‘Til All Are One

Donna Benjamin rounded a small group of us together to write a letter to Julia Gillard, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Education. The result was widely syndicated, hopefully building some mindshare in the process. The Education Expo proved to me more than anything else that FOSS is quickly becoming acceptable to the general public — the trick is in how you promote it.

So where to from here? How can we capitalise upon the gains we have made?

Perhaps our greatest single weakness is the perceived lack of professional support. I think OSIA should be doing more to address this (note: I’m not implying that OSIA isn’t taking this seriously). Here’s an e-mail I wrote to the osia-discuss mailing list (which is unfortunately subscriber-only):

The best thing OSIA can do is fight the popular notion that there’s no
professional support available for FOSS. We can beat the TCO and Freedom
drums as hard as we want, but few organisations are willing to entrust their
computing to ‘community’ support.

I managed the Linux Australia stand at the Education Expo a few weeks ago, and
my impression is that FOSS is on the cusp of mainstream acceptance:

http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2008/06/29/education-expo-report/

Schools are crying out for ways to get better value for their dollar, but they
aren’t going to even think about FOSS if they can’t get professional support.

If I run the stand again next year, I’d like to see some involvement from
OSIA. At the very least, we should have available some leaflets showing that
yes indeed there is quality, paid support for FOSS.

Also note that FOSS isn’t Linux. We got the most interest in the
OpenEducationDisc, a compilation of FOSS for Windows.

On the community side, we can continue to make FOSS more acceptable to school administrations, bureaucrats and politicians. Here’s my idea:

My suggestion is for us to build a Web site focused on open education in
Australia. We already have the perfect vehicle: http://openeducation.org.au.
However, at present it’s just a messy wiki more suitable for our own
brainstorming than for being a public-facing resource.

The wiki should of course remain, but I propose that we build a proper,
presentable Web site that is directly accessible via the
http://openeducation.org.au address.

Why do this when we already have http://linux.org.au/education? Open Education
is much bigger than Linux, and certainly should not be anchored to it. Here’s
a short list of what it can include:

• FOSS
• (GNU/)Linux OS - on servers
• (GNU/)Linux OS - on clients/desktops
• open standards
• open languages/libraries/APIs
• free content/culture
• open learning
• open curriculum

To be honest, I fear that we might be only hurting ourselves by tying open
education to a completely Free computing environment. That might be a worthy
aim, but few institutions are going to switch over all in one go. By offering
a migration path (or paths), a school can migrate more comfortably at its own
pace. We ought to be providing real choice, not just a binary ‘with us or
with the terrists’.

FOSS (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Scribus, etc.) can run on operating systems
other than Linux. To use the recent Education Expo as an example, we got a
lot of buy-in through the OpenEducationDisc, a compilation of FOSS for
 Windows.

Also note how I split Linux clients from servers. Linux’s place in the server
realm is very solid, but convincing an institution to accept a Linux client
solution is tougher. And by ‘client’, I mean either traditional desktops or
thin clients. The latter are often cost-effective and represent a real
strength of Linux, but are often overlooked or even have regulations working
against their adoption. On the server side, we have some great educational
tools such as Moodle and LAMS.

Open standards obviously include things like file formats and protocols, which
will become even more relevant as we see more applications (proprietary or
otherwise) pick up standardised methods of information exchange such as ODF
and PDF. This should also ease the integration of FOSS into pre-existing
environments. It also can include languages and all things related. Why are
schools still teaching Visual Basic when they could be teaching Python?

The final three points all link together. Most notably, they are not dependent
upon technology at all. Your average teacher isn’t a technologist, and
shouldn’t have to be. Knowledge can be shared and organised openly just like
code. Wikipedia has proven that great things can be built if ordinary people
are given easy to use tools.

Where to from this point? I suggest that we work towards getting a CMS running
at openeducation.org.au. We’ll have to agree upon a design and the message
that we want to purvey. Content creation should be separate from technical
ability, so the CMS should be simple enough for anybody to contribute.

Here is some inspiration from the UK:

• http://www.openschoolsalliance.org/
• http://schoolforge.org.uk/

The UK education sector appears to be much further ahead of us in terms of
embracing openness, and I think we can take some lessons from their efforts.

