Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog

It was interesting to see an apparently recent article “On the Sustainability of Free Software” published by the FSFE in the context of the Upcycling Android campaign. I have been advocating for sustainable Free Software for some time. When I wasn’t posting articles about my own Python-like language, electronics projects or microkernel-based system development, it seems that I was posting quite a few about sustainable software, hardware and technology like these:

• “On Not Liking Computers” (2016)
• “Sustainable Computing” (2018)
• “An Absence of Strategy?” (2019)

So, I hardly feel it necessary to go back through much of the same material again. Frustratingly, very little has improved over the years, it would seem: some new initiatives emerge, and such things always manage to excite some people, but the same old underlying causes of a general lack of sustainability remain, these including access to affordable, long-lasting and supportable hardware, and the properly funded development of Free Software and the hardware that would run it.

Of course, I wouldn’t even be bothered to write this if I didn’t feel that there might be some positive insights to share, and recent events have prompted me to do so. Hopefully, I can formulate them concisely and constructively in the following paragraphs.

The Open Hardware Crisis

Alright, so that was a provocative heading – hardly positive or constructive – and with so much hardware hacking (of the good kind) going on these days, it might be tempting to ask “what crisis?” Well, evidently, some people think there has been a crisis around the certification of hardware by the Free Software Foundation: that the Respects Your Freedom criteria don’t really help get hardware designed and made that would support (or be supported by) Free Software; that the criteria fail to recognise practical limitations with some elements of hardware, imposing rigid and wasteful measures that fail to enhance the rights of users and that might even impair the longevity and repairability of devices.

A lot of the hardware we rely on nowadays depends on features that cannot easily be supported by Free Software. The system I use has integrated graphics that require proprietary firmware from AMD to work in any half-decent way, as do many processors and interfacing chips, some not even working in any real way at all without it. Although FPGA technology has become more accessible and has invigorated the field of open hardware, there are still considerable challenges around the availability of Free Software toolchains for those kinds of devices. It is also not completely clear how programmable logic devices intersect with the realm of Free Software, either, as far as I can tell. Should people expect the corresponding source code and the means to generate a “bitstream” for the FPGAs in a system? I would think so, given appropriate licensing, but I am not familiar enough with the legal and regulatory constraints to allow me to expect it to be so.

The discussion around this may sound like a storm in a teacup, especially if you do not follow the appropriate organisations, figures, and their mailing lists (and I recommend saving your time and not bothering to, either), but it also sounds rather like tactics have prevailed over strategy. The fact is that without hardware being made to run Free Software, there isn’t really going to be much of a Free Software movement. So, instead of recommending increasingly ancient phones as “ethical gifts” or hoping that the latest crop of “Linux phones” will deliver a package that will not only run Linux but also prove to be usable as a phone, maybe a move away from consumerism is advised. Consumerism, of course, being the tendency to solve every problem by choosing the “best deal” the market happens to be offering today.

What the likes of the FSF need to do is to invest in hardware platforms that are amenable to the deployment of Free Software. This does not necessarily mean totally rejecting hardware if it has unfortunate characteristics such as proprietary firmware, particularly if there is no acceptable alternative, but the initiative has to start somewhere, however imperfect that somewhere might be. Much as we would all like to spend thousands of dollars on hardware that meets some kind of liberty threshold, most of us don’t have that kind of money and would accept some kind of compromise (just as we have to do most of the time, anyway), especially if we felt there was a chance to make up for any deficiencies later on. Trying to start from an impossible position means that there is no “here and now”, never mind “later on”.

Sadly, several attempts at open hardware platforms have struggled and could not be sustained. Some of these were criticised for having some supposed flaw or other that apparently made them unacceptable to the broader Free Software community, and yet they could have led to products that might have remedied such supposed flaws. Meanwhile, consumerist instincts had all the money chasing the latest projects, and yet here we are in 2022, barely any better off than we were in 2012. Had the FSF and company actually supported hardware projects that sought to support their own vision, as opposed to just casually endorsing projects and hoping they came good, we might be in better place by now.

The Ethical Software Crisis

One depressingly recurring theme is the lack of support given to Free Software developers and to Free Software development, even as billion-to-trillion-dollar corporations bank substantial profits on the back of Free Software. As soon as some random developer deletes his JavaScript package from some repository or other, or even switches it out for something that breaks the hyperactive “continuous integration” of hundreds or thousands of projects, everyone laments the fragility of “the system” and embeds that XKCD cartoon with the precarious structure that you’ve all presumably seen. Business-as-usual, however, is soon restored.

Many of the remedies for overworked, underpaid, burned-out developers have the same, familiar consumerist or neoliberal traits. Trait number one is, of course, to let a million projects bloom, carefully selecting the winners and discarding any that fail to keep up with the constant technological churn that also plagues our societies. Beyond that, things like bounties and donations are proposed, and funding platforms helpfully materialise to facilitate the transaction, themselves mostly funded not by bounties and donations (other than the cut of other people’s bounties and donations, of course) but by venture capital money. Because who would actually want to be going from one “gig” to the next when they could actually get a salary?

And it is revealing that organisations engaging in Free Software development tend to have an enthusiasm not for hiring actual developers but for positions like “community manager”, frequently with the responsibility for encouraging contributions from that desirable stream of eager volunteers. Alongside this, funding is sought from a variety of sources, some of whom being public institutions or progressive organisations perhaps sensing a growing crisis and feeling that something should be done. Other sources are perhaps more about doing “philanthropic work” on behalf of wealthy patrons, although I think I would think twice about taking money from people whose wealth has been built on the back of facilitating psychological warfare on entire populations, undermining public health policies and climate change mitigation, enabling inter-ethnic violence and hate generally, and providing a broadcasting platform for extremists. But as they say, beggars can’t be choosers, right?

It may, of course, be argued that big companies are big employers of Free Software developers. Certainly, lots of people seem to work on Free Software projects in companies like, ahem, Blue Hat. And some of that corporate development does deliver usable software, or at least it helps to mitigate the usability issues of the software being produced elsewhere, maybe in another part of the very same corporation. Large, stable organisations may well be the key to providing developers with secure incomes and the space to focus on producing high-quality, well-designed, long-lasting software. Then again, such organisations sometimes exhibit ethical deficiencies in their own collective activities by seeking to aggressively protect revenue streams by limiting interoperability, reduce costs through offshoring, assert patents against others, and impose needless technological change on their customers and the broader market simply to achieve a temporary competitive advantage.

Free Software organisations should be advocating for quality, stable employment for software developers. For too long, Free Software has been perceived as something for nothing where “everybody else” pays, even as organisations and individuals happily pay substantial sums for hardware and for proprietary software. Deferring to “the market” does nobody any good in the end: “the market” will only pay for what it absolutely has to, and businesses doing nicely selling solutions (who might claim that “the market” works for them and should be good enough for everyone) all too frequently rely on practically invisible infrastructure projects that they get for free. It arguably doesn’t matter if it would be public institutions, as opposed to businesses, ending up hiring people as long as they get decent contracts and aren’t at risk of all being laid off because some right-wing government wants to slash taxes for rich people, as tends to happen every few years.

And Free Software organisations should be advocating for ethical software development. Although the public mood in general may lag rather too far behind that of more informed commentary, the awareness many of us have of the substantial ethical concerns around various applications of computing – artificial intelligence, social media/manipulation platforms, surveillance, “cryptocurrencies”, and so on – requires us to uphold our principles, to recognise where our own principles fall short, and to embrace other causes that seek to safeguard the rights of individuals, the health of our societies, and the viability of our planet as our home.

The Accessible Infrastructure Crisis

Some of that ethical software development would also recognise the longevity we hope our societies may ultimately have. And yet we have every reason to worry about our societies becoming less equitable, less inclusive, and less accessible. The unquestioning adoption of technology-driven, consumerist solutions has led to many of the interactions us individuals have with institutions and providers of infrastructure being mediated by random companies who have inserted themselves into every kind of transaction they have perceived as highly profitable. Meanwhile, technologists have often embraced change through newer and newer technology for its own sake, not for the sake of actual progress or for making life easier.

While devices like smartphones have been liberating for many, providing capabilities that one could only have dreamed of only a few decades ago, they also introduce the risk of imposing relationships and restrictions on individuals to the point where those unable to acquire or use technological devices may find themselves excluded from public facilities, commercial transactions, and even voting in elections or other processes of participatory democracy. Such conditions may be the result of political ideology, the outsourcing and offshoring of supposedly non-essential activities, and the trimming back of the public sector, with any consequences, conflicts of interest, and even corrupt dealings being ignored or deliberately overlooked, dismissed as “nothing that would happen here”.

The risk to Free Software and to our societies is that we as individuals no longer collectively control our infrastructure through our representatives, nor do we control the means of interacting with it, the adoption of technology, or the pace such technology is introduced and obsoleted. When the suggestion to problems using supposedly public infrastructure is to “get a new phone” or “upgrade your computer”, we are actually being exploited by corporate interests and their facilitators. Anyone participating in such a cynical deployment of technology must, I suppose, reconcile their sense of a job well done with the sight of their fellow citizens being obstructed, impoverished or even denied their rights.

Although Free Software organisations have tried to popularise unencumbered sources of mobile software and to promote techniques and technologies to lengthen the lifespan of mobile devices, more fundamental measures are required to reverse the harmful course taken by many of our societies. Some of these measures are political or social, and some are technological. All of them are necessary.

We must reject the notion that progress is dependent on technological consumption. While computers and computing devices have managed to keep getting faster, despite warnings that such trends would meet their demise one way or another, improvements in their operational effectiveness in many regards have been limited. We may be able to view higher quality video today than we could ten years ago, and user interfaces may be pushing around many more pixels, but the results of our interactions are not necessarily more substantial. Yet, the ever-increasing demands of things like Web browsers means that systems become obsolete and are replaced with newer, faster systems to do exactly the same things in any qualitative sense. This wastefulness, burdening individuals with needless expenditure and burdening the environment with even more consumption, must stop.

We must demand interoperability and openness with regard to public infrastructure and even commercial platforms. It should be forbidden to insist that specific products be used to interact with public services and amenities or with commercial operators. The definition and adoption of genuinely open standards would be central to any such demands, and we would need to insist that such standards must encompass every aspect of such interactions and activities, without permitting companies to extend them in incompatible, proprietary ways that would deliberately undermine such initiatives.

We must insist that individuals never be under any obligation to commercial interests when interacting with public infrastructure: that their obligations are only to the public bodies concerned. And, similarly, we should insist that when dealing with companies, they may not also require us to enter into ongoing commercial relationships with other companies, purely as a condition of any transaction. It is unacceptable, for example, that individuals require such a relationship with a foreign technology company purely to gain access to essential services or to conduct purchases or similar transactions.

Ideas for Remedies

In conclusion, we need to care about technological freedoms – our choices of hardware and software, things like online privacy, and all that – but we also need to recognise and care about the social, economic and political conditions that threaten such freedoms. We can’t expect to set up a nice Free Software computing system and to use it forever when forces in society compel us to upgrade every few years. Nor can we expect people to make the hardware for such systems, let alone at an affordable price, when technological indulgence drives the sophistication of hardware to levels where investment in open hardware production is prohibitively costly. And we can’t expect to use our Free Software systems if consumerist and/or corrupt choices sacrifice interoperability and pander to entrenched commercial interests.

The vision here, if we can even call it that, is that we might embrace the “essential” nature of our computing needs and thus embrace hardware with adequate levels of sophistication that could, if everyone were honest with themselves, get the job done just fine. Years ago, people used to say how “Linux is great because it works on older systems”, but these days you apparently cannot even install some distributions with less than 1GB of RAM, and Blue Hat is apparently going to put all the bloat of a “modern” Web browser into its installer. And once we have installed our system, do we really need a video playing in the background of a Web page as we navigate a simple list of train times? Do we even need something as sophisticated as a Web browser for that at all?

Embracing mature, proven, reliable, well-understood hardware would help hardware designers to get their efforts right, and if hardware standards and modularity were adopted, there would still be the chance to introduce improvements and enhancements. Such hardware characteristics would also help with the software support: instead of rushing the long, difficult journey of introducing support for poorly documented components from unhelpful manufacturers eager to retire those components and to start making future products, the aim would be to support components with long commercial lifespans whose software support is well established and hopefully facilitated by the manufacturer. And with suitably standardised or modular hardware, creativity and refinement could be directed towards other aspects of the hardware which are often neglected or underestimated such as ergonomics and the other aspects of traditional product design.

With stable hardware, there might be more software options, too. Although many would propose “just putting Linux on it” for any given device, one need only consider the realm of smartphones to realise that such convenient answers are not necessarily the most obviously correct ones, particularly for certain definitions of “Linux”. Instead of choosing Linux because it probably supports the hardware, only to find that as much time is spent fixing that support and swimming against the currents of upstream development as would have been spent implementing that support elsewhere, other systems with more desirable properties could be considered and deployed. We might even encourage different systems to share functionality, instead of wrapping it up in a specific framework that resists portability. Such systems would also aspire to avoid the churn throughout the GNU-plus-Linux-plus-graphical-stack-of-the-day familiar to many of us, potentially allowing us to use familiar software over much longer periods than we have generally been allowed to before, retrocomputing platforms aside.

But to let all of this happen and to offer a viable foundation, we must also ensure that such systems can be used in the wider world. Otherwise, this would merely be an exercise in retrocomputing. Now, there is an argument that there are plenty of existing standards that might facilitate this vision, and perhaps going along with the famous saying about standards (the good thing being that there are so many to choose from), we might wish to avoid the topic of yet another widely-referenced XKCD cartoon by actually adopting some of them instead of creating more of them. That is not to say that we would necessarily want to go along with the full breadth of some standards, however. XML deliberately narrowed down SGML to be a more usable technology, despite its own reputation for complexity. Since some standards were probably “front-run” by companies wishing to elevate their own products, within which various proposed features were already implemented, thus forcing their competitors to play catch up, it is entirely possible that various features are superfluous or frivolous.

There have already been attempts to simplify the Web or to make a simpler Web-like platform, Gemini being one of them, and there are persuasive arguments that such technologies should be considered as separate from the traditional Web. After all, the best of intentions in delivering a simple, respectful experience can easily be undermined by enthusiasm for the latest frameworks and fashions, or by the insistence that less than respectful techniques and technologies – user surveillance, to take one example – be introduced to “help understand” or “better serve” users. A distinct technology might offer easy ways of resisting such temptations by simply failing to support them conveniently, but the greater risk is that it might not even get adopted significantly at all.

New standards might well be necessary, but revising and reforming existing ones might well be more productive, and there is merit in focusing standards on the essentials. After all, people used the Web for real work twenty years ago, too. And some would argue that today’s Web is just reimplementing the client-server paradigm but with JavaScript on the front end, grinding your CPU, with application-specific communications conducted between the browser and the server. Such communications will, for the most part, not be specified and be prone to changing and breaking, interoperability being the last thing on everybody’s mind. Formalising such communications, and adopting technologies more appropriate to each device and to each user, might actually be beneficial: instead of megabytes of JavaScript passing across the network and through the browser, the user would get to choose how they access such services, which programs they might use, rather than having “an experience” foisted upon them.

Such an approach would actually return us to something close to the original vision of the Web. But standards surely have to be seen as the basis of the Free Software we might hope to use, and as the primary vehicle for the persuasion of others. Public institutions and businesses care about reaching the biggest possible audience, and this has brought us to a rather familiar sight: the anointment of two viable players in a particular market and no others. Back in the 1990s, the two chosen ones in desktop computing were Microsoft and Apple, the latter kept afloat by the former so as to avoid being perceived as a de-facto monopoly and thereby avoiding being subject to proper regulation. Today, Apple and Google are the gatekeepers in mobile computing, with even Microsoft being an unwelcome complication.

Such organisations want to offer solutions that supposedly reach “the most users”, will happily commission “apps” for the big two players (and Microsoft, sometimes, because habits and favouritism die hard), and will probably shy away from suggesting other solutions, labelling them as confusing or unreliable, mostly because they just don’t want to care: their job is done, the boxes ticked, more effort gives no more reward. But standards offer the possibility of reaching every user, of meeting legal accessibility requirements, and potentially allowing such organisations to delegate the provision of solutions to their favourite entity: “the market”. Naturally, some kind of validation of standards compliance would probably be required, but this need not be overly restrictive nor the business of every last government department or company.

So, I suppose a combination of genuinely open standards facilitating Free Software and accessible public and private services, with users able to adopt and retain open and long-lasting hardware, might be a glimpse of some kind of vision. How people might make good enough money to be able to live decently is another question entirely, but then again, perhaps cultivating simpler, durable, sustainable infrastructure might create opportunities in the development of products that use it, allowing people to focus on improving those products, that infrastructure and the services they collectively deliver as opposed to chasing every last fad and fashion, running faster and faster and yet having the constant feeling of falling behind. As many people seem to experience in many other aspects of their lives.

Well, I hope the positivity was in there somewhere!

Last year, the university through which I obtained my degree celebrated a “milestone” anniversary, meaning that I got even more announcements, notices and other such things than I was already getting from them before. Fortunately, not everything published into this deluge is bound up in proprietary formats (as one brochure was, sitting on a Web page in Flash-only form) or only reachable via a dubious “Libyan link-shortener” (as certain things were published via a social media channel that I have now quit). It is indeed infuriating to see one of the links in a recent HTML/plain text hybrid e-mail message using a redirect service hosted on the university’s own alumni sub-site, sending the reader to a bit.ly URL, which will redirect them off into the great unknown and maybe even back to the original site. But such things are what one comes to expect on today’s Internet with all the unquestioning use of random “cloud” services, each one profiling the unsuspecting visitor and betraying their privacy to make a few extra cents or pence.

But anyway, upon following a more direct – but still redirected – link to an article on the university Web site, I found myself looking around to see what gets published there these days. Personally, I find the main university Web site rather promotional and arguably only superficially informative – you can find out the required grades to take courses along with supposed student approval ratings and hypothetical salary expectations upon qualifying – but it probably takes more digging to get at the real detail than most people would be willing to do. I wouldn’t mind knowing what they teach now in their computer science courses, for instance. I guess I’ll get back to looking into that later.

Gatekeepers of Knowledge

However, one thing did catch my eye as I browsed around the different sections, encountering the “technology transfer” department with the expected rhetoric about maximising benefits to society: the inevitable “IP” policy in all its intimidating length, together with an explanatory guide to that policy. Now, I am rather familiar with such policies from my time at my last academic employer, having been obliged to sign some kind of statement of compliance at one point, but then apparently not having to do so when starting a subsequent contract. It was not as if enlightenment had come calling at the University of Oslo between these points in time such that the “IP rights” agreement now suddenly didn’t feature in the hiring paperwork; it was more likely that such obligations had presumably been baked into everybody’s terms of employment as yet another example of the university upper management’s dubious organisational reform and questionable human resources practices.

Back at Heriot-Watt University, credit is perhaps due to the authors of their explanatory guide to try and explain the larger policy document, because it is most likely that most people aren’t going to get through that much longer document and retain a clear head. But one potentially unintended reason for credit is that by being presented with a much less opaque treatment of the policy and its motivations, we are able to see with enhanced clarity many of the damaging misconceptions that have sadly become entrenched in higher education and academia, including the ways in which such policies actually do conflict with the sharing of knowledge that academic endeavour is supposed to be all about.

So, we get the sales pitch about new things needing investment…

However, often new technologies and inventions are not fully developed because development needs investment, and investment needs commercial returns, and to ensure commercial returns you need something to sell, and a freely available idea cannot be sold.

If we ignore various assumptions about investment or the precise economic mechanisms supposedly required to bring about such investment, we can immediately note that ideas on their own aren’t worth anything anyway, freely available or not. Although the Norwegian Industrial Property Office (or the Norwegian Patent Office if we use a more traditional name) uses the absurd vision slogan “turning ideas into values” (it should probably read “value”, but whatever), this perhaps says more about greedy profiteering through the sale of government-granted titles bound to arbitrary things than it does about what kinds of things have any kind of inherent value that you can take to the bank.

But assuming that we have moved beyond the realm of simple ideas and have entered the realm of non-trivial works, we find that we have also entered the realm of morality and attitude management:

That is why, in some cases, it is better for your efforts not to be published immediately, but instead to be protected and then published, for protection gives you something to sell, something to sell can bring in investment, and investment allows further development. Therefore in the interests of advancing the knowledge within the field you work in, it is important that you consider the commercial potential of your work from the outset, and if necessary ensure it is properly protected before you publish.

Once upon a time, the most noble pursuit in academic research was to freely share research with others so that societal, scientific and technological progress could be made. Now it appears that the average researcher should treat it as their responsibility to conceal their work from others, seek “protection” on it, and then release the encumbered details for mere perusal and the conditional participation of those once-valued peers. And they should, of course, be wise to the commercial potential of the work, whatever that is. Naturally, “intellectual property” offices in such institutions have an “if in doubt, see us” policy, meaning that they seek to interfere with research as soon as possible, and should someone fail to have “seen them”, that person’s loyalty may very well be called into question as if they had somehow squandered their employer’s property. In some institutions, this could very easily get people marginalised or “reorganised” if not immediately or obviously fired.

The Rewards of Labour

It is in matters of property and ownership where things get very awkward indeed. Many people would accept that employees of an organisation are producing output that becomes the property of that organisation. What fewer people might accept is that the customers of an organisation are also subject to having their own output taken to be the property of that organisation. The policy guide indicates that even undergraduate students may also be subject to an obligation to assign ownership of their work to the university: those visiting the university supposedly have to agree to this (although it doesn’t say anything about what their “home institution” might have to say about that), and things like final year projects are supposedly subject to university ownership.

So, just because you as a student have a supervisor bound by commercialisation obligations, you end up not only paying tuition fees to get your university education (directly or through taxation), but you also end up having your own work taken off you because it might be seen as some element in your supervisor’s “portfolio”. I suppose this marks a new low in workplace regulation and standards within a sector that already skirts the law with regard to how certain groups are treated by their employers.

One can justifiably argue that employees of academic institutions should not be allowed to run away with work funded by those institutions, particularly when such funding originally comes from other sources such as the general public. After all, such work is not exactly the private property of the researchers who created it, and to treat it as such would deny it to those whose resources made it possible in the first place. Any claims about “rightful rewards” needing to be given are arguably made to confuse rational thinking on the matter: after all, with appropriate salaries, the researchers are already being rewarded doing work that interests and stimulates them (unlike a lot of people in the world of work). One can argue that academics increasingly suffer from poorer salaries, working conditions and career stability, but such injustices are not properly remedied by creating other injustices to supposedly level things out.

A policy around what happens with the work done in an academic institution is important. But just as individuals should not be allowed to treat broadly-funded work as their own private property, neither should the institution itself claim complete ownership and consider itself entitled to do what it wishes with the results. It may be acting as a facilitator to allow research to happen, but by seeking to intervene in the process of research, it risks acting as an inhibitor. Consider the following note about “confidential information”:

This is, in short, anything which, if you told people about, might damage the commercial interests of the university. It specifically includes information relating to intellectual property that could be protected, but isn’t protected yet, and which if you told people about couldn’t be protected, and any special know how or clever but non patentable methods of doing things, like trade secrets. It specifically includes all laboratory notebooks, including those stored in an electronic fashion. You must be very careful with this sort of information. This is of particular relevance to something that may be patented, because if other people know about it then it can’t be.

Anyone working in even a moderately paranoid company may have read things like this. But here the context is an environment where knowledge should be shared to benefit and inform the research community. Instead, one gets the impression that the wish to control the propagation of knowledge is so great that some people would rather see the details of “clever but non patentable methods” destroyed than passed on openly for others to benefit from. Indeed, one must question whether “trade secrets” should even feature in a university environment at all.

Of course, the obsession with “laboratory notebooks”, “methods of doing things” and “trade secrets” in such policies betrays the typical origins of such drives for commercialisation: the apparently rich pickings to be had in the medical, pharmaceutical and biosciences domains. It is hardly a coincidence that the University of Oslo intensified its dubious “innovation” efforts under a figurehead with a background (or an interest) in exactly those domains: with a narrow personal focus, an apparent disdain for other disciplines, and a wider commercial atmosphere that gives such a strategy a “dead cert” air of impending fortune, we should perhaps expect no more of such a leadership creature (and his entourage) than the sum of that creature’s instincts and experiences. But then again, we should demand more from such people when their role is to cultivate an institution of learning and not to run a private research organisation at the public’s expense.

The Dirty Word

At no point in the policy guide does the word “monopoly” appear. Given that such a largely technical institution would undoubtedly be performing research where the method of “protection” would involve patents being sought, omitting the word “monopoly” might be that document’s biggest flaw. Heriot-Watt University originates from the merger of two separate institutions, one of which was founded by the well-known pioneer of steam engine technology, James Watt.

Recent discussion of Watt’s contributions to the development and proliferation of such technology has brought up claims that Watt’s own patents – the things that undoubtedly made him wealthy enough to fund an educational organisation – actually held up progress in the domain concerned for a number of decades. While he was clearly generous and sensible enough to spend his money on worthy causes, one can always challenge whether the questionable practices that resulted in the accumulation of such wealth can justify the benefits from the subsequent use of that wealth, particularly if those practices can be regarded as having had negative effects of society and may even have increased wealth inequality.

