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Chuck Shotton: "I've written up a set of proposed extensions to the RSS 0.94 draft to resolve some ambiguities about content types and encoding formats." Garth needs some help from someone who knows the internals of Jabber. To Joel, here's why Groove can't bet exclusively on being a platform. "Most proposed platforms don't make it. It's just a fact. It's not my fault. It's not yours." Don Park writes about corruption in Korea. Doc: "It's a start, but it's got that delegated, glands-off look. It's you know: a site." NY Times: "At AOL, Mr Colburn and Mr Gilburne made an oddly complementary pair, several people who worked with them said. Mr Gilburne is a broad, strategic thinker with a quiet, professorial demeanor. He is prone to stroking his beard, alluding to Shakespeare and making Delphic comments about the technological future. Mr Colburn, on the other hand, is as volatile as Mr Gilburne is sedate. People who worked with them said Mr Colburn paced conference rooms with bleary eyes and a five o'clock shadow. He was known for wearing Armani suits over black T-shirts depicting cartoon characters. And Mr Colburn was also as intensely focused on details as his mentor was on the big picture." John Patrick found some free bandwidth in Ocean City, NJ. There's a new meme going round. Tell me who you are in five words or less. Easy easy. First the long version. I am a man. That means I dig holes. And then fill them in. Then dig some more. So I can do it in two words. Still diggin. Peterme has no credit. Interesting story. Read the comments, they're interesting too. Last year on this day I wrote about taboo-busting and aging. Two years ago today I explained why the misnamed RSS 1.0 was a setback for RSS. No one cared. Sad. Sam Ruby posted a table showing the evolution of various formats called RSS. I sent him a bunch of corrections and they were incorporated. Five years ago today, a princess died in a car crash. Breathwork and open source. You might think one has nothing to do with the other. But someone on a mail list devoted to breathwork, that I subscribe to, has constructed an amazing argument, fantastic in its boldness, with elements of truth, but quite misleading. Not caring Showing that you care is something you're not supposed to do. Better to stay aloof, uninvolved, like a TV character. "I don't really care," I say, when nothing could be further from the truth. This is the American way. (Or at least the California way.) But, at some point you have to take a stand. Maybe it's in the last days or hours of life, struggling against cancer, heart disease or diabetes, or whatever's gonna getcha. Maybe at that point it's okay to care, to take a stand, to fight. But I suspect not. Even then people say "What's he getting so riled up for?" The answer of course is fairly obvious. It's called living, and it's worth getting agitated over, in theory.
As promised, here's the first draft of the RSS 0.94 spec. It's a consolidation of all the specs I've written over the last two years. A few new features, listed on the (new) change notes page. Please read the roadmap to see what comes after 0.94. I'm not looking for much feedback until next week, but of course if you like it, no need to wait to say that. NY Times: "Many blogs, Iranian or otherwise, are boring accounts of people's daily lives, or gibberish-like streams of consciousness. But in Iran, bolstered by the anonymity their computer screens provide, female bloggers are catching attention for their daring and articulate mix of politics, dirty jokes and acid comment." News.Com: Out with AOL, in with Jabber. O'Reilly: "With the release of Mozilla 1.0, the world now has a browser that supports SOAP natively."
Halley also wrote the famous Internet essay that begins with this stunning sentence. "When my dad wakes up today, the first thing he will notice is that he is dead." Megnut: "You see, I never liked tomatoes." Same here. No strike in 2002. "With only hours to go before the first scheduled game on the day baseball players set as a strike deadline, management and union negotiators reached agreement on a four-year contract." Doc Searls reviews Apple's new Jaguar version of Mac OS X, from a user's point of view. Eric Albert: "Scott Rosenberg gets the story wrong regarding Apple's use of the DMCA.." According to News.Com, Apple Computer said it "plans by next month to release to the open-source community the technology it calls Rendezvous, which allows networked devices to automatically find each other."
Audioblogging collaboration betw Adam and Garth? Lots of interesting posts on Doc's DG. It's really spooky watching the archive for 2001 over the last couple of weeks. I can see the events in my world that preceded 9-11, the stuff that would get thrown in the air and pushed aside as we struggled to understand. Note that last year I said that Red Hat was overvalued at $600 million. Have to eat the words. Today its market capitalization is over $840 million. As Gomer Pyle used to say: "Surprise surprise surprise." On this day in 1997 I published a trial business plan for the now-defunct Power Computing, the leading Mac clone vendor of the day. Heads-up. I'm doing my first post-surgery technical project, a merging of the RSS 0.91 spec with the 0.92 addenda, and documenting the new features in 0.94 and including a roadmap for evolution, all in one Web doc with a liberal copyright. Should have a draft ready later today. An example of an 0.94 feed.
I have my instant outliner going again. Radio users can subscribe using the OPML coffee mug on DHRB. The new thing is that notification happens via instant messaging, not polling. And there's something really new in there. A remote procedure invocation protocol. They are not remote procedure calls because they don't return values and are asynchronous. But you can pass parameters, complex ones, using the encoding of XML-RPC. It's the loop-close on the work we did in Keystone with the Jabber folk last August. Works with AIM too. We're bootstrapping on the Radio-Dev mail list. Early in June I wrote a piece about journalism, exposing a vexing problem, and I said something that I believe, that would surely hurt a friend of mine, Dan Gillmor. Dan called me last week, just to say hello, and to express his best wishes for my recovery, which is going well, even if it's way too slow for my liking. Dan's a good guy. I am an extremist, in much the same way Ray Ozzie is becoming one (and Jon Udell is not). I started blogging because the professional journalists carry such huge conflicts, and often don't disclose them. They have to do it to keep their jobs. Human beings in difficult spots. But as a product developer, I couldn't get news about my products out through them. It got so bad that in 1993 I retired from software. I got back in because quite by accident I discovered that I could create my own waves without help from the pros. Now as a result I am a total hardass when it comes to undisclosed conflicts. Sometimes I lose friends because of this. Comes with the territory. I'm glad Dan is still my friend. I love the guy. I feel his pain, he feels mine. Right on. I still get my nose rubbed in the bullshit of the pros every damned day. People who don't tell their readers, and possibly don't even tell their editors, that they're making money on the side in areas they cover. I am totally sick of it. Sweet new design over at Evhead.
A brief response to Larry Lessig's story about releasing the source code of MORE. Sheila Lennon: "In order to foster the creation of a culture, copyright procedures were established that included sending copies of your work to Washington, thereby establishing authorship and date." Brad Pettit: "As for Lawrence Lessig's romanticized notions of MORE ('many who share my affection for this clean bit of code'), and for those who think the MORE source should be placed in public domain, be forewarned." Ken Hagler works at Symantec. He's raised the question reviving MORE internally. Interesting comments. Sandy Wilbourn responds to Lessig. Sandy is a former VP at Rational Software, and a personal friend since college. As noted here on Sunday, the link to Chairman Coble's bio is still broken. Scott Rosenberg: "Apple found the DMCA to be a pliable tool, easily adaptable for its own ends that have nothing to do with protecting intellectual property." Sean Gallagher: "Well, I'm sure that both Notes and Publishing, if they could be rendered as corporeal beings, would quote Python as well: 'I'm not dead yet.'" The users of a product called Blender are buying it for 100,000 Euros. That's an interesting idea. Good luck to Brian D Buck who's on a new round of chemo. Jon Udell: "I don't know exactly when it happened, but at some point I became an extreme anti-extremist." Have you ever been to this intersection?
New feature for Radio 8 users. Monthly archives. Just in time for the end of the month. Here's the August archive page for DHRB. Lots of coool pics. Yeah. There's another feature in the pipe, should be released later today. Instant outlining notification over instant messaging. Very rational, right? Still a glitch or two remain. Larry Lessig thinks the world would be a better place if the source of MORE was in the public domain. News.Com: "Apple Computer has invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent its customers from burning DVDs on external drives." Another site that I can't read. Screen shot. Luckily it has an XML feed so I can subscribe to it. NY Times: "The iMac, a graceful piece of art whose astonishingly thin screen floats in air on a gleaming chrome elbow, sells well enough. But whenever a Windows PC maker tries something similar, buyers stay away in droves." Christian Crumlish is looking for pointers to philosophy-oriented weblogs. Ray Ozzie: "Publishing is dead." Don Park: "Publishing is not dead." Rahul Dave: "I am fed up with all the spats and counterspats about licensing, copyright, open-source, free-software, and other yadda yadda yadda. So let me propose a new monicker for software, an inclusive monicker, Loving Software, the software which loves both its users and developers." Tara Sue: "Junebug and I are celebrating for the next five minutes. We' ve claimed our first campaign contributions from Paypal." Thanks to Patrick Breitenbach for helping expedite the Paypal connection. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for helping to spread the word. Halley Suitt: "I took the plunge and wow.." Yesterday I asked why RSS 1.0 is called RSS. A bunch of interesting responses, some of which I collected onto a single page. Several different points of view represented. Esp read Seth Cousins story, it's a bit of a rambler, he's a techie but a RSS newbie. As the day goes by I may add more points of view. It's good, we're making progress I think, and no flames. Thanks. For crying out loud David, it's super simple. If I build a house I can live in it as long as I want. If I want to rent out rooms I can do that too, as long as I want. Chris Chapman reports that the RIAA website was hacked overnight. He has a screen shot. As a computer professional, I can never condone this sort of thing. It's not okay to deface other people's sites, no matter what the cause. Now, that said, of all the sites on the Web, the one I care the least about being hacked is the RIAA site because they are asking for the the legal right to do that to our computers. Remember the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. News.Com: RIAA site comes under second attack. Another impossible-to-read website. Screen shot.
Sarah Deutsch, chief counsel for Verizon: "We oppose the Berman bill. It's very troubling in that it essentially permits one particular segment of the US industry to engage in vigilantism on the Internet." Steve Gillmor: "Notes is dead." Don Park has a weblog. Don and I worked together in the late 80s. I don't remember how we met, but I asked if he could hack IPC into the pre-System 7 Mac OS, and he said yes, and did it. I put an API on top of it, wrote some docs and sample apps, and thus was born UserLand IAC Toolkit, an ancient forerunner to Apple Events, XML-RPC and SOAP. Today's song: "The mystery man came over and he said 'I'm outta sight.' He said for a nominal service charge I could reach nirvana tonight. If I was ready, willing and able to pay him his regular fee, he would drop all the rest of his pressing affairs and devote his attention to me." CamWorld: "I leave for Krasnoyarsk, Siberia in Russia in one week." Wow. News.Com: "More than 100,000 copies of Apple Computer's OS X 10.2 operating system were sold worldwide during its first weekend, the company said." Apple's Ken Bereskin is pitching new Jaguar features one at a time on his weblog. John Robb: "Yesterday, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Rajesh Jain, the CEO of India's Emergic." Tara Sue gets a mention in USA Today. Screen shot. David Reed discusses Howard Coble's editorial in rebuttal to Ed Cone. He sees contradictions and double-talk. It's interesting, because of his chairmanship of the key House subcommittee overseeing the Internet, Coble is not only accountable to the voters of North Carolina, the citizens of the United States have a special interest in his opinions and thought process. Reed says something that's been much on my mind, something I'd love to hear Coble comment on. "Copyright holders can sue under the existing laws. Why create new rights of poorly restrained vigilantism?"
I wonder if someone can answer a simple question, without being insulting. Here's the question. Why is RSS 1.0 called RSS? Please state your opinion, if you have one. (BTW, if you don't understand that question, that's okay. Instead, send me an email saying what RSS is.) Lance Knobel discusses a Guardian interview with Britain's chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. This caught my eye because there are a couple of people with the same name floating around the US computer industry. One is a co-author of Lotus 1-2-3, and the other was an editor of InfoWorld who went on to be a top exec at AOL, retired, and is probably worth a couple of billion dollars. I guess it's a common name for talented Jewish people! ;-> Another early Lotus person, Bob Ramsdell, has disappeared from the face of the earth. He's a Googlewhack. He had a bad heart then, he was looking for a transplant in the mid-80s. I hate to jinx it, he's probably alive and kicking butt somewhere, just out of sight of the Web. I ran into one of his friends a couple of years ago and asked what had become of Bob, and she didn't know. I sorta guessed that Raines Cohen would know the answer. Bob died in February 2000. I'm sorry I didn't think to ask sooner. He lasted a long time for a guy who was so sick. Raines writes from Burning Man. "I remember Bob well from the Micro Finance Systems/Lotus days, I was a junior high school summer intern down in the basement in Central Square, working in 1980 on Apple II development of Executive Briefing System, little known as Lotus's first product. I also remember meeting your brother there and doing netadmin work, installing a Microsoft CP/M card in an Apple II in order to support characters needed for the programming language for 1-2-3)." That's funny. I didn't know my brother made the pilgrimage. Thanks to Google all this stuff will be recorded, and Bob Ramsdell, Raines, Lotus and my brother will be forever connected. Cool. One more thing. Raines says Bob's son Blake is following in his father's footsteps. And, of course, he has a weblog.
Welcome to Tara Sue's new weblog. It's a Manila site, so we can work on the templates while she's posting. It also has membership, you can join the site, and get bulletins, and participate in the discussion group. Of course since it's a website, it's still a work in progress, but it's a lot more functional than the original site. Howard Coble: Digital piracy bill is sound "Many intellectual property companies are already using some of these defensive measures now and believe it is legal under current law." A list of law-related weblogs. Today's song: "Only in America can a kid without a cent get a break and maybe grow up to be President." Some have asked who's paying for Tara's site. I wrote a page that explains. George Girton sends a map of North Carolina's Sixth District. He says "Here is a small map of what Tara's district looked like last time around (106th Congress), we are now on the 107th, so it could be different. Hers is shown in green, the 12th NC district is shown in red." Here's a site with maps and statistics for the 107th Congress districts in North Carolina. Thomas Madsen-Mygdal: "The next Danish prime minister will have a weblog." Evhead: "$2.50 G&T's. It's like you're making money." News.Com reports that Intel "released desktop Pentium 4 chips running at 2.8GHz, 2.66GHz, 2.6GHz and 2.5GHz, and those chips will be incorporated into new PCs from Dell Computer, IBM and others. Gateway, for example, is using the 2.8GHz and 2.6GHz processors in its new Profile 4 line of computers with a built-in flat-panel monitor, which debuted Monday." Danny O'Brien: "I have an always-on broadband connection, so I can check my mail from anywhere by logging in to my home computer from any net connection. And I do not need spare storage on someone else's server as I have enough spare disk space at home, thanks very much." Scot Hacker is choosing a weblog package for students. I think Manila would do it for him. There already are a few Manila installations at his school, I think. How a link from Instapundit turned into love and marriage. Karsten Januszewski from Microsoft floats a trial balloon for using UDDI to locate RSS files. People who think Washington is passing big laws that screw up the Internet should read Ernie the Attorney's legislative agenda for DC. It's funny but when you're finished rolling on the floor, give it some thought. The courts and a little civil disobedience can fix a lot of bad laws.
