Europe the place to be?

For obvious reasons what’s happening in the emerging markets such as India and China is getting a lot of attention but it seems worthwhile to underscore that Europe is really playing a major role in getting our industry to move forward.

If you’re not convinced I suggest you take a look at the news section of the Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe website.

I find it fascinating to see the prominent place open source and standards issues are taking in the political arena, the number of decisions various European administrations are making in favor of open source and standards, and the cost savings some of these administrations are reporting.

This is demonstrated by the following few examples:

EP candidate: Free software essential for public administrations

The French candidate for the European Parliament Marielle de Sarnez says public administrations’ interest in free software is essential. “This is an issue of competitiveness for the EU in the information technologies sector, as well as the condition of our technological independence.”

IT: Democrats want public administrations to favour open source

Two parliament members of the Italian Democratic Party want Italy’s public bodies to favour free software. By 2012 all IT systems should be based on such software, MPs Vincenzo Vita and Luigi Vimercati proposed in a bill last month

NL: Amsterdam to make OpenOffice and Firefox default on city desktops

The city council of the city of Amsterdam on Wednesday decided that OpenOffice and Firefox should become default applications on all 15.000 desktops in use by the administration.

SE: Municipalities ask software vendors to use open standards

Nine Swedish municipalities have asked ten software application firms to start supporting OpenOffice.

DK: Municipality uses OpenOffice and saves a million DKK per year

The Danish municipality of Gribskov has saved two million DKK, about 270,000 euro, over the past two years by switching the public administration and schools to OpenOffice, Michel van den Linden, responsible for IT in the municipality says in an interview with the Danish IT news site Computerworld.

FR: Gendarmerie saves millions with open desktop and web applications

The French Gendarmerie’s gradual migration to a complete open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euro, says Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard. “This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent. This will not affect our IT systems.”

And the list goes on and on. Good luck to those who think they can still stick to the old model of proprietary software and vendor lock-in. This is like standing in front of a train coming at full speed in my opinion.

On a personal level I’m obviously interested because I’m European and still have strong ties to the old continent but this, along with many other changes I observe, makes it clear to me that the United States are no longer where “things” are happening.  At least not the way it used to be. The change is coming from other places in the world, like Europe.

SDForum, Microsoft ISV Forum, and OSBC: three conferences on Open Source

As I indicated in a previous post I was invited to participate in the SDForum Open Source Colloquium on Monday. This year the event ended up being jointly held with Microsoft third annual Open Source ISV Forum which was taking place the same day. Unfortunately, due to conflicting schedules I couldn’t attend much of Microsoft’s sessions.

The next two days the InfoWorld OSBC conference was held in the same hotel and I attended that event as well. So, I just participated in two and a half days of presentations, panels, and hallway discussions on open source and I want to share some of my impressions.

First, I think it’s fair to say that the most obvious thing that comes out of all this is that there isn’t any discussion about whether open source is real or not anymore. It is clearly accepted that it’s become part of our industry and it’s here to stay. As several speakers commented the fact that even Microsoft seems to finally be recognizing this fact is a clear sign that this question isn’t really up for debate anymore.

I should point out that Microsoft’s message remains somewhat twisted though. Yes, they recognize that open source is part of our industry. They talk about interoperability with Linux for instance and this appears to be real, simply because it is motivated by customer demand and even Microsoft has to listen to its customers sometimes.

However, this doesn’t mean they are embracing open source for that matter. You’ve probably heard that the financial crisis is said to be an incentive for companies to look at open source solutions as a way to cut costs. I don’t know about you but it makes sense to me.

In the little I heard during Microsoft’s event one of their executives was claiming that contrary to what is being said there is no real move toward open source though. According to him this is because the last thing companies want to do in the current situation is to take risks and moving toward open source is too big a risk.

While the point may seem to have some validity it’s reminding me of the same old FUD Microsoft has been spreading for years to try and keep people away from using open source. And one has to balance that with claims from Mindtouch’s CEO and the likes about the ease and record speed at which companies can deploy their open source offerings.

The second thing I noticed is that a lot of the sessions were about sharing information on how to use open source, how to manage open source activities in your company, how to successfully launch an open source project and create a community around it, the legal intricacies of the various open source licenses and their interaction with proprietary code.

There seemed to be a large amount of lawyers actually, both presenting and attending, as well as geeks and business people. Bringing these people together seems to be a characteristic of what open source does actually.

I should mention one talk from a lawyer on how to separate or “shim” proprietary code from copyleft code (typically under GPL). He mentioned that some people got the feeling that he was just helping companies avoid having to comply with the obligations brought by the copyleft license and gave some explanation of why this wasn’t the case. But I have to admit that I did not understand it.

All I can say is that having listened through all the techniques he suggests one uses to avoid the license contamination did leave me with the exact feeling he tried to render invalid. That is: 1) these are just tricks not to comply with the license, and 2) this is clearly going against the spirit of the license.

In summary, I think there was a lot of very practical information being shared rather than general debates on the good or bad of open source we used to have. I think this is very good and a clear sign of maturity.

As some of us remarked during the conference(s) we probably won’t have conferences dedicated to open source for much longer for that matter. Open source is poised to become business as usual.

The Eco-Patent Commons has momentum

Although I’ve never talked about the Eco-Patent Commons before I’ve actually been involved in this project since its inception. You might wonder why, given that it doesn’t really have anything to do with standards and open source which are my primary focus.

It’s one of those “special projects” we have at IBM which do not necessarily fall within the scope of anyone’s responsibilities, and for which we pull in people with various skills to help out.

What I brought to the project was experience with patent pledges and policies as well as organizations/associations of various interested parties (regarding process, governance, etc.)

The initial idea came out of IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook program. A program in which we invite people from all around the world to meet and discuss “the most vexing challenges on earth” and what might be done about them.

In this case the idea that came out of the GIO was to share patents to help protect the environment and foster innovation in that field.

For several years IBM had been experimenting with non traditional ways to use our patent portfolio. We thus did several patent pledges in support of Linux, Open Source, Web services based healthcare and education related standards, and others. So, the idea of allowing one to use our patents on a royalty free basis for a specific purpose was no foreign concept to IBM and doing so in support of the protection of the environment fit within this trend. It was therefore agreed upon within IBM without much controversy.

Because we didn’t want this to be just an IBM thing however, we looked for a neutral host and invited other companies to participate in the creation of a patent commons.

Difference between a patent pledge and a patent commons

A patent pledge can take various forms but it is basically a public commitment from a patent owner not to sue one or more parties for infringement, typically, in support of a specific usage. This is usually done by companies like IBM in support of specific technologies, standards, or particular industry trends, such as the open source with the goal to facilitate adoption of a specific technology, standard, or software.

Wikipedia defines commons as a word “used in the sense of any sets of resources that a community recognizes as being accessible to any member of that community.” In the case of patent commons, the resources made accessible are patents. Like patent pledges, patent commons are typically created in support of a specific goal. The major difference between patent pledges and patent commons is that while pledges can be done unilaterally, commons by nature require the creation of a community, a set of identified intellectual property owners who agree to respect the rules set by the community.

We investigated several possible hosts and eventually settled on the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) which welcomed us with enthusiasm.

WBCSD is perfect for this because the project fits well within its mission and, WBCSD is an international organization with participation from companies from all around the world.

The Eco-Patent Commons was launched in January 2008 with the participation of Nokia, Pitney Bowes, and Sony, in addition to IBM.

Later Bosh, Dupont, and Xerox joined, and today WBCSD announced that Ricoh and Taisei joined the commons and Dupont contributed more patents.

While we haven’t seen an explosion in participation the commons exists and keeps on growing both in terms of number of patents and in number of members. This is very encouraging. The idea of pledging patents is still brand new so, it’s no surprise it takes time for companies to get comfortable with it. The fact that several companies have already done so leaves me without doubt that more are to join us.

I invite you to familiarize yourself with the Eco-Patent Commons. Investigate whether your company might join and talk about it around you. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Global Open Source Colloquium

I realize this is late notice but there is a whole set of events happening in San Francisco so if you’re in the area you may be interested in this.

I’ll be speaking on a panel on “Global Initiatives and Governments: Opportunities and Challenges” on Monday (03/23/09) as part of the Global Open Source Colloquium organized by the SDForum.

I participated in last year’s event and thought the discussions were very interesting so, I’m looking forward to it and I invite people to come and join us there.

If you’re interested check out the registration page.

See you there.

Irony of all – Peer review

I received an invitation to a Symposium on Peer Reviewing, which is motivated by the following:

Only 8% members of the Scientific Research Society agreed that “peer review works well as it is”. (Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192).

“A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision and an analysis of the peer review system substantiate complaints about this fundamental aspect of scientific research.” (Horrobin, 2001)

Horrobin concludes that peer review “is a non-validated charade whose processes generate results little better than does chance.” (Horrobin, 2001). This has been statistically proven and reported by an increasing number of journal editors.

After a short introduction the invitation then goes on into explaining how one should go at submitting a paper and what the selection process will be. And this is what it reads:

All Submitted papers will be reviewed using a double-blind (at least three reviewers), non-blind, and participative peer review.

Some people have humor.

On Open Extensions

I noticed that several e-government policy documents being developed around the world are touching on the difficult issue of dealing with extensions to standards. This is a problem that always seems to be a source of controversy and that is hard to deal with so, I decided to investigate it further.

I asked for input from several standards people and ended up writing, with my colleague Jochen Friedrich, the following short document.

In this document we tried to describe the problem, capture the main points that have been made to us so far, and further define the concept of “Open extensions”. This concept can be found in the draft policy of the government of India (PDF).

It would be great if this could constitute the beginning of a discussion and help move the industry in the right direction on this issue. I would appreciate if you could use the comment feature to give us your opinion on this.

This is very much a work in progress and I may publish updates in the future.

Disclaimer

As everything on this blog, this is my/our personal opinion and it does not necessarily represent IBM’s position.

Introduction

Extensions to standards are common practice, in some areas more than in others. Extensions can help to meet specific requirements in a given domain which are not covered by the applicable standard. On the other hand, extensions carry the risk of breaking the interoperability and thus violating one of the basic objectives of having a standard.

How to deal with extensions is therefore a major challenge – in particular for organizations which consider standards, and in particular open standards, as the basis for their technology and procurement decisions. Fundamentally, the goal of  procurement and open standards policies ought to be to prevent vendor lock-in via proprietary extensions which effectively break interoperability.

Open Standards and the Public Sector

In the globally integrated economy, open technical standards are integral to enabling the delivery of everything from disaster relief services and health care, to business services and consumer entertainment. They allow governments to create economic development platforms and deliver services to their citizens. Open standards enable electronic devices and software programs to interoperate with one another, which is a prerequisite for efficient electronic data processing and transaction handling.

Worldwide more and more governments are implementing open standards policies. They require open standards and interoperability in public tenders and thus leverage the benefits of open standards for the public sector. Open standards ensure that users have flexibility and choice, by keeping exit costs low where technologies need to be replaced by better, more efficient, or more cost effective ones. Open standards are key to guaranteeing fair competition. This includes open source offerings as well as other stakeholders in the market.

The challenge of extensions

Extensions to open standards are a challenge because they are to some extent contrary to the whole point of requiring the use of standards in the first place. However, both the complexity of the various situations technology has to address and the need for evolution makes extensions a necessity that needs to be taken into account. And, after all, extensions don’t necessarily have to break the idea behind using a standard.

Indeed, the key criterion regarding extensions is not whether some technology or product extends a given standard or not, but rather whether in doing so it breaks interoperability.

Some standards provide built-in extension mechanisms with ways to communicate what extensions, if any, are being used and how they must be dealt with. For instance, the standard may prevent interaction altogether if the integrity of the information being exchanged depends on an extension which is not understood by the other component.

In such a case a product is deemed compliant even when it supports extensions – assuming they are supported according to the mechanism defined by the standard.

Procurement policies – support for Open Extensions

In general, products that support extensions to a standard ought to strictly adhere to the standard by default and only make use of extensions through some explicit request mechanism. This is necessary to avoid unintentional reliance on proprietary extensions which is typically discovered later on, when trying to connect components from different vendors or replace a component from one vendor by that of another.

When extensions are supported they should be “Open Extensions”. Open extensions are to extensions what open standards are to standards. To be “open” extensions must meet the same criteria with regard to openness, transparency, availability, implementability, etc.

Open extensions are best developed as part of the evolution of the standard in an open standards development organization. This has proved to be effective and efficient in ensuring that such extensions are indeed open which is a major element to preserving interoperability.

