Some of Mozilla's initiatives for this year include an HTML5 Web app store, a mobile operating system and perhaps most intensive of all, a decentralized system for user identification and authentication at the browser level. In other words, a browser-based replacement for usernames and passwords.

Secure as it may be, application-level encryption won't be practical for some of the things Mozilla is working on, a few of which will naturally require that more data points about users are collected. This is a big deal to consumers and legislators alike, as issues like user tracking and online privacy receive more attention in the press and the halls of the U.S. Congress.

A Five-Point Plan For Data Security & Privacy

So how will Mozilla secure your data in the future? They've proposed a five-point set of guidelines to govern their development moving forward. Data should be collected only when doing so presents an obvious benefit to the user, and the vendor (in this case, Mozilla) should always be aware of what data is being stored, as well as how, where and why.

Mozilla also promises to do its best to minimize how long any given data point is stored on its own servers. If data is not needed for an extended period of time, it shouldn't be stored for long, if at all. That data should also be invisible to the server whenever possible. "If we can implement a given feature by never sending data to the server, or by using application-level encryption, then we will," Mozilla said.

Finally, if it's possible to use anonymized, aggregate data rather than individually identifiable information, Mozilla's engineering team will strive to do it.

Before SOPA exploded as one of the biggest tech news stories in recent memory, there was a growing amount of focus being put on online privacy and related issues. User data tracking and retention have caught the attention of U.S. legislators, who have demanded answers from Amazon over the user privacy afforded by its Silk browser and expressed concern about online user tracking in general. This level of transparency on Mozilla's part is probably no coincidence in light of these issues and the microscope they will continue to be placed under in the near future.

Zygote Media Group, which provided the imagery for Google's modeling, has built Zygote Body with the code. It offers the same navigation and features. To support this launch, the Google Body team has built a new, open-source 3D viewer at open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com. Thanks to the work of Google engineers, any developer can now use the same kind of 3D model browser for her or his own project.

Google has tried out lots of neat-o knowledge projects in the name of "organizing the world's information," only to find that they aren't tenable parts of Google's for-profit plans. As Sergey Brin told us at Web 2.0 last year, Google has long embraced the "letting 1,000 flowers bloom" strategy. While it's now gathering a select few of those flowers into "a nice bouquet" called Google+, some great Google projects have gone open-source.

In November, Google did the same thing to Knol, its Wikipedia-like collaborative knowledge database. It relaunched as a service called Annotum, powered by WordPress.

What kinds of projects can you imagine building with Google Body or the 3D viewer?

It's the kind of move that, in theory, the political Left can support because of its impact on transparency and government accountability and the political Right can support because it puts government in a role that emphasizes facilitating innovation and economic development. It sounds like a very smart way to deal with the declining financial support for Data.gov itself. It could be a big win for developers everywhere and for the people who love to use the apps they make.

"The U.S. and India are working together to produce an open source version available for implementation by countries globally, encouraging governments around the word to stand up open data sites that promote transparency, improve citizen engagement, and engage application developers in continuously improving these efforts," wrote US Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel and Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra in a post on the White House blog this morning. Independent Government 2.0 watchers appear to be cautiously optimistic about the move.

As part of the US Government's joining the Open Government Partnership in September, along with seven other national governments from around the world, the US issued a plan that included the creation of an open source version of the United States' Data.gov data portal and India's India.gov.in document portal.

The first code offered is from Data.gov and provides a mechanism for similar sites to ingest data sets uploaded by users. That code is available on independent commercial code repository Github and is being watched by 26 developers at press time. The project team says the next release will be from the Indian side of the partnership and will concern website infrastructure. A complete package of source code will formally launch in early 2012 according to the program's schedule.

Right: US Federal CIO and platform lover Steven VanRoekel.

Hopefully, open government data websites will spring up like weeds all over the world, at different levels of government and with meaningful support from government representatives. Other government developers and independent developers will then be able to access new sets of data programmatically that can serve as foundation or augmentation of new application development.

