough builds IT around flexible working
Significant changes to existing software will see an operating system refresh from Windows XP to Vista, as well as a move away from Novell Network and GroupWise to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange.
A new article about ZTE uses Novell as a textbook example of losing an installed base very rapidly and without chance of reversal.
The fact that no hack even mentioned Symbian to ZTE was extremely telling. It is reminiscent of the days when Novell had a huge installed base of network servers while the developer community had quietly switched its allegiance to Microsoft.
[...]
At present, this seems a bridge that ZTE will cross later.But Nokia must act fast if it is to avoid becoming the Novell of the handset sector.
Most people who observe Novell expect no Renaissance. Novell is already up for sale and the first Novell takeover attempt is mentioned again here. Novell sponsors a CIO meeting in Sri Lanka, but it seems like a lost cause for both sides. As we showed in the previous post, Research and Markets says that “The future of Novell, and therefore of the SUSE Linux distribution, is uncertain.” Sadly for Novell, no company seems interested in buying it, just a hedge fund (vulture). █
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Posted in HP, IBM, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Servers, SLES/SLED, UNIX at 3:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Novell Spin® Deluxe™
Summary: In order to generate hype which is not justified, Novell comes up with familiar numbers that do not tell much and might not tell the truth, either
NOVELL is still pushing whitepapers into all sorts of Web sites, even IDG in this case (we no longer report all the examples because there are many and they are repetitive). Given those IDC ‘studies’ from Novell (e.g. [1, 2]), it is apparent that Novell operates similarly to Microsoft. It’s about funding so-called ‘studies’ where the results are predetermined and then throwing the produced propaganda all over the Internet in order to deceive.
“It’s about funding so-called ‘studies’ where the results are predetermined and then throwing the produced propaganda all over the Internet in order to deceive.”As we showed twice this morning [1, 2], Microsoft loves fake numbers. To Microsoft, truth does not matter as long as the lie does not violate the law. And similarly, Novell issues a new press release this week [1, 2], claiming that 5,000 applications are now certified for SLE*. Now, we haven’t verified these numbers yet, but we vividly recall how Novell lied about those numbers some years ago (about a year and half ago) and got challenged rather severely by several journalists. Here is a news article that repeats claims from the press release without any scrutiny:
ISVs, Novell claims, are contributing an average of 150 new applications each month.
[...]
Since the launch of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server platform, more than 250,000 appliances for physical, virtual or cloud environments have been built by ISVs using SUSE Studio.
Many of them are just single users toying with the tool (us included), sometimes constructing several appliances per user (as we did). Novell makes it sound like many unique appliances are created to be spread to a lot of people (for each appliance). This is not true. It’s spin with numbers; in a Brainshare 2010 interview, Novell’s CEO parroted exactly the same type of statistics because them — and only them — make it sound like a success.
This is not the first time that Novell fakes or dishonestly selects numbers, sometimes by push polling.
“The future of Novell, and therefore of the SUSE Linux distribution, is uncertain.”
–Research and MarketsThis week we also find these two new copies [1, 2] of the IBM-Novell press release (already covered in [1, 2, 3]). IBM is another company that will help Microsoft/Novell increase the number of so-called ‘appliances’ that rPath seems to have invented. Research and Markets has a new report bearing the headline “Novell and SUSE Linux: Not So Happily Ever After?” From the summary: “Developers, partners, and users of SUSE Linux as distributed by Novell have seen the company go through a stunning range of disruptive events within the past several weeks. The future of Novell, and therefore of the SUSE Linux distribution, is uncertain. This Strategic Perspective looks at the most recent events causing uncertainty for Novell, and the effects on Novells SUSE Linux distribution and markets.”
In short, home and business users ought to avoid SUSE as a GNU/Linux distribution, especially now that Novell is up for sale. The same uncertainty applies to Mono and Moonlight. Timothy Prickett Morgan writes about the death of Itanium, which probably relates to this uncertainty around Novell, SUSE, and other Novell products. Conversely to this trend, however, Timothy claims in The Register that SLES is the last GNU/Linux distribution which supports Itanium.
