FACIL: actively promoting Open Source in Québec

I found a not-for-profit organization actively promoting free software in Québec: FACIL. They filed a motion against the government for not considering open source software for their workstation. They state that the migration to open source software would produce significant saving for the government and will also help Québec IT sectors to develop. Currently the government is sending millions to multinational corporation (mainly Microsoft) for products license. Those contracts are attributed without any invitation to tender, which is not in accordance to the regulation. FACIL intend to force the government into a more open and transparent procedure for contract attribution.

This is a really interesting case of F/OSS community actively contesting closed source monopoly. I did join up as a member, it cost 20$ and it helps to finance the lawsuit against the government.

You can read all about it here:

Montreal, August 28th 2008 - FACIL, a non-profit association, which promotes the collective appropriation of Free Software, contests the Quebec government purchasing methods for software used within public administrations. FACIL has filed a motion before the Quebec Superior Court in order to bring an end to these methods which the association believes not to be in the best interest of the Quebec government, but more importantly, not in accordance with the regulation for supply contracts, construction contracts and service contracts of government departments and public bodies (R.Q. c. A-6.01, r.0.03).

In Quebec, access to public markets is the rule while contracts attribution without invitation to tender is the exception. A public market should be transparent, fair and most importantly, open to all. The solutions as well as the propositions must be evaluated objectively on known and accepted criteria. Furthermore, the regulation implies that public markets have to enhance the local economic development as well as the Quebec technologies.

From February to June 2008, FACIL has noticed sales of proprietary software for more than 25 million dollars. These purchases were made for products offered by large multinational enterprises, with no regard to suppliers in Quebec. These purchases hurt the Free Software suppliers throughout Quebec and are an obstacle to the development of Quebec IT enterprises. FACIL contests these methods as the association believes they are illegal and unacceptable.

A strategic Free Software utilization in public administration could create thousands of jobs as well as a significant decrease in software licensing costs. However, Quebec's public administration refuses to even consider and evaluate these options.

While most of the developed countries have started, a few years back, migrating their technological infrastructures to Free Software, Quebec's public administration is far behind. In France, hundreds of thousands of desktops used by civil servants have been migrated. In the Netherlands, the public administration, one of the most modern in the world, has made open formats mandatory within the public administration, as well as a set of mesures to consider Free Software alongside proprietary software, and where possible to prefer Free Software.

But here in Quebec, despite numerous initiatives, the public administration refuses to communicate and to cooperate. FACIL has decided to bring the matter to court in order for the public market law to be respected.

More of Zotero

I've talked about Zotero before, but I can't stress enough on how this is really a good open source alternative to Endnote, you all should be considering it. Here are 10 reasons why you should switch:

1) Easy-To-Use Means Easy-To-Support
Users overwhelmingly report that Zotero is easy to use and intuitive. After watching a five-minute introductory video on Zotero, many users have more than enough knowledge to accomplish basic research tasks.

2) Save Money With Free Open Source Software
Say goodbye to expensive escalating licensing fees. Adopt Zotero and pay nothing. Not only can you use Zotero for free, but all the documentation at Zotero.org is yours to reuse and repurpose. The support community at Zotero.org provides an experienced responsive community to support the software and assist you in your efforts.

3) Hundreds of Institutions Recommend Zotero to Their Faculty and Students
Zotero is already recommended by more than a hundred institutions from around the world, including MIT, Stanford, and Yale. Zotero’s track record of success at these leading institutions underscores its ease of use and elegance as a research management tool.

4) A Single Research Management Solution For Every User, Everywhere
Whether your users run Windows, MacOS or Linux, Zotero is available to them. By syncing their data with the Zotero server, users can move between computers at home and at school with ease, even if the operating systems are different. Users don’t even need their own computers, because they can run Zotero off a small flash drive, which they can purchase for only a few dollars. With Zotero’s web interface, users can browse their collections online, even with mobile devices. Simply put, Zotero is wherever your users are.

5) Did We Mention It’s Award Winning?
Zotero was selected as the best reference management tool at CiteFest 2008 by Northwestern University’s Library and Academic Technologies group. That’s right, better than other, more costly, software alternatives. Zotero is among the “Best Free Software” available, as voted by PC Magazine in both 2007 and 2008. Zotero was also named Best Instructional Software of 2007 by the Information Technology and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

6) An Opportunity For Your Institution to Leave Its Mark
Zotero’s open and extensible nature means that, beyond offering a powerful resource to your students at a no cost, Zotero also offers a potential avenue for your institution to make lasting contributions to the open-source community. For example, the University of Michigan’s School of Information recently won funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to launch a new million-dollar information literacy game, Bibliobouts, on top of Zotero. Similarly, Concordia University’s digital history lab was granted funds from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to develop Vertov, a video annotation tool for Zotero. Both instances demonstrate how institutions can make Zotero more than a piece of software used on their campus; it can also provide a means to contribute and make your mark on the scholarly cyberinfrastructure.

7) Your Users’ Data is Theirs, Now and Forever
Everything your users do with Zotero is theirs in perpetuity. As a project developed by scholars with a commitment to openness and with a focus on the end-user, Zotero makes no claim of ownership or control over any of your users’ work with Zotero, and invites users to share and collaborate without fear of their work being co-opted.

8 ) Give Your Users Something They Can Take With Them
Licensed research management platforms may provide your users with functional services, but, chances are, your software license ends when your students graduate. Shouldn’t your users have access to their research after graduation? Zotero is free to everyone; that means your students will always have access to their collections.

9) Adherence to Open Standards Offers Flexibility
Zotero is committed to data portability and interoperability through adherence to existing open standards. Software makers which employ site-licensing fees have a vested interest in locking users into their own proprietary formats. Zotero makes it as easy as possible to migrate data to and from other applications.

10) Give Your Users The Freedom To Work In Their Native Language
Zotero runs in more than thirty languages, so chances are good that most of the languages spoken on your campus are available. This sort of linguistic agnosticism means that Zotero runs smoothly for people all around the world. Any languages not already supported can easily be added through the BabelZilla project.

taken from this blog post on Zotero website.

Trent Reznor on music industry

I found this recent interview with Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nail talking about his decision to publish his latest album under Creative Commons licenses.

This interview is from the Digg Dialogg show, where the digg community is asked to submit and vote question to be ask.

Reznor's answer to the first question is quite insightful on the way internet may change copyright and intellectual property in the future:

"Trent - you've embraced Creative Commons and file sharing, but your business model (aside from touring) still primarily involves selling music either digitally or physically. Why haven't you embraced advertising as a business model, e.g. placing ads on your torrent tracker? Why let Pirate Bay take all the ad revenue you deserve? Furthermore, why aren't you building a brand new record label based on a modern business model?"

Check out the video for his answer.





You can check the whole list of questions here.

EDIT: video doesn't fit well on the blog, visit digg dialogg web page to see it all.

Crisis: defining itself

Wow, lots went on in the last few days. The list that had a one or two messages per day went to more than a dozen everyday.

A political debate got really hot and personal between certain persons. The moderator had to step in, and it didn't really help the problem. Few persons left the list, new forums emerged and all this fuzz lead to a redefinition of the role of the list. Should it be used only for general discussion? Should the support aspect be moved elsewhere? Should there be new list for different type of discussion? Those are questions that are still debate. The increase of participant lately made the administrator request new moderators to join in, and the community is asking for more clarity.

What I've learn about this is that the place of the political discussion on my discussion list is taking new proportion lately and it is now requesting its own space.

Politicizing technical question

Ubuntu developers community has been describe as a community of practice before (see older post). I think this concept could also apply to the users of the discussion list I am following. They gather for enhancing their practice of Ubuntu. They use the discussion list to ask how to perform a really specific task, (lately it was about installing Ubuntu on a third drive), and everyone is trying to find a way to perform the task. Sometimes, it does look like a game: someone comes up with a problem, and then everyone is trying to get the better solution. It is the same pattern as describe in The Charms of Wikipedia (2008). That’s what makes the list so attractive to the users.

Almost every conversation on the list begins with a support question. But the support question often leads to larger discussion about open source philosophy and/or how to convince more people to join in. Not all support question that lead to open sources philosophy. Unsolved technical problems related to closed source driver, or closed source software are more subject to lead to broader discussion. Situations where corporation force open source user into closed source software give ways to heated debate on the discussion list. This restriction of liberty and choice encourage the users to consider political action, and some of the discussions did lead to concrete action.

Baker, Nicholson. 2008. The Charms of Wikipedia. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 4 (March 20).

Ethical concern

As you may have notice, the posting cadency hasn’t really improved since last time, while the handwritten scrapbook is filling. 

Even if I did participate a little on translation, the support discussion lists were better suited to get a glance at the discourse of the users and programmers. I decided to follow a French support list based in Quebec.

I informed the “administrator” of my intention to conduct a research on his list though the IRC channel associate to the list.

The discussion went like this:

me> I want to confirm, you are in charge of the discussion list, aren’t you?
admin> yes
me> I sent you an email Monday about a research project. Have you check it out? [the email was about getting permission for conducting research]
admin> I see
admin> the list don’t belong to me.
admin> The data that you could find on it is public
admin> the content is only owned by each authors
admin> so no need for my authorization – but “ be kind “ :)

As you can see, as a manager of the list, admin isn’t claiming any ownership. He’s simply using his role as a moderator as I have seen on the list. Now and then, he will only ask people to avoid crude language and that sums it.
Since I didn’t want to interrupt every user of the list for getting consent, I informed the whole list of my intention. Sadly, I never had feedback on this.

Translating Ubuntu

Sorry for the long period without post. I’ve been collecting lots of data for a long time, but I didn’t take the time to write it here. At least, I took note in a scrapbook, so I can trace back what have been done so far. I'll try to catch up with the lost time.

At the begining, I tried to engage myself in production of software development via a notorious developer’s platform based on a web site. From that site, you can upload code, comment on it, post bugs, translate part of programs, and so on.

Joining this the site web is quite simple: give out an email address and a password, and then sign-up you are done. But everything submitted goes through pair review, and in order to get accepted in what you do isn’t as simple.

A user profile page is where you can find much information about someone’s participations. You have information written by the owner of the profile, but also statistics of the participations, the number of bug report, code line uploaded, translation done. It is possible to go back and look at what the person have done before. There’s also a scoring ladder that reflect your participation. You accumulated point for your participation and it decrease over time. So even if you largely participate at some time, you’ll be out of point after one year if you’ve done nothing. This prevent power user to game the system, and new one to get a chance to get into it. There’s also a list of membership the person is in.

There’s also title, for example, Ubunteros. To become an Ubunteros, you need to accept to comply with the Ubuntu Code of Conduct (http://www.ubuntu.com/community/conduct), and sign the document. The easiest way to sign the document is to use GnuPG (http://linsec.ca/Using_GnuPG), a tool to encrypt and digitally sign your document. GnuPG is a program that generates two keys: the first one is private, to be kept one your computer, and it is used to decrypt message that are addressed to you, or to sign document. The second one is public and hosted on web server and everyone can use it to encrypt message that are addressed to you (decryptable only with the private key) and it can be used to verify a signature you made using the private key. In sum, it is a tool to certified that that the message come and goes to a specific email address.

So far, I’ve only participated in some translation. The first thing you need to do is to accept to put your work under the BSD license (open source copyright). It implies that anyone can use it and modify it without retribution. You cannot participate in translation if you don’t comply with this license.

After getting most of my work rejected, I discovered some web site where people organized themselves prior to work on the platform. The number of contributors in French translation is very large, and there’s little room for participation for newcomer. Also, next Ubuntu version is well advance in the process (1 month till it goes out) so most of the work has already been done.