Then Apple pushed iPhone OS 4 – or iOS4, as it’s now called – and the trouble began. Programs on my phone kept crashing, the sound kept getting interrupted and it became glacially slow. My phone went from being a thing of beauty and a joy to use to being a clunky machine to be endured and cursed. Using Wellington’s helpful text-to-park feature became nearly impossible because the parking machine would time out in the time it took me to send it a text message. And, in what was the last straw, it started ignoring incoming calls and going straight to voicemail.

This is the story of how I fixed all that by going back to iPhone OS 3.

Many others with the same phone model are complaining. I called Apple about it and they told me to reset the phone. I had tried that already, of course. I also updated it to 4.0.2, the very latest iOS, but to no avail. I tried all the tricks to improve the speed on a 3G that I could find on the Net including turning off Spotlight but it didn’t return my phone to a usable state. So I went back to the old iPhone OS.

Apple say that it is not possible to return an iPhone 3G that has been “upgraded” to iOS4 to the previous release of the iPhone software. There are many pages on the Web telling you how to do it, so I didn’t believe them. It is possible, as I have proved for myself, but it took a fair bit of time and some nail biting moments when the phone was all black.

Before I tell you what I did, please bear in mind that Apple claims this can’t be done and I’m certainly not offering you any guarantees. It worked for me, but if it fails for you, you are on your own with Google to figure out what to do next. Also, it should go without saying that you won’t have access to the iOS4-only features if you go back. For the iPhone 3G that includes threads in the email client and the ability to put programs into folders.

I started from this How to Guide by Taimur Asad. It covers downgrading your iPhone or iPod touch to iPhone OS 3. The guide provides instructions to get back to 3.1.2 or 3.1.3. I went back to 3.1.3 because I knew it worked well on my phone. If you are keen to do this, read the guide thoroughly a couple of times and be sure that you have one of the specific models it covers.

I use a Mac for the computer that my phone syncs with, and my phone is on Telecom’s XT network. Those things affect the instructions and you need to understand what to do differently if you use Windows or a different telco. That said, the guide looks as though it would work for a Windows computer, and carrier bundles are available for most mobile carriers.

I had several false starts when trying to follow the guide. Each was slightly scary because you have to put your phone into DFU mode (I think I know what that stands for!) which makes the phone black and unresponsive. Getting back from DFU mode involves a bit of (free) software such as RecBoot which you need to install on your computer before you start. Eventually the phone comes back to life. It’s all in the guide – thanks, Taimur.

Eventually I figured out that my false starts were because I was using a USB hub. I normally sync through a hub and it works just fine, but my computer wouldn’t recognise a phone in DFU mode unless it was connected directly to it with a single USB cable. Once I had sorted that out, the restore process followed the one set out in the guide.

The actual process was relatively quick once I’d figured it out. It took about half an hour. Then I had to do a restore and a sync of what was now an empty phone. That ran overnight.

There was a problem early in the restore process. iTunes refused to let me reload a recent backup saying that the backup had been made by more recent software than now existed on the phone, which it had. I wound up restoring from a very old backup. I’ve spent a chunk of today reloading configuration detail like my wireless passwords. It would be a good idea to identify the last backup you have (iTunes makes them when you sync) from iPhone OS 3 and restoring from that when the time comes. Do bear in mind, though, that you might lose information that is embedded in programs on your iPhone if you do this.

The final step for me was to reapply the carrier bundle for XT so my phone would do 3G data, texting and tethering again.

The result – one iPhone 3G functioning as well as it ever did, which is very well indeed. I only wish Apple hadn’t put me through so much grief to get it back that way.

I’m delighted with the decision. I’ve written before about the iniquities of software patents. Here are five reasons not to allow them:

1. Patents are private monopolies permitted because they are supposed to encourage innovation. Yet there is no shortage of innovation in software in countries that don’t allow software patents.
2. There is serious harm in software patents because their existence threatens software innovators who can’t tell if some idea is patented and have no way to evaluate a threat from someone who claims a patent over their work.
3. Allowing software patents lead to unintended bad consequences such as the existence of patent trolls – companies which appear to exist just to threaten developers with patent suits.
4. Patents cause a large deadweight cost in legal fees. That’s money which simply disappears from the software economy to the enrichment of patent lawyers.
5. Software patents can’t be awarded fairly. Patents offices and courts seem incapable of making sane decisions about what is and is not an original “invention” in software.

