Bobulate

As an extra event around FSCONS, I had the opportunity to meet a bunch of GNU hackers (part of the GNU Hacker Meeting, GHM). The GNU hackers are the people who maintain particular GNU packages, ranging from binutils to gcc to GNU Scheme to the new GNU PDF library. Cool folks all and neat to see them all in one room — and it illustrated for me that although I’m usually interested (from a technical perspective) in the desktop layer (e.g. KDE), there’s a huge stack underneath. That deeper software stack now has a face for me — up until now, somehow the “shared technology stack” underneath the Free Software desktop sort of stopped for me at X, HAL, DBus, Strigi. Let us not forget the bits underneath that make a GNU/Linux system run.

(Click for full-size version, where you can see that my camera has focus problems with wide pictures under mediocre lighting conditions) From left to right, we find that I’m really bad with remembering names: ?, ?, Matthias Kirschner (FSFE), Jose Marchesi (GNU PDF), Simon Josefsson (GNU TLS, recipient of Nordic Free Software Award 2009), ?, Bruno Haible (gnulib), Alfred M. Szmidt (glibc), ?, Nacho Gonzalez (sysadmin), ?, Henrik Sandklef (FSFE), Brian Gough (FSFE), Alina Mierlus (FSFE), Andy Wingo (Guile), Werner Koch (gnupg), Karsten Gerloff (FSFE), Eelco Dolstra (nix), Paolo Bonzini (GNU Smalltalk), ?. Drop me a note with who’s who (the list of attendees is on the GHM page, also the gnuticias site).

The FSFE stand at FSCONS was staffed by a mix of full-time employees, interns, volunteers, Fellows, country team leads and (occasionally) anyone who would stand there for a few minutes while the rest took off for a food break. In order to show who the FSFE is, I took to drawing little portraits on the whiteboard. Now, my artistic skills are well known — I believe I’ve written of my sheer awesomeness with Kolourpaint; phrases like “skillz like a road-kill hedgehog” apply. Nonetheless, here is a little flash-card which you can use to identify FSFE people at your next conference.

Every now and then I post a recipe on this blog, and sometimes I muse about KRecipes, and there have been a few KDE events (the launch event in Mountain View, or CampKDE) where I’ve baked cookies or done other foodie-oriented activities. You can usually count on me to go looking for interesting food (there is no guinea-pig to eat in London, BTW) at events as well. But this winter season, I’m looking at something different. We are looking at something different. The “we” here is the FSFE, and we’ve decided that there’s worse things to do than cook a lovely dinner for some of our friends. So as part of our 2009 Fundraiser the executive team (comprised of at least three affirmed foodies — I’m not sure we have anyone who can function as a sommelier though) will be cooking a lovely dinner for one lucky sponsor of the FSFE.

Perhaps I’ll be able to practice this weekend with Claudia in Berlin — I seem to remember we got along pretty well cooking dinner in Paul’s appartment last year, but it’s a little hazy. Otherwise I’m left to come up with something creative to do with the rutabaga in this week’s vegetable hamper all on my own.

So watch out: Freedom Food might be coming your way.

FSCONS day one is nearly done. The FSFE track in the morning was fairly well attended. Both technical topics (like the Fellowship GPG smartcard) and legal. I’ve attended a few other talks, talked to lots of people about licensing issues, eaten scrumptious cookies (the catering is both vegetarian and excellent), and now I’m ready for a nap. After that, I have a few new software licenses to read and think about, because I’ve been asked to comment on several from a Free Software perspective. Not that I’m authoritative on that topic, but I can do the rough work.

Right. Got that heading? Now turn 90 degrees to your right, because Gothenburg is that way. It’s time for FSCONS, the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit, so off we go. I’ll be talking about licensing, best practices in governance and trying to learn about Swedish copyright law for a few days. Looking forward to it, including taking advantage of Henrik.

Yesterday I rattled on about change processes for open standards; or at least, tried to suggest I’d done some thinking on the topic. This post is a little more “meta” because I’m going to point to some articles describing how the standards up to which standards are held, change — in non-open ways.

