as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

My ceaseless quest for DRM-free mp3 download files in the UK appears to be over!

A while back I tested Amazon’s mp3 store, which was fine except that you have to be in America. Fail. However, Play.com have just opened a similar store in the UK. As usual, my canonical test song for these things is Feelin’ Good by Nina Simone, and…I’ve just bought it from Play. As before, I have a list of requirements for these services:

• I can download one track, instead of a whole album; I don’t want ten Nina Simone songs, I just want the one I’m looking for - PASS
• No DRM. None. I don’t mind what the format is, if there’s no DRM, as long as it can be played on Linux (which is pretty much everything). Bonus points for oggs. Half a bonus point for just plain mp3. - PASS
• A track costs a pound or less. I’m not paying more than a quid for one song. - PASS (99c is about 50p)
• I feel comfortable putting my credit card number into the site. This means, in practice, that if it’s called something like mp3downloads.haxx0r.ru, I am not interested. - PASS
• I can just buy a song by putting my credit card number in and getting it for download. I don’t need to sign up for an account, give them all my details, none of that. - FAIL
• My music tastes aren’t very eclectic, so I’d expect the service to carry most of what I’d want to listen to. This means that a service for one label alone isn’t really what I want. I don’t want to discover new music with this; I want to get the stuff I already know about and want to listen to. - PASS
• I’ll get, probably, about five songs a year. So a subscription service is out, especially since with most of them your music stops working when you unsubscribe. - PASS

As with Amazon, Play fail on the “don’t need an account” idea. However, there are two extra thoughts concerning that:

1. They let you re-download the track later (an indeterminate number of times, depending on the record company) if you lose it or delete it. This is a good feature, and I can’t think of a decent way of doing it without some sort of authorisation process.
2. I have mailed them with a suggestion. If someone’s just buying downloads, why not have a “buy this without signing up” button, which just asks you for all the information that’s required on the “buy it” screen? (You can’t just enter a CC number; they need billing address and so on for the credit card companies, more’s the pity.) Then, quietly sign them up for an account under the covers, and when you send the “you have bought a download, go here to download it” email, say “oh, and we signed you up for an account, with password GF78F$0.Fsf;” and they can use it or not care. No idea whether the Play people will take this suggestion or not, though.

Anyway, it works. I can get songs and listen to them. Well done, Play. That will do nicely.

Blimey, tonight I’m on the radio.

Specifically, the Wolverhampton Politics show on WCR FM. I’m talking about digital rights and DRM and that sort of thing. It’s available as a stream — I should be on somewhere around 7.15pm this evening — and it’s also downloadable (episode should be available on Sunday or thereabouts). And if you’re in Wolverhampton itself you can listen to it on the actual radio. Cool.

Two years after I first laid out my plea to be able to download music the way I wanted, Amazon have pretty much come through. My canonical test song whenever someone announces a new music service is “Feelin’ Good” by Nina Simone, and here it is on Amazon.com. So, let’s test this service against my list of requirements.

• I can download one track, instead of a whole album; I don’t want ten Nina Simone songs, I just want the one I’m looking for - PASS
• No DRM. None. I don’t mind what the format is, if there’s no DRM, as long as it can be played on Linux (which is pretty much everything). Bonus points for oggs. Half a bonus point for just plain mp3. - PASS
• A track costs a pound or less. I’m not paying more than a quid for one song. - PASS (99c is about 50p)
• I feel comfortable putting my credit card number into the site. This means, in practice, that if it’s called something like mp3downloads.haxx0r.ru, I am not interested. - PASS
• I can just buy a song by putting my credit card number in and getting it for download. I don’t need to sign up for an account, give them all my details, none of that. - FAIL
• My music tastes aren’t very eclectic, so I’d expect the service to carry most of what I’d want to listen to. This means that a service for one label alone isn’t really what I want. I don’t want to discover new music with this; I want to get the stuff I already know about and want to listen to. - PASS
• I’ll get, probably, about five songs a year. So a subscription service is out, especially since with most of them your music stops working when you unsubscribe. - PASS

So it only fails on one thing: you need to sign up for an account. However, I already have an Amazon account. This is still technically a failure — because my desire for no signup was not only for my own benefit but because I didn’t want it to be a powerplay by some firm who would then spam everyone who bought mp3s until the end of time — but largely people already have Amazon accounts and Amazon have shown themselves (in my experience) to be reasonable citizens in this regard. I don’t receive lots of spam or unsolicited “recommendations” from them, and (from a web, if not open source perspective) I think the Amazon Web Services are a Good Thing. So although that’s a fail I’m prepared to let it slide.

Well done Amazon, I say. I suspect that it’s only tracks from some record companies, or some labels, or some other criterion that I don’t care about, but since my test track appears there they must have at least some of the music I like. Now I get to start buying mp3s.

Update: dammit, it requires a US billing address. Obviously I could lie about that, but if I was happy to lie then I’d just google for the mp3. So it’s presumably US-only at this point. Anyone got any contacts at Amazon who could give me an indication as to when or whether it’s being rolled out to other countries?

The most popular thing I’ve ever written is the JavaScript table sort library, sorttable. Recently, I got into a discussion with the LugRadio chaps about advertising on websites, and whether it’s a good idea or not. I’ve toyed in the past with the idea of adding adverts to this site; it somehow feels a little distasteful to me, but during the discussion it became apparent that I don’t actually have any reason to back that up; it’s pure prejudice. Somehow it feels less pure to do something if you make money from it: the phrase “filthy lucre” exists for a reason, and the love of money is the root of all evil. On the other hand, I do love money since it lets me buy cool things. So. To ad or not to ad?

On the other hand, I got an email from the Dynamic Drive people asking if they could feature sorttable in their directory of JavaScripts. Now, one of the things that the JavaScript community have discussed (and this came up in this past weekend’s JavaScript pub meet — pics available) is trying to get good, well-coded, modern scripting into these huge galleries of download-and-use plug-n-play scripts. The idea here (and not everyone agrees with me on this, I feel bound to say) is that we are never going to convince some people to actually give a damn about the quality of scripts that they use or write. They’re just going to think, “I want some effect, I googled for that effect, and here’s a script that does it, so I follow the instructions to drop that script into my site, job done.” Since that’s going to happen, we should make sure that the scripts that people find are decent ones. That’s why I wrote sorttable, for example: to ensure that people have a simple drop-in decently-coded way of doing client-side table sorting. One good way of doing this is to talk to the current big repositories of scripts, like Dynamic Drive, and work with them to try and make sure that their scripts are good ones.

But…if I put the script on Dynamic Drive, then some people will get it there instead of from me (even though there’ll be a link to my site) and…that’ll hurt my ad revenue, if I have ads.

So, questions therefore, for those of you out there reading this, whether you’re a JavaScripter or a website owner or just a consumer:

1. Would it be a good idea or a bad idea to have ads on some of my pages? (I’d probably do the browser code and other code pages, and old (not current) weblog posts.)
2. Should I put the script on Dynamic Drive?
3. Should I do both?

Your opinions greatly received in the comment box.

For some time now, I’ve been trying to work out where best to store my photos. You see, I’d like a gallery on line, so people can view it, and I’d like to be able to do simple photo editing — rotations, reflections, red-eye removal, that sort of thing. I was therefore caught between the idea of a local photo program, on my computer, and publishing those photos to an online gallery, and the idea of just having the online gallery and making sure that it’s one that can handle the editing requirements I’ve got. For some time I went backwards and forwards on this, thinking one way way best and then the other. I even toyed with the idea of writing some sort of web-based photo management app. I don’t like keeping things in two places — it’s an invitation to them getting unsynchronised. On the other hand, most of the existing web-based photo management (as opposed to photo display, for which you need nothing more than HTML) apps are shit. So, between a rock and a hard place.

One night I had an epiphany, which is: bandwidth is not infinite. Doing all my photo management online is unacceptably slow and annoying in a world where one photo might be 2MB in size. I couldn’t bear it. Of course, here, I’d fallen foul of one of the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing. Much as people would like to claim it, remote resources and local resources are not equivalent, at least not until we get a decent fast internet. That being the case, I needed to plump for a photo management app on my machine and then simply publish the photos online. Now, the choice of photo management app was fairly obvious: F-Spot. It’s nice, it integrates with Gnome. Its main competitor on the Linux desktop is Digikam, which is pretty good but which I just don’t like. No particular reason, and no discredit to the digikam team; it’s just not my sort of thing.

One big download later and I’d imported all my existing gallery photos into F-Spot. It also made it easier to import new photos from my camera, which was nice. Next step, then: putting these photos on the web so people can see them. F-Spot supports exporting to a number of existing photo sites (Flickr, smugmug, etc), to Gallery, the PHP online photo gallery thing, and to its own HTML layout and jimmac’s Original gallery. I was all geared up to use the HTML layout, at which point I found that it can’t be customised. I want my gallery (eventually) to fit in with the look of my site. So, I thought to myself: I’ll write something that parses that HTML, grabs all the info out of it, and then creates my own static HTML gallery. That’s a good idea.

Two months pass and I’ve done fuck all. What this actually means, when this happens, is that I’ll never get round to it. After three decades I know my own mind, even if it takes steps to hide what it’s thinking from me occasionally. In the interim, something important happened: Jono posted a few images on his website, they got syndicated onto various planets, and as everyone pulled up the image it drove our poor server to its knees. After some experimentation with ImageShack for this sort of thing, we came to the conclusion that off-site image hosting is what we need.

So Jono went to Flickr, because he hates freedom.

Flickr’s pretty good, I’m not going to deny it, but, as has been related in these pages before, I’d like to try hard to use free software only where possible. I’ve got no problem with paying a subscription to someone who’s doing the hosting for me, but I’d like to use someone who’s got open source running their site. Flickr might use lots of free software under the covers, but it itself isn’t free. Other photo sites seem to be the same; Smugmug are very proud of how they use free software, and they contribute changes and extra code back to the community in a good way, but the software for the site itself isn’t Free, so I was loath to use it.

Those of you saying “I bet you use Google!”, yes, yes I do. I didn’t say I’d succeeded in every way in not using non-free software, but two wrongs don’t make a right; just because I’d given in in certain areas doesn’t mean I should give in in all areas, does it?

And then I had a brainwave. LiveJournal is built on free software, and it’s released and available. And they do photo hosting. After a bit of looking around, I established that yes, indeed, they do, the code is open source, and so off I went to LJ. And now I have my photo gallery online. Well done, Brad and LiveJournal. I said before, a long time ago, that if the Semantic Web works then it’ll work on LJ first; looks like running a public profitable service without hiding your source away is working first there too.

It needs theming to look like the rest of my site and just generally not look horrific. I am aware of this, but I haven’t had a chance yet to properly understand the LJ “S2″ theming engine. I’ll get to it. I am also aware that by not being on flickr I miss out on being part of that community; my photos won’t show up in tag searches, that sort of thing. That is a shame, and I am indeed missing out; still, there you go.

This also means that I have finally got photos of the 2007 SOCPA mass lone protest available. Enjoy the site of Bill, Ginny, and I holding up signs in front of Westminster landmarks! And if you think we look daft then, well, where were you when we were protesting, eh?

Mark Shuttleworth:

Ubuntu 7.10 [the version about to go in development, due for release October 2007, codenamed "Gutsy Gibbon" - sil] will feature a new flavour - as yet unnamed - which takes an ultra-orthodox view of licensing: no firmware, drivers, imagery, sounds, applications, or other content which do not include full source materials and come with full rights of modification, remixing and redistribution. There should be no more conservative home, for those who demand a super-strict interpretation of the “free” in free software. This work will be done in collaboration with the folks behind Gnewsense.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay! I’ll be able to use Ubuntu and not feel slightly bad about it, because it’ll no longer be a little bit pregnant but it’ll be the loveliness of Ubuntu, with all the care and attention paid to my experience as a user. There can be no better news. Good work, Mark S and the Ubuntu team.

Those of you who are thinking “who the fuck cares?”, read my previous request for this to happen and particularly Freedom vs Features to find out why I care. You should also read Jono Bacon’s Features vs Freedom; if you fall on his side of the fence rather than mine, that’s fine, because in October we’ll both be able to be Ubuntu users without a problem. We can both be part of the conversation.

On the 21st April 2007, me and 2000 other people will be in London, doing 20 separate ten-minute demonstrations around Whitehall to protest about the SOCPA law, which says that to demonstrate in this area you need to beg permission from the police. I personally think that having to ask permission to exercise your democratic right to protest is bloody appalling, so let’s try and do something about it!

This is being organised by Mark Thomas. You can read more about the SOCPA protest at markthomasinfo.com. Basically, you have to write to Charing Cross police station to ask for permission to demonstrate in the “SOCPA area”, so Mark’s aiming for two thousand people (he’s up to 1200 already!) to each do twenty separate 10 minute one-person protests over the course of Saturday 21st April. There are lots of buildings in the SOCPA area; choose the ones you want to demonstrate about! Most government ministries are there, McDonalds are there, there are supermarkets and the Adam Smith Institute and the BBC’s Millbank studios. Show people that SOCPA is ridiculous. Thomas has produced an info pack to help you put together what you need. In particular, you have to send a real paper letter for each protest that you’re doing to Charing Cross police station, and they have to be in at the latest by the end of the week, so if you want to be part of it you’ll need to join in quickly. There’s a little “wizard” on Thomas’s site to help you easily produce the twenty letters you’ll need!

SOCPA is a stupid law. You should not have to beg permission to protest! One woman was arrested for ringing a bell and reading out the names of war dead, which is apparently a serious threat to the republic in this day and age. The law was basically brought in specifically to stop the protest by Brian Haw, who has been demonstrating in Parliament Square since 2001. The government have tried repeatedly to have him removed or deny him the right to demonstrate, and have failed; they passed SOCPA to try and ban him and everyone else from protesting anywhere near the government buildings, and then a court declared that the law didn’t apply to Brian because he was there before the law came into effect! One point to Brian Haw and the courts; minus nine million points to the government and trying to legislate away even more of our rights. The police have said that they get about 1300 SOCPA requests a year; we’re giving them twice that in one day. Get your placard and come with us!

Here’s the route that I’ll be taking. If you want to meet up while we’re there, drop me a line! Among the mini-protests that I’m doing are ones for enforcing anti-disability-discrimination laws against websites, as is supposed to happen, and use of open formats and open source software within the government, which two things probably cover a good proportion of the people reading this!

10:30 - 10:40 Parliament Square
10:50 - 11:00 DfES
11:10 - 11:20 Centre For European Reform
11:30 - 11:40 Channel 4
11:50 - 12:00 Home Office
12:10 - 12:20 DoT
12:30 - 12:40 MI5
12:50 - 13:00 DEFRA
13:10 - 13:20 Parliament Square
14:00 - 14:10 QE2 Conference Centre
14:20 - 14:30 Tescos
14:40 - 14:50 Boudica
15:00 - 15:10 MoD
15:20 - 15:30 McDonalds
15:40 - 15:50 Hungerford Bridge
16:00 - 16:10 Treasury
16:20 - 16:30 Cabinet Office
16:40 - 16:50 DWP
17:00 - 17:10 Downing Street
17:20 - 17:30 Parliament Sq

The WHAT-WG have been putting together specifications for a new version of HTML, to avoid the stagnation of the W3C. (Recently, the W3C seem to be responding to that by setting up their own working group, and you can be a part of that process; the WHAT-WG is already open to the public). Lots of interesting things happening there, but two recently show the two sides of the web, good and bad.

First, you can embed video into Internet Explorer without using <object> or <embed>, using HTML+TIME, a really interesting open W3C standard that no-one else ever bothered to implement (like VML, really). Cool technique, and another example of how the Microsoft IE team do interesting stuff and don’t just try and screw up the web. We have to remember this when preaching the new standards orthodoxy.

And then, over on the dark side, Apple are asserting patent rights over the <canvas> element, which they invented and the WHAT-WG have included in their proposal for a new HTML.

Microsoft doing cool exciting and innovative stuff; Apple using bully-boy legal tactics to shut down innovation.

Funny how the wheel turns, isn’t it?

This entry is my opinion and certainly doesn’t represent the views of my employer, who couldn’t care less about software freedom.

I’ve been in lots of discussions about software freedom. I’ve been loud-mouthed about it at my Linux User Group, I’ve been loud-mouthed about it on LugRadio, I’ve posted about it here. I’ve also recently expressed the view that Ubuntu might not be quite free enough for me. I suspect it might be time to try and lay out my viewpoint in a bit more detail.

My viewpoint boils down to: all software should be free. You might agree with that, you might not. This has come up most sharply recently with the much-announced Ubuntu decision to attempt to compete with proprietary alternatives like Windows Vista and Mac OS X by enabling a better graphical interface if you have proprietary video drivers. I don’t agree with that shift, and my view on that point has been challenged as being inconsistent, a block on the future success of Linux, and just plain wrong.

One of the phrases I’ve used in the past, particularly on LugRadio, is “no compromise”. I’ve said repeatedly that we shouldn’t give up on freedom to get features, that we shouldn’t be prepared to embrace proprietary, closed-off software even if that rejection comes at some cost. And I’ve said all this while working for a firm who use Windows everywhere and happily taking money off them in my paycheque every month. How is this reasonable?

Let’s look at an analogy. I smoke. Have done for years. I also have a six year old daughter. Now, if my daughter asked me if she should smoke, what should I say? Some people would say that I have no right to stand there with a cigarette in my hand and tell her not to do it. Others would be fine with the idea of me advising her against. Very few people would suggest that I should encourage her to do so.