Questioning philanthropy is not a particularly fashionable thing to do. In capitalist societies, wealthy people are often seen as having made their fortunes in an honest fashion, enjoying a substantial “benefit of the doubt” that this was what really occurred. Criticising a rich person giving money to ostensibly good causes is seen as unkind to both the generous donor and to those receiving the donations. But we should question the means through which the likes of Bill Gates (in our time) and James Watt (in his own time) made their fortunes and the power that such fortunes give to such people to direct money towards causes of their own personal choosing, not to mention the way in which wealthy people also choose to influence public policy and the use of money given by significantly less wealthy individuals – the rest of us – gathered through taxation.

But back to monopolies. Can they really be compatible with the pursuit and sharing of knowledge that academia is supposed to be cultivating? Just as it should be shocking that secretive “confidentiality” rules exist in an academic context, it should appal us that researchers are encouraged to be competitively hostile towards their peers.

Removing the Barriers

It appears that some well-known institutions understand that the unhindered sharing of their work is their primary mission. MIT Media Lab now encourages the licensing of software developed under its roof as Free Software, not requiring special approval or any other kind of institutional stalling that often seems to take place as the “innovation” vultures pick over the things they think should be monetised. Although proprietary licensing still appears to be an option for those within the Media Lab organisation, at least it seems that people wanting to follow their principles and make their work available as Free Software can do so without being made to feel bad about it.

As an academic institution, we believe that in many cases we can achieve greater impact by sharing our work.

So says the director of the MIT Media Lab. It says a lot about the times we live in that this needs to be said at all. Free Software licensing is, as a mechanism to encourage sharing, a natural choice for software, but we should also expect similar measures to be adopted for other kinds of works. Papers and articles should at the very least be made available using content licences that permit sharing, even if the licence variants chosen by authors might seek to prohibit the misrepresentation of parts of their work by prohibiting remixes or derived works. (This may sound overly restrictive, but one should consider the way in which scientific articles are routinely misrepresented by climate change and climate science deniers.)

Free Software has encouraged an environment where sharing is safely and routinely done. Licences like the GNU General Public Licence seek to shield recipients from things like patent threats, particularly from organisations which might appear to want to share their works, but which might be tempted to use patents to regulate the further use of those works. Even in realms where patents have traditionally been tolerated, attempts have been made to shield others from the effects of patents, intended or otherwise: the copyleft hardware movement demands that shared hardware designs are patent-free, for instance.

In contrast, one might think that despite the best efforts of the guide’s authors, all the precautions and behavioural self-correction it encourages might just drive the average researcher to distraction. Or, just as likely, to ignoring most of the guidelines and feigning ignorance if challenged by their “innovation”-obsessed superiors. But in the drive to monetise every last ounce of effort there is one statement that is worth remembering:

If intellectual property is not assigned, this can create problems in who is allowed to exploit the work, and again work can go to waste due to a lack of clarity over who owns what.

In other words, in an environment where everybody wants a share of the riches, it helps to have everybody’s interests out in the open so that there may be no surprises later on. Now, it turns out that unclear ownership and overly casual management of contributions is something that has occasionally threatened Free Software projects, resulting in more sophisticated thinking about how contributions are managed.

And it is precisely this combination of Free Software licensing, or something analogous for other domains, with proper contribution and attribution management that will extend safe and efficient sharing of knowledge to the academic realm. Researchers just cannot have the same level of confidence when dealing with the “technology transfer” offices of their institution and of other institutions. Such offices only want to look after themselves while undermining everyone beyond the borders of their own fiefdoms.

Divide and Rule

It is unfortunate that academic institutions feel that they need to “pull their weight” and have to raise funds to make up for diminishing public funding. By turning their backs on the very reason for their own existence and seeking monopolies instead of sharing knowledge, they unwittingly participate in the “divide and rule” tactics blatantly pursued in the political arena: that everyone must fight each other for all that is left once the lion’s share of public funding has been allocated to prestige megaprojects and schemes that just happen to benefit the well-connected, the powerful and the influential people in society the most.

A properly-funded education sector is an essential component of a civilised society, and its institutions should not be obliged to “sharpen their elbows” in the scuffle for funding and thus deprive others of knowledge just to remain viable. Sadly, while austerity politics remains fashionable, it may be up to us in the Free Software realm to remind academia of its obligations and to show that sustainable ways of sharing knowledge exist and function well in the “real world”.

Indeed, it is up to us to keep such institutions honest and to prevent advocates of monopoly-driven “innovation” from being able to insist that their way is the only way, because just as “divide and rule” politics erects barriers between groups in wider society, commercialisation erects barriers that inhibit the essential functions of academic pursuit. And such barriers ultimately risk extinguishing academia altogether, along with all the benefits its institutions bring to society. If my university were not reinforcing such barriers with its “IP” policy, maybe its anniversary as a measure of how far we have progressed from monopolies and intellectual selfishness would have been worth celebrating after all.

Adam Williamson recently wrote about how he no longer really likes computers. This attracted many responses from people who misunderstood him and decided to dispense career advice, including doses of the usual material about “following one’s passion” or “changing one’s direction” (which usually involves becoming some kind of “global nomad”), which do make me wonder how some of these people actually pay their bills. Do they have a wealthy spouse or wealthy parents or “an inheritance”, or do they just do lucrative contracting for random entities whose nature or identities remain deliberately obscure to avoid thinking about where the money for those jobs really comes from? Particularly the latter would be the “global nomad” way, as far as I can tell.

But anyway, Adam appears to like his job: it’s just that he isn’t interested in technological pursuits outside working hours. At some level, I think we can all sympathise with that. For those of us who have similarly pessimistic views about computing, it’s worth presenting a list of reasons why we might not be so enthusiastic about technology any more, particularly for those of us who also care about the ethical dimensions, not merely whether the technology itself is “any good” or whether it provides a sufficient intellectual challenge. By the way, this is my own list: I don’t know Adam from, well, Adam!

Lack of Actual Progress

One may be getting older and noticing that the same technological problems keep occurring again and again, never getting resolved, while seeing people with no sense of history provoke change for change’s – not progress’s – sake. After a while, or when one gets to a certain age, one expects technology to just work and that people might have figured out how to get things to communicate with each other, or whatever, by building on what went before. But then it usually seems to be the case that some boy genius or other wanted a clear run at solving such problems from scratch, developing lots of flashy features but not the mundane reliability that everybody really wanted.

People then get told that such “advanced” technology is necessarily complicated. Whereas once upon a time, you could pick up a telephone, dial a number, have someone answer, and conduct a half-decent conversation, now you have to make sure that the equipment is all connected up properly, that all the configurations are correct, that the Internet provider isn’t short-changing you or trying to suppress your network traffic. And then you might dial and not get through, or you might have the call mysteriously cut out, or the audio quality might be like interviewing a gang of squabbling squirrels speaking from the bottom of a dustbin/trashcan.

Depreciating Qualifications

One may be seeing a profession that requires a fair amount of educational investment – which, thanks to inept/corrupt politicians, also means a fair amount of financial investment – become devalued to the point that its practitioners are regarded as interchangeable commodities who can be coerced into working for as little as possible. So much for the “knowledge economy” when its practitioners risk ending up earning less than people doing so-called “menial” work who didn’t need to go through a thorough higher education or keep up an ongoing process of self-improvement to remain “relevant”. (Not that there’s anything wrong with “menial” work: without people doing unfashionable jobs, everything would grind to a halt very quickly, whereas quite a few things I’ve done might as well not exist, so little difference they made to anything.)

Now we get told that programming really will be the domain of “artificial intelligence” this time around. That instead of humans writing code, “high priests” will merely direct computers to write the software they need. Of course, such stuff sounds great in Wired magazine and rather amusing to anyone with any actual experience of software projects. Unfortunately, politicians (and other “thought leaders”) read such things one day and then slash away at budgets the next. And in a decade’s time, we’ll be suffering the same “debate” about a lack of “engineering talent” with the same “insights” from the usual gaggle of patent lobbyists and vested interests.

Neoliberal Fantasy Economics

One may have encountered the “internship” culture where as many people as possible try to get programmers and others in the industry to work for nothing, making them feel as if they need to do so in order to prove their worth for a hypothetical employment position or to demonstrate that they are truly committed to some corporate-aligned goal. One reads or hears people advocating involvement in “open source” not to uphold the four freedoms (to use, share, modify and distribute software), but instead to persuade others to “get on the radar” of an employer whose code has been licensed as Free Software (or something pretending to be so) largely to get people to work for them for free.

Now, I do like the idea of employers getting to know potential employees by interacting in a Free Software project, but it should really only occur when the potential employee is already doing something they want to do because it interests them and is in their interests. And no-one should be persuaded into doing work for free on the vague understanding that they might get hired for doing so.

The Expendable Volunteers

One may have seen the exploitation of volunteer effort where people are made to feel that they should “step up” for the benefit of something they believe in, often requiring volunteers to sacrifice their own time and money to do such free work, and often seeing those volunteers being encouraged to give money directly to the cause, as if all their other efforts were not substantial contributions in themselves. While striving to make a difference around the edges of their own lives, volunteers are often working in opposition to well-resourced organisations whose employees have the luxury of countering such volunteer efforts on a full-time basis and with a nice salary. Those people can go home in the evenings and at weekends and tune it all out if they want to.

No wonder volunteers burn out or decide that they just don’t have time or aren’t sufficiently motivated any more. The sad thing is that some organisations ignore this phenomenon because there are plenty of new volunteers wanting to “get active” and “be visible”, perhaps as a way of marketing themselves. Then again, some communities are content to alienate existing users if they can instead attract the mythical “10x” influx of new users to take their place, so we shouldn’t really be surprised, I suppose.

Blame the Powerless

One may be exposed to the culture that if you care about injustices or wrongs then bad or unfortunate situations are your responsibility even if you had nothing to do with their creation. This culture pervades society and allows the powerful to do what they like, to then make everyone else feel bad about the consequences, and to virtually force people to just accept the results if they don’t have the energy at the end of a busy day to do the legwork of bringing people to account.

So, those of us with any kind of conscience at all might already be supporting people trying to do the right thing like helping others, holding people to account, protecting the vulnerable, and so on. But at the same time, we aren’t short of people – particularly in the media and in politics – telling us how bad things are, with an air of expectation that we might take responsibility for something supposedly done on our behalf that has had grave consequences. (The invasion and bombing of foreign lands is one depressingly recurring example.) Sadly, the feeling of powerlessness many people have, as the powerful go round doing what they like regardless, is exploited by the usual cynical “divide and rule” tactics of other powerful people who merely see the opportunities in the misuse of power and the misery it causes. And so, selfishness and tribalism proliferate, demotivating anyone wanting the world to become a better place.

Reversal of Liberties

One may have had the realisation that technology is no longer merely about creating opportunities or making things easier, but is increasingly about controlling and monitoring people and making things complicated and difficult. That sustainability is sacrificed so that companies can cultivate recurring and rich profit opportunities by making people dependent on obsolete products that must be replaced regularly. And that technology exacerbates societal ills rather than helping to eradicate them.

We have the modern Web whose average site wants to “dial out” to a cast of recurring players – tracking sites, content distribution networks (providing advertising more often than not), font resources, image resources, script resources – all of which contribute to making the “signal-to-noise” ratio of the delivered content smaller and smaller all the time. Where everything has to maintain a channel of communication to random servers to constantly update them about what the user is doing, where they spent most of their time, what they looked at and what they clicked on. All of this requiring hundreds of megabytes of program code and data, burning up CPU time, wasting energy, making computers slow and steadily obsolete, forcing people to throw things away and to buy more things to throw away soon enough.

We have the “app” ecosystem experience, with restrictions on access, competition and interoperability, with arbitrarily-curated content: the walled gardens that the likes of Apple and Microsoft failed to impose on everybody at the dawn of the “consumer Internet” but do so now under the pretences of convenience and safety. We have social networking empires that serve fake news to each person’s little echo chamber, whipping up bubbles of hate and distracting people from what is really going on in the world and what should really matter. We have “cloud” services that often offer mediocre user experiences but which offer access from “any device”, with users opting in to both the convenience of being able to get their messages or files from their phone and the surveillance built into such services for commercial and governmental exploitation.

We have planned obsolescence designed into software and hardware, with customers obliged to buy new products to keep doing the things they want to do with those products and to keep it a relatively secure experience. And we have dodgy batteries sealed into devices, with the obligation apparently falling on the customers themselves to look after their own safety and – when the product fails – the impact of that product on the environment. By burdening the hapless user of technology with so many caveats that their life becomes dominated by them, those things become a form of tyranny, too.

Finding Meaning

Many people need to find meaning in their work and to feel that their work aligns with their own priorities. Some people might be able to do work that is unchallenging or uninteresting and then pursue their interests and goals in their own time, but this may be discouraging and demotivating over the longer term. When people’s work is not orthogonal to their own beliefs and interests but instead actively undermines them, the result is counterproductive and even damaging to those beliefs and interests and to others who share them.

For example, developing proprietary software or services in a full-time job, although potentially intellectually challenging, is likely to undermine any realistic level of commitment in one’s own free time to Free Software that does the same thing. Some people may prioritise a stimulating job over the things they believe in, feeling that their work still benefits others in a different way. Others may feel that they are betraying Free Software users by making people reliant on proprietary software and causing interoperability problems when those proprietary software users start assuming that everything should revolve around them, their tools, their data, and their expectations.

Although Adam wasn’t framing this shift in perspectives in terms of his job or career, it might have an impact on some people in that regard. I sometimes think of the interactions between my personal priorities and my career. Indeed, the way that Adam can seemingly stash his technological pursuits within the confines of his day job, while leaving the rest of his time for other things, was some kind of vision that I once had for studying and practising computer science. I think he is rather lucky in that his employer’s interests and his own are aligned sufficiently for him to be able to consider his workplace a venue for furthering those interests, doing so sufficiently to not need to try and make up the difference at home.

We live in an era of computational abundance and yet so much of that abundance is applied ineffectively and inappropriately. I wish I had a concise solution to the complicated equation involving technology and its effects on our quality of life, if not for the application of technology in society in general, then at least for individuals, and not least for myself. Maybe a future article needs to consider what we should expect from technology, as its application spreads ever wider, such that the technology we use and experience upholds our rights and expectations as human beings instead of undermining and marginalising them.

It’s not hard to see how even those who were once enthusiastic about computers can end up resenting them and disliking what they have become.

It didn’t all start with a poorly-considered April Fools’ joke about hosting a Python conference in Cuba, but the resulting private mailing list discussion managed to persuade me not to continue as a voting member of the Python Software Foundation (PSF). In recent years, upon returning from vacation, discovering tens if not hundreds of messages whipping up a frenzy about some topic supposedly pertinent to the activities of the PSF, and reading through such messages as if I should inform my own position on the matter, was undoubtedly one of the chores of being a member. This time, my vacation plans were slightly unusual, so I was at least spared the surprise of getting the bulk of people’s opinions in one big serving.

I was invited to participate in the PSF at a time when it was an invitation-only affair. My own modest contributions to the EuroPython conference were the motivating factor, and it would seem that I hadn’t alienated enough people for my nomination to be opposed. (This cannot be said for some other people who did eventually become members as well after their opponents presumably realised the unkindness of their ways.) Being asked to participate was an honour, although I remarked at the time that I wasn’t sure what contribution I might make to such an organisation. Becoming a Fellow of the FSFE was an active choice I made myself because I align myself closely with the agenda the FSFE chooses to pursue, but the PSF is somewhat more vague or more ambivalent about its own agenda: promoting Python is all very well, but should the organisation promote proprietary software that increases Python adoption, or would this undermine the foundations on which Python was built and is sustained? Being invited to participate in an organisation with often unclear objectives combines a degree of passivity with an awareness that some of the decisions being taken may well contradict some of the principles I have actively chosen to support in other organisations. Such as the FSFE, of course.

Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of vital activities performed within the PSF. For instance, the organisation has a genuine need to enforce its trademarks and to stop other people from claiming the Python name as their own, and the membership can indeed assist in such matters, as can the wider community. But looking at my archives of the private membership mailing list, a lot of noise has been produced on other, more mundane matters. For a long time, it seemed as if the only business of the PSF membership – as opposed to the board who actually make the big decisions – was to nominate and vote on new members, thus giving the organisation the appearance of only really existing for its own sake. Fortunately, organisational reform has made the matter of recruiting members largely obsolete, and some initiatives have motivated other, more meaningful activities. However, I cannot be the only person who has noted that such activities could largely be pursued outside the PSF and within the broader community instead, as indeed these activities typically are.

PyCon

Some of the more divisive topics that have caused the most noise have had some connection with PyCon: the North American Python conference that mostly replaced the previous International Python Conference series (from back when people thought that conferences had to be professionally organised and run, in contrast to PyCon and most, if not all, other significant Python conferences today). Indeed, this lack of separation between the PSF and PyCon has been a significant concern of mine. I will probably never attend a PyCon, partly because it resides in North America as a physical event, partly because its size makes it completely uninteresting to me as an attendee, and largely because I increasingly find the programme uninteresting for a variety of other reasons. When the PSF members’ time is spent discussing or at least exposed to the discussion of PyCon business, it can just add to the burden of membership for those who wish to focus on the supposed core objectives of the organisation.

What may well be worse, however, is that PyCon exposes the PSF to substantial liability issues. As the conference headed along a trajectory of seemingly desirable and ambitious growth, it collided with the economic downturn caused by the global financial crisis of 2008, incurring a not insignificant loss. Fortunately, this outcome has not since been repeated, and the organisation had sufficient liquidity to avoid any serious consequences. Some have argued that it was precisely because profits from previous years’ conferences had been accumulated that the organisation was able to pay its bills, but such good fortune cannot explain away the fundamental liability and the risks it brings to the viability of the organisation, especially if fortune happens not to be on its side in future.

Volunteering

In recent times, I have been more sharply focused on the way volunteers are treated by organisations who rely on their services to fulfil their mission. Sadly, the PSF has exhibited a poor record in various respects on this matter. Once upon a time, the Python language Web site was redesigned under contract, but the burden of maintenance fell on community volunteers. Over time, discontentment forced the decision to change the technology and a specification was drawn up under a degree of consultation. Unfortunately, the priorities of certain stakeholders – that is, community volunteers doing a fair amount of hard work in their own time – were either ignored or belittled, leaving them confronted with either having to adapt to a suboptimal workflow not of their own choosing, as well as spending time and energy developing that workflow, or just quitting and leaving it to other people to tidy up the mess that those other people (and the hired contractors) had made.

Understandably, the volunteers quit, leaving a gap in the Web site functionality that took a year to reinstate. But what was most disappointing was the way those volunteers were branded as uncooperative and irresponsible in an act of revisionism by those who clearly failed to appreciate the magnitude of the efforts of those volunteers in the first place. Indeed, the views of the affected volunteers were even belittled when efforts were championed to finally restore the functionality, with it being stated by one motivated individual that the history of the problem was not of his concern. When people cannot themselves choose the basis of their own involvement in a volunteer-run organisation without being vilified for letting people down or for “holding the organisation to ransom”, the latter being a remarkable accusation given the professionalism that was actually shown in supporting a transition to other volunteers, one must question whether such an organisation deserves to attract any volunteers at all.

Politics

As discussion heated up over the PyCon Cuba affair, the usual clash of political views emerged, with each side accusing the other of ignorance and not understanding the political or cultural situation, apparently blinkered by their own cultural and political biases. I remember brazen (and ill-informed) political advocacy being a component in one of the Python community blogging “planets” before I found the other one, back when there was a confusing level of duplication between the two and when nobody knew which one was the “real” one (which now appears to consist of a lot of repetition and veiled commercial advertising), and I find it infuriating when people decide to use such matters as an excuse to lecture others and to promote their own political preferences.

I have become aware of a degree of hostility within the PSF towards the Free Software Foundation, with the latter being regarded as a “political” organisation, perhaps due to hard feelings experienced when the FSF had to educate the custodians of Python about software licensing (which really came about in the first place because of the way Python development had been moved around, causing various legal representatives to play around with the licensing, arguably to make their own mark and to stop others getting all the credit). And I detect a reluctance in some quarters to defend software freedom within the PSF, with a reluctance to align the PSF with other entities that support software and digital freedoms. At least the FSF can be said to have an honest political agenda, where those who support it more or less know where they stand.

In contrast, the PSF seems to cultivate all kinds of internal squabbling and agenda-setting: true politics in the worst sense of the word. On one occasion I was more or less told that my opinion was not welcome or, indeed, could ever be of interest on a topic related to diversity. Thankfully, diversity politics moved to a dedicated mailing list and I was thereafter mostly able to avoid being told by another Anglo-Saxon male that my own perspectives didn’t matter on that or on any other topic. How it is that someone I don’t actually know can presume to know in any detail what perspectives or experiences I might have to offer on any matter remains something of a mystery to me.

Looking through my archives, there appears to be a lot of noise, squabbling, quipping, and recrimination over the last five years or so. In the midst of the recent finger-wagging, someone dared to mention that maybe Cubans, wherever they are, might actually deserve to have a conference. Indeed, other places were mentioned where the people who live there, through no fault of their own, would also be the object of political grandstanding instead of being treated like normal people wanting to participate in a wider community.

I mostly regard April Fools’ jokes as part of a tedious tradition, part of the circus that distracts people away from genuine matters of concern, perhaps even an avenue of passive aggression in certain circles, a way to bully people and then insist – as cowards do – that it was “just a joke”. The lack of a separation of the PSF’s interests combined with the allure of the circus conspired to make fools out of the people involved in creating the joke and of many in the accompanying debate. I find myself uninterested in spending my own time indulging such distractions, especially when those distractions are products of flaws in the organisation that nobody wishes to fix, and when there are more immediate and necessary activities to pursue in the wider arena of Free Software that, as a movement in its own right, some in the PSF practically refuse to acknowledge.

Effects

Leaving the PSF won’t really change any of my commitments, but it will at least reduce the level of background noise I have to deal with. Such an underwhelming and unfortunate assessment is something the organisation will have to rectify in time if it wishes to remain relevant and to deserve the continued involvement of its members. I do have confidence in some of the reform and improvement processes being conducted by volunteers with too little time of their own to pursue them, and I hope that they make the organisation a substantially better and more effective one, as they continue to play to an audience of people with much to say but, more often than not, little to add.

I would have been tempted to remain in the PSF and to pursue various initiatives if the organisation were a multiplier of effect for any given input of effort. Instead, it currently acts as a divider of effect for all the effort one would apparently need to put in to achieve anything. That isn’t how any organisation, let alone one relying on volunteer time and commitment, should be functioning.

A Footnote

On political matters and accusations of ignorance being traded, my own patience is wearing thin indeed, and this probably nudged me into finally making this decision. It probably doesn’t help that I recently made a trip to Britain where election season has been in full swing, with unashamed displays of wilful idiocy openly paraded on a range of topics, indulged by the curated ignorance of the masses, with the continued destruction of British society, nature and the economy looking inevitable as the perpetrators insist they know best now and will undoubtedly in the future protest their innocence when challenged on the legacy of their ruinous rule, adopting the “it wasn’t me” manner of a petulant schoolchild so befitting of the basis of the nepotism that got most of them where they are today.

A discussion on the International Day Against DRM got my attention, and instead of replying on the site in question, I thought I’d write something about it here. The assertion was that “this war has been lost“, to which it was noted that “ownership isn’t for everyone”.

True enough: people are becoming conditioned to accept that they can enjoy nice things but not have any control of them or, indeed, any right to secure them for themselves. So, you effectively have the likes of Spotify effectively reinventing commercial radio where the interface is so soul-crushingly awful that it’s almost more convenient to have to call the radio station to request that they play a track. Or at least it was when I was confronted with it on someone’s smartphone fairly recently.

Meanwhile, the ignorant will happily trumpet the corporate propaganda claiming that those demanding digital rights are “communists”, when the right to own things to enjoy on your own terms has actually been taken away by those corporations and their pocket legislators. Maybe people should remember that when they’re next out shopping for gadgets or, heaven forbid, voting in a public election.

An Aside on Music

Getting older means that one can happily and justifiably regard a lot of new cultural output as inferior to what came before, which means that if one happened to stop buying music when DRM got imposed, deciding not to bother with new music doesn’t create such a big problem after all. I have plenty of legitimately purchased music to listen to already, and I didn’t need to have the potential enjoyment of any new work inconvenienced by only being able to play that work on certain devices or on somebody else’s terms.

Naturally, the music industry blames the decline in new music sales on “piracy”, but in fact people just got used to getting their music in more convenient ways, or they decided that they already have enough music and don’t really need any more. I remember how some people would buy a CD or two every weekend just as a treat or to have something new to listen to, and the music industry made a very nice living from this convenient siphoning of society’s disposable income, but that was just a bubble: the prices were low enough for people to not really miss the money, but the prices were also high enough and provided generous-enough margins for the music industry to make a lot of money from such casual purchasers while they could.

Note that I emphasised “potential” above. That’s another thing that the music business got away with for years: the loyalty of their audiences. How many people bought new material from an artist they liked only to discover that it wasn’t as good as they’d hoped? After a while, people just lose interest. This despite the effective state subsidy of the music business through public broadcasters endlessly and annoyingly playing and promoting that industry’s proprietary content. And there is music from even a few years ago that you wouldn’t be able to persuade anyone to sell you any more. It is like they don’t want your money, or at least if it is not being handed over on precisely their terms, which for a long time now has seemed to involve the customer going back and paying them again and again for something they already bought (under threat of legal penalties for “format shifting” in order to compel such repeat business).

It isn’t a surprise that the focus now is on music (and video) streaming and that actually buying media to play offline is becoming harder and harder. The focus of the content industries is on making it more and more difficult to acquire their content in ways that make it possible to experience that content on sustainable terms. Just as standard music CDs became corrupted with DRM mechanisms that bring future access to the content into doubt, so have newer technologies been encumbered with inconvenient and illegitimate mechanisms to deny people legitimate access. And as the campaign against DRM notes, some of the outcomes are simply discriminatory and shameful.

Our Legacy

Even content that has not been “protected” has proven difficult to recover simply due to technological progress and material, cultural and intellectual decay. It would appal many people that anyone would put additional barriers around content just to maximise revenues when the risk is that the “protectors” of such content will either inadvertently (their competence not being particularly noted) or deliberately (their vindictiveness being especially noted) consign that content to the black hole of prehistory just to stop anyone else actually enjoying it without them benefiting from the act. In some cases, one would think that content destruction is really what the supposed guardians of the content actually want, especially when there’s no more easy money to be made.

Of course, such profiteers don’t actually care about things like cultural legacy or the historical record, but society should care about such things. Regardless of who paid for something to be made – and frequently it was the artist, with the publishers only really offering financing that would most appropriately be described as “predatory” – such content is part of our culture and our legacy. That is why we should resist DRM, we should not support its proponents when buying devices and content or when electing our representatives, and it is why we should try and limit copyright terms so that legacy content may stand a chance of being recovered and responsibly archived.

We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to resist DRM.

In the past few days, there have been plenty of reports of Lenovo shipping products with a form of adware known as Superfish, originating from a company of the same name, that interferes with the normal operation of Web browser software to provide “shopping suggestions” in content displayed by the browser. This would be irritating enough all by itself, but what made the bundled software involved even more worrying was that it also manages to insert itself as an eavesdropper on the user’s supposedly secure communications, meaning that communications conducted between the user and Internet sites such as online banks, merchants, workplaces and private-and-confidential services are all effectively compromised.

Making things even worse still, the mechanism employed to pursue this undesirable eavesdropping managed to prove highly insecure in itself, exposing Lenovo customers to attack from others. So, we start this sordid affair with a Lenovo “business decision” about bundling some company’s software and end up with Lenovo’s customers having their security compromised for the dubious “benefit” of being shown additional, unsolicited advertisements in Web pages that didn’t have them in the first place. One may well ask what Lenovo’s decision-makers were thinking?

Symptoms of a Disease

Indeed, this affair gives us a fine opportunity to take a critical look at the way the bundling of software has corrupted the sale of personal computers for years, if not decades. First of all, most customers have never been given a choice of operating system or to be able to buy a computer without an operating system, considering the major channels and vendors to which most buyers are exposed: the most widely-available and widely-advertised computers only offer some Windows variant, and manufacturers typically insist that they cannot offer anything else – or even nothing at all – for a variety of feeble reasons. And when asked to provide a refund for this unwanted product that has been forced on the purchaser, some manufacturers even claim that it is free or that someone else has subsidised the cost, and that there is no refund to be had.

This subsidy – some random company acting like a kind of wealthy distant relative paying for the “benefit” of bundled proprietary software – obviously raises competition-related issues, but it also raises the issue of why anyone would want to pay for someone else to get something at no cost. Even in a consumer culture where getting more goodies is seen as surely being a good thing because it means more toys to play with, one cannot help but be a little suspicious: surely something is too good to be true if someone wants to give you things that they would otherwise make you pay for? And now we know that it is: the financial transaction that enriched Lenovo was meant to give Superfish access to its customers’ sensitive information.

Of course, Lenovo’s updated statement on the matter (expect more updates, particularly if people start to talk about class action lawsuits) tries to downplay the foul play: the somewhat incoherent language (example: “Superfish technology is purely based on contextual/image and not behavioral”) denies things like user profiling and uses terminology that is open to quite a degree of interpretation (example: “Users are not tracked nor re-targeted”). What the company lawyers clearly don’t want to talk about is what information was being collected and where it was being whisked off to, keeping the legal attack surface minimal and keeping those denials of negligence strenuous (“we did not know about this potential security vulnerability until yesterday”). Maybe some detail about those “server connections shut down in January” would shed some light on these matters, but the lawyers know that with that comes the risk of exposing a paper trail showing that everybody knew what they were getting into.

Your Money isn’t Good Enough

One might think that going to a retailer, giving them your money, and getting a product to take home would signal the start of a happy and productive experience with a purchase. But it seems that for some manufacturers, getting the customer’s money just isn’t enough: they just have to make a bit of money on the side, and perhaps keep making money from the product after the customer has taken it home, too. Consumer electronics and products from the “content industries” have in particular fallen victim to the introduction of advertising. Even though you thought you had bought something outright, advertisements and other annoyances sneak into the experience, often in the hope that you will pay extra to make them go away.

And so, you get the feeling that your money somehow isn’t good enough for these people. Maybe if you were richer or knew the right people, your money would be good enough and you wouldn’t need to suffer adverts or people spying on you, but you aren’t rich or well-connected and just have to go along with the indignity of it all. Naturally, the manufacturers would take offence at such assertions; they would claim that they have to take bribes subsidies to be able to keep their own prices competitive with the rest of the market, and of course everybody else is taking the money. That might be almost believable if it weren’t for the fact that the prices of things like bundled operating systems and “productivity software” – the stuff that you can’t get a refund for – are completely at the discretion of the organisations who make it. (It also doesn’t help these companies that they seem to be unable to deliver a quality product with a stable set of internal components, or that they introduce stupid hardware features that make their products excruciating to use.)

Everybody Hurts

For the most part, it probably is the case that if you are well-resourced and well-connected, you can buy the most expensive computer with the most expensive proprietary software for it, and maybe the likes of Lenovo won’t have tainted it with their adware-of-the-month. But naturally, proprietary software doesn’t provide you with any inherent assurances that it hasn’t been compromised: only Free Software can offer you that, and even then you must be able to insist on the right to be able to build and install that software on the hardware yourself. Coincidentally, I did once procure a Lenovo computer from a retailer that only supplied them with GNU/Linux preinstalled, with Lenovo being a common choice amongst such retailers because the distribution channel apparently made it possible for them to resell such products without Windows or other proprietary products ever becoming involved.

But sometimes the rich and well-connected become embroiled in surveillance and spying in situations of their own making. Having seen people become so infatuated with Microsoft Outlook that they seemingly need to have something bearing the name on every device they use, it is perhaps not surprising that members of the European Parliament had apparently installed Microsoft’s mobile application bearing the Outlook brand. Unfortunately for them, Microsoft’s “app” sends sensitive information including their authentication credentials off into the cloud, putting their communications (and the safety of their correspondents, in certain cases) at risk.

Some apologists may indeed claim that Microsoft and their friends and partners collecting everybody’s sensitive details for their own convenience is “not an issue for the average user”, but in fact it is a huge issue: when people become conditioned into thinking that surrendering their privacy, accepting the inconveniences of intrusive advertising, always being in debt to the companies from which they have bought things (even when those purchases have actually kept those companies in business), and giving up control of their own belongings are all “normal” things and that they do not deserve any better, then we all start to lose control over the ways in which we use technology as well as the technologies we are able to use. Notions of ownership and democracy quickly become attacked and eroded.

What Were They Thinking?

We ultimately risk some form of authority, accountable or otherwise, telling us that we no longer deserve to be able to enjoy things like privacy. Their reasons are always scary ones, but in practice it usually has something to do with them not wanting ordinary people doing unexpected or bothersome things that might question or undermine their own very comfortable (and often profitable) position telling everybody else what to do, what to worry about, what to buy, and so on. And it turns out that a piece of malware that just has to see everything in its rampant quest to monetize every last communication of the unwitting user now gives us a chance to really think about how we really want our computers and their suppliers to behave.

So, what were they thinking at Lenovo? That Superfish was an easy way to make a few extra bucks? That their customers don’t deserve anything better than to have their private communications infused with advertising? That their customers don’t need to know that people are tampering with their Internet connection? That the private information of their customers was theirs to sell to anyone offering them some money? Did nobody consider the implications of any of this at all, or was there a complete breakdown in ethics amongst those responsible? Was it negligence or contempt for their own customers that facilitated this pursuit of greed?

Sadly, the evidence from past privacy scandals involving major companies indicates that regulatory or criminal proceedings are unlikely, merely fuelling suspicions that supposed corporate incompetence – the existence of conveniently unlocked backdoors – actually serves various authorities rather nicely. It is therefore up to us to remain vigilant and, of course, to exercise our own forms of reward for those who act in our interests, along with punishment for those whose behaviour is unacceptable in a fair and democratic society.

Maybe after a break from seeing any of it for a while, our business and our money will matter more to Lenovo than that of some shady “advertising” outfit with the dubious and slightly unbelievable objective of showing more adverts to people while they do their online banking. And by then, maybe Lenovo (and everyone else) will let us install whatever software we like on their products, because many people aren’t going to be trusting the bundled software for a long time to come after this. Not that they should ever have trusted it in the first place, of course.

According to the privacy policy on the Web site of the UK Pirate Party, “The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States.” Would it not be more appropriate for the pirates to do their own visitor analysis using a Free Software solution like Piwik?

Come on, pirates, you can do better than this!

Every now and then, someone voices their dissatisfaction with the GNU General Public License (GPL). A recent example is the oddly titled Licensing in a Post Copyright World: odd because if anything copyright is getting stronger, even though public opposition to copyright legislation and related measures is also growing. Here I present some necessary clarifications for anyone reading the above article. This is just a layman’s interpretation, not legal advice.

Licence Incompatibility

It is no secret that code licensed only under specific versions of the GPL cannot be combined with code under other specific versions of the GPL such that the resulting combination will have a coherent and valid licence. But why are the licences incompatible? Because the decision was taken to strengthen the GPL in version 3 (GPLv3), but since this means adding more conditions to the licence that were not present in version 2 (GPLv2), and since GPLv2 does not let people who are not the authors of the code involved add new conditions, the additional conditions of GPLv3 cannot be applied to the “GPLv2 only” licensed code. Meanwhile, the “GPLv3 only” licensed code requires these additional conditions and does not allow people who are not the authors of the code to strip them away to make the resulting whole distributable under GPLv2. There are ways to resolve this as I mention below.

(There apparently was an initiative to make version 2.2 of the GPL as a more incremental revision of the licence, although incorporating AGPLv3 provisions, but according to one of the central figures in the GPL drafting activity, work progressed on GPLv3 instead. I am sure some people wouldn’t have liked the GPLv2.2 anyway, as the AGPLv3 provisions seem to be one of many things they don’t like.)

Unnecessary Amendments

Why is the above explanation about licence compatibility so awkward? Because of the “only” stipulation that people put on their code, against the advice of the authors of the licence. It turns out that some people have so little trust in the organisation that wrote the licence they have nevertheless chosen to use that in a flourish of self-assertion, they needlessly stipulate “only” instead of “or any later version” and feel that they have mastered the art of licensing.

So the problems experienced by projects who put “only” everywhere, becoming “stuck” on certain GPL versions is a situation of their own making, like someone seeing a patch of wet cement and realising that their handprint can be preserved for future generations to enjoy. Other projects suffer from such distrust, too, because even if they use “or any later version” to future-proof their licensing, they can be held back by the “only” crowd if they make use of that crowd’s software, rendering the licence upgrade option ineffective.

It is somewhat difficult to make licences that request that people play fair and at the same time do not require people to actually do anything to uphold that fairness, so when those who write the licences give some advice, it is somewhat impertinent to reject that advice and then to blame those very people for one’s own mistake later on. Even people who have done the recommended thing, but who suffer from “only” proliferation amongst the things on which their code depends should be blaming the people who put “only” everywhere, not the people who happened to write the licence in the first place.

