Tonnerre Lombard
FFII’s coordinator for Switzerland
Call for Papers for CoSin 2010
June 3rd, 2010
On July 9th to 11th, the Chaos Singularity (CoSin) is taking place for the 5th time.
The Chaos Singularity is an event with presentations, workshops, discussions and information about technology, internet politics and geek culture. It is organized annually by the Chaos Computer Club Zurich (CCCZH) and Chaostreff Basel.
You’re invited to submit talks and workshops for CoSin until June 30 through CCC’s Pentabarf system.
As always, the CoSin is taking place at the Kulturzentrum Bremgarten (KuZeB), Zürcher-/Zugerstrasse, 5620 Bremgarten, Switzerland. Everybody with an interest in technology is invited to join. For more information please refer to the CoSin Call for Papers.
European Parliament solicits opinion on the Parliament Register
July 4th, 2009
The European Parliament is currently conducting an opinion poll about the Parliament Register. The survey covers merely how the query system works (which, in my opinion, is very spartanic and doesn’t really exceed the power of the early 90s) and how the results are presented.
This survey however provides every EU citizen with a chance to promote the use of open standards in the Parliament register, which currently hands out MS Word .doc files. Thus, I would like to ask everybody to participate in the survey.
Gnome did not go Mono
June 18th, 2009
There has recently been a lot of rumors about the article Gnome goes Mono and jumps into the patent trap. There are some things that should be clarified about this.
- Gnome did not go Mono. At least so far. The plans towards that direction appear to have been quite fruitless.
- There are people stating that the Microsoft .NET patents only cover the System.Data and System.Windows.Forms namespace. This implies that no patents cover the concept of .NET per se.
There has been no thorough patent analysis on this subject, and it should also be noted that patents, other than copyright, are a very broad so that rewriting the subsystem or class in question does not suffice. The class must be modified to make it work in a way that is not described in the patent claims. This means that, for a sufficiently unclear patent, it may not be possible to provide affected classes in nay way because any implementation would constitute a patent infringement. - Nobody is saying that Mono or .NET per se are evil; the point of criticism is that the legal situation is very unclear and potentially tainted.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Canadian Patents Appeal Board throws out business methods
June 13th, 2009
The Canadian Patents Appeal Board has ruled that business methods are not eligible for patent protection.
Hopefully this will add some weight in the same direction to the Bilski case.
German anti-censorship petition hits 100’000 signers
June 4th, 2009
The petition against censorship which was filed to the German parliament from April 24th, 2009 has finally passed the 100’000 signers. On June 4th, 12 days before the end of the petition, 110’298 people have signed it.
The powers that be however decided to ignore the petition so far. Apart from a lapsus of the German minister of economy, von Gutenberg, who declared that everybody who was against censorship is a pedophile, none of the politicians of the social democrats (SPD) or the christian union (CDU), the governing parties in Germany, has mentioned the petition in any way. Family minister Ursula von der Leyen, who is currently campaining for her reelection, even removed the time for questions from her campaign events.
Since the petition has passed the necessary limit of 50’000 signers, the petition committee of the German parliament will at least have to consider it. The result of this will be very interesting.
IBM speaks out against software patents
June 4th, 2009
The international computer manufacturer IBM has filed an amicus brief to the Bilski case in the USA, a case which is considered decisive for the future direction of software patents in the United States and potentially larger parts of the world.
The message was very clear: IBM stated that software patents are not needed to create or protect innovation. In fact they are hindering it and damaging the overall economy: «You’re creating a new 20-year monopoly for no good reason.»
This position came as a bit of a surprise considering that IBM is part of the Business Software Alliance, an organization who promoted software patents very openly during the Software Patent debate in the European Union. However, IBM lawyers have stated repeatedly on various unofficial occasions since then that the patents have not served the wealth of the company in any way.
Cold Patent War: Productivity considered harmful
The problem IBM is facing with software patents is very easy. The few actors in the world who had a sufficiently large budget to equip their operations with software patents are now standing unable to use them against each other because the patent portfolios are so vast that both companies would suffer serious consequences in any dispute. The reason for this is simple: IBM, just like other large companies, has a large amount of so-called «prior art», which means pre-existing software in this case.
This prior art however offers other patent holders a chance to attack IBM in revenge, because it most likely infringes on a number of patents held by the competitor. In the sum of hundreds or even thousands of patents, this means that they cannot practically be enforced, except as a defensive measure.
The only companies which are not susceptible to this type of dilemma are companies which never actually produced anything at all — so-called «non-producing entities» (NPE), or shorter, patent trolls. These companies solely exist for the purpose of holding and enforcing a software patent. As such, they contribute nothing to the state of the art while causing damage to companies that do.
Summarizing this effect, the patent system has a very negative effect on the economy indeed: it discourages innovation and productivity as a whole while promoting litigation. Thus, it is much less surprising that IBM finally realized that software patents are damaging — even to them.
References
In this blog:
Preliminary injunction against Microsoft contract
May 30th, 2009
The contract granted by the Federal Department of Construction and Logistics to Microsoft has been put on hold by the Federal Administration Court due to a pending case. The injunction explicitly excludes «all licenses required for vital operation of the federal infrastructure».
The reason for the injunction is the court case of other potential competitors against the department which had granted the contract to Microsoft without a tender, violating the federal law on acquisition.
See also:
- Gericht stoppt Bundesauftrag an Microsoft (Neue Zürcher Zeitung)
- Swiss Court stops Microsoft contract (Linux Magazin)
- 42-Millionen-Auftrag an Microsoft in der Schwebe (Inside IT)
- Federal government grants 42 million franks contract to Microsoft — without tender (earlier in this blog)
Berner Zeitung on a slander campaign against the Canton Solothurn
May 19th, 2009
The Berner Zeitung currently appears to be on some sort of crusade against the Office for Informatics and Organization (AIO) of the Canton Solothurn. The subject is the Linux strategy of said canton.
(Please note that not all comments in the referenced articles are referenced below since there are so many of them, and most of them already falsify themselves.)
Background
Back in 2001, the Canton Solothurn decided to migrate their entire IT infrastructure to a Linux desktop and Linux servers. Nowadays, most of the migration is complete and the old Windows NT terminal server farm exist in downsized form for legacy reasons.
Some applications still aren’t migrated, as evidently specialized applicatons aren’t always available initially for Linux.
A crusade against the strategy
The Berner Zeitung, however, is attempting to draw an entirely different picture of the migration. They recently published articles like «Kritik an der Pinguin-Strategie», «Wieder Ärger mit dem Pinguin» and others, all bashing the Linux strategy of the canton. Most of the articles mention complaints of users of the platform that they cannot do their work reasonably with the new platform.
One problem mentioned in such an article was, for example, that the office of justice received a PowerPoint presentation for some event and had to lend a laptop from the cantonal police to display it. This story is quite evidently nonsense, since the document could easily have been opened with OpenOffice. The other stories aren’t any better though.
Anonymous astroturfing site
The articles frequently cite a web site named Linux Windows, whose URL is not being linked to here in order to not affect the page rank. It is hosted at npage dot ch, which should help people to find it for reference.
This site is of really questionable quality. It is hosted with a hoster who refuses to provide any information about the people hosting sites using their services, and the site does not give any hint about the identity of the operator, who describes himself as a government employee.
The welcome site states explicitly that everybody who has something to contribute to the web site is allowed to publish to the guest book. However, all of the more insightful comments submitted in favor of the strategy, correcting statements about prior postings et cetera are never passed while some of the more superficial ones are permitted to simulate openness.
The entries posted to this site are then alltogether terrible. The issues mentioned are mostly minor temporary issues or general comments deprived of any basis. One comment claims for example that Open Source per se was bad because hackers have built backdoors into it, an argument which can be falsified easily by browsing through the FSF web sites or typing the claim into Google. Also, it neglects the fact that initially, all software was free software.
Instead, the owner of this site could have provided something constructive like a bug tracker, where fixed issues could be marked as such. This would have allowed constructive cooperation between the cantonal employees and the AIO.
Official «media management» by UDC
The conservative party UDC also published an article on the news site SOaktuell.ch mentioning the debate and taking sides heavily against the Linux strategy. The article states that the canton is facing expenses of several hundred million swiss franks — mentioning farther down that these expenses occur in the event that the strategy is changed and new Windows and Office licenses would have to be purchased. Under these circumstances it appears to be a good argument for keeping the strategy.
Another argument mentioned is that «the canton is sending out documents that its citizens cannot read». Were this the case, then at least there is a way out for the citizens which is free of charge: the installation of the OpenOffice suite, which can be done in only a couple of clicks.
However, the comment completely ignores that starting from Office 2007, Microsoft Office users have been sending out documents in the new OOXML .docx format by default. Reading these files requires a current version of MS Office, which has to be purchased. But even without this, reading newer Office files with older Office versions has always been a problem.
Official response
Mr. Bader from the AIO has been interviewed by various newspapers about the raised issues; his comment was that no such deterring problems are currently known to them. Most of the cantonal employees I’ve been in contact with also confirm that there are only occasional issues with the system which are usually fixed quickly. (This would probably also be the case with a Windows environment.)
It seems not to be a coincidence that these articles all appeared after the appeal to the decision of the Federal Office of Construction to grant a CHF 42 Mio contract to Microsoft without a tender, because the Canton Solothurn has been mentioned in the reasoning of the appeal as an example that alternatives to the Microsoft solutions exist. It is not known who is directing this slander campaign against the canton, but either way this person is mostly raising the ridicule of the community, rather than having a real effect.
Other renowned newspapers are already reporting that the Canton Aargau is considering to follow the good example of Solothurn and to migrate their IT to open source software. This makes it pretty clear that Open Source is indeed a viable alternative.
As a closing note, it should also be mentioned that our company is working with an exclusive Open Source environment and has been doing so since its early days in 2000. We have yet to encounter serious difficulties.
Links
EU commission takes another shot at software patents
May 13th, 2009
After their failure to introduce software patents in Europe directly through two directives, then through the community patent and then finally through the «European Patent Litigation Agreement» (EPLA), the European Commission has come up with a new way to legalize software patents: the «United Patent Litigation System» (UPLS).
The proposal displays a vast amount of similarity with the EPLA, except that the highest instance is moved to a specialized patent court. Instead of judges, this court is run by «patent judges», who, just like in the EPLA, do not have a legal degree but are only trained by the European Patent Office. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has no role to play in this and no right to review the decisions of the patent court.
This is another attempt of the patent system to move all control over patents and their applicability to the participants.
Why software should not be patentable
The big problem with regard to software patents is the question of invested effort. The whole debate about software patents usually evolves around the question whether or not copyright is a sufficient protection for software. In my opinion it is, which can be shown very easily:
- First you have an idea. This costs you nothing.
- Then you sit down and invest work in an implementation of your idea. This implementation is fully covered by copyright, and is your first real investment into the idea.
Surely, anybody could look at your product and clone it, but that requires that person to start at step 2 and re-do your entire investment in implementing the idea. Thus, this person has no competitive advantage of taking your idea. The investment software patents protect is essentially zero. This is a large difference from developing e.g. a machine, where a lot of material is usually invested into prototypes.
At the same time, the impact is not: software patents would forbid the competitor to implement his own variant of your idea. The idea is essentially monopolized, and the cost is carried by the community.
Links
Federal government grants 42 million franks contract to Microsoft — without tender
May 6th, 2009
The Swiss federal government published in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce that it has granted a maintenance contract over CHF 42 million to Microsoft — however, without a prior tender. The monopolist apparently had been granted the contract under exclusion of any potential competition.
The Federal Office of Construction and Logistics (BBL) apparently signed the maintenance contract over Windows and Office licenses, SharePoint et cetera in February already. A tender had never been held, so competitors had never been given a chance to demonstrate their own products. This, however, is clearly against the official regulations for acquisition of resources. A speaker of the Open Source corporation group /ch/open announced that the decision would be contested in front of the Federal Court which, incidentally, is a known user of the OpenOffice.org suite.
In a television interview on the popular Swiss talk show «10vor10», the responsible official defended the decision with the rather bogus words «We cannot be expected to migrate everything to Open Source software over night.»
In the meanwhile, the decision has caused a lot of press echo. Not only IT newspapers such as ProLinux, Inside-IT and IT Reseller Online have published articles detailing the deal, there were also articles in the Neue Züricher Zeitung (NZZ), 20 Minuten (print version only) and Infoweek as well as the aforementioned emission of the popular talk show «10vor10».
Not to be outdone, some parliamentarians announced shortly after the SHAB article that they created the «working group digital sustainability» which is pushing for more use of Open Source software in the federal government. Enough precedence cases exist already, with the canton Solothurn using the Linux operating system on the desktop, and other cantons introducing a variety of Open Source tools. But surely, it won’t happen over night.