If I, then, told her that she shouldn’t smoke, and that it would be bad for her, would that make me part of the holier-than-thou hypocrite brigade? Should she ignore my advice on that basis? Should she ignore any other advice that I give her, like not sticking her fingers in electric sockets, because I’m a holier-than-thou blogger who doesn’t practice what he preaches?

When I was a kid I got told that two wrongs don’t make a right. Myself smoking and her not is a better goal, overall, than myself smoking and her smoking too. Obviously, a better end still would be neither of us doing so. However, it would be better to at least start by making her Free of the bad thing, even if I haven’t managed it yet.

That someone suggests an idea but doesn’t do it themselves doesn’t make the idea a bad idea. That I smoke doesn’t make my advice to people to not smoke be worthless.

Back away from the analogy again, although I imagine you can see how it’s related to the topic. That I want to hold people to a standard of Freedom that I haven’t yet achieved myself isn’t a fault with the idea of being free. It’s a fault with me, that I haven’t got that far yet. If you’d like to help, I’d be interested in your input on how I might make Ubuntu free enough for my needs.

If you’re using Linux, right now, it’s a reasonable assumption that software freedom means something to you. There are people, plenty of them, out there who are using it purely because they like it or because it’s the best technical solution for them, but a high proportion of the Linux userbase are part of that userbase at least partially for ethical, as well as technical or financial, reasons. If that’s the case, ask yourself: would you be happy to see Linux have a 50% market share but have the principles of free software, of being able to hack on it all, be partially compromised (there’s that word again) to get that far? Some of the nature of Free software is difficult to choke down at times; that someone can take your work and sell it and not give you any of the money, for example. Or that someone else could take your code and change a few bits and make something better, and get most of the credit. That’s what it’s about, though; that’s what the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the Open Source Definition, and the Free Software Foundation, that’s what they’re all talking about. If you believe in that, if you want to be in a position where not only can someone sell your work or improve on it, but also where you can sell someone else’s, or where you can improve on another person’s program, you have to support Freedom. If you really wouldn’t mind if your next Linux distribution (or the one after, or the one after that) was only, say, 60% hackable, because the rest of it is proprietary — so we can keep up with the competition, of course, or because we need that hardware — then you should have no qualms about the decision at all, and good luck to you. You’re welcome to feel that way. If you don’t like that idea, though, perhaps you take offence at being lumped into a holier-than-thou zealot category.

A phrase you’ll hear, sometimes, is the end justifies the means. Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn’t; you can think of arguments for each side relatively easily, I suspect. Ask yourself, though, what happens if you decide to step away from your principles for a while and then find yourself unable to get back to them later. It’s not a pleasant situation to be in, to hold something dear to your heart and find yourself unable to achieve it because of some bad choices you made in the past. Making those wrong choices might make it impossible to ever get to your goals. Some doors can only be closed once. It’s difficult to know ahead of time whether the choices we’re making are of that type, but you owe it to yourself to consider the possibility. Make your views felt; be rational and reasonable about it, and clearly outline what might happen, so you can’t be dismissed as a zealot or shouted down by people who don’t realise the seriousness of what they’re contemplating. But be part of the conversation.

I use Ubuntu Linux. Have done since the day it was released. And I like it. However, I’ve had more than one argument with Jono about what I perceive as its increasing move towards encouragement of non-free software. I don’t want to get into that argument right now, so simply take it as read that I’m concerned about it, and feel free to consider me wrong for being concerned; I don’t mind.

Some people will be saying at this point: what about GNewSense? That’s Ubuntu with all the non-free stuff removed, isn’t it? Well, yes, it is. I’d like to use it. However, I can’t, for (as ever) two reasons.

The first is that there is no upgrade path from Ubuntu to GNewSense. If I want to move, I have to do a fresh install of GNewSense. that means reconfiguring everything to work the way I like it to work. If you’re thinking that I can just back up my configuration and copy it over to my new gnewsense installation, then, well, perhaps, if I knew where it all was. I don’t have records of every config file I’ve changed; I don’t know where they all are; I don’t know if all my configuration will work on GNewSense because I don’t know what I’ve tweaked. I was surprised that I can’t just add the GNewSense stuff to my list of software repositories and tell my machine “go ahead and upgrade”. Apparently that’s not a goal for the GNewSense team; OK, no problem. I’m not going to tell them how to run their project. It strikes me that a reasonable proportion of their potential userbase is people who already use Ubuntu but want a genuinely Free version, but I don’t want to assume that everyone’s like me.

The second reason is that GNewSense is based on dapper, Ubuntu 6.06. I’m running edgy, the newer version, Ubuntu 6.10, and I don’t want to lose the improvements that edgy brought me. Now, again, I’m sure that that’s not a deliberate decision but just a lack of time on the part of the GNewSense development team, but this reason and the other one lead me to not be in a position to shift to GNewSense.

So, what’s the alternative? Well, I can’t really see how making a completely Free version of Ubuntu wouldn’t just involve (a) removing some packages and (b) rebuilding a few packages. I just don’t know which ones. I was hoping that I’d be able to find that out from the GNewSense people too, with the goal of me writing a “Free My Ubuntu” script which does all the removals for you: to get a completely Free Ubuntu without any restricted kernel modules, simply download real Ubuntu and run the script and you’re done. However, the GNewSense team’s workflow is oriented around you building a whole distribution using Ubuntu as a base, rather than about you taking an existing Ubuntu installation and turning it into GNewSense (or any custom version you’ve made) and so they don’t really have that sort of script.

Some people (different people to the ones who suggested GNewSense above) may now be foaming at the mouth about how I’m a free software zealot who’s standing in the way of progress, and that Ubuntu is Free, and that I should just shut up. Again, feel free to consider me wrong; I won’t mind. I’m not suggesting that Ubuntu isn’t Free enough for you, I’m just saying it isn’t enough for me, and luckily, because of the nature of open source software, I have the ability and the permission to take the 99.5% of Ubuntu that I like and combine it with 0.5% of my own stuff to create my own perfect operating system.

What I’d really like to see, in the fullness of time, is this entirely-Free approach be supported by Canonical and the Ubuntu distro, so there are no restricted modules, I don’t get offered the choice between free and non-free video drivers, that sort of thing. My wireless card won’t work, and I’m happy with that. Of course, I can understand why Canonical aren’t devoting a lot of resources to that, and I can understand and sympathise with the arguments in favour of the (very few) compromises in the direction of non-Free software that Ubuntu, the distribution have made (binary drivers being an example here, to increase market share and make it look as good as everyone else), and that Canonical, the company, have made (the commercial repositories, for example). If someone comes up with Frubuntu, or GNewSense changes its goal, I’ll happily move to them; in the interim, I’m thinking about, and trying to work out, what the best way is of stripping all non-Free things, binary firmware blobs, etc away from my Ubuntu installation. Feel free to comment on why you think I’m wrong but bear in mind that I have heard most of the arguments against before. I’d welcome help and suggestions here on how to do what I’m doing; in particular, if you have a comprehensive list of things with a disputed Free status then I’d be very interested in seeing it.

According to the BBC, the Gowers review will recommend not extending the term of UK copyright from 50 to 95 years. Cliff Richard is disappointed by this but, well, fuck Cliff Richard. The proposed extension was to “harmonise” UK copyright law with US law, so when the US extends we all follow on behind? The hell with that. Nice one Andrew Gowers. Obviously the recording industry is getting their knickers in a twist over this, not that I care very much. Applauds to the independent review!

The Open Schools Alliance are asking people to write to their MP in support of an Early Day Motion by John Pugh, MP. It reads:

That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market.

I’m entirely in favour of this campaign. Every time I go to Niamh’s school I think that they could be doing so much more with IT if it wasn’t that they can’t do what they want. Sam tells horror stories about software for teachers. It needs fixing.

So I wrote to my MP. Why don’t you write to your MP too, if you agree?

Dear Lynda Waltho,

John Pugh MP has tabled Early Day Motion number 179, entitled Software in Education, which I found at http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=31752&SESSION=885.

The text of the EDM refers to the Open University and other educational institutions using free and open-source software, and expresses concern that Becta and the DfES are effectively denying schools the best choice of software by making it difficult for them to use open source.

Open Source software is software that is free of cost to everyone, and can be worked on by everyone. You may have heard of Linux, which is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows. Linux is created by a worldwide community of computer programmers, some employed by large organisations such as IBM and others devoting their free time to it. The idea behind open source software is that it gives IT staff the freedom to work with the software that they have; they can make changes to it to make it better or more appropriate to them, and the software isn’t controlled by one organisation who can refuse to fix the problems you find in it. You can find out more about open source software at http://opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php.

Speaking as one of your constituents, as an IT professional, and a father with a 6-year-old daughter at [redacted] School, I’d like to encourage our government to encourage schools to look at open source software as a way of saving cost and of helping schools work together to make the software that they need, rather than the software that large companies choose to give them. The e-Government unit published a report recommending that government agencies look at open source software as a strong candidate for software rollouts, with phrases such as “UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services”, and “UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments”. (I read their report at http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/policydocs/policydocs_document.asp?docnum=905 but you may have access to it some other way.)

The issue that John Pugh’s EDM is hoping to address is that schools receive questionable advice on IT procurement from Becta, the government agency responsible for the use of IT in education. BECTA’s framework agreements look only at the long-term financial performance of suppliers, which seriously hampers the involvement of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). There are large software houses which tender to the education market, but there are real opportunities for SMEs to become involved in software provision; this would allow a small software house to concentrate very specifically on a particular area of educational software, which brings employment across the country (rather than just at large 1000+ employees conglomerates). Concentrating on solely large enterprises ignores the risk that schools could become locked into expensive and restrictive contractual arrangements. Becta’s lists of approved suppliers are very limited both in number and variety - only fifteen suppliers for non-curriculum software for example, none of which has any commitment to open source software despite both the e-Government report above and that Becta’s own case studies found considerable savings in cost for schools using open source software.

Thanks for reading through this. I’d like to urge you to consider adding your name to John Pugh’s Early Day Motion. I’d be happy to talk to you further about this issue if you feel you’d like more information!

Yours sincerely,

Stuart Langridge

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format.

Signed up.

Also: new petition system, on the Prime Minister’s official website, and built by MySociety!

I have a page wherein I ranted about Carphone Warehouse. It attracted lots and lots of comments, most of which were just randomly obscene for the sake of it. Eventually, Carphone Warehouse themselves contacted me and asked if I’d remove comments that they found offensive, and I said I would. They sent me the following missive:

I refer our discussion over the phone a week ago in regards to the webpage of your website www.kryogenix.org which is/was about The Carphone Warehouse (CPW). Please accept my apologies for the delay in replying.

As discussed, we believe that numerous comments posted on this page are defamatory. These statements are not true and are not supported by any facts. The fact that they are posted by alleged CPW employees or former employees makes the matter even more dangerous, and readers of these statements may believe that they are a true reflection of CPW’s workplace, and more importantly, CPW’s work ethic.

We noted for instance comments implying that if your face does not fit you cannot progress at CPW. Other statements implied that CPW was only driven by money with no concern for its customers or employees.

These statements are intolerable and we would appreciate your willingness to withdraw them from the webpage. The webpage contains 246 comments, which are numerated. For convenience I will only refer to the numbers appearing in front of each statement. For clarity, the statement number one is the one that was posted on 25 February 2005 at 11.05am.

Please remove the following statements:

7/ 18/ 10/ 15/ 17/ 20/ 21/ 23/ 25/ 26/ 35/ 36/ 37/ 41/ 107/ 121/ 130/ 134/ 151/ 153/ 156/ 157/ 158/ 163/ 165/ 170/ 177/ 178/ 179/ 183/ 184/ 188/ 198/ 209/ 213.

