Related link: http://www.musicbrainz.org/index.html

MusicBrainz, an open, community-built music “metadatabase”, today launches its services to a larger audience.

The website has a fresh look and more details than ever before about the history, progress, and future of this public resource. The White Paper on MusicBrainz’s plans to become a self-sustaining non-profit corporation is especially informative.

New with this launch is also an innovative triple-licensing strategy. First, recognizing the important principle that facts are not copyrightable, MusicBrainz explicitly affirms that the factual information in its database is in the public domain, free for all to use.

Second, in a compact with its community of volunteer contributors, it offers all original/derived/authored materials in its database under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

Finally, when commercial initiatives seek to use the MusicBrainz data, case-by-case commercial licenses will be offered in return for financial sponsorship which allows the project to continue.

This three-track approach attempts balances the public interest, contributor desires, and the long-term health of the MusicBrainz project, and could become a model for other not-for-profit community-authored projects.

I’m rooting for this innovative model — and if you are too, you can join me and other supporters by contributing your time, money, or expertise directly to MusicBrainz. (I just PayPal’d $50…)

What benefits do you see flowing from the MusicBrainz project?

I can’t read the Japanese, but from the Flash animation, it appears that Sony is offering a 20GB portable WiFi file server.

More information is available via the German site Computerwoche (”Computer Week”), in article: Sony announces WiFi Fileserver in the Walkman format (Google translation):

MUNICH (COMPUTER WEEK) - Japanese electronics company Sony has a portable file server presented which, which kommunziert over Wireless LAN with PCS and PDAs. The “Fsv-pg1″ works with a Linux based operating system and contains a 20-GB-Festplatte in the 2,5-Zoll-Format, 17 GB of it is available for user data. The equipment fits with masses of 83 x 155 x of 31 millimeters loosely into a hand and weighs 390 gram. For the enterprise all thing a power pack is necessary, the internal Akku serves only for baking UP purposes.

The inserted ACCESS POINT (IEEE 802.11b) can serve according to manufacturer up to 250 users at the same time. Access to the stored files is possible over ftp, CIFS (Common InterNet file system) or NFS. By a Ethernet Cradle available as accessories the equipment can connect accessing Clients by WLAN in addition with the InterNet. As safety functions the Fsv-pg1 incoming inspection coding with alternatively 64 or 128 bits offers, stored files can by password be protected.

On the Net&Com 2003 in Tokyo the equipment is presented today to the public for the first time. It is to come at the end of March for converted 585 dollar on the Japanese market, the Cradle costs again scarcely 60 dollar. Whether and when the equipment appears also in this country, is not well-known.

You might call the kind of drive-by file sharing enabled by such devices “warsharing”.

Would you grab files from a server which temporarily appeared within your wireless range?

The hallways and confererence rooms are buzzing with activity here in San Diego at the O’Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference.

Tim O’Reilly introduced the morning keynotes, and gave a short introduction explaining why O’Reilly & Associates has been involved in bioinformatics. Tim explained that it was continuing O’Reilly’s tradition of bringing news from the future and following the alpha geeks, and he noted the strong ties to open source software that exist in the bioinformatics community.

Following Francis Ouellette’s keynote on genomic annotation, one of the heros of genomics was recognized, as Jim Kent was awarded the Bioinformatics.org Ben Franklin award. Kent, who practically singlehandedly beat the commercial effort to decode the human genome, followed the award with a timely keynote on the state of genomics aptly titled, “The Genes, the Whole Genes, and Nothing But the Genes”.

After starting out with a slide that made an amusing comparison between himself and Richard Stallman, who bears a resemblance to the shaggy Kent (”He’s ‘Free as in Freedom’, I’m ‘Free as in Free Lunch’), Kent went on to detail the different methods that are currently in use genomics. Kent colncluded that neither computational or traditional “wet” biological research methods were enough on their own, and a combination of both types of research were necessary to be able to make serious progress in identifying genes.

Besides Kent’s keynote, some of the sessions generating the most interest here were Doug Tidwell’s “XSLT for Bioinformatics” tutorial, and Nat Goodman’s “BioPerl: Reality vs. Myth”. In an informal survey taken by Tim O’Reilly this morning, Perl emerged as the language of choice by this crowd, and Goodman’s overflowing session confirms that.