At the same time, cloud technologies deliver better and better IT services. From email and content storage to complex computing and development platforms, users can access clouds via simple browsers, thus eliminating the need for end-user applications and high-power computers.

In UK Higher Education, cloud solutions are an integral part of a JISC programme aimed at helping universities and colleges deliver better efficiency and value for money through the development of shared services. As pointed out by Rachel Bruce, JISC’s Innovation Director for digital infrastructure, cloud solutions are increasingly attractive to HE institutions. They allow universities to reduce environmental and financial costs, share the load of maintaining a physical infrastructure, be flexible and operate on a pay-as-you-go basis, access data and applications from any location, and make scientific experiments easier to reproduce.

Mobile and cloud technologies are here to stay, and open source already plays a key part in the new market emerging from their cross-pollination, as the Future of Open Source survey indicates.

What are the effects of these two giants moving towards each other? What are the technological and economic implications of their intersection?

Open Source Junction 3 is an event specially designed to help you answer such questions by bringing together scientific innovation and business entrepreneurship to showcase early success and facilitate new collaboration in this sector. Over two days delegates from industry and academia will meet at Trinity College in Oxford to hear about highly innovative mobile cloud projects and work together to build industry-academia partnerships in this field.

One of the featured projects at OSJ3 will be ‘Access King’s Global Desktop’, which was implemented to support a new mobile working strategy at King’s College. Alex Hove from Getronix will describe King’s successful migration to a private cloud platform delivered over the JANET network, which provided some 25,000 staff and students with access to core applications from almost any device and any location.

Ajit Jaokar, founder of the publishing and research companyfuturetext, will highlight the technical architecture challenges facing a world of 50 billion connected devices predicted for 2020. He will discuss how the next generation web and new networking technologies such as white space networks may be able to address these challenges, in the context of the European ‘Smart cities’ initiative.

The ASTRA research project develops and tests low cost platforms capable of delivering scientific instruments into the stratosphere. Steve Johnston, Senior Research Fellow at Southampton University, will describe the hardware, data communications and software applications required for stratospheric flights, including the recent success of using Windows Phone 7 dataloggers with GSM communication and the Azure cloud for back-end processing.

The Eduserv Education Cloud provides compute and storage cloud IaaS for UK Higher and Further Education sectors. Eduserv was recently nominated as one of the top 20 tech companies to watch in 2012. Research Programme Director Andy Powell will describe the service and suggest ways in which cloud infrastructure such as Eduserv can support and enhance mobile technology projects.

Andrew Betts, founder of the web technology firm Assanka, will talk about the HTML5 web app they developed for Financial Times. HTML5 includes features that allow the creation of web applications that work while offline, and Assanka’s FT web app demonstrate how this capability provides excellent user experience in conditions of intermittent or no network access.

These are just a few of the projects that will be showcased at Open Source Junction 3. The programme also includes specially designed small group interaction sessions to help delegates understand each others’ value propositions and identify partnership opportunities.

Social activities on the evening of the first day, including a tour of the five century-old Trinity College, drinks at the historical Turf Tavern, and dinner at a surprise restaurant, will also offer excellent opportunities to network and further discuss collaboration.

Places are still available but early bird registration ends soon. We hope to see some of you at the event.

Rage, the id game which uses version five of the id rendering engine (id tech 5, as it is known) has just been released. This is the point at which the source to the previous engine would usually be released as open source. However in this case there is a problem. Back when id tech 4 was being written for the game Doom 3 over the period 2000-2004, many games developers were looking into what were then cutting edge graphical technologies for inclusion in their games. One such technology was stencil shadowing, which accurately projects shadows from moving objects onto surrounding surfaces based upon the light sources which are illuminating them. This is hard work even for the specialist graphics hardware in PCs and consoles, and so any algorithmic optimisations that are possible are highly valued by the industry. So, various developers hit upon the same optimisation around the year 2000. This optimisation has come to be known as Carmack’s Reverse, even though it was first presented by William Bilodeau and Michael Songy of Creative Labs back in 1998. John Carmack discovered it independently some time later, and was perturbed to discover that Creative had already patented the process.