Furthermore, we have also noted statements that were insulting and degrading. It is totally unacceptable that our employees’ names are disclosed in the comments. We therefore, demand that you remove these statements as well:

13/ 18/ 28/ 29/ 31/ 38/ 120/ 161/ 162/ 166/ 185/ 186/ 187/ 217/ 219/ 222/ 232/ 235.

As explained on the phone, we accept that people are entitled to express their views about CPW. However, there are limits to this freedom. Certain comments are extremely insulting and degrading and have caused shock amongst some of our employees. We would prefer to see the entire webpage closed.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

I’ve redacted practically all the comments on the page. On the one hand, there is the voice in my head telling me that I should fight the power and that this is an abrogation of free speech. On the other hand, I just don’t care enough to be bothered about defending a group of people who are clearly just looking for a place to vent.

A brief history:
I closed off comments on the post some time back, after it got up to 250 comments. Someone emailed me and left a comment on another post asking me to open it back up so conversation there could continue, because it “was helping a lot of people”. I took, and still take, the view that this site is mine, and I run it for my benefit; it’s not here to provide people with a general discussion forum. There’s other examples of that here too; I’ve closed off commenting on a post I made being amused about Schroedinger’s Cat because it became a discussion forum for people whose cats had died, and on my how to be rich and famous post after it became a place for people to post their phone numbers looking for talent agents. So, I said that if the Carphone Warehouse employees set themselves up another place to talk about this, I would add a comment directing people to that new place, which seemed to me to be a reasonable compromise. They did so, and I did so. However, I just checked that forum, and it no longer exists.

I believe that you should fight the power. This has been something of an ethical dilemma for me, primarily because, well, first they came for the people who complained about Carphone Warehouse and I did not speak out because I did not complain about Carphone Warehouse. I don’t mind holding the torch and standing up for my beliefs. I think, though, that my desire to do ethical good ends where I’d be maintaining a fight on behalf of a bunch of people who are clearly not interested in doing it themselves (they created some other forum and let it lapse) and fighting for a position (whether CPW are a good firm internally) about which I have neither information nor interest.

Have I caved in to the Man? Should I have done things differently? Answers in comments, because I have comments on all my posts until they prove to be a liability.

Incidentally, my emailed response to them said:

I’ve removed most of the comments on that page, including all that you specified. I’m a little concerned, though: we seemed to have a reasonable conversation, in which you made a request to which I agreed, and now I receive an email containing phrases like “we therefore, demand that you remove these statements”. Do you not feel that using heavy-handed legal terminology and making demands of people who have already agreed to help you will be counter-productive? It certainly made me consider going back on our agreement because you did not feel you could be gentlemanly about it.

Just had an entertaining lunch with Steve Chipman and Kevin Smith and Travis. I need to write down all the people I’ve met since otherwise I’ll forget that I’ve met them, which would be a bit bad. Good fun lunch, considering we drank about five beers: that’s a proper lunch. Yes indeed. They’ve all gone off to buy cowboy hats, but I already have a cowboy hat and so am now back at the SxSW venue. Thirsty for more beer, mind, but I probably ought to dial back until this evening.
The three of them reaffirmed my contention that no Americans that I know support Bush. We talked politics for a bit; about ten people I’ve met since coming here have said “please don’t judge us by our leaders”. What I don’t understand is that I know plenty of Americans, and they all seem decent literate clever people, and not one of them votes Republican. So where are all the Republican voters?
I should stay out of arguments I know nothing about.
I did find out that you’re allowed to pay waitresses less than the minimum wage here on the assumption that they’ll make it up in tips. Astounding.

Naked Law notes that the UK government’s IP review, set up to look at how to handle intellectual property issues and so on in the UK, has now issued a call for evidence. This is your chance to tell the government how you think copyrights and so on ought to work. I intend to draft a response, which I’ll post here when I do it; responses are to be in by April 21st, which gives you nearly two months.

I would like to occasionally download music. Not often, but occasionally, I’ll think of a song and feel a hankering to hear it. Today, it’s “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone. I would like to download this legally; I don’t want to just google for a ripped version of it. To that end, I’d like to find a good music downloading service and pay them my money, to reward them for being a good music downloading service. Good music services fulfil the following criteria, all of which are non-negotiable:

• I can download one track, instead of a whole album; I don’t want ten Nina Simone songs, I just want the one I’m looking for
• No DRM. None. I don’t mind what the format is, if there’s no DRM, as long as it can be played on Linux (which is pretty much everything). Bonus points for oggs. Half a bonus point for just plain mp3.
• A track costs a pound or less. I’m not paying more than a quid for one song.
• I feel comfortable putting my credit card number into the site. This means, in practice, that if it’s called something like mp3downloads.haxx0r.ru, I am not interested.
• I can just buy a song by putting my credit card number in and getting it for download. I don’t need to sign up for an account, give them all my details, none of that.
• My music tastes aren’t very eclectic, so I’d expect the service to carry most of what I’d want to listen to. This means that a service for one label alone isn’t really what I want. I don’t want to discover new music with this; I want to get the stuff I already know about and want to listen to.
• I’ll get, probably, about five songs a year. So a subscription service is out, especially since with most of them your music stops working when you unsubscribe.

Does anywhere like this exist? Tesco Downloads ships DRM-encumbered WMA files, which I’m not interested in. Yes, I could convert them to mp3 myself, but that’s not the point; I want to encourage a firm doing the right thing, and I’m interested to know whether it’s actually possible to download music legally without jumping through DRM hoops and giving away all my marketing information. Let me know.

Vote for Florian Muller as European of the Year to give him the chance to speak against software patents. Spread the word.

Jorge Castro:

A Mac friend of mine once commented to a user “It’s things like user-friendly DRM delivered via iTunes that will change the market.” … It’s unfortunate that so many OSS people don’t realize that the goal was never “UNIX on the desktop”, the goal is “A Free desktop”.

The US Patent Office has upheld the Eolas patent on browser plugins. This is only the latest stage in what will be a long, drawn-out process, and it’s being appealed to the Supreme Court, so it might all change again. From my perspective, though, it’s a good thing. “Plugins” in browsers are bad. Java applets, embedded movies, all bad. I never watch movies embedded in the browser; I get the URL and load it into a proper movie player. I don’t have the Java applet plugin installed. None of this affects my use of the web. The web is, true enough, a marvellous delivery system for all kinds of interesting multimedia content. The browser, though, is not. Browser plugins have non-standard interfaces, are confusing, and break a lot. The only plugin that I use even remotely often is Flash, and I wouldn’t miss it if it went away. I say support Eolas, and let’s keep the web HTML.
That is, assuming that the patent doesn’t cover things like images or JavaScript in web pages. If it does then I’ll be less supportive…

I am back. It was cool. Great guys I went with; actual event was nothing very exciting, but it didn’t matter because we had a superb laugh anyway. More full writeup later, but for now a quick taster of what the time was like: The Little Book Of Chin. Warning: think about the idea of implying that someone is lying by showing them a chinny raccoon. If you don’t find this funny, you won’t find the thing linked funny either.
I am now going to go to bed and sleep until my name changes to Rip van Langridge.

The Eurpoean Parliament has rejected the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive 648 to 14. No software patents for us! Hooray!
Hooray! I’m not sure I’m being clear enough about this. That’s bloody fantastic news.
“Hi-tech firms supporting the directive said it was vital to protect the fruits of their research and development.” The SME market, ordinary users, open-source development groups, and Stuart Langridge all said “we’re not going to sign away our ability to write software to a few firms with deep pockets“. Hooray!
“More than 1,700 Europe-wide companies, represented by the Free Information Infrastructure UK (FFII-UK), joined the plea for the European Union to reject any law which patents software.” I think all of you who are relieved and pleased by this decision should raise a glass to Rufus Pollock and the FFII for representing our views. They’ve done a great job, and they must be really rather happy today. Well done, guys.
Update: those of you thinking “bloody free software hippies, why are software patents bad anyway? Stop whining!” might want to read Why Can’t I Patent My Movie? for the lowdown.

The legal technology team of lawyers at my law firm. Mills and Reeve , have set up a weblog called Naked Law to discuss technology law in the UK. It’ll be interesting to read things about the law here from the perspective of actual lawyers rather than the armchair activists you normally see on the net, and I can vouch for the Mills and Reeve technology team’s competence because I know them. They’re writing not only about high-falutin’ technology issues, but also those with strong bearings on the sort of people who read this, including software patents, spam, and music downloading. All too much of the commentary on these sorts of issues relate to US law (the Naked Law guys even link to Larry Lessig’s site), and it’s important to remember that the UK is not the same and, in general, is more restrictive.
One interesting divide between the technology world (especially the open-source end of it) and the legal world is exhibited in a post they’ve written about software patents. They say that “[legal] practitioners in the area … have been flummoxed by the vociferous opposition to this directive which is merely attempting to harmonise member states’ laws on the patentability of computer implemented inventions“, and go on to point out that some of the member states already allow software patents, and the UK sort of does (when aggregated with other things). It’s possible that they’re not aware of the full nature of the arguments against software patents, such as those made by FFII and others, and I’m sure they’d welcome a lively debate on this (and other) issues.

—–

Freedom must be on by default.
Yes indeed. Steven Garrity’s excellent series on “the Catch-22 of open-source adoption” gets another article, this time on office document formats, to complement the previous two, on music and instant messaging.

—–

If you don’t agree with ID cards in the UK, would you be prepared to refuse to register for one and also donate a tenner to a legal defence fund? If so, then you should pledge to do just that at PledgeBank. They want 10000 people to sign up, and they’ve already got 3400, including me, so you won’t be alone. Ten thousand of us, all donating a tenner, will give a legal fund of a hundred grand to defend anyone they try and make an example of. According to the latest surveys, 43% of the UK think that ID cards are a bad or very bad idea. Those of you who agree or are indifferent, fine, no problem; those of you who disagree, are you prepared to put your (not much) money where your mouth is? You know it makes sense: pledge your support!

http://www.pledgebank.com/refuse

For a while now I’ve thought of donating some money to a charity or similar on a regular basis. However, I’d like to choose an organisation who is part of the fight against Big Media and over-extensive copyright laws and DRM and all that sort of thing, since that’s what I believe in. If I lived in the US, it wouldn’t be a difficult decision: I’d donate to the EFF. Since I’m in the UK, though…who should I send money to? The Campaign for Digital Rights don’t solicit donations, FIPR don’t seem to be doing a lot these days…suggestions?

I signed up to a pledge to mail my MP to get free wifi in the British LIbrary as long as 20 other people would do the same. Twenty people have pledged to do the same, and consequently I have written to my (new) MP, Lynda Waltho.
The text of (the relevant bit of) my letter (sent through Write To Them unsurprisingly) was:

I’m writing to ask you to help convince the British Library to offer free wireless (WiFi) access to the internet. Currently, the Library do allow people to connect to the internet while inside the library, but charge a rather high rate of £4.50/hour. While the Library is a
(perhaps the) superb place to garner knowledge, it’s good to supplement that knowledge with that available on the internet, and libraries are the best example of the government’s drive toward better free public education. The New York Public Library (in its significantly more
free-market-biased economy!) offers free WiFi access to visitors to the library, and I’d like to see the British Library follow suit; it leads the world in most areas of free access to knowledge, and it would be a shame to see it falling behind in this one thing.

The MySociety crew, who are responsible for excellent things like WriteToThem (which replaces FaxYourMP), have built PledgeBank. PledgeBank is a central clearing house for “pledges”—you say “I’ll write to the BBC and ask them to do things in ogg format as long as 30 other people will too“, and the site handles all the administration of collecting those thirty people. You still have to convince thirty people to do it, but at least you don’t have to try and track all their names and email them to remind them.

So, I’ve just got my results for an interesting online political survey, and you can read those results. I tend to be most like Green Party voters, which is interesting. More interesting is that it thinks that I am “slightly left-of-centre“, which differs from my self-characterisation of “fairly left-wing“. However, I think that it actually knows where the centre is, and I don’t; in every single point on this survey, a large majority of people were to the right of me. So much so, I think, that I believe that I’m defining “centre” as actually being a bit right-wing, because the British population as a whole isn’t normally distributed about the centrist position; they’re normally(ish) distributed about a right-of-centre position. This is why we have one a-bit-right-wing party in power, and the Tories have had to go even further right to distinguish themselves.
It’s reassuring to note that I consider myself left-wing and so does the site, so I’m not totally deluded. I shall be voting neither Labour nor Tory tomorrow.
Do your own survey (assuming that you read this before you vote tomorrow…)

—–

The What The Hack conference, sequel to the HiP‘97 and HAL 2001 hackers conferences, is on in July! Why didn’t I know about this! I’m currently trying to decide whether I can get there, since it overlaps a little with this year’s Men With Big Stones tour. But I want to go. Some thinking to do.

Andy, who is a friend and comrade and not incidentally the other half of the Men With Big Stones , has started a weblog where he intends to talk about things which interest him, which include football, Linux, geopolitics, and HR. The Linux stuff should be interesting; this is a bloke who wanted a computer to do all the standard computer things (surf the web, read email, write documents, rip CDs, plug in devices) and so I gave him Ubuntu, and he’s had nothing but success with it. He is a bright shining light shedding the illumination of truth on my fervent contention that ordinary people can use Linux just as successfully as they use Windows, and like it just as much. However, that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. Today I’m going to talk about HR.
Andy’s a pretty big wheel in HR for a large bank, which I’m not going to name. Over Christmas we talked about reward and recognition for people in IT, and since I go along with Joel Spolsky on this I said that recognition schemes were no good, give them new laptops and 19” flatscreens instead, all that sort of thing. And he was convinced. This is great. He’s an HR guy who gets it. Whether he’ll be able to implement this stuff remains to be seen, but he’s been writing about his attempts to tell people that IT reward is not about certificates with your name on. More! More!

—–

Via On Call Bald I learn that the EU has dropped the Software Patent Directive. This is bloody superb news! We have Wlodzimierz Marcinski, the Polish Minister of Science and Computerisation, to thank for it. Never heard of the bloke before now, but he’s suddenly become an Edgar Villanueva level of hero to the Free Software community overnight. Apparently Marcinski “firmly requested” that the Directive was withdrawn from the agenda. FFII has more (as you might expect) including the following press release:

National governments were misled into believing they were getting a Directive which allowed patents only for computer-controlled technical devices. Instead, most patent professionals believe the proposed text would have forced Member States to uphold the furthest reaches of current EPO practice—so that, in the words of patent attorney Simon Davies, “all inventions that might reasonably be considered as within the realm of computer science, for example procedures at the operating system level to improve machine operation, or generic algorithms, techniques and functionality at the application level” would be patentable. Even the UK Government, one of the strongest supporters of the proposed text, admitted that “Clarity will only come from the first test case in a European court.”

Hands up anyone who’s surprised that the UK Ministry of Truth are strong supporters of it, by the way.

—–

On the 15th December, the long-awaited Report of the Review of the Regulatory Framework for Legal Services in England and Wales was published by Sir David Clementi. It’s a serious and large-scale review of how legal services are carried out in the UK, and it’s been viewed with increasing trepidation by bits of the legal industry. Fortunately, the Legal Services Review team who did it appear to have their heads screwed on right, much as does Sir David himself. The report is published in HTML as well as PDF, and that HTML is pretty accessible (it’s table-based, but hey). Sir David himself seems to have taken a cold and clear-eyed look at legal provision in the UK, and there are a couple of superb bits in the report. It was clear in advance of the report that it would support LDPs, organisations employing both solicitors and barristers (this isn’t the norm), and the idea that such LDPs might be owned by a larger commercial organisation. The Bar Council and others were resisting this, claiming that being owned by a commercial concern might corrupt the poor innocent lawyers and conflict with their ethical mores. Clementi, in response to this concern, unleashes this mighty zinger:

It should not be permissible for the owner, under the terms of the LDP’s regulatory conditions, to interfere in any client case or to have access to any individual client files or client information. What the owner does have a right to seek, from the money he invests in the business, is a proper profit. But then lawyers are not uninterested in such matters either. The notion that for lawyers, unlike businessmen, making money is merely a happy by-product of doing their professional duty has limited resonance with the public. [ F/54 ]

Nice one, Sir David. We like you, yes we do.

—–

“What they could and did do was send a powerful message that this city was now an armed camp and that those with the arms would do as they pleased and the rest of us would just have to deal with it. For many New Yorkers, it was like living under occupation…One man got into an argument with a captain who told him to get moving. When the man asked for the captain’s shield number, he was arrested. Just like that…It was weird seeing this kind of thing right in front of you and not on a TV program about some distant land where freedom is merely a concept…Strange as it may seem, this was the most pleasant part of the whole ordeal. The police were almost friendly as they tied our hands behind our backs with thick plastic tie wraps…“I’ve got five bodies down the hall to move into a cell,” they would say. Perhaps that dehumanized the detainees to them but it made us feel more human than ever. At least it did at that point…It’s a nifty concept – I’ll bet if they arrested the entire city, they’d find enough wanted criminals to get some people to actually support the idea…As we moved down that hallway, I heard the hoarse voice of a female detainee from behind the wall crying out for a lawyer. I was sickened when I realized that it was the same voice I had heard there twelve hours before.”
What is wrong with America that 1200 or so people were swept off the streets of Manhattan by the police on August 31st 2004? They’re the land of the free, fergawdsake: what’s going on?
(props to Bill for the pointer)

via Gladys