Information freedom for open source users.

Local ID10T writes “The AP reports on a system of voting, called ‘cumulative voting,’ which was just used under court order in Port Chester, NY. Under this system, voters can apportion their votes as they wish — all to one candidate, one to each candidate, or any combination. The system, which has been used in Alabama, Illinois, South Dakota, Texas, and New York, allows a political minority to gain representation if it organizes behind specific candidates. Courts are increasingly mandating cumulative voting when they deem it necessary to provide fair representation.” Wikipedia notes that cumulative voting “was used to elect the Illinois House of Representatives from 1870 until its repeal in 1980,” without saying why the system was abandoned.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like Google before it, Facebook is now coming under increased scrutiny over the meaning of the term “open” in an online world.

Open software is good. Open data? Maybe not so much.

The traditional software argument is that unless you’re using the AGPL. unless everything is open including your secret source, that you’re not really open, that you’re just pretending to be. Open is just another word for nothing left to lose.

I have never bought that. Open source is not the same thing as free software, which was one of the first lessons I was taught when I took this beat. (Richard Stallman got on me personally about it.)

Open source is a continuum of choices, ranging from Stallman’s Free and Open Source software (FOSS) ideal through Microsoft code that is under tight restrictions. Open source was born in reaction to FOSS, and in opposition to it.

Early on I devised an open source incline to illustrate the range of choices available. As the need for community contribution increases you go down the incline. As your proprietary control over the code increases you go up the incline.

Later I amended this into the open source development incline, taking a variety of development models into account.

The point about most code intended for online use is that it is not usually at the bottom of the incline. Even Google is not at the bottom of the incline, although it’s an open source citizen in good standing. Google does not support the AGPL.

But what about data? Who decides the status of online data? Does that decision lie with you or with the company hosting the data?

Facebook has defined data as software and released its work into the wild, saying it’s just following the tenets of open source.

When you look at open vs. closed in a software world, open sounds marvelous. Look at it in a data frame, as in your data is open unless you say not, and Senators spy a privacy violation. Especially if, until recently, you’ve been defining yourself as a private network safe for kids, not an open part of the regular Web.

It’s pretty easy for software to move up and down the open source incline. For data it’s proving problematic.

The battle between Google and government widened considerably this week, with Google seeking to identify evil policies for its users and governments calling Google’s own policies evil.

(Google-is-evil logo from Scroogled and TechRepublic’s GeekEnd.)

The battle is important for the future of open source, because as governments gain effective power over Internet resources they make it harder for open source collaboration to happen in all spheres.

Sometimes, as in collaboration between criminal gangs or terrorists, that’s government’s idea. Sometimes, as in the case of an autocratic government seeking to keep knowledge of what it’s doing from reaching the world, that idea is also evil.

The governments of 10 western countries called Google evil yesterday because its street view and buzz services lack what they call privacy protections. People are clearly visible on those streets, the governments charge. Google is violating privacy, but also “data protection laws and cultural norms.”

Cultural norms? That’s one of those phrases that can make a reporter go hmmm. If every government expects to police a global network so as not to offend “cultural norms,” defining those norms arbitrarily, do we still have a global network?

Iran’s cultural norms may tell bloggers they have no right to write. Burma’s may tell users they have no rights at all. Or so the governments of those countries might say.

Are the governments supporting the good of their citizens, or just their own prerogatives? Once the questioning starts, it doesn’t end, and Google can keep the questions coming with data.

For example. You want evil disinfected, you say? Sunshine is a great disinfectant.

Google’s government requests tool is primitive, it doesn’t show numbers from China, but it’s a demonstration of what Google can do, when it wants to, to blow the lid off government hypocrisy.

Who is evil enough to demand user data from Google? We are. The United States of America. Also the U.K.. And India. Who’s most active in demanding access be removed from Google servers? Germany, India, and the U.S. again.

But also, curiously, Brazil. Brazil leads both categories. Brazil likes to say it’s the best friend open source has. Is it really, or is that love a one-way street, where open source gives and Brazil just takes, then beats open source values whenever it gets into its cups?

It’s not just Google vs. China any more. This battle between Google and governments is going to continue, on a global scale.

World War III is virtual.

Robert Galoppini (right)  writes that the Italian Constitutional Court has ruled legal a preference for open source software by the government.

He takes the opportunity to look at the worldwide trend, and generally finds that it peaked a few years ago.

The controversy has died down a bit, but I suspect it’s part of a continuing trend. And in looking forward it’s not the law, and not the politics, that we should be looking at.

But that’s precisely how we usually look of it.

When government uses open source, it controls its own code. When government uses proprietary software, the vendor controls the code.

This is a huge difference and there are advantages in both approaches:

1. Government owning code means government power increasing. Those who don’t like to see government power increasing may oppose such moves.
2. Government owning code means the buck stops there. With vendor code you can blame the vendor when things go wrong. When the code is yours you can’t.

I have written before that there is a  make-or-buy aspect to all this. I believe the Bush Administration has a bias toward buying, and the Obama Administration is adjusting the balance toward making. But it won’t be an either-or decision. Open source will have to prove its case, in every case.

Thus this press release, covering a study of the VA’s use of its VistA system over 10 years, and claiming $3 billion in savings, is significant.  It shows how the case will be made, and how it must be made, for government open source to move forward.

A non-ideological, dollars and sense, money-saving argument which is proven by subsequent events is the way forward for government open source.

The U.S. Appeals Court has kicked the idea of net neutrality, as applied by the FCC, to the curb.

(This was Google’s logo on April 1, 2010.)

The FCC says it will fight on. Congresscritters insist they will be heard from.

Big deal. The Bells can beat both with one wire tied behind their backs.

There’s really only one reason why Comcast, AT&T and Verizon aren’t handing out bandwidth with an eye-dropper and telling you what Web sites you may or may not visit right now.

Google.

Mike Loukides at O’Reilly was among the first to grok this truth. As I have written here many times, Google has a huge cost advantage when it comes to creating Internet transactions of all kinds — search, file transfers, you name it. It has spent its corporate life fighting this cost battle, and its victories give it the whip hand in the core of the network.

But if monopolies exist at the edge, and if the monopolists at that edge choose to press home their monopoly, then Google’s cost advantages in the core mean nothing. If a monopoly ISP wants to make Bing searches look faster they can. If they want to slow YouTube to a crawl they can. If they just want to demand bribes to allow access to “their” customers, they can.

So despite the fact it’s a cash sink, Google must be a threat at the network edge, at least until rules are in place banning its disenfranchisement or until some other form of competition arrives.

I have written to the point of boring you that wholesaling the last mile would assure competition, provide market incentives for more bits (rather than fewer) at the edge, and bring Moore’s Law to your doorstep, faster than anything else.

Most political analysts who have looked at the question have concluded that this is politically impossible. The Bells are just too strong.

That’s another reason why Google’s presence at the edge, or the threat of that presence, is vital. Its fiber contest set state regulators and urban leaders scrambling to create conditions that would help them win. Google’s relationship with Topeka is just one illustration of just how far cities will go.

In taking that journey, state and local authorities learn just how much of a stranglehold the present broadband monopoly has on their economies. That’s a political message no amount of contributions to a candidate can match.

The best response Bell shills like Scott Cleland can offer in response is that the Google is in bed with the Obama Administration (as if the Bells and Bushies weren’t closer than circuit lines on a RAM chip).

More important, however, is that the charge does not address the threat, which is that local and state authorities will learn the link between more bits and growth, figure out they’ve been had, and demand change. Every city and town applying to Google for fiber is learning this lesson.

Google isn’t trying to bring fiber to every home. It doesn’t have to. Its threat to compete has broken a political monopoly, making people think of broadband in a different way, and encouraged the idea that market competition is our best protection in the net neutrality debate.

Which it is.

With the battle between China and Google escalating, a lot more attention is being paid to how we need to play China.

I have given that some thought. Probably because I have friends there.

Having friends there changes your perspective. It removes abstraction, makes things concrete.

There is really only one thing I know for certain about China and its government. That is, it’s complicated.

There are lots of moving parts. There are tensions between the highly-industrial coast and the less-developed interior. There are tensions between the forces of order and capitalism.

There is also one inescapable economic fact underlying all of this. China is on a collision course with a hard reality we have only begun to face ourselves. That is, a need for balance.

In our case, it’s a balance between debt and the ability to pay. In their case, it’s a more basic balance between consumption and production.

While we’ve been building a debt mountain China has been building an unsustainable surplus. It must slow its total growth, and turn inward, in order to maintain stability.

We accomplished this through the 20th century. In the 1890s we were much like China is now, a fast-growing industrial powerhouse that was resisting calls from our people to share the wealth.

It took two wars and a Depression before we got the message. Today’s complex, high-tech, middle-class society is a monument to our success, a model that has spread throughout the industrial world.

China, in other words, is still stuck on 1898. Its challenge is to get from its industrial present to a post-industrial future without collapsing.

In this struggle the Web is our great weapon. Because the Web is not just computers and text and applications. It’s not Google.

It’s the minds behind every screen, and the power of those minds to self-organize freely, to produce change organically, from the bottom up. Our system is able to do this from everywhere, so that our culture rises out of the streets, absorbs the tastes of every immigrant, and adapts to rapid change.

(To the right, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, whose graduate paper became the architecture of today’s Web.)

China’s does not adapt well. Many of its researchers and businesspeople feel as free as their American counterparts, but they’re not. And they’re reminded of this every day, with every 404 error, of how opaque their society is.

