1984...meet DRM. Source: jbonnain on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.

The New York Times reports that Amazon is offering free-of-charge replacement copies of the deleted George Orwell e-books Animal Farm and 1984. Those who do not wish to replace their e-books may get $30 or an Amazon gift certificate instead.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, apologized to customers for the deletions in July. And late Thursday, the company tried to put the incident behind it, offering to deliver new copies of “1984” and “Animal Farm” at no charge to affected customers.

Amazon said in an e-mail message to those customers that if they chose to have their digital copies restored, they would be able to see any digital annotations they had made. Those who do not want the books are eligible for an Amazon gift certificate or a check for $30, the company said.

The message included Mr. Bezos’s mea culpa from July. “This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of ‘1984’ and other novels on Kindle,” Mr. Bezos said. He went on to describe Amazon’s actions as “stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles.”

It’s good to see Amazon admitting that they made a huge mistake here, and I applaud them for not making up excuses instead. Still, this highlights a huge problem with DRM’d e-books and e-book readers like the Kindle. Whether Amazon will pull a similar stunt in the future is uncertain, although the backlash from this makes it unlikely. However, it is important to remember that this could still be used for more nefarious purposes, such as oppressive governments coaxing Amazon into removing e-books that the government considers a threat to their well-being.

• The New York Times (cookies required)
• Slashdot

Textbooks. Source: "just the ones i'm getting rid of" by Plutor on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.

AOL Money & Finance reports that Flat World Knowledge, a textbook publishing company that publishes college textbooks under a semi-free license, will reach over 40,000 students at over 400 universities in the fall.

The increased adoption of Flat World’s free and low-cost open source textbooks follows two semesters of successful in-classroom trials. During Spring 2009 trials, Flat World textbooks were shown to reduce average textbook costs to only $18 per student per class, an 82 percent cost reduction compared to traditional printed textbooks averaging $100 per student per class.

“We’ll save college students and their families nearly $3 million in textbook expenses this semester,” said Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder. “We’re on track to expand to 50,000 students in Spring 2010 and to 120,000 students in Fall 2010. By the conclusion of 2010, Flat World will have conservatively saved 200,000 students over $15 million.”

While I would prefer a fully free license instead of a semi-free one (the books appear to be licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), this is still an improvement from the “traditional” model of overpriced physical textbooks that somehow manage to outdate themselves after only one year and digital versions or supplements that lock you in to a specific format or viewer and deny you the right of first sale.

• AOL Money & Finance

Waves. Source: "scope" by noii's on Flickr. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.

Google has released two parts of its Wave protocol under the Apache License version 2.

To kickoff Federation Day, we open sourced two components: 1) the Operational Transform (OT) code and the underlying wave model, and 2) a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave and we plan that code will evolve into the production-quality reference implementation. The prototype is intended primarily as a simple “hello, world” implementation, to encourage experimentation using the Google Wave Federation Protocol. All of this code — nearly 40,000 lines of Java code — is available under the Apache 2.0 license, and we’ll be open sourcing more code as wave evolves. Check out the source code and get started with the introductory documentation.

Hopefully Google will make good on their promise to release more code in the future.

• Google Wave Developer Blog
• Ars Technica
• Slashdot

Blackboard. Source: shonk on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.

The Washington Business Journal reports that all 38 contested claims in Blackboard’s e-learning patent have been invalidated on appeal of the Desire2Learn infringement case.

“Blackboard is obviously disappointed with the Federal Circuit’s decision and will seek further judicial review,” said Matthew Small, chief business officer for Blackboard (NASDAQ:BBBB). “Meanwhile, claims 39-44 of the 138 patent remain valid and enforceable. These claims were not at issue in the appeal.”

Even though Blackboard won just more than $3 million in damages from a jury trial in the U.S. District Court for Eastern District of Texas in February 2008, that court also found 35 of 38 claims of the patent to be invalid.

A good victory against bad patents, even if a number of claims remain valid. Blackboard is still proprietary and still has a horrible UI, so if you are still in the process of ditching it, I would continue to do so.

• Washington Business Journal [Print Version]
• Slashdot

"Shuttle Launch" by oneaustin on Flickr (CC-By-SA-2.0)

Released under the AGPLv3, Launchpad is now Free Open Source Software.

Karl Fogel writes on the Launchpad Blog:

This is a post I’ve been looking forward to for a long time:

Launchpad is now open source!

We released it today under the GNU Affero General Public license, version 3. Note that although we had previously announced that we’d be holding back two components (codehosting and soyuz), we changed our minds: they are included — all the code is open.

