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Archive for the ‘OSS’ Category

Call for Papers for CoSin 2010

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

On July 9th to 11th, the Chaos Singularity (CoSin) is taking place for the 5th time.

The Chaos Singularity is an event with presentations, workshops, discussions and information about technology, internet politics and geek culture. It is organized annually by the Chaos Computer Club Zurich (CCCZH) and Chaostreff Basel.

You’re invited to submit talks and workshops for CoSin until June 30 through CCC’s Pentabarf system.

As always, the CoSin is taking place at the Kulturzentrum Bremgarten (KuZeB), Zürcher-/Zugerstrasse, 5620 Bremgarten, Switzerland. Everybody with an interest in technology is invited to join. For more information please refer to the CoSin Call for Papers.

Preliminary injunction against Microsoft contract

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

The contract granted by the Federal Department of Construction and Logistics to Microsoft has been put on hold by the Federal Administration Court due to a pending case. The injunction explicitly excludes «all licenses required for vital operation of the federal infrastructure».

The reason for the injunction is the court case of other potential competitors against the department which had granted the contract to Microsoft without a tender, violating the federal law on acquisition.

See also:

Berner Zeitung on a slander campaign against the Canton Solothurn

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

The Berner Zeitung currently appears to be on some sort of crusade against the Office for Informatics and Organization (AIO) of the Canton Solothurn. The subject is the Linux strategy of said canton.

(Please note that not all comments in the referenced articles are referenced below since there are so many of them, and most of them already falsify themselves.)

Background

Back in 2001, the Canton Solothurn decided to migrate their entire IT infrastructure to a Linux desktop and Linux servers. Nowadays, most of the migration is complete and the old Windows NT terminal server farm exist in downsized form for legacy reasons.

Some applications still aren’t migrated, as evidently specialized applicatons aren’t always available initially for Linux.

A crusade against the strategy

The Berner Zeitung, however, is attempting to draw an entirely different picture of the migration. They recently published articles like «Kritik an der Pinguin-Strategie», «Wieder Ärger mit dem Pinguin» and others, all bashing the Linux strategy of the canton. Most of the articles mention complaints of users of the platform that they cannot do their work reasonably with the new platform.

One problem mentioned in such an article was, for example, that the office of justice received a PowerPoint presentation for some event and had to lend a laptop from the cantonal police to display it. This story is quite evidently nonsense, since the document could easily have been opened with OpenOffice. The other stories aren’t any better though.

Anonymous astroturfing site

The articles frequently cite a web site named Linux Windows, whose URL is not being linked to here in order to not affect the page rank. It is hosted at npage dot ch, which should help people to find it for reference.

This site is of really questionable quality. It is hosted with a hoster who refuses to provide any information about the people hosting sites using their services, and the site does not give any hint about the identity of the operator, who describes himself as a government employee.

The welcome site states explicitly that everybody who has something to contribute to the web site is allowed to publish to the guest book. However, all of the more insightful comments submitted in favor of the strategy, correcting statements about prior postings et cetera are never passed while some of the more superficial ones are permitted to simulate openness.

The entries posted to this site are then alltogether terrible. The issues mentioned are mostly minor temporary issues or general comments deprived of any basis. One comment claims for example that Open Source per se was bad because hackers have built backdoors into it, an argument which can be falsified easily by browsing through the FSF web sites or typing the claim into Google. Also, it neglects the fact that initially, all software was free software.

Instead, the owner of this site could have provided something constructive like a bug tracker, where fixed issues could be marked as such. This would have allowed constructive cooperation between the cantonal employees and the AIO.

Official «media management» by UDC

The conservative party UDC also published an article on the news site SOaktuell.ch mentioning the debate and taking sides heavily against the Linux strategy. The article states that the canton is facing expenses of several hundred million swiss franks ­ — mentioning farther down that these expenses occur in the event that the strategy is changed and new Windows and Office licenses would have to be purchased. Under these circumstances it appears to be a good argument for keeping the strategy.

Another argument mentioned is that «the canton is sending out documents that its citizens cannot read». Were this the case, then at least there is a way out for the citizens which is free of charge: the installation of the OpenOffice suite, which can be done in only a couple of clicks.

However, the comment completely ignores that starting from Office 2007, Microsoft Office users have been sending out documents in the new OOXML .docx format by default. Reading these files requires a current version of MS Office, which has to be purchased. But even without this, reading newer Office files with older Office versions has always been a problem.

Official response

Mr. Bader from the AIO has been interviewed by various newspapers about the raised issues; his comment was that no such deterring problems are currently known to them. Most of the cantonal employees I’ve been in contact with also confirm that there are only occasional issues with the system which are usually fixed quickly. (This would probably also be the case with a Windows environment.)

It seems not to be a coincidence that these articles all appeared after the appeal to the decision of the Federal Office of Construction to grant a CHF 42 Mio contract to Microsoft without a tender, because the Canton Solothurn has been mentioned in the reasoning of the appeal as an example that alternatives to the Microsoft solutions exist. It is not known who is directing this slander campaign against the canton, but either way this person is mostly raising the ridicule of the community, rather than having a real effect.