Open extensions provide for the required flexibility while keeping the spirit and technical benefits of open standards and openness. Where procurement policies – especially in the public sector – support extensions they should make clear that it is limited to open extensions. Procurement policies which require open standards and allow, in exceptional cases, for open extensions are optimally set up to leverage the full benefits of open standardization.

Linking the proper way

Admittedly this blog entry might just be seen as another rant but this is meant to be constructive so, hopefully that’s how you’ll see it.

I constantly see people put links in their web pages on words like “here”, “there”, or “this”. It is the wrong way to link to other pages.

For instance, it is wrong to write:

Arnaud posted a blog entry on linking the proper way here.

Although the link does function all right and will achieve the desired effect it violates the basic principle of hypertext linking the web is built on. Indeed, this principle is that the link needs to be placed on the object the page being referenced relates to.

In the above example, clearly the page the link points to is not about “here”. So, instead, you should simply write something like:

Arnaud posted a blog entry on linking the proper way.

In this case the link is set on “linking the proper way” which properly describes what the page being referenced is about.

Alternatively you could do the following:

Arnaud posted a blog entry on linking the proper way.

It is still correct because “a blog entry on linking the proper way” also properly describes what the page is about.

Sometimes, it takes a little effort to get it right. Instead of writing something like:

For more information look at this.

You’ll need to write something like:

For more information look at hyperlinks.

But the extra effort, quite minimal I’d point out, is not wasted. It is not only correct it is also much more informative. It actually provides the reader with a clue of what the linked page is about.

And if that wasn’t enough, linking the proper way has other advantages than informing the reader about what the link is about. The relationship thus established can also be used by search engines in determining what keywords might be relevant to the linked page. It is rather useless for a page to be associated with the word “here”. On the other hand, a search engine might make use of the fact that it is associated with the word “hyperlinks”.

Now, I know that it’s been found that using direct and simple instructions is more effective with some users. That’s what leads to the infamous and omnipresent “click here” but while I’m willing to accept that argument for commercial websites I can’t accept it for other type of content.

I think the reality is that lack of understanding and laziness are responsible for most of the errors made in this regard. Hopefully, this post will help with the former. As for the latter, it’s all up to you but, now that you’ve read this you won’t be able to claim you didn’t know.

Paradigm shifts and tug wars over the web – Part 2/2

In the first part of this discussion I focused on the shift that occurred around who controls the rendering of a page. I will now discuss how control of the user interaction shifted from the user to the page author/developer.

Web pages initially contained no information about how the user would interact with the page or the web browser would behave. It’s by using functions supported by the browser that a user would move back to a previous page, print a page, open a page in a new window, etc. The user was therefore in full control of the interaction.

This simple paradigm was however first challenged with the introduction of the infamous frames and link targets in HTML. These mechanisms let the web author control how the browser should behave when the user clicks on a link. Aside from making it impossible to reliably bookmark a page, this marked an important departure from the original concept of having the user in control.

Yet this was just the beginning, and was nothing compared to what is now done with all the websites full of javascript which make the so called “Web 2.0“.

With javascript, web pages no longer just contain some content to be displayed along with some layout information but they are in effect programs that want to dictate how the browser should behave and how the user should interact with them. And that’s where the problems creep in.

In reality we end up with two separate entities trying to control the same thing. The web author on one end and the user with the browser on the other. Both trying to control how to manipulate and interact with the same information. It’s no wonder there is a clash.

This can take some rather benign forms like the close button I often see on some web pages. I always wonder: who needs that? Why isn’t the close button in the corner of the window enough? I use neither anyway, favoring a quick Alt-F4, but admittedly other than a bit of wasted real estate on the page it doesn’t really hurt.

Equally useless is the print button I often see on web pages. Some websites use that to render the page differently, it’s not truly necessary with proper use of stylesheets but at least it does something useful. More often than not it does nothing different than the print command of my browser though. But, again, it doesn’t really hurt.

What really hurts is when it interferes with other aspects of the basic browser functions like the navigation history or whether the new page should be rendered in a new window or not. The reality is that in the vast majority of cases this is only done for bad reasons – or at least for reasons that serve the web author rather than the web user.

These reasons include: the authors don’t want you to move off their site, they want to force some information onto you (remember those lovely pop-up ads?), they think they know what’s best for you or that you don’t know how to use your browser, etc.

