GNOME and Project:Possibility: collaboration in open source accessibility

Published by stevelee on March 14, 2010 in Development, Software and Community. 1 Comment

In my last post I mentioned how satisfying it is to watch the results of making introductions between people or groups. Recently I was involved in a link up between students and GNOME accessibility and though I’d explain how events panned out, as well my hopes.

Project:Possibility organise team coding competitions for computer science students. The the goal of these SS12 events is to create accessibility software that will be of benefit to real users. These weekend ‘code-a-thons’ bring the students together with a mentor from industry and provide an exciting chance to learn something about accessibility, while creating open source software. Thus students get exposure to topics and skills that are still sadly absent from many computer science courses. Plus they get to have fun and win prizes.

Project:Possibility was set up by Chris Leung while he was at USC so it is fitting that the latest SS12 was a face off between USC and rivals UCLA. This added an extra element of competition, and the winning team from each campus have been invited to present their work at the 25th CSUN conference (#csun10) next week. They also get the opportunity to explore the conference, getting a flavour of the many accessibility offerings. CSUN have been very supportive of Project:Possibility and are keen to see students learn about accessibility and take the knowledge along with them as they start their careers.

The Project:Possibility board decided to concentrate our energy on the weekend competitions, at least for the short term. While accessibility is clearly a key feature of the events, I felt the experience of open source is less compelling. The code is given a open source licence and placed on Google Code but there is not much opportunity to provide an in depth experience of open development or to support subsequent maturing of the new software. OSS Watch are very aware that employers are seeking open source development experience, and yet there is a shortage of skills as they are not often being taught in computer science course. This further influenced my thinking.

I have previously worked with the friendly and hard working GNOME accessibility community, so I therefore proposed that we offer students the opportunity to work with them. The idea was to support students in adding features to existing GNOME accessibility projects, working with community members. This would introduce students to the project, hopefully exposing them to best practices. My hope was also that this introduction will lead to longer term engagement with GNOME accessibility or other projects and continuing contributions. Some concern was voiced that students would not want to climb the extra learning curve while competing in a weekend event. The GNOME team, however, were supportive of the idea and we all hoped the right students might be ‘up for’ the greater challenge and potentially greater rewards. We came up with a few coding ideas and I’m pleased to say a team from each of USC and UCLA chose to work on GNOME Caribou, the new GNOME on screen keyboard that provides operation for non keyboard users (via pointer, switch or other devices).

Ben Konrath, the Caribou lead, was available on IRC during the competition and answered questions from the students, helping them to get up to speed. With his help, both sets of students got through to the finals and came 2nd and 3rd place overall. Ben will now help the students go through the submit and review process and hopefully commit their code into Caribou. From there it will be part of GNOME and so will appear in many Linux distributions. Something the students can rightly be proud of.

If you are interested in seeing what the USC students have done with Caribou then you can meet the teams at CSUN next week on 26th and 27th. There is already considerable interest in the students work, including from Microsoft. CSUN have promoted their attendance in conference announcements, and this has also raised GNOME accessibility profile, not bad seeing it is their fist year at the conference. If you would like to find out more about GNOME open accessibility the team are there all week at the booth.

I’m really looking forward to the conference, catching up again with GNOME (and Mozilla), meeting the students and, hopefully, hacking a little on Caribou. I hope to see you there.

Life is wonderful

Published by Ross Gardler on March 10, 2010 in Discussion. 9 Comments

Whilst this blog allows OSS Watch members and guest posters to express personal opinion we don’t usually use this blog for personal items. However, I’m making an exception today to remind myself, and hopefully some others, that whilst life can sometimes be horrible it is more often than not wonderful

.Loving brotherDad and newborn Saskia Proud MumSaskia Frances Gardler

On Sunday at 17:17 (GMT) March 7th my wife gave birth to a beautiful and healthy baby girl, Saskia Frances Gardler at 7lb 10.5 oz. Mum and baby are doing very well and are now home with a proud Dad.

I’d like to publicly acknowledge the superb  care that my wife and I received during this pregnancy. We only truly appreciate the National Health Service when we really need it, and Heidi and I have  needed it on far too many occasions over the last few years. The care we have received has been exceptional when compared to what I have seen in other countries.

I should also mention Oxford University Computing Services. I could not have hoped for a more understanding employer, it was clear from the first day that as long as I worked hard when I was able OUCS would respond by giving me as much space and time as I needed to support my family during this difficult period. I’m truly grateful to my boss Lou Burnard and to my exceptional team here at OSS Watch.

As for extended family and our friends - we hope they already understand how appreciative we are of their combined efforts in recent years.

