BibOS Admin – free admin system for GNU/Linux to be presented at FOSDEM

Posted by agger on 0

You can meet me this year at FOSDEM. I’ll be presenting a lightning talk about BibOS Admin, which is a ” web-based, easy to use admin system for Ubuntu” which we made in my company, Magenta.  The  subtitle of the talk is: “Because Landscape is too expensive”.

Here is the description of the talk on the FOSDEM page:

The public libraries in Denmark wanted an admin system for their new BibOS-system, which is an Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distribution for audience PCs. To achieve this, we built a completely new and completely free administration system for Debian-based PCs.

The public libraries in several Danish municipalities are in the process of switching their audience PCs from Windows to Ubuntu.

They needed a central administration system to manage it, and Canonical’s Landscape product was unacceptable for them; they needed the system to be completely free/open source, and Canonical’s licensing when running Landscape as software-as-a-service was too expensive. The available free alternatives are either too technical for library staff, or they don’t support Debian-based systems well.

In response, we created “BibOS Admin”, a completely new administration system for all Debian-like systems. It enables users to remotely manage, maintain and upgrade PCs and run arbitrary, centrally defined scripts on them. The system is designed to be easy to use for non-technical staff who can rely on a set of pre-defined scripts, which should be set up as part of the setup for each organization (source code available here: https://github.com/magenta-aps/bibos_admin).

In the talk, I will discuss the technical and organizational challenges of building a new management system from scratch in collaboration with Biblioteksstyrelsen and the public libraries in Aarhus and Silkeborg, who kindly funded the effort.

This talk will be on Sunday, February 2. at 10.40 AM, but I expect to be at FOSDEM for the duration of the conference, i.e. both Saturday and Sunday. Hope to see you there!

Note: If you’re curious, you can check out the source code for the admin system and the BibOS desktop here:

 

Free software, technology and curiosity – celebrating 30 years of GNU

Posted by agger on 0

[ Celebrate 30 years of GNU! ]

On October 5, 2010, I gave a tech talk about free software at Open Space Aarhus, the only and at the time very new hackerspace in Aarhus. The talk was scheduled in celebration of Free Software Foundation’s 25th birthday the day before.

After giving the talk, I wrote a longish article from my notes, explaining free software from a non-programming but technical and scientific point of view. Today, I have published the article on my Danish-language blog in celebration of 30 years with the GNU project, and you’re free to read it and share it as you want.

Well, if you can read Danish, at any rate. If you want to get an impression of the article, you can try reading the Google Translated version. I can’t guarantee for its accuracy, though. But happy belated birthday to the GNU project, and especially to the rest of us who enjoy its fruits every day when we boot up our computer.

Link: Fri software, nysgerrighed og teknologi (Google translated).

Open Data – how to make it succeed, how to make it fail

Posted by agger on 0

This is a talk I gave on September 26th as part of an Ignite session for the hackathon Hack4DK. The hackathon was organized by the Danish Agency for Culture and was centered around recently released cultural heritage data. The talk was an Ignite talk, which means I had to talk exactly five minutes, accompanied by exactly twenty slides (PDF) which display for exactly fifteen seconds each.

Below, the actual speech I gave:

As you can read in the program for this event, I’m a software engineer at Magenta and a board member at Open Space Aarhus, our local community hackerspace. I am also an active Fellow of Free Software Foundation Europe.

This means that my background is in professional free software development AND in the hacker community around Open Space Aarhus. You might say that I represent a hacker’s point of view.

In free (or “open source”) software, the things you need to be able to do with a program are quickly described: You need to be legally entitled to USE, STUDY, CHANGE and DISTRIBUTE the software you work with. This enables sharing and user freedom and avoids expensive licensing.

In the hacker community, our slogan is, somewhat more playfully:

Build what you need, share what you build

AND

Be awesome (and have fun).

From both perspectives the requirements for open data are the same: We must be legally entitled to use them AND to share them – to distribute them ourselves.

If I am to build a free software app from your data, anyone must be allowed to use it, for any purpose. If people are to share what I build, it must be legal for them to do so. If not, my users might get sued.

This means that open data must always concede their users the following rights:

  • A free license, for instance the Creative Commons license used by Wikipedia
  • Redistribution and copying must be allowed
  • The data must be available in formats following open standards

Conversely, data are NOT open if they

  • have a license that limits commercial use in any way, or
  • don’t have a FREE license, or
  • if they don’t have any license at all, or
  • if they are only available in closed or patented formats.

Apps built on such data are not freely hackable and distributable as embodied e.g. in the Open Definition (http://opendefinition.org/okd/).

People from Wikipedia, from Creative Commons and from a plethora of excellent organizations have spoken at last year’s Hack4DK event, and everybody contributing to this year’s event should be aware of these things. But if I look at this year’s contributors of data, several present data with no license or with non-open licenses which are useless from an open data perspective.

One site affirms that its data are experimental and not to be used for commercial purposes. I wouldn’t dream of touching such data in an “open” context like a hackathon.

Worse, the data in question are apparently graphical renderings of maps that are hundreds of years old and thus in the public domain. So these contributors are not just offering data, they are simultaneously removing these data from the public domain and limiting their usefulness to the public.

On another site I find lots of nice and useful data – but, in many cases, no license!

I might claim good faith and use the data anyway, but if no license is given this implied permission could always be revoked and my customers might get sued. I do trust their good intentions, but I frankly think that someone who choose to call themselves “Open Data Aarhus” should know better than that.

And finally, an image offered for download by an art museum is accompanied by very hostile copyright language – which is also pointless, as that statue passed into the public domain centuries ago.

The point here is: If you want to open your data, don’t do it grudgingly. You don’t need hostile copyright language; what you do need is a nice and clear license allowing everybody to use, share, remix and distribute your data.

Cultural heritage data could play a very important part in a free and open society. The possibilities are virtually endless. But we must be free to use them.

Put your data out there under a clear, permissive and non-revokable license and allow users and businesses to share and redistribute them.

In that way a lot of very valuable knowledge and a lot of very valuable works of art may form the basis of many valuable contributions to our modern, digital culture.

Happy hacking! And thanks for having me here today.

I believe the organizers recorded the event on video, and I’ll post the video here as well when it’s available – which is, unfortunately, not just yet.

Fellowship meetings in Aarhus resumed

Posted by agger on 0

On Thursday the 20th, we had our second FSFE Fellowship meeting in Aarhus, Denmark, this year. Our group is new; we had three Fellowship meetings in 2012, after which we had to take a year’s break until we resumed them in May this year. The plan is to have one meeting monthly on the third-ish Thursday of each month.

The meetings take place in Open Space Aarhus, which is the local hackerspace featuring a large and well-equipped meeting room.

We were twelve people that day, which so far is a record. I gave a talk on BibOS, which is a customized Ubuntu installation which my company Magenta ApS is developing for the public libraries in Denmark. In the beta phase, the libraries were  using Canonical’s proprietary Landscape product, but found it too expensive per seat and wanted a Free/Open Source replacement – so about half of my talk was dedicated to the Landscape-like remote admin system which we are also building.

The talk was part of a deliberate strategy – we want to attract visitors by always having an interesting talk so people who don’t necessarily sympathize with (or care much about) the idea of software freedom will have a reason to come and hear about it anyway.

Afterwards, we talked about an idea our member and co-coordinater Benjamin has  about building a new web site in Danish to showcase free software success stories.  Benjamin has lots of experience building nice sites in Drupal. We may be allowed to replace the current (nice, but unmaintained) content of  OpenSource.dk. There was some discussion whether such a site should refer to the political and philosophical advantages of free software; in the end, it was decided to concentrate on the business aspects but include a well-rounded section on the concept of free software, which I offered to co-write.

All in all, the meeting went very well, and I have a good feeling about this reboot of our Fellowship meetings. Our next meeting will be on Thursday, August 22, and if you’re going to be anywhere near Aarhus, Denmark that day, you’re most welcome to show up.

Link: Official Minutes of Meeting on the Wiki (Danish)

Denmark: New government, new opportunities for free software

Posted by agger on 0

Denmark had a general election on September 15th, and this led to the ouster of the right-of-centre coalition which has governed our country for ten years now. The next government will be a coalition between social democrats, a moderate leftist party (SF) and a centrist liberal parti (Det Radikale Venstre, which actually means “the Radical Left” – historical reasons, for they are traditionally a very moderate bunch). From a political perspective, this will hopefully mean the end of ten years of catering to the extreme, xenophobic right in the guise of the Danish People’s Party, whose leader Pia Kjærsgaard has easily (and alas!) and by far been the most powerful political figure in Denmark for these ten years. Denmark has passed legislation which is so unbelievably unpleasant and racist in its intent, that you would not believe it unless you’ve heard about it or been unfortunate enough to experience it.

But all that’s really off-topic for this blog. If you want, you can read all about it on Adventures and Japes, a brilliant blog written by an English school-teacher in a small town in Jutland. So, let’s continue where we left off: New government, new opportunities.

