tech | Steve Woods

France – the state of open source

02/06/2021 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

In France the Conseil National des logiciel libres (CNLL – National Free Software Council) has just published its 2020/2021 survey (PDF) into free and open source software in France.

The report’s findings can be summarised as follows.

Free and open source companies are typically micro-businesses (59%) and SMEs (35.1%). They are generally well established youngish businesses with an average age of 11.5 years. They have a very varied customer base in all sectors and exports account for over 20% of their turnover, as opposed to 16.7% in the digital sector.

Besides service activities, there has been a move from solutions-based financial models (invoicing for use, sale of licences) whereas 57.1% are software producers, playing a vital ecosystem role.

During the Covid crisis, the majority (64.6%) of companies reported stable or increasing activities, with 82.8% of managers saying they were confident about the future of their companies and 61.1% seeking to recruit staff. However, 53.7% are worried about the French economy over the long term, particularly as regards the durability of B2B customers.

Although it has been recommended by the Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security (SGDSN) to reassert digital sovereignty, only 29.3% of respondents think that France is implementing an open source industrial strategy to counter the Big Tech companies and 64.6% of them believe the powers that be are not giving sufficient encouragement to open source as provided for by law, particularly in respect of public sector procurement.

Plus de 80% des entreprises sont déjà engagées dans une démarche éthique libre et responsable vis-à-vis de critères spécifiques : la moitié d’entre elles a déjà formalisé de tels engagements et l’autre se déclare prête à le faire.

Businesses are very involved in the ecosystem and contribute to more than 35 organisations. Furthermore, 9.7% report that their region has an open source-based digital strategy which has tangible results, albeit with marked regional disparties.
Printed manuals available for LibreOffice 7

29/05/2021 Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Open Source, Tech

The Document Foundation (TDF) blog reports today that users of the TDF’s free and open source LibreOffice suite can now acquire hard copies of guides to the various modules in version 7.* of the suite (Writer, Calc, Impress, Math and Base) as well as a general Getting Started Guide.

These new guides are full of tips, tricks and tutorials to help users get the best out of the whole office suite.

The guides are already available for download in both PDF and ODT versions.

There will nevertheless always be people who appreciate hard copies of manuals, so the LibreOffice Documentation community has joined forces with online bookshop Lulu (which was started by Red Hat co-founder Bob Young) made these available guides. The guides will be printed on demand in various locations and be shipped to anywhere in the world.

Pricing for the UK is shown as £10 per guide. Lulu also provide guides for earlier versions of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 7.1 Calc Guide available

23/05/2021 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source cross-platform LibreOffice suite, announced on its blog on Friday that a new guide for the suite’s Calc spreadsheet module had been released. Version 7.1 of LibreOffice was released in February this year.

The guide has been produced by members of the LibreOffice documentation community to take account of the improvements to Calc in the new release.

The Guide includes the volunteer effort of many members of the documentation community – Rafael Lima from Brazil, Martin Van Zijl and Kees Kriek from the Netherlands and Celia Palacios from the Spanish language community. Yusuf Keten from the Google Summer of Code program merits a special mention for work new extensions and template dialogs, as does Steve Fanning for his editorial review and to Jean Hollis Weber for her work on improving and organising the text. Work on the new guide was co-ordinated by Felipe Viggiano from Brazil.

The 545-page guide is available as a PDF and covers all of Calc’s basic and advanced features, making it a must-read for getting the most out of Calc.
American Express? That won’t do nicely!

21/05/2021 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Privacy, Tech

Yesterday the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) reported that it had fined American Express Services Europe Ltd. (Amex) £90,000 for sending four million unlawful, unsolicited marketing emails.

IT news site The Register has done some number crunching and worked out that the fine imposed by the ICO is equivalent to 0.021p per offending email or 0.009 per cent of Amex’s annual profits.

The regulator instigated investigations after receiving complaints from American Express customers who had specifically opted out of receiving marketing information. During its investigation the ICO found that American Express had sent over 50 million so-called “servicing emails” to customers (which anyone sensible would call spam. Ed.). The ICO revealed that between 1st June 2018 and 21st May 2019, over 4 million of those emails were marketing emails, designed to encourage customers to make purchases on their cards, thus benefiting the company financially.

Andy Curry, the ICO’s Head of Investigations said:

This is a clear example of a company getting it wrong and now facing the reputational consequences of that error.

The emails in question all clearly contained marketing material, as they sought to persuade and encourage customers to use their card to make purchases. Amex’s arguments, which included, that customers would be disadvantaged if they weren’t aware of campaigns, and that the emails were a requirement of its Credit Agreements with customers, were groundless.

Our investigation was initiated from just a handful of complaints from customers, tired of being interrupted with emails they did not want to receive. I would encourage all companies to revisit their procedures and familiarise themselves with the differences between a service email and a marketing email, and ensure their email communications with customers are compliant with the law.
Track & trace ‘partner’ sent 84,000 nuisance emails

19/05/2021 Steve WoodsGDPR, Privacy, Tech
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has today reported it has fined a Hertfordshire company for sending direct marketing emails to people who provided their personal data for contact tracing purposes as part of the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

St Albans-based Tested.me Ltd (TML) provides digital contact tracing services which work by offering people a QR code to scan when arriving at their destination.

TML sent nearly 84,000 nuisance emails at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic between September and November last year, when businesses were using private QR code providers to collect personal data to comply with government contact tracing rules.

The ICO fined TML £8,000 for using personal data for marketing purposes without adequate valid consent, contrary to law.

The ICO has created guidelines for businesses to follow as the UK economy continues to open up. Providers should:
- Adopt a data protection by design approach (DPBD) from the start when they develop new products;
- Make privacy policies clear and simple so that people understand how their information will be handled;
- Not keep any personal data they have collected for more than 21 days – in line with regulations brought in last year for the collection of information for contact tracing;
- Not use the personal data for marketing or any other purpose;
- Keep up to date with the ICO’s online guidance.
SUSE S.A. successfully launched on Frankfurt stock exchange

19/05/2021 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

SUSE was the first Linux distribution I ever got working successfully on one of my machines. Therefore, I still keep an eye on developments within the company.

Today German IT news site heise reports that SUSE S.A. has now launched on the stock market. Shares in the Nuremberg-based software supplier are being traded in Frankfurt. The company had previously set the final offer price at €30 Euro, at the lower end of the originally planned €29-34 price range. At 9:15 the opening price after the IPO auction, the initial opening share price was €29.50.

By launching on the stock market, the Linux developer originally wanted to raise up to €1.1 bn. The share price declined slightly after the start of trading, which is not uncommon after an IPO, and the shares are currently trading at over €30.

The traditional ringing of a bell was replaced by a virtual version with SUSE CEO Melissa Di Donato ringing a 3D-animated virtual bell in front of a video wall.

SUSE has been marketing open source software since 1992, particularly its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) Linux distribution, together with several infrastructure products for commercial use. It has been based in Nuremberg since 2011 and Melissa Di Donato, who previously worked for SAP, has been the company’s CEO since 2019. Ms Di Donato remarked that the stock market flotation was a new chapter for SUSE. In 2019 SUSE was acquired from Micro Focus by global investment company EQT, since when SUSE has undergone considerable year-on-year growth both in terms of its income and customer base, particularly as regards long-term commercial contracts.

SUSE recently stated that its takeover of Rancher Labs – completed in December 2019 – has proved to be particularly promising. Following this move, SUSE is now offering Rancher’s popular management platform for Kubernetes clusters in addition to its SLES software products.
LibreOffice 7.0.6 released

13/05/2021 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech

The Document Foundation (TDF), the German non-profit organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, has today announced the release of LibreOffice 7.0.6, the slightly less bleeding edge version of the suite intended for enterprise deployments and more conservative users.

LibreOffice 7.0.6 is the sixth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.0 family and is available for immediate download.

According to the LibreOffice Twitter account, this new release contains over 50 bug fixes. TDF also states this will be the final release of the 7.0 branch, with development efforts being concentrated henceforth on maintaining the 7.1 branch and working towards readying LibreOffice 7.2 for release.

For commerical deployments, TDF strongly recommends seeking support from its partners so as to obtain long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits such as SLAs.

Anyone who’s willing to contribute their time and professional skills to LibreOffice is advised to visit the dedicated supporters’ website.

Finally, all LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members are invited to make a donation to support The Document Foundation.
Germany – one place for public code

10/05/2021 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

German IT news website heise reports that software developed with taxpayers’ money should be made freely available by public sector organisations to enable its further development. Together with the states of North Rhine-Westhalia and Baden-Württemberg, the German Federal Interior Ministry wants to establish an open source platform for the public sector. It should make it easier for the Federal government, regional governments and local authorities to reuse open source software and jointly continue its development.

The overriding aim is digital sovereignty, i.e. minimising the current dependency on predominantly US hardware and software manufacturers. The repository should also be a documentation platform and include a user manual. Further important aspects in this case involve legal certainty, comprehensible rules for use, a general explanation of open source and bringing the community together.

