On Saturday afternoon I joined the workshop on Terrorism and Europe organized by the Centre for New European Research at Hitotsubashi University. I chaired the third session, and was lucky to have three  speakers give excellent talks from different perspectives:

• Tetsuo Sato from Hitotsubashi's Faculty of Law gave an excellent overview of the attempts to deal with terrorism in international law over the past fifty years or so;
• David Leheny of the Univ. of Wisconsin gave a very lively talk in which he stressed the extreme difficulty of evaluating the success of counter-terrorism measures, with the result that domestic and international political interests and ideas play a large role in the policies that are adopted;
• Yoshiko Ashiwa, my colleague in the Institute for the Study of Global Issues, described the way in which the LTTE has developed as an organization since the 1970s, in recent years learning a lot from NGOs and becoming skillful at mobilising civil society in the Tamil-speaking areas of Sri Lanka.

Yesterday afternoon I requested an inter-library loan on the Hitotsubashi library website. Just now—exactly 24 hours later—I got an email saying the book had arrived at Hitotsubashi library. Admittedly the book only had to travel from GRIPS in Roppongi, but I am well impressed.

The book is Protecting the virtual commons : self-organizing open source and free software communities and innovative intellectual property regimes / R. van Wendel de Joode, J.A. de Bruijn, M.J.G. van Eeten ; . -- T.M.C. Asser Press, c2003

(Update: John's lecture is now on the web.)

Yesterday afternoon I took John Mraz and his wife Eli Bartra to Hitotsubashi, where John delivered a fine lecture entitled "Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity." He has given me permission to put the recording of his lecture on the Centre for New European Research website, so I am currently editing the audio and enjoying his gravelly voice (over and over) again. He showed more than 60 photographs dating from the US-Mexican war to the present day, and it would of course be much better if  people could look at the photographs he is talking about. I imagine the older pictures are in the public domain, but getting permission to put the more recent ones online would be a major effort. I regret not asking John to give a brief description of each photograph for the sake of listeners. Anyway he says a lot of interesting things that I think will make the recording worth listening to in its own right.

We arrived in New Delhi yesterday, and are spending Holi cocooned in the luxury of the Claridges Hotel. As this is a public holiday and everything is shut, and as furthermore we dare not venture outside for fear of being covered with coloured powder, we are studying in our hotel today. I'm working on my lecture for Friday. My problem is to make a coherent lecture out of some information and thoughts on government policy for open source software, and the practice of open source development as I have observed it in the Japanese Plone community. There are one or two links between the two (at least three of the Japanese Plonistas I know get a fair degree of work from public bodies), but the levels of analysis are very different. 

I'm in Fukuoka, in advance of the open sessions at the 5th Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum. I met some of the IPA people in charge of OSS promotion last month in Tokyo, and hope to get some idea of how East Asian governments and business are collaborating on open source.

I enjoyed some fascinating conversations over dinner. With Masayuki Hatta of Tokyo University and the Debian project I discussed academic studies of open source, and whether open source is at heart better suited for large or small software companies. We had Hisashi Hashimoto of Hitachi on hand to give the large company perspective, and he told us that more and more Japanese clients are asking about and for open source. Finally, Koichi Yano of Turbolinux told me about a new product they're going to demo tomorrow: a 4GB USB stick memory that works as a music player but that is also a bootable Linux system that you can plug into any PC (or Intel Mac) and just start up. If there's not enough room for your data you can store it on Turbolinux's servers. They intend to have it on the market next February. Wow!!

I finally watched a recording of an NHK Close-up Gendai documentary on operating systems that was broadcast on 24 January 2007. The documentary highlighted the problems faced by public institutions such as schools, fire stations and city offices in keeping their computer systems secure and up-to-date. Many of them are continuing to use hardware bought seven or more years ago, and it is impossible to upgrade those machines to Vista. However Microsoft's announcement of discontinued support for 98, Me and eventually XP means those systems are becoming less secure. Some institutions are responding by installing Linux on all their machines and retraining their staff.

The program made continued reference to open source without telling viewers what it means or what it costs. Linux was described as something you can download from the net without paying, which is of course true, but the installed versions we saw were all Novell Linux Desktop, for the installation and support of which I imagine Novell had been paid. And, more important, there was no explanation of the fact that because the code is publicly available people can keep supporting it for as long as they need to.

There was no nationalistic angle to the program that I could detect: it was just arguing for more competition.

Many thanks to the OSS office of IPA for the recording.