Category: Open Source

from the safety-through-openness dept.
Senior Associate BryanBruns writes "I've posted a working draft of a paper on "Open Sourcing Nanotechnology" that I'm preparing for a poster presentation at the November MNT Conference. I've found a lot of interesting stuff, which I try to lay out in the paper, but have some questions where I'd like to ask what ideas and suggestions others may have…[see "Read More" for the specific questions and an abstract]…I'm coming at this as a sociologist, with some background in economics and computers, but not an expert in nanoscience. I'd welcome comments, either directly to me ([email protected]), or here on Nanodot if you think they would be of general interest. The NanoCAD mailing list offers a continuing forum for discussion of molecular modeling software." Read more for the full post.

from the maybe-they-do-get-it dept.

A major article in the New York Times ("Code Name: Mainstream – Can 'Open Source' Bridge the Software Gap?" by Steve Lohr, 28 August 2000) reports that a Presidential commission will recommend backing the Open Source software development model as an alternative path for addressing pressing national needs in the development of new information technologies.

According to the Times article, "the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee will recommend that the federal government back 'open source software as an alternate path for software development,' according to a draft copy of the report, which will be sent to the White House and published in a matter of weeks."

from the hearts-and-minds dept.

In an essay for the New York Times ("Whose Intellectual Property Is It, Anyway? The Open Source War," 24 August 2000), author Peter Wayner (Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans (HarperBusiness, 2000) ) declares:

"There's a war going on. . . . It is between nimble people who want to think for themselves and big dinosaurs of corporations that want to keep the upstarts penned up and docile."

Wayner concludes: "The open-source war is not going to be easy for society. The intellectual property laws do help protect creators and their innovations, and corporations instinctively grab as much power as they can get. But if the strength of these laws grows and the teams of lawyers that enforce them become more powerful, society will become much poorer."

from the goodbye-micro-hello-nano dept.
Senior Associate (and Nanodot co-founder) Dave Krieger brings our attention to this story from Wired: "Open-source standards will completely reshape the software industry by 2004, according to a recent report by Forrester Research. IBM and Dell will eventually triumph, while Oracle and Microsoft will struggle to cope with a changing marketplace. Forrester forecasts that within four years, all traditional software vendors will need to change their proprietary business models to open-source ones, or drastically lower the price of enterprise application licenses…And eventually, the report forecasts, MS [Microsoft] will become little more than a 'legacy vendor,' offering support for its antiquated products." Eric Raymond couldn't say it better…No, cancel that, he probably could.

from the let's-sue-somebody dept.
A Salon article looks at the disturbing possibility that software programmers, and by extension possibly other technologists, could be held legally responsible for the abusive purposes to which their creations could be put, including open source software:
"People have always said that the law doesn't matter because technology will outpace it," [lawyer] Granick says. "The idea is that you'll never be able to stop things like Napster or its new iterations — the horse is out of the barn. But the law is a lot more powerful than people realize. It has the ability to severely retard or stop these things entirely."
Gee, maybe we should hold everyone legally liable for everything that happens which has any connection to something they ever did. Or talked about doing. Or thought about doing.

from the can-I-pay-my-Foresight-dues-this-way? dept.
Paul Hughes brings to our attention a new startup (founded by Senior Associate Jim McCoy): "A new file-sharing system could best rivals like Napster and Gnutella through more anonymous and efficient transfers. The new open-source software is called Mojo Nation. The service has an innovative feature that rewards users for uploading and distributing files: payment in a form of digital currency called "Mojo." See also the Wired article on Mojo Nation.

from the don't-miss-this-one dept.
Register ASAP to save $100 on the Foresight Gathering, Sept 8-10. Here's a sample: ever-controversial Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder and cypherpunk John Gilmore will speak: "I think I want to talk about how the prospect of nanotech is driving my work on intellectual property reform…If our economy is not to crash immediately after assemblers arrive (resulting in many hungry people rioting or warring), society needs to learn how to structure an economy to support the expensive part while letting the cheap part provide its benefits of broad distribution of the results…If even a third or a half of the economy is running on open source principles before assemblers start assembling more assemblers, we can probably avoid war and worldwide civil unrest." Read More for John's full message.

from the intriguing-but-scary dept.
davesag writes "The gRobots project is a forthcoming distributed supercomputing platform specifically developed for the simulation of evolvable nanotechnology. The project is both for the use of evolutionary computation to simulate the design of nanotechnological devices, and for the ongoing simulation of self-replicating devices. The system will be open-sourced so that the broadest range of researchers, evolutionary computing enthusiasts, simulation geeks, chemists, engineers, students and others can participate. " From the site: "We think that the safest and best way forward as these fields merge is to provide a virtual environment for self-replicating machines running evolving software to be tested, evaluated and even farmed." Good idea or too risky–what do you think?

from the please-no-chatting-committees dept.
If we want standards that actually work in new areas such as nanotech, we can't rely on committees chatting. GinaMiller points out an article in EE Times describing the aggressive movement of open source into a new area. Proponents of open source have formed their own new industry organization, describing the old proprietary ways as resulting in "mess" and "despair". Those favoring the old ways claim they use "dignified standards bodies that have gone about their business on an appropriate time schedule" (emphasis added). But new technologies aren't developed on an "appropriate" time schedule–they come much faster.