what are we doing today, brain?

So here I am after a few WONDERFUL days with Jeff and Glynn going from Christchurch, to the glaciers on the west coast, Wanak, Puzzling World! (sooo much fun! :), Archery, and then “Sledging” which is basically White Water boogie boarding for 10kms. Awesome fun. We got into Dunedin at 9.20pm last night.

So now it is Monday morning and I’m in the education mini-conf which is pretty interesting. I’ve heard from one of The INGOTS guys which was very interesting, it is proving to be a great certificaton for schools and office computer users. I’m also heard a bunch about Plone from Julie Kosakowski which was interesting, and now about Moodle. I unfortunately missed Damian Conways “Presentation Skills” talk, but I’ll have to catch it later. I give a talk about the research project I’m working on, the Australian Special Knowledge for Open Source Software (ASK-OSS), which is a great project, and something anyone can get involved in. That’ll be tomorrow afternoon, last thing. I’m looking forward to Donna and Kathryns talks today and tomorrow. I’m also going to drop into the Digital Arts mini-conf as that looks awesome. I highly recommend coming along to the Digital Arts jam performance tonight.

The main conference looks great, and Mike and the lca2006 organising team are doing a great job. We’ve also had an interview with the local rag, the Otago Daily Times and there will be photos and everything, so again, grab the paper over the coming few days. Well done all! There will be a few surprises this year which will be fun, so keep an eye out

I found this very well-written article about “the importance of IP in Australia” which was very level headed, but also gave a good warning about the issue of patents in a way the average Australian business might understand. It points at an incident 3 years ago that I hadn’t even heard of which will be good leverage should any of our community be threatened with patents. I repeat that the most important thing is to drag this issue into the light of the public eye, and keep it there. Only by airing it can the average person actually understand the depth of the problem and potentially do something about it. Blog, email, talk to your LUG or Linux Australia before the threat is put into contracts where you can’t ever mention it again.

‘All of a sudden organisations in the US were threatening to hold up goods on the wharves unless DET’s annual licence fees were paid, says Matthew Tutaki, now head of government IP advisory body Sanseman Government, who at the time led the campaign against DE Technologies. “Once you receive an infringement notice it becomes next to impossible to overturn the patent, even if you have “prior art”. You actually have to go to the High Court to challenge it. This can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees” he says.’

The article finishes with the suggestion that companies who understand how IP impacts them will be “solidly positioned”, which I translate as “will have some hope in hell”. I would counter by saying that a) it is very expensive and difficult to protect yourself from hostile IP action and b) even if you understand the issue, how would you change your business and would it do your business any good? There is a serious problem here and it is impacting Australian businesses _today_!. Until we realise that strong IP protections are not really useful when the “IP” market has already been monopolised and countries like Australia have very little chance of getting the upper hand (above the US in particular) then we are going to continue this dance of “leveraging IP can be good for you” and “how do you protect yourself”. At least the issue is getting better understood. Great coverage by ZDNet.

So I’ve put in a grant request to LA to be a sponsor for the Go Girl conference at the beginning of March. Basically it’ll be 2,500 school girls exploring the awesome opportunities and chances that computers and the world of ICT can bring I will hopefully be presenting there, and will certainly be introducing these girls to FOSS and how technology isn’t just for solving technical or business problems, but can be used to solve social problems too It should be an awesome opportunity to introduce loads more kids, families and schools to both FOSS and also to socially responsible software. It is amazing how many people are simply unaware as to how they can use computers and the wide world of the internet to achieve mind-blowing things!

When I read articles like this I get a very heavy feeling. I translate this message from the WTO as thus:

We the big rich countries of the world that “own” 90% of the worlds
“Intellectual Property” (using systems we designed and global committees we
run) are going to be very nice and give you little-countries who don’t own
very much in our system a chance to put into place better mechanisms to pay
us loads of money. Did we mention how nice we are?

Most countries in the world don’t “own” very much “IP”, where ownership is
defined by this set of values shaped by a very small number of countries in
the world. This ownership paradigm being forced on the world is not good for
anyone but that minority of countries that own the majority of IP. Australia
wouldn’t come into the “least-developed” countries specified here, but even
we are net IP importers according to this system, and it does a net IP
importer no good to their own economy or society to increase the protections
on IP. All it does is raise the amount of money that goes directly overseas
and limit the local industries.

Some day, there will be enough resistance to such systems for people to
realise that there are other ways. Having a monopoly on an idea for a period
of time can certainly be an incentive for companies to create new stuff, but
when a huge proportion of money going into, for instance cancer research, is
simply paying for the legal fees to maintain “ownership”, then how much are
we really progressing? When the monopoly granted to IT companies for
“inventions” are longer than the entire life of the IT industry, you have to
wonder how that industry can continue to move forward. When the entire world
is having to pay homage to the “IP” created in a handful of countries rather
than being able to get on with creating their own, how much are we shackling
the world?

Please note, I’m not expressely against some way to build a business on what
you create, be that software, literature, or any other such work. My issue is
that I think it has gone too far. It seems a little ludicrous, most of the
world propping up the economies of a few countries based on systems those
countries made, got a foothold in and then started pushing onto the rest of the
world. Particularly when taking on these systems can often had a negative
impact on the local industries of countries new to that system.

