[Bravegw-web] Brave GNU World #56, English and #57, English

Welcome to another issue of the Brave GNU World, this time being written in a train from Zurich to Lausanne just before PrepComIIIa, about which more will be said later. The start for this issue will be an interesting project for film freaks.

Screenhack

Screenhack [5] was started 2000 by Michael Wouters, who later handed project maintenance over to Artur Skura so he would have time to work on a version with graphical user interface. A project without graphical user interface for film freaks? Yes, that's true.

Screenhack is a commandline tool for Unix and Windows, with which animations can be created. As such it is usually used as part of a tool chain between modeller and renderer.

Most other project for modelling, for instance Ayam3D or the Moonlight Creator, output RenderMan files, but don't allow doing animations. Closing that gap was what Michael Wouters had in mind with Screenhack -- so users of 3D modelling could also do animations.

RenderMan [6] itself is a standard format for realistic animations and according to Artur is also used professionally in high-budget movies. Therefore the output format of Screenhack is also RenderMan and can be transformed by a rendering program into the final movie with the desired quality. According to Artur Skura, the best Free Software RenderMan rendering program currently available is Aqsis. [7]

A typical user of Screenhack would be everyone seeking to do a movie with animation. Or, as Artur wrote: "Imagine you are shooting a commercial."

If you can live without graphical user interface, Screenhack does that job well and reliable. Working with 3D modelling and spatial imagination are definitely still prerequisites for full use of Screenhack.

On the positive side, it provides all the advantages of a commandline tool, especially for use in scripts. This allows the creation of whole fleets of spaceships, which are traversing space with different flight patterns. Or a whole hurd of GNUs, passing over a savannah.

Screenhack was written in C and it originally runs on GNU/Linux and other unix like systems, but a Windows port also exists. It is published as Free Software under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The development is essentially finished, since Artur takes the healthy perspective to not overburden Unix tools with features. But adding a few other tools to work with Screenhack would be a good idea.

For instance a tool that could insert a single frame between two other frames. This wouldn't have to be done by Screenhack necessarily, but would be very useful. Anyone willing to help is quite welcome.

Call for help from Bangladesh

Kim Neunert sent a call for help from Bangladesh. Close to the capital Dhaka he is working on a three month stipend of the ASA [8] as the first "computer volunteer" at a non-governmental organization called "Centre for the rehabilitation of the paralysed" (CRP) [9], the only center of its kind in Bangladesh.

The situation he describes doesn't look very good. In contrast to India, Bangladesh is technologically very weak, only in Dhaka, the capital, is technology used in significant amounts which is hindered by daily blackouts; and 99% of the computers run Windows 98.

The local GNU/Linux User Group [10] foundet itself as early as 1999, holding local meetings. The mailing list has a traffic of about 5-15 messages a day, most requests being requests for help with problems and how to obtain distributions.

Fortunately, there are also an increasing amount of development initiatives that also benefit Bangladesh even though they usually happen in the Bengal speaking part of India. There is for instance a project for free bengal founts [11] or a project to create a Morphix based LIVE-CD with Bengal GNOME, man pages and so on. [12]

With regard to the political, strategical and national-economic issues of Free Software there seems to be very little knowledge available in Bangladesh. Kim reports that even when people can follow and agree with the logic, they don't see the necessity to do something about it.

But the first steps have been taken, good signs are for instance the article "How Microsoft will kill Bangladesh (unless Linux saves us)" which was published in 2002 in a Bengal daily newspaper or the first political articles about the topic, [13] so the intellectual process has apparently begun.

Financial database in Bangladesh

Back to the concrete case of Kim. When he arrived, he found a rather badly set up financial database, based upon a single installation of a proprietary product without installation disk. The provider of that solution has been out of business for a while now. The problem was only seen when Kim explained them that he would not be able to modify that database to fit their needs.

Also a big database for medical research was in its test phase when he arrived. Although MySQL was mentioned in the offer, a proprietary database was used -- possibly because the system analyst had visited multiple Microsoft courses overseas. Interestingly enough, for this installation, the frontend was sold without the backend.

Unfortunately, Kim didn't succeed to convince the responsible people to not throw good money after the money badly spent on proprietary software in order to come to a solution that would provide more perspectives for the future. The much higher consequential costs don't seem to be understood or taken into account. Experience tells that often the facts are not everything there is to such situations, especially when the job of one of the people involved depends upon that project.

But for the financial database there is concrete potential and need for action. Therefore Kim is now trying to save the organization from binding itself to any particular proprietary technology for years to come. So he doesn't only document the existing proprietary solution, he also seeks to reimplement it with a similar structure based upon LAMP.

He started this work recently and is seeking volunteers who would like to help him in a rather clearly defined time scope.

Currently, the project is still in pre-Alpha state, for which he in parts built upon the GCDB [14] codebase while the table structure is predefined by the non-free prior solution. As license he'll use the GNU General Public License (GPL) and he hopes for help with code review, the reports and complicated forms.

This provides the chance to help people on the other side of the digital divide with rather simple means. If you would like to do more, you could get in touch with ASA [8] or get in touch with the "Digital Bridges" association [15], which is one outcome of Ganesha's Project [16] that has been introduced in issue #32 [17] of the Brave GNU World.

UNO summit about the Information Society

From this topic it is only a small step to the World Summit on the Information Society, which, among other things, tried to address the question of digital divide. The summit itself was presented already in issue #53 of the Brave GNU World [18], but a lot has happened since the Intersessional Meeting in Paris.

From September 8th until 26th 2003, the third preparatory conference (PrepComIII) took place in Geneva, Switzerland. Hundreds of delegates, economy representatives and civil society people came together to finish the documents for the summit itself, which is to take place in December in Geneva. They weren't entirely successful.

In fact, towards the end of the second week, the situation became so static that constructive discussion seemed impossible and some delegates were resting on their positions without any sign of compromise. This may in part have been caused by insufficient authorization of the delegates in Geneva, which added difficult and time-consuming synchronization with their governments to the process. But that wasn't the only reason.

In the question of internet governance, governments of the North and the South are strongly taking positions that are mutually exclusive. Within the area of security, the typical conflicts take place. While the USA suddenly found themselves side by side with China, both fighting for "Information Security," a common euphemism for censorship, Civil Society was arguing strongly for "Network Security," which asks for security and reliability of the networks.

And although the call for open standards is common among all govrnments, the documents are satisfied with terminology that accepts proprietary pseudostandards. As the Civil Society working group on Patents, Copyright and Trademarks (PCT) [19] explained, standards can only be fully open when they are "freely implementable" and "publicly documented."

In regard to Free Software, the situation is also difficult and highly dynamic. By using terminology such as "technological neutrality," some people try to suggest that a decision between proprietary and Free Software was a technological decision and not an issue of politics. This has been adopted rather uncritically by some governmental representatives, although it effectively means giving up democratically legitimated power in the areas of national economy, science and society.

The "freedom of choice" is another pseudo argument against a clear statement for the advantages of Free Software; as if it wasn't the the job of politics to further socially useful activity and not reward socially harmful activities.

During PrepComIII it also seemed that even within Civil SocietyFree Software and its impact on the summit wasn't fully understood. Therefore I used the last day of PrepComIII to start writing an article, which especially Karen Banks of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), one of the most active Civil Societies in the summit, provided extremely helpful feedback on, that is online by now [20] and might also prove useful in other activities.

More PrepComs

After it became certain on the last Friday of PrepComIII that there would be no agreement, two more preparatory conferences were hastily called for, dubbed as PrepComIIIa and PrepComIIIb as continuation of PrepComIII so the formalities of PrepComIII could be used without further discussion.

PrepComIIIa takes place November 10th until 14th 2003 (just after writing this column), PrepComIIIb will be just before the summit from December 7th until 9th 2003. Since -- among others -- the German chancellor Gerhard Schröder has been confirmed for the summit, one can only hope that the documents will be ready by then.

Also good news

But there are also good news. The cooperation between Civil Societies worked better than ever -- even though the UNO might have achieved this with spending less resources and fewer governmental representatives.

Especially in Europe it becomes possible that the summit will also lead to new forms of dialog between governments and Civil Society. In particular the European Caucus of Civil Society has worked more closely with the EU during PrepComIII than ever before. And there is reason to hope this will be continued during PrepComIIIa.

In general, it makes sense to take a look at the FSF Europe project page on the summit, [21] which not only links to the mailing lists for th European Caucus and the PCT working group, but also other sources of information, such as the excellent page of the Heinrich Böll foundation which is maintained by Ralf Bendrath, and the statement of the PCT working group for the UN plenary.

Towards the end a few more thoughts on the topic that has been addressed as "industrial information control" before, the so-called "intellectual property."

Limited Intellectual Monopolies

The term "intellectual property" is quite problematic and should really only be used in sentences to explain why the terminology is bad and shouldn't be used.

For any critical human being, the notion of "possessing" a thought and what this might mean automatically leads to a problem that bears similarities to Schrödingers cat or the question whether a tree that falls in a wood really makes a noise if noone is there to hear it.

Amazingly, the terminology is uncritically and widely accepted. People use it naturally and without reflecting, although the terminology not only carries an ideology of thoughts and ideas that suggests treating them like property. It also puts those who share their knowledge with others on the same moral grounds as violent criminals and murderers ("pirate copy", "software pirat").

Also, the term offers no scientific advancement, since it lumps together very different areas of law and suggests treating all these equally.

But from the way it is used, it appears there is need for one summarizing term and there is one thing all these areas usually referred to as "intellectual property" have one thing in common.

Each of them by purpose and function establishes a limited monopoly on something intangible. The justification of that monopolization has always been the benefit of society.

Therefore I suggest to avoid "intellectual property" (IP) and -- if you feel that you need to use a summarizing term and cannot address the areas directly -- to speak of "intellectual monopolies" (IM) or "limited intellectual monopolies" (LIM).

These terms are not only refer to them by what they are and do, they are also no more complicated or longer than the terminology currently in use and do not transport such questionably ideology.

Enough

Enough for this month, as usual I hope to receive numerous questions, comments and suggestions via email [1] -- especially project presentations, because without the cooperation and support of readers and authors the Brave GNU World would not be possible.

Return to GNU's home page.

Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to address@hidden.
There are also other ways to contact the FSF.

Please send comments on Georg's Brave GNU World (in English or German) to address@hidden,
send comments on these web pages to address@hidden,
send other questions to address@hidden.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this transcript as long as the copyright and this permission notice appear.

Last modified: Wed Jan 14 15:34:24 CET 2004

Welcome to another issue of the Brave GNU World, which will again spend some of its time on the UNO summit on the Information society. Given that the summit is supposed to create the framework conditions for the years and decades to come, it seems useful and helps to document the process on the way to the summit.

However, in order to not totally neglect the technical side, two projects are to be introduced first.

JaxoDraw

The first project of this issue was suggested via email [1] by Thomas Teußl and is called JaxoDraw. [5] JaxoDraw is a project to interactively create Feynman-Diagrams.

Since the majority of readers may not be familiar with the American physicist Richard Feynman or the diagrams with have been named after him, here is a short introduction. Richard Feynman was one of the most influential phyisicists of the 20th century. In 1965 he was awarded the Nobel prize along with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger for his work on Quantum Electro Dynamics. Physics students usually first come in contact with him through his "Feynman Lectures on Physics," one of the best and most comprehensible works to deepen physical understanding.

Feynman diagrams are commonly used in the area of Quantum Field Theory and allow, reducing some rather complicated calculations in particle physics to mere amplitude differences. Also, they help comprehending the interactions between particles.

By using the Axodraw [6] project by J.A.M. Vermaseren, for which JaxoDraw provides a graphical WYSIWYG user interface, JaxoDraw allows graphical, mouse-oriented creation of such Feynman-diagrams. Naturally, fine adjustment of such diagrams with the keyboard is also possible.

