Digital Citizen

A new show called “Questions Please…” has distributed episode #1 in Ogg Vorbis format under a license that allows verbatim distribution (”Verbatim copying and distribution of these entire recordings are permitted worldwide without royalty provided this notice is preserved.”). Jonathan Roberts, the host, interviews Richard Stallman, Jeremy Allison and Jeff Waugh in this episode.

There is some exploration of the value of freedom and consideration of ethics in computing, including debunking a common myth about becoming more free by being free to discard your rights. During a discussion of what free software-related wishes the three interviewees had, Stallman noted that he wouldn’t oppose a law prohibiting proprietary software but he chose to take a different path working against proprietary software. Roberts followed up by asking:

Roberts: Do you not think though, Richard, that a law against it [proprietary software] is in many ways restricting those people’s freedoms to—

Stallman: No. That’s basically making a Russell paradox out of freedom. The freedom to give up your freedom, basically, conflicts with the idea of inalienable rights. There’s some rights that are threatened and important, and in order to make sure they continue to exist, they must be inalienable. When people’s right to sell themselves into slavery was abolished, that made society more free because it closed a path by which people became slaves.

Roberts: Okay, yeah, that’s a good point.

Link: Russell paradox.

Ubuntu GNU/Linux’s Benjamin Mako Hill writes that he’s “perplexed by the recent fracas around the possibility of Ubuntu shipping non-free drivers by default as part of the feisty release goal to bring the bling“. “Feisty” is the codename for the next major release of Ubuntu GNU/Linux and “bring the bling” refers to splashy video effects like making windows shimmer when moved, or spinning the desktop image around. As of the time/date stamp on this post, the Ubuntu Wiki (linked above) says that the proprietary video driver software will be installed by default but won’t be enabled unless the user’s video hardware wouldn’t work without it. None of this discussion seems to get into the proprietary firmware (software uploaded to the computer running on some device) which will be employed as well.

So we’re presented with an opportunity to better understand what Richard Stallman is talking about when he describes the difference in reaction between a free software proponent and an open source proponent. I recommend reading the entire question-answer exchange so as to get proper context, but here’s a small quote:

So if I am offered a choice between a proprietary program which is powerful and reliable and a free program which is not, I choose the free program because that I can do in freedom. I’d rather make some practical sacrifices to reject oppression.

But suppose you want both? Suppose you want freedom and solidarity, and you want powerful reliable software? How can you get it? You can’t get that starting with the powerful, reliable, proprietary program because there is no way you can liberate that program. The only way you can get that, your ideal goal, is to start from the free program, technically inadequate as it may be, because you do have the option of improving it. That is the only path that can possibly ever get you to your ideal situation. Insist on freedom and make the program better.

Ubuntu’s choice is hardly surprising. Ubuntu’s unwillingness to abide by their own philosophy (”Every computer user should have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees”) is not new; Ubuntu’s fealty to the open source philosophy is clear (despite any language suggesting that software freedom ranks highly).

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Three times a year the US Copyright Office reviews applications for exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This time, the office has granted 6 new exemptions, the largest number they’ve granted so far. EFF has the details on the new exemptions.

One new exemption I’d like to draw your attention to:

Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

This will help the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulation project which writes software so that you can play arcade games on a modern home computer if you have a copy of the arcade game software (for instance, playing the original Pac-Man program on your home computer with perfect sounds, graphics, and with all the interaction of an arcade machine). Unfortunately, MAME is non-free software because its license prohibits commercial distribution. MAME’s copyright holders fear that if it could be legally distributed commercially MAME would threaten the extant arcade market by allowing arcade owners to set up MAME machines which could play many arcade games; a single box that could replace many arcade units. I don’t see that as a threat but an improvement to the arcade market.

Furthermore, the free software movement is in favor of commercial distribution because commercial distributors can help grant software freedom to more people and make money in the process; money that can be put right back into making and distributing more free software. Arcade game copyright holders could distribute old game code under free software licenses rather than let old arcade machines fall into disrepair and vanish from the market.

Here’s hoping MAME’s copyright holders reconsider their license and distribute MAME as free software.

Read this article on the myths Americans spread about the Canadian health care system.

One of these myths reminded me of a response I gave to Rep. Timothy V. Johnson (R-IL) a few years ago on a call-in TV talk show when I heard him spreading the lie that hospital waiting lists are so horrible they justify not having any kind of universal health care.

