Exhibit A: Thieves steal laptops from security conference. Called the Asian Securitex 2004 conference, participants hawked such devices as video surveillance cameras and alarm systems – which I guess weren’t plugged in.
Exhibit B: Intel releases the Wireless Technology Surfboard, allowing one to finally, irrevocably, “surf the web”.
It’s nice to hear that, every once in a while, the nice guy finishes first. Sir Tim Berners-Lee was just awarded the Millennium Technology Prize. He was also knighted last December and listed as one of Time’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
So what did he do that was so great?
He invented the Worldwide Web while at CERN in 1989. That in itself is not new: the hypertext concept is prevalent as far back as 1945. No, the real kicker is that he then gave the technology away. Without his contributions, the Internet as we know it today would never have existed:
“There would have been a CERN Web, a Microsoft one, there would have been a Digital one, Apple’s HyperCard would have started reaching out Internet roots,” he said. “And all of these things would have been incompatible.”
His current project, the Semantic Web, aims to make information retrieval more intelligent and intuitive. He is also outspoken about abolishing software patents altogether:
“What’s at stake here is the whole spirit in which software has been developed to date,” he said. “If you can imagine a computer doing it, then you can write a computer program to do it. That spirit has been behind so many wonderful developments. And when you connect that to the spirit of the Internet, the spirit of openness and sharing, it’s terribly stifling to creativity. It’s stifling to the academic side of doing research and thinking up new ideas, it’s stifling to the new industry and the new enterprises that come out of that.”
Basically, they work like iPass keyring fobs; you just wave it in front of the Dexit scanner at a participating retailer, and away you go. No PINs or swiping required. You can fill them up with a maximum of $100.
My first worry, solvency, as been largely mitigated. TD Canada Trust and the National Bank of Canada seem to be backing them financially, and both Telus Mobility and Bell Canada have marketing arrangements with them. They’re also pushing for an IPO.
The bad news: It’s still only supported by a small number of merchants, virtually all of them fast food joints, in and around First Canadian Place. However, Dexit is also cleverly supported at Ryerson and York cafeterias – captive young savvy audience, check!
There is also a price for the convenience. The tags are free, but it costs $1.50 per cash refill. In a world of no-fee Internet banking establishments, the question becomes one of utility. How much time do you really save? A few seconds of fumbling for change or punching in a PIN? Is that worth a minimum 1.5% on your purchases (assuming you refill a full $100)?
The ruggedness of the RFID tag itself is also dubious. Silverlotus’s Dexit tag has been banging around her purse for a couple weeks, and its lacquered label has already begun peeling off.
“You can’t just live on potatoes and lobsters forever,” Richard Kurial, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of PEI. “You can’t live in isolation. One of the things to bring to the table is a smart, educated population.”
And that’s what the university in the tiniest province in Canada is going to do. UPEI’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Culture, Multimedia, Technology and Cognition will create a digital library of Maritime cultural artifacts from PEI and New Brunswick. It will be powered by a custom-built IBM eServer Bladecenter – and $1.3 million in funding.
Cultural artifacts include literature, images, audio and video. Researchers will use the archive to produce multimedia learning environments and courseware. Then they’ll conduct studies on their learning effectiveness, monitoring “behavioural patterns” such as “brain waves, heart beat [and] eye motion”. Researchers will then take this information to generate better learning environments, and how to adapt them to unique cultures. I wish them luck.
“Do not archive your mail. 30 days. This is not something that you get to decide. This is company policy.”
– VP Jim Allchin’s email to Microsoft employees during antitrust litigation from Burst.com in 2000. Lawyers claim the directive was to “save computer memory space”.
“There is very little reason for anyone to throw anything away…You can store every conversation you have ever had, from the time you are born to the time you die.”
– Microsoft Research leader Rick Rashid at WWW 2004, describing MSR initiatives in capturing your entire life via technology.
IT Manager’s Journal gives seven open source business strategies for competitive advantage.
