Weblog: category "politics"

These are tough times for fans of open mobile environments. Android is less and less open, Symbian was closed again, HP stopped making webOS devices, and now Intel abandoned MeeGo to work with Samsung and operators instead. So, what is the community to do?

One option is to follow the lead of the big companies, hoping that Tizen works, or that Google again sees the benefit of working with others in the open.

The other is to take the matters in our own hands. There is precedent for this. Much of early Linux activity came from the efforts of the community, not on the initiative of corporate interests. And there have been OpenMoko and Mer, the latter an attempt to make a fully open version of Nokia's Maemo environment, suspended when MeeGo promised to bring the same benefits.

Well, now Mer is back.

The goals for Mer align pretty well with what the community would need:

• To be openly developed and openly governed as a meritocracy
• That primary customers of the platform are device vendors - not end-users.
• To provide a device manufacturer oriented structure, processes and tools: make life easy for them
• To have a device oriented architecture
• To be inclusive of technologies (such as MeeGo/Tizen/Qt/EFL/HTML5)
• To innovate in the mobile OS space

There have also been some other invitations to new potential homes for the community, ranging from openSUSE to Debian.

It will be interesting to see how this works out. But whatever we as a community do, we should ensure we look at more than just licensing.

I'm getting worried about Google. Long one of the champions of the open web alongside Mozilla, the rise of social networking silos and the app economy seem to have scared them. And like any scared organism, they lash out.

Many of their plans to make web competitive against native development environments are good, there is indeed much to improve in the stack. But what I'm uneasy with is the unilateral way they go about it, preferring "big reveals" and post-facto standardization instead of the open conversation that built most of the Internet we have today. This is not the way to collaborate.

Consider some of their recent efforts:

• SPDY, a protocol to replace HTTP which Web is built on. Currently only supported by Chrome, which uses it to talk to several Google services
• Dart, their JavaScript-killer which recently surfaced through a leaked email
• Microdata and Schema.org that seek to replace last ten years of semantic web development with a spec cooked up by couple of big vendors in secret

These - together with WebSQL, NaCl, WebM and WebP - mean that Google has active efforts to replace practically every layer of the web (except HTML itself) with something of their own design.

The way all of these were introduced bears strong reminders of how Microsoft tried to embrace, extend, and extinguish the web in late 90s. That period brought horrors like ActiveX and the awful, unkillable IE6. Though, for the sake of fairness, it also brought us XmlHttpRequest which was the enabler of the AJAX revolution.

Google's new technologies may end up being beneficial for web developers, but they also threaten to fragment the platform. After all, as the competition in the "post-PC" space heats up, the competitors are unlikely to embrace Google's extensions of the web stack. That would be a loss to all.

Brendan Eich, the original author of JavaScript comments on Hacker News:

So "Works best in Chrome" and even "Works only in Chrome" are new norms promulgated intentionally by Google. We see more of this fragmentation every day. As a user of Chrome and Firefox (and Safari), I find it painful to experience, never mind the political bad taste.

Ok, counter-arguments. What's wrong with playing hardball to advance the web, you say? As my blog tries to explain, the standards process requires good social relations and philosophical balance among the participating competitors.

Google's approach with Dart is thus pretty much all wrong and doomed to leave Dart in excellent yet non-standardized and non-interoperable implementation status. Dart is GBScript to NaCl/Pepper's ActiveG.

Disclaimer: I've been a long-time fan of many of Google's services, and have visited some of their offices a few times. I like the company. Which is exactly why I'm so concerned about this unilateral approach at standards. I am also involved in some standards processes through the IKS Project.

Somehow I had missed this term being coined:

The old "open vs. proprietary" debate is over and open won. As IT infrastructure moves to the cloud, openness is not just a priority for source code but for standards and APIs as well. Almost every vendor in the IT market now wants to position its products as "open." Vendors that don't have an open source product instead emphasize having a product that uses "open standards" or has an "open API."

"Openwashing" is a term derived from "greenwashing" to refer to dubious vendor claims about openness. Openwashing brings the old "open vs. proprietary" debate back into play - not as "which one is better" but as "which one is which?"

Especially Google seems to be doing this quite a bit. If you want to be open, work in the open. This is the only way to ensure acceptance and sustainability for your code.

Cory Doctorow on Locus:

To understand techno-optimism, it’s useful to look at the free software movement, whose ideology and activism gave rise to the GNU/Linux operating system, the Android mobile operating system, the Firefox and Chrome browsers, the BSD Unix that lives underneath Mac OS X, the Apache web-server and many other web- and e-mail-servers and innumerable other technologies. Free software is technology that is intended to be understood, modified, improved, and distributed by its users.

Also about the threat that centralized social networks produce:

As a techno-optimist, I was heartened to see the role that networked technologies played in aiding activists in Iran, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and other middle-eastern autocracies to coordinate with one another. But as a techno-pessimist, I was horrified to see activists making use of unsecured unfit systems like Facebook, which make it trivial for authorities to snoop on and unpick the structure of activist organizations.

In the coming years another billion people will get online. They will do it with their smartphones instead of what we consider computers. And their experience will be quite different from ours when we initially started using the internet.

Despite its promises, it looks like the post-PC ecosystem will be a lot more restrictive than the PC one was even in the worst days of the wintel duopoly. For a while it looked like software freedom might be one of the cornerstones of the new world, but since then it has been shown that the tech giants Apple and Microsoft, together with the American content industry, will ensure that this new environment is more tightly locked down than anything we've seen before.

These companies will have a say on who gets to create something, who to distribute it, and who to use it. Users will be 'protected from themselves' by enabling these devices to run only code approved by the company. We've already seen that this approval can be declined, or even retroactively withdrawn on a whim, and on grounds more political than technical.

If we want to ensure digital freedoms for ourselves, and for the people only now reaching across the digital divide, we must act. We must find ways to enable creativity to happen on these new devices. We need to find ways to enable people to create, distribute and use any software on their phones, regardless of what locked-down ecosystem their mobile operator pushed them into.

Luckily there is one programming environment, one runtime that even the most restrictive players haven't had the courage to lock down: the web. Web browsers, coupled with the modern, fast JavaScript engines, could be the tool to build the next step of the free software revolution. We must embrace it.

JavaScript is already fairly prominent in free software development. The GNOME Shell has been largely written in it, Qt Quick builds on it, and most of the common JavaScript libraries are free software. There are even ways to run JS as a server or build your own desktop applications with it.

For those looking to get started with JavaScript, here are some useful resources:

• Eloquent JavaScript is a free e-book that provides an introduction to the language. Read especially the chapter on functional programming
• CommonJS is a specification for writing interoperable JS modules. There is a tutorial on writing modules that work both on the browser and the server
• Backbone.js is a useful Model-View-Controller system for JavaScript. We use it with Midgard Create
• For those who dislike the JS syntax, there is CoffeeScript that provides a cleaner way to write your code. It compiles to JavaScript much like Vala compiles to GObject-oriented C
• Cloud9IDE provides a web-based IDE for JavaScript development. It integrates with Git repositories, and you can either run your own instance or use the hosted version
• JSLint is a good way to check your code for hidden problems
• The JavaScript Garden is also a good source of documentation

While there will never be a "one true language" to program in, JavaScript has the potential to be a big thing. And for writing and sharing software across platform boundaries, it may be the only way. It runs even on the most walled of gardens.

Finland's national brand strategy project released their report today on the Tehtävä Suomelle website. The basic idea is to promote the Finnish capability for getting things done, and the communal approach to problem solving.

I found the beginning of the Finland - It Works document particularly interesting:

"Just a hobby, won’t be big and professional" 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 Newsgroups: comp.os.minix

This statement sparked a revolution. The amateur computer programmer Linus Torvalds had come up with a way of enabling an unlimited number of people to work on the development of the same program source code. This was to prove to be a highly successful approach. Linux, which since then has evolved into a huge success, is one of the most significant open-source operating systems. The Internet would not be possible without a service infrastructure, which is currently largely based on Linux and open source.

