Moved by Freedom – Powered by Standards

I wish my vacations could have ended better. Don’t get me wrong, we spent a wonderful time for two weeks and are safely back home (and at the office). It’s the recent news that are really disappointing to me on so many levels.

• The Hungarian President ruling over France -I guess it is now a correct qualification of Nicolas Sarkozy based on the distinctions between French citizens he would like to make- has managed to stir quite a bit of outrage these days. The problem is that the case is a bit more complex than  what it seems. For several years now, taking the metro in Paris or walking on frequented streets, you couldn’t have missed the presence of Roma begging or playing music. Earlier this summer though, an incident between cops and a few Gypsies (not to be mixed with Roma, as they have been French centuries ago) prompted our beloved Hungarian President to demand laws that could lead a fresh French citizen to have his/her nationality withdrawn.  The absurdity and dangerousness of such measures set aside, the whole move was, according to some presidential majority representatives, an electoral maneuver designed to lure extreme-right voters back to the President’s camp. I predict this strategy is doomed to fail, as 30 years of recent French political History have shown.  On top of that, the methods of the French police to arrest the Roma and shove them in an airplane are not just outrightly scandalous, they are also useless: not only are Roma European citizens, they’re also migrant, poor, and many of them are locked inside mafious organizations that will put them back on the same streets they just left. But no attempt to fight this sort of crime ever emerged from the brain of our genius -and Hungarian (& partly Greek)- President. In fact, many people were wondering why the police was not doing anything to stop some of these Roma and take them away from the streets. When metros and public spaces are filled with CCCTVs you have to wonder what was going on… and in fact, their sudden arrest and expulsion of 100 people was a sheer act of disingenuity from a government that acted as if it had just discovered the issue one week before. That’s what I call a lie, as these Roma were literally kept on the back burner in case their public arrest might serve for political purposes. How convenient.
• How convenient here again: Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, gets charged with rape accusations, arrested by police and … the police withdraws the charge. “Strong social pressure” is the way a lobbyist once described these sorts of interesting events to me. If you thought the CIA could do something more effective than that, think again: they could not even predict 9/11.
• On a different level, but very much disingenuous: Oracle sues Google over alleged patent infringements on Java. This does not just highlight the absurdity of software patents once again, it shows an incredible lack of understanding on how ecosystems and FOSS work. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m confident that Google has money to pay its lawyers, and so does Oracle, but why wasting so much money? Time to land back on earth, Iron Man…

Share This

Free Software, General, Linux, Open Content, Open Source, Software Patents, community

• Can one sponsor sustain a FOSS project on the long term? A crucial question that comes with my crucial answer, this time on FOSSBazaar.
• After several articles in the press reporting on the Board of the OpenSolaris sabotaging itself, I wanted to clarify that the OpenOffice.org has fortunately a quite different situation with a clear ideas on who our community manager is, who sits at the Community Council, who does this and who does that. Of course not everything is perfect, far from it. But we do talk to Oracle, although we would hope to be kept in the loop as to where Oracle would like to go in the future with OpenOffice.org…
• “Rotten to the Open Core”: a great post by Dave Neary setting the record straight on this insipid debate. And for what it’s worth, let’s remember Free Software means something and is not just nice and fancy brand to be used by everyone.
• Steven Vaughan-Nichols is an incorrigible cynic. I’m glad OpenOffice.org is supposed to survive the slow death he predicted to others.
• lpOD O.9.2 has been released. Grab it here!
• Ars Aperta will be giving conferences and talks at the OpenWorld Forum at the end of September-beginning of October. Please come and visit us!

Share This

Ars Aperta, Free Software, OOo Postings, Open Source, OpenDocument Format, OpenOffice.org, community

A few days ago ZD Net’s anchor Dana Blankenhorn came up with an interesting theory. Because of the recent Bilski judgement by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, the Free & Open Source Software community seems to be divided and looking for scapegoats. One of his “leaders”, Florian Mueller, is actively pointing at IBM as being the source of all evil. By evil, he means software patents,  but perhaps also the latest iPhone blunder, the gigantic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and probably AIDS as well.