A Political Movement

The article mentions that the GPL has become a “political platform”. But the whole notion of copyleft has been political from the beginning because it is all about a social contract between the developers and the end-users: not exactly the preservation of a monopoly on a creative work that the initiators of copyright had in mind. The claim is made that Apple shuns GPLv3 because it is political. In fact, companies like Apple and Nokia chiefly avoid GPLv3 because the patent language has been firmed up and makes those companies commit to not suing recipients of the code at will. (Nokia trumpeted a patent promise at one point, as if the company was exhibiting extreme generosity, but it turned out that they were obliged to license the covered patents because of the terms of GPLv2.) Apple has arguably only accepted the GPL in the past because the company could live with the supposed inconvenience of working with a wider development community on that community’s terms. As projects like WebKit have shown, even when obliged to participate under a copyleft licence, Apple can make collaboration so awkward that some participants (such as Google) would rather cultivate their own fork than deal with Apple’s obsession to control everything.

It is claimed that “the license terms are a huge problem for companies”, giving the example of Apple wanting to lock down their products and forbid anyone from installing anything other than Apple-approved software on devices that they have paid for and have in their own possession, claiming that letting people take control of their devices would obligate manufacturers to “get rid of the devices’ security systems”. In fact, it is completely possible to give the choice to users to either live with the restrictions imposed by the vendor and be able to access whichever online “app” store is offered by that vendor, or to let those users “root” or “jailbreak” their device and to tell them that they must find other sources of software and content. Such choices do not break any security systems at all, or at least not ones that we should be caring very much about.

People like to portray the FSF as being inflexible and opposed to the interests of businesses. However, the separation of the AGPL and the GPL contradicts such convenient assertions. Meanwhile, the article seems to suggest that we should blame the GPL for Apple’s inflexibility, which is, of course, absurd.

Blaming the Messenger

The article blames the AGPLv3 for the proliferation of “open core” business models. Pointing the finger at the licence and blaming it for the phenomenon is disingenuous since one could very easily concoct a licence that requires people to choose either no-cost usage, where they must share their code, or paid usage, where they get to keep their code secret. The means by which people can impose such a choice is their ownership of the code.

Although people can enforce an “open core” model more easily using copyleft licensing as opposed to permissive licensing, this is a product of the copyright ownership or assignment regime in place for a project, not something that magically materialises because a copyleft licence was chosen. It should be remembered that copyleft licences effectively regulate and work best with projects having decentralised ownership. Indeed, people have become more aware of copyright and licensing transfers and assignments perhaps as a result of “open core” business models and centralised project ownership, and they should be distrustful of commercial entities wanting such transfers and assignments to be made, regardless of any Free Software licence chosen, because they designate a privileged status in a project. Skepticism has even been shown towards the preference that projects transfer enforcement rights, if not outright ownership, to the FSF. Such skepticism is only healthy, even if one should probably give the FSF the benefit of the doubt as to the organisation’s intentions, in contrast to some arbitrary company who may change strategy from quarter to quarter.

The article also blames the GPLv3 or the AGPLv3 for the behaviour of “licence trolls”, but this is disingenuous. If Oracle offers a product with a choice of AGPLv3 or a special commercial licence, and if as a consequence those who want permissively licensed software for use in their proprietary products cannot get such software under permissive licences, it is the not the fault of any copyleft licence for merely existing: it is the fault (if this is even a matter of blame) of those releasing the software and framing the licence choices. Again, you do not need the FSF’s copyleft licences to exist to offer customers a choice of paying money or making compromises on how they offer their own work.

Of course, if people really cared about the state of projects that have switched licences, they would step up and provide a viable fork of the code starting from a point just before the licence change, but as can often be the case with permissively licensed software and a community of users dependent on a strong vendor, most people who claim to care are really looking for someone else to do the work so that they can continue to enjoy free gifts with as few obligations attached as possible. There are permissively licensed software projects with vibrant development communities, but remaining vibrant requires people to cooperate and for ownership to be distributed, if one really values community development and is not just looking for someone with money to provide free stuff. Addressing fundamental matters of project ownership and governance will get you much further than waving a magic wand and preferring permissive licensing, because you will be affected by those former things whichever way you decide to go with the latter.

Defining the New Normal

The article refers to BusyBox being “infamous” for having its licence enforced. That is a great way of framing reasonable behaviour in such a way as to suggest that people must be perverse for wanting to stand behind the terms under which, and mechanisms through which, they contributed their effort to a project. What is perverse is choosing a licence where such terms and mechanisms are defined and then waiving the obligation to defend it: it would not only be far easier to just choose another licence instead, but it would also be more honest to everyone wanting to use that project as well as everyone contributing to the project, too. The former group would have legal clarity and not the nods and winks of the project leadership; the latter group would know not to waste their time most likely helping people make proprietary software, if that is something they object to.

Indeed, when people contribute to a project it is on the basis of the social contract of the licence. When the licence is a copyleft licence, people will care whether others uphold their obligations. Some people say that they do not want the licence enforced on a project they contribute to. They have a right to express their own preference, but they cannot speak for everyone else who contributed under the explicit social contract that is the licence. Where even one person who has a contribution to a project sees their code used against the terms of the licence, that person has the right to demand that the situation be remedied. Denying individuals such rights because “they didn’t contribute very much” or “the majority don’t want to enforce the licence” (or even claiming that people are “holding the project to ransom”) sets a dangerous precedent and risks making the licence unenforceable for such projects as well as leaving the licence itself as a worthless document that has nothing to say about the culture or functioning of the project.

Some people wonder, “Why do you care what people do with your code? You have given it away.” Firstly, you have not given it away: you have shared it with people with the expectation that they will continue to share it. Copyleft licensing is all about the rights of the end-user, not about letting people do what they want with your code so that the end-user gets a binary dropped in their lap with no way of knowing what it is, what it does, or having any way of enjoying the rights given to the people who made that binary. As smartphone purchasers are discovering, binary-only shipments lead to unsustainable computing where devices are made obsolete not by fundamental changes in technology or physical wear and tear but by the unavailability of fixed, improved or maintained software that keep such devices viable.

Agreeing on the Licence

Disregarding the incompatibility between GPL versions, as discussed above, it appears more tempting to blame the GPL for situations of GPL-incompatibility than it does to blame other licences written after GPLv2 for causing such incompatibility in the first place. The article mentions that Sun deliberately made the CDDL incompatible with the GPL, presumably because they did not want people incorporating Solaris code into the GNU or Linux projects, thus maintaining that “competitive edge”. We all know how that worked out for Solaris: it can now be considered a legacy platform like AIX, HP-UX, and IRIX. Those who like to talk up GPL incompatibilities also like to overlook the fact that GPLv3 provides additional compatibility with other licences that had not been written in a GPLv2-compatible fashion.

The article mentions MoinMoin as being affected by a need for GPLv2 compatibility amongst its dependencies. In fact, MoinMoin is licensed under the GPLv2 or any later version, so those combining MoinMoin with various Apache Software Licence 2.0 licensed dependencies could distribute the result under GPLv3 or any later version. For those projects who stipulated GPLv2 only (against better advice) or even ones who just want the choice of upgrading the licence to GPLv3 or any later version, it is claimed that projects cannot change this largely because the provenance of the code is frequently uncertain, but the Mercurial project managed to track down contributors and relicensed to GPLv2 or any later version. It is a question of having the will and the discipline to achieve this. If you do not know who wrote your project’s code, not even permissive licences will protect you from claims of tainted code, should such claims ever arise.

The Fear Factor

Contrary to popular belief, all licences require someone to do (or not do) something. When people are not willing to go along with what a licence requires, we get into the territory of licence violation, unless people are taking the dishonest route of not upholding the licence and thus potentially betraying their project’s contributors. And when people fall foul of the licence, either inadvertently or through dishonesty, people want to know what might happen next.

It is therefore interesting that the article chooses to dignify claims of a GPL “death penalty”, given that such claims are largely made by people wanting to scare off others from Free Software, as was indeed shown when there may have been money and reputations to be made by engaging in punditry on the Google versus Oracle case. Not only have the actions taken to uphold the GPL been reasonable (contrary to insinuations about “infamous” reputations), but the licence revision process actually took such concerns seriously: version 3 of the GPL offers increased confidence in what the authors of the GPL family of licences actually meant. Obviously, by shunning GPLv3 and stipulating GPLv2 “only”, recipients of code licensed in such a way do not get the benefit of such increased clarity, but it is still likely that the fact that the licence authors sought to clarify such things may indeed weigh on interpretations of GPLv2, bringing some benefit in any case.

The Scapegoat

People like to invoke outrage by mentioning Richard Stallman’s name and some of the things he has said. Unfortunately for those people, Stallman has frequently been shown to be right. Interestingly, he has been right about issues that people probably did not consider to be of serious concern at the time they were raised, so that mentions of patents in GPLv2 not only proved to be far-sighted and useful in ensuring at least a workable level of protection for Free Software developers, but they also alerted Free Software communities, motivated people to resist patent expansionism, and predicted the unfortunate situation of endless, costly litigation that society currently suffers from. Such things are presumably an example of “specific usecases that were relevant at the time the license was written” according to the article, but if licence authors ignore such things, others may choose to consider them and claim some freedom in interpreting the licence on their behalf. In any case, should things like patents and buy-to-rent business models ever become extinct, a tidying up of the licence text for those who cannot bear to be reminded of them will surely do just fine.

Especially certain elements in the Python community seem to have a problem with Stallman and copyleft licensing, some blaming disagreements with, and the influence of, the FSF during the Python 1.6 licensing fiasco where the FSF rightly pointed out that references to venues (“Commonwealth of Virginia”) and having “click to accept” buttons in the licence text (with implicit acceptance through usage) would cause problems. Indeed, it is all very well lamenting that the interactions of licences with local law is not well understood, but one would think that where people have experience with such matters, others might choose to listen to such opinions.

It is a misrepresentation of Stallman’s position to claim that he wants strong copyright, as the article claims: in fact, he appears to want a strengthening of the right to share; copyleft is only a strategy to achieve this in a world with increasingly stronger copyright legislation. His objections to the Swedish Pirate Party’s proposals on five year copyright terms merely follow previous criticisms of additional instruments – in this case end-user licence agreements (EULAs) – that allow some parties to circumvent copyright restrictions on other people’s work whilst imposing additional restrictions – in previous cases, software patents – on their own and others’ works. Finding out what Stallman’s real position might require a bit of work, but it isn’t secret and in fact even advocates significantly reduced copyright terms, just as the Pirate Party advocates. If one is going to describe someone else’s position on a topic, it is best not to claim anything at all if the alternative is to just make stuff up instead.

The article ramps up the ridicule by claiming that the FSF itself claims that “cloud computing is the devil, cell phones are exclusively tracking devices”. Ridiculing those with legitimate concerns about technology and how it is used builds a culture of passive acceptance that plays into the hands of those who will exploit public apathy to do precisely what people labelled as “paranoid” or “radical” had warned everyone about. Recent events have demonstrated the dangers of such fashionable and conformist ridicule and the complacency it builds in society.

All Things to All People

Just as Richard Stallman cannot seemingly be all things to all people – being right about things like the threat of patents, for example, is just so annoying to those who cannot bring themselves to take such matters seriously – so the FSF and the GPL cannot be all things to all people, either. But then they are not claiming to be! The FSF recognises other software licences as Free Software and even recommends non-copyleft licences from time to time.

For those of us who prefer to uphold the rights of the end-user, so that they may exercise control over their computing environment and computing experience, the existence of the GPL and related copyleft licences is invaluable. Such licences may be complicated, but such complications are a product of a world in which various instruments are available to undermine the rights of the end-user. And defining a predictable framework through which such licences may be applied is one of the responsibilities that the FSF has taken upon itself to carry out.

Indeed, few other organisations have been able to offer what the FSF and closely associated organisations have provided over the years in terms of licensing and related expertise. Maybe such lists of complaints about the FSF or the GPL are a continuation of the well-established advertising tradition of attacking a well-known organisation to make another organisation or its products look good. The problem is that nobody really looks good as a result: people believe the bizarre insinuations of political propaganda and are less inclined to check what the facts say on whichever matter is being discussed.

People are more likely to make bad choices when they have only been able to make uninformed choices. The article seeks to inform people about some of the practicalities of licence compatibility but overemphasises sources with an axe to grind – and, in some cases, sources with rather dubious motivations – that are only likely to drive people away from reliable sources of information, filling the knowledge gap of the reader with innuendo from third parties instead. If the intention is to promote permissive licensing or merely licences that are shorter than the admittedly lengthy GPL, we would all be better served if those wishing to do so would stick to factual representations of both licensing practice and licence author intent.

And as for choosing a licence, some people have considered such matters before. Seeking to truly understand licences means having all the facts on the table, not just the ones one would like others to consider combined with random conjecture on the subject. I hope I have, at least, brought some of the missing facts to the table.

