SteveStreeting.com

I read today that ‘Pentagon uber-hacker’ (if you believe the US authorities, who presumably don’t want you to think that their security systems are akin to wet tissue paper) Gary McKinnon has lost his appeal in the Lords against his extradition to the USA. I think we can all feel sorry that a misguided but definitely non-malicious geek is going to get the book thrown at him.

Coincidentally, we also watched Sneakers last night, after I finally got around to buying it on DVD. It’s still one of my favourite films, even though occasionally it errs on being film-friendly rather than technically realistic (accoustic couplers in 1992?). The cast is fantastic, the script is great, and the appeal of a bunch of non-conformist, philanthropic hackers coming out on top is enduring.

What a shame life doesn’t imitate fiction a little more often.

The debate about whether Resident Evil 5 is racist or not continues to simmer. It’s easy to coldly and calmly rationalise the scenes that RE5 depicts on the basis that since it’s set in Africa, the chances are that the majority of the zombies are going to be black - it would be pretty stupid for it to be otherwise. Makes perfect sense. But, the fact is that the depiction of a white guy striding through an African village, gunning down the local populace, even if they are zombies, cannot be taken in isolation when there is far too much painful and rather recent history involved here - RE5 may be just adhering to common sense, but it invokes imagery which has strong parallels with real-life racism and oppression. I don’t think RE5 is itself racist at all, but I do think it is insensitive, and blind to the real-world context in which it exists. Imagine if instead the game featured a set piece where in order to destroy the zombie horde, you had to blow up a skyscaper in a major US city. That isn’t advocating terrorism and is explained by a valid plot device, but I’m sure people would find the imagery hugely distasteful. This is a case of game content being perfectly reasonable in a vacuum, but the real-world context makes it inappropriate.

Yes, you can say that RE4 had the exact same issues because all the zombies were Spanish - thus RE5 is no more racist than RE4. This is entirely true - but it’s also an irrelevant argument. This isn’t about RE5 being racist, it’s about certain elements of RE5’s imagery having very stong resonance with dark moments in real-world history. The simple fact is that the same kind of recent history of oppression, dominion and enslavement doesn’t exist in connection with the Spanish, and when it comes to subjects like this, history & context is relevant, and gamers who scoff at the sensitivities RE5 disturbs, even tangentally, are blind, ignorant, or both.

You could claim that society has progressed to an extent that images like this, which are not in substance connected with that history and do have a valid plot justification, should be viable because to avoid them in fact avoids dealing with / discussing that history, and in fact making it an issue perpetuates the race arguments. I wish we were at such a cold and logical juncture, but the problem is that these issues are not really historical yet. I recently saw on TV some reactions from regular US citizens to Obama’s ascendence to the Democratic candidacy (something I personally welcomed), and was appalled to hear a few of them say that despite being democrats, they wouldn’t support Obama because he was black, or were ‘considering their position’ based on that factor. I was appalled, not only that someone should think that’s an issue, but that they were willing to say it on camera, to an international audience, and act like it’s a totally cogent argument. The 21st century didn’t feel so progressive all of a sudden.

So, no matter how much RE5 might be able to logically explain the hordes of black zombies that must be dispatched, and thus not be racist in itself, the imagery it uses has too much resonance to be taken outside of the context of our imperfect world. The fact that the designers seem to have failed to see that is quite surprising to me, although I’m aware that Japan isn’t the most racially aware of countries. Plus, their argument that simple statistics denote that most of the zombies will be black doesn’t explain why the main character is white. I realise this is probably because they’re carrying forward a character from previous titles in the series, but isn’t it actually more believable that a local, so far uninfected by the zombie virus, would be making a stand rather than waiting for some American to fly over and save the day? After all in the original Resident Evil it was a local town law enforcer who was first on the case, so why is it different here? You can’t use common sense for one thing and ignore it for another. I’m not sure the protests would have been entirely absent had that been done, but I’m certain they would have been far less acute.

I’m not trying to be politically correct for the sake of it here, and like I say I don’t believe RE5 is itself racist. You should be able to have a game about zombies in any configuration and it shouldn’t be a race issue - after all with equality should come the equal right to be turned into a zombie and then blown away (in a virtual sense). But to pretend that history never happened, that we live in an equal world already, and that sensitivities around certain types of imagery don’t exist is frankly ludicrous. At the end of the day I don’t find RE5 offensive or racist, but I can definitely see how it has the potential to be construed as such for some people, particularly those who don’t know the RE history or who aren’t gamers, and ignoring that or saying it doesn’t exist, or is only present in ’stupid people’ is plain wrong. We should be concentrating on getting to the stage where there isn’t any reason for anyone to find such things offensive, but pretending that we’re there already is turning a blind eye to reality.

Grr. I hate it when departing politicians, particularly unpopular ones, decide to do a ‘farewell tour’. They’re an unmitigated waste of time, resources and news coverage - Blair did it and I found it grossly distasteful then, and now it’s Bush’s turn. The very act of touring countries shaking hands, getting all chummy with the native leaders is so undignified - the personal relationships they’re seeking to form / rejuvenate serve nobody but the individuals themselves, since once the administration changes it’s a total reset. Thus, I see these tours as self-indulgent ego stroking - no change there then for Mr Bush. He’s doing his trademark brash smirk / swagger combination in Downing Street today, and no doubt getting on the tits of most British people he meets, even if the crushing weight of his ignorance won’t let him recognise it.

Bush is already a has-been, with his only remaining notable acts likely to be a few last-minute pardons or favours for his chums before his sweaty hands are prised from the tiller of the economic powerhouse of the world. He’s clearly thinking about his legacy - but having presided over arguably the darkest period in American politics since at least Nixon, and in all likelyhood surpassing even that, this man has absolutely nothing to be proud of, except perhaps spawning an unintentional bi-product - that he has hopefully reinvigorated the more intelligent citizens of the USA to get involved in politics again to try to make sure that an administration like this doesn’t get their hands on power next time.

So, sod off Bush, you swaggering, arrogant, bigoted, egotistical ignoramus. Please do let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, assuming you can figure out how to open it in the first place.

My Rock Band drum mods arrived today, they took a week to arrive which isn’t bad considering they had to meander their way from the Land of the Free (ish) via regular US letter post.

Drum Pads
I decided to go for drum pads from RocPadz, which are basically just circular cut mouse mats with a rigid back. I went with these for a number of reasons, such as that the neoprene rubber is hard wearing and long lasting (unlike foam pads which quickly lose their effect). These pads also scored highly in reviews for ‘bounce’ which can make playing easier, and they were also rated highly for the QM drum set which I have. The other main contender was DrumSoft, but while their pads are nice looking, they seemed a little too delicate for my liking - reviews were very keen to point out that you could rip the top surface if you weren’t careful during installation, which made me think they might not stand up to long-term abuse as well. The only downside to the RocPadz is that they’re a little expensive for 4 modified mouse mats - you could actually just buy yourself some regular office mouse mats, cut them to size and get some rubber glue to apply them with, but a combination of laziness and the fact that the dollar is weak meant I decided to just go with the prefabs.

Installation was very easy, they even supply you with a little alcohol swab to clean the pads with first which I thought was a nice touch. The result seems very good - the noise from the pads is definitely reduced, and the fact that the drum sticks bounce more really does feel better when playing. The only downside is that it seems to very slightly exacerbate the lack of sensitivity around the edge of the drum pads, which was already there anyway but seems slightly worse. However the middle area of the pads, where you had to play anyway to avoid missing notes, are not affected at all, they’ve still highly sensitive and a very light tap will trigger them. I hope to play more over the coming days.

Kick Pedal
The kick pedal mod should be a familiar one by now, an aluminium plate from Pedal Metal. I went with the billeted metal version because it looked nicer than the regular diamond-plate - yeah, I’m a sucker for aesthetics. I also paid a little more to get the hinge replacement bit too - I don’t need it yet, and haven’t installed it because it’s more fiddly - I figure I’ll keep it as an emergency reserve in case my hinge does break, so I don’t have to wait for a replacement.