Will you make as much money going open source as you did with proprietary software? It’s not guaranteed, and many OSS-focused companies have shrunk or disappeared. However, the only sure thing is change. Tthis anonymous comment sums up my thoughts on the paradigm shift in the software market:
The point is that companies do not have the right to make money in any specific way. As long as they add value, they make money…Open source/free software does not make any difference in this. It is a sign that the market is settled. We know how to make an operating system. Do not try to make a living by incrementally optimising it – it is not profitable any more. Build something on top of it, or start potato farming.
Pragmatism and a clear business strategy is key.
Interesting fact: the conference was also presented online in realtime to attendees around the world. They used ePresence, a LiveMeeting-esque interactive webcasting system developed at UofT. They plan to release that software as open source in the near future.
Trackbacks
Webcasts of the conference will be also be available for free on the website.
Pet Peeves
Scheduling: This conference could have easily been four days. Day 2 ended at 9pm AT NIGHT. And many attendees were turned away from the microphones due to lack of time.
Do what we say, not as we do: In Day 1, Brad Behndorf apologized before hand if his slides were a bit messed up, since the presenter laptop used PowerPoint. Gary from Teledyn pointed out the conference website ran on Microsoft IIS 6.0. It
I missed the morning of the final day of the Open Source Conference at the University of Toronto, but I did get back in time to see the closing arguments and final keynote.
Joseph Potvin, Public Works, Government of Canada, pledged that the Canadian government was serious about standards, and committed to embracing the “full 
spectrum of software models”. He reasons that since the government is for the people, they should have a stake in running free/open software by the people. He also runs GOSLING, a community dedicated to promoting the use of OSS in government.
Two poetic descriptions of the open source community: “a wellspring of human spirit” and “a group consciousness”.
The panel concluded by saying that knowledge sharing is a sign of a heathy economy.
In the end, open source advocates agree on one thing: the FLOSS ideology appeals to the heart and also the mind. They feel there are
While everyone else on this planet was at E3, I hunkered down to 
Day 2 of the Open Source Conference at the University of Toronto. Today’s themes were business models and technology. This day ran over 12 hours long – from 8:30am to 9pm!
“Business Models Don’t Matter”
Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat and Lulu.com and current owner of the Hamilton Ti-Cats, was even more pragmatic when discussing Red Hat’s business model; that is, they had none. Having just been laid off from being a computer salesman, Young’s goal was to feed himself. Their strategy was to listen to their customers’ needs.
Lamenting the free market: “Customers are evil. They always want more for less money. The second less evil people are your employees. The only people who understand you are your competitors.”
In the early years, most industry insiders predicted Red Hat was doomed to fail. In 1994, Scott McNealy joked that it was “hard to calculate a P&L without a P”. Despite this, Red Hat continued to flourish, because only at Red Hat could customers “get software that could do what they wanted it to do”. Red Hat ended up winning InfoWorld’s OS of the Year award five years in a row, from 1996 to 2000.
It’s the collaborative development of software through peer-review. It’s a constitutional right that will beckon a new age of civil liberty. It’s a business model for making great, cheap programs. It’s a disruptive economic factor that will level the playing field in the software market, a market currently dominated by monopolies.
These are some of the opinions given at the Open Source Conference at the University of Toronto on May 9-11. In a three-day schedule, speakers discussed open source software’s social, legal, business and technological implications.
Not Just for Nerds
The attendees at this conference were technically very savvy. Many had Wi-Fi enabled devices. The teenager in front of me was reading Slashdot on Firefox while running Eclipse. Another man was using Microsoft OneNote and MindManager. (I chatted with him briefly, it turns out he’s working on his Ph.D. thesis, which is an Outlook add-on that intelligently organizes your email). Who’s here: Bell University Labs, IBM, Government of Canada, Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks, and University of Ottawa. Most were also very passionate orators with multitudes of opinions themselves.
Romancing the Source
To understand open source, we must go back to the beginning. The term “open source” was coined in 1998, but thirty years ago, virtually all software was released into the public domain.