Germany Funds Open Source Software

I missed this when it first came out a couple of weeks ago:

Der Bundesrat hat am 20.2.2009 dem Gesetz zur Sicherung von Beschäftigung und Stabilität in Deutschland zugestimmt und so den Weg für die geplanten Investitionen frei gemacht. Im „Pakt für Beschäftigung und Stabilität in Deutschland“ sind auch 500 Mio. Euro für Maßnahmen im Bereich der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnik enthalten, deren Verwendung durch den Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Informationstechnik gesteuert wird. Von diesen 500 Mio. Euro stehen 300 Mio. Euro sofort zur Verfügung. 200 Mio. Euro wurden durch den Haushaltsausschuss des Deutschen Bundestages bis zur Vorlage konkreter Maßnahmen gesperrt.

...

„"Ziel der Maßnahmen ist es, die Bereiche Green-IT, IT-Sicherheit und Open-Source auszubauen sowie innovative zukunftsfähige Technologien und Ideen für die Verwaltung nutzbar zu machen."“ sagt Staatssekretär Dr. Beus. Hierzu gehöre auch, ergänzend in die Weiterentwicklung der zentralen IT-Steuerungsmechanismen des Bundes zu investieren, um IT-Großprojekte künftig effizienter und schneller umzusetzen.

[Via Google Translate: The Federal Council decided on 20.2.2009 to the law to secure employment and stability in Germany, and approved, paving the way for the planned investment made. In the "pact for employment and stability in Germany" are also 500 million for activities in the field of information and communications technology, whose use by the Federal Government for information technology is controlled. Of these 500 million euros 300 million immediately available. 200 million euros were fixed by the Budget Committee of the German Bundestag pending concrete actions blocked.

...
"The aim of the measures is to improve the areas of Green IT, IT security and open-source develop sustainable and innovative technologies and ideas for the administration to use." Says Secretary of State Dr. Beus.It also includes, in addition to the development of the central IT control mechanisms of the federal investment to large-scale IT projects will be implemented more efficiently and faster.]

Every little helps. (Via PSL Brasil.)

UK Government Wants to Kill Net Neutrality in EU

The UK government is fast turning into the digital villain of Europe as far as the Internet is concerned. Not content with monitoring everything we look at online, it now wants to break Net Neutrality so that it can block out chunks of the Internet is disapproves of - killing Net Neutrality in the process.

That, at least, is the effect of a proposed amendment EU's Telecoms Package, currently being circulated according to Monica Horten's IPtegrity site:

The UK government wants to cut out users rights to access Internet content, applications and services. Some of the information used to justify the change has been cut and pasted from the Wikipedia.

Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users' rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a ‘principle' that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services.

As Horten explains:

The proposed amendments cut out completely any users' rights to do with content - whether accessing or distributing - which would appear to be in breach of the European Charter of Fundamental rights, Article 10. The Charter states that everyone has the right "to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers." In the digital age, the Internet, and the associated applications and services provided by the World Wide Web, is the means by which people exercise that right.

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The amendments, if carried, would reverse the principle of end-to-end connectivity which has underpinned not only the Internet, but also European telecommunications policy, to date.

The proposal is not just against the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, but will also bring the European Council in conflict with the European Commission and the European Parliament. Unfortunately much of the real power in Europe still lies with the Council, so if this proposal is accepted there, it might still be imposed against the wishes of everyone else.

SCO What? It's Patently over for Copyright

Remember SCO? It's a once-important company that developed a death-wish by suing IBM in 2003. As Wikipedia explains...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Not that We Live in a Police State...

...but there is this:

Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.

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Police surveillance teams are also ­targeting journalists who cover demonstrations, and are believed to have ­monitored members of the press during at least eight protests over the last year.

Because we know that all journalists are scum, anyway....

