## Metadata

%product Foo
%copyright 2000-2007 by Foowhizzer.
%vendor Foocom
%license COPYING
%readme README
%description Foo server.
%version 2.2.2 1

## Filelist

$prefix=/usr/local

f 755 root sys ${prefix}/bin/foo foo
i 755 root sys fooinit fooinit

## Scripts

%preinstall << EOF
echo “doing pre install, enter your name:”
read name
echo “oh hai, $$name, thx for installing”
EOF

%postinstall << END_OF_POSTINSTALL
echo “doing postinstall”
END_OF_POSTINSTALL

And thats it. Run epm and get a deb, rpm, tgz, pkg or whatever.

Over half (53%) of the value of all royalty and license fees paid in 2002 were received in one territory: the United States. Large proportions of these fees were also received in Japan and the United Kingdom.

These fees are the payments made by someone who wants to use an idea, invention or artistic creation that legally belongs to someone else. To receive these fees a copyright or patent is needed, which may remain active for years after the initial invention…

Read the rest here.

The Utopian approach may be described as follows. Any rational action must have a certain aim. … To choose this aim is therefore the first thing we have to do if we wish to act rationally … These principles … demand that we must determine our ultimate political aim, or Ideal State, before taking any practical action. Only when this ultimate aim is determined and … when we are in possession of something like a blueprint … only then can we begin to consider the best ways and means for its realization.

This is opposed to the piecemeal engineer, who:

will be aware that perfection, if attainable is far distant, … will adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.

Now my claim is that Utopian Engineering is similar to the waterfall model and that piecemeal engineering is similar to an agile approach. I think this is pretty much self evident. Waterfall attempts to capture requirements (i.e. the greatest good) and development the ‘final solution’. Agile developments attempts to satisfy quickly certain user stories (i.e. the greatest need).

Popper goes on to explain why Utopian engineering is doomed to failure. Firstly, Utopian engineering encourages centralized control (totalitarianism) and since the re-engineering will likely be painful and costly, the engineer becomes deaf to complaints. Secondly, since the program will take time to deliver, the requirements are likely to change:

This approach … can be of practical value only if we assume that the original blueprint … remains the basis of the work until it is completed. But that will take some time. It will be a time of revolutions, both political and spiritual, and of new experiments and experience in the political field. It is therefore expected that the ideas and ideals will change.

Change `political’ for `software’ in that and it reads like a criticism of the waterfall method. Perhaps the history of failure in the software field could have been avoided if we’d paid attention to what happened to previous attempts at Utopian engineering. Of course, the price of failure is much less when software projects go bad, but when our health insurance is being robbed to pay for it it starts to hurt.

“‘Look at the debates that there have been on intellectual property since the arrival of the internet. They have been loud and shallow. They have been between people who say everything’s free and you shouldn’t pay for anything and people who say everything’s mine, and you should pay for everything. And actually neither of them are right.’ Andrew Gowers is sitting in a back room of the British government’s vast Treasury building. It’s just a few hours after the launch of his year-long review of the framework governing intellectual property, a text he hopes will change the nature of the debate not just in Britain, but internationally.

“The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property has been broadly welcomed by copyright campaigners…”

Read the rest here.

The second is this excellent overview of ICT for development from Patricia Daniel, which makes clear that OLPC/XO-1/the $100 dollar laptop will not be operating in a vacuum in the developing world. David, our deputy editor, has been trying to source a piece like this for a long time – it’s a really useful summary of schemes in the Global South. What I took from it is, much ilke Web 2.0 hype in the West, the projects that work are the ones that are user-orientated, and that people want to use.

“The Novell/Microsoft deal could divide the FLOSS community into those who code for profit, and those who code for fun. In their 2 November statement, Novell and Microsoft stated that “Microsoft will not assert its patents against individual non-commercial open source developers”. Read this statement closely and it speaks to a future where FLOSS code development is split down the middle, where amateurs tinker and professionals profit.