To clarify one thing in the above, I wrote the text for http://linux.org.au/education, but I never felt comfortable with it being there. So much of open education has nothing to do with Linux and Linux Australia shouldn’t be diverting its focus to dwell on it directly. With a more independent Web presence (in collaboration with Linux Australia), I feel that we can be much more effective.

LotD:   Open sourcing Australia: OpenAustralia.org goes live

Two weeks ago, we had the Education Expo.

Here’s my report, as co-ordinator of the Linux Australia stand:

Education Expo
Sat 14 to Sun 15 June
Rosehill Racecourse, Sydney

The Education Expo is an annual trades show targeted towards the K-12 educational space. Visitors consist of families and educators. Linux Australia once again had a stand, with volunteers spreading the word about free and open source software.

As always, we were very successful. With each passing year, the level of awareness of FOSS noticeably improves. Whereas at previous shows we would spend much energy expounding the basic concepts of FOSS/Linux, this year most people had either heard of it or were already using FOSS products such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org.

One thing we did differently this year was place more focus on FOSS running on Windows. Our past efforts have been meet with some resistance, as installing a different operating system posed a barrier to entry that many would not surmount. We had plenty of copies of the OpenEducationDisc to distribute, in addition to Fedora, Ubuntu, Edubuntu and Mandriva.

The fact that the NSW Dept of Education is migrating over 40,000 PCs across the state to OpenOffice.org was a useful selling point as well.

Our marketing efforts have been improving with each event. Our message is becoming more refined, and our leaflets are becoming more relevant. On the technical side, FOSS is becoming easier and more accessible, with projects such the aforementioned OpenEducationDisc and Wubi leading the way.

Our Web presence is improving, too. It’s far easier to point a newbie to just one easy-to-remember URL instead of confusing them with a list. In addition, I built an education portal for Linux Australia just in time for the expo.

There were at least two other stands that were FOSS-friendly. In fact, one of the largest stands were demonstrating their Web-based software product on about ten computers, all of which were running Ubuntu. Other stands expressed real interest when approached.

Other highlights of our presence included:

• OLPC XO laptops (from OLPC Australia)
• Intel Classmate PCs (from Mandriva Australia)
• ASUS Eee PCs
• laptops showing Edubuntu

Rodger Dean has some photos of the event.

A big thanks to everyone who helped at the stand:

• Ashley Lynn
• Ashley Maher
• Brendan Puckeridge
• David Andresen
• Gloria Arnold
• Harrison Conlin
• John Arnold
• Megha Kanth
• Pia Waugh
• Rodger Dean
• Vicki Burke

A special thank you goes to Melissa Draper, who was instrumental in ensuring the success of the stand in more ways than one.

LotD:  Insurance company bets health on open source — I’m quite heavily involved in this project, so needless to say I’m proud of what we’ve achieved

Bill Gates was interviewed by the BBC’s Money Programme. As he prepares to significantly reduce his direct work for Microsoft Corporation, Bill reflects upon what got him started in the first place and what kept him ahead of the ‘competition’. The video provides a brief glimpse into the character that founded and guided Microsoft. Regardless of whether you love him or hate him, he is indeed a fascinating character.

Skip ahead to the 40 second mark, to the segment titled “How the teenage Gates and his friend Paul Allen got access to a computer”. The story according to Gates was that he and his friends were allowed to hack on a company’s computer “like monkeys” at night to find bugs. He spent hours reading manuals and experimenting to figure out this “fascinating puzzle”. However, they were stuck at the “tinkering” stage until they stumbled across the source code in a rubbish bin. It was only then could the monkeys evolve.

I don’t think the producers of the show realised the significance of this admission, since they quickly cut to another segment. Reading between the lines, Gates is essentially confessing that he would not have progressed had he and Paul Allen not found the source code. Without this knowledge, and without this opportunity to understand and experiment with how the internals of a computer worked, Gates and Allen would have been severely constrained in their ability to found a software company and develop products

I would go so far as to say that Microsoft owes its very existence to this access to source code.

To anyone with a passing familiarity to how things worked back then, this comes as no surprise. Source code was expected to be free, and this in turn nurtured a generation of computer hackers. But whereas Richard Stallman saw the amazing potential of this freedom and wanted to preserve it for all, Bill Gates appears to have perceived it as an advantage for himself that he must deny to others.

