Open-source software in developing countries

As opposed to proprietary software, the code of open-source software and operating systems is generally available and can be modified and enriched by practically any user. The open-source movement has been growing over time, the number of people using and contributing to the movement has increased to a significant level, and a expanding number of enterprises and administrations are implementing the software and operating system.

With the expansion of open source, the current reality is that users have a true choice between a variety of possible solutions to best accomplish their computing and networking goals. Along the way, the issue has arisen as to the place of open source for developing countries. In a recently released study titled "Open Source Software, Perspectives for Development" and commissioned by infoDev, this precise issue is explored.
- posted by sankarshan @ 1/17/2004 11:41:00 AM 0 comments

 
Proshika to connect villages with internet

Proshika, a leading NGO, has taken extensive programmes to bring all villages under its Internet coverage.

"Besides, Proshika is also enunciating programmes to introduce ICT-based school-level education across the country," Proshika President Dr Qazi Faruqe Ahmed said this while he was chairing an exchange of opinion session at Proshika Bhaban here yesterday.

The session was organised to share experiences of the four-member Proshika delegation, which attended the recently concluded World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva.

Delegation leader Vice-President Mahbubul Karim and other members Qazi Rubaiat, Badruddoza Swapan and Sheikh Kamruzzaman Prince also spoke on the occasion.

Proshika had also set up a big and impressive stall at the summit venue with rich information materials on the country's ICT sector.

Stressing the need for decentralisation of management of information system (MIS), Qazi Faruque said, "Delivering ICT skills to the common people means delivering power to them to shape their destiny of their own choice."

Terming ICT as sharpest tools to face development challenges, he said computers must reach each and every house for people to survive the present day tough challenges facing mankind.

While highlighting the Geneva experiences, Mahbubul Karim said WSIS was in fact a tug-of-war between two forces. The World Bank and other developed nations with concept of making booming business through ICT was at one end, while the civil society and donors with an approach to utilise ICT for eradication of poverty and materialising development initiatives on the other.
- posted by sankarshan @ 1/17/2004 11:40:00 AM 0 comments

 
MP3 versus free speech
For many centuries now, the world of science and the world of business have evolved a happy coexistence. Businessmen know that the golden eggs are laid by scientists, and societies which have done well in fostering scientific research have prospered.

A key part of the recipe for doing science is openness. Scientists produce new ideas, and expose them to the scrutiny and criticisms of peers. Each researcher stands on the shoulders of investigators who came up with important innovations before him. Most laymen grossly under-estimate the extent to which the scientific process involves intense communication and collaboration; the image of a lone genius like Ramanujan is much more important in mythology than in reality. Free speech is an essential part of science. Indeed, closed societies have generally done badly at producing good science.

The one area where the scientific community accepted restrictions upon openness was weapons research. Hence, the scientific community has accepted a two-tier world where most research is public domain, except for that which delivers weapons into odious hands.

My story starts at MP3: the ubiquitous file format through which computers play music at extremely high quality. The record industry considers MP3 to be a disaster since it is easy to make MP3 files from CDs, and MP3 files are easily transferred to others.

Every music CD that exists in today's world can be converted into MP3 files and be endlessly copied without paying fees to the record companies. This could mean the end of record companies as we know them. Many musicians would welcome such an outcome, since the music industry only pays roughly 10% of its revenues to the creators of the music.

The record companies' attempt at survival is centred around the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), a mechanism through which music CDs would have "watermarks" which would prevent copying. The record companies hope to create a world where all new CD players would respect these watermarks, and the distribution of all new music would be based on SDMI. Hence, the stock of existing music would roam free in the world, but atleast a future friendly to the record companies could be conjured.

In September 2000, SDMI announced a challenge where music samples based on four alternative watermarking schemes were made available on the Internet, and a prize was offered to anyone who could break them. A team of researchers led by Edward Felten of Carnegie-Mellon University, who are experts on computer security and watermarking schemes, broke all four schemes. Under normal circumstances, we would have thought that they did a great favour to SDMI by exposing the weaknesses of the schemes.

A research paper Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge which explained these schemes and how they were broken was due to be presented on 26 April 2001 at a conference. In a remarkable move, the record companies threatened to bring a lawsuit if the authors proceeded with their presentation or the publication of the paper. Threats were made against the authors, against the conference organizers, and against their respective employers.

