Coffs Free and Open Technology Network

Yesterday on Identica, I declared that I was:

"De-Bacon-ising. Unsubscribing from @jonobacon, #FLOSSWeekly & #ShotOfJaq. Can't bear the anti-FSF anti-RMS attitude any longer."

I soon realised this sounded too unfairly personal, so I think I'd better elaborate.

I've considered myself a part of the free software movement from the "Woah!" moment when I first read the preamble of the GPL over ten years ago. This was around the time of the formation of the open source movement, and for a while I was as confused as many people still are about the relationship between free software and open source, believing the latter term to be as Bruce Perens intended a synonym of the former.

The good thing about being a member of a relatively small credit union is that you don't have to worry about phishing email. Customers of Chase Manhattan, Barclays, or even the Commonwealth Bank may have to second-guess every email that purports to come from their financial institution, but customers of - for instance - the Sydney Credit Union are too small a target.

That is of course unless their credit union makes them an easy mark.

Some people like bad jokes, the more lame and groan-inducing the better. Richard Stallman (who henceforth I'll refer to by his preferred name, RMS) is certainly one of those people.

One of these bad jokes, told many times by RMS over the years, has recently received some criticism, which subsequently triggered a barrage of outrage:

The talk started out with a rehash of open source [sic] history--much of which is, I'm certain, quite well-known to the audience, and then lapsed into a fairly undirected rant about C# and how no one should be using it (with a completely incomprehensible comment that it was "good" that there were free C# implementations... huh?), before Richard donned his "Saint Ignotius" [sic] get-up. For me, things went rapidly and drastically downhill from that point.

I've been meaning to write about this subject in stanzas of more than 140 characters at a time, but in lieu of me getting my act together and making time to do so, here's the text of an enjoyable debate of sorts I had with cashmusic and others on Identica, reproduced here under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

For some time now, I've found the Creative Commons philosophy morally troubling in a way that the free software philosophy isn't, without being able to satisfactorily articulate precisely why. (I want to stress that I am criticising the project, not the people involved in it or people who use CC licenses, many of whom recognise that it is an imperfect but useful tool for achieving goals which I would consider quite compatible with my own.) Last week Science Commons, a subproject of the Creative Commons, released a short video summarising their mission. A couple of quotes from this video struck me as problematic:

March 26th 2008 is the first annual Document Freedom Day, a global day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards.

Have you ever sent out a document from your brand new version of your favourite word processor and got abusive emails in return from people who can't open the file you just sent them? They may even use the same software from the same vendor, but their version is crying "unrecognised file format"!

Ever fished an old file out of your archives and found you've got no software that can read it? Perhaps the company that made the software you used to create the file went out of business years ago. Perhaps they just didn't see any profit in continuing to support the old versions of their file formats. Either way you've just lost your data forever down the black hole of proprietary file formats.

Data loss, forced software upgrades (and associated expense), and vendor lock-in are not an inevitable part of computer use. For example, the OpenDocument format, an International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) standard for spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents, is supported by a wide range of software including OpenOffice.org, Google Docs, and IBM Lotus Symphony. OpenDocument is the file format of choice at organisations such as the National Archives of Australia, where the accessibility and long-term preservation of information is their paramount concern.

There are many other free and open file formats for text, graphics, audio, and other applications. To mark Document Freedom Day the next meetings of the Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club and ClubLinux Coffs Harbour will include a review of the best ways to ensure that your data remains accessible for as long as you want, not held hostage to the whims and fortunes of the company that wrote the software you use.

Mark Pilgrim shows how fact follows dystopian fiction in the case of the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. Looks like Amazon plagiarized the Kindle terms of service from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Richard Stallman's the Right to Read.

Medical practices around the world are rushing to roll out Electronic Health Record (EHR) software, in many cases without pausing to consider the freedoms and functionality they are sacrificing in the process. An opinion piece on the LinuxMedNews blog calls this "The Coming Electronic Health Record Software Disaster". The widespread use of proprietary EHR systems:

"... amounts to widely installing Electronic Health Record faucets of tremendous range of shapes, sizes and colors, each with toll booths attached to them, with the intervening plumbing as an afterthought. What the faucets actually do and how and when the plumbing in between will be installed is left as a future exercise."

An article in the journal ADVANCE for Health Information Executives concurs:

"New York City recently awarded a $19.8 million contract to a proprietary EHR vendor, which will permit the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to provide free software to physicians and clinics to be used for care of patients. While this may be a good idea from the standpoint of affordability and interoperability if the patients all go to the clinics that use this particular system, it won't be much help when those patients seek care somewhere else."

Forget Radiohead and Price's half-hearted independant distribution efforts, Toronto band the Craft Economy have been taping copies of their debut EP to telegraph poles, along with the posters advertising their upcoming shows. For those without access to a Canadian telegraph pole, you can also download the music from their website, under a licence that permits non-commercial sharing, unlike Radiohead and Prince's latest releases.

I'm listening to the EP at the moment. It's nice melodic power-pop reminiscent of Australian bands the Hummingbirds, the Falling Joys, or the Clouds.

CPA Australia has published a substantial article explaining that "as well as being cost-effective, open source software can give end users more control over their information".

Citing pioneering Australian free software adopters De Bortoli Wines, as well as Toowoomba Shire Council, HR and recruitment firm OnCall People Solutions, and free software consultancy Cybersource, they observe:

"There is a unique and fruitful symbiosis between those who develop and service open source software and those, like De Bortoli Wines, who use it. Customers share with developers and other customers in the creation, ownership and outcomes of the software they use."