[Commons-Law] relay

Via: Hasit seth

Via: Prashant Iyengar

Via: Ramanraj K

bbls_ps@allahabadhighcourt.in wrote:

>Dear Sir
>The aforesaid article and some other articles by his lordship Justice
>Yatindra Singh dealing with computer software, open source are available
>on the web site of the Allahabad high court (www.allahabadhighcourt.in).
>They may be seen by going to the
>web Diary - Item Wise - speech/article or may be accessed at
>http://www.allahabadhighcourt.in/calendar/itemWiseList.jsp?group=11
>
>Yours truly
>BBL Srivastava
>
Thank you for the information. I'll forward the news to other mailing
lists that would find the articles and site interesting and useful too.
It is heartening to know that the Allahabad High Court is using free and
open software and standards so extensively. If I may say so, the
articles by Hon'ble Mr. Justice Yatindra Singh have approached free
software from a neutral point of view and present a fair picture to the
reader.

In the talk titled "OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
RIGHTS" delivered by Justice Yatindra Singh at NALSAR Hyderabad and NLS,
Bangalore and NUJS, Kolkata, Linus Torvalds has been quoted from "Just
for Fun: the Story of an Accidental Revolutionary' as
saying:

"The GPL and open source model allows for the creation of the best
technology.
... It also prevents the hoarding of technology and ensures that anyone with
interest won't be excluded from its development.

So open source would rather use the legal weapon of copyright as an
invitation
to join in the fun, rather than as a weapon against others. It's still
the same old
mantra: Make Love, Not War, except on a slightly more abstract level."

The quote captures the key IPR feature central to free software, and
makes the legal intricacies involved superfluous.
The practical reasons why many prefer to use free software is succintly
summarised in the following words:

"I shifted to GPLed software few years ago: the reasons were practicable.
GPLed software comes without any cost. And it does what I do--word
processing,
playing music, watching Video, surfing internet,and electronically
managing my
calendar --as well as any other proprietary software."

More generally, the observations on using computers in the talk titled
"IT: The Road to Speedier Justice" is remarkable:

"Computers are like 'English butlers'. They have to be told what to do
and they do it in that way and no other way. Computers love routine and
are never bored. But to achieve any success the minds of the judges,
lawyers, and court employees have to be streamlined into a method. One
has to leave individualism. The reports cannot be generated unless data
is fed into computers; they will not have any meaning unless they are
utilised and goals are fixed. And above all, if there is no will to
change, no orientation to the work culture, then nothing can work."

Sacrificing individuality is a small price to pay for the larger
benefits received in return by the general public. Probably NRC-FOSS (
http://www.au-kbc.org/nrcf/index.htm )could include some of the articles
as part of the curriculum for students. Public institutions that have
not yet adopted free software practices need to wake up now.

Thanks,
Ramanraj K

Via: Seth Johnson

> http://business.newsforge.com/business/05/12/13/1814250.shtml?tid=110


Seminar leads to ongoing forum for UK FOSS interests

By: Bruce Byfield

Thursday December 22, 2005 (07:00 PM GMT)


When Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli agreed to deliver a seminar on "Open
Source in Government" to parliamentary staff members and
representatives of local government in the United Kingdom earlier
this month, he planned to introduce his audience to some basic
concepts. However, when he got there, he found that most of the
audience was already familiar with the concepts. As a result,
instead of educating people in public life, he may have done more
than he hoped -- he may have helped to create an ongoing forum in
which the free and open source software (FOSS) communities,
political lobbyists, and members of the governing Labour Party
and the opposition Conservative Party can work together to
promote the use of FOSS in the governments of the United Kingdom.

The seminar was held on December 1 at Portcullis House, an office
and conference complex for British Members of Parliament and
their staff. Sponsored by Dr. Andrew Murrison, Conservative
Member of Parliament (MP) for Westbury, the seminar attracted a
broad range of political interests. In addition to employees of
both Conservative and Labour MPs, the audience included people
with ties to Chelgate Limited, a major English PR and public
affairs firm; the London Regional Council of the Confederation of
British Industry, a well-known lobbying organization; Eurim, a
technology lobbying group; mySociety, a organization to promote
the use of the Internet in the public and non-profit sectors;
Open Forum Europe, an advocacy group for FOSS; The Real Time
Club, a high-tech networking society; and the UK Unix User Group.
In short, members represented a broad cross-section of people
interested in the role of technology in government.

Al-Ubaydli, the speaker for the seminar, is a medical doctor with
a degree from Cambridge. Already interested in computing,
Al-Ubaydli decided while serving his residency at Queen Elizabeth
Hospital at King's Lynn that "my computing skills were useful for
much more than research." After graduating in 2000, Al-Ubaydli
designed software for handheld computers for Cambridge medical
students and wrote Handheld Computers for Doctors.

In 2003 Al-Ubaydli became a Visiting Research Fellow at the
National Library of Medicine in the United States. There, John
Knight, an active member of the Washington area FOSS community,
encouraged his interest in the subject. One result of this
interest is the book Free Software for Busy People , an
introduction to FOSS that has been praised by Cory Doctrow and
Eric S. Raymond, and translated into Spanish, Mexican, and
Chinese.

In addition, Al-Ubaydli is co-founder of Medical Futures, a
company concerned with intellectual property issues in medicine,
and Medical Approaches, a non-profit organization that provides
free electronic textbooks in medicine. He currently works at the
National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Md.

Al-Ubaydli stresses that he delivered his talk on "Open Source
Software for Government" in none of these capacities, but rather
as a private citizen.

The presentation

Al-Ubaydli's presentation is now available online. For members of
the FOSS communities, much of it is familiar, from his definition
of open source and his debunking of myths about it to his point
that, if you have used the Internet, you have used FOSS without
knowing it.

What may be less familiar are the examples Al-Ubaydli used, and
his call for action at the end. Both were carefully chosen to
appeal to policy makers and policy influencers, as well, at
times, as their national pride.

One example that Al-Ubaydli gave was the response to the tsunami
in southeast Asia in early 2005. According to Al-Ubaydli, the
software used to organize relief efforts in Sri Lanka was
developed as an open source project with the assistance of IBM,
and is now widely used by the United Nations. Similarly, the
first charity to help earthquake victims in Pakistan used open
source software for both its affordability and reliability. "The
benefits of these developments flow back to our societies,"
Al-Ubaydli said. "And non-governmental organizations realise
this."

In addition, Al-Ubaydli stress the transparency of FOSS -- the
fact that users can confirm that the software did what it was
supposed to do and nothing else, contrasting it with users'
inability to know whether an application such as Skype really
does protect their security.

Returning to this point later in the presentation, Al-Ubaydli
brought the issue of transparency closer to home by commenting on
the case of Helen Wilkinson, which was discussed in the British
Parliament in June 2005. According to Al-Ubaydli, despite
Wilkinson's experience with bureaucracy and the cooperation of
government officials, she was unable to remove the erroneous
claim in her medical health records that she was an alcoholic.

The new system for medical health records that caused Wilkinson's
problem were built with proprietary software. Had open source
software been used instead, Al-Ubaydli suggested, the National
Health Service might have been able to track down the problem
successfully. Instead, after months of effort, Wilkinson withdrew
from the National Health Service.

Without the transparency that open source can provide, Al-Ubaydli
predicted, in the near future, "There will likely be a backlash.
This would mean that the tremendous and worth investment in
electronic medical records in which Britain is leading the world
will be reversed because of lack of faith in the system. Patients
will demand to be removed just as Ms. Wilkinson did." In other
words, the transparency of FOSS might prevent the loss of public
faith in major British institutions -- an issue that the current
Labour government is actively grappling with. Certainly the
issue, Al-Ubaydli observed after the seminar, seemed of
particular interest to his audience.

Britain, Al-Ubaydli went on to note, is far behind most of Europe
in FOSS adaptation. According to Al-Ubaydli, only 32 percent of
local English governments use FOSS, compared to 71 percent in
France, 68 percent in Germany, and 58 percent in Holland.

In conclusion, Al-Ubaydli asked his audience to do three things.
If nothing else, he asked them not to hinder FOSS by supporting
software patents. More actively, he asked them to encourage
competition in government software purchases, and to avoid
exclusive deals with proprietary companies such as Microsoft.
Finally, speaking as a taxpayer, he asked them to adapt FOSS to
save money and raise the quality of government resources at the
same time. Like much of his talk, these final calls to action
were an explanation of ideas common in the FOSS communities
expressed in language designed to appeal to his audience.

The discussion

The discussion after the presentation was chaired by Nick
Wood-Dow, an IT specialist at Chelgate Limited. The topics raised
were far-ranging. Most, however, dealt at least indirectly with
how to encourage the use of FOSS in public affairs -- a tendency
that some of the audience apparently thought inevitable.

Omar Salem, co-author of Wide Open , a book that advocates using
FOSS as part of the solution to social problems, commented that
"the politics of open source software are one of the issues that
needs to be tackled. The OSS community needs to think of clear
and compelling ways to explain to politicians and normal people
why OSS is good."

Another attendee, Basil Cousins of Open Forum Europe agrees,
saying, "We urgently need to work out how to communicate with
others who generally have no interest or knowledge in open
source."

According to Salem, the general feeling was that the educational
process would be an uphill battle. Other members of the audience,
he reports, said that "they knew of no more that 10 Members of
Parliament who could be said to have an interest in OSS."

At this point, Cousins reports, the discussion turned to
practical ways to raise awareness. Leslie Fletcher of the UK Unix
User's Group raised the issue of FOSS education. Cousins himself
mentioned that the Open Source Academy, funded by the Office of
the Deputy Prime Minister, is currently developing accreditation
programs for open source.

Others discussed ways in which the FOSS communities could work
with parliament. According to Cousins, Andrew Murrison suggested
a "formal independent review" or a parliamentary open forum that
would bring Members of Parliament together with members of the
public to discuss both general FOSS solutions and specific issues
in education and health.

By the end of the seminar, attendees had agreed to respond as a
group to the government's request for responses to the Department
of Constitutional Affair's Transforming Public Services
discussion paper by the February 3, 2006, deadline. The goals of
this paper include "to deliver better services for the public"
and "to ensure that the faith the public have in government is
improved," making it an ideal vehicle for increasing awareness of
FOSS. The group will meet in late January when Al-Ubaydli next
visits London.

Meanwhile, simply by getting together to discuss their common
interests rather than their differences, the seminar attendees
may have made an important contribution to the cause of FOSS in
the United Kingdom.

Bruce Byfield is a course designer and instructor, and a computer
journalist who writes regularly for NewsForge.

Via: Seth Johnson

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Upd-discuss] The Ghosts of Internet Time
Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2005 23:43:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Andy Oram
To: upd-discuss@lists.essential.org

(This first came out six years ago, but at this season I find it
relevant once again.)

http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/wr/ghost.html

The Ghosts of Internet Time

December 17, 1999

In the murky light of dawn I was bestirred by a sound I had
not heard for a long, long time. Groggily stumbling toward
the piercing beep, I exclaimed, "Why, it's the old Unix talk
program! That strange little full screen utility--discussed
by Douglas Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas--that prefigured
chat and instant messaging." In response to the letters
flashing on the green monitor, I quickly entered talk ghost
and pressed the RETURN key.

"This is the Ghost of Internet Past," wrote my mysterious
correspondent. "NSA, poppy, Castro. I shall show you the
Internet in its glorious early days. Tools were clunky back
then, but we all studied a bit and learned to understand the
medium we were using; and such a wonderful community we built
online!"

I remembered what the ghost was talking about. True, 99% of
all newsgroups degenerated into philosophical spats between
leftists and libertarians, and three-quarters of all the
alerts circulated had been hoaxes, but we still exploited the
incredible power of instant worldwide diffusion to carry out
some impressive campaigns. Lotus was a pretty big company
when an Internet protest made it withdraw its database
product on consumer spending.

"Look, Andy, you were more idealistic then too," admonished
the ghost. "It's been years since you contributed to free
software projects. Look at the dates on these files." A
stream of file names, dates, and sizes dribbled down my
scream.

I squinted at the vaguely familiar output format. "Yeah,
those dates are old. Where did you dig up that list?"

"Archie," typed the ghost.

"Oh, Ghost," I hammered out. "What has happened to the flame
of Internet community? Why do so few of the new users
understand it?"

"What do you expect once ANS took over the backbone?" spat
out the ghost. "Canter and Siegel, eye candy, streaming
media."

"But mere commercial usage isn't bad," I replied. "When
people trust a medium enough to put the very stuff of which
life is made there, it has come of age. Non-profit
organizations can be self-seeking information hoarders just
as much as for-profit organizations."

"Damned private-sector hegemonism--"

"Humbug. I've heard that all before; you're putting me to
sleep," I typed, and as if to lend credence to that statement
fell into unconsciousness once again.

Next I was awakened to a furious rush of talk. It was as if
someone had started several dozen RealPlayer streams at once.
The babble of many contributors crowded out all hope of
understanding. "Can anyone make sense of this!" I cried.

