Discussion September 2001

discussion@lists.fsfe.org

34 participants
43 discussions

Re: "Why we speak about Free Software" campaign
by MJ Ray 07 Sep '01

07 Sep '01

The Debian constitution <URL:http://www.uk.debian.org/devel/constitution> only mentions free software (no capitals) and not open source, as far as I can tell. -- MJR Thesis watch: 25% This is my personal web site =-> http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ http://www.alug.org.uk/ <-- This is the LUG I go to I work for this clever internet developer ==> http://www.luminas.co.uk/

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Activity Report of FSF China
by Loic Dachary 06 Sep '01

06 Sep '01

Hi, Hong Feng (hongfeng(a)gnu.org) asked me to relay the activity report of FSF China. It will soon be published on http://www.rons.net.cn/english/Links/fsf-china Enjoy, --- Activity Report of FSF-CHINA Hong Feng <hongfeng(a)gnu.org> September 01, 2001 This report presences the activities of FSF-CHINA in the period of June 23 - August 31, 2001. If you are interested in the background information of the projects mentioned hereinafter, please refer to our previous Activity Report, which was published on June 23, 2001 at http://www.rons.net.cn/english/Links/fsf-china. Works for Community =================== 1. Urge Universities to CS Curriculum Reform ----------------------------------------- We published an open letter to the deans and professors of computer science departments of Chinese universities, and urge them to make more reforms on curriculums of computer science departments. The open letter was published on http://www.rons.net.cn In the letter, we emphasized the importance of Free software for the education reform. For computing science department, we strongly suggested university to renew up the training courses on compiler theory by GCC and data structure/algorithm theory with Lisp or Scheme. One active response came from Prof. Zhao ZhiZuo <zzzhao(a)xmu.edu.cn>, he is the author of a book entitled "Introduction to Computing Science", in which he offered a proposal on the curriculum reform plan consisting of two exhibitions for computer science students. Prof. Zhao listened RMS's speech about Free software in 1999 in Nanjing, and he will try to use Free software in his teaching practice. RONSNET and RON's Datacom raised a reward of RMB10,000 to encourage students to design a Scheme implementation which is R5RS compliant. The deadline is Aug 31, 2001, though our Academy researchers have not finished the evaluation to the feedbacks from students and we don't know yet if any student could reach the goal required by the reward, we could say a lot of participants showed their strong talents, it is encouraging news that so many students have known the spirit of Free software, and they've showed the ability and determinations to support Free software movement in China, which is also the mission of MNM Project. 2. Chain Schools In the previous activity report, we mentioned that we were organizing our chain schools for training courses about Free software. and we are going to offer training courses about free software tools over TV and Internet in the new semester! In the past several months, we were negotiating with Openedu, a newly formed company in China, with the mission to become the largest ESP (Education service Provider) in China. Their web sites are http://www.openedu.com.cn, and www.open.edu.cn. It is interesting to introduce the vice president of the Openedu. Juliet Wu, she was the former managing director of Microsoft China. Two years ago, she was unsatisfied with the company's policy in China and left M$, and later undertook the managing director position of TCL (Note, it is TCL, not Tcl as the scripting language), one of the largest consumer electronics appliance manufacturers in China (their TV sets are very popular in China), which is one investor of Openedu. Another investor of Openedu is CRTVU, which is the largest open university in the world, it has built large infrastructure in the past two decades, consisting of 40 provincial branches national wide, and 1,500 training cites national wide. At this writing, it has registered students of 1.55 millions, It owns 2 TV channels in China: CETV-1 and CETV-2, I was told the signals are also available in Taiwan, North and South Korea, Hong Kong, Viet Nam and several other neighbor countries (Chinese TV scheme is PAL). We are coming close to the negotiation with Openedu to offer four series of training courses: * Hackerdom series -- to teach how to use the free software tools like GNU Emacs, GCC, GDB, etc. * Electronic Publishing -- to teach how to publish information from SGML/XML documents over the web; * System Administration -- to teach how to become a professional system administrator of enterprises; * Network Administration -- to teach how to become a professional network administration for enterprises. 3. Typesetting Workshop RONSNET has set up a typesetting workshop on Aug 18, its main task is to typeset the free software manuals for MNM Project. Also, we are coordinating with FSF, as FSF is temporarily understaffed , we could help them to typeset some FSF manuals. FSF-India will also help FSF, and we have discussed with FSF-India <radi(a)gnu.org> on how to cooperate. The typesetting workshop will also offer service for authors of free manuals for the community. The workshop also undertakes the research task of "POD over Internet" which we mentioned in our last report. When the experience accumulated, we will turn them as the templates over the web, so that authors could fill the contents into the template anywhere over the web, and the get the hard copy output from our POD center nearby. Also we are helping FSF on cover design for new FSF manuals. Victor Kurian (root.escom(a)rex.iasnet.ru) and his sister ( who is a professional oil painter lives in Rostov, Russia.) are helping us on this. When I visited Moscow in the July, we discussed how to make nice covers for GNU documentations, currently, Victor and his sister have offered several sketches for BASH Manual, when FSF adopts the design, it will printed on each of the BASH manuals. 4. Souvenirs Made in China We are also discussing with FSF to produce some souvenirs and marketing materials for the community, like badges, posters, T-shirts, mouse-pads, etc. We also could offer such services for other Free software communities. China is perhaps the best the production place for these souvenirs. Research Projects ================= RONSNET has made several research projects, the brief introduction is as following: 1. Data transmission over the power supply wires/cable. In China, nearly every building has installed the power supply system, almost every room has the wire for power supply at 220V/50Hz, I have noticed there are experiments in England and Germany, which tried to transmit Internet data over the power supply wires and cables. The sample we made uses 450KHz, and the data could be sent over the LAN back and forth successfully at a low data speed, but the distance could reach more than 20KM. For the next step, we will increase the frequence by using higher frequence resonators, our goal is to reach 200Kbps for data transmission in the building, and try to get it plug and play with the USB port of PC running GNU/Linux, then we could sell the design to a hardware company and put it into mass production. 2. Meta Kernel On July 30, I met Prof. Boris Babayan, who is the director of Russian Academy of Science Institute of Microprocessor Computer System. Prof. Babayan design a lot of microprocessors in his life, he has a lot of innovative thoughts on microprocessor designing, including the one largely inspired Transmeta's Crusoe. One of the thought matches our Meta Kernel Project, i.e. to split the hardware resources on the computer into a series of modular (Prof. Babayan already implemented it in his E2K chip), and during the compiling time, computing tasks could use the combinations of the scheduled hardware modules. Prof. babayan agreed to publish one of his paper for the first issue of our Free Software Magazine. Thanks for his support. I discussed this idea with Prof. Wu XueMou, the founder of Pansystems, and he pointed out Prof. Babayan created a way that our Meta Kernel project could learn. In Prof. Wu's term, our system is self-adaptive, which came from the root of Alan Turing's original computing model. Stack-based computer might be the best one for our Meta Kernel based system, but unfortunately, none of stack based chips is freely available. We are waiting our implementation of new Scheme implementation (which is R5RS compliant, and support 16-bit character sets, see the coming up section) 3. Implementation of Scheme with R5RS Compliant Like Lisp, there were a lot of Scheme implementations developed in the past 26 years. R5RS is a specification of Scheme programming language issued on Feb 20, 1998, it is freely available at http://www.schemers.org, currently, PLT MzScheme is recommended by the webmaster of www.schemers.org as the best Scheme implementation, and MzScheme is perhaps one of the closest implementation to R5RS. ( In many technical aspects, I agree with him, as PLT MzScheme is quite stable and powerful. The only one problem to discuss is the license of MzScheme, it is not GPL, but BSD license alike.) Guile from FSF was not so R5RS-supportive, and we want a truly R5RS compliant implementation for our Meta Kernel Project (We expected the Mata Kernel will be mostly written in Scheme, except the parts interact with hardware directly.) One of the important goals of this project is to let Scheme support 16-bit character sets directly, like Chinese. And S-expression could be expressed in any 16-bit characters, so that non-English natives could programming in their mother tongue freely. During my visit to Moscow, I discussed with Prof. Vladimir Tsurkov <tsurkov(a)ccas.ru>, and we decided to make a joint project to support this idea. 4. TEITools in Emacs Lisp/Scheme TEI (http://www.tei-c.org) has been selected as the standard documenting specification of MNM Project. We used to consider DocBook, but finally we came to regard TEI is more flexible than DocBook, as it supports DTDs not only IT based documentation, but also those for literature and others. TEITools is a tool to convert TEI documents for several outputs, it is written by Russian programmer, Boris Tabotras <boris(a)xtalk.msk.su>, it could output TEI documents to TeX/DVI, HTML, Postscript/PDF, RTF, but the program is written in Tcl, which we don't like that much, and we try to rewrite it in Emacs Lisp and/or Scheme. ( when the Emacs Lisp port gets ready, we will pack it into GNU Emacs.) RMS (rms(a)gnu.org) asked us to keep the consistence of format of free documentations, he insists on adopting Texinfo as the default format for GNU's free documentations. On the other hand, he has not refused to use SGML documents for the GNU documentation, as long as they could be converted into Texinfo format. 5. MNM Office The first component of MNM Office is under development now, it is called "ZopeBoard", which is a web based conferencing system. As Zope <http://www.zope.org> offered a nice web development framework, and now Python's license (version 2.1.1) is GPL compatible, so we could use Zope as the development platform for Zopeboard. We think all the free office suites (like GNOME's, KDE's) are quite Microsoft Office alike, but we think such importance for desktop is decreasing in the networked environment. Also all the office suites are too fat -- 80% of the contained functions you will never use in your life. Also these office suites did not put the SGML/XML in the root design. MNM Office has its goal to do so from scratch. The reason to start MNM Office from a web based conferencing system is because we intended to get Free software community better organized. There are several roles defined by ZopeBoard, including: - System administrator, - Manager, - Moderator, - User and - Guest. As our ZopeBoard set the PostgreSQL as the database engine at the backend, It keeps the track of virtual meetings, messages, users, etc. The frontend is a set of JavaScript scripts communicate with Zope, and ZopeBoard resides on the Zope server works with PostgreSQL database engine. We need to work out how to connect Zope and PostgreSQL database with DA. We've noticed a team of Italian hackers designed an amazing package of DA (database adaptor) to store and retrieve data on PostgreSQL database via Zope. In the past, there was a DA for Zope to connect PostgreSQL, but it limits only one user to access one database at a time, obviously this is a serious restriction for real applications. Psycopg allows heavily threads to access the multiple database at a time, it is under GPL and freely downloadable from http://www.initd.org. We will use Psycopg. At this writing, the latest version of Psycopg is 0.99.6b1, we are testing it for the reliability. 6. Blueprint -> Blackprint Our research staffs often retrospect various printing technologies and try to figure out how to improve them. Recently we checked the way how the engineering drawing is made, and we've got an inspiration from it for our POD over Internet project. The traditional engineering drawings (also called "blueprint") offered us a scheme to make new POD system, now the key issue is to explore how to change the color from blue to black, once this gets solved, then it could be applied to print our free software documentation and other books with a series of innovative inventions. 7. Free Chinese Fonts Under the leadership of Professor Wu XueMou, a group of new spline functions are under development to describe Chinese 400 basic blocks which we used for our free Chinese font project. According to the report I received, it uses less cubic spline functions, and it possibly runs faster than the current software for getting high quality output. 8. Publishing A lot of free books for MNM Project have been listed, including books for Exim (a GPLed MTA), GPG, etc. Also RONSNET offers services for Chinese periodicals publishers with Free software based solutions. There are more than 8,000 periodicals in China, most of them have not adopted SGML based technology, we will show them the benefits to adopt SGML technologies with Free software in the business, which also provides the Free software community a huge market to grow. Bad News: ========= We have some bad news to report here too. 1. ISO standards are proprietary. Much to our surprise, ISO standards are proprietary, they are not freely to copy, and freely re-distributable. I wrote to ISO copyright officers, RMS also joined the discussion, but no positive result received. Before ISO changes their standpoint, we should avoid to use any ISO standards in the future, as they are not free. 2. An Chinese publisher violated GNU FDL Linux Network Administrator's Guide is a free documentation under GNU FDL, but this book was published in China as a proprietary publication by a shameless publisher. We try to correct the situation, we wrote to the the authors of the book, but neither of them replied. Donations ========= 1. RONSNET supports FSF-CHINA not only with a web site at http://www.rons.net.cn, but also offered a physical location in Wuhan, the postal address is: Room 309, No. 158, YanJiang Ave., Wuhan, Hubei Province 430017, China P.R. Telephone: +86-27-82779465 2. MNM Project received its first donations of CHF1,000 from an anonymous, who is a Chinese but very supportive to our MNM Project. © 2001 Hong Feng. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this copyright notice is preserved. This document is created by GNU Emacs, and marked up according to TEI-Lite guidelines, and output to html with TEItools.

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"Why we speak about Free Software" campaign
by Christian Selig 06 Sep '01

06 Sep '01

Hello all, today, I've written a mail to fsfe-de regarding a problem with the German translation of the campaign headline (it's not yet confirmed, I currently use my work mail account). After reading MJ Ray's message through pipermail (I have not subscribed to discussion@...), I realize now that we have a problem with the campaign title in English, too. I'm not that good at English, so please correct me if I'm wrong. When we speak about someting, we refer _either_ to its meaning _or_ to the term itself. It's unclear what "speaking _about_" something refers to. I don't know whether "talking of sth." is the right wording so that it's clear that we talk about the term "Free Software", not its meaning. In German, Wolfgang translated it as "über etw. sprechen", not "von etw. sprechen", which would be the way in German to avoid that ambiguity. Comments by English native speakers highly appreciated. Bye, Christian -- "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to loose. Nothing's worth nothing but it's free." (Kris Kristofferson) Christian Selig, <sledge(a)warptec.com> http://www.warptec.com/

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Re: "Why we speak about Free Software" campaign
by MJ Ray 06 Sep '01

06 Sep '01

"Jaime E . Villate" <villate(a)fe.up.pt> writes: > Any ideas on how to convince Debian's webmasters? If it *is* enshrined in the constitution (and I haven't checked yet), you will need to start the process on debian-policy to change the constitution, I guess. Finding a group debian maintainers to do this is probably best. -- MJR This is my personal web site =-> http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ http://www.alug.org.uk/ <-- This is the LUG I go to I work for this clever internet developer ==> http://www.luminas.co.uk/

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Bruce Perens in Linux Magazine Sept 2001
by Georg C. F. Greve 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

Hi all, Bernhard Reiter and I are currently on a very short road-trip through the United States and yesterday we got ourselves a Linux Magazine (September 2001 issue) in Madison, Wisconsin. On pages 35 to 38 there is an interview with Bruce Perens that contains some interesting statements about the OSI that we'd like to share with you. [ begin - page 37 ] LM: But wouldn't you say the Open Source Initiative has shifted the dialogue away from Free Software? BP: Yeah, it did. You know, I correspond with all of the players, Eric Raymond included. Eric and I have certainly had some rough times. When we founded Open Source, my understanding was that Open Source would be a gentle introduction to Free Software and not a separate movement. I would never have participated in Open Source for the purpose of creating a schism. Especially now, it is important that we stand together. That's more important than it used to be. I harbor some disappointment that Open Source became something that sort of deprecated Richard Stallman's philosophy rather than leading people into Free Software. Richard Stallman is not the best person to make the bridge to the complete novice. It takes awhile before you can understand him. So we needed a project like Open Source to get people working on this stuff and, then, they would appreciate their freedom. But I am disappointed that Open Source has been sort of perverted into being a separate instrument. Eric is obviously very aware of that disappointment. LM: So are you glad you participated in the Open Source Initative or do you regret it? BP: It is very interesting because I ran for the GNOME Board and did not get elected, though I did reasonably well in the election for someone who hadn't done much in the world of GNOME programing. One of the things people didn't like about me was that I was instrumental in creating the Eric Raymond PR Monster. I hope Eric laughs when he hears this. So, I do actually feel bad about that to some extent because I did not understand where Erc was coming from when I co-founded the Open Source Initiative with him; his heart is in the right place. He's doing what he believes is right. It just so happens that it's not what I believe to be right. But had I understood Eric a little better, I would not have co-founded the Open Source Initiative with him. [ end - page 38 ] Okay, it is time for us to leave Clinton, Iowa now and drive through Savanna(h). We will look out for the mailman. :-) Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve <greve(a)gnu.org> Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World (http://brave-gnu-world.org)

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NDA's
by Ruben Leote Mendes 04 Sep '01

04 Sep '01

Hello, Some days ago Loïc Dachary published an article[1], titled "Free Software Experts", requesting that free software developers apply for External Experts of the European Commission. This article was published on several news sites including gildot.org which is a kind of slashdot.org in portuguese. There was a comment[2] (in portuguese) from someone who was an Expert last year that mentioned that all Experts must sign Non-Disclosure-Agreements. What follows is a message I sent to Loïc about this. In this message I give an example with Werner Koch/GnuPG because that was what GnuPKI inspired me. I hope Werner doesn't mind. :) Loïc thinks we should discuss this so I am bringing it to the mailing list. [1] http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/article2001-08-23-01.en.html [2] http://www.gildot.org/articles/01/08/26/1212223.shtml > Hello Loïc, > > The article published in gildot.org had only one comment so far. > But it was an interesting article from someone who have been an Expert before. > He mentioned that all experts must sign Non Disclose Agreements (NDA). > Consider the following scenario: > > Werner Koch applies to became an expert and he is approved. He signs the NDA. > He is assigned the task of evaluating GnuPKI proposal, which he does. > Some time later he adds some feature to GPG that is very remotely related > to some work described on GnuPKI papers. GnuPKI says Werner is violating > their intelectual property and sues him for violation of contract. > > This is just an hypothetical scenario but I think it illustrates them problem. > NDA's are never good. I won't sign one myself and I don't think any free > software developers should sign them. > > What do you think? -- Rúben Leote Mendes - ruben(a)nocturno.org

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Re: Smoothwall not free software
by MJ Ray 04 Sep '01

04 Sep '01

Alex Hudson <home(a)alexhudson.com> writes: > As far as I am aware, 0.9.9 beta is not GPL. I concur with this. I have just been in discussion with some of their developers on IRC and although they *say* it is GPL, it clearly does not comply with the requirements about offering the source in clause 3. Their defence is that it is not released, but I am unsure why this makes a difference if the project is being distributed. We must hope that the full version is released under the GPL, although recent messages posted to uk.comp.os.linux about its poor security make me wonder how useful this project is at this time.

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Re: American Linux Magazine on Free Software and Open Source
by Alessandro Rubini 03 Sep '01

03 Sep '01

> I have a copy of the magazine in the editorial they explain why they > accepted adv by Microsoft. Oops.... when I was young I used to read it all, but now I'm no more :( > In the article of Sam Ockman, I've seen an explanation to why HE > supported the term Open Source against Free software when it was > created rather then predication to the use of the term Open Source > against Free Software. Hmm... didn't consider this option. I may make sense and turn the article into a positive move, but it isn't explicit as it should be. Actually, the author is not known enough to justify an article that clarifies to the public his position back then. While I hope your interpretation is right, unfortunately it don't think that's the message people get. On the other hand, Sam Ockman also writes "Ultimately, it is the freedom of open source software that provides its most powerful advantages. If we could have designed a name that expressed a clear and accurate message of freedom, we certainly would have." -- still, I think "libre" works well and "open source" is by design on a different level. /alessandro, who should learn to be more careful in judging

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American Linux Magazine on Free Software and Open Source
by V.Dormeyer＠t-online.de 02 Sep '01

02 Sep '01

Hi, today I got an issue of the american Linux Magazine (August 2001) here in Germany. Under section "In the trenches" on page 20 is an article called "Taking the 'Free' Out of Open Source" from Sam Ockman. In this article Sam Ockman tries to motivate people to use the term "Open Source" instead of "Free Software". By describing the misunderstandings of "Free Software" he explains why people should use the term "Open Source". But he did that with no word about the misunderstandings of "Open Source" and the obvious _misuse_ of the term "Open Source"! That's not good, I think. In one paragraph he says: "Ultimately, the Free Software movement has much of the complexity of movements like Capitalism, Marxism, Zionism, and Catholicism. It's not something that can be summed up in on phrase. Nonetheless, use of the term "Open Source" helps to provide some sort of indication of its unique qualities from a functional standpoint. Open Source hat thus provided us with a neutral startung-ground from which to explain what this movement is all about." To the end he comes to the conclusion: "Open Source is a good term - now it's up to all of us to make sure that the world understands exactly what we mean by it". What do you think about that? Perhaps you have read it, too. I can't find it online, so I can't post a URL. regards, Volker -- ########################################## Volker Dormeyer # V.Dormeyer(a)t-online.de ##########################################

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Re: Raise-consciousness-howto (was Re: valinux goes propietary?)
by MJ Ray 01 Sep '01

01 Sep '01

Giovanni Biscuolo <giovanni.biscuolo(a)libero.it> writes: > Maybe the best thing we should do is to talk to as many people as > possible to try to explain our point of view (hoping we have well > understood and share Free Software philosophy, you know: "Sometimes we > can be our own worst enemies. I know I am."). > If they are willing to hear, there is a chanche for us to raise > consciousness. That is quite the point I was trying to make. Yes, we need to talk to people, but we also need to know how to persuade people. There's no point in talking to people if we're going to each individually make the same mistakes over and over again as we learn to talk about software freedoms in a language that people can comprehend, then we're probably going to fail. Remember that one piece of bad persuasion usually outweighs nine pieces of good (roughly like the saying "a happy customer will tell one person... a bad one will tell anyone who will listen"). We can't afford to each add several pieces of bad persuasion before we start adding good ones. It's painful to watch, too. > It is not possible to have an effective "Raise consciousness HOWTO". Not in the sense of an exact plan, no, but I think there needs to be something to set advocates off in a good direction rather than heading out with flame-throwers, as many are inclined to do. (Why do fundamentalists like invoking fire and brimstone so much? It always seems that way.)

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Discussion September 2001