Karsten on Free Software

There’s a great workshop coming up at the European Parliament, on “Legal aspects of Free Software”. The official link is rather understated, but the speakers are first class [Update" here's the preliminary agenda]. They include Eben Moglen, economist and Free Software researcher Rishab Ghosh, FSFE’s very own Carlo Piana, and the project lead for Munich’s migration to Free Software, Jutta Kreyss. The workshop will take place on July 9 in Brussels, coinciding with RMLL, so a great many Free Software people will be in town.

So far, so good, and I’m very glad this event is taking place. Of course I want to be there, and registration is required. And to register, you need what? Adobe Acrobat.

*facepalm*

Fortunately, you can also register by mail. I’ve done so, and used the opportunity to raise some concerns about what this choice of procedure means for the EP’s relation to Europe’s citizens. In case you want to come for the workshop, and if you share these concerns, feel free to re-use whatever you see fit of the points below.

UPDATE: I’ve been assured by the people who have been working for about a year to make this workshop happen that they’ve actually tested the sign-up form in a number of Free Software PDF readers, and that they’re going above and beyond their obligations in making sure that people can also register by mail. So the blame for this doesn’t fall with the EP staffers running the sign-up process, who have apparently done the best the can, but rather with the people in charge of the EP’s overall software environment (and those setting their priorities). The problem just becomes more apparent because this particular workshop deals with Free Software.

Dear Madam, Sir,

I would like to register for the

JURI Workshop on LEGAL ASPECTS OF FREE AND OPEN SOURCE
SOFTWARE

taking place in the EP on July 9. Please find my registration data
below.

The workshop program is highly promising, with great speakers who
are leading experts in their field.

However, I would like to express my severe disappointment at your
decision to require would-be participants to sign up using Adobe
Acrobat. This choice means that in order to participate, I would
have to purchase and install non-free software on my computer,
which might not even work on my operating system.

The European Parliament must set itself the highest possible
standards for transparency and citizen participation. In this
instance, it has clearly failed to do so.

If I were to recommend a more suitable procedure for handling
registrations in an efficient manner, I would suggest setting up a
simple web form. This is easy, efficient, and is done frequently
at a wide range of institutions, including the European
Commission. I would expect the EP’s IT department to make
available such a tool available to all parliament staff; if this
is not already the case, I recommend requesting it from them.

As regards PDF files, you might be interested in the website
PDFreaders.org

http://pdfreaders.org/

which lists Free Software [1] PDF readers for the most widely used
operating systems.

Requiring people to use non-free software in order to
participate in the Parliament’s activities erects unnecessary
barriers between European citizens and their institutions. I urge
you to help reduce those barriers, rather than making them
stronger.

My registration data is as follows:
[...]

Best regards,

Karsten

 

[1] Free as in freedom, not price.

I’m Bucharest this weekend for the Coliberator conference, organised by FSFE associate organisation Ceata. In one of my talks, I presented FSFE, and talked about things we can work on together.

In the discussion that followed, we collected problems that Free Software is facing in Romania. It’s a rough-and-ready list of points, collected on a public Etherpad – if you have more, please add them, and give me a ping in the comments. (Just keep it limited to Romania, please.)

• afraid of Free Software
  • afraid of change
  • afraid of having to learn something new
• companies pressuring politicians to avoid change
• user organisations afraid of lack of support
• corruption
  • can’t make hidden deals with Free Software companies as easily
• Lack of collaboration between activists and groups
• Users are unfamiliar with Free Software programs
• hardware sometimes doesn’t support Free Software
• Too little Free Software use in education system
• Education system doesn’t emphasize Free Software well enough
  • Asset: Free Software used for training at Bucharest Politechnical Institute
  • Asset: some courses on GNU/Linux use at University of Bucharest
• Misconception that Free Software is more buggy than proprietary software
  • caused by the fact that we don’t hide problems
• Government forces people to use non-free software
  • MS Windows reqired for end-of-high school exams
  • Flash widely used in education – platform
  • government is contractually obliged to use non-free software through their hardware contracts
• Office suite: People blame Free Software programs for lack of compatibility
• Getting unlicensed proprietary software is much easier than using proprietary software
  • and people consider proprietary software to be more professional

Sure, it’s a long list of problems, and most of them are issues that we know well from other countries. The good news is that the list also contains some very specific issues, such as the Flash-based education platform. These things present a clear target, and may well be footholds on the steep climb to solving the other, less well-defined problems.

