Posted on February 13, 2011 by Simon Phipps
-
Don’t for a second underestimate the importance of document formats – the way your files are stored by the program you use – in locking you in to a vendor ecosystem. It sounds dull – not just mundane, the esoterica of the mundane – but it’s a crucial driver in the dominance of major vendors.
DFD has been running for a few year. It provides a day to raise the profile of document formats and demand that our governments, schools, religious bodies, employers and more all use open formats. When they do, we’re all free to engage with them using the computers and software of our choice rather than theirs.
Without document freedom phrases like “if you don’t use Microsoft Word you can’t apply” negate our choices and incrementally remove our freedoms. So celebrate Document Freedom Day 2011 this year, it’s on March 30th and you can join in easily, maybe by choosing to challenge a demand to use a particular computer program that day (“I’d love to read your document but I don’t have the program you used to make it”). [Extended version on ComputerWorldUK]
Also:
Filed under: Links | Tagged: Document Freedom Day | Comments Off on ☞ Getting Document Freedom
Posted on February 12, 2011 by Simon Phipps
-
Great explanation from Mark Wielaard of how the effectiveness of the OpenJDK community in dealing with the Double security problem was degraded by poor communication.
-
More of Dave Neary’s wisdom, this time on the key open-by-rule metric of community roadmaps.
-
Excellent analysis from Stephen O’Grady of why Java is nowhere near as dead as some other analysts would like you to believe – “rumours of my death are much exaggerated”. This was the well-received talk Stephen gave at FOSDEM.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Java’s Future
Posted on February 11, 2011 by Simon Phipps
Charles-H Schulz from The Document Foundation submitted the data for a benchmark evaluation of LibreOffice. I have read his evaluations and added scores, giving a current evaluation of +5 for LibreOffice (on a scale of -10 to +10). This would firmly identify LibreOffice as open-by-rule.
There is still some room for improvement, but that’s to be expected from a young organisation with ambitious goals. I look forward to being able to re-evaluate in a few months.
| Rule |
Data |
Evaluation |
Score |
| Open, Meritocratic Oligarchy |
Community postings and
Bylaws |
While the LibreOffice project is only 4 months old both its development track and its community governance show a fast pace of developers’ growth and an open and meritocratic oligarchy. This last point is particularly reflected in its bylaws that emphasize the notion of openness, freedom and meritocracy.
Score: +1 for open to all contributors, 0 for unproven meritocracy, +1 for structured leadership |
+2 |
| Modern Licence |
Licensing Explanation |
LibreOffice inherits from the licensing of OpenOffice.org and the copyright assignment schemes from both Oracle and Sun Microsystems. This means that the bulk of the code, that stems today from OpenOffice.org shares the same license of its older brother (LGPL v3). Yet newly developed code done inside the LibreOffice project has a triple license: (L)GPL v3 + and MPL. It is thus a situation where LibreOffice has no other choice than to deal with previous licensing choices, not to make new ones.
Score: 0 for OSI-approved licensing not under the control of the community |
0 |
| Copyright Accumulation |
Policy statement |
LibreOffice got rid of any copyright accumulation in the sense of copyright assignments to The Document Foundation and does not require a contributor agreement. |
+1 |
| Trademark policy |
Draft trademark policy |
The trademark policy is almost finished at this point. It attempts to define specific allowed uses for logos, etc. without stumbling too much in certain GNU/Linux distributions’ own policies. While this is a big plus (these distributions’ developers are often part of the LibreOffice core team) it has been noted that the Trademark policy itself is sometimes complex to understand, especially for business uses.
Score: 0 for trademark policy under community control (+1 once completed) |
0 |
| Roadmap |
Release plan |
Efforts are made to make LibreOffice releases predictable and the plan looks good. However it does not mean we know what feature would be included for each release.
Score: 0 for intent to have a schedule and roadmap, +1 once established |
0 |
| Multiple co-developers |
List of contributors |
Contrary to OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice has always wanted to be a diverse community. At this stage the main contributors are Novell and Red Hat, followed by an impressive numbers of independent developers (patches between the “independent” and the corporate are about 50/50). Expect Canonical to ramp up its contributions with its new hire(s). |
+1 |
| Forking feasible |
Developer how-to |
One can fork LibreOffice very easily. The problem is that it’s a very heavy application that has its own technologies and idiosyncrasies that most of developers would need to get really familiar with before trying to fork it. LibreOffice has already invested a lot of effort improving this situation and it will continue to be a priority, so this rule should eventually score +1. |
0 |
| Transparency |
Steering Committee |
While the Document Foundation is being set up not everything in its governance is fully enabled: for instance the Document Foundation still has to elect a full-fledged board, as the present Steering Committee is only an interim one. However significant efforts have been made to make the governance transparent. |
+1 |
|
|
Total |
+5 |
Many thanks to Charles for the submission. More submissions most welcome.
Filed under: Governance, Open Source | Tagged: LibreOffice, Open-By-Rule | 7 Comments »
Posted on February 10, 2011 by Simon Phipps
My article about how procurement policies need to address copyright ownership is now available from the Essays section.
Filed under: Copyright, Webmink | Tagged: Procurement | Comments Off on ☂ Procurement And Copyright Article Available
Posted on February 9, 2011 by Simon Phipps
I’ve two stories about the discovery and resolution of bugs in important software packages – Solaris and Java – that suggest a properly-functioning open source community gets security problems fixed faster than a closed process. Read about it on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Security | Tagged: Java, Solaris | 1 Comment »
Posted on February 9, 2011 by Simon Phipps
-
The Obama administration wants Big Media to have even more repressive control on America’s citizens. Looks like Obama doesn’t need the people that got him elected any more.
-
Seems companies abusing the DMCA to limit free speech are easily identifiable by their fear of transparency. Look at this disgusting new ploy aimed at keeping their bullying secret.
-
The OSI Board has welcomed the DoJ’s further investigation of the sale of patents by CPTN, as well as endorsed the comments made by the FSF on the matter.
-
If you’re about to set out on your own and are looking for startup ideas, you should check here to see if it’s been done before…
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Dealing With Monopolists
Posted on February 8, 2011 by Simon Phipps
-
Give this
UK-based online music site a try (assuming you can – the usual music industry geographic restriction nonsense applies). It lets you listen to whatever you want just like Spotify does, but without the ads, subscriptions and restrictions. The music is cheap too and there are regular special offers – try entering code “20X20” to get all tracks for 20p each for the next 20 hours, for example.
Note: This code gives me a music credit if you sign up directly from it, but I’d recommend the site even if it didn’t 🙂
-
Here’s a great download for your e-reader if it can handle PDFs – Lord of the Rings retold from the perspective of the oppressed orcs.
-
You’ll need to be familiar with his books (like “The Tipping Point”) but if you are chances are that you’ll like this.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Fun For A Change
Posted on February 7, 2011 by Simon Phipps
Given the interest in my earlier article about a scorecard for open source and my own rough-and-ready benchmark proposal, I’d be interested in seeing how well the benchmark works at rating a variety of open source projects. If you’re familiar enough with a project to be willing to have your name associated with rating it, please complete the table below in the same style as my own evaluation of OpenJDK. Cut & paste into an e-mail and send the completed table to me.
I will review the information you’ve provided, possibly adjust your proposed scores a little to match the scoring style used for other evaluations and then I’ll publish all valid good-faith submissions on my blog.
| Rule |
Data |
Evaluation |
Score |
| Instructions |
Provide sample extracts from public sources supporting your evaluation, together with links |
Read the Benchmark. Evaluate as objectively as possible, and conclude with a rationale for the score you are giving. Score -1 for a rule where the governance implementation detracts from open-by-rule; score 0 for implementations that have an overall neutral effect; score +1 for implementations that contribute positively to an open-by-rule community. “Open/Meritocratic/Oligarchy” scores between -3 and +3, evaluating for each word. I’ll review your submission before publication, so don’t worry too much 🙂 |
|
| Open, Meritocratic Oligarchy |
|
|
+/-3 |
| Modern license |
|
|
+/-1 |
| Copyright accumulation |
|
|
+/-1 |
| Trademark policy |
|
|
+/-1 |
| Roadmap |
|
|
+/-1 |
| Multiple co-developers |
|
|
+/-1 |
| Forking feasible |
|
|
+/-1 |
| Transparency |
|
|
+/-1 |
|
|
Summary (scale -10 to +10) |
+/-10 |
| Project name |
|
| Project URL |
|
| Your name |
Filed under: Governance | Tagged: Open-By-Rule | 2 Comments »
Posted on February 7, 2011 by Simon Phipps
My article establishing an open-by-rule benchmark for checking the governance of open source communities is now available in the Essays section.
Filed under: Governance, Webmink | Comments Off on ☂ Governance Benchmark Available
Posted on February 6, 2011 by Simon Phipps
The Free Java DevRoom at FOSDEM was packed with people all day yesterday. At the beginning, Mark Reinhold (from Sun and now Oracle, the chief Java engineer) hoped to speak briefly about the new OpenJDK governance draft but faced plenty of searching questions about it – you’ll not get to see though, as Mark and Joe were unable to gain permission from Oracle for their talks to be recorded. But that was the last it was mentioned the rest of the day until my talk at 6pm.
In the interim were plenty of interesting talks, most notably Mario Torres and David Fu talking about their IcedRobot project to get Android apps to run on OpenJDK (and thus on any desktop). The room was packed out and had a line of people down the hall at the end of the day to hear Stephen O’Grady speak, and I was his warm-up act with a talk looking at the lessons I learned liberating Java into OpenJDK (I’ve uploaded my slides), putting the governance draft into context a little. O’Grady explained – accompanied by plenty of data – how despite the rumours to the contrary and an overall decline in apparent usage around the whole web application platform tool-set, the indicators for Java as a developer language are still strong when taken in context.
In the evening, the Free Java attendees all went for a dinner sponsored by Oracle, Red Hat and Tarent – a crucial part of the annual Free Java activity and one of the main reasons it remains a strong annual community. Meeting actual people and sharing a meal with them makes it so much easier to work objectively and avoid demonising people, and Tom Marble and the organising team are to be congratulated for the work they have put in to make it all happen. FOSDEM remains the meeting point for European software freedom because of the work they and others like them contribute.
Filed under: Events, Java | Tagged: FOSDEM, OpenJDK | 4 Comments »
Wild Webmink 