Free Software to be used in priority by French schools?

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French Free Software activists have been busy lately. An important bill on “Policy and planning for the rebuilding of the school of the Republic ” has been travelling back and forth between the National Assembly and the Senat. Its article 10 deals with e-learning. In paragraph 7, the version voted by the Senat (FR) and confirmed by the Cultural affairs and Education commission of the National Assembly reads that

“Such [e-learning] public service uses in priority Free Software and open document formats”.

The big drama happened on Monday and Tuesday. The bill came back to the National Assembly to be examined in plenary session.
The (socialist) government had tabled an amendment to weaken the provision (FR), yielding to proprietary software’s lobbies – according to April. Their main justification is the alleged incompatibility of the first wording with the EU competition law.

A bit of research quickly showed that the argument is flawed.

A very clear article by Carlo Piana analyses the 2010 ruling of the Italian Constitutional Court concerning this issue. Giving “more “weight” in public procurements to offers that provide Free Software and implement Open Standards” is not against competition: saying in the tender that the requested information system has to offer a set of rights (use, study, share, improve; randomly !) is completely legal. It doesn’t require a particular technical solution, nor a specific company’s offer, it just adds more general criteria to the tender specifications.

Unfortunately the government’s amendment was voted on Tuesday during the plenary session.

Interestingly enough, the French highest administrative court, le Conseil d’Etat, already took a close look at the issue concerning Free Software, public procurement and competition in 2010. The Picardie region had chosen a Free Software to equip local highschools and then issued a tender for the related implementation, maintenance and hosting services. The legality of this tender was attacked by two companies. The ruling states that since this Free Software was “acquired” for free (gratis), there was no need to issue a tender. As long as competition rules were respected for the service procurement, the region’s choices were legal.

Good to know that making Free Software the priority choice

  1. is already possible for public bodies
  2. can be added to the legislation without violating European rules

The Free Software movement has some good friends in our National Assembly, as the debates showed (FR). April is also doing a great job, providing a lot of legal and political analyses and background.

Since the National Assembly modified the draft, it has to go back to the Senate. Debates are not over (FR)!

THSF 2013

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From mai 22 to 26, FSFE sent me to the Toulouse Hacker Space Factory, in Toulouse, southern France. It was probably the best hacking event I have been to.
Taking place in Mixart Myrys, a former artists squat, the public was very diverse: from hackers to activists to artists to high school classes.

The booth
The booth itself was quite small (a simple table) but it was at the entrance of the main area, an ideal spot. But for occasional help from friends, I mostly managed it alone.
Fortunately, the two first days’ low attendance allowed me to get to know many hackers, who later helped a lot.
It was probably way less pretty than during other events: I forgot the posters in Berlin Tegel’s toilets. The first day, we made a Free Software Foundation Europe banner by hand and hanged some Tshirts on the wall behind the booth. It fitted perfectly with the do it yourself culture of the event, but I was still disappointed no to have posters.

Thursday-Friday
The first two days were mostly focused on conferences and workshops. I only used FSFE’s political material, to be able to move and go talking to people without letting goodies at the booth. I had the chance to talk about Free Software with a class of teenagers visiting the place and to get introduced to hackers coming from every corner of the country.

The workshops were about some arduino hacking and about building a network. In Toulouse, one can get internet through an association called Tétaneutral. They are part of the federation initiated by FDN (French Data Network). They built their own (neutral) network and are showing and teaching people what is internet and how it physically works. Thanks to the hours we spent discussing and debating at night and thanks to a 2 AM private workshop in Myrys’ basement where we welded optical fibres, I now understand a lot better what internet is, logically and physically.

Week-end
The atmosphere during the week-end was very different. It was badly crowded and there were people coming at the booth all the time. I loved the fact that most people didn’t know anything about FSFE, and quite many didn’t know much about Free Software in general.

Talking to people who are not already convinced is a great pleasure.

I had a binder with most of the important articles on fsfe.org printed. We installed several chairs near the booth, and people came around, sat, had a drink and chatted there. Our booth became the meeting point of several hackers, who often helped me answering technical questions. Their technical knowledge and my understanding of FSFE’s work were a perfect mix. Several times discussions started at the booth kept going on in the improvised café next to it. Our booth became a social place!

Merchandising
For most people it was the first encounter with FSFE, I didn’t want to make them run away by talking about money right away. It still worked quite well.

Following up
Several people took the fellowship leaflet and seemed interested. Five subscribed to the newsletter.
As always, the most satisfying part was all the informal links created! The hacker community is full of awesome people, I am glad that we had the chance to meet. I hope that some of them came a step closer to FSFE!

Back to my woman condition

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I just read a long article about geeks and sexism.  Some parts may make over generalisations and I probably wouldn’t be able to define what is a geek. But still, the situations the author describes made me nauseous: pure and un-understandable hatred.

Last week in Toulouse we had one more discussion about women in Free Software. My point is always that I am fed up with talking about it, because it’s the only time I actually remember that I am a woman. I very rarely experience sexism in FS, and it’s always remarks that are very easy to ignore. I never find it offensive because they always sound absolutely stupid and meaningless.

Reading Felicia Day, Miranda Pakodzi or Anita Sarkeesian‘s stories, I felt extremely lucky. In the hacker communities I joined in France and Germany, in the hackerspaces, conferences and of course at FSFE, people have always been welcoming, friendly and respectful. I never felt my woman condition as a burden.

I don’t know what are the roots of the lack of women in technology related fields, but it does disturb me when I realise it. It mostly happens during big FS events, when I end up being one of the rare or the only woman. I don’t feel threatened at all, the problem is that I am enjoying this technology world so much, and I feel so empowered by all the things I discover that I want to share it with other woman. But they are mostly absent.

If I understand technology, I can fight surveillance and keep having privacy and the freedom that comes with it. This is why I became involved with the Free Software movement in the first place. I don’t want to be controlled by those who control the technology that shapes my life.  There is a great gap between people who understand technology and the others. Security, power, access to knowledge… I don’t want women to be mostly on the wrong side of the gap, which is why I try to get as many women as possible to start using Free Software, as a first step towards technological liberation.

We need to know how to fix our bicycle, change a tire and grow food. We also need to know how to manage our computer, encrypt our communications and we need to understand what is internet or how does DPI work -I hope I will come to this in a future post.

My personal story, the protected world I live in and all the great people around allow me to see the “women and technology” issue very positively. I have a “it’s great, bring your sister your friends and your mom” approach. Mar_Lard’s article made me realise once more how lucky I was: being a woman in a geek world can be a nightmare.

Gender aside, I still badly lack legitimacy here. I need deeper technical expertise/understanding. No matter how much I understand about theory, to feel good in this world I will need practice. Snakes, here I come !

 

Happy Hardware Freedom Day

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Today takes place the first edition of Hardware Freedom day, a global celebration of hacking and DIY, powered by the Digital Freedom Foundation.

I discovered the existence of Hardware Freedom Day during Document Freedom Day, on which they published a news item supporting the campaign. The same foundation is organising a Culture Freedom Day in May.

Culture Freedom, Hardware Freedom, Document Freedom and Free Software: links between those movements are harder to find than I expected. Firstly because they are far from being unified, and then because they are dealing with things of very different nature. Materiality of hardware changes the way it can be approached, while culture -but what is culture?- standards and software may have the common point of being mostly immaterial. We should handle analogies between information in digital form and physical goods with care, it doesn’t work the same way.

Rejection of the concept of intellectual property seems to be a common ground of those movements. They all insist on the freedoms to use, study, share, and improve on the work of others.

Because this subject is new to me and complex, I will only focus on Hardware Freedom and Software Freedom, culture being a completely different topic.

 Freedom and Efficiency

According  to the Open Source Hardware Association, companies having a business model based on Open Hardware are flourishing everywhere and growing  fast, with Open Hardware being “tangible artifacts — machines, devices,  or other physical things — whose design has been released to the public  in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things”

Sharing design boosts innovation, each developer adding a penny to the existing work. Open 3D printers allow flexible, small scale local production of some goods, and  thus better economic efficiency.

The main difference between hardware and software is obviously that hardware cannot be copied at no cost. If cheap 3D printers may tend to change this  fact, producing one or 10000 copies of a piece of hardware are two very different things, while it makes no difference in the software realm.  Thus comes a need for more money, not only to pay for work but also for raw materials and machines, and time to copy.

As has been repeated over and over, Free Software is a lot more than a business model that favours innovation by allowing knowledge to be shared. It does, but it also grants other freedoms to users, freedoms that are politically very meaningful.

A piece of software does not act on its own will -yet- but according to the will of the people who wrote it or who control it. May it be users, IT companies or anyone else. Free Software allows us to regain control over technology we are depend on, because machines themselves are controlled by software.

The Free Software philosophy is about innovation, efficiency, empowerment and ethics, while, if I understood correctly, Open Source Software is mostly about the first two terms.

Will we see such a difference in the hardware domain?

Society as a whole can probably benefit from the economic efficiency open innovation allows, but it doesn’t sound to me as an argument strong enough to  blindly endorse a technical revolution. What could Free Hardware do for ethics? Decentralising goods production, making people less dependent on specific companies? My flatmate recently had to order a very tiny piece of plastic from the other side of the planet to fix his radio-controlled helicopter, while he could had produced it locally given that the design was available. Here we can find ecological advantages I guess.. And technological empowerment of users.

Still,  it’s quite far from what brought me to Free Software’s.

Happy Hardware Freedom Day!

To be powerful, a political movement needs to be focused and consistent, with a few claims clearly expressed. For Free Software, FSF, FSFE and other sister organisations provide a set of principles that are widely followed. Having the “Free Software philosophy” evolving and spreading in different areas may strengthen it, as new people may have their first contact with it through calls for Free Culture or Open Hardware. Or it may make it fuzzy and less powerful.

According to the Hardware Freedom Day team, hardware design that have to be released include “drawings, blueprints, software code that may be running in the device or used to generate some of its parts or drivers and any other information one could need to create that device itself”.

Finding the right political strategy somewhere between scattering and marginalisation is hard. For now, I think it is safe for a Free Software activist to, at least, contribute raising awareness about the importance of free firmware and free drivers by supporting campaigns like Hardware Freedom Day and insisting on some or their software-related aspects.

So, Happy Hardware Freedom Day!