Karsten on Free Software

Last week’s verdict in Apple vs Samsung involves some big numbers – hey, more than a billion US dollars in damages for Apple -, but it’s hardly as earth-shattering as some commentators claim. There will be an appeal, and then perhaps another one. We may see those damages shrivel from enormous to minimal (or even zero) faster than you can say “rounded rectangle”.

In hindsight, the ruling may come to be seen as a high-water mark for the insanity caused by software and design patents. But it won’t fundamentally change the smartphone market, or even the patent battlefield.

I was going to discuss this in greater detail. But it turns out that Glyn Moody has already done the job. Please go and read his article. Here are some notable points:

• The jury leader might have been biased. Samsung is sure to bring this up in an appeal.
• There’s prior art for most of the patents in question.
• With the lawsuit, Apple may have damaged the uniqueness of its own brand. The lawsuit highlighted how similar Samsung’s devices are to the iStuff. Moreover, by descending into this sort of petty squabble, more people may come to view Apple not as a pioneering innovator (though I’d just say they’re rather good at copying and improving things), but more as a new Microsoft; a company that has run out of ideas and survives by grabbing competitors by the neck and emptying their pockets:

Apple’s products are just as well-designed and good-looking today in the wake of the court case, as they were before. But something has changed, thanks in part to the courtroom spectacle of Apple and Samsung’s lawyers slugging it out, trying to land as many punches below the belt as possible. Apple has lifted the veil and in doing so, begun to destroy its own mystique and magic.

Until the broken patent system is fixed, prepare to see more of this.

Oh, and Samsung will continue to sell Apple components that make up 26% of each iPhone. Business as usual, then.

Microsoft recently announced that the next edition of the company’s office suite, called Office 2013, will support the OOXML document standard in its file formats. That’s a little surprising if you consider that Microsoft pulled out all the stops and opened its bag of dirty tricks to get OOXML adopted as a standard, first by ECMA in 2006 and then by ISO in 2008.

Promises, promises

This is a very public admission by Microsoft that they haven’t actually implemented OOXML until now – despite everything their sales people have apparently been telling clients in business and the public sector. Let’s all repeat together one more time: “Microsoft has so far not implemented proper OOXML support in its products.”

Microsoft seemingly has a knack for forgetting the odd promise. In July 2012, the European Commission had to remind the company that it had somehow forgotten to implement the commitments it made to settle a competition complaint. The Commission could decide to charge Microsoft up to 10% of annual revenue as a fine for this unprecedented breach of a settlement.

OOXML is tremendously over-complex as a standard. The standard document runs to a cool 6,000 pages (by comparison, this edition of the complete works of Shakespeare makes do with a mere 1,424 pages, and is a much more interesting read.) Still, a published specification is better than a secret file  format. It should become easier to achieve greater compatibility between Microsoft’s Office suite and Free Software programs.

But Microsoft intentionally made OOXML so complex that perfect compatibility with the much clearer ODF standards will remain hard to achieve. The standard also contains internal contradictions, and it does not appear that these have been resolved – for example, plentiful references to other proprietary forrmats. Microsoft promised to fix these in later revisions of the standard, but we haven’t seen any such revisions.

Defaulting on users?

But will strict OOXML be the default file format in Office 2013? Most people use whatever format their program tells them is the default. If the current, broken OOXML-transitional format remains as default, then Microsoft’s support for OOXML-strict will remain purely theoretical. And when will Microsoft drop support for OOXML-transitional?

As long as the company’s programs use the secret, proprietary OOXML-transitional as the default format, users will merely open files in other formats and save them in a way that nobody except Microsoft’s customers can read, thus hoovering even more documents into Redmond’s proprietary universe.

So, while it’s good news that Microsoft is planning to follow through on its 2008 promises some time in 2012 or 2013, it’s not exactly a revolution. The company also promises that Office 2013 will have full support for ODF 1.2. It remains to be seen how well Microsoft will treat the main rival to its own proprietary formats. It seems unwise to expect an excess of fairness.