Installation was easy, once you get over the fact that you’re invalidating your warranty by screwing stuff into your plastic pedal. But I figure the warranty on the pedal is pretty useless anyway, since it’s the one thing that is highly likely to keep breaking in it’s original form under any long period of stress (given the cost of the kit, it’s scandalous that it isn’t already reinforced with metal), so I might as well make it more robust myself. Once it’s on, while it doesn’t make any difference to the play experience itself, it’s nice not to have to worry so much about how hard you’re stomping it, particularly as I’m starting to play on Hard now which is bringing in some rapid-fire kick pedal action in places. The main thing is that it totally eliminates the rather disconcerting ‘flex’ in the pedal if you pressed it between the hinge and the spring - this pedal ain’t for bending now.

So, I’m very happy with these mods - it’s yet more money down the throat of the ravenous Rock Band monster, but it’s so much gosh darned fun I really can’t hate it for it

Web 2.0. It’s a horrible, marketing-speak term that deserves the unending derision it is generally given by techs the world over, but nevertheless it’s stuck. Depending on who you ask, Web 2.0 either means the technology that make current darlings like Facebook and GMail work (such as AJAX), or the underlying principles of the regular users of websites having a more direct community involvement in the shaping of content they view. I guess it’s actually both. People have heralded this progression as a new renaissance for the Internet - personally I just see it as a natural incremental progression of technology and not the sea change that it is often sold as, there were pockets of the Internet doing this stuff long before the term was coined, it’s just more mainstream now.

However, there’s a trend that I’ve seen arise from Web 2.0 which I find a little disconcerting, and that’s an increasing centralisation of control and increasing reliance by the Internet-surfing public on a small number of technology players. On the one hand, we have personally hosted blogs, forums, comments etc where content is truly democratic / meritocratic; no-one controls what I say or do on this blog but me, and I expose precisely what I want to and no more. On the other hand, you have corporate players who provide hosted services, and increasingly this is what’s becoming what most ‘normal’ people associate with Web 2.0 - sites like Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, GMail are all controlled by corporations who make their money by attracting eyeballs. The content may be user-generated, but control over that content once posted is very much centralised and divested from the point of origin - convenient for sure, but what exactly are we giving up by being so dependent on them?

Freedom of speech has been one of the core tenets of the Internet from its inception. However, corporations have vested interests and potential exposure to litigation, so any service they host must be regulated, which is at odds with this principle. The result is of course censorship, often harsh and unilateral (particularly if Viacom took a dislike to you) and it has plagued most of the big names at one time or another. It’s because there’s a fundamental conflict of interest here - the corporations hosting these services make their money by hosting user content, but some of that content can get them into trouble, or ruffle feathers that it is not in their business interests to ruffle. Sure, these centralised sites can pretend to be the voice of the people, but they’re really not - they’re just corporations who have figured out how to make money by being a conduit for people’s Internet behaviour. In the end, despite the rethoric they’re ultimately not there for the individuals, or to make the world a better place, they’re there to make money - and individuals and content that isn’t compatible with that model can and will be excluded.

There are other issues too, probably the most important one being privacy. Protection of personal data from corporate exploitation has always been a serious issue in the UK (let’s ignore for a second privacy from our own governments which has gone backwards in recent years) but increasingly people are giving away their personal information to companies hosted in regions which have little or no such protection. Sure, a site may have a privacy policy, and perhaps give you supposed control over who you’re exposing the information to, but if they’re negligent and allow your data to slip into the wrong hands, there’s really very little statutory recourse, meaning data protection can never truly be a top priority for these companies, not compared to shoehorning in new features to beat the competition or to find ways of generating revenue. With identity theft on the rise, it’s alarming that so many people are willing to risk entrusting their personal information to third parties in juristictions with flimsy protections, and to companies who can sometimes pay lip service to privacy.

My opinion on this is that these problems are inherent to using third parties to act as hosts for our information, or rather allowing those third parties to control how the information is stored and regulated (and if you think that interface on your Facebook profile is true control, think again - at the end of the day your data is sitting unencrypted in a datacenter somewhere and is far from secure). They’re never going to care as much about our information as we do - with millions of users and a business to run, how could they? Maybe you don’t care that much since you’re just using these sites for personal photos and simple information, but I think this is a slippery slope. Do you know where the dividing line is between facts you’d be happy to be accidentally exposed by a server breach, and those you would not? Perhaps it isn’t a line, maybe it’s more of a grey area, since it’s increasingly possible to take a bunch of disparate information and piece together a greater profile from that? And can you deny that more and more of your life is transitioning to the internet, and that at some point you might look at everything you’ve given to the likes of Facebook and wish you hadn’t? And, what if you find that you can’t delete it?

Web 2.0 and the current vision of what ‘the cloud’ should be tends to revolve around technology companies holding repositories of information which we all must feed in order to form these rich online information exchanges. However, I really don’t believe this is necessary. Yes, there is a need for ‘hubs’ in the Internet, focal points where people can discover each other and connections. However, there’s really no reason why all our potentially private data needs to be centralised, under someone elses control. Right now it’s the only way for most people, because rolling your own hosting requires more technical knowledge and resources than most people have at their disposal, and ‘connecting the dots’ can only currently be done on centralised sites. I think we should be working towards developing technologies that make it easier for individuals to be in charge of their own information, not to give it away to third parties, and to form and be in control of their own connections - directly, not just via some centralised site which provides a mere illusion of control.

Personally, I see the current situation as a step on the path, and that the eventual goal should be to ‘re-democratise’ the Internet, where users are once again in full control of their data, exposing and exchanging only what they want to, directly with their trusted contacts and not via an untrusted middle man. Every Internet user has an ISP, and that ISP generally provides them with additional services like a mailbox and some variable amount of web hosting. All these technologies are based on standardised protocols and well-known principles, and generally are delivered via open source software. They’re true commodities - and what’s surprising is that this base feature set has barely changed in over a decade, and yet the way people use the Internet has changed almost beyond recognition. Imagine this - what if, as part of your ISP service, you were provided not just with simple web hosting, but a local version of Facebook? One where all the data you post is held locally on the ISP’s server (with appropriate quotas, but hey, disks are cheap), and preferably encrypted. Let’s now say that you can syndicate / exchange elements of that information to third parties that you trust over standardised protocols - exchanged over a secure channel if desired and the source / destination verified using digital signatures or common authentication systems like OpenID. All those updates you usually post to a central site can easily be desemminated directly in an ad-hoc fashion to your friends in a push model, or in a pull model for new joiners. But, you may ask, even with the automated syndication / synchronisation, how do you find your friends in the first place without a central system? Well, via the search engines we’ve all used for years - you will obviously need a regular public profile web page for unvalidated users to land on, and automated search engine submission; there’s no reason why specialist networking providers like Facebook couldn’t still act as hubs for just the public information to allow this discovery to happen, without having to hold sensitive or personal data.

In a nutshell the advantages of this approach over current centralised services include:

• Control of personal data remains in your own hands; you can choose what to give out, control encryption etc
• No censorship
• No need to maintain multiple profiles in many different systems
• No dependence on third parties, they are a value-add, not an inherent requirement
• Security based on open standards, transparency and trust are key

Much of the technology required to do this already exists, and has done for years, what’s needed is the vision and development effort to pull it all together and make it truly usable for the mass-market. If something like this is to fly, it has to be as easy to use as Facebook even though the underlying tech to make it happen is a lot more complex (as any decentralised system is). I think it’s an effort worth making though; personally I strongly believe that we’re setting ourselves up for a fall by entrusting too much of our data to third parties, and that in years to come, as people look to put more and more of their personal and business lives up on the Internet, eventually people will be crying out for a way to wrench control of their information back. Think of the web-of-trust systems we rely on for PGP communications, and now imagine that extended to a social network model, peer to peer, decentralised control, encrypted and validated via trusted signatures, not some self-appointed third-party web site.

