With this notice, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Office of the President, requests input from the community regarding enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by Federal science and technology agencies. This RFI will be active from December 10, 2009 to January 7, 2010.
But bringing Google Chrome to Linux wasn’t just a straight port — it was a labor of love. Google Chrome works well with both Gnome and KDE, and is updated via the normal system package manager.
The two new System z configurations for application consolidation can run hundreds of Linux virtual servers on IBM’s z/VM virtualization platform. The systems come with a “save-as-you-grow” pricing model in which incremental capacity is priced significantly lower as the configuration size increases, IBM said.
In its ongoing effort to become the coolest city in the U.S., the mayor of Portland, Oregon, is going to attempt tomorrow night to make it an “open source city,” making its data as open as possible while respecting privacy, and buying open source applications when possible.
Sam Ramji, the open source advocate who sometimes stirred up controversy inside and outside Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), has joined the Silicon Valley startup Sonoa Systems. The four-year-old firm has 65 employees, or a little more than half of the 120 Microsoft employees that Ramji previously supervised as director of platform strategy.
Interested in becoming an editorial journalist? Enter for your chance to win a weekly opinions column and a launching pad for your editorial career in washingtonpost.com’s America’s Next Great Pundit contest.
BlackBerry Desktop Manager for Mac allows people to sync data with Mac apps for contacts, appointments, tasks, and notes. The software also allows people to schedule back-ups, encrypt files, and perhaps most importantly, install software updates for their BlackBerry devices.
This week I’m going to pose a series of questions in the hope of driving some discussion around the use of open source in government, as well as government involvement in open source.
(General warm-up question) In what ways is it in the public’s interest for a government to make the intellectual property it develops available to its citizens?
In the case of software, does exclusive patent licensing by a government patent holder have any advantages or disadvantages to the public interest compared with making it available for open source implementations?
Does a government allowing open source implementations of its software intellectual property foster potential security problems?
Does a government allowing open source implementations of its software intellectual property dilute any potential innovation and economic advantages to its citizens?
This week I’m going to pose a series of questions in the hope of driving some discussion around the use of open source in government, as well as government involvement in open source.
Questions
When a government provides funding to a research project, should any software created in the project be released under an open source license?
Does this change if commercial companies are involved? How?
Does this change if academic institutions are involved? How?
How should the open source license be chosen? Who gets to decide?
This week I’m going to pose a series of questions in the hope of driving some discussion around the use of open source in government, as well as government involvement in open source.
Questions
Should government employees be allowed to participate in creating open source software?
What are the intellectual property issues involved?
Does government participation in open source violate any sense of neutrality of choice between open source and proprietary software?
1) Direct executive departments and agencies to use universally accessible document formats as part of the Open Government Directive called for by the Executive Order on Transparency and Open Government issued by President Obama on January 21, 2009. The Order directs the Chief Technology Officer to coordinate the development of recommendations to executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles of transparent, participatory, and collaborative government. Requiring the use of universally accessible document formats – namely ODF, PDF, and HTML – could be easily implemented with existing, competing (even free) technologies and would result in immediate benefits for citizens, including greater transparency, easier access to information today and in the future, and more choice on software to access this information.
2) Convene an inter-agency working group to create policies and guidelines regarding the use of open standards and universally acceptable document formats to enhance interoperability. These policies and guidelines would form the basis of an interoperability framework that details how interoperability will be achieved among government agencies and with citizens, maximizing the efficiency in the exchange, management, and reuse of data.
3) Review and modify regulations on software procurement and its use to ensure adherence to open standards and universally acceptable document formats. In addition to clear and consistent policies and guidelines, software procurement regulations should recognize open standards and universally acceptable document formats as a critical step to creating a level playing field for government contracting while saving taxpayer dollars and enabling a smarter government.
Laura DeNardis, Executive Director of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, announced today that the group had sent a set of recommendations for open standards to the new Obama administration. In the announcement, Laura said
The administration’s technology policy priorities create a moment of opportunity to rethink U.S. strategy on technical standards, an invisible form of technological rulemaking with consequences for U.S. innovation policy, national security, and government efficiency and openness.
On January 21, US President Barack Obama published a memo called “Transparency and Open Government.” In it he makes many good points, but particularly note
“Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.”
“Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions.”
“Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government.”
Things to think about:
How do these ideas apply to national standards bodies, both in the US and elsewhere?
Substituting “Standards” for “Government,” you get a good sense of what open standards advocates have been strenuously arguing for the last few years.
“Openness” is a general movement, not just related to open source and standards. That said, openness intersects many areas and it doesn’t take a big leap to go from discussions about open government to procurement policies for IT based on open standards.
What might these mean in your country?
Also see Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s blog entry on the memo.
I’m a relative newbie when it comes to standards, only being involved for the last 12 or 13 years. I’ve never before seen the amount of attention that is being brought to the idea of standards reform by so many groups of people at various levels of organization. Rather than write a long essay on this, here are some points that people are discussing:
The new spirit in Washington brought about by the election of Barack Obama is encouraging people to think of new possibilities around the value of standards to governments as well as government’s role in the creation, implementation, use, and protection of standards.
The effective use of standards and open source technologies in the Obama campaign to connect and marshal voters might well be used in the same way with citizens.
That said, the potential use of standards to aid in the coming economic recovery and growth is worldwide and at many levels of government. The US has an opportunity to lead, but it is one of many countries that can do so.
There is increasing pressure on governments to not just recognize “certified” organizations like ISO but also groups like W3C, OASIS, and OMG. Nobody gets a free pass, but the days of saying something is an “international” standard no longer implies quality or global adoption, at least in IT, in my opinion.
There is much work to do in the area of intellectual property and standards, as I’ve spoken about here before, especially as it relates to open source. As I said at LinuxWorld, it’s time for a Creative Commons-like approach where we have 8 – 10 model intellectual property licenses that cover the range of software, hardware, and services standards.
Many people working in the area of Internet and Web standards tend to forget that there are many areas of standardization where royalty-free licensing is not common, or at least not automatic. Some of these areas seem to be on their way to royalty-free, though there are powerful, conservative forces trying desperately to slow down the movement in this direction.
In the non-RF areas, there is more and more pressure to have ex ante disclosures of patents and/or licensing terms before a standard effort starts or at least gets too far along. A patent might become much more profitable if a critical standard gets created that uses the patent. What is the government’s role concerning intellectual property and standards? What government are we talking about? Should it tackle the problems with standards and patent trolls?
Measuring the quality of standards is difficult. I’ve previously spoken about what quality might mean, and suggested that having a “Michelin Guide” for standards would be a big help to users.
However, the first question I usually get when I suggest this is “who gets to create the guide and why should we care what they say?”. Well, there could be multiple guides and over time the “winner” might become clear. There might be different winners in different areas of standardization.
Various people to whom I’ve spoken about this have convinced me that this approach is too formal, too stuffy, and too resource intensive.
Therefore I’m now trying to talk up the idea that there could be a “standards review” website hosted by some trusted and neutral party where “standardized” basic information about standards is collected, modern tagging and categorization is used, and the rankings and reviews for standards along various dimensions comes from the community. Rather than being a massive, dull cataloging effort, it needs to be organic and as automatic as possible, using Web 2.0 technologies where beneficial.
This would need to follow something like the Amazon product rating scheme, where the reviews themselves are rated, at least thumbs up or down, by other readers.
Over time, the best and most trusted reviewers would become clear. This would also serve to connect communities of current and potential standards users and implementers around the world.
Participants would need to “be themselves,” state their employers and other appropriate affiliations, and the set of reviewers would need to be kept in balance. Problematic situations: all or most reviewers come from a single company and its business partners; and reviewers come from the staff of the organizations that created the standards.
Generally, we need to look more at community-based methods and efforts to help improve the standards world rather than traditional approaches.
Keep talking. Pragmatism welcome, cynicism not so much. The ideas are coming in fast and furiously from many people, including many of the above. Join the conversation.
Andy Updegrove has published his “10 Standards Recommendations for the Obama Administration.” In my opinion, this is a timely must read for those concerned with both standards reform as well as a modern application of standards to IT policy.