Like I said in the intro, sometimes life is horrible, but more often than not life and the people around us are wonderful. We should never forget that in the difficult times.

Guest post: 2010 - Threats to copyleft

Published by Elizabeth Tatham on March 5, 2010 in Guest and Legal. 3 Comments

This post is by Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz, Director for European institution studies at Unisys Belgium (Brussels). His team is in charge of the www.OSOR.eu (Open Source Observatory and Repository), the Free/Libre/Open Source information platform and forge launched by the European Commission for public sector projects.

Combining freedoms and copyleft in the Gnu GPL license (invented by Richard Stallman) was the cornerstone of free software. This is now questioned due to the proliferation of incompatible copyleft licenses.

After counting 1,800 free software licenses used in hundreds of thousands of projects, the Black Duck company patented (Patent US 7,552,093 B2) the technology for controlling the use of open source licensing in a multi-source development process (meaning combined works, elaborated from multiple free components under different licenses).

No need to say that patenting proprietary technology to solve copyleft licenses incompatibility may not be seen by everyone as a major achievement!

Lamenting on license proliferation or blaming new license authors – who all call upon the best reasons of the world, looks useless. It would certainly be reasonable, as recommended by Bruce Perens, to deal with only four permissive and copyleft licenses, but this is wishful thinking. New licenses are presented every week by FLOSS authors and communities, and no benevolent dictator will limit human innovation regarding licensing.

The heart of the problem does not lie in the number of licenses, but in their incompatibility. I do not think that license proliferation is a failure of the FLOSS movement, it is rather the entire contrary: a testimony of the attractiveness of FLOSS models. In reality, license proliferation illustrates the failure of a certain model of strong copyleft, as it was initiated by the GPL in the 80’ and – unfortunately - reproduced by nearly all subsequent copyleft licenses. Once necessary and successful, this model looks not adapted anymore because it was copied and - seeing the Black Duck patent - one may question (like Ernest Park has done) if the way copyleft is applied does not generate today more jails than freedom.

According to my first study for the European Commission, the Gnu GPL v2 was used in 85% of the FLOSS projects in 2001. With a copyleft that was – maliciously – said “viral” by some, meaning that compatibility is always “upstream” (to itself) and never “downstream” (to other licenses), the adoption rate of the GPL should have been universal in 2010, confirming analysts’ assumption that “it is good for the community if people use a single copyleft license [1]”. However, the exact reverse happened: the GPLv2 (reducing) is still used in 50% of projects, the new GPLv3 reaches little more than 5% and other licenses are proliferating.

The fact a dozen of licenses are used by 90% of the FLOSS projects does not help very much, as the implementation of free solutions (which are often combined works) is done through integrating many components. It is enough to find only one incompatible license to compromise the distribution of these solutions.

The current situation is damaging for other reasons: it creates endless discussions on what could be considered as integration in combined works (dynamic or static linking) and it feeds disputes. To preserve their communities from schisms, gurus and acolytes urge followers not to use any other copyleft licenses, whatever their specific merits or advantages could be. It is time to admit that the strategy of keeping a “captive asset” of license users was not successful for avoiding proliferation, and that it is not the most appropriate way to reinforce the freedom, collaboration spirit and consistency within the fragmented FLOSS world.

In Europe, the recent - OSI approved and copyleft - European Union Public License (EUPL) meets some initial successes due to its compliance with Member States’ law and because it has equal value in the 22 languages of the Union. It has been selected by the German Federal Agency for Information Technologies, it is the license of choice in schemes published by the Dutch NOiV (see on the www.OSOR.eu site an English version of this scheme, translated by a member of the Swiss administration), a dedicated EUPL site was created in Italy, etc. In Spain, the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce (where the public agency Red.es is located, in charge of information technology) provides the following in call for tenders (software specifications):

“In case the contractor integrates in the development that is the object of the contract with modules or elements owned by third parties, he must first obtain from the legal owners the licenses and rights necessary to transfer the ownership of the development to , which will submit it, including the elements that are performed under the contract (such as fonts, dll, scripts, etc..) to the public license EUPL. In any case the total and final result of the development and the overall project will be subject to a license EUPL.”

Applying such provisions excludes strong copyleft components from the delivered combined work: all original developments are allowed; all “permissive” components are allowed (BSD, MIT, etc.); all “weak copyleft” components are allowed (i.e. LGPL), but no Gnu GPLv2 (or V3) components (except if the copyright owner is entitled to dual license the component under LGPL-like terms, for the purpose of addressing the contractual specifications).

