One of the most frustrating things about free software is that it frequently fails to build on its strengths beyond its code-base.
This is probably because programmers are keener to produce the next cool hack than to worry about meta-tasks that seem more akin to marketing....
On Open Enterprise blog.
I've always been a huge fan of live CDs/DVDs: effectively, they let you try out distros before you install them - and try out multiple offerings. This is something that Windows can't do, of course. It hadn't really occurred to me that live USBs might be even more powerful, but this story about schools switching from hard disc installation to live USB drives makes sense:The Kremser Bundesgymnasium uses this system since two years on all computers in the computer science classrooms. Now they decided to switch from local installations to live systems on USB sticks. The advantage: The pupils can carry their system around with themselves. They can use it at school, at home or at any computer they want. About 50% of all pupils uses the system regularly at home. It seems like especially the young pupils using the system quite naturally and have no reservations. Further Rene Schwarzinger explains: “We don’t want to encourage our pupils to create illegal copies just to be able to work at home with the same programs as at school”. Of course the natural solution to avoid this is to use only Free Software at school and pass it down to the pupils.
In autumn they want to introduce netbooks together with the GNU/Linux USB stick to the pupils.
I really like the idea using USB sticks instead of normal installations on hard disks. Live systems are nothing new but I think it makes much sense in this scenario. With the USB sticks the pupils can work with their systems and their data wherever they want without having to convince their parents to install a new operating system at home which could be quite challenging, both technically and philosophically.
As well as the natural advantages this system offers, described above, there is also the bonus that Windows simply can't compete: you can't transfer Windows to USB drives and hand them out to all and sundry. This seems to me to be an hugely important aspect: instead of fighting Windows where it is strong - on the desktop - GNU/Linux should be deployed where it offers unique solutions, and unique benefits.
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Here's an interesting experiment that shows the way for all national libraries:Kopinor and the National Library of Norway signed a contract regarding a pilot project for digital books on the Internet.
Through the project, called Bokhylla.no (’Bookshelf’), the library will make all Norwegian books from the 1790s, 1890s and 1990s available on the Internet.
All titles from the 1990s and some titles from the 1890s – together approx. 50.000 books – are under copyright. These books will not be prepared for print or download, but will be made available to Norwegian IP-addresses.
There are things to fault - like limiting it to Norwegian IP addresses, and the fact that only some years are available - but it's a useful start.
It's really heartening to see this openness/transparency meme blooming everywhere. But the forces of ignorance are fighting a rearguard action. Here's news from Sun's Simon Phipps of the Dutch journalist Brenno de Winter, who is battling for the truth in the Netherlands:Brenno has been trying to get details of local government procurement published on the web, so that the resulting transparency can drive better decisions. Since most local authorities haven't wanted to do that, he's been filing bulk Freedom of Information requests (the Dutch abbreviation is apparently WOB) to get the data.
...
I got a note from him yesterday telling me a new problem has come up. Despite the fact that the local authorities - like all in Europe - have a legal duty to provide the information, they have started sending Brenno big bills for the administrative work involved, in a kind of denial-of-service attack on his campaign.
He's pretty sure that if he takes all the claims to court he can get them struck down, but to do that he needs a fighting fund. There's an event in Amsterdam on June 11th where Scriptum Libre will be raising funds for him, and you can contribute by visiting their payment page and designating Brenno as the beneficiary of your donation. Worth supporting - pass it on.
Indeed: please pass on if you can.
One of the most vexed questions at the moment is the state of the netbook market. What are the returns for GNU/Linux-based systems? And is it true that Windows XP is all-conquering here? Unfortunately, despite all this sound and fury, there are few data points to provide much guidance. So some news from the the OLPC community is particularly interesting.
As you may recall, one of Microsoft's bigger "victories" was getting OLPC to offer Windows XP versions alongside the original Sugar-based system, running on GNU/Linux:
It was almost exactly one year ago that Nicholas Negroponte announced an agreement between OLPC and Microsoft to bring Windows XP to the XO-1 to great turmoil. I vividly remember the late-night flood of e-mails and IRC chats where everyone was trying to figure out just what that announcement really meant.
