FSFE-IE July 2007

fsfe-ie@lists.fsfe.org

7 participants
8 discussions

ISO/IEC DIS 29500: OOXML
by Glenn Strong 05 Sep '07

05 Sep '07

Hi Folks, Just a quick request. As with the previous round, I am coordinating the IFSO contribution to the NSAI on this issue. I'd appreciate it if anyone who may also be working on a submission could get in touch with me. Similarly, anyone who wants to help out. Thanks, -- Glenn Strong

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Software patents to be studied again at EPO
by Ben North 23 Jul '07

23 Jul '07

This is the article I was trying to remember: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/04/epo_pres_patent/ which as you can see was published on 20070704. The article talks about a meeting which was happening the next day, so we couldn't have done anything even if I had been more timely in forwarding the article to the list. The new President, Alison Brimelow, has an interview up at http://www.epo.org/about-us/press/backgrounders/interview.html (linked to from Register article). She says in that interview that she rejects the "more patents == good" argument, and talks about "the theme of quality and fitness-for-purpose of the patent system" as one of the challenges she faces. Quite encouraging. Given that we have missed that swpat meeting, should we (or FSFE) try to find out what happened, and find out how we can participate in the future?

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IFSO Meeting: Wednesday 18th July, 20h00, Mahaffey's Pub
by Malcolm Tyrrell 16 Jul '07

16 Jul '07

The monthly IFSO meeting will happen on Wednesday in Mahaffey's Pub at 20h00: http://www.ifso.ie/images/mahaffeys.png Good luck, Malcolm.

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Dodgy InformationWeek article about GPLv3
by Ciaran O'Riordan 16 Jul '07

16 Jul '07

InformationWeek recently wrote a dodgy article about GPLv3, and it was featured on Slashdot. I guess after the GPLv3 release, journalists were on the edge of their seats waiting for a controversial quote from Linus. InformationWeek finally couldn't wait any longer, so they made some up. Well, like the best lies, their quotes are based on a grain of truth. Torvalds did say those words, he just wasn't talking about FSF at the time, and the time was a month ago, not after GPLv3 was released as the article implied. I put this in a blog entry: http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/misleading_i… Which people seem to have liked. It even made front page of digg: http://digg.com/linux_unix/InformationWeek_fabricates_GPLv3_scoop_here_is_h… -- Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3 http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \ GPLv3 and other work supported by http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \ Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org

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Fwd: New Core Body Of Knowledge for the ICT Profession
by Janet Hawtin 14 Jul '07

14 Jul '07

The proposal below is from a group which has criteria for inclusion. This document is being proposed to government as a criteria for reducing professional indemnity insurance for the IT sector. ie There will be a relationship between the government getting cheaper insurance and hiring people who match this kind of profile. The group has projects which talk about ethics and being in the public interest, They also have specific criteria for inclusion as a member and their subjects they recognise tend to be more business computing than computing science. MS product features strongly. FOSS stuff less so. It has been said by one of their people that this is because the members do not have an interest in the foss subjects, or that the foss things might be considered if they were of interest to members, but this is sort of a closed loop, ie if youre in youre probably in because you match the standard degree with msce kinds of training which they match against. The group disagrees with my concerns. I feel they are scoping peoples' right to participate in the IT sector by excluding people from their criteria because their criteria suit the interests of members and also because the process of choosing people by matching a standard process is a better match for broadcast software liks ms. Following a standard path is something to do if youre working with a supplied tool set. If youre a member of a community which participates in constructing the tool set the sources of reference and strategies for developing solutions will be more diverse, informal learning from niche specialists in our communities is a good fit for this kind of skill development. It is a bad fit for distributed communities. FOSS groups often have diverse experience and the act of participation in an open community of development is the means of improving people. There are other groups in AU following the same line of thinking. Defining a scope for who is trusted in IT around a normal route to skills. In my opinion at least in this form this is basically MS marketing in a fancy frock. I think membership is a poor alternative for transparent and reviewed practices possible with open code. Because these groups are interested in describing people who do not fit their model as untrusted I am thinking about ethics and free software and how we reflect the kinds of ethics we do have. Personally it is my experience that foss people are the most authentic and direct people i have met. There is nowhere to hide in foss. Would be interested in other people's ideas about this kind of document and whether groups where you are are doing the same kinds of things. What kinds of approaches can foss communities use to provide a constructive alternative conversation which does not exclude people but which focuses on recognising the strengths of open collaboration and peer review. Probably the scoping will provide only one flavour of person and folks will soon need to look beyond that source? tbh It just feels very old fashioned. Janet ---------- Forwarded message ---------- The Australian Computer Society have released a Discussion Paper "Redefining And Building The ICT Profession: Core Body Of Knowledge Review" (21 June, 2007 Version 2.0). In January the ACS combined its Accreditation, Assessment and Appeals Board and Membership Standards Board into a new Professional Standards (PS) Board. The new Board is reviewing the ACS Core Body of Knowledge (CBOK) by June 2008. The Board has invited comment on the Discussion Paper (details in the paper): <http://www.acs.org.au/attachments/acs_CBOK_Position_Paper.pdf>. Contents: List of Acronyms 1. Introduction 2. Core Body of Knowledge revision process 3. Defining the ICT/Computing Profession 4. Rationale for the ACS Core Body of Knowledge 5. Current Core Body of Knowledge 6. Some initial common ground 7. Moving forward 8. Remaining issues 9. References Appendix A Professional Standards Board Membership Appendix B ACS Qualifications Framework for ICT Professionals

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MS, digital preservation and Irish National Archives
by Teresa 13 Jul '07

13 Jul '07

There was a piece on the mid-morning Derek Davis show on RTE1 on Wednesday, 11 July about digital preservation. OOXML was not mentioned but this was clearly the backdrop to the discussion because the lead-in to the story was the British Library/UK National Archives (TNA) "digital dark age" story from last week. You can listen here, it starts at 1 hr 27 mins http://rte.ie/radio1/todaywithderekdavis/ Teresa ----- Two people from the Irish National Archives were interviewed along with Nick McGrath, Microsoft Director of Platform Development. The two archivists welcomed the MS/TNA initiative and said it was encouraging that one software developer was attempting to meet the challanges in cooperation with public archives. They were resassured by the MS arrangement with TNA. One archivist pointed out that MS was not the only software used in the Irish public service. Nick McGrath explained that MS were offering TNA two different approaches to fixing the digital dark age problem. 1. They were enabling translation of documents from the older versions to bring them up to latest file formats. TNA have a comprehensive search and retrieval system that achieves this very purpose. 2. When people look at the documents, they may want to look at them in the format and application which they were originally created in. MS has been providing applications like Word, Excel, etc. for 20+ years. They decided to go back into their archives within MS and to collect old versions e.g. win3.1, office 4.2, and to create a "virtual pc" environment for every single older version. Now TNA have 2 different ways of retaining the information. They can either convert it to the latest versions of MS products which now comform to open standards, or they can allow the person to view in the original application, old versions of MS products. The presenter asked about the point made by the archivist, that many other computer systems are used beyond MS and does the system accomodate the work of other producers. McGrath responded that 15 years ago the market place was very fragmented. This meant that MS had to have incredibly good interoperability or translators to the other packages that were available e.g. Lotus 123, WordPerfect or WordStar. Now TNA have got old verions of MS Word which correspondingly allow them to open up those other older legacy products as well. So it doesn't just protect them on the MS format themselves, but it also protects them for the competitor formats that were in the marketplace 10-15 years ago. The presenter asked that if you use this system, are you no longer under control of MS, that you no longer have to get at the stuff through MS if you get the system. McGrath said yes. MS has listened to archivists around the world, and has engaged with the PLANETS consortium of European national archives [http://www.planets-project.eu/]. In response to their feedback and that of public sector organsations and customers, MS has now opened up their file formats in the latest version of Office 2007. This means that any document that is created in those formats is created in open standard i.e. it is fully documented. Archivists in 100 or 1000 years have all the documentation that will explain exactly how to open up that file and how to preserve that data.

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FSFE Newsletter
by Free Software Foundation Europe 12 Jul '07

12 Jul '07

1. FSFE's General Assembly and the first Benelux fellowship meeting 2. GPLv3 and LGPLv3 have been released 3. Free Software personal consultancy for businesses 4. Six questions to national standardisation bodies 5. Georg Greve in India 6. FTF useful tips translated to Asian languages 7. Free Software in Austrian Schools 8. Get your friends to support the Fellowship and FSFE 1. FSFE's General Assembly and the first Benelux fellowship meeting The first Benelux meeting of the Fellowship took place on Thursday the 28th of June in Brussels and provided an excellent opportunity for the local fellows to get to know each other. Two days later the General Assembly of FSFE met at FSFE's Brussels office for a productive discussion about the foundation's past work and future direction. Georg Greve was re-elected as president and Jonas Oberg as vice-president of FSFE, with Reinhard Muller elected as the Head of Office. The executive summary for the last two years of FSFE's work can be found on-line here http://fsfeurope.org/documents/reports/es-2007 2. GPLv3 and LGPLv3 have been released The final text of both the GNU GPL version 3 and the GNU LGPL version 3 licences were released on the 29th of June 2007. The GPLv3 is the result of eighteen months of drafting, a process which included four published drafts and thousands of comments from interested parties. http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html 3. Free Software personal consultancy for businesses FSFE has always helped the community through providing pro bono advice, and through this we have discovered that businesses often require additional personal assistance. For this reason, FSFE is offering businesses a chance to get individual consultancy regarding Free Software issues at its Zurich, Switzerland office. Shane Coughlan, FTF coordinator, will be available for reserved sessions starting from July 13th. The sessions cost 150 Euro per hour, with a special discounted rate of 100 Euro for companies that have fellowship members among their employees. The FTF can also organise and hold in-house training sessions and workshop on Free Software licensing. By making use of this service, companies will also help to sustain FSFE's continuing community work. http://fsfeurope.org/ftf 4. Six questions to national standardisation bodies Microsoft very actively seeking ISO approval as an Open Standard for their proprietary MS-OOXML format. Should ISO approve this format as a standard, Free Software may find itself locked out of the office application and collaboration market and the barriers to Free Software adoption will increase. FSFE president Georg Greve spoke about the necessity and value of interoperability at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in Calcutta. In order to help people understand the issue, FSFE also published six questions that every national standardisation body should have good answers to if it wants to approve Microsoft's application. Read more and help us spread the word at http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions 5. Georg Greve in India In cooperation with FSFE's sister organisation, the Free Software Foundation India (FSF India), FSFE president Georg Greve visited the Indian subcontinend and gave speeches in Mumbai, Calcutta and Trivandrum at institutions like the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) or the Technopark in Trivandrum, the first of its kind in India. You can read more about the trip and some truly exciting things about Free Software accessibility for the visually impaired at http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/last_night_in_india http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/back_from_india 6. FTF useful tips translated to Asian languages FSFE's Freedom Task Force is proud to announce that the useful tips for users and vendors of GNU GPL version 2 software are now available in Korean and Traditional Chinese. These documents are intended to help users and vendors think about licence compliance and to guide people to authoritative sources of information on the Internet. By making these documents available in more languages the FTF aims to continue building productive infrastructure for Free Software in Europe and beyond. Useful tips for users: http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ftf/useful-tips-for-users_ko.pdf http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ftf/useful-tips-for-users_zh_tw.pdf Useful tips for vendors: http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ftf/useful-tips-for-vendors_ko.pdf http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ftf/useful-tips-for-vendors_zh_tw.pdf 7. Free Software in Austrian Schools During the monthly meetings of the Fellowship in Austria, a constant topic was the importance of Free Software in education to give the next generation the freedom to become an active part of society. Some committed Fellows carried this message into schools and as a result of the initiative of two teachers, the "BG Rechte Kremszeile" in Krems decided to switch the whole school to exclusively Free Software with the start of the next school year. The Free Software Foundation Europe congratulates the school on their decision and encourages others to follow the example. Our thanks go to the Fellows involved in this initiative. 8. Get your friends to support the Fellowship and FSFE FSFE's Fellowship is a community of people united by their interest in Free Software and freedom in all aspects of the digital age and FSFE is dedicated to supporting all aspects of Free Software in Europe. Please tell your friends and collegues about the Fellowship and FSFE. Their help and support would be invaluable in helping us to accomplish our goals across Europe. Join the fellowship https://fsfe.org/en/fsfeuser/register Donate to FSFE http://fsfeurope.org/help/donate-2002.en.html Volunteer time and energy http://fsfeurope.org/help/help.en.html You can find a list of all FSFE newsletters on http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html

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MS file formats and archives (FSFE article on BBC)
by Ciaran O'Riordan 11 Jul '07

11 Jul '07

Here's a piece written by Georg and JJ in FSFE about Microsoft trying to get archives to use their formats: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6291124.stm Nice to see the mainstream press covering it. -- Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3 http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \ GPLv3 and other work supported by http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \ Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org

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FSFE-IE July 2007