Ubuntu UK Christmas Sherry and Mince Pies Evening
We are pleased to announce the first annual Ubuntu UK sherry and mince pies evening!
We will sort out the booze, but we would like everyone to bring some mince pies or Christmas themed nibbles – extra points if you cook them yourself.
Cost: it will be an integer number of pounds between £0 and £5 depending on numbers and corporate contributions.
If anyone would like to do a little talk about something interesting they have been up to recently or perhaps discuss a topic of interest for Lucid then that would be great. Not formal presentations, but there will be power and wireless broadband available so if you want to demo something that would be cool.
Tuesday 22nd December
6PM-9PM
The Hub Islington
4th Floor
5 Torrens Street
London
http://islington.the-hub.net
To make sure we don’t under-cater on the sherry side of things we would like you to sign up for the evening by RSVPing on this Doodle poll.
It’s definitely working…
My eldest son James, who’s 9, suggested something to me on Saturday morning over breakfast that made me quite proud and very chuffed.
The conversation went something like this:
“Dad, I think you should come to our school and talk to us about what you do. You know, Ubuntu and Open Source and all that.”
“Really James? Do you think so?”
“Yes, you’d have to be CRB checked [sic], but you could come and explain about Ubuntu. If Mr. Jeffs [The Headmaster] knew about it we’d have more money to spend on useful things for the school.”
“That’s interesting James, what do you mean?”
“Well, Ubuntu is free isn’t it. So we wouldn’t have to buy Microsoft Windows any more. And it is better than Windows isn’t it. And it doesn’t get viruses like Windows either does it Dad. So I’m sure Mr. Jeffs would think that it’s a really good thing…”
Both my kids use Ubuntu at home; they are 5 & 9. They skip easily between Ubuntu & the Windows machines they use at school and with their friends. They also switch without difficulty between applications too. When necessary James does his homework in OpenOffice.org and takes a USB stick to school with the files saved in a nasty proprietary format.
Seems like I’d better write a nice letter to Mr Jeffs then hadn’t I?
Building an Engaged Community
I am very pleased to report that I have an assignment for OSSWatch, an organisation set up by JISC and attached in a kind of complicated way to the University of Oxford, to report on an upcoming event Building an Engaged Community. I will be covering it in two ways, an article after the event summarising it and also a live stream throughout the day. The live blog will be hosted on coveritlive.com which is really well designed for such events. The only issue I had with it was that to be the presenter you have to be on a recent Firefox or Chrome browser (I think Opera and something else may have been in the list too) and I wanted to use it on my OLPC XO laptop that I have running Debian and the Iceweasel browser. Iceweasel is simply Firefox with a different name but the browser detection failed. Luckily the workaround was easy enough, going to about:config you can change the general.useragent.extra.firefox string from Iceweasel to Firefox, leaving the version number alone. With this done Coveritlive seems to work perfectly.
So if you want to follow along on Monday you should be able to watch the stream live in this blog post, if you have comments during the event you can submit them and I will endeavour to ask the speaker your questions. You can also tweet comments with the hashtag #opendev09 (sorry don’t think there is identi.ca integration but if your identi.ca feeds your twitter it should all work)
A response from my MEP about EIF2
A couple of weeks ago I wrote the following to my MEPs using the excellent www.writetothem.com
Tuesday 3 November 2009
Dear Marta Andreasen, Nigel Farage, Catherine Bearder, Sharon Bowles, Peter Skinner, Caroline Lucas and Nirj Deva,
I am very concerned about the progress of the European Interoperability Framework version 2. This document seeks to encourage openness and interoperability between IT systems of member bodies and the legal and policy frameworks above.
A first draft was published http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728 and comments were solicited http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7732.
Having read the first draft and the comments I am at a loss as to how the leaked second draft http://www.bigwobber.nl/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/European-Interoperability-Framework-for-European-Public-Services-draft.pdf came about. Most of the document has been ripped out and that which remains has been watered down to the point of being meaningless. I have some specific examples I would like to share with you:
1) The last paragraph on page 23
“Therefore, technical interoperability should be ensured, whenever possible, via the use of either standards endorsed by recognised standardisation organisations or technical specifications made available by industry consortia or other
standardisation fora.”This should have the words “whenever possible” struck out. I can think of no situation where it would not be possible to publish a technical specification, although it might be possible to relax the definition of “industry consortia or other standardisation fora” – as long as the specification is published and freely implementable (and is accurate) then I don’t think it is essential to be published by a consortia.
2) The paragraph on page 25 at the end of 5.2.1
“However, public administrations may decide to use less open specifications, especially in cases where open specifications do not meet the functional interoperability needs or the ones available are not mature and/or sufficiently supported by the market, or where all cooperating organisations already use or agree to use the same technologies.”
This is a recipe for lock-in and the exact situation the EIF is supposed to counter. If there is a single vendor providing the technology then the specification needs to be *more* open not less open. This means if a vendor has a monopoly position, they are allowed to defend this monopoly by having a less open specification so that other products find it harder to interoperate. If all cooperating organisation already use or agree to use the same technologies *now* they should be specifying open standards for interoperability such that in the future if one or more cooperating organisation decides to change their technology they are free to do so.
I would really like to know which public comment or behind the scenes lobbying motivated the insertion of this paragraph.
It might be possible to split this into two paragraphs, one permitting “less open specifications” where there is evidence that a wide range of implementations exist including open source implementations, and one permitting all cooperating organisations to use the same technologies where there is a “more open specification” that is freely implementable.
3) the last paragraph of 2.10 on page 11 is also a concern, pretty much the same as the one in 5.2.1
European public administrations need to decide where they wish to position themselves on this continuum with respect to the issues discussed in the EIF. The exact position may vary, on a case-by-case basis, depending on their needs, priorities, legacy, budget, market situation and a number of other factors. While there is a correlation between openness and interoperability, it is also true that interoperability can be obtained without openness, for example via homogeneity of the ICT systems, which implies that all partners use, or agree to use, the same solution to implement a European Public Service.
This could be fixed by adding a sentence warning of the danger that a homogeneous ICT environment coupled with a lack of open standards for interoperability leads to partners being locked in to that environment – which is what EIF seeks to prevent.
Yours sincerely,
Alan Bell
and yesterday I got the following reply from the office of Caroline Lucas
Dear Alan,
Thank you for your recent email, which Caroline has asked me to respond to on her behalf.
Greens have long campaigned to protect free and open source software, including heading off proposed legislation to introduce software patents. We are opposed to patenting on a number of grounds including:
· the threat to small business and the open source community
· that innovation will be stifled
· unnatural corporate influenceThe impact on consumers is also important to Caroline and the Greens and we argue that patents help lock in technology, in the way you describe, thereby encouraging monopolies and discouraging interoperability. So, we want to guarantee that any EU legislation on interoperability genuinely does open up IT, rather than close it down and concentrate control in the hands of a few corporations.
The European Interoperability Framework version 2 is designed to help overcome interoperability problems and in principle is something that Green MEPs would support. However, Caroline takes your point that the wording of the leaked draft is certainly not as strong as it might be. Please be assured that when the proposed framework comes before MEPs, she and her Green colleagues in the Parliament will be working hard to press for legislation that delivers full interoperability and to oppose the standards being watered down by powerful players in the IT industry. The European Commission does have a track record of standing up to companies like Microsoft, so Caroline is hopeful that on this issue its final proposals will be strong.
Thank you for getting in touch and for alerting Caroline to your concerns. If you need any further information please do let me know. You might also be interested in reading about Caroline’s work on a range of issues at www.carolinelucasmep.org.uk
Kind regards,
Cath.
Cath Miller
Constituency Coordinator and Researcher
Office of Dr Caroline Lucas
Green Party MEP for SE England