To the credit of Florian Mueller, he’s been involved in the fight against software patents for over 10 years. He also seems to have worked for the Real Madrid Football Club before landing back in Brussels to defend the poor millionaire Monty Widenius against Oracle. Now Florian is all about IBM and claims that IBM essentially shot down the debate on software patents at the Supreme Court by addressing a “Friend of the Court Brief” in which IBM was essentially explaining the Court should not outlaw software patents right away, as these were valuable intangible assets that could badly hurt US companies. Florian Mueller has also been behind the infamous “Open Mainframe” initiative, targeted again at IBM and involving himself in an existing anti-trust case.

I disagree with Dana Blankenhorn on several points. First, Florian Mueller is by no means a leader of the Free & Open Source movement.  Florian had his shot several years ago when the debate on software patents in Europe emerged and was a defining moment for the European community of digital rights and innovation proponents. It was in a sense a “rite of passage” for many. Since that time, some went their own way, some others maintained the flame and vigilance that is tested again these days.  Florian was part of the former group. He went to work for the Real Madrid Football Club, and we somehow lost his track.  Sometimes after the OOXML standardization odyssey, Florian took several planes to Brussels. He went to see many people, including many of my own personal friends and colleagues. His big project was to crush IBM, and Oracle, and anyone who was benefiting from software patents. Well, not exactly anyone: Microsoft was thoroughly avoided each time, sliding through the raindrops, but leaving everyone with an odd taste in the mouth. Soon enough, Florian’s campaigns, backs and forths appeared to many as  they have always been since his come-back: an over-inflated bag of wind.

Let me explain: There is no division when it comes to software patents inside the Free Software & Open Source community. Software patents are evil. They stifle innovation. When used by patent trolls “non-practicing entities” they are at the core of a despicable racketeering system that can at times be seen as proxy war between some large software vendors. When piled up by software vendors, they are used as weapons of mutually assured destruction. That is, by the way, what the Open Invention Network is doing, piling up patents and neutralizing them, and it’s one of the reasons why Canonical recently joined it, as Ars Aperta has done a few years ago. Let there be no doubt: Software patents suck. We do not want them in Europe, no matter how high the pressures are. In this game, every major software vendors has patents on software: IBM, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Computer Associates,  Novell… heck, I even think that Red Hat has some. Is this a situation we wish to solve? Certainly. Does the fact of owning software patents mean you stand against Free & Open Source Software? Hardly. Does IBM own Software patents? Yes it does. Does IBM help Free & Open Source Software? It did more than most of the others, Red Hat excepted. Does IBM benefit from Free & Open Source Software? It certainly does, it even makes billions of dollars out of it, and they’re not the only ones. But the question is perhaps asked the wrong way, so let me rephrase it: There is a project, there is a team, or only one person, there is code. And when the code is available online, in the form of source code and binary bits, that you can access, study, modify and redistribute the software under these two forms with no constraints attached on the code, then you have Free & Open Source Software. That’s where contributors or sponsors come in. IBM is no different than any contributor or sponsor. There is given project with available code. IBM decides to contribute to it (the same is true for anybody else), period. Free and Open Source Software does not have bow to anyone to strive, because it does not have to “join” one camp or another. It is its own camp, which IBM, Oracle, Google, Red Hat, Novell, etc. agree to join for contributions or not.

In this sense, Florian Mueller has been rattling his saber for almost a year now, launching “fatwas” and anathemas on selected vendors (IBM and to a lesser extent, Oracle) while refusing to address the very big elephant in the room: Microsoft. Now this is not a rant against Microsoft I’m engaging into, but truth be told, Ballmer must have a crack at watching its competitors diving into various anti-trust cases in which they’re involved. And he sure must be very grateful to Florian Mueller, although Florian’s actual impact is very much limited to his own buzz: There is a reality distortion field that seems to be on around Florian’s weblog. It does not go beyond it. Florian has no troops, no clout, no beef, no legitimacy, no credibility among the Free & Open Source Software community. The man seems to have enough money to drum along though and in this sense, he’s acting a bit like  the infamous “Tea Party Movement”: You create a pretendedly grassroots movement in the hope people will believe it’s real until some more people actually joins your cause. In this case, however, I’m afraid this “Tea Party Movement” is stuck at level 1: The Astroturfing stage.