The waiting times for some procedures are longer in Canada than in the United States, but this problem is being actively tackled by the government in the wake of a Canada Supreme Court decision that “access to a waiting list is not access to health care.” However, the decision did not abolish the one-payer system — in fact, it reinforced it by giving the Quebec government, which was the chief object of the lawsuit, 12 months to remedy the situation.

As a result, Quebec is working hard to catch up with the rest of Canada. The average wait for a hip replacement has been reduced to four to five weeks, and knee replacements usually take six to seven weeks. This may still be too long, but if you happen to be one of the 40 million uninsured Americans, you might have to wait forever.

Sun Microsystems says they’ll release their Java runtime software under the GPL. They haven’t done this yet, so there isn’t much to celebrate now. But in 2007, Sun’s Java ME, Java SE, and Java EE should be released under the most widely used free software license.

If this happens, many thanks are due to Sun. This will be a substantive contribution to software freedom everywhere and will help many people do lots of things we can’t do so easily right now (including playing multimedia on a webpage inline, right there on the page). I’ll look forward to seeing the source code licensed to me under the GPL.

Sun held a conference to announce this and the speaker misintroduced Richard Stallman as being

[...] first and foremost, the name associated with Open Source. He has been the strongest advocate, for many years, in driving the understanding of the value of the Open Source program. And in the past, in the context of licensing and distribution plan for Java, he has had some issues and has published a paper called “The Java Trap“, and, you know, we’ve taken a long hard look at that and respect the perspective there. But with today’s announcement, I think you’ll see a bit of a change.

Some of what he said is true: the Java trap will be significantly disarmed by GPLing Sun’s Java. But another part is not true: Richard Stallman does not promote Open Source. He takes great pains to tell people this every time he talks. You won’t see it in RMS’ segment promoting Sun’s soon-to-be freed Java because that is obviously edited. All of the Sun videos linked from this article are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Why would Sun do this if they’re making so much money and wielding so much persuasive power with a non-free Java?

The folks who write Apache Jakarta (a FLOSS Java replacement) say it’s because of Jakarta’s progress in replacing Sun’s Java, functionally speaking. There are other free software Java projects bearing down on Sun too: GNU Classpath and Kaffe, to name a couple more. In short, Sun saw the free competition on the horizon delivering a significant part of what Sun distributes under a non-free license and Sun knew they had to do something to retain an audience in the long term. This was a move to remain relevant.

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Prof. Eben Moglen says that GPLv3 will prevent a user’s loss of freedom in light of the details of the Novell-Microsoft deal.

Microsoft claims that the Linux kernel infringes on many of Microsoft’s patents. Microsoft would love to be a gatekeeper telling which Linux kernel users can continue to use Linux and which can’t by covering certain Linux users. Novell isn’t making as much money as they’d like to. Novell becomes a target for Microsoft’s millions—Novell recently agreed to take $348m of Microsoft’s money in exchange for signing a patent agreement which says that Microsoft won’t sue users of Novell’s GNU/Linux distribution for alleged patent infringement. This makes it look like Novell is agreeing to Microsoft’s claims that patents are being infringed and Novell is signing this deal for the benefit of Novell’s users.

In reality, no substantive proof of infringement has come from Microsoft, and Novell’s deal with Microsoft probably made enough big Linux kernel development corporations nervous enough to want to push hard for the Linux kernel to be distributed under GPLv3, the next improved version of the GNU General Public License; the license under which the Linux kernel is distributed.

So, it’s looking more likely that Novell did do the free software community a favor, even if they did it by making a huge mistake for themselves.

Also worthy of note, Moglen’s review of the “open source” language which led to this outcome:

“What’s happened is that “Open Source” has died as a useful phrase - Free Software, the GPL, the FSF - all have become major stakeholders in the industry in Microsoft’s verbiage.”

“Once you’re a major stakeholder you don’t go back to being a minor stakeholder unless you go bankrupt - and we can never go bankrupt because we have no business to lose.

“So if we’re major stakeholder. now we stay that way until the end of the chapter, and that’s a problem for Microsoft.”

Alberto Milone is looking for a new video card. Why? Because the driver software he chose to run his current video card doesn’t work anymore.

My old ATI card is not supported any more by the ATI driver (fglrx) since version 8.28.8.

One wonders why treatment like this deserves the name “support”. If ATI really cared about their users they’d at least make the software free for hardware they no longer wish to deal with. Apple has the same problem, as any Apple Newton user or anyone trying to develop bootable CDs for so-called “old world” PowerMacs will attest to.