The Hope

Adriel Hampton, founder of Gov 2.0 Radio and lead organizer for CityCampSF, calls the partnership between the US and India groundbreaking.

"The partnership on open government technical infrastructure between the U.S. and India is groundbreaking in that it will help create data standards for governments of all levels. In the Gov 2.0 community, we've seen that increasing access to standardized data not only spurs business innovation, but it can greatly reduce the cost of research for NGOs and other third-sector groups working on issues like global warming, urban poverty and public education.

"I'm hopeful that this open source partnership at the federal level between two of the world's economic powers will spur increased adoption of open data infrastructure and standards by cities both small and large. This is the major step towards benefits like consumer applications that interact well with government services whether in Hyderabad, Mexico City or Los Angeles, and in increased effectiveness of both government and private sector social spending."

The Concern

Code alone is not enough, though, says O'Reilly Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent Alex Howard.

"I'm cautiously optimistic about what this news means for the world, particularly for the further validation of open source in open government.

"To rehash an old but important principle, Gov 2.0 is not about launching new 'websites' or 'portals' -- it's about Web services and an emerging global ecosystem of big data. There's a growing international movement afoot worldwide to open up government data and make something useful with it. Civic apps based upon open data are emerging that genuinely serve citizens in a beneficial ways that officials may have not been able to deliver, particularly without significant time or increased expense.

"In this context, Gov 2.0 isn't simply about setting up social media accounts, moving to grid computing or adopting open standards: it's about systems thinking, where open data is used both by, for and with the people. If you look at what the Department of Health and Human Sevices is trying to do to revolutionize healthcare with open government data in the United States, that approach may become a bit clearer.

"For that to happen, countries, states and cities have to stand up open government data platforms. There are bedrock issues for open government around the globe that no technology solution in of itself will address. Simply opening up data and standing up a platform is not a replacement for a Constitution that enforces a rule of law, free and fair elections, an effective judiciary, decent schools, basic regulatory bodies or civil society, particularly if the data does not relate to meaningful aspects of society.

"With this step forward from the U.S. and India, however, the prospects for stimulating more economic activity, civic utility and accountability under a global open government partnership is now brighter."

We asked and you answered and we culled your responses from the original post on ReadWriteWeb, Twitter and Facebook and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

The announcement comes after a rocky year for OpenOffice, which was largely abandoned by Oracle and turned over to the community, many of whom in turn forked the project to LibreOffice and created The Document Foundation.

In announcing the contribution, Oracle's vice president Luke Kowalski says the action demonstrates Oracle's "commitment to the developer and open source communities." But open source technologies and the developer communities around them have had a rough time under Oracle, particularly in regards to the assets that were acquired by the company when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. Those assets include MySQL and Java, the latter being part of a lawsuit Oracle filed against Google and fuel for many developers' fears that Oracle is actually far from committed to the open source community.

The Future of OpenOffice: The Code and the Community

IBM, which had lobbied for Oracle to spin out the OpenOffice project after it was clear that the company had no commercial interests in continuing its development, also issued a statement today, saying that "We look forward to engaging with other community members to advance the technology beginning with out strong support of the incubation process for OpenOffice at Apache."

But those community members may be elsewhere, as the creation of The Document Foundation included some of the leading developers on the OpenOffice project. While Oracle has handed over its OpenOffice code, the move does not reunite these two groups.

The Document Foundation stressed the importance of bringing these communities together in its statement in response to today's news: "The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms - licensing, membership and more - to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.

Potential Licensing Problems

There may be further problems ahead for the project too, considering that the OpenOffice is currently licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 3.0, something that isn't fully compatible with the Apache License 2.0.

However, Jim Jagielski, president of the Apache Software Foundation, issued a statement saying that "We welcome highly-focused, emerging projects from individual contributors, as well as those with robust developer communities, global user bases, and strong corporate backing." Jagielski is the proposed mentor for the project, which will be a "podling" and not fully accepted as an official Apache project.

Digium, the open source project's maintainer, has informed its users that Skype for Asterisk will no longer be available for sale or activation after July 26. According to the notification, Skype has opted not to renew the agreement that allows Digium to utilize Skype's proprietary software in order to turn the open source Asterisk into a native Skype client.

Although ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus argued that Skype's acquisition by Microsoft could take the VOIP service "to the next level" with integration in Windows mobile devices and with Xbox and Kinect gaming systems, it appears that the new frontier for Skype may be inhospitable for open source.

CRN reports that open source telephony has seen steady growth lately, as companies have soft lower-cost but feature-rich solutions, with open-source PBX systems accounting for almost 20% of all PBX sales in North America.

As ReadWriteWeb's Dan Rowinski recently noted, Microsoft's acquisition plans for Skype may include deep integration of the VOIP service into its Lync communications platform - a platform that is certainly a competitor to the open source Asterisk.

With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described today as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: "the traditional of the global intellectual commons."

The opening keynote at today's OCW Consortium meeting was Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, who spoke on "Perspectives on Open" and on what opencourseware and open education can learn from the open source movement.

The focus, says O'Reilly is on changing the world by spreading the knowledge of these innovators, focusing on that mission itself rather than on how that is actually accomplished.

And that is the advice he had for the OpenCourseWare Consortium members in the audience today, the representatives of the 250 universities who have published some 15,000 courses online - free and openly licensed: Focus on the mission. Think deeply about what it is that universities really do.

Unbundling the University with OpenCourseWare

Are universities about credentials or research? Are they a repository of knowledge? It's important, O'Reilly argued, if you want to be innovative "to think about what job you do for your customers (for your students) and not just think about how you do that job today but why you do it."

But it isn't simply a matter of thinking (or rethinking) your mission when it comes to making your university's course content available online. O'Reilly emphasized the importance of smaller pieces and modular design - to disassemble or unbundle some of that lengthy university heritage and offer OCW students learning opportunities that work more like YouTube talks, perhaps - 5 minute increments rather than 90 minute lectures, or semester-long courses.

Focus on the People, Not Just the Project

One of the most important lessons to be learned from open source may be to develop in public. O'Reilly pointed to the social coding site GitHub or the open source directory Ohloh as examples of how the development of ideas can and should be undertaken in public and with a community in mind.

It's important to make affordance for "the social," and to add community participation even to the things that may not seem inherently participatory. Developing an "architecture of participation" doesn't just mean measuring how many people download your courses or view your pages, but accounts for how many people actually contribute.

There seem to be many forces at play right now that are forcing higher education to rethink itself - rising student loan debt, falling government and foundation funding. Some universities are weighing the decision to monetize their course content online via distance learning programs, as opposed to opening that content via OCW.

Opencourseware, much as the open source movement did to software development, may be one of the key things that helps universities reconsider how they can build an open and interoperable learning environment and how they can actually create more value than they capture.

The slides from O'Reilly's talk are embedded below and available here.

"Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village."

Here is Jakubowski, a physicist turned farmer turned open source advocate, at TED talking about his project.

Here is the Global Village Construction Set in action.

Jakubowski photo via TED | other sources: PSFK

Until now, Ushahidi has been most known as a service for reporting location during times of crisis. From its use during the earthquake in Haiti to, most recently, the revolution in Egypt and Libya, the service has been used to help humanitarian workers quickly report location using SMS technology. Today, the company has taken a bit of a turn with the release of its open-source check-in service.

Now, anyone with a bit of PHP knowledge and a server can create a Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places or check-in service of their own and keep their location data out of the hands of the public and corporate alike.

Brian Herbert, director of Crowdmap, called the app a "roll your own Foursquare," saying that, with its release, Ushahidi became the only open source check-in platform available across mobile platforms.

Why, you might ask, would you want to "roll your own Foursquare?" The answer is simple - complete control over your own data. At a recent discussion of privacy and location-based services, Reputation.com's COO Owen Tripp discussed the various ways that location data could be used to negatively impact the end-user, from insurance companies using it to deny coverage requests to employers spying on their workers. Just as Status.net and Diaspora work to provide open-source alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, respectively, Ushahidi could provide a number of alternatives to any of the mainstream check-in services. It could also lead to an entirely new realm of specialized check-in services wherein the users control how their data is stored and used.

Beyond the ability to create your own location based service, the Ushahidi checkin app also increases the usability of Ushahidi for smartphone-bearing crisis workers.

"In some cases, it doesn't make sense to fill out full-on reports on Ushahidi, because it can be complicated," said Herbert. "Sometimes you want to be able to just drop a check in on a map, with maybe a photo."

In certain crisis situation, said Herbert, the smartphone app would simply be a "more simple reporting mechanism for something that's happening right now."

The iPhone application is available in the app store now. You can get it from the App Store and the Android app can be downloaded from the Android Marketplace.

If you download the app, make sure to check out SXSW.crowdmap.com where Ushahidi check-ins will be aggregated over the coming week.

No surprise, then, this chain of events has resulted in what seems to be a shaken confidence in Java. Indeed, that seems to be the consensus from a survey taken at JavaOne last fall. The survey was meant to gauge the Java community's thoughts on Oracle and open source.

56% said they were concerned about Oracle's lawsuit against Google, saying they felt that the lawsuit was bad for Java. 13% said they felt the lawsuit would be a good thing for Java.

The survey is not scientific to be sure. It was taken by EnterpriseDB, an open source competitor to Oracle, and taken from a group that has a clear stake in how these things shake out. Nonetheless, it certainly suggests there's plenty of concern about Oracle's leadership and the future of Java.

"Openwashing" is a term derived from "greenwashing" to refer to dubious vendor claims about openness. Openwashing brings the old "open vs. proprietary" debate back into play - not as "which one is better" but as "which one is which?"

What does it mean to be open? And how can you tell if a product is really "open"?

Why does it matter?

Take NASA's experience with Eucalyptus Systems as an example. NASA's Chris Kemp told The Register that the space agency had concerns that Eucalyptus's open source private cloud computing solution couldn't scale to meet the agency's needs. NASA engineers tried to contribute some new code to Eucalyptus to make it more scalable, but Eucalyptus rejected the contributions because they conflicted with code available in a closed source version it sold.

The source code that NASA was using was available, fulfilling at least one definition of the term "open source." But it wasn't open for contributions from outside and Eucalyptus served as a gatekeeper for the product. Eucalyptus didn't mislead customers - it was upfront about the existence of its proprietary offerings - but by some standards its product wasn't open. Eucalyptus has recently made moves towards being a more open company.

What is "Open"?

Openness can perhaps be best thought of as a scale rather than a binary state. Simon Phipps of the Open Standard Initiative (OSI) has suggested the creation of an Open Source Scorecard. Until such a thing exists, what can you do evaluate the openness of a product or solution?

Michael Coté of the analyst firm Red Monk says that in some cases openwashing is mere ignorance - a company's decision makers don't realize what really goes into making something truly open. In others, it's a matter of opinion. There's a lot of fine print involved, and not everyone agrees on what "open" is.

Gil Yehuda, the director of open source at Yahoo, says that a lot of companies are willing to release code but are reluctant to take contributions. "That's not really what open source is all about, but it does accomplish something," he says. Yehuda cites transparency, trust, motivation to write better code, and recognition for contributors as some of the benefits of such an arrangement.

But Yehuda says accepting contributions has its own benefits, such as "crowdsourcing bug-fixes, evolving the project in novel directions, and building real partnership with the community."

The first step in evaluating the level of openness of a product or solution is determining your own requirements. You need to decide in what ways you need the product or solution to be open. Then, complete the following steps to determine in which ways a product or solution is open.

1. Check the License

2. Evaluate the Community and Governance

Being "open" means more than just making source code available. It also means letting the community contribute to a project. In the case of open standards, it's important that as many stakeholders as possible have a say in the decision-making process. In the case of software, contributions should be judged by the merit of the code, not by whether the contributor works for the right company.

Developer Mikeal Rogers, who works for CouchOne, suggests looking at how decisions are made for a project. Are decisions made in public on a mailing list? Who can participate? Is the decision making process open only to vendors or can individuals join? Are dues involved?

In an interview on the Sun web site Phipps said "meritocracy, transparency of process, and open access for everybody with the necessary skills to participate in a project" are the essential elements of good governance for open source projects. The same elements can also be applied to open standards governance.

Coté adds that roadmaps should be publicly available. "If you open source something, it really should mean more than the source: your community, if you're lucky enough to have one, wants to know everything, including future directions."

3. Beware "Open Core" Software

Open core software is proprietary software built on top of open source software. This often means there's a free, open source (sometimes even with an OSI-approved license) version of a product available, but paid versions with proprietary features are a vendor's primary product. Eucalyptus is a historical example, though its moving away from that approach.

"This can be just fine, or terrible - it all depends on the communities expectations and how useful the open source software is on its own," says Coté.

However, Gartner analyst Brian Prentice writes that most of the advantages of open source software is lost when one upgrades to a paid edition of an open core solution. "You're licensing a proprietary solution from an organization which builds it with free open source components," he writes. "The direction that happens - either open-to-proprietary or proprietary-to-open - is meaningless to you."

Again, it comes down to your own requirements. You're best off considering open core products as proprietary products and making your decisions based on the same assumptions you would make about proprietary software unless you're sure the open source versions will meet your needs.

4. Read the Terms of Service for "Open" APIs

APIs are increasingly important as organizations rely on cloud services and many vendors claim to have "open" APIs. What should you look for in a vendor API?

Consider who can use the API, what purposes it can be used for and whether data flows both ways. You need to make sure that you won't be excluded from using the API and that your proposed uses for it aren't prohibited. You also need to make sure that you can write data to the service through the API and retrieve data from it through the API. For an example of an API that's free, but not necessarily open, check out our analysis of the Wolfram Alpha API.

Closing Thoughts

Yehuda says one of the best things about the open source community is that it that it's quite resistant to deception. If that's true, openwashing might not have a long shelf-life as a marketing tactic. But the debate over what is and isn't open will probably never die. That's why it's important to have a clear idea of what openness means to your organization.

Photo by ollinger

"This is a kind of software fraud we've never even heard of," writes Rosen in a blog post this evening, "a pirate simply downloading the app and resubmitting it to the same distribution channel at a lower price. We immediately emailed Apple explaining the situation, expecting them to quickly investigate the situation, shut down the fraudulent app, and follow up with us. We started this process a few days ago, and haven't heard back from Apple yet."

His justification for the claim: the release of Lugaru's source code last May.

That was an act done "in the spirit of the Humble Indie Bundle," a phenomenally successful pay-what-you-want video game sale, organized by Wolfire Games. At the end of the campaign, Lugaru, along with three of the other games that were part of the game bundle, went open source.

Lugaru's source code was released under the GPL or "general public license," one of the most common licenses for open source software. But while developers are free to hack away at the Lugaru code, Wolfire Games does retain all the legal rights to the characters and the game assets. Open sourcing Lugaru's code certainly doesn't give others the right to sell the game in the Mac App Store.

The folks at Wolfire Games have long been proponents of open source, often making the argument that it's a great way for indie game developers to help improve the code - and of course the games - they build. Rosen says he fears "this incident may make developers much less likely to release the source code to their games."

We've contacted Apple for comment, and will update when we hear more. It's not the first time that open source developers have run into problems with the new Mac Store, most recently when VLC was pulled after a developer claimed its presence there ran afoul of the GPL.

Under the banner of security, the U.S. has announced the creation of a "verified" ID program that looks for all the world like a walled, or at least fenced, section of the Internet. Russia has moved to open source not out of a philosophical belief in free software, but out of fear of American software hegemony.

Putin recently signed an executive order requiring all Russian governmental organizations and departments to go open source by 2015 and establishing the creation of a Russian open source software repository. Although this will save billions for the government, the reason behind a similar move among U.S. municipalities, the move seems more closely related to national security. Proprietary software - from Microsoft, Google and so on - puts Russia in a state of dependence on a sector that is overwhelmingly American.

There is also the issue of "back doors" in U.S. software. Are there any such points of access built into software at the behest of the American government? It seems doubtful. If there's evidence to that effect, it's in short supply. But the fear of it is a powerful motivator.

As the Internet and the web see more action as geopolitical battlefields, the willingness of countries to run their governments on software designed, built and sold by other countries decreases. Already, Iran has announced a move to open source and China is investigating the practicality of doing so. Turkey is examining the possibility of creating a national search engine and a national email system.

The Politics of Information

The politics of information seems to have always swung back and forth. For a while, any new way of sharing information seems like a liberation, with governments ignoring what they perceive as a fad or fringe-concern. Eventually, though, they catch on and it swings in the other other direction, with repressive laws and arrests and efforts to silo information.

Governments know that high-tech communications tools create wealth. But they are also aware they carry dissent. It is no exaggeration to say the effort to free information tech to create wealth, while simultaneously limiting its capacity to carry anti-government speech, occupies most governments today.

Will the creation of controllable, national information systems be successful? You underestimate government efforts at your peril, but you can likewise underestimate the (metaphorical) desire of information to move. We may well be witnessing the beginning of the end for the pretty fiction of the web as a liberating technology. But if that proves to be so, it would be surprising indeed if another technology did not come along eventually and knock the counterweight back.

Putin photo from World Economic Forum | Kremlin photo by Andrew Bossi | Checkpoint photo by Tony Cassidy

According to TUAW, the removal of VLC was not a case - as we have often seen - of Apple pulling an app because it felt as though it violated the developer guidelines. Rather, the app was removed because Apple received an infringement complaint from VLC developers.

Developer Rémi Denis-Courmont posted on the VideoLAN blog that "On January 7th, Apple removed VLC media player from its application store for iDevices. Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved - the hard way. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone, given the precedents."

The GNU General Public License (GPL) allows people to freely copy, distribute, and modify GPL software, but the digital rights management applied to those apps downloaded from Apple's App Store prevents that sort of sharing.

TUAW says that Denis-Courmont has waged a "one-man campaign against Applidium's iOS port of VLC, claiming the app violated the GNU public license (GPL) because App Store purchases have Digital Rights Management (DRM) applied to them." But Denis-Courmont disputes this version of events, detailing his thoughts on the app's removal in a subsequent blog post. Noting that it has been over two months since the initial claim of copyright infringement, Denis-Courmont minimizes his role in VLC's removal, instead pointing to Apple's anti-GPL stance. "All in all, we will probably never know the truth," he writes. "But I am inclined to believe what Eben Mogel, from the Software Freedom Law Center, foretold me 2 months ago: Apple would remove VLC simply because it cannot stand software distributed under the GPL on its stores."

The Future of GPL Apps

VLC's removal from the store is a shame for iPhone and iPad users, who could use the app to view video in formats not supported by Apple's video viewer. But the removal, particularly over conflicts with the GPL, highlights the conflicts between open source projects' licensing and their availability on Apple devices. Now that Apple has an App Store for Mac as well (with popular open source software like VLC noticeably missing), we may see more of these sorts of conflicts, with some developers eschewing Apple and wanting to retain the "purity," if you will, of the GPL and others simply wanting to take advantage of the popular Apple marketplace.

Drupal 7 includes a number of improvements to both performance and usability. The enhancements to the UI mean easier administration, update management, accessibility and content creation. There's also a new image editor that allows users to re-size and crop photos without having to leave the platform.

Drupal 7 also features RDFa semantic technology as part of its core. The design of the platform embeds semantic metadata that will make machine-to-machine search native for a Drupal 7 website. RDFa will be able to give search engines more details not visible to humans, such as latitude and longitude of a venue. According to Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert, "Adding semantic technology to Drupal core will make a notable contribution to the future of the web."

The Drupal platform has seen increasing adoption, powering hundreds of thousands of websites, including a number of quite prominent ones, including WhiteHouse.gov and NASA.