The "New Privacy"

There was a great session on Online Privacy on NPR's Science Friday today, including a guest spot by Emily Vander Veer, the author of O'Reilly's Facebook: The Missing Manual. You can subscribe to the podcast or download today's episode directly.

The discussion here is yet another independent confirmation of the new definition of privacy that's emerging in American culture. We used to fight for the right not to reveal information about ourselves. The "new privacy" is about fighting for the right to spread your personal information all over very public forums but still control how it's used. It's an almost Escher-esque redefinition of language. To quote my own earlier writing: "If you paint something on the city wall, don't expect it to be hidden."

Daniel Weitzner made a big point on the show of the parallels between protection for the kind of information we display on Facebook and legislation to protect medical and financial information. He missed a crucial difference: the medical and financial information protected by those laws prevents information that must be revealed in one context (to your doctor or banker) from leaking out into other contexts. But, if you posted your bank and credit card details and medical records on a public web site for the world to see, people might accuse you of being stupid, but they wouldn't claim that we need tighter legislation on the use of information.

Concurrency Summit in Mountain View

Next Friday, March 7th, O'Reilly is holding a summit on concurrency at Google's Mountain View campus. We've invited a number of people from the Foo network ("friends of O'Reilly") to talk about their work and research in concurrent/parallel development, in software and hardware, in commercial, academic, and free contexts. There's an enormous amount of work pouring into this space right now, as multiprocessor machines become the norm, and small improvements in concurrency techniques can result in significant performance gains. We're aiming for a mental map of the concurrency space, a cross-pollination of ideas and solutions, and connections between developers who might not meet in the ordinary course of their work. I'm particularly looking forward to it, because a key focus of my work on Parrot over the past few months has been designing and implementing the concurrency model. If you have an innovative approach to concurrency and would like to join us, contact me at allison {at} oreilly {dot} com.

Free Computers for Local Schools

If you're located in the Bay Area, take a bit of time out this weekend to help the community and the environment. On Saturday, March 1st, the Alameda County Computer Resource Center together with Untangle, are hosting an installfest in 4 locations: San Francisco, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Novato. They'll be installing Ubuntu, Firefox, Open Office, and more on recycled machines and donating them to local schools. Based on a trial run, their goal is to set up 500 machines this weekend, diverting approximately 25,000 pounds of toxic e-waste from the landfill.

If you're not located in the Bay Area, ask your local Linux user group if there's a similar program in your city. It's a growing trend, combining concern for the environment, equal access to technology for less advantaged children (and adults), and open source advocacy.

Interview with Linus Torvalds

The second half of the Linux Foundation interview with Linus Torvalds went up today. Several interesting perspectives on patents, competition, innovation, community building, target markets, and the future of Linux.

If you're looking for hope that Linux will focus more on the desktop market, look no further:

"I have never, ever even run a Linux server and I don’t even want to; it’s not what I’m interested in. I’m more of a desktop guy. I’ve always used Linux as a workstation person."

Linux and GPLv3

The Linux Foundation published a podcast interview with Linus Torvalds this week, the first in a new series. The interview covers a broad range of topics related to Linux, but towards the end spotlights the subject of licensing. As I suspected, 6 months after the release of GPLv3, Linux shows no signs of adopting the new version of the popular license. The quote that hit Slashdot was, "at this point in time, Version 2 matches what I think we want to do much, much better than Version 3".

There are two opposing forces here, touched on briefly in the interview. On one side is the fact that over time more and more packages distributed with the Linux kernel will be distributed under GPLv3. On the other side is the fact that the Linux kernel doesn't have a single unified holder of intellectual property who could make an executive decision that the license must change. It has, instead, a whole collection of contributors, who each hold a piece of the copyright.

It will be years before enough packages are licensed exclusively under the GPLv3 to cause a problem for the Linux kernel. Most packages distributed under the GPL are flagged with "or any later version", so there is no urgent need to change. Compared to the speed of technology advances in open source software, the legal advances are almost glacially slow. Given a pace like that, chances are that a number of work-arounds will be developed long before we encounter a GPLv3 package so critical and so well positioned that it forces a change in the license of the kernel.

And equally, though it would be quite possible for an entity like the Linux Foundation to collect contributor agreements from all Linux kernel developers and become the copyright holder, there isn't any urgent pressure to do so. In many ways, the distributed nature of the Linux kernel copyright is an advantage. It's a Matrix-like strategy of dodging bullets by simply not presenting a target for the bullets to strike.

In the end, what we have is a stable system by reason of inertia. It may eventually shift, but not anytime soon.

The second half of the interview with Linus Torvalds will be posted in February on the Linux Foundation's Open Voices blog.

OSCON 2008 Call for Participation

The call for participation for the 2008 O'Reilly Open Source Convention is out. This year marks the 10th anniversary of OSCON, of the Open Source Initiative, of Mozilla, and of the term "Open Source", so a huge celebration is in order. OSCON will be in Portland, Oregon again this year, one of the key Open Source hubs in North America. It will be co-located with the 2nd annual Ubuntu Live conference, which is also currently running a call for participation.

OSCON will host talks on a wide variety of topics, from programming techniques and tools, to user experience and user-centered design, to mobile technologies, to system administration and security, to community building, to open source in business, to languages like Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, to various flavors of *nix (Linux, BSD, etc), to web application development, to database administration, optimization, and development. We're especially seeking talks that not only cover the state-of-the-art in open source technology, but also look ahead to the future of open source. Submit your proposals by February 4th.

Phone Monopoly Redux

The economics of hardware subsidization aren't as significant in mobile phone
contracts as you might think. The mobile phone companies could sell you a $20 phone that would work just fine. They do in other countries, and they used to do it in the US. They don't any more, though, because if they offer the option, people take it instead of getting locked into a lengthy contract.

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