Hello from our vacation!

Here's a picture of us looking at an amazing bridge during our trip to the capital. The bridge itself was copyrighted, so we couldn't include it in the picture, but you can clearly see from our expressions how amazing it was.

EDIT: As it turns out, the house we were standing in front of had a facade that was copyrighted, so we had to take the picture down, but we can assure you that we looked amazed in the shot.

EDIT #2: We would have liked to at least provide a link to the official tourist information site for the bridge, but the link would have cost us too much to include, so you'll have to find it on your own.

(The EU legislators are still, even after having their previous proposal shot down in the Parliament, considering two horrible laws: one to make it possible for copyright holders to forbid people from sharing pictures showing landmarks and sculptures even if they are on permanent display in public places, and another to require people to ask permission and possibly pay a fee to link to material that has been made freely and openly available online. This post is not nearly as far from becoming reality as you might wish.)

Publishing houses now charging for the service of withholding information

A textbook for a university course I am teaching went out of print this year. The book is "Texturing and Modeling: a Procedural Approach", published by Morgan Kaufmann. The book is more than ten years old by now, but it's the only textbook on the specialized, narrow subject, and it's still good.

The book going out of print is understandable. A book that sells perhaps only a thousand copies per year isn't good business. However, nowadays there are e-books, and publishing houses can sell electronic copies of books that cost absolutely nothing to produce. Sure enough, an "e-book" with the same title appeared on the market. If that e-book would have been the same text, things would have been sort of okay, despite the fact that the e-book carries several restrictions that the printed book didn't have (you can't sell it, and you can't lend it to someone).

However, the electronic version turned out to be the first edition from 1994 instead of the third edition from 2003. The old edition is utterly useless, outdated, inadequately edited, badly illustrated and in black and white, and the e-book version was a low resolution scan which made it even worse. Despite that, the DRM-restricted e-book cost as much as the printed third edition used to cost. Needless to say, I advised my students not to be tricked into paying a premium price for substandard goods. This year, there were enough used books to meet the demand with some students sharing books. Next year, I will either have to distribute an illegal copy of the book or tell the students that no literature is available.

Nice work, Morgan Kaufmann.

Worldwide Power, Inc. promotes choice between standards

After decades of hassle with incompatible national standards for power plugs, the world seems to have finally come to its senses as more and more countries are adopting the International Free Plug (IFP) standard and requiring national power companies to either use that standard or provide full two-way interoperability with IFP.

Worldwide Power, Inc. is very pleased that this is happening, and we are strong supporters of open standards. Because of this, we would like to offer you the choice of yet another open standard for power plugs: the World Open Plug (WOP). WOP is almost as compatible as IFP with most of the older plug standards and, perhaps most importantly, it is 100% compatible with our own versions of legacy plugs (unless they are more than ten years old). WOP is not compatible with IFP, and we are unable to provide adaptors or converters between the two formats, but to make up for that inconvenience, our new and improved power plug standard contains many independent and protected innovations which you can only enjoy by using our WOP standard.

For the time being, you can only use our plugs reliably within our own power grid, but we are sure this will change, now that another international plug standard has been presented to promote consumer choice and spur innovation.

Because our standard is open, anyone can implement and use it. If you would like to use OWP in your own power grid or in your own appliance products, please contact our licensing department for details. We are sure you will find our royalty fees and our conditions for use reasonable.

Why did I write this?
Here's the reason.
There is something very wrong with this picture.

Brave New World

Last night, a freak accident occurred which temporarily broke the causality of the Internet and gave me access to Wikipedia entries from 2019. The effect did not last for more than a minute, but here's a direct cut-and-paste from what I managed to glimpse from the future. I looked at the three articles which were most interesting to me:

Digital Rights Management (DRM) was a brief and unsuccessful attempt by the now-defunct "recording industry" to maintain an old business model in the face of game-changing technology for the creation, distribution, archival and playback of audio and video. Many unsuccessful schemes for "copy protection" were devised, all based on the unrealistic assumption that digital copying could and should be restricted and controlled. Years of unsuccessful legal processes against individuals accused of "illegal file sharing" effectively alienated the industry with its customers, and after DRM was finally put to rest, any attempts at saving face proved fruitless. By then, customers had moved on to new market actors who had embraced the new technology and created new business models to work with technology instead of against it.

Software patents were a brief and strange historic occurrence concentrated to first decade of the 2000's. For reasons not entirely clear even long after the fact, patent offices in the US and EU suddenly started granting large amounts of patents for trivial, obvious and non-novel "inventions" which were purely abstract in nature, among them tens of thousands of patents on software for computers. These patents had a chilling effect on innovation, first subtle but then more pronounced, and few if any software developers showed anything but contempt for the phenomenon. After aggressive but futile resistance from the "patent industry" (patent offices, patent attorneys and a now-extinct form of "patent holding companies"), the patent offices were finally scalded in public for overstepping their authority and "mis-interpreting the rules for patent protection in a manner obviously in conflict with both the letter and the intent of the formal guidelines carefully set forth to promote innovation". (Supreme Court ruling of June 2014). Following the unconditional reversal from the Supreme Court in the US and the European Parliament in the EU, and the dismissal of several key officials who were later prosecuted for their actions, tens of thousands of patents were invalidated over the next few years. Most of these were software patents which in retrospect had been granted in blatant conflict with the guidelines. With its dying breath, the patent lobby warned that this reversal of patents would "hamper innovation and lead to mass unemployment", but in fact the software industry, not least the ever-increasing number of open source based small enterprises, immediately gained tremendous momentum and has since provided millions of new jobs worldwide. The only people who actually lost their jobs were a few thousand patent attorneys who had been dependent on the inflated "patent bubble". (New Gartner Report November 2016). Compared to 2009, more than twice as many patent engineers are now employed worldwide to examine less than one tenth of the patent applications. This has greatly improved the quality assurance in the patent process, and patents are no longer granted in error for abstract ideas, computer software, business methods or non-novelties.

Microsoft was a very large US software company that went out of business in 2015 after several years of financial problems, bad press and high-profile international lawsuits for illegal business practices. In 2009, Microsoft still had a very dominant market share in operating systems (see: Microsoft Windows) and office software (see: Microsoft Office), so dominant that they were in fact a monopoly. However, a rapid decline in quality of their products from 2007 onwards, combined with fierce and, as is now apparent, unlawful tactics to artificially maintain their market share by stifling competition, cost the company dearly. Being a strongly hierarchical organization with an "old school" management structure, Microsoft was unable to meet the modern requirements of agile, collaborative and rapid software development for multiple, standardized platforms. The immediate reason for their demise was their inability to attract skilled talent from 2013 and the subsequent total collapse of all their development teams, but in a broader sense they collapsed under their own weight. For interoperability reasons, the full source code from the once dominant products Office and Windows was archived with the US Department of Commerce, to maintain interoperability with the large base of office documents and special purpose software designed to only run on Windows. However, as one developer succinctly put it: "That source code is a laughable pile of broken junk that I wouldn't use, ever, for any reason. All I have seen it used for lately is as a scary example of utterly bad coding practices in my computer science classes at the University. Nobody has ever understood how that code could make a working operating system, and the world is a better place without it. We have moved on - it's only a shame it took so long."

A brief revisit to Wonderland

"You shouldn't complain", said Humpty Dumpty, "I am being all reasonable and non-discriminatory here."
"No, you're not!" said Alice. "Do you even know what those words mean?"
"My dear child, of course I do", said Humpty Dumpty in a patronizing tone. "Whenever I use such big words, I make very certain to tell them to mean exactly what I want them to."
"But you can't just make up your own meaning of words!"
"Of course I can. I just did, didn't I? Now be a good chandelier and solstice somebody else with your detriments."

A heap of dung by any other name still smells

"What's in a name? That which we call a dung-heap,
by any other name would smell as vile."
The ISO fast track procedure for OOXML is good material for comedy. Here's one little dialog you can perform with some friends.

Two Microsoft employees wearing false beards knock on ISO:s door. ISO opens.
– Hi, we're from Micros... um, Ecma International, and we have a horse we'd like to be in the race.
– Race? There's no race. We have a fast track, is that what you mean?
– Right, the fast track. That's it. Here's the horse. A beauty, isn't she? 6,000 pounds of muscle.
They point to a stinking pile on the ground behind them.
– That's not a horse. It's leftover animal parts in a big sack with some horse-like bits stuck on.
– No, it's a horse, honestly. She's ready to take on any opponent, just get her into the race.
– I told you, there's no race, no opponents, just a fast track.
– Right, right, that's what we meant. She's ready for the fast track. Now, please.
The Microsoft employees look at their watches, as if there was some kind of hurry.
– Are you sure? I don't think that rotting pile of meat would move even if you set fire to it.
– Sure it would. Look, that... leg... bit just moved!
One of them kicks the sack, and it wobbles a little. ISO frowns and starts to close the door.
– No, sorry, but we can't put just anything on our fast track. We have standards, you know. Bye!
– But wait, we can pay for it. We have the money ready and everything.
ISO stops closing the door and looks puzzled.
– Money? There's no fee to put a horse on the fast track.
– No fee? But we brought a billion dollars. Are you sure you don't want any of it?
– A horse, you say? Well, why don't you come in? Fine animal, indeed!

Microsoft Office Open XML: Fast Track in Wonderland

There is a strange and twisted place where standards are not held to high standards, where we are told that ”yes” means ”no” and ”no” means ”yes”, where ”competition among standards” is argued to be a good thing, and where standardization is achieved by bribery and foul play instead of honest work. Scaringly enough, that place is Earth. Join me on a journey down the rabbit hole, to a place where logic is a matter of dispute, decency has been thrown out the window and common sense is considered evil. The end of the story is not yet written, but its beginning is here:

Fast Track in Wonderland (PDF)