As reported in the IMPACT legal blog and elsewhere, the UK government has launched a consultation on copyright exceptions. Perhaps unknown to many people, it is currently illegal in the UK to copy works, such as music and video, from format to format, device to device, unless explicitly permitted by the licence. Although many millions of people have probably copied music from CDs to their computer or music player, or from their computer to a CD to listen to in their car, this is usually illegal.

The proposals being consulted about, however, include the idea that consumers should be able to "make a copy of a work they legally own, so that they can make the work accessible in another format for playback on a device in their lawful possession". The aim of this exception would be to permit "format shifting", the "copying of legitimately owned works to different formats for use on different devices". The full consultation document is available here.

This seems to me to be one of the most immediately sensible and non-controversial things the government could do in the field of copyright at present.

But, restrictive DRM technology has been quietly, and not so quietly, weaving its way into people's homes and lives, on devices and in their music and video files. Current DRM technologies physically prohibit the kind of copying being proposed in the consultation, without reference to any national laws. How can these two ideas be reconciled?

Well, it's no secret that I am no fan of DRM, and would love this to signal the demise of such schemes which impose technical restrictions far beyond legal limitations. So, would this kind of DRM under such a new law be illegal? That seems an unknown at present, but even if not it seems unfair to criminalise anyone hacking such a DRM system in order to obtain their legal rights.

This post is somewhat delayed (given that I wasn't around much last week) but KDE 4 has now been released. The internet is now full of reviews and blog posts about this highly significant milestone in the development of KDE and free software generally. The KDE news post can be found here, and there are articles here, here and here. If you have a spare hour, I also highly recommend watching the release event's keynote speech, delivered by Aaron Seigo, President of KDE e.V, the non-profit organisation which represents the KDE project legally and financially. The video, available here, contains lots of nice demos of the new functionality, and also introduces the new frameworks (or pillars) upon which KDE 4 is built. It also shows early demos of KDE running natively on Windows and OSX, as platform independence was always one of the goals of KDE 4. This is a little contravertial, but also quite exciting as it has the potential to bring in many more users (and testers and developers).

I myself have installed the KDE 4.0.0 packages, available with Kubuntu Gutsy (see here), though haven't had much time to look at it yet. Hence I'm going to refrain from any real judgement or review until a later date. I will say, however, that despite a few of my concerns around Dolphin and the general move to dumb down much of the user interface, it does look very nice indeed, and I like the sound of where the project is heading. It's good to see a piece (suite?) of software which I use so much having so much effort and momentum behind its development. Personally, I'm going to be very interested to see the new Akonadi (named apparently after the Greek god of Knowledge) personal information management framework come into play in forthcoming releases.

As all the release statements and blogs say, KDE 4.0.0 is merely the beginning of KDE 4. The frameworks are now laid out and finalised, the applications are coming together. It is in no way yet suitable as a replacement for KDE 3.5, simply because the applications are not there yet (such as Kontact), but with a little time, I am certain that this will become an excellent leading edge desktop system.

I was recently given a bike by my parents for my birthday. I know that this makes me sound like I'm about 12, but hey ho, they knew that I'd been wanting one for a while and I hadn't got around to buying one. I'm actually really pleased with it.

By most standards, I probably live in one of the best places in the country for cycling (unless you're really into mountain biking or BMX or something else). I live within about a 2 minute ride of a route on the national cycle network and about 5 minutes from the national canal network, which from Bournville, not only goes to university (where I work), but also beyond to the city centre and ultimately the rest of the country.

The ride into university takes about 15 to 20 minutes, which is basically how long it had been taking me by train, given that I usually end up waiting about 5 minutes or so for one.

Now the decision of whether to ride or go by train now seems to me to be an easy decision. As an example of mechanism design, this is how I see it: Each day I get paid £1.80 (the train fare) to exercise for half an hour. It takes up no more time out of my day, and there's none of the expense (and in my opinion boredom) associated with going to a gym.

So, the picture above shows my new route to work. And, as if the benefits already were not enough, instead of being advertised at by the omnipresent telescreens on the train, I instead get to enjoy the drifting smell of chocolate being made at the Cadbury factory, and to watch the ducks and geese flapping and hissing at me as I ride past.

Now I'm just waiting for my first rainy day...

I bought a CD this week. Exciting stuff, eh? It's not worth a mention, of course, except that I thought I'd give a bit more interweb presence to whom I've discovered are quite a good local band. Friends of the Stars are based in Moseley, in Birmingham.

Somehow - I'm not exactly sure of the sequence of events leading up to it - I ended up on their email list, and they started sending me links to tracks and previews and things available online. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't spam, just that I probably signed up and forgot about it. Anyway, after having listened to their melodious folky kind of sound for a while, I decided to buy their CD, Lighting & Electrical. Click, click, click and I'm done, as is how we're used to these days. It should be here within a couple of days, I thought.

Just a couple of hours later, and Craig, from the band, emails me to say thanks for the purchase, and that since I'm only down the road, he'd just pop the CD through my letterbox. Great stuff. This has to be the antithesis of Amazon and CD WOW, the latter of which ships its CDs to the UK from Hong Kong in order to shave a little off the cost.

Nice one Craig, I'm enjoying your tunes very much.

For the last couple of months, I've been very fortunate and grateful to have been lent a Neo 1973 smartphone by Andy Loughran. Thanks Andy.

The Neo is the first piece of hardware which has been released by FIC, as part of the OpenMoko project. OpenMoko aims to create a fully free (as in freedom) mobile phone. Both harware specs and the software source code are free and open. So, what's it like?

Well, for a start, the thing runs Linux, which is rather cool and makes sense given how successful Linux has been on other small devices such as the Sharp Zaurus. The Neo is very obviously running Linux too, with the scrolling text boot-up screen Linux users will be famlilar with, from time to time hidden by a progress bar decorated splash screen. I decided not to put any real pictures or screenshots on this post, since none of the ones I tried came out very well, and there are lots of good examples on the net already, such as this video on YouTube and these pictures on Flickr. Zeth Green has also written about the OpenMoko software, and his post here has some great screenshots.

This is a project which I wholeheartedly support. Mobile phones are probably the last major area of modern personal computing-based technology which does not yet have a decent free software option. Indeed, since the phones are very often bought from the network operating companies themselves, the companies almost without exception impose some form of locking down on your phone. The extreme example is probably the iPhone, of which a friend of mine is currently having to downgrade the software, in order to get it to do what he wants. Apple has left no doubt as to its view on people having any kind of control over their own equipment. Other examples of locking down include non-optional firmware upgrades, tying you into one particular network and most importantly making it very difficult to develop your own software for the thing, in order to make it work in the way in which you want it to.

OpenMoko is changing this idea. Okay, but let's be honest, we're still not there yet. Whilst the hardware is virtually finished, the software is still really a work in progress. Power management, for example, is still quite broken, meaning that the phone won't go into standby mode properly and loses its entire battery in just a couple of hours. The phone is also quite a pain to charge, since it seems to go through phases of turning itself on and off repeatedly when it doesn't have much juice in it. These problems, of course, will be fixed in good time.

But these initial factors, whilst making the Neo unusable as an everyday phone at present, cannot rain on the parade that is the achievement in bringing really good free smartphone software into the world. The OpenMoko software suite looks nice, being based on GTK+, the widgets used in GNOME, and works well for the most part. The phone's touchscreen makes it feel more like a PDA than a normal phone, but I guess that perceptions will change with more and more touchscreen phones being invented, such as the aforementioned iPhone. There are small usability problems to be sorted out, like the touchscreen keyboard requiring accuracy the likes of only Robin Hood possess with the stylus, in order to enter words. Nevertheless, it's easy to see how this will be a major player in the phone market once it is finalised.

The OpenMoko software will run not only on the Neo 1973, but also on many other phones, according to the OpenMoko project. It's easy to predict a scenario where OpenMoko can be installed on pretty much any phone, rather like how Rockbox can be installed on pretty much any music player. This has to be a good thing.

And in case this wasn't enough, there's also the Qtopia smartphone software, also open source, being developed by Trolltech, the Noweigian company who develop QT, the libraries upon which KDE is based. While OpenMoko will look familiar to GNOME users, KDE users will probably feel more at home with Qtopia, and it looks just as good. The Qtopia software, which has been primarily developed for their reference platform, the Greenphone, is perhaps a little closer to release quality at present, and can, as mentioned, be installed easily on the Neo.

All this flexibility, in my opinion, hails a fantastic, revolutionary time for our now ubiquitous mobile phones. Pretty soon, we will all have the choice not only of which phone to use, but also of which software to run on it, regardless of hardware or network. We'll be able to extend it, modify it, and share our work with the community. The success of the free software model has really been demonstrated through many hugely successful projects. When the ability to improve stuff is open to anyone, it seems, all sorts of possibilities come into play and things get better. Just take a look at this video showing someone running the KDE 4 desktop, Plasma on the Neo, merely a couple of weeks after its release, and this one of Enlightenment E17 running on it.

OpenMoko is a great start, the Neo is quite a cool looking phone, Qtopia is coming along really well, and with projects like KDE embracing PDAs and phones as part of its cross-platform approach (see my post on KDE 4), the future looks very bright for free and open phones. Arguably the KDE vs GNOME desktop competition has been a good driver of free unix-based desktop systems, and it seems we won't be able to escape that particular war even on our mobile phones.

Anyway, flame wars and trolling aside, I'm looking forward to the freedom to choose.