Words Myte Bite

Tuesday’s thought for the day

Open Streetmap (OSM) whose web site is unsurprisingly  http://www.openstreetmap.org is a user generated site, you too can contribute. I live in Dublin, Ireland and one of my pal’s is a prolific cartographer on OSM. This got me thinking, here are people all around the world doing things in a common way by mutual agreement for a common objective. It is a bit like Free Software projects in general.

I am going to suggest that the data gathered by the Irish Government belongs to the Irish People it should be made available (within the parameters of the law) so that people in this country can exploit it in business or for other purposes that may help the Irish Economy grow. An obvious example is the OSI which is a government based monopoly which appears to generate cash, it would be nice to see what parts of it are really cash generating, and not just public monies being moved like wooden dollars. Wooden dollars are money you never get but appears on your bottom line as though you earned it, for instance recharging things within a company, a division could look very profitable but when you take away the “super charge” they are raising against other departments they could be found to be just providing a necessary service and charging a lot for it.

Lets think medical for a moment, imagine if no matter where you walked into a surgery or hospital in your country the doctor that sees you can see your history, perhaps they have to have an id card or code to get that information made available to them, or have an emergency procedure to access it if you turn up unable to help them to help you. That kind of information flow would hugely facilitate the level of important data that a patient may forget due to the stress or trauma they are undergoing.

What blocks this kind of thing?

Incompatible systems all claiming to help the data owner in each location manage their data but preventing the information help the public for whom all the services should be working to help.

Lets look at academia, the person who writes a paper and submits it to a peer review journal gets lauded for their important paper which then goes on to be quoted by others in the field. That looks great, however here is the cost to society, society paid for the research, it got owned by some publication which then places constraints on the author and their organisation as the originating body has to pay a high price for the peer reviewed journal.

The thoughts that follow on from this is that these things seem to be to be overly complex expensive costs to society, society has already paid to gather this data, it should be released for a nominal fee, the work is done, the payment for that work has already been made, society can benefit from the labours of those it has employed then it should there is a thing called innovation, but if you make the cost of entry too high people can’t innovate. Innovation is small incremental improvements on what went before.

Before I start delivering a full blown lecture I will stop here.

Stating the obvious about Microsoft

They don’t have a working implementation of OOXML version in the market place, the version of a “standard” they fought for a long time to make a standard.

(in the process a lot of hot air passed on and it has been claimed that the ISO system is now a victim of this standard lying face down in the dirt with a knife called OOXML in it’s back)

There are real implemented standards, so it is possible, ODF.

Both ISO standards, you can choose to use a standard but there is only one implemented!

(if you can  on show me I am wrong I’ll gladly publish the comment)

Were the actions taken to get OOXML turned into a standard an abuse of the power of a single player in the market place?

If the answer is yes, where are the regulators.

Software And Business Method Patents Are A Bad Idea

In a world of business method patents this is possible:
A Great Business Method Patent Joke

Business method patents allow the state to give someone a monopoly on a how they might do business.

Those pushing for their acceptance and those considering their acceptance should be aware of the fact that in the US the landscape has changed somewhat since a Supreme Court Judgement in a case commonly known as the “Bilski case”.

Groklaw article on Bilski.

It has been said that the patents and copyrights are heading  in a direction that might be compared with buying a car from a garage and finding you might only be able to get that car fueled in a garage of that brand. Work out how restrictive that would be, do you find that acceptable?

BSA in Czech Republic need to be pointed at

The Czech Republic Ministry of Finance And the BSA came up with this brilliant idea (ok that is a scarcastic comment):

http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/mfcr-bsa-open-source?page=1

No tax relief on hardware bought without software on it. I don’t know about you but I try to buy “white boxes” as they used to be called, that is hardware built to my spec with no software on it, why because I use GNU/Linux.

Why, not just as a hobby, where I work we save in excess of a hundred thousand euros because we can, by not paying Microsoft for their software and using as a viable alternative GNU/Linux.

Where I am it is not an IT or Web company, it is a service company with people doing administrative work and one IT person, me. We manage lots and do almost all of it with GNU/Linux, it really is that simple. Why do we have any Microsoft software at all? Because some external suppliers require it, because they are not neutral in the way they build web sites, yuk.

However they are few and far between. At least we have some competitive advantage in that we can claim these expenses. I hope the person who made that decision in the Czech republic ends up understanding what they are doing to their own economy, piping money out for no internal gain, great trick if you can do it.

Distributed Social Networking 5 (The Simple UI)

How do you actually read data on this Distributed Social Network?

I suggest that the model of a web server run on the local machine would serve many purposes.

In web services there is the concept of the “vhost” that of a virtual host a named site that lives at the same address as other sites.

In this way one computer can host many web sites.

The second part of this is to introduce something like “webmin” not webmin but something like it.

http://www.webmin.com/

For every group Mary sets up she has a “vhost” like envronment.

To control her local settings and privacy she uses the webmin like tool.

This presents a few problems, such as firewalls, however there are ways to deal with this. It will need to be a little creative but should not cost too much effort.