Month: February 2010

Proprietary Vendors Want Open Source Sanctions

The Guardian reports that  International Intellectual Property Alliance requested that the U.S. Trade Representative to put countries using open source in government on a “Special 301 watchlist” – a list of intellectual property-violating nations, or “state sponsors of piracy.” The recommendation states:

The Indonesian government’s policy… simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market.

Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.

As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions.

In general, this is just another example of an established, successful industry trying to maintain power by coercing governments to make emerging business models illegal, rather than bothering to innovate and create sustainability in the free market. I rant about this all the time, so I won’t continue to do so here.

But since this was filed by the “International Intellectual Property Alliance” – an interest group which conveniently separates this action’s publicity from the companies it represents – I thought I’d just call out just a few of the member companies which are behind this anticompetitive action: (this list goes through member organizations of the IIPA, including the BSA, ESA and AAP)

  • Adobe
  • American Association for the Advancement of Science
  • Apple
  • Bloomberg Press
  • The Cato Institute (Free market libertarian economics think tanks for government regulations?!)
  • Cisco Systems
  • Dell
  • Electronic Arts
  • Harcourt, Inc.
  • Houghton Mifflin Co.
  • HP
  • IBM
  • Intel
  • McGraw-Hill
  • Microsoft
  • Motion Picture Association of America
  • Nintendo
  • Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
  • SAP
  • Sony
  • Symantec
  • Xerox
  • Countless University presses (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, Universities of California, Chicago, New York, North Carolina and more)

While there isn’t evidence that these companies directly instigated the effort to stifle competition from open source, they are the financial backers of this anticompetitive organization, and thus have a responsibility to be accountable for its actions.

Why Google Buzz is a huge deal

Today, Google announced the release of their new product, Google Buzz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi50KlsCBio

Looking at just the features offered in this video, it appears to be nothing more than a Facebook News Feed clone with Gmail integration. But don’t be fooled: Google Buzz has the potential to totally disrupt social networking as we know it today, and to do it for the better, for the sole reason of its open nature.

Online social networking has been a repetition of the same pattern since the mid-1990s: companies offering “walled-garden” networks offering cool new ways to connect with others – as long as they buy into the same network. It’s great for business, as users are better attractors of customers than any cool new feature could ever be. The operator then owns that social interaction medium between the people who come to rely upon it. We saw it happen with AOL. We saw it in the early 2000’s with the advent of blogging, as the most successful personal blogs were the ones hosted on social communities such as Livejournal, Xanga and Blogger. We moved on to MySpace (come on, admit it… we all can share in the shame!) and then Facebook, and Twitter has long passed the point of being a toy for early adopters, as it has become a tool of the masses.

But these sites – these closed networks – lock users into using their system for communication. This is in stark contrast with our real life social network – the completely fluid and decentralized manner in which we interact. This social network belongs to us, and cannot be monopolized by another. There is no tangible constraint that keeps me from interacting with someone else in one way or another, only issues like distance and language, things which are decreasingly important as technology advances.

So why should our social interactions online be different from our interactions in the rest of the world? I should be able to connect with others regardless of which applications I choose to use. Google Buzz is a major step in this direction. Buzz has a huge amount of interoperability using existing technologies like Atom/RSS and OAuth, and is getting much more soon. (It’s all for developers’ taking at Buzz’s Google Code page.)

What makes this relevant to everyone is the ability to publish and read from just about any application you want. This isn’t a centralized application like Facebook Platform, where developers extend more functionality to users and keep them inside the “Walled Garden,” but enables social communication between all kinds of applications, instead of demanding that friends use the same applications if they wish to communicate. In theory, I can post a status, photo, video, or just about anything on Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, or even my personal site at ZekeWeeks.com, and everybody gets that information regardless of which applications they choose to use themselves.

This announcement means a win for the users, and a serious threat to operators of closed social networks. I don’t know how much it will succeed, but I’m all for products which improve users’ lives and increase technologies’ openness to everyone’s benefit.

