Karsten on Free Software

Will technology make us freer? Cory Doctorow has a nice little article about the role of Free Software as a tool for social activism. In particular, he’s writing about why it’s important that the tools we use for activism should be free:

Herein lies the difference between a ‘‘technology activist’’ and ‘‘an activist who uses technology’’ – the former prioritizes tools that are safe for their users; the latter prioritizes tools that accomplish some activist goal. The trick for technology activists is to help activists who use technology to appreciate the hidden risks and help them find or make better tools. That is, to be pessimists and optimists: without expert collaboration, activists might put themselves at risk with poor technology choices; with collaboration, activists can use technology to outmaneuver autocrats, totalitarians, and thugs.

The text makes it pretty clear why Facebook is horribly ill-suited to social activism. It also reminds me of Malcom Gladwell’s argument from October 2010 that the revolution will not be tweeted.

Yesterday, I hopped over to Amsterdam to speak at Mediamatic about Free Software and FSFE at one of their Ignite events. The format was interesting: A strict time limit of five  minutes per speaker, with slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds.

The Mediamatic Bank is an art and exhibition space in central Amsterdam. Most or all of the other presentations were artists telling the audience about their own work. There were some projects that I liked a lot:

• Miktor and Molf divide their projects into “good work” and “bad work”. Good work is when they get paid, bad work is when they don’t. They’re right now  building an empty swimming pool for skating in, in Amsterdam. Like a number of the other projects presented that evening, it’s crowdfunded.
• Niels van Koevorden and Sabine Lubbe Bakker are making a movie about “The  End of Belgium”. The country hasn’t had a proper government for about a year  now. So these two are now setting off on a month-long tour in a converted army  truck, interviewing people around the country and trying to work out what holds  Belgium together (or not). Given that I live about 200 metres from the Belgian  border, I’ll invite them to come round to my place and look at Belgium from the  outside.
• Journalist Mariette Hummel is kicking off her DigiMe project. For six months, she  will try to document all the traces she is leaving in the digital world, whether  actively (e.g. Tweets) or passively (e.g. mobile phone location records).

There was  much more goodness, such as Alex Fischer carving treesaround the world (my favourite was a tree with a power socket in it), Arthur de Vries turning photos of faceless  mercenaries into statues, and Erik de Graaf with his graphic novel “Scherven” (Fragments)  about a Dutch couple being torn apart in WWII.

The current Piece de Resistance exhibition at Mediamatic Bank (Vijzelstraat 68) looks very  interesting, though I didn’t get time to really see it. In case you’re in the area on May 21, Mediamatic is hosting a fingerprint forgery workshop courtesy of the Chaos Computer Club, along with an RFID Zapper workshop. Should be a treat.

(Article originally published on netzpolitik.org)
Das Bundeskartellamt und das US-Justizministerium haben gestern den Verkauf von 882 Novell-Patenten genehmigt. Die Software-Monopolrechte gehen an eine Firmengruppe namens CPTN. Die wiederum besteht aus Microsoft, Oracle, Apple und EMC. Das Erfreuliche: Offenbar unter massivem Druck aus der Freie Software-Welt mussten sich die CPTN-Firmen offenbar auf Bedingungen einlassen, die den Wettbewerb durch Freie Software schützen sollen. In ihren Mitteilungen heben die Behörden nicht nur die Rolle Freier Software für den Wettbewerb hervor. Sie stellen auch klar, dass Patentklagen ebenso wettbewerbsfeindlich sein können wie “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”-Strategien.

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At FSFE, we’re closely watching how the public sector goes about buying software. A lot of money changes hands here, so it’s worth paying attention, especially since a couple of studies have shown that public authorities frequently get the process wrong.

Fortunately, there are legal remedies available. If your company bids for a contract, and the offer is rejected, you can go to court if you feel treated unfairly. You can do the same if you think the call for tender is designed in a way that prevents your company from bidding for the contract in the first place.

There’s certainly a lot of unfairness out there. One of the most common mistakes that public bodies make is to use a brand name in a call for tender, such as saying “we want software from company X”. Under European rules (see Directive 2004/18/EC, para 23.8) , that’s illegal unless there’s no other way to describe what you’re looking for. In software, there almost always is such a way. If you’re looking for a word processor, you should say so, rather than asking for “Microsoft Word” or similar – otherwise you’re excluding competitors from bidding. And that’s illegal.

So there are clear rules, and there are lots of public bodies breaking them. Yet when I ask companies that offer Free Software or related services why they don’t go to court more frequently to appeal against such unlawful calls for tender, they often tell me “we don’t want to annoy our potential customers”. They’re afraid that if they sue a public body (for example, the European Commission) over a bad procurement action, they’ll never get any business from the Commission again.

But is that fear justified?

Our intern Natalia was looking at the EC’s own procurement practices the other day. The Commission’s desktop computers run on Windows XP. The necessary licenses are sourced through a contract with Fujitsu-Siemens from 2008, with a total final value just short of 49 million Euro. When the EC awarded that contract, an unsuccessful bidder sued (Case T-121/08, pdf). The bidder’s name? PC-Ware. That sounded familiar, and indeed: It’s the very same company that won a the 189 million Europe SACHA II contract from the European Commission in December 2010. That’s almost four times the total of the Fujitsu-Siemens contract.

Which goes to show that suing your customers can be, to paraphrase Neelie Kroes, a very smart business decision indeed.

When it comes to Free Software and Open Standards, the UK has long lagged way behind other countries. There were a few policies that sounded good on paper, but that’s exactly where they stayed.

This may be finally changing. The UK Cabinet Office has issued a “procurement policy notice” (.pdf) that is, well, surprising. In a good way. It tells public bodies in the UK how they should go about buying software. It says the right things:

When purchasing software, ICT infrastructure, ICT security and other ICT goods and
services, Cabinet Office recommends that Government departments should wherever
possible deploy open standards in their procurement specifications.

and for the right reasons:

Government assets should be interoperable and open for re-use in order to maximise
return on investment, avoid technological lock-in, reduce operational risk in ICT
projects and provide responsive services for citizens and businesses.

But if you’ve followed the epic EIFv2 debate and its outcome, you’ll know that the key to it all is the definition of what an Open Standard is, exactly. This is where this little unassuming procurement notice really shines:

Government defines “open standards” as standards which:

• result from and are maintained through an open, independent process;
• are approved by a recognised specification or standardisation organisation, for example W3C or ISO or equivalent. […]
• are thoroughly documented and publicly available at zero or low cost;
• have intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis;
  and
• as a whole can be implemented and shared under different development approaches and on a number of platforms.

So, what does this amount to?

This is one of the stronger policies that we’ve seen from European governments. It certainly is a leap ahead for the UK, which until now has lagged behind many other European countries in terms of Free Software adoption in the public sector. We’d like to see similarly well-considered steps from more European governments.

The policy note is refreshingly clear on what constitutes an Open Standard. The requirement that patents which are included in Open Standards should be made available royalty-free is a welcome improvement over the fudged compromise in the new European Interoperability Framework. It’s good to see the UK government take leadership on this important issue, in its own interest and that of its citizens.

As the lamentable OOXML charade has shown, it’s important that standards are developed in a process that’s independent of any particular vendor, and open to all competitors and third parties. We commend the UK government for making this an explicit requirement. The definition of Open Standards could have been even further improved by demanding a reference implementation in Free Software.

Procurement based on this policy will bring the UK public sector strategic independence in its IT choices, freedom from vendor lock-in, and financial savings. It will also make it easier for UK citizens to communicate with their authorities using Free Software and Open Standards.

What next?

While this is an excellent document, we’re not quite there yet. The UK government has just opened a public consultation on Open Standards in government ICT that needs your input. Notably, the survey includes a section on what the definition of an Open Standard should be.

As always, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Implementation is what counts in the end, and the UK public sector has some credit left to earn in that respect. But this policy note takes the UK’s public sector one large step closer to software freedom, and into Europe’s fast lane of Free Software policy.

On the invitation of the GNU hackers, I spoke today in the GNU DevRoom at FOSDEM. The talk was on “Power, Software, Freedom — Why we need to divide and re-conquer our systems”. Here are the slides.

What makes a free service? If we do our computation on machines that we don’t control, how can we make sure we get the same freedoms that Free Software gives us on our own computers?

This is a discussion that urgently needs your brainpower and your coding magic. As a starting point, do you know a project in this area that should be added to this list?

Spotted near Puerta de Sol in Madrid, Spain. Dec 3, 2010.

Progress sometimes comes very gently. Last week’s session of the WIPO committee in charge of implementing the Development Agenda (CDIP) was a case in point.

As in previous sessions, a lot of the discussion still revolved around procedural issues. Member states are battling over the question of how much power the committee should have, and again failed to agree during this round of negotiations.

Yet there was also some substantial work done, with a few new studies commissioned and progress in some studies that are already underway. Believe it or not, but the mere fact that these studies exist is progress already. Where WIPO used to be single-mindedly drive the rightsholder perspective, the organisation is now making an effort to look outward and get an idea of the reality that it is legislating upon.

That’s not to say that those studies are perfect. During last week’s meeting, member states adopted a project to study “open collaborative projects”. The proposal focuses on activities that are essentially just R&D outsourcing, all but ignoring Free Software. We pointed this out in a written submission to the committee and highlighted the issue with several member states, who took a keen interest. Unfortunately, our comments and suggestions eventually took a back seat to the procedural wrangling that still dominated much of the sessions.

In conversations with some WIPO staff, there was a palpable interest in making innovative approaches to knowledge management, such as Free Software, a greater part of WIPO’s regular activities. There are a number of people who realise that to stay relevant and truly serve its member states, the organisation will have to learn some new tricks.

While WIPO has some very good in-house expertise on the traditional way of handling these monopolies, they will need advice on more recent ideas and practices. We’ll definitely be there to help, and seize the opportunity to move WIPO a bit closer to becoming the World Intellectual Wealth Organisation we described years ago.

A study (see p.79) on “Intellectual Property, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the Digital Divide and Access to Knowledge” that’s currently underway may turn out to be interesting, though results aren’t due before early 2012.

Yet WIPO clearly still has some way to go. A seminar organised as part of a project on “IP and competition policy” at the end of October not only lacked the perspective of users and consumers. WIPO had also invited none other than Microsoft to present the industry perspective on the interactions of copyright, patents and competition policy. While I won’t deny that the company’s convictions for anticompetitive behaviour in high-profile lawsuits on two continents have given it some relevant experience, inviting them as experts on competition policy is like asking Jack the Ripper for advice on public safety. We pointed this out to member states and the secretariat, and will make sure that the seminar’s results are taken with a rather large pinch of salt.

Overall, this was a good week at WIPO, where the road is alway long and progress happens at a glacial pace. Sure, we’re impatient to see more movement on the organisation’s part. But this is a big wheel, and it turns slowly. Yet some of open, friendly and constructive conversations we had this week would plainly not have happened a few years ago. We’ll stay on the case.