Chinese people accept this opacity as the price of stability. But the price is high, and it’s borne by everyone, whether they are even aware of it or not.

Rather than confronting China about this, or lecturing them, I think it’s most important right now that we set a good example for them. That’s not easy. We have our own problems. Our society is both complex and polarized.

But the best way we can help China through its troubles is to be more transparent about our own, to work harder at getting along among ourselves, and to demonstrate that change, while slow and difficult, is worth the pain.

Open source is a great example of this. Chinese businesses see software as an input. Open source makes clear it’s more than an input. It’s a process. Sharing the development load makes solutions easier to implement. Companies and individuals must cooperate in open source to make progress.

Open source is, of course, a product of the Internet, but also of the academic models and scientific methods which built the Web. Open access to all the Internet, the open availability of all knowledge, is something scientists and academics take for granted. Collaboration is in their DNA.

This is what we can offer China. It’s a gift, albeit a loaded one, because there is a certain amount of chaos within it, chaos Chinese fear the way Germans do inflation, the way Japanese do radiation, the way we do communism or fascism or Islamofascism. Inside that mirror of the screen there are no secrets, and that’s scary, still.

But that’s the light China is moving slowly toward, and if they have a friend on that journey, a competitive and true friend who will speak truth to power, they have a better chance of getting through it.

What are Google’s weapons in its struggle with China?

Most people are focusing on its search results and other basic services. Despite the rising temperature Google still has one-third of the Chinese search market. Many Chinese academics, especially those fluent in English (and they have lots more than we have Chinese speakers) depend on Google.Com.

But I don’t think these are Google’s primary weapons. The two I look at most closely are:

• Infrastructure
• Open source process

Both could be overcome, but let’s look at them more closely.

Infrastructure

As I have noted here many times Google’s infrastructure is unique. It can deliver Internet “goods” for much less than any rival.

Google has developed many technologies in order to do this. It distributes the work of servers. It uses low-cost PCs as servers. It has software algorithms. It has dark fiber. It has many different server centers caching content to reduce how far queries must travel. It works hard to reduce its energy costs.

These advantages are definitive within the U.S. market. Microsoft can’t compete with them. Neither can AT&T or Comcast. Neither, frankly, can China.

But it can overcome them, to an extent, with a brute-force approach. China’s basic Internet infrastructure is now more advanced than ours, in most of the country. Its algorithms are adequate. Caching, the use of low-cost PCs, and energy awareness are ideas it can freely copy.

Open source process

I’m not talking here of code. Anyone can access code. Efforts by the U.S. government to restrict code access drew publicity, but I’ll bet the targets of those blocks chuckled as they maneuvered around them.

I’m talking more here of the open source process, the casual, day-by-day sharing of tips, techniques, and help that let American companies like IBM extend the state of the art through Eclipse and share the cost of that with other firms.

Google is very good at this. China is not good at all.

It’s not all down to government policy. The Chinese market economy is fiercely competitive, and companies are very protective of their tiny advantages. It will take years to convince most to throw software into a common pot as in the story Stone Soup.

Not even all ZDNet readers believe the open source process works, or trust it implicitly. Neither do all U.S. companies. Efforts to open up those software repositories through things like CodePlex will take years to bear fruit.

By most accounts China is far, far behind America in its use of the open source process. Enormous amounts of education will be required for it to adapt. Google is now denying it much of that education, and putting a cloud over all who seek it, especially as they cross borders with their browsers seeking lessons.

Ironic, isn’t it? Communist China has become so capitalist, on the ground, that its businesses can’t accept the code sharing process American open source businesses have perfected in the last decade.

That should give the giant Mao statue directing traffic in Chengdu a headache. Start it flipping around on its axis. (I took the picture above last year, and isolated the picture with The Gimp this morning.) Drive safely, my friends.

The continuing conflict between Google and China, which may be a proxy for deeper conflicts over economics and values, could easily impact open source.

That’s because Google has become the U.S. company most identified with open source development. Google’s Android phones are mainly made in China — like nearly all phones.

Google insists its pull-out won’t impact Android, but can we really be certain? Can Google really be certain?

Hassling HTC, quietly putting out the word to others not to support Android, could delay Google considerably. If China wanted it could tell its courts to encourage Apple to file suit there, saying it was only seeking to protect patent rights. It could tell Taiwan that Android is provocative.

The plain fact is that the open source ethos of trusting people and accepting diverse opinions in the code stream is directly at odds with China’s Internet policy, which insists on shifting boundaries moved at the whim of Beijing’s mandarins, and absolute adherence to those boundaries.

Anyone who thinks modern China is communist knows neither China nor communism. It’s an evolving amalgam of the mandarin, bureaucratic system that ruled under the emperors, and a centrally-controlled capitalism George Orwell wrote about in his journalism.

