Petter Reinholdtsen

Peter Hidas fra Gartner melder i Computerworld at Unix nedkjempes av Linux og Windows. For meg er påstanden meningsløs, da Linux er en variant av Unix, og hele diskusjonen om Linux er Unix eller ikke er utdatert og uinteressant. Jeg ser at Helge Skrivervik deler mitt syn på saken i sin kommentar fra i går om at "Unix vs. Linux = uinteressant".

I NUUG-sammenheng møter jeg av og til folk som tror NUUG er for avdankede folk som driver med den samme Unix-varianten som Peter Hidas skriver om i sin kommentar, og dermed er en foreningen for avdankede teknologer interessert i døende teknologi. Intet kunne være lengre fra sannheten.

NUUG er en forening for oss som har sans for fri programvare, åpne standarder og Unix-lignende operativsystemer, som Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Debian, Mint, Gentoo, Android, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Firefox, LibreOffice, ODF, HTML, C++, ECMA-Script, etc. Kort sagt der nyskapning skjer på IT-fronten i dag. Det innebærer selvfølgelig også de som er interessert i de "gamle" Unix-ene som Solaris og HP-UX, men de er bare et lite mindretall blant NUUGs medlemmer. De aller fleste medlemmene har i dag fokus på Linux.

It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to publish another interview with the people behind Debian Edu and Skolelinux. This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor details get right before release.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly 20 years as certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an international company for machinery and equipment. Since 2011 I'm a certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year I will manage the department of technical documentation at a manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.

My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at home since 2006.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project?

Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old computers in use. I answered: "Yes".

Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in Bielefeld in December of 2006.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages for me as today.

In the past there were advantages like:

• I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as they had little money to spent for computers and software.
• It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without cost.
• It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a server
• I was able to configure the server to the needs of the school.

Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones came up in this way:

• Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software now.
• They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.
• With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the interfaces used in the past.
• It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the different needs.
• The documentation is usable and gets better every day.
• More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the world and so the community, which is an very important part I think, is sharing knowledge and minds.
• Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are solved today by Debian Edu.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

• There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even whole municipality areas.
• Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to politicians.
• Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.

Which free software do you use daily?

I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel, KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt, screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.

My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS, rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me and the whole family. I probably forgot something.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software?

I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different countries and areas all over the world.

I går ble jeg kontaktet på epost av digi.nos Eirik Rossen som lurte på om jeg hadde noen kommentarer til kartverkets pressemelding om Norges tetplassering når det gjelder kart-tilgjengelighet. Jeg svarte følgende, som resulterte i noen sitater i Digis dekning av kartverkets pressemelding.

Takk for muligheten til å kommentere.

Pressemeldingen omhandler tilgjengeligheten av kart for aktører som er medlem i kartellet Norge Digitalt. Det er ingen overraskelse for meg at tilgjengeligheten til kart hos disse medlemmene er god. Men for oss på utsiden av kartellet er tilgjengelighet av det som burde være felleskapets og innbyggernes kart dårlig.

Bruksvilkårene til kartene fra medlemmene i Norge Digital hindrer nyskapning og selv om en er villig til å betale den ublu prisen som forlanges får en fortsatt ikke tilgang til kartdata uten bruksbegresninger. Derfor bruker jeg heller tid på å gjøre fribrukskartet OpenStreetmap bedre. Der fremmer bruksvilkårene nyskapning og lar meg skape nye tjenester uten å måtte søke om tillatelse fra det offentlige.

En annen problemstilling er jo sikkerhet til fjells og til sjøs. Mon tro hvor mange ulykker på sjøen som kunne vært unngått hvis sjøkartdata var tilgjengelig uten bruksbegrensninger, slik at enhver med GPS eller kartplotter tilnærmet kostnadsfritt kunne sikre seg mest mulig oppdaterte sjøkart? Det hjelper jo ikke at offentlige etater har enkel tilgang til sjøkartene når det samme ikke gjelder hver båtkaptein og småbåtfører. Jeg tror samfunnet som helhet hadde tjent på å unngå kostnadene ved disse ulykkene ved å tvinge sjøkartverket til å publisere sine kartdata på Internet uten bruksbegresninger.