That leaves HP’s HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop operating systems, Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, and a handful of proprietary OSes from Europe and Japan on Itanium chips.
Earlier this month, an Intel spokesman said that most Itanium users run HP-UX. So SUSE for Itanium too might soon fade away. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Ubuntu at 2:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Reminder for the unaware that Docky, which can easily be substituted with another dock, brings with it a whole stack of problems
Docky is a close relative of GNOME-Do (they are being decoupled), which is of course based on Mono. We thought it would be worthwhile pointing this out because a lot of people are unaware of the issue. To quote from a new thread in a Ubuntu site (GNOME-Do is developed by a Canonical employee by the way):
“what is this “class=/usr/lib/docky/’Docky.exe’”? exe file in linux 
why ?”
In reply:
“That is called Mono. Mono program also use .dll for their library files. Awful, isn’t it ?”
We strongly discourage the use of Mono and so does Apple on the face of it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] (not to mention the FSF). This new article from the Guardian mentions Apple’s exclusion of MonoTouch. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Novell, Patents at 2:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell’s software patents pursuit continues unabated, based on new reports from Utah
Novell has just been granted 3 more software patents, continuing a tradition that only harms — not helps — GNU/Linux. The patents are as follows:
System and method of searching for providing clue-based context searching, patent No. 7,707,146, invented by Nathaniel Dourif Friedman, of Boston, Mass., assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.
System and method of searching for classifying user activity performed on a computer system, patent No. 7,707,284, invented by Nathaniel Dourif Friedman, of Boston, Mass., and Jon Eric Trowbridge, of Chicago, Ill., assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.
Authentication cache and authentication on demand in a distributed network environment, patent No. 7,707,416, invented by Scott Alan Isaacson, of Woodland Hills; Daniel Gene Fritch, of Maple Valley, Wash.; Larry Hal Henderson, of Orem; Lynn Wells Crabb, of Lindon; and James Duane Nyland Jr., of Pleasant Grove, assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.
Nat Friedman recently left, but Novell had pulled some more software patents with him. Having worked at Microsoft for a while, Friedman was a Microsoft apologist/proponent inside Novell.
The thing about such software patents is that Novell brags about them. Any claims that Novell helps GNU/Linux should be taken with a grain of salt because more than anything Novell is helping Microsoft and later today we will provide new examples. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Unlike Windows, Linux is a heavily networked OS where one needs internet connection to do things like application installation. This very factor is one of the greatest deterrents to the use of Linux here. How do you get people to use it when they have no reliable and affordable internet connection?
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Desktop
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Microsoft’s army of apologists like to spread the word that Linux is a “hobbyists OS”, so this post is a look at what that means and why it’s a label more suited to Windows. The attack is meant to draw attention to the fact that anyone can write code which appears in Linux, inferring the quality of the code is dubious. Basically, it can’t be good quality if people outside the corporation write it.
They try to paint the picture that while Windows just works, Linux needs a lot of tinkering to get anything done. It’s pitched at both home users and businesses. For the home user it’s about “you have to learn all this stuff, and spend hours fixing it” while the businesses get the “you have your staff PC’s down for X hours so they can’t be productive, while also spending extra wages on skilled IT people to fix and configure things.” The implication is that “Windows is a better investment in man hours, productivity and cost, Linux costs you money.”
How many man hours do you have to spend on Windows doing virus scans, spyware scans etc? How many man hours do you have to spend Googling to find how to remove infection because your chosen protection tools can detect it but can’t remove it? How can you assure your customers that their data is not compromised by some spyware your tools can’t detect? How can you be assured that the site supposedly giving a solution to a particular virus is not itself a phishing scam waiting to sell you some software if you put your credit card details in or a script laden site ready to dump a whole new payload of malware on your plate?
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I’ll let you decide, however next time you hear that Linux is “unproven” or a “hobbyist” OS with a 1% market share, remind the person that this unproven hobbyist OS was not only responsible for the rather profitable Avatar film, but also seems to be responsible for considerably more activity than a 1% market share would imply. Of course on top of that you have government bodies (which we have covered here) switching to Linux, but then as the Microsoft faithful would say, it’s merely a 1% share… 
Surprising then that on the majority of tech forums this 1% is always visible, they must be a very busy 1%.
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If you think Linux desktops are ugly, think again. Here is an awesome collection of 15 jaw dropping Linux desktop customizations made by users. I wouldn’t mind calling them works of art instead of just customizations. They are that good. A good number of them include clever conky modifications. I haven’t yet tried to emulate them in my desktop, but surely will, at least some of them. For now, just the screenshots and the source. Watch and enjoy!
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I’m no friend to Windows. I know the operating system too well to trust it. But, I did think that even though Windows is defective by design, you could keep it relatively safe by installing patches quickly and using anti-virus software religiously. I was wrong.
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The greater problem though is that, even if Microsoft and the anti-virus companies spent ten-times the money and time on securing Windows they still couldn’t do it. When your foundation is built on sand instead of rock, there’s only so much any amount of patching can do to keep a house solid.
No, if you really want a secure desktop you need either Linux or Mac OS X. Is either of these perfectly secure? No, no they’re not. But, they are much more secure than Windows can ever be.
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Our next entry for the “The $100.00 (USD) Coolest Linux Workspace Contest” was sent all the way from the Netherlands by a digital forensics student named Huseyin. He is also working as an intern at an IT-audit company and described Linux as the best OS to do research on. If ever chosen as the grand winner, he says he will use the $100 to buy another 1TB hard disk drive since the 3TB of HDDs that he already have are not enough –probably because of lots of legal evidences to store 
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Graphics Stack
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One of the common complaints that’s also come up as of late with NVIDIA’s latest Linux drivers have been issues surrounding PowerMizer not working correctly, which is hopefully one of the fixes that will work its way into NVIDIA’s Release 256 for Linux / OpenSolaris / FreeBSD.
In 2006 and 2007 there were security problems with the binary NVIDIA Linux driver and now there is apparently a new zero-day vulnerability within NVIDIA’s Linux stack, which we hope will be fixed by the NVIDIA 256.xx release.
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X.Org Server 1.9 is the key interest now among X developers working on the graphics and input stacks with its release coming as soon as August, but Peter Hutterer once again is taking over the role of maintaining the stable X.Org Server branch. With X.Org Server 1.7.7 being nearly out of the way, the first point release for X.Org Server 1.8 is being prepared for release.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Software guys are often accused of wanting to spend too much time polishing their beloved programs. I’m very guilty of that myself, and that’s doubly hard because of our work on Wine. While Wine is amazing, it’s not perfect, so there is a challenging balance in deciding that we’ve made enough progress to justify a release. Of course, if you let us software guys decide, we’ll take forever and never ship anything.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Scorched 3D is a modernization of the classic DOS game Scorched Earth. It’s a simple turn-based artillery game and a real-time strategy game in which players can counter each other’s weapons with creative accessories, shields, and tactics.
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Basilisk Games, Inc. today announced the release date for Eschalon: Book II for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
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Full-featured desktop Linux distributions like PCLinuxOS and Linux Mint are quite useful, but there are times when a smaller and lighter distro can also be desirable. CDlinux is petite mini-distro that can be installed on a USB device or on a Windows C: partition.
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Summary: A useful distro that provides a viable option for those in need of a portable version of Linux. The standard edition also works well as a rescue distro.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS 2010 Gnome theme is dark with black and grey colors throughout the boot menu, login, and desktop screens. I preferred the PCLinuxOS 2010 Gnome release over the KDE and other PCLinuxOS 2010 releases because of it’s difference in color. Although all quite different, the other editions did all stuck with the darker blue look. I like blue but ‘loved’ the darker colors on the Gnome edition.
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Fedora
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Ubuntu
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The desktop editions of Ubuntu will also be released on Thursday, sporting a new look (but not Gnome 3 — that will probably arrive with the Maverick Meerkat release six months down the line), new graphics card drivers and a number of consumer-oriented innovations. These include the MeMenu panel for easy access to messaging and social networking services, the new Gwibber microblogging client, and an online music store.
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In the netbook edition for 10.10, we’re going to have a single menu bar for all applications, in the panel.
Our focus on netbooks has driven much of the desktop design work at Canonical. There are a number of constraints and challenges that are particular to netbooks, and often constraints can be a source of insight and inspiration. In this case, wanting to make the most of vertical space has driven the decision to embrace the single menu approach.
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Canonical also announced that it has advanced several new hardware and software partnerships. The biggest news on the hardware side is that Dell will support the Ubuntu server and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud as an option on its cloud-server PowerEdge-C line.
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Appearance
Shiny! That’s how we define Ubuntu’s long hoped-for departure from the dusky brown, and it’s a good look too. In the past few years, all manners of people, those who use Ubuntu and even those who don’t, have expressed their views on the sometime dusty-sometime-dusky-always-brownish ‘Human’ theme. According to Mark Shuttleworth, we’re now in store for five more years of releases with this new theme, which has been christened ‘Light’.
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Canonical officials are emphasizing software vendor support in the release this week of upgrades to the company’s Ubuntu open source Linux platform.
The company will make available on Thursday desktop and server versions of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long-Term Support), which offers capabilities for cloud computing as well as consumer-oriented features. Version 10.04 will ship with hundreds of open source applications available at install.
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There are many Linux distributions out there in the world; some are free (as in beer), some are free (as in speech), some are commercial products (you pay $$$ for them), some are hybrids or combinations thereof. The point here being that there is no ONE Linux to rule them all. The Linux that rules them all is the one chosen by you to use as your primary operating system on your computer.
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First, the good news for Canonical: As a Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 10.04 seems to be generating confidence among potential software partners. From Adobe to VMware, Canonical says a lengthy list of software companies and application providers plan to support Ubuntu 10.04.
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Android
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android market suggestions1 220×216 Android Market (Unofficially) Eclipses 50,000 AppsAccording to reports, the Android Market has surpassed the 50,000 app mark, demonstrating the rapid growth of the Android operating system.
The updated total was highlighted by AndroLib, a third party app tracking website that reports there are a total of 50,031 approved binaries at the time of writing.
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When Android was being built, many only visualized it as a phone operating system: for a long time, phones were the only things you could find Android running on. Since then, we’ve seen kitchen appliances, cars, netbooks, tablets, robots – you name it, and Android has probably already seen it.
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In the Internet age, does software have value? Of course software is valuable in the sense that it provides service and is useful, but does software have monetary value?
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The first handset to use the Symbian operating system since it became open source has been announced by Nokia.
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Mozilla
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Late last month, a number of sites noted that a very early build of Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, was available to download for Android phones. However, that build wasn’t official as it was put together by an individual and optimized for the Droid device. Today, Mozilla has itself put out a pre-Alpha build of Fennec that should work at the very least on Droid and the Nexus One.
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Oracle
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What’s still troubling is that very little is coming out of Oracle in terms of what its plans are for OpenOffice.org itself. Updegrove’s primary concern is ODF, but I’m more interested in its primary working implementation. Dealing with Sun as the primary mover behind OO.org had its pros and cons, but at least you could get some kind of answers out of the company. Oracle is, so far, doling out very little information. I’ve tried to get comments out of a few former Sun folks at Oracle and very little is forthcoming. That doesn’t seem to bode particularly well for OpenOffice.org.
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BSD
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Version 5.5/5.5p1 of open source SSH (Secure Shell) implementation OpenSSH is primarily a bug fix version and improves logging of authentication using client certificates. The source code should now compile on platforms which do not support the dlopen function for loading dynamic libraries.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Bradley and Karen discuss whether or not proprietary software is “evil”, mention the new documentary film about patents, and discuss briefly new non-profit filing requirements.
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According to the rationale, the Cross of Merit was awarded for my work for Free Software and Open Standards, starting from my being speaker of the GNU Project, including my very first speech, my work on the Brave GNU World, over driving the creation of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), to the work done around the Open Document Format (ODF) and the work for Open Standards in general with a variety of hats. The initial proposal originated in the Foreign Ministry from what I heard, which has been a champion for Free Software and Open Standards, especially the Open Document Format (ODF) for years, resulting in one of the most efficient and strategically sound IT environments of all German ministries.
So this is the most important message: By awarding this Cross of Merit, the Federal Republic of Germany recognises the importance of both Free Software and Open Standards. After Matthias Ettrich was already awarded the Medal of Merit in November 2009 for his work on KDE, this sends another strong message of support for Free Software and Open Standards and for the importance of the work carried forward by associations such as the Free Software Foundation Europe. This work, by the way, is an ongoing process, and it needs your support. So if you can, please join the Fellowship right now.
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Licensing
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Good developers these days don’t write code from scratch. Good developers know where to get code and combine it with their own value-add to get the functionality.
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Open Access/Content
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The goal of the Share Exchange is to aggregate sharing tools in a central, persistent place in the community to catalyze a green local economy. If the successes of coworking and The Hub social enterprise community centers are any guide, the Share Exchange may be onto to something. The lesson of The Hub is that grounding a movement in a shared physical place adds tremendous value.
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The World Bank announced this week a new open data initiative, which provides free and open access to the Bank’s health and development data, including 2,000 social, economic, financial, institutional, and environmental indicators. The World Development Indicators, the Bank’s most popular statistical resource, consist of over 900 indicators for 200 countries alone, including many that go back to 1960. The Bank has also opened up access to the Global Development Finance, Africa Development Indicators, Global Economic Monitor, and indicators from the Doing Business Report.
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About 1,800 courses, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are indexed on OCW Search for starters, says the operator, Pierre Far. Polling on the Web site, which went online this week, will determine what courses to add next; those at Stanford University are in the lead, and Mr. Far plans to add them in the next few days.
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The IT industry’s US lobby group has released a report calculating the size of the “fair use economy” in the US — all the businesses that rely on fair use, including web hosting companies, private schools, search engines and many others. The total for 2007 (the last year for which stats are available) is a whopping $4.7 trillion — one sixth of US GDP — with over 17 million people employed.
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The Conservatives have promised to extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act within weeks of the general election.
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Standards/Consortia
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I’d not originally intended to respond to open trolling. The continued urging of many individuals has convinced me it’s important to rebut in some public form. Earnest falsehoods left unchallenged risk being accepted as fact.
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Messina added that he’s “looking forward to what efforts like OpenLike might do to tip back the scales, and bring the potential and value of such simple and meaningful interactions to other social identity providers across the web.” Indeed, that’s something we should all have an interest in.
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Science
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Now a diverse group of leading scientists has unveiled an extraordinary plan to meet these challenges through a project inspired by historic enterprises such as the Apollo Project. Their ambitious proposal aims to stimulate an urgent scientific effort of unprecedented scope focused on building a more powerful and accurate science of human systems and their interaction with the global environment. Their efforts will exploit the revolutionary scientific potential of modern computational, communication, and information technologies, backed up by theoretical analysis.
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Global System Dynamics and Policy: Another aspect of the project will necessarily focus on the difficult issue of how information coming out of the crisis observatories or other data-intensive centres for social science can be made most helpful to decision makers.
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Security/Aggression
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The war on terror has been used by the UK Government as a battering ram to the rights of the citizens of this country. New laws have been passed, including two new terrorism acts (2000 and 2006), which have restricted free speech and the rights of demonstrators to protest, given the police new powers of stop and search, and let’s not forget the 28 days detention and control orders.
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Television dramas that rely on forensic science to solve crimes are affecting the administration of justice
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Alan Johnson has just sung out a press conference in praise of CCTV – even wheeling out a poor women who was attacked and whose attacker was caught on camera.
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Finance
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Stocks have bounced back in early trading this morning, recovering some of the losses incurred in yesterday’s sell-off, as trader expect good news from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke this afternoon and pressure builds on Germany to back a Greek bailout.
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The man on the hot seat is Fabrice Tourre, the 31-year-old Goldman vice president who is the only individual civilly charged in the case, and his silence about IKB, a German bank that lost $150 million in the collateralized debt obligation Tourre structured, is deafening. It indicates the main vulnerability for Goldman from the SEC’s suit.
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Newly disclosed Goldman Sachs Group Inc. internal e-mails cast light on how the investment bank devised collateralized debt obligations called Abacus, including one at the center of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission fraud lawsuit.
The e-mails show employees discussed which outside firms would be “easiest” to work with while creating Abacus CDOs to bet against the housing market.
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Goldman Sachs (GS.N) executives on Tuesday faced the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to answer questions on the business practices of the investment bank, which is also battling a fraud suit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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When Jackson first challenged the Second Bank, many people thought his concerns about the bank’s powers were excessive. But then Biddle started to fight back, spending money freely to buy congressional affection (and even leading orators) and attempting to contract credit in order to demonstrate that Jackson was hurting America.
At that point, people understood that Jackson was essentially right. The Second Bank had become so powerful that it could challenge elected executive authority and, if Biddle won, the consequences for democracy would be dire.
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Thomas Montag, the former head of sales and trading in the Americas at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., called a set of mortgage-linked investments sold by his firm “one shi**y deal,” according to an excerpt from internal e-mails released by Senate lawmakers.
The transaction was Timberwolf Ltd., a $1 billion collateralized debt obligation holding pieces of other CDOs, according to a statement from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The CDO also included optimistic side-bets on the performance of CDOs, derivatives in which the firm took the opposite pessimistic side in “many” cases, the panel said.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which for years saw no need to play a traditional Washington lobbying game, is deploying former lawmakers and crisis specialists as it tries to tamp down the political firestorm threatening its well- honed brand.
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A lawyer reportedly helping Goldman Sachs executives prepare for a Senate hearing today revealed his usual strategy for congressional hearings in an interview last year.
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The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels. It doesn’t count people who are “involuntary part-time workers,” meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn’t count “discouraged workers,” meaning long-term unemployed people who lost hope and don’t consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure. For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were “officially” labeled “discouraged workers.” So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off.
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The unemployment rate peak in 2009 is likely, but not certain.
In the early ’80s, real house prices declined until the unemployment rate peaked, and then increased sluggishly for a few years. Following the late 1980s housing bubble, real house prices declined for several years after the unemployment rate peaked.
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Fresh off a confrontation with Goldman Sachs executives, Democrats are mounting another effort to police the freewheeling Wall Street ways that they say helped bring on the worst recession since the Great Depression.
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Leave it to Sarah Palin to come up with the solution. This is from a post on her Facebook page. I advise everyone to read it, since it’s a highly amusing piece of propaganda…
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The costs of solving the federal deficit problem are more than many people want to pay – higher taxes on a wide swath of Americans and cuts in benefit programs that reach into millions of homes.
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President Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, was interviewed on PBS late last week about the state of play on financial reform. In an odd, shifty-eyed discussion, Summers admits “mistakes were made,” but none by him.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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LIB Dem plans to scrap ID cards would cost jobs in Durham, the Home Secretary claimed yesterday.
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Liu Xiaoyuan’s blog recently described two instances of citizens kneeling before officials, asking for change. The first was “a woman who kneeled before the Municipal Party Committee Secretary of Nanping, Fujian, to communicate a grievance.” The result was that she was “taken into administrative detention.”
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Why is Google collecting this data?
The data which we collect is used to improve Google’s location based services, as well as services provided by the Google Geo Location API. For example, users of Google Maps for Mobile can turn on “My Location” to identify their approximate location based on cell towers and WiFi access points which are visible to their device. Similarly, users of sites like Twitter can use location based services to add a geo location to give greater context to their messages.
