Dear Mr Bell,

Thank you for your letter.

I was both concerned and delighted to read your comments. Concerned as to
the matter you highlight, yet delighted to see someone taking such an active
role scrutinising legislation; it is to your credit that you take such an
undertaking upon yourself.

With regard to the’ European Interoperability Framework version 2′ it is my
understanding that although it remains in the drafting stage (the current
version of the draft and more information are available from
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728) it will be submitted to the
European Parliament and Council soon. When it is presented to the
parliament I will do my best to raise the issues you highlight with the
relevant members and ensure that the specific points you raise are
appropriately addressed.

However, as you are no doubt aware that most of this process is highly
secretive. It is sadly endemic of the EU legislative procedure that it is
formulated and discussed behind closed doors, with deals and compromises
made in circumstances that are often totally unaccountable. You can rest
assured that I share your frustrations with this and will do all I can over
the course of my time as an MEP (as I have until now) to change this.

I am happy to tell you that we are making progress. For the first time
there is an opposition to the existing way of doing business in Brussels.
My Conservative colleagues and our allies in the European Conservative and
Reformist Grouping are doing all we can make the EU accountable and to
expose the process to the full light of public scrutiny. Free to ask the
awkward questions we are fighting to ensure that when laws are passed they
represent the best possible, rather than the just the least bad choice.

I will of course keep you up to date with any and all developments. In the
meantime if I can be of any further assistance please do not hesitate to
contact me.

Best Regards,

Nirj Deva MEP

If you are wondering who Nirj Deva is then take a look at this:

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One of my actions from the recent Ubuntu UK team meeting was to organise a evening out on the Real Ale Train.

The Watercress Line is a small steam powered railway line in Hampshire. It runs from Alton Station to Alresford. Alton is the end of the line for scheduled services from Waterloo. Every few weeks or so they run an evening special, the Real Ale Train, or RAT.

Basically the train turns into a very very long bar for the evening. There are several converted bar carriages and plenty of seating (comfy old seating in groups of 4). Steam, Beer and Software Freedom seems an irresistible combination so it sounds like an ideal evening out for the Ubuntu UK community.

Firstly we need to decide on a date, we have created a poll to find the most popular date from the dates far enough ahead to be organised, and skipping the date when the next Ubuntu Developer Summit is likely to be happening. Please vote on the poll and we will announce the most popular date on IRC, the wiki page and on the Ubuntu UK mailing list on January 24th. When the date is announced you will need to book your ticket, tickets can be booked online and cost £10 each. This includes a voucher for your first pint. Beer is not “Free as in Beer”, but it is just £2/pint. Don’t hang about and try to book late, they sell out months in advance.

Beards are strictly optional – it may sound like a male dominated event (and to be fair, it is) but it has a very friendly atmosphere and all are welcome.

Other alcoholic and soft drinks as well as snacks are on sale at the on-board buffet. Hot food can be purchased on board the train with vegetarian alternatives available. You have to be 18+ to buy beer, but there is no age limit (at either end of the scale) for joining in.

The RAT starts from Alton at 19.20 and tootles gently up and down the line a couple of times, returning to Alton in time for the 22:44 train back to Waterloo. (This is a connecting service, if the RAT is late, the mainline train will wait for it)

Dress – something Ubuntu related.

Tell Someone Else!

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.

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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)

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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 influence

The 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

Tell Someone Else!

Keyboards without a windows key are few and far between. Here is a picture of one from ZaReason.

Todays announcement from Google that they are going to release an operating system may cause keyboard manufacturers to think about their little windows adverts a bit more carefully. Initially Google is targeting netbooks with integrated keyboards, presumably they won’t tolerate a windows logo on the keyboard. If and when the Chrome OS moves to a more desktop like platform will Google start pressing OEMs to add a Chrome key? Or will the key be neutralised to a more generic symbol that doesn’t advertise an operating system at all?

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Lets just assume for the moment that this promise means what they say it means (forgetting about the partial implementations exclusion and the fact that the promise needed to be made in the first place) and it makes Mono totally safe to use now, even in countries with broken patent laws. I still won’t be using Mono. Mono is a useful tool for solving the problem “how on earth am I going to run all this .Net code I wrote when I switch to Linux?” I for one don’t have that problem, but for those that do, Mono is the tool for the job.

The reason I won’t be using Mono is that the .Net framework is already embraced by Microsoft, it is already extended by Microsoft. It was from the beginning and will probably always remain so. Mono is playing catch up and people want to be using the leader. This goes for Moonlight and Silverlight too. Silverlight 2 came out, some misguided websites moved to it, Moonlight 2 is in progress, but following. The only glimmer of hope for Mono as something that is more than a specific problem solving tool is GTK#. In this, the Free software community is taking the upper hand by extending Mono, in ways that Microsoft won’t follow. Maybe if .Net/GTK# applications become the norm on Windows this would be a good thing overall. Personally I will stick to Python/GTK on Ubuntu for my fairly limited desktop app programming requirements.

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Digging about in the PPA reveals the source tar.gz in which we can learn a bit more. Firstly it is a GPL3 licensed python application. In the doc area is a very nice little schematic describing the connect and sync process:

The rest is just lots of code and it is probably best to wait for it to run to see what it does. I will leave you with this fragment from a main.py deep in the tree because it made me smile:

  self.logger.debug("I can't attain Nirvana yet."
    " [state: %s; queues:"
    " metadata: %d; content: %d; hash: %d]"
    % (self.state.name,
      len(self.action_q.meta_queue),
      len(self.action_q.content_queue),
      len(self.hash_q)))
  return
self.logger.debug("Nirvana reached!! I'm a Buddha")

We are looking forward to playing with this one in more detail.

Tell Someone Else!

To help the community find and purchase these scarce pure and unadulterated computers we have started a directory of suppliers at nakedcomputers.org. If you know of any supplier, small or large, who will sell a naked computer then let us know about it, or register on the site and add them yourself.

If you are a supplier and want to get on the list it is very simple, just add a naked computer to your range and tell us about it, there is no cost to a normal entry on the list but we might add some kind of enhanced sponsored option at some stage.

Tell Someone Else!

Dear Jeremy Hunt,

I am concerned about the Coroners and Justice bill currently being
debated. I am an IT professional and have studied the Data Protection
Act as part of my education and professional development. Not being a
Coroner or a Judge I had little interest in this new bill. I was very
surprised to learn that clause 152 of this bill will rip apart and
remake the Data Protection Act. This seems to me to be a very
underhanded way of making law. If there is a need to change the DPA then
the government should attempt to do so in a separate act with a relevant
title.
Please vote to have clause 152 completely removed from the bill leaving
intact the data protection act. I will leave it to the coroners and
judges to comment on the usefulness of the remainder of the bill.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Bell

and he got back to me 3 hours later with this:

Dear Mr Bell,

Thank you very much for getting in touch about the proposals for new
data-sharing powers in the Coroners and Justice Bill.

I completely share your objections to this section of the Bill. These
proposals would have a truly dramatic impact, allowing Ministers to make
an ‘information sharing order’, meaning that a whole range of public
servants could access the public’s personal data. Data could be shared
between officials across Whitehall, with local authorities and even with
companies in the private sector, simply in order to meet a Government
policy objective.

This threatens to open the floodgates to a continuous, uncontrolled and
unchecked flow of personal data, and as is often the case with the
Government, any safeguards will only be put in place after the Bill has
already passed into law. This means that Parliament will be asked to
vote on proposals which contain no safeguards and no serious sanctions
for abuse of the new powers. This is simply unacceptable.

The Government has displayed its incompetence and complacency in
relation to data time and time again – it is no wonder public trust in
the ability of the Government to keep our personal details safe is at an
all-time low. Last year, HMRC lost the personal data of almost half the
population, leaving over 7 million families worried about the security
of their bank accounts. More recently, the details of thousands of
criminals, held on a memory stick, were lost by a government contractor.
Countless other cases of lost data have occurred, including the details
of thousands of driving test candidates, prospective military recruits
and over 5,000 prison service staff. Now, even the Prime Minister has
admitted that he “can’t promise that every single item of information
will always be safe.”

In this context, I find it extraordinary that the Government has slipped
these clauses into the Bill without any consultation or prior warning,
and certainly without the case for them being made. I assure you that my
Conservative colleagues and I will vigorously oppose this latest step
towards creating a database state by stealth.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to write to me. As always,
please do not hesitate to contact me again if I can be of any further
assistance.

Best wishes,

Jeremy

Jeremy Hunt
Member of Parliament
South West Surrey

so a pretty good response and a vote in the right direction. Now who wants to help get the scope of the Freedom of Information Act fixed, your MP is only a click away.

Tell Someone Else!