Sometimes open source ideals make for the strangest–and most wonderful–bedfellows. We met Dr. Vandana Shiva–physicist, scientist, environmentalist, and activist–several years ago. Her work saving seeds and protecting traditional knowledge in the farming industry parallels the openness, transparency, collaboration and freedom of open source ideology. Her simple, clear explanation of why knowledge should be shared–and the devastating results should it be hoarded–is part of the essential truth that makes the work we do so incredibly important. But don’t take our word for it.

Get more information about Dr. Shiva’s work.

The State of Things is a show produced by North Carolina Public Radio. This week host Frank Stasio interviewed James Boyle, a Duke law professor and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, about his new book The Public Domain. Boyle explains how the public domain is getting smaller and smaller and the ways modern copyright laws are strangling accessibility to 20th century culture.

• Listen to the interview
• Download the book, appropriately being distributed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license

And speaking of Creative Commons, have you taken their non-commercial survey yet? If not, the deadline’s been extended. They want to understand how people feel about the term “noncommercial use.”

• Read the Creative Commons blog post
• Take the survey

With 1.4 billion people connected, the Internet is the greatest collaborative network that mankind has experienced. One of the consequences of the growth of this network is a shift in the way knowledge is being created and distributed. As we move to an interconnected world, the balance of power is shifting from old, proprietary models of knowledge creation to the open source model that emphasizes collaboration and sharing. From management gurus to consulting firms to leading business schools, everyone is taking note of this new phenomenon that goes by various names like ‘Collaborative Innovation,’ ‘Open Innovation,’ or ‘Distributed Co-creation.’

The open source movement has pioneered the Collaborative Innovation trend, and it is no surprise that the rapid growth of the Internet and the equally rapid growth of the open source community have mirrored each other. The Linux® operating system and Wikipedia website are both good examples of open source projects that embody the ideals of Collaborative Innovation. And those in the technology industry aren’t the only ones to take notice. Policy makers and corporate leaders in all markets are exploring how this powerful trend can be harnessed for social and economic development.

Let us take Linux as an example. In September 1991, Linus Torvalds released 10,000 lines of source code under the General Public License (GPL). The GPL gives users four freedoms:

1. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose
2. The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
4. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits

Over the years, thousands of volunteers contributed to the code released by Torvalds. It is estimated that Linux now has around 100 million lines of source code and that the commercial value of this source code is approximately eight billion dollars. ^[1] This represents an enormous wealth of knowledge that is freely available.

The innovation that is possible through the efforts of thousands of people collaborating on the Linux source code is a powerful (and constantly growing) advantage for open source software. In the next few years, we may see the pace of innovation in open source outstrip anything that proprietary vendors and their closed group of paid programmers can produce.

Explaining this phenomenon, Tim O’Reilly says that, “Sustained innovation is no longer just about who has the most gifted scientists or the best equipped labs. It’s about who has the most compelling ‘architecture of participation.’”

Henry Chesborough, author of the book Open Innovation explains the contrast between the open and closed innovation models with this chart:

The term “Collaborative Innovation” may be new, but the concept and the practice have been part of Red Hat’s corporate philosophy since the company’s inception. For 15 years, Red Hat has applied this framework to successfully compete with proprietary software vendors who have built multi-billion dollar empires using the closed innovation model. The Fedora® Project is a prime example of Red Hat’s Collaborative Innovation strategy. Red Hat engineers work with the open source community to develop cutting-edge technologies for Fedora. When these innovative technologies mature, they are incorporated into Red Hat® Enterprise Linux.

By working with smart people inside and outside Red Hat, the company is able to create a transparent, cost-efficient model of technology development. Despite having just 2,600 employees, Red Hat has been able to build and provide world-class solutions that are deployed in demanding environments like the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Aviation Administration as well as large government and private deployments across the world. While Red Hat does not generate all of the code that makes up Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company is able to create value by providing services, training, and support around open source software. This is no mean feat considering that the primary operating system competitor is a deeply entrenched company that employs more than 50,000 people.

Eager to take full advantage of its possibilities, thought leaders across the world are applying the collaborative innovation model in areas like content (Wikipedia), medicine (Open Source Drug Discovery), scientific publishing (Public Library of Science), flexible copyrights (Creative Commons), and many other areas. Red Hat’s greatest contribution to the Collaborative Innovation movement–so far–has been its success in building a business model around open source software that can be replicated in other fields. With the Internet becoming an integral part of our lives, Collaborative Innovation is set to become one of the most important aspects of our future.

Related links

• Design Thinking, part 1 and part 2

About the author

Venkatesh Hariharan is Corporate Affairs Director at Red Hat and works on open source, open standards, and other policy issues. He is interested in the impact of technology on society. He co-founded IndLinux.org in 1999 and pioneered localization of Linux to Indian languages. He blogs at www.osindia.blogspot.com and his photos are at www.flickr.com/photos/venky7.

My name is Adrienne, and I’m a graphic designer at Red Hat—I create meaning using type and image. The other day I stumbled upon a story involving music, sustainability, and open source. Needless to say, I was intrigued.

Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain are the artists and creators behind Monome. At first glance, this cool device is simply a white square with a grid of buttons. It produces music and the buttons light up. It seems random, but the lights and music are synchronized.

Monome is a musical interface that connects to a computer–and is controlled by the applications the computer runs. It respond to the keys being pressed, and the LEDs light up–it is, at its simplest, a programmable controller for music, video, games, or art.

The beauty of an open process allows people to build on the idea, creating more than anyone could originally imagine (just like Fedora). People have manipulated Monome to do a number of things.

Max/msp is the programming environment for most of the Monome applications. This environment gave Crabtree and Cain the flexibility they needed to compose live art and video performances. Open source technology was better than the conventional methods they tried previously, because they could use and manipulate technology the way they wanted.

Monome was born to help express music and art. But instead of hiding the idea, Crabtree and Cain decided to share with the world. So far, the work has been incredibly successful and a large community has formed, building upon the Monome idea. So far they’ve constructed 3 models:16 x 16 inches, 16 x 8 inches, and 8 x 8 inches. Each time they have sold out quickly.

I love this line from their blog:

“We believe that open source is commercially viable and mutually beneficial for our collective and the consumer. In opening our software we eliminate wasteful, redundant coding for ourselves by incorporating proven libraries and frameworks.”

The Monome duo believe in sharing and sustainable practices. Even the name, Monome, is derived from their belief in minimalism. They make everything from the musical interfaces to the screenprinted shipping boxes in their loft in Philadelphia. They follow sustainable practices that use local sources for raw materials and services. They sell kits so people can build their own. Their business is based on the open source model.

Like the Fedora Project, Monome also has a growing community of artists and programmers that actively contribute—whether it’s writing software or finding new ways to use the interface. This community has released a wide range of videos, showing everything from creating the actual machine to playing live performances.

Perhaps their blog says it best:

“We seek to actively facilitate community participation and encourage sharing.”

At Red Hat, we do the same.

More information

• Monome’s Wikipedia entry
• Official Monome website
• A Video and Text Interview with Monome from Cycling ‘74
• YouTube videos of mono in action can be found here and here.

Today Creative Commons launched the Case Studies Project, a large community effort to explore and document the use of Creative Commons around the world. At the same time, Creative Commons Australia is holding a conference on “Building an Australasian Commons.” There the project is being announced with the publication of a publicly available booklet featuring some of the best global case studies.

Despite having just launched, the site is already full of studies. A few you’ve heard of. Most you probably haven’t. Here are a few I thought were interesting:

- Architecture for Humanity. “Design like you give a damn.” Co-founder Cameron Sinclair won a 2006 TED prize for the project. How do they use CC? “We use the Developing Nations licence for the designs of our buildings. Once the first prototype building is completed, we can essentially give away the designs to other communities in other developing nations.”

- Blender. If you’ve done any 3D animation, you know about this successful open source project. The entire production files of two movies–Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny–are released under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

- The University of Southern Queensland OpenCourseWare. This project applies the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia license to ten courses. From October 2007 to March 2008, there were over 26,000 visitors to the site. The most popular class? C++.

The Case Studies Project is set up wiki-style, so it’s just waiting for your contributions.

• Learn more.
• Explore and add.

FUDCon comes on the heels of the Red Hat Summit, with many of the speakers and developers doing double-duty. Even Red Hat’s CEO showed up for both events. Did you miss out? Never fear, there’s always another FUDCon coming up, and the Fedora Project Leader is happy to give you the report from this one.