Someone from the One Laptop Per Child News site has had the excellent idea of following things up:I've been wondering about what ever happened to these Windows XP-based OLPC trials. I haven't really heard anything about them in quite some time. Now more recently I've asked around and found there is a good reason why I haven't seen anything: countries are choosing Sugar over Windows XP for their XO deployments.
Apparently the conversations are going pretty much as many of us had expected: Initially country representatives inquire if Windows XP runs on the XO laptop. That doesn't really come as a surprise - for many people Windows is the definition of a computer. However, upon further investigation every country decided to stick to Sugar.
So, is this evidence that XP is a damp squib in the OLPC world? And what implications does it have for netbooks?
Yesterday I had another meeting with Richard Steel, CIO of Newham, who was generous with both his time and information. After our introductory session a few weeks ago, we got down to the nitty-gritty – the server side. I was impressed by spaghetti-like complexity of the diagram showing the links between the disparate services and their databases: running a borough is clearly an incredibly complex job, and it's clear that we are still in the early days of automating that process.
Two things emerged during the morning, one good, and one bad...
On Open Enterprise blog.
This review of "Burning the Ships" is perhaps the most clueless thing I've ever read on Ars Technica:
Phelps' point throughout is that such deals were possible thanks to Microsoft's IP, which gave it something valuable to offer in cross-licensing agreements that brought companies together as partners, not just as totally independent rivals. That's the way it has to be for companies today; technology has grown so complex that a "fortress mentality culture and go-it-alone market strategy" simply won't work anymore. Collaboration and partnership are the new name of the game, and IP is the glue that seals such deals.
That's like saying giving people manacles is providing them with some nice bling. The point is they are manacles - just like intellectual monopolies are manacles. They are only valuable in the eyes of slave traders; any civilised society would ban them.
To call this "collaboration" is a perversion of language: it's about *enslavement*, pure and simple. It's just that Microsoft has become subtler.
One of the favourite passages invoked by people who believe that sharing does not diminish ideas (and by extension digital content) but enhances whatever it touches, is the following from Thomas Jefferson:He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Now Larry Lessig passes on the news that the idea goes back even further (no surprise there) to that fab bloke St. Augustine, who wrote the following poetic par:
The words I am uttering penetrate your senses, so that every hearer holds them, yet withholds them from no other. Not held, the words could not inform. Withheld, no other could share them. Though my talk is, admittedly, broken up into words and syllables, yet you do not take in this portion or that, as when picking at your food. All of you hear all of it, though each takes all individually. I have no worry that, by giving all to one, the others are deprived. I hope, instead, that everyone will consume everything; so that, denying no other ear or mind, you take all to yourselves, yet leave all to all others. But for individual failures of memory, everyone who came to hear what I say can take it all off, each on one's separate way.
Who could possibly gainsay that?
At a time when transparency – or lack of it – is in the air, here's another demonstration of how not to do it, this time from the European Union. It concerns the valiant efforts of an Italian MEP, Marco Cappato, who had a few questions for the European Commission about its use of free software....
On Open Enterprise blog.
It means to make clear, or obvious. Like this?1. A system that facilitates rich interaction with and/or management of environmental components included in an environment, comprising:a housing with a face;a communication component that manages a set of I/O components, the communication component is configured to receive an input by way of an input component from the set of I/O components and to transmit an instruction by way of an output component from the set of I/O components;a presence component that employs a set of sensors to determine an orientation of the housing;a command component that determines the instruction based at least in part upon the orientation; andan advisor component that is configured to provide guidance in connection with the orientation.
2. The system of claim 1, the set of I/O components includes at least one of a keyboard, a keypad, a button, a switch, a touchpad, a display, a speaker, a microphone, a receiver, or a transmitter.
3. The system of claim 1, the instruction is configured to update a state of an environmental component, the environmental component is configured to receive the instruction and to update the state.
4. The system of claim 3, the environmental component is at least one of a light device, a thermostat, a media device, a game console, a computer, a controller device, or a component of one or more of the foregoing.
5. The system of claim 1, the orientation is at least one of a direction of the face or a gesture, the gesture is a recent trajectory of the housing.
6. The system of claim 1, the orientation indicates an environmental component targeted by the face.
7. The system of claim 1, the set of sensors includes at least one of an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a camera, a laser, a biometric sensor, a transmitter, or a receiver.
8. The system of claim 1, the command component further employs the input to determine the instruction.
9. The system of claim 1, the advisor component, in order to provide the guidance, facilitates articulation or display of at least one of the instruction, a targeted environmental component, a suitable orientation to produce the instruction, or a suitable orientation to target a particular environmental component
10. The system of claim 1, the advisor component provides the guidance by way of an associated avatar, the avatar is presentable by way of an audio output, a text-based output, a video output or display, a holographic output or display, or combinations thereof.
This comes from a new Microsoft patent:The claimed subject matter relates to an architecture that can facilitate rich interaction with and/or management of environmental components included in an environment. The architecture can exist in whole or in part in a housing that can resemble a wand or similar object. The architecture can utilize one or more sensor from a collection of sensors to determine an orientation or gesture in connection with the wand, and can further issue an instruction to update a state of an environmental component based upon the orientation. In addition, the architecture can include an advisor component to provide contextual and/or comprehensive guidance in an intuitive manner.
The long, detailed and dull description of this wonder is so obscure and unclear that people are speculating what exactly it might be or do. But the whole point of a patent is to explain what you have invented, and what it does, so that you can lay claim to it as a new and wonderful creation. If it's not even clear from your patent, then you've clearly failed, and it ought to be rejected out of hand.
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One of the Great Lies of the Labour's surveillance society is that being watched - specifically by the greatest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world - makes us safer. Guess what - it doesn't:The use of closed-circuit television in city and town centres and public housing estates does not have a significant effect on crime, according to Home Office-funded research to be distributed to all police forces in England and Wales this summer.
Actually, I'm being unfair: CCTV is useful for one particular application.The authors, who include Cambridge University criminologist, David Farrington, say while their results lend support for the continued use of CCTV, schemes should be far more narrowly targeted at reducing vehicle crime in car parks.
So there we have it: the vast majority of CCTV cameras are a waste of money. They should be removed - or at least deployed to where they serve some purpose: to car parks.
As I have observed recently (probably ad nauseam for some readers - apologies, but it needs saying), the openness that lies behind open source, open access and the rest feeds naturally into at least partial solutions for the political malaise affecting many countries, including, notably, the UK.
So it's great to see some of my fellow openists coming to the same conclusions:I would not normally write about politics on this blog but Non-Brits may not have caught the raw anger of the UK electorate about the betrayal of trust by their elected representatives (members of Parliament). I believe that “web democracy” is now essential for modern government. By web democracy I mean the processes that so many of us have developed in our own work. I am not suggesting that conventional government is replaced by Web processes but that web processes should be used to supplement the process of government and be baked into that process. That is why Net Neutrality matters so much.
Heartening, too, that mainstream media are starting to join the dots, and are realising that the enemies of openness are precisely the ones with something to hide:
An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has established that backers of a Bill two years ago which aimed to exempt Parliament from the full force of the Freedom of Information Act have benefited from thousands of pounds paid under the second home expenses system.
Openness, everywhere, now.
Microsoft is stitching up Africa in the cruellest way:Microsoft is on its way to becoming a dominant brand in Africa, mainly through the deals made with various governments.
“We are very conscious of the environment in which we do business, where our employees and customers live, we always try to empower those communities," said Dr Diarra.
“Africa is really the last frontier in not only developing technology that is specific to people's needs, but eventually even developing new business models that will enable the emergence of local software industries, such as young people who have the skills to be able to write their own applications for their own community,” he said.
Fine words, but the reality is that if those "local software industries" do indeed emerge, they will be formed from programmers who are completely dependent on American software for the livelihood: it's neo-colonialism, pure and simple.
