Category: Aus Community

To live among real people

I have decided to not run for the Linux Australia committee again for 2008, and to instead live as a normal community member in the Australian FOSS community. I’m hoping this will give me some context as to the good and bad of Linux Australia, and help me understand our community better, how people/organisations interface with LA, and what a national body can do for our community as our needs and society changes. Alongside this goal is also the fact that I have become relatively burnt out and need a break. I wasn’t nearly as active on the LA committee in 2007 as I wanted to be, and I also have two specific community-centric projects I’m helping with for 2008 that will be taking a lot of my time (specifically Software Freedom International of which I am still President, and a project yet to be announced).

With this in mind I thought I would briefly chronicle my time with LA for histories’ sake. I also want to lay the groundwork for what I believe makes a good candidate for the LA committee based on my experience and observations.

In the beginning…
When I came across LA only about 9 months prior to linux.conf.au 2003 (Perth) I found an organisation with a total of 5 members (who were also the committee members) and a legacy of flamewars, distrust and apathy. The founding members had a great vision, and many thanks to them for their hard work in establishing Linux Australia (in particular Anand Kumria, Terry Dawson, and Gary Allpike). However, unfortunately it had become caught up in politics and harsh words, and didn’t yet have a strong base that people could get behind. The website was informative but quite difficult to use. The general decision making processes and vision of LA were not firmly established nor particularly transparent. But there was an interest in change for the better from at least 3 of the 5 members.

The party begins
I convinced the committee of the time to have an open AGM at lca2003, to drop the membership fee completely and to grant free membership to all attendees of lca2003. Then, at lca I went and spoke to most of the ~450 people who attended about what, if anything a national body could do for our community. A few people thought there was some usefullness to such an organisation. A few thought it was a complete waste of time. 150 people turned up to the AGM which was fantastic! I had never been on a committee before and I was considering perhaps nominating for an ordinary committee member position, and was absolutely floored when I found out some rogue had nominated me for President (I still don’t know who). I convinced Hugh Blemings and Andrew Tridgell amongst others to run for positions (they went for ordinary committee member positions) and all up we had about 20 people nominated for positions. At the end of the process I was nominated President with an incredibly strong team, namely Stewart Smith (Vice President), Andrew Cowie (Secretary), Anand Kumria (Treasurer), Hugh Blemings, Leon Brooks & Andrew Tridgell (Ordinary Members). Together we forged a strong base on which LA has grown now to almost 1400 members, with strong relationships with other organisations and even Government.

It took a lot of work as we had to create from scratch a vision for Linux Australia which really was focused on being an organisation that supports its members to do great stuff, that drives forward FOSS and the FOSS community in Australia, and that is flexible enough to reflect changing times and community needs. We also had a lot of grunt work to do establishing a useful constitution (many thanks to David Lloyd for helping with this), several policies and procedures for dealing with things usefully, and a whole new precedent for the organisation. In particular, Andrew Cowie helped with this by drawing on his background of building strong foundations for new organisations.

Passing the torch
In 2005 I decided to not run for the President role again, as I strongly felt that passing the torch is extremely important to successful projects coming into their own, and I wanted LA to be about itself, not about Pia Smith (at the time). Many FOSS projects become identified by their top representative, and this is fine in many cases, however it can also be to the detriment of the project. Particularly when it is a community-centric project, rather than a software-centric project. I ran for and won VP, primarily to provide support to the President and some continuity in the organisation. I have been really pleased over the past two years of watching LA be driven by Jon and a couple of great committees, to see that LA now is an entity that has its own momentum, its own identity and ultimately its own sustainability. Rock on to all the wonderful individuals who contributed to making this happen!

How to pick a strong candidate for the LA committee
One of the things I wanted to briefly cover is from my experience what it takes for someone to be a strong candidate and contributor to the LA committee. Below is a top five list of personal attributes I believe are important, and I would urge you all to look for when casting your vote for the LA committee in January. Feel free to add more important attributes in the comments 🙂