Normally, the elementary provisions for free speech in a democracy would ensure that presentation or publication are simply unchallengeable. The record companies found legal support in a remarkably odious piece of legislation in the United States called the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (DMCA).

I think of this as a milestone in the history of free speech. This is the first time that a researcher has been muzzled in an area which has nothing to do with weapons research.

In a related development, the software firm Microsoft has announced that its upcoming Windows XP operating system will have an inherent bias against MP3 files. It is not clear what steps will be undertaken, but users may be prohibited from creating MP3 files at high resolutions, or noise may be artificially mixed into MP3 files at playback time. Microsoft's intent is to wean users away from MP3 to proprietary formats that are created by Microsoft, which will cooperate with SDMI. One scenario could involve Microsoft becoming a middleman picking up fees from users playing music and passing on a cut to the record companies.

Thus we have the MP3 file format in the crosshairs of the music industry, backed by the DMCA, and Microsoft, backed by its monopoly.

The principle that is at stake is human freedom. I have always believed that the only way to block music piracy is the erection of a police state, and we are now seeing the first steps towards this. Blocking the presentation of a paper is the kind of conduct we would have normally expected with the Shiv Sena or the Taliban. The links between attacks on MP3 and a police state are frightening, including efforts in China and Taiwan to use strong-arm tactics against citizens owning MP3 files.

Going beyond principles to effectiveness, I believe that we are in a lucky situation, where these efforts will be perfectly ineffectual:

* It is not possible to block the free movement of knowledge.
* As the paper demonstrates, a watermarking system that works does not yet exist.
* All music in the world today is on pre-SDMI CDs and can freely be converted into MP3 files. If new CD players do not support SDMI, or new CDs don't work on existing players, they will not sell. Hence, it will be extremely difficult for SDMI (when it is ready) to gain adoption.
* Even if watermarking is ubiquitous, anyone can take the audio signal out of a CD player and convert it into an MP3, with a slight loss of quality once, after which the MP3 file can be copied indefinitely thereafter.
* Microsoft wants users to eschew MP3. Users will eschew Microsoft by either staying with older versions of M S Windows or moving on to Linux and FreeBSD.

However, I think this eposide highlights certain vulnerabilities, which should be addressed. Specifically, we should be very careful in understanding the sources of authoritarian power in the DMCA, and ensuring that such ideas are not present in India's IT Act. The IT act has got too little scrutiny to date. Its authors clearly obtained inspiration from an odious dictatorship (Singapore). Hence, I would be concerned about the extent to which human freedoms are being violated by the provisions of the IT act.

I believe that MP3 is here to stay, and that the music industry will have to change. Concerts, merchandise, advertising and product endorsements will be more important sources of revenue. The music industry will focus on these. Musicians will directly sell music over the Internet, while disintermediating the record companies. Musicians will get a greater fraction of the total revenues of the music industry. I expect that it will be a good world for the people genuinely producing music and the people genuinely consuming music. The middlemen, like the record companies or Microsoft, will get eliminated, which will be a change for the better.

http://mayin.org/ajayshah/MEDIA/2001/sdmi-mp3.html
- posted by sankarshan @ 1/16/2004 10:14:00 PM 0 comments

 
Who's Patching Open Source ?

An interesting 2 part article states that -

The first place many companies look for Apache support is their main distribution provider, most commonly Red Hat or SuSE. As open source grows, the need for support grows, and this new need has led to the development of a new support option: third-party vendors who manage or patch software.

Part 1 of this two-part series addresses the special challenges inherent in fixing problems as they arise in open-source software. Part 2 takes a look at some potential solutions.

When Red Hat decided to stop supporting certain earlier versions of its Linux software, it instantly created a new market: a third-party source for Red Hat 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 patches. Customers who once received patches for those distributions from Red Hat are -- potentially -- a lucrative market for another vendor.

Filling that need, as of January 1st, is Progeny, an Indiana-based company that specializes in custom-built Linux applications.

As for why Red Hat itself is not providing the patches, Progeny president Garth Dickey noted that Red Hat has shifted to an "up-market strategy," focused only on enterprise accounts. Its earlier versions no longer fit into that plan.