LotD:  Gates memo shows user frustration

The Education Expo is on this weekend. I’ve sent a couple of missives to our helpers. The second one contains some advice that would work well in many situations regarding FOSS (especially where marketing is concerned), so I’ll reproduce it (slightly edited) here:

Subject: Education Expo, this weekend!
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:29
From: Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar@dhanapalan.com>
To: SLUG Activities <activities@slug.org.au>

Thanks again to everyone who has volunteered to help with the Linux Australia stand at the Education Expo.

The expo itself runs from 9am to 4pm on Saturday and Sunday. Entry is free. It’s a fun day for families with children in the K-12 space, so feel free to bring along your kids and make a day (or two!) out of it.

This year, the expo will be held in Rosehill Racecourse’s brand new Events Centre, and our stand is in a prime position right in front of the door. If you haven’t already, take a look at the original announcement and the Education Expo Web site.

I asked in my previous message if people could tell me when they would be available to help out. If you haven’t already, please let me know. If you’re unsure, that’s fine too: just show up and grab me at the stand.

I’ll be there at 8am on Saturday (an hour before it starts) to set up the stand, and probably at 8:30 on Sunday. I might need some assistance to set up, and also to pack up afterwards.

Some tips:

• Wear comfortable casual clothing. It might get hot in the exhibition hall.
• If you’ve got any Linux or FOSS themed clothing, wear that
• Wear comfortable shoes. You’ll be standing most of the time.
• Keep some water handy.
• Talking to stand visitors can strain your throat. Some mints can help.

Make it clear to visitors that there is a vibrant FOSS community in Australia, and especially in Sydney. Invite them to SLUG, which meets in the city on the last Friday of every month (next meeting on 27 June). SLUG has a segment known as ‘SLUGlets’, which is intended for newbies.

Familiarise yourself with the leaflets that we will distribute:

• http://linkpot.net/ravines/
• http://linkpot.net/dethrone/
• http://linkpot.net/tremolos/

Have a read of Linux Australia’s guides to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and FOSS in education. Remember to promote these to stand visitors as the best place to start with Linux and FOSS:

• http://linux.org.au/linux
• http://linux.org.au/education

One important point to remember is that Linux is not FOSS. We will be handing out copies of the OpenEducationDisc, which is a CD full of education-oriented FOSS for Windows. Not everyone is able to switch over to Linux cold-turkey, but we can get them started with FOSS on Windows first.

Similarly, open standards are not FOSS, but they are a good start. Inform people about the dangers of proprietary file formats, as seen with Microsoft Office, and promote in their stead open alternatives such as OpenDocument and PDF.

Show people that Linux isn’t strange and new. Many don’t realise it, but they are already using FOSS. For example:

• Firefox and OpenOffice are becoming increasingly popular. The NSW Department of Education is in the process of switching over >40,000 school computers to OpenOffice.
• Wikipedia is built around the idea of open knowledge, inspired directly from the FOSS movement (and it’s built on FOSS too!).
• Even Mac OS X has many important components based on FOSS, such as the kernel, file sharing, printing and the Web browser.
• About two-thirds of Web sites are served by the FOSS Web server, Apache.
• Most of the large Web companies (like Google, Facebook and Yahoo) are built with FOSS.
• It is normal for Hollywood films to be created using Linux.
• Linux is prevalent in a range of consumer devices.
• The popular ASUS Eee PC, and many of its competitors, come with Linux pre-installed.

Show people that Linux is easy to install and use. Ubuntu has an installer called Wubi, which is a Windows application that installs Ubuntu as a file without partitioning the hard drive. It behaves like a normal dual-boot system, but it can be uninstalled from ‘Add/Remove Programs’ just like any Windows application. We’ll also have copies of Edubuntu. Remember that this is an add-on companion, not a stand-alone liveCD as in the past. Give a copy of Ubuntu with every Edubuntu disc you distribute.

Linux is more secure. While nothing can claim to be 100% secure and virus proof, Linux has an excellent track record. It doesn’t need ‘band-aid’ solutions like anti-virus and anti-spyware software because the software was built sanely to begin with. The Internet was built for UNIX, not for Windows.

Linux and FOSS is great for families. It’s affordable and reliable. It won’t get infected and show unsolicited porn adverts to your children. There are heaps of great educational software installable with just a few mouse clicks.

Some caveats:

• As a community stand, we are not selling anything.
• Avoid unnecessary Microsoft-bashing. We’re running the stand because we love FOSS, not because we hate Microsoft.

The second Open CeBIT in Sydney ended last week. Forming a section of the much larger CeBIT expo, Open CeBIT focused on open source technologies and solutions. I was involved in three stands: BizCubed (my employer), Linux Australia and Open Source Industry Australia.

In the market, FOSS is clearly maturing and becoming more mainstream. At a CeBIT a couple of years ago, I’d be answering basic questions like, “what is open source?”, “what is Linux?” and “how do you make money?” This year, I didn’t get any questions like that at all. Most people knew something about Linux and FOSS, and just needed some direction to get started.

We had much interest in community and general usage at the Linux Australia stand. Our Fedora, Ubuntu and Edubuntu discs were popular. Of immense popularity were our OLPC XOs, thanks to OLPC Australia. Visitors were genuinely interested in the units, and I didn’t hear any negative feedback at all. I do believe that a lot of people did understand that this is an education project for children in the developing world and not just a laptop project.

At the Open Source Industry Australia stand, I spoke to many people who were interested in deploying FOSS solutions to solve specific problems. Many of these people would not have considered FOSS in the past, so clearly our message is resonating.

Coming up in a couple of weeks (June 14-15) is the Education Expo. We’ve always been successful there, and all signs point to us repeating that.

LotD:   MacGyver is favourite disaster hero

Lately, I’ve been thinking more than ever about ways to promote free and open source software to a non-technical crowd. This has largely been prompted by the Education Expo in Sydney, for which I am co-ordinating the Linux Australia stand (Stand F9). Currently on my mind is Open CeBIT, which is right around the corner. I’ve been doing some (fortunately not all) planning for two stands, my employer’s and Linux Australia’s.

Here are some thoughts I have had regarding FOSS marketing. It’s a bit of a jumble, but hopefully it comes of some help.

• Marketing is just structured, methodical, non-rabid evangelism. It isn’t inherently dirty, and it is not synonymous with advertising (advertising can be a part of marketing, but the two aren’t conjoined). We in the FOSS community need to get over the stigma that is sometimes attached to ‘marketing’, so that we may harness it for good and not evil.
• Identify your target audience, then determine what kinds of questions they will be asking/thinking. This is Marketing 101, but it can be easy to lose sight of. While can be good to cast a wide net, being tactically focused can often yield better results. For the Education Expo we have a leaflet specifically for students, and for CeBIT we have one for businesses.
• As a follow-on from the previous point, know whom to keep on-side. While your school/university might be using Microsoft products, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are in bed with Bill Gates. Don’t assume malice when the more likely reason is simple ignorance or misunderstanding. Writing an accusative article in your student paper might give you a temporary sense of satisfaction, but such a hostile approach is more than likely to backfire on you and cement the Establishment’s negative (or lack of) opinion on FOSS. Try to gently educate, not censure.
• Relevant case studies are pure gold. If you’re dealing with the education sector, talk about successful school deployments, interesting projects like One Laptop Per Child and appropriate devices like the Asus Eee PC.
• Referencing honest, independent studies can be much more persuasive than referring to press releases or vendor-sponsored reports.
• There are some angles that might not directly apply to the target professions/market, but might peripherally be of interest to people. This includes things like the benefits to the local economy and industry, the environment, government and so on.
• Most people either have children, are children or have a soft spot for children. FOSS is great for kids and education, so be able to talk about that! Parents are always looking for ways to get their kids engaged in fun and constructive activities, if only so that they can have five minutes of peace and quiet in the house
• Focus on value, not cost. It might not cost anything to acquire and use FOSS, but people are naturally sceptical of things that are promoted as having no cost (and really, who can blame them?). Leading your argument with “it’s free” leaves people to wonder if there is a catch or if the product is of a lesser quality. To take OpenOffice.org as an example, it compares very favourably to Microsoft Office in terms of functionality and of course freedom. To stress the ‘freeware’ angle is to sell it short, and could leave your listener to believe that it’s just an ‘el cheapo’ knock-off. The fact that many companies (e.g. Sun, Novell, IBM) contribute to and benefit from OpenOffice.org’s development is evidence that it is of a high standard and is of economic value. Firefox is a great example to use, as almost everyone has some familiarity with it. Firefox has benefited greatly from Google and AOL, to name but two major contributors. In turn, these companies have built business models around it (not so much AOL these days, but they are still probably the largest contributor overall).
• FOSS is very pro-free-market, and is in fact similar to the ideal held by many economists known as perfect competition. As already mentioned, Linux has and continues to be beneficial to a very wide range of companies and industries.
• Freedom is vital, but I find that people normally don’t understand if you begin your explanation by talking about distributed development or Software Libre. Start by talking about more obvious benefits, like software quality, rapid development, long-term affordability, reliability and so on. This will inevitably lead people to wonder how this can be achieved, and of course the answer is that it is all Free Software. Then you have your opening to talk about software freedom and the FOSS community, and it will seem much more relevant to your audience. This isn’t a matter of de-emphasising Freedom, but rather a way to prepare your audience so that they can be more receptive to it.
• Of course, there are the age-old arguments versus Windows surrounding speed, viruses, and so on. But it is better to keep the Microsoft-bashing to a minimum. Going off on an anti-Microsoft rant only fuels those who like to falsely label FOSS supporters as communists/anarchists/anti-capitalists.
• Nevertheless, proprietary software is potentially capable of matching FOSS for quality, speed, security, etc.. The one thing they cannot match is Freedom. Freedom is our fundamental advantage.
• Analogies to parts of everyday life can help to make people connect with the ideas behind FOSS. Simple things like sharing and modifying recipes, lending a book, opening the bonnet of your car and remixing music are already accepted (indeed, expected) by the general populace, and have direct parallels to the principles of FOSS.
• Speaking of analogies and examples, appropriate ones are closer than you may think. Just about everyone uses FOSS in some form or other. Firefox, OpenOffice.org, the GIMP, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia and Apache are all great examples. There is nothing to be afraid of.
• Mac OS X users are already prolific users of FOSS, as their operating system contains some BSD, Samba, CUPS and more. They are familiar with FOSS without even knowing it.
• EULAs and DRM mean that the software or media file that you just bought isn’t really owned by you. Your rights are restricted and can be revoked at any time. This should be cause for concern for any consumer.
• It might help to capitalise Free Software in documentation, as a means of emphasis and to differentiate from freeware.
• Be honest! Free software is inherently honest and accountable by virtue of being open. We should be using his honesty and openness as our advantage. Remember that there’s a difference between explaining something in an attractive way and outright lying. Don’t make FOSS sound better than it really is. Nothing is perfect, and if you make FOSS sound perfect you’ll likely be met with suspicion. Linux isn’t Windows — it does look an feel different. But it’s not necessarily any better or worse (depending on the particular software in question), it’s just a bit different. If you lead people to think that OpenOffice.org is the same as Microsoft Office, they might rail against it at the slightest difference they find. It’s different, but certainly no more different than Office 2003 is from Office 2007. At the end of the day, it’s about managing expectations — portraying FOSS in a positive light but not creating unrealistic hopes. The last thing we want are a battalion of users disgruntled because they expected FOSS to be able to vacuum their house. Those people will be far less likely to try FOSS again, even years later.
• As a corollary of the previous point, advocacy is about managing expectations. Set realistic expectations and people will be less likely to be disappointed in the longer term.
• Avoid sounding like you’re selling snake oil. Copious use of all-caps, bold text and exclamation marks runs the risk of making your well-intentioned writing look like just another scam.
• Be positive! People don’t want to read bad news, and there’s plenty of good stuff to say about FOSS. Honesty takes priority, but phrase it well.
• Be prepared to fight FUD, but remain positive.
• Free software is more trustworthy. Would you trust your privacy and sensitive data (Web browsing history, e-mail, financial records, etc.) to non-auditable software? Identity theft and other forms of cybercrime are a major and underappreciated problem. The old assertion that nobody would bother to “hack” into your home computer is misleading, as most intrusions are made by bots and worms.
• A picture can tell a thousand words. A video can tell a million. A good screencast works wonders. If you’re running a stand at an expo, have a monitor playing a pile of screencasts in a continuous loop, with subtitles (because people are unlikely to be able to hear anything on a crowded show floor).
• Internationalisation and Accessibility can be powerful drawcards for some, especially those of non-English speaking backgrounds.
• Not everybody loves FOSS (yet), but few can argue against the merits of open standards. Most FOSS is built around open standards.
• Open standards are at least as important as Free Software. Don’t conflate the two — proprietary software can employ open standards. Even if someone rejects OpenOffice.org, I’d feel some solace knowing that they’re converting their MS Office documents to PDF (an open standard) for sharing with others.
• Make it as easy as possible for people to get involved. Hand out CDs or DVDs with software useful to your audience, like Ubuntu/Edubuntu and the OpenDisc/OpenEducationDisc. Don’t expect people to jump ship straight to Linux. Let them get their feet wet first with FOSS apps on Windows, LiveCDs, dual boots and so on. Baby steps are much easier to make than massive strides.
• Welcome people to get involved in your community. Ask them to join your mailing lists. Invite them to your next LUG meeting. Make sure they are fully aware that there’s a vibrant community out there to help them. They can even make friends and employment/business contacts.
• There’s only so much that you can include in a short article/spiel, so be sure to refer to other resources that have more information. Quote or link to sources if you feel they do a good job — there’s no sense in trying to reinvent the wheel. Nobody wants a link farm, though. Be selective in your references so that people don’t feel overwhelmed.
• And finally, keep it short and sweet. I’ve listed a lot of points here, but if you tried to cover them all in one go you will end up with a speech/document that is unacceptably long or lacking in depth (like this one! ). Split them up, or structure them so that the basic message is passed early on, with the rest being elaboration/explanation.