There has been a chorus of approval of the Committee’s decision. But there have also been some people arguing against. Two come to mind:

Patent lawyers AJ Park say:

[Open source promoters] believe that software patents are inconsistent with the open source model. However, this is only relevant if the model is proven to be best and that all software developers should use it. There is no such evidence. Developers who use the proprietary model should be free to do so unless there is proven economic harm.

Say what? Whether or not open source proponents believe that closed source is a valid business model – and there’s a range of opinion on that point – is irrelevant to whether the law should permit the existence of small software developers. The existence of software patents effectively works against small and lightly-funded software writers, some of whom use open source. AJ Park are either confused or disingenuous here.
Software has protection from copyright. That’s as it should be. It permits the author of a piece of software control over who uses it and what for. Open source and closed source software all rely on copyright for their licences. That’s what’s used to pay the developers if they wish to be paid. So, by denying the ability to patent software we do not prevent people from making a living producing software for sale. Rather, we inject some certainty into software development by freeing developers from worrying about whether someone else has invented – or just holds a patent over – some technique they are using in their code. We also allow small companies and even bedroom coders to create software without a large suit of patents they can cross-license with the big software companies. That’s how software patents suppress innovation, a point which AJ Park claims not to understand.
The comment that I want to highlight comes from NZICT. This is an industry body representing mostly large multinational software companies. Despite its claims, it certainly does not speak for the ICT industry in New Zealand. There are many, many large and small IT companies operating who are not affiliated to it. In its latest newsletter, which I can’t find online, NZICT says:

We regard patents as a fundamental property right for those software developers that choose to pursue this path.

A fundamental property right? I don’t think so. A patent is a limited right to exploit a monopoly over an idea for a period of time. There’s nothing fundamental about that – it’s a legal consensus created, supposedly, to encourage innovation. In as much as software patents are a right at all, they are a right open to definition by legally-constituted authority. That’s Parliament in New Zealand. But the real issue I have with this remark is the same as AJ Park’s above: allowing software patents greatly advantages a few large companies at the cost of everyone else in the industry and has a chilling effect on small developers.
I’ve already explained why I think software patents are a bad idea. They don’t deliver the benefits of encouraging innovation that patents are intended to do and many are actively harmful for various reasons. It’s no surprise that some people think software patents should be extended rather than reduced. It’s no surprise that they talk about “fundamental property rights”. But, then, turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, do they?

Two years ago I went as part of the New Zealand delegation to a meeting in Geneva called to determine the fate of a proposed new ISO/IEC document format standard, called colloquially OOXML or Office Open XML. Despite its name this standard had nothing to do with the OpenOffice word processing and spreadsheet program – which, in fact, uses a well established ISO standard format called ODF. Rather, OOXML was a an entirely different format invented by Microsoft for use by its Office 2007 suite.  Microsoft was very keen that OOXML be made an ISO standard, taking a full page ad in the Dominion Post claiming all kinds of benefits, including, mystifyingly, “provid[ing] choice about which software we use to exchange to documents” and “fostering innovation”.

The OOXML specification weighed in at 6,500 pages. At the time of the meeting in February 2008, national standards bodies had already voted not to standardize it. Their objections covered a huge range of technical problems with the standard, concerns that the standard might be encumbered with patent claims, and a view among some that setting multiple standards for the same thing would hinder the ability of people and businesses to swap documents between different word processors. The meeting I went to was intended to deal with the technical concerns.

By the time we arrived at the meeting 1,500 pages of changes had been proposed to the draft standard. The meeting, which had about 50 countries with an average of three attendees each, then tried to work its way through these changes to see if they could ‘fix’ the technical problems in the draft standard. Needless to say, it didn’t get a long way through and ended up voted to accept a lot of the proposed changes en masse.

I don’t want to imply that the people in the meeting didn’t work hard on that draft standard. We put huge effort into trying sort out its problems. One thing the meeting did was to split the draft standard into two streams, called “transitional” and “strict”. Transitional corresponded pretty much to the original 6,500 pages with its long list of technical problems. Strict included many of the changes in the 1,500 pages of changes and more stuff that we put in during the meeting. Things like accessibility for blind people. There was a lot. It was understood that software should support the strict version (i.e the improved version) of the standard as soon as possible, and the transitional version was just there to get through the next year or so.