Geez, so it has been decided after all this time that Microsoft is allowed to have the patent on the Fat file system. According to this article this means they’ll probably go after Linux vendors for patent infringement. I wonder if they go after USB key manufacturers, after all many of them use fat in order to make the keys easily accessible by Windows. Fat isn’t a great file system, but it has been an easy way for people to ensure compatibility with Microsoft whether they be devices or other operating systems. Microsoft seem to be cutting of their nose to spite their face by patenting and threatening competitors by “protecting” infrastructure that allows some interoperability with Windows. Groklaw looks at the the patent issue for more information.

Last year I gave a keynote and mentored at an event for twenty 14-17 yr-old girls to talk about IT and the opportunities therein. I compared IT to Charlie’s chocolate factory (distant, a little scary, full of weird people but so amazing and fun once inside!) which they really took to. Since then I’ve spoken to a few of the girls and am helping one of them secure work experience. Anyway, it was
a very interesting experience, particularly when only a few girls coming into the sessions were at all interested in working in IT, but by the end of 2 days, almost all of them were keen for it. The other interesting thing I found after talking to these girls was the high proportion of them who had told their careers advisors they wanted to work with computers who were told, “oh no dear, you should try social work or teaching”. WTF! Anyway, they came out with a report about the event, which also has some good stats and information about women in IT generally.

I think the exercise clearly demonstrated that girls at school are not getting any support or encouragement even if they demonstrate a specific interest in computers, so there is where we need to be focusing our efforts if we want to see equal access to ICT opportunities for both genders. Please note, I am not lobbying for equal numbers in ICT for women, I simply feel that at a young age women are being actively discouraged from ICT and I feel this is robbing both the industry from a huge demography and robbing many young women of the amazing opportunities ICT can bring to their lives and careers. I always use these opportunities to show the girls how working in ICT rocks, but also how being in the FOSS community I have had incredible and life-changing experiences due to the doors opened to me and the wonderful things I can achieve there. They have generally been very enthusiastic about the idea of socially responsible software, and achieving their personal dreams using technology to get there.

Oh, and Linux Australia is listed there as one of the sponsors Hooray for Linux Australia!

So I’m in this months Linux Format magazine amongst some of the best known women in Open Source today talking about women in FOSS. Hooray! Unfortunately the article isn’t online, so check it out at the newstore. There is a silly photo of me in it too

The LA election process is happening right now and we are currently in nominations phase. Nominations close the 11th January, and voting starts on the 18th and closes before the AGM which will be at linux.conf.au on Wednesday the 25th January. All LA members should have received their AGM notice, and if you aren’t yet a member, then join up at the membership page.

Good luck to everyone!

It has been a huge week. We went down to Yass for the break on the 22nd and on the 23rd I had some excellent meetings in Canberra. Firstly I met with Michael from the National Archives of Australia. The stuff they are doing with Open Source is incredible. Firstly they have one of the nicest server rooms I’ve ever seen, complete with a robot sweeper that knows when to recharge itself. They get all the fun toys! They also had some amazing SAN technologies and were running several operating systems including of course a couple of versions of Linux The most interesting part of what they are doing there is a digital preservation application they have written and GPLed called Xena which is of course on sourceforge. Xena is a world first application for proper digital preservation and management and is very smart. The NAA say in their documentation about Xena that proprietary data formats are the greatest risk to the ongoing preservation and accessibility of electronic data, and thus Xena is built completely on open standards, including of course the OOo document standards. The Xena data preservation process is roughly as follows. First they quarantine the data, to ensure it doesn’t have viruses in it, ensuring it is safe and such for about a month updating the anti-virus app daily. Then they transform it to open formats, and finally they store it in multiple repositories to ensure redundancy that is cross hardware and cross platform. Anyway, it was great to see the project and what they are up to. I’m looking forward to seeing their case study to be presented at Linuxworld in March at Government Day, which isn’t yet announced but will be in a couple of weeks. Hurrah!

I had forgotten to mention a very cool story from the Open Source World Conference in Spain late last year. Some of my Brazilian friends Fabs Balvedi and Marcelo Branco, who are wonderful people working on FOSS in Brazil showed me a fantastic video called “Cultura Digital” about the creation of FOSS music labs in Brazil created for the youth to express themselves. Also on the site is a music video with Stallman performing alongside Brazilian music god Gilberto Gil, who has also been a political activist in his time and is now the Minister for Arts in Brazil. Anyway, pretty awesome stuff. Check out the computer case graffiti being done in the Cultura Digital video. Thankyou Marcelo and Fabs for showing me, I look forward to returning to Brazil, which is certainly one of my favourite places in the world

Last but not least, the planning for Linuxworld Conference and Expo is going well. We have a finalised main conference outline, some great exhibitors at the trade show, and Government Day about to be announced. I’m personally pretty excited about this event, which will be the first Open Source business and Government focused event in Australia. Getting the word out has been hard as people automatically assume Linuxworld is the same as linux.conf.au, which shows how strong the LCA branding has become, but nevertheless, they have very different audiences. If you know managers, C level people, policy makers and generally anyone in the business or Government community looking to understand the Open Source opportunity, send them to Linuxworld. It’ll certainly help them understand the market, understand the opportunity and understand that they are missing out, if they are not already using FOSS and building concise FOSS strategies. The aim of the conference is to grow the industry and help educate our business/Gov community about FOSS.