newsletter

Computing Our Liberty: July 2005

Victory

It\'s summer time folks! Well, at least for the most of us (most of Earth being mainly on the northern hemisphere). For many summer is a vacation time, but this summer may also be a celebration time. The timing is great, just before you may have picked up your suitcases you heard the great news, the battle we were all fighting for the past months is won. EU wont see software patents legalized in quite some time after this. However, while you may certainly afford yourself a nice and happy vacation there, winning a battle (however significant it may be) isn't winning the war. Software is being patented in Europe no matter if these patents aren't universally enforcable and some countries may yet legalize them. This merely means that the eyes and ears should be kept open.

Computing Our Liberty: June 2005

Loosing the spirit?

\"Linux\", \"Open Source\", \"Free Software\", these are just some of the new major buzzwords floating around in the information technology world, each one having a different meaning to all of us, each one capable of inducing a different image in our minds of what the true sense of those words are. The average person might only see them as merely a great contribution to any young revolutionaries lexicon, and in this capitalist society made to believe that these things are somehow wrong.

Free Software is making a major breakthrough in the market, there are more GNU/Linux users around these days and even more corporations trying to take advantage of that very fact. Some are scared by it, others are excited by it, but somewhere in the mist of all the excitement did we somehow forget what these things really mean to us. At what point did it become ok to make money from \"free\" software, at what point did we say to ourselves, we have the right to have access to the source code. The truth is both are true, at one point it was black and white but somewhere along the line, the neat little line got smudged, turning black and white into black white and grey, it\'s this grey area that makes people unsure as to what \"Free Software\" truly is.

Computing Our Liberty: May 2005

Somewhere in the milky way galaxy, far far away from some alien\'s home, on a third blue planet around the yellow giant star that its inhabitants call Earth, on a northern hemisphere, continental formation called Eurasia, country called Croatia, on a hot spring, but summer-like day, in a camp-house-like \"box\", a small and fragile human being writes another small letter to the world, one to be transmitted throughout the international network, one that is once more - computing our liberty. A loose \"rant\" with a purpose - to keep up the voices!

What a beautiful planet we have here, in a beautiful part of the space (if there is such a thing as an \"ugly\" part of space), so rich, so vast, so inspiring - bound to make us create and then again create upon as we get inspired again, getting better and better at it - until we created a civilization, a civilization of the 21st century - aware of the world around us, even more, a space around us. But is this civilization as civil as it ought to be? Is this society as societal as it ought to be? Do human beings really care about this world, a world of humans?

Yet another month has passed, full of events, screaming thoughts and voices, virtual fights, victories and defeats. But the "war" is still raging. And this column is on the "computing liberty front", with small people like you and me with great multiplied power, fighting for a simple freedom to be masters of our own computers, our own digital destiny and our "hidden" urge to cooperate for our and everyone's benefit.

Software Patents: Screaming in the night: "Where is the light!"

But on the other front there are people afraid for their position in the world, for the destiny they planed to build on the expense of others. Software Patents in Europe and US are nothing short of that. Corporate powers of capitalism (read: profitland) are now more powerful than a country, or even worse, a union. So powerful that the union\'s principles are being thrown away for it - democracy (if there ever was such a thing) - rejected for \"higher interests\". The \"suspected\" collusion of Microsoft with European Commission when they, despite all of the major opposition, decided to pass software patents as an A-item leaving only one chance for it to be rejected, on a second reading to European Parliament, proves the already clear involvement of \"higher interests\". There is little chance that European Parliament will have majority for rejection and we, my dear readers, have come ever close to the worst threat our computing freedoms ever encountered becoming a legitimate reality.

Since this is the first edition of new \"Computing Our Liberty\" monthly \"look-back commentary and announcements article\" i would first like to introduce you to it. The idea is to *compute* our computing liberties as they were the past month time and as they are now. This means that we will review and comment major free software related events happening last month and their impact on our computing freedoms, that is, mainly our software freedoms. We will talk about power, justice, moral, irony, comedy, facts, FUD and other more or less disturbing things about events from within the turbulent world of computing.

So where do we start? Maybe by making out a picture of the IT world as it looks like today. And indeed it looks very colorful. I don\'t know an area of human activities that is as interesting and exciting as the IT world is today. And probably one of the greatest reasons for it is the continuing surge of Free Software both in business and a way of thinking. Those two things actually go pretty much together.
Free Software has probably caused the *most wars* or the *biggest war* that ever got ignited in the \"IT industry\". MS \"empire\" actually got a *real* competitor and to make it more interesting it is not even some kind of a new bombastic corporation with the new killer product. It\'s a new business model, disruptive, efficient, hardly beatable, operating on a different scale and up on another dimension.. virtually untouchable to anyone that tries to compete it with anything from \"downthere\". And it is spurred by a very different way of thinking which, obviously being shared by the free software \"warrior\" (advocates) camps, starts to light some bulbs above the heads of others whose battle field are the green landscapes of \"profitland\" (present capitalist market). And there they are, IBM and HP \"love\" linux, Novell fell in love so much that it even bought one of its breeds and RedHat and Mandrakesoft are the old folks who discovered that love way before. Everyone seems to be giving in to the Free Software currents more or less, everyone except MS (unless of course you *really* dare to think of \"shared source\" as Free Software) and Sun.