Moved by Freedom - Powered by Standards

We already knew Mahmud Ahmadinejad did not know how to count. He is part of this revisionist movement who believes that in order to have a truly non-aligned and anti-western political stance, you need to deny the reality of the WW2 Holocaust to better outline the grievances of your own people. This is what led him to dismiss the Holocaust as a “great deception“.

Now Ahmadinejad has apparently some problems with other numbers: the ones of the election results. According to him there is apparently no fundamental contradiction with towns having had over 150 % participation to the presidential elections.  So the people, and I’m saying the whole Iranian people, is on the streets, and wants justice. Mahmud, here again, seems to have some mathematical trouble with the number of protesters on the streets of Iran. But I trust he won’t have problems with counting the number of cops and paid partisans he’s sending to hit and kill his own people.  In any case, you should help, even in small ways. Check out this site: Where is my vote Dot Org.

Meanwhile, I would like to propose a riddle to Mahmud : I hope he will understand it, because regardless of what his henchmen will do to to crush the protests, this will be only a matter of time before Democracy will come back in Iran.  So tell me Mahmud, do you know how to count how many fishes there are in this picture below? Or is it yet another deception? (Image found on Facebook, credits not quoted here for intentional privacy concern).

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• IBM votes for OOXML at the ANSI (the U.S. standards body) and the Microsoft-sponsored mob rejoices. The problem? Despite what it seems, the rules of the particular TC at the ANSI did not allow members to go against a previous ISO vote on the standard. In short, Jesper & Co are dancing over the body of a dead horse, or rather, continue to behave like some analysts who claim that Bernie Madoff’s business has a great future. Is OOXML a standardisation ponzi scheme? I think it is.
• Oracle buys Sun. That is going to shuffle the cards a lot, and maybe ruffle some feathers. In any case, the competitive landscape is going to be changed for ever. What does it mean for OpenOffice.org? I really don’t know, and not much can be said beyond the formal answer. Browsing through the different FAQs and press releases though makes me think that 1) ODF will be supported and carried forward 2) Although not a real open source player, Oracle takes open standards at heart. Stay tuned, it’s going to be interesting.
• The Durban 2 conference in Geneva makes me think of a bizarre mashup of the first Durban conference and what I experienced at the OOXML BRM. On the one side you have outrageous antisemitic accusations going unpunished, dangerous sophistry enforcing the preeminence of religious fundamentalists over freethinkers, while on the other side, you have members of international organisations who claim everything is fine and is working out just fine. What would Alex Brown do?

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This week showed a quite surprising turn of events at the French Assemblée Nationale. The French Parliament actually rejected the infamous HADOPI law (the three-strikes law). More details here. Yet, while things could have remained the way they were, the government has decided to get this law passed again regardless of the actual expression of people’s will.

Certainly our government knows what is right for us. And we should be happy and for ever grateful of whatever (divine) decisions it makes. Actually, I am so happy about my government trying to decide for me what my culture should be, that I have copied and pasted a small east-german song below. But before starting to play this unforgettable remnant of Communist culture, I thought I would tell my readers a little bit about record labels in France and their history.

By choosing this song, I will probably not have any problem with the almighty SACEM who pretends to dictate to anyone how they should listen and play music. Well I’m sure they can find something reprehensible in actually sharing lyrics and videos that are not even copyrighted by them but ever since World War Two, the SACEM pretends a lot of things. For instance, it pretends to lawfully own a lot of real estate in Paris. Oddly enough, this real estate used to belong to  Jewish families before 1940. But that must be an unfortunate coincidence. I would however like the SACEM to be as demanding towards itself as it is towards 14 million of French citizens who download music “illegally” over the Internet.

Happy Easter and enjoy the music!

Lyrics can be found here.

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• I happen to write articles on email clients. And this time, my friend Tristan Nitot is not going to like it.
• Interesting description of one of the upcoming features in OpenOffice.org: Secured digital signatures. Guess what, we will soon be the only ones to have them!
• An excellent exemple on how native-language projects cooperate inside OpenOffice.org. Here, you can see the Chinese, Japanese and Korean communities working to tackle common problems.My thanks to the teams and especially to Hirano Kazunari!
• This time, Tristan will approve that one: command line comes to the Firefox bar, integrating completely Ubiquity to Firefox!
• Unfortunate but expected, the French Minister of the Record Labels Culture, strongly supported by the Government has forced the Parliament to vote the outrageous legislation on “illegal music downloading”, treating 14 million of her own citizens like pirates. Here’s someone who must have some clear picture on what “serving private interests in detriment of the public good” means.
• I have been asked this several times already this week, so let me clarify something: I do not work for Sun, nor for IBM and I do not know anything else about the buyout rumourthan what the press says.

Enjoy your week-end!

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Dear readers,

This is not a regular post. In France we always had had a strange institution  called the Ministry of Culture. I qualify it as strange because although most French people never thought it was not an obvious part of the government abroad, having a Ministry of Culture is sometimes seen as an useless and costly toy in several parts of the world. Many French people sometimes note half-jokingly that the reason why we are pretty much the only nation to have a distinct, autonomous Ministry of Culture is that France has an important cultural heritage, and an important cultural influence. 

Or so we thought. These days the Minister of Culture, a super-duper Agrégé de Lettres has decided that our culture was to bow before its new masters, namely the record labels and decaying industry. In her great wisdom, our glorious Minister, the Salt of our soil, our Doctrix Ignoranta, has decided that anyone could be convicted by a private court of illegal music downloading, that the punishment would be the banning of culprits from the Internet and of course the payment of penalties. And in order for citizens not to be suspected, they will have to pay for proprietary software (running only on Windows) that may exempt them from outright suscpicion by default (and yet that’s not even clear). She has achieved what centuries of invasions, wars, and disruptions of various kind hadn’t: To bring the value of culture to the one of mundane objects. And while she is actually proud of that  (”to download music illegally is like stealing in a bakery” is what she keeps hammering), she has so far refused any kind of discussion.

I must say that this new legislation will have some advantage: Travelling abroad will be much easier for French. From now on, we will not have to boast anything coming from our country. Our Government has taken Britney Spears to the level of Charles Baudelaire and Molière and is trying hard to put restrictions on the Internet similar to the ones existing in the P.R.C.

No wonder the same government thinks our National Education system has to be deeply amended: One of its members is the living evidence of it!

More seriously, I do think this new legislation is dangerous and goes against every democratic principles. This government and the record labels  will not tell me what I have to do with my computer. Let me be very clear on this. 

Unfortunately what is happening right now at the French Parliament is very much telling of the French society: A country with decaying elites trying to impose their own citizens the constant telling of the same farce: the myth of France, the everlasting Grande Nation, its Grande Culture, and above all, its own version of American Idol.

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