I Got My Penguin

Chin Wong gave me a penguin!

Well, at least a personalized drawing of a one on the penguin collection graphic on his website (www.chinwong.com). You can see my penguin (notice the beard) in the blown-up version on the right . The original is a cool, high-resollution affair, and you can get your own penguin on it simply by asking Chin. His site has a form just for that.

Chin was the Editor-in-Chief of Computerworld Philippines, a position he ably held for many, many years. He is also a happy convert to Linux, having made the switch in 2006. In his blog article, “Secret Weapon“, he says this of the tale:

Two years ago this month, I erased Windows XP from my home PC and installed Ubuntu on it and have not looked back since. Today, the Linux-based system I have is more secure, more efficient in its use of resources—and more fun to use— than any Windows-based installation on comparable hardware. It certainly blows Windows Vista out of the water. Remarkably, it’s also 100 percent legal and 100 percent free, which is something you could never say about Windows, whether you used a licensed version or a pirated knock-off.

Now how’s that for a ringing endorsement? it’s these success stories — and helpful users like Chin — that win new converts to Linux.

I first began using Linux in 1999, when I installed Red Hat 5.0 on my 180MHz clone. Just like Chin, I had my ups and downs. Linux was certainly not as easy to install then, and the Red Hat graphical desktop was usable but had some pretty rough edges. I’m now running CentOS, a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

If you have a Linux success story to tell, let Chin know about it and get yourself a penguin. You’ll be in good company.

Investigating the OOXML Vote

Although Microsoft managed to get its OOXML ratified as a “standard” via a spectacularly flawed fast-track process, that travesty has caused quite a ruckus in the ISO itself, and may have mortally wounded the credibility of the standards approval process. It’s not all over yet, however, as reported in the ZDNet story, “Venezuela and India appeal OOXML ratification“:

“After the two-month appeal period, we now have four appeals — Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela,” Jonathan Buck, the director of communications for IEC, told ZDNet.co.uk on Monday. “The appeals are now with our CEOs, IEC General Secretary Ronnie Amit, and ISO Secretary General Alan Bryden, who have a 30-day period to make sure appeals conform to directives.”

Since groups in at least four other countries have had the courage and integrity to question how their representatives could have voted “yes” to such a mockery of standards and the approval process, perhaps it’s about time Filipinos do the same. When will an investigation of the Philippine vote take place? After all, the Philippines voted to approve a “standard” whose final form had not really fully discussed, and which cannot even be implemented by it’s creators (Microsoft). How can the interests of the Philippines be represented by such silliness?

Those in the Philippines who voted to approve the OOXML non-standard should not be allowed to get away scot-free with such a disservice. It’s about time someone send a letter of protest — not just to ISO but to the Commission on ICT as well!

Resources

Groklaw has done a great job keeping track of “ISO-Gate”, which is quite an appropriate name for this fiasco. Some resources include:

• An Open Letter on OOXML Happenings in India
• A Reminder: ISO’s Code of Ethics & What Happens Next – Update: Venezuela Appeals Also
• Now an OOXML Protest from Denmark’s OSL – Updated 3Xs: Official English Translation

Making Elections Open and Transparent

A group of concerned citizens called the Advocacy for Open Systems in Elections is offering a free, open source solution for automating the counting of election results. Ito Gruet, a member of the group, was interviewed by Erwin Oliva of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and the video of the interview is available on the Inquirer website as “Pushing open source solutions for elections“.

Gruet revealed that the group advocating the use of open standards and open source software for the automated election system, which would help ensure the transparency of the electoral process. Gruet explained:

Basically it’s to ensure that we are able to track and trace back to a source document and audit the results of the elections. And what we are proposing is the we make this process tranasparent to the public… to all the voters. Transparent in terms of the technology to be used, so we should be using open standards. We believe that the software should be open source so that people in the know can look at it, can review, and see if it’s really a working system. Transparent in terms of the data itself, which means that results should be easily verifiable by the public, and anybody can do their own tabulation.

Ya Gotta Hear This (Updated)

I thought that I had heard the worst ravings and silliest nonsense from some of SCO’s people concerning their claims about Unix and Linux. SCO, after all, claimed that some of their code was in Linux, but never managed to prove it.

(Image on the right is from the film “Reefer Madness.”)

After over six years, it seemed that the case was winding down: Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell, not SCO, still owned the copyright to Unix; and SCO filed for bankruptcy. Despite some news that SCO might be bought out and get enough money to continue the case, to me it pretty much boiled down to when — not if — SCO would just plain lose once and for all. Now, like some bad gas emanating from a crypt, we hear this latest whopper from SCO CEO Darl McBride, as reported by Ars Technica in “Deluded SCO CEO on witness stand: ‘Linux is a copy of UNIX’“:

McBride said that SCO holds the rights to UNIX and that “many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developers.” Specifically, he said, “We have evidence System V is in Linux,”—directly contradicting what Sontag had previously testified. Due to the witness exclusion rule invoked by both parties, McBride was not present during Sontag’s testimony and wasn’t aware of what had been said. McBride’s claims also directly contradict internal SCO memos from 2002, which reveal that the company’s own extensive source code audits had uncovered no UNIX code in Linux. McBride attempted to reinforce his argument with analogy. “When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there’s books on ‘How to Program UNIX’ but when you go to the Linux section and look for ‘How to Program Linux’ you’re not gonna find it, because it doesn’t exist.” Then came the real humdinger, and my jaw dropped when I heard the following come out of his mouth: “Linux is a copy of UNIX, there is no difference [between them].”

