Archive for December, 2010

Fixing the Web with the help of the open source community

Published by Elizabeth Tatham on December 17, 2010 in Community and Guest. 0 Comments

This guest post was written by Dr Gail Bradbrook, who works for Citizens Online, a charity that promotes digital inclusion.

Fix the Web is, in the jargon of the day, a crowd-sourcing project with the aim of changing the face of web accessibility. It is led by Citizens Online, the national charity I work for. A couple of years ago, we did some work with the EC on their strategy for digital inclusion (the use of technology by disadvantaged people).

At a European level, the progress on ensuring that all disabled people have a good internet experience was shockingly bad. EU countries signed up to a Riga target in 2006, which said that by 2010 all public sector websites should be accessible. I don’t think they have (dared!) measure it this year. In 2007 it had improved by only 2%, so they are moving their target to 2015.

We are probably at about 40% in the UK, according to Socitm research, but of course that is just the public sector. The private sector is not as ‘good’ and there is clearly still a long way to go. Using the latest (2008) WCAG2.0 standards (the basis of the recently launched BS8878) would seriously diminish (to nearly zero!) the number of accessible sites. What struck me was that the attempts to rectify this situation were very top-down, useful, but nonetheless limited attempts to draw up standards and promote them, build business cases, etc.

I asked myself where the voice of the average disabled person was in this and what role social media and ‘good geekery’ could play? (I’m a self-confessed ‘Geek Groupie’ at Stroud’s Barcamp!). Fix the Web was born out of those considerations and discussions with stakeholders. We got some funding from the Nominet Trust to take it forwards. I was always certain that the open source community would be central to the success of the project (though I had to stop referring to you good folks as ‘hactivists’ because people thought I was proposing something illegal!).

The simple idea is that we want to make reporting inaccessible websites as easy as possible for disabled people. They can highlight any problems they are having in less than 60 seconds, then quickly move on, without the burden of finding the right person to contact, and then constructing a considered email or filling out a form (which may finish with an inaccessible CAPTCHA!).

People can choose from a few options when reporting a problem: using a form on the site (http://www.fixtheweb.net), via twitter (#fixtheweb #fail, url and the problem) or by emailing post@fixtheweb.net. However, my ‘dream’ was a clickable toolbar that would capture the website details and provide the easiest option. Steve Lee from Full Measure brokered an introduction – as part of his OSS Watch support activities provided to ATBar – to the folks at Southampton University who are developing the ATbar (formerly funded by TechDis). The development team of Sebastian Skuse, Dr Mike Wald and E A Draffan from the Learning Societies Lab at Southampton, have collaborated with Fix the Web to create a special Fix the Web button on the toolbar, not only making the reporting process as fast as possible, but also opening up the project to the 2 million current users of the toolbar.

The idea of the toolbar has also been supported by JISC-funded OSS Watch, which provides advice on the use, development and licensing of open source software. The team aims to build a community around the project and take it forward through its recently awarded JISC REALISE project. Over the last five months, there have been over 1.8 million ‘toolbar hits’ on the ATBar.

The underlying ethos of Fix the Web is about raising awareness across the spectrum of understanding on this issue. So those who are clueless will get to hear about it, those who forget to consider it will find it further forwards in their thinking, those who know something will learn more, etc. And it is about empathising with people and the barriers they face, whether in knowledge or power or current budgets, and working with them, rather than naming and shaming.

It would be great to get more open source folks involved in the project. You don’t need to be an expert in web accessibility to join in, but you may improve your knowledge by doing so. Volunteering takes place online, in your own time. This is very much about a lot of people doing a little and over time collectively helping to Fix the Web we all love.

The JCP is Dead to me, Long Live Java

Published by Ross Gardler on December 9, 2010 in Business, Community, Development and Discussion. 3 Comments

I’m a great believer in community, openness and transparency. I have lived the majority of my life believing in teamwork, collaboration and honesty.

When I was a schoolboy I played Volleyball. My coach taught me the importance of working hard within a team and, as a result, I was lucky enough to be selected for the England Schoolboys Squad. During the final squad selection process I suffered a pretty bad injury that prevented me from participating in the traning sessions. Rather than sit at home sulking I took my coaches advice and helped the remaining players demonstrrate their skills. I worked hard to both hide my frustration and ensure that the team was prepared to play without me.

On the day the final squad was selected I was the first to be called into the Managers office. Naturally I expected to be dropped, I wasn’t fit. Instead of dropping me the Manager explained that a team needed motivators and leaders as well as raw talent. Apparently he had seen two of those three qualities. To my amazement he asked me if I would take the role of Vice-Captain, focussing on team spirit and cohesion.

I was proud and amazed, but more importantly I’d learned a great deal about the importance of teamwork and collaboration.

A few years later my fun seeking took a turn towards some of the less healthy pursuits in life. Music became more important to me than sport and, after a series of false starts, I ended up managing a Dub Reggae band based in the crescents of Hulme in Manchester. This area was a horribly run down and deprived area, but it was a place of wonderful community and togetherness (if anyone cares the ExHulme site is devoted to how the area was back then, there’s even a photo of the band in its early days, with a very flattering although not quite true heading).

