Anonymous Reader writes: “OSNews reports on the second day of the LinuxWorld Expo. Highlights of the article is CodeWeaver’s Photoshop WineX effort and the fact that OpenOffice.org is collaborating with all the other major Linux office suites and word processors towards the creation of a new, open XML-based, file format.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “LinuxDevices.com has just published its weekly Embedded Linux Newsletter, with all the latest news and info from the exciting world of Embedded Linux and Linux-based gadgets.”

Debinay writes: “This article at developerWorks helps you get to know freeVSD, a “virtual server daemon” for Linux that allows multiple virtual servers to operate on one physical machine. Each virtual server has its own separate Web-hosting environment. This is typically used for hosting, but it can also be deployed to allow one machine to serve as a development testbed for several developers.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “I asked JPB and Bruce Perens Wednesday morning to contribute an article to my new eBlogazine, Stoned Out Loud. Yesterday afternoon eff.org’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) John Perry Barlow sent me “Slouching Towards Hollywood – Creative Livelihood in an Economy of Verbs”.

Here is a digest version (I added bolding and italics for this submission…they are not in the original -dcm):

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Slouching Towards Hollywood – John Perry Barlow on Stoned Out Loud

submitted byD.Manchester for Stoned Out Loud

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Slouching Towards Hollywood
Creative Livelihood in an Economy of Verbs

“By” John Perry Barlow

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has
come.– Victor Hugo

The great cultural war has broken out at last.

Long-awaited by some and a nasty surprise to others, the conflict between the Industrial Period and the Virtual Age is now engaged in earnest, thanks to the modestly conceived but paradigm-shattering thing called Napster.

What Napster’s first realization of global peer-to-peer networking made inevitable is not so different from what happened when the American colonists realized that the conditions of their New World were sufficiently different from those of ancient England that they would be obliged to cast off the Crown before they could develop an economy natural to their environment. For the settlers of cyberspace, the “shot heard ’round the world” was fired on July 26 by Judge Marilyn Patel when she enjoined Napster and thereby sought to silence the cacophonous free market of expression already teeming with over 20 million directly-wired music lovers…

…Even though they are exceptionally slow learners, entertainment executives will eventually realize what they should have learned long ago: The free proliferation of expression does not decrease its commercial value. It increases it. It would serve them far better to encourage it.

The war is on, all right, but to my mind, it’s over. The future will win.
There will be no property in cyberspace. Behold DotCommunism.
(And dig it, ye talented, since it will enrich you.)

It’s a pity that the entertainment industry is too wedged in the past to recognize this, as they will thereby require us to fight this war anyway. So we will all enrich lawyers with a fortune that could be spent fostering and distributing creativity. And we will be forced to watch a few pointless public executions – Shawn Fanning’s cross awaits – when we could be employing such condemned genius in the service of a greater good.

As the inevitable unfolds, the real challenge arises: It’s one thing to win a revolution and quite another to govern its consequences…

…Even during the zenith of copyright, we got some pretty useful stuff out of Benoit Mandelbrot, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andresson, and Linus Torvalds, none of whom did their world-morphing work with royalties in mind. And then there are all those great musicians of the last 50 years who went on making music even after they discovered that the record companies got to keep all the money…

…after giving up on copy protection, the software industry expected that widespread piracy would surely occur. And it did. I often ask audiences how many of them can honestly say they have no unauthorized software on their hard drives. Most people don’t raise their hands. And yet, the software industry is booming. Why? Because the more a program is pirated, the more likely it is to become a standard. Once it becomes a standard, it is a great deal more convenient to enter into a long-term service relationship with the vendor.

All these examples point to the same conclusion: non-commercial distribution of information increases the sale of commercial information. Abundance breeds abundance.

This is precisely contrary to what happens in a physical economy.
When you’re selling nouns, there is an undeniable relationship
between scarcity and value. Adam Smith figured that out a long time ago. But in an economy of verbs, the inverse applies. There is a relationship between familiarity and value. For ideas, fame is fortune. And nothing makes you famous faster than an audience willing to distribute your work for free…

…Following the death of copyright, I believe our interests will be assured instead by the following practical values: relationship, convenience, interactivity, service, and ethics.

Before I go further in explaining what I mean, let me state a creed:

Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship,
and a relationship with the Holy at that. To reduce such work to “content” is like praying in swear words. End of sermon. Back to business.

The economic model that supported most of the ancient masters…was patronage, whether endowed by a wealthy individual, a religious institution, a university, a corporation, or, by the instrument of governmental support, society as a whole.

Patronage is both a relationship and a service…

…I could go on, but I can already hear you saying, “Surely this fool doesn’t expect the return of patronage.”

But patronage never went away. It just changed its appearance. Marc Andresson was a beneficiary of the “patronage” of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications when he created Mosaic; CERN was a patron to Tim Berners-Lee while he created the World Wide Web. DARPA was Vint Cerf’s benefactor; IBM was Mandelbrot’s.

“Aha!” you say, “but IBM is a corporation. They profited from the intellectual property Mandelbrot created.” Maybe, but so did the rest of us. While IBM would patent air and water if it could, I don’t believe it ever attempted to file a patent on fractal geometry….

