Project London movie is the triumph of community spirit, togetherness or whatever you call it over money. A team of online volunteers using free software, created the movie, Project London, with as many as 650 VFX shots! Isn’t that awesome?
While thinking of the next article for the Open Sound Series, I was listening to some music via Ampache. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ampache, it is simply a piece of software that allows you to upload, download, and stream music (and now videos) from a collection of media residing on a server. It features the ability to have multiple catalogs, ratings of songs and videos, playlist creation (including “democratic playlists” that users vote for), tag editing, album art and streaming various formats of music. While most software designed to listen to music does many of the same things, Ampache is then able to take it a step further by adding the idea of concurrent users of a single instance of the software.
For the last couple of years I’ve been responsible for our wonderful Evangelism group at Mozilla. We’ve been responsible for a combination of developer relations, standards work and outbound developer-focused communications. If you’ve followed our work on hacks and devmo, especially around the release of 3.5 and 3.6 then you’ve familiar with the pretty amazing work of this team.
If there is any failing on the part of the GPL here, it is not in the eyes of the second party – that person doesn’t want to share his code anyway. If there is a failing it is that the GPL has failed to enforce the terms that the first party expected – which I think are in line with the expectations of Free Software.
The new coalition government’s commitment to transparency heralds an exciting time for the possibilities of open data. The data release movement is relatively new and it’s difficult to predict its full economic impact in advance.
The US leads the way in encouraging and financially incentivising the software community to develop new apps based on publicly available data. The first round of the Apps for Democracy competition in Washington DC saw 50 new apps created in 30 days. The city gained $2.5m in development work outlaying just $50,000 in prize money for the winner. The Californian government introduced a transparency website costing $21k with $40k annual operational costs. As a result of citizens reporting on unnecessary spending the state saved a whopping $20m in a few short months. A similar website in Texas saw $5m savings, again within a few months of operation according to an EU e-gov survey.
Technology has placed vast amounts of medical information literally a mouse click away. Yet what often may be central – a doctor’s notes about a patient visit – has traditionally not been part of the discussion. In effect, such records have long been out of bounds.
Apparently, when it’s been released under a freedom of information (FOI) request!
This is not, I imagine, the answer you, gentle reader, expected:)
Pangloss was recently asked by an acquantance, X, if he ran any legal risk by publishing on a website some emails he had obtained from the local council, as part of a local campaign against certain alleged illicit acts by that council. According to X, the emails could destroy the reputation of certain local councillors involved, and that they had had great difficulty extracting the emails, but finally succeeded. Obviously the value to the public in terms of access to the facts – surely the whole point of FOI legislation – would be massively enhanced if the obtained emails could be put on the campaign website.
Yesterday I was invited to a meeting at the Department for Communities and Local Government with the key players in the local spending/Spikes Cavell issue that I’ve written about previous (see The open data that isn’t and Update on the local spending data scandal… the empire strikes back).
The following guest post is from Katleen Janssen, researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data.
The MIX website has been up for a few months now, and it looks like there are 2-3 new hacks being put up each day. What’s more, all of the work on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which is awesome (although they chose the “no derivatives” version, which is less awesome, and perhaps a bit misaligned with the vision of the project to me).
Today SourceForge is announcing an open beta period for a new set of tools for developers. Specifically, our engineers have begun work on new and better tools for project members who want to use our tracker, wiki, and source code management. We also have a new open source project management environment. And there’s more to come.
Python developers have their choice of shells – command-line interpreters that let you write Python code and execute it immediately. Israeli developer Noam Yorav-Raphael used IDLE, the graphical shell shipped with Python, for many years, and even contributed to its code. But IDLE was originally created to run as a single process, so the client-server model was “quite hacky,” he says, and it was written using the outdated TkInter GUI toolkit. Yorav-Raphael decided that writing a new shell was the way to go.
“I started to gather ideas for a new shell in the summer of 2007, started writing it in the summer of 2008 (so I had a working but not really usable shell), worked on it again in the summer of 2009 (which made it actually usable), and added some cool features in the end of 2009. I released the first public version of DreamPie in February 2010.” Today he released the latest version.
If you want to watch Internet-delivered video on your PC, the vast majority of Web sites have settled on a single, consistent way to do that. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this single, consistent delivery system is Adobe Flash, with all its security and stability issues.