The internal data representation and storage of JaxoDraw is done by means of a XML based format and output can be formatted as (encapsulated) Postscript, which allows conversion to PDF, as well as LaTeX [7] code. The output facilities to LaTeX were one major motivational point for Daniele Binosi and Lukas Theussl, the authors of JaxoDraw, since this allows easy incorporation of the diagrams into scientific papers.

Because of its flexibility and efficiency, the LaTeX typsetting system is very popular in the scientific area in general and Physics in particular. When working on diagrams, its non-WYSIWYG approach can make it more difficult to achieve one specific result, which makes JaxoDraw most likely a very useful addition for LaTeX users.

As the name suggests, JaxoDraw was written in Java. This brings the advantage of relatively good platform independence, but unfortunately it is dependant on the proprietary Java implementation by SUN, which brings the usual problems. JaxoDraw itself is published as Free Software under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Although the authors very clearly state that it is not mandatory to do so, they encourage users of JaxoDraw to cite the related scientific paper. [8] This is a very interesting connection to the thoughts on Free Software and science of issue #54, [9] since it shows in practice how Free Software itself becomes a scientific publication.

The next project, at the moment more or less a sleeper still, also deals with typesetting and publication, but it is specifically geared towards non-scientists.

Mom

The most common contact of users with GNU groff [11] is most likely for formatting the manpages, which provide help for most commands of a Unix-like system simply by calling "man <command>."

Few realize that groffs is indeed a full text typsetting tool close to TeX or lout, with which typographically professional postscript documents can be created, for instance the O'Reilly Perl introduction. For this, groff only required a fraction of the resources needed by LaTeX -- groff can be used on a 386 with 8 megabytes of RAM and 250 megabytes hard disk without a problem.

For Peter Schaffter, a Canadian writer who -- according to his own words -- lives in the same penury that many of his colleagues find themselves in, this resource friendliness of GNU/Linux and groff was a major factor in his decision. His computers are usually a couple of generations behind the state of the art, "resource challenged" machines that have been given to him.

Unfortunately, groff is not very easy to learn for most users, since commands tend to be terse, not always typographically intuitive and (according to Peter Schaffter again) "über-geeky." That is why he started working on Mom. [12]

Similar to LaTeX building upon TeX, Mom provides a macroset for groff, which defines a simple syntax. At the same time, it allows for very fine typographic control of generated documents that is comparable to other DTP solutions without requiring knowledge of the cryptic troff/groff syntax.

Mom's target audience are typesetters that have been discouraged by the troff/groff syntax, writers that simply want to write their texts and make them look good, and beginners that seek a well-documented solution.

In fact Peter Schaffter has been dedicating significant work to the documentation, as he is convinced that good documentation is an essential part of good programming. A sentiment that cannot be repeated often enough. The documentation is available as Free Documentation under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) in HTML format and many cross-references as well as the lack of optical ballast make it comfortably accessible with any browser.

Florian Cramer, who filled out the Brave GNU World standard question for Mom, highlights three reasons that are strongly in favor of Mom. First the unique combination of structured document processing in combination with an outstanding manual layout control. Second the low resource hunger and third the significantly lower complexity in comparison to LaTeX, which makes individual modifications easier.

Limits of the project are that it -- other than LaTeX -- is not very fit for scientific use, since it does not support cross-references, indices or numbered figures. Also the amount of output formats is limited. Mom is dedicated to produce PostScript (and therefore also PDF), theoretically, "grotty" and "grohtml" also allow outputting raw text and HTML, but the project doesn't pay attention to these.

Originally written by a Canadian writer for his own needs, Mom offers exactly what Peter Schaffter needed: an easy yet fully featured way of letting text look good.

Florian Cramer goes even further and also poses the question why XML/SGML systems all exclusively use TeX and not groff for print output; according to his opinion, groff would provide a great output format for XML based formats, as O'Reilly already demonstrated with "Programming Perl" by using DocBook SGML and groff.

In his eyes, Peter Schaffter is one of the unsung heroes of Free Software, and he was particularly impressed how friendly and quickly his suggestions (automatic generation of a table of contents) was picked up. By the way: if you also want to contact Peter Schaffter, you should make sure that your email contains the words "groff" or "mom" in the subject, otherwise it won't survive the spam filter.

Even though a few more additions may be added to Mom upon request, Mom is considered stable and Peter Schaffter would like to leave it up to the other users to decide which expansions are useful or necessary.

Based upon a very conscious decision, Mom is Free Software under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Not only as a gift in return and to say thanks, but also because he feels close to the social values of Free Software.

Study about "Hacker Ethics"

There are in fact an increasing amount of "classical" approaches trying to understand the phenomenon of Free Software. In quite different faculties from economy to sociology diploma and PhD theses are conducted on this topic. Such as the dissertation "Hacker-etik - en filosofisk undersøgelse" ("Hacker Ethik - a philosophical study") [12] by Aputsiaq Niels Janussen.

Although he was already familiar with Free Software and GNU/Linux, he hadn't thought much about the background until summer 2003. During that summer his interest for the philosophical background of the GNU Project [13] was raised -- specifically by the articles of Richard Stallman.

Based upon the book by Stephen Levy ("Hackers", 1984) he began serious studies on the phenomenon and also included constructive controversy with "The Hacker Ethic" by Pekka Himanen in his dissertation.

The paper was turned in July 7th 2003, so it is finished, but available as free documentation under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and if someone was willing to help with this, Aputsiaq would explicitly welcome a translation from Danish into English. Since began working and will most likely move to Greenland in 2004, he probably won't find the time himself.

His favorite anecdote for the dissertation is that during his discussions with Richard Stallman, Richard voiced scepticism as to whether a hacker ethics exists as such. The final word on issues of the knowledge and information society has certainly been spoken yet.

World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)

Issues #53 [14] and #56 [15] of the Brave GNU World already informed about the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), but now the summit is about to close its first preparatory process and climax in Geneva. And even though Chancellor Schröder, who originally announced his presence, now had to delegate this task to the ministry of economics and labor because of internal German affairs, the questions discussed at the summit are at the highest international level.

Not unexpectedly, the quickly called-for PrepComIIIa didn't bring a solution for the critical issues such as human rights, financing, limited intellectual monopolies (in particular Copyrights and Patents) and Free Software. In the area of Free Software, a compromise seemed imminent, but the USA made their acceptance of that paragraph dependant upon the acceptance of the limited intellectual monopoly paragraph by other countries.

The group on this issue had several "open ended" meetings starting at 19:00 and usually had to close without result around 22:30. During these 3.5hrs of closed negotiation after a long, tiring conference day without sufficient food or fresh air, there was little will to compromise.

The second night was opened by statements of the "Motion Picture Association of America" (MPAA), before its representatives, just like the representative of the "World Intellectual Property Organization" (WIPO) had to leave the room.

The German ministry of justice quickly flew in an expert on the issue for consultation and a consensus was sought in bilateral as well as multilateral discussions. This will most likely take the shape of highlighting the importance of a balance between monopolization and accessibility of knowledge without implying whether that balance exists or does not exist today.

According to last information, the negotations are revolving around that point. The suggestion of Civil Society, which in fact did achieve this tricky point wasn't officially brought forward by any government as everyone feared bringing in new text might end up confusing the situation more.

Also potentially interesting in this context is the article "Fighting Intellectual Poverty -- Who owns and controls the information societies?" [16] which was written for a WSIS publication by the Heinrich Böll foundation.

Essential Benchmarks

Civil Society, so the part of the summit that is neither government nor economy or organization close to the UN, increasingly focussed on getting their own vision forward. In particular the time at PrepComIIIa was used to improve the document that was originally dubbed "non negotiables of Civil Society."

On four pages this document -- now called "Essential Benchmarks of Civil Society" [17] -- addresses the central issues and shows how these can be significantly improved. This is the most compact and encompassing document so far -- and the Civil Society "Visionary Declaration," which is about to be written as a counter-vision to the governmental declaration, will also have to benchmark itself against these.

But even within Civil Society there is still substantial need for discussion and the lines of conflict permeate all areas.

In internet governance there is still a discrepancy between the North, which seeks more independence from governmental control, and the South, for whom governmental control seems to provided the desired stability.

Questions of limited intellectual monopolies are also still in need of discussion; while some organizations seek to protect the rights of indigenous peoples by increased monopolization, this is in conflict to the largest part of the world, where a readjustment of monopolies is needed to allow access to information and help overcoming the digital divide.

And even for generally uncritical questions within Civil Society there is still need to talk amongst South/North, women/men, young/old and the different areas. Within Civil Society there are also many who for instance have not yet understood software as a new cultural technique and realized why Free Software provides answers to fundamental social questions.

My personal favorite for this is a quote from the PrepComIIIa workling group on the "Free Software paragraph" when one of the delegates in the U.S. governmental delegation said that the choice between proprietary and Free Software was indeed a political, not a technical one to make, but this forum (the summit) is not the right assembly to make political decisions.

Coin slots in hotel rooms?

As a final word I'd like to say something about an absurdity that has seen massive spread recently, particularly in hotels and airports: wireless internet access at ridiculously high charges.

Installing a simple wireless access point in the lobby of a hotel or the lounge of an airport (within most Northern countries) usually requires no more than an investment of up to 500 EUR and monthly fees of about 30 EUR (DSL flatrate).

In fact there are more and more hotels and airports offering wireless networks. But usually these come at 3-10 EUR per half-hour of internet access. But even when a traveller is in bad-enough need of internet access, payment usually creates the next barrier.

Usually these networks are designed as open networks with the first HTTP access being rerouted to a specific page for payment. Fortune smiles when this allows direct payment via credit card -- because often the system only works with prepaid-cards, which can be bought at the lobby.

But these have often run out or are not available at all. Personal experience says that at a specific Swiss airport two services are competing with each other. As a result, finding the sales point for the right network is a quest.

Should one be able to get one of these cards, that is usually not the end of all troubles, because most of the services seem unable to create stable web pages that work with all browsers. _javascript_ is the least proprietary technology encountered. It can therefore happen that pages are not available despite having entered the correct code or that prepaid cards quickly discharge themselves.

In one case -- this time Torino, Italy -- turning off the counter only worked by means of a popup window, for which the browser had to accept any popup and cooky from any site. Independent from using the service depending on opening security holes in your computer, there was of course no information provided about this before the user finds this out the hard way.

Given the microscropic costs of installing and maintaining a wireless internet access point in comparison with installation and maintenance of water and sanitation, should you expect to find coin slots next to the toilet, shower and each faucet in your hotel room?

These slots would of course not accept common currency, but special tokens, which are sometimes to be bought at the reception -- and sometmies only at the gas station across the street that unfortunately closes around 8pm.

But we already do live in the "sanitation age" -- it is the information age that still seems very far away given such developments.

Good New Year

Alright, enough Brave GNU World for 2003, I wish all readers a good year 2004 and hope you won't hold back on comments, questions, ideas, criticism, praise and project suggestions sent to the usual address. [1]

Return to GNU's home page.

Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to address@hidden.
There are also other ways to contact the FSF.

Please send comments on Georg's Brave GNU World (in English or German) to address@hidden,
send comments on these web pages to address@hidden,
send other questions to address@hidden.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this transcript as long as the copyright and this permission notice appear.

Last modified: Thu Jan 15 14:48:06 CET 2004

From:	Georg C. F. Greve
Subject:	[Bravegw-web] Brave GNU World #56, English and #57, English
Date:	Thu, 15 Jan 2004 22:42:35 +0100
User-agent:	Gnus/5.110002 (No Gnus v0.2) Emacs/21.3 (gnu/linux)