It’s been indicated to me that I never put out a report on Software Freedom Day in Sydney. Well, better late than never

Advocates of free software celebrated at the University of New South Wales on 16 September for the fourth annual Software Freedom Day. Members of SLUG, Ubuntu-AU and the general FOSS community collaborated to spread the message of free software to the general public.

Interest and buzz was generated in the days leading-up to the event through a poster campaign across the campus. At the UNSW Computer Fair, we piqued the curiosity of many computer users with our displays, screencasts and spiels. Those who were enthusiastic migrated to our room in the nearby Law Building, where we could explain and demonstrate in greater detail. Not only did we have many expressions of interest from newcomers in free software and the free software community, we also succeeded in bringing those who already use FOSS into participation in the local community.

Regrettably, I was not able to take any decent photographs of the event. If anyone has pictures, I’d be grateful if they could be sent to me.

I would like to give a big word of thanks to everyone who helped on the day:

• Andreas Fischer
• Brendan Puckeridge
• David McQuire
• James Dumay
• Jim Tsao
• John Ferlito
• Ken Wilson
• Lindsay Holmwood
• Matt Moor
• Peter Baker
• Pia Waugh
• Rodger Dean
• Silvia Pfeiffer
• Anyone else who I may have forgotten (if I have, sorry!)

In addition, I would like to thank those who provided resources in support of our efforts:

• Computer Fairs Australia (tables at the computer fair)
• David Vaile, Abi Paramaguru and Alana Maurushat at the UNSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre (room in the Law Building)
• John Schilit (IBM and Robocode materials)
• Solutions First (Unwired modem)
• Ubuntu Screencasts Team (screencasts and subtitles)
• Canonical (Ubuntu CDs)
• The worldwide free software community

LotD: Sign the petition for a Free Society and against Digital Restrictions Management and Treacherous Computing

iTnews rehashes the old refrain of ‘Why Linux won’t succeed on the desktop‘ articles.

These sorts of articles come out all the time, and they are always written by people who have not used Linux much and therefore don’t understand how it works and how it is developed. The article is not without merit, but it does display many misunderstandings. Most telling are the omissions — the fact that the real strengths of Linux are ignored and the deficiencies of Windows overlooked. It gives undue weight to proprietary software development and totally forgets about the free alternatives that are available for Linux. And by ‘free’, I mean the proper ‘free as in freedom’ definition, not the tired-old ‘freeware’ misconception that the author makes. As for the antique ‘too many distros’ argument, people only need to use one, and some quick reading would easily narrow the choices down to a small handful, if not one. I personally find the different ‘distros’ of Windows (including WINCE and so on) to be more confusing.

Most Linux people are very well versed in Windows, so they generally know of which they speak. My experience is that many Windows people expect everything to work exactly like Windows, and they complain whenever something is even slightly different, even if it is better. For some reason, they accept crashing, viruses and poor security as a fact of life, and so aren’t attracted to Linux. In fact, it goes further than that: to most people, Windows is computing. Anything else is just heresy.

These critical articles about Linux aren’t new, but they should not be ignored. Linux has many rough edges to smooth out, but then again so does Windows. At the end of the day, it often comes down to people being set in their ways and being afraid of the unfamiliar.

I’ve seen this happen even with Microsoft products: Windows Live Messenger, Internet Explorer 7, Office 2007 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, but mysteriously not consistently in Outlook) and Windows Vista have been widely criticised for adopting odd and inconsistent interfaces. The first three lack a basic menu bar (each using its own weird alternative), and Vista doesn’t have a Start button (it’s a round circle with a Windows logo). It’s a tech support nightmare. Yet despite the resistance, people force themselves so that they eventually accept them. Some even grow to defend the changes. What possessed people to behave in this way? Is it the marketing, or even the cult of personality that Bill Gates has managed to build, as the article proclaims? We are now in a position where it is easier for an MS Office 2003 user to move to OpenOffice.org than to Office 2007. Why aren’t we seeing this happening more often?

Never underestimate the power of inertia and marketing.

The fact that Linux can prove to be such a great system despite its miniscule desktop market share and lack of resources compared to the proprietary world (which is much bigger than just Microsoft) shows the strength of the free and open source software (FOSS) model. One needs only to look at Mac OS X to see a desktop that is almost unquestionably superior to Windows in every way, thanks in part to its extensive use of FOSS.

Another thing to remember is that the desktop computing market is but a tiny fraction of the overall information and communications technology sector. Linux is quite prevalent, and even dominant, almost everywhere else [PDF]. In most of these markets, Microsoft isn’t represented at all.

By the way, the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ thing is not taken seriously by more established Linux users. The phrase is used mainly by journalists looking for attention, or by more recent Linux users. For everyone else, it’s become more of a running joke, much like Linus Torvalds’ faux ambition of ‘world domination‘.

Update:  Yet more reasons for why Linux is supposedly unsuitable for the desktop.

Update 2:  Here’s another rebuttal to these articles. 

LotD:  I failed basic chemistry 

Whilst codifying the plans for Software Freedom Day in Sydney, I decided to put together a mock press release. A little of the content is lifted from the SFD Web site. Feel free to modify it for your needs (localised to your city, etc.) and redistribute.

SYDNEY CELEBRATES SOFTWARE FREEDOM, THIS SUNDAY

For the second time running, The University of New South Wales (UNSW) has been selected to form the centrepiece of Software Freedom Day in Sydney.

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this annual celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere!

Have you ever had your computer software crash, lose data or get a virus? Imagine if after only a few years that the thesis that you worked on for ages was no longer readable, or that your precious home movies were no longer watchable. If you complain to the software company, they try to talk you into spending yet more money on an ‘upgrade’, which only turns out to be slower and buggier than the previous version. Ever bought a new music player, only to find that it refuses to play the music that worked just fine on your old player?

Unfortunately, most people are living in this world today.

Software Freedom Day exists to show the general public that there is a way out of this vicious cycle. Through the use of free software, you regain control over your computer and your data. Every person has the freedom to participate in and use free software, whether it be on a totally free operating system like Linux or on a non-free platform like Windows or Mac OS.

This Sunday, the Sydney FOSS community will demonstrate how easy it is to install and use free software to achieve a variety of tasks. Our activities shall gravitate around two venues in UNSW:

• At the computer fair in the Roundhouse (10am-3pm), we will be demonstrating FOSS technologies to vendors and visitors.
• In Law Room 203 (8am-5pm), we will be hosting a series of talks and tutorials.

We will also have people roaming around campus spreading the news. We will be happy to answer any questions that you may have pertaining to FOSS. We will have CDs and other items to hand out, to get you started. If you bring (or buy at the fair) a USB drive, we can transfer free software onto it for you.

If you’re buying hardware at the fair, we can help you to get it running with FOSS. If you’re a student, or just plain curious, we can show you how you can maximise the potential of your computer, all at no cost to you.

Unlike with non-free software, FOSS is typified by extensive community networks that are able to provide detailed support should you need help. Examples include the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG), which hosts e-mail lists, monthly meetings, and other events for people of all skill levels.

With the financial support of IT market leaders like IBM, HP, Dell, Intel and Google, as well as countless governmental bodies and companies in other industries, FOSS is growing from strength to strength at a phenomenal rate.

If you have any further questions, please see our list of resources below. Otherwise, come and see us on Sunday, and we’ll show you in person!

If you’d like to get involved as a volunteer, read our plans for the day (linked below).

 

RESOURCES

• To view our plans for the day, see http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/teams/oceania/au/Sydney
• For more information on the meaning of Software Freedom Day, see http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/about
• For more information on FOSS, see http://www.linux.org.au/linux

LotD:  I never got around to writing about the Education Expo, so I’ll point to Pia’s writeup. 

Tighten your belts and buckle your shoes, for Software Freedom Day is just around the corner! This year, the Sydney team is hosting their event one day late (on Sunday instead of Saturday), to take advantage of the computer fair at The University of New South Wales. We’ll have a couple of tables, which we shall be using to show off the wonders of FOSS to consumers, students and other vendors.

I have chronicled our plan at the Software Freedom Day wiki. If you’d like to get involved, please get in touch with me.

LotD:  Getting in Bed With the Customer (an oldie but a goodie)

Reading this KernelTrap article, I came across an interesting quote from Linus Torvalds:

"Really early on when I was making Linux, one of the things I was really doing was reading Internet news from the university computer. I was dialing up to the university, I usually got a busy signal, so I programed an auto dialer. It would dial and if it got a busy signal, it would wait a minute then redial. I wasn’t using Linux full time yet but was still using it. By mistake, I auto dialed my hard disc and basically I overwrote the operating system with the dial strings. So I had to decide if I would reinstall the OS I was using or start using Linux full time. I said OK, that’s a sign, I’ll start using Linux full time."

This rekindled memories of what prompted me to use GNU/Linux full-time, back in 1999. My 12GB hard drive decided to cark it, and at short notice I was able to borrow an 850MB unit. Being far too small to comfortably accommodate two operating systems, I was faced with a dilemma: should I stick with what I knew (and hated), or take the plunge and go all the way with the OS that I had only been toying with by that stage? I chose the latter, and have never regretted it.

What are your experiences? Was there a single incident that ‘broke the camel’s back’, or was it more of a gradual process? Let me know in the comments section.

LotD:  The definitive dual-booting guide: Linux, Vista and XP step-by-step

George Orwell’s classic allegory, Animal Farm, presents many perspectives on human behaviour and society. One of these is how people can be led and manipulated through the control of information. In the story, the Seven Commandments formed a de facto constitution for the Animalistic society. Since only a handful of animals could read, the rest were dependent upon what they were told was written. Gradually, the writing was cunningly altered to the benefit of the pigs above all other animals, and the populace was taught to not trust their recollections of what was written in the past.

What made this subversion possible was the inability of most animals to read. The two animals that could read (aside from the pigs) chose not to do anything about what they saw. Amongst other things, the right to access and read information is an important cornerstone of democracy.

This is where open file formats come in. As our lives become increasingly defined by electronic records, there needs to be a way for independent viewing and auditing. Paper is easily read, but computer files require software to decypher them. Imagine if you needed special (and expensive) glasses just to read the letter that you yourself wrote only a few years ago.

There has been a fair amount of discussion in the press regarding the OpenDocument and the so-called ‘Open’ XML formats. The primary focus of this reporting thus far has been on the political and technical facets. This is slowly changing, as the importance of long-term data preservation and freedom of information become apparent to ordinary folk.

The BBC has published a report on the problem, and discusses how the UK National Archives are attempting to deal with it. Alas, it appears that they have opted for a short-sighted approach, relying on virtualisation of older operating systems and applications, through a direct partnership with Microsoft. With this approach, the format decoders/viewers (not to mention the operating system and software performing the virtualisation itself) remain closed in source and specification, and one must deal with a cumbersome virtual machine just to view a document.

Where is the guarantee that files can be read hundreds of years from now, just as we can do today with paper documents such as the historic Magna Carta? How does this partnership benefit me, an ordinary citizen who might wish to view ten- (or even two-) year-old public documents that are only available in a proprietary electronic format?

It’s both sad and frustrating to see that history is yet again repeating itself. Whilst the contents of the Domesday Book can still be read nearly 1000 years after completion, the digital BBC Domesday Project was rendered virtually unreadable a mere 16 years later.

Thankfully, there are efforts to create an infrastructure for long-term preservation and management of digital documents. To start with, there are open formats such as OpenDocument and PDF. The Australian National Archives have long been supporters of OpenDocument, to the extent that they are standardising upon it. Putting their money where their mouths are, they are building a completely open source (GPL, no less) data managment system that anybody can use or improve to suit their needs. Michael Carden gave a great talk [Ogg video] at this year’s linux.conf.au about this technology, known as Xena [PDF]. Whilst their UK counterparts seem to have forgotten that access to data is not just a privilege for those able to make exclusive agreements with purveyors of lock-in technologies, the Australian National Archives have been striving to ensure that nobody is left out of the digital revolution.

Four legs good, two legs… better? Let’s prevent this subversion from happening.

LotD:  Mexican ‘world’s richest person’

Things have certainly been crazy as of late. Being elected onto the SLUG Committee (at the March AGM) has given me a greater appreciation of local community issues and of what it takes to co-ordinate a group. At the same time, managing the Linux Australia stand at Open CeBIT has also been a tremendous learning experience. My official report is here.

I’ve had a few requests to elaborate upon the ‘brush with death‘ mentioned in that message. Driving home after the second day of CeBIT, I experienced a car accident. While travelling at at least 60km/h, I somehow lost consciousness, and woke up phoughed into the side of another car. Fortunately, the car was parked and unoccupied. Nobody was involved aside from myself. The car was a write-off, but the passenger cabin was fully intact and I experienced no injuries. The other car was part of a company fleet, and its custodian wasn’t bothered much at all. Insurance took care of the costs on both sides.

I was quite shaken after the crash, and I very nearly didn’t go to CeBIT the next day. After being cleared by a paramedic and two doctors (one on the night of the crash and another the following morning), I decided that I wasn’t going to let this get in my way. It was probably the best decision that I made, since it forced me to get back on my feet doing something that I love, rather than sitting at home in misery. I was unable to moderate the Linux Australia panel discussion that I had helped to organise, but I was there at the stand just like on the previous two days.

Otherwise, CeBIT was a resounding success. It proved to be a fantastic springboard for us to launch the inaugural SLUG Bootcamp. More on this later.

I can’t fully explain why I blacked out in the first place. When I was younger, I would occasionally black out under certain circumstances. Neurologists at the time couldn’t identify what it was, but told me not to worry about it. I was probably just exhausted, from the exhibiting all day, the planning in the lead-up to the event, my new job, TAFE, and various other things. The doctors that I spoke with agreed with me that it was probably just a microsleep.

I’m still recovering from the after-effects of the accident. I get stressed more easily when driving, but I can feel that slowly receding with time. Most of all, I feel exceptionally lucky that I didn’t hurt myself or anyone else.

LotD:  IBM PC Real Time Clock should run in UT

Are you receiving syntax errors when running a shell script on Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)? If so, you might want to check what shell you are using. While testing scripts for the LCA A/V Team a few months ago, I discovered that the Ubuntu developers decided to symlink /bin/sh to dash, for faster and less memory-intensive script execution. For POSIX-compliant scripts, this isn’t a problem at all. However, there are many third-party scripts which call /bin/sh but use shell-specific (typically bash) syntax. They can be fixed by altering their first line to call the most appropriate shell, for example:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

env makes it possible to call bash, wherever it may lie. While my Ubuntu and Gentoo systems have a /bin/bash, there are other distributions which have /usr/bin/bash or /usr/local/bin.bash.

While you can and should fix your own scripts to operate in this way, constantly mending others’ mistakes can become tiresome. You can return your /bin/sh to point to bash with the following command:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash

When asked if you wish to install dash as /bin/sh, tell it to go to hell

Note that bash does use more memory, but on a modern desktop machine the difference is negligible. This change will not affect the default login shell, since that is already bash.

LotD:  Obese Aussies get big ambulances

I have been completely floored by Ubuntu’s new Migration Assistant. It’s certainly something that we have needed in the FLOSS world for a long time. Anything we can do to reduce migratory hurdles is by all means welcome.

To play devil’s advocate, however, I’d like to point out a deficiency of such migration tools. To take an established example, witness Mozilla Firefox on Windows. When you first start it, you are greeted with a friendly wizard to port settings and bookmarks from Internet Explorer. If, like most people, you allow it to proceed, it will replace the carefully-selected default Firefox bookmarks (not to mention the awesome BBC Headlines live bookmark) with those from IE. The result can be a cluttered, advertising-laden (Windows Marketplace, anyone?) monstrocity that has lost the simplicity and original intent of the product being loaded.

The Ubuntu Migration Assistant potentially raises this application-level misdemeanour to an OS-level atrocity. As this review of the utility demonstrates, even the Teletubbies wallpaper of Windows XP can be migrated with ease, not to mention the aforementioned bookmarks. This can ruin the intended look and feel of the OS, thus preventing the user from experiencing the OS in a clean, ‘pristine’ state.

Is this a good or a bad thing? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that the designers of this tool should be careful to select default settings which do not unnecessarily alter the user experience. Tread carefully.
 

LotD: Linux Genuine Advantage

There appears to be much confusion amongst the press and the general populace regarding the One Laptop Per Child Project, which I blogged about earlier. This article in the Murdoch press, for example, has stimulated some of these misconceptions. They stem from the false assumption that the OLPC is a computing project. "Don’t these kids deserve food, water, clothing and shelter first?", some people ask.

The fact is that the OLPC is far more than a simple computing project. It is an education project, or more broadly, a development project. The computer is merely the tool to enable education and creativity. How can one learn when a textbook costs more than an average weekly wage? Imagine if you could interact with your textbook, in the form of games and exercises. Imagine if you could learn to write your own software for this device, and distribute it to help others in your community. You can create your own artworks, write your own novel or make your own music. Wireless mesh networking allows the distribution of data between computers, and even the sharing of one Internet connection across a villiage. For many households, the keyboard lights will be the only form of artificial lighting. The possibilities are effectively limitless.

The point that I am trying to make is that it is not the computer that is important, it is what you can do with it that truly matters. The computer is an enabler, a tool that allows people to ultimately create their own livelihoods and futures. There’s no point in keeping people dependent on handouts. Let’s encourage them to stand on their own feet.

Back in the developed world, I was able to attend a panel discussion for NSW ICT for the forthcoming state election. Pia made some good analysis of the event. In summary, the representative for the Liberal Party was completely and utterly useless when the question turned to open standards and FLOSS. Moreover, both sides (Labour and Liberal) would seemingly deliberately confuse open standards and open source when questioned about them. The key when questioning such people is to not mention open standards and open source together. Force them to address the issues separately, or they will conflate the two. The City of Munich was disparagingly referred to several times as an extreme case. What disturbs me is that there was specifically strong emphasis on NSW as a procurer and consumer of ICT, rather than as a producer. So while projects like the OLPC can promote local education and industry, the NSW government wants to keep us dependent upon foreign providers.