Originally published on opensource.com

For the first time, the European Parliament is about to release one of its own programs as Free Software. The program in question is called AT4AM, short for “Automatic Tool for Amendments”. The Parliament is in the business of making laws, and AT4AM automates a lot of the formal stuff associated with the production process.

To understand what AT4AM means for MEPs and their staff, have a look at how amendments were filed before, and how it works now. (Vimeo. Flash required, sorry.) Parliament staffer Erik Josefsson compared the introduction of AT4AM to the arrival of version control for developers. It’s been in use inside the parliament for about 18 months, and it’s a pretty fundamental tool for the people working there.

So we were happy to read in May that the Parliament was going to release AT4AM as Free Software. Last week, the parliament’s Free Software user group held an event to discuss the right license under which to publish AT4AM. Attending were not only a crowd of people from outside the Parliament, but also the Parliament’s own AT4AM development team. (Presentations and video recordings here.)

(By the way, you’re welcome to participate in the European Parliament Free Software User Group!)

I went there to talk about Free Software and democracy. AT4AM encodes a large part of the process of how laws are made – it’s literally an instrument of power. The European Parliament is bound to the highest standards of transparency, and releasing AT4AM means that everyone can have a look at the way Europe’s laws are made. While this isn’t exactly a revolution, it’s good to see the Parliament finally engage with Free Software.

FSFE General Counsel (and genius Free Software lawyer) Carlo Piana got down to the business of picking the right license for AT4AM. The development team wants other parliaments to use, study, share and improve the program, and feed their improvements back into the main branch. AT4AM is a server-based application, and using it on a server doesn’t count as “distribution” under the GPL. Given those inputs, picking the license wasn’t hard. He recommended that the Parliament should release the tool under AGPLv3 or any later version of the license. This way, everyone could take the software and do as they please.At the same time, once the program is released, there would be no way to take it away from the public again.

In addition, the developers might consider using the EUPL as a second license. This isn’t compatible with GPLv3, and opens a back door towards making future versions of the program proprietary again. But since the license is developed by the European Commission, it sometimes helps to overcome the fears of public-sector decision makers who are dipping their toe into the Free Software waters for the first time.

The Parliament’s attitude to Free Software remains ambivalent. On the face of it, releasing AT4AM is a nice step forward, but hardly a revolutionary one. Public-sector platforms like Joinup and its associated forges currently host more than 4000 programs released by public bodies under Free Software licenses. Some governments, most recently in Spain’s Basque Country region, have made releasing publicly funded software the default procedure.

On the other hand, there’s the Parliament administration, which instinctively recoils from anything that looks different from their usual ways. When Nick Stenning filed a Freedom of Information request for AT4AM’s source code and database on April 1, there was a drawn-out discussion, which currently ends with a lengthy “no” from the Parliament’s Secretary General.We’re currently also waiting for the Parliament’s administration to report on its use and development of Free Software.

And there’s so much more we’d like to see from the European Parliament in terms of transparency. Why not give the public read access to the EP’s internal AT4AM system, so that we could follow laws being made in real time? Why not give every MEP and staffer a Free Software desktop for their daily work? And when will the Parliament, and every other European institution, finally give the public what they’re due, and release all programs that were developed with public funds as Free Software?

I’m busy getting a new laptop operational, with all the little tweaks that I’ve come to rely on over the years. One of those is Gtimelog. It’s a small and simple Python program that lets me track my working time. I’ve been using it pretty much every working day since 2006 or so. Over the years I’ve converted most of FSFE’s staff to the program. It lets us manage working hours much better than we could otherwise, and helps avoid burnouts.

