My Opinions

While in Portland to meet many Free and Open Source leading actors, I was delighted to shake hands with Bibiana McHugh, the visionary lady that was the driving force behind the Open Data initiative at Portland's Trimet (the public transportation company of the city of Portland). She really understood what this is all about, when saying “Our transparency allows people to use our data and develop smart, innovative mobile applications to help riders—at no cost to TriMet.”

Let me try to explain why.

Thanks to the effort of many wonderful people (see at the end of this post), it is now possible to call an external solver from apt-get, if you use at least version 0.9.5, which will be the case in Wheezy.

It's pretty simple, just install apt-cudf :

apt-get install apt-cudf

but please check that you get version 2.9.16~rc1-1 or later of it!

dpkg -l apt-cudf
======================================
ii  apt-cudf  2.9.16~rc1-1   CUDF solver integration for APT

This package will also install one of the available solvers that support CUDF, for example aspcud.

Then you can simply use the --solver option of apt-get to have the dependency solving delegated to aspcud:

apt-get -s --solver aspcud install totem

On my machine, this gives a solution with these characteristics:

49 upgraded, 47 newly installed, 1 downgraded, 9 to remove and 2551 not upgraded.

Which might be more interesting than what the standard internal solver of apt finds, as it changes and removes quite a few more packages

79 upgraded, 98 newly installed, 15 to remove and 2520 not upgraded.

I just got my copy of the HIB games from http://www.humblebundle.com/, and while they do come for my preferred software platform (GNU/Linux), you need to do some tweaking to make them run properly on a 64 bit machine. This short blog post details the steps you need to make to have them run on your system. In particular, I loved CrayonPhysicsDeLuxe, which was a real pleasure to play with my young son.

While walking around in some corridors in Brussels, Paris and other capitals to explain why the state, which is different from a private company, must focus on Free Software, I had on many occasions the opportunity to cross officials encumbered by sincere fear. They explained to me that some major players in the proprietary software industry (and it was not just Microsoft!) threatened to file suite against the for breach of competition law as soon as they showed some interest in Free Software.

The lobbyists argument went more or less like this:

"If you make a tender, or worse, if you write a law or directive requiring the use of Free Software, it prevents us from participating in these tenders with our proprietary software, so you violate the right of free competition because you exclude some of the software industry from your markets. We'll sue, and you will see what you will see! "

On each occasion, I tried to explain to this particular civil servant that this argument was completely hollow: there is violation of the competition when we exclude from a procurement a potential competitor on criteria other than technical needs real, not when a provider excludes itself by refusing to provide what is asked in the tender.

For example, we might attack for violations of rules on competition the innumerable public tenders poorly written that, instead of requesting an "integrated solution for email and calendar compliant with RFC822 and following standards, and able to exchange calendars in the published ICAL format" just mentions " 300 licenses for Microsoft Outlook "; misteriously, the lobbyists who roam the corridors have really nothing to say against these flagrant violations.

On the other side, if a government opened a tender for the construction of a building complying with (public) standards of high environmental quality, it is quite natural that manufacturers not knowing or not wanting to meet these standards are excluded: this is not an infringement of competition law.

Now, a government that takes seriously its obligation to ensure the sustainability of access to public data and confidentiality of personal data of its citizens, it must ask in its bidding that the software solutions provided are based on open standards and are made with free software: it is simply demanding software with the features necessary to accomplish its public service mission. If a software vendor can not or will not provide software with these characteristics, he is free to do so, but he can not pretend that there is a violation of competition law.

But this was, of course, just the opinion of an academic against that of heavy lobbyists.

A recent development of case law in Italy, that I just learned of thanks to Assoli, should finally help our dear frightened officials to fight back. Here are the key points.

• The Piedmont Regional Council had approved a law containing this language: "... The Region, in its choice of software, supports free software and software whose source code is verifiable by end users. » (article 6, alinéa 2) "(Article 6, paragraph 2)
• The Presidency of the Council of Ministers objected to this, asking the Constitutional Court to cancel a number of provisions.
• On March 23, 2010, the judgement is out, and among the rest, we note that the Court debunks the arguments by the Council of Ministers (argument which is, unmistakably, a copy of 'the argument propagated by the lobbyists).

"The concepts of free software and open source software are not concepts relating to a specific technology, brand or product, but express a legal feature ... (and) the choice (of this feature) belongs to the ... buyer of the software. It follows that ... there is no breach of competition (when giving advantage to Free Software in a regional guideline). "

I would like to thank deeply, in order, the Piedmont Region in Italy for having shown to be aware of the fundamental duties of a public administration in the era of digital technologies, the Italian Council of Ministers for having, by challenging this regional law, tested the validity of the specious arguments peddled by lobbyists of proprietary software, and the Italian Constitutional Court to have decided the issue clearly, in a language understandable even for the general public.

Now, let us forward this information to all the civil servants in our countries.

In the US, a new report on Scholarly Publishing Roundtable Report and Recommendations wants to be optimistic about Open Access, but contains, as its recommendation n. 2, the following:

Agencies should establish specific embargo periods between publication and public access. An embargo period of between zero (for open access journals) and twelve months currently reflects such a balance for many science disciplines. For other fields a longer embargo period may be necessary.

This is totally unreasonable, coming from the "Committee on Science and Technology of the United States House of Representatives, in coordination with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy".

I would suggest that these people, representing The People, reconsider their position: this recommendation simply states, openly and plainly, that the interest of the publisher has diverged completely from the interest of the scientists they are supposed to serve.

I would recommend to read again my old article on Scholarly Publishing, which, by the way, got the best paper award from Novatica in 2006.

It is election day in the US, so the time is particularly favorable to attracting public attention, again, to electronic voting machines... probably the most funny example of this is Oprah's vote getting lost on a touch screen; knowing Oprah's tremendous reach, maybe a non negligible amount of North American citizens now knows that computers don't do good voting devices. Unfortunately, Oprah's blamed this on herself, in the all too common old mood of blaming oneself for somebody else's bad software design that made companies like Microsoft immensely rich.

There have been many disparate experiments worldwide in building higher education diplomas offering some form of specialization in Free and Open Source Software over the last years.

We are many to believe that it is time to bring all academics having worked in this area together to build together a Free and Open Source Software curriculum schema for higher education in IT. It will be a long lasting effort, and the first significant step will be the FOSS Curriculum event in Paris, in the framework of the Open World Forum.

The following call for comments and contribution details the scope of this action.

Microsfot announced on February 29th a massive price slash on its Vista family of operating systems. The truth is, at 399$ (which converts to a whopping 500+ euros for us in Europe) for the Ultimate version, a full copy of Vista was massively overpriced especially considering how it expensively cripples the user experience to enforce DRM.

The recent remedies announced in the EU to counter Microsoft's illegal and anti-competitive behavior have sparkled a wealth of comments in the media, but I would like to try and offer another point of view, because I think some of the most important consequences of what is happening have been up to now somewhat overlooked.