The hard part is finding a business model to support it, because to do something this ambitious will undoubtedly require funding. Although I strongly believe that putting the power back in the hands of the people is the right thing to do, when you stack it up as a business pitch against the current approach of forcing users to give all their data to you, and to be totally reliant on you on an ongoing basis, it doesn’t stack up particularly well. Plus, everyone is already familiar with the ‘host user content, get eyeballs, profit!’ sequence so it’s a relatively easy sell. Perhaps the answer is not to chase the stratospheric growth targets of typical Web 2.0 companies, but to ramp something up quietly and organically, funding via lightweight (optional) hub search services and provisioning to ISPs and/or early adopters. Open source is totally inherent in the approach too, both to promote open adoption but also to instill trust - in order to fully trust a system like this, its inner workings have to be completely open for anyone to scrutinise.

Well, there we go, my vision for the future of exchange of personal information on the Internet. If any VCs are reading this, feel free to discuss it with me further

It might not be quite as glamourous or important as a certain ongoing bout of democratic pugilism, but nevertheless even small dots in the ocean have the occasion to decide who their leaders should be, and today is that day for us - I’ll heading to our local polling station later on in fact to help elect our next government. A last tiny bastion of feudalism may still exist a few short miles away, some of the candidates may be less than impressive, and the non-partisan system may often result in what seems like 45 people pulling in 45 different directions, but hey, it could be worse.

Chances are most of you reading this couldn’t give a flying monkeys about the issues involved in this election, so I wouldn’t blame you if you stopped reading at this point - I live here and it sometimes takes a concerted mental effort to summon up the requisite interest. But for those who want to read on, the current political hot potatoes here are the enduring combinations of economy, environment, education and social policy you’ll find everywhere. In particular, we recently underwent a major tax change that means that except for deposit taking banks, no company registered over here will pay a bean of tax on their profits, so long as they don’t distribute money to local shareholders. Prior to this only certain classes of company benefitted from a zero rate of tax, used by trusts and similar ‘vehicles’ to avoid paying tax in other juristictions, but that was frowned upon by the OECD for being unequal - so the only viable choice was to apply it to everyone. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that companies get to avoid paying tax - and that includes my company, unless I take the profit out - and the shortfall has to be made up in efficiencies and raising funds from other sources - mostly employment tax on the people, unless a sales tax is needed beyond that.

So, much of the debate is about whether this was the right decision. Personally, the reliance on the finance industry over here has always been a tad uncomfortable - although I’m fully aware that as a tiny juristiction with few natural resources, finance is one of the few routes to any significant economic success, and as such is necessary for the continued prosperity of what would otherwise be a tiny backwater. At the same time, I’m also aware that the business of international finance largely fails to ’speak’ to me at any spiritual level - I don’t resent it, I have a pension fund too - but it’s not the kind of industry I feel ‘aligned’ with, if you follow my meaning. Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved several times in projects that I felt meant something, either to me personally or in a wider context (e.g. systems supporting a badly needed social policy, promoting a certain open source rendering engine to let people be creative more easily, running my own company), and those experiences have meant that now, if at all possible I want to at least feel some level of kinship with the goals of whatever organisation I’m working for, rather than it being a strictly employer/employee transaction, and I’m not sure I could ever find that in the finance industry. It’s a little self-indulgent I know, and certainly I know I could just do a job in my given field regardless of employer if the need arose and probably enjoy it well enough - but there’s no denying that once you’ve been in a position where you feel the objectives of the company / organisation are also your own (even partially), it’s very hard to envisage going back to a more mercenary setup.

Beyond the basic dominance, our government also seems increasingly willing to do whatever the finance industry wants it to do, under the consistent and now barely veiled threat that the industry will disappear to some other juristiction if it doesn’t get its way, and leaving us all destitute (except me perhaps, since all my income originates from completely unrelated sources - I could be king!! ahem.). I’m all for being supportive of the industry in the interests of the huge number of people & service industries that rely on it, but there has to be a line - the transformation of certain parts of our town into glass-and-steel business parks, the changes to the tax burden, pressure on population and services - there is a balance point present here, regardless of what the lobbyists would like us to think. These lobbyists have constantly been pulling out the ‘fear’ card here to indicate there is no practical choice but ‘total compliance or total financial ruin’ - but personally I think that’s a gross oversimplification and besides, I don’t like to be threatened.