Coming to my rescue, a voice rose above the rest. "Welcome to
the debates over Internet policy. As the Ghost of Internet
Present, I have to follow them all."

"What on earth are they talking about?" I demanded.

"Do you mean: what do they claim to be talking about, or what
are they really talking about?"

"Both, I guess," I answered, non-plussed.

"Well," explained the ghost, "they think they are talking
about which of the old regulatory models to apply to a
revolutionary new space."

"Sounds pretty pointless."

"And that's why so few bother to listen. But really what
they're talking about is bandwidth."

"Yeah, I heard of that--won't dark fiber solve everything?"

"That's a 90s panacea," interrupted the ghost scornfully.
"The current fad is packet radio. But I was not talking about
physical bandwidth at all. I was referring to control. Who
has the power to use the Internet? Will it have job postings
for the underprivileged or only stock quotes for the
affluent? Can communities grow up spontaneously around great
works of creative art or must they pay a middleman? Should
taxpayer-funded research be sold for hundreds of dollars a
document or made freely available to all? Who can be reached
simply by requesting a name--big corporations or small
voices?"

"For goodness's sake," I exclaimed, "why don't people talk
about the issues that way!"

"A few try," replied the ghost, "but as soon as you start
looking closely at the legal, social, and implementation
implications, the answers get so--well, technical."

I wanted to ask more, but my ghost said, "The present is
fleeting. I must depart; the Ghost of Internet Future will be
here in my stead."

Excitement seized me. "Oh Ghost of Internet Future," I cried,
"show me what glories the medium has still to offer!"

Someone grasped my arm and dragged me running through mazes
of clattering streets under gray skies, where no creature
tread and no breeze stirred. "Where is the Internet Future?"
I yelled. "Where did everybody go?"

"The Internet is gone," said my companion, stooped and hoary.

"How could that be--what could replace its bounty?"

"The international financial institutions have a proprietary
satellite-based network, imposing and impenetrable. The
entertainment companies put out 6500 programs a week, all
strictly metered by kilobyte and filtered to isolate
controversial content. The electric companies--which always
controlled the ultimate pipe, and therefore ended up
controlling the medium--run the network that activates
devices in the home. Everything the vendors want is built
into powerful circuits costing a thousandth of a penny,
making software and the culture that accompanied it obsolete.
So there are many separate networks, each specialized and
tightly controlled."

"But what about democracy? What about a public space? Is
there no forum for the average citizen?"

The old Ghost's wrinkled face cracked in a sputtering, hollow
laugh. "Forum? You want a forum? I'll give you a million of
'em. Every time Consolidated Services, Inc. or Skanditek puts
up a new item on their media outlets, they leave a space for
viewers to post reactions. And they post, and post, and post.
Nobody can track the debates..."

"They forgot," I sighed. "People forgot that the Internet
enables discussion and community; they acquiesced to an
overly pragmatic and impersonal approach that fragmented
protocols and media in such a way as to remove the human
element. What can I do to prevent this, Ghost? Tell me what
to do when I return to my present life!"

But mists swept over the scene and the hand of the Ghost of
the Internet Future slipped invisibly from mine. "I am
fading," it whispered. "The Internet is gone..."

And so I awoke, but I lay with eyes closed and addressed my
three Ghosts in my thoughts: "I promise I will learn the
lessons you taught tonight!

"Ghost of Internet Past, I promise I will learn about the
technologies that affect my life so that I can control them.

"Ghost of Internet Present, I will talk to ordinary people
about the everyday issues that are affected by Internet
politics. And I'll use it to fight real problems: racism, the
income gap, war, ecological devastation.

"Finally, Ghost of Internet Future, I will always insist that
the Internet is more than a means of transmitting data--it is
a place for building community."

And the day was still just dawning.

Via: anu

Via: Seth Johnson

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: France is the first country to propose the legalization
of P2P downloadingin its new DRM law
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 09:56:48 퍝
From: Jean-Baptiste Soufron
To: seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org, rms@gnu.org,
hart@pglaf.org

http://www.audionautes.net/blog/index.php?2005/12/22/63-france-is-the-first-country-to-propose-the-legalization-of-p2p-downloading

Via: Seth Johnson

> http://www.developer.ibm.com/university/scholars/news/open_collaboration.html
> http://www.kauffman.org/pdf/open_collaboration_principles_12_05.pdf
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/technology/19research.html

Via: Thomas John