Milone asks for help picking a new ATI card (!) and lists the criteria he wants you to use to help him place more trust in his apparently untrustworthy master. One of those points is “it should be supported by the latest ATI driver”.

He also says what he’d rather buy—a card that runs with free software drivers? No: “I’d rather buy a card of the X series (e.g. X800) so as to be sure that the support for it won’t be dropped soon.”.

Lizzie pointed me to the Guardian’s interesting article on passport security—digital passports make it easier to pose as someone else. No need to steal someone’s passport when you can duplicate it and travel as someone else. Also interesting from a privacy angle: broadcasting passport data via RFID “up to a few meters [...] depending on the chosen radio frequency and antenna design/size” (according to Wikipedia). But even if that length isn’t often repeatable, the reliable length is certainly long enough to stand next to someone whose passport data you’d like to gather.

Consider this scenario: A postman involved with organised crime knows he has a passport to deliver to your home. He already knows your name and address from the envelope. He can get your date of birth by several means, including credit-reference agencies or from the register of births, marriages and deaths (and, let’s face it, he delivers all your birthday cards anyway).

He knows the expiry date - 10 years from yesterday, give or take a day, when the passport was mailed to you. That leaves the nine-digit passport number. NO2ID says reports from its 30,000 members up and down the country are throwing up a number of similarities in the first four digits of the passport number, so that reduces the number of permutations, potentially leaving five purely random numbers to establish.

“If the rogue postman were to take your passport home, without opening the envelope he could put it against a reader and begin a ‘brute force’ attack in which your computer tries 12 different permutations every second until it has the right access codes,” says [thebunker.net's Kent] Laurie. “A five-digit number would take 23 hours to crack at the most. Once all those numbers were established, you could communicate with the RFID chip and steal all the information. And your passport could be delivered to you, unopened and just a day late.”

Thanks to Lizzie for the tip.

Bradley Kuhn, former Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation now Chief Technology Officer for the Software Freedom Law Center has published his take on the Microsoft patent pledge—useless to free software developers because of what they must do to qualify to use it at all, worse than useless for those who feel safe because of it. All cards on the table, I had Bradley Kuhn on my show and he was an excellent guest. I was also pleased to hear him speak at the University of Illinois on April 24, 2004 (read more about this talk) and I enjoyed dinner with him and the Free Software Society afterwards. This talk is Copyright Free Software Society, Urbana, Champaign. Verbatim copying, distribution and public performance of this entire speech recording is permitted in any medium provided this notice is preserved.

In short, the pledge applies precariously to developers who work in a vacuum: those who write original software in their spare time, receive no payment for it, and do not distribute it to anyone under the GNU GPL. It’s worse than useless, as this empty promise can create a false sense of security. Don’t be confused by the illusion of a truce; developers are no safer from Microsoft patents now than they were before. Instead, Microsoft has used this patent pledge to indicate that, in their view, the only good Free Software developer is an isolated, uncompensated, unimportant Free Software developer.

Why did Novell get involved with Microsoft and stand behind this? Is Novell simply so cash-poor that deals with Microsoft look good?

Read Kuhn’s complete essay here:

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According to many on CommonDreams.org, this US mid-term election just passed was a referendum on Iraq, even if you had no genuine referenda on your ballot specifically asking about Iraq.

According to the AP/Edison exit poll, it would be more accurate to say this election was a referendum on the economy and the Iraq war weighed in at number 4 in the ranking below “Corruption” and “Terrorism”.

Sure, the money spent on the war adversely affects Americans and “Terrorism” could describe what the US is doing in Iraq, but Iraq was specifically mentioned yet didn’t rank at #1.

Also, since the Democrats didn’t offer anything for anti-war voters (who are now a majority in the US), it might be more fair to put the emphasis on the Republicans losing and the Democrats winning anything because America is a two-party country where independents and third parties only began to show up as challengers in some districts (Rich Whitney, Green party candidate for Illinois governor, had low double-digit support in early counts while the Democratic incumbent was hearing his Republican competitor concede the race to him). News reporters on TV last night said Whitney took more votes from the Republican candidate than the incumbent, which they said was odd.

When you’re trapped in a duopoly, the only other competition you’re allowed to hear from doesn’t have to offer you anything. You’ll be told to vote for them because “where else are you going to go?”. In two years it will be even more important to tell both corporate parties that you’ll leave them for independent and third party candidates.