Faced with a choice between licensing the patent from Creative or making his code sub-optimal, Carmack decided to strike a deal with Creative that allowed him to use the technology at no cost. Perhaps coincidentally, id also agreed to use sound rendering technology by Creative in their game.

So the game was shipped and everyone was happy, until half a decade later when it came time to ship the code as open source. Obviously whatever deal was agreed between Creative and id did not involve making code available that embodied Creative’s patent under an open source licence for the whole world to use. In a tweet on the subject Carmack explained:

Lawyers are still skittish about the patent issue around “Carmack’s reverse”, so I am going to write some new code for the doom3 release.

It will be interesting to see how Carmack replaces the code, but the issue is also of interest because it illustrates the importance of keeping good records of the inbound IP in a software project. id’s lawyers caught what could have been an expensive potential infringement of Creative’s rights when they ‘skittishly’ requested that Carmack rewrite the code.

Emerson’s non-quote does raise a question, however. How do we identify technology which is better? With mouse-traps there are some fairly obvious metrics relating to mouse mortality and cheese preservation, but not all inventions are as easy to benchmark. The last few weeks have seen anouncements of upgrades to the world’s two most commonly used smartphone operating systems: Apple’s iOS (version 5) and Google’s Android (version 4). Each brings a raft of new features, although in both cases it has to be said that these new features are no longer as core to the operation of the device as innovations in earlier versions. Voice-operated search and facial recognition are nice, but hardly essential elements of a mobile computer, at least for now. Perhaps lost in the combative comparisons deployed by proponents of each OS is the fact that a genuinely key ability – web browsing – is implemented on both platforms using essentially the same code: the Web Kit open source project. While newer functionality is added by Google and Apple to differentiate the competing products, it pays them to cooperate on key, unavoidable elements of their offerings. Given this, it’s fair to repeat the question – how do we identify real innovation? The newer differentiating features appear to be the cutting edge of endeavour, but their very newness is a demonstration that – up to now at least – they have not been essential elements of the technology in question. Some of them will die away despite their novelty, having never truly improved the invention that they embellish. Like a cheese grater on your mouse trap, it’s possibly a nice idea and undoubtedly novel, but how useful is it really? Only time will tell, and in the meantime better springs, and better browsers, are being developed.

So perhaps the question needs to be: “looking back at innovations that have proved to be key, how do they tend to develop?” Using the answer to this, we might be able to form some techniques for looking at our cutting-edge-but-possibly-pointless innovations and making guesses about their eventual utility. We might even be able to identify over-arching strategies for conducting and rewarding innovation…

Here we get into an argument that flared up earlier this month, when a video of Francis Gurry, the Director General of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) back in June was discovered by the internet commentating community. Gurry was speaking to sum up his views on a debate which had just taken place on ‘Accelerating Growth and Development’ in relation to invention and intellectual property. Gurry’s argument was seemingly  summed up by the headline on the BoingBoing article which drew it to the internet’s attention: “WIPO boss: the Web would have been better if it was patented and its users had to pay license fees”. Reading the article, though, even the quote that BoingBoing had pulled failed to use that emotive word ‘better’:

Intellectual property is a very flexible instrument. So, for example, had the world wide web been able to be patented, and I think that is a question in itself, perhaps the amount of investment that has gone into or would be able to go into basic science would be different. If you had found a very flexible licensing model, in which the burden for the innovation of the world wide web had been shared across the whole user community in a very fair and reasonable manner, with a modest contribution for everyone for this wonderful innovation, it would have enabled enormous investment in turn in further basic research. And that is the sort of flexibility that is built into the intellectual property system. It is not a rigid system.

Reaction to the video from proponents of open content and open source across the internet was voluble and aggravated. Gurry was accused of being ideologically indoctrinated and blinkered, tied to anachronistic models of IP registration and exploitation even in the face of the incredible growth and success of the web largely without the intervention of these models. In fact though, the most that Gurry says is that the web would have been ‘different’. Taken in the context of the statements which preceded it (and which you can hear by downloading the video), in which the value of the traditional IP systems had been questioned repeatedly, Gurry’s statements do not really support the distillation they were given, and which caused so much anger. He is trying to argue that the web could have grown within more traditional licensing structures. Whether he is right about this or not, he is not claiming here that it would have been ‘better’ under those circumstances.

The anger and confusion here are natural, though. The battle lines between proponents of the traditional and the more ‘open’ approaches to innovation (and here we should note that the buzz phrase ‘open innovation’ often itself refers to deeply traditional IP exploitation patterns) have long been drawn, and the forces on both sides are keen to tackle and destroy the arguments of their opponents wherever they see them. The web is often perceived  - with much justification – as a triumph of innovation outside the traditional IP exploitation framework. To hear someone perceived as being part of the old-guard even discussing it can seem presumptuous to some ears. Yet in reality the implied dichotomy here is simplistic. The open licensing movements themselves are underpinned by the arcane operations of traditional licensing and exploitation. While they may give these operations an innovative twist, they could not be enforced or defended without them. Conversely, Gurry’s example of why  the patent regime is beneficial fails to address the criticisms of openness proponents. He points to the publication framework implicit in the current patent system, and makes the comparison between the saxophone – which has fully documented design documents available thanks to its having been patented – and the violin – where many secrets of producing the greatest instruments have been lost through secrecy and the passage of time. This critique – while interesting – is almost wholly inappropriate as a defence of the current system in opposition to more open models. In the modern case, both models involve complete publication – the distinction lies in how benefits are reaped from exploitation and by whom.

Given the frequent failures of either side in this debate to engage with what the other is actually saying – illustrated by this sad tale –  it’s not surprising that telling which innovations are better remains hard. While ideology is important, it can often obscure our view of what actually matters to most people: how many mice are killed (or indeed captured).

The answers varied, but people seemed to perceive the diversity of points of view involved in this cross-cultural exercise as beneficial. The delegates with an industry background praised the deep thinking and creativity of researchers, while academics were impressed with the down-to-earth revenue-generating mindset of their industry colleagues.

The early feedback we got from the first event of the series was equally positive.

Open Source Junction 3, due later this year, will continue to facilitate the encounter between the academic and business cultures focused on open development in the mobile sector.

Watch this space.

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Camille Baldock, Softwire

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Steven Gray, University College London

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Julian Harty, ebay

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Samuel Carlyle, Sukey

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Nick Allott, NquiringMinds

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Tim Fernando, University of Oxford

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Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, Wikitude

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Yuwei Lin, University of Salford

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Dave Raggett, W3C

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Gabriel Hanganu, OSS Watch

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Jay Lyman, Senior Analyst at The 451 Group recently twittered that the “overwhelming message @ Oscon so far is open source now driven mostly by innovation.” This in turn prompted Brian Proffit of IT World wrote:

if you put yourself in the right mindset, this kind of innovation is easier to spot than ever. Open source isn’t “just” the alternative anymore, it’s becoming the mainstream technology in a lot of areas.

When we created TransferSummit the objective was to highlight the fact that open source is open innovation in software. However, unlike most open source related conferences we are not interestedin preaching to the converted. Open source and the innovation it brings is important to everyone and TransferSummit is designed for everyone, no matter their existing level of open source knowledge.

TransferSummit 2011 has the same goal and has an equally impressive range of speakers for you to engage with and share ideas. We have:

• 2 days’ trainings
• 2-day conference across three tracks
• Mobile focus, virtual track
• Government summit
• Hands-on learning and break-out sessions
• Gadget playtime
• Gala dinner
• On-site housing
• Intimate setting, limited to 300 participants

This is the must attend event for 2011, tickets are selling fact so register now.