The list of bad web programing practices hidden behind all this is endless. How many times do you see websites that urge you not to use the back button or reload the page, informing you that doing so may lead to multiple charges on your credit card? This one has typically nothing to do with javascript but more with the fact that they didn’t program their state machine well enough to support you going back and forth between pages, or reload them.

In fact, most of this only exists because websites are poorly designed, there are mechanisms to ensure the browser history gets updated so that the back button works for instance but, fundamentally it remains that there is a clash between two different paradigms that are both at play: 1) the user is in control, 2) the web author is in control.

Users have control via their browser, authors have control via the javascript and other techniques they stuff their pages with.

While I enjoy many of the benefits modern websites bring, as a user, I regret the loss of control that often seems to come with them. I hope that we eventually reconcile the two forces at play, and authors/developers get better at designing their websites so that users can get the advantages of modern websites without losing basic functionality and control.

Paradigm shifts and tug wars over the web – Part 1/2

I posted a rant on the fact that many modern websites break some basic browser functionality but as I did so it occurred to me that I should take the time to discuss the paradigm shift that is behind that simple fact.

Indeed, beyond the fact that the back button of my browser is rendered unreliable by some websites, lies a major shift, a kind of tug war between web users, armed with their browser, and web authors/developers, armed with the latest techniques in websites development. This shift or tug war is about how the web fundamentally works and whether the consumer or the content provider has control.

In fact, we’ve already seen several paradigm shifts in how the web works. First, there was a shift in how a web page gets displayed. Then there was a shift in how one interacts with the page. The latter is now intensified by the introduction of the latest web technology.

As I was about to post this entry I realized it was getting really long so to make it more digestible I decided to split in two parts. In this first part I discuss the first shift which is about who controls how a web page is to be displayed. In the second part I will discuss the second shift which is about who controls the interaction with the web page or how the browser behaves.

When Tim Berners-Lee created the web his idea clearly was that what was important was to enable the exchange of information.  How exactly the information would end up being rendered didn’t matter that much.

For this reason the early versions of HTML were very much designed to carry structure and meaning rather than precise rendering. The HTML specification, for instance, doesn’t specify what font a heading should be rendered in. It just has a general notion of different levels of headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) and it relies on the browser to choose appropriate fonts to represent the different levels in a reasonable way.

When the web picked up and commercial enterprises started developing websites this paradigm quickly flew out the window though. Marketing departments, typically in charge of developing websites and used to developed glossy brochures and the likes, wanted precise control of how their website would appear to the user and tolerated no variations.

This is what brought us the lovely early websites full of tables filled with one pixel wide images that failed to render properly on any screens other than those that had the exact resolution they happened to be designed for.

Thankfully, people learned, and with the introduction of stylesheets and the array of devices in use the situation has greatly improved on that front.

This was also helped by the fact that there is a limit in how much authors can force users to look at their information the way they want because some people just can’t. Accessibility issues indeed come into play, and they mean that, at least to a certain degree, the browser must provide users with a way to override the desires of the web author. This can be to render the text with enough contrast or in a font big enough for instance.

Nevertheless, it remains that the initial paradigm of “I don’t really care how exactly my page gets rendered” seems to be gone for good. For better or for worse.

Read on the second shift in Paradigm shifts and tug wars over the web part 2.

Giving me back my back button!

It is somewhat unfortunate that I start the year on my blog by posting a rant but here I go anyway.

I’m getting tired of all the websites that make the “back button” of my browser useless.

And when I say “button” I really just mean “back function”, because I actually seldom use the mouse and favor key strokes in many cases. So, in reality I typically hit the “page back” button on my keyboard or Alt-left arrow key when I’m on a keyboard that doesn’t have that key.

But that doesn’t really matter, whichever way I actually do it, I expect this action to get me back to the page I was previously on, just before I followed some link that led me to the page I’m looking at now.

Unfortunately, more often than not nowadays this action leads me to the wrong page. That is I typically land on some page I visited before but not the previous one. This obviously makes using the back function of my browser useless.

Sadly this problem seems to be a common characteristic of modern websites, such as Facebook or Picasa just to name a couple, that provide their own navigation mechanism which screws up the history the browser relies on for its back function.

Every time I mention that to my friend Andy who writes javascript for a living he says: “ah, yes, keeping the history straight is tough.” Well, I don’t care whether this is tough or not, website developers need to understand that this is something they need to worry about and get right.