The band was called Community Charge, a play on a hated Tory policy of the time and a call to arms for the community to rally and charge against such policy. Through my time building the band and crew to a team of 16 people I learned that a handful of individuals with passion, vision and talent could rally huge numbers of individuals for a cause, entertain, have fun and even earn a living.

Fast forward a few more years and I discovered FidoNet and open source software as a means to reducing costs in organising and managing our tours. I immediately felt at home, the whole idea of people coming together to share skills in order to achieve more just felt “right”.

A few more years later endless touring had taken its toll. I went to University as a mature student in order to reinvent my career. I learned more from open source communities than from my lecturers. I became a committer on my first Apache project and I took an unexpected career move into academic research. My open source mentors helped keep me ahead of the curve. I contributed back and was rewarded with recognition and support that would have been far too expensive otherwise. I became an independent contractor and never looked back.

As a Java weenie I rejoiced when the 1998 creation of the Java Community Process (JCP) promised to allow the future of the language to be openly defined. Whilst the language itself wasn’t open source, at least the process for defining the language was open and reasonably inclusive.

More fast forwarding and Sun Microsystems announced that they were going to open source their Java implementation. The licence they chose was not a license I like to use, but OpenJDK is a free and open source implementation of an openly defined language. What’s not to like?

I’ll tell you what’s not to like – there’s a trap.

A trap that many in the community were not recognising. There are hidden restrictions that mean I (and you) can’t modify OpenJDK to suit our needs. If we do modify it we have to choose between either remaining protected from patent litigation or conforming to the GPL, the chosen licence for OpenJDK.

Similarly you can’t create an independant open source implementation of Java and protect users from patent litigation whilst also conforming to the Four Freedoms and/or the Open Source Definition.

This trap was put in place by Sun Microsystems and The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) fought hard to remove it. The ASF has served on the JCP Executive Committee for the past 10 years, winning the JCP “Member of the Year” award 4 times, and recently was ratified for another term with support from 95% of the voting community. The majority of the EC members, including Oracle, have publicly stated that restrictions on distribution such as those found in the Java SE 7 license have no place in the JCP

Sun did not remove the trap (despite a contractual obligation to do so) but they chose not to trigger it either. instead they chose to keep it primed for a day when it might be sprung.

Today Oracle own Sun Microsystems. One of Oracles first actions was to make it clear that they were not going to change the licencing terms for Java (despite a contractual obligation to do so). Even worse, Oracle sent clear signals about their strategy for Java – they were going to trigger the trap.

Since none of my business activities have ever made me rich I’m not about to tell Oracle how to run their business. However, I do claim to know a thing or two about openness, transparency and fairness.

Oracle are free to play the closed game with Java, but I object to being lied to.

The java specification is not open, OpenJDK is not open – Oracle should stop the lies.

I’ll skip over the fact that Oracle objected to the trap when they might be caught in it, but are willing to use it now they own it.

I’ll also skip over the fact that James Gosling, the creator of Java, has quit Oracle over their handling of the Java language team (Gosling told eWeek that “Oracle is an extremely micromanaged company. So myself and my peers in the Java area were not allowed to decide anything. All of our authority to decide anything evaporated.”)

Instead I’ll just add my support to The Apache Software Foundation who have resigned from the JCP EC. I’ll also add my support to the two distinguished individual members, Doug Lea and Tim Peierls who have resigned in protest over the same issue.

I object in the stongest possible terms, to Oracle claiming that Java is open when in fact it is “proprietary technology that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the spec lead chooses.”

The JCP is dead, will Java continue as a proprietary technology or will the community step up?

Disclosure: I'm a member of the Apache Software Foundation. In this post I speak entirely as an individual, 
not as a member of the Apache Software Foundation or as a member of the OSS Watch team.

Creativity, divergent thinking and collaboration

Published by Elizabeth Tatham on December 6, 2010 in Community and Discussion. 2 Comments

In my last blog post, I mentioned an article by Stephen Sackur, in which he suggests that most of us, in our youth, have the capacity to be innovators and free thinkers, but that we learn at an early age that it’s easier to conform than to rebel. Since then, I’ve been thinking about why and how this happens.

I found some interesting answers, and further food for thought, in the entertaining and wonderfully illustrated animated version of ‘Changing paradigms’ by creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson. He maintains that the current system of education was designed and structured for a different age, in the interests of, and in the image of, industrialism; a production-line mentality that aims for standardisation. Accordingly, schools train children to think in convergent ways – to find one, correct, answer. As a result, the innate capacity that all children have for divergent thinking deteriorates as they become educated.

Divergent thinking shouldn’t be confused with creativity. Sir Ken defines creativity as having original ideas that have value, while divergent thinking is the ability to interpret questions in different ways and to see lots of possible answers; you could call it lateral thinking.

Innovation, I think, requires both creativity and divergent thinking. Open innovation – the sharing of inventions and/or innovations across organisational boundaries – also requires collaboration. This is another topic explored by Sir Ken: ‘most great learning happens in groups’ and ‘collaboration is the stuff of growth’, he enthuses. Sadly, however, collaboration is also not encouraged by the current education system: in school, it’s called copying, and copying is cheating!