Other renowned newspapers are already reporting that the Canton Aargau is considering to follow the good example of Solothurn and to migrate their IT to open source software. This makes it pretty clear that Open Source is indeed a viable alternative.

As a closing note, it should also be mentioned that our company is working with an exclusive Open Source environment and has been doing so since its early days in 2000. We have yet to encounter serious difficulties.

Links

New «OSS Jam» with a lecture from my part

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

On May 7th of 2009, a new OSS Jam is going to take place at the Google Zurich office. While this seems like nothing unusual as OSS Jams tend to take place about once per month, it is slightly special for me, as I’m going to give a small lecture there.

Monitoring Systems lecture

The topic is going to be monitoring systems, as the most popular monitoring system Nagios recently added a PHP dependency for its web interface. Since a monitoring server is supposed to be a hardened setup as it needs to work reliably rather than sending out SPAM into the wide world, this means that for everyone at least half a bit into security related matters, Nagios just turned into a no-go.

The Hobbit Monitor provides a nice alternative to Nagios, but while its notification system is way more configurable, its plain text checks are easy to define and while it performs a great lot better than Nagios, unfortunately it lacks some features which might be necessary for larger setups. Also, better performance doesn’t mean good performance — with a few thousand hosts, the Hobbit Monitor also puts a rather large load on the monitoring server.

Finally, as always, the conclusion tends towards a Kästnerian «Do it yourself». Thus, I’m introducing a new monitoring system I’m going to develop in the closer future, entirely in C with a nice templating system, and decent performance.

Binary patches

As I’m currently implementing a binary patch management system for the NetBSD Foundation, I’m also going to talk a bit about requirements of binary patch systems and how my system meets them. Since I only have a working prototype with basic functionality so far, people are also welcome to join this effort.

OSS Jam Reloaded in Zurich

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

After the success of the first OSS jam, Google invites people to a second round in its new Zurich office on February 28th, 2008. Once again, participants are invited to present their projects in a short 5-minute time frame, trying to find future project contributers.

This time, a topic has been set for submissions: «The desktop in the past, present and future». People who are seeking for participation in their desktop projects are invited to present them at the jam.

OSS Jam and Google

The question is of course how this fits into Google’s search engine business. To this question, there are two different, unrelated answers.

Firstly, Google has extended its scope beyond search engines quite some time ago. Like Yahoo delivered widgets for web applications, Google also delivered the Google Widget Toolkit for Java web applications and similar products, and is expanding its scope to Open Source and the community.

Secondly, Google’s OSS Jam provides the Open Source community with ways to find new participants for their projects, and as such, there is a philosophical relation to the search business.

Either way, it is going to be interesting to watch the future development of this tradition.

For more information please visit Google’s Open Source Jam information site

Google invites to “OSS Jam” lightning talks in Zurich

Friday, November 16th, 2007

The web service platform provider Google invited to an Open Source Software lecture event called Open Source Jam in Zurich. On that event, participants are invited to present their projects in 5 minutes, trying to find other programmers who are willing to participate in it.

The event is also supposed to feature a “hack center” where participants can code together and socialize. And as the main feature, pizza and beer are provided. The date is not fixed yet though, and participants are invited to subscribe to a common organization mailing list.

The nomenclature debate

It is also to be noted that the event has been announced as an Open Source Event, which has already caused Free Software propagators to abstain from participation in an event. It is clear that the event is unluckily announced already, and it is going to be interesting how it is going to be accepted in the Free Software camp.

Invitation to the 2nd Swiss FOSS compatible lobbyists meeting in Berne

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

I would like to invite all people who have an interest in political activism for the benefits of Open Source and Free Software as well as aiming at a free and open information infrastructure (open standards, etc.) to the second Swiss FOSS compatible lobbyist meeting in Berne, in the conference room in the railway station. The meeting will take place on

Monday, November 5th, 2007 18:00 (that is 6pm)

in the conference rooms inside the railway station of Bern, Switzerland.

The place is easily reached by taking the train to Berne and leaving at the central station. If you are planning to go there by car, there is a parking lot (surveilled) right above the railway station (Universität Langgasse).

If you have comments or don’t know how to find this place, call me under TL1733-RIPE or +41.793790549.

Agenda

  1. Salutation
  2. Review of the situation since the first meeting
  3. Analysis of failed projects
  4. Introduction of working groups and creating member lists (see next headline)
  5. Working group agenda discussion
  6. Outlook on likely items for the year 2008
  7. Maybe drop by at the Altes Tramdepot or something similar to have a drink

Proposed woking groups

The following is a list of working groups which are deemed helpful for the organization of the upcoming campaigns:

Currently debated items

  • Office OpenXML standardization
  • Copyright Revision (cleanup work)
  • Federal Surveillance (trojan etc.)

Generic Working Groups

  • Open Standards
  • Amendments
  • Lobbying
  • Intelligence
  • Press
  • IT (Yes, there are lots of things to do in this area too)