  • Community first – it is important to try wherever possible to put the community before personal feelings or motivations. Being on the LA committee puts you in a position of both representation and personal responsibility
  • Good communication skills – all committee members need to try to maintain good communications, an open mind to other perspectives, and in particular be clear about what hat they are wearing at any one time 🙂
  • Personal responsibility – it is important that candidates are willing to take personal responsibility for any specific tasks, communication, making decisions and whatever comes up (obviously in consultation with the committee). A strong committee only exists where each individual is willing and able to contribute personally
  • Being open to constructive criticism – Everyone receives their fair share of criticism, and often there are trolls lurking in the bushes with nothing better to do. Being open to constructive criticism and the possibility that at any time you could actually be wrong is important in keeping the channels of communication open, to growing as a person, and to understanding how to do your job on the committee better
  • Finally, and most importantly, positive vision – all the people who have had the best impact on LA have done so not only with a strong vision, but with a strong positive vision. You need to be able to articulate and encourage in a positive way, otherwise your attitude has a net negative impact not only on you and people you communicate with, but on the whole community

I guess these are some things to look for in committee members. It isn’t actually whether they are popular, fun to be around, great coders (or documenters, etc) or even great advocates. It is about what they can bring to Linux Australia and to our community. I would strongly encourage all candidates to really outline their goals and vision in their spiels so people can carefully weigh up what they want to bring to the table alongside other candidates.

Finally
I have been on the Linux Australia committee for 4 years now, two as President and two as Vice President. I’m really proud of what we achieved, particularly in the first two years of Linux Australia and I have met many extremely inspiring people along the way. I look forward to seeing what LA does in 2008 and I wish the best luck to all candidates in the upcoming election. I also call on all people who want to contribute to our wonderful community to put their hands up and nominate themselves for the LA committee. It continually needs new ideas and perspectives to keep it in line with our changing community needs and directions, and it is such a great privilege to serve the Australian FOSS community, which is one of the best FOSS communities in the world. I’d like to thank everyone I have worked with over the past 4 years, in particular Jeff for his constant support and advice, Hugh Blemings and Andrew Tridgell who provided a lot of advice in the first year, Jon Oxer who has been such a great steward of LA over the past 2 years (and hopefully again in 2008!), and to Bdale Garbee, who convinced me in 2003 that I had what it took to “herd cats”.

Initial report from OOXML technical and legal workshop last week

Last Friday I helped facilitate a workshop about the technical and legal feasibility of OOXML (check out the website, it has some interesting reading) in an attempt to get an understanding about where all parties are coming from and assist Standards Australia in understanding the issue from a holistic perspective (they have had quite a few flames targetted at them from both sides of the fence). This is just an initial report and I will be publishing the full audio from the technical event as soon as I can rip it from tape to digital.

I organised the technical speakers, including Matthew Cruickshank (New Zealand XML expert, contributor to a no vote in NZ and covenor of the very useful iso-vote website), Colin Jackson (who gave the NZ Gov perspective and overview of why NZ voted no), Rick Jelliffe (who participates in ISO, has done a small amount of work for Microsoft on this topic, and seems fairly neutral in person. He can come across as pro-Microsoft, although in reality he is probably just pro-“creating new ISO standards will fix everything”). We also had representation from Google (Lars Rasmussen), IBM (Paul Robinson), OSIA (Jeff stepped in by request from Brendan Scott and represented the OSIA view), and Microsoft (Greg Stone with 2 others). Janet was supposed to be there to represent LA (although most of her comments were for the legal section which was in the afternoon and I personally had to leave, so hopefully some of the blogs linked at the bottom of this cover that). We also had Alistair Tegart from Standards Australia, who is the person leading the SA investigation into OOXML, and it was great to have him both listen and participate. Overall, I’m really happy with how it all went.

The technical discussion was quite interesting. Firstly almost everyone said it was good to see Microsoft trying to be more open and make available standards that have been very proprietary forever. Then it went back and forth between actual technical issues and big picture issues. Most people agreed the technical issues were mostly reconcilable given time, for instance a whole bunch of technical concerns raised by Standards Australia in their “abstain with comments” vote have already been fixed apparently.

Some core technical issues raised were:

  • Accessibility – Matthew had great concerns about compliance to mechanisms that ensure accessibility is possible
  • Interoperability and access to data across multiple platforms – particularly when OOXML uses a lot of non-open undocumented standards (such as Microsoft’s DrawingML) as part of its inner workings rather than leveraging existing documented and ISO approved standards (such as SVG). This usage of pre-existing standards is supposedly one of the key criteria ISO look for in a new standard, but anyway
  • The implementability of DIS29500 – Several people said it was a lot of work to actually implement DIS29500. Jeff mentioned this is trivial for a lot of mature FOSS projects that have already had to do the work with older MS formats and that this is easier than reverse engineering. However, it was agreed on by several participants (include Google, OSIA and Archives) that it would certainly be difficult for organisations or new software projects who have to start from scratch as it is a dense, complex document with many legacy and undocumented assumptions and formats

The biggest issues raised and left unresolved were big picture issues, and I have to say I agree with all of these concerns. They were generally brushed off by both Microsoft and Rick. The biggest issues raised in no particular order were:

  • Harmonisation – Microsoft believes harmonisation is impossible and a lot of work. Everyone else thought harmonisation is not only possible but both really important and not as hard as is being made out. Lars even invited Microsoft to come participate in ODF so that it would meet their needs. They didn’t really have an answer for this apart from repeating that is was hard, and making some comment about the risk of a “third standard” which Matthew pointed out is part of the natural versioning process of standards development, and that ideally harmonisation would mean MS changes would be folded into a next generation version of ODF.
  • A single standard – most people agreed that ODF was an existing standard that has industry and community buy-in and collaboration, and that it should be built upon rather than creating new standards. Everyone agreed that ODF has some issues and doesn’t include all the functionality MS wants, however it was pointed our several times that if MS wanted to participate in ODF then they could, so the question was raised why they don’t. There wasn’t much of an answer here. Jeff, Mike and Lars pointed out that supporting multiple standards that do fundamentally the same thing will make it much harder for organisations to support real interoperability, and so by accepting DIS29500, ISO is basically complicating a plethora of business, archival, competition and other factors. Jeff made the comments that “there is not sufficient technical rationale behind another standard in this area”, and was very supportive of industry collaboration on ODF
  • The review process – several people expressed concern at the fast-tracking of DIS29500, and whether there has been adequate review. It was also mentioned that the review allocated to DIS29500 is by far proportionally smaller than ODF, PDF, or many other examples
  • The ingoing maintenance of OOXML – One of the maintenance models for DIS29500 proposed is that ECMA will 100% maintain current and future versions of DIS29500 with input but no control of QA from ISO. This seems ludicrous in the extreme. If this model was taken up basically future versions of DIS29500 would be ISO standards by default with basically only ECMA and Microsoft to be accountable. And these future versions could contain _anything_. Greg Stone was quick to mention that there are several models on the table, my thoughts are this in itself should result in a no vote as it completely subverts the entire process (even more)
  • Why ISO – It was pointed out by Microsoft on several occasions that surely having OOXML openly documented was better than not having it openly documented. Everyone agreed with this (it is far easier than reverse engineering a proprietary format). It was made clear however that OOXML is already documented through the ECMA process so what purpose does it serve to have it as an ISO standard, and that there is no value to this when they could participate in the process of harmonisation with ODF as described above. This I think is a big question. People talk about OOXML becoming a standard. It is already a standard, an ECMA standard, so it was very disingenuous for Microsoft to pull the “but we are trying to be open” card at this point. ISO standardisation doesn’t improve the documentation made freely available.

Some interesting arguments that Rick brought up that I hadn’t heard before were:

  • The standard doesn’t reflect the actual implementation. DIS29500 doesn’t mean the same as OOXML. So arguing against OOXML is actually not going to necessarily help you in battling DIS29500 acceptance. How Microsoft or anyone else decides to implement DIS29500 is not the concern or responsibility of ISO.
  • The conformance language in DIS29500 is really bad and needs serious work.
  • The steering committee in ISO responsible for OOXML (as well as ODF, PDF and others) is committed to ZRAND (Zero cost, Reasonale and Non-Discriminatory standards) as opposed to RAND (same as ZRAND but with fees associated).

It has to be said I have a lot more respect for Rick for in person (although his blog coverage of the event was again quite one-sided) and I don’t believe he is generally supporting Microsoft per se, but rather he genuinely believes the more standards the better. Also, the guy has actually received death wishes over this, which is never an acceptable way to deal with disagreement, ever. He mentioned another colleague who has also received threatening calls. This is coming from both sides of the fence and reflects badly on everyone. Anyway, he said several times that ISO acceptance of DIS29500 doesn’t mandate using it, and how that is up to individual organisations and Governments to decide, so there is no problem or even a huge impact in DIS29500 being an ISO standard. However, as Mike Carden pointed out this is fairly disingenuous given that so many Governments have to date used ISO as the standard of standards which has a massive knock on effect on uptake and competition, especially when there is an existing collaboratively developed standard that fulfills that niche (and could fulfill Microsofts’ “unique” needs if they actually participated in it). Unfortunately for ISO I know people in Governments from around the world (and locally) who will be seriously reconsidering that assumption now.

