In his return to blogging on Friday, Bosworth confirmed that he's starting a company and hiring people but he didn't say what, where or who.

How isn't too mysterious. He said he's already written prototype code, and he can probably fund a company himself after all the time he spent with Borland, Microsoft, Crossgain, BEA and Google.

Even without providing details, Bosworth had a few people ask in the comments area how they could submit resumes.

A health-related startup seems obvious since that was what he was doing at Google's New York office and he's passionate about the subject, after helping his mother during a long battle with cancer.

There was a sense of urgency in his blogging last year about the need for better systems to share, access and manage personal health records. I wonder if he wanted to move faster than Google could in this area.

But would he dare moon another giant?

If you don't recall the story about Bosworth's last startup, it was an Overlake software company that Microsoft hobbled by invoking non-compete agreements with Bosworth and other ex-Microsoft people involved.

Maybe Microsoft was mooning him back last week when it announced the HealthVault, a promising service that sounds a lot like the sort of healthcare information project that Bosworth was working on at Google's New York office.

Here's an excerpt from his Nov. 2006 entry on the official Google blog:

Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. Today it is much too difficult to get access to one's health records, for example, because of the substantial administrative obstacles people have to go through and the many places they have to go to collect it all. Compare this to financial information, which is much more available from the various institutions that help manage your financial "health." We believe our industry should help solve this problem.

Here's a quote from Microsoft's HealthVault press release:

"People are concerned to find themselves at the center of the healthcare ecosystem today because they must navigate a complex web of disconnected interactions between providers, hospitals, insurance companies and even government agencies," said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft. "Our focus is simple: to empower people to lead healthy lives. The launch of HealthVault makes it possible for people to collect their private health information on their terms and for companies across the health industry to deliver compatible tools and services built on the HealthVault platform."

I'm not saying Microsoft took Bosworth's ideas from the Google blog, just that they were working on the same stuff in parallel.

Now he's starting his own company. Maybe he found an angle that Google's not pursuing, or maybe he's mooning two giants at once?

Either way, I'll bet he gets resumes from Seattle, Redmond and maybe even Kirkland.

I'm not the only one on a fair use jag today.

Jeff Atwood's "Coding Horror" has a great piece today on You Tube: The Big Copyright Lie. It goes much deeper on fair use than I did in today's column on Amazon's new MP3 store.

Channeling Viacom boss Philippe Dauman, Atwood rips YouTube/Google for its hypocrisy:

What I don't understand is why YouTube continues to get away with the big copyright lie they've perpetuated from day one. They pay lip service to copyright, while building their business on an empire of unauthorized, copyrighted content. It's so brazen -- so blatant.

I wonder if music stores are doing the same thing by offering DRM-free music that they know is likely to be used in ways that violate its licensing rules. But it's different, because YouTube is giving stuff away while music stores are charging for content, making contracts and linking buyers to content.

It could get interesting if those links are used for enforcement, and not just to cover the backsides of distributors.

Could a record company figure out it if you were the one who bought the copy of a song that was copied a few times and ended up being distributed to millions of people online?

Some, but not all, of the songs sold at Amazon's MP3 store are traceable by music studios even though they don't have DRM software.

Instead, some have digital watermarks that identify their origin. This is what Pete Baltaxe, Amazon's director of digital music, told me when I asked about watermarking last week:

"Amazon does not apply any watermarking so in some cases the labels have asked, or are interested in providing files that would indicate that Amazon was the retailer."

It seemed like a sensitive subject to Baltaxe, who stressed that Amazon isn't doing this, but record labels are:

To be clear, we don't apply any watermarking ... In some cases labels can deliver us sound files that have a watermark that indicates Amazon is the retailer. Amazon doesn't apply any watermarking.

Still, Amazon's music store is a leap ahead in useability. It's so good, consumers probably won't care about watermarking or terms of service.

It could inspire other music vendors to follow suit. At least that's the advice of Yahoo Music's Ian Rogers, who helped build the company's music store around Microsoft's DRM technology.

Amazon's MP3 store got it right, he said in a presentation ("Convenience wins, hubris loses ...") that he made to other music business-types and then posted on his blog. An excerpt:

But now, eight years later, Amazon's finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that's simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync'd them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years.

8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, "If we build it they will come"? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn't gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.

Amen*.

A computer science study program that Google and the University of Washington developed last year will be rolled out nationally in cooperation with IBM, the companies are announcing today.

It's an effort to "promote new software development methods which will help students and researchers address the challenges of Internet-scale applications in the future,'' the release said.

Specifically, the companies are providing hardware, software and services to help schools teach students about "highly parallel computing practices to better address the emerging paradigm of large-scale distributed computing."

They are dedicating a cluster of hundreds of computers -- Google systems and IBM servers -- and will eventually give students access to more than 1,600 processors to test parallel programming projects. The servers "will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache's Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System,'' the release said.

Quoting Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at the UW:

"In 2006, when I helped Christophe Bisciglia, a former UW student now a senior engineer at Google, to develop the program, our goal was to understand the challenges that universities face in teaching important new concepts such as large scale computing and develop methods to address this issue. A year later, we've seen how our students have mastered many of the techniques that are critical for large scale-internet computing, benefiting our department and students."

The program is expanding beyond the UW to Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland.

CEO quotes in the release:

"This project combines IBM's historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google's complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters," said Samuel J. Palmisano, chairman, president and chief executive officer, IBM. "We're aiming to train tomorrow's programmers to write software that can support a tidal wave of global Web growth and billions of secure transactions every day."

"Google is excited to partner with IBM to provide resources which will better equip students and researchers to address today's developing computational challenges," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. "In order to most effectively serve the long-term interests of our users, it is imperative that students are adequately equipped to harness the potential of modern computing systems and for researchers to be able to innovate ways to address emerging problems."

Online resources include a curriculum that Google and the UW developed that's available here, and open-source software IBM designed to help students write programs for clusters running Hadoop. It's an Eclipse plugin available here.