There’s more to keeping the web free and open than encouraging fierce competition between access providers and equally impartial treatment of traffic. Free and open also extends to software technologies that enable and extend our use of the net.

When it comes to software, we like free. Free insures quick adoption by those who have a compatible platform. Free and open is better, but in the case of the net, open is a necessity to insure continuous development, improvement, and availability to the broadest range of platforms.

According to Mozilla’s Tristan Nitot :

“proprietary solutions running on top of the Web are trying to take over”…”So far, there has not been a problem,” Nitot said. “Both Adobe and Microsoft have been willing to give (Flash and Silverlight away) for free. But maybe they have an agenda. They’re not here for the glory; they’re here for the money.”Nitot gave two historical examples of Microsoft and Adobe withdrawing or withholding products from certain platforms: Microsoft’s discontinuation of Internet Explorer for Unix and Mac, and Adobe’s long-standing refusal to “provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users.” He suggested that Web developers should be asking those companies whether they are “sure that Silverlight and Flash will always be available on all platforms (and) run decently on all platforms.” (Cnet)

Adobe’s recent move to partly open Flash is an improvement, but does not go far enough. Closing software that is dominant also causes stagnation. Windows is a great example of that.

Adobe may be close to discovering the fact that going open source is the only way to insure long term wide spread adoption of Flash. At least the Open Screen Project takes a step in that direction.

The Open Screen Project, supported by Adobe and several “industry leaders” and announced today, is supposed to foster the creation of a “consistent runtime environment” that will “remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices, and set top boxes”. The idea is that such a runtime environment will provide the best performance across a wide range of operating systems.

As part of the Open Screen Project, Adobe announced several changes in their policies towards Flash, “to open access to Adobe Flash technology”:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

(OS News)

A nex report by Xiti indicates that Firefox browser has gained market share in most areas of the globe except for the US which had a small drop in March. Biggest gains are int eh New Europe countries like Poland. The most stalwart use being in Australia.

According to Xiti, Internet Explorer has lost 2.5 percentage points during the past six months. Opera and Safari have also seen slight gains during that time period to 3.3 and 2.3 percent, respectively. Xiti does not provide statistics for iPhone browser marketshare and the report does not specify whether or not iPhone browsing is counted as part of the Safari statistics.

Xiti’s global statistics indicate that Oceania—comprised of Australia and New Zealand—has the highest Firefox market share of any continent, with 31.2 percent. The continent with the lowest marketshare is Asia, at 17.2 percent. In many parts of Asia, Firefox has trouble competing with Maxthon, a browser created in China that uses Internet Explorer’s rendering engine.

With Safari, Opera, and Firefox continuing to expand; IE’s dominance is slowly shrinking.

Xiti report here.
HT: Ars Technica

Finland. Fron the same folks that produced Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning now comes a virtual production studio. They have developed a collaborative creation platform for film. Barrier to entry? None. Just join and provide your talents.

The Star Wreck Studios team, based in Tampere, Finland, has built a virtual studio for Iron Sky and an open-source platform that gives anybody the chance to make a film at no cost. They have recruited American Stephen Lee as managing director, and the chairman of the board is John Buckman, mostly known as the founder of Magnatune, a record label he created in Berkeley, Calif., in 2003.

Board member and serial entrepreneur Peter Vesterbacka says the aim of the open-source project is “wrecking the Hollywood model.”

“Hollywood only distributes 700 films a year, but there are 100,000 people in Hollywood with film ideas,” said Vesterbacka, who formerly worked for Hewlett-Packard and is also co-founder of the global social event Mobile Monday.

With this Web-based platform, people interested in film can make high-quality productions at almost no cost. The content can be anything from short films to feature films and can be distributed on the Internet or mobile devices or in theaters.

Vesterbacka says open source for film hasn’t worked so far, because of the complex production requirements.

So lets see. The big studios are losing their grip on distribution. They could still survive being the point of production and do some sort of pay-per-view TVoIP platform. But wait if Star Wreck Studios can approach 80% of production value for 10% the cost does that not threaten the big studios last bastion of revenue? I come to the same conclusion.

Star Wreck may not be the last such operation, but one of many. There will be a wholesale morphing of film. Or I should say how it is stitched together and deployed. Not only that but maybe this kind of tool would give folks like Michael Yon a venue to produce a full length film that is better than the Iraq-something trash that has bombed at the box office so far. Real life heroes in a real life place.

Linky.

Mr. Malone of the WSJ lays out aspects of societal and business change that the US faces in say the next 50 years. He throws terms out like ‘fat pipe’, ‘process patents’, ‘free internet’, etc. Our loyal Thridpipe readers already know all this because we have this electronic pulpit on high. We have been laying this prescription down since this blog was created. —

- Build up Brand America. Government agencies, including the USAID and United States Commercial Service, need to promote American brands, via the Web, hardware and software, to everywhere in the world where they are currently unknown or disliked. Voice of America needs to become a massive Internet portal to the American economy and media.