Things were certainly different when I started my university degree many years ago. For a start, institutions of higher education provided for many people their first encounter with the Internet, although for those of us in the United Kingdom, the very first encounter with wide area networking may well have involved X.25 and PAD terminals, and instead of getting a “proper” Internet e-mail address, it may have been the case that an address only worked within a particular institution. (My fellow students quickly became aware of an Internet mail gateway in our department and the possibility, at least, of sending Internet mail, however.)

These days, students beginning their university studies have probably already been using the Internet for most of their lives, will have had at least one e-mail address as well as accounts for other online services, may be publishing blog entries and Web pages, and maybe even have their own Web applications accessible on the Internet. For them, arriving at a university is not about learning about new kinds of services and new ways of communicating and collaborating: it is about incorporating yet more ways of working online into their existing habits and practices.

So what should students expect from their university in terms of services? Well, if things have not changed that much over the years, they probably need a means of communicating with the administration, their lecturers and their fellow students, along with some kind of environment to help them do their work and provide things like file storage space and the tools they won’t necessarily be able to provide themselves. Of course, students are more likely to have their own laptop computer (or even a tablet) these days, and it is entirely possible that they could use that for all their work, subject to the availability of tools for their particular course, and since they will already be communicating with others on the Internet, communicating with people in the university is not really anything different from what they are already doing. But still, there are good reasons for providing infrastructure for students to use, even if those students do end up working from their laptops, uploading assignments when they are done, and forwarding their mail to their personal accounts.

The Student Starter Kit

First and foremost, a university e-mail account is something that can act as an official communications channel. One could certainly get away with using some other account, perhaps provided by a free online service like Google or Yahoo, but if something went wrong somewhere – the account gets taken over by an imposter and then gets shut down, for example – that channel of communication gets closed and important information may be lost.

The matter of how students carry out their work is also important. In computer science, where my experiences come from and where computer usage is central to the course, it is necessary to have access to suitable tools to undertake assignments. As everyone who has used technology knows, the matter of “setting stuff up” is one that often demands plenty of time and distracts from the task at hand, and when running a course that requires the participants to install programs before they can make use of the learning materials, considerable amounts of time are wasted on installing programs and troubleshooting. Thus, providing a ready-to-use environment allows students to concentrate on their work and to more easily relate to the learning materials.

There is the matter of the nature of teaching environments and the tools chosen. Teaching environments also allow students to become familiar with desirable practices when finding solutions to the problems in their assignments. In software engineering, for example, the use of version control software encourages a more controlled and rational way of refining a program under development. Although the process itself may not be recognised and rewarded when an assignment is assessed, it allows students to see how things should be done and to take full advantage of the opportunity to learn provided by the institution.

Naturally, it should be regarded as highly undesirable to train students to use specific solutions provided by selected vendors, as opposed to educating them to become familiar with the overarching concepts and techniques of a particular field. Schools and universities are not vocational training institutions, and they should seek to provide their students with transferable skills and knowledge that can be applied generally, instead of taking the easy way out and training those students to perform repetitive tasks in “popular” software that gives them no awareness of why they are doing those things or any indication that the rest of the world might be doing them in other ways.

Minority Rule

So even if students arrive at their place of learning somewhat equipped to learn, communicate and do their work, there may still be a need for a structured environment to be provided for them. At that place of learning they will join those employed there who already have a structured environment in place to be able to do their work, whether that is research, teaching or administration. It makes a certain amount of sense for the students to join those other groups in the infrastructure already provided. Indeed, considering the numbers of people involved, with the students outnumbering all other groups put together by a substantial margin, one might think that the needs of the students would come first. Sadly, things do not always work that way.

First of all, students are only ever “passing through”. While some university employees may be retained for similar lengths of time – especially researchers and others on temporary contracts (a known problem with social and ethical dimensions of its own) – others may end up spending most of their working life there. As a result, the infrastructure is likely to favour such people over time as their demands are made known year after year, with any discomfort demanding to be remedied by a comfortable environment that helps those people do their work. Not that there is anything wrong with providing employees with a decent working environment: employers should probably do even more to uphold their commitments in this regard.

But when the demands and priorities of a relatively small group of people take precedence over what the majority – the students – need, one can argue that such demands and priorities have begun to subvert the very nature of the institution. Imposing restrictions on students or withholding facilities from them just to make life easier for the institution itself is surely a classic example of “the tail wagging the dog”. After all, without students and teaching an institution of higher education can no longer be considered a university.

Outsourcing Responsibility

With students showing up every year and with an obligation to provide services to them, one might imagine that an institution might take the opportunity to innovate and to evaluate ways in which it might stand out amongst the competition, truly looking after the group of people that in today’s increasingly commercialised education sector are considered the institution’s “customers”. When I was studying for my degree, the university’s mathematics department was in the process of developing computer-aided learning software for mathematics, which was regarded as a useful way of helping students improve their understanding of the course material through the application of knowledge recently acquired. However, such attempts to improve teaching quality are only likely to get substantial funding either through teaching-related programmes or by claiming some research benefit in the field of teaching or in another field. Consequently, developing software to benefit teaching is likely to be an activity located near the back of the queue for attention in a university, especially amongst universities whose leadership regard research commercialisation as their top priority.

So it becomes tempting for universities to minimise costs around student provision. Students are not meant to be sophisticated users whose demands must be met, mostly because they are not supposed to be around for long enough to be comfortable and for those providing services to eventually have to give in to student demands. Moreover, university employees are protected by workplace regulation (in theory, at least) whereas students are most likely protected by much weaker regulation. To take one example, whereas a university employee could probably demand appropriate accessibility measures for a disability they may have, students may have to work harder to get their disabilities recognised and their resulting needs addressed.

The Costs of Doing Business

So, with universities looking to minimise costs and to maximise revenue-generating opportunities, doing things like running infrastructure in a way that looks after the needs of the student and researcher populations seems like a distraction. University executives look to their counterparts in industry and see that outsourcing might offer a solution: why bother having people on the payroll when there are cloud computing services run by friendly corporations?

Let us take the most widely-deployed service, e-mail, as an example. Certainly, many students and employees might not be too concerned with logging into a cloud-based service to access their university e-mail – many may already be using such services for personal e-mail, and many may already be forwarding their university e-mail to their personal account – and although they might be irritated by the need to use one service when they have perhaps selected another for their personal use, a quick login, some adjustments to the mail forwarding settings, and logging out (never to return) might be the simple solution. The result: the institution supposedly saves money by making external organisations responsible for essential services, and the users get on with using those services in the ways they find most bearable, even if they barely take advantage of the specially designated services at all.

However, a few things may complicate this simplified scenario somewhat: reliability, interoperability, lock-in, and privacy. Reliability is perhaps the easiest to consider: if “Office 365” suddenly becomes “Office 360” for a few days, cloud-based services cannot be considered suitable for essential services, and if the “remedy” is to purchase infrastructure to bail out the cloud service provider, one has to question the decision to choose such an external provider in the first place. As for interoperability, if a user prefers Gmail, say, over some other hosted e-mail solution where that other solution doesn’t exchange messages properly with Gmail, that user will be in the awkward position of having to choose between a compromised experience in their preferred solution or an experience they regard as inconvenient or inferior. With services more exotic and less standardised than e-mail, the risk is that a user’s preferred services or software will not work with the chosen cloud-based service at all. Either way, users are forced to adopt services they dislike or otherwise have objections to using.

Product Placement

With users firmly parked on a specific vendor’s cloud-based platform, the temptation will naturally grow amongst some members of an organisation to “take advantage” of the other services on that platform whether they support interoperability or not. Users will be forced to log into the solution they would rather avoid or ignore in order to participate in processes and activities initiated by those who have actively embraced that platform. This is rather similar to the experience of getting a Microsoft Office document in an e-mail by someone requesting that one reads it and provides feedback, even though recipients may not have access to a compatible version of Microsoft Office or even run the software in question at all. In an organisational context, legitimate complaints about poor workflow, inappropriate tool use, and even plain unavailability of software (imagine being a software developer using a GNU/Linux or Unix workstation!) are often “steamrollered” by management and the worker is told to “deal with it”. Suddenly, everyone has to adapt to the tool choices of a few managerial product evangelists instead of participating in a standards-based infrastructure where the most important thing is just getting the work done.

We should not be surprised that vendors might be very enthusiastic to see organisations adopt both their traditional products as well as cloud-based platforms. Not only are the users exposed to such vendors’ products, often to the exclusion of any competing or alternative products, but by having to sign up for those vendors’ services, organisations are effectively recruiting customers for the vendor. Indeed, given the potential commercial benefits of recruiting new customers – in the academic context, that would be a new group of students every year – it is conceivable that vendors might offer discounts on products, waive the purchase prices, or even pay organisations in the form of services rendered to get access to new customers and increased revenue. Down the line, this pays off for the vendor: its organisational customers are truly locked in, cannot easily switch to other solutions, and end up paying through the nose to help the vendor recruit new customers.

How Much Are You Worth?

All of the above concerns are valid, but the most important one of all for many people is that of privacy. Now, most people have a complicated relationship with privacy: most people probably believe that they deserve to have a form of privacy, but at the same time many people are quite happy to be indiscreet if they think no-one else is watching or no-one else cares about what they are doing.

So, they are quite happy to share information about themselves (or content that they have created or acquired themselves) with a helpful provider of services on the Internet. After all, if that provider offers services that permit convenient ways of doing things that might be awkward to do otherwise, and especially if no money is changing hands, surely the meagre “payment” of tedious documents, mundane exchanges of messages, unremarkable images and videos, and so on, all with no apparently significant value or benefit to the provider, gets the customer a product worth far more in return. Everybody wins!

Well, there is always the matter of the small print – the terms of use, frequently verbose and convoluted – together with how other people perceive the status of all that content you’ve been sharing. As your content reaches others, some might perceive it as fair game for use in places you never could have imagined. Naturally, unintended use of images is no new phenomenon: I once saw one of my photographs being used in a school project (how I knew about it was that the student concerned had credited me, although they really should have asked me first, and an Internet search brought up their page in the results), whereas another photograph of mine was featured in a museum exhibition (where I was asked for permission, although the photograph was a lot less remarkable than the one found by the student).

One might argue that public sharing of images and other content is not really the same as sharing stuff over a closed channel like a social network, and so the possibility of unintended or undesirable use is diminished. But take another look at the terms of use: unlike just uploading a file to a Web site that you control, where nobody deems to claim any rights to what you are sharing, social networking and content sharing service providers frequently try and claim rights to your work.

Privacy on Parade

When everyone is seeking to use your content for their own goals, whether to promote their own businesses or to provide nice imagery to make their political advocacy more palatable, or indeed to support any number of potential and dubious endeavours that you may not agree with, it is understandable that you might want to be a bit more cautious about who wants a piece of your content and what they intend to do with it once they have it. Consequently, you might decide that you only want to deal with the companies and services you feel you can trust.

What does this have to do with students and the cloud? Well, unlike the services that a student may already be using when they arrive at university to start their studies, any services chosen by the institution will be imposed on the student, and they will be required to accept the terms of use of such services regardless of whether they agree with them or not. Now, although it might be said that the academic work of a student might be somewhat mundane and much the same as any other student’s work (even if this need not be the case), and that the nature of such work is firmly bound to the institution and it is therefore the institution’s place to decide how such work is used (even though this could be disputed), other aspects of that student’s activities and communications might be regarded as beyond the interests of the institution: who the student communicates with, what personal views they may express in such communications, what academic or professional views they may have.

One might claim that such trivia is of no interest to anyone, and certainly not to commercial entities who just want to sell advertising or gather demographic data or whatever supposedly harmless thing they might do with the mere usage of their services just to keep paying the bills and covering their overheads, but one should still be wary that information stored on some remote server in some distant country might somehow make its way to someone who might take a closer and not so benign interest in it. Indeed, the matter of the data residing in some environment beyond their control is enough for adopters of cloud computing to offer specially sanctioned exemptions and opt-outs. Maybe it is not so desirable that some foreign student writing about some controversial topic in their own country has their work floating around in the cloud, or as far as a university’s legal department is concerned, maybe it does not look so good if such information manages to wander into the wrong hands only for someone to ask the awkward question of why the information left the university’s own systems in the first place.

Excuses, Excuses

Cloud-based service providers are likely to respond to fears articulated about privacy violations and intrusions by insisting that such fears are disproportionate: that no-one is really looking at the data stored on their servers, that the data is encrypted somewhere/somehow, that if anything does look at the data it is merely an “algorithm” and not a person. Often these protests of innocence contradict each other, so that at any point in time there is at least one lie being told. But what if it is “only an algorithm” looking at your data? The algorithm will not be keeping its conclusions to itself.