Torvalds understood that a complex system, such as a global network, can only function if there are a large number of motivated individuals contributing to its development. This is expressed in another famous statement made by Torvalds: "Given enough eyeballs, any bugs are shallow". In other words, the difficulty of problems depends on the number of people involved in finding a solution.

Linux, which was created by Torvalds, and other open source systems combine the foremost virtues of Finnish functionality: nurturing the commons in a successful way, and the shrewd use of human resources. Thus it is probably no coincidence that the main impetus for open source came from Finland, from a country where functionality is the highest praise for almost anything.

I would imagine this is the first time a country uses FOSS philosophy as one of the building blocks for a national strategy.

If you have the time, go to the project website and read the materials. They seem to have some interesting suggestions on how to move Finland's public image forward.

Free Software Foundation Europe, has recently expanded by the addition of a Finnish country team. FSFE is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring software freedom, which is an important building block in an open information society.

The current Finnish team includes Otto Kekäläinen of VALO-CD, the distribution of free software applications for Windows as the country coordinator, and Henri Bergius of Midgard as the deputy coordinator. Timo Jyrinki from Ubuntu Finland is the translation coordinator. Here you can see the team in a recent info event organized together with the Finnish Linux User Group and TKO-äly:

While COSS is already doing important work for free software in Finland, FSFE amends that agenda by providing focus on the freedom of software and citizen-level participation.

If you're interested in contributing to software freedom, start by joining the Fellowship of the FSFE. You can also contact us at finland@fsfeurope.org and find out more about what is happening in Finland in the field of free software by following the vapaasuomi.fi website.

Dave Neary summed this up well:

...I fundamentally disagree with discouraging someone from pursuing a technology choice because of the threat of patents. In this particular case, the law is an ass. The patent system in the United States is out of control and dysfunctional, and it is bringing the rest of the world down with it. The time has come to take a stand and say “We don’t care about patents. We’re just not going to think about them. Sue us if you want.”

With Midgard we have prior art on some software patents. Software patents only promote big multinational monopolies, and therefore are against the interests of both Europe and the Free Software movement. They're silly, don't apply here, and therefore the only rational response is to ignore them.

Technorati Tags: softwarepatents

Quite a good blog post from the security expert:

The old timesharing model arose because computers were expensive and hard to maintain. Modern computers and networks are drastically cheaper, but they're still hard to maintain. As networks have become faster, it is again easier to have someone else do the hard work. Computing has become more of a utility; users are more concerned with results than technical details, so the tech fades into the background.

...

There is one critical difference. When a computer is within your network, you can protect it with other security systems such as firewalls and IDSs. You can build a resilient system that works even if those vendors you have to trust may not be as trustworthy as you like. With any outsourcing model, whether it be cloud computing or something else, you can't. You have to trust your outsourcer completely. You not only have to trust the outsourcer's security, but its reliability, its availability, and its business continuity.

This is something I've written about before. Your data and applications stay available in the cloud only at the service provider's pleasure. Free software should aim to provide an alternative, using peer-to-peer technologies and desktop-to-web content repositories to provide both the flexibility and collaboration features of the cloud, while still providing the security and privacy of local application instances.

In a world of non-neutral networks, government snooping and, yes, even sometimes lack of connectivity we need alternatives that will work even when offline and allow collaboration over more ad-hoc, personal network connections.

EDIT: While I'm critical of going fully cloud-only, I have to recommend Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch which provides many compelling arguments and historical analysis for utility computing.

Technorati Tags: cloud, privacy, security

From USB fingers and flying cars to Chinese death vans, I think we need to agree that the future is now. It is just not (thankfully) evenly distributed.

Inside each 'death van' there is a dedicated team of doctors to 'harvest' the organs of the deceased. The injections leave the body intact and in pristine condition for such lucrative work.

What next, Soylent Green?