The U.S. International Trade Commission must actively pursue illegal international threats to our e-economy from hackers to scammers — such as bringing serious economic sanctions against nations that look the other way (or even support) these activities. We need to capture the dominant share of the minds of the next two billion, enforce an honest Web, and make America again synonymous with the best.

- Create a Fat Pipe. Many of the great fiber optic lines entering and leaving the U.S. were almost dark a decade ago, and that abundance created an opportunity that helped propel the creation of companies like Google. But Google’s recent announcement that it was going to install its own cable across the Pacific to Japan suggests that the age of cheap bandwidth is almost over. Late last year, a report by Nemertes Research predicted a bandwidth shortage by 2011.

The U.S. needs to have the fastest, cheapest and most reliable Internet access on the planet, both inside our borders and in our connections to the rest of the world. Like the railroads and the interstate highway system before it, we need a program of direct investment, subsidies and tax breaks to assure that Americans always have the world’s best Web access – and the rest of the world has the best access to us.

- Revamp Nafta. While the Democratic candidates are calling for the abolition, or crippling of the North American Free Trade Agreement, what we should be discussing is how to revamp it and other trade accords to reflect the newly emerging world of people-to-people, not just business-to-business, trade. We need to be prepared for a world where knowledge workers around the world are hired online by the minute – in other words, radically simplified employee contracts, payroll tax documentation and W-2s, and improved tax laws on home offices, part-time work, and self-employment.

But most of all, we must not impede this inevitable transformation by doing anything to limit free trade – even if that means reaching individual trade accords with countries regarding buying and selling on eBay, MySpace, Facebook and the like.

- Promote a Free Internet. The lights of intellectual freedom that have been created by the Internet are slowly going out all over the world – look at China’s recent blackout of Web videos of events in Tibet. We need to fight to keep the Internet open and accessible to everyone on the planet, and keep tyrants from censoring their people.

Short of that, we need to keep the U.S. an island of Web freedom, open to anyone who can reach our servers and sites. A good start would be to require U.S.-based companies to maintain free speech in all their international subsidiaries – no more Yahoos helping foreign governments locate dissidents.

- Reform patent laws. In an era characterized by “free” downloads as well as the proliferation of pirate content sites, the overly broad U.S. patent and copyright laws need to be reformed to reflect these new sensibilities. Today they stifle innovation. A good place to start would be a revamping, if the not the elimination, of “business method” patents, which even Justice Anthony Kennedy has suggested can suffer from “potential vagueness and suspect validity.” Meanwhile, patent approvals need to be made faster, tougher and cheaper.

- Make education more open. It is time for the rest of us to accept the reality that education in the U.S. is now a multi-platform (public, private, home) experience, and begin building Web-based curricular support for all three. It is in our national interest to make all schoolchildren well-educated and competitive in the modern economy.

Now we are not Malone clones. There have been articles we have vehemently disagreed with. But for once he is firing all the cylinders. Most definitely get rid of the ‘business process’ patents. They are a scourge. But we ought to go further. First roll back patent use to 17 years as was originally fostered. If you can’t turn a profit in that period of time you don’t deserve to keep the patent anyway. Patents and copyrights should also have innovation and sunset provisions. If a patent holder does not utilize the patent or license it for deployment within the first 4 years then the patent is invalidated. As well if a copyright is not longer a published work available for first release purchase or the death of the author then it becomes public domain. I love Elvis Presley recordings, but something is wrong when the estate is still in force collecting royalties.

There is also one that Malone missed. ‘Promote the Everyman’. Foster an environment that anyone who wants to compete can do so. The function of government should be to build that stadium of equal opportunity. The place to start is in revamping small claims court to include all the provisions of superior court as to court directed remedies. Today most small claims are only available for remedy of monetary damages. The problem is in many cases the damage stems from systemic abuse by corporations. The little guy has to be able to have their day in court. Abolish one way contracts and forced arbitration as a manner to receiving products & services. Eliminate legal extortion by making it a penalty of disbarment for a lawyer to blindly issue legal threats without ascertaing that there has been actual damages to his client.

Mr. Malone is to be commended for this piece.

Read the whole article here.

It’s not news to most of our readers. Open Source is the new business model for software. Red Hat derives its income largely from support and services. It’s also no secret to most that Red Hat’s biggest competitor is not other Linux distributions, it’s Microsoft.

New CEO James Whitehurst believes Red Hat is now ready to continue rapid growth through an economic downturn as the Raleigh-based company pitches its free software to organizations looking to cut their tech budgets.

“It’s my hypothesis for why we continue to see robust demand while others seem to be having issues,” Whitehurst said in an interview. “We’re known for value, and when you’re looking to cut budgets, we’re a logical name that comes to mind.”

Unlike Microsoft Corp., Red Hat makes money from its Linux operating system and other software by selling subscriptions for service. (Yahoo News)

Having completed transition from it’s original sponsor, Wengo, popular open source VoIP engine Open Wengo has resumed development as QuteCom With MBDSYS as it’s sponsor.

MBDSYS has five developers working on WengoPhone and its underlying libraries, one full-time and four others on a part-time basis. Because its normal line of business often involves contract and customization work with WengoPhone and its components, Lebedev expects taking on management of the project to have little impact on the company’s time.

Re-starting development

In the short term, Lebedev says to expect a new release shortly after CeBIT, which ran last week. That release will be based on the current 2.2.x-series code, and will consist of primarily bug fixes, but will also introduce peer-to-peer presence management — allowing users to relay their present/away status without passing that information through a SIP server.

More on Open Source VoIP engine Open Wengo reboots as QuteCom

Some folks are starting to understand just how viral the GPL in its various can be. SFLC has been operating as the legal arm in several case, the latest against High-Gain Antennas. Armed with a track record SFLC is now going after Verizon for the same infraction. —

The SFLC has settled yet another GPL lawsuit, this time agreeing to dismiss its case against High-Gain Antennas. Similar to prior agreements to comply, the latest GPL settlement comes with some key requirements for the defendant, which was sued for distributing GPL’d BusyBox code in its wireless connectivity devices without properly sharing source code. To dismiss the case, High-Gain Antennas has agreed to appoint an open source compliance officer, publish source code for the version of BusyBox it previously distributed through its Web site and notify recipients of their rights to the software. In addition, the settlement includes an undisclosed payment from High-Gain Antennas to the BusyBox developers who were the plaintiffs in the case.

The settlement leaves one remaining GPL suit from the recent round of enforcements, which total four since the first suit in September 2007, also based on the GPL-licensed BusyBox software. That remaining one is a biggie, U.S. telecom and wireless giant Verizon. While the settlements so far should serve to bolster the GPL in general, Verizon is one company that could let a long legal process play out. However, Verizon may also choose to listen to the advice of High-Gain Antennas CEO and founder Richard Bruckner, who stressed the need for more GPL awareness. Bruckner credits the settlement to “the effort made by BusyBox to assist in the education of GPL compliancy without seeking costly and unecessary litigation.” Even if Verizon did choose the courtroom, that could deliver what many open source and GPL supporters have been calling for: U.S. case law on the GPL.

Linky.

Open Moko Inc will start selling the OpenMoko phone shortly to the general public.The code is open source but not Android.

OpenMoko announced at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference that it will start selling mobile phones to general consumers.

OpenMoko (run by Openmoko Inc of Taiwan, a subsidiary of First International Computer Inc of Taiwan) is a developer of mobile phones using open-source hardware and software. OpenMoko developed OpenMoko Linux and Neo, which are open-source software platform and hardware for mobile phones. OpenMoko Linux uses Linux as its OS kernel and employs X11 and GTK as its window systems.

“OpenMoko Linux is entirely composed of open-source software,” said Michael Shiloh, head of developer relations.

Linky

An idea pioneered by a company called Meraki (who later changed their business model and doubled prices), has been resurrected by Open Mesh. Once gain, small groups and individuals can build and maintain cheap wireless community networks. Powered by open source firmware on a cheap router, installation is plug and play.

Today Michael Burmeister-Brown announced a new product and company designed to fill the void left by Meraki — Open-Mesh.

Open-Mesh does everything the original Meraki did — and more:

• It’s inexpensive. Open-Mesh WiFi repeaters cost $49 each or $39.95 (qty 20)
• It’s Ad free. Open-Mesh promises they will never push ads into your networks. You decide what, if any, content you want to display.
• It’s 100% open source and deployed on top of OpenWRT. You can change anything.
• You can re-flash the firmware if you want.
• The Dashboard management system provides free administration, alerting and mapping. It allows you to configure the ESSID, splash page, passwords, and Bandwith allocation of your networks.
• The devices auto-configure. It’s simple to create a neighborhood or apartment network. You don’t need to use their management system if you don’t want to.

Unlike Meraki and FON, their architecture is 100% open source. You can re-flash the firmware if you want. Put up a new splash page. Use their free management software (below) — or not. (from Daily Wireless)

Want to provide basic access for your community? This is the way. It’s so simple even a Senator could install and manage it. Cheap enough to be funded by a bake sale. No new taxes or funding required.