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We are having our first Linux Australia face to face meeting and planning session this weekend, and I’m feeling really positive about the team. We’ll be going to the Woolloomooloo hotel for dinner on Saturday night if anyone wants to join us for some beers. It’d be a great chance to meet the committee as they are rarely all in the same place. You can get help us get some ideas before our main meeting Sunday, which will be covering everything from how better to support the community, looking at where LA has gone in the last few years, to assessing the grant proposal and other projects and how we can make them more useful to people. We’d certainly love the feedback. When I first got involved with LA the first thing I did was accost almost everyone at LCA 2003 about what they’d like to see in a national body, and the feedback helped shape what we did. The feedback and involvement of the community is what makes such an organisation relevant and useful to the community. Yay team! 🙂

Well the first online LA election went well. The new committee is unofficially:

President: Jon Oxer
Vice President: Pia Smith
Secretary: Anthony Towns
Treasurer: Mark Tearle
Ordinary Members: Andrew Cowie, Geoffrey Bennett, Stewart Smith

Well done by everyone, looks like a rocking crew and I’m looking forward to an excellent LA year 🙂 I’m happy that I was re-elected, as I get to continue my work for LA while ensuring continuity of what I have been trying to achieve for the past two years. I’m extremely glad Jon got president as I think he’ll bring yet another community focused and mature approach to LA.

Gar! So last night while the household was sleeping, someone climb up our balcony, walked into our loungeroom (we didn’t used to lock that door when home) and took two laptops and some cash. Craige lost a lot of work, and I lost about 3 months of work. Very annoying stuff! Luckily they didn’t take my entire wallet (just the cash), and to be honest, when stuff like this happens I’m just glad that everyone is safe. Anyway, now to try and catch up with everything.

Great quote:

You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees.
An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil.
A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.

-Ghandi

Which File Extension are You? 🙂 and happy new year everyone!

After moving from the technical to the strategic type role, dealing with vendors and corporate type in the “Open Source” space I’ve realised an incredibly scary thing. The word mincing running riot is stripping the meaning of what we within the Open Source/Linux world have come to expect. Companies releasing “Open Source” code that offers none of the freedoms we all enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that “Free Software” is any better a term (“Freedom Software” perhaps, but then you just completely lose people). I hate the fact that many companies are trying to reinvent a monopoly in their own image, and to make it worse they are using our language against us. Anyway, I sat down and thought about what makes Open Source so important. I came up with five “pillars” of Open Source, and realised that if anyone says they have Open Source, and are missing even just one of these pillars, it just isn’t Open Source:

Open Standards – software that adheres to internationally recognised and open software protocols and data formats

Open Licences – the software _must_ be released under an official Open Source licence according to the OSI

Open Knowledge – the development tools and documentation must be freely available to everyone

Open Community – contributing to and using the software must be completely open to anyone, anywhere, with no restrictions

Open Source – the software and source of course must be available and freely distributed, ensuring equal access to the technology

I know that these rehash some of the points of the OSI Open Source Definition, however I feel that they are an easy test of whether something is or is not in fact “Open Source” as the community has come to expect.

I guess that for me, the wonderful thing about “Open Source” is that it is a technology solution to a very real human problem. I see it as being a mechanism to award more equal access to opportunity across the board. This is why I don’t want to see it diluted, and this is why I am so passionate about the whole topic. There are two goals that are extremely important to me:

1) Complete Connectivity – I think that by getting more people online, you offer them a line of communication beyond what they were born into. This develops understanding and empathy of the unknown, hopefully leading to a less fearful and volatile global society. It leads to more opportunities, contacts, participation.

2) Complete Knowledge – By ensuring there is always a free and accessible place to gain and commit information, we would effectively be ensuring that the wonderful resources provided by the internet are not monopolised, and people are able to share and grow together. In the short term future I am hoping to work with some people to create a Free Knowledge project that extends way beyond just IT. I posted about Free Knowledge before so I won’t go too much into it, but just imagine if every person on this earth wrote down one thing they know well. Whether it be how to plough a field, how to maintain good hygiene in places with dirty water, how to teach 6th grade maths to kids, etc. There is already so much information on the web, which is awesome, and some are trying to partition off information for profit, an inevitable step in modern money-obsessed western cultures. I hope to ensure that good quality information is always available to people freely, and that people will always be able to commit information freely. It amuses me how much the monetary priorities of the “western” world don’t take simple human sharing into account. Most people like to share information, to teach others freely. It is part of our nature. We don’t need a price tag on everything we do. We certainly don’t need a price tag on our evolution.

I went to an interesting conference last week. It was called Unlocking IP and it was looking at different models of managing “Intellectual Property”. I spoke about one of the best examples in the world of sharing knowledge productively, Open Source, as well as some of the Free Knowledge projects that are springing up around the place. I have an interest in trying to get some sort of Free Knowledge project off the ground, where people can post and collaborate on various works, and it is freely accessible. Imagine if every person in the world wrote just one paper on something they know well (astrophysics, 12-yr old math, how to plough a field, painting, etc) and everyone had access to this. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be able to make money from their creations, however what seems to have happened is that as a species, we have locked up our knowledge and further divided up society into those who can afford and those who can’t. My argument is that by doing this, we have put a price tag on our own evolution, and are only allowing the more wealthy, and minority of people at that, to advance.

To be honest I got quite disillusioned by some of what I heard. People saying “so we love Open Content and Open Standards, we believe in a better future, better opportunities for all, blah blah blah, and by the way this is only achievable with our product”. I started to get a little angry with some of the strange interpretations of free and open, so I put together a list.

Open Knowledge is NOT!:

– Controlled search mechanisms

– Controlled access to data

– Having to register or pay for knowledge

– Creating standards and imposing them on others

– Embedding into people/children habits that create revenue

– Intentionally embedding into people/children particular biases or worldviews

– Advertising

– Making money out of information which is meant to be open to the public anyway, such as public records

– Filtering information

– Value-adds without content

– Having a barrier to access or contributing

– Segmenting the world through controlling who gets access to what information and when

I also got a little sick of people continually saying they were just protecting the “innovators” or “copyright holders”. One of the problems as I see it is that the innovators are not being protected. We are kind of lucky with the GPL in software because there are copyright protections that stop large players from being able to monopolise Open Source software. We still have the patents problem, and usually it isn’t the innovators who own the patents to their works in software, it is the company they work for. Therefore big companies are acquiring and then enforcing patents. The patents game seems almost to be a numbers game, (IANAL) in that they with the most win. If you manage to afford the incredible cost to lodge a patent to protect some incredible invention you’ve come up with, the fact is to practically implement that invention in a program you will alsolutely step on many trivial patents owned by larger companies who have the money and lawyers to throw at this that the rest of us can’t afford. Therefore if they like your idea, they can potentially muscle it out of you with their own portfolio as a threat. Already we’ve seen several projects that would be of huge benefit to the ICT industry and the Australia people, such as rproxy, that are locked up by companies who own patents that will never implement them except to extract $$$ from someone else who usefully implements the idea in code.

The Unlocking IP conference was more about content than code, and the problem extends way beyond the software industry. The music and film industry is no better, often the copyright holder is the large company such as the MPA, who have been running around trying to jump people for copyright infringment. This wouldn’t be so bad if 1) they weren’t using word searches on FTP repositories without human interaction, as they did with LA, and 2) that the proceedings were going back to the musicians and actors. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this area, but you so often hear about the bad contracts musicians particularly get, and the hoops they have to run through, getting a pittance (comparatively) for their work. As the large companies effectively become the copyright holders, you can bet the musicians are getting next to nothing out of copyright infringment cases.

Rusty Russell has written several rants on patents, copyright, lawyers, and more. I highly recommend checking out his blog. As a software developer who is both personall affected, and who knows many people affected by these kinds of issues he has a lot to say on the subject. Lawyers to watch are Kim Weatherall, Brendon Scott, Jeremy Malcolm and Ian Oi. Also check out Groklaw for more legal foo.

PS – One of the lawyers there, a Special Counsel to the Australian Government no less made the adsurd comment that “those Free Software people don’t believe in Copyright”. I pulled him up in the question time as soon as I had the chance, explaining that given the existing copyright system, Free and Open Source people rely on copyright, in fact without it Linux and other Open Source software projects wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as they have. It acts to protect the people, the integrity of the code, it stops a company monopolising the code, amongst many other good things. He had got this assumption from an RMS talk a little while ago, and while I don’t doubt that he misinterpreted somewhat, I also saw RMS talk in Sydney and he certainly left a lot of people confused. We need to ensure that the messages are extremely clear to stop these kinds of misleading comments being made.

RMS was certainly interesting when he spoke here, he recommended I change the name of Linux Australia to GNU/Linux Australia (no surprises there), he suggested to an ICT advisor to simply not speak to her clients rather than giving her tools to introduce FOSS to clients (such as business case reasons), he said we all need to stop using the term “Intellectual Property” (which I can kind of understand, but we can’t just bury our heads indefinitely). After the talk, when most people had left he decided to yell at me. I’ve never seen someone so adamant about picking a fight, especially when I was actually saying thankyou for the talk. Certainly not making any friends there RMS, and certainly not “saintly” behaviour as he likes to see himself.

In reference to my wonderful, caring and generous fiance’s blog about my little adventure on friday, I’d just like to clarify that I was under the influence of valium, anti-inflammatories, anti-biotics, and much anesthetic at the time. I am however the happy owner of a nice new tooth, and I have metal in my head. I just hope it doesn’t get picked up in airport metal detectors, otherwise any flights through the US particularly could become a little more….personal than I’d be comfortable with 😉

“I _swear_ I have metal in my head! No no, not the gloves!!!”

On Wednesday Linux Australia, OSIA and Baker & McKenzie presented the first Open Source Forum. I have to say I’m pretty proud of this event 🙂 Quite some time ago, particularly during the whole “Free” Trade Agreement research Linux Australia was doing I realised something quite scary. In Australia there is no differentiation between that which is good for ICT in Australia, and that which is good for the Australian ICT industry. IE – what is in the best interests of the ICT players in Australia is not necessarily in the best interests of the _Australian_ ICT players. I realised that a lot of legislation, and industry practices have been directed by large multi-nationals, some of whom play dangerous software patents games, some of whom participate in anti-competitive practices beyond belief. I felt and still feel that the Aussie companies are not always considered properly, and often assume that organisations such as the AIIA act in their best interests, even when the AIIA has perhaps one Aussie company represented on their board. Anyway, issues such as software patents are relevant to both open source and proprietary companies, in fact any person or company who is creating software.

So how does this relate to the Open Source Forum? I thought it would be great to take topical issues, present a diverse _range_ of views on the issue, and then give people the mechnism to have the discussions that are currently not happening. For our first Open Source Forum we used Software Patents as our topic. We had legal, practical, industry and developer perspectives represented, giving the participants several points of view to take home. It was a great success, with nearly 100 participants, and excellent feedback. I’m hoping we can see more SME and developer representation, as they are the particular groups who need to become educated in these issues. Thanks very much to all the presenters, and to Baker and McKenzie for hosting the event.

I’m looking to run these every two months. The next one will likely be “Linux on the Desktop”, and we’ll have a few vendors as well as solutions providers to see the vendor spiels and realities of implementation. See you all there! I’ll try to get a bigger venue to cater for the demand, so if anyone wants to participate, sponsor, or help support this event, please contact me – pia at linux.org.au. Rock on Australia!

Linux Australia is holding our first Open Source Forum in collaborationg with OSIA and Baker & McKenzies. The first one is around Software Patents. The idea is to get 4-6 speakers to address an issue from different perspectives, giving attendees the ability to form a well informed and balanced view on the issue. Each speaker only have 10-15 minutes to put across their point, and after the talks there is the opportunity for discussion. A mechanism for actually having the conversation about the issue if you will. Anyway, I’m pretty excited. We have a legal perspective, two industry perspectives, a developer perspective and a real perspective of how the patents system works in Australia. If anyone is itnerested, it is being held in Sydney city, RSVPs are required, and all details can be found at the Baker and McKenzie website.

Rock on Linux Australia! 🙂