[E-Lang] E, DRM, ENative, openCOLA, and other stuff

[Dan Moniz]

Hi all,

This is a distillation of several messages passed back and forth between myself
and Mark Miller (markm) and Marc Stiegler (marcs) somwhat recently on the
topics of digital rights management (DRM), E, the ENative initiative and some
other ideas I've had since then.

I'm presenlty employed as the research lead of a company called openCOLA
(http://www.opencola.com/) and as such, I've been researching a number of
technologies which I think are going to be key to our software (we're in the
somewhat crowded peer-to-peer space, but also distributed computing and
intelligent information retrieval) and product. I won't get into the whole
corporate bit here, since it's not my bag, and there are those who do it much
better than I do, suffice to say we're also a relatively clued open source shop
-- we plan on open sourcing under an industry accepted license the software we
produce from our venture. 

For those who may not know, I've been tracking E's progress for a while, easily
since the website went up (some of you may know Eric Forste, when he briefly
lived in Albany, NY, he introduced me to E [at a Perl Mongers meeting no
less!]) and I've list member since mailing markm way back about some early
install issues, when he invited me to join. Since then, I've mostly lurked and
watched. I tried to get some E projects launched at previous employers, but
there wasn't a lot of support at the time, for various reasons.

However, at openCOLA (oC), one of my main short-to-long term research tasks was
to look at a number of acceptable digital rights management solutions, with an
eye towards being able to implement something that would allow us to be able to
share copyrighted content and make sure the correct parties get paid, etc.
Shortly before officially coming on board with openCOLA, I had made the oC guys
aware of the E toolkit and the surrounding project, and placed a rough sketch
of how E and the smart contract concept can really be an amazing solution to
DRM, as well as something that goes beyond simple DRM into the realm of almost
all financial (or otherwise) transactions across the oC network.

I started talking with markm about this in vague terms a while back -- oC is
presently using C++ and some C for all of our production code, and the ENative
idea had been put forward on the list with support from Ping, so I got in touch
and started moving some ideas to the forefront with markm and marcs about how
oC may play into this.

I've recently been given the go ahead to throw everything out to the list and
make this my top priority in terms of R&D projects for the short term -- a
sensible, flexible, and killer DRM solution is integral to our success in this
area, and I'd like to see E be it. There are a lot of benefits that go along
with choosing E, which include the open source culture, the fact that we'll
have an open system which will be able to be inspected, like E. There's also
constant improvement and evolution as E itself evolves.

So far, my talks with markm and marcs have centered around the benefit of
putting a full scale sister project on ENative into action. I've been trying to
get out to the San Francisco area to meet up with markm and others to discuss
the particulars of the whole arrangement, but this hasn't been possible just
yet. On the other hand, later today I'll be flying up to the main office in
Toronto and will be spending the first half of the week organizing a relocation
plan to move myself to the Bay area (which is where the R&D team will be
instantiated).

My main motivation in posting this to the list at large is to gauge how much
interest there is from list members on potentially working on a project such as
this, questions you all have about oC and our goals, and ideas you may have on
how this might work (or not).

Also, I'm in contact with some of the Mojo Nation people, who I desperately
want to meet with as well, since their current system and ours (openCOLA's)
are amazingly similar, and we have goals that also seem to be in lockstep with
one another. If anyone knows people I can talk to there that would be
interested in talking to me, I'd appreciate referrals. I snagged ahold of Bram
Cohen (from coderpunks) on their IRC channel one night, but again, due to a
hectic schedule, haven't yet been able to get to a sit down meeting.

Now for todays dose of unrelated ideas:

I've been reticent about getting down and dirty with Java for a while, but the
various "small Java" pieces that are coming out of Sun and others actually have
my interest. I've been playing with things like Wabasoft's Waba VM
(http://www.wabasoft.com/), Sun's KVM (part of the J2ME, and more specifically,
the CDLC), and Sun's MIDP, along with a modified Java SDK from Research in
Motion (http://www.rim.net/), a firm with heavy Canadian ties (they make the
BlackBerry email pagers). Naturally, this has me wondering about a microE (uE
?) that would work on these sorts of devices. Anyone else have ideas in this
field?


-- 
Dan Moniz <dnm@pobox.com> [http://www.pobox.com/~dnm/]