NY Times: "These days, Internet users complain of a proliferation of Web sites that offer a peek up Anna Kournikova's skirt or that hawk pills to increase the size of their sex organs. The Internet was supposed to make people's brains bigger."
A fantastic weblog covering the World Summit on Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Thanks to Shelley Powers for the link. Note: I had an idea how to get the two forks of RSS to merge, but then I did a bit more investigation and found it was a dead end. I was surprised that the top-level element in the RDF branch is not Aaron Swartz wrote a template for a letter to a congressperson that outlines an enlightened view of the mischief that Congress has been up to on behalf of the entertainment industry. I got a funky Russian greeting card with a monkey and even funkier music. If only I knew what it said! (Postscript: I've gotten numerous translations now. It's spam. Shucks. I was hoping I had a Russian friend who thought I spoke Russian.) To Michael Rogers who asks how frequently a person writing a weblog should update (I hate calling these people bloggers, as Rogers does, that's a trademark). My answer is As frequently as something happens and you have the time or inclination to write it up. Rogers then says something provocative: "The kind of article that a writer produces after a week of thought is fundamentally different than one produced after a few hours." True. But you can keep lots of ideas in your head, and think about them for hours, days, weeks, months, years or decades; and even repeat them and expand on them, and (rarely) change your mind about something. Even great writers like Hemingway repeated themes. People who blog do this even more. It helps fill the space. Every event is an opportunity to "prove" ones' pet theories. I do this a lot. It's okay because everyone else does it too. John Robb trawled the Web to find incumbents who were more likely to lose their jobs in the next election, and received big bucks from Hollywood, and supported one of the initiatives to hack the Internet for their contributors in California. If you live in the districts of one of these Reps, you have extrordinary power in November to change policy in the US for the better. Your vote, and your neighbors' votes, really mean something this time. BTW, it's interesting to see that the Internet issues don't appear on the candidates' websites at this time. Ed Cone, in today's News & Record, continues the discussion of the digital vigilante bill sponsored by his district's Rep, Howard Coble. It's remarkable, don't miss what's going on. A fairly random district in America's industrial South is becoming a hotbed for one of the most interesting faceoffs in politics, economics and the Internet. Dan Gillmor: "It's doubtful that Tara Grubb worries Hollywood's movie moguls or the people who run the record industry." Standing on the toes Sir Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." A beautiful idea, something like "Only steal from the best." BTW, it might have been sarcastic, it turns out, but it's still a nice sentiment and a good philosophy for explorers, leaders and scientists like Newton. Brian Reid, said "In computer science, we stand on each other's feet." That's still true, to this day, and very unfortunate when it happens. Blaze a new trail, start something different, take what we know and discover something completely new. But be careful when you do that. "No good deed goes unpunished."
Glenn Fleishman reviews the new Mac OS X. Destined to take the place of the mud shark in your mythology. I spent most of today working on a new Tara Sue website, one that will be easier for her to work on, and easier for us to help her with. As I was putting together the initial blogroll, I decided to link to Howard Coble, her opponent. I wondered how Tara would feel about it. I just walked her through the new site, and when I explained this part she literally shreiked with delight. In other words, there's an impedance match on values. Of course we point to our competitor. An informed reader would want to know about Coble. His site is part of the big picture. Gotta link to it. Makes sense, right? Ed Cone: "After my first column ran, Coble's chief of staff, Ed McDonald, told me on the phone, 'Now we are going to rip your face off.'" Coble responded to Cone's column in the print edition of the News & Record, but not on the Web. Please, please, all this stuff must be on the Web. All. Must. Got a couple of emails overnight from Tara Sue. She was up till 4AM working on her Web stuff. Right on. Evreyone is setting expectations really low for Tara, but not me. I think she can win. I think the voters are smart and will be able to figure this one out. I love that Coble's chief says he's going to rip Ed Cone's face off. Ed is a powerful dude. That's strong motivation. It also helps undermine the reputation Coble has for being such a nice guy. Look who he's running against. If I were him, I'd apologize right away and send Ed a case of whatever beer they drink in North Carolina. His Good Old Boy reputation could be at stake. Let's also see if Coble reads Scripting News. Ray Ozzie had a lawyer at Groove, Jeff Seul, draft a weblog policy for employees. Meanwhile, back at home, Tara Sue has been Slashdotted.
Political Web: "An analysis of Web sites promoting candidates for House, Senate or Governor in the 2002 election shows that relatively few have tapped the potential of the Internet to stimulate political action on or through their sites." Ernie the Attorney links to two articles, one passionately in favor of reform in the music business, and one passionately supportive of music industry hacking of users' computers. Ernie says he agrees with both. I find that amazing, but we live in amazing times. Weinberger's third point was particularly stirring, to me: "The very thing the most conservative among us have dreamt of, have died for since the founding of this country, is now within our grasp: free markets, free speech, worldwide. And we're blowing it because some dinosaur companies insist on maintaining their grip on every last dollar before their industry dies. 500 million of us can see how close it is, how the world economy would blossom, how the human spirit would get dizzy with possibility, and we're arguing about how we can best prevent it?" Jon Hanna wrote a tutorial on RDF. Cute title. In Business 2.0, Dylan Tweney says a weblog is a "quick-and-dirty, easy-to-use knowledge management system."
Megnut: "For those of us that are self-employed, and for those that are unemployed, health insurance continues to be a big expense, and an even bigger pain in the neck." Amen. Charles Cooper: "Lessig would limit software copyrights to 10 years. After that, the code would wind up in the public domain. I can't think of a better prescription for formalizing the existing constellation of power that favors the Microsofts and Oracles over the small and independent developers." BBC: "Millions of people using Microsoft's Office and Internet Explorer programs are at risk from security holes that could allow malicious hackers to change files on their computers." News.Com: Apple to unleash Jaguar OS upgrade. David Fletcher: New Utah Weblogs. Is today the third birthday of Blogger? According to my archive, it is. Congrats! Meg confirms that today is Blogger's birthday. Through the magic of archives, next year we won't have to wonder. News.Com: Hyperlink patent case fails to click. Ed Cone: "Comebody could end a political career pretty damn fast by letting out some 2 AM brainfart onto the Web." I don't agree with this prediction. My guess is that when politics and governance move to this medium, it will be a lot more resilient than TV. Remember, in this medium, each voter can have his or her own TV station. It's gratifying to read about the role weblogs are playing in news from the Middle East, through Lance Knobel's weblog. In 2000 and 2001, Lance and I wanted to offer weblogs to people attending the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos. The management of Davos didn't think it was worthwhile. That was one of those times when we absolutely knew we were right, and that one day we'd get a big I Told You So (assuming anyone remembered the proposal). Eventually the world will be run with weblogs, much the way it's run with telephones today. My belief is that when you find a technology of this stature, you deploy as quickly as possible, without worrying. It could be that weblog technology would avert the next international crisis, or deal with its aftermath, more effectively. (Actually there's no "could" to it, to me it's a certainty.) Here we go. Wired News lifts Tara Sue, and gets Coble's staff to hedge on the Hollywood hacking bill. She's the first candidate with a weblog. Yeah. Soon all races will be run on weblogs. All of them. By the way the Plotkin quotes really sting. How did Tara Sue's weblog get going. Wasn't that the technology industry? Sanjiva, an IBM SOAP developer, comes from and lives in Sri Lanka. He posted a photo essay of a recent trip he took, with monkeys and elephants. Lawyer jokes Happy Friday, one and all. Thinking about Lessig's Hemingway story. Also wondering why Lessig's book isn't on the Web, so we can read his code. So many mealy-mouthed advocates for this guy. That's kind of a clue. They believe in Free Software. All of them paid $21 to read Lessig. Let me know when you get that to parse. (Would they pay the money if they could read it for free on the Web?) Anyway, I don't trust people who tell me that Hemingway reveals all his source code when nothing could be further from the truth. A writer of prose reveals the final copy and nothing more. He doesn't reveal the life experiences that taught him the lessons that the book teaches. He doesn't tell you which ideas he stole from other books he read. He omits all the blind alleys and dead ends, the characters and plot ideas that didn't make the cut. The novelist omits the text of all previous books, and that's interesting because many if not all authors write the same book over and over, refinining it, narrowing the focus, taking stuff out, amplifying and discussing. Some of my favorite authors work that way. Bottom-line, despite what Lessig says, there's no full disclosure in art. Yesterday John Robb said something profound about The Commons. It's almost empty. Not many want to put anything in. Or we want to be selective about it. You can read Scripting News and DaveNet for free. You can even use Radio and Frontier for free, for a short period of time while you evaluate the software. But this world, with doctors, hospitals, grocery stores, cars, gas, insurance, medicine, lawyers, etc, requires money. The trick is to have art in your life and make some of it pay. And that in itself is an art. My core objection to the doctors of You-Give-Me-Your-Source is that there's an art to what you give. Ask anyone who actually knows my work, not people who put me in the same league as $30 billion companies. I give you a lot of my code, but not all of it. Apple does the same with theirs, but they flip it around. No one knows which approach is "right." It's arrogant to think you can dictate the terms of gifts, esp when you aren't yourself immersed in the art. That's what I don't like about Lessig and his followers. They don't do, they just talk. It would be as if I told Bowie or Elvis Costello or Sting how they had to make music for me. Well fuck that shit. I want the music that comes from their creative process. If they want to give me the source, so be it. If they don't that's okay too. Lawyers. Plug in every lawyer joke here. If you think I haven't been generous enough, check it out. It's like the visitors to an art gallery thinking they're seeing all the art in the world. For once I'd like to see the artists get to blow away the critics. Perhaps that's what the Internet makes possible.
Washington Post: "The most downloaded album in Internet history -- the recently released 'The Eminem Show' -- is also the best-selling album of the year, which suggests that at least some fans were spurred to buy the disc even though they already had it stashed on their hard drives." Wired: "[Verizon] refused to comply with the order, arguing the entertainment industry is presuming the guilt of its users without any due process." BBspot is a "satirical news and comedy source and meant to be funny. If you are easily offended, gullible or don't have a sense of humor we suggest you go elsewhere." Mac Net Journal: "Chuck Goolsbee from Digital Forest, the ISP that hosts Mac Net Journal and my other business site for White Rabbit Publishing, posted an interesting note yesterday to the TidBITS Talk mailing list about the MPAA going after his business to shut down an individual user who is sharing Simpsons material through Gnutella while connected to Digital Forest." Tomorrow is Day 70 of No Smoking Dave. Ten weeks. A non-smoking story at the Bowie concert last week. As I'm walking out I see people lighting up everywhere. Smell of smoke all around. It smells good. I really want one. In my mind I outline the steps it would take to be smoking and the amount of time it would take. I would ask someone if they could spare a cigarette. If they said no I'd offer them $1. Oh hell, just offer $1 to begin with. Whoo, where would I get a match. I'd ask for a light. Take a drag. Estimated time, 15 seconds to one minute to first nicotine rush. My heart started beating faster. I felt scared like you feel on a NY subway platform as a train is entering the station and you're standing on the platform and in the instant before it passes you think how you could end your life by leaning forward. I never actually jump, and that night I didn't smoke, and it's good that inside I equate smoking with death so deeply that it invokes my subway nightmare. Do I have it beat? No way. I am still an addict, I expect I will be for life. But I'm an addict in recovery, who is not taking the drug. Even better, I am becoming a constant evangelist for a nicotine-free lifestyle for nicotine addicts, illustrating the old adage that you teach what you most need to learn. Ed Cone: "What is success for a neophyte Libertarian against a GOP heavyweight -- 20%? Would 30% be shocking? The last Libertarian got 9% to Coble's 91%. The successes of Grubb's campaign, and its implications for the Weblog nation, will most likely be incremental, not monumental. But in the real world, that's impressive enough." Doc: "Give every journalist in the whole AOL/Time Warner organization a blog." SJ Merc interviews Janis Ian. "She credits Napster and its progeny with sparking renewed interest in her music, at a time when she can't be heard on contemporary-hit-obsessed radio stations. And she says her decision to offer free music downloads had done the opposite of what the industry predicts it would do: It caused a 300 percent spike in merchandise sales." Glen Daniels is "lucky enough to share a house with the two best cats on the planet." Amy Wohl: "Copyright remains an inappropriate mechanism for protecting software because the right model would let IP owners do what Dave Winer does with his software -- let people develop on top of it or even create another version of it and do that legally -- while still protecting his right to collect revenue from the use of the software itself, should he choose to do so." John Robb: "That a puny $20 billion industry is on a path to potentially cause $100 billion in damage to the US economy based on less than $1 billion in suspected damages defies reason." Joshua Allen rambles his way to an important idea. "The whole point of loosely-coupled architectures is that you don't need to have access to source code to get the network effect." Exactly right. Think about XML-RPC. I can deploy applications that cross all kinds of technical, philosophical, and economic boundaries, without installing other people's software, and certainly not requiring me to see their source code. Yuck. Who wants to read someone else's source? Have you ever tried to read Perl code? Dawn to Doc: "You are the sexiest and sweetest tech blogger ever." That's the truth. More thoughts on Lessig More thoughts on Lessig's proposal for software copyright reform. First I don't have a good pointer to a Web page explaining his proposal, so I'm having to do this from memory. I'm not going to buy his book because I don't want to give him any money because I find what he wants so unsupportable. If you've read his book, and if I've got his proposal wrong, please send me a correction. Thanks. Here's the deal. Lessig would limit copyright to ten years, and force developers to put source code in escrow. After the copyright expires the source code goes into the public domain. Now of course we don't have to do that now. If the customers placed a sufficiently high value on having access to source code, or if they felt our copyrights lasted too long, of course we would have to do what they want us to, or retire from the market. So the proponents of this plan are trying to legislate what they haven't been able to gain in the market. It's a weak position for that reason. Second, it comes at a pretty bad time in the software business, which has been reeling from the idea that what we produce should all be free. Right now, in mid-2002, we're getting back on track, there's a general consensus developing that if we want to have a technology industry, users are going to have to pay. Given enough time that will lead to profitable products, and investment. But right now we're weak. There's no investment in software, hasn't really been any investment in a decade (the investors were buying marketing people, ads on TV, lots of stuff that produced no new software). Why attack such a weak industry, and one that is probably very vital to the health of our economy? After giving it a bunch of thought, I think Lessig is going after the BigCo's, probably Microsoft. But he would also sacrifice the independent companies. If we have to publish our source code the users won't pay for it. Ten years isn't enough time to create a new market. So you wouldn't get any commercial innovation in this system. The BigCo's don't innovate. Further, I don't buy the idea that Lessig's plan is granting me anything that I'm not entitled to, at no charge, by the US Constitution and the First Amendment. But of course I'm as much of a legal neophyte as Lessig is a software neophyte. One final thought, to those who think there are two camps here, the good guys (Lessig, open source advocates, small creative developers) and the bad guys (Eisner, Redstone, Spielberg, Feinstein, Berman, Coble, Rosen, Valenti) -- think again. I have a lot of interests in common with the people you think are bad. I believe in financial compensation for creative people. Where I diverge from the entertainment industry is that they don't pay the artists. That's their basic weakness. (Also as a user of their product, I don't like that they're so anti-user, so unwilling to give me what I want, or even listen to their users.) I am a capitalist and proud of it. And I also believe in the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. Perhaps Lessig and his friends are well intentioned, I don't know what the thought process is, and I don't care. They've got a gun to the head of my art and business. We can't talk as long as they have that position. Withdraw, and then let's get to know each other and see what we have in common.
Glenn Reynolds: "The ideal candidate is one who is (1) in Hollywood's pocket; and (2) vulnerable, with a realistic challenger. Any suggestions?" Sean Gallagher: "Both copyrights and patents, post-DMCA, are chilling to free speech and infringe on users' well-defined rights of the past. They've paved the road for anti-time and form shifting for personal use, the locking of users into consuming media in a certain way (and with hardware from a certain vendor), and preventing users from becoming anything more than consumers if possible." Eric Soroos: "How can you tell when a network executive is lying? His lips move." Werbach: "During the Internet boom, the technologists were ascendant, so Hollywood had to play along, though its online efforts largely failed. Now, thanks to the economic crash, consolidation of the media industry, and the long-awaited rise of broadband, these strange bedfellows are finding themselves thrown together. It's not a pretty sight."
The Green Papers website gives you a quick readout, by state, of who's up for re-election, and who's running against them, by state. The whole US House is up, and one third of the Senate. Unfortunately neither of California's Senators, both Democrats, are up for re-election this year. Branford Marsalis starts a new record label. "We guarantee that we will give artists the freedom to make great music." John Patrick: "Stopping for a bite to eat in a small New England town, was I ever surprised to find a Wi-Fi connection available at 1.2 megabits per second. Where was this bandwidth coming from? No idea. Who was paying for this bandwidth? Same answer."
Note to Tara Sue and others running for elective office, Don Strickland may be a good Web campaign manager for you. "I love Larry's notion: identify 2 luddite members of Congress -- one Republican and one Democrat. Organize and defeat them in November. Did I mention I need income." News.Com: "The president of media giant News Corp warns that the Internet has become a 'moral-free zone,' with the medium's future threatened by pornography, spam and rampant piracy." Paolo is leading a project to share bookmarks. WorldTechTribune: NSA deputy director says “never again” to open source. On this day three years ago, I got my outliner connected to the discussion group software that would form the core of Manila later in 1999. I still write that way. When I get back to programming, my first job is to finish the weblog outliner, so people using Blogger, Radio, Manila or Movable Type will be able to edit their weblog posts in the outliner. Sometimes it takes a long time to realize a dream. The email thread with Lessig, mediated by David P Reed, continues. He says he supports copyright for software, and asked for a citation that indicates otherwise. I sent him the Hemingway quote from his Future of Ideas book. It feels like a waste of time on both sides. Ultimately he may get his laws passed but they won't be respected by people who create code. It's his career to waste if he wants to. BTW, here's the bookmark for where we got to yesterday. Chuck Shotton enumerates the whole argument in gory detail. Lawyers please read this before passing new laws. I've been arguing this endlessly with Lessig. He thinks my source reveals all. I'd like to introduce him to some programmers I've worked with who say "comments are for sissies." In user interface oriented software the UI reveals all. Perhaps source matters for infrastructure, but probably not as much as some people (who don't write software) think. Megnut: "I got up a bit earlier today than usual and noticed the sun wasn't yet shining into the living room." Joe Gregorio writes to say that his weblog is more readable now, and indeed it is. Patrick Breitenbach says the culprit was a W3C-supplied "core" stylesheet called "Swiss" that specifies the font size as 1em. The stylesheet is described on this W3C page, which unfortunately also uses the Swiss stylesheet and therefore is difficult to read. Adam Curry: "Good morning from a rainy Belgium." Yesterday I did several back and forths via email with Larry Lessig, we got to an interesting place. Late last night he posted a lengthy piece on his weblog. It's a bit snooty, but what the heck, we're big boys. It's good to see the professor use the medium. By the end of the piece we're in agreement. The most powerful tool we have is the vote. And while he's a newbie to weblogs, it's the most powerful way to route around the media monopoly owned by our common opponents. It's also the key to self-governance, don't overlook the power of representatives who take responsibility for communicating every day with the people who elect them. How could Lessig get this idea until he himself stopped delegating his weblog. I'm glad to see the professor roll up his sleeves and participate. For him, that's the first, and perhaps the biggest step. Now w'e're getting the real Lessig. Excellent. John Robb: "I was the person that offered a weblog to Larry late last year, before we launched Radio." Why do we copyright software? We seem to assume that software is like a book or a movie or musical creation. In some ways software is like those things. But in other ways it's like a car. You might copyright the owner's manual for a car, but it would be ludicrous to copyright the car itself. It's a piece of machinery. For at least a couple of decades we've been copyrighting software, and now I realize that I don't understand why we do. Talking with Doc Searls last night, who is a master of analogy, we kind of agreed that perhaps there is no suitable analogy for software, that software is a unique thing unto itself. There's no doubt, with me at least, that creative developers need to own what they create. I don't believe in communism for my creative work (maybe yours, heh). So when I sell you the right to use my software, what am I selling you, what rights do you have, and what rights do I retain? Be careful, if you strip me of all my rights, I'll go make pottery. It has to be enticing to the creative person. Note: Thanks to Ernie the Attorney for helping me see this in his post yesterday. TQ White on UserLand copyrights I don't have a suitable web place to comment but wanted to add a thought to your process. It's not clear to me where copyrights actually fit into your business. You expose almost all of your code. You encourage people to duplicate your developments (a brilliant thing to do, I think). You allow people to use variations of your software for free under many circumstances. When you charge for Frontier, it's a subscription fee that compensates you for the development work you do each year, not the code you did last year. (Heck, I didn't have the money to continue my Frontier subscription last year but bought a Radio the day it came out. I don't have time while making my new company to mess with it but I wanted to support the process. No copyright necessary on my street.) I don't see how Userland makes use of software copyrights at all or how you would be harmed if they went away.
News.Com: "The US Department of Justice is prepared to begin prosecuting peer-to-peer pirates, a top government official said on Tuesday." Really interesting discussion at Tara Sue's weblog. Mark Pilgrim: "I want to buy Busted Stuff, the new CD from Dave Matthews Band, but I find myself hesitating because I don’t know if it’s copy-protected." News.Com: "File-swapping company StreamCast Networks released a long-awaited new version of its Morpheus software Tuesday, in a bid to recapture its once-unrivaled online popularity." Ed Cone: "She is the first candidate for US Congress to have a Weblog, and that alone is noteworthy." I've had the same dream that John Robb describes. (I also smoke every damned night in my dreams. Always sneaking a puff or two, and explaining myself, sheepishly.) Joe Gregorio's weblog is impossible for me to read. Ernie the Attorney is trying to figure out what we're talking about. "I'm just a lawyer who handles mostly commercial disputes, but to me the current patent law and copyright law system is clearly out of whack." Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit fame is also a law school professor, and has written a paper on patent and copyright. I haven't read it yet, but I will. Thanks.
Tara Sue Grubb has her own weblog now. Progress. I think Don Box is cutting us a new one (not uncommon) but Simon Fell and Sam Ruby conspire (apparently) to return the favor. Catch all the chuckles on Sam's blog. (You have to be at least a partial XML geek to get it.) InfoWorld: "ICANN weighed in with its choice on who should run the .org domain name registry Monday, tapping the Internet Society in Reston, Virginia." This is so beautiful and symmetric. An ISP is banning the RIAA from its network. Now, let's all of us think of ways we can erase the RIAA from our lives. This could get interesting. Ray Ozzie: "Over the past week, I've been inundated with email from Notes customers and partners who are clearly feeling some pain, in search of answers, and wondering if Groove can play a role." Wow, I gotta admit to being impressed with the surprise that Evan had cooking up. A deal with a major media company in South America of all places. Blogger Brasil. I like the sound of that. Hey what's the Portuguese word for Ooops? I tried to create a new site, and got this error page. Still diggin? Aha, this wasn't news. It was reported on June 17, which happens to be the day I had my surgery. No wonder I missed it. Damn. I should have told the surgeons to wake me up if something important was announced. Happy 70th birthday to my mom. And many happy returns. Happy wedding day to Andre and Andrea. And many spicy noodles!
Here's an exclusive. On the phone with Scoble. "How come you don't update?" I ask. "Too much sex," says Scoble. There you have it. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
