Archive for February, 2011

Rave proposal brings together US and European partners

Published by Ross Gardler on February 22, 2011 in Community. 2 Comments

There are currently three separate open source implementations of extensible and lightweight Java platforms for the hosting, serving and aggregation of Open Social Gadgets and services. These platforms are the engines for internet and intranet portals and form the building blocks to provide context-aware personalization and collaboration features. Each of these three implementations has its strengths and weaknesses.

At ApacheCon 2010 Ate Douma and I discussed the possibility of bringing these engines together under a unified project banner. Taking the best from each and producing a single engine that all parties could work together on. This was never going to be easy, but we felt the effort would be worth it.

Yesterday Ate, after a great deal of hard work, posted the Rave Proposal to the Apache Incubator. This proposal is a joint effort between:

  • Hippo – Netherlands, CMS provider
  • MITRE Corporation – US, manages federally funded research and develelopment centres
  • Open Gateway Computing Environments project - NSF-funded collaboration between Indiana University, San Diego University, San Diego Supercomputer Center and Texas Advances Computing Center
  • SURFnet SURFConext Portal project – Netherlands, next generation collaboration infrastructure
  • OSS Watch – UK, Open Source Software advisory service
  • and several other individuals.

We are starting with three code bases from MITRE, SURFnet and OGCE and aim to have a single product within six months. This prevents the unnecessary duplication of effort across each of these organisations and ensures a viable shared infrastrcuture product for each participant.

In addition to these initial codebases the project plans to utilise code from Apache Wookie (Incubating). Some time ago OSS Watch helped the University of Bolton take their implementation of the W3C Widget specfication into the Apache Incubator. In the Incubator the project is able to focus on building community around its code and prove to the world that it is a viable open source project upon which people can build real systems. It’s been slow going for Wookie, the original Bolton team are ploughing forwards and have generated plenty of funding revenue from the project, but there still is no vibrant community around Wookie. This is due in part to the fact that the W3C Widget standards it implements are still not recomendations, but the project continues to develop and attract interest.

At OSS Watch we are really excited about this proposal. Not only will it provide signficant opportunity for the Wookie team to make their code more accessible for new use cases but it also brings together a signficant number of commercial and academic interests from across Europe and the US. The outputs of this project will be of significant value to our sector as we seek to produce userc configurable and context aware interfaces to new systems.

Governance for growth: how a governance model can benefit your open source project

Published by Elizabeth Tatham on February 21, 2011 in Community. 2 Comments

This guest post was written by Mark Webb, research scientist at the Met Office.

I work at the Met Office Hadley Centre and part of my job is to evaluate the representation of clouds in the computer models which we use for climate predictions.

One way in which we do this is to compare the clouds simulated by the models with observations of clouds from satellite instruments in orbit around the Earth. Unfortunately this process is complicated by the fact that satellites do not have a perfect view of all clouds. For example, low-level clouds are often not visible from space because of other clouds above them.

For this reason, we use satellite instrument ’simulators’, which are computer codes designed to simulate what a satellite would see if it were observing our climate model. Simulator outputs can then be compared with observed satellite products in a quantitative way. This overcomes the ‘apples and oranges’ problem of comparing climate model clouds on all levels with observed clouds with some low-level clouds missing.

A number of simulators have been developed over the years, for a range of satellite instruments. These include operational weather satellites, which make ‘passive’ measurements of energy radiating from the Earth at infra-red and visible frequencies. More recently the approach has been extended to include new active instruments – for example, a cloud-profiling RADAR which analyses the time and intensity of a return from a pulse of radio waves sent into the atmosphere from the satellite.

I co-chair the Cloud Feedback Model Intercomparison Project (CFMIP), and as part of this I have been involved in an international effort to develop a software package which will bundle different simulators together and provide a consistent interface. This package is the CFMIP Observation Simulator Package (COSP). COSP had its first production release earlier this year, and is now being implemented in a number of climate models around the globe as part of the CFMIP.

COSP currently runs to about 15,000 lines of FORTRAN code, contributed by a number of academic and government organisations around the globe. The COSP glue layer and all but one of the instrument modules are available under a BSD licence. Although we liked to think of the project as being quite open, until recently we have had no formal governance model, and have been running the project under an informal form of benevolent dictatorship.

This all changed following a few conversations with Steve Lee of OSS Watch (who I know socially). Steve outlined a number of benefits to having a formal governance model. The first benefit that struck me was that a governance model would lay out clearly a number of roles and responsibilities which could encourage those who may not want to develop code to contribute in other ways, e.g. by testing, improving documentation, or helping with user queries. The other is that it lays out a clear decision-making process.

About the same time, our group of developers were discussing the possibility of securing some funding to employ someone to take responsibility for developing and improving the code. It seemed to us that a governance model would provide a useful foundation for any bids for funding, and would ensure that control of the project remained with those who have contributed over the years.

We found the OSS Watch information on governance models very useful for this. We had considerable debate about whether to move to the benevolent dictator or meritocratic governance model, but we eventually agreed that we would adopt the meritocratic model. We have now formed our Project Management Committee (all developers were invited) and appointed two co-chairs. We will be having our first teleconference to discuss the future of COSP in a couple of weeks.

Already I am seeing evidence of more shared responsibility for decision-making on the project, and I am looking forward to seeing the project grow, knowing that we now have a process in place for making decisions – hopefully one which will scale well as the project grows. I’m very grateful to Steve Lee and OSS Watch for the support that they have given – I doubt we would have made this transition without them.

Patent posse stalks WebM?

Published by Rowan Wilson on February 18, 2011 in Community. 1 Comment

Last month I posted about WebM, the free-for-reuse video codec that has been released by Google. In that post, I mentioned the reservations that Apple and others have about patent status of the codec. There are various groups of patents held by industry players that concern the encoding and decoding of video. To make the process of creating hardware and software that encodes and plays video easier, the MPEG LA was created, a body to administer the collection of royalties for the use of up to date digital video and audio patents. So if you’re writing a program that decodes, say, H.264 video, you could pay a fee to the MPEG LA to cover your use of the patents. In turn the MPEG LA would split the fees between the individual patent owners in the ‘patent pool’.

Now as detailed in a previous post, the issue of video patents is becoming increasingly controversial as the web becomes more and more video-oriented. The new HTML 5 specification includes a ‘video’ tag along the lines of the current ‘image’ tag which allows the embedding of video media direct into web pages, without the need to specify a helper object (like say a Flash video player) to actually do the decoding. This means that web browsers themselves now need to be able to handle the decoding and displaying of videos, and that would seemingly mean the payment of money to the MPEG LA (unless you used very old video standards that have the double disadvantage of poorer quality and larger file size).

So the arrival of WebM was seen by many as a blow for the open web, making the creation of open source and free software web browsers and video encoders possible without the levying of patent fees by the MPEG LA. Not unnaturally, the MPEG LA were not too pleased about this prospect, and began making comments about starting a VP8 patent pool almost immediately. On February 10th the MPEG LA went public with their plan to create such a pool.

So it seems that battle lines are being drawn. When asked about the situation Google told The Register that they are in the process of building a coalition of technology players who agree to not assert their IP against the WebM standard. Indeed the VP8/WebM code made available by Google is under a permissive (BSD) licence with an additional patent licence that is conditional on the licensee not alleging that VP8/WebM infringes on any of their patents. While the terms of the WebM hardware codec designs are not publicly available, it seems very likely that they too carry this kind of stipulation.

It’s not surprising then that the list of firms who support the use of WebM has no cross-overs with the list of firms that hold patents in H.264, the standard with which WebM competes most squarely. If WebM does implement some of the patents from the H.264 pool, and it’s quite possible that it does, Google should in theory be paying a lot of licence fees into this patent pool, to cover the entirety of the community use around WebM. In practice, if Google can force uptake of WebM rapidly enough, hardware and software producers will need to serve user demand and join the Google non-assert posse, even if they are also H.264 licensors.

This strategy is helped by the fact that WebM is less of a standard and more of a solution. Formal video standards like H.264 are described in official published documentation, and implementers are allowed to write the encoders and decoders according to their own ideas of what is most efficient. WebM does not have the same kind of official standardised documentation that H.264 has, which makes it much harder to implement without just using the code Google makes available, with its accompanying non-assert patent commitments.

Is UK education policy being dictated by publishers?

Published by Ross Gardler on February 10, 2011 in Community. 11 Comments

OSS Watch is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to provide advice and guidance to the higher and further education sector with respect to open source software. The JISC is funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) who recently conducted a review of the JISC.

The HEFCE report was published yesterday. In the main I find it to be sensible and realistic and I welcome the vast majority of its recommendations. However, there is one paragraph that I find to be ill informed, and as a result, dangerous. In this post I wish to focus on that paragraph.

Before highlighting the offending text I would like to share, by way of background information, a few thoughts about the JISC and its relationship to open source software.

The JISC and open source

The JISC does some great work in relation to open source software. In particular it has funded OSS Watch since 2003, long before I joined the team in 2007. Our remit is to understand how and when open source is applicable to our sector. The goal is to help ensure the sector benefits from open source whenever and wherever appropriate.

In 2003 open source was not widely respected as a viable software development methodology. It was also thought that open source was somehow the opposite of commercial. Major closed source software companies attacked the open source development model rather than competing with specific open source products; at the same time SCO was trying to kill Linux in the law courts whilst marketing machines portrayed open source developers as long-haired, bearded social misfits working out of back bedrooms (usually in their parents’ house) – they weren’t to be trusted.

Foresight

Today it is difficult to understand the foresight shown by the JISC in 2003.

Today there are a significant number of highly successful open source companies, some of which, such as Xensource, were born within universities (xensource was sold to Citrix for $500M in 2007). Furthermore, modern software development teams embrace the open development model found within successful open source projects. Even Microsoft, once the most vocal of anti-open source companies, is seeking to engage with open source communities and products as a part of its closed source business model.

As a result of the JISC’s desire to understand reality, rather than succumb to marketing messages from big companies back in 2003, it has been instrumental in the creation of policies and practices which have started to level the playing field for open source suppliers in our sector. It has successfully done this without shutting the door on closed source companies. The result is increased competition, which any good capitalist will know leads to improved quality and reduced costs.

The JISC has also worked hard to ensure that software outputs from research projects are sustained through open source models, where applicable. It has encouraged the debate about open source and open development of software, ensuring that the sector is better informed and capable of making important decisions.

In today’s world, where governments around the world are adopting open source policies, the JISC, through OSS Watch is, in my somewhat biased opinion, one of the best sources of unbiased, balanced information about open source methodologies, not just in the UK, but in the world. I firmly believe that our sector is better equipped to implement the government’s open source action plan than any other sector in receipt of public money.

More to do

Despite the JISC’s foresight there is still much to be done. Whilst the sector is better informed than most we still lag behind other countries and the private sector with respect to our successful adoption of open source, both as users and as developers. Here at OSS Watch we’ve long been aware of the need to provide a vehicle whereby software produced in our sector can be exploited and developed in the private sector, whilst still being of value to the education sector. We’ve been working to make this happen, and welcome the implied message in the JISC review to continue this kind of work.

Last year we ran the first edition of TransferSummit, a conference bringing together academic and commercial partners. This conference was 60% funded by the private sector; this year, when we run it in September, it will be 100% funded by the private sector. We have helped take software, such as Apache Wookie (Incubating) from the dark recesses of university repositories to the bright lights of successful open source foundations, where it has a chance to flourish amongst some of the world’s most important software projects and the commercial organisations helping fund them. We have advised and engaged with projects ranging from six-month prototype developments to multi-million-pound international collaborations. We’ve worked with universities, not-for-profits and for-profits.

We’ve done all of this, and much much more, because the JISC understands that open source has its place and is here to stay.

Signs of Rot?

OSS Watch was created under the previous government. Today we have a new government. A government that faces significant economic challenges. A government that has an opportunity to improve things, cut out the fat and really push things forwards. A review of the JISC was not just inevitable, but in my opinion, necessary. The review has now been delivered, and  is available for comment on the excellent JISCPress site (which is, by the way, is powered by Digress.it which was JISC-funded and open source).

The report is timely and, in the main constructive. I find myself agreeing with most of the recommendations and am happy to report that, under the JISC’s guidance, OSS Watch is already well on the way to doing their bit to implement many of the recommendations.

However, there is one paragraph that I am, quite frankly, appalled to see in this report:

“JISC’s promotion of the open agenda (open access, open resources, open source and open standards) is more controversial. This area alone is addressed by 24 programmes, 119 projects and five services.[7] A number of institutions are enthusiastic about this, but perceive an anti-publisher bias and note the importance of working in partnership with the successful UK publishing industry. Publishers find the JISC stance problematic.” (see this paragraph in context on the JISCPress site).

I’m going to skip over the fact that UK publishers (private sector) should not be dictating how HE/FE spends its money (public sector). Instead I’ll focus on the fact that this demonstrates an unbelievable lack of understanding and a significant lack of research on the part of the review committee.

In this post I will remain focussed on my own area of expertise, open source, leaving others to comment on the open access, content and standards parts of this paragraph[1].

From an open source perspective I want to know:

Since when has the “UK publishing industry” been able to dictate how our sector produces and consumes software?

Open source software is a software development methodology which is protected by a software licence [2]. It is a methodology that many believe brings significant benefits including increased innovation, reduced costs and increased quality of software, increased potential for self service or mixed economy support, empowerment of both small and large businesses, sustainability of research outputs and the breaking of monopolies. It drives economic growth and encourages the sharing of tacit knowledge.

In short, open source software is, in today’s world, an important fixture of the information technology and research industries.

Closed source software companies are no longer running scared from open source. Even the most aggressive of proprietary software companies are embracing open source as a fundamental part of their business models, both in driving markets and in university collaborations. Some are making multi-billion-dollar acquisitions in order to be able to do so.

The JISC knows what is right

The JISC is a thought leader in relation to openness in the higher and further education sector. I trust that in its planning of future activities it will strike this paragraph from its mind and continue to explore all aspects of openness in a balanced and unbiased way.

Failure to do so will be a considerable blow to the sector.

Footnotes

[1] I'm avoiding the ethical arguments for Free Software so as to remain focussed on the economic arguments;
    however, we really should keep the ethical arguments in mind
[2] Please feel free to post comments and link to your thoughts on the other aspects of openness
    in this paragraph - I feel certain you are just as angry as I am, make your voice heard