In America business is strong and government weak. In China it’s just the opposite. And the government process is an opaque tea party. (China was drinking tea when Sarah Palin’s ancestors (and Keith Olbermann’s) were living in caves.) Business has access to that tea party, but its interests are not controlling. Businesses are not people under Chinese law.

Right now China is going through an enormous internal struggle, similar to what this country was going through in 2007 and 2008. It’s looking for an economic soft landing while the economic ground comes up to meet it.

We own its bank. Its system of maintaining a strong yuan through purchases of U.S. government assets is a game that must end, somehow, which means growth must slow, which means dreams must be put off, which risks social unrest.

China fears disorder the way Germany does inflation.

Open source is a disordered state of software development, especially when contrasted with proprietary models. Individuals are free to see code, change code, and release code on their schedule, to their own specifications. To a Chinese bureaucrat’s eyes it must seem akin to anarchy. Someone might stick a Falun Gong fortune cookie in there.

We call it freedom. China calls it madness.

China has grudgingly accepted Americans’ rights to do and think as Americans will, but it has not yet accepted the idea of its own people thinking and doing as they will. Boundaries must be maintained.

Proprietary software maintains boundaries. Proprietary development can be controlled.

I can easily see China turning toward the proprietary model. Open source may be an innocent bystander in this great game, but innocent bystanders can be victims, too.

VJ42 writes “With the 2010 UK general election fast approaching, the Pirate Party of the United Kingdom will be fielding elections for the first time. The Digital Economy bill and ACTA are hot topics for UK geeks, and the Pirate Party is looking to pick up some votes. Their leader, Andrew Robinson, has agreed to answer your questions. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today Matt Asay urges government buyers to support open source, open data and open standards.

Why? Because it’s better. Because it promotes competition. Because it gives government flexibility.

But after watching government on every level, in various countries, for over half my lifetime, I can tell you the last thing any government wants is to make a decision its successor can overturn.

Every government knows its time in office is limited. What it needs are stalwart friends and a legacy. Proprietary vendors deliver both, and it is in the nature of open source that these not be provided.

You’re probably thinking this is an attack on American politicians, so let’s go offshore for our example. Let’s go instead to Great Britain and, to make it a little less partisan, to the BBC. (This might be useful to Matt since he’s now COO of a British-based company, Canonical.)

(Cue the flashback effects, please.)

About 15 years ago now, when I was at Interactive Age, the BBC asked us to send someone over to Radio House for a two-day conference on what it should do with “multimedia.”

The plan was for our publisher to give a little speech, but then the magazine was closed, most everyone left for pastures new, and this junior reporter was left with the duty.

I gave a little talk but, having nothing better to do, stayed for the whole show. Near the end the audience was broken into working groups on various topics. Mine was on the Internet.

While everyone around me argued, I noodled around on a connected PC and found an early NPR podcast of its headlines. I turned around, got their attention, started playing the file, and told them “this is your competition.”

Over the years the Beeb became an online leader. Its online budget grew. But pushback emerged from private news sources. They said the Beeb’s dominance was hurting their business prospects.

The response was to try and tie the BBC’s existing strengths in broadcasting tightly to its Web site. Politically the idea was to make them one and the same. The BBC needed a friend here, and it found one in Microsoft.

Microsoft was willing to do whatever the BBC wanted, support whatever draconian DRM regime was called for, in exchange for proprietary advantage. Its iPlayer gave the agency control over who could see what, reducing the inherent subsidy in Americans visiting the BBC News Web site.

One result is that the BBC is now locking out open source, verifying “rights” to view content by verifying the player. They have gone so far down the proprietary road that the interests of specific American companies — Microsoft and Adobe — are now the interests of the BBC.

It’s crazy if you think about it. Tieing British citizens to American technology companies, when there is solid British-based competition from Matt and his bosses, right there in London.

But open source could not have enforced rules on users as the proprietary companies could. Open source could not have the politicians’ backs as Microsoft might.

And open source could not have obligated the next government, which may be much less friendly to the BBC’s interests, to support BBC technology, lock-in and user control the way a proprietary solution does.

Lock-in is not a bug but a feature. In any political setting — and even a private company boardroom is a political setting — that can be a real advantage. It’s something open source can’t match (thank goodness) but there it is.

Since I began writing this blog in 2005 I have watched open source move from a fringe idea to something embraced by the IT mainstream.

But there are still extremists out there who want to destroy open source. Some of their names may surprise you.

What they have done is retreat into a group where they seek not to be identified.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance dates from 1984, before open source began, and is thus the perfect front group for this activity.

It’s a coalition of seven groups that together comprise the copyright industry:

• The Association of American Publishers (AAP)
• The Business Software Alliance (BSA)
• The Entertainment Software Association (ESA)
• The Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA)
• The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
• The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA)
• The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)

Most of these groups are not involved in software, except as users. The exceptions are the BPA and ESA.

The IPAA’s focus is on so-called Special 301 Reviews. It’s an annual review of our trading partners’ policies conducted by the U.S. Trade Representative. This can result in countries going on a Watch List making it harder to trade in these goods.

Most of the countries the IPAA wants on the lists are either havens for piracy or have laws that don’t give as much protection to American movies, music and TV as the industry wants. Industry is apparently especially suspicious of Canada and Mexico.

But Edinburgh professor Andres Guadamuz has learned the group is now also going after open source, urging that countries go on the watch list if they merely encourage the idea.

This is not something that came from the music or movie industries. Both benefit enormously from open source, both in the creation of their products and in opening new markets.

This comes from the ESA and BSA. Let me focus on the BSA.

The BSA has long focused on piracy. Piracy is a problem. Piracy is bad.

But open source is a cure for piracy. It brings programmers from other countries into the software creation process. Its contracts let poor countries use software legally.

If the BSA’s position has reversed, if it now wants to use the force of the U.S. government to drive open source under, then its members are also against open source. But the BSA’s membership includes IBM, HP, Cisco, Adobe, and Dell — some of the biggest boosters and biggest beneficiaries of open source on the planet.

It’s time to ask these companies. Do you agree with the position of the trade group you belong to? Should you continue to support a trade group that is acting against your corporate interests?

Or are you playing a double game, supporting open source in public while trying to destroy it in private?

There has been a sea change in public opinion.

Google is now seen as the evil empire. Microsoft, they’re the feisty little guys up in Washington state.

The change has also been marked by a new attitude toward open source. Google’s delivery of open source code for Living Stories is treated as ho-hum. The donation of $2 million to Wikimedia is quickly followed by snark. Is that all they’re giving? Well, their search engine likes Wikipedia best.

Forget how cool Living Stories is, or the effort that went into creating it. There must be some hidden agenda.

It reminds me of the Monty Python “Dennis Moore” sketch (above). The poor become the rich, the rich poor. This redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought.

The initial impacts of this changed attitude are being felt by Google, which has long used open source donations to maintain goodwill, a vital asset in a business environment that can abandon you at the click of a mouse.

The game is no longer working.

Every donation is now questioned. The attitude that Google wants to “control the Internet,” along with its content and access, has spread beyond its Bellhead lair and into the general public, making anti-Google acts like France’s “online ad” tax seem more acceptable.

I predict these anti-Google rumblings are going to start hitting open source, too, and soon. There are always dual motives in open source — it’s part of the business world after all. There is an assumption that open source steals jobs, and drives down tech wages, which is growing.

It may be too late to put the open source genie back. And it’s true that the gains of open source, its value, accrue mainly to customers large and small, not to open source companies, and not even to programmers.

But the days of “open source good” and “closed source bad” are over. The knees won’t jerk that way any more. Questions are going to be raised. Motives are going to be challenged.

I count this as a sign of success. What do you think it is?

While most reporters were flocking to hear about a consortium of 24 carriers wanting to build out their app stores, I decided to look at another story from yesterday.

Lack of cellular capacity is killing the business.

Kent German calls AT&T’s spotty service a potential deal-breaker for the iPad. Even the FCC admits the carrier is capacity constrained. Carriers are in Washington crying for more spectrum.

But then I came across this piece from our own Marguerite Reardon. It may be the most important story of the year so far. Carriers do have a solution to their capacity problems, she writes. Offload traffic to WiFi.

The idea is that carriers could create their own hotspots on buildings and on poles that would move wireless traffic to their wired networks, either cross-town or cross-country. Get those Internet calls onto the Internet fast and your wireless frequencies are free for other customers.

But if that makes sense, and it does, then two questions occur:

1. Why is the government even thinking of giving carriers more spectrum, when even carrier engineers say the solution is more WiFi?
2. Doesn’t this move the mobile phone battle underground?

When you move wireless traffic onto the Internet, you add traffic to wired networks. In the near term this would seem to benefit Comcast and the Bells, who dominate the last mile and have enormous control over core Internet traffic.

But they are not alone in the core. Global Crossing and Level 3 are there. Qwest, Sprint and Savvis all live there.

And then there’s Google.

Google spent most of the last decade buying unlit “dark” fiber, and speculation has been continuous about what it might do with it. It’s plainly an element in keeping its internal costs down. I have written here before about how Google’s costs for moving and processing data are an order of magnitude lower than anyone else’s.

Its recent announcement, seeking to test 100 MBps connections to the home, indicates that not all this capacity is accounted for. Now that the value of core capacity is rising, Google is sticking its hand up.

If Google can send 100 Mbps connections to the home, with minimal investment, why can’t it pick up wireless traffic off WiFi and route it where it needs to go? Especially if that traffic is coming off an Android phone, or (later this year) a Chromium tablet or netbook.