“Vanessa Sievers, a Dartmouth College junior, was not content to wait tables or make coffee as a side job. Instead she ran for treasurer of Grafton County, N.H., and won, unseating the incumbent and unleashing a war of words.”
Many diehard baseball fans love to play with the numbers, the statistics, associated with the game. One reason is that there are just so many of them, but the other is the hope that somehow they might predict the future for your favorite player or team. If you are into fantasy baseball, and I am not, they are the lifeblood of how the whole system works.
Let’s say the bases are loaded in the bottom of the 9th, two outs, and the manager has a choice between sending up two batters, one with a .350 batting average with men in scoring position, and the other with a .250 average. Which one should he choose? The first seems pretty good.
However, what if that first batter was 2 for 10 when he was hitting in the 9th inning and the second was 4 for 8? The second now seems better.
What if the pitcher is a lefty and each batter is 1 for 3 against left handed pitchers in the 9th inning. Hmmm? Do you then look at the day of the week, the weather conditions, what the batters had for lunch?
Last week was election day in the US and we were swamped with many numbers. Numbers in states, numbers of voters in demographics, likelihoods of certain people to vote. If you are into stats, you can play the same sorts of games with politics as with baseball.
All of this is really just lead up to a link to a New York Times article this morning about Nate Silver, founder and chief numbers guy of FiveThirtyEight.com. In the piece, “Finding Fame With a Prescient Call for Obama,” author Stephanie Clifford talks about Silver’s obsession with stats and his shift from analyzing baseball trends and probabilities to looking at the fire hose of politics-related numbers. Many of us have been following FiveThirtyEight.com for some time, but I was not aware of Silver’s background with baseball.
By the way, I can’t stand to watch the tv show “Numb3rs.” It makes my skin crawl the way they abuse and misstate mathematics for the sake of supposed entertainment.
Last night a lot of the tension and stress of this election season in the US hit me and I went to bed early, exhausted. For me, that meant 10pm since I’m a night owl if I can get away with it. I woke up at 3:45 from a weird dream that had me arguing with local election officials.
In the dream, the names in my polling booth were all blank, and I was expected to memorize what names corresponded to what levers. The arguments went on and on, and it ended when I woke up. Luckily I was able to fall asleep again before my 6:20 alarm.
No doubt these dreams originated from my plan to vote early today. My son and I left the house at 7:00 and drove to to the local Methodist Church, our polling place. I wasn’t expecting a long line and there wasn’t, since there are five or six polling places in my town. Personally, I’m glad I get to go to the church rather than the polls at the “transfer station,” the polite and modern name for “town dump.”
I was the third in line for my district booth, and my son came with me into the booth. He’s been talking a lot lately about how kids should get to vote, since this election is so obviously about his future. Last night at dinner he was explaining his scheme about how all the kids in a family can vote among themselves and then cast a single vote in the real election. We didn’t really work out the nits, but I believe that with his sister away at college and of voting age, he therefore got to cast the sole “kid at home vote.”
So he came into the booth with me and I voted. He pulled the big lever that registered the votes and opened the curtain of the booth. This is the last election where we’ll be using these old lever-based machines before New York moves to optical scanners. So my son was part of history in a couple of different ways.
So now we wait. My wife has been very active in the local GOTV effort, which means “get out the vote,” and are not the call letters for a new cable channel like I thought when I first saw the acronym. So she’ll be driving people to the polls this morning and this afternoon. I’ll be working and doing various odds and ends, including packing for my trip to San Francisco tomorrow to speak at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Before I leave, though, we should know who the new President is. We should have a better idea of what this country will be like over the next four years. We should know just what sorts of dreams we can expect and hope to have.
Starbucks is offering a free tall cup of coffee to anyone (presumably in the US) who comes into one of their shops on Election Day, Tues, November 4, and says they voted.
I realized today that it’s been almost a week since I last did a non-news post here. There are several reasons for this.
First, of course, I’ve been busy with work. Among other things, I’m preparing for my ten minute session at next week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Though I can’t find it exactly, John F. Kennedy is said to have said something like “It takes 20 minutes to prepare for a 4 hour talk and 4 hours to prepare for a 20 minute talk.” I know the feeling. I’ve been chatting with many of my colleagues on the topic I’m going to cover, and it’s a great excuse to get caught up with the people and the technology.
Second, last weekend we drove out to Chicago for the Family Weekend at my daughter’s university. Though I had seen her a couple of weeks earlier, it was the first time my daughter, my son, and my wife had seen each other in over a month. That had never happened before in our lives. So seeing her was wonderful, saying goodbye was bittersweet, but she’ll be home for Thanksgiving in four weeks.
Third, everyone in my family is obsessed with the US elections. Sites like pollster.com allow you to wallow in statistics and trends to your heart’s desire, but you have to get back to real work and life on a regular basis. I’ll be glad when the election is over, assuming my guy wins.
Fourth, I keep poking around in virtual environments like Second Life, though in no way as seriously as I did at the beginning of 2007. They’re not going away, but are morphing, getting refined, and being combined with additional technology.
Fifth, I’m trying to get serious about the guitar again. I know what I did wrong in my initial burst of enthusiasm with it, and this time I’m trying to have more discipline. I also better know my limitations. You know how some people are double jointed? I’m half jointed. Therefore I may as well accept that barre chords just aren’t going to happen for me, but that’s ok. I’ll never be able to sit in a lotus position without falling over either.
It snowed here last night, though only about half an inch. Traffic wasn’t really disrupted by it, though people seemed a little bit nervous driving when I brought my son to school this morning. Where I live, they don’t cancel school if we have half a foot of snow, but they do if it hits -20 F (-29 C), which happens every few years in January or February.
When we first moved to northwest New York 15 years ago, my daughter Katie was 3. That first Halloween we had half a foot of snow. Rather than being discouraged, she thought it was great. Somehow two holidays, Halloween and Christmas, got combined. She didn’t get gifts but she certainly got a lot of candy. (See photo.)
My son thinks November will be great. On one hand, there is the election next week. On the other, World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King comes out on the 13th. I believe him when he says that the former is more important to him than the latter. If his guy wins.
In case you didn’t see it, here’s the opening comedy skit from Saturday Night Live: Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, as played by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, discuss sexism in American politics.
A higher resolution video clip is available on the NBC website.
“However, the legal environment surrounding interoperability between Microsoft’s products and the open-source applications that have sprung up to rival Redmond’s proprietary wares is scarcely less murky today than it was yesterday.”
“But if you take a close look at this PR stunt, and that’s all it really is, and then look at Microsoft’s long history of making, and breaking, interoperability promises, well I don’t believe that for a New York minute.”
“To be absolutely clear: The announcement about Microsoft’s so-called new interoperability push is a public relations ploy, since the company touts as a customer benefit something required by European trustbusters.”
“Despite the rhetoric, Microsoft said it will continue to play verbal hardball with commercial open source competitors that don’t license the company’s intellectual property.”
“If Microsoft truly means to facilitate interoperability and fair access they should spare delegates the BRM, retract MS-OOXML from ISO and converge this work into the global effort for the Open Document Format, the existing Open Standard at ISO for office documents.”
“… having spent the greater part of my career working on standards, I find the whole OOXML debacle truly appalling and a total disgrace to the standards community …”
“The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation with grassroots action for promotion of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general.”
“On one thing, the experts seem to agree. The differences between hillaryclinton.com and barackobama.com can be summed up this way: Barack Obama is a Mac, and Hillary Clinton is a PC.”
“Confirming weeks of speculation, Larry Lessig, the Stanford University law professor and “free culture” icon, has confessed that yes indeed, he’s considering a run for the U.S. Congress this year.”
“Despite the popularity of .Net within companies and other employers, Microsoft has seen its standing among students continue to be eroded by a combination of open-source programming tools and Adobe Systems Inc.’s Web design software. Now, after years of using half-measures to try to beat those technologies on college campuses, Microsoft is taking a bolder step by making four pillars of the .Net platform available free of charge to tens of millions of students in the U.S., Canada, China and eight European countries.”
“But now, according to a press release I got Tuesday morning, a company called Vollee is planning on releasing technology that will make it possible to run Second Life on 3G handsets via Vollee’s streaming media service.”
“Though set on a future Mars terraformed for human habitation, Blue Mars isn’t hardcore sci-fi — indeed, the company’s hoping to attract non-gamer women who’ll enjoy shopping, socializing and playing casual games built into its idyllic locales.”
“Blue Mars is a new online massively multiplayer virtual world (MMVW), featuring stunning graphics, realistic characters and endless social bonding opportunities. Set on Terraformed Mars in the year 2177 AD, players will be able to live out their fantasies through personalized avatars. Blue Mars is scheduled for beta release at the end of 2008.”
“Welcome to DevMaster’s Game and Graphics Engines Database, your ultimate source for 3D Engines. This database is committed to providing you with the most accurate and up-to-date information for current engines around the web.”
“A well-supported and fully-funded open source project, Delta3D is a full-function game engine appropriate for a wide variety of modeling & simulation applications.”
“The Irrlicht Engine is an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written and usable in C++ and also available for .NET languages. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer”
“Over the course of the last 6 years, OGRE has grown to become one of the most popular open-source graphics rendering engines, and has been used in a large number of production projects”
“Students use 3D modeling software (Maya), painting software (Photoshop), sound editing software (Adobe Audition & Pro Tools), and Panda3D, a programming library originally developed by Walt Disney Imagineering’s Virtual Reality studio, to display our virtual reality worlds.”
“After more than four years of hard work and many point releases, the developers behind the jMonkeyEngine are proud to announce the release of version 1.0 of their Java game engine.”
“Given Office’s status, it’s a major eyebrow raiser that this category was won by relative newcomer IBM Lotus Symphony. Perhaps it’s because Big Blue’s product is free (that always helps), or because IBM is itself such an established vendor. Whatever the case, consider this vote as a huge upset.”
“I am awed by the security apparatus which is being rolled out to ensure the integrity of the open standards process. Photo ID requirements, badged access to the meeting room, prohibitions against cameras and recording devices, no observers, no press. Truly, this is what open standards are all about.”
Just imagine had they done this three years ago instead of offering a license to Massachusetts that did not allow GPL implementations. As I’ve said before, these binary formats will live on, though I suspect OOXML will die off.
“City election officials this week said that their formal review of the results, which will not be completed for weeks, had confirmed some major discrepancies between the vote totals reported publicly — and unofficially — on primary night and the actual tally on hundreds of voting machines across the city.”
“innotek’s product, VirtualBox, is a GPL-licensed, open-source platform that allows a single desktop or even laptop PC to run multiple operating systems concurrently. Users can jump between the platforms with the click of a mouse.”
There will be a concert tonight where several of the remaining members of the Grateful Dead will reunite in a concert to benefit Barack Obama. Whatever your politics, the concert will be streamed over the Web starting at 7:30 PM PST. That’s 4:30 AM for me in Warsaw, so y’all will have to tell me how it went.
“Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world’s second largest music company, will this month become the last of the big four majors to drop copy protection software on music downloads”
“When Koltun, an assistant professor of computer science, set out with his Stanford Virtual Worlds Group to prove that object construction can be sophisticated without being difficult, they began with trees.”
“Dryad lets you intuitively create beautiful trees for your virtual world or game. In Dryad, you create a tree by visually navigating to it through a design space: the space of all trees.”
“Microsoft Corp has offered to buy Norwegian Internet-search software firm Fast Search & Transfer for 19 crowns per share, valuing it at about $1.2 billion, the companies said on Tuesday.”
I had missed this when it was first announced. “The high-end server maker and owner of the rights to Java will temporarily change its stock ticker to “JAVAD” to reflect its 1 for 4 reverse stock split.”
“The Robot Guitar system–called Powertune and developed by Tronical, based in Germany–can be installed by any authorized manufacturer or service center.”
“Gore was among the 2007 Nobel Prize winners who were invited in for a photo and some chatter with the president; Gore got the recognition for his work on global warming.”