The EUPL itself has an innovative approach to solve copyleft licenses conflicts: it publishes a downstream compatibility list (to other licenses). It is allowed to integrate EUPL components in a combined work that will be distributed under a compatible license. The concept is not new, as the FSF applied it with the LGPL a long time ago. The LGPL (now LGPLv3) is convenient for software libraries aimed to produce combined or derivative works: if the library is propagated on its own, it must be under the provision of its original license (LGPL), but if the library components are part of a derivative work, this work can be licensed under another license, while the original library remains LGPL. The EUPL compatibility is exactly the same, but its copyleft effect is stronger than in the LGPL (because compatibility is restricted to a limited and published list of other copyleft F/OSS licenses). Therefore it is not a weak but – say, a “tolerant copyleft”.

Such flexibility removes incompatibility barriers and restores developers’ freedom, while keeping it in the limits of the desired copyleft effect.

While the EUPL solution may be considered as a conceptual progress, its tangible impact will stay very limited as long other copyleft licenses will not give some reciprocity: the quantity of available EUPL-ed material is quite small today, compared to the mass of components that are already available under the GPL terms. Extending the list of EUPL compatible licenses (i.e. by adding the still missing GPLv3) will not change the issue resulting from the Spanish specifications, where the government requires the facility to distribute the received combined work under the single license of its choice (the EUPL in this case).

Solving problems related to the proliferation of copyleft licenses requires setting up interoperability provisions between these main licenses. It will create, and focus attention, on a kind of “circle of trust” where the original copyleft licensing condition of a software will never be changed, but where – just to take an example – a GPL component could be part of a combined work that the recipient (let’s say the French or the Spanish government) could distribute as a whole under the provision of the copyleft license of its choice (i.e. CeCILL or the EUPL) provide these licenses are allowed in the compatibility list.

The Gnu GPLv3 includes (in its section 13) the exact provision corresponding to the above need, but it is directed to the AGPLv3 only. The intellectual effort to extend this provision in direction of a small list of interoperable licenses seems easy to deliver. The reciprocal condition must be added: in the example above, the combined work could be also (as the need may be) distributed under the provisions of the GPLv3.

This could be a way out to the deadlock where we are, due to the proliferation of incompatible licenses.

Looking for alternative? Pay a Black Duck patent license!

Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz – www.OSOR.eu

[1] R.T. Nimmer, Legal issues in Open Source and Free Software distribution, The Law of Computer technology, Ch. 11 (1997, 2005 Supp.) (“Two different copyleft licenses are usually “incompatible”, which means it is illegal to merge the code using one license with the code using the other license; therefore it is good for the community if people use a single copyleft license (GPL)”).

Dev8D - where collaboration happens and skills are learnt

Published by stevelee on March 3, 2010 in Event, Development and Community. 0 Comments

One of the most satisfying aspects of working for OSS Watch has been observing the outcomes from introducing people and then encouraging them to collaborate on new ideas. Outcomes such as personal development and new or improved projects. The recent Dev8D event was a real highpoint in several strands of OSS Watch activity and I was inspired to have been able to observe what happened and be part of the action. Dev8D is about developers getting together and seeding new project ideas, something that is an important aspect of open development, and so is important to OSS Watch. The Dev8D team, led by Mahendra Mahey, along with everyone who participated over the 4 days made Dev8D a fantastic event. Much developer happiness was expressed both during and after the activities, not to mention the many new project ideas that were hatched.

Several coding challenges where made and our very own Sander won 2 of them with MuCoMaCo an interesting Google map mash-up of MLA library data. OSS Watch have provided continuing support services to the Apache Wookie (Incubating) project from the University of Bolton. Recently Sander recently organised a Wookie Training day at OSS Watch. This was led by Scott Wilson, Wookie project lead, and Ross, OSS Watch manager. Scott was with us at Dev8D, so it was no surprise that Sander’s winning entry was a Wookie served W3C widget. This enables it to be readily deployed in a range of contexts with little effort.

The other winning entry that OSS Watch had close connections with was Wookie BaLTI. BaLTI is a sample Moodle course by Mark Johnson and Dan Hagon and features the newly developed Twirlymol and CollabMCE widgets. These 2 widgets use the widget loading and collaboration facilities of Wookie to provide a shared 3D interactive view of a molecule model and shared WYSIWYG editing. Several threads came together to make this happen. Those familiar with OSS Watch and open development will not be surprised at how open collaboration has made this possible.