Aloha Editor is an easy to use WYSIWYG HTML editor, featuring fast editing, floating menu, and support for HTML5 ContentEditable. It provides WYSIWYG editor to any website content instantaneously, enabling content editors to see the changes the moment they type.
Summary: Head of Microsoft New Zealand steps down, New Zealand permits software patenting only with the “device” trick, and Ben Sturmfels is working to marginalise software patents also in Australia
Last night we caught up with the latest news from IPONZ, the Intellectual Monopoly Office of New Zealand. Basically, software patents are not entirely dead in New Zealand, but the saga ended up a lot better than it initially appeared. And now an Australian petition has been created to replicate the achievement of software developers in New Zealand. As ITWireputs it, “FOSS dev launches petition against software patents”:
Close on the heels of New Zealand declaring that software would not be patentable, a Melbourne free software advocate and developer has drafted a petition to press for the same to happen in Australia.
Melbourne developer Ben Sturmfels (below) is soliciting signatures for the petition which, he says, will be personally delivered to Senator Kim Carr, the minister for innovation, Industry, science and research in the current Labor government.
The petition has been launched at a time when the federal government is reviewing the scope of patent law and Sturmfels says it is the right time to push for abolition of software patents. It also comes at the start of a federal election campaign, with Australia going to the polls on August 21.
Last week, New Zealand announced that it would not be making any changes to its Patents Bill which is moving through parliament. Wellington has decided that inventions which have embedded software can be patented, a stance which was welcomed by the New Zealand Computer Society.
The New Zealand Computer Society (NZCS) did a fantastic job against foreign lobbyists (NZICT for example [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]). News items that we have not yet referenced in our coverage are:
Commerce select committee chairwoman Lianne Dalziel has welcomed a Government change of heart on a controversial amendment to the Patents Bill.
But she warns guidelines that will be developed to accompany the bill could still frustrate the committee’s recommendation on software patents.
Commerce Minister Simon Power says the bill, which says that computer programs are not a patentable invention, will proceed through Parliament unamended. The Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ), part of the Economic Development Ministry, will develop guidelines to allow inventions that contain “embedded software” to be patented, in consultation with parties.
Minister of Commerce Simon Power today announced that further amendment to the Patent Bill is neither necessary nor desirable, and that the insertion of an exception for software would prevail. He has also asked IPONZ to formulate draft guidelines and seek the views of interested parties regarding patents involving embedded software.
The response to this news has been immediate. Paul Matthews of the New Zealand Computer Society writes “Despite what appears to be a big-budget lobbying effort by the pro-patent fraternity, Hon Simon Power announced today that he wouldn’t be modifying the proposed Patents Bill hence software will be unpatentable once the Bill passes into law.”
Guidelines rather than a law change will be used to allow inventions that contain embedded software to be patented, Commerce Minister Simon Power says.
The Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) would develop the guidelines once the Patents Bill passed.
Mr Power said a further amendment to that bill was not needed.
When the commerce committee reported the bill back to Parliament in March it recommended that computer programs not be a patentable invention after submitters raised concerns that would stifle innovation and restrict competition.
New Zealand is passing a law which makes most software unpatentable. The only exception, added yesterday in an amendment, is to allow patents on inventions that contain embedded software.
While mulling the bill the committee was inundated with submissions from people opposing the granting of patents for computer programs. They complained that such a move could “stifle innovation and restrict competition,” said the NZ government.
It looks like those reports of NZ politicians backing down may have been a bit premature. Chirag Mehta points us to the news that, despite the lobbying effort, it’s been announced that the patent bill will not be changed, thus basic software will remain unpatentable. However, the details suggest that embeddable software can be patented, and there are some concerns that the “guidelines” (yet to be developed) for such embeddable software will be used by some to sneak in standard software patents.
Still, it’s good to see New Zealand realizing that basic software patents can be harmful. It sounds like a big help was the fact that the two biggest New Zealand software companies both came out against software patents certainly helped. Orion Health noted that patents generally are “counter-productive” and “are often used obstructively.” The company also noted that the ” best protection is to innovate and innovate fast.” Exactly. Meanwhile, Jade said: “We believe the patent process is onerous, not suited to the software industry, and challenges our investment in innovation.”
Yesterday Minister of Commerce Simon Power instructed the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) to develop guidelines to allow inventions that contain embedded software to be patented.
It’s not been a happy time for anti-software patent campaigners recently – with bad news coming in from both the United States, in the form of the Bilski…
New Zealand’s parliamentary Commerce Committee had recommended that software not be patentable. Last week the country’s Commerce Minister Simon Power announced that he’d make no further changes to the Patents Bill. That means no software patents, although inventions that contain software would still be patentable.
One can reasonably suspect that the Managing Director of Microsoft New Zealand is leaving the place partly due to backlash relating to software patents. Microsoft was part of the push for software patents in New Zealand. According to this report, there is agreement that Microsoft had issues locally (many of which we covered).
Ackhurst relinquishes from the shores following a three year period in the top position, which has witnessed some reverses for Microsoft and unsettled times for the local ICT industry as a whole.
Kevin Ackhurst, Managing Director of Microsoft New Zealand, will be moving to Singapore to take up the position of VP Sales and Marketing for Microsoft.
Sales and marketing. It figures. Nothing technical whatsoever, just like most software patents proponents. █
Summary: Microsoft gradually loses control of the British public sector
AS PROMISED last night, here is a status update about the UK government and Microsoft. With BECTA out of the way, things improve rapidly. First of all, Richard Steel, the "Everything Microsoft" CIO from London, decided to retire early (having been exposed and publicly humiliated [1, 2]) and now comes this similar story from the London Stock Exchange. “London Stock Exchange CTO leaves during move to Linux,” reports IDG.
It is unclear whether Paine’s departure is connected to the change of operating system – Paine was notably instrumental in bringing a major Microsoft-based platform to the LSE. That platform, called TradElect, experienced a number of serious glitches.
In a 2007 interview, Paine said: “We looked at their (Microsoft’s) whole suite of technology from their development environment through to their databases and operating systems, and we decided that their technology was best aligned to achieving this range of design principles”
The TradElect platform was abandoned after the series of outages, one of which lasted all day and led to traders storming out of the building in protest. The LSE is moving to a Linux and Sun Solaris-based Unix platform, which uses an Oracle database.
Last July, the London Stock Exchange indicated that it was moving to the new platform and bought the IT services and software company, MillenniumIT, to help it achieve its aim. Earlier this month, the LSE announced that the rollout of the new system had been delayed by two months for further testing.
Brian Proffitt, formerly the managing editor of Linux Today, goes further and explores the situation with regards to calls for the UK government to move to GNU/Linux. Microsoft UK has responded to this:
Microsoft UK: Don’t Cave to UK Survey’s Linux ‘Suggestions’
[...]
Well, you know what? Don’t do it. Let the UK government convert to Linux and open source software. Call their bluff, and let them deploy software that is cheaper, faster, and more secure. Don’t cave to those tricky politicians’ sneaky attempts to shake you down. Stand firm on your bottom line, and reap the profit margin you so clearly feel you deserve.
That’ll fix ‘em.
After all, what do you have to lose? You and your bosses in Redmond have repeatedly said Microsoft products are superior to open source applications and operating systems in every way, so you’d teach those government paper-pushers a thing or two when they actually deployed Linux. I mean, you’re not worried that they might find out something different, are you?
After taking the opportunity to tease Microsoft’s UK division last week, I found myself wondering, whatever happened to the UK’s National Open Centre?
It was a bit of a circuitous path to get to this question, and a little bit of a winding path to get to the answer.
What started all this was the release of a survey from the Spending Challenge, an austere budget program from Her Majesty’s Treasury. The first-phase results of the survey was public-sector workers asked for ways to save money in the UK budget.
The survey results were a sampling of the nearly 60,000 ideas that were turned into the HM Treasury office… 31 suggestions that were, according to the post, “… not ideas that have been shortlisted for further work or implementation but they will all be considered individually alongside the other 60,000 ideas that have been put forward.”
[...]
Much ado was made about NOC, which held a Feb. 2007 launch event at the Houses of Parliament, where Liberal Democrat MP John Pugh caused a stir with his comments regarding open source’s tenuous status in government.
“Open source has enemies, and its enemies are very, very close to government,” Pugh said at the time.
Software licensing in the National Health Service is about to get a lot more complicated, and a lot more expensive.
Back in 2004 the Office of Government Commerce signed a massive deal with Microsoft to provide all desktop software within the NHS. This followed some very high-level lobbying from both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer when it looked like the health service might ditch Microsoft from desktop PCs.
But the NHS enterprise agreement has now been scrapped. A message on the relevant page of the Microsoft website says: “We are currently updating these pages to reflect new licensing information as of May 2010. Please check back shortly.”
“Excellent news: couldn’t come at a better time,” says Glyn Moody regarding this news and adds that “Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust chooses Koha supported by PTFS Europe”
The library at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust has chosen the Koha open source library management system to replace its existing Unicorn system. PTFS Europe are carrying out the initial implementation and providing ongoing support. The system is hosted at the PTFS Europe data centre in Maidenhead.
Koha Library Management System
With Koha, library staff access to the system is completely web-based; acquisitions, circulation, cataloguing, serials and reports are all done through a web browser. As well as an excellent search engine the OPAC offers a range of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 facilities such as tagging, commenting and public and private lists. Koha can also integrate with the ArchivalWare digital library as well as other link resolution services.
The Register posted this update regarding the NHS just the following day:
End of Microsoft NHS deal means mass deletions
[...]
Microsoft has warned any NHS worker who took advantage of the huge discounts available for installing MS Office at home that they must now delete the software.
The NHS used to buy its software from Microsoft as part of an Enterprise Agreement. One of the advantages of this purchasing procedure, apart from costing less, was that NHS nurses and doctors or other staff could buy a copy of Microsoft Office to use at home for the not-so-princely sum of £8.95.
[...]
Virtual Desktop Access and Office Roaming must also be switched off.
Great news. Go for it. Before Ballmer packs up his suitcase. █
“Nobody makes any decisions without checking with me first. If you’re going to change any of the interfaces or anything for that matter, you have to talk to me in order to get them approved. We’ll improve communications this way.”
Now, I’m not opposed to companies trying to get their spin out there, but that doesn’t mean I pretend that it’s anything other than what it is: PR spin with only the most tenuous connection to “truth”.
For example, when Novell spreads around that good old-fashioned “IP peace of mind” FUD in ad campaign after ad campaign, I understand it’s “just business” for Novell (and Microsoft). Being understandable doesn’t make something acceptable, though. I understand why SirsiDynix feels the need to lie about Open Source, doesn’t mean I accept it.
Another post comments on a Venn (ish) diagram and says:
But I thought Free Software == Communism?
Yes, to Microsoft it is. Microsoft is hypocritical and dishonest. While the OSI tries to bridge the gap between Open Source and software Freedom, Microsoft/CodePlex does the exact opposite in order to marginalise freedom. █
Summary: The Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) is still supporting a back door to software patents, despite premature celebrations that software patents were rendered dead in New Zealand
ACCORDING to some renowned economists, software patents would not be of value to a country like New Zealand, where software patents have been entered through the back door. There is this update on the NZOSS mailing list and the president of the FFII says that “it looks likely that the IPONZ guidelines will define embedded software and allow for embedded software to be patented”
Commerce Minister Simon Power has instructed the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) to develop guidelines to allow inventions that contain embedded software to be patented.
“IPONZ will formulate draft guidelines and seek the views of interested parties,” Mr Power says.
The process will begin once the Patents Bill has passed its final stages in Parliament.
NZCS seems to be missing the EU-style trick as it goes with the headline “It’s official: Software will be unpatentable in NZ”
Despite what appears to be a big-budget lobbying effort by the pro-patent fraternity, Hon Simon Power announced today that he wouldn’t be modifying the proposed Patents Bill hence software will be unpatentable once the Bill passes into law.
This is significant. As we’ve previously pointed out software patents aren’t black and white, and there are certainly pros and cons. However on balance, we believe they represent a far greater risk to smaller NZ-based software providers than opportunity, and there are many cases where they have significantly stifled innovation.
Tectonic says that “South Africa must take lead from NZ on software patents,” but what really was achieved over there? It’s not as bad as it could possibly be, but it seems like software patenting loopholes may remain. This won’t be the last time we heard from New Zealand about this subject. █
Freedom champion Glyn Moody spoke to Richard Stallman earlier this month and revealed that Stallman had not changed his mind about Mono. To quote the relevant bits:
GM: Could you please explain the problems with Microsoft’s .NET? Is all of it equally problematic, or just some, given that Microsoft has made its Open Specification Promise for parts?
RMS: Eben Moglen told me that “open specification promise” is not something we can rely on.
For the C# language that was standardized by a standards committee, Microsoft was required to make a stronger commitment. But that does not apply to the rest of .NET.
GM: Against that background, what is your current advice to people in terms of using .NET technologies, and why?
RMS: You shouldn’t write software to use .NET. No exceptions.
The basic point is that Microsoft has patents over features in .NET, and its patent promise regarding free software implementations of those is inadequate. It may someday attack the free implementations of these features.
Team Apologista refuses to honestly acknowledge that the patent promise covering .NET is insufficient. In fact, a favorite tactic of Mono Apologists is to mention some other technology (usually AJAX or FTP) and then pretend the Mono situation is similar to AJAX, and so if one is opposed to the former, they must also oppose the latter, or are ignorant/hypocritical/whatever.
The truth of the matter is that .NET is NOT under the same “promise” that these other technologies are, so this ruse is inaccurate. Shockingly, Mono apologists continue to use this faulty “defense”.
Additionally, much of .NET (and corresponding portions of Mono) are NOT covered by any promise whatsoever – and despite Team Apologista’s occasional concession on this point (often with vague promises to “split” Mono into “covered”/non-”covered” portions), I feel it is not unfair to say Team Apologista downplays this distinction.
Today I was looking through the logs and it struck me I haven’t seen any Wikipedia traffic of late, so on a lark I went to the site and saw someone had (anonymously of course), removed the link to my site, with the following “explanation”:
The Source and BoycottNovell are not trustworthy “news” sites and are known to be anti-Mono/anti-Novell propagandists.)
Note that same users edit history; every edit (excluding a handful back in 2008) is a .NET/Mono-related topic and in every case that I bothered to look at are all non-factual and (in wiki-speak) non-NPOV edits.
Especially devious is how this individual edits articles to downplay patent concerns for Mono, while emphasizing the issue of patents for Portable.NET.
Gotta let people know where they can get that “IP peace of mind” I guess.
umad?
This is just more of the same from Team Apologista. Today I was looking through the logs and it struck me I haven’t seen any Wikipedia traffic of late, so on a lark I went to the site and saw someone had (anonymously of course), removed the link to my site, with the following “explanation”:
The Source and BoycottNovell are not trustworthy “news” sites and are known to be anti-Mono/anti-Novell propagandists.)
Note that same users edit history; every edit (excluding a handful back in 2008) is a .NET/Mono-related topic and in every case that I bothered to look at are all non-factual and (in wiki-speak) non-NPOV edits.
Especially devious is how this individual edits articles to downplay patent concerns for Mono, while emphasizing the issue of patents for Portable.NET.
Gotta let people know where they can get that “IP peace of mind” I guess.
umad?
This is just more of the same from Team Apologista.
Watch the comment which says:
There is no excuse for removing criticism from Wikipedia, no matter how controversial the subject is.
Heck there is even this on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia
So whoever made the change you describe should instead have created a new section on the Moonlight page, called “Criticism”, and moved the content there.
Or created a new page called: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Moonlight
and moved the content there, and linked to it from the main Moonlight page.
Needless to say, I am disgusted by this form of perception management, it has a stench of Microsoft.
But let’s go back to Stallman’s criticism. It appears as though Florian Müller — as misguided as he is when it comes to the subject of Microsoft — has decided to personalise and mass-mail journalists (as usual) with his thoughts on “RMS’s call to boycott .NET, C#, Mono, DotGNU” (notice the strength of the words).
“Avoid .NET and C# at all costs.” –FFII President“It’s kind of predictable that you and some others will interpret my latest blog posting (on Richard Stallman’s call to boycott .NET and its free implementations) in a certain way but that consideration can’t limit me in my expression of opinions,” Müller explained. “I doubt that RMS’s advice to developers hurts Microsoft but the people who do DotGNU, Mono or software running on top of those platforms may be hurt by it, at least emotionally. And for no good reason because .NET isn’t less free than Java or PHP, as I explain on my blog.”
Müller misses the point entirely for reasons we explained before. Maybe he is trying to miss the point, but deliberate misinformation is too hard to prove. Müller is conveniently ignoring Microsoft’s past and he is whitewashing instead, due to an irrational fixation. This latest post of his makes his irrational defence of Microsoft even more apparent and one of our readers broke Godwin’s law when he described what he saw here. There is more of that in the IRC logs.
“Avoid .NET and C# at all costs. Platform dependencies all the way,” told the president of the FFII to Müller, who replied with: “Platform dependencies are a different topic, I just said #swpat aren’t a particular problem of .NET, C#, Mono, DotGNU.”
Michael Widenius, the founder of MySQL who had Müller as a sidekick while serving a Microsoft board, is currently debating the whole “open core” mess and he says:
To me it’s clear that just because some of your product(s) is available under an open source license, you can’t claim to be an open source company, as that would make the term meaningless. Under such a definition even Microsoft would be an open source company, as some of their products are now available as open source.
On what platform/s? Under what conditions? What about software patents? What about Microsoft’s history of criminal abuse? Does that not count? █
Vodafone Group will make its location based services software open source on http://oss.wayfinder.com. The code will be made available on github. The aim is to offer other organisations the opportunity to use a code base which has been developed over the past decade so that they can build new and innovative navigation products which widen choice for consumers.
Nearly a year ago the FSF held a mini-summit for women in free software to investigate practical ways to increase the number of women involved in the free software community. Those that attended the summit formed the Women’s Caucus, and have been working to develop practical policy to recommend to the FSF and the wider free software community. Today, we are publishing the Caucus’s initial findings and recommendations.
Well, a bunch of geeks still believe that none of the standard browsers cater to India needs and this is what they have done – launched a browser for the Indian market.
In a talk delivered last Wednesday at the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, Canada, Pascal Finette, director of Mozilla Labs, asked an audience of more than 150 Web developers a hypothetical question: what would an “open” Web app store look like? The answer could play an important role in the future of personal computing.
Apple posted the Firefox Home application, which complies with Apple’s policies by using WebKit as opposed to Gecko. Regardless, for whatever reason Apple feels that Firefox Home is a NC-17 application.
Can we talk about licenses for a bit? It’s something I’ve wanted to talk to you about for a long time, and it’s a good time for it, because Mozilla is redrafting its license and would like your input.
You may have seen some of the news reporting of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) meeting that was held last Monday (I am an elected member of the Board). At a meeting with an unusually large number of community observers, we discussed how to respond to the 100% radio silence the OGB has experienced from the new owners of the OpenSolaris copyright and infrastructure. I believe we reached a balanced and well-considered conclusion and remain hopeful of a good outcome.
[...]
There are two choices for the final step. In one, the OGB are able to liaise effectively with empowered Oracle staff to devise a new direction for the OpenSolaris community. The other is one we hope we will not need to take, of recognizing we have no further means available to act and using the formal mechanism defined in the OpenSolaris governance for exactly this situation. Here’s hoping.
If WordPress were a country, our Bill of Rights would be the GPL because it protects our core freedoms. We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license. There have been some questions in the community about whether the GPL applies to themes like we’ve always assumed. To help clarify this point, I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world’s preëminent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress’s code, community, and provided us with an official legal opinion. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
There are really only two interesting questions here as far as I’m concerned. Does Thesis have the right to not adhere to the terms of the GPL? And independent of that question, does it make business sense for them to not adhere to the license?
After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.
Open Source is at the heart of SugarCRM’s business. Well over half of our engineering effort produces code that is released under an OSI approved license. We have three versions of our Sugar CRM product: Community Edition, Professional Edition, and Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition is licensed under version 3 of the AGPL, and has been licensed under some version of the GPL or AGPL since early 2007. Prior to that it was available under several variants of the MPL.
I’ve been having a number of conversations in e-mail on the subject of open core business models. The problem that keeps coming up is that there are a range of behaviours exhibited, some of which are acceptable to pragmatists and some of which cross the line into abusing the term “open source”. Where should we draw the line in? When is it acceptable for a company to call itself “an open source business” and when is it not?
[...]
The fact is, the community edition and the commercial editions have disjoint user bases. The community edition is used by a group of people who have the time and skills to deploy by themselves and who have no need of the many differences of the commercial versions. The commercial versions are feature-rich and effectively lock their users into a traditional commercial ISV relationship with the vendor. If these two were kept distinct, there would probably be no pragmatic issue (naturally Free Software purists would still protest the existence of closed code, but that’s not a part of this particular argument).
I’m still waiting to hear back from Eucalyptus about this, but if it’s true it’s a significant case study in the consequences of the open core model, both for the company using it, for their customers and for the community they have gathered around the code. Open core obstructed NASA’s freedom to modify the code to suit their needs as well as leading to the creation of a powerful competitor for Eucalyptus. I wrote recently that open core is bad for you; this seems a powerful demonstration of that observation in action.
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.2 is now available.
This release represents two years of development effort and over 23,000 changes. The main highlights are the support for 64-bit applications, and the new graphics based on the Tango standard.
Creators of free and open source software are often criticised for not bothering to make equivalents of proprietary software and web applications to attract users over.
FSFE is proud to welcome the release of a new educational document on Free Software licensing. Developed by delegates of the European Legal Network, the document helps software developers and lawyers by making it easier to decide under which licenses they can distribute their work.
Last year I attended Open World Forum in Paris. It was a lively conference with broad representation of industry leaders, community organizers, and government officials and administrators. The warm reception by the Mayor’s office in Paris (at the Hôtel de Ville) underscored what has become increasingly obvious in the analysis of economic statistics: open source software is appreciated, in Paris, France, and Europe. My reflections on the subject of last year’s topic, the digital recovery, were captured in the blog posting From Free to Recovery. This year, the agenda of the Open World Forum (Sept 30-Oct 1, 2010) is more ambitious, and I am pleased to be on the program committee, an editor of the 3rd edition of the FLOSS 2020 Roadmap document, as well as one of the organizers of a think-tank session focused on, and beyond, the role of open source software and the future of the BRIC thesis.
Confindustria Vicenza, the local chapter of the Italian manufacturers’ association, on the 13 of July hosted an event about open source entitled, “Open Source, a 360-degree view: pros and cons, legal implications and hence who can profit from it“.
France’s ministry of Defence will next year test open source office productivity tools, according to answers given by the ministry to written questions by Bernard Carayon, a member of France’s parliament, about a framework contract with a proprietary software vendor.
The ministry on 1 June replied it will in 2011 start testing a software architecture including office tools based on open source software. This will be used parallel to the current proprietary tools. The results of the test will be used to decide on the future IT plans, writes the ministry. “The strategy is to have two or three different solutions available, to avoid vendor dependence, strengthen our bargaining position with suppliers and to have a proven alternative ready.”
French Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) MP Carayon asked the ministry in Aprilto explain its new framework contract with Microsoft Ireland. Carayon fears that as a consequence of this contract, the ministry will stop all research into alternatives to the proprietary vendor’s software.
A European plan to advise governments on software purchases has set off a lobbying battle this summer between the U.S. software giant Microsoft and its rivals Google, I.B.M., Red Hat and Oracle over a set of guidelines that could redefine the competitive landscape for proprietary and open-source software.
The focus is a document called the European Interoperability Framework, a recommendation by the European Commission that national, provincial and local governments in the 27-nation European Union will consult when buying software. Open-source software advocates including Google, International Business Machine, Oracle and Red Hat, through a lobbying group, are pushing for a strong endorsement of open-source platforms in the document.
The Commission’s European Interoperability Framework guidelines are expected to provide help to national, local and provincial governments on the best software required to upgrade their systems.
I’ve written before about the software freedom issues inherent with Android/Linux. Summarized shortly: the software freedom community is fortunate that Google released so much code under Free Software licenses, but since most of the code in the system is Apache-2.0 licensed, we’re going to see a lot of proprietarized, non-user-upgradable versions. In fact, there’s no Android/Linux system that’s fully Free Software yet. (That’s why Aaron Williamson and I try to keep the Replicant project going. We’ve focused on the HTC Dream and the NexusOne, since they are the mobile devices closest to working with only Free Software installed, and because they allow the users to put their own firmware on the device.)
Over the last few months months I’ve been corresponding with Dennis Ulrich of Western Digital (WDC) about my concerns with the EULA for the My Book World Edition (MBWE) and their obligations under the GPL. To say it has been a drawn out process is an understatement.
