‘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

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

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)

Simon and Lindsay: EasyTAG is indeed a useful tool for tagging many music files at once. While EasyTAG does automate a lot of the work, it is still quite a laborious process. This really grinds when you’re trying to manage a large music collection. What if your tagger worked more like your ears and brain — it just listened to the music and worked out what song was playing?

Enter Picard, stage left.

Picard ‘listens’ to your music and ascertains an audio fingerprint of each track. Using this information, along with more traditional data such as existing filenames and tags, it consults various online sources to deduce the details of the track and populate the metadata fields. I’ve found the results to be amazingly accurate. Sometimes it finds multiple matches, and it can occasionally get confused if the same track is available on different albums (e.g. a single, an original album and a ‘best-of’ compilation). If you have some idea of what the track is, you can lend Picard a hand by manually adding a more useful filename or some tags. This is where EasyTAG works well with Picard, since Picard isn’t geared towards manual tag editing. Still, it’s bloody impressive nonetheless.

As an album-based tagger, Picard behaves somewhat differently from file-based taggers like EasyTAG. It can take some getting used to, and it might be less accurate for people who prefer to collect single songs and not entire albums. If you’re like me and do compile full albums, it can do clever things like ascertain that you have the ‘White Album’ (or part of it) if it sees ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ as well as ‘Revolution 9’. The developers have recognised that the UI does need some love, but once you’re used to it it isn’t too bad.

Picard is a mass-tagger, so drag a whole stack of music files onto it and watch it do its work. It’ll try and group your music into albums. To correct allocations, drag their entries to arrange them in the way you please (or drag them away if nothing is suitable). Depending on how esoteric your music tastes are, you should find that most tracks are handled fairly accurately. If you sign up for a MusicBrainz account, you can submit your changes for others to benefit.

Addendum: If you’re using Ubuntu, don’t forget to install libtunepimp5-mp3 for MP3 support.

LotD: Excellent speech by Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop Per Child. I would especially recommend that the naysayers listen to it.

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!

My last post made me revisit an internal debate that I’ve been having for a number of years: what licence should I publish my works under? There has been plenty of work done on this with regards to software, but what about documentation and other works? What licence can I use for my guide to Linux and FLOSS, or just for my blog?

If I was a coder and not a writer, the answer in my mind would be much simpler. The GNU GPL allows me to give back to the community from which I have gained so much, and it also allows me to leverage a vast horde of pre-existing code.

The culture in other creative areas appears to be somewhat different. I often see licences such as the Creative Commons, using combinations of the Share Alike, Attribution, Non-Commercial, and No Derivative Works clauses. I see several problems with these. Share Alike is most in line with my principles, being in the same quid pro quo spirit of copyleft. Attribution is reminiscent of the ‘obnoxious’ advertising clause in the original BSD licence, and as far as I can see carries the same potential problems. Non-Commercial restricts works to the amateur field. As long as changes are shared back in their entirety to help everyone, why shouldn’t anyone be allowed to commercially benefit? There is hardly a scarcity of projects in the Free Software realm that are improving in leaps and bounds thanks to commercial input. Because those improvements need to be shared back, everyone benefits. No Derivative Works is a restriction that puts the work behind glass for people to look at but not touch. It’s no different from freeware. What’s the point?

Should works such as prose, documentation, graphics, audio and video be treated any differently from code? All of the Creative Commons licences have an Attribution provision. Many of us in the Free Software community would baulk at that, just as we did with XFree86. I understand that people like to be credited for their work, but is it worth it if it comes at the expense of the community as a whole? If I’m going to be basing my work upon that of others, must I spend time and effort ensuring that I’m legally abiding by all the attribution provisions? Do I need to bookend it with a long list of credits? If I was writing software, do I need an About menu item that includes everyone in the White Pages, along with their genealogy stretching back to Creation?

It looks like a Creative Commons licence with only a Share Alike provision would suit my needs, but such a beast doesn’t exist. Is there a reason why creators of non-code works don’t feel the same sense of community as coders? Why the strong need for recognition?

Let’s look at one example. All Wikipedia content is published under the GNU Free Documentation License (sic). Nobody seems to mind posting without attribution within the articles. This encourages easy and unrestricted editing, ranging from simple spelling/grammar corrections to establishing a new article or rewriting an existing one. The attributions are automatically kept separately, in the wiki history. Similarly, established code projects almost always have some sort of revision control system to manage and track contributions.

Can this be done with other, non-code projects? Wikis often work well for text. Document management systems like Alfresco and Plone exist for more complicated document arrangements, but the emphasis is still on text. I have seen efforts for other kinds of media, but I have no idea how mature or appropriate those are. Nevertheless, it is often too complex and burdensome for the average person to implement such systems.

That brings us back to my legal navigations through the sea of licensing. At first look, the GNU Free Documentation License looks like the way to go. With the Free Software Foundation and Wikipedia seal of approval, how could one go wrong? Not so fast there, mate. Examination by the debian-legal team found it to not be in compliance with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. This is in disagreement with the Free Software Foundation (who don’t believe there’s a problem), but regardless it means that if I choose this licence my work will never be compatible with Debian. That is not something I can be comfortable with. Unfortunately, debian-legal don’t explicitly seem to offer any alternative licence to use. Most of their documentation I have examined, like the Debian New Maintainers’ Guide, go with the GPL. Their own Web site has chosen the Open Publication License (sic). This is more likely than not to be an artefact of the past: Wikipedia calls the licence “largely defunct”.

Obviously, Debian isn’t the only game in town. Let’s see what some of the other major FLOSS projects are up to. Both GNOME and KDE have standardised their documentation around the GNU FDL. Ubuntu and Gentoo use the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licence, with the notable exception of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide, which is GPL to maintain compatibility with Debian development documentation. Fedora make the effort to list and explain ‘good’ and ‘bad’ licences, for software, documentation, typefaces and other forms of content. They don’t mention the GPL for documentation or other non-code content.

That doesn’t mean that the GPL is not usable for non-code works. The Free Software Foundation don’t explicitly recommend the GPL for documentation, but they do have it listed as a licence “for works besides software and documentation”. They go on to explain: “The GNU GPL can be used for general data which is not software, as long as one can determine what the definition of “source code” refers to in the particular case.” I am not a lawyer — what exactly does this mean? I think it’s clear enough for documentation/prose, but for other content types this can get considerably more hairy. Is there a guide out there for using the GPL for non-code works? Something along the lines of the Software Freedom Law Center’s (sic) recently-released Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects would be brilliant.

With these things considered, I’m currently leaning towards using the GPL for my work, perhaps with a little message requesting (but not requiring) attribution. As much as I can determine, this would not break compatibility with an unmodified GPL. Alternatively, I could just go with the GNU FDL, despite its shortcomings. I’d be interested to hear people’s wisdom, knowledge and experiences with this.

LotD: Best. Talk. Ever!

Two different tests, one same outcome. Things that make you go hmmmm…

Which Transformer Are You?

You are Optimus Prime! Take this quiz! Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

I AM 64% OPTIMUS PRIME

Take the Transformers Quiz

LotD:  Transformers: The Game

George Orwell’s classic allegory, Animal Farm, presents many perspectives on human behaviour and society. One of these is how people can be led and manipulated through the control of information. In the story, the Seven Commandments formed a de facto constitution for the Animalistic society. Since only a handful of animals could read, the rest were dependent upon what they were told was written. Gradually, the writing was cunningly altered to the benefit of the pigs above all other animals, and the populace was taught to not trust their recollections of what was written in the past.

What made this subversion possible was the inability of most animals to read. The two animals that could read (aside from the pigs) chose not to do anything about what they saw. Amongst other things, the right to access and read information is an important cornerstone of democracy.

This is where open file formats come in. As our lives become increasingly defined by electronic records, there needs to be a way for independent viewing and auditing. Paper is easily read, but computer files require software to decypher them. Imagine if you needed special (and expensive) glasses just to read the letter that you yourself wrote only a few years ago.

There has been a fair amount of discussion in the press regarding the OpenDocument and the so-called ‘Open’ XML formats. The primary focus of this reporting thus far has been on the political and technical facets. This is slowly changing, as the importance of long-term data preservation and freedom of information become apparent to ordinary folk.

The BBC has published a report on the problem, and discusses how the UK National Archives are attempting to deal with it. Alas, it appears that they have opted for a short-sighted approach, relying on virtualisation of older operating systems and applications, through a direct partnership with Microsoft. With this approach, the format decoders/viewers (not to mention the operating system and software performing the virtualisation itself) remain closed in source and specification, and one must deal with a cumbersome virtual machine just to view a document.

Where is the guarantee that files can be read hundreds of years from now, just as we can do today with paper documents such as the historic Magna Carta? How does this partnership benefit me, an ordinary citizen who might wish to view ten- (or even two-) year-old public documents that are only available in a proprietary electronic format?

It’s both sad and frustrating to see that history is yet again repeating itself. Whilst the contents of the Domesday Book can still be read nearly 1000 years after completion, the digital BBC Domesday Project was rendered virtually unreadable a mere 16 years later.

Thankfully, there are efforts to create an infrastructure for long-term preservation and management of digital documents. To start with, there are open formats such as OpenDocument and PDF. The Australian National Archives have long been supporters of OpenDocument, to the extent that they are standardising upon it. Putting their money where their mouths are, they are building a completely open source (GPL, no less) data managment system that anybody can use or improve to suit their needs. Michael Carden gave a great talk [Ogg video] at this year’s linux.conf.au about this technology, known as Xena [PDF]. Whilst their UK counterparts seem to have forgotten that access to data is not just a privilege for those able to make exclusive agreements with purveyors of lock-in technologies, the Australian National Archives have been striving to ensure that nobody is left out of the digital revolution.

Four legs good, two legs… better? Let’s prevent this subversion from happening.

LotD:  Mexican ‘world’s richest person’

"Freedom is the right of all sentient beings." — Optimus Prime

This one throwaway line in the new Transformers film is in fact homage to the original Transformers series. As observant readers of this blog may have noticed, I am quite a fan of the Transformers multiverse, particularly of the 1986 animated film (amongst other things, it has an awesome soundtrack and some great vocal work). Optimus Prime was a childhood hero of mine, so this motto has always struck a chord with me.

It also makes me wonder, if the Autobots are such strong advocates of freedom, are they themselves programmed with Free Software? Conversely, are the Decepticons proprietary?

LotD:  The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers