][ stefano maffulli

Bradley is right to be excited for the phone call he received from a socially responsible investment company. While social responsibility has become a big issue for many companies, corporate reports focus mainly on projects to protect the environment, to sustain developing countries and to improve working conditions of their employees and contractors. So far, use and support of Free Software doesn’t appear in social responsibility reports. Companies instead mention more and more their support to Free Software (often using the term “Open Source”) in their marketing brochures. As a bad result, many people believe that Oracle is an ‘Open Source’ company, together with Google, nVidia and Intel since these have ‘Linux’ and ‘OSS’ all over.

I think we need a way to measure how close the actions of corporations are to the values of the Free Software movement and put such measure into corporate reports. We might discover that what they do is (or is not) far away from what they say in their brochures.  This index (call it Free Software Fairness Index) could serve as a basis for classification of Free Software Business, on which socially responsible investment funds can decide to invest. This FSF Index could be an indicator of the adherence of the companies’ actions to the principles of the GNU Manifesto.

It’s not simple to summarize real life actions into a number, but there examples out there that we can draw inspiration from.  What do you think?

It’s good to read on Palamida weekly reports that the GNU Afferto GPLv3 is being adopted at a fast pace, after I asked OSI to approve it. Considering that Google is passively opposing its adoption, I think that 95 projects is a good start. Now Funambol is in company of other high quality projects, like Clipperz and Wavemaker and with SourceForge supporting the Affero license, I think that there will be more. I’ve just updated the Trove category for the Funambol-related projects, where I could, but I advice other maintainers to do the same with their projects (and then move to the new Funambol Forge, which has cooler features than SF ).

I have the suspect that this is just the beginning and that AGPL will become as popular as the other two FSF licenses, the GPL and LGPL.

Notizia di inizio 2008: Sony BMG sta pensando di vendere file musicali via internet senza schemi fastidiosi di restrizione, i Digital Restrictions Management. E così Sony si unisce alle altre aziende del settore: Universal, EMI e Warner che per indebolire Apple danno diritti ai loro clienti. Le major hanno capito che ci piace comprare e spostare musica tra i nostri vari computer e dispositivi senza essere legati ad un solo produttore. A noi piace l’interoperabilità, ci piace comprare sul negozio iTunes, trasformare il file in OGG Vorbis e ascoltare sul lettore Samsung o sul cellulare. Ci piace masterizzare una collezione di musica natalizia da regalare alla mamma o caricare un disco USB da portare ad una festa a tema anni ‘70. E ci piacciono le soluzioni semplici: nessun DRM è meglio di un DRM interoperabile costruito ad-hoc (o peggio, obbligatorio per legge). Le major sembrano sulla buona strada, almeno per quanto riguarda la musica.

Sembra sulla cattiva strada invece la malconsigliata Viviane Reding, la Commissaria Europea alla Società dell’Informazione e i Media, la quale sta considerando la possibilità di costruire un framework legale per DRM interoperabili. A lei la campagna Defective By Design ha indirizzato una lettera aperta per raccontarle la realtà dei fatti: i DRM, tutti, sono incompatibili con il Software Libero e i cittadini hanno già chiaramente indicato alle major che le restrizioni non sono benvenute.

È presto per cantare vittoria perché comunque gli schemi DRM resistono su film (Blu-ray/HDDVD), sui giochi (misto a TPM, sebbene i bug siano sempre presenti e le protezioni aggirabili), nelle trasmissioni televisive (IPTV e digitale, sia satellitare che terrestre) e nella mente di alcuni politici incantati da anni di pianto greco delle major.

Agisci: firma l’appello di Defective by Design e sostieni la FSF.

DefectivebyDesign.org posted a list of actions and campaigns activated and run by FSF in the past year. I really like what the strategy they put in place and the results so far. DefectivebyDesign brought the problem with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to a wider audience, reaching also Newsweek. I loved the real-life events, like the raid in Seattle during Microsoft Vista’s launch: brilliant, Peter looked great in his hazmat suit The Expert Witness Fund to help families attacked by RIAA to counter their arguments on technical basis, the Play OGG to support OGG format and the new Kindle Swindle, to inform about Amazon’s crippled ebooks.

Plus the international campaign Free Software Free Society designed to inform all organizations, NGOs, coops, civil society about the values of Free Software. I’m glad to see that Legambiente has joined the campaign: almost 5 years ago they were the first to radically switch from Microsoft Windows to cheap and convenient GNU/Linux terminal based workstations. No trash, more useful computers. I remember how traumatic that was but I was happy to help the ~40 employees and volunteers to understand the values of Free Software and now Legambiente is a fully free environment.

So I join Mako and Peter: give yourself a nice present for Christmas become an FSF associate member or make a donation. With the Euro so high anything you donate from Europe will multiply

I’ve started the new tag system offered by Wordpress 2.3.1 a few weeks ago and I’ve also stopped using the categories. I left them on because I didn’t want to change the archives.  I’m still looking for a way to deal with dual language posts: Wordpress seems not to support natively multiple languages (we talked at the Cena Lunga about this with Giacomo and LK).  I thought of using different categories, it and eng, but I’m not sure how to achieve separate feeds. Gengo seems too complicated and doesn’t work on 2.3.1anyway, other solutions I found seem abandoned. Does anybody know of a *stable* solution to mark posts as Italian or English, offering two separate feeds?

While I was playing with WP I’ve added two new widgets: one from twitter (more freaky experimenting with social networks) and the new FSF fund raising widget. Put it on your blog too and give yourself a nice Christmas present donating to FSF. Did you know they have also a fund to support the defense of poor moms and kids against the RIAA lawsuits?

Sometimes it takes very little to improve visibility and communication of your brand. Few days ago, while experimenting with Facebook, I added some “causes” I care about to my page. I noticed something was not working. Se the image below: I’m sure you can’t recognize FSF’s image immediately, while you can see easily EFF and Creative Commons logos.

After a little chat with Matt Lee, the new FSF Campaign Manager, he modified the logo previously used. Now the panel looks already much better, although there is always space for improvement. Well done, Matt.

After reading this, consider joining the cause and donate.