Our Open Source consulting business, The Open Learning Centre, has been very busy of late. We’ve been working with a household name hardware manufacturer and a very well known high-street retailer to deliver a really exciting and innovative product to the consumer market.

Say hello to the webbook (click for a very big image).

The webbook is manufactured by the UK electronics company Elonex and is being sold exclusively by The Carphone Warehouse.

The webbook is a high specification UMPC that has a 1.6Ghz Via C7 processor (x86), 512Mb of RAM and [currently] an 80G HDD. The screen has a very usable 1024×600 resolution and it has the usual assortment of USB, LAN and an SD socket, plus built in WiFi too. We have setup a blog specifically for the webbook here so users can get access to all the latest news, tips and advice. Be sure to add it to your feed reader.

The really cool thing about the webbook is the software. The webbok comes pre-loaded with Ubuntu 8.04.1, Hardy Heron, and some new software written especially for this application that delivers broadband connectivity over 3G Mobile networks.

With Ubuntu you get pretty much everything you will ever need included right out-of-the-box. You don’t need to go out and pay several hundred pounds to get legal copies of a word-processor, spreadsheet and email client. The webbook comes pre-installed with the fantastic OpenOffice.org applications suite and the Evolution mail and calendaring client. Web browsing is provided by the most excellent Firefox 3 and there are many more high quality and fully functional applications provided on the hard disk. A couple of examples are The Gimp for photo editing and Pidgin for Instant Messaging. Of course you also have access to Ubuntu’s on-line software repository where there are literally thousands of other programs and applications to choose from. And they are all free and are not “demo” or limited functionality versions either. Open Source gives you freedom, not restrictions.

The 3G communications software called Wader (GPL licensed, and funded by Elonex) was written by Warp Networks of Zaragoza, Spain. Their knowledge of this specialised area of communications technology and Python programming is superb and the chaps did a fantastic job to get the software ready for production in what were ultimately very tight time-scales. We have plenty of plans for new features and enhancements, and as the software is open source, community involvement is welcomed and encouraged. We will be communicating more on how to get involved shortly.

For anyone interested in Mobile Broadband, or just getting their mits on a webbook for that matter, the proposition from Carphone Warehouse is very attractive indeed: simply take out a contract (with Carphone Warehouse) for 3G Mobile Broadband with either Orange, T-Mobile or 3 and you get the webbook for free! Or, you can just buy the webbook outright. If you are in the UK, there’s probably a webbook near you now. They are available on-line or from their many high street shops.

Our role in this was to work with Elonex to get the right software packaged and delivered on time to Carphone Warehouse. We introduced Elonex to Canonical in London (now can you guess where I am?) who are the commercial enterprise behind the world’s most popular Open Source Operating System, Ubuntu. We orchestrated the 3G development track with Warp Networks and carried out testing as the code was being produced. And we coordinated and managed the packaging and development of the software bundle as a whole.

Here’s the other side of the webbook:

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It’s time to give up our Microsoft habit. We used to be able to afford to pay the Microsoft tax. Those days are done.

The hard days ahead are the days when we need to make the most of what we have and that means Linux. If we, and our businesses, are to make it through the great depression of the 21st century, we must start moving to Linux today.

I recommend you read it through, there’s some really simple and compelling arguments in there. And then read the comments.

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It was from Alexandro (CoLo of OO.o Spain) who is looking for a job in the USA working with OpenOffice.org. Here is one I don’t think he’ll be applying for…

US-WA-Redmond-SMB Marketing Manager - Breadth.

The Breadth Team is seeking a talented Marketing Manager to help drive our competitive efforts within the SMS&P-SMB and with other field teams, segment teams and product groups across Microsoft. Our passion is helping our field and partners win against our biggest competitors in this space, particularly OpenOffice and MySQL.

[Emphasis mine]

Or perhaps he should? Why not infiltrate the competition? I’d hazard a guess that M$ do, or have done it.

O.K. I’ll admit that he might not last so long But I’m sure he could cause a decent amount of “Collateral Repair”. [This is the opposite of Collateral Damage; in this scenario he would help many SMEs to discover the advantages of using OpenOffice.org and Open Source in general, thereby preventing the damage caused by using proprietary software].

Have a nice day.

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… who are interested in open standards and interoperability [to] look at, comment, and, if appropriate, express their support for this draft or portions thereof.

What draft is he talking about? This one. It the draft of a report by the EU’s IDABC called the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) v2.0.

They request that

Everyone who sees interoperability as an effective means to provide better pan-European eGovernment services is invited to read the draft document and to provide feedback on its content by sending comments to eifv2@ec.europa.eu by the 22nd of September 2008 at the latest.

IDABC is interested in your reactions and contributions. A summary of reactions will be published on this website and will constitute another input into the EIF elaboration.

The EIF v2.0 will take the form of an official Commission position with the publication of a Communication from the Commission to the Council and to the Parliament by the end of 2008.

Although the draft is quite long (a 3.5Mb PDF) I am going to read it over the next few weeks and will certainly be making comments. I encourage anyone who is interested in Open Standards and the ability to communicate electronically with “the state” using the tools of your choice [e.g. An ODF document, created in OpenOffice.org, running on an Open Source operating system], to do so too.

Thanks for pointing this out Bob. I briefly saw Basil from the OFE yesterday and he mentioned it was due out imminently.

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If you don’t know who Matt Mullenweg is (I didn’t), here’s what it says on his about page…

I am the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software that runs much of this site and thousands of other sites around the world.

This has a nice geeky reciprocal feel to it. Writing stuff in Wordpress about the guy who, wrote Wordpress…

Anyway, back to Andy Grove’s thesis on the energy supply and climate change agenda.

It’s a bit OT for me I know but I really learned quite a bit from it. And as a concerned member of the human race anything that helps me to understand more about the problems we face and are continuing to make for ourselves is fine by me.

Several bits really surprised me:

• The dramatic graph showing China’s growth and energy consumption;
• The discussion on why energy independence is a flawed objective;
• The idea of “sticky” energy types;
• Converting stupid SUVs (4×4s) to dual fuel could halve the USA’s petroleum imports

The whole thing was well written and thought provoking.

I felt there were a couple of areas that didn’t get coverage so I’ll mention them here.

Electricity itself is a good clean energy medium and relatively easy (and very quick!) to distribute. A big issue however is with transmission losses and the wasted energy over long distances. The other problem with electricity is storage. There are plans and ideas circulating around something called micro-generation. Basically, enable every home, office, shop or other “consumer” to also generate power through renewable methods (solar, wind, tide or whatever else works) and feed that back into the grid. Power is then available in a far more dynamic fashion and is produced at a more local level, reducing losses and increasing efficiency.

This isn’t something that will happen over night. But it is an important part of a more “joined up” approach to solving our energy crisis

Secondly, Andy failed to discuss Hydrogen. This could be a massive contributor to the whole energy and climate change problem. There are issues with Hydrogen certainly, although I doubt these would be insurmountable if we put our best brains on them. And I have heard that there is a country already gearing itself up to become the world’s Hydrogen manufacturer; they can produce it at very low cost to the environment. That place is Iceland.

Of course the final issue is we have to get the petroleum and automotive manufacturers to stop sitting on their pile of IP and patents and actually use them to develop better technology - but where’s the incentive to do that right now? Oil prices at an all time high and GM and Ford struggling for survival…

Hey ho.

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“I really don’t think OOXML is worth wasting much time over any more …”

And I only wrote that a few hours ago too! But I simply couldn’t resist this gem of a story from Roy Schestowitz over at Boycott Novell:

… I got a couple of docx documents and had trouble getting them to open, even with the plug-in for Office XP. Next thing I know, I get a notice from my registry auditor that I have 1300 new registry errors. And suddenly, my PC is churning the disk-drive and the network connection at 3:00 AM (I’m getting old and have to get up), and the network shows that I’m uploading something at full speed, even though my computer is supposedly sleeping. …

Reading this was so coincidental - last night I was in my local pub talking with a mate who’s an IT Security professional. And we were chatting (reminiscing?) about Back Orifice….

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1. I’ve had more important things to do.
2. I honestly believe that it is going to be a totally insignificant and inconsequential standard that will probably be dead (isn’t it already?) before it’s first birthday.

However, having just read the flame-war over on Alex Brown’s blog I couldn’t resist and simply had to make a comment. Which I did If it isn’t approved for some reason, that comment (verbatim) is here:

Words, Words, Words…

Will all of you get a life; please?

We all know that OOXML will be approved, but who gives a toss anyway?

It will be of little or no importance to anyone. It’s a dead duck before the shell is even broken.

Nobody believes it was an “honest” process. No body believes that Microshaft didn’t screw the process. No body believes that Doug ‘Mawho’ is Vice President of IASA Malaysia. Nobody believes that Azerbaijan, Côte-d’Ivoire, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lebanon, Malta, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay and others weren’t bought and paid for. And EVERY one believes Martin Bryant when he said so publicly:

“The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles. The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting “standardization by corporation”.”

Who are you trying to kid Alex? What do you gain? A few nice juicy contracts and some speaking engagements at M$’s ’special rates’?

Move along. Nothing to see here.

So swiftly moving on, I really don’t think OOXML is worth wasting much time over any more. Even M$ it seems doesn’t really want IS29500. The rest of us really care little about it, especially now there are so many other avenues for preservation of our data and the world is finally starting to “grok” what Open really means.

So runs my dream, but what am I?
An infant crying in the night
An infant crying for the light
And with no language but a cry.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

OOXML: 2006-2008

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The story in question, from The Inquirer, is basically this:

Becta refused to satisfy a Freedom of Information request made by the INQUIRER for details of the latest Microsoft schools megadeal, “after consultation with Microsoft.”

Which is pretty bad really. We are talking about Taxpayers’ (that’s you and me friend) money here. Why should we not be allowed to know what our beloved Government is spending with a US Software company on our children’s behalf? And don’t forget that it’s a company that has been convicted of monopolistic and anti-competitive practices, so it should be even more important we know what we are giving them. Shouldn’t it?

Well, on the face of it I bought the argument from Becta that goes:

If Becta, a UK government quango, published details of schools’ Microsoft spending, it “could give rise to an actionable breach of confidence by Microsoft against us,” it said. This was a “considerable risk”, it added.

And further, plausibly stated:

Becta said there could also be repercussions in disclosure for itself: “We have concluded that disclosure of any part of the MOU would prejudice the commercial interests of Becta and of schools throughout the UK because the significant savings achieved under the MOU would be put at risk,” it said. “We believe that our future negotiating position with Microsoft would be weakened and we would not be confident of our continuing ability to obtain the best deal possible for those UK schools that choose to purchase Microsoft products,” it added.

If we ignore the fact that the Microsoft products are pretty crap, and they aren’t really the right thing for education to be using in the first place, I can sort of understand the bit about their negotiating position - if they know no better.

But I wasn’t totally convinced… Something was niggling at the back of my mind as to why this is really bad…

Enter Glyn:

I do realise that it’s too much to hope that Becta will take open source seriously, but I wonder if it has ever crossed Becta’s chosen minds that putting themselves in this position of snivelling dependence on Microsoft isn’t actually the optimum way to get the best deal for UK schools – even for those benighted enough to want to bathe their charges in the delicate glow of BSODs. Has it ever occurred to them that if they started negotiating from a position of dignity and strength, rather than abject, supine servitude, they might just possibly do their job a teensy-weensy bit better?

Microsoft is scared witless by the prospect of open source getting a foothold in schools, and would agree to any deal rather than let the UK education system discover the power and value of free software. Becta is actually in an incredibly strong position, and yet somehow manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The idea that “our future negotiating position with Microsoft would be weakened” if it dared to cross Masher Microsoft, as it has claimed to The Inquirer, is simply risible, and shows how desperately out of touch it is with the realities of the marketplace. The sooner this particular quango is abolished, and decisions are made locally, the better.

Ouch!

Thanks for clearing that up Glyn

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The post in question is titled “Richard Stallman’s not-so-finest hour”. And it refers to an article Richard Stallman (RMS) wrote - on request - for the BBC in which RMS talks his usual talk. To be honest there isn’t much new in what RMS penned here. Having heard him talk in Manchester a couple of months ago, this BBC article is basically the summary of his thesis that has stood the test of time and has given the world the Free Software Foundation, GNU and the GPL and much , much more - a new way of thinking and an ideal. Basically he derides M$ for being, well, M$ really. A convicted monopolist and anti-competitive software vendor that has used every legal trick in the book to lock it’s customers into a spiral of upgrades and new purchases of what is pretty uninspiring software.

To pay so much attention to Bill Gates’ retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers.

So Matt Assay took one small paragraph from this to generate his headline and thrust for his post:

Gates’ philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people’s good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.

What I fail to see is why this made Matt “cringe”? He (RMS) only mentioned a well known and reported article published and investigated by the L.A Times back in January 2007!. But that is the only part of the whole BBC article where RMS mentions the Gates Foundation and he does so only to expose an interesting story to the great unread who are simply blinded by Gate’s presence (remember Tony Blair?).

If Matt had bothered to read the article in the LA Times he would find snippets such as:

Using the most recent data available, a Times tally showed that hundreds of Gates Foundation investments — totaling at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets, not including U.S. and foreign government securities — have been in companies that countered the foundation’s charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy.

or:

… In 2005, the foundation held nearly $1.5 billion worth of stock in drug companies whose practices have been widely criticized as restricting the flow of key medicines to poor people in developing nations.

If you are prepared to read a bit, there is a great deal of smelly fish surrounding the activities of the investment side of the foundation.

Matt concludes:

He may be right. He’s probably wrong. Regardless, it just demonstrates poor judgment and bad taste to try to kick Gates on his way out, especially for the charitable work that Gates and his wife do.

Ahhh, poor old Bill on his way out. What a crass statement that is. The guy is still the richest man on the planet and deserves to be scrutinised. RMS didn’t “kick Gates”, he just noted some of Bill’s past deeds - and accurately I might add. Why didn’t you mention the many companies Gates has crushed in the past Matt?

So I really don’t get what Matt has found that is so disingenuous to a man who has stolen ideas from other companies, crushed competition by using illegal and anti-competitive practices, and created the world’s largest convicted monopolist.

Perhaps Matt isn’t really being stupid or blind. Perhaps he gets paid to generate lots of traffic for CNET? I don’t know. But this is nearly as smelly as The Gate Foundation’s investment strategies…

My personal opinion to the readers of this or Matt’s piece would be to believe a man who has spent his adult life giving stuff away, and preaching that giving is a good thing, and who has created one of the most powerful movements for change in recent history. Rather than to believe a man who has done none of the above and is called Bill.

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Answers on a comment and we are looking for precision in the location here, just the city name is not good enough!

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