rants

The questions Roberto poses to lobbyist Florian Mueller gave me to think about the current file format war and the role of medium/large European companies.  It impresses me how many of them still have no idea of what mess the specification of OOXML are, how bad it will be for them on the market to have it approved by ISO.

I’m glad that it’s Roberto saying the following:

I invite medium to large IT European companies to think about it, and invest money to lobby. Now.

I hope they listen.

What a month this was.  ISO vote on fast-tracking approval of OOXML is approaching and in this room all I can hear is the tipical klanging noise of double-hand swords. I can barely write.  Next Friday GPLv3 final version is being published: phones are ringing and press officers are typing.

If this was not exciting enough, tomorrow FSFE starts its annual meeting, this year in Bruxelles.  Tomorrow night there is a Fellowship party (get the details here, it will be in a bar/pub in the city centre).  On Friday morning I will present to FSFE board the results of the Fellowship project. Next days will be very intense, I can’t wait.

I’ve put online the presentation I gave few days ago at the Executive MBA in ICT in Milano.  It’s my first experiment with beyond bullets style.  I liked preparing it and thanks to the CC search in Flickr it didn’t take much time. I’ve always thought that an image is better than 1000 words, so I let the images speak and impress the audience while I added my words on top. 

The structure of the presentation, designed for a two hours lesson (I stayed in time, including some questions and a couple excursions for deeper explanations asked by students), follows a scheme in three acts:

1. setup the story: introducing the digital society we live in, show that software is everywhere, explain that who writes software has power that needs to be balanced:
2. develop the act: show examples of life in digital society, show how digital domain work, why it is different, what laws exist to balance powers, introduce ethics and business responsibility in the digital domain
3. Frame the resolution: present the vision of FSFs with programmer’s ethics (four freedoms) and work to improve the situation, with a final call for action to claim balance of powers in digital society.

Most of the slides are images, but there are few sentences in Italian. Let me know what you think, if find it inspiring at all.

I owe a lot to Roberto Galoppini, for the image of Free Software Business as a juggling act: (aren’t they all, btw?), to Lawrence Lessig (for the ebook DRM screenshots) and Renzo Davoli (for the pipe).

This morning I wanted to blog about my lesson at the MIP Politecnico Business School, but I stumbled upon this story that made me hate my Nokia 6680.  I tried syncing my Symbian based phone with my Ubuntu so many times but all I got was frustration.  This guy, OTOH, reports an [almost] flawless experience syncing Evolution with his WinCE based phone.  I’m so jealous. Is this the luck of the newbie or is it that Nokia has screwed things up royally?

I’ve been aware of the existence of the Linux operating system for a long time, but I’d always assumed that it would be too complicated for me to learn and was a bit too geeky. Recently, however, I began hearing about a version of Linux called Ubuntu that was supposed to be pretty easy to use. Flash forward a few weeks and not only have I found that it is relatively easy to use, but it’s already replaced Windows Vista as my main operating system of choice for day to day use!

Read more: A New Adventure! Windows Mobile and Ubuntu Linux

To confirm that June is a busy month I add some more important meetings to the list I wrote. They are all happening in Rome, during the Festival dell’Innovazione.

Roberto Galoppini, Nicola Mattina and others setup an informal session for Bruce Perens to meet the Italian blogosphere.

Tonight, starting at 8pm Arturo di Corinto will moderate a debate about Free Software between Ethics and Business, open issues and success stories asdf

On Saturday (tomorrow) Galoppini will be moderating a session on Commercial Open Source Software at the Auditorium Ara Pacis. 

Rome is upside down with all these meetings. There is even George W. Bush arriving today. I can only guess how happy romans are 🙂

What a month! This June is full of important dates, at least in Italy the Free Software enthusiasts have all weeks full.  Tomorrow Richard Stallman will speak in Rome at Università La Sapienza in Roma. He and Bruce Perens will also be heard later by the President of the Italian Chamber. Many Fellows will be there with FSFE merchandising: look for the "plussy" 🙂

Next Sunday, June 10th there will be the Pluto Meeting in Padova: special guest Richard Stallman that will receive the official paper attesting that Internation UNESCO  Clubs (FMACU) inserted the GNU Project into the list of World Treasures.

On June 12th in Milano I will participate to a panel promoted by AICT about Free Software trends where I have been asked to speak about DRM.

But first I will have to give a lesson to the Executive MBA in ICT students of Politecnico Business School, MIP on June 9th.  I’m preparing the slides now and I’ll publish them later.

And this is only the first half of the month 🙂 For the second half I think all FSFE will be super-busy preparing the yearly General Assembly in Bruxelles.

I love the GNU Lesser GPL (LGPL).  Actually, I love the fact that FSF has offered the choice of two licenses: GPL and LGPL.

They are both full free software licenses, with the difference being the strength of its copyleft protection.  Business-wise the LGPL offers a tactical weapon to companies like Engineering, developer of the business intelligence suite SpagoBI (LGPL-ed) to compete on the market. 

To understand the tactical value of the LGPL I quote Richard Stallman’s words:

Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every [circumstance]. There are reasons that can make it better to use the Lesser GPL in certain cases. […][When] the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, […] it is better to use the Lesser GPL for that library.

And it’s always worth remembering that FSF has adopted the LGPL with a tactical move itself:

This is why we used the Lesser GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries.

Does it make sense to use LGPL for Business Intelligence suites like SpagoBI? I think so, and mostly it depends on the business model that the company is using.  I think that the important discriminator for a real Free Software Business is not the license it choses or its business model, but its ethical stance for freedom in the digital society.