Ciarán's free software notes

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

MS patents make a no-op of their latest interop announcement

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:04:46 +0100

A lot of media reports seem to have missed that Microsoft have said very explicitly that they consider patent licences mandatory for anyone who wants to use the interop info they're going to publish. This makes it pretty much unusable by free software, so this PR stunt is no more than that.

Below is a snippet from Microsoft's recent press conference transcript. The announcement is so slippery, even Ballmer forgot what weasel words to use and needed interuption from Brad Smith :-)

STEVE BALLMER: Patents will be, not freely, will be available.

BRAD SMITH: Readily available.

STEVE BALLMER: Readily available for the right fee. The basic economic analysis that you should go through sort of goes like this. We have valuable intellectual property in our patents, we will continue to view that as valuable intellectual property in all forms, and we will monetize from all users of that, not all developers, but for all users of that patented technology, all commercial developers, and all commercial users of that patented technology.

Groklaw has an article on the announcement: Promises, Promises from Microsoft. Again.

Update: FSFE has now issued a PR about this: Microsoft pledge excluding primary competitors.

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

Don't buy iPod nano 2nd or 3rd generations

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:45:50 +0100

Because Apple encrypted the pre-installed firmware, the Rockbox and iPod Linux projects have been unable to port their after-market firmware to the iPod nano 2nd generation or 3rd generation.

I'm a very happy user of Rockbox on my iRiver H10, so after receiving one of these as a gift, I was very disappointed that I couldn't use Rockbox on it. Next, I found that Apple had decided to only support their own formats plus the mp3 format. I use a different format, so my 4Gb of audio files are unreadable to the iPod. How needlessly frustrating.

I strongly advise avoiding these devices. In general, to avoid frustration, avoid any consumer device when free software after-market firmware exists for that category of device but doesn't work on that particular device. For digital audio players, you can check support at:

For details about the attempts to port Rockbox and iPod Linux to the iPod nano, you can find info on the "Nano 2G" thread on the Rockbox forum, and for datasheets, see iPod Linux's Generations page. Porting efforts started in the 2nd half of 2006 and no one has yet gotten firmware to boot on these devices, so it looks unlikely that the problem will be solved soon.

One postive tangential discovery was the Songbird software which, although still in Beta, does a good job of organising music files.

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