“Interestingly, this same future has recently been hinted at by another figurehead of free culture, Lawrence Lessig. On 28 September this year, the Creative Commons pioneer wrote a short blog post entitled “On the economies of culture”. In it, he argues that “the Internet has reminded us that we live not just in one economy, but at least two”. One was the common or garden “work for pay” economy, the second that embodied in Wikipedia, which went by a variety of names, including “amateur” and “non-commercial”. These were “separate spheres”, argued Lessig, but ones that could and should be linked, in order “to inspire the creative work of the second economy, while also expanding the value of the commercial economy”.”

Read it in full here.

New stuff I learnt from this piece:

• IBM and Microsoft are collaborating on a rival low-cost child’s computer, called “The Classmate”, which will come in at “up to” $400
• The first laptops left a factory in Shanghai last week, to be road-tested for final changes.
• The first five countries to order a million laptops will most likely be Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand

Obviously, loads of people are bitching about them already. They’re late. They’re too expensive. They don’t have that cool wind up thing you showed us at WSIS.

“The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk … and with a tiny little screen” says Bill Gate, apparently. Hilarious. Even on this issue the man does FUD. It’s one laptop per child, Bill, ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD. Not worried those five million little blighters might grow up liking Linux, are you?

It’s not just techies having a go – the development community is questioning “whether it is worth spending $100 on a laptop, when so many schools don’t even have enough books.” I got a preview of some of the stuff they’re going to want to ask at an event at the LSE a couple of weeks ago. I’d worry too if a load of Silicon Valley tech evangelists started saying they could solve the problems you’ve been working on your whole life. We’ll just have to see.

But surely you can deliver a whole load more books over wireless than on a dead tree?

UPDATE: A nice gallery of XO-1 pics here.

He seemed to propose the stripped-down laptop as an alternative to the dystopian “information appliance” of his theory. Then he posed the question, should OLPC laptops be identified as such on the network, so they can actively seek each other out to swap code? Or would this be a kind of discrimination, or a violation of privacy that outweighed the benefits of collaboration?

More for the ideas scrapbook…

The pioneering Global Voices initiative hosted bloggers from Algeria to Zambia at a conference in London. An impressed Becky Hogge reflects on the challenges it may soon face.

Christmas came early for Joshua Schachter this year. On Friday 9 December his web-based social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us, which lets users share their favourite links with each other using a tag-based system, “joined the Yahoo! family” for an undisclosed sum.

The deal closes a good year for the internet. In March, Yahoo! purchased Flickr, a photo-sharing website also based on tags; in September, eBay bought Skype, the internet telephony company. With web giants Google and Amazon also continuing to pour money into research and development, it’s clear that the second dotcom boom is upon us.

There have been ripples in the corporate world on the east side of the pond too. Wanadoo, Europe’s most successful internet service provider, is preparing to align its brand with its sister mobile telephone company Orange in 2006. British Telecom, mindful of the disruption on the horizon represented by internet telephony, has been busily developing its media and tech development arms, hiring whole office-fulls of ex-television executives and hackers at one time. British television company ITV has bought Friends Reunited (no, I don’t know why, either) and the British Broadcasting Corporation continues to prepare for the eventual demise of television with its interactive media player, the IMP.

The listening art

With all this cash slushing about it seems only fitting that the Global Voices conference on 10 December 2005 should have been held in London’s Canary Wharf. A swooping gesture towards corporate aspiration, the twenty-year-old business district contains the UK’s tallest building, 1 Canada Square, whose straight tower and glass pyramid roof has more than a whiff of the Franco about it. Walking through it (or indeed, taking the DLR monorail) is like being transported into a world where global free-market capitalism got to paint on a blank canvas.

The Global Voices project, started a year ago on modest seed capital by Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, couldn’t be more of a contrast. In late 2004, MacKinnon and Zuckerman realised that although American weblogs were talking to one another and gaining lots of exposure in the mainstream press, blogs from the rest of the world needed a bigger audience. Their central mission, beyond supporting the right of people to speak and speak freely, became promoting the importance of listening.

The result is a website which aggregates posts from weblogs around the world. The homepage of the Global Voices site is dominated by a cloud of tags listing countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Clicking on each one brings you the news from the blogosphere, with options to visit other blog summaries in the region. The site, originally maintained by Zuckerman and MacKinnon, now has a team of six regional editors. It is supplemented by a wiki running through the centre of the page, where readers can suggest other regional blogs worth monitoring.

The project has grown at an enormous pace. The site received a total of 800 visits in its first four weeks. Now 300,000 individual people check the site each month. On an average day, Global Voices gets 12,000 readers, many from the mainstream press, which uses the stories as its own personal and international news desk.

The modest origins and bottom-up character of the project make it revealing that the London conference is being hosted in the vast white marble Reuters building on the edge of Canada Square. Many of the bloggers have been flown from their respective parts of the world at Reuters’ expense, thanks to a new partnership between the grassroots blogging tool and the world’s most recognisable newswire. The result is vibrancy tempered by doubt: as bloggers from Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv, Amman, Beijing and Kingston sit down to coffee and cakes together, a series of questions pops up – now we’ve got so big, will we screw it up? Do we need to start behaving like journalists? Where do we go next?

On hand to help are professional journalists, not only from Reuters, but also from the BBC, as well as “citizen media” expert Dan Gillmor. Ethan and Rebecca act as conference Oprahs, weaving their way through the audience, mic in hand, picking out contributors and reinforcing contributions with their own thoughts on the way between one speaker and the next.

The information being generated from the conference is immense. An audio stream is beamed out to those who could not make the show in person. They in turn populate an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, monitored by one of the conference attendees, who gives a periodic summary of the remote debate taking place. The meeting is both transcribed and compressed, live on screen, into a set of notes. Meanwhile bloggers weave through the audience taking snapshots, which are immediately uploaded onto a Flickr photo pool to share with the group. On more than one occasion the wireless network cracks under the strain of all the information flowing through it.

The format reflects perfectly why Global Voices has been such a success. These people clearly know how to handle data, and have harnessed the wealth of information generated by weblogs around the world to great effect, much like del.icio.us harnessed the wealth of people bookmarking links on the net, and Flickr captured the trend for sharing photos online.

The personal and the political

But opinions (as expressed in blogs) are not links or photos, and one gets the impression that the friendly, armchair style employed by the hosts has enabled the project to cope with such diversity for this long. One session asks how to nurture the blogospheres of countries that have come late to the web. The answer? Be encouraging; be nice.

What doesn’t get discussed is also revealing. On a weekend when the World Trade Organisation is preparing to meet in Hong Kong, the United Nations is hosting a conference on climate change in Montreal, and the “war on terror” is blowing up in the face of the United States and British administrations, political issues seem to be off-topic. When Robert Scobles, the Microsoft blogger, starts talking, a ripple of what feels like outrage drifts over the audience, but the discussion is quickly brought on to friendlier terms by a few words from MacKinnon.

One question from the floor is still resonating in my head: is Global Voices personal or political? For me, the answer has to be the former. Weblogs are the ultimate personal communication medium, and the decisions of what to feature on a digest of personal weblogs made every day by MacKinnon, Zuckerman and their regional editors are also personal, in the sense that they are made by a person and not a machine. Diversity and transparency are the watchwords of all the Global Voices editors – the more voices they feature, the more likely the site is to offer a full picture of events and aspirations around the world. But as the project begins to be taken seriously as a global news source, will this be enough?

There is a cautionary tale for Global Voices in Wikipedia’s recent travails (Jimmy Wales, founder of the online, open-access encyclopaedia, has announced that contributors are now required to register before they can create articles, after John Seigenthaler, former journalist and founding editorial director of USA Today, accused it of being host to “volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects”.) Once your profile as a source of information grows to a certain level, more than diversity and transparency alone are needed to secure your reputation. It became clear meeting people around the conference that the Global Voices community are well aware of the pitfalls they face. How they chose to steer around them in the coming year will have something to teach us all.

The debate about who governs the internet will dominate the World Summit on the Information Society meeting in Tunis this week – but the world’s web users have more important things on their mind, says Becky Hogge.

One of the biggest draws of the information technology scene is that, unlike nearly any other sector of civic life, it does not tend to attract argumentative people in the twilight of their careers debating aimlessly in closed rooms without having the first notion of what they’re talking about, just because they’ve come to feel very lonely when not accompanied by the sound of their own voice. If technology has one central piece of lore, it is “find it, fix it”. But times they are a-changing. Take a ringside seat at WSIS round two, starting this week, and you can say you were there when the tides turned.

Instead of getting down to the real business of pondering why, if this info-juice is so wonderful and free and everything, whilst I’m timestamping my political satire .mp3 downloads on the bus, there’s a whole village in east Africa sharing one mobile phone, at the UN’s World Summit for the Information Society in Tunis on 16-18 November we’ll be asking: who controls the net? That’s right, it looks like after all this time – why, we nearly had Mr Murdoch in a sweat back there – the world wide web was something that could be controlled after all.

The question being put to the floor is, should the US government cede its control of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to the UN? To most of global civil society, the answer seems clear. Of course the internet, a global phenomenon, should be controlled by a global organisation, no matter what we might think of the UN right now. Why leave it up to the Americans? What have they done for world peace recently?

But to every point comes a counterpoint. “Will the internet become the Unternet? ” screeched Tech Central Station last month. The headline (which, however misguided, possesses a beauty to make your average sub weep) captures perfectly American fears that its homegrown, freedom-delivering invention will become bogged down in geopolitical grey goo the moment it cedes control to the UN.

The minute you scrutinse what “control” Icann currently exerts over the net, both these arguments start to look a little premature. Because the holy grail of internet governance about to be debated at WSIS is a little thing called the root zone file – the system which controls the distribution of top-level domains (like .com, .org and .net) that make up the majority of the World Wide Web. Icann maintains the root zone file by virtue of a very tight, exclusive contract with the United States department of commerce. And the reason the DoC exerts control over the root zone file is because it bought it from a geek called Jon seven years ago.

As the Internet Governance Project so rightly point out in their recent report The political oversight of ICANN (no pun intended), this knotty arrangement with Jon (now deceased, who’s company, VeriSign, currently owns the largest domain-name registry business in the world) means that wresting control of the root zone file from the US commerce department would most likely involve a Congressional debate. US law and technology do not happy bedfellows make (the US Supreme Court recently outlawed the photocopier) and the prospect of a nationally-lobbied US Congress having ultimate say in the future of the root zone file is almost as haunting as that of a conglomerate of techophobe heads of state working out what to do with it.

A debate about the governance of Icann is long overdue. But what that debate is not about is freedom of speech, human rights, spam, or any other of the motley crew of concerns that have been brought to the negotiating table at WSIS. Icann may be an opaque and cumbersome organisation, but the root zone file is not the internet. George W Bush cannot delete it in a fit of neo-conservative pique.

True, religious lobbying of the DoC did result in severe delays in the assignment of a dedicated top-level domain name for pornographic material, .xxx. Further, accusations have been levelled at Icann that (rather unsurprisingly) it favours US business interests and has been slow to move on multilingual top-level domains.

But Icann is not watching you, nor is it scanning your correspondence for keywords like democracy. Icann is not partitioning off the bit of the web that tells you the meaning of life, or tomorrow’s outcome at the horse races. Just as American liberals are wrong when they opine that ceding “control of the internet” to an international body would allow repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia and China to cripple the net overnight, so civil society is misguided when it looks to UN “control of the internet” to bridge the digital divide (and in this respect it might well like to look at the UN-sponsored International Telecommunication Union’s record on competitive internet service provision in the developing world)

Throughout its short history, Icann has tried to find ways to “control” the web beyond the assignment of top-level domains, and Icann has failed. Now it’s the UN’s turn to fail. “Strong feelings about protecting the internet are to be expected” wrote Kofi Annan in a tempered Washington Post editorial comment (“The U.N. isn’t a threat to the net”, 5 November 2005), his attempt at calming everyone down. But feelings, no matter how passionately felt and how eloquently debated in Tunis, will not change the internet.

Whether we rent our space in the virtual world from a US-controlled Icann or a UN-controlled Icann, in the end we, the users of the internet, are the ones in control. And the World Summit on the Information Society would better spend its time this week working out how to get the next 5 billion users onto the information superhighway, rather than wasting our time erecting the kind of top-down policy roadblocks that the “find it, fix it” web has categorically demonstrated it can easily route around.