In my last post, I asked how we, as parents, can help our children to become free thinkers and innovators. Given that everything they do at school seems to encourage the exact opposite, we have our work cut out for us.

The Novell Deal

Published by Rowan Wilson on December 3, 2010 in Business and Legal. 0 Comments

The web has been aflutter with the news that Novell – owners of the SUSE Linux distribution – have been sold to Attachmate, and that futhermore a bundle of 882 patents belonging to Novell have been sold to CPTN Holding, a somewhat mysterious proxy for a group of tech companies organised by Microsoft. Whenever the words Microsoft and Linux get mentioned together there is extensive internet drama. In this case the concerns raised were chiefly

  1. that Microsoft might somehow use the 882 patents to destroy Linux
  2. that Attachmate might kill the openSUSE project

Point 2 was answered quickly by a statement from Atachmate shortly after the deal was announced:

“The openSUSE project is an important part of the SUSE business… As noted in the agreement announced today, Attachmate plans to operate SUSE as a stand-alone business unit after the transaction closes. If this transaction closes, then after closing, Attachmate Corporation anticipates no change to the relationship between the SUSE business and the openSUSE project as a result of this transaction.”

That leaves the suspicion that CPTN Holding might be a lynching posse for Linux. An interesting post on the FOSSPatents blog argues convincingly against panic on this score, but I think there are also other reasons for delaying any effigy burning or widespread acts of civil disobedience.  Novell was a member of the Open Invention Network, an organisation that holds a group of patents and licences these to tech companies on condition that they commit not to use their own patents against Linux. The OIN is criticised on occasion for seeming to be inert (in fact the blog post I linked above does just that) but it’s quite possible to argue that for a body like the OIN success looks an awful lot like inertia. After all, if it were constantly having to ride to the rescue of Linux, it would be failing in at least its intended deterrent effect.

In any case, OIN is kind enough to publish the standard agreement that tech companies sign up to when joining.  This agreement covers what happens when a signatory wants to sell (assign) the patents that they have agreed not to use against Linux:

5.1 No patents subject to this Agreement shall be assigned or any rights granted hereunder unless such assignment or grant is made subject to the terms of this Agreement. Neither OIN nor You shall assign this Agreement, assign any of its rights under this Agreement, or delegate any of its obligations hereunder, unless otherwise agreed in writing by the other party. Any attempt to do any of the foregoing shall be void.

I am not a lawyer, but my reading of this clause is that – assuming this agreement was in force between them – Novell needed OIN’s agreement to sell their patents and the patents themselves remain subject to the agreement at their new home. If this is the case, it seems extremely unlikely that they can be used against Linux.

Use OSS Watch’s resources within your organisation

Published by Sander van der Waal on December 1, 2010 in Business, Community, Development and Procurement. 0 Comments

Open source software projects can form a perfect example of a level playing field in software development. This is especially true for projects that have a meritocratic governance model in place, which by definition recognises all contributions to the project equally regardless of the person or organisation contributing. This is one of the reasons why we believe open source software projects are the prime example of open innovation in software.

It is therefore of no surprise that a lot of the materials that we write at OSS Watch are not just applicable to the Higher Education and Further Education sector in the UK (which form our remit as defined by our main funding body JISC). On the contrary, many of our documents discuss issues related to open source that apply just as well to the public sector at large, or to the commercial sector for that matter. I will highlight a few of the most relevant documents here.

Suppose you are in an organisation that’s developing software either for itself or collaboratively with other departments or other organisations. If you are considering the longer term sustainability of your software you might want to consider releasing your code under an open source licence. To better understand what software development in open source projects actually entails, our document that deals with getting to grips with the open development method could be of interest.

In many cases it is more beneficial to join an existing project community rather than trying to create your own. Joining an existing project means that you can tap into an existing body of knowledge and benefit from the development efforts of other, potentially myriad, developers. To better understand the mechanisms of contributing to an open source project some of more technical documents, like the one that explains what a software patch is, could be helpful. In any case you will have to make sure that all the provisions are in place to be able to contribute your code to the project.

If you are sure there is no existing project where your code will fit, you could consider starting your own open source project. In that is the case, it is important to consider what the right governance model is for your project. Do you want to go with the benevolent dictator model, which leaves all decision to one person or governing body, or do you want to create a level playing field by choosing a meritocratic governance model? Another important aspect in open source projects is ensuring the Intellectual Property is properly managed, which means that you should consider putting a Contributor Licence Agreement in place.

A completely different use case that we come across often is considering open source in a procurement process. Also then many issues are the same irrespective of whether your an academic institution, some other organisation in the public sector, or a commercial company. Our document on decision factors for open source software procurement could be useful in these circumstances. To get a more detailed and substantial view on existing open source projects, we have developed the Software Sustainability Maturity Model that guides you through the most important issues you should consider as an end-user of open source software.

To summarise, there are many aspects of open source software where our resources may be of use. All OSS Watch documents are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales licence, so you are free to reuse our content as long as you mention where you got it from and make any derivative work available under a similar licence. These are the documents that were mentioned in this post: