There should be a board meeting at 1900 UTC in #spi on irc.oftc.net, according to the last meeting. There’s no announcement or agenda online at the time of writing. (If only you’d elected me…)
Hopefully, a meeting will decide on issuing a statement in support of the campaign against Software Patents and supporting FACIL taking on the Quebec proprietary software problem.
Update: The agenda appeared between the time of writing and the time of posting.
Lucy Bridges writes:
“Saturday 20th September is Software Freedom Day [1]. As many of you will know, this is a worldwide event designed to promote software freedom. I am proud to announce that Manchester Free Software (like many other groups across the country and the world) will be hosting an event to celebrate.” (original)I don’t know of any events in the Bristol or Somerset areas, but I wish the Manchester event all the best.
I concentrated on work after my return to the keyboard last week and then spent much of the weekend reroofing a shed, so today was my first day catching up with the news. Here’s what I noticed:-
The biggest competitor to our telephone service, BT, increase their connection charge to 7p per call tomorrow (16 September 2008) for many customers (thanks to MSE for the news).
However, our telephone service’s basic prices remain 4.7p per call for up to 1 hour (then 1.175p/minute) for Evening & Weekend Local and National calls and 2.94p/minute Daytime Local and National Calls, with no set-up charge.
BT’s prices for 1471, 1571, ringback, alarm calls and 3-way calling are also increasing. What are they playing at? It says these price rises are “in order to stay competitive”. Huh? Increased competition but still raising prices - it’s almost like they want to stay competitive by not having any customers who read their bills! I guess then they’ll be able to charge what they like, pretty much. 5 per call, anyone? And Phorm would get through pretty easy if they only have negligent customers…
I’ve been away from the blogging keyboard for a few more days than I expected. For some reason, my Wordpress doesn’t work in lynx so I couldn’t post from the mobile phone when I had chance. I was at:-
News reports have described the use of forced child labour for cotton harvesting in Uzbekistan, which is then used in t-shirts and so on, including those sold by some major shops in England like Asda/Wal-Mart, as I mentioned on the debian-project email list last autumn. When you buy badly-produced T-shirts to support free software projects, you may be helping provide freedom for more software users in your country, but you may also be helping to enslave vulnerable workers in other countries.
If you buy Debian T-shirts from the UK, you’re probably OK. This is something that the Debian UK Society seems to do right. Their buyer (and current Debian Project Leader) Steve McIntyre wrote:
“[Fruit of the Loom premium Ts, Kustom Kit Augusta/405 polo shirts ...] both FotL and KK have ethics statements that describe their standards. The KK one is linked off the front page of their website; the FotL details I have in .doc format that I’ll pass on if people would like to see them.” (original)I also asked my local perl mongers group to do similar but there’s been no response to that yet (or any t-shirts AFAIK). I’ve been told that all of the FSF Europe gear is Fair Trade but it doesn’t say that on their web shop. How about other free software projects? Have you asked about your T-shirts? Is there a central site for this sort of information?
I’ve been seeing a bit about Canada recently, what with plastic-bottled water (more on that next month), the airline I used for my last trip (Zoom) going bust and stranding passengers and being a fan of Co-op Radio’s documentaries, so I was particularly interested to see this news:
“FACIL, a non-profit association, which promotes the collective appropriation of Free Software, contests the Quebec government purchasing methods for software [...]” (first seen at Lawsuit, etc - Diary of a CrazyFrench)In England, discrimination against free software has been less obvious, with the whole national, county and district government system being officially open to free software (or rather, open source that meets gov.uk’s own definition of the term), but very biased towards large service providers. Like most countries, England doesn’t seem to have large pure-free-software service providers yet, so this usually means that the best we can do is get some mix of free and non-free software. This only gets beyond token gestures towards free software when lots of the project development and leadership is internal, as in nearby Bristol City Council, or the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. I’m surprised that Quebec has been overt enough to make a lawsuit possible and I’m very encouraged that FACIL is the group to do this. I’ll suggest to SPI and a few other groups that they should join to show support, but I don’t know whether the “political interventions” policy of FACIL will cause problems for non-profits.
I hate the Plesk server control panel webapp but our webmaster cooperative still maintains one (but only one) server that uses it. That non-free software means that it’s under our “limited support agreement” which essentially says “you understand that the lack of copyright permissions means this system may break in ways we’re legally forbidden to fix and you have to go beg the copyright holder for help”.
Recently, a site broke because it wanted to use a PEAR module and Plesk’s PHP configuration includes an open_basedir which forbids access to /usr/share/pear - that’s stupid. If someone has enough permission to install dangerous stuff into that folder, they definitely have enough permission to edit the PHP configuration.
The httpd.include file which contains that PHP configuration has a comment at the top that helpfully tells you to create a vhost.conf file alongside it, instead of editing the httpd.include which gets regenerated by Plesk (wiping out any changes at some near-random time in the future). It doesn’t mention that you need to run /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=your.domain after creating it, else no amount of reloading the Apache httpd configuration will make it use the new file. I found the idea from this Re:morse.nl blog post and then read the –help output to pick the best options for me. It’s not obvious on SWSoft’s Plesk help, which is also stupid.
Finally, you can’t edit the httpd.include template (to mention the websrvmng command to future sysadmins, or to change the open_basedir across all sites) because it is a string inside websrvmng and not a template file - very very stupid.
I didn’t find the source code for websrvmng and I doubt we have permission to modify it, so I guess this is another thing we can’t fix in a reasonable way, like the limited support agreement says. I could recompile PHP to ignore those open_basedir settings or add /usr/share/pear to it, but that’s one hell of a work-around. It seems like having non-free software (like Plesk) rewrite the configuration files of free software (like PHP) is a good way to cripple the free software.
One day I want us to be like Bristol Wireless and have a policy of refusing to deal with such non-free-software systems, but that’s a decision I’ve never won in any organisation I’ve joined yet.
Three replies to things I saw today on Planet Debian on blogs of people that don’t have fully-working web comment systems:-
Among other things, my webmaster cooperative is an agent for the Phone Co-op. Particularly with Free Software, cost-efficient ways of downloading data is a good companion service to have and the Phone Co-op has given a good ADSL and calls service to my own home and office for a few years now. When there are problems, they’ve worked pretty well to fix them. Just last week, I had a phone call to tell me when routing problems in LINX were fixed… which was a great help. I don’t remember an ISP doing that for me for years. I think the last one was my university’s dial-up service, 10 or more years ago.
Another unusual thing for a UK ISP is the excellent public position on the Phorm ad-snooper that I mentioned previously: We strongly oppose these practices, especially the loss of privacy [...] Phorm is not operating on our users’ lines and we have required and received assurances from our suppliers that this will remain the case.Our Chief Executive Vivian Woodell gave an interview to the FT (accept the first two cookies, then block the rest, else you only get two paragraphs) which has a pretty good explanation of how the business side of the cooperative works. We’re recruiting for Line Rental (PSTN and ISDN) until the end of the year, including special offers like residential Unlimited Anytime Calls for 7.95 a month (normally 9.99) at the moment, as well as the great climate-neutral and ethical policies - if your landline contract renewal comes up, give it a look. The Phone Co-op was ten years old in June, but there are still big challenges: I’d love to see a cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service and the mobile contract offers still look a bit expensive to me (no bundled data on phones, 25 per month for a 3G data card). I’d also love to see support for some daring innovative solutions like customers owning their own tails (tails are the last link to their house, where most of the UK has a choice of one provider: BT), using that as a way to upgrade small towns and villages to fibre-optic, or offer resident-owned wifi. Update: As if by magic, Ofcom has started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Go comment.
As you may know, our webmaster cooperative is classed as a Social Enterprise by gov.uk because it has social primary aims and isn’t run for shareholder benefit - we have neither shareholders nor employees, which screws up lots of surveys. Although its workers make a little money from it, I think it’s better than many Social Enterprises because it’s in common ownership rather than private ownership (which means, as I understand it, if we kill the company for whatever reason, its copyrights and so on would go to other common-ownership organisations, else fall into the public domain - the ultimate free software guarantee).
Social Enterprise seems very popular at the moment. We keep getting asked our opinion by both government (public sector) and other social enterprises. I think this is because most public sector bodies seem to struggle to get enough input from the third sector and most third sector bodies want to make sure they’re not squashing other bits of the third sector.
Next Thursday, I’m going to a “consultation to identify priorities for support for the South West’s social enterprises” but I’m really not sure what to say. I’m going to ask my cooperatives for suggestions, but I’d welcome suggestions from anyone else interested in social enterprise too. Any ideas?
Two interesting nearly-free-software articles about Free Software for Libraries:-
I was just looking to buy some online classes. I haven’t bought one yet and here’s three ideas I think online course sellers should follow to get more customers:-
Some interesting events that I’ve heard about recently, with a bit of a focus on software, cooperatives and the South-West:-
I’d been having problems connecting my laptop to my router to the Phone Coop using a new network cable that I laid under the floor just after the new heating system was installed. It’s a 1970s building - cat-5 wasn’t installed with the original wiring and mains homeplug networking is tricky on this wiring layout. The growing number of people with WiFi and video senders on my hillside (70% of UK users “never or rarely switch off their broadband wireless routers”) seems to be causing more interference and slow-downs, so it seemed worth installing a wired connection while the floors were up.
The connection seemed to work fine, but then kept stopping for 20 seconds at a time - that’s just long enough to break network connections, but barely long enough to start up debugging tools, let alone get useful output.
I was pretty sure the cable wasn’t at fault - Paul tested it with his fancy test gear when he completed the wiring for me. That left the hardware: my much-hated Belkin F5D7630 and the Realtek 8139 in the bizarre Compaq Evo N1015v. I’ve still not got around to replacing that Belkin and it’s been behaving itself well enough recently, while the Compaq has run smoothly once I actually got Linux onto it.
I found the end of this Ubuntu Forums thread which pointed to this archlinux bulletin board thread which suggested pnpbios=off pnpacpi=off in the boot options. After adding that, the 20-second network pauses have stopped. But why? The ACPI and BIOS in this laptop are generally troublesome (and it looks like this also happens on some Presarios), but what in particular is going wrong this time? Will I suffer ill effects from switching off PNP options? Time will tell, I guess.
Apparently the LUG’s website is still off-line and there’s no idea when it will return, so let me use this site to help announce that the LUG’s regular meeting at the Knights Templar public house, near Isambard Walk, Bristol, will happen tomorrow Saturday 23 August from noon-ish until whenever people drift away.
Software Freedom Day happens between this meeting and the next one. Is anyone interested in running a Bristol-area event and do you know of a suitable/available venue? I’m finding the SFD official site somewhat dysfunctional (I’m not in the Northern Caucasus, damnit), so I’ve not found a nearby team registered yet…
I’ve ordered some USB charging leads for various portable devices, mainly because I’ve already got mains-USB and car-USB power adapters (they came with a bluetooth headset that charges from USB) and I agree with things like this:
“management of an individual charger for each device is becoming a pain in the backside. Since the USB power form specification is a standard, ANY charger with sufficient load capability should be able to charge ANY device.” (from USB As A Power Source)but I’ve also heard that charging from USB is greener - or more precisely that because your computer’s power supply is running anyway, it uses less electricity to plug battery chargers onto the Universal Serial Bus than to plug in “wall-wart” DC adapters. But is this claim true? Claims from USB recharging product sellers concentrate on the obvious “less waste compared to disposable batteries” strength, although some smarter chargers cut power to charged devices - it’s not clear whether the mass-market USB battery chargers do this, but the reasons and the electronics don’t look that complicated. China (not famous for environmental protection yet) now requires USB-charging of mobile phones while a mobile phone industry body has recommended the same approach in general. However, there are concerns about whether Power over Ethernet is making networks less green, which might be true for USB if devices demand more high-power sockets and device makers don’t include intelligent control electronics (which people generally don’t want to pay for). Is USB charging greener than mains charging? I’m not sure and I haven’t found any great answers - can you? I guess in the worst case, I can try some tests with a power meter later…
According to a recent article, 6 Common Website Mistakes That Cost Money are:
.htaccess file containing something like:-
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST !^www\.yourdomain\.co\.uk$ [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]That even works on BT Business web hosting, by the way. If it doesn’t work, try asking your web hosting provider to enable mod_rewrite for you or ask them to suggest how to achieve the same result.
I had a small chuckle at the delay to Debian Project news because the listserver filter treated it as if an event was on Free Ando Penis Land. Parties in Scunthorpe and Penistone may have a similar problem.
At least it got through eventually. If only Yahoo was as responsive as debian listmasters…
Incidentally, while trying a web search for “the Scunthorpe Problem”, I got an intermediate screen warning me that the results may contain “adult content” but none of the results looked like they were more than 18 years old.
I’ve been installing free software for library cataloguing onto Apples recently. It’s not been great (GNU/Linux is still easier and faster, in my opinion) but it has worked much better than older Macs.
As well as making servers that are finally getting easier, Apple lead the way in locked-down portable players, with their iPod and iPhone devices and iTunes service. Quite rightly, free software users campaign against Apple’s use of DRM/TPM (Technical Protection Measures). One of the rallying points has been Defective by Design (DbD), an FSF initiative since 2006. Long-time readers may remember that I took part in a DbD protest at an Apple Store in September 2006:-
“I noticed the huge till queue, which was attractive for three reasons: it had no security (I guess shoplifters rarely queue for the till), most of them are standing around waiting for something to read and they are almost certainly Apple customers, so who better to inform? After I rejoined the back of the queue a few times, a security man was watching it, so I moved off and chatted to people waiting to do hands-on tests on the upper floor for a bit [...] then I moved back to leaflet the till queue again. [...] Then, I got a bit bored and started putting the leaflets into Apple’s product leaflet dispensers (in front of Apple’s - no leaflets were removed), which soon got me rumbled.”To me, that was fine: I dislike that type of store, which tries to look like public space, but is actually privatised and controlled. My resource use was minimal (one security man escorting me out and some Saturday kid probably “cleaned” the leaflet racks) but I passed information to many Apple customers, who are one of only two groups Apple must keep happy, ultimately. Popey is a bit upset by the latest protest idea, which he describes as:-
“urging people to book slots at the Apple in-store “Genius Bar” to ask probing questions which they already know the answer to about their company policy on DRM and Free software. The ‘Genius Bar’ is an official Apple support avenue for their customers, and is a service provided inside many of their stores.”It’s also been criticised by neuro and Pete along similar lines. I agree. It’s wasting both side’s resources. Apple don’t really need to keep their staff happy (they can hire new staff) and it offends Apple customers and shareholders. It’s not even efficient: each unit of Apple employee time wasted costs a unit of DbyD worker time and who’s got the most resources there? What are FSF thinking? It’s stupid, even without the bad press it’s had. So, this brings me in a roundabout way to answering
“I am aware of the Linux Foundation and the FSF and others, but how does SPI differentiate itself and its goals from those organizations?”from why people don’t join SPI. In my opinion, a key difference of Software in the Public Interest is that it is managed by free software developers in a more-or-less democratic fashion. Even though I’ve failed in two elections, I still think it’s better than the alternatives. No project as unpopular as wasting Apple Store helpdesk time would ever get backed by SPI, would it?
Next.