Open Source Sells Planes
Another one from the Wikileaks archive, in which Japan choose Open Source European fighter jets over closed American fighters.
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/08/09TOKYO1813.html
While U.S. weapons are shrouded in secrecy like a “black box,” BAE
Systems takes pride in “open source.”
Latham said: “We are willing to meet Japan’s requirements, whether
it is licensed production or importation.”
MOD officials in charge of arms trade with the U.S. have taken note
of BAE Systems’ posture of emphasizing the merits for Japan. A
senior ASDF officer says:
“Actually, the top secret documents in the MOD mostly consist of
information on U.S. weapons. When parts designated as top secret
black box break down, they need to be sent back to the manufacturer
in the U.S. for repairs. Sometimes, these parts are left unattended
for extended periods of time due to circumstances on the other side.
It is possible that we will not be able to use them at a critical
moment.”
and just to rub in how much they value access to the source code:
When Tamogami was in active service, he told this reporter: “We need
only some 50 FXs. I have a feeling that since the number is small,
the U.S. will not object too strongly if we choose the Eurofighter.
If the U.S. is willing to open up the black box of the F-35, we are
willing to consider it.”
Obviously in this example they might not be talking about Free Software as such, I have no idea if the BAE fighter control software is licensed under the GPL or another copyleft license or if it is more of a “published but proprietary” thing. Either way, having the right to know what their hardware is being commanded to do is important to Japan, and it should be to you too.
Microsoft pulling dirty tricks in Thailand
I had a bit of a poke about in the newly released Wikileaks diplomatic cables archive looking for interesting stuff and came across a cable from the Chiang Mai Consulate that contains an allegation that the Microsoft Thailand Corporate Affairs Director was explicitly bad mouthing Open Source and being critical of Thailands Creative Economy policy of promoting the use of legal Open Source software instead of using unauthorised copies of proprietary software. The open source community generally doesn’t have this level of access into the heart of government, which is one thing that we have been working to fix in the UK with our friends at Open Forum Europe (who I work for part time). It really is important for the community to support organisations and individuals that can provide a credible voice at a high level and advocate for Open Standards, Free Software (yeah, approximately synonymous with Open Source) and a level playing field through the interoperability of systems and a lack of vendor lock in.
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/02/10CHIANGMAI18.html
---------------------------------------------
IPR: Concern Over Open Source Software and Data Protection
---------------------------------------------
9. (SBU) Microsoft-Thailand's Corporate Affairs Director
identified software copyrights as a big issue. On the one hand,
he praised the Thai government (RTG) for strengthening its IPR
enforcement and education efforts, and said Microsoft was "very
pleased" that Thailand's software piracy rate has decreased by
two percent a year since 2006. On the other hand, he expressed
concern over the RTG's Creative Economy policy of promoting the
"open source" software model over the "commercial source" model
as a means to curb piracy. (Note: this is an issue for IT
companies worldwide, and not unique to Thailand).
10. (SBU) The Business Software Alliance (BSA) Director for
Software Policy-Asia also urged the RTG not to favor open source
over commercial source. He argued that (1) the open source
model has been shown to have an insignificant impact on reducing
software piracy; and (2) by focusing on an open source policy,
the RTG signals the market to stunt the development of
commercial source software, which in turn undermines Thailand's
ability to fully service market needs.
In case you think this post is Microsoft bashing, I generally don’t pick on Microsoft, they are by no means the only big bad wolf out there. Remember, I didn’t pick Microsoft for this post, they picked the Open Source as the thing they wanted to get rid of in Thailand. There were other proprietary vendors in the meeting, the main anti-open source quote was attributed to Microsoft, but this kind of thing goes on all the time. The anti-FUD message needs to be just as strong and persistent.
The science of meetings
This post isn’t going to make an huge amount of sense to people who are not using IRC or involved in the Ubuntu project, feel free to let your eyes glaze over and wait for the next article.
The #ubuntu-meeting IRC channel is the place where most of the regular team meetings of the Ubuntu project take place. There was a bot called MootBot in the channel which was there to facilitate meetings, which it did for a number of years. I was never that impressed by what it did with the minutes, there was too much manual writing of meeting minutes which really the bot should have been doing for people. I started making a few tweaks to a copy of the bot so that it would generate formatted minutes in moin wiki syntax for pasting direct into wiki.ubuntu.com I had also been working on a complete rewrite of the code in Python rather than TCL that was started by the Debian project. This was a bit of a background task for me and was nowhere near finished, when a couple of weeks ago the original Mootbot broke and nobody had time to go fix it. As a result of this my next generation meeting bot was pressed into service somewhat ahead of schedule, bugs and all, and is now working hard in the #ubuntu-meeting channel under the name meetingology. The code is at https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-bots/ubuntu-bots/meetingology and patches are very welcome. I am running a development version of the bot in the #meetingology channel, feel free to pop in and test it there.
Meetingology supports rather more commands than the old bot and you can use the old form with square brackets [TOPIC] or just #topic and it isn’t case sensitive about commands. The full list of commands is documented here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/meetingology. In particular note that you can now do “#startmeeting meetingname” to set the overall meeting title. There are a number of improvements and issues to fix with the output minutes, I will get round to that over the next few weeks (patches are welcome remember). Some teams have their own meeting syntax and scripts to parse it, if you want a particular output format for your meeting then do come and find me and we can make it happen. The goal is that the post-meeting effort for the chair is copy-paste-done. Writing up minutes is a task that is not worthy of a human.
Going dotty
Back when the very nice Ubuntu font was initially being developed I did some testing of it using the fontforge application and some looking through the Unicode specification for blocks of characters that should be implemented. There is all sorts of character sets tucked away in the Unicode standard including Klingon and Braille. Sadly the Klingon wishlist has been parked with a status of wontfix but Braille is an interesting one. I was expecting a block of characters in alphabetical order somewhere, but it isn’t quite like that. The specification has all the dot patterns but quite how you type “this is in braille” and get “⠞⠓⠊⠎⠀⠊⠎⠀⠊â ⠀⠃⠗â ⠊⠇⠇⠑” is not defined in Unicode as there are a number of different mapping tables you can use to go from letters to dot patterns. So it would be great if the Ubuntu font had those glyphs, however they would be of limited practical use to most people who are interested in Braille. At this point I should clarify that I do know that Braille patterns on screen or printed flat on paper are as much use as a chocolate teapot, they have to be embossed to be read by the fingers. I am taking a broad interpretation of “people who are interested in Braille” and I am including in that someone who wants to make a simple sign that can be read in Braille perhaps using a bit of sheet metal and a centre punch and teachers wanting to get a class to make labels for their coat pegs with their names in Braille, that kind of thing. So for these use-cases and not for typesetting a book in Braille I have made as my first fontforge project a little font which has Braille dot patterns as the characters. This means you can type something in LibreOffice Writer (or word processor of your choosing) and change the font to see it in Braille. You can print it out and stick things on the dots, (if you want to do the centre punch thing do bear in mind that you need to punch through the back of the paper over the dots or you will make a sign that is mirrored and incomprehensible). So here it is, Libertus Braille, a Free font for simple educational uses of Braille.
A Professional keyboard with an Ubuntu Logo on the super key
Keyboard made from pure awesome
Today I got a new keyboard, nothing unusual and particularly blogworthy in that you might think, but look a little closer, especially at the two little keys on the bottom row that traditionally host two little adverts for a legacy operating system – they are gone! The little flags (previously discussed in the context of Google ChromeOS) are replaced with the Circle of Friends, the Ubuntu Logo that symbolises friendship and freedom. So where, I hear you ask, did I get such a marvel of modern clavicula engineering? Well the answer to that is from our friends at the Keyboard Company where they distribute and customise high end and specialist keyboards. This one is a Filco Majestouch which they modified by replacing the super keys with custom printed ones with the Circle of Friends on. Now you might note the price tag for this keyboard is £95 ex VAT, and yes this is a high end keyboard. It has a solid quality feel to it and the key action is superb. In fact when ordering you can specify one of three different key actions, tactile action, click action or linear action. I got the tactile one, which is not clicky, but has a point of resistance to push past in the travel at the actuation point. Kind of like pushing the accelerator on an automatic car past the bump to get it to kick down a gear.
It also does N Key rollover, which is great. Most cheap keyboards have a matrix of wires and switches that link keys into groups and when pressing multiple keys together this can lead to ambiguous signals that cause ghosting (keys being signalled as pressed which were not) and jamming (keys pressed, but not signaled). This keyboard has each key individually addressable, you can press a whole bunch of keys at once and it will know exactly which ones you have got pressed. This helps for the rapid typist and in gameplay where you might be holding down a bunch of keys to move a character whilst jumping, turning and firing. A missed keypress in this scenario could lead to an almost tragic loss of virtual life.
Qwerty to Steno keyboard mapping
I am not really a gamer, but the N-Key rollover does interest me for a completely different reason, it means I can try out the chorded keyboard typing with Plover. This allows you to write instead of one key at a time by pressing a chord of multiple keys like a court reporter would do on a stenotype machine, this can in theory allow you to communicate at a blistering 250wpm. This open source software reads what you are typing using the steno chords and maps it from a kind of syllable level shorthand into what you intended to say.
If you would like to have one of these fine keyboards you can order them from the keyboard company, at the same price as the version with the flag key, just specify in the additional information box on the order form that you would like the Ubuntu Circle of Friends on the super key. They can ship anywhere and do them in pretty much any international layout, so if you want AZERTY or whatever then they can oblige. I would love to see them listed as a product in the Ubuntu store but as yet I have been unable to contact a human there, if anyone knows how to do that then do leave a comment.
OpenERP Wordle
This week we are exhibiting at the SmartGovLive event in the ExCeL centre in London. As part of a presentation I am doing I wanted to explain what OpenERP does, so I took the 138,000 words of the official OpenERP book and fed them in to Wordle, three hours later it had rendered this, pretty isn’t it!