As the free software advocate puts it in the same story:“Today we're seeing growing open-source programmer, developer communities in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries.
“Clearly, if you have this informal programming sector coming up, access to source code is almost critical if they are going to be able to take advantage of these new tools that are emerging," he said.
Exactly; pretending anything else is cynical in the extreme, condemning, as it does, Africa to a wasted generation of software development - something it can ill afford.
Great to see Heather Brooke getting at least *some* recognition for the huge service she has done transparency in this country by fighting for access to details of MPs' expenses, thanks to her fascinating piece in the Guardian today, which lets her tell the real story behind recent events. Do read it if you can: it's an extraordinary tale of dogged refusal to give up in the face of unremitting parliamentary arrogance. Best quotation:"Transparency will damage democracy."
I just hope she gets at least a juicy book deal out of all this - I'll certainly buy a copy, and will promote it as much as I can. After all, it's the Telegraph that is getting most of the glory for this, when she did 99.9% of the work, which is downright unfair ("Unsung hero" is the all-too apt title of her Guardian feature).
Amazingly, and to her eternal credit, she's remarkably lacking in bitterness about this:
As a campaigner I was thrilled to see the details finally put into the public domain. This is important information that the public have a right to see. But as a journalist, I was livid. I asked myself - what is the point of doing all that work, going to court, setting a legal precedent, dealing in facts, when every part of the government conspires to reward the hacks who do none of these things?
But I don't begrudge the paper. It is getting the story out in the most cost-effective way possible. What's unforgiveable is that the House of Commons repeatedly obstructed legitimate requests and then delayed the expense publication date and that MPs went so far as to try to exempt themselves from their own law. I wonder, too, how much we would have actually seen if we'd waited for the Commons to publish, given that MPs were given a free hand to black out anything that was "personal" or a danger to their "security". These terms have been so overused by MPs that I've no doubt that items such as cleaning the moat would have been removed for "security" reasons, as would the house-flipping scandal, as an invasion of MPs' privacy.
Kudos to all involved.
Georgia has some concerns about closed-source code:Kaspersky anti-virus, one of the most popular software programmes worldwide, has unofficially been declared a spy programme in Georgia. State organizations are avoiding installing Kaspersky, afraid of information leaks.
“The reason is that Kaspersky anti-virus is projected by Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab, who is of Russian origin. Officials from the Ministry of Defence are afraid that with the help of Kaspersky software it will be possible for the leak of confidential news to occur,” George Kofenlu, Product Manager of UGT, told The FINANCIAL.
Maybe they'd like to start using ClamWin: free and open to scrutiny.
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Recently, several posts on both of my blogs have been circling around issues of government transparency, especially in the light of the current MPs' expenses scandal. As I've suggested, it may well be that this is a singularly propitious moment to push for real openness in government: it would go a long way to allaying fears that the British public has about what exactly is happening in Parliament, while simultaneously providing a simple and fair self-policing mechanism for MPs and other officials.
So the Cabinet Office's appointment on Wednesday of Andrew Stott to the new role of Director of Digital Engagement, a position created to take forward the Power of Information report – whose approach I praised a few months back - is very fortunate timing....
On Open Enterprise blog.
How do you applies principles of opennes to an entire city? Ask Vancouver, which has posted the following motion on open data, open standards and open source:
BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:
* Open and Accessible Data - the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;
* Open Standards - the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
* Open Source Software - the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT in pursuit of open data the City of Vancouver will:
* Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;
* Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;
* Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large
* Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;
* Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;
* License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction.
If adopted, this will be pretty extraordinary - and a template for other cities who wish to re-invent themselves for the 21st century. Kudos to all involved: let's hope this goes through, and that others follow.
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Amazon's Kindle runs GNU/Linux, which is no surprise given its suitability for these kind of consumer systems. The Kindle is fast establishing itself as the leading ebook platform, so, at first blush, that might seem unalloyed good news for free software.
Sadly, though, Amazon has also proved that it is no great friend of freedom - first, by embracing DRM for its books, and secondly, by cravenly disabling the text-to-speech capability because The Authors' Guild has eighteenth-century ideas of what copyright is about.
Against that background, new entrants to the e-reader market that run GNU/Linux are particularly welcome, since they offer hope that not all ebooks will be viewed on locked-down devices.
Here's one, with the rather hubristic name of Cool-er, which has the bonus of being British (although it doesn't seem available here yet). It's too early to say how hackable it will be, and whether it will be able offer features like text-to-voice, but it's likely to be the first of many such alternatives to the Kindle, and that's got to be cool.
Update: @codepope has reminded me that the FAQ seems to suggest that the Cool-er reader isn't compatible with GNU/Linux. In fact, I checked, and this only refers to anyone benighted enough to want to use Adobe's DRM; for texts that don't have manacles, GNU/Linux works fine, I am assured.
Sir John Sulston is one of this country's - and the world's - heroes. Already a one-time Nobel prize winner for his work on worms (well, cell death, more precisely), he stands a good chance of winning another one for his work on the human genome project. But his contribution there is even greater: he was one of the main people behind making the human genome data freely available immediately, with no strings attached - one of the first, and still biggest, wins for open data.
One knock-on effect was that this made patenting genes harder in those jurisdictions benighted enough to allow it - something that Sulston has railed against loudly. As it happens, there is currently a major court case in the US is trying to undo some of the stupid earlier decisions in this respect: this is a biggie, so let's keep our fingers crossed.
But Sulston is not resting on his considerable laurels; he's at it again, working this time with a traditional publisher to edit a major new series of books that will be freely available online under a CC licence:
Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project, has teamed up with Bloomsbury to edit a new series of books that will look at topics including the ethics of genetics and the cyber enhancement of humans.
The series will be the first from Bloomsbury's new venture, Bloomsbury Academic, launched late last year as part of the publisher's post-Harry Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons licences, the intention is for titles in the imprint to be available for free online for non-commercial use, with revenue to be generated from the hard copies that will be printed via print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies.
As for the topics:
Sulston and Harris's series, Science, Ethics and Innovation, will be aimed "at a very wide market", covering subjects from "the interplay between science and society, to new technological and scientific discoveries and how they impact on our understanding of ourselves and our place in society", and the responsibility of science to the wider world. Authors they will be looking to commission will range from academics to policymakers, opinion formers, those working in commercial scientific roles, "and maybe even politicians". "They'll be non-technical books which will appeal to any intelligent person," said Harris. "The proverbial Guardian reader."
This is whole area of openness is one where Sulston has been active for decades. Indeed, alongside open data and open access he is also a big supporter of free software, and hugely savvy about the ethical aspects of this movement. If you want to find out more about this extraordinary man and his amazing career, I strongly recommend his autobiography: The Common Thread.
Maybe something good can come out of the unholy mess of the MPs' expenses:Mr Brown said that politicians had to "prove themselves worthy of the public trust" and said the allowances system must be reconstructed to ensure transparency.
At the first Prime Minister's Questions since the expenses scandal broke, he gave his support to a proposal from David Cameron for all future claims to be posted on the internet by the Fees Office.
Now, that would be be truly wonderful, because it would not only solve most of the problems associated with the expenses, but it would provide a beachhead of transparency that people - we - can build on for the future.
And if that sounds hopelessly optimistic, here's another extraordinary straw in the wind:
Minister of Justice Michael Wills has told ZDNet UK that the UK's Freedom of Information Act is to be extended. Currently requests under the act can only be made to public bodies, but Wills said that the government had been considering modifying it to allow requests to private companies working in the public sector.
"We are going to announce the result soon. There is going to be an extension", he told our reporter Tom Espiner at the Private Data, Open Government conference today in London.
Keep those transparent fingers crossed.
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It's widely accepted that one of the core engines driving the success of free software is the central role the community has there, be it the community of coders or the community of users. The power of the community, even outside the world of software, is demonstrated by the 200 million+ users of Facebook, and the steep ascent of Twitter, not to mention the hundreds of other social networking sites.
So it's deeply ironic that the free software world has no central point where that community can come together, albeit virtually. That lack has been remedied now, at least to a certain extent, with the unveiling of the new Linux.com site. This has been revamped, and now places the concept of Community at its heart. Other sections include News, DistributionCentral, Learn and Directory. Everything's pretty adumbratory at the moment, but that's to be expected.
Two things strike me as particularly good omens. One is that emphasis on community, and the other is the ambition: Linux.com obviously wants to become the first place people should turn to find out more about this strange thing called GNU/Linux, and where people return in order to interact with fellow explorers. It's not quite the be-all and end-all for free software, which obviously extends well beyond GNU/Linux, but it's a good start.
Viviane seems confused:
From the governance point of view "Net Neutrality" is essential. New network management techniques allow traffic prioritisation. These tools may be used to guarantee good quality of service but may also be used for anti-competitive practices. The Commission has taken steps to empower national regulators to prevent such unfair abuse to the detriment of consumers. These measures are at the heart of the new telecoms regulatory package
Well, no, not as such. The provisions in the Telecoms Package actually *gut* net neutrality. So either you don't understand what the current proposals say (not difficult, since they are meant to be misleading) or you don't really care about *real* net neutrality.
So which is it?
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I don't normally comment on rumours, but this one is too plausible:Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer on Tuesday said speculation the company may buy German software firm SAP (SAPG.DE) was a 'random rumour.'
"I have nothing to say about rumours of acquisitions ... positively or negatively," he told reporters in Mumbai, when asked about an acquisition of SAP.
"It strikes me as a random rumour."
Microsoft, the world's top software firm, on Monday sold a $3.75 billion debt issue, sparking talk that it could be readying a bid for the German firm.
SAP's Co-Chief Executive Leo Apothekar said on Monday he believed the business software maker should stay independent, following the fresh speculation in European markets that Microsoft could bid for it.
Irrespective of rumours, Microsoft would be the perfect suitor for SAP since the latter is one of the last major bastions of proprietary software in Europe, and favours software patents.
That's no surprise, since Enterprise Resource Planning - SAP's heartland - is one of the few software sectors where open source has failed to make significant headway yet, and software patent monopolies are a great way to lock out up-and-coming free alternatives to high-priced closed-source solutions.
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Why didn't somebody think of this before?
Wikipedia for schools is ... a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. The current version has about 5500 articles (as much as can be fit on a DVD with good size images) and is “about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words)”. It was developed by carefuly selecting for content, then checking for vandalism and suitability by “SOS Children volunteers”. You can download it for free from the website, or as a free 3.5GB DVD.
The following point is even more interesting:I also see this as a potential future model for Wikipedia — allow people to edit, but have a separate vetting process that identifies particular versions of an article as vetted. Then, people can choose if they want to see the latest version or the most recent vetted version. To some, this is very controversial, but I don’t see it that way. A vetting process doesn’t prevent future edits, and it creates a way for people to get what they want... material that they can have increased confidence in. The trick is to develop a good-enough vetting process (or perhaps multiple vetting/rating processes for different purposes). This didn’t make sense back when Wikipedia was first starting (the problem was to get articles written at all!), but now that Wikipedia is more mature, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a new need to identify vetted articles. Yes, you have to worry about countries to whom “democracy” is a dirty word, but I think such problems can be resolved. This is hardly a new idea; see Wikimedia’s article on article validation and Wikipedia’s pushing to 1.0. I am sure that a vetting/validation process will take time to develop, and it will be imperfect... but that doesn’t make it a bad idea.
Indeed. What this means is that different organisations could pass the whole of Wikipedia through their particular prisms - like that filtering stuff for children. This is a very strong argument for Wikipedia being inclusionist - having as much stuff as possible - and letting the filters take out stuff that particular groups don't want. These would then offer their seals of approval to that particular cut - even if many people would disapprove of the choices made. That's freedom for you, I'm afraid.
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One of the things I have been unable to understand is why the French, well known for their love of liberté, égalité, fraternité and all that jazz, seem hell-bent on getting rid of large chunks of said liberté in the digital sphere.
I refer, of course, to the infamous HADOPI law, which aims to deprive French citizens of their Internet connection purely on the say-so of French media companies. Doesn't sound like much égalité, fraternité there, does it? That's bad enough; but it seems that this bad legislation is leading to even worse knock-on consequences.
For example, it's emerged that the Head of the Web Innovation Centre for the French television company TF1 was fired for daring to write to his MP to express his opposition to the HADOPI law. Here's a good summary of what happened:Yesterday’s Liberation carried a detailed report on the dismissal of a TF1 (Télévision française 1) employee for having expressed his opposition to the law. TF1 is a private TV network, whose boss Martin Bouygues is a close friend of Sarkozy. Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim was employed there in the web innovation unit. In February he wrote a personal mail to his MP, Françoise de Panafieu (UMP), expressing his opposition to the law and outlining his reasons as well as explaining his involvement in the sector. At the beginning of March he was summoned by his boss at TF1 online, Arnaud Bosom, who read his letter back to him, verbatim. Bosom explained that the letter had been forwarded to TF1’s legal adviser, Jean-Michel Counillon, by the Ministry of Culture! In April he was summoned to a disciplinary meeting and was sacked on April 16th.
Note that this was a personal opinion, expressed from home, and yet he lost his job because one of the strongest supporters of Sarkozy's drive against file sharing, Martin Bouygues, seems to think he has the right to tell his employees what to think, even outside work.
That's clearly outrageous, and I imagine that TF1 will regret the storm of protest it has provoked, and that maybe even a politician or two will find themselves in trouble. But other side-effects are more subtle – and more insidious.
The same site that carries the post about the TF1 sacking has this useful explanation of another knock-on effect of HADOPI:An element of Hadopi which hasn’t received much or enough attention as yet, is a section which specifies steps that can be taken by computer users to ensure that they will not be found liable under the new regime. The following is a rough translation of the relevant sections, taken from the text of the law in its current state, as found here. Bear with me, it is torturous, some explanatory notes are added in bold…
« Art. L. 331-30. – After consultation with those developing security systems designed to prevent the illicit use of access to a communication service to the public online (internet!), or electronic communications, people whose business it to offer access to such a service as well as those companies governed by title 2 of the book (Intellectual Property Code) and rightsholders organizations (ie SACEM etc), the High Authority will make public the pertinent functional specifications that these measures must comprise so as to be considered, in its eyes, as valid exoneration of the responsibility of the access subscriber (internet user!) as defined in article L. 336-3.
At the end of a certified evaluation procedure, and taking into consideration conformity with the specifications set out in the previous paragraph and their effectiveness, the High Authority will issue a list certifying the security software whose use will validly exonerate the access holder (internet user!) from their responsibility under the terms of article L. 336-3. This certification will be periodically revised.
Mmmh. So what the law intends is to set up a meeting between security software vendors, antipiracy organizations and ISPs to decide what software you need to install on your machine, so that they can be sure that you behave yourself. If you don’t fancy installing their device, then you’ll just have to swallow any liability consequent to someone else using your machine or accessing your connection.
Now, one aspect not evident from the legalistic mumbo-jumbo above is that this spyware may well not support GNU/Linux:
The Assembly also postponed a handful of amendments that sought to exempt the subscriber if the system is not interoperable with software security, with the first assumption that it uses a system that is too old. An "old" Windows with expensive software installed on, for example. Or a free software ...
An amendment sought to nip in the bud the potential for discrimination technological and financial background of interoperability ( "the means of secure, freely available to consumers, are interoperable). But again, it was rejected by the rapporteur implacably Franck Riester and the Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel.
Now, normally I would assume that good sense would prevail, and that this casting into the outer darkness of GNU/Linux users would be rectified by those rational French people (after all, France is one of the biggest users of free software in the world). But given the rampant insanity that has broken out around HADOPI, I'm no longer confident that is the case. Instead, I fear that France is about to consign itself into the digital dark ages. Quel dommage.
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