Regarding the other two problems of patents and multiple standards: the international standards bodies ISO and IEC said that Microsoft had assured them that were no patent issues and they accepted that. ISO/IEC also said that multiple standards for the same thing weren’t a problem in themselves.

After the meeting and the assurances from ISO/IEC, national bodies had a chance to change their votes. Some did, and OOXML became an ISO standard. End of story.

But, perhaps not. Flash forward to 2010. Many Microsoft Office users now use OOXML document formats. These are the files called .docx and .xlsx saved by Office 2007 and 2008 that older copies of Office can’t open without special plugins. They aren’t saving in the standardized versions of OOXML, but Microsoft assured us in 2008 that with the next release of Microsoft Office they will be. There are formatting problems interchanging files with OpenOffice and other suites, but since Microsoft has such a high proportion of the market this only annoys the few people who dare to use anything else.

So, business as usual. And at least we have a standard, and hopefully competing software will eventually catch up with it. Except for two things: during the meeting in Geneva Office 2007 was brand new. Now the next version – Office 2010 – is coming out in beta around now and it won’t support saving documents in strict OOXML. Just the transitional version with its huge list of technical problems. Sure, it can read strict OOXML, but since nothing saves strict OOXML this is not terribly useful. Microsoft says to wait for the next Office release if you want to save documents in OOXML. That’s going to be two to three years away. For now and until at least 4 years after that meeting, nothing can save OOXML – the standard is purely theoretical.

A lot of people sweated blood to improve OOXML, but it looks like they needn’t have. The meeting in Geneva need never have happened, although of course countries would never have voted for OOXML to be standardized if it hadn’t.

The independent chair of that Geneva meeting, Alex Brown, is clearly very disappointed about the outcome, two years down the track. He now has this to say:

I was convinced at the time, and remain convinced today,
that the division of OOXML into Strict and Transitional variants was
the innovation which allowed the Standard to pass. Enough National
Bodies could then vote in good conscience for OOXML knowing that
their preferred, Strict, variant would be under their control into
the future while the Transitional variant (which – remember – they
had effectively rejected in 2007) would remain purely for the purpose
of accurately specifying old documents.

In other words, the basis on which some countries changed their minds and voted for OOXML standardization turns out not to be real. At least, not yet, two years and another Office version down the track.

And there’s another problem. Remember the concerns about potential patents over OOXML that that ISO/IEC said was a non-issue? It seems that another company called i4i has been suing Microsoft for patent violation on a core part of OOXML (they call it “Custom XML” – it was one of the selling points of OOXML) from the get-go. Some XML specialists are saying that the i4i patent is silly and should never have been granted. Maybe. But it’s won twice in court now. That effectively prevents developers from implementing it, making the standard useless.

This patent suit was filed in March 2007. It had been extant for almost a year early 2008 when ISO/IEC were assured that there were no patent issues. That was the assurance they passed on to us meeting participants. Where does that leave the standard now? According to ISO/IEC:

If, after publication of the standard, it is determined
that licenses to all required patents are not so available, one
option would be to withdraw the International Standard.

I wonder if that will happen?

This whole business leaves me wondering why and how so many people, companies and governments were induced to invest so much effort into the whole thing.

In a Sex Pistols live recording somewhere in my CD collection, Johnny Rotten snarls into an open mic: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” I’m guessing that the world’s standards bodies feel that way right now.

I’ll leave the final comment to Alex Brown:

it seems to me that without a change of direction the
entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.

Quite. Can anything save OOXML?

In the more widely published of the two announcements, the Whitehouse has gone to the free and open source Drupal content management system, replacing the commercial one installed some years ago. All the Whitehouse websites including whitehouse.gov have been changed over.

There are stories like this one about the move all over the web. The reasons the Whitehouse staff give are that they are moving to modern, state-of-the-art platform that will allow them a lot more flexibility in how they engage with citizens. They also expect greater security of the software through the open source development model.

In the other story, the US Department of Defense has just issued a policy statement (pdf) telling all its component parts that they should be seriously evaluating open source alternatives. The reasons they give are reduced cost of ownership (well, d’oh!), better security, and that the ability to modify the software gives them the chance to alter it to meet their changing needs.