It’s me again, asking you, my dedicated readers (Hi Mom) to help paint this really cool white fence. This is for a presentation my friend and colleague John Ittelson asked me to assist with (I bet more of you know John than me, but ask me sometime to tell the story of the lunch we never had in Albuquerque).
Anyhow, John is doing a session July 28 in San Jose for the Adobe Education Leaders, and he asked about doing a reprise of the Amazing Stories of Openness gig I did last year at the Open Education Conference.
The BookLiberator is an affordable personal book digitizer. We’ve just finalized the hardware design and are now proceeding to manufacturing. We want to have them for sale at our online store as soon as possible; we’re aiming for a price of appx $120 for the kit plus around $200 for the pair of cameras (many customers will already have consumer-grade digital cameras, so we’ll offer the BookLiberator with and without).
Russ Nelson, License Approval Chair at the Open Source Initiative (OSI), recently proposed a session at OSCON about OSI adopting a definition for open data:
I’m running a BOF at OSCON on Wednesday night July 21st at 7PM, with the declared purpose of adopting an Open Source Definition for Open Data. Safe enough to say that the OSD has been quite successful in laying out a set of criteria for what is, and what is not, Open Source. We should adopt a definition Open Data, even if it means merely endorsing an existing one. Will you join me there?
The Semantic Web, open data, linked data. These phrases are becoming increasingly commonly used in terms of web developments and information architectures. But what do they really mean? Are they, can they be, relevant to education?
Prince was wrong – it’s not the internet that’s dead, it’s the intranet. When I talk to clients about intranets as a collaboration hub they cock an eyebrow as if I’m speaking 2003 speak rather than 2010 speak. Some of it may be terminology tedium, but the sentiment is born out of a sense that the intranets of old no longer offer a compelling enough business proposition.
I love this because it really goes beyond just entries in Wikipedia; it’s about making everything that *can* be made universally available – non-rivalrous, digital content, in other words – freely accessible for all.
It’s one of the key reasons why I think copyright (and patents) need to go: they are predicated on stopping this happening – of *not* sharing what can be shared so easily.
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Update: oh, what a surprise: some of the films have *already* disappeared because of “copyright issues”. Because copyright is so much more important than letting everyone enjoy an artist’s work. (Via Open Education News.)
Creative Commons is deeply honored to announce CERN corporate support at the “creator level”. CERN is one of the world’s premier scientific institutions–home of the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the web. This donation comes on the occasion of the publication under Creative Commons licenses of the first results of LHC experiments.
The central recommendation of the Government 2.0 Taskforce’s report was that the Australian Government makes a declaration of open government. As the Minister responsible for that Taskforce, I am proud to make that Declaration today on behalf of the Australian Government.
I recently wrote about the latest iteration of the Open Source Hardware Definition, which provides a framework for crafting open hardware licences. It’s a necessary and important step on the road towards creating a vibrant open source hardware movement. But the kind of open hardware that is commonly being made today – things like the hugely-popular Arduino – is only the beginning.
Minister of state Cornelia Rogall-Grothe, IT Commissioner of the German government, said in an interview with the newspaper C’t (C’t 2010 Heft 15, S. 150-51) that “only by using Open Standards can [the government] obtain independence from software development companies”. He also recognised that “maximal interoperability can be reached with open IT-Standards”.
For Rogall-Grothe a valid technological standard must first be fully publicized, secondly be unrescritively and consistently used, and thirdly not be subjected to any legal restrictions. “The German government has clearly stated that a technical standard will only be recognised if it can be implemented by all organisations, including Free Software companies and developers”, says Matthias Kirschner, German Coordinator at the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
This international plugfest is jointly organized by the Federal State, the Regions and Communities of Belgium. The event will be held in Brussels on the 14th and 15th of October 2010. The conference room in the “Boudewijn”-building – kindly provided by the Flemish Government – is conveniently located near the Brussels-North railway station.
The president of the FFII points out that Neelie Kroes says about open source: “What if we are sued if we infringe someone else IP if we use this?”
Given Kroes’ past when it comes to patents, it’s no shocking U-turn and the video above is good news by most judgments. There are also good things happening in the UK government at the moment. More on that soon. █
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