As on Wednesday a committee in Munich decided to do the Windows Munich Migration Project (let's call that "WiMue" for short in future ;) ) I thought you might be interested in this LWN article about my talk on the migration in Munich, which I gave at the Open Source Summit in Prague.
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/737818/5b7cd538561e8a06/
This does not cover the latest news from this week. But our German team is working on that. A rough English translation of the quick comment which Florian Snow (Deputy German Coordinator) and I worked on this is:
EU wide politicians recognise the importance of Free Software for the modernisation of the state. The German land Schleswig-Holstein established the migration to Free Software in the coalation agreement and in the [Tallinn Declaration 32 EU-Ministers](https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20171109-01.html), responsible for egovernment, called to push for Free Software].
But Munich in an intransparent process Munich drifts in the opposite direction. Instead of focusing on the organisations problems -- identified by studies commissioned by the city itself -- the mayor Dieter Reiter starts this project. With this red herring he present this to his new head of IT, who will start early 2019, as a fait accompli. The WiMue project (Windows in Munich) will paralyse the city administration for years with the public servants and the citizien in Munich suffering from this.
As always the comments on LWN are also interesting. I especially like this one:
"The title lured me into reading what I thought would be a religious article or some kind of flamewar. But then I found myself reading all this common sense. Very disappointed, I want my money back! :-)"
Best Regards, Matthias
Matze,
publishing a private subscriber only URL to a _public_ mailing list is not for what LWN generate them as a favor to their subscribers.
Salam-Shalom,
Werner
Hi Werner,
# Werner Koch [2017-11-10 21:36 +0100]:
publishing a private subscriber only URL to a _public_ mailing list is not for what LWN generate them as a favor to their subscribers.
When I asked Jake, author of this piece, about an article he wrote about one of my talks, he said that sharing individual links on MLs is fine. I guess Matthias had the same information.
Best, Max
Am 10. November 2017 21:36:22 MEZ schrieb Werner Koch wk@gnupg.org:
Matze,
publishing a private subscriber only URL to a _public_ mailing list is not for what LWN generate them as a favor to their subscribers.
It's common practice on hackernews for example. LWN now shows a 'please subscribe' header if you open it without being subscribed already.
Best wishes Michael
Hi all,
Every time someone says something like that on Hacker News, Jonathan Corbet usually weighs in to say "actually, they're fine, please spread them." He sees them as marketing for LWN, which is why he puts them out there in the first place.
On 10 November 2017 at 20:36, Werner Koch wk@gnupg.org wrote:
Matze,
publishing a private subscriber only URL to a _public_ mailing list is not for what LWN generate them as a favor to their subscribers.
Salam-Shalom,
Werner
-- Die Gedanken sind frei. Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
Hello Werner,
* Werner Koch [2017-11-10 21:36 +0100]:
publishing a private subscriber only URL to a _public_ mailing list is not for what LWN generate them as a favor to their subscribers.
That is what I thought before, too. In the past I always had a reminder a week later and then distributed the normal link. When I talked with Jake Edge (LWN) about that some months ago, he encouraged me to send subscriber links to public mailing lists, news aggregators, social media, etc. He told me that helps them. When you see an article through the subscriber link, there is more advertisement to become a subscriber. It seems that until now that works quite well for them.
As I highly appreciate LWN I therefore changed my behaviour.
Best Regards, Matthias
On Friday 10. November 2017 15.53.26 Matthias Kirschner wrote:
As on Wednesday a committee in Munich decided to do the Windows Munich Migration Project (let's call that "WiMue" for short in future ;) ) I thought you might be interested in this LWN article about my talk on the migration in Munich, which I gave at the Open Source Summit in Prague.
[...]
As always the comments on LWN are also interesting. I especially like this one:
"The title lured me into reading what I thought would be a religious article or some kind of flamewar. But then I found myself reading all this common sense. Very disappointed, I want my money back! :-)"
I left a comment as well:
https://lwn.net/Articles/739339/
Rather than focus on this particular situation in Munich, it discusses how the body of available Free Software work (focusing here on calendaring and groupware) may not convincingly offer obvious solutions to organisations, and it suggests why this might be happening and what might be done to rectify such problems.
Paul
P.S. The article is now freely viewable. I have previously seen people post subscriber links to mailing lists, usually with the explicit permission of the authors and editors. Indeed, I've seen the LWN staff post subscriber links to mailing lists themselves.
Reading the comments that replied to your message there make me feel like a blind person in a shootout...
Anyways, back on the topic.
I think one way out of this would be making free/libre software that follows entirely public and well document "open" standards (as some people call it, although I don't like the "open" word), and I mean to follow it extrictly, that is: if there is something missing in the standard, make a change in the standard, not a custom part in the data file. For a criticism on "customizing the data file" see [1], and also note that as far as I know, GNOME Evolution, Kontact and KMail tend to do this customization.
For contact management, use vCard standard; for calendar and event/task organzing, use iCalendar standard.
One other way would be to follow a known file format used mainly by a free/libre software for these two matters mentioned in the paragraph above. For example, Emacs BBDB 3 for contact management; and Emacs Org mode, or Emacs Diary mode (this one is limited to current day) both of which can be used for organizing events/tasks. Currently I don't know if these have synchronization support but in case of Org mode I know one can always do some GNU Sed or Emacs Lisp trick to only extract parts of the agenda file that someone else uses).
Still on the subject of how to synchronize public Emacs Org mode agendas, there is currently an interesting discussion in [2].
The idea is to have various softwares that works with a given file format or standard, and in such way that it doesn't make the end-user tied to a particular software or particular graphic environment.
This multi-software setup we have so far can be seen in the case of Emacs Org mode documents (Emacs and Pandoc support converting from it to other formats, and any plain text editor can change the file), LaTeX (LaTeX/PDFLaTeX, LuaTeX, XeTeX, ConTeXt, TeX4Ht, HTLaTeX, and many other *compilers* support it, also any plain text editor can change the file), Ledger accounting files (many Ledger-likes support reading from it, and any plain text editor can edit the files).
In the case of LaTeX, I was made aware that some compilers *other than* LaTeX/PDFLaTeX, TeX4Ht and HTLaTeX seem to implement custom commands not supported by these just mentioned.
[1] https://alessandrorossini.org/the-sad-story-of-the-vcard-format-and-its-lack-of-interoperability/.
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2017-11/msg00213.html.
2017-11-16T18:36:30+0100 Paul Boddie wrote:
[...]
I left a comment as well:
https://lwn.net/Articles/739339/
Rather than focus on this particular situation in Munich, it discusses how the body of available Free Software work (focusing here on calendaring and groupware) may not convincingly offer obvious solutions to organisations, and it suggests why this might be happening and what might be done to rectify such problems.
Paul
P.S. The article is now freely viewable. I have previously seen people post subscriber links to mailing lists, usually with the explicit permission of the authors and editors. Indeed, I've seen the LWN staff post subscriber links to mailing lists themselves. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
On Thursday 30. November 2017 13.00.52 Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
Reading the comments that replied to your message there make me feel like a blind person in a shootout...
Well, I guess there is some additional history that isn't readily apparent from reading my remarks and others. Personally, I don't think it is too much to ask that the different Free Software solution providers consider things like interoperability between their own solutions and others, and that they also try and grow the Free Software share of the market instead of trying to be the biggest fish in an ever-shrinking small pond, but I suppose I'm in the minority and my opinion doesn't matter, anyway.
Indeed, there are fundamental issues with sustaining Free Software that people refuse to acknowledge or address. As long as those people retain the mentality that they may "dethrone" the proprietary software incumbent and show everyone else how it is done, while trying to do what the incumbent does on a vanishingly small fraction of the resources that this incumbent has, while also leaning on "the community" as a source of free stuff when the resource problem starts to bite, then we should just expect more disappointment when Free Software is discarded or not chosen. Because those fundamental issues will still be there.
It is possible that I am completely wrong and that Free Software is incredibly successful in the area being discussed, but if so then such success is happening behind closed doors, nobody ever speaks of it, and what we read about in terms of the Free Software development process is largely just for show, perhaps to attract support for specific products. And then I must wonder why "the community" should pay the topic any attention at all. I am sure my life would be easier if I didn't spend time on these things.
Anyways, back on the topic.
I think one way out of this would be making free/libre software that follows entirely public and well document "open" standards (as some people call it, although I don't like the "open" word), and I mean to follow it extrictly, that is: if there is something missing in the standard, make a change in the standard, not a custom part in the data file. For a criticism on "customizing the data file" see [1], and also note that as far as I know, GNOME Evolution, Kontact and KMail tend to do this customization.
For contact management, use vCard standard; for calendar and event/task organzing, use iCalendar standard.
These are indeed the standards we have to live with. I have less to say about whether vCard can be customised to successfully provide "social profiles" (why not use URLs just as one of the commenters asks?) than I might have about the way these files are encoded and structured (data should be represented in a consistent way with as few edge cases as possible) and the way these standards are developed (iCalendar seems to be developed within some "pay to play" organisation called CalConnect).
Personally, I don't think people take enough advantage of what these standards can already do, anyway. Participants in a scheduling activity merely need a means of exchanging calendar information, not some central server, but many people seem to have the misapprehension that a server is mandatory when it is at most helpful. It would be nice to enhance mail/calendar clients to exchange free/busy information between themselves, precisely as described by the standards, but I've never seen it done. Again, someone insists on a server to orchestrate the job. For example:
https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/calendar-free-busy.html.en
Such things matter more to the likes of you and me than to someone selling solutions to businesses, however. But then again, we should care more about these things than what "businesses demand" if we don't get to see any of their money.
Paul
You took my words and left me speechless. That is: I would say exactly the same thing. ;)
2017-11-30T16:22:19+0100 Paul Boddie wrote:
Well, I guess there is some additional history that isn't readily apparent from reading my remarks and others. Personally, I don't think it is too much to ask that the different Free Software solution providers consider things like interoperability between their own solutions and others, and that they also try and grow the Free Software share of the market instead of trying to be the biggest fish in an ever-shrinking small pond, but I suppose I'm in the minority and my opinion doesn't matter, anyway.
Indeed, there are fundamental issues with sustaining Free Software that people refuse to acknowledge or address. As long as those people retain the mentality that they may "dethrone" the proprietary software incumbent and show everyone else how it is done, while trying to do what the incumbent does on a vanishingly small fraction of the resources that this incumbent has, while also leaning on "the community" as a source of free stuff when the resource problem starts to bite, then we should just expect more disappointment when Free Software is discarded or not chosen. Because those fundamental issues will still be there.
It is possible that I am completely wrong and that Free Software is incredibly successful in the area being discussed, but if so then such success is happening behind closed doors, nobody ever speaks of it, and what we read about in terms of the Free Software development process is largely just for show, perhaps to attract support for specific products. And then I must wonder why "the community" should pay the topic any attention at all. I am sure my life would be easier if I didn't spend time on these things.
These are indeed the standards we have to live with. I have less to say about whether vCard can be customised to successfully provide "social profiles" (why not use URLs just as one of the commenters asks?) than I might have about the way these files are encoded and structured (data should be represented in a consistent way with as few edge cases as possible) and the way these standards are developed (iCalendar seems to be developed within some "pay to play" organisation called CalConnect).
Personally, I don't think people take enough advantage of what these standards can already do, anyway. Participants in a scheduling activity merely need a means of exchanging calendar information, not some central server, but many people seem to have the misapprehension that a server is mandatory when it is at most helpful. It would be nice to enhance mail/calendar clients to exchange free/busy information between themselves, precisely as described by the standards, but I've never seen it done. Again, someone insists on a server to orchestrate the job. For example:
https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/calendar-free-busy.html.en
Such things matter more to the likes of you and me than to someone selling solutions to businesses, however. But then again, we should care more about these things than what "businesses demand" if we don't get to see any of their money.
Paul _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion