Ciarán's free software notes

OOXML Yes vote questions and complaints

Fri, 16 May 2008 11:53:53 +0200

IFSO member Ben North has sent a Freedom of Information Act request regarding Ireland's change to a Yes vote to the National Standards Authority of Ireland. The request has been received and we're told it's being acted on. Letters sent by IFSO during the ISO consultation can be found on IFSO's correspondence page.

Becta in the UK have sent a complaint to the EU about the UK's Yes vote. This story was also covered on channelregister.co.uk.

And now I see that "the city of Aarhus" in Denmark have registered a complaint about Denmark's Yes vote. (From Groklaw's newspicks)

All is not over yet and OOXML may come out of this with a very negative image. Background info can be found on FSFE's open standards page.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Working breakfast on Community Patent

Thu, 15 May 2008 12:26:34 +0200

Here's a report from a breakfast meeting I was at yesterday on the topic of SMEs and the Community Patent. There were 50 seats, all full. The speakers included representatives from the Commission, the Parliament, and the Slovenian EU Presidency.

The most interesting part was the speech by a Director of the European Commission. She talked about its possible adoption, the motivations, translations, and she responded to my question about software patents. (Each topic has a section title if you want to skip some parts.)

Possible adoption

About the possible adoption of this proposal, she talked about this being one final attempt. The question of how realistic this proposal is is an important one since the EC have been making proposals on this since 1962 without success. She said that only one country is still openly opposed to the current proposal: Spain. France is not supporting the proposal, but that's only because they're not willing to start an open conflict with Spain. So if Spain can be convinced to change their position, then agreement could be possible quite soon. Me, I hope Spain continues to block this until all the problems are fixed.

Motivations

On motivations, she gave an example of an unnamed large European tyre manufacturer. I'll paraphrase slightly. This manufacturer applied for patents in it's core markets which were the UK, Italy, France, and Germany. Then they heard that a shipment of tyres was to arrive in Antwerp and that those tyres used the patented idea. The European tyre manufacturer phoned the Belgian authorities and asked them to stop the shipment in Antwerp, but the Belgian authorities refused. The allegedly infringed patent didn't exist in Belgium. It only existed in the UK, Italy, France, and Germany. The arrival of the tyres in Belgium might not be a big problem (given that Belgium isn't a core market for them), but because the EU has reduced borders, these tyres could easily be transported into the UK, Italy, France, or Germany.

I don't have a position on the patentability of tyres, but this example is interesting because it's quite easy to understand. When we're making proposals for how to avoid harming software developers, we have to keep in mind what the possible legitimate goals of the legislation are. That allows us to make proposals that face less resistance.

Another interesting point is that when telling the tyre story, she kept referring to this as "counterfeiting". I'm not sure if that was just an accidental wrong choice of word or if this is a hint at a plan to link the ideas of patent infringement and counterfeiting, or even a plan to broaden the definition of "counterfeiting".

Translations

On translations, she said most countries were now satisfied with the proposal to have patents only in English, French, and German. Unofficial automated translations would be provided in the other languages of the EU. She acknowledge the general low quality of automated translations but said that the EPO had now developed some amazing new software for automated translations.

This made me think of a comment about ODF and OOXML compatibility: To sway votes, it doesn't have to be technically possible, it just has to be politically possible. Heh.

Software patents question

At question time, I asked: When I talk to SMEs in the field of software, they say they want fewer or no software patents. We have to remember that every patent is a regulation. Every patent is bureaucracy. The software patents that exist today, although dubiously legal, are making product development difficult. They are particularly problematic when they block the use of a standard, thus prevent others from writing useful software. Wouldn't a faster, cheaper system worsen the current problem in those fields?

Of the six questions asked, the moderator picked this question out as the most interesting. He was an MEP, so it was nice to see this issue still touches a nerve - even moreso because he was a pro-swpat MEP (or was in 2005 at least).

The Commission speaker's reply was that the Community Patent doesn't aim to encourage more patents, weaker patents, or an increase of wrongly-granted patents - but she didn't explain how it wouldn't. She did say that being EU-wide, it would be easier to overturn wrongly-granted patents since they would only have to be overturned once instead of in every Member State. She also said that by making the granting process faster, the period of uncertainty would be reduced.

Those two points are not wrong, but they're help is not so great, and they definitely wouldn't cancel out the problems caused by the increased number of patents (which is inevitable if the process is faster, cheaper).

When talking about software patents, she constantly called them "wrongly granted" patents or "disguised software patents". This is consistent with the European Commission's position that software patents are not valid, but "computer implemented inventions" are valid. In reality, the latter is just a vague term which includes software patents. The European Commission's use these funny terms and definitions makes meaningful dialogue difficult.

Asking a question won't have an immediate effect. Commission and Parliament speakers are ready for these questions. The point is that they have to be reminded constantly that we're still here, the problem is still here, and we still want a solution. If you're at such a meeting and no one else raises the issue of software patents or free software, you have to ask a question. It's also good practice. Asking questions is the best way to get good at asking good questions :-)

Miscellaneous

Aside from the above points, she mentioned in passing that the London Protocol had made progress and that France had now ratified it, and said that she hoped this would encourage others to also ratify it.

She also positioned the Community Patent as something that is meant to help the little guy. She went as far to say that Big Business is trying to stall the Community Patent behind the scenes - saying that Big Business doesn't want SMEs to have access to the patent system. She said the European Commission isn't changing the Community Patent in ways Big Business is asking for - "Big Business can take care of itself". This sort of talk is to be expected, given that it was an SME breakfast, but I thought it was interesting to note that this is how they're promoting it.

There was no mention of the issue of having a central court, and how impartial the judges would be, and how to avoid the EPO (the executive power) having power over the court (the judicial power). Maintaining this separation of powers is important.

Well, without getting too long, that's the summary of my notes. Probably the best way to ask questions would be to raise them on FSFE's discussion mailing list. And there's more information about software patents FSFE's Software Patents page.

In related news, FFII published a very interesting press release on another software patents topic yesterday: "McCreevy wants to legalise Software Patents via a US-EU patent treaty".

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Links: swpats, OLPC, MS+Blender

Wed, 14 May 2008 15:18:22 +0200

FFII PR: McCreevy wants to legalise Software Patents via a US-EU patent treaty
Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi - an insider's criticisms of the OLPC's seemed move toward MS Windows (with an interesting link to a New York Times article on the failure of cheap laptops as an educational tool).
Microsoft has asked for help from the Blender 3D project - the question is, does Microsoft deserve their help and what should be asked in return? Meaningful patent promises would be nice, as would (really) opening some file formats.
GPL wins in court again - short blog entry by Harald Welte about the recent victory against Skype.
Qwantz: Dinosaur Comics the recent ones have been good, but none stand out as excellent. The beginnings are usually better than the endings.

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Wikipedia's free software articles as of April 2008

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:31:31 +0200

After the free software movement, Wikipedia has to be my favourite computer-enabled community project. It does a first rate job of getting computer users involved, it's articles can be freely copied and modified, and it has lots of useful info.

Since I blogged about it last year, English Wikipedia's Free Software Portal has continued to improve. The "Topics" and "Featured and Good content" boxes on the portal are interesting, as is the separate archive of highlighted articles. There are now also Free Software Portals on 15 of the Wikipedia's in other languages (compared to 6 in March 2007). For the list, see the box at the bottom of the left-hand column of the Portal.

As well as the articles having good info, the references sections at the bottom of each article are very useful. I often dig around the references when I'm looking for an old webpage or news article whose title I can't remember.

Here is a list of some good free software articles. They're good, but remember that you can improve them.

Of course, there are also plenty of articles that really should be better, such as:

And interesting related articles:

And there are hundreds of articles on specific free software packages: glibc, GCC, Emacs, OpenOffice.org, RockBox, etc.

The coordination WikiProject for Free Software is still there, but isn't used for much.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Links: Net filtering, gNewSense, OLPC, Guile

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:01:58 +0200

gNewSense 2.0 aka DeltaH is released.
The Guile project's new FAQ. Guile is GNU's embedable Scheme interpreter. Version 1.8.5 was just released.
Squaring The Net a French initiative against a proposed Internet filtering law.
Software patents and free software - Wikipedia's article on the relationship between the two. Contains good links. Maybe you can improve it. (Found on WP's Free Software portal)
RMS: Can we rescue OLPC from Windows? His April 29th blog entry (that I just saw now). Also discussed on Groklaw.
European Parliament testing GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org, and Firefox (Firefox users might be interested in the GNUzilla/IceCat browser).

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

The Open Parliament petition

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:04:46 +0200

A few weeks ago, FSFE co-launched the Open Parliament petition, along with Esoma and OpenForum Europe. Here's a summary of why we're asking you to sign it, and we hope you'll point others to it.

The focus of this petition is to ask the European Parliament to review their policies for choosing software and for publishing data. We'd like the elected politicians to be able to choose free software and we'd like data to be published in open standards.

The online petition is not part of the official petitions process inside the European Parliament, but it is a way to show that this issue is important. On the openparliament.eu website you can see the text of the petition.

This text was written for the official internal petitions procedure of the European Parliament. It avoids technical details and it focusses on referencing related projects instead of making detailed requests. As far as I know, this is the normal style for petitions. Some studies will be done to define the details. FSFE is explicitly mentioned in the petition, so we will be involved in the process to ensure it does it's job of removing barriers to the use of free software.

The open standards aspects are important because when the European Parliment publishes videos in proprietary formats, they are pressuring EU citizens to use proprietary software.

In March, we made a joint press release and held a press conference in the European Parliament with MEPs David Hammerstein and Eva Lichtenberger. (Old friends from the anti-swpat campaign.)

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Open standards section on fsfeurope.org

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:17:59 +0200

There's now an open standards project section on the fsfeurope.org website. There are links to our previous documents, including the ones about ISO and OOXML. Maybe most interesting is that there's a definition of open standards that we endorse. We didn't write this definition, but we took part in it's drafting, and many of our projects need to define "open standard" at some point, so this is the common definition we're using. Comments welcome, obviously.

There's also a new website section for hosting the leaflets that we have at our conference booths. Comments welcome there too (that is, unless you're going to say the formatting of the software patents leaflet is horrible - I just spotted that myself).

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

RMS interview, GPLv3 adoption, GPL logos

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:14:40 +0200

Datamation's James Maguire just published an article with an audience questions session and an interview of Richard Stallman. I think it's quite interesting. There's also a page 2 and a page 3.

On that kind of topic, Palamida's GPLv3 blog reports the number of GPLv3 projects has reached 2,000. I'll have to look into this however since a friend said his company's three GPLv3'd projects aren't listed, so the reported number may be a conservative estimate. I just also noticed that the Boycott Novell site has some cautionary advice for Palamida about how to describe licence risk.

And while I'm blogging, here's a link to new logos for projects using GPLv3 ...and while grabbing that link, I just noticed that FSF has launched a jobs directory.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

What to do with ISO and OOXML?

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:11:49 +0200

So, FSFE is concerned about the ISO process, but the ISO process is not over, and the ISO process is not the only process. First, ISO endorsement does not automatically lead to endorsement by national governments. Second, there are still two months during which the ISO votes can be contested - and there are already a lot of allegations of voting irregularities.

The national level

Sometime in the future, separate to the ISO vote, each country will make its own decision to accept/reject the ODF and OOXML standards. Many countries have already accepted ODF.

Voting irregularities

OOXML needed 22 votes out of 32 to be approved. It got 24 because a lot of countries changed their vote in the last few days. Now there are numerous complaints about those votes. If 3 of those "approve" were changed back to "disapprove" in the next two months, then OOXML would be denied ISO certification.

UPDATE: Computerworld is carrying an article saying that the European Commission started investigating Microsoft's participation in February, and this story is also on CNet.

Noooxml.org also have a page of irregularities, and more stories will surely appear on Groklaw.

Related press releases

And, for what it's worth, here's a list of some press releases from organisations who were also against OOXML.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

What's wrong with OOXML anyway?

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:48:53 +0200

ISO has now approved OOXML. In FSFE, as our press release title says, that makes us concerned about quality of standardisation process; but if you're like most of the world and haven't followed every OOXML blog entry from Andy Updegrove, noooxml.org and Groklaw, you may be wondering: what's wrong with OOXML anyway?

I'll try to summarise points from those blogs and FSFE's previous writings on the issue. Because this news is unfolding fast, I'll put this blog entry online section by section as I write it.

Patents

When people pointed out the danger of Microsoft's patents, Microsoft published an "Open Specification Promise" saying that they won't use their products against your project "to the extent it conforms to" the OOXML specification. However, Microsoft's own word processor does not fully comply with the OOXML specification, so if you try to make software compatible with their word processor, they can still use their patents against you. (This was pointed out FSF Latin America)

Further problems with their promise have been detailed in SFLC's document No Assurance for GPL.

Technical

Archive your data here?

It is known that the OOXML specification contains hundreds of problems. The Grokdoc website lists many, and the national standards bodies submitted more than 1,100 in September 2007. When these were discussed in Geneva at the end of February, it was concluded that there was nowhere near enough time to discuss all the problems. A bulk vote was proposed on the Thursday and on Friday a 6:4 vote approved, without discussion, Microsoft's suggestons for 900 problems.

ISO not up to the task

It seems ISO was not up to the task of making a technical decision under pressure, and failed to fix their process when the cracks became obvious. ODF remains the only open standard. There are claims of voting irregularities in United Kingdom, Germany+Croatia, Norway, Poland and others.

National standards bodies to approve farcical OOXML

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:32:27 +0200

Unofficial counts indicate that OOXML will be approved by ISO because enough national standards bodies changed their vote. Andy Updegrove is keeping a running tally. I just got off the phone to the National Standards Authority of Ireland and, disappointingly, Ireland is among the countries that changed their vote from "disapprove" to "approve" (despite a letter from IFSO).

One of the big problems with OOXML is the danger of software patents. Microsoft published a promise not to sue people for implementing the OOXML specification, but the promise only covers fully-compliant implementations. Microsoft's own implementation is not fully compliant, so if you write your software to interoperate or be compatible with Microsoft's software, you will not be protected by their patent promise. This was pointed out and explained by FSF Latin America recently.

On the technical side, the problems pointed out by FSFE's previous documents still stand:

Allegations of voting irregularities are rife among European standards bodies. More information can be found on Groklaw and on Nooxml.org.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Voting today on OOXML

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:45:15 +0100

It's now one month since the Geneva Ballot Resolution Meeting. There were complaints about the procedure, and these were refuted by the Convener Alex Brown, but I think it's more important to focus on the substance. By Rob Weir's count, only about 1.5% of problems were fixed at the Geneva meeting.

India subbmitted it's "disapprove" vote last Friday, and I just saw that South Africa has just submitted their "disapprove" vote too. On the other hand, when I checked yesterday, it was looking like the United Kingdom might vote "approve".

In Ireland, a letter from Irish Free Software Organisation called on relevant Irish body to maintain it's "disapprove" vote. No confirmation yet on that.

Meanwhile, the procedure for how to change your vote has been made more complicated, so I hope the national bodies are careful in their submissions. It seems Cuba's "disapprove" vote has already been mis-counted.

And remember, there's still time to phone your national standards body and remind them to submit their "disapprove" vote.

UPDATE: I phone the national standards body of Ireland and was told they won't publish their vote until the deadline - which is midnight Saturday. So it is possible that decisions are being made right up to the last minute, so it *is* worth contacting your national standards body. Also, Groklaw is following this with a few stories and updates to older stories.

Reading the recent post-BRM OOXML news

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:03:16 +0100

I'm still being impressed by the quality of the reports of the ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting that are appearing. When I read the blogs on Monday, I was worried because I thought Microsoft did a top-notch job of spinning it their way. It was only later when someone reminded me to search the mainstream tech media that I saw that, while it may be a masterpiece, nobody's buying it. Every report of the vote is critical.

As a friend pointed out, this is a tectonic shift - Microsoft's credibility has taken a nose dive in the mainstream press. No journalist is willing to reprint Microsoft's version of the story.

Maybe their real feeling about the vote can be seen by their silence about it on microsoft.com (or if there's anything there, it's not prominent) and the silence on the OOXML "community" site.

Two more long, quality post-BRM accounts I'd like to highlight:

Some clarifications on the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting, by Greek delegate Antonis Christofides (with whom I had the pleasure of working on the anti-swapt campaign)
Art of being mugged, by Rob Weir - part of the US delegation
And I should add this Vint Cerf interview, on the state of the Internet, but also discussing OOXML (Groklaw)

Some of the key critical statements picked up by the press were from Frank Farance. Farance is a very senior figure in the standards process and was head of the US delegation (which voted against approval) at the meeting. One IDG article quotes him with: "It's like if you had a massive software project and 80 per cent of it was not run through QA [...] I've never seen anything like this, and I've been doing this for 25 years."

All that said, this is just the media battle. The official result of the meeting was approval - albeit with everyone unhappy about the procedure and a lot of questions of validity. The real vote will take place on March 29th. ISO voting members clearly should reject this application for fast track, but it's not at all certain that they will. We have to keep up the pressure on the national bodies to scrutinise this application.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Coming month of OOXML work

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:00:53 +0100

Rather than declaring victory, my previous blog entry should have said: we have another month of hard work ahead. It seems I missed the not-so-subtle difference between *really should* and *surely will*. I've even heard that it currently looks very realistic that OOXML will get final approval.

In checking how I wrongly drew my "victory" conclusion, I found some interesting coverage:

Andy Updegrove's Standards Blog - already updated with 8 first hand accounts and with comments posted by BRM Convenor Alex Brown. It's worth at least skimming the comments for the comments of Alex Brown and the replies by Andy (whose username is "Admin").
ComputerWorld: Changes to OOXML Draft Standard Waved Through
Reuters: Bureaucracy swamps ISO meeting on Microsoft format (with quotes from Shane Coughlan)
Sun's Tim Bray: BRM narrative a critical review of the process managed by Alex Brown "a good guy in a lousy situation"
Weak ISO support for changes to Open XML throws shadow over final approval
Microsoft's Jason Matusow: The Open XML BRM an unqualified success - if you want to know how Microsoft will spin this, it's all in this blog entry.
Microsoft's Brian Jones: BRM is done, time to sleep a bland blog entry
Groklaw's BRM story and Updegrove interview - same link I posted on Friday, interesting comments about the ISO process

So, rather than being an easy celebration, Document Freedom Day is something that we have to work toward.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

OOMXL fails to get majority approval

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:14:39 +0100

After a week of hard work from many sides, Andy Updegrove comments the result: OOXML failed to achieve majority approval at ISO's Ballot Resolution Meeting.

This means the problems found in the OOXML specification last September have not been resolved, making final rejection almost certain in 30 days time. [UPDATE: Oops. Rejection's not at all certain] Groklaw has also just published an interview Sean Daly did with Andy there in Geneva before the result. In it, he explains the government-like privileged position ISO holds, why the ISO process coped badly, and why ICT standards are as important as the freedoms of free software.

One more thing to celebrate on Document Freedom Day this coming March 26th.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship