The Open Sourcerer

BETT 2009

Next week, we’ll be exhibiting at BETT, “the world’s largest educational technology event” in Olympia, London from the 14th to the 17th January.

On our stand (SW104) “The Open Source Precinct” with our friends at the OpenForum Europe we will be:

… promoting the benefits of Open Standards and the Free and Open Source Software Community. This global community creates high quality software that is Free for everyone, and best of all, the code is open so anyone can study how the software works and make improvements. Open Source and Open Standards create a lower cost, more open and competitive ICT market. Visit us to see (and play with) software for students and staff and learn where you can get local support from IT companies and user groups to get you started.

Please drop by if you are coming and say hello. Or if you know of any educators who are going, mention us to them. The educational world really needs FOSS right now more than ever before. But publicising it against the backdrop of vast marketing budgets and political influence is hard.

Think about it.

• Do you have kids who go to school?
• Do you still go to school?
• Do you teach?
• Do you pay tax?
• Do you care about the future?

If you can answer yes to one or more of these questions then FOSS in education really matters.

Do you want our Government and education system to waste your money on proprietary software like Windows, Anti Virus Software, Office 2000, 2003, 2007 etc and simply teach us how to use these products? “Just press CTL+ATL+DEL when it stops working Jonny”

Or would you prefer to spend the money on more teachers, buildings, hardware etc and teach us how to use any computer and how the software works and how to improve it and how to collaborate and how to communicate and and and?

We will have Edubuntu running on all our PCs, and lots of interesting applications to see and touch and play with.

ISO/IEC officially redundant and history

Thanks to Andy Updegrove for bringing this to our attention.

CONSEGI 2008 DECLARATION

We, the undersigned representatives of state IT organisations from Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay, note with disappointment the press release from ISO/IEC/JTC-1 of 20 August regarding the appeals registered by the national bodies of Brazil, South Africa, India and Venezuela. Our national bodies, together with India, had independently raised a number of serious concerns about the process surrounding the fast track approval of DIS29500. That those concerns were not properly addressed in the form of a conciliation panel reflects poorly on the integrity of these international standards development institutions.

Whereas we do not intend to waste any more resources on lobbying our national bodies to pursue the appeals further, we feel it is important to make the following points clear:

1. The bending of the rules to facilitate the fast track processing of DIS29500 remains a significant concern to us. That the ISO TMB did not deem it necessary to properly explore the substance of the appeals must, of necessity, put confidence in those institutions ability to meet our national requirements into question.
2. The overlap of subject matter with the existing ISO/IEC26300 (Open Document Format) standard remains an area of concern. Many of our countries have made substantial commitments to the use of ISO/IEC26300, not least because it was published as an ISO standard in 2006.
3. The large scale adoption of a standard for office document formats is a long and expensive exercise, with multi-year projects being undertaken in each of our countries. Many of us have dedicated significant time and resources to this effort. For example, in Brazil, the process of translation of ISO/IEC26300 into Portuguese has taken over a year.

The issues which emerged over the past year have placed all of us at a difficult crossroads. Given the organisation’s inability to follow its own rules we are no longer confident that ISO/IEC will be capable of transforming itself into the open and vendor-neutral standards setting organisation which is such an urgent requirement. What is now clear is that we will have to, albeit reluctantly, re-evaluate our assessment of ISO/IEC, particularly in its relevance to our various national government interoperability frameworks. Whereas in the past it has been assumed that an ISO/IEC standard should automatically be considered for use within government, clearly this position no longer stands.

Signed:

Aslam Raffee (South Africa)
Chairman, Government IT Officer’s Council Working Group on Open Standards Open Source Software

Marcos Vinicius Ferreira Mazoni (Brazil)
Presidente, Servico Federal de Processamento de Dados

Carlos Eloy Figueira (Venezuela)
President, Centro Nacional de Tecnologías de Información

Eduardo Alvear Simba (Ecuador)
Director de Software Libre, Presidencia de la República

Tomas Ariel Duarte C. (Paraguay)
Director de Informática, Presidencia de la República

Miriam Valdés Abreu (Cuba)
Directora de Análisis, Oficina para la Informatización.

Ouch!

The above is a joint and public statement from the State IT bodies of Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay when they met at a conference CONSEGI 2008 at the end of last week.

It is a really important development in the OOXML (DIS29500) fiasco and one that confirms what I have been saying for some time now; that ISO/IEC, in respect to ICT standards at least, are finished. They have no trust in ISO’s ability to produce Open Standards any more.

I was particulary interested in how much effort has been put into supporting IS26300 which was approved in 2006 and is now in widespread use around the world. This is the default (and currently the only really open standards) document format in many office suites like OpenOffice.org and also on many of the on-line services like Google Docs. It will even be supported in the next SP to, and release of, Microsoft’s Office product before they get around to delivering DIS29500 – if they ever do that is.

This has really been a sorry affair for ISO. They have lost all credibility, have been shafted well and truly by M$/ECMA and now are being told to “F” off in no uncertain terms by nation state IT organisations. What a complete mess.

Acronyms Galore: But EIF v2.0 (draft) warrants your attention

Bob Sutor, encourages all Europeans

… 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.

Encourage UK PLC to use Open Standards

Do you remember that total Jerk Dennis Byron? The chap who thought that Digistan was some sort of terrorist organisation? Well here’s a rather nicely ironic way to shove his ignorant and frankly stupid views in that familiar place where “the sun doesn’t shine”.

A fellow colleague on the blogosphere, Russell Ossendryver, sent me an email linking to a recent on-line petition instigated by John McCreesh (of OpenOffice.org) on 10 Downing Street’s petition engine.

Basically it calls for the UK Government to:

(1) Procure only information technology that implements free and open standards;

(2) Deliver e-government services based exclusively on free and open standards;

(3) Use only free and open digital standards in their own activities.

as adopted and proclaimed by the founders of the Digital Standards Organization in The Hague on 21 May 2008.

That sounds like a fine idea to me! It would save the country literally hundreds of millions of pounds just for starters.

There are some particularly interesting names already on the list of signatories:

Mark Taylor (Open Source Consortium), Chris Puttick (CIO for Oxford Archaeology), Glyn Moody (Journalist and Open Source Commentator: http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com), and Ian Lynch (of INGOTS fame).

I’ve signed it. If you think that Open Standards are important (and you SHOULD if you are reading this!) then what are you waiting for? Click here and register your opinion.