Opening up Knowledge

I know you probably didn't notice, but I posted very little on this blog last week - nothing, in fact. This was not down to me going “meh” for a few days, but rather because I was over-eager in accepting offers to talk at conferences that were almost back to back, with the result that I had little time for much else during that period.

On Open Enterprise blog.

RMS on Amazon's "Swindle"

As you've probably seen, there is concern over Amazon's plans to pull the text-to-voice capability of the Kindle e-book reader, because of misguided pressure from authors groups in the US. There's been a lot of discussion about this, and how to react to it, on the A2k mailing list, including the following characteristic submission from a certain Richard M Stallman:

I sympathize with the feeling behind these protests, but they are directed at the wrong target.

The protestors rightly condemn the Authors Guild for demanding the removal of the screen reader feature, but the way they are doing it makes Amazon look like a victim. Actually it is the main perpetrator.

The reason that Amazon can turn off the screen reader capability is that the machines use non-free software, controlled by Amazon rather than by the user. If Amazon can turn this off retroactively (does anyone know for certain if they did?), it implies the product has a dangerous back door.

In addition, the Amazon Swindle is designed with Digital Restrictions Management to stop people from sharing. It is a nasty product with an evil goal.

I hope there will be protests against Amazon's role in these events.

Well, at least he's consistent.

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A2K Goes ODF

Access to Knowledge is an important movement designed to make knowledge, well, more accessible. Its conferences a serious knees-up where the great and good in this field congregate. This year, they've done something sensible:

Open Document Formats have finally become the default document format for presentations. Having been at all three editions, I am personally impressed that the ISP has come this far. In the first edition, we had proprietary document formats; during the second edition, there was a 50-50 thing going on but the default still remained proprietary. The third edition has proved to be 100% ODF.

This needs to become the default at all open conferences: it will help peopl kick the Word/Powerpoint habit.