Opining on Generation Open

Here's a nice little thought-piece from Chris Messina:

The people within Facebook not only believe in what they’re doing but are on the leading edge of Generation Open. It’s not merely an age thing; it’s a mindset thing. It’s about having all your references come from the land of the internet rather than TV and becoming accustomed to — and taking for granted — bilateral communications in place of unidirectional broadcast forms. Where authority figures used to be able to get away with telling you not to talk back, Generation Open just turns to Twitter and lets the whole world know what they think.

But it’s not just that the means of publishing have been democratized and the new medium is being mastered; change is flowing from the events that have shaped my generation’s understanding of economics, identity, and freedom.

Obviously, I agree with all this, since it's what I've been preaching for some time. But I think this is rather wide of the mark:

Obama is running smack against the legacy of the baby boomers — the generation whose parents defeated the Nazis. More relevant is that the boomers fought the Nazis. Their children, in turn, inherited a visceral fear of machinery, in large part thanks to IBM’s contributions to the near-extermination of an entire race of people. If you want to know why privacy is important — look to the power of aggregate knowledge in the hands of xenophobes 70 years ago.

But who was alive 70 years ago? Better: who was six years old and terribly impressionable fifty years ago? Our parents, that’s who.

And it’s no wonder why the Facebook newsfeed (now stream) and Twitter make these folks uneasy. The potential for abuse is so great and our generation — our open, open generation — is so beautifully naive.

I really don't think the "Nazis" are much of a factor these days, even for older baby boomers. In fact, I'm constantly amazed at how distant World War II now seems. Too much has happened since then, not least in technology.

I think that's the real reason that (some) baby boomers have problems with Facebook and openness: it's the nth wave of stuff that's come through, and they're still grappling with the first few.

One of the great things about openness is that encourages yet more open experimentation, leading to a kind of dizzying positive feedback, and a delirious helter-skelter ride of techno-fun. Understandably, that's disconcerting for generations who grew up expecting stability, not constant lability.

Do Open Source Eyeballs Really Work?

One of the most contentious areas in computing is whether open source is more or less secure than closed source systems. Open source is open for everyone – including the black hats – to poke around and find the bugs, but it's also open for anyone skilled enough to fix them. Closed source is (theoretically) harder to peek into, but (practically) impossible to fix unless you work for the company that wrote it.

Here's some nice empirical evidence that many eyeballs looking at open source code *do* make a difference...

On Open Enterprie blog.

Cuba Gets an (Open) Hand from Brazil

It's been evident for some time that Brazil is a real powerhouse of open source. Now it's moving to the next level: exporting its success to other countries:

Brazil’s Software Público website was created as part of this initiative. At the beginning of 2009, they started Phase One of the process to internationalize the free software available at the portal. A poll will facilitate a vote on the available software, with the top two being the first ones to be translated.

The poll was launched on February 13th at the XIII Informatics Convention and Fair in Havana, Cuba. During this meeting of government officials, Cuba and Brazil agreed to start a partnership on developing free software together.

Cuba will be the first country to formally receive implementation assistance using the Brazilian experience. Fausto Alvim, an official from UNDP who is responsible for the replication of the Brazilian model in other countries, highlighted that “the first country to utilize the Public Software Portal project will be the one that demonstrates identity with the replication of the model,” in that their experience in using Brazil’s experience will be further shared as more countries adopt the model.

The Real Reason for Microsoft's TomTom Lawsuit

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Microsoft's suit against TomTom, which alleged infringement of eight of its patents - including three that relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. I wrote there that this seemed part of a larger attack on Linux, and not just one on TomTom, as Microsoft nonetheless insisted.

This called forth a fair amount of disagreement, so I was glad to come across this post on Harald Welte's blog....

On Open Enterprise blog.

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Open Microblogging for Open Source Professionals

I like Twitter, but I feel rather guilty about using it, since it's hardly open source. Of course, there's Laconi.ca, which is not only open source, but allows all kinds of other services to be built upon it. Here's a good example:

FLOSS.PRO is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software Laconica tool.

FLOSS.PRO is there for people involved in FLOSS, join the groups or create the ones you need. It's built so that FLOSS Professionals can get help and to help.

As you can see, FLOSS.PRO is not only open source, but devoted to the world of open source. Gaining critical mass is the central issue for these services, which is why I still use Twitter, to my shame.... (Via Tectonic.)

Nutting Net Neutrality

If you thought all that anti-net neutrality stuff was just for Yanks, think again: they're trying to sneak it over here, too:

Telcos are lobbying hard for discriminatory practices in network management to be permited, which threaten the neutrality of the Internet. They are opposed by citizens groups who are calling on MEPs to close the loopholes in the Telecoms Package Second Reading.

Liberty Global is the latest telco to throw its hat in the anti-net neutrality ring, with a statement in support of its colleagues at AT&T and Verizon. In a statement to run with its European Parliament seminar today, Liberty Global calls for limitations on regulatory intervention in respect of ‘network management practices'. The AT&T amendments are about trying to stop European regulators taking the kind of action that the FCC was able to take in the Comcast case, where a netwwork operator was restricting lawful services on the Internet and the FCC told it to stop.

Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty (Global)...

Patently Good News

There have been a number of important cases on both sides of the Atlantic concerning the patenting of software recently. In the UK, there were two cases, both initially rejected. Here's the reasoning behind turning down the application from CVON Innovations Limited...

On Open Enterprise blog.

CollabNet Comes Out of the Shadows

CollabNet has a fascinating history that goes back to 1999, when Collab.Net launched SourceXchange:

a site where companies can post proposals for programming work and solicit bids from open source coders. It is intended to form the first of a series of projects exploring new business models based on open source, and which collectively make up Collab.Net. A list of those involved reads like a roll call of the leading players in the open source industry. Employees include Frank Hecker, who played a major role in convincing Netscape to take its browser open source, and James Barry, who helped convert IBM to Apache. Alongside [co-founder Brian] Behlendorf, Tim O'Reilly and Marc Andreessen are board members, and investors in a $35 million round of funding closed in June 2000 included Dell, HP, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Sun and TurboLinux....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is This the Next Aral Sea?

Ever heard of Lake Balkhash? Me neither. But now might be a good time to get to know it - before it disappears like the Aral Sea:

Lake Balkhash lies in Central Asia, and is the largest body of water after the Caspian Sea, recently earning this status with the demise of the Aral Sea. Both the Aral and Balkhash lie locked in desert and semi-desert regions with little rainfall, fed largely by rivers running through heavily irrigated, arid regions. They are bodies of water with historically dynamic shorelines, vulnerable to a wide variety of actors in the region. comparative surface areas of central asian bodies of waterThe similarity of Balkhash and Aral suggests that a closer analysis of the cautionary tale presented by the disappearance of the Aral can give some indications as to the future of Balkhash. Being prey to many of the same factors that caused the desiccation of the Aral Sea, Lake Balkhash may soon suffer a similar fate. The permanent representative of the United Nations Development Program in Kazakhstan stated “…Lake Balkhash could meet a fate similar to the Aral Sea.”

Defend the Data Protection Act

One of the most important and earliest pieces of legislation concerning digital information is the Data Protection Act (DPA). Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, currently before Parliament, would effectively nullify the DPA, since it would allow Ministers to use information gathered for one purpose for another – one of the things the DPA is there to prevent.

I therefore urge you to use the WriteToThem service to contact your MP, asking them to vote against the measure. Here's what I've sent:

I would like to express my concern about Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill. As you know, this would enable any Minister by order to be able to take any information gathered for one purpose - across the public and private sector - and use it for any other purpose. This would effectively nullify the Data Protection Act (DPA) – one of the key pieces of legislation for the digital age – and leave British citizens quite defenceless in this important sphere.

Not only would this be bad in itself, it would be done in a way that undermines Parliament: Ministers would be able to ignore the DPA for any purpose whenever it suited them, without any need to return to Parliament to have the move scrutinised.

I am writing to you to ask you to vote against this pernicious move. Moreover, please know that if the Clause is passed, I refuse to give my consent to the arbitrary sharing of my information under any ‘Information Sharing Order’.

UK Government Fails to Get Web 2.0

This is so depressing:

There should be no new exemption from copyright law for users' adaptations of copyright-protected content, the UK Government has said. To create such an exemption for user-generated content would ignore the rights of content creators, it said.

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"Another significant concern is the extent to which such an exemption might allow others to use the works in a way that the existing rights holders do not approve of and the impact that exemptions in this area might have on remuneration," it said.

In fact reading the full report is even more depressing, since it constantly harps on "stakeholders" - by which it means content owners - and clearly doesn't give a toss for the general public's concerns or needs.

The UK government is clearly still trapped in the mindset that it's about telling the little people what they can do with the stuff kindly provided by those magnanimous content corporations. Even extending exemptions for teaching and libraries are frowned upon as self-evidently bad things - can't spread that dangerous knowledge stuff too widely, now can we?

How to Save Investigative Journalism

There's increasing hand wringing over the fact that revenues at dead-tree newspapers are diving, leading to redundancies, and loss of the ability to conduct high-quality investigative journalism. At the same time, one of the best sources for investigative journalism, Wikileaks, is a bit short of dosh. Problem, meet solution: newspapers should fund Wikileaks.

What the Hashtag?!

One of the reasons Twitter has taken off and become so popular (at least amongst sad people such as myself with nothing better to do) is that a rich ecosystem has sprung up around it, with all kinds of serious and silly services that build on its content. Here's one of the better ones, What the Hashtag?!:

Welcome to What the Hashtag?!, the user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter

What's a hashtag?

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your posts. Hashtags can be created by anyone simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #myhashtag. Hashtags were developed as a means to create groupings of related content on Twitter.

This is an interesting way to access and index content, and adds an extra level of usefulness to Twitter.

Linux's Next Frontier: “In-Vehicle Infotainment”

One of the sure signs that open source is taking hold in computing is that it is spreading far beyond its heartland, the datacentre. Smartphones have been perhaps the most visible manifestation of this, but the world of embedded systems, where the operating system is even less evident than with mobile phones, is potentially even more important, for the simple reason that it embraces so many different sectors, each of which is economically significant in its own right.

The announcement today of the creation of GENIVI is very clear sign that Linux is already moving into another huge vertical industry: in-car entertainment...

On Open Enterprise blog.

How to Make Money from Music

Someone's managed:

it was recently revealed that rock gods Aerosmith have made more money off of their crummy co-branded version of Guitar Hero (I say crummy because reviews of the game have been lackluster) then they have on any album that the band has released to date. The revelation recently came from Activision chief executive Bobby Kotick and it unscores a number of really interesting points. First off, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is nothing more than a "greatest hits" montage for the band, with a bunch of indy band songs sprinkled in for variety. Putting out the game cost Aerosmith nothing more than their signature, agreeing to allow Activision to use their music. Secondly, it proves the consumer is still interested in paying for music. They just don't want to buy CDs or single tracks anymore. They want interactivity, add-ons, special content and video games. According Microsoft gaming chief Robbie Bach, more than 60 million tracks were downloaded for Rockband, Guitar Hero and Lips over Xbox Live in 2008.

The second point is crucial: you've just got to offer stuff in the form that punters want. Is that so hard to understand for the music business?

Sun's McNealy Sees the Light on Open Source

If you were looking for a sign of the times in computing, you could do worse than consider the trajectory of Scott McNealy. When he was running Sun, open source in his view was pretty much the un-American cancer that Microsoft had proclaimed it to be - largely because of the inroads that GNU/Linux was making against Sun's proprietary Solaris. That was then; this is now....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Help Stop Clause 152...

...of the Coroners and Justice Bill (currently being debated in Parliament): it's not just bad, it's diablolically bad, because it lets the UK government eviscerate the Data Protection Act at will.

As No2ID's Phil Booth put in at the Convention on Modern Liberty:

Please write NOW to your MP - http://www.WritetoThem.com is a single click away - telling him or her that you *refuse your consent* to the arbitrary sharing of your information under any ‘Information Sharing Order’ and that you want him or her to vote to have Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill (currently being debated in Parliament) *completely removed* from the Bill.

If you care about our fundamental rights and freedoms, the time to act is now - before we lose yet another one!

For those who don’t have time to read Clause 152, it would enable any Minister by order to be able to take any information gathered for one purpose - across the public and private sector - and use it for any other purpose.

All by itself, it is more dangerous than the entire Identity Cards Act - it literally provides the powers to build the Database State.

Please write to your MP *now* - and tell everyone you know about Clause 152, and ask them to write to their MP too.

http://www.WritetoThem.com - “I refuse to consent, stop Clause 152″

We CAN stop this. Over to you…

He speak de troof: please do it....

How to Hijack an EU Open Source Strategy Paper

Open source is an outsider, not part of the establishment. One price it pays for this is not being privy to all the decisions that are made in the field of governmental policy. Too often, established players are involved without any counterbalancing input from the free software side. Generally, we don't see all the machinations and deals that go on here behind closed doors. But thanks to the increasingly-indispensable Wikileaks, we have the opportunity to observe how an organisation close to Microsoft is attempting to re-write – and hijack – an important European Union open source strategy paper.

On Linux Journal.

This isn't “Open Source”

As a kind of pint-sized free software fidei defensor I feel obliged to counter some of the misconceptions that are put about on the subject around the Web. But I find myself in a slightly embarrassing situation here, in that I need to comment on some statements that have appeared in the virtual pages of Computerworld UK....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Has Microsoft's Patent War Against Linux Begun?

It's been in the air for ages, and now it's happening:

Microsoft filed suit against TomTom today, alleging that the in-car navigation company's devices violate eight of its patents -- including three that relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel.

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Five of the patents in dispute relate to in-car navigation technologies, while the other three involve file-management techniques.

Presumably those are the three that relate to Linux, in which case this is likely to have broader implications than just the in-car navigation market.

Here's a nice statement of how Microsoft views all this:

"Microsoft respects and appreciates the important role that open-source software plays in our industry and we respect and appreciate the passion and the great contribution that open-source developers make in our industry," Gutierrez said. He said that respect and appreciation is "not inconsistent with our respect for intellectual-property rights."

In other words, Microsoft "respects and appreciates" open source until it actually starts to replace Microsoft's offerings, in which case the charming smile is replaced with the shark's grimace.

It may not be a coincidence that Gutierrez has just been promoted to the rank of corporate vice president: could this legal action be his way of announcing the direction he and Microsoft will now take in the battle against Linux?

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

ID Card Database *Already* Breached

That's almost before it's come into existence:

The breaches of the Customer Information System (CIS), which is run by the Department of Work and Pensions, were revealed in a DWP memo to housing benefit and council tax benefit staff on 15 January.

CIS is designed to give local authorities access to citizens' data, including HMRC tax-credit information. In 2006, it was decided that the ID card project would use CIS for biographical information, to avoid having to create a new, monolithic database of the UK's inhabitants.

In the DWP memo, the government department said that desktop access to CIS had helped to "significantly improve service delivery" to citizens, but noted that a series of checks had identified that some local-authority staff were committing serious security breaches using the system.

What makes it even more risible is the following comment:

"The breaches were not necessarily someone purposely going on there and checking something they shouldn't," the DWP spokesperson said. "They could be inadvertently clicking on information."

Yes, that will be a good excuse, won't it: honest guv, I just inadvertently clicked on Gordon Brown's ID card information....

And then, of course, there is the canonical "white is black", "up is down", "bad is good" bit of spin:

The DWP's spokesperson did not respond to a request to describe how it might be possible to break these rules by inadvertently clicking on information in the CIS database, but did claim the number of breaches revealed in the memo showed the system was secure.

And presumably it will use the increasing number of breaches to prove the increasing security of the system in the future.