How would you know what is really being done with your data? Not only is the code being run on a remote server, but with the most popular cloud services the important code is completely proprietary – service providers may claim to support Free Software and even contribute to it, but they do so only for part of their infrastructure – and you have no way of verifying any of their claims. Disturbingly, some companies want to enforce such practices within your home, too, so that when Microsoft claims that the camera on their most recent games console has to be active all the time but only for supposedly benign reasons and that the data is only studied by algorithms, the company will deny you the right to verify this for yourself. For all you know the image data could be uploaded somewhere, maybe only on command, and you would not only be none the wiser but you would also be denied the right to become wiser about the matter. And even if the images were not shared with mysterious servers, there are still unpleasant applications of “the algorithm”: it could, for example, count people’s faces and decide whether you were breaking the licensing conditions on a movie or other content by holding a “performance” that goes against the arbitrary licensing that accompanies a particular work.

Back in the world of the cloud, companies like Microsoft typically respond to criticism by pointing the finger at others. Through “shell” or “front” organisations the alleged faults of Microsoft’s competitors are brought to the attention of regulators, and in the case of the notorious FairSearch organisation, to take one example, the accusing finger is pointed at Google. We should all try and be aware of the misdeeds of corporations, that unscrupulous behaviour may have occurred, and we should insist that such behaviour be punished. But we should also not be distracted by the tactics of corporations that insist that all the problems reside elsewhere. “But Google!” is not a reason to stop scrutinising the record of a company shouting it out loud, nor is it an excuse for us to disregard any dubious behaviour previously committed by the company shouting it the loudest. (It is absurd that a company with a long history of being subject to scrutiny for anticompetitive practices – a recognised monopoly – should shout claims of monopoly so loudly, and it is even more absurd for anyone to take such claims at face value.)

We should be concerned about Google’s treatment of user privacy, but that should not diminish our concern about Microsoft’s treatment of user privacy. As it turns out, both companies – and several others – have some work to do to regain our trust.

I Do Not Agree

So why should students specifically be worried about all this? Does this not also apply to other groups, like anyone who is made to use software and services in their job? Certainly, this does affect more than just students, but students will probably be the first in line to be forced to accept these solutions or just not be able to take the courses they want at the institutions they want to attend. Even in countries with relatively large higher education sectors like the United Kingdom, it can be the case that certain courses are only available at a narrow selection of institutions, and if you consider a small country like Norway, it is entirely possible that some courses are only available at one institution. For students forced to choose a particular institution and to accept that institution’s own technological choices, the issue of their online privacy becomes urgent because such institutional changes are happening right now and the only way to work around them is to plan ahead and to make it immediately clear to those institutions that the abandonment of the online privacy rights (and other rights) of their “customers” is not acceptable.

Of course, none of this is much comfort to those working in private businesses whose technological choices are imposed on employees as a consequence of taking a job at such organisations. The only silver lining to this particular cloud is that the job market may offer more choices to job seekers – that they can try and identify responsible employers and that such alternatives exist in the first place – compared to students whose educational path may be constrained by course availability. Nevertheless, there exists a risk that both students and others may be confronted with having to accept undesirable conditions just to be able to get a study place or a job. It may be too disruptive to their lives not to “just live with it” and accept choices made on their behalf without their input.

But this brings up an interesting dilemma. Should a person be bound by terms of use and contracts where that person has been effectively coerced into accepting them? If their boss tells them that they have to have a Microsoft or Google account to view and edit some online document, and when they go to sign up they are presented with the usual terms that nobody can reasonably be expected to read, and given that they cannot reasonably refuse because their boss would then be annoyed at that person’s attitude (and may even be angry and threaten them with disciplinary action), can we not consider that when this person clicks on the “I agree” button it is only their employer who really agrees, and that this person not only does not necessarily agree but cannot be expected to agree, either?

Excuses from the Other Side

Recent events have probably made people wary of where their data goes and what happens with it once it has left their own computers, but merely being concerned and actually doing something are two different things. Individuals may feel helpless: all their friends use social networks and big name webmail services; withdrawing from the former means potential isolation, and withdrawing from the latter involves researching alternatives and trying to decide whether those alternatives can be trusted more than one of the big names. Certainly, those of us who develop and promote Free Software should be trying to provide trustworthy alternatives and giving less technologically-aware people the lifeline that they need to escape potentially exploitative services and yet maintain an active, social online experience. Not everyone is willing to sacrifice their privacy for shiny new online toys that supposedly need to rifle through your personal data to provide that shiny new online experience, nor is everyone likely to accept such constraints on their privacy when made aware of them. We should not merely assume that people do not care, would just accept such things, and thus do not need to be bothered with knowledge about such matters, either.

As we have already seen, individuals can make their own choices, but people in organisations are frequently denied such choices. This is where the excuses become more irrational and yet bring with them much more serious consequences. When an organisation chooses a solution from a vendor known to share sensitive information with other, potentially less friendly, parties, they might try and explain such reports away by claiming that such behaviour would never affect “business applications”, that such applications are completely separate from “consumer applications” (where surveillance is apparently acceptable, but no-one would openly admit to thinking this, of course), and that such a vendor would never jeopardise their relationship with customers because “as a customer we are important to them”.

But how do you know any of this? You cannot see what their online services are actually doing, who can access them secretly, whether people – unfriendly regimes, opportunistic law enforcement agencies, dishonest employees, privileged commercial partners of the vendor itself – actually do access your data, because how all that stuff is managed is secret and off-limits. You cannot easily inspect any software that such a vendor provides to you because it will be an inscrutable binary file, maybe even partially encrypted, and every attempt will have been made to forbid you from inspecting it both through licence agreements and legislation made at the request of exactly these vendors.

And how do you know that they value your business, that you are important to them? Is any business going to admit that no, they do not value your business, that you are just another trophy, that they share your private data with other entities? With documentation to the contrary exposing the lies necessary to preserve their reputation, how do you know you can believe anything they tell you at all?

The Betrayal

It is all very well for an individual to make poor decisions based on wilful ignorance, but when an organisation makes poor decisions and then imposes them on other people for those people to suffer, this ignorance becomes negligence at the very least. In a university or other higher education institution, apparently at the bottom of the list of people to consult about anything, the bottoms on seats, the places to be filled, are the students: the first in line for whatever experiment or strategic misadventure is coming down the pipe of organisational reform, rationalisation, harmonisation, and all the other buzzwords that look great on the big screen in the boardroom.

Let us be clear: there is nothing inherently wrong with storing content on some network-accessible service, provided that the conditions under which that content is stored and accessed uphold the levels of control and privacy that we as the owners of that data demand, and where those we have elected to provide such services to us deserve our trust precisely by behaving in a trustworthy fashion. We may indeed select a service provider or vendor who respects us, rather than one whose terms and conditions are unfathomable and who treats its users and their data as commodities to be traded for profits and favours. It is this latter class of service providers and vendors – ones who have virtually pioneered the corrupted notion of the consumer cloud, with every user action recorded, tracked and analysed – that this article focuses on.

Students should very much beware of being sent into the cloud: they have little influence and make for a convenient group of experimental subjects, with few powerful allies to defend their rights. That does not mean that everyone else can feel secure, shielded by employee representatives, trade unions, industry organisations, politicians, and so on. Every group pushed into the cloud builds the pressure on every subsequent group until your own particular group is pressured, belittled and finally coerced into resignation. Maybe you might want to look into what your organisation is planning to do, to insist on privacy-preserving infrastructure, and to advocate Free Software as the only effective way of building that infrastructure.

And beware of the excuses – for the favourite vendor’s past behaviour, for the convenience of the cloud, for the improbability that any undesirable stuff could happen – because after the excuses, the belittlement of the opposition, comes the betrayal: the betrayal of sustainable and decentralised solutions, the betrayal of the development of local and institutional expertise, the betrayal of choice and real competition, and the betrayal of your right to privacy online.

I was interested to read about the new Norwegian electronic voting administration system, EVA, and a degree of controversy about whether the system can scale up to handle the number of votes expected in Oslo during the upcoming parliamentary elections. What I find more controversial is the claim that the system has been made available as “open source” software. In fact, a quick look at the licence is enough to confirm that the source code is really only available as “shared source”: something which people may be able to download and consult, but which withholds the freedoms that should be associated with open source software (or Free Software, as we should really call it).

So, here is why the usage of the term “open source” is dishonest in this particular case:

• The rights offered to you (as opposed to the Norwegian authorities) cover only “testing, reviewing or evaluating the code”. (The authorities have geographical and usage restrictions placed on them.)
• The licence restricts use to “non-commercial purposes”.
• Anything else you might want to do requires you to get “written approval” from the vendors of the different parts of the system in question.
• The software is encumbered by patents, but there is no patent grant.

Lost in Translation

In fairness, the page covering the source code does say the following about the use of the term “open source” which I have translated from the Norwegian:

When we use the term “open source”, we do not mean that the entire solution can be regarded as “free software”, meaning that you can download the software, inspect it, change it, and use it however you like. Anyone can download and inspect the source code, but it may only be used to carry out Norwegian elections. The solution should be available for research, however, and you are allowed to develop it further for such academic purposes.

Why translate from Norwegian when the English is underneath in the same page? Here’s why:

When we are using the term “open source code”, we do not say that the source code as a whole is what’s known as “open source”, that is code that can be freely downloaded, examined, changed and used. Anyone can download our source code, but it is only permittable to use it for elections in Norway. However, research on the solution is allowed and you are hence allowed to develop the system for an academic purpose.

In other words, while there are people involved who are clearly aware of what Free Software is, they apparently reserve the right to misuse the term “open source” to mean something other than what it was intended to mean. By consulting the Norwegian text first, I even give them the benefit of the doubt, but the contradiction of saying that something both is and is not something else should have awakened a degree of guilt that this could be regarded as deception.

Open Season

Now, one may argue that the Open Source Initiative should have been more aggressive in upholding its own brand and making sure that “open source” really does act as a guarantee of openness, but the “open” prefix is perhaps one of the most abused terms in the field of computing, and thus one might conclude that the OSI were fighting a losing battle from the outset. Of course, people might claim that the term “free software” is ambiguous or vague, which is why I prefer to write it as Free Software: the use of capital letters should at least get English readers unfamiliar with the term to wonder whether there is more involved than the mere juxtaposition of two widely-used words.

In Norwegian, “fri programvare” communicates something closer to what is meant by Free Software: the “fri” does not generally mean “for free” or “gratis”, but rather communicates a notion of freedom. I imagine that those who translated the text quoted above need to improve their terminology dictionary. Nevertheless, this does not excuse anyone who takes advantage of the potential ambiguity in the common sense perception of the term to promote something that has only superficial similarities to Free Software.

The Good, the Bad, and the Evry

I suppose we should welcome increased transparency in such important systems, and we should encourage more of the same in other areas. Nevertheless, with a substantial amount of activity in the field of electronic voting, particularly in the academic realm and in response to high-profile scandals (with some researchers even apparently experiencing persecution for their work), one has to wonder why the Norwegian government is not willing to work on genuinely open, Free Software electronic voting systems instead of partnering with commercial interests who, by advertising patent coverage, potentially threaten research in this area and thus obstruct societal progress, accountability and democracy.

One might suggest that the involvement of EDB ErgoGroup, now known as Evry, provides some answers to questions about how and where taxpayer money gets spent. With substantial state involvement in the company, either through the state-owned postal monopoly or the partly-state-owned incumbent telephone operator, one cannot help thinking that this is yet another attempt to funnel money to the usual beneficiaries of public contracts and to pick winners in an international market for electronic voting systems. Maybe, with voting problems, banking system problems and the resulting customer dissatisfaction, public departments and ministries think that this vendor needs all the help it can get, despite being appointed to a dominant position in the nation’s infrastructure and technology industry to the point of it all being rather anti-competitive. When the financial sector starts talking of monopolies, maybe the responsible adults need to intervene to bring a degree of proper functioning to the marketplace.

But regardless of who became involved and their own rewards for doing so, the Norwegian ministry responsible for this deception should be ashamed of itself! How about genuinely participating in and advancing the research and development of voting systems that everyone on the planet can freely use instead of issuing dishonest press releases and patronising accounts of how Norway doesn’t really need to learn from anyone? Because, by releasing patent-encumbered “shared source” and calling it “open source”, some decision makers and their communications staff clearly need lessons in at least one area: telling the truth.

An Aside

I also find it distasteful that the documentation hosted on the government’s electoral site has adverts for proprietary software embedded in it, but I doubt that those working in the Microsoft monoculture even notice their presence. These people may be using taxpayer money to go shopping for proprietary products, but I do not see why they should then be advertising those products to us as well using our money.