Is providing third-party patches for open source profitable? Of the many Red Hat users, "I don't think anyone's ever asked how much of that is licensed Red Hat and how much of it is free Red Hat," Dickey noted.

Many users of free Red Hat may never have paid much for support at any point, Open Source Development Lab analyst Stacey Quandt told NewsFactor. "So it will be interesting to see if [Progeny] is able to scale that model to get users to pay support dollars for that."

This concept may not be appealing to open-source developers, Quandt noted, but Covalent's target audience is end-user companies, not developers. "People look to the best solution to solve the problem," she said, "so it doesn't necessarily mean that they're not going to look at proprietary applications."

- posted by sankarshan @ 1/16/2004 06:35:00 AM 0 comments

 
A recent article by Richard Stallman on the subject of the direction of the Free Software community provoked a lot of discussion, in particular on whether he is right to push so strongly his principles of Free Software over and above the pragmatic principles of Open Source. In this article the author defends Stallman's vision of software, and its place in community rather than as a consumer product, and re-advocate Stallman's assertion that the right to form a community is more important than the ability to use particular software.

Whether FS or OSS, community matters

In fact, it is not only in governments and developing countries that the importance of community is apparent. Every nation is composed of communities formed around religious beliefs, shared hobbies and interests, political necessity, and all kind of other grounds. In these communities, the benefits of being able to share software, to customise or have customised software for their particular needs, and to be free as a community from the influence of any particular software producers is a great opportunity.

Associated with Free Software is also the ability to influence, contribute to, or join the communities that produce the software you can use. Not only can entire communities, as in the internationalisation cases, link up with communities that they benefit from, but individuals and companies, should they want to, can do so too. Whilst the idea of your average Web-browsing, document-writing computer user contributing to the Linux kernel may sound absurd, simply providing the ability for such a person to file a feature request or ask a community of developers and supporters for help is enormously empowering. It humanises software, and takes the user from being a passive consumer who must put up with what he is given to being a potentially active user who can exercise a degree of power over what he is given, both in terms of actually changing particular features, and in terms of influencing the development agenda.

The freedoms ensured by Free Software also enable new communities to form, for example locally based cooperative volunteer support groups, or Linux User Groups (LUGs) for short. The more the public is able to share and cooperate without destroying the software "industry" entirely, the more citizens will gain in terms of participation in communities, increased opportunities with information technology, and of course all of the "pragmatic" benefits. So long as Free Software doesn't undermine the ability of the public, including business, to make software and make it usable for everyone, it is morally superior to proprietary software, and leaves us with no reason to keep proprietary software. Where proprietary software is necessary, that may not be the case, but I don't want to get into a discussion as to where it might be necessary.

In highlighting these cases, I am not trying to suggest that Open Source as a philosophy denies the importance of community, but that those who attack Free Software advocates like Richard Stallman for talking about cooperation and community are quite wrong. Community matters, more in fact than considerations of stability and cost, because in the long term, whilst Free Software will enable communities and deliver the quality of products citizen-consumers require, proprietary software will further divide and polarise communities and inhibit the potential of information technology for the public. Considerations of cost and stability will continue for as long as software is produced, but considerations of community are central to the direction of information technology in society.

Whether or not you can sell this vision to the average consumer over a shop desk, it matters. If the community behind Free Software forgets this in its rush to spread the software, and we confuse the goal of freedom with the goal of popularity and market share, it fails. Until those who disagree with Free Software advocates understand that this is our position, criticisms will fall on deaf ears.

- posted by sankarshan @ 1/14/2004 08:59:00 PM 0 comments

 

Hi,

I am undertaking a study titled

"GNU/Linux L10n initiatives and their impact on ICT4D efforts with special relevance to management of such projects, integration and collaboration protocols, tools and methodologies"

under the Independent Research Fellowship offered by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (Sarai), New Delhi.

The aim of this study includes :

* an attempt to understand the publicly available roadmaps for the L10n projects,

* analyse the project management and release management protocols in place,

* an attempt to analyse ICT4D efforts based on these localised GNU/Linux implementation and releases and

* an effort to locate and identify possible 'index cases' and test bench areas leading to a self-sustaining implementation

I wish to :

[i] investigate existing domains of ICT4D through interaction with the shared networks in order to understand the processes

[ii] analyse (and help in analysing) new 'niche' systems where ICT4D implementations can be carried out

As part of the study, I'd like to request your assistance in :

[1] providing a roadmap of the L10n initiative you are working alongside with special reference to the stated objectives and adherence to Open Standards as well as potential implementation areas

[2] providing contacts for various ICT4D initiatives which are based on such L10n efforts

The results of the study will be made available periodically in human readable format through various mailing lists (especially those at Sarai). All contributions and assistance rendered will be duly acknowledged and credited in such published results.

Looking forward to a positive response.

Warm regards

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay
sankarshanmukhopadhyay at vsnl dot net

- posted by sankarshan @ 1/14/2004 08:53:00 PM 0 comments

 
AlwaysOn sits down with Ximian founders Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza :: Novell & Linux

i wonder why does the mainstream media have to repeatedly refer to 'Linux' !! no wonder that the Free Software Foundation is compelled to through this link. That aside, the interview does really through up some nice points about corporate involvement in the F/L OSS space. Sometime back Developers Lab posted a nice feature on Free/Libre Open Source Software and the osmosis effect it has in the corporate community. This recent interview takes a logical step forward.

An excerpt reads as ::

Friedman: One of the things that is really important to us is to get Novell to recognize that an open-source community is a social fabric of individuals organized in a meritocracy; it's not consortium or standards. If you're a company that wants to be credible and have strategic input in the Linux world—the open source world—you have to have key individuals weaved into that fabric that are part of your company. You have to have major contributors, people who are maintainers, people who are driving the strategy in the community, freely and openly, that are part of the company, too. You can interlace your goals and the goals of the community. That's how it works. And so it's not about a top-level decision to throw some money at Linux; it's about actually having people in the team.

[emphasis mine]

This is an absolutely on-the-ball assessment of the rules of the game, from someone who is a trailblazer. To gain credibility, corporates must leave the age-old theory of 'let's throw more money into the ring and cook up a storm'. As Nat states it's about a team. F/L OSS has classically eulogised and idolised the team based collaborative platform. With corporate makeovers it is important not to lose sight of the community based goals and strategic long term plans. It is easy to do so with release deadlines and 'process paralysis'.

Bringing in corporates mandates a more transparent development as well as standards based development. At some point of time, having a major 'name' comes in handy to push through protocols and processes. While this is evident in various global cases, in the case of India, this needs to be studied in depth. With more maturity, perhaps a better understanding of the dynamics will evolve.
- posted by sankarshan @ 1/14/2004 08:53:00 PM 0 comments

 
OpenOffice.org XML Essentials—Using OpenOffice.org’s XML Data Format is a book in progress written by J. David Eisenberg for O’Reilly & Associates and submitted to an open review process. The content is currently licensed under a Creative Commons License. The result of this work will be freely available on the World Wide Web under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Free Documentation License.

http://books.evc-cit.info/
http://books.evc-cit.info/OOobook_4_jan.zip
- posted by sankarshan @ 1/12/2004 07:42:00 PM 0 comments

 
OpenOffice makes government inroads
http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-5128730.html?tag=nefd_top


- posted by sankarshan @ 1/12/2004 07:40:00 PM 0 comments

 
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/7605219.htm

``It's an extremely big announcement,'' said Louis Suarez-Potts, community manager for OpenOffice.org. ``What we've been seeing in the last nine months is more and more national governments moving over and supporting open-source endeavors. Israel is an extremely important economy.''

Suarez-Potts said his group would soon be able to release a Hebrew language version of its software as part of a broad effort to develop localized versions.

OpenOffice.org is an effort sponsored by Sun Microsystems to develop open-source versions of software that would compete against Microsoft Office, the suite of productivity software from the Redmond, Wash., company.

In the short term, Israel's government agencies will use existing Microsoft Office products rather than upgrade to newer versions. In the meantime, the Israeli government will encourage the development of lower-priced, open-source alternatives to Microsoft in an effort to expand computer use by the public.

``The move with Microsoft was a purely economic decision,'' said a Finance Ministry spokeswoman, speaking on condition of anonymity to the Associated Press. ``The Israeli government will not be purchasing new products from Microsoft but will implement its contract to secure existing systems.''
- posted by sankarshan @ 1/12/2004 07:38:00 PM 0 comments