Can Blizzards be struck by lightning?

Usually I never find time to play games anymore; most of my conscious time is spent working for Free Software and related issues. The rest of my time generally goes to reading, riding my motorcycle or doing Aikido. Also I discovered running for myself this year. For whatever reason, today I felt like none of these things and wanted to check out available Free Software games.

Using aptitude to check for installable Debian packages, I found the "freecraft" packages and gave them a try. Quite a nice job, I have to say. My congratulations to the developers — and my deepest sympathies, because when I looked on www.freecraft.org, this is what I found:

This domain is available. Please submit your proposal to: [...] If you're wondering what happened to the old site, please read this: FreeCraft Cease and Desisted by Blizzard [...] 

 

Yes, apparently Blizzard shut down this Free Software hobby project by threatening them with the big legal stick.

That got me curious and one thing I found out that people have taken the engine and started a new project with it: Stratagus. This may be a hobby project, but it looks quite professional. Check it out.

I have to say that I really liked the WarCraft games when they first came out, but this behaviour by Blizzard is really off-putting. It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… Did Blizzard really feel that threatened by a group of nerds who liked the game so much they wanted to make it more popular by improving it?

And Blizzard does seem to have a track-record for hostile behaviour. Following up on that brings us quickly to Florian Müller who has (in the name of the nosoftwarepatents.com campaign) asked the Free Software community to vote for him in the "European of the year" election. This article quotes some of the things he said about Free Software. It has also been reported on LWN.net.

Since Michel Rocard is also nominated, that would be a much worthier selection and if all of this had been about making a stand against software patents, that is who Florian should have suggested — not himself.

And as far as Blizzard is concerned: I don’t think I’ll buy any of their games ever again.

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Braindead patent?

During the struggle against software patents, many people used the example of plotlines and concrete stories to demonstrate the difference between patents (= plotlines) and copyright (=the actual story).

Like the "imagine Beethoven had gotten a monopoly on ‘musical pieces with two flutes and a cello’ — would that have served the ‘music innovation’?" example, it also served to show how ludicrous patents are in some areas.

But real life never seems to miss an opportunity to catch up with idiotic ideas in imagination. As read on "The Register", someone now actually filed a patent on a movie plotline for a Zombie flick.

This — forgive the pun — is entirely braindead.

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IPRED2: have a nice time – in jail!

Apparently a Dutch court sentenced a man to six months in prison for violation of laws for handling counterfeit goods. His crime? He wore a fake Rolex: http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1587840.html?menu=news.quirkies.strangecrime

Please note that he did not produce or sell a fake rolex. He only wore it.

I guess the Finnish culture minister got lucky she didn’t have to face a Dutch court. If not even the Finnish culture minister (who just before worked to enact a law to prevent this kind of thing) can remain within the bounds of law, what about normal people?

And with IPRED2 the European Commission seeks to increase punishment on such "crimes". I wonder who does not have a single faked brand somewhere in their household, knowingly or unknowingly.

Has anyone ever stopped to consider that artificial monopolies like trademarks theoretically draw their justification from their benefit to society?

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Problems with e-waste? Send it to Africa!

The Basel Action Network (BAN) published an interesting report, titled "The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa" in which they analyse the effects of many "ship your old computer to Africa" activities.

Studying Nigeria as a role model for such programmes they found that these activites can indeed be very useful and contributes to building local skills and economy. They also found that around 50% of these activities are best described as "hazardous waste disposal" under the guise of "bridging the digital divide", bypassing export and environmental laws created to prevent that kind of thing.

The Basel Action Network demands that such initiatives need to be watched closely whether they ship working, useful hardware — or totally outdated and/or dysfunctional junk.

That is good advice and I hope people will heed it. But if our goal is to bridge the digital divide, that is not enough.

As we’ve seen during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), "bridging the digital divide" serves as a convenient catch-all justification for many activities, including the creation of dependencies on Northern proprietary software vendors.

CNN quotes Bill Gates in the following way:

"Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software," Gates reportedly said. "Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." 

This is as clear as it gets: Proprietary software is always only under the control of the proprietor, never under the control of the user. It is in fact the user that is under control of the software. So while Microsoft of course believes that "Africa doesn’t need Free Software", this belief is obviously fueled by more than just a little self-interest.

It comes as no surprise that their statements once more confuse the question of zero price — which they can (and occasionally do) offer — with questions such as freedom of market, freedom of competition, freedom of learning and freedom of opinion — all of which they cannot offer.

Maybe they think that "we can’t offer this" translates to "noone needs it"?

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Women in Free Software

It seems to me that the issue is discussed more often these days. My first contact with it was when talking to the organisers of the "Women in Free Software" workshop during the 4th Free Software Forum in Porto Alegre in June 2004. Then there were several other meetings and articles, which made me curious, so I wrote issue 76 (careful: shortened German version only) of the Brave GNU World about it.

Recently there was the article by Fernanda on Groklaw and now I stumbled upon an article on Netzpolitik.org — apparently the OSI has now also discovered the topic.

From the comments on Groklaw and also to Fernandas Blog "Free Software with a female touch" here on the Fellowship site, it seems this topic can be quite controversial.

If someone has some new theories on why Free Software has so few women, I’d be interested to hear them.

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I should grow a beard

After Karsten told me he was a Low-Ranking geek, I could not resist to try this myself.

So I gave it a quick shot… and found out that I am only a High-Level Computer Geek:

My computer geek score is greater than 89% of all people in the world! How do you compare? Click here to find out!

I should probably grow a beard or stop having sex.

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Boycot O2

Computers + Kafka = Instant Insanity

Here is another story that is too absurd to be fiction, thus it must be real: How to (not) escape the claws of an immoral mobile phone provider. As this story has stretched out for years, let me try to tell it in chronological order.

…in the distant past

Some years ago — it must have been late 1999 or early 2000 — I was sharing an appartment with some friends of mine, one of which had the luck of being offered an internship position in the United States. Let’s call him Mr X to protect his privacy.

Mr X immediately accepted, which made his mobile phone contract with VIAG Interkom rather superfluous effective immediately and he asked me to step in for him: Several phone calls and snail-mail letters later, including photocopies of our personal ID cards and other official acts of contract transferrals which VIAG Interkom asked us to do, everyone agreed the contract had been transferred over to me.

This is where we’ll skip a good bit of uneventful time.

August 2002: Zombie Time!

VIAG Interkom, which in the scope of international merging and expansion had decided to call itself O2 as of 1. May 2002, offered to prolong the contract for another two years — and get a new mobile phone as a reward, an offer I gladly accepted at the time. Due to problems with my old VIAG Interkom SIM card, they also wanted to send me a new one. That however never arrived.

As you can see from the date, I had by now begun working full-time for Free Software Foundation Europe and was travelling most of the year. There was not a whole lot of time to get my mobile phone back working, so I had to find some solution fast. Several phone calls later I found out that O2 had sent the SIM card to Mr X’s name at my address — apparently his contract data had risen from the dead and killed mine.

By visiting one of their stores physically, taking a SIM card off the hands of one of their employees before they could also send this one into nirvana, I managed to get my mobile phone back to work.

Also, I repeatedly tried exorcising the rampant zombie contract. This was made impossible by one of the most excellent pieces of modern logic: "My computer does not show that the contract was transferred, so you must be wrong." There was no way to get a reality check on this. Believe me. I tried. The sky was whatever color the computer said it was, eyes, light, refraction had nothing to do with it. If the computer says its yellow with purple dots, then it is.

Given that the contract had been extended to 9. September 2004 and the basic functionality — pick up phone, call people, pay money at the end of the month — worked, I decided to let the zombie rest for the moment: I had real work to do.