So, despite all this I won’t be voting for any of the nutjobs who rail against the industry entirely (and we have one of those running in our constituency - which I’m oddly glad about even if I won’t vote for them, since it lends something of a balance to the proceedings); instead I’m interested in candidates who have practical views on managing the situation sustainably, while promoting and supporting as much diversification as is realistically possible within that environment. After all, both Specsavers and Healthspan started here, two very big companies who are entirely unrelated to finance - there’s no reason this cannot be repeated. Of course now that the tax system has been re-jigged, only highly paid employees (rather than profitable companies) feed funds back into the wider economy, which itself introduces an inherent bias which may make diversification harder by limiting it to companies with small resource requirements but high wages; like software development maybe, particularly service-driven open source companies It’s not impossible - baby steps. So I’m for the candidates who are positive about those kinds of prospects, as well as sensibly balancing our rather agreeable environment here with the needs of business. There is a line to be walked I believe, one that doesn’t involve veering dangerously towards either rampant socialism or total capitulation to the finance business.

Congratulations if you made it this far. To reward you, I’ll give you my astute and detailed political analysis of something you might actually be interested in, the US democrat primaries:- Obama rocks.

They’re not announcing the results officially until tomorrow, but it appears that enough countries have changed their votes since September 2007 for OOXML to become an ISO standard. Some of the key ’switchers’ responsible include the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Japan (all from No to Yes) and France (from No to Abstain).

We need document standards to preserve business data over long periods and thus as a core principle it’s a good thing to have an ISO standard used by Microsoft Office, the dominant business office suite  - and for good reason, it’s been a great product over many years. Personally I find the features added to it since around 1997/2000 to be entirely optional in all practical real-world use, so I jumped off the upgrade treadmill some time ago and am quite content with Open Office now for both personal and business use, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that Office has always been good. Milked until it’s drier than the Goby desert maybe, but still good

The problem that most (sane & rational) detractors have with OOXML is not that it’s from Microsoft (although that justifiably promotes extra scrutiny from the off, given their track record) - it’s that, as a standard, it’s borderline unimplementable. The whale-crushing 6,000 page spec has proved somewhat inpenetrable to most people outside Microsoft, even with the changes since September. Ambiguity, references to existing Office behaviour, patent concerns (remember, Microsoft’s open specification promise excludes all commercial implementations) all make OOXML something of an encumbered standard at present, and encumbered standards are potentially worse than no standard at all - because they can give an impression of openness without actually delivering on the benefits that it’s supposed to bring; i.e. a lack of vendor lock-in for your critical business data. There is exactly one implementation of OOXML right now - Office - and without a clear, unambiguous, no-nonsense spec there won’t be any others that you can trust either. Which the cynical among us would say is exactly the way Microsoft wants it.

I don’t have anything against OOXML in principle if it’s truly open and genuinely implementable by someone outside Microsoft. Sure the world doesn’t need 2 document standards, but if MS insists on having their own (what’s new, I think ‘Not Invented Here’ must be in their training manual), let them if that standard is truly open. A 6,000 page spec with 1,100 comments still largely unaddressed at the last reading doesn’t seem to fit the bill to me - maybe if more time had been spent hammering those things out I might have felt like it’s respecting the spirit of openness, but this just feels like a wave-through by vested interests to me. Let’s see what happens over the next year or so, but I’m not confident about OOXML doing anything but sowing confusion and doubt in the document interchange arena, all the while being spun by the PR machine as an interchangeable standard. Business as usual then.

This is a good write up of the process so far and why it’s been seriously lacking.

I have a confession to make - in my deep and distant past, I have an accountancy qualification - a legacy of a young man with too little focus about what he wanted to do in life and before it had occurred to him that someone might pay him to play with computers. Not that I think there’s anything particularly wrong with accountancy; in an island dominated by finance it was a safe bet for a mathematically / logically-minded individual with too many diverse interests and no particular clue which one to follow at the time - but I found out pretty quickly that it definitely wasn’t for me. I don’t regret having done it though, since the knowledge, fogged though it is due to time, does sometimes come in handy; in particular, the economics elements. I’m no Warren Buffet by any stretch of the imagination, but I do at least have some grounding in the subject, and I do at least try to stay roughly abreast of economic events. And certainly, it’s been one hell of a year for those.

We’re now in the situation where not one, but 3 banks have been bailed out globally by governments, effectively propping up an ailing business by stumping up taxpayers money as security - Northern Rock in the UK, Bear Stearns in the US, and IKB in Germany. All three were brought down because of their reliance on a system which had poor lending practices built into it, and a level of greed which was suppressing sensible risk analsis. In all 3 cases they themselves were not the bad lenders, but they either bought the repackaged ‘leveraged’ debt as high-risk, high-return (in theory) investments, or relied on other people continuously buying into those kinds of ‘products’ to keep the system sloshing about with fresh money they could borrow themselves. In all 3 cases it was entirely their own fault for taking on excessively risky positions in the pursuit of profit - of course there were environmental factors over which they had no direct control, but these happen from time to time and a good risk strategy should cope with that. Ultimately the cause of failure was that these banks gambled too hard and got caught with their pants down. They bet that the house of cards wouldn’t blow over on their watch, and they were wrong - and they didn’t have the resilience to weather that, because they bet big, because they wanted to win big. More risk equals more reward, except when you lose.

When considered in isolation, I find it utterly distasteful that these businesses should be bailed out by governments. Between them they have made many, many billions in the past, which has no doubt funded some pretty lavish lifestyles at one level or another in the company, but they got too greedy and theoretically should pay the price that comes with that, since they already reaped the successes. But they haven’t really; the taxpayer is now shouldering most of that, along with shareholders who have lost their investment. For Northern Rock the amount being covered is to the tune of the entire NHS budget for a year - a staggering amount of money. However, I do understand why the central banks & governments had to step in, in all practical terms - after all in the interests of all of us, the financial system has to be seen to be stable, and given that people’s savings and pension funds were in danger, letting these companies go to the wall would have had some really nasty knock-on effects. Nevertheless, it does set something of a precedent - that a regular business will just be allowed to go under if it doesn’t perform, but high-flying banking business can take a ton of risks, make a truckload of money in the good times that they can spend on private yachts and penthouse apartments, and then get bailed out when the tide turns and their extravagant risks catch up with them. It’s a skewing of the karmic system that doesn’t feel right at all, despite all the valid reasoning that underpins it in an imperfect world.

I only hope that when the good times roll around again, these banks pay back the favour, with considerable interest. And that maybe, just maybe, a better way will be found to regulate these banking practices - I totally agree that government should not get involved in regulating business any more than it absolutely has to, but if the bottom line is that the government picks up the tab for failure, then these principles are incompatible - you can’t have it both ways. Maybe banks of this size should be required to make large annual contributions to a ‘rescue fund’ to cover those in their number that need bailing out - an insurance policy of sorts?

Holy cow, the EC has now fined Microsoft a cumulative figure of £1.27bn (~$2.6bn) for what they say is the worst case of non-compliance with antitrust / competition law in 50 years. Even when set against the quadzillion dollars Microsoft makes every waking second that’s a pretty robust kick in the knackers if I ever saw one. The latest round covers the period where MS finally opened up some specs about desktop interoperability, but charged competitors disproportionate royalties to use them - supposedly because APIs now represent ’significant innovation’ if you’re Microsoft, although in my opinion an API spec represents about as much innovation as my next shopping list. Weirdly I’m of the opinion that implementations are where the vast majority of development work goes, but what do I know?

With any luck, this latest fine will give MS pause if they try to use royalties as an alternative way to stifle competition following their latest ‘we’re open, honest’ touchy-feely announcement.