Since we spotted Mark’s announcement of his first small contribution to Moodle and subsequently invited him to present it at an OSS Watch workshop, he has gone from strength to strength. At the Dev8D awards dinner Mark deservedly one ‘Best newcomer’. An award that provided him with a small Lego car kit, which we ‘knocked up’ during the meal, and a rather handmade certificate. The point is that Mark’s enthusiasm for learning about and contributing to open development has been noticed and is sending ripples through the HE and FE communities. Mark attended the previously mentioned OSS Watch Wookie training day, which stood him in good stead for working on the challenge with Dan. Since the Dev8D fun, Mark has pledged on the Wookie lists to reimplement his editing widget without the current LGPL licensed code dependency and to contribute it to the project. Further evidence of Mark’s personal development and it’s far reaching affects comes from his recent blog post. He also supplied us with this comment.

My manager appreciates the opportunities that open development provide to us as a department and an institution, both internally and externally. By letting me go to events like Dev8D even though the things I did there don’t relate directly to my current job, she gave me the opportunity to develop new skills which will allow me to provide new facilities to the staff and students in our institution. We’ve just started an ILT working group with our teaching staff, so hopefully I’ll be able to apply some of my new skills and knowledge to the ideas that come from that.

Mark’s collaborator, Dan, was the first person I met at Dev8D, and as with Mark you can’t help but be affected by his friendly enthusiasm. When I discovered that he had created an interesting Google Wave widget I steered him towards Scott and Mark and watched the magic happen. Scott explain how trivial it was to port the widget to Wookie, and once they’d decided on the LTI challenge Scott added BasicLTI interfaces to Wookie in order to support the challenge work. These are now part of the Wookie project code. More great collaboration followed and someone gave them an Amazon cloud server to install Moodle on. I observed them working together, discussing ideas, fixing bugs and working on their ‘judgement’ presentation. I tried to muscle in on the action with another widget idea but got rather distracted and bogged down in practicalities. Still I do have some new ideas to add to Wookie at some point.

I also attended their pitch to the judges as moral support and I’m glad I did. Chuck Severance of IMS and Sakia and Steve Vickers where in the judging team. A soon as the pitch was over, Chuck and Steve rushed off to add the widget to Sakai, Blackboard and WebCT. Chuck made the point that by using Wookie and LTI it is now possible to have something running in all these platforms, and in a matter of minutes. He then distributed screen shots around various lists.

Dev8D saw many other collaborative ventures seeded or strengthened. New skills were learnt by motivated developers and new contacts made. For example I enjoyed watching Chuck and Tobias Schiebeck work on a tricky Sakai bug. Finally I’d like to mention GNOME who were running an overlapping event in London. After a bit of prodding for collaboration, Willie Walker and Brian Cameron came over and presented on accessibility and GNOME work. Both were very interested in the accessibility possibilities of “Mr gadget” Ben O’Sheen’s demonstration of software to talk to wiimotes. A representative from Dev8D also went over the to GNOME usability hackfest and I expect we will see fruitful cross pollination developing from this mutual interest. Not least is the opportunity for HE/FE developers to learn from a large, established and successful open source project.

Opportunities for scientific research in open source projects

Published by Sander van der Waal on March 3, 2010 in e-Research, Development and Community. 0 Comments

There are many interesting open source projects that can be beneficial to academic research. As OSS Watch’s recent article on e-Research by Gabriel Hanganu shows there are social and organisational problems in adopting open source for e-Research, but there are many open source software projects there to be joined. Some projects are suited very well to be used in scientific research and I feel that this is especially true in the realm of big data databases.

Google showed the way, really, with the MapReduce paper in 2004. They published their programming model for processing large amounts of data in parallel and although publishing it, they did not neglect to apply for a patent as well, which was recently granted. Hadoop, which originates from a project at Yahoo!, also implements the MapReduce pattern, but is completely open source being a project of the Apache Software Foundation. And now recently Apache Cassandra has joined the mix. Cassandra originates from Facebook, but has become open source in July 2008. It recently promoted from the Apache Incubator and is now an official top-level Apache project.
Work has been initiated to facilitate integration between Cassandra and Hadoop, which simplified means the Hadoop database HBase is replaced with Cassandra. There has been discussion of this on the list and a feature has recently been implemented. So there’s Yahoo! working on Hadoop and Facebook working on Cassandra, and recently also Twitter has announced that it is working towards using Cassandra for their backend. Also worth mentioning is the open source implementation of Amazon’s Dynamo database which is named Voldemort. This project is used and actively developed by LinkedIn and is therefore another example of how you can benefit from the work this large company is investing by engaging with this project.

To me, this all shows that there will be large investments in NoSQL databases from major companies in the coming years, and it will all be in open source software. This means that there is a lot of opportunity for anybody who has to deal with big data to profit from this investment. All you have to is try out the software and engage with these projects. Researchers also have to cope with more and more data, so I think they have good reason to follow these developments closely and step in to benefit.