Following on from the platform built at Open Source Junction 1, this two day conference at Wolfson College Oxford developed the theme of industry-academia collaboration on open source mobile technologies. The focus this time was on  context-aware mobile technology.

So what is context-aware mobile technology? Over the course of the two days, there arose a number of interesting definitions taking the notion of context beyond the simple idea of location based services and into the lives of end-users, taking into account such things as their emotional state, habits, patterns of social interaction and the way they use their time.

In a talk entitled ‘Context Aware Applications: Industry Landscape And Commercial Opportunities’, Nick Allott, the founder of Nquiring Minds Ltd, said context was ‘all about probabilities’ and relationships, good examples being Amazon’s suggestions that ‘if you like X then you’ll like Y’ or the idea that if your friend installs a security system, you are more likely to trust it. Julian Harty, ‘tester at large at eBay’, in his talk ‘Smartphones In Context’, asked delegates to think in terms of interaction with the outside world. ‘Do you know how many sensors your smartphone has?’ he asked. The answer he said was almost certainly likely to be more than 10; including a light sensor, a sound sensor, a compass, rotation detection, accelerometers, GPS. All of these sensors work with the context in which they are placed – and can be used to create new contexts. Elsewhere, the idea of context was touched on in talks also encompassing business and academic integration, licensing, best practice in running open source projects, financial issues, dealing with huge amounts of data  – and ensuring that  data sources are reliable.

Context, it seems, is a broad issue – but the over-riding theme was the importance of engagement; whether that be with other programmers and contributors on open source projects through mailing lists, or between developers and the wider public. Such engagements have the power to change the world – and the way we see it. More particularly, the aim of the conference was to foster engagement between industry and academic people, to help them understand each other’s interests in context-aware mobile technologies.

One of the main ways this latter aim was encouraged was in show-casing a diverse range of projects and ideas from both industry and academic speakers through a wide range of presentations. Indeed, the very first presentation from Gabriel Hanganu tackled the idea head on. He acknowledged that there are perceived barriers between the worlds of academia and business, especially relating to the different drivers in each sphere. Profit and practical production motivate business. Ideas, research and journal production push academics. But Gabriel pointed out that academics are not as slack when it comes to entrepreneurial thinking as is often supposed -  while business can really profit from academic thinking. There is plenty of common ground – and when it comes to software development, the practices and procedures relating to open source can help bridge gaps. (More on that later.)

Roland Harwood, co-founder of 100% Open built on this idea of the usefulness of partnerships with his talk about open innovation collaboration. He highlighted a large number of examples of successful collaborations, and showed how even traditionally less open companies like Lego have benefited by enabling a broad community to use their code, and unleash their creativity. Mindstorms, thanks to its fan built ideas, has now become Lego’s best selling product.

As well as generating nifty new revenue streams, new technology can also provide a fascinating new insight into the way the world works. Steven Gray from the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis gave a fascinating run through his work on a number of game-changing projects, the most famous of which is Tweet-O-Meter, a program that uses geo-location data from Twitter to show when and where people are sending tweets. The data can be aggregated around maps to show interesting things. So, for instance, in London they can trace where there are roadworks and traffic jams because people are tweeting about them. They have also spotted that people tweet a lot on railway lines and at Heathrow airport as they take off and land and that parks are particularly free of activity during winter. They can see cities waking up and sleeping. CNN used the meter during the Japanese tsunami to show how people reacted to the news (since lots of people in Tokyo used their mobiles as landlines were down). They could also see the news spread to San Francisco.

Another clear demonstration of how mobile technology can be used to trace events in the physical world came in the form of the Nature Locator, described by Mike Jones  from The Institute of Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol. This emerged from a JISC-funded project that facilitated development of an Android and iOS apps to support citizen science. The app allows members of the public to submit photographic and geo-location evidence of leaf damage by a non-UK-native moth to the Conker Tree Science project – and has generated masses of important and useful scientific data.

The useful practical applications for such technology were clearly demonstrated by Serge Pawlowicz from the Centre of Geospatial Science in the University of Nottingham and his talk on a Particpatory HealthGIS that uses geospatial data and public participation surveys to help in all kinds of health research, for instance, tracing the sources of viruses. ‘It works!’ he said.

Ben Butchart, an experienced software engineer from EDINA (a JISC-funded national academic data centre providing online data services to academic institutions) continued this theme, explaining that the uses of HTML5 caching technology has opened up all kinds of new possibilities for developing useful technologies for geo-dependent projects (such as geology projects) even in isolated locations where signals are unreliable. At the other end of the spectrum, Tim Fernando gave an overview of how useful context-aware technology can be to residents of Oxford, and the success of Mobile Oxford, a campus-wide mobile service providing information on everything from bus times to library book availability to gigs.

Such projects can also be extended to provide useful information to and further engage with the wider public (end-users) by inviting them to contribute to location-based media platforms. So said Mick Lockwood from Salford University who demonstrated this in his talk about Maxamundo. He explained that using OpenStreetMap and a range of open source software, and getting user contributions helped him become ‘able to fulfil a dream’ even if he was just an ‘amateur hobbyist’. He’s now built up a detailed overview of Manchester and its attractions (a great many of which appear to be pubs) and the Maxamundo platform even becomes the subject of a sociological project. This latter project was run by Yuwei Lin, also from Salford University, who gave a fascinating account of the way it worked against open source development methodologies after Mick had finished speaking, explaining that Maxamundo has started to fulfil many of the functions of social networking sites, contextualise city lives, and re-order personal stories on a map.

The conference even explored the imaginary plane as well as showing so much about mapping the real world. Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis described how Wikitude, an augmented reality app that overlays virtual images and information over the real world (as revealed in, for instance, smartphone camera viewers), has the potential to alter the way we interact with, well, everything. Current uses include navigation devices for driving and 3D gaming, but the potential is limited only by the imagination of the huge community that can be harnessed to create new ‘worlds’ to overlay the context provided by the phone.

Elsewhere, one of the most impressive examples of context-aware engagement came from Samuel Carlisle and his colleague Matt Gaffen and their talk about Sukey. Sukey, we were told, exists to keep demonstrators safe and mobile during protests. It was created in 2010 in the aftermath of the occupation of UCL and most particularly in response to the police tactics used during that winter’s student protests, whereby protestors were ‘kettled’ for long periods of time and had their freedom of movement restricted. (The name comes from the nursery song, ‘Polly put the kettle on, Sukey take it off again’.) Sam said that they started putting out maps of protests that started giving them upwards of 60,000 hits in just a few hours – which inspired them to produce a proper app.

Using information crowd-sourced from the app, alongside information in Twitter streams, Sukey attempts to put out the most relevant and useful material surrounding demonstrations. So, for instance, they show where the police are forming kettles, where streets are blocked and also provide compass directions designed to help people on the ground get out of trouble. It’s run by volunteers in their spare time and it’s not for profit, so the use of community engagement was vital in making it work… And work it did; providing helpful information to thousands of protestors, and even acting as a conduit for advice and information from the police themselves. The application also received widespread media coverage and helped inform the wider ongoing debate about police tactics. A clear demonstration of just how quickly and effectively free-at-point-of-use software can change our society.