I often wish I could post more here about the work I do. It’s an unfortunate fact of the industry I work in that ‘innovation’ often also means ’secrecy’, and such things generally go against my innate nature - I like to think of myself as a sharer of knowledge, an active participant in a global intellectual cauldron that spawned the open source development approach, among other things. When I find something out, I generally want to tell people - I want to show it to them, and have them pick it apart and give it back to me with a bunch of Post-It notes attached telling me all the things I did wrong and how I could make it better. Then, I want to rinse and repeat that until together we’ve made something awesome that we all can use to our respective benefit, and that none of us could have created alone. It’s a nice principle, and it’s one that underpins every open source project out there.

Unfortunately, there are frequent instances where that isn’t possible, usually because the work is deemed to be valuable IP that shouldn’t be shared with others. That’s fair enough - it’s being paid for after all and the company funding it should get to choose what’s open for scrutiny and what’s not. I personally think that in a lot of cases, there could be significant benefits to the company in question to allow public sharing of the work, since there are a lot of smart people out there who always come back with improvements to pretty much anything you publish, so the return could be very valuable compared to relying on expensive internal development alone. However, I’m the first to admit that I haven’t exactly gotten rich on my open principles so far - on the contrary, the majority of the work which keeps me in coffee and snacks is of the traditional proprietary model. I just can’t help thinking about just how much each of us is reinventing and recreating in this model that each company considers its ‘unique IP’ but in fact if offset against the amount that could be done in collaboration, would pale in comparison.

Now, I’m also not naive - IT companies rely on IP for their balance sheets. The traditional answer to creating value out of open processes is to charge for services rather than products, but really that only works at scale if you’re dealing with mainstream business software - office servers, CRM, ‘insurance policy’ support agreements, that kind of thing. Big business is willing to pay for services it doesn’t need, or hopes not to use. Out at the fringes, and I consider 3D to be there in the grand scheme of things, there’s a lot of people who are more interested in products than services; they just need something that does ‘X’ really well, and don’t need a support contract or a complicated service leasing model. So, I think there are plenty of areas where a proprietary software model will continue to be required to keep people in jobs, and as such not everything can be open. However, I also think that there’s a lot more scope for core services to be provided by open source solutions, and perhaps more importantly for the companies using them to more fully embrace the open model for what it is, as an evolving opportunity for advancement  - not just a resource to use as-is, and to take the minimum action to comply with the license. Proprietary products can and do differentiate themselves via user experience, smart automation, and other combinatory advances, without precluding open collaboration at a deeper level. Some companies do subscribe to this, as is evidenced by the participation of their employees in our OGRE forums, but an awful lot do not.

The fact is that collaboration is the number one reason why an open source project exists and is mature enough to use anyway, so if a company chooses it, it’s acknowledging that ‘the system works’. I’m going to assume most of these companies don’t want that base to stand still, even if it is already good for their purposes. By embracing the open model that created it, it’s possible to take that base platform to the next level in partnership with others, quicker than could be done with internal development alone. Sure, competitors will get access to that technology too, but I rarely see any products that genuinely rely on technology alone - mostly it’s clever combinations of raw tech. But there’s also this - would they actually have gotten more done by keeping it all to themselves? Or have competitors just been inventing the same stuff in their own labs too anyway, levelling the playing field? How about if by spending that effort in the open, it was magnified by a factor of 5 through collaboration with others? They’d be in the same position relative to their competitors, but everyone is 5x further along than if each person is driving their own pump. Assuming that possibilities for high-level differentiation are proportional to the sophistication of the back-end plumbing, aren’t they actually better off from doing some of their work in the open instead?

I have a vested interest in this, of course. Perhaps through explicit recognition of the value of collaborative open projects as a base for higher-level innovation, and greater active participation in them by commercial organisations, more open source projects outside the traditional ‘business plumbing’ arenas might get  funding just to do what they do, instead of their members having to make a living doing other things. In a word, it would be wonderful to be able to be truer to our core principles and pay our bills at the same time, and I do think there’s an argument that says it isn’t entirely incompatible with traditional commercial thinking.

Am I nuts? Maybe. But I hope I got you thinking