Bobulate

At the Free Software Foundation Europe general assembly, I was accepted as a member of the association. Like KDE e.V., the FSFE is a German association with fairly strict rules on becoming a member (I should mention that becoming a member of KDE e.V. isn’t all that hard, and that you can support FSFE by becoming a fellow of FSFE). This means that I have an additional FSFE hat to wear, on top of NLUUG and KDE.

I am also discarding some hats. On the cusp of summer, I have informed the University of Nijmegen that I am leaving the place where I’ve studied and worked for the past 19 years (that’s longer than KDE exists, and longer than some valued contributors to KDE have existed, for that matter). This means that I will no longer be working on CodeYard (a project to have Dutch high-school students produce Free Software with modern tools) or Sprint-UP (closing the gap between high schools and universities). CodeYard occupies a special place in my heart, as it has produced some really neat software and gotten students to build beautiful things — something I think is really important when writing Free Software. I’ll continue to watch CodeYard from the sidelines, though.

The FSFE hat represents some additional responsibilities, too, and answers the “how do you eat?” question. In the coming months the Freedom Task Force will transition from the capable hands of Shane Coughlan to mine; Shane has spent the past two years building up a unique group of technologists and legal representatives to discuss law-and-technology matters on neutral ground and provide services to Free Software projects that need a little help getting their legal activities in order. The FTF created the Fiduciary License Agreement, for instance, for dealing with copyrights in distributed development projects; KDE uses a modified version (PDF, 40k). It continues to grow, and I hope I’ll be able to follow some of the path that Shane has charted.

I may need a captain’s hat, after all.

Last weekend was the annual general meeting of the Free Software Foundation Europe, which was the reason I was in Spain. It was very much fun to meet the people who have been working on Free Software at a European level for the past eight years. Much like every Free Software conference or meeting I’ve ever attended, there was a “work hard, play hard” atmosphere. Plans for the next year were made, schedules set and many tales were told. The main result of the meeting is the changing of the guard: after eight years, Georg Greve has stepped down as president of the FSFE. I cannot hope two write something to compete with the words of thanks for Georg’s work pronounced elsewhere. So I will round up with some typical KDE words: “dude!”

Spotted a peculiar and tendentious article on WebWereld (Dutch only), which suggests that Karl-Heinz Streibich of Software AG said that the (proprietary) software industry needs direct financial support. There’s no direct quote, though. The closest thing to a direct quote is the call for a “clear strategy” in Europe to strengthen the software industry.

I’m sure the Free Software world can come up with some good suggestions there. Skill building? Local autonomy? Escape from vendor lock in? All solutions for strengthening the European software industry at all levels and obtaining better software and promoting cooperation between public sector organizations.

I have not seen this mentioned elsewhere, so it may just be lousy sensationalist reporting.

Now, there is an EU software strategy being formulated. It tries to bring together the viewpoints of various parties on what to do with software. LinuxJournal does a nice piece on it, highlighting the tensions between the EU itself, real Free Software organisations like the FSFE, and proprietary software companies.

There have been a lot of stories around public procurement of IT services and software lately. Naturally I filter for the ones that say nice things about Free Software or indicate that Free Software is gaining traction in the public sector. I can explain why I feel that governments (at all levels) should prefer Free Software over proprietary software whenever possible, and it comes down to my belief that governments exist to take care of, or improve, the quality of life of their subjects. That’s the moral basis for their existence, and you are right in saying that it’s also stunningly naive of me in practice. So I will claim that governments should do what is best for their people and that short-term TCO calculations, dependency on third parties, vendor lock-in and data hostaging (is there a term for “your own data is stored in a proprietary format that may not even be legal for you to reverse-engineer and extract?”) are not good ways to serve the people. Developing local skills, fostering cooperation and pushing open standards for long-term storage and interoperability is. Now, this isn’t to say that there’s no space for proprietary software at all, but it’s a little like importing rice to feed the populace: something you want to do as little as possible and stop doing as quick as you can, because it places you at the mercy of your food (or software) sources.

Anyway, let’s take a look at a few of the stories: Vancouver embraces Open Source (does this have anything to do with Aaron moving there?). One weird quote in there from Andrea Reimer “now we just have to look forward on implementation and figuring sort of the order with which we do that.” That sounds like there’s goodwill, but no concrete implementation plan to me. Still a step in the right direction. Also from the article: “For example, she said, videos made at city hall, including videos of council meetings, are currently in a proprietary format that cannot be posted on YouTube.” Sounds to me like they need Theora, as YouTube in itself is not a long term storage provider.

Way down in New Zealand there has been some changes in the procurement strategy of the State Services Commission. From the Reg’s reporting (or the SSC statement) it is difficult to say whether this is a real win for Free Software or whether it’s just a no-central-deal-has-been-reached situation where individual departments now strike their own deals. One desirable approach to procurement might be to require an evaluation of Free Software first.

The UK has found some savings, but unfortunately by shifting around proprietary software licenses and not by going for something that is Free (it might not be cheaper, but it will be better controlled in the long run). The hard-to-credit part of the story is actually that specialized tools are (or were) apparently bundled previously, and the savings are to be realized through unbundling.

On the bundling front, though, there’s Romania (also on Glyn Moody’s blog with a variety of very bitter comments about EU politics, further emphasizing that my sunny picture of the duty of government above is totally whack; Romanian translation of the OSOR article also available — it’s an interesting language to try to read). The question to ask is always: at the end of the contract period, what do you have left? And I’m afraid that the answer will be “increased dependence and no software.” Throwing that much money at one or more Free Software companies would change the end results considerably even if in the short or medium term the results are less comfortable.

[[ PS. As far as checking out what kinds of procurement strategies there are and what IT money is spent on, the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) or equivalent might be useful. In the Netherlands we have something called the WOB which makes it possible to request information about the decisions made in council by various levels of government; it seems that Dutch blogger and journalist Brenno de Winter has gone and WOBbed every local council in the country for information regarding their adherence to the national action plan on software procurement. ]]

Over at arstechnica.com: DRM makes pirates of us all. This is an easy-reading version of Patricia Akester’s own summary of her DRM work. My own take on the issue is that DRM entangles the copyright on a creative work (and copyright is a well understood social contract) with a device used to present, reproduce, or make accessible the underlying work. And the mechanisms used in the device are not held to the same social contract as that of copyright; you end up with the lowest common denominator of copyright and the mechanism, which often means stripping you of the rights you would have under copyright. With an old-fashioned book, the mechanism does very little other than to present the underlying copyrighted work. I can pull a book off the shelf and the book itself poses no additional restrictions. Here’s a quote from an 1829 almanac:

Wij plagten ons Jaarboekje altijd eene vriendelijke groete en eene of andere boodschap, was het niet in verzen, dan in proza, mede te geven.

No restrictions, and in using the creative work the user is obligated to check whether the use is allowed under the rules of copyright. 1829 is sufficiently long ago that any restrictions imposed by copyright are long gone.

With DRM, there is an additional class of restrictions present based on a different social (?) contract. While the user may think they are obtaining a copy of a work under copyright law — and they are — they are also getting an inferior contract because of the entanglement of the work with the device.

It would be interesting to time-travel 90 years into the future and demand, then and there, from the rights holder at the time, a public domain version of the Wolverine movie. That’s the trade off in copyright: you get protection for a limited time, and then the creative work becomes part of the public domain, free for all to use, study, modify (that might make a new creative work) and distribute. And then sue them into oblivion when DRM prevents the rightsholder from fulfilling their end of the bargain. Unfortunately, by that time it’s a bit late to realize that 90 years of creative work is effectively excised from the public domain because it was entangled with devices that were produced with an inferior contract.

So yes, you buy a DVD and you get a device for reproducing a creative work; this device gives you a lousy set of rights. I wonder if it could be argued that this is not publishing and therefore the work on the restrictive device doesn’t obtain copyright protection at all. Then you’d get no fair use out of it either. Good thing this blog entry is peppered with counterfactuals like time travel so I can claim that the whole thing was rampant speculation.

My iPod shuffle — I won one in a raffle earlier this month — is not a matter for speculation. It’s a very peculiar 4GB USB stick, it doesn’t use standard USB cables, and what the heck kind of USB stick has a clip for attaching it to your lapel? (Yes, I know there are enough weird-form-factor USB devices. Don’t send pics.) I’m told it can play music, too, and indeed headphones attached to the device will inform me “Please use iTunes to synchronize this device.” Yeah, right. It’s sufficiently new that gnupod doesn’t support it, but it illustrates in a round-about-way how devices impose additional restrictions on end users.

It reminds me a little of poorly written software licenses. At Free Software legal events I usually use the example of “you may use this software under the terms of the 2-clause BSD license provided you also stand on your left leg.” It’s an additional technical requirement which is is tolerable — but still not right — for a brief time, and then quickly becomes noxious and annoying.