I managed to get the last word in to the technical discussion (yay) and I basically said that given all the unresolved issues, concerns from industry and the broader community, lack of finalised information (such as what model DIS29500 would be maintained under) and general controversy, perhaps it would be most prudent for Standards Australia to vote “no” for DIS29500 and Microsoft can choose to put DIS29500 through the normal non-fast track process for proper analysis and appraisal if they want. Standards Australia originally gave an abstain vote. I think that needs to be carefully weighed up and understood that if there isn’t enough information to make a clear “yes” decision stating a lack of information, then the default should be no, because how can Standards Australia (or any other standards body) feel comfortable with a standard passing ISO ratification if they can’t even feel comfortable with it themselves? I know there are many people deeply concerned about this right through from community, business and Government, and it will be interesting to see what happens to the general trust in and acceptance of ISO regardless of what happens with DIS29500.

Please find a few blog posts and other references below:

  • Email short report from Mike Carden
  • Oliver Bell’s blog
  • Brendan Scott’s blog about legal foo prior to the event. He also did a good announcement about OSIA’s position along with supporting documentation here
  • Rick Jelliffe’s blog – I’m particularly disappointed with this post. He told me on the day it was one of the best and most civil discussions he’s had (although I left before most of the legal session, so who knows 🙂 )

Finally a huge thanks to David Vaile and the Cyberlaw team who ran both events. These are the same people who ran the GPL V3 event last year (which I also helped facilitate) which included Eben Moglen (by phone), Andrew Tridgell and others.

Comments, additional reports about the event and feedback welcome.

I will note there have been some other reports about this event (prior to the event) that were slanderous, malicious, uninformed and assumed that I am part of a massive conspiracy to thwart the progress of freedom (in spite of the years of being very publicly and actively committed to FOSS and software freedom). I have not linked to those as I think they a) don’t contribute to the content, b) are unnecessarily malicious and assume the absolute worst and c) don’t deserve my googejuice 🙂

Edit: Matthew Cruickshank just sent me his paper on accessibility which includes a whole schwag of technical and other useful perspectives. Find it here

Hard to find neutral OOXML comments

I got dragged into the OOXML debate only in October this year, prior to which I had avoided it in the comfortable (and incorrect) knowledge that it was being taken care of in Australia by people far more in the know than me. While in NZ I was chatting to the folk there who have lobbied hard and resulted in a “no with comments” vote for NZ and I realised I could have a positive impact in getting the debate on track in Australia. After all, Australia abstained from the last vote and we have one last chance come February to make a stand.

The main problem I’ve found as I’ve waded into the dark and murky waters of this topic is that the moment you try to take a logical even-handed approach, you are basically demonised by one or both sides of the debate. If you don’t take the emphatic “OOXML is evil and btw ODF is pure shining light!” approach, then random people in the FOSS community start to question your motives and credibility, which I can tell you, gets old pretty quickly. Particularly after both Jeff and I have spent so many years committed to the progress of FOSS and software freedom both locally and internationally. People don’t seem to understanding that taking an extreme stance puts you squarely on one side of the fence and makes it harder for the people actually making this decision to take what you have to say seriously.

It is like people in the FOSS community saying to Government “you are not using FOSS everywhere already, so you must be getting paid off, there must be a conspiracy! You are all bastards!”, and then wondering some people in Government have reservations about FOSS. Luckily there are a lot of very smart people in Government (in Australia) who are already using, writing policy about, and understanding that a good knowledge of FOSS helps them make more educated decisions about their ICT procurement generally. Which actually helps them choose FOSS where it makes sense, in spite of the loud offensive voices in the community.

Anyway, I am running an OOXML technical feasibility event on Friday in which I have experts from New Zealand and Australia speaking, as well as a variety of industry and community perspectives. The idea of this event is to understand whether OOXML is actually technically feasible (and there is a legal event in the afternoon for the same purpose). I believe that if OOXML is not technically feasible (which many people in the FOSS community take for granted) then it is a simple, practical and non-political reason to have a no vote for Australia.

I just found this blog post which also reflects the frustration felt by many people trying to understand what is going on without all the political wailing on both sides of the fence:

So, what I have gleaned from my researches (though that is probably too strong a word) so far is that while there are some valid discussions to be had, the majority of participants are either staunchly pro-ODF, or they are working for Microsoft. I do know that, were I an end-user, I would remain ignorant – but given the mud flying around, perhaps ignorance is bliss.

I will probably need to keep my mudproof raincoat on for a little while yet.

Do you think about OOXML?

Just one last reminder that there is a free event on this Friday (in two days) that will be delving into the technical and legal feasibility of OOXML. Speakers include both technical and legal experts (and you can attend either session or both) as well as industry and community representation. If you think about OOXML and want to contribute to the discussion please come along.

  • Date: Friday 14 December 2007
  • Time: 8:30-1:00 (technical), 2:00-4:30 (legal) (catering provided)
  • Venue: Room 101, level 1, new Law Building, UNSW lower campus (taxi to main gate, Anzac Pde, second building on left on main walkway)

Please RSVP to feedback [at] cyberlawcentre.org if you want to attend one or both sessions for catering purposes.

Just two days to complete the Census!

The Australian Open Source Industry and Community Census 2007 closes in two days, so please get in and complete the Industry Census for your company, and/or the Community Census for yourself, and please let other companies or community members know.

The aim of this project is to raise the profile of our industry and community, so stand up and be counted! Companies have the option to be included in a business directory that lists your skills, contacts details and spiel only, and individuals have the option to be in the running for a GP2X gaming unit.

The report will be freely available in February and distributed to Government and the general public.

Australian political parties views on FOSS

Responding to survey results prepared recently by OSIA, the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal-National Coalition, the Australian Democrats and the Australian Greens have all voiced strong support for the adoption of Free and Open Source Software for both boosting local ICT development and ensuring open and interoperable standards.

Awesome work by Open Source Industry Australia in this excellent little document that outlines the perspectives of all the major parties towards Open Source.

In the answers, Labor refers to their “10 year strategy for software” which was announced in 2004. In it was this little gem:

A 10-year strategy for software and digital content would also be created under a Labor government, Lundy said. This strategy would aim to increase the local software industry’s global market share by focusing on open source development and partnering with SMEs.

The change in Government has provided the FOSS community and industry a real opportunity to get FOSS on the political agenda, and into a meaningful discussion about the broader benefits FOSS can offer both economically and socially to Australia.

Help! Seeking OOXML comments for event

I am helping coordinate the first ever Australian event to really delve into the technical and legal practical feasibility of OOXML. It will be on December 14th, and will include experts from Australia and around the world. The schedule is currently up, however all the speakers names will be published in the coming week. There will also be participation from Microsoft, so if you have outstanding technical or legal questions about OOXML, you should come along and participate! The attendees will be a combination of the general public, academia, standards people and our course domain experts.

It will not be a political event, as there are enough of those around 🙂 The aim here is to have a calm and open discussion about the technical and legal feasibility of OOXML. The top 10 or 20 technical comments of concern brought up from the ISO process will be analysed and industry players will be able to have a say. The end result will be a better understanding about OOXML to help inform those making the final decision on the Australian response to the ISO processing of OOXML in February 2008.

Now to my heading! I have found many people linking to the summary of ISO comments from around the world on OOXML, however it appears that the document is now protected by a password (see document 904, which I would like), as are several other documents that could be helpful for this event. If anyone has a copy of the summary of comments, I would really appreciate a copy so I can pull together the comments of most global concern for this event.

Open Source WA Symposium – Wrap up

Last month saw the first ever Open Source Western Australia Symposium. It was an excellent event attracting over 60 CIOs from Government and top companies in WA to head about Open Source. Jeff and I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the event, and it was great to see such a diverse crowd of CIOs so interested in Open Source.

One of the things mentioned at the event was the recently launched Open Source WA survey, which emulates the AGIMO Open Source survey done earlier this year. The OSWA survey is for all users of Open Source in WA, be they Government, business or education, and calls on all users of Open Source software in WA to fill in the survey to help create a clear picture of the Open Source usage and needs of business, education and Government in WA. Waugh Partners is helping run the survey (on Open Source software) and afterwards to provide analysis of the anonymised data.

The organisers say there will be audio available from the event within the week, so keep an eye on the Open Source WA website! There was a news article about the event in PCWorld, which is mainly an interview with one of the speakers, Craig Nielsen from Red Hat.

The group behind this initiative is the Western Australian Supercomputer Program, which was funded by the Western Australia Department of Industry and Resources to run the event. WASP have also been involved with the Perth Linux User Group and basically ran the Perth Software Freedom Day event, which was excellent! Great work guys!