Category: Government

So I’ve been on the road pretty much for two weeks. A week in Brisbane and now a week in Spain at the Open Source World Conference and since I’ve been in Spain this is the first time I’ve got online. Anyway, I’ll be getting to emails I’ve been trying to get to for a few days so anyone trying to contact me, SORRY! 🙂 I’ll be in London for a few days catching up with the crew from OSS-Watch, some of the Software Freedom Day folk and a few friends including my second family, the Mays 🙂 Should be great!

I always enjoy the Spanish and Brazilian Software Livre conferences as they are so passionate and realistic about FOSS. I’m hoping to get some of the great people I know here to Australia for conferences soon. If Government day at Linuxworld this year goes well, perhaps next year I’ll focus on what is happening in Europe. This year we are profiling some of what is happening in Asia-Pacific which should be really interesting. Anyway, I’ve also been able to meet up with Maureen O’Sullivan who is the awesome Irish chick who is trying to solve how to protect the FOSS movement through international legal treaties which is proactive protection rather than just relying on licences which is defensive protection. Some interesting stuff, plus she’s mad as a hatter so we get on famously 😉

So I’m spending the week in Brisbane doing both some contract work and also some meeting with various businesses and Government people, all talking about FOSS 🙂 It has worked out really well because I had lunch with some of the people from the QLD Government and will probably be back to Brisbane chatting to more Govvies about FOSS. The way I see it, we should be taking any opportunity to chat to people about how FOSS can be relevant to them. Not why it is important to us 🙂 but rather thinking through how FOSS can help that individual in their work and play, and put it in their context. This is an invaluable approach in getting the message out there.

So of course seeing I don’t get to Brisbane often I based my trip around when HUMBUG is running, so here I am chatting away to some HUMBUGers 🙂 I love visiting the different LUGs and seeing what they are up to and how they are going. Anyway, off to Spain on Monday for the Open Source World Conference which will rock!

I’ve really realised the importance of not only educating the public but also educating the Open Source industry about how to better market themselves and their capability. I’ve also after many discussions, particularly with Government people realised the need for good vendor-neutral advice, because although the vendors are a great source of information about their products, they are not getting the even-handed Open Source message out particularly well. I’m hoping the ASK-OSS reference centre for information about Open Source that I’m working on will help with this a challenge.

This is one of my favourite photos, and I just got it digitised 🙂 In the photo my Mum is as old as I am now. She had spent hours fixing the computer, then she left me with it for 10 minutes whereas I managed to bork it again. The picture is of her fixing my breakage 🙂 Hooray for me!

Software Freedom Day this year and every year from now on will be on the 3rd Saturday of September. That means it’ll be on the 16th September this year and even more excitingly, it means it’ll be on International Talk Like a Pirate Day in 2009. Hooray! Start planning today 🙂 What will your team do this year? How can you take FOSS to the big wide world? Who do you most want to influence and what would make FOSS attractive to them? Bounce the ideas around your LUGs and SIGs, as it is a great event to rally around on a yearly basis and be at the very least reinvigorating and growing our community while also hopefully taking FOSS to the masses.

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!