August 2004: Another exorcism failed

In August 2004, after I had been pestered as Mr X both via SMS and phone calls while being on vacation in the Alps, I once more tried to get out of the contract and informed O2 that I would like to end it as soon as possible. No reply. Phone call fun again: Some discussions later, during which they did not tire to tell me that I could give them the go-ahead for another two-year contract term now and would get a new mobile phone if I did, I encountered the Zombie again:

"Our computer says the contract is with Mr X." (re-)enter circular logic revolving around a simple fact: Obviously I had to be wrong, because computers never err and no computer system ever fails.

After long discussions thathad distinctly kafkaesque qualities I finally managed to find someone who realised that contracts that could never be terminated under any circumstances might not be entirely legal.

So as a new tune it turns out they now referred to their contractual terms, which according to their own logic ("you are not our customer", remember?) I had never seen nor accepted — but which they felt bound me nonetheless: Unless terminated three months in advance, the contract automatically runs for another year.

As that smelled rather strange, I looked it up on the internet, finding out pretty quickly that German customer protection law defines this as the limit of an immoral and thus void contract. So O2 is essentially leaning against the wall legally defining immorality.

They did however tell me on the phone that they would accept ending my contract until 9. September 2005. Having wasted way too much of the time that I could have spent working for software freedom, I decided to let it rest and patiently await freedom in another year.

September 2005

"Freedom at long last!" I thought, but I was wrong. I was as much in the claws of the O2 Zombie as before, maybe even more so.

Not having received any kind of confirmation about termination of contract by the time — which is what I would have needed to keep my number when transferring to another provider — I called them twice over a couple of weeks, being told that they would immediately send the confirmation again. Not having received anything, and needing to get back on the road very soon now, I called them once more earlier today. And guess what?

"Our computer shows Mr X is our contract partner, and it shows no signs of the contract having been terminated. As you are not our customer, only Mr X can terminate that contract, and only to 9. September 2006. Until then, you can keep paying the bills."

Only the "Would you like to bind yourself for another 2 year period and get another mobile phone now?" was missing this time. I guess they got the hint of murderous lust in my voice. There is no doubt that if I asked, they would accept this from me — I can apparently do everything, only termination of the contract is impossible.

But it gets better. They also said they never approved termination of contract and rather sent a formal denial of termination last year. Guess where? To Mr X at my home address. Having been told by me repeatedly since 2002 that Mr X cannot be reached under this address, they might as well have sent it to "Santa Clause, North Pole" for all that this was worth.

In a perfect world, one might think that "if it bounces back to me as undeliverable, it wasn’t recieved" was an obvious conclusion to reach. The idea "if the bills are delivered under the name Georg Greve at this address and there is this Georg Greve guy writing us all these letters while we had no contact with Mr X for years, maybe we ought to send it to that Georg Greve guy?" apparently seemed much too obvious, as well.

How many times does one have to tell them to not send it to Mr X and rather use my name or the return address given on the letters? When does using the Mr X name with my address become the legal equivalent of "Santa Clause, North Pole?" Is about 40 times enough? But I digress.

Anyhow: Despite informing them that I had lost contact with Mr X some time ago, O2 still says "Computers don’t err, Mr X is our customer, unless he terminates the contract, you pay."

So for all intends and purposes, I am now stuck with a zombie contract that cannot be terminated, only prolonged. On the phone O2 tells me completely contradictory things and when trying to put it into writing, no reply from their side ever reaches me as they keep sending it to Santa Clause, North Pole.

And above all, always remember: computers do not err.

As I said: Instant insanity.

Boycot O2!

So by now I’ve started searching out the German customer protection association. The immediate solution is probably to simply get myself another mobile phone and refuse to pay O2 any more money.

Anyone who wishes to show sympathy for the trouble and annoyance caused by immoral behaviour of companies such as this one: Boycot O2!

If you have a contract, terminate it — there are other mobile phone providers out there — and let them know WHY you did it. Feel free to also provide the URL of this to their customer care department so they know WHY you won’t be their customer.

And if you get mail from me telling you I have a new mobile phone number: now you know why.

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Will Microsoft support the development agenda at WIPO?