All this could be checkmate for the phone carriers.

If Google supports WiFi, if the carriers know they need WiFi, if Google can serve the underground and core needs of WiFi, then who needs the phone company?

Other than Google, of course.

Without the competition AT&T, Verizon and Comcast provide, Google would quickly come under severe antitrust scrutiny. So it needs to play this game carefully. Keep the phone companies in the game. Stay out of their way as much as it can, for as long as it can.

Be vewy vewy quiet.

Please note. This is not a political post. It is about politics co-opting the term open source as a frame.

At his Global Guerillas site, John Robb (right) calls the conservative Tea Party open source.

He compares it, in this context, to open source warfare. I don’t think that’s a compliment, because by that definition Al Qaeda is open source. But let’s continue.

Robb says that Tea Party activists swarm, that their movement has no barriers to entry, and that it consists of a lot of small groups, even individuals, with a variety of different motives for their actions.

This is the point where I, personally, have to say we’ve extended the open source metaphor a little far.

There are a host of American political movements from the past that emerged similarly. The Netroots early in the last decade. The Far Left of the late 1960s. The Populists of the 1890s. Even the Know Nothings in the 1850s.

I don’t think Millard Fillmore was open source. Do you?

New political movements are seldom tied directly to political parties. Absorption takes place slowly.  And it tends to be a mutual thing.

Tea Party activists are running primaries against regular Republicans all around the country — they’re trying to take the party over.

The Netroots are still not happy Democrats. They stand on certain political principles, like the Tea Party people. They organize online, like the Tea Party people. They were, when they began, all about grievances and the stupidity of government, just like the Tea Party people.

What has happened, in our time, is that the Internet has given people the opportunity to self-organize, and to act on that self-organization. The Internet lets political movements of all types rise quickly from the bottom-up. This is in contrast to the way government must act, which is from the top-down.

This President came to power through a great bottom-up movement, some of which he organized, some of which he co-opted, some of which was drawn to him by the times, and all of which moved as one thanks to the expert use of Internet tools.

But once this President achieved power, his attempt to turn the movement into a tool for governing quickly fell apart. Government is a sausage factory, and one tour was enough for most activists to go screaming back to where they came from.

John Robb has a way of making everything the Internet is capable of seem like a threat. Violence is a threat to order, and to the extent that the Internet allows those with violent intent to self-organize there is danger there.

But the Internet can also organize anger into something useful. That’s what open source is. It’s something useful.

As open source has evolved, bottom-up tools like Sourceforge have mostly given way to top-down tools like custom forges, and to company-specific sites like Google Code and CodePlex.

Successful political movements marry bottom-up activism with some top-town structure. They have this in common with big open source projects like Linux itself.

This tends to be organic, a market process. Which I think is my real objection to Robb’s analogy.

Because at its heart, open source is a market process. It’s about building, about saying yes to something, even if that something is merely an alternative to something that already exists, like Windows or Microsoft Office.

Open source is about saying yes we can, not no you can’t. And about proving it.

Over at ZDNet Government, Doug Hanchard turned his Webcam on himself yesterday (right) to discuss the question of whether the U.S. government should be doing more with open source.

Having followed this issue for several years now, I have something important to say about it.

It’s a make-or-buy decision.

The choice is not always a simple one.

Making stuff means taking responsibility for it. It means hiring people both to make it and maintain it. It means committing to spending money both today and tomorrow. It’s a policy that’s difficult to turn back from.

For many decades the U.S. government was a maker. Even when contracts were handed out for big projects, the government remained the general contractor. Over time it became responsible for hundreds of thousands of mid-level employees, paid on a GSA schedule, who were loyal to the idea of government doing things.

If it sounds like make-or-buy is a political choice, it is.

The Bush Administration was a buyer. I’m not just talking here about Halliburton and Blackwater. But throughout the government, and throughout the Administration, the attitude was it was better to buy what was needed than to take the responsibility of making it.

There were, the Bush Administration felt, sound reasons for this. Private contractors owed loyalty to their employer, not the government. Contractors could control employees in ways the government could not. The hope was that profit motive and flexibility would both save money and deliver good service.

This was carried into the IT sphere. I did several stories at ZDNet Healthcare about efforts by private contractors to destroy the VA’s open source VistA system — starving it of funds, driving away the best employees, centralizing contributions, and eventually replacing it through contracts.

My sources were former government employees. The ex-VA employees stayed in touch with former colleagues and got the story out. This was not a big story, but it held a lesson, namely the risk inherent in having government employees building vital infrastructure.

The Obama Administration has reversed this policy. Its appointees believe strongly in the value of open source, not only at the VA but elsewhere. The National Health Information Network, built by Harris Corp. under contract, is now lauded mainly for its use of open source software components. It’s called the Health Internet.

As Brian Klepper and David Kibbe wrote when this re-branding was announced, this becomes an issue of control. In this case, who will control health data interchange. In the larger context, who will control the systems which result from using open source.

Making things creates constituencies, within government, both on behalf of a project and on behalf of continued government funding. Some may argue this risk exceeds the value of using open source.

I disagree. I say we have run the experiment. We have tried making, and we have tried buying. I say making makes more sense in the long run, and that a government which only sees things in terms of the short time horizons of its political term is short-sighted indeed.

Oh, one more thing, Doug. Leave the facial hair to the experts. I think you’re handsome enough.

Doug Hanchard, over at ZDNet Government, offers a thoughtful and fair defense of the fear now gripping Internet security professionals following the allegedly Chinese attack on Google and others.

He concludes with a poll, asking readers whether they would accept having their CPUs registered as a condition for going online. This would make it possible to trace computer crime to its source, he suggests.

At last count sentiment was running 4-1 against. No surprise there. But surprising he thought to ask the question that way, because IPv6 has plenty of address space to give every phone, PC and Internet-connected toaster its own IP address.

In other words, his solution is at hand.

So why the pushback?

(Picture from Regentsprep.org.)

Possibly because a solution like this may indeed be China’s aim. China sees freedom as chaos, dissent as treason. It demands the right to police its people as its proprietary property.

In this I believe it has the support of its people. The history of the last century (above) argues that, without unity at its center, China collapses like a house of cards, and that foreigners use this collapse to hold its people down.

Words like freedom and democracy are middle class conceits, China argues. Without power, without rules, and without enforcement of those rules by the wisest and wiliest, the argument goes, society collapses.

Of course, we know better. Open source knows better. Open source, at its heart, is an argument for freedom. People freely choose to support open source projects, or not. The code is visible to all, and there is an assumption that it’s through transparency evil can best be contained.

Open source is derived from Internet values, and those are descended from American history. First the cooperation among professionals and groups that won the Cold War, and second the self-interested cooperation among equals upon which our republic was founded.

China’s values have made it an industrial powerhouse, but its ability to navigate the increasingly-rapid changes of 21st century technology must be questioned. Innovation requires open minds, open hearts, and free inquiry. Limiting the resource, limiting the people, also means limiting thought, limiting imagination, limiting innovation.

As change accelerates the cost of limiting innovation increases, unless a structure is in place that can strictly limit that innovation, channeling thought only in approved directions.

This is the choice the world faces. We know where China stands. We know where America stands. But the Internet can’t long survive half-slave and half-free. It will either become all one thing or all the other.

And in that larger battle, even well-meaning security professionals may, in their honest attempts to secure order, give the future of the Internet, and the world, to our adversary.

The Obama Administration has forced Sourceforge to deny service to its anti-terrorism sanction list.

In practical terms this means people in Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria and Iran get “403 forbidden” messages when they try to access sourceforge.org addresses. (Here’s how the Armenian Private School in Toronto, Canada displays 403 errors.)

Sourceforge is not happy about it, noting that Section 5 of the open source definition prohibits discrimination “against any person or group of persons.”  Neither is anyone else in the open source movement.

A more important question may be how far is the State Department willing to go in order to enforce this restriction and how far is the open source movement willing to go to fight it?

That’s because Sourceforge is no longer the only open source repository. Microsoft has a big one. Google has a big one. Many open source projects now run their own forges. Will the U.S. government now censor Google while it ostensibly fights alongside it against Chinese censorship?

Also, neither open source nor the Internet are entirely American any longer. Just as Iranian dissidents can use anonymizers to hide their tweets from the Mullahs, so Iranian hackers working for the mullahs can use the same technology to bypass any block.

Sites like ArabCrunch, or open source advocates in places like India, now have an opportunity to mirror Sourceforge content in the name of Internet liberty. And how delicious would it be for China to allow content mirrors and enable access to those whom the U.S. Internet authorities are “oppressing”?

(NOTE: Some readers have been offended by the use of the word “oppressing” to refer to countries our government does not like. It was used in the context of how Arab or Chinese readers might react to the move. My apologies to all who might be offended.)

The law of unintended consequences is about to come down hard.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

A New Zealand high school has defied the national government and struck a blow heard around the world of open source.

Albany Senior High School is ignoring a deal worked out between the National Party government and Microsoft and claims it is saving a bundle.

The high school opened just last year, and its IT system is based on Mandriva servers and Ubuntu desktops, supporting Moodle, Open Office and (most important) any client the kids want to bring in.

Open Systems Software of Auckland was the project’s system integrator, and presented its solution at a Linux conference last week.

In their presentation they noted that when the school moves to new quarters later this year its server rack, designed to hold 48 servers, will instead need only four. The system also took less time to build than a Microsoft system would have, the school said.

One thing that makes this a political story, down under, is that under the nation’s contract with Microsoft the software giant still gets paid for Albany’s Microsoft software even though it’s not being used.

New Zealand’s opposition Labour Party has not yet commented on the Albany situation, but New Zealand is a relatively small country, and Labour’s blog hasn’t been updated since last December 9. (New Zealand has about twice the population of its namesake, which is part of Denmark.)

(CORRECTION: A reader correctly notes the country takes its name from Zeeland, a Dutch province now home to 300,000, rather than the Danish island of Zealand. Wikipedia says the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman called the place Staten Landt. The Maori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa. My apologies, and thanks for encouraging the exploration.)

Hopefully this won’t turn out like last week’s New Zealand story. Open source activist Jeremy Allison joined the talkbacks there to note he’s given the same talk about Microsoft attacking open source patents for years. (Are stories just louder there, in an Internet sense?)

In any case, the Albany story has blown away San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s announcement of a new open source policy for the city, under which departments must “consider open source software” in developing new applications.

Maybe if he’d announced it in New Zealand.

Visicalc co-creator Bob Frankston (right) has re-imagined the Internet and found it to be good.

I should say at the top that I have known Bob online for nearly a decade and find him to be among the most brilliant, original thinkers we have on the resource, as well as the best writer. While I can describe what he is talking about here, he can explain it better here.

It’s his latest effort, called Understanding Ambient Connectivity. And it’s deceptively simple.

Stripped of all the regulatorium and arguments about owning infrastructure, the Internet still works, and provides a model for assuring abundant bits to everyone.

We’re talking about things like best efforts, connecting first while paying later, and separating services from their transmission.

Simplicity has been lost this decade as carriers gained sole-source control over customers and sought to extract monopoly rents. Billions in subsidies have been pocketed, Moore’s Law has been ignored, and we now pay more for fewer bits than we did a decade ago.

What to do? Here’s what Frankston suggests:

Rather than having to negotiate a deal for each application we need to be able to assume connectivity is just there – part of our ambient environment. At a technical level we can – it’s just that it’s made unavailable by business policies that date back to 19th century telegraphy when we financed scarce capacity by buying services.

The capacity is no longer scarce – it just seems that way because of these policies.

Align incentives properly and this can change, he writes. He notes a recent AT&T suggestion that it abandon its copper wires and runs with it. Light that copper with the best technology available, open the access paths to wireless, and make that utility available to everyone, he suggests. Markets will boom.

We are accustomed to thinking of the Web as the Internet, he writes, but that’s just its visible face. Separate services from transmission and passive data like fire alarms or  bar codes  become valuable to us.

One way to do this is with a Globally Unique ID, which every one of us can have (along with all our devices) using IPv6. You can then track devices to their location, and know who did what, for both billing and law enforcement purposes.

Frankston’s key point is that digital capacity is unlimited, and that capacity can be unleashed by separating the transmission of bits from the services those bits provide. Aligning our policies to encourage growth rather than monopoly, as the Internet was designed to do, can unleash this power.

Google’s decision to go public on China’s efforts to control its own Internet, and people, by every means necessary may become Hillary Clinton’s Cuban missile crisis.

That’s because missiles don’t win wars anymore. Wars are fought economically. They can be just as destructive as before, but in the Internet age they will be based on Internet means.

The BBC is calling this a battle of the blogs, many pundits are yawning loudly, but this is as serious as a heart attack. The world economy hinges on the U.S.-China relationship. And that relationship rides on the Internet.

The real question is whether the Internet will be an international network or a collection of national networks. This has been obscured by two key realities. China’s control of its Internet is not nearly as complete as it appears, and western support for a global network that can bypass national laws is not as great as it appears, either.

The present incident was born of this yin and yang.

China still sees free thought as a threat to its security. Google knows better. It is laying down this marker from a position of relative strength — the present Administration is far more supportive of Internet freedom (and open source) than its predecessor.

Its timing is also good. Critics like to say that China owns us. But when you hold enough of a bank’s debt you own the bank. It’s this debt that is the weapon of mass destruction in the present crisis. And it’s in our hands, not theirs.

Open source depends on these networks remaining open. A government-driven cut-off of online ties, should it come, would make it very hard to do open source business, since it would raise costs and limit collaboration. In that way open source is the “peace dividend” both sides want to protect.

China also needs the competition Google provides. Without it sites like Baidu will become lazy. Despite its huge market it could easily fall behind on features and functions, ironically making it vulnerable to cyber attack.

No one wants cyber-war, but there are differences in the American and Chinese approach to the Internet, and to economic questions generally, that need to be managed. Whether weiji (above) truly means both danger and opportunity, this crisis is indeed both.

The question now is whether the Administration will seize it or just try to muddle through.