I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway. But the last ones have not really been up to the task. My last cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the time, and cutting my head took forever. And the one before that did not work very well either. We have looked for something better for a while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we discovered that there are indeed better tools available. But these are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers". The hair saloons can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell companies. The models they sell, are very different from the ones available from Elkjøp and Lefdal. The main difference is their efficiency. It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40 minutes required by my impotent Braun. The hairdresser I visited had a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the producer. But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.

The next step was to find somewhere to buy it. This was not straight forward. The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser did not want to sell anything to me. But searching for the model on the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for around NOK 4000,-. This was a bit much. We kept searching and finally found a Danish supplier selling it for around NOK 1800,-. We ordered one, and it arrived a few days ago.

The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started to use it, so we left it charging over night. Normally it will only need one hour to charge. The following evening we successfully tested it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair cutter. The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter toys.

NUUG-styremedlem Hans-Petter Fjeld meldte nettopp at han har sendt inn NUUGs høringsuttalelse angående Difi sin standardkatalog v3.1. Jeg er veldig glad for at så mange bidro og sikret at vår stemme blir hørt i denne høringen. Anbefaler alle å lese våre to sider med innspill.

In an article today published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer Eirik Helland Urke reports that the video editor application included with HTC One X have some quite surprising terms of use. The article is mostly based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:

"Drøy brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat."

I quickly translated it to this English message:

"Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos commercially. Although I can ONLY use them privately."

I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I discovered with my Canon IXUS 130. The HTC One X specification specifies that the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for video. AMR is Adaptive Multi-Rate audio codec with patents which according to the Wikipedia article require an license agreement with VoiceAge. MP4 is MPEG4 with H.264, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement with MPEG-LA.

I know why I prefer free and open standards also for video.

I januar i fjor startet vi i NUUG arbeid med å gjøre informasjon om hvem som har stemt hva på Stortinget enklere tilgjengelig. I løpet av få måneder fant vi sammen med organisasjonen Holder de ord som arbeidet mot et lignende mål.

Siden den gang har vi fått tak i maskinelt lesbart informasjon om hvem som stemte hva mellom 1990 og våren 2010, og tilgang til stortingets nye datatjeneste som har informasjon fra høsten 2011 til i dag. Det gjenstår litt arbeid med det første datasettet, men datasettet fra høsten 2011 er klart til bruk. Begge datasettene er tilgjengelig via git.

På Go Open i morgen lanserer NUUG sammen med Holder de ord en test-tjeneste som viser hva som er og blir behandlet på Stortinget og hvem som har stemt hva siden oktober i fjor. Du får herved mulighet til å ta en sniktitt.

Here in Norway, the Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs is behind a directory of standards that are recommended or mandatory for use by the government. When the directory was created, the people behind it made an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions to the government. Free software and non-free software could compete on the same level.

But recently, some standards with RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) terms have made their way into the directory. And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from implementing them. The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone willing to pay will get a license. Both sound great in theory. In practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user. By definition, users of free software do not need to register their use. So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects. And given that people will use the software without handing any money to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights to implement a standard when the income available is zero. The result in these situations is that free software are locked out from implementing standards with RAND terms.

Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory. Because free software developers are working in a global market, it does not really help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable in Norway. The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here. I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more attention to these issues in the future.

You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms from Simon Phipps (RAND: Not So Reasonable?).

Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a blog post from Glyn Moody over at Computer World UK warning about the same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government. I can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for the hearing taking place at the moment (respond before 2012-04-27). It proposes to require video conferencing standards including specifications with RAND terms.

Da jeg googlet etter noe annet kom jeg tilfeldigvis over en hovedfagsoppgave ved Universitetet i Oslo som diskuterer verdien av GPLs fire friheter for brukerne av IT-systemer. Jeg ble fascinert over det som presenteres der. Her er sammendraget:

Motivasjonen til å skrive denne oppgaven er en personlig undring over hvorfor det primært, og ofte eksklusivt, fokuseres på det økonomiske aspektet ved utredninger om fri programvare er et godt valg for det offentlige. Fri og produsenteid programvare bygger på fundamentalt forskjellige ideologier som kan ha implikasjoner utover økonomiske kostnader. Kunnskapskulturen som er med på å definere fri programvare er basert på åpenhet, og er en verdi i seg selv.