“Due to my position as a director of the GNOME Foundation, it’s important to point out that this post represents my personal views, not those of the Foundation.”
“THE co-founder of Hotmail, the web-based e-mail service bought by Microsoft for $US400 million ($459 million) a decade ago, is challenging the American software giant’s core $US20 billion office desktop business.”
“ODF supporters are welcoming presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama’s promise to put government data online in universally accessible formats should he be elected.”
‘Neil Diamond held onto the secret for decades, but he has finally revealed that President Kennedy’s daughter was the inspiration for his smash hit ”Sweet Caroline.”’
Today is Election Day in the United States. While next year is a presidential election and last year had many congressional elections, this is what is called an “off year.” Most of the elections are local, with some statewide propositions and special votes.
I live in New York and there is a proposition for amending the state constitution. What is it about? Water. The town of Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks State Park wants to swap twelve acres of its land for one acre of state land. What’s the big deal? As the New York Times explained:
The reason for all this effort is that since the six-million-acre park was created in 1892, nearly three million acres of forest has been preserved as “forever wild” by the state Constitution. There is plenty of private land in the park, with 130,000 permanent residents, and there are enough lakes and mountains and trails and cabins to lure about 10 million visitors a year.
But when the founders of the park put some sections off limits — deeming it to be of such importance that almost nothing new should be built on it — they clearly meant business.
Any exceptions require a constitutional amendment, which in turn requires the consent of both the Legislature and the voters. Over the years, state voters have been asked to approve a range of projects — cutting trees near an airport, for instance, or expanding a cemetery — and most such requests have been granted.
This is a good thing that there is such care and oversight, in my opinion. If you’ve ever visited the Adirondacks, I think you might agree.
Closer to home, we have a four way race for town supervisor, with one of the main issues being the construction of another big box store. Personally, I don’t think we need the traffic. The convenience will be minimal since there are existing local stores that overlap in stock as well as another instance of the proposed store just 25 minutes away. The additions to the tax base will be minimal and we won’t even get that many jobs out of it. I think several of the candidates wouldn’t be quite so supportive of the proposal if the store was going to be built closer to their homes.
Off year or not, it’s still important to get out and vote. I voted around 7 AM this morning before dropping the kids off at school and heading to the airport. As they say, every single vote counts, and this is especially true in local elections where the total count can be in the hundreds.
“When Google announced that its new social-networking initiative would extend to any site that wanted to participate, the land grab for the social Web’s attention just got a whole lot more intense.”
“With Google’s OpenSocial plans out of the bag, I checked out how some of the chosen few–Slide, NewsGator, Ning and salesforce.com–think about the new APIs and how they plan to apply them.”
“MySpace and Google have issued a press release that, confirming rumors, announces that the News Corp.-owned social networking site will be part of Google’s new OpenSocial developer initiative.”
“To me SharePoint is the epitome of Microsoft’s extend and embrace strategy. If you buy into it, you have to buy into an expensive complete server to desktop package.”
“Sun Microsystems has released the first results of a project to give its open-source Solaris effort a Linux-like programming approach and a stronger connection to other parts of the open-source movement.”
“The GOS (Google Operating System) being shipped is actually just a version of Linux licensed through Google, which includes fast access to things like Google Mail, and Google Documents (although you can also run Open Office for that).”
“The South Carolina Democratic Party voted Thursday to keep funnyman Stephen Colbert’s name off the Democratic Primary ballot, according to the party’s executive director.”
“In other words, should anyone feel safe to make direct access to file parts, and start getting free of running instances of Microsoft Office and its COM object model, usually through VBA ?”
“about 1 percent of the nearly 500,000 students who took the SAT exam in October 2005 had received incorrect scores because their answer sheets had become moist”
“Not content with taking on Microsoft Office with its online Docs and Spreadsheet service, Google has now included StarOffice in its free download suite.”
“If Fred Thompson formally announces his intention to run for president, NBC will not schedule any further repeats of ‘Law & Order’ featuring Mr. Thompson beyond those already scheduled,” which conclude on Sept. 1, NBC said in a statement.