Big congratulations (and thanks) to the Canonical Launchpad team, who worked overtime to make this happen sooner rather than later, and to Mark Shuttleworth, whose decision it was to open source Launchpad in the first place.

I’ve been waiting for this a good deal of time now, and I’m sure many others have been too. I favor the Bazaar VCS over git, so I’ll have no second thoughts using launchpad for any future application development.

• Entry on Launchpad Blog

Press Here - Credit: pressheretv.com

Mike Linksvayer (VP of CC) and John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla) make an appearance on NBCs press:here

Yesterday morning, “Press:Here” – a new technology news TV show produced by NBC in the San Francisco Bay Area – aired an interview with Creative Commons Vice President Mike Linksvayer. The episode serves as a nice primer to CC; in it, Mike gives some of our backstory and talks about how people and organizations are using CC’s copyright licenses to make sharing and collaboration easier. Mozilla CEO John Lilly is one of the episode’s other featured guests. Watch it online.

Wait, isn’t NBC in a league with MS?  How did this happen?

• Creative Commons

Google has released a server for the NX remote desktop protocol, called Neatx, under a GPL license:

There is a free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine’s libraries named FreeNX, but this did not appeal to Google.

“FreeNX’s primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of Bash, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain,” according to Google.

“Designed from scratch with flexibility and maintainability in mind, Neatx minimizes the number of involved processes and all code is split into several libraries.”

Neatx is written in Python with a time-critical process written in C and some wrappers in bash script.

Good to see Google contributing some code again.

• Neatx’s Google Code page
• TechWorld article

Carthaginian - Credit: wildfiregames.com

Wildfire Games has decided to make their work-in-progress RTS game 0 A.D. free content by releasing the source code under the GPL v2 and putting all of the artwork for it under a CC-BY-SA license. While it is not yet playable, the developers hope to attract new developers to the project:

We’ve been working on this game in some form or another since 2001. We’ve come a long way since then, but making this kind of game is really quite hard. The original team members were largely students, and have now moved on in life and can’t devote much time to the project. Attracting new developers is difficult and time-consuming – few people have the time and skill to learn how to work within our existing code and to make significant contributions. So we want to lower the barriers to entry, making it easy for people to check out our project and see if it interests them, in the hope that some will decide it does.

While Wildfire’s initial contribution is free content, whether or not future contributions will fall under that category is up in the air at the moment:

Licensing of contributions is an open question. On one hand, accepting GPL code would guarantee to contributors that we’re not going to unfairly use their work. On the other hand we’d like to keep our options open by only accepting BSD-licensed code, perhaps to produce a special version linked with proprietary cheat-detection software to discourage multiplayer map hacks that would be trivial to add to an open-source game, or to link with proprietary digital distribution systems to get more widespread distribution. The ideal solution is not clear, so we’d be interested in discussion of this issue.

The cynic in me wants to say that they’re doing this to revive a dying project that lacks developers, but even if that were true, this is a significant contribution to the free content gaming world, especially since the current offering of open content strategy engines don’t look nearly as good as 0 A.D. does. I’m a bit wary of the licensing of future contributions, but they seem open to discussion about keeping it free. Time will tell, I guess.

• Phoronix article
• 0 A.D. open source page

Google Images - Credit: google.com

Google Images now recognizes Creative Commons and let’s you filter your searches based on the suite of licenses as well as other licenses.

Let’s say you’re a blogger. You’ve just returned from a trip to New York City, and you’re writing a post on New York landmarks. You want to illustrate your travel guide with an image — as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s easy to find images of New York online. But you want to make sure that you don’t use images without the permission of their owners, and you can’t afford licensing fees for professional photographers.

Today, we’re launching a feature on Image Search to help you find images that you can use for free, while respecting the wishes of artists and creators. This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

A little late.  I was expecting this about a year ago.

• Google Blog
• Creative Commons

Uknown Horizons - Credit: Unknown Horizons

Unknown Horizons 2009.1 (a major release) has been released recently.

We have made many improvements to our previous release, 2009.0. Here is a list of the most important changes:

• All new user interface.
• Gettext supported muiltlanguage support. This release comes with complete English, French and German translations and mostly complete Norwegian and Portuguese translations.
• New main music theme.
• A boatbuilder to build new ships for your fleet.
• Hunter graphics added. No functionality yet.
• Some revamped ingame graphics, like new inhabitants.
• Some performance improvements for the build process. Previews are now shown much faster.
• Lots of bugfixes.
• Removed all drop down widgets to ensure crashfree setting changing.
• Lots of code refactoring. More to come.
• Saving and loading of games.

It’s bad how many posts I’ve mad about this one, and have not yet played it.

• Unknown Horizons