Make no mistake though: we all stand against software patents. But Florian Mueller’s tactic is strange, extremely partial, and leaves some big questions unanswered: Who does benefit from an anti-IBM campaign? Who does benefit from Oracle not merging with a dying Sun? Who does benefit if everybody thinks Google infringes your privacy?

Share This

Ars Aperta, Free Software, Linux, OOXML, Open Source, Software Patents

Recently we have redesigned the lpOD project’s website. This redesign is actually not that trivial, as it integrates entire chunks of the lpOD technology through the last release of Ikaaro. There are also some important aesthetic changes, but that’s somewhat besides the point of this post. I wanted to highlight the fact that we have embarked in an effort to better educate developers on how to use the lpod technologies and develop on them. Because of this we have created some easy use cases for anyone who might be interested in using lpod. We will continue to expand these examples through various initiatives and we hope to be able to share these with them right on the ODF Toolkit website, as the lpod consortium and its leading contributors are now part of the ODF Toolkit Union.

Meanwhile, you can dive right inside the official lpod documentation, which is at this stage covering only the lpod-python part of our platform.  Speaking about languages, I can already point our interested readers to an early, development stage version of lpod-perl, currently hosted on the CPAN repository (as this development version is thoroughly unofficial).

Last but not least, here’s where you can get our code, and if you are interested feel free to take a look at our custom ODF News Reader. It agregates the feed from many interesting sources (blogs, websites, etc.), you can export them as an OPML file, and it’s a good place to stay tuned to what’s going on inside the ODF ecosystem.

Enjoy!

Share This

Ars Aperta, Free Software, OOo Postings, Open Standards, OpenDocument Format, Web 2.0

When I was freshly elected at the OpenOffice.org’s Community Council the Free Software Foundation approached us with a question related to our extensions web site. Basically they felt that we should not be hosting non Free Software extensions and requested we take those down otherwise they would open their own extensions site.

For the sake of clarity, extensions are “plugins” for OpenOffice.org that work very much like Firefox plugins. They extend the feature set of  OpenOffice.org and are a great way to grow our community. I should mention that the number of Free and Open Source Software extensions outgrow by far the number of the proprietary ones: They are in fact more the exception than the rule. The Community Council has been working on a press release which we just released and that you can read on this page. I am sorry we could not find a good solution, but we have essentially and respectfully agreed to disagree on a topic which I find quite unimportant. Shortly after I posted the announcement on behalf of the OpenOffice.org project, I received a flurry of emails, both satisfied and unsatisfied, both public and private.

As for my very own, personal opinion, I do have the highest respect and regard for the Free Software Foundation and count myself as one of their most fervent supporters. But I would have hoped  that they understand the merit of prioritizing their agenda items and the timing of their actions. When the FSF approached the OpenOffice.org project via our Community Council we were shaken by the buyout of our main sponsor, Sun Microsystems, and had to reassure both our contributors, our users, and perhaps ourselves as well. The request from the FSF caught us off-guard and although we dealt with it with the utmost attention, I could not help but think that the folks over there in Boston must be living in another dimension. I got the feeling they were like a bunch of officiers from the logistics department of an army who would stop everything on the wake of a war just because the markings underneath the trucks have not been properly painted.

Seriously, did they have nothing better to do ? Asking questions on the future of our project? On the ODF standard? On how the new main sponsor thought of its future leadership? On the changing grounds of FOSS vs. proprietary software in the context of the emergence of cloud computing? Really, did they have nothing on their plate besides picking the five proprietary extensions on the OpenOffice.org website and make a whole cheese out of it? Now the FSF seems busy creating another extensions website, which I can’t help  finding useful for OpenOffice.org, as it is just a second “app store” for our users and a second venue for our developers. Congratulations, FSF, you know how to pick your fights.

Share This

Free Software, OOo Postings, Open Source, OpenOffice.org