First off, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has a definition of Open Standard. Like I said, it’s one of many; it is based on the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) definition, strengthened a little for Free Software. The Dutch government agency for software, NOiV has a Dutch definition, again directly derived from the EIF one.

There is an update coming to the EIF, described in (among others) ArsTechnica’s “EU waffles” article. The update is still in draft form; the draft was leaked to Brenno de Winter. Since the update was supposed to have been published by now, the fact it’s still in draft suggests that the (non-open) process for updating it is not going too well. Ryan Paul picks out many of the key problems with the new (draft) definition, in particular changing the language from fairly clear, fairly forward thinking, to one that is muddled and unclear. Replacing clarity with confusion does not, to me, constitute a valuable change in a standard (a meta-standard, describing how other standards should work: in other words, muzziness here is damaging across a far wider scope than just one badly-written standard elsewhere).

In a sense, you could say “closed is the new open.” Or maybe “closed is just a kind of open, at the 0.0 mark on the sliding scale of openness.” Yes, and slavery is just 0.0 freedom, and broken is just 0.0 functioning. Indeed, on scales like that, you can make almost anything mean anything at all (lemons just taste 0.0 sweet).

Karsten Gerloff has the FSFE’s response, and points to an article by Glyn Moody (where I see Keith Jones has added a comment that pre-dates this entry, with the same gist — I think he misses the point where the new EIF says “for interoperability, we need open standards, and open standards are ..”; relatively good comments thread there, anyway.)

Starting in November 2009, Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) will award three people with a Fellowship grant every month for the coming year. Everybody who is actively working for Free Software but cannot afford the Fellowship contribution can apply for the grant.

That’s from the Fellowship of FSFE news page. The Fellowship of FSFE is the way that individuals can support the work of FSFE; by becoming a member you add to our resources of people, time, enthusiasm. However, it costs money, which not everyone has, so we’re looking to recognize people who contribute time, enthusiasm and skills to Free Software with a complimentary Fellowship.

The Fellows in an area also organize get-togethers — after all, they are members of one club — and the groups in various cities in Germany are quite active and successful. In the Netherlands, not so much, but we’re looking to change that by getting together in the second half of january (after jan. 14th, when the New Year’s borrel for a whole bunch of Free Software and Open Standards groups happens). For those in .nl — keep an eye on the national mailing list.

The nice thing about standards is that there’s so many to choose from. Joel Spolsky elaborates on Martian handsets in the context of web standards — it’s a fun read, go on. It’s somewhat relevant in the context of Open Standards (there are many definitions out there, largely compatible and differing in details; the FSFE uses on definition of Open Standard, the SIUG uses a slightly different one). Now, one of the characteristics of an Open Standard is that there is some change process — new features are added, ambiguities in the standard worked out. Article 4 of the FSFE definition asks for “managed and further developed independently of any single vendor”. I think none of the available definitions demand “don’t be daft.”

But when changing standards (e.g. producing a new version of a standard with new features, new extensions, or clarification and disambiguation), some form of “don’t be daft” needs to be taken into account. Clearly there’s a need for measured progress, although we can argue about what “progress” means. As a (former) formal-verification-kind-of-guy, I suspect I use words like “specification” and “standard” differently from, say, the ISO. A specification states truth, and does so elegantly. In my academic experience, changing a specification raises two main questions: is this true? is this the best possible way to express the spec? These academic specs, too, are written by small groups of people, with strong co-working ties.

Way down at the other end of the spectrum — no, I shouldn’t suggest that there’s a continuum present here; somewhere there’s a quote like “that’s not the same ballgame; heck, it’s not even the same sport” but I forget where that’s from — are fuzzy processes, ambiguous specifications and fundamental disagreements on what “progress” means. Rob Weir has a three-part blog series (Part I) on the IS29500 update process. Looking at that, I see an update process rife with procedural problems, intellectual dishonesty, and a lack of commitment to a common goal. It’s an interesting read, if only to wonder — what kind of provisions should we make in the definition of Open Standards to ensure a (better) workable change process?

