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Openness is undeniably cool right now, at least if you move in the slightly odd circles that I do. Openly available scientific papers are disrupting the world of scholarly publishing (which may not be all good, but that’s a post for another day). Openly available university courses are finally beginning to work out how to offer meaningful accreditation to students. Openly accessible data from government agencies around the world bulks out almost every data marketplace, and anchors many an analysis. Openly available code for cloud infrastructure or networking is challenging the hold of the tech world’s giants. Everywhere you look, ‘incumbents’ are apparently being ‘challenged’ and ‘disrupted’ by the power of open.

The truth, of course, is a little more complex and a lot more nuanced, as business models shift and evolve just like they always have. In sustainable systems, some people still need to be rewarded (often through being paid) for their effort. And in sustainable systems, paying someone can often be a pretty straightforward means of ensuring that you have a throat to choke if something breaks; big companies adopting open source often seek a proper financial relationship with someone who installs and maintains the ‘free’ software or hardware they’re depending upon.

One area of openness that I’ve been involved with for about ten years is that of open licensing for both creative works and data. And it’s come a very long way.

Here in Europe, for example, the (badly flawed) 2003 Public Sector Information Directive is under review, and there’s every likelihood that the replacement will make a number of sensible moves toward greater openness, transparency, and reusability for publicly funded data. As the EPSI Platform site notes today, Andrés Nin proposes going a step further than the European Commission is currently contemplating, by instituting a common open license across Europe;

“The creation of a single public information re-use space in Europe requires much more, it requires a common European OpenData license applicable to all data generated by European public administrations.”

I would certainly welcome a model license that European member states might be enabled to use. I’d also welcome — and support — vigorous efforts to dissuade individual member states or ministries from their usual practice of tweaking and otherwise modifying perfectly good documents in order to demonstrate how ‘special’ or ‘different’ their circumstances apparently are. When will they all realise that they are neither as special nor as different as they like to think?

But — and it’s a big but — it seems unwise, premature, and unhelpful to even begin to suggest that such a license might be mandated across Europe. It isn’t required, and attempts to develop a single document that everyone could accept would be an unhelpful distraction that would result in something so bureaucratic, so ringed in opt-outs and prevarications, as to be utterly worthless. It would also, in all likelihood, be one of those exercises in which the process very quickly subsumed the point. A prime candidate for, in the words of an old boss, being too busy to be effective.

Related articles

• Branding academic publishers ‘enemies of science’ is offensive and wrong (guardian.co.uk)
• Open Data: Europe Starts to Get It (opendotdotdot.blogspot.com)
• Open Data in Europe gets a huge boost from new EU rules (thenextweb.com)

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Last week, open standards body OASIS unveiled yet another shiny new standards effort. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee hopes to make it “easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in,” and to support moving from one cloud to another. The usual suspects — the likes of IBM, CA, and Cisco — are on board. The usual holdouts — Google and Amazon, of course — are not. So what is TOSCA trying to achieve? How does it fit alongside all the dead, dying, or ponderously deliberating cloud standardisation efforts that have gone before? And without the giants of the cloud, is there really any point bothering?

As I’ve probably mentioned before, involvement in various national and international standardisation efforts played a big part in my early career. I went to the working group meetings in odd (but often beautiful) locations. I participated in the conference calls. I engaged on the mailing lists. I drafted and edited and reviewed the documents. I completely buy into the idea that there is a place for foundational standards, developed through consensus-building and maintained for the long haul by organisations that stand apart from the vested interests and their competing agendas.

I also believe that there’s a time and a place for these standardisation efforts. Do it too soon, and we end up ossifying something that needs to be in a state of flux. When you don’t know what the best way to prepare a meal is, it’s too soon to print the recipe book. We need to try different approaches, and we need to be able to throw away the attempts that didn’t work out. More worryingly, standardisation efforts can be used for political ends. They can be little more than a rod with which to beat the (usually dominant) competition. At best a distraction, or a talking shop for those unwilling or unable to just get on and do something. At worst, one amongst a toolchest of dirty tricks in a broader war for hearts, minds, and — ultimately — wallets.

The cloud market is a fascinating place. There are leaders and there are followers. There is innovation, and there is competition. There is agreement, and there is debate. For all the rhetoric, and all the posturing, we really don’t yet know the right answer to many of the cloud’s questions.

Maybe TOSCA and the Open Data Center Alliance and IEEE and the rest are — still — too early, and should be content to let the market thrash out a few more of these issues before anyone tries to write anything down? And when it is time to write some stuff down, let’s make sure we focus on specific, finite, tangible, atomic tasks rather than “the cloud.” As Dave Roberts commented in regard to TOSCA’s scope;

“That goal is so large, that I think it’s probably unbounded. When problems get unbounded, the best you can ever hope to achieve is to solve a large enough subset of the problem that the solution is still interesting. If you can’t achieve that, people ignore the solution because it fundamentally doesn’t help them. There is always an ‘interesting’ part of the problem space that they have to solve a different way, and that undercuts the use of the partial ‘solution.’”

And as for Tosca? Things didn’t end well for her, did they? Might TOSCA’s fate, too, be sealed?

Related articles

• Tech giants back standard for cloud portability – InfoWorld (infoworld.com)
• Proposed spec aims to nix cloud lock-in (gigaom.com)
• On TOSCA and Cloud Standards. MyPOV (diversity.net.nz)

I’ve been a fan of Om Malik‘s boutique analyst site, GigaOM Pro, pretty much from the outset, and happily renew my subscription each year. The site covers a wide range of industry topics, and those Quarterly Wrap-ups are worth the fee all by themselves.

I’ve written a few reports for them in the past, but was delighted when Mike Wolf got in touch to see if I fancied trying my hand at curation on their Infrastructure/Cloud channel.

So next week (from 31 January) I’m going to be gathering and commenting upon links from around the web, writing a daily ‘Today in Infrastructure,’ and finishing off with a Weekly Update. If you’re not (yet!) a subscriber, why not sign up for a free seven day trial and join me for the start of my little adventure?

If there’s something you think I should be covering, do let me know.

Related articles

• Free GigaOM Pro Webinar: The Scalable Cloud (gigaom.com)
• GigaOm raises $2.5M, claims 10,000 Pro subscribers (venturebeat.com)
• The Cloud has a place, even inside heavily regulated industries (cloudofdata.com)
• Talking Scalable Clouds with GigaOM Pro and Limelight Networks (cloudofdata.com)
• GigaOM Structure 2011 (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Join GigaOM at Big Data on March 23 in New York City (gigaom.com)

Towards the end of George Orwell’s allegorical take on the Stalinist Revolution, the pigs of Animal Farm take on the trappings of the humans they supplanted, shifting ideologically from ‘Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad’ to declare ‘Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better!’ as they rise to stand on their hind legs.

The pigs’ dogmatism forces a series of increasingly convoluted rationalisations, until they end up professing exactly the opposite of their original position. Black, it seems, really can be white… but there’s absolutely no room for grey.

With data, current moves toward ‘open’ are certainly to be lauded, and we should continue to demonstrate the benefits of more equitable access in persuading those who have yet to realise the opportunities for rethinking their business.

However, I’ve been in too many situations recently where persuasion, encouragement and demonstration have been cast aside in favour of brow beating, castigation and vitriol. Anyone who fails to immediately throw open the doors to their data vaults is, the argument increasingly seems to go, cruelly, wantonly, and entirely unreasonably standing in the path of truth, justice, and the {insert name of country} way. The language is intemperate, and the unspoken undercurrent of feeling seems almost to lump these evil data hoarders with the most vile underminers of social cohesion.

Nonsense.

Open Data is a good thing, and we could benefit from an awful lot more of it. But the arguments surely shouldn’t be religious (‘Open’ is better than ‘Closed’) or so polarised that compromise typically becomes impossible. Instead, we need collectively to demonstrate the value of change, and we need to understand and respect the positions of the market’s incumbents. Current practice should never be accepted as an excuse for lack of change, but all too often it may actually mask quite a good set of reasons.

Where data are currently sold, can we (as was to some extent done for the Ordnance Survey) calculate the costs of data collection, curation and sale, and demonstrate convincingly that more money could be made by removing that initial barrier to access?

Where a data holder participates in an existing data sharing arrangement with their peers, surely we can gather the evidence to demonstrate the likely effect of opening parts of that value chain… without destabilising an otherwise useful set of collaborations?

Where large quantities of low value data (such as a customer’s address) are stored and managed alongside highly valuable business data (the facts of a customer relationship), we can certainly set about demonstrating the ways in which a more open approach could pay dividends; instead of managing that postcode yourself, share a little in order to benefit from the work done by others on tracking past, current, and future changes of address.

Then again, maybe we should just scream and swear at all those data-hoarding dinosaurs, without trying to understand them or engage with their fears, concerns, and counter-arguments. It’s much easier that way.

Four Legs Good. Two Legs Often Quite Good, Too!

Related articles

• The black market for data (radar.oreilly.com)
• GTEC 2010: David Eaves on Open Data: ‘Just Do It!’ (techvibes.com)
• The Linked Open Data and Pavlova (blogs.talis.com)
• Nottingham University offers masterclasses in dealing with open data – for free of course (guardian.co.uk)
• Talking with Richard Stirling about progress with data.gov.uk (cloudofdata.com)
• ICO launches consultation on data sharing code of practice (v3.co.uk)
• How Open Data is Used Against the Poor (readwriteweb.com)

The OpenStack activity was unveiled by Rackspace, NASA, and their partners back in July, and is on track to deliver functional initial releases in the next few weeks. We discuss the relationship between OpenStack’s deliverables and earlier developments from Rackspace and NASA’s Nebula project, and begin to explore the implications of an Open Source Cloud Computing stack for the wider industry.

This podcast was recorded on Friday 10 September, 2010.

During our conversation we referred to the following resources;

• Amazon
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon S3
• Apache license
• Citrix
• Cloud.com
• Dell
• GoGrid
• HP (and my podcast with Russ Daniels)
• IBM (and my podcasts with Kristof Kloeckner and Ric Telford)
• KVM
• Linux
• Microsoft (and my podcast with Amitabh Srivastava)
• mySQL
• NASA
• NASA Nebula (and my article for GigaOM Pro)
• OpenStack
• OpenStack code launchpad
• OpenStack design conference, November 2010
• Oracle
• Rackspace (and my podcast with Lew Moorman)
• Rackspace CloudFiles
• VirtualBox
• Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, discussing ‘false Clouds’ at GigaOM’s Structure conference
• XenServer

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• OpenStack sets some Texas-sized deadlines (zdnet.com)
• OpenStack: Rackspace and NASA Nebula Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem (readwriteweb.com)
• NASA gives OpenStack instant credibility (zdnet.com)
• Impact of OpenStack Project Goes Beyond the Cloud Industry Leaders (readwriteweb.com)
• Space IT, the final frontier (radar.oreilly.com)
• What’s next for OpenStack’s cloud efforts (news.cnet.com)
• Rackspace Announces Open Source Cloud Platform (informationweek.com)

When I was a child, I wanted to be a spaceman. No great surprise there, perhaps, and also no great surprise that I — like so many others — never got to achieve that dream.

Still, when the opportunity presented itself to write a space-y piece as my latest contribution over on GigaOM Pro, I jumped at it.

It was fascinating to hear about the very different efforts at the European Space Agency and NASA to harness Cloud Computing… and it brought back some of that childhood excitement in the process.

Thanks to William O’Mullane at ESA and Chris Kemp at NASA Ames for their time and insight.

And if a slot opens up on the next non-robot mission, you know where to reach me…

Related articles by Zemanta

• NASA’s Nebula: The Cloud in a Container (datacenterknowledge.com)
• To Space and Beyond: The Rise of Research-driven Cloud Computing (gigaom.com)
• Cassini Shows Saturnian Roller Derby, Strange Weather (spacefellowship.com)
• Ames expects Obama budget will mean growth (insidehpc.com)

Have a listen to hear about some of mySociety’s projects, and to learn Tom’s views on the current rush toward greater access to data.

As usual, links to the resources we discuss are available in show notes on the Talis site.

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• Parliamentary website TheyWorkForYou launches redesign (onlinejournalismblog.com)
• Mapumental: visualise any neighbourhood in the UK by transit times, house prices and “scenicness” (boingboing.net)

Back in May, ReadWriteWeb reported on a Motion put before legislators in the Canadian city of Vancouver. Duly passed, the Motion commits the city to three closely related ‘open’ agendas;

• the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
• the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles;
• the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns.

Last week I spoke with David Eaves, a co-author of the Motion, both to understand the city’s rationale, and to explore intentions for the third area — Open Data — in a little more depth. The result has just been released as a podcast, which is available below.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Nodalities blog.

As more and more data become available as a matter of course, the examples set by organisations such as MySociety become increasingly attainable for us all. Other than ensuring that it is ‘open,’ do we need to be asking for more from those making data available? And once it’s there, will its use and scrutiny move beyond the enthusiasts and activists to encompass the population at large?

David shares his views on these and other questions during our conversation.

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• What is an Open City? (mt-soft.com.ar)
• City of Vancouver embraces open data, standards and source (cbc.ca)
• Doors are finally opening to public data (bookmarkdevil.com)
• City of Vancouver embraces open data, standards and source (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
• Vancouver, BC Wants to be an Open City (readwriteweb.com)
• Vancouver mulls making itself an ‘open city’ (cbc.ca)
• Vancouver’s Open Data, Open Standards, Open Source and the Vancouver Public Library (madanalogy.com)

As the company’s press materials note,

“Garlik, the online identity expert, was founded by Mike Harris, founding CEO of Egg plc, former Egg CIO Tom Ilube and former British Computer Society president Professor Nigel Shadbolt. As the first company to develop a web-scale commercial application of semantic technology, Garlik enables consumers to protect themselves against identity theft and financial fraud.”

According to Wikipedia, ‘Egg… is now the world’s largest internet bank,’ so effective management of identity information is clearly nothing new to Ilube and his team.

Founded in 2005, Garlik has secured some £4.5million from 3i, Doughty Hanson and Noble Venture Finance to offer products such as their DataPatrol solution for tracking sensitive personal information online, and the less ‘serious’ measure of online status, QDOS.

Behind the scenes, data is aggregated from across the open Web and various proprietary databases, and stored in Garlik’s own RDF triple store.

Now the company is releasing their triple store — 4store — under a GNU GPL license and making it available for download. Capable of scaling to handle as many as 60billion triples (perhaps at least three times more than their closest competitors), 4store has the potential to address many concerns about the scalability of triple store technology.

I took the opportunity to talk with Garlik’s Tom Ilube and 4store’s designer, Steve Harris, before the launch and the result has just been released as a podcast.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Nigel Shadbolt talks about Web Science, the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and Garlik (blogs.talis.com)
• Online fraud at highest level ever (telegraph.co.uk)
• Happy 20th Birthday, World Wide Web (sciam.com)
• ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 2: Search Engines, User Interfaces for Data, Wolfram Alpha, And More… (readwriteweb.com)

Sun Microsystems used the CommunityOne East event in New York City this past March to unveil their Cloud Computing offering. I spoke with the company’s Juan Carlos Soto recently, to learn more.

Today, David Douglas (Senior VP, Cloud Computing) opened CommunityOne West in San Francisco discussing ‘Communities, Open Source Platforms, and Clouds.’ I joined the live webcast to see what he had to say.

Dave Douglas kicks off, talking to the importance of ‘community’. He stresses the underlying value of open – source code, protocols, formats, ideas.

“‘Open’ lowers barriers to adoption and innovation.”

A lot of the ideas he’s highlighting are similar to Tim O’Reilly’s call to ‘do stuff that matters;’ but oddly Dave doesn’t mention this.

Lew Tucker, Sun’s Cloud CTO, gets up on stage to talk about Sun’s Cloud Computing with Dave. Their opening gambit is around the on-demand nature of the Cloud, with its ability to pull up (and shut down) Cloud resources on demand, with a credit card. Lew argues that the Cloud doesn’t create lock-in, as it’s based upon open software such as Apache, Solaris and Linux.

Sun’s Storage Service, announced in March, is still on track to be available this summer… so no surprise unveiling from the stage today.

Lew shows some demonstrations of the Sun Compute and Storage Services, building upon those we saw in March to manage resources in the data centre via GUI.

Dave mentioned that ‘several thousand’ Sun staff currently use the Sun Cloud internally, every day, “in Open Office” and elsewhere. Is this ‘just’ Cloud-based file storage, or something more?

On an intriguing mix of laptops, other examples from Sun Partners include Vertica and webappVM. The examples definitely leaned towards the sysadmin and developer crowd, and I look forward to seeing some user-facing apps down the line. Dave cites ‘dozens and dozens’ of partners, as their logos flash up on screen behind him.

Lew suggests that the Cloud introduces a change from ‘Download -> Install -> Config’ to ‘Deploy,’ with the implication that this will always be easier.

Turning to Security, Lew points to a new ‘secure hardened VM for OpenSolaris,’ available on Amazon S3 today. The Center for Internet Security has assessed this new VM and verified it as secure.

Eric Baldeschwieler from Yahoo! gets up on stage, to talk about the ways in which Apache Hadoop is being used at Yahoo! – and their use of the Sun Cloud.

I look forward to hearing more, face to face, during June’s Semantic Technology and Cloud Computing tour around Silicon Valley; Menlo Park is already on my itinerary, along with sojourns to San Jose, San Francisco and Sunnyvale. Anyone else got things they want to show me, June 14-21?

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• Sun Microsystems Forecast: We Are Partly Cloudy (sitepoint.com)
• Sun Announces Open Cloud Platform & API (java.sys-con.com)
• Sun Microsystems Plans To Compete With Amazon Web Services (cloudave.com)
• Sun Open Cloud – Detailed Review (taragana.com)
• Sun’s new mantra: Call us the ‘cloud company’ (news.cnet.com)
• Sun breaks through the clouds (theregister.co.uk)