The DoD also takes aim at that hoary old chestnut, the notion that the GPL might somehow force a company that was was altering free software for its own internal needs to republish the resulting source code. The company can chose to do that, but it absolutely doesn’t have to, unless it wants to distribute software outside the organization.

The real story here is not that open source software is being more widely used, and used by some famous and influential people. It’s that free software released under the GPL – as Drupal is – is more than acceptable for government work; it’s positively encouraged for its low cost, high security, and flexibility.

To close – I’ll alter a slogan published by Data General when IBM entered its main market:

People are saying that the US Government’s endorsement of free software will legitimise it. The bastards say: Welcome!

The site for the Wellington event is here, the Waikato one here, and if you know of others please put them into the comments.

I’ll be on just after the 11am news. Listen live, or after the broadcast you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3.

A: Let’s talk about Software Freedom Day, 20th September 2009 in Wellington, and events on in other parts of the country as well. This event has been running for at least the last three years but it seems to have grown real legs this time round. It’s being hosted by none other than Nat Torkington, so if you want to see what he really looks like, get down to the Wellington Convention Centre between 9 and 6 on Sunday 20th. Just tell them I sent you.

Q: This used to be just a few people giving away CDs in previous years.

A: It did, and now it’s grown into the kind of thing that can take over the Wellington Town Hall and the Michael Fowler Centre.

Q: What is the purpose of software freedom day?

A: It’s a celebration of all aspects of free software. There are at least seven parallel streams running down there, including a bar camp for people to brainstorm ideas, an installfest for people to install free software on their computers, a kids programme – which might be a good thing if you are a parent of primary kids, and a student programme. Incidentally, if you think your kids would be interested in a day playing with computers – download the program called Scratch first, if you get time. It’s a neat way of learning how to do interactive graphics programming – it’s a lot more fun than it sounds. Scratch runs on Windows and Macs and you get it from the MIT website – in today’s links.

Q: So is the event free?

A: Free as the air. If you’re in Wellington and you have any interest in computers – or your kids have – go and have a look at what’s going on in the Town Hall on Sunday 20th.

Q: That’s not the only thing they mean by free, is it?

A: No, they’re referring in part to Richard Stallman’s concept of free – that’s the so-called four software freedoms. They are: the freedom to run software for any purpose, the freedom to study how software works and change it to suit your purpose, the freedom to give copies of software away, and the freedom to improve software and give those copies back to the community. If all software was like that we would all be building on each other’s ideas and work and making huge progress – and if you don’t think software has the potential to make progress for people, just look at the Internet, at how banking has changed, how modern cars just start first time…

Q: So is this event just happening in Wellington?

A: Wellington is certainly having a big one this year. But there are events in Auckland, Albany, Hawke’s Bay, and probably other centres. I can’t say for certain what’s on in those places but there will definitely be things happening.

Read on for my speaking notes, or after the broadcast you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Today, I’d like to talk about software patents.

Q: A patent is…?

A: Essentially it’s a government-granted monopoly on an idea. You design, say, a revolutionary new vacuum cleaner technology. Maybe you came up the spiraling air thingy which many of the better ones have today. And you can get a patent on that so that anyone else who uses that technique has to pay you a licence fee.

Q: How do you get a patent?

A: In principle, what you have to do is write out your idea, with drawings, and assert that it’s entirely a new thing, then send it off the patent office – in New Zealand that’s called the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand – and wait for a long time, answering any questions they might have. The patent examiner will need to be convinced that it’s a new idea – there’s no “prior art” in patent jargon – and that it’s not an obvious or trivial idea. In practice you ask a patent attorney to arrange it for you.

Q: How long does it take?

A: Years, it seems. And patents have a finite life as well. They are there to reward innovation. The idea is that getting that spiraling chamber on the vacuum cleaner working would take a lot of resources and that we want people to risk having no income for while they develop something like that in order that they might get a bog payoff at the end of it.

Q: Do you think they are a bad thing?

A: Not really. I’m persuaded by the argument there should be a mechanism for that people who back themselves and put a lot of work into a risky venture have an opportunity to make some return if they were right. I think they encourage innovation, by and large, in that scenario. What I do have a problem with is software patents.

Q: Why do you patent software? I though software was copyrighted?

A: Software certainly is copyrighted, most of it anyway. Incidentally it’s not true that free and open source isn’t copyright. Free software in particular is subject to strong copyright provisions. It’s just that the owners of free software mostly don’t charge you money to use the software – but they do use copyright to place restrictions on you, mainly to prevent you taking the free software and incorporating into your own works without passing them on.

So, with software copyrights you have a legal way of making money off selling your software if that’s what you want to do. Put another way – you don’t have to think that all software should be given away for nothing, to think that software patents are a bad idea.

Q: Why are they a bad idea?

A: Several reasons: 1) There is no benefit. Patents are intended to incentivise innovation by allowing an inventor a monopoly they can exploit for money. There is no shortage of innovation, however, in countries and communities that do not use software patents. The whole of Linux would be a good example.

2) There is serious harm in software patents, because they prevent others from using ideas. The whole of our technology, and in fact our whole culture as the human species, is built upon us using ideas others have had and developing them further.

3) Software patents lead to unintended bad consequences. Software patents have proved hugely detrimental in the US where they are often used for anti-competitive purposes. Just the threat of being sued over a software patent is often enough to stop a new product in its tracks, without that patent ever reaching court and being tested.

4) There is a large deadweight cost in legal fees and court costs which simply does not exist without software patents.

5) They can’t be awarded fairly. Patent offices overseas have proved incapable of determining what a valid software patent is and have consequently awarded patents on all kinds of obvious things. Sometimes these get overturned some years later after pressure from the community, but often they hang around and frustrate new software. Bill Gates is on record as saying “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” He worried that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent to “take as much of our profits as they want.”

There’s a delicious irony going on in the strange world of software patents at the moment: you’ll recall that last year I was spitting tacks at a certain large software company – Microsoft – that was demanding that it’s own format for saving office documents be made a world standard. One of the main features Microsoft proudly touted was that its format would allow the saving of custom XML – effectively user-defined information in a standardised framework. Their standard was eventually endorsed by ISO, even though several countries including New Zealand argued against it, partly on the grounds that there might be patents getting infringed.

What has now happened is that a company has successfully claimed in a US court that it owned a patent on saving custom XML features in word processing documents and it has got an injunction against Microsoft preventing it from selling copies of Word in the US.

Q: So you can’t buy Microsoft Word in the US any more?

A: You can, because the injunction doesn’t kick in for a couple of months. Nobody seriously expects Microsoft to have to stop selling Word – they’ll just apply a very large amount of money and lawyers to the problem, and either buy the other company outright or apply huge legal pressure to get the thing overturned. And the joke is that anyone who understands formats would know that the idea of saving custom fields in XML documents is totally obvious and the patent should never have been granted in the first place. It’s like getting a patent for walking a dog with a chain instead of a lead. So this highlights my point that the whole software patent regime is a total mess and ends up achieving nothing but enriching patent lawyers.

Q: Are there software patents in New Zealand?

A: There are some, mainly which have been granted overseas and taken into our patent system from there. There was a Canadian company a few years ago that threatened to sue New Zealand e-commerce websites because it said it had a patent on the whole area. I’m happy to say some people faced them down and got the patent overturned in court. That kind of thing happens from time to time but its really expensive. The government is considering right now, in a Patent Bill that’s before a Select Committee, what we should do about software patents in New Zealand. And I’m very clear that our law shouldn’t allow them.

Links

The Herald on the background to software patents, and the campaign against them.

Microsoft hoist by their own patented petard.

A software patent is a state-enforced monopoly on a idea. They exist in the US and some other countries, but not in many places including New Zealand. We don’t need or want them here. If you want some reasons, here are five good ones:

1) There is no benefit. Patents are intended to incentivise innovation by allowing an inventor a monopoly they can exploit for money. There is no shortage of innovation, however, in countries and communities that do not use software patents. The whole of Linux would be a good example.

2) There is serious harm in software patents, because they prevent others from using ideas. The whole of our technology, and in fact our whole culture as the human species, is built upon us using ideas others have had and developing them further.

3) Software patents lead to unintended bad consequences. Software patents have proved hugely detrimental in the US where they are often used for anti-competitive purposes. Just the threat of being sued over a software patent is often enough to stop a new product in its tracks, without that patent ever reaching court and being tested.