One peculiarity of Dutch copyright law is the fact that obtaining a copy of a (copyrighted) work that is not offered in a legal fashion (i.e. the person offering the copy does not have a license to do so) does not in itself constitute infringement. In other words, you can take, but you can’t offer. Sounds a little like “do ask, but don’t tell” to me. I believe a similar situation applies in Canada. Both countries also have a “copying levy” applied to blank media.

The effect of this situation is to turn all the Dutch computer magazines (the non-technical ones anyway) into “where to get yur music n vidz” catalogues. Something that I feel does the notion of copyright a disservice. [[ I should note that it’s possible to disagree with the notion of copyright itself or the implementation thereof, but here we’re mostly weaseling to escape the fundamental restriction that it should be the author of a work who controls what may be done with it. ]]

[[ Additional warning: all links in this blog entry lead to Dutch-language pages, so be warned that they may contain Hottentottententententoonstellingen and other examples of that raspy tongue down by the sea. ]]

In the past few weeks there have been repeated kerfuffles around enforcement of copyright — in the music business, not software — but the Dutch government has now stated that it intends to make downloading illegal. Well, fortunately a little more subtle than that (although the umbrella for copyright organizations has in the past tried to paint a picture that all downloading is illegal, until the NLUUG and others called them on that). It hit one news site as free downloads should be punishable; another headline (same site) was gov’t to ban downloading. What I make of this is that “downloading” in Dutch apparently means “obtaining a copy of a work from an unlicensed source.” See the perverse effect on language?

This kind of news hits lots of channels, and you can see, for instance, on security.nl — the usual kind of discussion focused on “music biz needs a new business model” and “copyright lasts too long” and “implementation is infeasible because I’ll use encryption.”

But let’s take a closer look at the sources (maybe not the most-original source, but closer than reports in the media): a press release from the ministry of Justice. The summary of the press release reads:

Thuiskopieheffingen op informatiedragers zoals blanco cd’s en dvd’s moeten op termijn worden afgeschaft. Daarvoor in de plaats komt een regeling die het downloaden van beschermde werken uit (evident) illegale bron verbiedt. Verder wordt het toezicht op auteursrechtorganisaties sterker en zal de contractuele positie van auteurs en uitvoerende kunstenaars worden verbeterd.

[[ Loose translation in English: ]] The blank media levy (which covers home copying of music and video) on cd’s and dvd’s should be scrapped in due time. In its place, downloading of copyrighted content from (obviously) illegal sources will be prohibited. In addition, the oversight of copyright-related umbrella organizations will be strengthened and the contractual position of authors and performing artists will be improved.

I suppose I can only say I think I applaud this (the devil’s in the details, of course), as it moves to a somewhat less actuarial approach to copyright violations and tries to come up with something that works more closely along the original setup where the author had control over the protected work (within the scope of copyright law, which is the social contract governing the use of creative work, along with its explicitly allowed exceptions).

Two days of LinuxWorld have left me tired by happy. I ended up giving two talks, because Karsten and I made it a double on wednesday and then on Thursday I had another one on best practices in license selection for Free Software projects (one-line summary: pick one that is consisten with your business strategy). The Open Source pavilion at LW isn’t all that large, so 14-20 people as an audience fills it.

Besides giving some talks on licensing topics (FSFE hat), I sometimes stood around the NLUUG booth and handed out posters for the next NLUUG conference — spring 2010, topic “System administration.” Very traditional for an Open Systems and Open Standards organization. And aside from that, wandering around a trade fair with four themes — Linux, Storage, Security and Business Tools — is an education in itself. I try to make clear at the start of every conversation that I’m not a sales opportunity, as that seems to avoid wasting time for both of us if I run into a hard-sell booth (still, the one stand that asked “How many workplaces does your company have?” and then “Well, you have less than five hundred desks, you’re not interesting, goodbye!” — I never even found out what they were selling at all.) You can still get conference goodies though, so I got home with a nice collection of peppermints and flashlights for the kids.