A Day In Technology: 2010

Two and a half years ago, I was feeling super geeky and wrote a post covering the software I use in a normal day. It was interesting to read now, as somethings have changed a ton, and some things have remained exactly the same. I have since switched my main machine from a Dell Inspiron laptop to a MacBook Pro running OS X Snow Leopard, so that obviously changes some things, but what’s more interesting is the trends in how work and play gets done online in a pretty short time. So here’s an up-to-date synopsis of the tech that this CIS Major / Web Developer / general technophile interacts with in a normal day:

In the morning:

  • I try to avoid the computer sitting in my bedroom. I agree with the psychologists who claim that bedrooms should only be used for sleep and sex; I prefer to have a separate workspace. My current house is great, but lacks the room for me to really do this. I’m connected to the web all the time, so I can afford to stay disconnected in the morning as I gather my senses and try to remember who I am and why I’m not waking up in Spain.
  • This all goes out the window if I’ve forgotten to sign out of Instant Messenger – in that case, my friend Jesse usually jars me awake just for kicks.

From the Fortress of Productivity (also known as my home workstation):

  • It’s insane how many productivity tools are moving online. Because of this, most of what I do runs out of a Chromium (Google Chrome) nightly build. Chrome’s recently-added bookmark sync and extensions features are to die for, and make web apps feel more like traditional desktop ones.
  • I had a six-month affair with Apple Mail for my e-mail, but I have since returned to my web Gmail client. Nothing beats the ability to never delete a single email, and then go back to search all of those messages. I can pull up client interactions from 2004 and have them readily accessible at a moment’s notice. I’d honestly prefer to use a desktop client, but so far they’re pretty limited by the old IMAP and POP protocols.
  • I keep an eye on both my social networks and the news using TweetDeck.
  • Less frequently, I check a ton of RSS feeds using my Netvibes homepage. I recently borrowed my friend Kevin’s great idea and now have a whole tab devoted to feeds of Craigslist job listings, which allows me to spend a lot less time on upkeep while still staying on top of the latest job openings.
  • I recently started teaching myself guitar. I use Apple’s Logic Studio to play and record. It has a ton of amazing amp models and effects. I was using FL Studio on my PC system, which I still know my way around better than Logic. I’m honestly tempted to put a native Windows install back on this machine in order to have FL back. I’m trying to convince myself that I just need to work my way up the learning curve with Logic. We’ll see how that goes. On the flipside, I have GarageBand installed too, and that’s about the coolest and easiest-to-use Digital Audio Workstation I’ve ever used.
  • Adium is one of the real joys of being on Mac OS. I haven’t been happier with a multi-protocol IM app.
  • I’d be dead in the water without VMware Fusion 3. I use this as my connection to the Windows world, as well as the tool which enables me to try out the latest Linux distributions, though this has become a lot less interesting since my switch to OS X satisfied almost all the needs I was looking to Linux to fill.
  • For years I relied on the Adobe Creative Suite, especially Dreamweaver, to do web design and LAMP development work. Now I’m using Panic’s Coda, which is an amazing single-window IDE for web development. The interface is way more usable and gets out of the way to let you code. It has great integrated workflow for previewing layouts, uploading & managing files, and doing remote terminal work. I use the MAMP software package as a super easy way to test my apps on local web servers and databases.
  • For the more uninteresting kind of work, I’ve got both the Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2010 Beta for Windows installed on my system. I have to say that I’m not a huge fan of Mac Office in comparison to Office 2007 and 2010 for Windows, of which I’m a huge fan. But what has surprised me most is how much I enjoy using Apple’s Pages and Keynote as alternatives, which seriously required no time for me to learn and are a lot easier to start doing pretty great visual layout tasks without needing in-depth knowledge of the program. All of my current résumé stuff is done in Pages. It’s really the first time I’ve actually felt like I’m enjoying a word processing program. Unfortunately it doesn’t have perfect compatibility with MS Office, so anything that has to be interoperable with others still gets done in Office.
  • Dropbox has accomplished what web companies have been trying to get right for over a decade: seamless personal file sync. My Dropbox folder has completely replaced the various “Documents” folders on various systems I use. Instead, this little piece of software gives me one unified folder that stays in sync across all my machines: my laptop, my netbook, even my iPhone. And if I’m in a computer lab or elsewhere, it’s all accessible through the Dropbox website as well.
  • Picasa 3 is still my photo library software. They don’t make it easy to export from Windows to Mac versions, so I had to do some XML hackery to keep all of my albums and tags intact. Picasa has all of the features I need, but the Mac version is built on the Qt framework, which does a great job, but is very sluggish. I’d love to give a more native app like iPhoto or Aperture a try, but the effort involved in moving my stuff over means that I won’t make the jump unless I really have to.
  • I still love using WordPress as a content production platform for myself and clients. While traditional blogging is falling in popularity, WordPress is evolving to offer syndicators new and interesting ways to get their content out there. Right now I’m trying to decide on the best way to turn ZekeWeeks.com into my personal content hub which then syndicates select stuff to Facebook and Twitter.

On campus:

  • Each day I debate which computer I should bring to campus: my MacBook Pro or my netbook. The netbook runs Windows 7 Professional phenomenally, and has an amazing battery life. Having Google Chrome on there means my bookmarks stay in sync with my main machine. On a side note, I am a huge fan of Windows 7; I think it’s the best Windows release in a decade, and could be a very happy person using it as my main OS.
  • I take notes with Evernote, which is nothing short of amazing. All my notes stay in sync across all my devices, a rich web client, and my iPhone, and are fully searchable and require little effort to keep organized. I have one class where laptops aren’t allowed, so I’ll scan in notes from that class once I get home. Evernote has OCR technology that recognizes my handwriting and makes those notes searchable.
  • This semester, I’m taking a pretty interesting class in advanced networking & security. We’re doing everything on top of the VMware ESXi virtualization platform. I’m pretty familiar with VMware’s desktop offerings, but ESXi is a whole new bag of fun for me.

On my iPhone:

  • I’ve had my iPhone since 2007, and phones are finally starting to come out that can match its usefulness. I’m patiently awaiting the next round of devices from HTC and Apple, and will probably go with the best offering on Verizon later this year.
  • I have constant social network overload thanks to Facebook for iPhone, Tweetie 2, iReddit and BeejiveIM.
  • Spare moments around town find me using the Kindle app, or DoodleJump, an addictive game tied into my friends’ highscores. My 9 year old cousin kicked my butt last week.
  • My phone is carrier unlocked to T-Mobile and jailbroken to allow me to run GV Mobile, a native Google Voice client for my phone. All my voicemail forwards to Google Voice, where I get message transcriptions that are easier for me to deal with than traditional voicemail.

So there it is – I had a lot more to say on that than I had expected! It’s interesting how much stuff has moved over to the web. Socially, everyone is getting more and more interconnected, and it’s changing the face of our personal and professional lives. I think it’s important to stay conscious of these changes, both for the opportunities they present and the important decisions they demand we make regarding our availability to others, our privacy, the way we do business, and even our values in how we relate to one another.

McCain breaks his word on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

Three years ago, John McCain had this to say regarding the United States’ discriminatory policy on homosexuals serving in the military:

“The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to.”

Today, the leadership of the military – Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen – testified to the Senate Armed Service Committee that it is time to change the policy. McCain’s response to the military’s highest leadership?

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been an imperfect but effective policy.  And at this moment, when we are asking more of our military than at any time in recent memory, we should not repeal this law.”

Admiral Mullen testified, “It is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.… I cannot escape being troubled in the fact that we have in place a policy that forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.” But apparently that’s not good enough for Senator McCain any more.

John McCain has been an interesting character to me, and my coverage of him on this blog reflects that. I’ve given him high praise for his sometimes unpopular stand on torture, and endorsed him in the Republican primaries. But despite the noble values the Senator sometimes espouses, this is not the first time he has made a complete political about-face – check out his argument for troop withdrawal from Haiti in the early ’90s compared to his unflinching support of our current extended occupations in the Middle East.

It’s one thing to be a “maverick” and express your views even when they conflict with political convenience. It’s another thing to actually follow through on those views as an honest man. I honor your opinions, Senator McCain, but I question your integrity when you won’t stand by your own commitments.