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Commons good

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Creative Commons is doing important work: Pushing back against the juggernaut of overly restrictive copyrighting, and striving to create new models for intellectual property that encourage openness, collaboration and creative reuse while respective the rights of creators.

If you missed their big party on Sunday, as I did, you can catch up with the latest news from the group — in entertaining, Flash-file format —
here. (This short animation is a follow-up to the group’s introductory movie, which lays out the basics of the Creative Commons ideal.)

Interesting news: Creative Commons is unveiling a new “sampling OK” license, and to introduce it to the world Brazil’s Gilberto Gil will release a new recording under it.

Programming’s two cultures

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Joel Spolsky is one of the great writers on programming today, and his essay on the differences between Unix programming culture and Windows programming culture — built around a review of Eric Raymond‘s new book, “The Art of Unix Programming” — offers a slew of useful insights. (You don’t need to be a programmer to get a lot out of this piece.)

The key idea here: “Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.”

Bush’s Iraqi debt plan: Foot. Shoot. Ouch!

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There remains, in some quarters at least, a notion that the Bush administration — whatever you think of it ideologically — has its act together: That the Republicans running our country are seasoned, experienced, competent public servants who understand how to manipulate the levers of power, domestically and internationally, to achieve their goals. You can expect this notion to play a big part in the Bush campaign’s war-of-images with its Democratic opponents, particularly if Howard Dean wins the nomination.

But events keeps playing havoc with the idea of the Bush administration’s competence. This week’s devastating case is the Iraqi contracts-and-debt fiasco. If you haven’t followed closely, this is the sequence of events:

(1) President Bush announces that he’s calling in his favorite fixer, James Baker, to handle a new diplomatic effort to obtain some relief for Iraqi debt from the many nations Saddam Hussein had run up debts with. Among Iraq’s big creditors: Germany, France and Russia.

(2) The Pentagon publishes a rule that, on grounds of “national security,” forbids nations that failed to join the military coalition against Saddam from bidding on contracts to help rebuild Iraq. Among those the rule blocks: Germany, France and Russia.

(3) Bush’s and Baker’s new Iraq debt-relief initiative has its knees kicked in before it even starts, as Russian and other leaders scorn the U.S.’s overtures.

Much of this sorry affair is chronicled in today’s New York Times. As one official puts it in the Times: “What we did was toss away our leverage.” In the short term, it means that Bush will have a much harder time trying to ease Iraq’s debt burden; in the long term, it means that the total cost of the Iraq adventure to the deficit-strapped American people will end up far higher.

Is this foul-up evidence of a continuing internecine power struggle between the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz axis of hawks at Defense and the Powellite internationalists at State, for whom Baker is a sort of emeritus leader? Is revenge against perfidious “old Europe” — and lucrative contracts for former employers and pals of Bush and Cheney — more important than building a financial coalition to share the prodigious cost of Iraqi reconstruction? Or is the train wreck more simply a sign of an administration that can’t coordinate important policies at the most basic levels?

Whatever the answer, shouldn’t we expect our executive branch to not trip itself up in such bizarrely self-defeating ways? After all, it’s not just Iraq’s debt that Bush is messing around with. Since the U.S. has no choice but to remain strategically committed to making post-Saddam Iraq work, the U.S.’s fiscal future is equally at stake.

Dean and the Dukakis hex

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So now Al Gore is endorsing Howard Dean. The primaries don’t start for weeks, but the Dean bandwagon certainly has impressive momentum. Nine, even six months ago, the conventional wisdom viewed Dean as a long-shot outsider. Today, he’s the man to beat.

Any time a candidate pulls off this sort of feat, it usually means there’s more going on than the media can figure out. So far, the standard skeptical line on Dean is that his campaign appeals primarily to white-collar workers, yuppies, geeks and starry-eyed college students. But if his support were really that narrow, it’s hard to imagine him even getting as far as he has.

I think the Dean campaign’s innovations have significantly outstripped the media’s ability to interpret them. Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is… (Chris Nolan has some choice comments on the same topic.) If six months ago, the experts thought Dean didn’t have a shot at the nomination, maybe we shouldn’t unquestioningly swallow today’s expert line — that, if nominated, Dean will go down to McGovern- and Dukakis-style defeat.

Sure, it might happen. There’s a year’s worth of history to unfold between now and November 2004. And Bush has an unprecedented mountain of money to spend.

But — despite the propaganda that Dean is the candidate Karl Rove would most like to run against — it’s not as if Bush can walk easy. After all, the red state/blue state electoral breakdown from the 2000 election was a dead heat. You can cede the Republicans the South and still win if you capture just one more state than Gore did.

As someone who came of age in the 1970s in the aftermath of Watergate, I tend toward political pessimism: The bad guys are always worse than you think they could possibly be, and the good guys’ victories rarely stick. But, like a surprisingly large number of other Americans, I’m sensing a little room for hope. It’s too early for me to choose a candidate, but Dean has won my attention. His rhetoric is impressive, his openness to change is attractive.

To those who say he’s doomed the way Adlai Stevenson was doomed, I’d say — maybe. But maybe the world has changed in the 50 years that have passed since Ike trounced his “egghead” opponent. And, though Stevenson lost twice in 1952 and 1956, don’t forget who America elected in 1960.

JFK broke that losing streak for the Democrats. I still haven’t heard a conclusive argument why Dean doesn’t have a shot at lifting the Dukakis curse.

The RSS Pushmepullyu

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My column on RSS, which noted how poor a name the acronym is, sparked a good discussion over at John Battelle’s blog about how to find a better name.

And I note (thanks to Lockergnome for the link) that Amy Gahran of Contentious has a contest going for a new name.

Jeremy Zawodny makes the same point I was trying to make, in a slightly different way:

  In 2004, RSS is going to go mainstream–and it’s going to happen in a big way. Remember when you first starting seeing URLs appear on billboards and at the end of movie trailers? So do I. It’s going to be like that. One day we’re just going to look around and realize that RSS is popping up all over the place. And a couple years later, we’ll all wonder how we ever got along without it.

Finally, Dru (no last name provided) wrote in to say, “RSS is not push, it is all pull. And that is extremely important… Any time an RSS reader goes to check on a feed, it pulls down a copy from the given url.”

He’s absolutely right, in terms of the technical meaning. However, from the user’s standpoint RSS provides essentially what “push” promised but delivered only with great, painful effort: dynamic notification of new stuff to read. So, though I stand corrected in my use of the term, I think the analogy still holds.

The paper chase

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Robert X. Cringely’s technology commentary on the PBS Web site is always entertaining, sometimes off-the-wall, occasionally unreliable, and every now and then so right-on it’s frightening. His piece on the voting machine mess falls into that last category:

  Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines — EVERY ONE — creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not.

New column: Ode to RSS

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Since starting this blog my output of regular columns has declined, but I’m back, tonight, with an ode to RSS. This will be old hat to many reading here, but for the wider world of Salon’s readers and beyond, RSS remains a novelty worth introducing with a fanfare.

Fog of war invades game of telephone!

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Jeff Jarvis suggests that I am on the garbled end of a game of telephone or “teleclick” in my post about the battle of Samarra below — and that I’m deriving “Vietnam nostalgia” in the process, to boot. Then Glenn Reynolds nods approvingly. It sounds good, but Jeff is completely misreading my post.

My question — “54 Saddam loyalists dead? Or American soldiers firing on Iraqi civilians?” — wasn’t derived in a tag-team hand-off from Cole to Marshall to me; it’s a question that lies at the very heart of the conflicting accounts of the event itself, as summarized in the New York Times story I linked to at the very start of my post (and that Jarvis links to as well): “Accounts of a three-hour battle fought in the alleys and streets of Samarra on Sunday diverged radically, with Iraqis saying only eight people had been killed, several of them civilians.” It is the question about this still-hard-to-read event, and one does not have to wear Vietnam-colored glasses to ask it. My point remains: Our leadership would have a lot more credibility in these situations if it hadn’t racked up such an awful record in the past.

So Jeff misunderstands or distorts my post, and Glenn applauds. Who’s playing telephone, again?

Fog of war dept.

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Lord knows what really happened at that battle in Samarra — or whether we will ever find out — but Juan Cole and Josh Marshall are asking the right questions.

54 Saddam loyalists dead? Or American soldiers firing on Iraqi civilians? It would be so much more reassuring to believe our side’s version of the story. If only our side had a better track record of telling the truth. But we’re too busy making up stories about our president’s bravery.