So, I’m back.
Back for 6 weeks already, in fact – how time flies – having spent an incredible summer with the family.  I reflected on my own situation when I read this in the Guardian, Forget the balance, this is the merge, a slightly depressing article for a number of reasons: firstly its conclusions (there is no balance), but also its assumption that only mothers need to consider time with their children (to the Swedish resident, it’s clear that fathers and children need to prioritise time together just as much).  Equally, those without children need their balance just as much, in order to grow as people.

Anyway, having spent several weeks largely away from screens (email, IRC… especially email), I felt refreshed.  And I had to consider this when reading the miserable story of a wretch from Lancashire who was “trolling” the family of abducted, presumed murdered, schoolgirl April Jones.

How does someone sink so low?  Well, people have always told sick jokes.  Not everyone – certainly I’ve always been too squeamish – but many do.  I tend to smile wanly, perhaps groan, to show I’m not amused but nor have I taken offense.  After all, once chooses to take offense, doesn’t one?

No.  Not always.  Not entirely.  Not when your daughter is missing, presumed murdered.  You’d have to be absurdly tranquil not to take offense.

Those of us in the Internet industry talk of “disintermediation” as the malaise afflicting network operators, excluded from being able to offer differentiated value-add to their users.  But the Internet disintermediates people too.  One only has to read a comments thread on -and I’m going out on a limb here- just about any online forum to find deeply uncivil exchanges.  People seem to delight in attacking each other online, and in hurting each others’ feelings.  There is almost a sense of liberation for so-called trolls: this piece, “Meeting a troll…” is very instructive.  The false sense of anonymity the Internet conveys allows people with limited imagination and empathy do very unpleasant things.  I pity the person who behaved so vilely towards the family of April Jones: he isn’t a fully-formed person, or at least, is capable of behaving like he isn’t one.  I’m sure he’s no parent himself.  I’m equally sure he wouldn’t behave like that in the company of that poor family.

But then, this isn’t just an Internet phenomenon.  In the mid 1990s, the term “road-rage” was coined, describing how recklessly and aggressively people could behave in situations of stressful traffic.  I’ve been a passenger in cars where the driver has “retaliated” for a perceived slight.  I may even have quietly cursed under my breath at being cut up myself.  Where does this come from?  I’m sure studies have been done, but my jaded perspective identifies three causes: busier roads seems fairly obvious; a self-righteous egotism or sense of entitlement (think Gordon Gecko); and the simple fact of being in your own isolated environment.  Or, as Gary Numan put it:

Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It’s the only way to live.

Now, the clever souls at Wieden+Kennedy think that Facebook  is like a chair.  And the rest of the Internet cannot wait to tell us what other things Facebook is like.

Well, let me make my contribution:

Those of us in the industry need to pay attention to the harmful effects, the lack of humanity, that existence behind a screen can give rise to.

The study of industrial economics is, what, 235 years old?  And it was only about 220 years old when I struggled through a joint honours programme.  There I was exposed to the eloquence of (inter alia) Dr Quentin Outram.  I recall his delight in exploring theory A and critique B before tossing both on the bonfire, with contemporary thought C, as he said with a chuckle, “in what we laughingly call the real world”.  His subtext (or what I understood it to be) was that our attempts to explain reality will always be doomed to revision, that there will always be a reality yet more real that the one we’re currently dealing with, just like in Inception The Truman Show The Matrix Fight Club.

So…is anyone actually using Google+ (at least, for what Google hope you’ll use it for?).  Facebook perhaps wasn’t a great original invention, but it generated what you might call “critical mass” and has quickly evolved into a platform.  Google+ seems to think it has identified the fatal flaw with Facebook: that one’s friends are not homogenous group but rather, several smaller circles.  Paul Adams of Google had demonstrated as much over a year ago. We have circles of friends.  That’s wisdom so great that it verges on common sense.

I read with interest the complaints of Violet Blue (if that is her real name) about Google+’s “drama”.  Google is, after all, desperate to get this right.  And they believe that they are fixing the fundamental flaw of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter et al.

Google+ will

make connecting with people on the web more like connecting with them in the real world.

Except it won’t.  It may yet be successful.  Google may yet bring to bear the massive quantities of information they have and gather up Facebook’s users, but let’s not pretend Google+ or Facebook or anything else are like connecting “in the real world” was, or is.  Facebook caters to (amongst other things) exhibitionism.  It’s partly popular because exhibitionism is easier in Facebook than it is in the real world.  And it keeps friendships alive that would not survive, or simply were not possible in the real world.

As for circles of friend – yes, they certainly do exist.  But “circles” is the wrong name for them, as they aren’t circles, at least, not from the perspective of the person who is at the centre of them.  They’re irregular, they overlap and you are not equidistant from all points.  Who has not, at some point, had a “best friend”?

Just as social media is changing friendships, so is the nature of friendship informing how social media works.  But after nearly two and a half centuries of the dismal science, events of the past two years tell us that we retain a great ability to wholly ignorant of how we “really” work.

Alina gives her personal perspective on the Document Foundation.

Tristan notes the courage involved.

[updated following Mo’s comment]

Just five years after an even that sparked a global celebration, and one that I was proud to be a part of, the dream appears to be over.  And what promised to be the start of a new era, if not of dominance, at least of a renewed competitiveness, proved to be a chimera.  Yes, just five short years after Liverpool won the Champions League in Istanbul, the club’s constrained ambitions were fully revealed by the signing of the distinctly limited left-back Paul Konchesky.  Oh, and Oracle confirmed that the OpenSolaris project, launched in 2005, is effectively dead.

Adam Leventhal offers a rather interesting perspective on OpenSolaris, and it’s a perspective I share much – but not all – of.  But to understand how the project could make so much sense for Sun and so little for Oracle, I think it’s necessary to understand the mentality at Sun.   Specifically, the dot-com boom was a success from which Sun never truly recovered.  The company grew far more rapidly than seemed advisable, quality and culture the obvious victims.  And the aftermath of the dot-com boom, and the emergence of Linux and horizontal scaling, placed Sun in a very obvious bind.  Sun’s previously unassailable technological advantages were being attacked by that most dangerous of competitors, a commodity market.  Nothing stung (nor stuck) more than the label Merrill Lynch pinned on Sun in 2003, that is was in danger of becoming “irrelevant”.

The response, initially ungracious, turned to one of acceptance, respect and accommodation for what appeared to be a cyclical phenomenon.  Greg Papadoloulos, Sun’s CTO summed up the world view, as “Red Shift” (a term which refers to the property of light from astral bodies that are moving away from the viewer).  The idea was that the technology market was always subject to commoditisation,  a sort of Moore’s Law writ large: processors, storage, software – all would be subject to lower and lower prices (and it is staggering when you consider what 1GB of storage cost 10 years ago and what it costs today).  Sun’s strategy, then, was to look for the “red shift” segment – the segment of the market that want more than commoditisation will offer, that want to stay “ahead of the curve”, for whom technology is a prime competitive weapon, and a centre for investment.  This is actually a throw-back to the dot-com era: Sun was still hoping to capture the startups, and if Sun had capitalised on the the first boom, it had missed out badly on “Web 2.0”.

Sun aspired to be central to the next network-inspired boom, and it was understood that to do that, you had to be promiscuous, available, familiar, and easy-to-acquire.  Hence open source, and hence OpenSolaris, and hence creating an OpenSolaris distribution (rather than just offer the source).

The OpenSolaris distribution, project Indiana, was controversial for its two reasons – firstly, it exposed the fact that Sun retained the trademark “OpenSolaris” and could and would use it to further its strategy.  How serious was this?  Even if you felt that OpenSolaris did need a binary distribution, it was deeply divisive.  For example, it caused the esteemed and founding OpenSolaris Governance Board member Roy Fielding to resign from the project, commenting “this well is poisoned“.  This controversy also partially hid the second issue (something that Adam identifies, and which in truth predated project Indiana), that a lot of OpenSolaris development was aimed at making something usable on the desktop, rather than an enterprise-class operating system.

The question that was constantly aimed at Jonathan Schwartz and other Sun executives (and is one I still get, working as I still am, for an open source project), is “how do you make money?”.  Sun was always somewhat evasive on this point – but essentially Sun would continue to make money from servicing its enterprise customers and defend that business, while strategy was geared up to become a ubiquitous – i.e. highly relevant – vendor once more.

What does Oracle care of this? Not a great deal.  For all their red-blooded tough-guy image, Oracle are as much farmers as they are hunters, and they understand that it is much easier to rertain customers than to acquire them.  What does Oracle care for the red shift?  By definition, it’s a sector that doesn’t have much money, unlike Sun’s traditional customer base.

When Merrill Lynch called Sun “irrelevant”, it also went on to say that it expected Sun would “eventually be acquired for its installed base“.  That is debatable, because by the time Sun was acquired by Oracle, it was a veritable smörgåsbord of technologies that would have interested Oracle, including Java and MySQL.  But still, it’s an interesting lens to view the acquisition through.  Oracle cares much more about delivering an enterprise-class operating system than it does about providing useful and accessible technology for developers.

So, farewell OpenSolaris?  As the project is currently constituted, it seems so.  But happily, there is a community around the code, a community that has grown and diversified and is now genuinely independent.  The one aspect of the project that was most roundly criticised in 2005, the CDDL, would appear to be one of the things that has most guaranteed the longevity of the community post-Sun.  Participants in the Illumos community appear (to my non-lawyerly mind) to be safeguarded  from any claims from Oracle, at least for the code released under the CDDL.  Oracle’s aggression towards Google over Android is not a great concern for Illumos.

And what of Liverpool’s back four?  Well, with the arrival on Konchesy and Raul Meireles we might suppose that Roy Hodgson intends to play a 4-2-3-1 (pioneered by Benitez in Liverpool’s 2007 defeat by AC Milan, unless you know better, and almost universally adopted at the 2010 world cup).  What’s more, Liverpool have retained their crown jewels in Gerard and Torres, and we know that 4-2-3-1 is system they both shine in.  The future for OpenSolaris and Liverpool could be so much worse.

Suddenly, everyone is in the serendipity business.  Facebook Places promises “serendipitous meet ups between users”.  StumbledUpon reckons it will bring “serendipitous discovery” to iPhone users, and no less an authority on happy coincidences than Google’s CEO is talking about calculating and producing serendipity electronically.   Well, after the last few weeks, my faith in the future of the Internet is genuinely shaken.  Like many people, I am still trying to understand what the very real prospect of the end of net neutrality might mean.

I am from Liverpool, and therefore immediately associated with either football or the Beatles.  I take great pleasure in both.  The Liverpool of the late 1950s that gave birth to the Beatles was a famously fertile ground for music, and especially rock’n’roll (known as “Merseybeat”).  There are a few possible explanations for this, but the most plausible is that the ships arriving from the US (Liverpool was the main transatlantic seaport) brought with them the rock’n’roll and blues records that were in the charts in the States.

It’s worth reflecting that these would have been “grey” imports, exchanged outside of commercial framework the copyright holders would have imagined for themselves, and facilitated by a global communications infrastructure that was barely aware of transporting them. This is how the teenaged Lennon and McCartney discovered their destinies.

The Internet offers possibilities for similar cultural and intellectual cross-pollination, only on a scale previously unimagined.  But wouldn’t an Internet operated for the highest bidder be an Internet that exists almost entirely for the transmission of more and more intimate advertising?  You don’t have to subscribe to the worldview of Ms Naomi Klein to consider this bleak.  I’d recommend reading (for those who have not), The Affluent Society, -also a product of the late 50s- when considering just how felicitous these circumstances might be.

That’s why I believe in the importance of neutrality.  I don’t think that neutrality need be cast as a left-versus-right, regulate-or-deregulate discussion and I am saddened when I read it characterised as such.  I firmly agree with the Mozilla manifesto. The Internet is integral to modern life; the Internet is a global public resource.  Its capacity to facilitate disruption has been a phenomenal engine of economic and (in some or other sense) cultural growth, granting us that great curse of “exciting times”.  There would be nothing serendipitous about an early demise to this.

-and with words like that, who wouldn’t want to join the Linux community? Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier is still bashing the OpenSolaris project. I truly believe that some competition between open source operating systems is a good thing, and I am amazed that this is a controversial opinion with some.

Apple reels as Steve Jobs Flashturbates • The Register

Great headline, interesting article on what the author sees as Apple’s damaging (to them, to the web) hubris.

• Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days?
  Not often that I find I warm to Eric Raymond’s writing, but this was a sane and helpful analysis of IBM’s apparent declaration of an end to 5 years of patent peace.
  (tags: IBM softwarepatents)
• Microsoft roasted for Office 2010 standards FAIL • The Register
  Alex Brown, who presided over the ISO vote in April 2008 that ratified the spec as ISO convener of the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting, accused Microsoft of acting in bad faith for implementing a “transitional” variant of the OOXML spec and not the strict version in Office 2010.

  The transitional version is based on a copy of the spec rejected during a vote of ISO members in 2007. The spec was re-drafted before it was accepted in 2008.

  “If Microsoft ships Office 2010 to handle only the Transitional variant of ISO/IEC 29500 they should expect to be roundly condemned for breaking faith with the International Standards community. This is not the format ‘approved by ISO/IEC’, it is the format that was rejected,” Brown wrote.

  (tags: microsoft standards odf ooxml)

On November 9th the Mobile team announced the Mobile Add-On Challenge, and I gather that they are delighted with the interest shown in the contest so far.  They will be awarding prizes of Nokia N900s (nice) to the 10 best entries, and you still have three weeks to submit your add-on.

However, I have received a questions about the rules of eligibility for the contest.  We are really sorry that there are certain regions and countries where the contest is not available.  I wanted to make it absolutely clear with this post that this is a legal restriction imposed on Mozilla that relates to running such contests – not to code, and these laws are no barrier to participation in the rest of the Mozilla project.

For all that we are very sorry that there are members of the Mozilla community who are not able to take part in this Mobile Add-On Challenge.  Like all open source projects, Mozilla is founded on participation and we believe that people should be able to participate wherever they are.

It’s a shame to write about something with the sole intent of being critical, so let us first say that Benjamin Black’s commentary about the GPL in the context of cloud computing is of its time.  That is, as the web starts to fulfill its promise of delivering more and more computing, the importance of Free software might appear diminished.  Tim O’Reilly, for one, has been forecasting this for several years already, and the AGPL was written with this in mind.  (Incidentally, fans of plain speaking might note that Greg Papadopulos has pioneered a new term for cloud computing: “the network”.)

Rather than make things even more complicated than they are, let’s be clear.  Free software is about your rights in relation to a device that you own (iPhone owners: Apple controls your property).  When we consider the increasing intimacy of technology in our everyday lives, work and social  interactions, the importance of this becomes more and more apparent.  You may want a vendor to control what your device does, but you should at least have the right to opt out.  And this also explains why many people feel that the publc sector should have a proclivity mandate to use Free software.  It starts to seem unreasonable that a government body, paid for by and representing the public, should allow its infrastructure to be controlled by a commercial interest.

But cloud computing is the use of someone else’s infrastructure.  And so, Mr Black is entirely correct in saying that rules around, for example, data portability, are very important and not yet well-defined.

Now, none of this invalidates the importance of a strong copyleft like the GPL, and it certainly does not mean it acts unfairly.  Mr Black talks about “those who control a software project” deciding who “gets paid”.  In this model, the dual-licensing model (licensing software either as open source or with a commercial license), is the only way to “get paid”.

Leaving that dubious assumption aside, where does control come from? Control of a project is a function of its ownership of the copyright and the trademark of the software.  Control over copyright is gained by creating the work, paying for its creation, or by paying for the rights or by receiving those rights as a contribution.   By no means all GPL projects conform to this consolidated ownership, and those that do may be under the control of a commercial body or they may be held in trust elsewhere.  I believe that the Free Software Foundation Europe offered this service a while ago.  (And as an aside, I am delighted to read that some people welcome Sun’s policy of dual-copyright ownership.  This was a labour of love for me and others to get the several hundred open source project at Sun to use the same contributor agreement).

So, when Mr Black is complaining that the GPL is “like DRM”, he is referring to projects which, in order for you to contribute back to the code base that will bear the trademark by which the project is widely known, require that you assign some measure of copyright ownership back to the original owner (or proxy owner) of that code base.   It really, really, really is not like DRM.

Enough of this navel-gazing.  Let’s simplify these problems:

The rights of the user in relation to their own property are reflected in Free software.

The rights of the developer in relation to a project they participate in are reflected in open source. (Some people consider that the use of trademarks are an important, under-investigated are of this – I am one of them).

The rights of the user in relation to using someone else’s infrastructure are not yet governed by any widely understood framework.  The Open Cloud Manifesto is the first attempt (I am aware of) to address this.  It will take time.  That neither the Free software movement nor the open source movement address this is no criticism of either.

More to the point: exercising ownership rights which do not curtail anyone else’s freedom in relation to that work (c.f. DRM), but may impair their ability to make money on a piece of work you own is not, really, really not, wrong.