Jonathan Murray, Microsoft’s CTO for the EMEA region felt compelled to comment on our recent announcement of the GPLv3 revision process for 2006. Naturally, I was interested to see what he had to say. Unfortunately he only seemed to go about confusion that had already been clarified. But let me still repeat some of those clarifications for your sake, Jonathan.

You are indeed very right that it makes no sense at all to try and deny anyone in possession of patents the use of Free Software. Many journalists realised this was an odd statement and thus immediately came back to us asking whether this was truly what we had said. As I told them, let me also tell you: We are considering for the GPLv3 a kind of stronger patent defense clause to protect Free Software authors from offensive use of software patents against them. What is in the GPL already may not be explicit enough, which is why this is one point we consider. You can find another example of such a clause in the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and it seems that Firefox is doing quite well with this clause. Companies like IBM and HP included.

You made your second point about DRM. That is an issue I believe we could have a very interesting and long conversation about, although most of that would have nothing to do with the GNU General Public License (GPL). But there is one connection: Given that software and source code are also stored on a computer, DRM and TC are both issues that directly concern all programmers and users in their basic freedoms to use, study, modify and distribute computer programs. This is what we are worried about regarding the GPL.

As the basic assumption was flawed, it came as no surprise that you would come to wrong conclusions. But I have to admit being tempted to open a general discussion on DRM with you: Given that users lose all rights and become subject to absolute control over what they can or cannot do with their computers, I find "Digital Rights Management" to be highly euphemistic, quite frankly. Digital Restriction Measures would seem a more descriptive term.

DRM is a solution in search of a problem: As Felix Oberholzer of Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of UNC Chapel Hill found out to their great surprise, the assumption "if someone downloads a movie or song, that means lost sale" is obvious, intuitive and wrong. They conducted a study, setting out to measure the effect, sure they would come to shocking results. The results shocked them more than anything they expected to find: "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates."

The media industry is clearly in crisis, but that crisis is only remotely connected to digitalisation, which has changed the rules of the game, but these days mainly serves as a convenient scapegoat in denial of reality. Artists like Courtney Love at times speak out and explain the real problem — unfortunately not enough people stop to think about it.

Instead of embracing change and adapting to it, the media industry seeks to enforce the same old structures that Ms Love describes on the digital world. Their motivation is fear of change. Their tool is DRM. And yes, if Free Software does not implement DRM in a way that gives them a false sense of security, it may mean we won’t be able to play the new HD-DVDs, just as we initially weren’t able to play DVDs of any kind.

After all, we both know that was your main motivation to push for TC and DRM in the first place: By encouraging the fear of the media industry about high-seas ship robbery, you prepared yourself to point them to an easy answer, knowing that if they went down that path, they would become ultimately dependent on you — knowing full well that only you would be able to offer them a "sufficient" level of control over your users.

My compliments on how you managed to make the media industry think you were their friend, that it would be beneficial for them to have all their distribution channels depend ultimately on your single company.

Regarding the "internet tax" that you chose for the title of your blog entry, let me briefly point out this is not something I advocate, although I do follow the discussion around it as an interested bystander.

I know of social studies that most people have a certain budget for culture that they will spend at maximum, which is a very fixed number. No matter how much DRM, advertisement or whatever else you dump on them, they will not go beyond that amount. On the other hand, people are willing to spend that amount on culture, and the only reason they would not do so is because they can’t do it in a convenient way. In other words: There is a relatively stable influx of money that is pretty constant, but you can cut yourself off from it by not meeting the demands of the market.

Instead of spending 95-98% of that influx on "system maintenance", on trying to enforce on people what they should want, some people have advocated the concept of a "cultural flatrate" on internet connections in combination with legalising all downloads and file sharing. Their calculations seem to indicate that artists and authors would get a good deal more this way, as we’d be able to cut down on the infrastructure costs a lot.

Whether their calculations are solid, I cannot say. Whether all artists or authors could do "creation on demand" models, which were another example I mentioned, I also cannot say.

It was this digression — which was equally caused by a misunderstanding of the DRM issue — that was compressed into the single statement you responded to. Neither FSFE nor me advocate these models, but I personally think they deserve fair consideration.

It is funny that you would bring the digital divide into this, though: An "internet tax" in richer countries was indeed advocated by some participants of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) to finance closing the digital divide.

I can’t say that I necessarily share that view, but then I can’t help but notice that if we were to move to a cultural flatrate model, we could simply base the amount of that fee on the development index of each country. That might contribute quite a bit to closing the digital divide by finally giving the South access to knowledge.

We denied them that access for a long time by overly restrictive regimes of "intellectual property" — like the TRIPS treaty, for which Microsoft was one of the key players. The debate at WIPO about these issues has been heating up this year; and your "Business Software Alliance" (BSA) has now filed for permanent accreditation.

We’ll be delighted to work with them to help the Southern countries establish a development agenda at WIPO to close the digital divide. If we had known this was so centrally on your mind, we would have gotten in touch much earlier. Let me know how we can make this happen.

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Reasons to not fly KLM and SkyTeam

…as I found myself sitting all the way in the back (second last row) all the way in the middle between a vertically challenged U.S. citizen and a bloke from the UK. Okay. To be fair: Both were friendly and even though it was uncomfortable as hell, it could have been much worse. Thanks to a first dan (a.k.a. "black belt") in "sleeping on uncomfortable flights" yours truly managed to catch some Zees.

When arriving in Amsterdam, James (the UK bloke) told me that I had jumped in my seat a few times during the flight when the baby behind us made strange noises. So it seems that I did in fact sleep — and arrived in Amsterdam in only slightly wrecked condition. After a breakfast involving caffeine, sugar and orange juice, I was feeling the desire for a shower, but otherwise did consider myself human enough to do some writing on my laptop for a publication about the WSIS that was somewhat overdue.

Business as usual for the travelling Free Software worker thus far.

Having landed at 7:15 with a connection at 10:05, time went by quickly enough and I went to board my plane to Hamburg. Arriving at the gate, I heard that one or two other flights were having technical difficulties and were being delayed or cancelled.

When getting on board the bus that was supposed to bring us to the plane, everything still seemed normal. When having waited for around 10 minutes in the crammed bus, it appeared that nothing was normal, indeed. We were told that the plane had technical difficulties and that we should please get off again to board at a later time.

Back in the hall, we were told that indeed boarding would now be delayed by 30 minutes. So open laptop, reply to some mail. 35 minutes later, we were told that indeed the plane was too broken to be repaired in time and that our flight was cancelled. Marvellous.

Actually: This seemed to be true for about four flights during the time I was in that boarding zone — so roughly one hour. Time to wonder wonder whether KLM actually had any plane that worked…

We were then told there was a later flight to Hamburg, but that was almost entirely booked, so only about 12 people would get on this flight. All of these would have to be Flying Dutchman (KLM’s bonus mile program) card holders. Which reminded me…

— Begin historical excursion —

I had flown with KLM to Sao Paulo for the CONISLI conference in November 2004 before, for which I actually did register with their bonus programme. When I registered, I was told that I would receive the card after having flown 5000 miles with them.

Having registered my miles with the KLM bonus programme, I felt quite certain that indeed Sao Paulo was more than 5000 miles from Hamburg. It appears that KLM disagreed, though, as no card ever showed up… although… the account statement I got from them said something about 12000 miles. Hm.

When trying to do online check-in the night before I flew to Boston, I found out that my account with their portal had apparently been deleted. In fact, it informed me that my id number for their bonus programme did not exist. Having filled out their feedback form to ask what exactly this meant, I never received any reply.

So apparently, KLM’s bonus program does not really exist and I could not find out whom you would have to bribe or contact to actually get your card…

— End historical excursion —

…which I suddenly remembered when hearing about only bonus card holder being on that next flight to Hamburg. Talking to the people at the desk it became clear quite quickly that they would not be of any help, so I made my way to the transfer center, where they sometimes can do something for you with other airlines.

At the transfer center, some middle-aged woman kindly informed me that there was nothing she could do for me and that the best she had to offer was a flight sometime in the afternoon going to Bremen — another city west of Hamburg — with ground transport to Hamburg. When telling her that I could not afford to lose my whole working day, she informed me I should consider myself lucky that they would bring me to Hamburg that day and not just tomorrow. An amazing statement to make around 11:00 in the morning.

By this time I started getting upset. And discovering that Amsterdam airport charges 8 EUR for 30 minutes of internet access did not help either. I will spare you the details of wasting your day at Amsterdam airport while you should already have been back on your desk, showered and with a fresh cup of good tea.

Amazingly, the plane to Bremen in the afternoon did not collapse on the runway. So a whole group of people who were on my original flight ended up in Bremen and eventually were loaded onto a bus to go to Hamburg.

Something like 2hrs+ later, we finally arrived at Hamburg airport by bus.

It was of course impossible to bring us to a useful location — like the central station — instead of the airport, you know how difficult it is to find landing slots for busses. They can’t just simply make a stop. In any case: the bus driver categorically refused to bring us anywhere else than the airport although 90% of the people did not want to go to the airport. As an explanatory note: While the airport in Hamburg is still in the city, it is not very central. And the bus driver was indeed very friendly and apologetic, but told us that KLM would give her all sorts of hell if she deviated just slightly from the predefined route.

All things considered, I finally made it home around 19:00 in not exactly mint condition, while the original flight would have brought me to Hamburg at 11:10, seeing me home before 12:00. More than six hours — essentially the whole productive time of the day — lost.

Interested in what KLM offered me as recompense for this ordeal when I asked at the transfer center in Amsterdam? Nothing.

Believing in qualified customer feedback, I did take the time to summarize the whole story to their customer feedback department. After the online experience I did not really expect to hear anything from them, but I wanted to give them a last chance.

I was positively surprised by the fact that there was any response, at all. But that positive surprise did not go very far as the letter that they sent me more than two weeks later only told me that they were very sorry, but since they have fulfilled their obligation to bring me to Hamburg, there was nothing they wanted to offer or do for me.

Just so you have the comparison: When flying StarAlliance to Linz, Austria for the ars technica, I missed the connection in Vienna because of a delayed flight. This affected two people — me being one of them — and Austrian Air’s response was to put both of us on a nice limousine with a driver determined to make up for the flying experience, driving us to Linz under gross disrespect for the speed limit and dropping us off at our final locations/hotels.

Since KLM / Sky Team worked so hard on this, I will not deny them their recognition as the number one airline to avoid flying with. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the Royal Dutch Airlines are indeed a Royal Pain in the A***.

Or, as my Brazilian friends would put it: KLM — Ninguém Merece Airlines!

 

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Short stop in Hamburg

As you may have read in Karsten’s blog, the WIPO meetings in Geneva were indeed very exciting. It seems there is a realistic chance that WIPO will change fundamentally if the Friends of Development group keeps up the pressure and not too many of them sell out the rest in the bilateral negotiations that the United States, European Union, Canada and Japan are no doubt now entering into with each of them.

So after coming back with the last flight on Friday around 23:00, I spent most of yesterday doing things like washing clothes, sorting papers and doing the necessary travel aftermath in terms of receipts & financial stuff. Also, I managed to at least do a short round on my motorcycle and catch some sleep, which was a very good thing.

After summarizing my KLM experience for my flight back from Boston, I will now try to get away from the computer and enjoy the nice weather out there. Maybe I should go to the sauna…

Next week will again be busy — even if not unusually so.

Tomorrow I need to go to Milano, where I will meet with our Italian team and celebrate the Fellowship with the next freedom party before continuing on to Torino, where I will speak to World Bank managers about Free Software in World Bank financed projects on Wednesday. Then I will fly on to Munich to speak at the LiMux migration on Thursday before going back to Hamburg on Friday.

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