4) There is a large deadweight cost in legal fees and court costs which simply does not exist without software patents.

5) They can’t be awarded fairly. Patent offices overseas have proved incapable of determining what a valid software patent is and have consequently awarded patents on all kinds of obvious things. Sometimes these get overturned some years later after pressure from the community, but often they hang around and frustrate new software.

We don’t need or want software patents in New Zealand.

I put out a call for suggestions for this program by email and on my blog a few days ago. If you were one of the helpful people who replied – thanks. This program’s yours as much as mine. Don’t you love the Internet!

Listen live at 11:05 or download the audio as Ogg or MP3.

Q: Your main topic today – free things. What sort of thing do you mean?

A: Mostly software and services. Let’s start with the canonical example that most of use every day – Google search. We all know it, of course. That’s a free service supplied by a private company, and using the Internet is almost inconceivable without it.

Q: It’s supported by advertising.

A: Yes, it is. And a lot of free stuff is only free in the sense that the users aren’t paying but someone is.

Q: You’ve talked about free software before – that means something more than that you don’t have to pay for it, right?

A: Yes, there’s a definition of free software – Richard Stallman originated the term in this sense. And, by free software, Stallman means that the software itself is available for people to modify and pass on. It’s a strong form of open source. But that’s one meaning of free software. I thought to day I’d concentrate on the less idealogical meaning, the straightforward alternative meaning that it doesn’t cost you any money to use it.

Q: That’s not the same thing?

A: No – it’s possible to have free software in the Stallman sense of the word that you have to pay for, and quite a lot of software you don’t have to pay for is not free in the Stallman sense. The terms ‘libre’ and ‘gratis’ get used sometimes to make the distinction – both translate as ‘free’ in English, but one is about freedom and the other about cost.

The other thing we are not talking about here is software that’s been placed on sites for unlawful download. There’s no excuse for using pay for software without paying for it. It’s just wrong. And there’s so much legitimately free to use software and services out there that, if you don’t want to pay for some specific thing, there’s a high chance that there is a free to use alternative. Just use Google.

Q: OK – we’ve got that straight. So, what sort of thing is out there legitimately cost-free?

A: there’s a whole array of amazing stuff just waiting for you to use it!

Let’s start with OpenOffice, which is a free replacement for word processing and spreadsheet software. Lots of people have OpenOffice, and its often distributed on a new PC. If you want to do word processing – writing letters etc and you don’t have a program to do that – you can either buy one of get OpenOffice for absolutely nothing.

Q: Is it any good? And does it open the same files as the other programs?

A: Yes, OpenOffice opens files from all the main word processing packages including the ones you have to pay for. And it’s pretty good. Just go download it from OpenOffice.org.

And then there’s Ubuntu – or Linux in general, which can completely replace Windows on your computer if you want it to. If you do install that you find a huge list of free software in the menus. But you don’t have to be a fully piad-up Linux-loving tree-hugging hippie to like getting stuff for free. Assuming we are staying with Windows, there are some great things available just for the download.

Links

Web browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera

Mail software:Pegasus Mail, Thunderbird

Web-based mail: Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail

Notes and backup: Evernote, Dropbox

Applications online: Google Apps and Microsoft Office live

Word processing and spreadsheets for your computer.

Maps: Google Earth, Google Maps, Windows Live Maps, and for the stars: Stellarium, Celestia

Skype for free calls and inkstand messaging, also Microsoft’s and Google’s equivalents

Security software: AVG free edition. HijackThis for advanced security users trying to diagnose problems.

Play audio and video: VLC

Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, and Twitter clients Twitterrific, Tweetdeck

Air New Zealand’s superb mobile phone software – mPass

Doodle – meeting scheduling – if you have people around the world, check Time and Date

VirtualBox – for running several operating systems simultaneously.

Published materials – TV, NZ Onscreen, Radio

Books – TOR science fiction, Bantam DoubleDay Dell has some free stuff as well, so does O’Reilly technical publishers, and some books about open source software.

Tripit – trip planner, puts together an itinerary from all your tickets and bookings.

Swivel.com – stats and charts form your own data. See also Geocommons.com

Gapminder.org for analyzing statistics about world population, health, wealth etc.

Please feel free to put suggestions in the comments!