Yearly Archives: 2005

Capitalism-enthusiasts should go for Open Source

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The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source by Bruce Perens: recommended! Open source and capitalism are really more similar than what you think.
It’s not immediately obvious how Open Source[1] works economically. Probably the worst consequence of this lack of understanding is that many people don’t understand how Open Source could be economically sustainable, and some may even feel that its potential negative effect upon the proprietary software industry is an overall economic detriment. Fortunately, if you look more deeply into the economic function of software in general, it’s easy to establish that Open Source is both sustainable and of tremendous benefit to the overall economy.
Open Source can be explained entirely within the context of conventional open-market economics. Indeed, it turns out that it has much stronger ties to the phenomenon of capitalism than you may have appreciated.

The Gates of Interoperability

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Some recent bla bla bla by billgates about interoperability (while the all history of micro$oft is all about closed formats that force you to use the buggy micro$oft software). And a good reply by Opera CEO, noting for example that the page of the billgates announcement produces 126 HTML errors (it it not interoperable since it does not conform to standards) [the printer-friendly page is even worst] and that “your server sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets“.
Why did gates speak about interoperability? My guess is that more and more governments are thinking about moving away from M$Office (for the really interoperable OpenOffice) and billgates is trying the last, desperate attempt to say “ehi, governments, we are open too”. Some weeks ago, at the University of Trento there was a day devoted to “Software libero e formati aperti per la Pubblica Amministrazione” (free sofware and open formats for the Public Sector). There was Markus Spring who is in charge to migrate 14.000 computers of Munich’s City Hall from closed-gates software to gnulinux/openoffice/freesoftware. He said many times that the reason for the switch was INDEPENDENCE: they want to be independent from a single vendor and free to read citizens data with different softwares (just in case your vendor closes its activity), especially in the future and free to move to different vendor, if they wish. This is not possible with closed formats (such as .doc): about this I suggest you to read “We Can Put an End to Word Attachments” by Richard M. Stallman. I especially enjoy the presentation of Roberto Di Cosmo that was an astonishingly clear, entertaining and convincing talk about why governments should only use free software and open formats (even if they are much much much more expensing than closed software). Check his talk (PDF in Italian) and all the other talks. If you are organizing a presentation trying to convince a public administration about the reasons for switching to free software and open formats, call him, he will convince even stones (in English, French, Spanish or Italian)!

Flickr FlashGraph

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Found on FlickrBlog, a fancy Flash application that shows your social network on Flickr. For mine, type
  http://www.marumushi.com/apps/flickrgraph/flickrgraph.cfm?q=phauly
for yours, just change the string “phauly” with your username on flickr. What is terribly better than the social network visualiization tools I saw before (based on TouchGraph, check del.icio.us subscription network visualizer
 or these) is the fact that nodes are represented by photos. This makes me much more aware of the social network and (possibly) able to manage it and depict it in my mind.
And just to be clear, no, I don’t think this graph-based interfaces are usable for now, they are just fancy to play with for some seconds. But, as I said, “for now”….
And let me say “happy birthday Flickr” (the post also points to great pictures, Visualizing the Flickr social network)

Eclipse trust framework

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I found on SocialPhysics Wiki a very interesting proposal: Eclipse Trust Framework (ETF).
The goal of the ETF Project is to provide an open source framework to support the creation of applications on the Eclipse platform that manage a person’s online context (profile) and identity from the person’s or their agent’s perspective. (Eclipse is one of the most used tool for writing Java code, it is open source and funded mainly by IBM).
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My first couchsurfing host

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During past week I hosted in my house a russian girl I didn’t know before. Why? She asked hospitality through CouchSurfing. I subscribed few months ago to CouchSurfing when I was looking for free hosting in Cyprus. In the meantime I also arranged to find hospitality in Paris. And of course I was very happy to host her (Anna is her name and here is her couchsurfing profile). Feel free to contact me if you pass near Trento, Italy (here is my CouchSurfing profile and it should be easy to find my email address around).
And as an example of how much information you leave behind yourself surfing the web, here you can see a map of places Anna has logged in from.
One evening she asked me to use Internet and I saw she was typing livejournal.com, and yes, she has a blog, though it is in Russian and I cannot understand it.
[CouchSurfing can be interesting also from a research point of view, see much below in the following text]
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Europe and Italy

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This funny flash animation can give you an idea of how Italy is different from Europe. I especially enjoyed the representation of how Italians form queues, and I can swear that it is totally true: queue is probably a too difficult concept for us. This humorous anthropologic study can be useful in case you are pondering about coming to live here (you know who you are).

“Tag_the_tag” tag and metadadaism

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In Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain, Jakob argues “a neuron in your brain is a lot like a tag in a tagweb“. A tagweb is a network of tags whose edges are the “this tag is tagged with this tag” relationship, for example he tags the tag “Victoria” with the tag “female”. He states that it is not possible to tag tags on flickr but there is a workaround. If you tag a page that “represents” a tag, you are implicitly tagging that tag and you can do it with del.icio.us. I tagged some pages representing tags with the new tag “tag_the_tag” (metatag has already another meaning due to HTML). It can be a sort of wordnet but bottom up. I’m skeptical about the rise of “tagging tags” but, if this happen, then tag spam will be an issue. Jacob ends with “I now understand how my brain works, and I can act in ways that embraces that knowledge.” that really seems an enormous excess of “technology-driven optimism”.
[New word you find in the text: metadadaism (search for metadadaism and write metadadaism in wikipedia).]
[Note for myself: an online article with colorful pictures is more likely to attract attention (at least for me) but .mov videos are bad since I have many problems watching them on my operating system libre]

Trento Caput Mundi?

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After BillGates and Stallman, Sun is working with Trento. “Java Open Business Initiative launched by Sun Microsystems Italia … con il patrocinio dell’Università degli Studi di Torino e dell’Università di Trento, Dipartimento di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni”. Did the world discover this little town all of a sudden?

Ubuntu and Stallman

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Today I received a package from Ubuntu. It contains 50 cardboard folders containing both an UbuntuLinux Install CD and an UbuntuLinux LiveCD. And Ubuntu sends it for free. This is very timely since there will be Stallman (father of GNU and Free Software Foundation, the one who started it all) in Trento on February 28, 2005 and the intention is to give away hundreds of CDs with free software (ubuntu GNU/Linux, mandrake Linux, but also free software for Windows such as theopencd and gnuwin2) and creative-commons-licenced music. Most people still don’t understand that copying and giving away free software is totally legal, actually it is what people creating that software want you to do! Anyway, I want to thank Ubuntu, to invite you to order some free Ubuntu CDs as well and, if you feel like, to donate to Ubuntu.