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Loading ...On May 30, celebrate 6 Years of Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments
May 30′th, 2008 is the 6 year anniversary of GOSLING: Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments. We are having a party at the Parliament Pub, just in front of the parliament buildings in Ottawa. For details and any changes please see our website where we also ask people to RSVP so we can plan food.
GOSLING started in May 2002 as a couple of informal Friday gatherings after work at the pub, to bounce around some ideas ahead of the first free/libre/open source software event hosted by the Government of Canada. We have been meeting nearly every Friday since. Our weekly gatherings are very informal. While we expect our 6-year anniversary party to be larger than any other GOSLING gathering in the past, it will be equally informal.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Entertainment Software Association opposes technology property rights
Michael Geist reported that Canadian copyright scholar Howard Knopf squares off against Stevan Mitchell of the Entertainment Software Association on Buisiness News Network’s show SqueezePlay. I sent the following as a letter to the show.
Stevan Mitchell of the Entertainment Software Association needs to be honest about what the hardware he held up in the show actually does. The way he held it up we are all supposed to think it is a bad thing that should be illegal, or that it only has illegal purposes.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Recognizing a policy problem doesn’t suggest agreement on solutions
A few hours after posting my article on the content industry vs content delivery providers I was sent a link to an article titled “Raging Grannies demonstrate for fair contracts for freelancers” by its author, journalist Shannon Lee Mannion. The contracts that the big media companies are asking freelance journalists to sign are getting worse and worse all the time. I feel really bad about this situation, and I do anything I can in my policy work to help improve the situation for authors — especially freelance creators given I am one myself with my self-employed business.
I am left with mixed feelings, however, because I believe that the organizations that should be helping authors — organizations like the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC), The Writers Union, and other members of the Creators Copyright Coalition and DAMIC — have been promoting policies which will have the effect of protecting or worsening the market conditions that enabled these bad contracts in the first place.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Content industry vs content delivery providers: who is the customer?
One of the common problems you will see in policy discussions is that many people are focused on their narrow issues, sometimes even tiny edge-cases, and not investing any time looking at the bigger picture of how different policies interact. This leads to the solutions to these edge cases sometimes causing even worse problems for the proponents.
We had one of those moments at CopyCamp when I tried to demonstrate a bigger picture issue by adding in “Net Neutrality” related discussions into a narrow discussion of business models for authors.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Real-world experience important for politicians and other policy makers/promoters
Reading a press release from Timmins-James Bay MP Charlie Angus, you will see the following:
“Angus is one of the only MPs who has relied on income from copyright royalties from music, book and textbook sales to make a living. He says the New Democratic Party strongly supports fair remuneration for artists but that copyright must be looking forward to the 21st century reality rather than attempting to force consumers back to an obsolete 20th century business model.”
It is interesting to note that while federal Members of Parliament come from many walks of life, most of those who are vocal on technology law have very little experience with the relevant technology, or businesses affected by them. Musician and author Charlie Angus stands out as an exception.
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(2 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Michael Geist: fictional character, or the real person?
Overall, CopyCamp last week was great and brought people with a wide variety of views of the future of creativity and the roll of the Internet together. There was one very odd phenomena that I would like to describe, and that is what happened whenever anyone mentioned the “G” word: Michael Geist.
Dr. Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law. He has authored many academic papers, articles for newspapers, as well as running an active BLOG on related topics.
Whenever his name was brought up the conversation quickly split into two groups: people who see him as a great ally, and those who seem to think he has horns coming out of his head. Because of this strong split it was hard to have a reasonable conversation once his name came up, a form of Godwin’s Law for CopyCamp.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Summarizing CopyCamp 2 while looking forward to CopyCamp 3
Tuesday evening and Wednesday all day was the second CopyCamp. The first CopyCamp was held in September 2006, and I actively participated in both. The first good news is that all the language coming out of the organizing committee is that they already have a desire for there to be a third, so this may become a yearly event.
The format is of an unconference where the participants themselves organize most of the sessions. There are a variety of unconferences such as BarCamp, DemoCamp, and in Toronto on the Tuesday evening there was even a StartupCamp.
There is a mixture of people who attend CopyCamp, including both the technophiles and technophobic, as well as people who see the Internet and new media as the greatest thing to recently happen to humanity and people who fear that Internet will destroy life as they know (and like) it. Nearly everyone who attends is either a creator themselves (of a variety of types and media), or represent creators in some way (lawyers, boards of associations, etc).
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(2 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Putting the Cart before the Horse
Cisco has come forward with a new vision for the data center. This may really be what I have maintained for the last 15+ years. The future will happen when the “computer is really in the network.”
This is Cisco’s first big shot in a war to control the data center of the future. This strategy, Cisco’s Data Center 3.0, envisions switches at the heart of the architecture with service regulated commodity status for the underlying technology. Essentially, the switches become the epicentre for running and controlling all IT decision-making. Cisco envisions the orchestration of infrastructure services from pools of servers, storage, and network resources over Gigabit Ethernet networks.
Cisco’s comments about the data center can be found in “Transforming Your Data Center One Project at a Time.” The following is a direct quote: “The emergence of the human network is raising individuals’ and organizations’ expectations about how technology, and their IT organizations, can support their objectives and evolving work styles. The data center IP network, as the platform that integrates, protects, and scales other IT resources, is central to the fulfillment of the human network’s promise. A process evolution from transactions to interactions is leading to the emergence of data centers built on network-based service-oriented infrastructures (SOI). SOI softens traditional server, storage, and network operation silos and allows well-integrated IT departments to treat their data centers as single functional units composed of interdependent, virtualized pools of storage, network, server, and application resources to better support applications and meet the challenges introduced by a more distributed interaction model across and between organizations.”
”Why is the network so integral to service-oriented infrastructure? According to IDC (Abner Germanow, “Why Is Networking Growing Faster Than the Rest of IT?” June 4, 2007), “Server virtualization, storage virtualization, and the federation of software applications, to name three examples, are all enabled by the network… As trends in computing evolve from consolidation back to scaling out and scaling up, the potential for the network to participate in the security, reliability, and management of that scale will rise.
”It’s not a bad vision, say industry analysts, and it is shared by server and storage manufacturers. Thanks to virtualization, the server’s role in the data center is increasingly being diminished. Virtual storage, virtual processors, and virtual memory, and maybe even virtual networks, are coming. The major server makers acknowledge that this is the future.
Cisco is saying that because everything converges on the network, network architecture will make the overarching decisions on resource allocation. In other words, the control plane is collapsed onto the network.
Here are some reference points. This announcement can be found at Data Center - Cisco Systems: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns708/networking_solutions_solution_segment_home.html
This announcement shows that Cisco is committed to a full virtualization strategy, which I wrote about in my blog post “Does Virtualization Equal ‘Bullet Proof’?”: http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insights/2008/01/
Essentially, we are moving away from the era of computing just being an amalgamation of devices in the network. This has been a big break from the status quo for the last 50 years. Cisco’s move is a clever attempt to avoid being displaced and relegated to commodity status.
Other major vendors are following suit. For example, today Nortel released the announcement “Nortel Virtualization Solution Simplifies Network for Instant, Secure Launch of Unified Communications”: http://www2.nortel.com/go/news_detail.jsp?cat_id=-8055&oid=100239954&locale=en-US Nortel is trying to capture control of the virtual data center. Here is a quote from that release: “Nortel’s network virtualization solution enables enterprises and service providers to simplify their communications infrastructure by allowing resources to be made available in a collective manner and to be allocated as needed,” said Cindy Borovick, Research Vice President, Data Center Networks, IDC. “This maximizes the capabilities of their network, decreasing wasted resources. It also limits the equipment that needs to be deployed, delivering savings over the life of the solution. The integration with a server virtualization solution gives new options for end-to-end virtualization deployments.”
It will be interesting to see how all these initiatives play out. In later posts, I’ll cover how Microsoft, IBM, SUN, HP and others want to play in this space.
I have to apologize for not posting in the last few weeks, as I have been commuting back and forth from India. It is a very exciting place to work. My experiences there will be the focus for some Enterprise Insights in the future. Once I’m back from my next trip and recovered from another round of jet lag.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Dare to try something different?
Recently I was asked by two IT industry reporters I’ve known for a long time whether I would continue to evangelize the use of Linux for knowledge worker desktops. I answered yes. I also understand that the adoption of a Linux desktop is not perceived as trivial. We are all very fortunate today to have so much choice in our desktop operating systems. We can select from two shipping versions of Windows, multiple Linux distros (although I’d be failing in my job if I didn’t specifically mention SUSE Linux) and a resurgence of Apple Macintoshes running OS X. So rather than go into a pitch for Linux, let me instead offer a conversation on an alternative for your day to day office productivity.
We all know, or should, about Microsoft’s excellent Office suite. Office is available for Windows and OS X. Linux? Uh, that would be no. So let’s agree that Office is a fine offering and proceed to look at what I believe is a viable alternative for a high percentage of knowledge workers. The offering is an open source project called OpenOffice delivered by contributors to openoffice.org
Open Office includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation builder, a database, and HTML editor and a drawing program. What I find most important about OOO is the flexibility in file formats made available. As an advocate of the Open Document Format (ODF) I choose to default to this format. However, I work with folks from lots of different organizations and many of them have a large repository of Microsoft Office formatted documents. OOO reads and writes the standard Office formats natively. In fact, Microsoft has worked with Novell and other players in the open source community to develop translators to permit the translation of their new OpenXML formats to ODF.
Since the preservation of documents over time is one of the most critical elements for business users, there has always been some reluctance to try a non-Microsoft suite. I think the MS products are excellent, but Open Office does have one advantage. It’s open source and therefore has no license cost at all. You may have users (ok I’m sure you do) who could be fully functional immediately with Open Office and continue to use all their existing documents that may exist in Microsoft or other proprietary formats.
So here’s my challenge to you. Don’t believe me. Try it yourself. You can download a free copy of Open Office for Windows, or Linux at www.openoffice.org. If you are a Macintosh OS X user, there is a Mac version but it requires you install the X11 windowing environment. If you want to maintain the real Mac look and feel, instead download NeoOffice from www.neooffice.org. Open Office provides a viable alternative to other Office suites, with a very familiar look and feel and could save you and your company money.
Until next time, peace.
Ross
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Industry Committee study on Science and Technology is underway
Last month I blogged about why it is important to participate in the study by parliament’s Industry Committee on science and technology. I also provided a link to my own submission (OpenDocument, PDF, HTML). Michael Geist has reported that the Canadian Association of Broadcasters has also included copyright proposals in its submission.
The study is already underway, with meetings being held on April 10 and April 17. Read the rest of this entry »
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