We’ve got lots of good stuff to say about FOSS, but what matters is not so much what we say but how we say it.

It can be amusing when news articles or blogs are written about a report/study that has only been released or read in excerpt. Small snippets can be extremely controversial on their own, and are easily taken out of the context of the gestalt article.

Such has been the case with the announcement of the Standish Group’s report, titled ‘Trends in Open Source’. The report is available in full to Standish subscribers, or for a fee of $US 1,000 per copy. Standish themselves chose to drum-up publicity in a press release two and a half weeks ago:

Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies.

Some commentators pounced on this in defence of FOSS, and in doing so played right into Standish’s hands. A week later, other reports chose to focus on the technical perceptions of FOSS solutions, in particular security. Some of these articles basically said, “we haven’t been able to read the full report, but this is what we’ve been told”.

More informed accounts have hit the virtual presses in recent days, and it’s been revealed that the report is very positive overall with regards to FOSS. When iTnews asked me for comment, I was assured that the report had been thoroughly read. I said a lot of things, but the quotation that made the final cut is the following:

FOSS is inherently compatible with a free market, and hence with business. There is no closed-off ‘command economy’ that is characterised by proprietary software companies. The software and its development are totally open to the world.

Following the interview, I tried to distil some key points about FOSS:

• The keys are transparency and accountability, as well as freedom over your own information and independence from vendor lock-in.
• Most FOSS is based on open standards, which means that users/companies are not tying their data/processes to one vendor or piece of software. Some might be wary of FOSS, but I don’t think anyone can argue against the merits of open standards.
• There is plenty of FOSS that works well on proprietary platforms (like Windows). There is no inherent tie-in with Linux.
• FOSS has been most successful where it isn’t noticed. This can be in embedded devices, or in popular desktop applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
• Most people might think of a ‘computer’ as a desktop computer, but most of ICT (and ICT growth) is actually elsewhere (servers, consumer electronics, mobile phones, telecoms, embedded, supercomputers, etc.). Linux and FOSS is far more popular in these fields.
• Most of the Internet is based on FOSS and open standards built around FOSS. For instance, TCP/IP networking was built for BSD UNIX (which is open source), and the majority of Web servers run the open source Apache web server.

Obviously there are more points than these, but I deliberately kept this as a quick ‘off the top of my head’ exercise as a means of preventing it from growing into an encyclopaedic tome.

LotD: Ubuntu theme for Windows

I promised way back in January that we’d release a video of that month’s SLUG meeting — our up-close-and-personal with Microsoft. We did just that a month ago, but I totally forgot to mention it here.

I know, I suck.

Anyway, you can get the video and slides here (the links in the original announcement are no longer functional). It’s been pointed out to me that the slides in the video vary slightly from the PDF, but the difference is minimal. It’s three months old now — so don’t expect any revelations — but it’s still an interesting watch.

LotD: Save money by buying directly from the USA (for Australians only)

The last two weeks have been quite eventful. Each of these probably deserves its own blog post, but since I don’t have the time to write them all I’ll just give a summary.

Document Freedom Day, 26 March

The first annual Document Freedom Day (inspired by Software Freedom Day) was celebrated globally. In Sydney, the celebrations were hosted by Google at their offices, supported by the Internet Society of Australia and the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG). As the SLUG representative, I was asked to say a few words about our organisation and its relevance to document freedom. Not having time to prepare, I managed to ad-lib a speech, drawing on memories of what I had written before on the Domesday Book and Domesday Project. I’m not an experienced speaker, so I’m very glad that it came out well.

Senator Kate Lundy and David Vaile delivered great talks that made us think about openness of information and their importance to society. For the most part, we didn’t mention the war (which unfortunately has been lost), but there was no escaping acknowledgement of the Waughs. Anyone disillusioned at the state of politics in Australia ought to speak with Kate. Even after 12 years in parliament, she is still inspiring.

All in all, it was a fantastic night. Thanks to Alan Noble, Andrew McRae and the other folks at Google for making it happen. Andrew and Sarah Maddox have written good summaries of the evening.

I would have loved to have taken Kate up on her invitation to join her ‘Foundations of Open: Technology and Digital Knowledge’ local 2020 Summit, but alas a trip to Canberra for one day was a bit much. I’m glad to see it all went well, though.

Sydney Linux Users Group Annual General Meeting, 28 March

What can I say? Thanks to everyone in SLUG who supported my candidacy for the role of President. The new Committee looks like a great mix of talents, and we already have some good ideas in the pipeline. The next twelve months is looking to be exciting indeed.

We had the first gathering of the new Committee on Sunday. It was a handover meeting, with the old Committee members present to pass on their wisdom and experience to the new. My sincere gratitude goes to the departing Committee members. I feel truly honoured to have worked with them over this past year.

Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report 2008 launch event, 1 April

Free software and free beer! It appears that with FOSS, you can have your cake and eat it too

Note: there was no cake — but there were Iced Vo Vos! Sweet!

It’s great to finally have some & Community Report">authoritative statistics to back our cause. Common myths were dispelled, and we had confirmation of things that seemed so obvious to us but might have been less so for others.

BarCamp Sydney, 5-6 April

BarCamp 3 was notable for expansion to two days of revelry. The venue migrated from UTS for the first two BarCamps to the UNSW Roundhouse for the third, which despite the longer commute I feel was a good move. Attendance did seem thinner than in previous years. This was probably due to visitors spread over a larger venue and across two days. One thing I like about BarCamp is that I get contact with people and ideas that I otherwise wouldn’t notice from FOSS gatherings like SLUG. BarCamp has considerably more proprietary software developers and entrepreneurs. Less Google, more Microsoft. As much as I love FOSS, I do like to see what’s happening in the rest of the ICT universe.

I made an effort this time to attend talks that were less technical and more business or personal development oriented. Stand-out speakers included Nick Hodge, Matt Moore and Richard Hayes.

Perhaps the highlight was the Saturday evening. Mike from Atlassian led us through a few rounds of Werewolf, a variation (and an improvement, IMHO) of the classic Mafia game. I still can’t believe that we didn’t deplete the bar tab that Mike set up for us. We’ll have to have SLUG’s DebSIG present at BarCamp 4

LotD: OpenOffice.org en masse in NSW schools!

Sam Varghese over at iTWire asked me a couple of days ago for input on whether FOSS would be affected if the Windows source code was released. I started drafting a response, expecting to be finished quickly, but the ideas just kept flowing. The end result was a touch over a thousand words! I was expecting Sam to maybe quote a token sentence or two in his article. To my surprise, he basically reproduced (with a little paraphrasing) the whole thing!

The article is here. Skip to page 4 to start reading my contribution.

Here is my complete response to Sam. As you can see, very little was left out of the article.

The impact on FOSS would depend on what circumstances the code was released under. Windows code is already available under Microsoft’s ‘shared source’ programme. In this state, you must sign a restrictive NDA to see the code, and after that your mind is forever tainted with Microsoft’s intellectual property. Write anything even remotely similar to the code you were deigned to see, and you leave yourself open to litigation. In other words, taking part in shared source is a sure-fire way to torpedo your career in software.

Microsoft have for years been experimenting to find a licence that they can convince people is ‘free enough’. Fortunately they haven’t succeeded. The danger if they did would be to shift the balance in the open source world away from free software and towards a model that is more restrictive but still accepted. They have enough code to seriously upset the balance, ignoring for the moment the complexity (which includes also legacy cruft, bloat and so on) and hence difficulty for anyone to actually comprehend the code and participate in development.

Quality (or rather, lack of quality) aside, Microsoft’s code could be useful to see how formats and protocols are implemented. Linus Torvalds once wrote, “A ‘spec’ is close to useless. I have _never_ seen a spec that was both big enough to be useful _and_ accurate. And I have seen _lots_ of total crap work that was based on specs. It’s _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality.” It’s one thing to have documentation (as the Samba team have recently managed to acquire), but there’s nothing to guarantee that there are no mistakes or deviations (intentional or otherwise) in the actual implementation. The WINE project is a classic example - consigned to faithfully reimplement all of Microsoft’s bugs, even if they run counter to documents you might find on MSDN.

There are many ‘open source’ licences. Too many, in fact. Many of these are incompatible with each other, and a ludicrous volume of them are just MPL with ‘Mozilla’ replaced with $company. What keeps open source strong are the licences that either have clout in their own right or ones which can share code with those licences. The GPL is right at the centre of this, and we should be proud that the core of open source’s superiority is Free Software. Microsoft could try and release code that meets the Free Software Definition but is intentionally incompatible with the GPL, as Sun did with OpenSolaris and CDDL. It still remains to be seen if OpenSolaris is of any success, and I think GPL incompatibility is certainly a factor there (for example, they can’t take drivers from Linux, so its hardware support remains poor). OpenOffice.org, on the other hand, is a prime example of a large proprietary project that has been released under a GPL-compatible licence (LGPL) and has gone on to be successful as a consequence. That success would not have happened if code could not be shared with other FOSS projects, integration could not be made (direct linking, etc.) and mindshare not won (FOSS advocates to write code, report bugs, evangelise, etc.).

The big stinger here is patents. Sun have addressed this in the past with a strong patent covenant, and more recently they’ve been trying to do it properly by for instance relicensing OpenOffice.org as LGPLv3 (hence granting its users the inherent patent protections of that licence). Would a mere ‘Covenant Not to Sue’ suffice for Microsoft? In the case of Microsoft’s recent releases of binary Office formats documentation, their covenant only covers non-commercial derivations. Similarly, their Singularity Research Development Kit was released a few weeks ago under a ‘Non-Commercial Academic Use Only’ licence.

It is be vital that companies have as full rights to use the code as non-commercial groups. Otherwise, the code would be deemed to be non-Free (Free Software doesn’t permit such discrimination). The contributions made by commercial entities into the FOSS realm is immense and cannot be ignored. To deny them access would be a death sentence for your code. Microsoft would be stuck improving it on their own, and in that case what was the point in releasing it in the first place? Don’t malware writers have enough of an advantage?

Don’t trust what a single company says on its own. Novell was for a short while the darling of the FOSS world… then they made a deal with Microsoft. I’m glad that many of us were sceptical of Mono back before the Novell-MS deal, because I’m sure as hell ain’t touching it now. .NET might be an ECMA ‘standard’, but like OOXML it is a ‘standard’ controlled wholly by Microsoft. Will such a standard remain competitive and open? We’ve seen this in other standards debates, a good example being the development of WiFi. Companies jostled to get their own technologies into the official standard. The end result might indeed be open, but if it’s your technology in there you already have the initiative over everyone else. If Windows is accepted as being open source, Microsoft will continue to dominate by virtue of controlling and having unparalleled expertise in the underlying platform.

To raise the most basic (and in this case, flawed) argument, free software is fantastic for all users no matter what. Free (not just ‘open’) Windows means that Free Software has finally achieved global domination - a Free World, if you will. By this argument, we should simply rejoice in our liberation from proprietary software and restrictive formats/protocols.

Of course, I have already demonstrated that this cornucopia likely will not eventuate even if Microsoft released the Windows source code as open source (even GPL). The software on top will remain proprietary (the GPL’s ‘viral’ nature aside). We’ll still have proprietary protocols and formats - and even digital restrictions management (DRM) - at the application level. In the grand scheme of things, the end consequence on FOSS of Windows source code being released might possibly be zilch.

LotD: Happy Pi Day everyone!