From FUDCon Boston, June 20, 2008:

The Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) is in full swing on its second day. We have another full day of exceptional hacking taking place on the third floor of the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Just as the Red Hat Summit is drawing to a close downstairs–winding up with a half-day of sessions and panels–we’re just now kicking into high gear. This has been an exceptional way to introduce open source customers to the larger ecosystem behind the products they love, and the community that powers Fedora, the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Last night at the close of FUDCon Day 1, we had two huge events–the first came courtesy of Fedora’s Infrastructure team. Over the last couple of years, the team has built a world-class infrastructure for hosting and communication throughout the entire Fedora community. Last night, Infrastructure team leader Mike McGrath announced a one-two punch of free software goodness for Fedora. First, our Fedora Account System is now an OpenID provider. This means that the identity you create in the Fedora Project can be used across thousands of web sites. The other big announcement was the new Fedora telephony system, “Fedora Talk,” based on the juggernaut free software VoIP project Asterisk.

That’s right, Fedora contributors will be able to use VoIP to set up voice meetings that facilitate better and more efficient collaboration. There will also be features to ensure that those conversations don’t damage the openness and transparency on which Fedora thrives. As Mike announced in this recent blog post, the hardware and bandwidth have been provided courtesy of our friends at ServerBeach, and the dial-in numbers by Arrival Telecom and DiDDiscount.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst arrived in the FUDCon space just in time for Mike’s big announcement. I saw a smile spread across his face as he saw the incredible work done by our Infrastructure team–just a recent example of the constant, continuous improvements in Fedora. If you’re interested in what Jim had to say, Fedora engineer Jeremy Katz posted an excellent summary of the speech and subsequent Q&A.

This morning things kicked into high gear again. Some of today’s highlights:

• Our QA and Triage teams continued some very intense work on Fedora’s testing processes, and discussing the current and future use of Rawhide and how it can be used most effectively to improve the distribution.
• A brainstorming session was held by Max Spevack and Mairin Duffy on the future of the Spins website, and how to generate a user-friendly experience for people who want to create and consume customized versions of Fedora (“spins”). Max and Mairin make a great team for keeping the talk on-track and focused on the user experience (or “story”) before lunch, and afterward narrowing in on guidelines and goals for the spin process itself.
• The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) group members here at FUDCon also formed a hackfest session. The EPEL special interest group is all about helping enterprise Linux users use more of the thousands of software packages available in Fedora.
• The Community Architecture group had a long strategy meeting to talk about its funding for the rest of 2008–making sure it’s spent in a way that maximizes the benefits to Fedora and our community building goals. One of the most interesting things about our CA team–and frankly, one of the reasons many others want to emulate the way they build Fedora’s community–is that they conduct all this work openly and transparently. Anyone is free to see how we allocate our funds, set our priorities, and produce results from our community work.
• Thanks to our friends at Digium, the company behind Asterisk, many of our Infrastructure team, some folks who operate in remote areas of the globe, and a handful of other Fedora team leaders and engineers were able to receive SIP handsets. We’ll use those with the new Fedora Talk to test and implement new communications solutions for all our contributors.
• Around all this activity, there were a constant stream of visitors from the Red Hat Summit–people interested in the ways in which our community brings innovative new ideas and software to the world of free and open source software. Educators, engineers, system administrators, editors, students, journalists, C-level executives, and enthusiasts all were well represented.

It’s been an exhausting but incredibly fulfilling couple of days thus far–and the BarCamp day on Saturday is sure to be just as solid. Just another few days in the whirlwind of community-powered goodness that we call the Fedora Project.

With this announcement at the Summit, Red Hat® Network® enters a new, more open era. We caught up with Mike McCune from the RHN team, and he sent us this quick run-down of the new release and the project’s decision to go open source.

Intro

Responsible for 1,000 systems? One hundred systems? Ten? If so, you likely have processes in place for maintaining these systems, if only to preserve your sanity! Perhaps you have custom ssh scripts to command the systems remotely, or maybe you have your own yum repositories to maintain software patches critical to your systems. If the burden of maintaining these systems causes you a headache or your needs go beyond the methods you use today, Red Hat has tools available to make your life as a system administrator easier.

Satellite

Red Hat Network Satellite is a systems management platform that will make the deployment of your Linux systems easier, faster, and more scalable. Satellite automates many of the day-to-day operations that would otherwise require manual script writing, remote ssh execution, and a considerable amount of human effort. Satellite can centralize the storage and deployment of Red Hat products alongside your own custom software content in one server for easy and controlled distribution to as many systems as you desire.
Users deploy Satellite in environments ranging from tens to tens of thousands of Linux systems.

If any of the features below sound useful to you, give Red Hat Network Satellite a try:

• One-click software updates in an easy-to-use web interface
• Role-based administration
• Flexible delivery architectures – Satellite, Proxy, and Hosted
• Virtual Machine Management – Provision, control, and configure virtual machines
• System grouping for easier administration
• Automation of previously manual tasks
• Life-cycle management of your entire Linux infrastructure
• Performance tracking for your Linux systems

Latest features in Satellite 5.1.0

With the latest release of Red Hat Network Satellite, 5.1.0, we introduced some excellent new features to help Satellite better integrate with your environments. The most notable feature we introduced in the release is the Multiple Organizations feature, sometimes referred to as ‘Multi-Org.’ This feature allows you to partition your servers, users, software, and configuration into separate ‘Organizations’ within the Satellite. Each organization can manage their own sets of users and systems allowing you to control access to your data without having to install and maintain separate Satellite servers.

An example usage of this feature would be a user that wants a Satellite for managing systems in a multi-departmental organization. Each department would be given its own separate Organization within the Satellite: one organization for Finance, one for IT, one for Engineering, and so on. Each organization would then be granted a set amount of licenses (‘entitlements’) to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as determined by a central Satellite administrator. Likewise, the Satellite Administrator would create administrators for each Department within the Satellite. Each department would then have rights to register and administer their
systems without fear of users in other departments seeing or manipulating their systems.

Other exciting features in 5.1.0 include:

• API Call enhancements: Vastly expanded set of XML-RPC APIs to help you better automate your experience with RHN Satellite.
• Satellite support for x86 64-bit (Intel/AMD) and z390/x (IBM) platforms. You can run your Satellite on more hardware than ever before!
• Provisioning support for Power PC (PPC) platform: Kickstart your PPC boxes from Satellite.
• Apache 2.0 support for Satellite and Proxy on RHEL4
• Exporter tool for moving RHN configuration information
• Web User Interface (UI) enhancements: Expanded CSV export support and performance enhancements.

Last but not least

Big news in the world of RHN Satellite: We are going open source! Our development, source code, and communications will all be done in the open with GPLv2 licensing. Much more information at our website:

http://spacewalk.redhat.com/

Attend one of our Satellite lab sessions to talk one-on-one with developers on our team and get the latest information.

More information

Red Hat press release webcast

Red Hat press blog announcement

Developer Blogs: Jesus Rodriguez, Devan Goodwin

Red Hat Delivers on Linux Automation with Identity Management and Open Source Systems Management Solutions

Red Hat Network to Be Open-sourced

Starting off this year’s Red Hat Summit was a triplet of keynotes: a Red Hat leader (CEO Jim Whitehurst), a Red Hat partner (Jim Stallings of IBM), and an open culture visionary (Dr. John Halmaka, CIO of Harvard Medical School.) This ordering of keynotes is representative of how the Red Hat commmunity is structured–a balance between enterprise and open communities, with Red Hat in the lead. (These keynotes will be available in their entirety from the Red Hat Summit page.)

Leadership keynote: Jim Whitehurst

Jim Whitehurst focused on how Red Hat enables customers to gain value by entering the open source ecosystem. As examples, he talked about SELinux</a< and AMQP. The Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP) was developed internally at JP Morgan for fast messaging. Whitehurst described the visionary CIO of JP Morgan, who realized JP Morgan could improve the code and reduce their maintenance commitment over the long term.

Whitehurst encouraged customers to look at the code they develop internally. “The waste in IT software development is extraordinary,” he said. By bringing that coding effort into the open and building a community around it, enterprises can look at millions in savings.

Visionary keynote: Dr. John Halamka

Continuing the discussion of the value of open culture, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School, talked about healthcare IT. In modern medical IT, he said, “Open and transparent is good, closed and proprietary is bad.” Dr. Halamka’s talk focused on the millions of Eastern Massachusets medical records handled by their Red Hat cluster, placing that in the context of national work on open medical IT standards.

Dr. Halamka works as part of the American Health Information Community (AHIC). One of his main projects with AHIC is improving medical record standards. He describes it as “500 groups working to harmonize standards.” The AHIC defines a number of use cases to drive their work. One of their projects, for example, might be making it possible to get your medical records in a totally portable way.

In Massachusetts, the IT group Dr. Halamka oversees has put this planning into action. Patient records are transmitted on an entirely open source architecture, with edge servers at all the medical providers and payers. As an example, Dr. Halamka pulled up his own record, then joyfully showed his mostly-IT audience the underlying XML source.

By using open standards running on an open source infrastructure, they move patient data wherever it needs to go without delay. In the process, they have saved over $20 million a year by not having licensing and fees for a slower clearinghouse to ship records.

As a call to the innovative open IT audience, Dr. Halamka listed the items that keep him awake at night: Electronic health records for doctors; storage as a utility; e-Prescribing; data sharing for clinical care among a community of caregivers; security; RFID and bar-coding; providing remote decision support; compliance requirements; internal and external websites that provide social tools for end-users; and disaster recovery.

Partner keynote: Jim Stallings

Jim Stallings from IBM presented the partner keynote, which served to bring home some of these open source lessons from the big infrastructure/large enterprise/data center perspective. What are global CEOs/CIOs worried about? Globalization, scale, complexity, security, and energy. In particuar, Stallings explained how energy has been the surprise concern that is going to change how data centers operate in the future.

In this transformation of the data center, one area of cost savings includes dealing with heat. As a global concern, power and cooling are going to drive data center changes, with Linux at the center because of flexibility, speed, and a history of caring about these matters.

Stallings describes an average achievable energy savings of 40%, with an average payback of less than two years. For every dollar of energy savings, there is an average additional six to eight dollars in operational savings.

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Authors: James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: March 2008

Patent Failure examines the current state of the American patent system based on the way it has traditionally been treated–as a type of property system. Using the yardstick of property rights and the economics they influence, Bessen and Meurer analyze the costs and benefits of patents to innovators. Their qualification: “If the estimated costs of the patent system to an innovator exceed the estimated benefits, then patents fail as property.”

The authors rightly point out that many of the criticisms of the patent system are anecdotal. We’ve all heard about the peanut-butter-and-jelly patent. So what are we to base reforms on then? Patent Failure answers that with empirical evidence, largely economic, but also from history, international comparison, and legal precedent. The book focuses quite a bit (some might say a bit too much) on the claims brought by E-Data, now a decade-old case.

For quite a few years, patents have been lumped in with the completely different systems of trademark and copyright under the title “intellectual property.” And, as the authors point out, the quotation marks have fallen away. Many, if not most, people now assume patents are property. But for certain industries, namely software, patents fail as a property system.

So what should we do?

That “for certain industries” part is a sticky point. I have to admit, it’s easy for me, and I suspect others, to forget that patents can work quite well outside of software. But because that’s where the controversy is, that’s where the media is, and so it’s the failures we hear about. Bessen and Meurer do plenty to build a separation, often making exceptions for chemical and pharmaceutical patents. Those types of patents come much closer to passing the patent-as-property test than software.

The authors then devote chapter 9 to “Abstract Patents and Software,” the entirety of which you can download as a book preview. They point out that “no other technology has experienced anything like the broad industry opposition to software patents that arose during the 1960s.” That is to say, this unprecedented opposition is coming from within the industry the patents ideally help protect. Software developers oppose patents on their own work. You simply cannot draw the same fence around the property lines of software patents the way you would around the property boundaries of the land you own. The authors conclude:

[Software patents] play a central role in the failure of the patent system as a whole. Any serious effort at patent reform must address these problems and the failure to deal with the problems of software patents–either with software-specific measures or general reforms–will likely doom any reform effort.

Like not giving away the end of the movie, I’ll leave it to you to read and form your own opinion of their recommendations that follow that chapter. You can also read excerpts and some interesting discussion about the book on PatentlyO, a patent law blog.

And if you’re interested in hearing more about the authors’ ideas firsthand, Michael Meurer will be presenting a session about Patent Failure at the Red Hat Summit on Thursday, June 19 at 11:30.