Fellowship interview with Florian Effenberger

Florian Effenberger

Florian Effenberger

Florian Effenberger has been a Free Software evangelist for many years. Pro bono, he is founding member and part of the Steering Committee at The Document Foundation. He has previously been active in the OpenOffice.org project for seven years, most recently as Marketing Project Lead. Florian has ten years’ experience in designing enterprise and educational computer networks, including software deployment based on Free Software. He is also a frequent contributor to a variety of professional magazines worldwide on topics such as Free Software, Open Standards and legal matters.

Chris Woolfrey: How did you first get involved with OpenOffice?

Florian Effenberger: I started using Free Software very early, and installed my first GNU/Linux in June of 1994. At the end of the 90s, I started using what was, back then, StarOffice, and was involved in the user newsgroups. Free Software attracted me, as I met very open-minded and creative people who were engaged with passion and stood behind important ideas and values.

When the OpenOffice.org project started in 2000, I followed it closely, but didn’t get directly involved before 2004, when my first proper “engagement” took place at a trade show. In 2005, I was offered the role of German Marketing Contact for OpenOffice.org, and from that point on I got more and more involved, until I eventually became the Marketing Project Lead. These days I’m very active with LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, and also serve on the Board of Directors of the German non-profit Freies Office Deutschland e.V.

I’ve wanted to give back something. Being a long-time user of Free Software and benefiting from it, it is a wonderful experience to tell the world about it, and help spreading the word.

CW: What did your time working for OpenOffice.org teach you about marketing and Free Software?

FE: I think marketing serves a very important cause. You can have the best software and the most qualified developers, but when the world doesn’t know about what you offer, nobody will use it. Of course, it’s important to point out, for completeness, that without developers, the marketeers would have nothing to market either; but people don’t always see it that way.

“there’s so much to Free Software that many people don’t see at first glance”

To me, marketing Free Software serves a variety of purposes. Telling people about the advantages of Free Software is one important part of it; there’s so much to it many people don’t see at first glance, like Open Standards, freedom to use, study, share and improve it, and preventing a digital gap. One of the tasks of marketing Free Software is to find the right balance between ideological and technological views, and those that are important for average users who are not so deeply tied to the ecosystem just yet.

Another task of marketeers is to establish communication channels not only to users, but also to corporations who adopt or develop Free Software. Promoting the right image and finding the right balance in what and how you communicate is crucial to reaching a broad audience and conveying the benefits.

CW: Did marketing concerns like these cause LibreOffice to adopt its new name, or was the re-branding primarily for legal reasons?

FE: When we started The Document Foundation, we talked about continuing with the brand that the Community had shaped and built over the past ten years. However, things turned out the way they did, and we are happy and proud of the perception of the new brand. Indeed, LibreOffice was not only chosen for legal reasons – it also marks the next step, an important evolution. This is reflected by the name: previously, we were open, now we are also “libre”, meaning free.

CW: How does the Document Foundation work to ensure that the LibreOffice community retains this principle of freedom within its products and operations?

FE: One of the reasons for setting up The Document Foundation in its current form — i.e. as a vendor-neutral Foundation in German law — was to provide an ideal framework for our community and its ecosystem to grow. All our assets are maintained by the Foundation and based on our open, meritocratic and transparent approach. This ensures that, as an example, the brand and trademark are not under the control of individuals or corporations, but rather by the community itself.

As an example: our trademark policy has been publicly discussed, and we incorporated many proposals and ideas that were raised on the mailing list.

“we have more than 180 new code contributors, more than 60 translators, and roughly 6,000 people contribute to our mailing lists”

CW: Has project growth continued since the height of press interest in the split from OpenOffice?

FE: We are still overwhelmed by the amount of contributions and contributors worldwide. Many organisations and corporations joined our idea from the first day, giving their public statement of support, and we managed to raise €50.000 in donations in just eight days, which is just amazing.

In addition, we have nearly 70 mirrors worldwide, offering LibreOffice for download. Plus, we have now more than 180 new code contributors, providing patches, features and bugfixes for LibreOffice, plus more than 60 localisers translating it into various languages. Roughly 6,000 people contribute to our mailing lists, and about 7,500 opted in to receive announcements on new versions and releases. Plus, we’re very much in line with our release plan.

Besides these numbers the feedback from the community, end-users, and corporations, is just fantastic, and encourages us to follow the path that we’ve taken.

CW: Do you think The Document Foundation does enough to appeal to people who don’t already use Free Software? Roughly what share of the whole office suite market does LibreOffice have?

FE: We’ll be providing detailed download statistics soon, but Windows is one of our most popular platforms. We’ve already seen corporations and organisations migrating to LibreOffice on a variety of operating systems, and the feedback we receive clearly shows that people not only understand why we were taking this approach, but that they also welcome and applaud the path we’ve taken. We have users, adopters and contributors from all fields. Given that release cycles (particularly in larger organisations) tend to be measured in months, it is yet too early to look at a comparison of market shares however; the Document Foundation has only existed for about eight months now.

CW: How do you see the relationship between LibreOffice and OpenOffice developing in future?

FE: The recent announcements made by Oracle about OpenOffice.org have raised new questions. But from the very first day, The Document Foundation has been open for everyone, and we will continue to be open for any interested party to join us. I think the past months have shown that we’re on the right track, that the approach we’ve taken and the model we follow is ideal for a community like ours. I am happy to repeat our invitation to everyone to join us and to contribute to the success of a truly free office suite.

CW: But given what has happened with OpenOffice recently, how will the foundation ensure that LibreOffice’s financing and philosophy remains community-based in future?

FE: The Document Foundation has been established to ensure a healthy framework, independent from one corporation’s business: that’s what our vendor-neutral approach and set-up as a Foundation based in Germany is for. The success of our fund-raising challenge has shown the wide support for what we do, and that people are willing to give. Of course, we work in an ecosystem where corporations can participate and benefit, and we are also looking into a variety of options on how the Foundation itself can raise money for achieving its goals. Our community by-laws take precautions to avoid too much influence based on money rather than on merit.

“our community by-laws take precautions to avoid influence based on money rather than on merit”

CW: In relation to both growth and neutrality, how do you see the relationship between LibreOffice and the Document Foundation in relation to other Free Software projects?