Oppgavens tema er programvarelisensen GPL og frihet. GPL-lisensiert programvare gir visse friheter i forhold til produsenteid programvare. Mitt spørsmål er om, og eventuelt i hvilken utstrekning, disse frihetene blir benyttet av ulike brukere og hvordan de manifesterer seg for disse brukerne. Sentrale spørsmål i oppgaven er:

• Hvordan fordeles handlekraft gjennom lisensieringen av programvaren?
• Hvilke konsekvenser har programvarelisensen for de ulike brukere?

Fri programvare gir blant annet brukeren mulighet til å studere og modifisere kildekoden. Denne formen for frihet erverves gjennom kunnskap og krever at brukeren også er en ekspert. Hva skjer med frihetene til GPL når sluttbrukeren er en annen? Dette diskuteres i dialog med informantene.

Jeg har i denne oppgaven samlet inn intervjudata fra IKT-ansvarlige ved grunnskolene i Nittedal kommune, driftsansvarlig og IKT-veilederen for skolene i kommunen, samt IKT-koordinator for utdanning i Akershus fylkeskommune og bokmåloversettere av OpenOffice.org. Den empiriske delen av oppgaven er delt inn i to seksjoner; den første omhandler operativsystemet Skolelinux, den andre kontorprogrampakken OpenOffice.org.

Som vi vil se gir GPL lokal frihet og kontroll gjennom omfordeling av makt fra produsent til bruker. Brukerens makt analyseres gjennom begrepene brukermedvirkning og handlingsfrihet. Det blir også lagt vekt på strukturelle forhold rundt bruken av teknologi, og spesielt de økonomiske begrepene nettverkseksternaliteter, innlåsing og stiavhengighet. Dette er begreper av spesiell nytte når objektet som omsettes eller distribueres er et kommunikasjonsprodukt, fordi verdien til et slikt gode for en potensiell bruker avhenger av antall eksisterende brukere av godet. I tilknytning til denne problematikken inneholder oppgaven også en diskusjon rundt åpne standarder og formater.

Oppgaven konkluderer med at de «fire frihetene» som GPL-lisensen er laget for å beskytte er av avgjørende betydning for bruken av OpenOffice.org og Skolelinux, i Akershus fylkeskommune såvel som i skolene i Nittedal. Distribusjonen av handlekraft er ikke helt symmetrisk. Det er først og fremst de profesjonelle utviklerne i Skolelinux som direkte kan nyttiggjøre seg friheten til å endre kode, mens en sluttbruker som Nittedal kommune nyttiggjør seg den økonomiske friheten til å kunne distribuere programmene. Det er imidlertid også slik at ingen aktør klarer seg uten alle disse «frihetene».

Jeg fant også en masteroppgave fra 2006, men der ligger ikke komplett oppgave tilgjengelig. På tide å holde et øye med Skolelinux-søket til DUO...

Behind Debian Edu and Skolelinux there are a lot of people doing the hard work of setting together all the pieces. This time I present to you Andreas Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several years. He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set up in the recently released Debian Edu Squeeze version.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany. After studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in Quantum Optics. After that I worked some years in an optics company. Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school. I teach math, physics, information technology and science/technology.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project?

Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu project because of my interest in education and Debian. Within the qualification/training period for the teaching, I started contributing.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the Debian Project!

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its downside, too. In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the setup, if you need or want that. Further more, it is not easily possible to upgrade the system to a new release. It takes much too long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps because the number of developers working on the core of the code is rather small and often busy elsewhere.

The Debian LAN project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.

Which free software do you use daily?

I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian on all my machines. For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing. At school I have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software?

One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom: Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader". The school administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor. Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats. Even free browsers do not work for the school administration. Publishers of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.

To change this, political work is very important. Parts of the political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years. However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free' the system. There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and "Free/Open Standards". I am not sure if all the involved parties have a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a fraction takes them seriously. However it might slowly make free software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.