Can this data be used by third parties?
Yes–but the only data which Google discloses to third parties through our Geo Location API is a triangulated geo code, which is an approximate location of the user’s device derived from all location data known about that point. At no point does Google publicly disclose MAC addresses from its database (in contrast with some other providers in Germany and elsewhere).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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We’ve pointed out this kind of “cargo cult copying” in the past as well. Copying is not nearly as “easy” as some make it out to be, because those doing the “copying” often are only copying the superficial aspects, without recognizing the underlying reasons why something works. It’s why IBM failed at copying Microsoft years ago. It’s why Microsoft failed at copying Google. They tried to directly imitate on the surface, rather than understanding the underlying aspects of what’s happening.
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Unstructured P2P systems are not only capable of delivering this kind of volume, they have been doing so for over a decade, often under the radar of the established companies, which only sit up and notice when some of their stuff starts being shared across them.
In a way, the fact that this could be overlooked is a neat summary of what’s going on here: the changes Shirky describes have already happened, but not everyone has noticed.
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Copyrights
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Why the clandestine approach on the Council side? Why don’t they reference the correct dossier name and procedure? I assume you may find the answer in the delicate substance of the proposal. I remember I met an economist in Parliament who tried to get the results of his research to the attention of MEPs, and basically saw the dossier as a great scam.
The dossier became widely known informally as the “Cliff Richard pension fund” because it was promoted by aging UK rock musicians, a kind of special gift to the music industry by the outgoing Commissioner. I haven’t monitored the dossier any further. In any case, outrageous policy making.
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If you’ve read one of my books, thanks. I write them to be read, so without you, it would be a pointless exercise.
I’m asking a favor: Would you give your copy (or lend, I’m fine either way) of Linchpin away?
Go find someone you care about, hand them the book and insist they read it. I’d consider that a gift of the first order, and I hope they will too.
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WIPO
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It is traditional within WIPO to form negotiating groups, usually along geographic lines but also on basis of a common position. There has also long been a cross-regional group of developed nations – the so-called “Group B” – in which developed countries holding most of the world’s IP rights negotiates as a bloc.
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As mentioned already, Creative Commons strongly supports the work of this Committee. We are encouraged in particular by the work in Technology Transfer and in studying the public domain, and also welcome the work of the SCCR in “Limitations and Exceptions for Educational Activities”. We would like to point out that CC is creating a prototype tool for marking and tagging public domain works, which we expect to have that out by mid Summer 2010. Any work on tools to facilitate the ID of and access to PD content must interoperate and have buy-in from all stakeholders who possess information about and can facilitate the marking of such content.
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RLSLOG, one of the world’s most popular release news sites, has been pulled offline by its German hosting company following a takedown request from Universal Music. The site, which has never hosted any copyrighted material on its servers, is currently looking for a new home outside Germany.
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ACTA
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This is pretty funny. After working really hard to keep ACTA negotiations a secret (even ridiculously claiming it was a national security issue), the USTR finally was pressured into release the draft text which showed, in fact, that the online leaks were exactly correct. Yet, the USTR is sticking to its earlier talking point that all the concern about ACTA in the online community was due to “misrepresentation” and “misinformation.”
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Digital Economy Bill
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Last week, it was reported that Nick Clegg had suggested that if the Liberal Democrats win the election they will repeal the digital economy bill.
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Great news from the BPI: Despite the UK economy having been in recession last year, the UK music industry saw an increase in sales. In money terms:
A strong fourth quarter and increased digital income streams offset the reduced sales of physical formats as the UK recorded music market reported a modest 1.4% annual increase in total trade income for 2009 of £928.8m, BPI’s annual survey of industry income revealed today.
Brilliant news, eh? Champagne all round, barkeep and…
Oh, hang on: if digital sales are growing so strongly, then that kind-of makes the arguments that without supertight new copyright laws, the music industry will vanish look like a bit of a fib. Quick, everyone, turn those grins upside-down…
NASA Connect – PW – Meteorology (1/10/1998)
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