FE: We have seen many successful and important Free Software projects, based on Foundations and comparable structures, with the same virtues that we share — openness, transparency, meritocracy. Each of these projects has their own unique history, and so do we, but the principles they’re built on are comparable. So, I think we are in a good neighborhood.

There are many Free Software projects, and lots of them have quite a few things in common; in terms of governance, but also in technical terms, and as part of the global ecosystem of Free Software. Cooperating and working with each other, exchanging thoughts, ideas, brainstorming, but also discussing issues which more than one project is facing: all these help greatly.

Nobody has to re-invent the wheel, but can benefit from what is already available. A good example is our infrastructure: we’re based entirely on Free Software, from web server to wiki, blog, mail server, mailing lists, our planet, and much more. We not only use it, but also contribute back — for the mailing list system we use, one admin colleague has written tools that are Free Software. Plus, right now we are working on providing cross-compilation of LibreOffice for the Windows platform, to enable building it for that OS from within a free build environment.

Actively cooperating as well as benefiting from other Free Software projects is one of the things that makes the dynamics and fast development in this area.

CW: Given that you fit so well into the community, and that you’re growing at an impressive rate and in keeping with targets, where next?

FE: We’ve set a pretty good basis for the future. The next major step is legally setting up the Foundation, which we’re working on at the moment. We have summed up details on this in a blog post.

The improvements in our development scheme, plus the 180 new developers, and all the other volunteers with their amazing work and their creativity, already help us in making much bigger steps. We’re evaluating future ideas and major improvements to free office suites at large: everyone’s invited to shape the future together with us, and I’m pretty sure it will be exciting. The good thing about The Document Foundation is that it will provide a framework for all future developments, so people have the means of coming up with cool new ideas.

Fellowship interview with Michiel de Jong

Michiel de Jong

Michiel de Jong

Michiel de Jong has worked as a programmer, researcher and sysadmin in Amsterdam, Oxford, London and Madrid, where he ended up as a scalability engineer for Spain’s national social network Tuenti. In Winter 2010 he took a two-month hacker’s holiday in Bali to set up the Unhosted project. He now lives in Berlin, with Kenny Bentley and Javier Diaz, where they plan, donations permitting, to work on the project full-time.

Chris Woolfrey: Would you like to explain the Unhosted project in your own words?

Michiel de Jong: There are several ways you could explain it; my favourite angle is the software freedom angle. Software freedom used to mean the right to control (use, share, study and improve) the source code / the program that the application executes – the definition that FSFE uses. Back in the day, that was enough. It was taken for granted that you already had control over the data that the application handled; of course you do, it’s on your computer, or on a server where you have full access to at least the data that your applications are using.

For installed software, both desktop and server, that view used to be accurate: if you controlled the source code you had software freedom. But then, slowly, installed software was pushed further away from the user by hosted software (stuff like Google Docs, Facebook and Twitter). Hosted websites like these aren’t primarily a source of information; they are interactive applications, and in this context software freedom doesn’t exist.

It’s absurd that hosted software makes you surrender your data to the author of the application in question, but it’s what happens. It happened slowly, because informational websites became dynamic websites, and those dynamic websites then started accepting user input and slowly became interactive software. Now fully hosted software is widely used, and people use it to replace locally installed desktop applications.

“Software freedom requires code-freedom plus data-freedom”

In the shift from local applications to hosted applications software freedom got left behind. Nobody talks about locally installed software any more, they talk about hosted software, yet some people say “I run an entirely Free Software stack on my laptop; only the firmware of the graphics card is proprietary”, and that’s a mistake, because so much of the ‘software’ that they use is not installed locally on their laptop, it is merely viewed through their web browser.

The Unhosted project aims to invent and promote a way to fix these issues. Software freedom nowadays needs to be not only code-freedom; it must be code-freedom plus data-freedom.

CW: How does Unhosted achieve this?

MdJ: We’re separating the code of an application from its data. When you log in to an Unhosted web application, the URI in the address bar determines where the code lives, but the domain succeeding the ‘@’ symbol in your username determines where your data lives; this frees your data from the hands of the application server, and frees the application server from the burden of your data.

This means that free of charge hosted Free Software web applications become feasible again. After all, there is an obvious Free Software replacement for Microsoft Windows: GNU/Linux, just as an obvious Free replacement for Microsoft Office is Libre Office. But what Free Software can so obviously replace Google Docs? Why can’t you go to ‘www.libredocs.org’ and use Free Software on the web, just like you can with desktop software?

The simple answer is that the costs of running software remotely on a server and providing it as a service are too high to be able to provide it free of charge. In order to write Free Software, all that is required is the time and skills of the developers concerned. But there is no way to make Free Software available to the world online which doesn’t involve a monetary cost, because doing so requires the use of servers, and whoever owns those servers will charge you a monthly fee. Our architecture for separating code and data, leaving the processing in the browser, fixes that: it makes it very cheap to host Free Software web applications because all you have to host is the application logic, the code files, not the data that drives it.

“Unhosted makes it very cheap to host Free Software web applications”

That’s the ‘free the application from the burden of your data’ part. And then there’s the other part: that software equals code plus data, but software freedom equals code-freedom plus data-freedom. With Unhosted, data-freedom is achieved because when you sign in to some application you decide which domain gets to host your data for you. You can get an account with a public provider – they’re in the process of being set up – or tell your university or employer’s sysadmin to run a node for the faculty or for the office, then basically everybody who has an email address ‘@wherever’ would get an Unhosted account with that same user name.

CW: Are there privacy benefits of using Unhosted applications when compared to traditional web applications which store both code and data remotely?

MdJ: When using an Unhosted application, all your data is encrypted by your web browser before it is sent to the server where your Unhosted account resides. That way the data stored in your Unhosted account can exist on any commodity server, because although you rely on that server to give you access to your data, the data itself is securely stored and encrypted, and you need not worry about your Unhosted account host reading your messages, for example. The data stored by an Unhosted application is encrypted by your web browser before it is sent and stored in your Unhosted account, and it then gets decrypted when it is sent back to your web browser when it is required. The server storing your Unhosted web application data is blind therefore; it sends your data to and from Unhosted websites without being able to read its contents.

Normally, using JavaScript for cryptography doesn’t make a lot of sense because if a website includes JavaScript scripts for encrypting data then those same scripts could be used to eavesdrop on the encrypted data. But in these cases the cryptography scripts originate from the same untrusted source that the encrypted data would then be sent to and received from. In the case of Unhosted it’s different since we separate the domain that delivers the application code from the domain where the data is stored. The Unhosted account provider will not have access to the application’s JavaScript cryptography scripts, so the Unhosted web application can encrypt things that the Unhosted account provider won’t be able to decrypt.

CW: What kind of applications do you think are best suited to using Unhosted? What types of web application do you expect to adopt Unhosted first?

MdJ: Any application which doesn’t store a large amount of user data can be easily adapted to use Unhosted. Applications like Google Docs which require the storage of a lot of important user data would benefit most from moving to Unhosted however. For parallel computing it will also be a great boost. But for other things, like search engines, it would require some clever algorithms to allow it to work in a more decentralized way. In general, any web application that requires the storage of a large amount of user-specific data could benefit from becoming Unhosted.

CW: It sounds like there’s a lot of scope for Unhosted to have a big impact on other web-based Free Software projects; how does your work fit in with things like Diaspora, Appleseed, and YaCy?

MdJ: Unhosted was sort of born on the Diaspora developer’s mailing-list. We were talking about how Diaspora switched from PGP to SSL, and how end-to-end encryption would be nicer, so I started trying to write Ajax payload encryption. It was meant to be an addition to Diaspora. Later I realised that it could be used much more widely than just for Diaspora.

We have yet to start to write an Unhosted social application that could federate with Diaspora and Appleseed instances. Because YaCy is a search engine, it would require some engineering in order to combine it with the Unhosted Web application architecture.

“I realised that it could be used much more widely than just for Diaspora”

Apart from the ones you mentioned, we were approached by LibreOffice to talk about how Unhosted and LibreOffice could work together. That was a great honour. We are currently implementing an Unhosted cloud-sync for LibreOffice. It doesn’t bring LibreOffice to the web in the sense that it would put the whole of the program into your browser, but it makes LibreOffice into a ‘document browser’ similar to a ‘web browser’, and it will be compatible with the web standard we published three weeks ago.

Other than that, we are only just getting started. We’ve put out a demo application that shows you how to do it: myfavouritesandwich.org. People can copy that and use it as a ‘Hello World’ starting point on the Unhosted web.

CW: What a great domain name!

MdJ: It was originally myfavouritecar.org but Javier thought that myfavouritesandwich.org was funnier.

CW: Is the way the project looks important to you?

MdJ: 33% of our full-time team is a graphic designer. That’s another pretty unique fact about this project; I don’t think a lot of Free Software projects reach that percentage. We need end-users to switch, and end-users often don’t understand software freedom, but if we make really nice applications, they’ll come for the applications, and stay for the freedom.

There is no threshold for the end-user: that’s an important feature for us. The user doesn’t need to know whether an application is hosted or Unhosted; if the Unhosted-ness is invisible then we’ve done a good job. We need to convince web developers to develop Unhosted web applications, and their clients don’t even need to know exactly what it is. If a client asks the developer for something new then the developer just needs to be able to say ‘OK, we’ll use the latest technology to develop that web application for you’, and then develop it as an Unhosted web application. The client need not notice that you used Unhosted’s architecture, only the web developer needs to know.

We want to create a few demo applications that are really nice to use, so that we can avoid the usual stigma that Free Software often gets from non-converts; that a program must be ugly if it’s Free Software. I think it’s important that Free Software looks nice and feels nice. A lot of projects are doing a really good job now, and we want to be one of those: that’s why 33% of our full-time team is graphic design.

CW: It seems that you’re trying to appeal strongly to people outside of the existing Free Software ecosystem. Do you think that there are obvious benefits of using Unhosted for non-Free Software companies and organisations?

“Users will come for the applications, and stay for the freedom”

MdJ: Yes, definitely. First of all, a company that uses software as a production means may want to use the end-to-end encryption so that company secrets don’t leave the company virtual private network, but still use storage on Amazon servers, for example. So they could use Unhosted web applications with Unhosted accounts that store encrypted data on Amazon’s servers, and it would all work from their staff’s web browsers without having to install software on-site. Also, the scalability and robustness that comes from a distributed architecture can make good business sense: if you want to offer a proprietary application, but don’t want your servers to be a single point of failure, then the Unhosted web will give your application less downtime, or at least incidents will be per-user, and your application will not go down entirely because of localized problems. Also, the cost of hosting an Unhosted web application is much lower than the cost of hosting a traditional web application.

That’s a great advantage for public domain projects that, at the moment, simply cannot afford to host web applications, but for proprietary applications it’s obviously also an interesting feature because it can cut costs. And then there is the potential business of setting up as an Unhosted account provider; depending on how many interesting applications we can get out there, companies like this will also pop up, so users will start using their brand as their login for all the unhosted websites that they use. The potential for interoperability between applications is also exciting – because you separate the application from the data it will also (where format compatibility allows) become possible to switch to a different website and see, for example, that all your photo albums are there, then switch back to the previous website and see your edits have come through instantly, without having to export or import, because it is the same data.

That will be a shocking experience for end-users when we get it working! Some people don’t care about scalability, robustness, encryption, privacy, public domain applications, software freedom, or any of that, they only care about this possibility of data interoperability. This kind of interoperability could be the best feature of the Unhosted project.

CW: Why has it taken until now for a project like Unhosted to arise?

MdJ: I think it is all very recent. One year ago, the landscape didn’t show as obviously that there was a problem as it does now: yes, there was Richard Stallman’s article about SaaS, then Eben Moglen’s seminal speeches, but in the meantime, Facebook became dominant. I mean, 18 months ago Facebook was still not as much of a monopoly as it was 12 months ago. Also, Chrome Web Store and Chrome OS were announced only quite recently.

Two years ago it wasn’t so clear to see. I mean, I know I couldn’t have thought of all of this two years ago, but I think the time is ripe now. But many of these ideas are not mine: some very important ideas came from Tim Berners-Lee and Zooko, and I just put them together and wrote a ‘manifesto‘ about it, which again, is mainly copied from Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman.

CW: How do you plan to devote yourself to Unhosted full-time?

MdJ: Next month we want to raise €36000. We had the choice of founding a business start-up or running the project entirely as a non-profit organisation. We chose the non-profit route because we think it’s important to do so. We’re three full-time engineers, and we’re intending on getting a hacker space in Berlin for the three of us, plus two spare desks for visiting hackers. That will be open for holiday makers who want to spend a week in Berlin, hang out in our hacker’s loft and contribute to freeing the web. Rent is very cheap here in Berlin, but we still each need about €1000 per month to live off.

We’re very passionate about this. In the near future we’ll be publishing tools and demo applications to push the Unhosted web forward, and we’ll work out the details as we go along. It’s a community project, entirely open, but I do think it’s good to have the ‘foundation plus community’ structure, with a small full-time team to give it some steady momentum.

We’d love people to subscribe to our mailing-list, follow us on Identi.ca and Twitter, and come to our IRC channel. Apart from that, we’re encouraging people to fork our demo application and build their own Unhosted application from it. The Unhosted web starts here.

Fellowship interview with Dan Leinir

Dan Leinir

Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, when not solving interoperability problems between Open Document Format (ODF) editors at KO GmbH, spends his time developing GamingFreedom.org: a gaming orientated social network which promotes Free culture, and Gluon: a full featured modern game engine, based on the Qt framework. Dan describes the aims of these exciting projects, and discusses what Free Software could mean for gaming in future.

Chris Woolfrey: Can you explain what GamingFreedom.org is, and it’s relationship with Gluon?

Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen: GamingFreedom is a social network for makers and players of games, based on the concept that there are very few people who make games who don’t also play them. So, rather than view game distribution as a way of pushing a product to the users in order to make back the money that was invested, GamingFreedom views it as a social thing: you have an idea for a game, you build that game, and you distribute the game to some repository, which in our case is GamingFreedom.org. From there you can download the game and play it, and you can then provide feedback if you want; through ratings, commenting, even user submitted screenshots and other such things.

Gluon comprises the technologies we have created to support these concepts; a set of libraries and applications which support you all the way through this. And, interestingly, there’s basically nothing like this out there right now which does this in a general way. Bits of it exist already, but there isn’t anything else that connects it all. That is, with Gluon, once you get the idea for a game, you just open up Gluon Creator and use that to build the game. Once you’ve got it playable, you go to the publishing pane in Gluon Creator and publish the game directly from there. No need to package it up manually and such and upload it to a website: the tool does that for you.

“you can download the game, play it, and provide feedback through ratings, commenting, and screenshots”

Gluon Player is then the collective name for a set of applications on a bunch of different platforms and form factors: Gluon Player Touch for tablets and the like, Gluon Player for the desktop, Gluon Player Mobile for touch based smartphones. These apps all connect to GamingFreedom.org and let you both download and play the games uploaded there, but also comment on them, rate them, even donate to the people who made the game if you think that they’re deserving.

Back inside Gluon Creator, the author of the game then gets this information showing up in the publishing pane – which is a sort of Gluon Player just for a single game – and thus, the circle is complete.

CW: So part of playing Gluon-based games is being involved in what the game becomes through a peer review process?

DJ: It’s still based around being a team who creates a game, but Gluon makes it much, much easier to get feedback from your users and such. And the creation part of it is something else, which is what we’re gearing up towards now. Building the games is something where we provide a whole lot of functionality, basically everything that can be done without knowing the concept of the game; things like rendering sprites on screen, input handling, game UI, all that sort of stuff. All of that can be made ahead of time, and then put together using Gluon Creator. This allows games to be created entirely using non-compiled assets including textures, sounds, vertex and pixel shaders, javascript for game logic, and so on.

CW: It’s in many ways a model inspired directly by the way Free Software (FS) works, right?

DJ: It is indeed. We even suggest that people use one of the creative commons licenses for games they create.

CW: Do you find that people generally use permissive licenses for their Gluon games? The Gluon game development process and copyleft would seem to be a good fit.

DJ: The project is still much too young to really know that, I’m afraid; I suspect we will know more about that in a year or so. Currently we’re gearing up to the second alpha release, named Electron, in which Gluon Creator is at a level where games can be made in the way we envisioned, and the next release cycle is about the distribution system. The applications for playing Gluon games are already well under way, and as our distribution site is based on openDesktop.org, that already exists, but the next release cycle is focused on getting it all done up as the vision describes.

We’re aiming directly at products like Steam and Impulse. Not so much at ModDB’s Desura, as they already have something of the mentality.

CW: What other technology are you using to build this stuff? You’ve already mentioned openDesktop.

DJ: The overshadowing technology is Qt, which is what gives us the enormous list of possible target platforms, but we’re also wrapping OpenGL and OpenGL ES for GluonGraphics, plus OpenAL in GluonAudio. We’ve got a game specific input library called GluonInput which is based in part on Qt’s input system, but also has early support for various more gaming-friendly inputs like joysticks and visual inputs and such. Finally, for custom game logic we’re using QtScript, which is an ECMAScript based scripting system, and the Qt Quick UI system for in-game UI, which enables the makers of games to create very advanced UIs in their games, instead of just those simple menu-upon-menu formats you see in a lot of places.

CW: It’s great to see that Gluon is 100% Free Software. Was that decision taken for practical or philosophical reasons?

DJ: Well, a bit of both, as well as tradition. We’re all members of the KDE community, and there’s a strong Free Software tradition there, so it was the natural choice really. But also because GNU Lesser General Public License allows potential users to use our code even if they might not be so interested in being entirely ‘libre’ themselves, and this is something the game developers of the world traditionally have had big problems with.

“Gluon games can legally be licensed any way they want”

That said, because of the way the engine works – it’s a lot like a document in a word processor or a 3D graphics suite, being entirely assets and distributed like that – the games can legally be licensed any way they want, which is something we have been quite keen on emphasising. While we strongly suggest that people follow the Free licensing schemes, the makers of Gluon games are able to choose any license they see fit for their game. We feel strongly that this freedom is as important as that of the players of games – as long as they are informed of their lack of freedom in any particular license of a game they choose to play, which we can provide information about through the players and through the GamingFreedom.org site.

The Gluon development team feels strongly about protecting the freedoms of all our users.

CW: Are you a gamer yourself?

