Coffs Free and Open Technology Network

March 26th 2008 is the first annual Document Freedom Day, a global day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards.

Have you ever sent out a document from your brand new version of your favourite word processor and got abusive emails in return from people who can't open the file you just sent them? They may even use the same software from the same vendor, but their version is crying "unrecognised file format"!

Ever fished an old file out of your archives and found you've got no software that can read it? Perhaps the company that made the software you used to create the file went out of business years ago. Perhaps they just didn't see any profit in continuing to support the old versions of their file formats. Either way you've just lost your data forever down the black hole of proprietary file formats.

Data loss, forced software upgrades (and associated expense), and vendor lock-in are not an inevitable part of computer use. For example, the OpenDocument format, an International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) standard for spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents, is supported by a wide range of software including OpenOffice.org, Google Docs, and IBM Lotus Symphony. OpenDocument is the file format of choice at organisations such as the National Archives of Australia, where the accessibility and long-term preservation of information is their paramount concern.

There are many other free and open file formats for text, graphics, audio, and other applications. To mark Document Freedom Day the next meetings of the Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club and ClubLinux Coffs Harbour will include a review of the best ways to ensure that your data remains accessible for as long as you want, not held hostage to the whims and fortunes of the company that wrote the software you use.

Mark Pilgrim shows how fact follows dystopian fiction in the case of the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. Looks like Amazon plagiarized the Kindle terms of service from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Richard Stallman's the Right to Read.

Medical practices around the world are rushing to roll out Electronic Health Record (EHR) software, in many cases without pausing to consider the freedoms and functionality they are sacrificing in the process. An opinion piece on the LinuxMedNews blog calls this "The Coming Electronic Health Record Software Disaster". The widespread use of proprietary EHR systems:

"... amounts to widely installing Electronic Health Record faucets of tremendous range of shapes, sizes and colors, each with toll booths attached to them, with the intervening plumbing as an afterthought. What the faucets actually do and how and when the plumbing in between will be installed is left as a future exercise."

An article in the journal ADVANCE for Health Information Executives concurs:

"New York City recently awarded a $19.8 million contract to a proprietary EHR vendor, which will permit the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to provide free software to physicians and clinics to be used for care of patients. While this may be a good idea from the standpoint of affordability and interoperability if the patients all go to the clinics that use this particular system, it won't be much help when those patients seek care somewhere else."

Forget Radiohead and Price's half-hearted independant distribution efforts, Toronto band the Craft Economy have been taping copies of their debut EP to telegraph poles, along with the posters advertising their upcoming shows. For those without access to a Canadian telegraph pole, you can also download the music from their website, under a licence that permits non-commercial sharing, unlike Radiohead and Prince's latest releases.

I'm listening to the EP at the moment. It's nice melodic power-pop reminiscent of Australian bands the Hummingbirds, the Falling Joys, or the Clouds.

CPA Australia has published a substantial article explaining that "as well as being cost-effective, open source software can give end users more control over their information".

Citing pioneering Australian free software adopters De Bortoli Wines, as well as Toowoomba Shire Council, HR and recruitment firm OnCall People Solutions, and free software consultancy Cybersource, they observe:

"There is a unique and fruitful symbiosis between those who develop and service open source software and those, like De Bortoli Wines, who use it. Customers share with developers and other customers in the creation, ownership and outcomes of the software they use."

If anybody knows how to regard the claims of commitment to standards and interoperability that come from proprietary software vendors, it's Jeremy Allison. Jeremy is a key member of the Samba team, whose software makes it possible for other operating systems to communicate with computers running Microsoft Windows using Microsoft's Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol. The name of this technology, rebranded in 1996 from the more descriptive but less Orwellian "Server Message Block", is misleading in two out of three possible ways. It is technically a file system, but it can't be described as common, as only one organisation has all the information necessary to fully implement it, and nobody uses it to tranfer data over the Internet, for a number of very good reasons. Jeremy notes that despite early emphatic assurances from Microsoft that CIFS sould indeed be common and freely usable by all...

"Once [CIFS competitor] Netware was defeated by Windows NT, their attitudes changed, and the flow of information stopped. Proprietary modifications to core protocols [...] followed, and these changes were treated as trade secrets, patented if possible, and only released under restrictive non-disclosure agreements, if released at all."

Jeremy examines Microsoft's recent attempt to have it's new MS Office file format "fast tracked" as an ISO standard in the light of their past performance on standardisation and interoperability. For anybody considering sinking their valuable data into the Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) black hole, he recalls Einstein's warning that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

"Waugh Partners is launching the first national research project to study companies and contributors involved in the Australian Open Source industry and community."

I can't think of anybody who's worked as tirelessly as Pia and Jeff Waugh to promote free software in this country, so I encourage anybody who develops or supports free software to fill out the survey. However I was disappointed to find that among the last questions in the survey are a couple of invitations to contribute to the deployment of proprietary software on free platforms, and I encourage anybody who fills out the survey to send the emphatic message that we will not harm our customers or our community in this way.