For the second time, the European Parliament has asked its internal administration to prepare a full report on how the Parliament uses and develops Free Software. Our friends over at EPFSUG have been pushing hard for this for a long time, and we at FSFE have helped where we could:

48. Requests for the second time, after the first request relating to the discharge procedure was made in 2010, a full report on how Parliament’s Free Software projects have developed with regards to use and users in Parliament, citizen interaction and procurement activities; invites for the second time to investigate, in a full study, Parliament’s obligations under Rule 103 of its Rules of Procedure with regard to Free Software and Open Standards; regrets that Free Software and Open Source solutions are not more widely used in the Parliament’s IT infrastructure;

In the slow-moving world of EU administrative processes, a report on the Parliament’s use of Free Software would provide an important reference point for efforts to make European policy makers more aware of Free Software.

So far, the Parliament is moving in the right direction, but at a snail’s pace. In March, we saw the release as Free Software of an internal tool for drafting and tracking legislation.

Open issues

At the same time, more fundamental problems remain unadressed. The Parliament still offers staffers non-free software for private use, fully expecting them to breach the terms of use of those programs.

The Parliament has also failed to make any progress on breaking free from its lock-in to proprietary vendors. It acquires most of its desktop and software through contracts made by the European Commission. The Commission, in turn, awards those contracts without a competitive tendering process to proprietary software makers and resellers.

The report which the Parliament has now requested from its own administration would represent an important bit of introspection. While not sufficient, this is a necessary condition for improvement.

Microsoft just can’t avoid getting into trouble with competition watchdogs.

Today, the European Commission slapped the company with a fine of EUR 561 million (ca. USD 731 million) for breaching a 2009 settlement over the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. Under this agreement, Microsoft promised to display a “browser choice” screen on Windows installs in Europe, inviting users to choose other browsers besides the company’s own program.

At FSFE we were cautiously optimistic at the time. We were glad that the European Commission had taken on this issue at all, but we also pointed out that regulators would have to keep a close watch to make sure the browser choice screen was having the intended effect:

It is now up to the users to take advantage of the choice they are offered. Gerloff reminds the EC that it will constantly need to monitor the success of the ‘ballot screen’. “Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and has broken countless promises in the past,” he says. “We urge the European Commission to keep a sharp eye on how well this measure plays out in practice.”

After initially displaying the choice screen in new installs, Microsoft stopped doing so after a while. It claimed that this was due to a technical glitch which had simply gone unnoticed. For more than a year.

Sure. Why would anyone at a company of Microsoft’s size feel the need to keep an eye on such minor details as antitrust settlements?

Joaquín Almunia, the EC’s competition chief, was clearly not amused. In a statement on the fine, he said:

The lack of compliance is, as a matter of principle, a serious breach of EU law itself.

If companies agree to offer commitments which then become legally binding, they must do what they have committed to do or face the consequences – namely, the imposition of sanctions.

I hope this decision will make companies think twice before they even think of intentionally breaching their obligations or even of neglecting their duty to ensure strict compliance.

Faced with a blatant breach of the agreed settlement, the Commission had no choice but to act decisively. The alternative of doing nothing, or imposing a minimal token fine, would have made European competition regulators look like paper tigers.

As Microsoft has now, again, learned to its cost, the EC demands to be taken seriously on such things.

Yet while large in absolute terms, the fine amounts to 1% of the company’s revenue in 2012. There is a danger that companies of this size see regulatory interference as a mere cost of doing business, rather than as an impulse to mend their ways. To achieve this, more forceful measures may be necessary, such as excluding offenders from public procurement for a limited amount of time.

Among all the Free Software and Open Standards posts on this blog, here’s a personal announcement.On Sunday a week ago, I had a sports accident that left me with a broken foot.

During a game of capoeira, my partner’s shin ended up on top of my foot, and I ended up on top of his folded leg. The bones in my left foot didn’t appreciate the sudden arrival of ca. 150kg of pressure on a very small surface area, and gave way. This is the result:

You know you’re in trouble when the doctors look at your injury and call it “interesting”. But right now, things are looking up. After spending a week in bed with my foot propped up, I had surgery today. They put a couple of wires in my foot, and gathered up all the little bone splinters and put them back where they belong. A couple more days in hospital, and I’ll be back home with my family.

I’ll have to walk on crutches for six weeks or so, meaning that I won’t be able to travel. It’ll be three months until I can get slowly back to practicing capoeira again. Currently I’m focused on recovering, but I’ll ease my way back into work over the coming weeks.

If you’re waiting for a reply from me and not getting it, now you know why.

The Free Software angle

There’s a Free Software angle to this, too. During my initial visit to the hospital, they gave me an X-Ray. On the pictures, there seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary.So they sent me home, told me to cool the foot and stay in bed, and predicted that I’d be out and about again in a week’s time.

The next morning, the hospital called me. They had noticed a tiny detail on the X-Ray pictures. Could I come in again for a CT scan? On these pictures, taken from all angles at a much higher resolution, the full extent of the damage became apparent.

As they sent me back home to wait for surgery, they gave me a CD with my CT scan pictures on them. They came in a format I had never heard of before: DICOM.

Since I was very curious what was going on with my foot, I dug around for DICOM viewers. After a little digging, I found Aeskulap. It’s a neat Free Software program (GPL for the top layer, LGPL for the middle layer, BSD for the bottom layer) that lets me look at those DICOM images, rotate them and zoom them. While it didn’t make my foot work any better, it did make me feel better about my foot.

Today is a good day for Free Software companies in the UK.

The UK government is certainly taking a long and winding road towards Free Software and Open Standards. The UK’s public sector doesn’t use a lot of Free Software, and many smaller Free Software companies have found it comparatively hard to get public sector buyers for their products and services. The main reason is that government agencies at all levels are locked into proprietary, vendor-specific file formats. Government’s tendency towards gigantic IT contracts didn’t help. Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Office, said today that “despite accounting for half the turnover in the UK economy – were winning only around 6.5% of Central Government’s procurement spend.”

Today, the UK took a long-awaited, important step towards fixing this problem. (FSFE press release) It published a set of “Open Standards principles” (pdf). They’re effective immediately, and all central government bodies will have to abide by them. It also put out a response to the public Open Standards consultation that it had run up to June 2012. (See FSFE’s response to the consultation.) In this post, I’m covering only the Open Standards principles.

The first thing we need to look at in an “Open Standards policy” is how the term “Open Standards” is defined. FSFE has a clear definition, and it appears that the UK government has been paying attention. Patents that are essential to implementing a standard must be licensed free of royalties or other restrictions. And that’s what the UK government has finally done here:

Rights – rights essential to implementation of the standard, and for interfacing with other implementations which have adopted that  same standard, are licensed on a royalty free basis that is compatible with both open source and proprietary licensed solutions. These rights should be irrevocable unless there is a breach of licence conditions.

There’s none of the pussy-footing that turned the European Interoperability Framework from a valuable document into a useless mush two years ago.

Francis Maude, Minister for the UK’s Cabinet Office, has it right when he says:

Following this consultation I am today publishing our Open Standards Principles. These set out that Royalty Free open standards are key to levelling the playing field for open source and proprietary software in government IT.

And that competition between open source and proprietary software can result in lower licensing costs and increased innovation in government IT.

These Standards are going to have a huge impact. In the future all Government bodies must comply with the Open Standards Principles or apply for an exemption. And a challenging comply or explain process is being implemented, through the existing IT spend controls process.

The Open Standards Principles contain a number of important points. Many of these are things that FSFE has been pushing for for a long time.

The product choice made by a government body must not force other users, delivery partners or government bodies, to buy the same product e.g. web-based applications must work equally well with a range of standards-compliant browsers, irrespective of  operating system, and not tie the user to a single browser or desktop solution.

and

Government bodies must be clear about the user need and functional outcome for a standards-based solution in specifications so  that suppliers can meet these needs. Government bodies must not specify particular brands or products.

If this sounds revolutionary, it shouldn’t. Here, the government merely makes clear what is already required under European law.

The cost of getting out of a proprietary solution often turns into a roadblock for efforts to migrate to Free Software, when it doesn’t serve as an excuse to not even consider such a migration (yes, European Commission’s DG DIGIT, I’m looking at you). This is something the UK government gets right in its new policy:

As part of examining the total cost of ownership of a government IT solution, the costs of exit for a component should be estimated at the start of implementation. As unlocking costs are identified, these must be associated with the incumbent supplier/system and not be associated with cost of new IT projects.

So if a government body buys into, say, Microsoft Office, it can’t simply rely on the sticker price for the solution. It also has to add how much it will cost, for a future migration five years from now to convert millions of files into a different format. With proprietary formats, this cost can be substantial. With Open Standards, it’s usually zero.

There’s more. They openly admit that their customary ways of buying software and services weren’t working so well:

The Government’s procurement choices have resulted in a lack of diversity in existing government IT contracts. As a purchaser of IT, this restricts our options and threatens value for money.

This is refreshingly honest.

It’s good to see that the government took up FSFE’s recommendation to avoid large IT contracts, and use larger numbers of smaller contracts instead, so as to give SMEs a chance to participate.

Government bodies can ask for an exemption from the Open Standards policy for a particular case. While this may sometimes be necessary to keep operations running smoothly, it also represents a back door that, if widely exploited, could render the entire policy ineffective. One way to mititgate this risk is to expose any exemptions to public scrutiny:

All agreed exemptions to the open standards policy must be published, detailing the standards specified and the reasons for  exemption, unless there are national security considerations which prevent this.

We’ll all need to be vigilant that this doesn’t turn into an easy way out of implementing the policy. The government of course needs to take the lead here, but if they fail to do so, we can help make sure that things stay on track.

In this and other respects, the UK government wisely recognises that policies by themselves don’t do much good – they also need to be properly implemented. Public scrutiny will help drive this process:

Government bodies must provide publicly available information on their alignment with compulsory open standards for software interoperability, data and document formats. Implementation plans for transition to the open standards or open standard profiles, within a specific timeline, must be published.

When it comes to procuring Free Software, one frequent obstacle is that the people actually handling the procurement may not be familiar with the subject, and may not have the necessary knowledge to obtain the advantages of Free Software for their organisation. So the government will offer training and guidance:

Procurement, project management, information and IT professionals in government bodies must have the skills to make appropriate choices in IT specifications and bid assessments, in line with the Open Standards Principles. Training and guidance should be offered through partnerships with established profession and skills development networks.

On the whole, the Cabinet Office has done a great job with this policy, covering not only the principles of Open Standards, but also the practicalities of effectively implementing the policy. From what we hear, the big proprietary vendors have put them under tremendous pressure. There is sure to be some pushback. In the interest of those living and working in the UK, let’s hope that the Cabinet Office keeps its nerve.

On Tuesday, I went to Amsterdam to talk about “How Software Patents Are Delaying The Future” (pdf, 79kB), on a discussion panel organised by the European Patent Office. The other people on the panel were patent attorney Simon Davies and Ioannis Bozas, a patent examiner at the EPO. The panel was moderated by James Nurton of Managing IP. Despite our very different views on the subject, we had very friendly and informative conversations before, during and after the panel.

For the EPO, organising this debate was something of a gamble. They’re widely criticised for their practice of awarding patents on computer programs, and the debate tends to get rather heated. While I couldn’t disagree more strongly with the way they do things at the EPO when it comes to software, I give them credit for putting this debate together. It was also refreshing to hear Ioannis state clearly that the EPO grants patents on software, as long as the program makes a “technical contribution” – that’s somewhat clearer than the line about “computer-implemented inventions” we’ve mostly seen the EPO employ so far.

There were many interesting points in the debate, though, as you might imagine, consensus was in short supply. The argument that I made was that we need to encourage innovation; that patents are only one of many possible tools to encourage innovation; and that in the case of software, they’re horribly counterproductive. That’s why we need to get rid of software patents, and bring the patent system under the control of political institutions, so that we can design an evidence-based innovation policy as required by the circumstances. [See here for FSFE's work on software patents.]

Read on for the full discussion.

Continue »

We have learned that the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs committee has taken the unitary patent off the agenda for its meeting today and tomorrow.

We expect that the discussion will take place later in the fall of this year. This means that there is more time for you to discuss software patents and the unitary patent with the MEPs on the Legal Affairs committee.

Of course, the issue of the unitary patent continues to evolve. Here and at fsfe.org, we will continue to provide updates on the situation as it evolves.

In the meantime, you can call the committee’s MEPs. You can also get your company to sign a declaration against software patents aimed at MEPs.