OLPC Caves In

Looks like the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project may abandon one of its most important features: free, unfettered software.

(The photo on the right is by Mike Mcgregor licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.)

Computerworld, in “Report: OLPC may eventually switch from Linux to Windows XP” noted that:

One day after the resignation of the One Laptop Per Child project’s president was publicly revealed, the OLPC’s founder and chairman said that the group’s XO laptop may evolve to use only Windows XP as its operating system, with open-source educational applications such as the homegrown Sugar software running on top.

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte also told The Associated Press on Tuesday that an insistence upon using only free, open-source software had hampered the XO’s usability and scared away potential adopters.

This turnaround — and it’s clearly compromising justification — drew immediate comment from Michael Tiemann, President of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). In his post “Damn disheartening news from OLPC“, Tiemann said:

I believe that without open source, the fundamental purpose of OLPC will fail, because it will create another generation of slaves to proprietary technologies and corporate largesse. In other words, it will perpetuate the status quo, rather than rearrange it.

He ended his post in this manner:

But if OLPC abandons its open source roots, then I do not see the project accomplishing any of its goals. And while I can afford to throw away the three XO laptops I bought, the world cannot afford to throw away the goal of ending poverty in favor of preserving monopoly control of technology.

Real-world security

Many people who know or care about computer security probably won’t be surprised to hear claims that Linux or BSD is generally more secure than Windows. That conventional wisdom seems to have been confirmed yet again by the results of a hacking challenge last March 28, Friday, at the CanSecWest 2008 conference. This was reported in the InfoWorld article, “With Vista breached, Linux remains unbeaten in hacking contest“:

Earlier this week, contest sponsors had put three laptops up for grabs to anyone who could hack into one of the systems and run their own software. A $20,000 cash prize sweetened the deal, but the payout was halved each day as contest rules were relaxed and it became easier to penetrate the computers.

On day two, Independent Security Evaluators’ Charlie Miller took the Mac after hitting it with a still-undisclosed exploit that targeted the Safari Web browser. After about two minutes work, Thursday, Miller took home $10,000, courtesy of 3Com’s TippingPoint division, in addition to his new laptop.

It took two days of work, but Shane Macaulay, finally cracked the Vista box on Friday, with a little help from his friends.

Macaulay, who was a co-winner of last year’s hacking contest, needed a few hacking tricks courtesy of VMware researcher Alexander Sotirov to make his bug work. That’s because Macaulay hadn’t been expecting to attack the Service Pack 1 version of Vista, which comes with additional security measures. He also got a little help from co-worker Derek Callaway.

Go GPL!

The GPL has won another victory — its biggest so far. Linux-Watch, in the article “Biggest legal victory ever for GPL“, reports:

The Software Freedom Law Center filed a copyright infringement lawsuit on Dec. 6 against Verizon Communications on behalf of its clients, the two principal developers of BusyBox. The suit alleged that Verizon violated the GNU GPLv2 by distributing Actiontec MI424WR wireless routers–which contained unsanctioned GPLv2 code–that were used with Verizon’s fiber-optic Internet and television service, aka FiOS.

On March 17, the SFLC announced that Verizon has come to an agreement with the SFLC and the BusyBox developers, which enables them to dismiss the GPL enforcement lawsuit. BusyBox is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems. The popular development tool kit is licensed under GPL. Verizon and Actiontec violated the GPL condition that redistributors of BusyBox are required to ensure that every user of the code, or a device containing the code, must be provided access to the program’s source code.

To date, Verizon is the biggest company to be accused in court of a GPL violation. The fact that the case has ended in a settlement should set a good example for others to follow should they ever find themselves in the same position. Hopefully this will also send a strong signal to those who may think that they can get away with not complying with the terms for using GPLed code.

To learn more about the GPL, its history, and its terms, here are some important resources:

• Here’s the GNU General Public License (GPL) itself: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
• The GNU GPL on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
• The Open Source Initiative (OSI) page for the GPL: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php

Microsoft’s Interoperability Propaganda

Microsoft-Watch columnist Joe Wilcox is at his best when he tells it like it is. He’s a bit like John C. Dvorak but with less crankiness. In his March 6 post entitled “Interoperability by PR Is a Gambit“, Joe pulled no punches when he gave readers the lowdown on Microsoft’s commitment to interoperability:

Microsoft’s idea of a Document Interoperability Initiative is to put together a bunch of businesses that profit from file format incompatibilities. And that is supposed to demonstrate — quoting from the press release — “Microsoft’s commitment to implement a set of strategic changes in its technology and business practices to expand interoperability through the implementation of its interoperability principles.”

The Document Interoperability Initiative is shameless propaganda along the lines of Monday’s Internet Explorer 8 standards announcement. Real initiative (pun intended) would be a group that included Adobe, Apple, Corel, Google, OpenOffice, Sun and other developers of software that produce documents and/or have their own desktop file formats.

Other forms of “openness” and “interoperability” on the part of Microsoft have been found to be far less substantial than the hype contained in the company’s announcements. You have, for example, Microsoft’s promised release of voluminous documents on the APIs of its major applications, apparently to comply with the directives of the EU Commission. In its February 21, 2008, press release, Microsoft announced: