http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=495538&in_page_id=1811

A (not so funny) play by Mark Pilgrim on the DRM’ed (Digital Right Management) future of reading. Here is act I out of 6:

Act I: The act of buying

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this. -Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s CEO), Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content. – Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

Received August 30, 2004. This paper was with the authors 9 months for 5 revisions. Published online in Articles in Advance Nov 9, 2007.

This line cannot capture the amount of work, frustration, and effort that has gone into our article “Code reuse in open source software” (article only available to INFORMS subscribers, sorry, available version will be published here as soon as we may do it) which is being published in Management Science.

Abstract: Code reuse is a form of knowledge reuse in software development, which is fundamental to innovation in many fields. To date, there has been no systematic investigation of code reuse in open source software projects. This study uses quantitative and qualitative data gathered from a sample of six open source software projects, to evaluate two sets of propositions derived from the literature on software reuse in firms and open source software development. We find that code reuse is extensive across the sample and that open source software developers, much like developers in firms, apply tools that lower their search costs for knowledge and code, assess the quality of software components, and they have incentives to reuse code. Open source software developers reuse code because they want to integrate functionality quickly, because they want to write preferred code, because they operate under limited resources in terms of time and skills, and because they can mitigate development costs through code reuse. Implications for research and management practice are discussed.

A blogentry of the developer who ported the game to Unix confirms that game publisher Electronic Arts will release the source code of the classic “Sim City” as GPL’ed software.

Electronic Arts plans to donate the original version of the popular SimCity computer game to the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project for inclusion on the XO laptop, reports another blog.

I loved SimCity and had been playing it for days and days when I was younger. I wonder how it would feel to play the original again now.

Found via prolinux

The Journal for Computer-Mediated Communication published a special issue on ‘Social Network Sites’ . I don’t know this Journal, so I can’t comment on its quality, nor have I seen the articles yet. But it is interesting to note that social networking has entered the field of academia.

Table of Contents

• “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship” by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison
• “Signals in Social Supernets” by Judith Donath
• “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances” by Hugo Liu
• “Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites” by Eszter Hargittai
• “Cying for Me, Cying for Us: Relational Dialectics in a Korean Social Network Site” by Kyung-Hee Kim and Haejin Yun
• “Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com” by Dara Byrne
• “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball” by Lee Humphreys
• “Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube” by Patricia Lange

found this on BoingBoing.net

NBC Universal’s boss Jeff Zucker is angry. He only made 15mio USD from sales over iTunes last year. There are plenty of postings on the Internets, reporting (German) on this.

I see 2 arguments there:

• Apple doesn’t want to share it’s hardware revenues with NBC and is “freeriding” on NBC’s content and
• Apple is refusing to adapt it’s fixed pricing scheme of 1.99$ per TV show to allow some to be sold at a higher (not at a lower) price.

I don’t know whether I should start laughing or crying first. I don’t know if all the reportings are true, but if yes, then some people have lost contact to reality.

“Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content.” Why the heck should Apple hand out a share of its hardware sales to NBC? Is it only fair that consumers should pay twice for each content now? And does Siemens pay me for my phone calls which might get routed through Siemens-installed hardware at some Telecoms switchboard? Heck, they are freeriding on my content, on my conversations, so I think I deserve something back.
This argumentation only makes sense in some parallel universe which is actually orthogonal to our world.

The second issue makes more sense. NBC wants flexible pricing, but iTunes strategy is a simple pricing model. This is a free world and if that is Apple’s strategy, it’s their right to stick to that. If NBC doesn’t want to provide their valuable content (some of the shows they want priced higher are aired for free over US tv channels) to Apple under these conditions, they should simply not offer it through them, that is their right too. But since when is it deemed only fair that one side of the value chain can negotiate flexible prices? I can’t remember last time I could negotiate the price of a Music CD in a shop either.

If Music companies still don’t understand that times of automatic and absurdlyconveniently high margins are over, they should start taking some courses somewhere, quickly. And quotes like the following “we know that Apple destroy the music industry -concerning prices- and if we don’t take control, they will do the same to videos.” (freely translated from the German Spiegel article) seem to indicate that Mr Zucker did not understand yet that not Apple is responsible for decreased profits of the incumbants in the music industry.

P.S. This is my private personal rant and has got nothing to do with my employer.

I am not satisfied with the state of bibliographic software on our Macs. If we used WinWord there were a number of plugins that allowed us to interact with both open source bibliography managers and commercial ones such as Endnote. But writing on OpenOffice/NeoOffice doesn’t work out well because there is no support. The included bibliography features in OpenOffice just don’t cut it, and solutions such as bibus don’t work on Mac yet (plus development seems to have stalled). So far I keep my references in a bibtex database, using jabref and that works OK, but doesn’t allow the automatic creation of reference lists. And honestly, I am not sure the development of jabref progresses quickly enough to satisfy my needs in the mid-term future. This is nothing against jabref development, but I am not sure their needs equal mine.

I now rediscovered Zotero which is “a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is generously funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.” This is a Firefox add-on (working on Linux/Win/Mac) which provides a bibliography manager.

Zotero as part of a Firefox window

Even better it offers a plugin for OpenOffice/NeoOffice which allows to insert citations and automatically create reference lists. Apparently the reference list output format can be adapted using some citation style language.

Neooffice plugin

I’ll keep a close look on Zotero, but if it works well, this might just have been what I was looking for. Now if there were some possibility to even share references within a team, that would be perfect :-).

A posting by LWN highlights an Linuxwatch report on an article in eweek that reports findings on a study by IDG. (credit where credit is due :-)).

Der Spiegel berichtet heute über den “erfolgreichen” Streik der GDL. Ich bin an beiden vergangenen Streiks zufällig in Deutschland Zug gefahren und musste Verspätungen und Komplikationen in Kauf nehmen. I am not amused!

Es geht den deutschen Lokführern nicht allzuschlecht, und Ihnen wird eine (durchaus beachtliche) Lohnerhöhung angeboten, gleichermassen wie andere Bahnangestellte auch. Grundsätzlich bin ich ein Freund von Gewerkschaften und bin sicher wir lebten noch vom Frondienst, falls es keine Gewerkschaften gäbe. Aber ich finde es eine Frechheit, dass man, getrieben von Egomanie, Starrsinn und Grössenwahn, auf Forderungen beharrt, die unrealistisch sind.

So etwas kann auch nach hinten los gehen. Ich jedenfalls bin sauer auf die GDL und nicht auf die Bahn. Und an Stelle des Bahnmanagements wäre das ein Grund für mich, die Entwicklung Lokführerfreier Züge zu forcieren.

I am back from a nice family weekend in Frankfurt. I never thought of Frankfurt as a pretty or interesting city, but it actually is. It is good to get away from your regular day-to-day business and spend some family-time. That is what we try to do each year in a different place. Although I had caught a cold, it was nice exploring Frankfurt, drinking “Äppelwoi” and just catching up with the family in general.

We also went to the cinema and watched “Die drei Räuber”, an animation film, based on a 1960’s children book by Tomi Ungerer, which my brother helped to produce. It is a good movie, with lots of fun details added. It’s told in a slow fashion though, not action packed. I wonder if children are still used – and can stand – such a quiet way of narrating a story. One of my favorites is the sountrack, it’s been composed by “Bananafishbones” and is very catchy.

Short (randomly gogled) review (German) here. The German magazine “Der Stern” also has a favorible review (including Song text). The Internet Movie Data Base website has some basic infos, but is still awaiting 5 votes, so if you have seen the film, go and rate it.