Denmark has not traditionally been a free software country. Rather, it has traditionally been solid Microsoft territory. Penetration of free software solutions is very low compared to many other countries, and under the present government, this has been supported by lobbyism from the larger vendors coupled with the government’s very “business-friendly” approach. There has been some debate about the possibility of saving money by going “open source”, and some (few) local authorities have been rolling out OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and GNU/Linux. The values behind free software, which in my opinion is what makes the real difference, have been completely absent from the public debate.

But now, we have a new government, and in my opinion this represents a very interesting new opportunity for free software. The politicians behind the new government can’t be expected to act very differently in the realm of IT politics than their predecessors. The reason for this is that really understanding the issue requires either a level of technical insight or at least an interest in the subject which many politicians simply don’t have. One very important reason for this is that frankly, they have other very important subjects to think about. Like foreign policy, wars and a sinking economy. The only political party which has shown a real understanding of the issues behind free software is the leftist “Enhedslisten” (the “United List”, comparable e.g. to Izquerda Unida in Spain), and they will not be part of the new goverment.

The opportunity is that the new government consists of parties which are ostensibly progressive. Whereas the old government was simply set in their ways and completely out of reach on this subject, the new government can be expected to be genuinely interested in hearing new things. If we start telling their politicians about free software there is a real possibility this could lead to, not wholesale adoption (that is way too optimistic), but a real change in their attitude.

Maybe we should do something similar to what the French organization APRIL has done and send letters of education and pledges for politicians to sign to indicate they understand the issue of free software and will work for it. Like I wrote in my first post, I am currently working on a manuscript on free software which will hopefully be published as a book in 2012. I am thinking of sending an excerpt of this book to all relevant politicians and offer to send them the actual book free of charge. Another possibility might be to offer to give free talks to politicians from the new government parties, and from Enhedslisten, who will also be important. And to the opposition, for that matter, as they may be more interested in real issues now that they have lost their posts in government.

Does anyone have experience doing this kind of advocacy they would like to share? If so, feel free to add your opinion or advice in the comments section.

Welcome, statement of intent

Posted by agger on 0

Hi there, and welcome to my new blog at Free Software Foundation Europe. I joined the FSFE as a paying member very recently, though I’ve been following the discussions on the mailing list for years.

I will use this blog to write in English about free software activism in general and my own projects in that direction in particular. I’m a currently 46-year-old software developer from Denmark with a day job which allows me to use free software only, specifically Python, PostgreSQL, Apache, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and a number of other free tools. In other words, I work with administrative web applications.

I’ve been a political activist for more than a decade. This magazine was my first political platform, and as long as it’s necessary, I’ll always be active against the somewhat creepy turn to the right which has occurred in Danish politics. That, however, is not the point of this blog.

My eyes were opened to the importance of software freedom in 2005, about the same time I discovered Ubuntu, a user friendly GNU/Linux distribution which did not require me to use unreasonable amounts of time just to get everything working. I’ve since done quite a bit of IT political advocacy in one track of my personal blog, while another track is dedicated to a more technical kind of advocacy/discussion.

I’ve been quite active in the Danish Ubuntu group, and helped starting regular Ubuntu-centric face to face meetings in Aarhus. I am, however, now leaving this work, because I prefer doing things under the headline of “free software” and “freedom” (which was always the point anyway) rather than “Ubuntu”. I hope to do some of this under the auspices of OSAA, a hacker space in Aarhus which was co-founded by our Ubuntu group. Open Space Aarhus is one of the most awesome new things to happen in Aarhus for several years, so be sure to visit it if you pass by.

I’m also an aspiring writer and poet. My first completed manuscript, a popular secular scholarly introduction to the Qur’an, is currently with a publisher’s house, awaiting their aye or nay. I’m also currently doing the proofreading and editing on my second completed manuscript, an introduction (in Danish) of free software, its history and motivation, under the working title of “Fri software: Et kampskrift“. I’m not sure what the final title is going to be, but I do hope to see it published sometime in 2012. I also hope it will be able to give the free software movement in Denmark a push forward.

For I perceive the free software movement in Denmark as ailing. The dominating discourse is to use “open source”, and people are mainly arguing for it on purely economic grounds. The term “free software” and the political and philosophical motivations for using it are often considered an embarassment. I sincerely hope my book and the dust I can kick up around it can change this and help promote free software adoption in Denmark, and hopefully other places as well.

That’s it for now. Do not expect this blog to be frequently updated, that’s what my political blog is for. But I do intend to report  on the progress of my free software manuscript/aspiring book as well as on whatever free software advocacy I deem relevant to write about here, in English. ‘Be seeing you. 🙂