busy week

…I’ll just briefly let you know that I can apparently still type.

As you may have seen, we were quite busy processing the first batch of SmartCards. Unfortunately, before we could get to the printing and shipping, I had to write the script that handled the initialisation and letter generation. Well, at least I was allowed to do some programming again. 🙂

At the same time, the all-time-favorite-topic of my life, software patents, have once again kept me somewhat busy. Can you imagine working against software patents since October 1999? Yes, I know. I could hardly believe that myself, but when doing the math, it turns out that October 1999 was the first time I participated in a podium discussion against software patents.

I have to tell you that I am really looking forward to a time when I will not have to explain again why software patents are a really bad idea. Unfortunately, I am not sure that day will ever come. Fortunately, the contribution of all of our Fellows allowed us to now have Ciaran O’Riordan working full-time for FSFE in Brussels. One of the issues he will be working on are software patents, of course.

The amount of people active for, around and within the Free Software Foundation Europe is growing rapidly… unbelievable it is only four years now. Quite exiting, indeed.

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Catching up…

Alright, just trying to catch up a little bit on what happened during the past weeks.

As you may have seen in the FSFE newsletter, just after our first Freedom Party, I have been visiting Boston, seizing the chance to talk to meet and talk to Peter Brown, US FSF’s new Executive Director, Janet Casey of the Free Software Directory, and of course Eben Moglen, Lawrence Lessig and Richard Stallman. Also, I was quite happy to talk with people attending the Associate Member meeting from all over the United States, as well as meet again Niibe Yutaka, chairman of the Free Software Initiative Japan (FSIJ), FSFE’s associate organisation.

Having barely survived the flight back (I should write about that), I was still kept quite busy by the start of the Fellowship and the necessary setup of our small office in Hamburg, Germany, which you may already have read about in Karsten’s blog.

So once more I found myself on the plane early Sunday morning without having had a single free day in between. This time to Geneva for the WIPO Meeting on the so-called "Development Agenda." This meeting will be quite fundamental for the future of WIPO, which has been the source of many of our headaches in the past, such as TRIPS, DMCA/EUCD and — to some extent — software patents.

This could be one of the first little steps towards turning WIPO into a "World Intellectual Wealth Organisation."

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Hacking for Freedom?

Georg in the Fellowship T-Shirt
Picture taken by Michael Gottschalk during FOSDEM 2005. If you need commercial reproduction rights, you’ll need to contact info@michaelgottschalk.com

It was our first-ever and soon-to-be-thoroughly-missed intern Matthias who came up with the idea of making "Hacking for Freedom" our first Fellowship t-shirt. When he dropped the idea, we all loved it immediately.

Then we started worrying.

People outside the information technology area seem to generally think of "hacking" as "breaking into someone else’s computer, usually with bad intentions." What if people misunderstood what we wanted to say? What if people came to think we wanted to advocate breaking into computer systems? We were suddenly not so sure anymore.

So why did we end up making "Hacking for Freedom" our first t-shirt?

The true meaning of the word "hacking" is to

find an elegant solution to a non-trivial problem.

More conservative souls might describe this as "leapfrogging innovation" or "solving relevant problems." Hackers call this hacking. To hack a system means to improve or fix it. A "quick hack" is a solution created under time pressure that is not quite up to the standards, but solves the problem.

Hacking is a constructive activity.

When computers were still young, there was generally little to no security because people did not consider it relevant. Security by principle always creates artificial obstacles. If they become more burdensome than people feel willing to accept, they will be bypassed. You can see this everywhere: People using the same password for all web sites, people writing their passwords on paper slips attached to the monitor, people bypassing the firewall to download the next new movie.

Similarly, when the first software developers and engineers were confronted with logins and passwords, some considered them an unacceptable burden and routed around them. When it later became more apparent that growing networks and spread of computers did indeed make security a necessity, a culture of "digital neighborhood watch" began: People would check out networked computers, which were very often not secured at all, and left notes for the system administrator to inform them how easy it would be to do harm and that they better close the door.

This could be what the press has misunderstood and then spread.

And indeed it should be pointed out that most of todays Hackers do not consider this kind of "digital neighborhood watch" such a good idea anymore. While it is still useful to email an administrator if you happen to accidentally stumble upon a problem, you should not go poking around for them on your own. Often, the poking can cause the problem and it is not clear whether the poking was done with friendly or hostile intentions. When locks were new, telling people to not leave the key sticking outside was clearly useful. These days, using a battering ram to open a door, only to prove that steel doors would be more secure, is clearly not.

But the Hackers — architects, teachers and builders of digital society — still exist.

To me, Hacking is a constructive and proud term.

It is a term and concept that also applies to ther areas — like politics and law.

This is our term and we want it back!

To me, "Hacking for Freedom" means working together, building and shaping a digital society that respects freedom and other fundamental human rights. It means that we consider ourselves a community of people where each person adds something. And it means to not wait for others to tell us what kind of society we should live in, but actively shape and build the society we want to live in.

And that is why I consider "Hacking for Freedom" the perfect fit for the first Fellowship t-shirt.

Keep on Hacking for Freedom!

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Struggling with alien artefacts

Do you know the movies where some people discover an alien artefact or space ship and try to find out what it does or get it to work? The scientists carefully examine the alien language, trying to understand strange symbols and getting very unexpected results when fiddling with some switches.

Why am I writing this?

Because in the past weeks I have felt very much like these scientists in trying to work with others to get this Plone site up and running properly.

Plone — like alien spaceships — is of bedazzling complexity and redundant systems of which it is sometimes impossible to tell which is active and which is not. Things seem to work or fail magically, which reminds me of Asimovs quote about magic and technology.

Example: While the user names are stored in a PostgreSQL database and show up properly, their properties table exists, but remains empty. The properties can be set and read, so they are stored somewhere. But it seems impossible to find out where.

Also, Plone — like the obelisk from 2001 — essentially comes without documentation. Some pages exist, but it appears that they are usually outdated or related to a different problem. And the introductions are apparently often written for people who already know the system.

So we often very much felt like cosmonauts making the first trip into space when trying to find the one permission setting among the 200 permission switches that caused folders to be unreadable or blogging to break.

What irked me most was something else, though.

When saying that we would hire someone to get this done properly and finally end the odyssey, it turned out that people who earn their professional living setting up Plone sites told us they did not know those modules and also did not know anyone else who did.

Maybe Plone IS an alien artefact, after all.

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