Many of these projects are already successful and those in their infancy are already demonstrating real potential, but at Open Source Junction 2 there was no shying away from the challenges they face. Speakers made it clear that taking contributions from large numbers of people – whether they be citizen scientists or developers sharing in an open source project – is not always easy. The team behind Sukey, for instance, have to dedicate a lot of energy to combating spam and false information. The Nature Locator has had to deal with a lot of incorrect data. Checks and balances are going to play an increasingly important role, it seems. W3C fellow Dave Raggett, meanwhile, highlighted the fact that ‘simplicity is hard’, explaining the need for good communication paths based on trust relationships, an easier way to manage security and logins across a number of platforms than we have at the moment and suggesting, cleverly, that it would be better if users could check the credentials of the website – as well as the website checking them out and for there to be support for pseudonymous identities that reflect the real world. No easy tasks – although we can at least take solace from the knowledge that he and others are working on them.

It was also emphasised that open innovation isn’t a panacea in every case. It can offer a fantastic way to cut costs, save time and maximise the potential of developers. Ross Gardler outlined a number of open source business models that can help you make sure ‘your company doesn’t go bust because it’s spending so much maintaining software’, ensure long term sustainability for projects and ideas, and open up many opportunities for commodotisation. But it was also emphasised that there are all kinds of procedures to follow and tough decisions to make to ensure the smooth running of projects – and that they remain sustainable in the long term. Just how careful projects have to be to follow the correct processes was clearly demonstrated in talks from Sander van der Waal concerning best practice relating to open source projects (emphasising the need to have a good management structure in place, transparent updates and progress reports via mailing lists) and a look into the complications surrounding patents, licences, Intellectual Property Rights and European law from Rowan Wilson.

In spite of such challenges, another clear advantage of open source development became clear over the course of the two days – how much it can help in academic and business collaborations, just as Gabriel had hinted in his opening talk. Camille Baldock from Softwire explained to me that while there is plenty of desire in the business world to tap into the academic knowledge base and expertise, such collaborations remain rare, thanks to perceptions about the different cultures and priorities found in the two ‘tribes’. But, as Gabriel  repeatedly stressed during the day, in software projects, developers can offer an alternative common ground in the form of the clearly defined work practices associated with open development.

Another thing that wasn’t in doubt at the end of the conference was how much participants did have to give each other. The ‘speed dating’ session invited delegates to write down three things they could offer a potential partner  – and three things they wanted in return. Ross Gardler got the ball rolling. He offered: a wide network from working in real open source, guidance on sustainable models, and practical experience on making things happen. He said he wanted: real projects before they go to market, innovation companies to work with, and introductions to more useful people. There followed a fast and furious twenty minutes with a huge array of services offered and requested. Offers included, contacts and development from the London Mobile Developer community, an open invite to hackdays – including organising them, a strong network for industrial partners in the telecoms, students and resources, expertise in security, 3D Printing knowledge and (let’s not forget!) another conference in September – TransferSummit, co-organised by OSS Watch. Wants included, ideas and products to sell, the promotion of open source, partners, funding opportunities, opportunities for future consortia.

These connections were further aided by the format of the event, with numerous other such interactive sessions built in. As well as the ‘offers and wants’ session, delegates were invited to ‘self pitch’, giving a 45 second overview of their mobile app’s interests and invite feedback. They also took part in a ’3 minute joint venture’  session in which they were invited to pair up with someone they hadn’t yet talked to and spend three minutes coming up with an idea for a joint venture. (Highlights included a mashup of eBay and location-based sales, using targeted marketing on people walking down the street, and AID – Am I Dying – a mix of a virtual patient project in St George’s with an intelligent clothing company… ). There was also plenty of space for informal conversations over breaks, drinks and dinner saw many start to form those connections.

In short, there were many successful interactions building from the platform established at the first Open Source Junction. Even the fact that the attempt to put geo-location technology into practice on a country walk resulted in all delegates getting soaked in a rain storm and two chased by a bull didn’t dampen spirits. People were exchanging details, forming links throughout the two days and I’m told many are discussing opportunities in more detail now. There was the feeling that a community was forming. Let’s hope it continues to grow and prosper, and watch out for the next OSJ3 planned for November.

It gives me great pleasure that one of my own hires, Sander van der Waal, has agreed to be my successor. Sander has been a key part of the team for some time and is well equipped to take over from me as manager. I have no doubt that Sander will continue to deliver, through the brilliant OSS Watch team, an advisory service designed to ensure our sector benefits from, and contributes to, open source.

Before explaining what I’ll be doing next I want to explain why I’m leaving.

Difficult Times

The academic sector is changing. It’s changing in fundamentally important ways. Most importantly, for OSS Watch, the funding models for services like ours is changing. For some time I, as manager, have been seeking to ensure all staff within the OSS Watch team have a level of job security that our current funding model is unable to provide as we move forwards.

As background consider that OSS Watch staff, including myself, have been on rolling three month contracts for nearly a year. Naturally, under these circumstances it has been very difficult to provide a valuable service to the sector. I’m extremely proud of the OSS Watch team and what we have achieved under these circumstances.

I’m not interested in complaining about the lack of security for our staff. The reality is that the economic and political environment of the last couple of years is the root cause of these difficulties and it’s pointless to suggest that the problems could/should have been avoided. The fact is OSS Watch is a minuscule part of this whole sector and nobody is to blame for how things have affected us. In fact, rather than complain I would rather state, loud and clear, I have nothing but praise for those with a direct influence on our work.

The JISC, through our programme director Matthew Dovey, have done everything in their power to ensure OSS Watch remains viable. Similarly our host, Oxford Universities Computing Services, have been faultless in their handling of staff contracts. There were a number of times that OUCS could have legitimately cancelled our employment contracts, but this was never seriously considered. On behalf of the OSS Watch team I want to thank the JISC and OUCS for taking responsibility and not sweeping important services like OSS Watch under the carpet.

Similarly, I want to thank the OSS Watch team. Despite extremely difficult circumstances the team have stuck by me and my plans for the future of OSS Watch. This is a testament to both the value they place in OUCS as an employer and to their commitment and contributions to open source advice in the academic sector.

So, if I am so happy with our funders, employers and team why am I leaving?

An OSS Watch Spin-Out

During the last year I and the team have been working to secure additional funding streams for OSS Watch. We’ve had plenty of success in attracting funding for specific support activities in key projects, this has enabled us to significantly reduce our demands on the JISC. In addition, I’ve had success in generating interest in an OSS Watch like service for the private sector.

As a result of this interest from the private sector I’m leaving OSS Watch in order to start a new company, OpenDirective, with Steve Lee as a partner. Our goal is to connect the smart folk in the UK research domain to the people who can take their software developments to market.

Both Steve and I will remain engaged with the OSS Watch team to ensure our services are complementary.  Through our collaboration we will seek to identify opportunities for technology transfer and, in so doing, generate alternative streams of revenue for open source activities within the academic sector.

What Does This Mean to You?

First and foremost, OSS Watch continues to provide free, at the point of use, advisory services to the UK Higher and Further Education Sector. OSS Watch remains fully independent of commercial interests and as such continues to provide unbiased, non-advocacy advice. However, these services will remain advisory only. That is OSS Watch will not tell you the best course of action, nor will they actively engage with the implementation of your chosen route. OSS Watch seek to enable you to choose and act upon the right option.

OpenDirective, on the other hand, are able to provide more proactive and engaged services. We won’t just advise you of your options, we’ll be willing to tell you what you should do. We’ll even help you do it. Naturally we’ll explain our reasoning, but we’ll be spending more time on making your project succeed than deliberating over all possible alternative actions. OpenDirective will not be free at the point of use, but our contracts are performance based, that is we’re happy to put our time and money where our mouths are.

Interestingly, one of OpenDirectives first clients is OSS Watch. For the foreseeable future, Steve and I will remain a part of the OSS Watch project support team. So, if you are part of a project that has Steve or I are assigned to then things will not change a great deal for you. At the same time, a couple of our initial contracts are injecting funding and community development work back into OSS Watch projects.

