Category Archives: Open Source

Parliament’s ‘transparency’ trick

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This morning’s Observer column.

Many years ago, the Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig coined the phrase “Code is Law” to express the view that, in a digital world, private fences erected via software can undermine public law in all kinds of unanticipated ways. The recent antics of our parliamentary authorities in relation to MPs’ expenses have provided us with an instructive case study of the Lessig principle in action.

Their chosen tool for controlling our access to information is the computer code embodied in the portable document format (PDF)…

Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code

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Fascinating Boing Boing post by Cory Doctorow about a student’s fight to publish code that he wrote for an assignment.

Kyle’s a student at San Jose State University who was threatened with a failing grade for posting the code he wrote for the course — he wanted to make it available in the spirit of academic knowledge-sharing, and as code for potential future employers to review — and when he refused, his prof flew into a fury and promised that in future, he would make a prohibition on posting your work (even after the course was finished) a condition of taking his course.

Kyle appealed it to the department head, who took it up with the Office of Student Conduct and Ethical Development and the Judicial Affairs Officer of SJSU, who ruled that, "what you [Kyle] have done does not in any way constitute a violation of the University Academic Integrity Policy, and that Dr. Beeson cannot claim otherwise."

There’s a lot of meat on the bones of this story. The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs — including me, at times — fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc.

Kyle’s blog post has lots more detail — including copies of the correspondence with his Prof and the university administration.

Thanks to Glyn Moody for Tweeting it.

Google: waving, not drowning

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This morning’s Observer column.

From the outset, Google clearly had plans for Ajax. The evidence was in the steady accretion of Gmail features like instant messaging, audio – and then video – chat, and so on. But until the end of last month we were still unsure about where all this was headed.

Now we know. It’s called Google Wave. It’s described as “a real-time communication platform which combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client”. Translation: it’s a sophisticated set of tools enabling people to work collaboratively across the internet. And ‘real-time’ means exactly that: in most cases what you type appears – as you type it – on other people’s screens…

Saving Thunderbird

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Thoughtful article by Glyn Moody.

Email is dying. Time and again I come across comments to the effect that people have given up on their email inbox, and simply junked their messages. Increasingly, people are turning to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as their messaging medium. It’s not hard to see why. These are opt-in services: you get to choose who can contact you, unlike email.

This has led to the scourge of spam, which now represents 94% of all email, according to Google’s Postini subsidiary. A classic Tragedy of the Commons has resulted, whereby a few selfish individuals exploit and ultimately destroy a resource used by all. Sadly, it looks like the battle against spam is lost; even though services like Gmail offer extremely efficient filtering in my experience, it’s a poor substitute for a messaging service that can assume that you want to see everything that is sent to you, because only people of interest are allowed to contact you.

The more Facebook and Twitter spread, the more people will be turning to these opt-in networks for their communications; email, as a result, will dwindle in importance, turning into a kind of digital wasteland inhabited mostly by those too poor, uninformed or lazy to move on, and by spamming parasites who prey on them. I don’t imagine that Thunderbird wishes to become the software of choice for either…

This makes sense. As our communications ecosystem evolves, so too should the software. From now on we will need comms clients wwhich do everything — including email. I guess that’s where Tweetdeck et al are headed. Maybe that’s how Thunderbird should evolve?

New Labour (re)discovers Open Source?

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Maybe it’s the downturn, but this statement by Tom Watson, the UK Minister for Digital Engagement is interesting.

Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations; it has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work; and from its IT base the Open Source movement has given leadership to new thinking about intellectual property rights and the availability of information for re–use by others.

This Government has long had the policy, last formally articulated in 2004, that it should seek to use Open Source where it gave the best value for money to the taxpayer in delivering public services. While we have always respected the long-held beliefs of those who think that governments should favour Open Source on principle, we have always taken the view that the main test should be what is best value for the taxpayer.

Over the past five years many government departments have shown that Open Source can be best for the taxpayer – in our web services, in the NHS and in other vital public services.

But we need to increase the pace…

Ignorance scales new heights

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Fascinating insight into the mind of the invincibly ignorant. This is an excerpt from an email sent by a Texan school teacher to Ken Starks, an open source evangelist:

"…observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.

This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them…"

Karen xxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxx Middle School

Source: Blog of helios: Linux – Stop holding our kids back.

Thanks to Good Morning Silicon Valley for spotting it.