Moved by Freedom – Powered by Standards

Lame ducks & hidden agendas

August 25th, 2010

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I wish my vacations could have ended better. Don’t get me wrong, we spent a wonderful time for two weeks and are safely back home (and at the office). It’s the recent news that are really disappointing to me on so many levels.

The Hungarian President ruling over France -I guess it is now a correct qualification of Nicolas Sarkozy based on the distinctions between French citizens he would like to make- has managed to stir quite a bit of outrage these days. The problem is that the case is a bit more complex than what it seems. For several years now, taking the metro in Paris or walking on frequented streets, you couldn’t have missed the presence of Roma begging or playing music. Earlier this summer though, an incident between cops and a few Gypsies (not to be mixed with Roma, as they have been French centuries ago) prompted our beloved Hungarian President to demand laws that could lead a fresh French citizen to have his/her nationality withdrawn. The absurdity and dangerousness of such measures set aside, the whole move was, according to some presidential majority representatives, an electoral maneuver designed to lure extreme-right voters back to the President’s camp. I predict this strategy is doomed to fail, as 30 years of recent French political History have shown. On top of that, the methods of the French police to arrest the Roma and shove them in an airplane are not just outrightly scandalous, they are also useless: not only are Roma European citizens, they’re also migrant, poor, and many of them are locked inside mafious organizations that will put them back on the same streets they just left. But no attempt to fight this sort of crime ever emerged from the brain of our genius -and Hungarian (& partly Greek)- President. In fact, many people were wondering why the police was not doing anything to stop some of these Roma and take them away from the streets. When metros and public spaces are filled with CCCTVs you have to wonder what was going on… and in fact, their sudden arrest and expulsion of 100 people was a sheer act of disingenuity from a government that acted as if it had just discovered the issue one week before. That’s what I call a lie, as these Roma were literally kept on the back burner in case their public arrest might serve for political purposes. How convenient.
How convenient here again: Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, gets charged with rape accusations, arrested by police and … the police withdraws the charge. “Strong social pressure” is the way a lobbyist once described these sorts of interesting events to me. If you thought the CIA could do something more effective than that, think again: they could not even predict 9/11.
On a different level, but very much disingenuous: Oracle sues Google over alleged patent infringements on Java. This does not just highlight the absurdity of software patents once again, it shows an incredible lack of understanding on how ecosystems and FOSS work. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m confident that Google has money to pay its lawyers, and so does Oracle, but why wasting so much money? Time to land back on earth, Iron Man…

Joining the OASIS Consortium’s Board of Directors

June 26th, 2010

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That’s something of an announcement for me. I have to say that I believed all the way during these elections that the odds were very much against me, but I was obviously wrong: I have been elected at the Board of the Directors of the OASIS Consortium. I feel both honoured and humbled by the trust and approval talented professionals and experts have put in me. I will try to show myself worthy of their esteem. To all of you, I would like to express my sincere gratitude.

Together, you and my new colleagues of the Board of Directors and the Technical Advisory Board (TAB) will help not just the OASIS Consortium’s expansion; we will also promote and forward what has appeared over the recent years as the OASIS “model” of standards development: an open, inclusive, professional and no-nonsense approach to standards development, allowing everyone to have a say in a transparent fashion and giving birth to standards that are easy to use, integrate and redistribute with no constraint on any implementor nor distributor. In a word, the OASIS Consortium helps the establishment and expansion of unbiased and sustainable competition in harmony with governmental leadership and authority.

High quality, innovative, ready to use, open and free (in every sense of the word) standards: That’s what we strive for, that’s what we do. And I look forward doing this with you at the Board of Directors. Again, thank you for your support, I look forward working with all the stakeholders of the standards development world. This is going to be exciting.

Who said Macs were for creative people? (random thoughts on Apple)

June 6th, 2010

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These days it’s pretty fashionable to discuss the iPad, and indeed the other evening Jerome, (the other co-founder of Ars Aperta) and I were talking about the iPad when he made a comment that is I think the key to understand Apple’s strategy. Just after Steve Jobs had made the statement that there is a market for paid digital content on the D8 stage, something that he is essentially right about, Cory Doctorow had written an article which I find essential as it phrases what the problem is with the iPad. But let’s go back to Jerome’s comment: Ever since the return of Steve Jobs at Apple through the acquisition of his former company NeXT, the perception that Macs are for creative people is still around, but has proven to be very much wrong. In fact, Macs are fantastic computers designed for consumers of digital content. Let’s never forget that Steve Jobs used to buy what would become Pixar from the LucasFilm company and that he sold it back to Disney, becoming one of its shareholders in the process.

Steve Jobs is therefore a many of the “entertainment industry” as much as he’s an IT genius. Too many people forget it. Because of the focus on developing and selling machines for digital content consumers who are supposed to pay for it, one can come to see the iPad as one other device to consume paid content. The point, unfortunately, is that the lines are very much blurred at this stage between pundits taking on the angle of the tablet metaphor and the ones focusing on the business model instigated by Apple on the iPad (and the iPhone, indirectly).

The fact that the iPad is not capable of multitasking might have come as a disappointment to mostly IT people, but it’s beside the point: We will see multitasking iPads, make no mistake about it. The problem, and the one that Cory Doctorow does in fact properly discuss in his article, is not the hardware. The hardware is very nice, somewhat weak, but it will improve anyway. The problem lies in the economic model of the iPad: Digital content publishers adapt to one particular sales channel for one or two specific devices with a revenue sharing model that does not seem to satisfy them for the most part, and by doing this they essentially relinquish control to one player (Apple) controlling both the delivery channel and the device. That does not end there. The device itself, be it an iPhone or an iPad, is not meant as something you can create anything with. Sure, there’s IWorks, but that hardly counts as a truly creative software. Anyone can get an office suite. On the iPad… you can only have this one. So because of the tablet metaphor, which in itself is not bad at all, the content delivery channel and the inherent limitation of the software platform, the iPad turns its “owners”‘ as passive consumers of digital content.

Now, there is surely a market for paid digital content. It would be better if this paid content was in the form of non-DRM riddled open standards and if you could actually have the tools to freely collaborate, share and create. That’s not what the iPad is intended to do. And that’s where Cory’s article hits the target. But there is more: the civilization in which the solely accepted way to use software and digital content is to be a passive consumer is over. It may perhaps never have really existed. The reasons for this are complex, and relate directly to the very end of the mass consumerism era as we know it, with its environmental and social damages (see the Story of Stuff for instance) it induces.

The iPad essentially is perhaps a beautiful tool, but it litteraly frames us in an environment where the only accepted form of creative creation comes from the established entertainment industry. It’s the television that everyone can take in his/her hands, and that dream already existed for 3G phones 10 years ago. But today, in the age of social networks, collaborative platforms, free and open source software, this model looks strangely outdated. As the famous sociologist Bernard Stiegler puts it, people have become sick of mass consumerism and eerie marketing strategies that tend to frame people as objects. Entertainment consumerism is no different. And the irony of all this is that we still perceive macs as being computers for the creative bunch. It’s actually quite the contrary. And that’s why, by the way, my next laptop will not be a mac, inasmuch as I love its hardware. Macs, iPads, iPhone will continue to generate enormous revenue, but they have it backwards and will have to be reinvented (again): Apples never fall far from the tree…