Now, this new laptop is running Fedora 17. The OS is pretty delightful, but I can’t get Gtimelog to work. There’s no Fedora package, so I installed it according to instructions by Sam Tuke. Those worked fine for F16, but not for F17. Starting Gtimelog in a console gives me:

** (process:1748): WARNING **: Trying to register gtype ‘GMountMountFlags’ as enum when in fact it is of type ‘GFlags’

** (process:1748): WARNING **: Trying to register gtype ‘GDriveStartFlags’ as enum when in fact it is of type ‘GFlags’

** (process:1748): WARNING **: Trying to register gtype ‘GSocketMsgFlags’ as enum when in fact it is of type ‘GFlags’
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/gtimelog”, line 9, in <module>
load_entry_point(‘gtimelog==0.7.1’, ‘gui_scripts’, ‘gtimelog’)()
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gtimelog-0.7.1-py2.7.egg/gtimelog/main.py”, line 2110, in main
tray_icon = icon_class(main_window)
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gtimelog-0.7.1-py2.7.egg/gtimelog/main.py”, line 1088, in __init__
‘style-updated’, self.on_style_set) # Gtk+ 3
TypeError: <gtk.Window object at 0x1103320 (GtkWindow at 0x1140060)>: unknown signal name: style-updated

Can anyone make sense of this?

And is there anyone out there who has successfully gotten Gtimelog to work on Fedora 17?

The European Parliament has rejected ACTA today at 12:56 CEST. There were 478 against, 39 in favour, 165 abstention.

This means that the treaty is effectively dead. In theory, the remaining countries that are party to the agreement could still
adopt it, but it’s unlikely that they’ll bother.

It’s also a humiliating defeat for the Commission, which is now facing a more assertive Parliament. MEPs weren’t happy at all with how the EC treated them during the negotiation process. Bizarrely, the Commissioner in charge of ACTA, Karel de Gucht, says he still wants to have the European Court of Justice review the agreement.

ACTA also shows that citizens are willing to stand up and be counted for their digital rights en masse – that’s probably the best news out of this whole process.

The ideas that ACTA stood for won’t go away, and are bound to return in new guises. There’s the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) being negotiated by the US, Japan and various Asian countries. Closer to home, the EC is currently reviewing IPRED2. And no doubt there will be more treaty drafts, law proposals and other noxious stuff. Unitary patent, anyone?

We’ll attend to these things tomorrow. Today, we celebrate.

Yesterday, the European Court of Justice ruled that users may resell software licenses. It’s an important decision – for proprietary software. (Human-readable press release here.)

The case deals with the question of whether it’s ok to resell the right to use a program. If we were talking about apples or cars, no sane person would have claimed that it’s not ok for the owner of the apple or the car to sell it to someone else.

Apparently an ECJ decision was necessary to confirm that this applies to software as well.

With Free Software, the question doesn’t even come up. If you’re not allowed to redistribute the program (gratis or for a fee), it’s not Free Software, period.

I see two interesting aspects to the decision, though.

One, it shows that Free Software licenses provide much more clarity, and puts the user in a stronger position, than proprietary End User License Agreements (EULAs) do. The ruling also highlights that even the more central bits of such EULAs won’t necessarily stand up in court, let alone all those frivolous bits that say “by using this program, you grant us unlimited and perpetual rights to slurp all your data, empty your fridge and sleep in your bed”.

Second, I wonder what the ruling changes for music, books, movies and other stuff sold with DRM functions that tie these to a single user. Shouldn’t we be allowed to resell those as well? The press release says that “[selling a license to use, for a fee] involves a transfer of the right of ownership of the copy”. That’s a pretty clear statement.

This could be a useful precedent. Interesting times ahead.

Sometimes, a government just gets it right. The Basque Country in Spain has just introduced a policy that’s eminently sensible: Software developed with public funds will be released as Free Software by default. Citizens, companies, and other public bodies will be able to use, study, share and improve that software as they see fit. Before contracting out software development, public bodies are also asked to check whether the program they need already exists. (Now that’s revolutionary, right?)

In most places, it’s the other way round: People pay taxes, and the public sector spends part of that money on companies that develop proprietary software, which the taxpayers can’t get hold of, let alone use.

Taxpayers often end up paying over and over again to have very similar software developed, because public bodies normally don’t exchange software with each other; and if they wanted to, they couldn’t, because they acquired that software under a proprietary license.

There are some initiatives to fix this, notably Joinup (formerly OSOR) on the European level (disclosure: In 2006-2009, I was working for one of the organisations contracted by the EC to set up OSOR) and Adullact in France.

But when it comes to routinely releasing public sector programs under Free Software licenses, it’s the Spanish regions that are in the lead. Andalusia has been doing it for a while, as have Catalonia, Galicia, and Extremadura. Now the Basque Country has joined them. (Article by El Pais in Spanish, with more links.)

I was given the opportunity to comment when this policy was being developed, and all I can really say about it is “See, that wasn’t so hard”. There’s no reason why every other government out there couldn’t do the same thing.

Now, there will be those who say “but it’s bad for business”. Wrong, entirely. The Basque Country’s association of Free Software companies (ESLE) seems happy enough. About two years ago, an entrepreneur from the region told me: “You know how the Andalusians have this policy about releasing public sector software? The companies down there are getting really good at what they do, and they’re starting to eat our lunch. We need a policy like that here in the Basque Country too.”

Now they have one. Their government has realised that Free Software means helps to develop businesses and IT skills in their region, and drives regional development. It also lets the public sector get much better value for its investments in software. And citizens get to see what the public sector does with their taxes.

Governments everywhere should take note.

Staffers in the European Parliament are facing a challenge to their ethics. A company is offering all of them a gift which could not only compromise their independence, but also get them in hot water for copyright infringement. The people working at the European Parliament now need to make a choice: Leave the gift on the table and earn the respect of the citizens they’re working for, or compromise on ethics.

The company in question is Microsoft, and the gift is a bunch of proprietary programs. Through the Parliament’s administration, Microsoft is offering staffers (though probably not MEPs) gratis licenses to Microsoft Office, Project (a project management software) and Visio (a diagramming tool). This happens under the so-called “Home Use Program“.

Such programs are a fairly standard part of Microsoft’s contracts with large organisations. But while private companies are of course free to make their own choices about the perks they offer to their workers, political institutions like the European Parliament are bound to higher standards. There are several serious problems with this program.

(All this is before we even start to talk about the fact that the European institutions haven’t run a competitive bidding process for Microsoft products in 20 years; or that the Parliament which represents us all has no business promoting a dominant company’s market power.)

Conflict of interest

The most obvious problem is that the parliament’s staff are working on regulations that govern the very business that is now making a gift to them. That’s a clear conflict of interest which can’t be explained away.

You might say “well, as long as it’s just the staffers accepting gifts, not the MEPs, then that’s ok” – but you’d be very wrong. On my frequent visits to the Parliament, I sometimes meet with MEPs. But I always meet with staffers. They’re the ones who make the wheels turn. They’re the ones who do all the legwork, and they control access to the MEPs.

It’s tempting to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher: “If you want something said, ask an MEP. If you want something done, ask a staffer.” Staffers have real influence. It may not be illegal to give them gifts, but it’s definitely not ethical.

(Many staffers know this. On my last visit to Brussels, I went to lunch with one of them. We had a bag of fries and a couple of soft drinks. He wouldn’t even let me pick up the tab for the drinks. That’s how it should be.)

Systematic copyright infringement in the making

Shouldn’t the EP’s staff have the possibility to use the same software at home as they do at work? The hours in the EP are long, the pressure is huge, and sometimes work just needs to get done on a private computer. So, shouldn’t staffers have the necessary tools available on their home computers?

Sure. But that’s not how the Home Use Program works:

2.6. Types of use

Entitlement to the Standard HUP is limited to the following types of use:

• Private use by the staff member concerned and his/her close family.

That couldn’t be clearer. Write a letter to your grandma on that computer: Fine. Prepare a presentation for work: Congratulations, you’ve breached the license, so you’re now violating copyright. (Though I bet that this is one user group that the BSA would hesitate to audit.) Staffers who accept this gift set themselves up for copyright violations.

If the EP really cares about letting staffers work from home, or from their private laptops; and if the EP really cares about its independence; then the administration should initiate a move to Free Software tools. This would make both ethical and licensing issues go away. European citizens could be more confident that those working for them in the Parliament are not beholden to corporate interests. And staffers would be safe in the knowledge that they won’t get in trouble for merely doing their job.

MEPs, it’s your turn

MEPs who want to keep their hands clean should now tell their staff, and the staff in their groups, not to accept the poisoned gift of Microsoft’s Home Use Program. They should push the administration into making available Free Software tools that staffers can use to do their work, and urge the Parliament itself to migrate to Free Software.

There’s the European Parliament Free Software User Group (EPFSUG) that can help with this. They’re always happy for  members from within the Parliament, and for outside supporters. If you want to help, please join this group and get active.

The debate around ACTA is in full swing. The European Commission pretends that there’s nothing to see here, please move on. The informed European public thinks otherwise, prompting tens of thousands of people to take to the streets repeatedly.

This has prompted the Commission to play for time. It has asked the European Court of Justice to check whether ACTA is compatible with Europe’s current laws (the “acquis communautaire”). As La Quadrature du Net explains, this question misses the point entirely. It is so limited that the EC can be pretty sure of getting the answer it wants.

That’s because in reality, ACTA is a political issue, not a legal one. The real question is not “is ACTA legal?”, but “do we need ACTA?” The assessment commissioned by the European Parliament’s INTA committee says no, as do most other people who have taken a close look at the agreement.

Now it’s the turn of the European Parliament to make up its mind. Do MEPs really want to ratify a treaty that offers no visible advantage to most people in Europe, but comes with lots of risk for repressive implementations by member states?

And will MEPs accept that they were sidelined during the negotiation process, and kept in the dark about most things relating to ACTA? Will they rubberstamp a text of questionable value?

Or will they demand (and earn) respect as the elected representatives of Europe’s citizens?

I wish they would.

The Wall Street Journals has an interview with Kader Arif, who recently resigned as the EP’s rapporteur for ACTA. He says that “either ACTA is useless, or it is a threat”.

I recommend you go read the whole thing. It’s a concise summary of some of ACTA’s greatest risks, plus interesting background on goings-on in the European Parliament.

Arif makes clear that ACTA cannot come into effect in the EU unless all 27 member states sign the agreement. The reason is that ACTA contains a chapter on criminal measures, and those are a competence of the member states.

And here I am very much concerned because I (and many international experts) consider that the text of the agreement breaks this very fragile equilibrium between interests of right holders and protection of civil liberties. […]

First is the article 11 of the agreement, which states that the right holder has the right to ask for information “regarding any person involved in any aspect of the infringement or alleged infringement”. This article is worded in such wide and unclear terms that it leaves a great deal of room for interpretation. In practice, almost anyone could be linked to an infringement of intellectual property rights and face criminal sanctions under such a vague definition. It is our responsibility as legislators and people’s representatives not to leave it to a judicial authority to decide of the scope of an agreement which could affect people’s civil liberties.

He says that if the EU and member states sign ACTA, and then discover at some point that it’s incompatible with the acquis communautaire (ie. accumulated current EU law), then EU/national laws would have to change — not ACTA.

The European Commission claims that national law would take precedent over ACTA. But Arif says that this doesn’t make sense, as it would render ACTA ineffective. Why negotiate an international agreement if it can be overriden by national laws?  So these claims are probably bogus.

At the same time as it says that ACTA will not bring changes in Europe, it claims that the agreement would make it easier for European companies to enforce their copyright and patents abroad.  But most ACTA parties are countries where this isn’t a problem today. Those countries where enforcement is difficult – Arif names India and China – are not party to ACTA.