…Even copyright lawyers wouldn’t find it advantageous to copyright their briefs, since they rip one another off so flagrantly. Copy and paste is second only to paranoia in being is the best thing that ever happened to the legal profession.

In general, if you substitute “relationship” for “property,” you begin to
understand why a digitized information economy can work fine in the absence of enforceable property law. Cyberspace is unreal estate. Relationships are its geology…

…Think of how the emerging digital conveniences will empower musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and writers when you can click on an icon, upload a cyber-dime into their accounts, and download their latest songs, images, films, or chapters, all without the barbaric inconvenience currently imposed by the entertainment industry.…

…I’m reasonably well-paid to write, despite the fact that I put most of my work on the Net before it can be printed, but I’m paid a lot more to speak, and more still to consult, since my real value lies in something that can’t be stolen from me – my point of view. A unique and passionate viewpoint is more valuable in a conversation than the one-way broadcast of words. And the more my words self-replicate on the Net, the more I can charge for symmetrical interaction.

Finally, there is the role of ethics…. As http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/l ove/ in new window”/> Courtney Love said recently in a brilliant blast at the music industry: “I’m a waitress. I work for tips.” She’s right. People want to pay her because they like her work. Indeed, actual waitpeople get by even though the people they serve are under no legal obligation to tip them… because it’s the right thing to do.

…in the practical absence of law, ethics are going to make a major comeback in cyberspace. In an environment of dense connection where much of what we do and say is recorded, preserved, and easily discovered, ethical behavior becomes less a matter of self- imposed virtue and more a matter of horizontal social enforcement. (Think of how much better you tip when everyone at the table can watch you total the credit card slip.)

Besides, the more connected we become, the more obvious it is that we’re all in this thing together. If I don’t pay for the light of your creation, it goes out and the place gets dimmer. If no one pays, we’re all in the dark. In cyberspace, it becomes increasingly obvious that what goes around comes around. What has been an ideal become a sensible business practice…

…think of how much more money there will be for the truly creative when the truly cynical have been dealt out of the game. Once we have all given up regarding our ideas as a form of property, the entertainment industry will no longer have anything to steal from us. Meet the new boss: no boss….

…We’ve won the revolution. It’s all over but the litigation. While that drags on, let us think about our real mission: ancestry.…

…What we do now will likely determine the productivity and freedom of artists 20 generations yet un-born. What we do now will determine whether the great works of the last century rot embedded in the corpses of the their former distributors, forever lost to our descendents….

story at:
http://www.stoned-out-loud.com,
http://www.stonedoutloud.com,
http://stoned-out.blogspot.com,
http://stoned-out-loud.tripod.com,
http://stonedoutloud.com,
http://stoned-out-loud.com

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related:
Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Declaration of Cyber Independence.”

–By Grant Gross –

Red Hat founder Bob Young has started his new venture, a series of “tech circuses” founded on the very Open Source idea that tech enthusiasts should be able to explore the guts of the technologies they use and have fun doing it.
Think of the Lulu Tech Circus as an anti-trade show type of show, Young says, designed for attendees, not vendors who are “trying to reach into my back pocket and take money out.”

Young says the circuses won’t focus solely on Open Source software, but they do build on an Open Source world view. “I define Open Source much more broadly than the Open Source community does,” says Young, still serving on the Red Hat board after serving as past chairman and CEO. “I define Open Source as empowering the user to understand what’s going on inside the technology he’s using. As our society becomes increasingly dependent on digital technologies … it’s going to be essential that the individuals in our society have a right to audit what those technologies consist of.”

The problem with building a digital society based on proprietary rules is that citizens can’t appeal the rules because they don’t know exactly what those rules are, Young says. “It’s a little bit like getting thrown into jail, and no one has to tell you what you got thrown in jail for,” he says.

“I do not actually have an Open Source [software] bias in the circus,” Young adds. “I simply have an education bias and an empowering-of-the-user bias. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that Open Source empowers the user a great deal more than proprietary technology.”

The Lulu Tech Circuses, planned for several North American cities over the next year, may not actually have three wooden rings, but they will have a circus atmosphere. Attendees will be able to wander between several sections, with themes like Linux and Open Source, robotics, ham radio and digital media. They will see demonstrations in each topic “ring,” attend in-depth sessions on topics such as how to build a robot, and even trade software or gadgets at a huge swap meet.

Expect sessions such as “how to use your PDA in ways the manufacturer didn’t intend,” or “how encryption works.”

The assumption of the Lulu Tech Circus is that fans of technology aren’t interested in only one narrow topic, and the idea, Young says, is to gather together all kinds of tech enthusiasts from different disciplines to create a “marketplace of ideas.” Young hopes the circuses can be a place where Linux hackers hang out with robot builders and the two can hatch a plan for for a better kind of robot. The circuses may be like an old-time Linux gathering combined with a consumer gaming show, with maybe a touch of Burning Man (sans nudity) mixed in. Young’s goal is to host a gathering of the tech tribes.

“I’ve yet to meet a technology user who was uni-dimensional,” he says. “No one is just a Windows user, and no one is just a database user, and no one is just a game player. Suddenly, it becomes the intersection of the rings that becomes a huge value to the attendee.”

Young, who calls himself a former “serial entrepreneur,” says the idea for the circuses began brewing a year ago, when several journalists asked him about the significance of Linux at its 10th birthday. Many had questions about Open Source business plans and asked why several Open Source companies were struggling.

Young compared Linux at 10 with the “parallel new technology model” of the PC industry in 1984, when it was 10 years old and companies like Dell and Compaq weren’t founded yet.

“Compared to the PC industry after 10 years, the fact that some of the early Linux players are no longer around should not be a surprise,” Young says. “What you have to look at is the fundamentals. Is this a movement that materially benefits the consumers of technology? That’s exactly what drove the PC — it was of so much more value to the consumer of technology than the previous model. That’s exactly where Linux is — Open Source is simply of greater value to the consumer than proprietary software, where the vendor controls the technology.”

After explaining the value of Open Source — that it gives customers a choice of what to do with their code — to a series of journalists, Young decided he again needed to put his money where his mouth is. “At the end of of the day, you look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘do you really believe this, or this this so much spin?'” he says. “The problem was I believed it. I looked in the mirror and said, ‘this is actually right — the Open Source thing at the early stages of its adoption, and the Dells and the Compaqs have not even been formed yet.

“I’m going, ‘hold on, if the Dells and the Compaqs haven’t even been formed yet, why can’t I start the Dell or the Compaq?” he says. “That’s really what Lulu is all about.”

You might not think of Lulu Enterprises, which also includes newfangled e-publishing company Lulu Press based on the eBay model, as a traditional Open Source company, but if we follow Young’s comparison to the PC industry, it might be similar to an ISV or PC training company, which created markets beyond the original PC manufacturers. “What Lulu is doing is providing some of the services in the Open Source space that are not currently available,” he says.

If you’re wondering, the name “Lulu” comes from a pet name Young had for his daughters. It’s also Young’s good fortune to have the slang meaning of “a remarkable person, object, or idea.”

After the journalists’ questions planted the seed of the idea, a pet peeve drove Young to pursue it. It might not be an accident that Young says he hated most trade shows just as LinuxWorld attendees complain that show has gotten too corporate. “The reason I hated most trade shows as an attendee was that they were designed to exploit the attendees,” he says. “The trade show management put on a trade show in order to serve the needs of the exhibitors. There wasn’t a single trade show manager on the planet who cared about the attendee. As far as the trade show manager was concerned, the attendee was so much cattle fodder for serving his real customer, the exhibitor.”

Young says if the circuses attract enough attendees, he’ll have no trouble attracting exhibitors. In fact, his organization is spending more time recruiting user groups than exhibitors, because Young plans for user groups to have front-and-center space at the circuses, not a corner in the back, like at most trade shows.

The beta circus [with publicity by former Red Hat PR maven Melissa London] is in Young’s hometown Raleigh, N.C., September 27 to 29. A Boston gathering is planned for December 13 to 15, and a D.C. area one is slated for March 28 to 30. Shows are scheduled for Chicago, Toronto and Atlanta later in 2003, and Young plans for each show to become an annual event.

Obviously, Young sees a business model in all this. General admission will be $10 or $15. Organizers are using a state-fair admissions approach, where much of the show is available for the small entrance fee, and attendees pay extra for tickets to specialized workshops. That low admission price fits in with Young’s general philosophy that informed users are good customers.

For Young, co-founder of the Center for the Public Domain, Lulu Tech Circus continues his philosophy that open systems and open dialogs are essential for a democratic society to function. “How do you go about educating people about this stuff?” he says. “Well, you could march on Washington, and there better people than I am who will do that, but what I love about free markets is the opportunity to solve the problem in the marketplace.”

From The Register: “Sun yesterday unveiled licensing relaxations designed to placate critics and boost contributions to OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite project … The new Joint Copyright Agreement (JCA) and Public Documentation License (PDL) change this in two ways. The JCA covers source code and related material, and is an assignment rather than a licence, allowing developers to share copyright ownership with Sun when they contribute code. The developer keeps ownership, but all source code is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).”

eWeek.com reports that the Open Source Development Lab has announced the formation of a new working group, the Data Center Linux Working Group, as well as milestones for its Carrier Grade Linux Working Group.

An anonymous coward writes: Free Standards Group executive director Scott McNeill discusses LSB, UnitedLinux, and other standards issues with MozillaQuest Magazine (MozillaQuest.com). “As the Linux Standard Base matures into full adulthood, it likely will become a major player in the Linux community. More than that, the Linux Standard Base could be instrumental in making the Linux operating system a major player in the PC world too. Get the full story on MozillaQuest.com!“

CRN.com reports on a LinuxWorld keynote by Doug Elix, senior vice president and group executive at IBM Global Services. “Today we have to share the stage with a crowd of tree-huggers and self-declared converts,” said Elix, taking a shot at HP and Sun. “But make no mistake, the Linux momentum is real.”

ZDNet reports that Red Hat and Sun Microsystems are gearing up to sell Linux for desktop computers. Not with each other, of course.