Home for free code

A group of experts made up of members of the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), the Bundes-Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Kommunalen IT-Dienstleister e.V (VITAKO) and several collaborators carried out the preliminary work in September 2020 and produced an initial plan for an open source code repository. The initiative is working under the slogan “One place for public code”.

At the same time, the IT Planning Council’s “Cloud Computing and Digital Sovereignty” working group of the IT Planning Council decided to pilot an open source code repository. The BMI, North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg are currently testing the platform’s initial stage. According to the BMI, a minimum viable product with the central platform’s core functions was achieved at at the end of March. On the basis of this, tests are currently being carried out, whilst the project continues to be developed.

Numerous supporters

“One place for public code” is also associated with the initiative. Its supporters include local authority associations, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), The Document Foundation (TDF), Wikimedia Deutschland and many major city councils such as Munich and Frankfurt am Main.
Muse Group acquires Audacity

04/05/2021 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Audacity is a great free and open source audio editor, which is available for all major computing platforms – Linux, Mac and Windows. It’s one of the free and open source software packages I recommend in my list of free and open source software.

Audacity running on Linux, audio track and MIDI track playing

Today The Register reports that Audacity has been purchased by Muse Group, which has promised to keep the platform free and open source.

The deal was announced on 30th April by Martin Keary, who is Head Of Design at MuseScore, an open-source notation software package also owned by Muse Group, and who will now “manage Audacity in partnership with its open-source community”. The financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.

Audacity received a major update to version 3.0 in March, some 20 years since its first version 1.0 was released. Among the new release’s features were a new file format, analyser and a multitude of bug fixes.

In addition Keary announced that the project was seeking to recruit “a few key positions for senior developers or designers who have experience in audio or music tech.”

A video was also released to coincide with the announcement.
German federal elections 2021 – Demands for digitally sovereign society

27/04/2021 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Open Source, Politics, Tech, Uncategorized
German digital civil society organisations have made four demands for a digitally sovereign society to politicians standing in the 2021 federal election in late September 2021. Among them is the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), which works to ensure that software developed with public money shall be published under a free and open source software licence.

On 1st April 2020, German civil society organisations working for an independent digital infrastructure and free access to knowledge called on politicians to learn from the crisis and strengthen digital civil society.

In an open letter (German) of that date, the signatories (Chaos Computer Club, D64 – Zentrum für Digitalen Fortschritt, Epicenter.Works, the FSFE, Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, Superrr Lab and Wikimedia Deutschland) also made clear recommendations for action. However, far too little has happened since then. The past year has made it clear that politics and the public sector are overwhelmed with their own digital transformation and are setting priorities in digital policy that do not meet the needs of society. We are far from a digitally sovereign society.That is why a broad spectrum of organisations, including the FSFE has once again come together to support politics with their expertise.

With four demands, the network shows how digitisation can succeed for a digitally sovereign society – and calls upon the parties to make digitisation for the common good a central topic in the forthcoming federal elections.

Photo courtesy of FSFE

Four demands for the federal government
- Digital Sovereignty: politicians must anchor the digital sovereignty of society as the highest maxim in digital policy. Instead of a digital ministry, we need a mission for the coming legislative period that elevates digital sovereignty to a guiding principle and is drafted and evaluated together with representatives from civil society, science and business.
- Participation and Transparency: civil society must finally be afforded the same opportunities as business and science to contribute its expertise via a civil society quota in political advisory bodies, communication and transparency on procedures of political decision-making processes, legally defined deadlines for consultations and machine-readable documentation.
- Public Money, Public Good: publicly funded solutions must be accessible to all under a free licence so that no knowledge is lost or problems are solved twice. It should be a legal requirement that software developed for the public sector with public money must be published under a free and open source software licence. If public money is involved, the code should also be public. In addition, public sector data must be open data.
- Sustainable Digitisation: digitisation can only succeed if the development of digital infrastructure is economically and socially viable. To this end, diversity in digitisation and the development and maintenance of secure, decentralised digital infrastructure for society must be promoted in the long term.
5th May launch event

A new organisation and website – https://digitalezivilgesellschaft.org/ – has been established to promote the above demands and a launch event will be held on 5th May 2021 from 18:00 to 19:30 hrs to discuss these demands with a panel consisting of Julia Reda (former MEP), Henning Tillmann (software developer and co-chair of D64) and Julia Kloiber (co-founder Superrr Lab). The panel will be moderated by Katja Jäger (betterplace lab). Afterwards, all participants will have the opportunity to exchange ideas on solutions, measures and calls for action in four thematic rooms. FSFE’s Alexander Sander will moderate the room on “Public Money? Public Code!”.

Home for free code

Numerous supporters

Four demands for the federal government

5th May launch event

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