Wild Webmink

• U.S. Says Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patenting
  Welcome and surprising intervention by the US government saying that natural things like genes should not be patentable. Expecting a huge backlash from the biotech industry who will make no attempt to argue the moral case but will scream about unfair loss of earnings (even though the earnings themselves are unfairly gained).
• A Is For Accident by The Dresden Dolls
  I don’t know how long it will be this way (probably not long) but a fan favour this album is available as a digital download for any price you name (including zero). I’d be interested to see the statistics of how many pay what.

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• Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted

  Very smart move (also covered at GigaOm) – Microsoft are trying to lead the race to the bottom with HTML 5, presumably in the hope of killing Adobe, rather than cascading money faster and faster into Silverlight in an attempt to fight the old way. They only place Silverlight is still strategic is on mobile, and honestly they probably realise HTML 5 is the future there too.

  This suggests Microsoft are finally awakening to the power of community. Instead of trying to fight their competitors alone, they are teaming up with open standards – and increasingly open source – to achieve that effect. You can tell where they think they are strong – those are the places they are still fighting with communities and consequently about to lose their lead… [See ComputerWorldUK for an expanded commentary]

• US Invasive Intimate Pat-Down Checks On Travellers Would Fail Research Ethics Review

  “I did not observe anything that would approach informed consent. Put another way: if I proposed this as a university research study, IRB would reject the design.”

  Is the whole point here to see just how far people can be pushed? Or is it really the case that America’s legislators cannot see the challenge to the county’s core values posed by these Constitutionally-challenged measures. Over here in Europe the tolerance threshold seems to be about reached, but nothing of the kind seems to be happening in the US. Why is that?

• Into the sunset : The data charmer
  The diaspora continues as Giuseppe Maxia, all-round good guy of MySQL, leaves Oracle.

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• Symbian: A Lesson on the Wrong Way to Use Open Source
  Matt Asay correctly observes that this corporate attempt to use open source was ill conceived and doomed to failure. It was obvious to me right from the moment I heard the strategy (from a head-hunter trying to recruit me about 6 months before launch) that it was going to crater unless there was a serious focus on developers in general and open source developers in particular. 

  I responded to the headhunter that they needed two leaders; one to wrangle the sponsors, the other to wow the developers. They hired the former and ignored the latter, and the rest is history. It’s hard to see how the situation could possibly be redeemed now, and honestly it’s looked doomed for a long time.

  The key lesson we should all take to heart is that creating a Foundation solves nothing on its own. All it does is facilitate and crystallise other solutions to systemic problems. If the other problems are ignored and left unsolved, all creating a Foundation does is accelerate failure.  [See ComputerWorldUK for an expanded commentary]

• A month of LibreOffice

  “LibreOffice is here to stay; as a project, and as a software. After our two betas we are expecting a code freeze by tomorrow or so, and we already have included lots of patches and fixes that will make LibreOffice already different from what you would have expected: a themed OpenOffice.org . More changes will be visible soon.”

  Great to see the energy that has been unleashed by removing the barriers to participation. Let’s hope it can be sustained, and especially that parallel innovation can happen too. What’s really needed here is “FireGull” – the equivalent of the process that led to Mozilla’s old browser being replaced by Firefox, through reimplementation in a new project.

Also…

• Oracle Claims Google Copied Java Code – Not So Fast, Though
  I’m pleased that Oracle has updated their claims to actually include some meat, but the analysis from the first few people to dig into it doesn’t seem to yield a compelling case.
• Oracle Responds to JCP Concerns
  Exactly the sort of public statement that needs making, bravo. Let’s hope there is a whole lot more of this and it stops being necessary for the community to yell before there’s explanation or (even better) dialogue. [See ComputerWorldUK for an expanded commentary]
• ZFS v28 is ready for wider testing.
  The BSD community is pressing on with ZFS despite the closure of OpenSolaris. Hopefully they will upstream to Illumos so everyone wins.
• 2010 Open Source Award Recipients
  Open Source for America makes it’s first awards. Especially delighted to see Brian Behlendorf and Ean Schuessler recognised, both are awesome dudes (and I say that advisedly).

And finally…

• Vatican to rich countries: stop “excessive zeal” for IP rights

  “A recent encyclical by Pope Benedict, one that speaks at length about the Catholic approach to development, is deeply concerned with economic inequality. In Benedict’s view, strong IP rights can be part of such inequality. “On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care,” he notes.”

  For once a papal conclusion I agree with. Hopefully the Pope will also make a stand against ACTA…

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• Tantric TSA: The art of foreplay

  “I wondered what government official in what dark alley dreamed up this groping to protect the public?”

  At some point our elected representatives will get a clue and say on our behalf that it’s time for the security theatre to end and for the spiralling abuse of ordinary people has become a barrier to the freedom to travel. Sadly that time hasn’t come yet and we’ll continue to hear how arbitrary jobsworth-quality privacy invasion without reasonable cause is “for our own safety”.

• www.opensourcesymposium.com

  I’ve confirmed that I will speaking at this event in Rotterdam on November 11th – if you attend, be sure to say hello!

• A modest proposal re. Unity
  Dave Neary’s compromise proposal. Given it requires Canonical to give up copyright aggregation on code they clearly want to control at all costs, I doubt it will fly, but it’s interesting to see someone making a proposal instead of delivering spin.

[Apologies for multiple copies of this being published – looks like some issue over at del.icio.us that’s affecting their auto-post facility. The wretched thing has been posting roughly every ten minutes since lunchtime, and I’ve so far had no response from Yahoo to help fix it]

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Thursday Links

• LibreOffice Contributions stats
  It’s early days, but it seems liberating the OpenOffice.org community from the contributor agreement and excessive vetting has helped more than sixty (yes, 60) people decide to try their hand at co-development on LibreOffice. This rare experiment seems to show that an open-by-rule community really does encourage participation. The big lesson for Project Harmony is that there are very real – and significant – disadvantages to demanding a contributor agreement as a precondition of participation.
• Ubuntu to move to Unity as default desktop for 11.04
  While I have no problem at all with Canonical innovating, I fear that part of their motivation in developing in isolation from the GNOME community is becuase otherwise they would be unable to maintain ownership of the resulting code – presumably this is one of the drivers for them initiating Project Harmony. So I’m interested in Dave’s analysis that suggests they may have failed to learn the lessons of history from other before them who have tried the same thing.
• PGDay Europe 2010 schedule announced
  I’m delighted and honoured to have been invited to deliver a keynote for European PostgreSQL developers at PGDay Europe 2010 in Stuttgart on December 6th. I’d love to see you there.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Open (Source) Data

• Building an Online Reputation, One Angry Customer at a Time
  Really excellent advice here on how to handle customer engagement. As one of the comments says this is a typical profile – both of attitude and skill – for a community manager, and that’s a job that is undervalued by some and in hot demand by others. I’ve used B&H off and on for many years, both in their quirky New York store and online, and every time has been a good thing. 

  On a related note, if you are a community manager looking for a job, send me an e-mail with your background explaining why – I have a small list of people hunting for the perfect person to hire.

• iPhone Jailbreak Tool Sets Stage for Mobile Malware
  This illustrates the wider truth that it’s impossible to regulate what’s illegal. The big weakness of dictatorial platform control – setting aside it’s abhorrent disregard of customer freedoms – is that it encourages an ecosystem to evolve beyond the influence of the platform owner. While Apple can deal with malware that sneaks into the AppStore (and it inevitably will), a philosophy that opposes uncontrolled software encourages dependence on software that has to stay underground to survive, with the consequent risk of it being exploited for evil as well as for innovation. 

  We saw it in the Prohibition, we can see it in the ridiculous “war on drugs” and we’ll see it anywhere people assume “technical measures” can comprehensively succeed. Apple may tar it with a black brush but ultimately it’s a demon they invoked themselves.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Reputation and Regulation

• Wind of Change
  Florian Effenburger steps down as OpenOffice.org marketing project lead. He has always been the model of leadership in that role, patient, tolerant and firm when necessary, and I am sure he will be missed. His replacement Peter Junge is from Red Flag 2000, a Sun/Oracle partner in China developing the Red Office distribution of OpenOffice.org, and used to work in Sun’s Hamburg team on StarOffice.
• Debt collectors may join antipiracy fight
  Just when you thought the abuse of customers and prospective customers of media products couldn’t get worse, this proposal for debt collectors to be deployed to collect money with menaces before any legal judgement is obtained comes along. Where are our legislators? Are they ignorant of the abuse, misinformed or corrupt? I can’t see a fourth explanation.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ More Change