Category Archives: News

Community Foundations at OSCON

OSCON is approaching and the schedule‘s looking great. On the Tuesday morning Simon will be one of several open source foundation leaders giving guidance and sharing experience on some of the practical aspects of starting a foundation at the Community Foundations 101 tutorial. Here’s the program for that event:

Scheduled: 9am Tuesday August 23rd, in room F150

09:00    Welcome and introduction of Faculty
09:10    Should we form a Foundation or join a host organisation?
  • What is a Foundation and what benefits does it provide?
  • Should every project be part of a Foundation?
  • Should we start our own Foundation?
  • What existing Foundations could we join?
09:50  How do we form a new Foundation?
If we form a Foundation:
  • Where should we do that?
  • What “type” should it be? 501(c)(3, 4, 6), eV, Stiftung etc
  • Regulatory trends
10:30  How should we staff & administer it?
  • Staff roles
  • Do we need an Executive Director?
  • Outsourced administration
11:10  Fundraising and fund-using
  • How can we raise the funds we need?
  • How can we spend money?
  • Should we pay for code?
11:45  Open Q & A

12:00  End

Chair:  Simon Phipps, OSI & MariaDB Foundation
Faculty:

  • Josh Berkus, Software in the Public Interest & PostgreSQL
  • Steve Holden, Python Software Foundation
  • Paula Hunter, OuterCurve Foundation
  • Bradley Kuhn, Software Freedom Conservancy & FSF
  • Dave Neary, Red Hat & GNOME
  • Deb Nicholson, OIN, MediaGoblin & OpenHatch
  • Ian Skerrett, Eclipse Foundation

The topics covered here are just some of the considerations to be made when starting a foundation; in fact even the decision to start a foundation is itself not always the best option. Hearing about some of the mistakes, failures and successes that the panel have already experienced will help get your foundation on the right track.

Simon will also be giving a talk on the Thursday afternoon about the process by which corporations can find themselves embracing and benefiting from open source.

Italian Region Switches To Open Source

Bolzano LogoThis morning saw the announcement by the Italian province of South Tyrol that they would begin a three year migration process to using LibreOffice for all of it’s public administration needs; they apparently use Microsoft products at present. The move is part of a broader strategy to eliminate dependence on monopolistic vendors, reduce costs, become more flexible and support locally based service providers.

You can tell that this is a project with a high likelihood of success because of the extent of the planning that has apparently gone into making the change. Simon’s article “Migrating to Open Source Needs a Plan” laid out some of the reasons why it’s vital that these sorts of migrations are not taken lightly or used simply as a cost cutting measure. When done carefully and with forethought there are rich rewards to be reaped and this South Tyrol migration bears the hall marks of an administration that is making the change in the right way. Gradual phase in, dialogue with and training for unfamiliar users, a changeover budget, these are all signs that this is one migration which is going to meet its aims.

The “Technical Round Table for Open Source” on whose advice this decision seems to have been made  have very likely built their proposed changeover plan on the basis of the document foundations own recommendations for migrating to LibreOffice. It will be interesting to watch the progress of this bold move.

Making Transparency A Priority

Have you heard of the Tshwane Principles yet? Published a week ago the Tshwane Principles on National Security and the Right to Information set out detailed best practice recommendations on where the lines should be drawn between disclosure and  secrecy with regard to government held information. The document represents over two years of work by a collaboration of governments, academics, civil society groups and a wide range of expert opinions from over 70 different countries. The standards also address other issues from the treatment of whistle blowers, to the classification and declassification of information and to the formation of independent oversight bodies to name just a few.

This announcement article from the Open Society Justice Initiative who facilitated the creation of the principles claims that even the draft form of the principles has already proved itself a useful tool in the debate over  state information laws in South Africa. It’s hoped that the completed Tshwane Principles will be considered and adopted by governments all over the world, promoting openness and justice in the area of information access. Lord Alex Carlile QC described the Principles as “a standard that is both aspirational and achievable”. Whenever issues of access, disclosure and classification make it onto the agenda, the Tshwane Principles need to be close behind, holding governments to a standard that is high and fair yet still has its feet firmly grounded in the realities of security today.

Patents; a good time for change

Yesterday saw the unveiling of a new White House initiative to combat patent trolls. The measures are a welcome follow-through to President Obama’s online comments and could be a much needed step towards curbing the power of patents. The announcement correctly highlights the fact that patents are intended to encourage innovation and protect innovators. Patent trolls, in contrast, represent the very antithesis of patents desired usage and outcome; “costing the economy billions of dollars and undermining American innovation”.

Dealing with trolls needs to be a first step though. The patent system contains other flaws, equally damaging to innovation and competitive business practice . Yesterday’s other big patent news was of the ITC’s decision that Apple are in breach of Samsung’s patents  Continue reading →

EFF Rallies Industry Leaders

Last May Judge Alsup ruled that APIs are not copyrightable. Oracle was left flat on its face, even handing over $1m to Google at the conclusion of the case they had claimed would end with their own pockets being well lined. Feeling somewhat put out by this result, Oracle decided to appeal the decision on the Federal Circuit.

The case has been well covered. Almost everybody with a working understanding of the case is in agreement with the ruling. If APIs were copyrightable the software industry would be transformed in a very negative way, stifling innovation.

A number of amicus briefs have been submitted to the proceedings to make these views known, including one from the EFF, to which Meshed Insights’ Simon Phipps is a signatory. The message of the brief is clear; Oracle should not be pursuing this. Alsup’s ruling accurately reflects both industry and legal perspectives on the case.

US Federal Circuit Finds CLS Software Patents Invalid

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit published an opinion last week in the CLS vs Alice case. You’ll recall this was a crucial hearing that has the potential to decide whether software is patentable in the USA.

The opinion published by the court — sitting en banc with all but one of the Circuit’s judges represented — found that the software in question was not a patentable subject. That’s very good news and if the finding stands could strike at the heart of the software patent problem.

But the story isn’t over here. The document actually includes six separate opinions by different groups of the judges. A majority of them were able to agree to the overall court verdict, but it is clearly inconclusive. As a consequence, it seems almost certain this finding will itself be appealed to the US Supreme Court. So celebrate, but hold back a little – it’s not over yet.

No One Speaks For Me

“Thoughts on Open Innovation” is the title of a recently released OpenForum Academy publication collecting essays on a range of open innovation topics designed to “deliver a snapshot of important developments for policy-makers, business leaders and researchers to consider”. Simon contributed a chapter entitled “No One Speaks For Me”, looking at the concept of a meshed society and some of the ways in which the old world naturally excludes and even fights the onset of the new. The book can be downloaded free, either as a whole or by individual chapters; so have a look, there’s plenty there to get your teeth into!

OSI Board Meeting

Last week the new board of the Open Source Initiative met in Washington DC. Decisions were made with regard to a range of issues including a move to become a member-based organisation and the decision to hire a general manager for the group (details and availability of the role to be advertised shortly). Read the full meeting report here.

SVG Everywhere

Some landmark news you may have missed recently is the reality that all the major web browsers now support the open standard for scalable vector graphics, SVG. SVG was of course created and standardised long ago, but it’s taken some 14 years from the initial development through to this position of receiving full support from all the big name browsers.

Resistance to the standard came from Microsoft. They attempted to have their own technology become the standard — first by submitting it as a candidate for the basis of the SVG standard and then, when the rest of the community rejected their submission, by leveraging their other software monopolies to promote their own format and by dragging their feet over supporting SVG.

But the inevitable attractor of open standards has finally had its effect, and the power of this important open standard is finally unleashed across Firefox, Chrome, IE8 and most others. SVG allows very small image downloads to deliver rich, potentially interactive graphics that work on any device at any resolution. To get a hint of the power, take a look at the web site of SVG pioneer Kelvin Lawrence.

WWW: Why the Web Worked and Gopher didn’t

The document CERN signed that made the technology behind the World Wide Web available without restrictions to everyone in the world showed up recently as part of CERN’s celebration of 20 years of the open web. Back at the start of the 90s, I was at IBM working on video conferencing (you’ll still find my name next to the well-known port number allocation for it), and among my responsibilities was making information available on the newly-popular Internet. We had a web page for our project, and did consider the idea of publishing information through another, much more widely used technology of the time – called Gopher. However, doing so was more complicated, and also we were concerned that running our own server might require some sort of license. So we stuck with just a web page.

Our experience was duplicated all over the world. Despite being very widely used, Gopher stagnated in the face of an open alternative. People don’t like to have to ask permission to get their job done, so given a choice between a technology that can be used without having to seek permission and one which requires approval from its owner (and all the corresponding bureaucracy that goes with that with ones employer) the decision is easy.

People have asked “what would have happened if the Web was patented”. The answer is there would never have been a web. It would have been an interesting project stuck in a lab somewhere, unable to get any traction against the more widely used Gopher and probably never heard of. What made the WWW was CERN’s decision to make it freely available. We should be immeasurably grateful for that enlightened decision.