'Til All Are One

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 Open​Of​fice​.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). Open​Of​fice​.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 Open​Of​fice​.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?

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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

What do you do when you’re in the city and need to kill some time? Watch­ing a film soun­ded like a fair option to me. The cine­matic mas­ter­piece (!), ‘Epic Movie’, caught my eye. I wasn’t expect­ing much from it at all, so I placed myself into Low Expect­a­tions Mode™, grit­ted my teeth, and went in. It went accord­ing to plan, with the LEM buf­fer­ing me some­what from almost-​​certain disappointment.

One thing struck me, how­ever. I was sit­ting through the clos­ing cred­its, and I noticed an attri­bu­tion to a char­ac­ter named ‘Steve Irwin’. That’s strange, I thought. I didn’t remem­ber a Steve Irwin char­ac­ter. The clos­ing cred­its were punc­tu­ated by short video clips, each fol­lowed by a change in music as the stand­ard cred­its scrolling returned. A minute later, the screen flickered for a split-​​second, the cred­its returned, and the music sud­denly changed. Did they cut some­thing out? At the end, there was still no sign of Steve.

Was the Steve Irwin scene removed some­where between the film stu­dio and Hoyts? It could not have been done by the stu­dio — the cut was far too ama­teur­ish for that (although I might be giv­ing them too much credit, given the mediocre qual­ity of the film). While I under­stand that Steve Irwin died not too long ago, in my opin­ion that is no excuse for any­one to tell me what I can and can­not watch. The cinema prob­ably cal­cu­lated that the risk of pub­lic back­lash from main­tain­ing the scene would be greater than the oppos­i­tion to cen­sor­ship. If so, they were prob­ably right. That still doesn’t change the fact that I paid money to view a title that has been rendered incom­plete at the (likely per­ceived) behest of extremists.

Cen­sor­ship has its place in soci­ety, but this is going too far. Within reason, a free and open flow of inform­a­tion is the hall­mark of a healthy demo­cracy. Of course, the per­cep­tions of what exactly ‘reason’ is is debat­able, and that’s what lies at the heart of such debates. I prefer to err on the side of open­ness, in the same vein as ‘inno­cent until proven guilty’. I don’t like being told what to think, and what I can view. If I wanted that, I’d be using Win­dows Vista with all of its Digital Restric­tions Man­age­ment nonsense.

There’s always the chance that I’m com­pletely off the mark with my accus­a­tions. I’d appre­ci­ate it if someone could verify/​dispel my claims.