DJ: I have always been a little funny when it comes to games; I’ve always much more enjoyed looking at other people gaming than actually playing myself. I’ve watched many an hour of StarCraft, and though I’ve certainly played a few hours of CounterStrike and Unreal Tournament 2004, I have probably watched many more hours of it. This mostly happened at the computer club Boxen, which I helped set up in a small village in Denmark a decade or so ago.

CW: So for you the GamingFreedom.org and Gluon projects are more about the philosophical and political aspects than about gaming itself?

DJ: Well, it was certainly part philosophy. As a part of the KDE community it is something I feel strongly about, and with the success of the Humble Indie Bundle 1 and 2 in the last couple of years, we suddenly saw a good few more FS games being released, because they released some of the games from those two charity packs under the GPL.

It struck me that at least on the indie scene Freedom is becoming a popular thing, and we’d like to help with that. But we also saw an opening; like I mentioned earlier, nothing like the GamingFreedom network really exists right now. Each part of it exists, but the whole thing, the connected from end to end thing and back, that doesn’t exist anywhere else right now. There’s something under way from the Sauerbraten based CubeCreate team, but we believe we may have something different to offer on that account. While Sauerbraten lends itself well to a certain type of game, Gluon was specifically designed without any particular type of game in mind; it was made to be as generic as possible.

CW: Do you think that gaming, which tends to move fast with new technology, is currently in need of something Gluon?

DJ: Yes. So many things are happening with games; not so much in the triple-A scene, but more in the indie scene, which we hope we can tap into, and Gluon is built to allow them to ignore the issues of porting between various platforms, because we’re doing that work for them.

“we hope to tap into the indie scene; Gluon ignores issues of porting between various platforms”

In the non-Free world something like this exists on the creation side: Unity3D, the interaction methods on which some of Gluon’s concepts of game construction are based, but in the Free world, it’s sorely lacking. Game engines such as LOVE2D are all very well, but when a tutorial begins with “Start up your text editor and write this code”, you’ve already decoupled a great many people who will never look at you as an option again. It’s a sad but true thing, really, and for many of these engines, distribution is of course also a problem; you have to package up your things manually and then find somewhere to put them. With GamingFreedom we’ve already got that ready.

CW: Which means you’re definitely appealing to techies and non-techies alike. It sounds like a very exciting project, and it further draws comparison between FS and the Arts.

DJ: We’re trying to, yes. Glynn Moody gave a keynote speech at the Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria, and he argued that Free Software is a lot like the liberal arts. I hadn’t thought of that before, but I could not agree more. It helped me explain to people why I do this whole geeky, coding thing. I can simply say this is my painting, or my gardening, or my singing.

CW: Do you see your work with KOffice as being related to that?

DJ: Not exactly. Calligra, which is the new name for KOffice, is more a WebKit type thing; it’s basically an office engine, which allows you to write office applications. There are at least two different ones right now, and there’s more under way; it’s slowly finding its way into the minds of developers around the net that they need something different to the monolithic codebases of LibreOffice and its like. They’re great applications, but that is also their problem – they are applications, and thus not really suitable if you want to build something like a viewer or something which just reads meta-information out of ODF files.

For me, I guess that Calligra is more an example of how working with Free software has helped me find a fulfilling and challenging job with people I already worked with on other things. All of KO’s employees are members of the KDE community in some way or another, and I got hired as a result of working with Arjen Hiemstra on Gluon; he recommended me for a position with KO.

My job straight out of university was working with Frank Karlitschek on Project Bretzn, which is a connection between IDEs, like Qt creator, build services like OpenSuse’s, and distribution sites like openDesktop.org’s network. When that project ran out of budget after six months, we went to FOSDEM and presented the results to a room full of excited Free software enthusiasts, which felt like a really great way for me to exit the project, which is of course still going on. Now, the Bretzn project came out of my work on Gluon, so I guess there’s something like a red thread here.

CW: As there always is in the Free Software community. Isn’t that its beauty?

DJ: Ah! Well, it’s the Six Degrees of FS!

Fellowship interview with Massimo Babieri

Massimo Babieri

Massimo Babieri - Photo: CC BY-NC Elena Gazza

Massimo Babieri is an IT manager at the Earth Science Department, of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. As well as holding a Ph.D in Geology, Massimo leads the band The Radiostars, releasing their music under a Free license. As well as being a member of the LUG Scandiano, he has been very active in the ongoing success of the PDFreaders campaign in Italy.

Chris Woolfrey: As an artist who believes in the merits of Free culture and Free Software, why do you think it is that more musicians, photographers, and film makers haven’t gone down this road?

Massimo Babieri: There are a few reasons why artists don’t usually use Free licenses. The first is probably caused by the money: if you sell a lot of records you may collect a lot of money, even from royalties, and probably most artists don’t want to lose that money. But I think there is also a problem of knowledge. A lot of artists don’t know what “authors’ rights” really means and they think that if you want to gain paternity over your work, or if you want to protect your art from theft of paternity, you have to do some formal stuff like join a society of authors and publishers, like SIAE, ASCAP, and so on. What I’m trying to say is that many artists don’t know what their rights are when it comes to their art.

CW: Radiohead come to mind. Back in 2007 when they released In Rainbows, it was a bold move, as such a big band, when they told fans they could pay what they wanted for their album. But they didn’t change the copyright. Should they have?

“Music is as old as man, but copyright is very, very new”

MB: Probably asking people to pay what they want for Radiohead’s album is a good thing for music and for people too because every kind of art is culture, and I think you shouldn’t have to pay to get culture; everybody should be able to take benefit from it. Radiohead didn’t use a new license for their album but I think that it’s great that everybody can listen to it. Every artist holds the rights to their art so I do not think there’s a wrong here, as long as the music can be enjoyed freely. Next year The Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do’, should become Public Domain License. This is a great thing for culture.

CW: I suppose the question is whether art can be enjoyed freely, though, without the release of copyright?

MB: If you think about music, it’s maybe as old as man, but the terms of copyright are very, very young; the idea that you can make money because someone plays one of your songs on the radio is very young. Culturally, we say “play music” and not “work music”, because music is a part of humanity, is a part of our culture, and copyright is only a recent invention. For that reason it should be quite natural for an artist to use a Free license.

CW: Do you use the free license because you think it represents what’s natural about music?

MB: Yes, but also because I like to get my music to people. I like it when someone says to me “Hey, I listened to your album and I like this song…”

CW: So, Free licensing also has a commercial appeal?

MB: I didn’t make any money with Jamendo, but I think it can represent commercial appeal for Free art. You have to consider that, for a musician, money comes also from the selling of the album and from shows, so a Free licence can be also an important way to promote music.

CW: Do you think then that there is a greater need for education about Free Culture, as there is for Free Software? Do you see a need to set an example by producing and promoting Free art?

“Free art means Free education”

MB: Free art means Free education. There are a lot of things that we can learn form art. Using a Creative Commons (CC) license can be a good way to promote your art and make it known to a wider audience. For the artist it also represents the control that you have on your art. Our first three albums were, unfortunately, published with ‘All Rights Reserved’ licenses. In 2008 we moved away from that, to CC, and now we feel more free with our music.

CW: And more able to make it the way that you want to?

MB: Exactly!

CW: Let’s hope more follow your example! Free art is getting more popular, and now that there is more of a public debate about it do you think it’s inevitable that the majority of art might once again become “Free”? Isn’t that part of what worries the industry about ‘piracy’?

MB: I hope that art will again become Free, but I strongly regret that piracy exists because every artist has their rights on their own art and we have to respect that. I hope that art becomes Free, but in a natural and legal way, with Free licenses adopted by artists. I think that things will change, maybe in few decades, maybe a few hundred years.

CW: You’ve spoken about art as a cultural tool, and its use in education; another important part of culture is history. Document Freedom Day is coming up at the end of March: how important is it for you that culture which is stored digitally remains Free for future generations?

MB: It’s absolutely fundamental, of course! But not only if we think about the story in decades, centuries or millennia; it’s fundamental even if we think about the few years that make up our own lives. Open Document Formats are the only way to keep alive the possibility of choosing your software, protecting you from vendor lock-in and assuring the life of your data.

CW: Do you see Document Freedom Day and the PDFreaders Campaign as twin warriors, in that case?

“The value of these campaigns lies in the opportunity to speak to public bodies”

MB: Well I think that the PDFreaders campaign is mainly focused on neutrality, and this is the thing: that’s more easy to understand from the point of view of a public institution. When we are able to open that dialogue with them there is often the opportunity to talk with them about FS and Open Standards. So I think that the high value of both campaigns is that we get the opportunity to speak with public bodies. I’m really enthusiastic about this approach: I sometimes think that if you want to bring FS and Open Standards to public bodies you simply have to talk with them. Talking to people is the best way to help FS and Open Standards, and to protect both; there are a lot of people that do not consider the value of their data.

I think there are only two possibilities: either we talk with people and try to convince them to use Open Standards, or we simply wait for the day when most people won’t be able to access their data or choose the software that they use. Recently I’ve seen this second case at work: one of my colleagues uses Macromedia FreeHand. Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia in 2005 and started to control the line of Macromedia products, including Freehand. In 2007, Adobe said that it would discontinue development and support of the program. So what about his data? I took this opportunity to convince him to use Inkscape and to save his work in .svg, which is an Open Standard.

That’s the risk here: dependence on a single company. If you use a proprietary file format you will of course always be locked with the company who own this format; if we continue to use proprietary file formats we will lock future generations with the company who own the format, choosing not just for ourselves but also for future generations.

Fortunately there are a lot of people and technologies which already use Open Standards. We, the LUG Scandiano, recently convinced our Municipality to distribute files from their website using only Open Standards.

CW: Lobbying and activism have an important role to play. But is education the best place to fight the battle? Do you find that, working in a university, a lot can be done in education?

MB: Yes, by talking about education we are talking about the future. As an FS lover I think that school should never propose to the students the use of non-Free Software. And of course many good students and teachers could benefit form FS, but it’s not always easy to persuade teachers to change. I recently acheived an important goal in my department. For 3 years we had the Microsoft Campus contract for the use of MS Office; after a lot of pressing I persuaded the leader of my department to stop paying for it. It can take a long time but I think that insisting every day we can obtain results.

CW: With smaller campaigns like these, plus the bigger campaigns run by groups like FSFE, we might really be on to something!

MB: Yes, I think! And I hope. If people talk about FS to their friends, talk about FS to their boss, talk
about FS to the mayor of their city, and so on, I really think so.

Fellowship interview with Anne Østergaard

 Anne Østergaard

Anne Østergaard

Anne Østergaard is a veteran of the Free Software community, and attended the first Open Source Days, back in 1998. She holds a Law Degree from The University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and after a decade in government service, international organisations, and private enterprise, she has become a devoted Free Software advocate. Her interests lie in the long-term strategic issues of Free Software; in the social, legal, research, and economic areas of our global society. A former Vice Chairman at GNOME, she’s heavily involved in political lobbying, and has been fighting for changes in software patents and copyright for a number of years.

Chris Woolfrey: As somebody who’s been involved with the implementation of Free Software at government level, tell me about the developments in policy, as you’ve seen them, in recent years.

Anne Østergaard: I became involved actively with questions concerning Free Software when the software patent battle in the European Union was put on the agenda of the European Commission, and it later also came on the agenda of the European Council of Ministers, as the European Commission was pushing to change the “Software Patents Directive”. I joined the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) and Free Software Foundation Europe, and worked on common mailing lists. I assisted in meetings with our local government in Denmark, in The European Parliament, and with representatives from the Free Software communities in various European countries.

It was a big and not-too-promising looking task at the beginning. I thought that it would be near impossible to explain to the members of parliaments in Europe, and to the general public, just how dangerous software patents are for innovation. It took a very long time until the main newspapers in Denmark and other countries were starting to write about software patents, but the ball was rolling. With the help of friendly mailing lists, both public and non-public, it became clear to me that with the infrastructure that the Free Software community offered, anyone who is dedicated and willing to respect the ethical rules of group collaboration could join in and join forces.

My friends and I all learned so much in the process. For me and many others the patent battle was a case story that demonstrated to us that a critical mass of dedicated persons from all the European countries can have significant political influence when fighting for better regulations for our society. Now, under the latest European Treaty, Official Journal of the European Union C 115/21 Article 11, a group of one million people from different member states can ask the European Commission to take up a specific topic to initiate or change legislation. It has not yet been decided what exactly the conditions are, but Green Peace has already been knocking on the European Commission’s door.

CW: And groups like the FSFE are knocking on the door, too.

“Large countries in the world have the opportunity to do things right from the start”

AØ: There’s a question that the FSFE need to think about, and that’s “How Can Software Freedom Fighters be the First Movers to use the Citizens Rights Initiative?” We, the FSFE community, have the infrastructure to organize such citizens’ initiatives. The new European Treaty states that broad consultations should be carried out to ensure that the Union’s actions are coherent and transparent. The concerned parties can ask for a public consultation, or simply send a letter to the European Commission or the European Parliament to state their position and to be heard.

Using these new citizens’ rights are a challenge to us, because we need to spend a lot of time finding out about all the steps in the political decision making process. But I know of many people who would rather be part of only the creative process. To those I would like to say this: think of the political and legislative process as creative; one can learn much from participating in this process alone.

CW: How do you think Free Software will develop in the political sphere in future?

AØ: We have seen that documentation and knowledge sharing in the form of case stories, presentations, or consultations etc., can be helpful when you want to convince the government in your country. We have seen from these results of openly sharing knowledge that ideas and inspiration are spreading rapidly from country to country and over the continents. Right at this moment we are seeing that large countries in the world have the opportunity to do things right from the start.

Take, for example, the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap, which says that “In light of the considerable resources of the BRIC Countries (Brasil, Russia, India, and China), in light of the aspirations and proven abilities of many other countries to make intellectual capital a valuable global resource and a viable basis of commercial services, and in light of the enormous changes occurring both in the world itself and our collective and individual worldviews, the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap suggests how Free / Open Source Software can be used to transform ICT from yet another unsustainable hold-over from 20th century economics into a viable, valuable solution for 21st century challenges”.

Many other countries are on their way. Recently the Cenatic Foundation in Spain has issued a very informative Report on the International Status of Open Source Software 2010. It is a long report and well worth reading.

Of course, it took 10 years of fighting to avoid software patents in Europe in the first place. The battle is still ongoing. Luckily even the U.S (Public Patent Foundation) and the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) are involved. However, we need international legislation as Free Software travels fast and knows no boundaries.

CW: If it travels fast then the decision making of government might not be the best ground for it to flourish; given your experience, is this top-down legislative approach best?

“Only together are we strong enough to successfully continue our ongoing battle”

AØ: Experience shows that it is best to have a real need for any new legislation, and to know if there is such a need; a bottom-up approach is clearly the best starting point. But without acceptance and adoption by governments there will not be any sustainable results, because companies are rightfully reluctant to make investments in an unclear situation. This is why the smallest unit of freedom, the individual Fellowship Member, or the equivalent in other freedom commons, is so important: only together are we strong enough to successfully continue our ongoing battle, maintaining the freedoms we have gained and to go on fighting for those freedom rights, we still need in a modern democratic and global world.

Smaller or bigger national or regional groups that share the same goal are our most important representatives when it comes to convincing governments. It takes an understanding of all the nuances of respective cultures to get the message across in the right manner, else it risks being rejected. Like language barriers, cultural barriers are important to acknowledge; wrong approaches could harm or block your efforts before the argument is heard. After all we must not forget that human beings are making decisions based on their inner feelings on what would serve their own agenda best.

CW: If that’s how people make decisions, how best can we help others to enter into the argument?

AØ: When these questions are asked we tend to point to our educational systems. But school systems are very different from place to place. I think it is up to us to think of ways to spread the message of not only Software Freedom rights, but also personal freedom rights in our local communities, as the personal freedom rights are the back bone of freedom. Until we have spread the fundamental freedoms of Free Software further there is little chance that we can make individuals understand the importance of being in control of your own life, and being the one to decide from case to case with whom you want to share information on matters you consider to be of a private nature.

Take Facebook. For most young people it is important to be seen, to have many friends and to be popular. This is why social platforms such as Facebook have become so popular. However, the wider perspective, that Facebook’s members are giving away important personal information and thus making themselves into a product to be sold to private companies, is not so obvious to a vast number of the website’s users. And when important politicians are on Facebook it gives a signal to people that it’s OK to be there. But don’t forget that politicians want to be exposed to get re-elected, and marketing departments of companies wants you to buy their products. To be in control it is safer to be able to remove things that you’ve written in a social forum that are no longer relevant or suitable.

“When important politicians are on Facebook it gives a signal to people that it’s OK to be there”

And there is also the debate about Cloud Computing. Until there is a real possibility for fair competition, and this means that there must be a a secure right to get your own content back, it is a risky thing to base your business on. In his essay “Declouding freedom: reclaiming servers, services and data”, Philippe Aigrain is clearly describing why the open cloud movement is falling short of addressing some important challenges facing user autonomy and capabilities. As Aigrain comments, “The open cloud movement will become one of those activities whose very business rests upon enabling customers to leave it.”

We need a legal framework to ensure effective protection for network neutrality that ensures equitable treatment of decentralized Web services by prohibiting and sanctioning discrimination against protocols, applications, sources and contents. But we also need community and policy; to invest in the development of decentralized, user-controlled, free software-based Web services for all essential social/collaborative applications and promote their usage.

So called “intellectual property” rights are causing problems for free access to knowledge. In my opinion, developed countries have an obligation to share with developing countries so that these countries are able to play on a level playing field in the not too distant future, and without having to pay someone for content that has already been published on the internet.

Having access to the internet is taken for granted by many of us. Many people have only had this privilege of searching for information on the internet for less than ten years and are still not very familiar with how this modern infrastructure is constructed, and is functioning. Let us not forget that several millions of people haven’t even had the chance to use ICT yet. We are living in times where we are expected to make use of electronic self service systems by our governments; systems of an often non-free, and less mature and user friendly nature. If around 30% of a population have severe problems, our governments have a problem.

Fellowship Interview with Brian Gough

Brian Gough

Brian Gough

Brian Gough is one of the core developers of the GNU Scientific Library, which he has been contributing to for many years. He runs Network Theory Ltd., which publishes Freely licensed printed manuals and tutorials for Free Software projects, such as GCC, Perl, Python and PostgreSQL. He lives in Guildford in the United Kingdom, and regularly attends Free Software conferences and meetings.

Chris Woolfrey: Tell me how Network Theory got started.

Brian Gough: It’s been going since 2003, about 7 or 8 years. It all started when I was working on the GNU Scientific Library: I’d written the manual and couldn’t find a publisher that would want to publish it under a Free documentation license. And as I’d previously been in a job that was related to digital libraries and scientific journals, I knew a bit about the publishing industry, and decided to publish it myself. It was basically just to make the book available to people: I didn’t think of it as a business at the time. But once I’d done one manual, I saw that there were other great Free Software manuals out there that weren’t available as printed books. And for those of us who like printed books over reading on a screen, it would be a good service to publish other books as well. So I set up the company to publish manuals for Free Software that are published under Free documentation licenses.

CW: Why the struggle with finding a publisher for these books? Free licensing is an established trend in the software world, yet this practice hasn’t been adopted by many publishing firms.

BG: Just as with software, it’s more profitable to publish under a proprietary license than a Free license, generally. I didn’t even try going to traditional publishers because you could just tell that they weren’t interested in publishing free manuals at that time. It was a new thing.

CW: So you decided to do things for yourself. How have things developed?

BG: Well, the idea of the business was to be able to put the money back into Free Software; so to give a donation, typically of $1 for each book that’s sold. And we’ve currently donated over $24,000 to different projects from sales of the books. We’ve published over 25 titles so far. All the books are produced entirely using Free Software, as far as possible. So internally everything is done with Free Software: the graphics, the typesetting, all the editing is done with Free Software, using Emacs, Ghostscript, and so on. And we submit the proofreading corrections that we find back as patches to the original project.

CW: How important is it that what you publish is Freely licensed? Is it integral?

“Without documentation being kept up to date under a free licence, people lose the ability to understand how software works”

BG: Absolutely. There’s an original essay by Richard Stallman on the subject called ‘Free Software Needs Free documentation‘ and the basic idea is a very simple one, which is that if you can modify the software – as you can with Free Software – then you should be able to modify the documentation as well. And if you can’t do that, then really your freedom to modify the software is limited because the documentation, if it’s under a non-Free license, can’t be kept up to date. So over time, without current documentation being kept up to date by everyone under a free licence, the ability of people to understand how the software works and how to use it is impacted. Documentation needs to be free so it can evolve with the software.

CW: Network Theory has published an impressive number of titles; how many people are working on these?

BG: There are two of us who are actively working on all the projects, and I have a few other people who help out on a freelance basis. We’ve got a lot more books coming out in the pipeline. The “Perl Language Reference manual (v5.12.1)” is 700 pages and is the most up to date Perl manual that’s out there right now. And we’ve got the W3C standards for XML. The other ones we’ve got coming out are the latest PostgreSQL manuals for PostgreSQL 9 in four volumes, and the latest Apache Reference manual (version 2.2.16).

The one which is my favourite is the Emacs Org-Mode Reference Manual: a GTD Emacs mode for time management. It lets you organise your tasks, your notes, your appointments, in Emacs – basically to organise your whole life according to the ‘Getting Things Done‘ philosophy. And honestly, it’s the greatest Emacs mode in 20 years. We use it in the company and it just works so well in a Free Software environment. Everything is plain text, so you can put it under version control, you can check out the latest task file, edit it, go offline and work while you’re travelling, update tasks and open new tasks, and then commit back to the repository so other people can pick them up. It really works well with the Free Software approach to doing things, of keeping things in plain text and not being tied into proprietary web-service task tracking systems. I love Org-Mode, so I’m really happy to be publishing the manual for it!

CW: Would you say Org-Mode is one of the more exciting projects in the Free Software world at the moment?

“Something that’s adapted exactly to your needs can be so much more powerful…that’s one of the advantages of Free Software”

BG: Definitely. Maybe it’s even the most exciting! Certainly it’s transformed the way that I organise my work, and I think it has for a lot of other people as well, so it’s software that can revolutionise your life, not just perform a function. One of the great things about Free Software is that you can do things differently. So many of the paradigms of proprietary software are really inefficient, and although Free Software maybe doesn’t always look as nice, doesn’t maybe have the fancy graphics, or whatever, in terms of actually getting things done, if you’ve got something that’s adapted exactly to your needs then you can be so much more powerful and efficient. It can give you a real advantage in whatever your doing. That’s certainly something that’s really valuable to businesses, if they can adapt software specifically to their needs, and other businesses using proprietary software are stuck in a particular way of working that doesn’t suit them. And I think that’s really one of the advantages of Free Software: that you can adapt it.

CW: Many people seem to share the strange perception that computers are something that you don’t need to know about, and even shouldn’t know about; that you shouldn’t mess with them.

BG: Well, I always start from the assumption that the computer should do what I want, and that’s why I use Free Software. I think that’s how people should approach it: they shouldn’t just accept what’s given to them, because computers are such powerful tools that you really want them to be working exactly the way that suits you, not that suits somebody else.

CW: You use the word ‘tools’. Some people seem not to see that computers are tools. People who are only familiar with proprietary software often don’t realise that computers can be used in this way, or that they may be modified to suit a particular task . What are your thoughts on how to educate people about the wider possibilities of computing and Free Software?

BG: I don’t have any big insights into advocacy, but I would say that people shouldn’t passively accept what they’re offered by corporations. They should always seek out something better and with computers that means Free Software, if you want something better, meaning that you want it to do what you want, not what somebody else has designed it to do.

The word ‘tool’ can be misleading because we think of it as something that just does a single job, whereas the computer, a general purpose computer like a PC, is just completely different to anything that has existed before in history because it is completely reconfigurable in the way that it processes information, so that although it is a tool in a sense, it is a tool which is infinitely modifiable and like nothing else we’ve seen. So we shouldn’t just accept the very limited types of software we get from proprietary software companies: we should really have a much bigger vision of what computers do, and I think that’s what Free Software offers. So maybe that’s a way of explaining to people what Free Software is about: it’s a much bigger vision of what computers can do than just being provided with a product.

Network Theory Ltd. is looking for new books to publish. If you would like to see your Free documentation in print, get in touch with Brian at bjg@network-theory.co.uk.