Taken together we believe that the combination of OSS Watch and OpenDirective give you a new range of options that should enable you to reach your goal state in the most appropriate way possible for your unique position.

Specifically in the i4i SCOTUS case this would mean that Microsoft could use circumstantial evidence that i4i in fact invalidated their own patent by selling a product based upon the technology over a year before they applied to patent it. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the source code to this late-90s product  - which would have been direct evidence of invalidity and therefore met the ‘clear and convincing evidence’ standard – no longer exists. All Microsoft has are manuals that imply that the technology was present in the product. So if SCOTUS agrees to Microsoft’s arguments, Microsoft will be able to bring this weaker evidence back to the court and will have a much better chance of invalidating i4i’s patent.

While this would to be cathartic for Microsoft who have been losing heavily every step of the way in this chain of cases, the implications of a Microsoft win here would be profound indeed, and perhaps surprisingly, they would benefit open source software a great deal. Lowering the standard of proof needed to invalidate a patent would – inevitably – lead to the value and effectiveness of patents themselves dropping. Generally open source software is on the receiving end of patent litigation; there is little motivation for open source developers to apply for patents as the licence they plan to use on their software makes the patent rights available at no cost to everyone. If that’s the effect you wish to achieve, just releasing the software does the job without any additional patent attorney fees. So – arguably – any weakening of the defensibility of patents benefits open source developers and users.

When a case gets to SCOTUS there tend to be many briefs submitted from interested parties not directly involved in the action. These ‘Amicus Curiae’ (friend of the courts) briefs describe the view of these external parties who feel they might be affected by a decision one way or the other. In this case, i4i’s argument is backed by a very wide range of patent-obtaining entities from Universities to pharmaceutical companies. Even the US government has submitted a brief arguing that the current standard should stand. Submitting briefs backing Microsoft are – among others – Apple, Google and Apache. It’s an interesting sign of how – despite the endless rounds of suing and retaliatory counter-suing over software patents in the IT industry – the big players see the current system as flawed and damaging. The contrast with the Pharmaceutical industry in this case couldn’t be more striking. For Pharma, patents are unequivocally a good thing, serving their need to underwrite investment in research with strong IP protection of their products. In IT it seems, even those with the largest patent portfolios see them as too powerful a weapon. When even the owners of software patents want them weakened, it’s hard to argue that the current law strikes the correct balance.

Of course, the problem here is that Microsoft’s argument, if successful, would reduce the enforceability of every kind of patent in the US, software or otherwise, and for that reason it could be argued that even if the IT industry is being hamstrung by endless patent wars, that is an evil we must tolerate for the good of innovation across the economy. Having lost the opportunity to reduce the protection of software patents on their own during Bilski it may be overly optimistic to hope that SCOTUS will address this even wider issue with anything like clarity. The court is expected to deliver its conclusions in June.

Abi James wants to learn more about how open source could bring assistive technology tools to mobile platforms.

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EA Draffan has learned more and networked more at this event than has been possible in weeks of desk work.

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Gabriel Hanganu tells us why OSS Watch decided to run this
event.

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Julian Harty is curious about open source communities and is enjoying networking with key people who can help him in his work at eBay.

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Iris Lapinski tells us about Apps for Good, a technology charity that helps young people to create apps that change their world.

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Mark Johnson is exploring mobile development and has already met people he could collaborate with.

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Mike Jones describes Mobile Campus Assistant, which provides useful information for students.

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Nick Allott describes the challenge of creating web apps that can talk to each other securely.

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Ross Gardler explains that one of the main aims behind this event is to get a dialogue going between the academic and commercial sectors.

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Roland Harwood demonstrates how the principles of open innovation are being applied to business.

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Tim Fernando tells us about the Molly mobile web apps project and invites more people to get involved.

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Stephen Walli explains that as open source projects get more mature, they need to manage their intellectual property more professionally.

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