- Opensource - Comments

Postscript on the POST

garym — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 14:48:51 -0400

Alas, the operative words may have been learning to share or maybe this is just an idea way ahead of it's time, but sadly, nearly one year later and there is still nothing posted to the POST list outside of a few a tiny handful of portlets and while one or two look interesting, most of the others are trivial search-forms, something far easier to cobble in-house than to learn to adapt.

I don't know why POST failed. Maybe it's politics. Maybe portals have had their day in the digital sunshine and have become pass&#233, quaint anachronisms of the days of the megalithic all-in-one website. Or maybe it's because, even after all this time, JSR-168 is still pretty obscure -- I had a request come in just this week from somebody claiming to offer me "the most advanced business portal" and they hadn't even heard of JSR-168, or Pluto, nor had they even really considered the portal paradigm as a platform for multi-vendor applications...

Adaptive et Al, Munich Meetup

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 08:14:37 -0400

This is for all members of a model development project: the developers, the QA engineers, spec and technical writers, project coordinators, technical translators, consultants, contractors, designers, content providers, communicators. International crowd preferred. All flavors and trends: Adaptive, Agile, Extreme, Open Source.

Goal: talking shop *across disciplines*
networking and project aquisition *beyond sandboxes*. Southpark Dilbert style humor required .

More details here:
http://softwaredev.meetup.com/45/boards/view/viewthread?thread=799524

Quick, what do Microsoft and Big Tobacco have in common ...

garym — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 20:19:51 -0400

This is just getting too cool too fast, be still my beating heart: "Disinfopedia has been asking some obvious questions":http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=AdTI-Funding ... like, just for instance, who is it who pays all those whopping salaries at AdTI? Well, gee now, if you want to fling dung, hey, there's a game _everyone_ can play ...

bq. In June 2002 open-source software advocates wondered if an AdTI criticising open source software was actually a veiled Microsoft response to recent reports of rising government and military interest in open-source systems. Wired magazine reported that a Microsoft spokesman confirmed that they funded the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. "We support a diverse array of public policy organizations with which we share a common interest or public policy agenda such as the de Tocqueville Institution," the spokesman wrote in an e-mail."

An unspecified spokesman, an email, I love it.

More? You want _more_? Of course "there's more":http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=AdTI-Funding ...

how quickly we forget

Wed, 02 Jun 2004 16:38:42 -0400

Strange how much interest this generated as a prospect and how few people ever actually cared when NASA began officially releasing Open Source Software about 3 months ago.

There's not much there but it looks like a start.

http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/

Mandrakesoft's Patent-Lobbying HOWTO

garym — Mon, 17 May 2004 15:43:29 -0400

From the latest Mandrakesoft plea for public action to derail this railroading bill ...

You can convince even more of [ the EU governments and media ] to reject software patentability. In order to do that, please take some time to read about the issues at stake, and spread the information across your friends and business contacts, the press, your members of the parliament and your government. It is essential that elected policy makers get back into command of the situation and do not leave the patent offices decide alone.

Here are some texts which can help you to present the issues to the media and to convince policy-makers of all countries of the European
Union.

A very readable analysis by FranÃ§ois Pellegrini explaining the legal and economic issues of software patentability:
"http://www.abul.org/article191.html":http://www.abul.org/article191.html

A thorough analysis by Jonas Maebe of the difference between the three versions of the directive, and why software patents are indeed illegal with respect to TRIPS:
"http://www.elis.ugent.be/~jmaebe/swpat/councilanalysis/paper-en.pdf":http://www.elis.ugent.be/~jmaebe/swpat/councilanalysis/paper-en.pdf

Positions of the member countries of the European Union:
"http://swpat.ffii.org/akteure/":http://swpat.ffii.org/akteure/ (add "pt", "ie", "fr", "de", "be", "gr", etc to have the positions of the
member countries)

The page of the FFII giving some directions for actions:
"http://kwiki.ffii.org/?LtrSmePolit0405En":http://kwiki.ffii.org/?LtrSmePolit0405En

A recent paper published in the Washington Post describing the current situation in the United States:
"Patenting Air or Protecting Property? Information Age Invents a New Problem"
"http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54548-2003Dec10?language=printer":http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54548-2003Dec10?language=printer

31 companies sued for using the JPEG image format (the plaintiff filed for a patent while recommending the adoption in international bodies of a standard including its patented technology):
"http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,63200,00.html%3Ftw%3Dwn_bizhead_1":http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,63200,00.html%3Ftw%3Dwn_bizhead_1

A US company sues companies of on-line content distribution:
"http://www.e-data.com/":http://www.e-data.com/
"http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5205529.html":http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5205529.html
"http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5144097.html":http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5144097.html

A well-documented file on the reference site Law.com:
"http://www.law.com/jsp/statearchive.jsp?type=Article&oldid=ZZZV4RVSSPC":http://www.law.com/jsp/statearchive.jsp?type=Article&oldid=ZZZV4RVSSPC

Thank you very much for your help.

Mandrakesoft Online Team.

Locating the Online Component

garym — Sun, 09 May 2004 01:17:02 -0400

Ah, well, _that_ was web-friendly! To get the skinny on how to join up with the online component, you have to _download the PDF file_ where it is indeed spelled out quite plainly in the sidebar of the 3-column print brochure:

bq. The conference will be webcast live worldwide and made available after the event in archive form using the KMDI ePresence interactive webcasting system http://epresence.kmdi.toronto.edu/

oh ... did they mention? Registration for the _webcast_ is $95 -- that should trim out the riff-raff, eh? Little wonder they left that gem for the fine-print footnotes of the PDF.

Ok, on second thought, I think I'll wait for the post-mortem blog distillations ... and maybe spend the $95 I don't have on mom.

Webcasted

garym — Sun, 09 May 2004 01:00:57 -0400

No hints as of midnight Saturday as to where and how this thing is going to be 'webcasted', and I note with some resignation that this 'comprehensive' program makes no mention of the community or _labour saving device and not product_ aspects that are the true meaning of free software -- hopefully this will surface and all we can do is revert to pre-dotbomb methodologies of polling the page over and over to find out what's going to be what with it.

You can watch for page updates here on the communiqué in the SiteCloud sidebar, especially as there's no blog, and no RSS feed, which I suppose is unsurprising considering this is a venue who see fit to _host_ their webbycasting on a "Windows Server 2003 running Microsoft-IIS/6.0":http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?mode_u=off&mode_w=on&site=http://osconf.kmdi.utoronto.ca/

A Case Study: Basing a Business on Free Software

garym — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 12:17:02 -0400

Apropos to this thread, here's a transcript of a discussion over accountability and support issues -- the scenario is the discovery that a certain piece of core-business software, free software, behaves differently on different platforms.

The issue is who they should hold accountable for the failure, and issue not far from the indemnification issue, and with the same answer: It's our code, so it's our problem ...

This client is very open minded about free software, but our conversation shows how some of the old expections can surface:

11:10 p this should behave the same across versions
11:11 p but it could be client needs to install different versions or whatever
11:11 garym not across version, but certainly across platforms, only it is under no obligation to behave the same.
11:11 p yes, across platforms
11:12 garym don't forget: Free software is the responsibility of the user ... if it doesn't work for you, you have to change it yourself -- it's a labour-saving device, not a product that has someone responsible for a contract on it.
11:12 p right
11:12 garym and that's a risk in using free software, if you approach it like it was a product. it is only there to save us from having to write it ourselves.
11:13 garym that said, the authors are most often interested in issues like this.
11:13 garym so it's worth while to find the name of the author in the two packages and let them know we've found a "possible portability conflict"
11:13 p so what is J's (or our) responsibility in packaging this stuff?
11:14 garym if we give out guarantees, then it's our responsibility. The code we give out is held out as ours, and the buck stops here, officially. authors are generally very helpful, but they have no obligations to their code, they just put it up for people to share it.
11:15 p yeah, i realize that. so we should go in and make the fix if necessary?
11:15 garym so, for example, we take that ticket app, which was broken, and A fixed it. We don't owe the author anything, but if we really got stuck, he'd probably answer our emails. -- if we make a fix the author doesn't like, then we've split the project and that then means we must forever maintain our version. this is why opensource people are so religious about standards.
11:16 garym it's because we're lazy :)
11:16 garym that, of course, assumes we can go in and fix it. It's likely a whopper of a program.
11:17 p and what about this one?
11:17 garym it may be possible to hire the author to fix it. but as I said, reporting the bug is a good first step because many times the authors do care and also have the time available (or make time). If they can't or don't want to, the next step is to ask them if there's someone we can pay to make a customized change.
11:17 garym same with this one, same even with RedHat Linux :)
11:17 p a whopper? can J do the fix if needed? C++ right?
11:18 garym couldn't tell you. this is C++/C but I've never looked at the code and since we have two different behaviours, I wonder if the windows and the unix are the same code base.
11:18 p but I think J should make the diagnosis too. Don't know if I'm qualified. I see the symptom
11:18 p ok, so there are options
11:19 garym yes, lots of options, but we have to maintain the perspective about the code we use. explain that we've run into what appears to be a portability issue and are contacting the authors for assistance.
11:21 garym software authors generally say "upgrade to the latest version" as the first diagnostic; that can be because they don't bother to maintain the old versions -- they only do what they need, anything more is a gift -- here again, we 'own' the code, and unlike commercial software, the responsibility is ours: if you need the old version updates, you have to do it yourself.

I don't know how this particular issue will unfold. The software authors are both coding to spec, but the spec is ambiguous on this one tiny issue, and it seems the unix crew took the first clause of the OR conjuntion, the windows crew took the second. If we're lucky, someone thought to make the behaviour selectable -- worst case, as with HTML in browsers, we'll just need to tailor the app to the platform services and put it down as just a fact of life.

That said, in my two decades using free software the cases where the authors don't jump right in to help are a tiny minority; most authors are kind, open and generous -- that may be why they chose to release their code as free software in the first place. I won't be in the least surprised if one or both of the windows and unix crews jump on our bug report and dig right in to correct this little anomaly, they may even keep us in the loop with updates or test-versions as they hunt for an amiable solution.

A House of Gifts

I've been told there is a Japanese proverb

bq. where a house is filled with Rights
there is no room for gifts.

All that earnest involvement and action by the package authors may happen, but it is not required to happen. It is a gift. As users of free software, our expectation must be that this code we use only saves us the trouble of typing it all in; the author owes us nothing.

We may not claim authorship, we may not even really understand how it works, but the free software we use is nonetheless our responsibility. Anything more is a gift.

And to our delight, the free software bubbles over with a bounty of boundless generosity.

Community Knowledge in Action

garym — Thu, 27 Feb 2003 16:54:23 -0500

Our thanks to Jim for posting this casestudy: The Chandler site is also a particularly good example of a use for the Drupal "Community Book" feature where members of their professional organization work together to create a comprehensive guide; as in the software-document uses of this service, the chandlers who find errors or omissions need only click the link to enter the form and submit their corrections for approval. Distributed knowledge management in action!

Post-production Filtering on WikiPedia

garym — Fri, 31 Jan 2003 15:18:22 -0500

As a footnote to that story, the last I heard from Larry Sanger was an email in November 2002 calling for support of an initiative "to select and post Wikipedia articles that are up to a certain standard."It never happened, and it shouldn't because, just as Nupedia failed to grasp what Tim Bernards-Lee had wrought with this web thing, this second notion to have the expert few hand-pick and pre-certify the contributions of the masses was doomed not only because the task is just too mammoth for anyone to fund out of any single entity, but mostly because again, it betrays a naivity of the media: All the WikiPedia really needs is a distributed aggregation and rating system, exactly as we find with the weblog impact on Google, and the cream will rise to the top.

May and I were watching a James Bond film set in Rio at Mardi Gras. I said to her, "How much does that festival cost?" and got the usual "He's flipped out again" look ;)

"Nothing," I responded to my rhetorical question, "Nothing at all. It costs nothing because it's $5 here from this person, $15 from that one, this shop spends some on decorations, this one on a band, this one spends a bit on their float ... and it all adds up."

The total expense is unknown, like the expense of rolling out the world's railways or telecommunications systems, like the cost of paving the world's highways, like the cost of Linux or Apache --- we know the costs of our little bit of it, but the grand cost is unknown because it all adds up from aggregating thousands of small, individual and voluntary contributions, each paying what they themselves need to contribute, and each participant virally marketing only what they themselves enjoyed.

And before you know it, you have a festival --- or an encyclopaedia or even software --- that is the envy of the entire world.