Nicolas Jean's FSFE blog

Hi everyone,
Here is a short summary of a new French tax on mobile devices to be voted soon, which could absurdly favour Microsoft.

Facts

• on the 14th of December, the French “commission sur la rémunération pour copie privée” (Commission for financial compensation of private copying) has decided to increase the tax on hard drives, USB sticks and flash drives, and to newly tax some GPS devices and car radios, as well as on tablet PCs (which is the interesting one for us).

• the killer detail is that regarding tablet PCs, only those equipped with music player, an _operating system made for mobile devices_ or a decidated operating system (“avec fonction baladeur, munies d’un système d’exploitation pour terminaux mobiles ou d’un système d’exploitation propre”)

Analysis

The “UFC-Que Choisir”, the biggest consumer protection charity in France, denounces that according to this phrasing, concerned tablets will be iPads (running iOS) and tablets running Android. But it would not concern tablets running Windows 7, since this is neither a mobile OS, nor a dedicated OS, but has been written for personal computers (sic!).

Future

This decision should be made official on the 12th of January, and made applicable on the 1st of February, at the latest on the 1st of March, if delays occur. If this goes its way, French electronics maker Archos’ Director Henri Crohas says he will support the French electronics maker syndicate (Simavelec) to take action before the State Council (conseil d’état).

Hello fellows!

The Flattr plugin for WordPress have just been installed on our blogs.

Privacy implication: of course, Flattr gets information about who gives to whom through their system. Furthermore, when you get onto a webpage where a dynamic (=with javascript) Flattr button is present, your browser usually has to ask this file to flattr.com, through an HTTP request which referer field is set to the viewed page. Thus and more simply said, as soon as a user gets onto your blog, Flattr is informed who (ip address) is viewing your blog.

This is therefore a question of trust (in how Flattr uses this information) and everyone’s responsibility to decide whether to use this tool.

If you want to, please follow these steps:

1. activate the Flattr plugin under Plugins in your dashboard;
2. follow the configuration steps under Settings→Flattr, which are:
3. bind your user account to your Flattr account, or the FSFE’s one;
4. select the options you wish.

More information can be found on the official plugin page.

Have fun using this new plugin!

Since January, United Kingdom has released a lot of public data, for use in applications any interested developper can imagine. Not only this is great news for all free society enthousiastics, but the platform itself makes a lot of use of Free Software. According to the presentation held by Prof Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton), the platform is based on Joomla and Mediawiki, and its data representation relies on Tim Berners Lee’s open standard Linked Data.

Very good news, maybe I should ask my president (okay, okay, maybe only the ministers) to do the same !

Buying a new computer with Windows (or some other system) maybe has the advantage of offering a usable operating system – not debating its quality here –, but the worse part is that it costs. A lot. According to certain cases, it can reach the same cost as the hardware, making the computer twice as expensive as it could be.

Still computers continue to be sold this way, and one could ask: how can that be? Well there are different answers, because of lobbying from Microsoft, fear of the vendors to propose something new… This leads to the current, unacceptable situation, in which one can hardly buy a computer without Windows or Mac pre-installed. Without knowing the separate prices of hardware and software too, and thus without getting the economic advantage of a free software solution (often at-no-cost).

However, this situation is not legal. Because this is practically called a “tying” case, the software being bundled, tied with the hardware, products should be sold separately. And a lot of cases, in the past few years, have shown that courts tend to agree with this. Many users, in France for example, have been able to get a complete refund of the Windows license, sometimes even of other installed software. As often, it has been harder for the first ones doing it, the companies would not want to do anything about it until sued… But with the phenomenon growing, the experience of users describing successful procedures, the practice has become easier.

This is not only the law, but a user freedom that’s flouted. And many users would probably think twice if the prices would be separated, like “what, this computer costs 300€ and I must still pay 100€ just for Windows”. This is a very good publicity for free software. Maybe a bit rough, because people will mix free beer and freedom. This is however no big deal: bringing more people to just know free software is definitely a good thing.

That’s why the FSFE should probably do more about it, advertise throughout the world. There already exist this page, which would gain from having more visibility, explaining the different procedures, giving advice about how not to pay for software you do not want.