Equally critical of proprietary and open source myths, advocating software choice beyond marketing and romanticism
About the Editor
Roberto has 30+ years of experience, specializing in open source. He's actively involved in various OS organizations and has helped companies integrate OS into their strategies.
Bob Sutor, IBM Vice President Open Source and Standards, invited the IBM Italian subsidiary to organize an event aimed at public officers or those who have an interest in the public sector.
IBM Italia recognizing the importance of open standards, and knowing that open standards in IT are critical to allow new entrants to participate, invites stakeholders to meet up with IBM open source and open standards pioneers.
The event will be held on the 8 of May at the IBM office in Rome. Giovanni Aliverti, IBM Italy Institutional relationships, will open the session. Then Bob Sutor will give his keynote speech talking of open source trends for the next 12 months. Vittorio Pagani, CNIPA Open Source Observatory, and Flavia Marzano will cover respectively open standards’ issues by central and local public administrations. I will eventually give my presentation on standards conformance, hilighting the importance to prove that software products are meeting open standards‘ specifications.
Last but not least Gianfranco Cesareo will introduce the audience to IBM software products compliant to open standards.
If you wish to join the event send me an email, the event is invitation-only.
PAAL2008, Open and Free Public Administration, will be held this week on the 17th and 18th of April in Pula (Cagliari).
The second conference on FOSS in public administrations has a rich two days program, if you are in Sardinia this week and you have good command of Italian consider join the event.
The success of our initiative is clear: in a week, without any substantial media coverage, one hundred candidates signed the letter engaging themselves to promote free software and digital rights. Two thousands voters indicated that they would be more likely to vote for candidates supporting the campaign.
Candidates from all parties backed Assoli’s campaign, Paolo Didonè emphasize the result:
It is important to notice that candidates from all major parties signed our letter. This is a good sign, we are looking forward to get involved together with politicians in sustaining politics in favor of free software, in country’s interest. The day after the election we’ll contact politicians for pragmatic actions.
Smart cards and digital signatures are presented as among the most important components of e-government in Europe, but they are still far from being an effective, Linux-friendly solution to reduce administrative and business costs. But the same tools may become a way to make the general public use or support Free Software.
Almost 10 years ago, European Community directive 1999/93/Ce stated the principle that, in certain cases and under certain conditions, a digital signature can be just as reliable and legally binding as one on paper. “Qualified electronic signatures,” which are generated with a secure device and validated by an official certificate, belong to this category. For this reason, digital signatures and identification through smart cards are considered one of the main tools to reduce costs and increase efficiency in European e-government and public administrations. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported in March that Italian economy as a whole saved €260 million since some procedures to create a new company went entirely digital, and that, country-wide, online tax filings cost €90 million less every year than doing them with paper documents.
Back in 1997, Italy was the first EU country to acknowledge the legal validity of electronic documents. The Code of Digital Administration that followed in 2005 laid down the official rules for using digital signatures and smart cards in the country. As a result, as of June 2007 Italy was also the EU country with the highest number of smart cards — almost three million — released for official purposes. In the coming years this trend will grow, due both to the need to comply with national and EU regulations and, above all, to reduce costs.
In spite of all this, however, inertia, as well as lack of information and coordination, still limit the benefits of smart cards in Italy, especially for GNU/Linux users. Many procedures and tools are either redundant, obscure, or far from being technically and legally interoperable, even when they are open source.
I am a citizen of the EU, and I want the European Parliament to adopt the use of open standards and to promote interoperability in the ICT sector.
The signatories of this petition, representing a Community for Freedom of Choice and Market in the European Union, draw the attention of the Members of the European Parliament to the current situation where the institution’s ICT systems are locked into the products of one vendor, warns about the implications of this for participative democracy and for fair competition, and calls for action to promote Open Standards and Interoperability.
IDC starting from the ten rights that enable open standardsmentioned before, evaluated ten organizations - CEN, Ecma, ETSI, IETF, ISO, ITU, NIST, OASIS, OMG, and W3C – and all organizations had the opportunity to review and comment on the evaluation of their organization. NITA specified 9 of Krechmer’s criteria, where the exclusion of “Open World” stems from the re-purposing of “Open Interfaceâ€, extended to covering both and accordingly renamed “Open Interoperabilityâ€.
IDC in conclusion states that there are differences between standard setting organizations in terms of “openness” and is implemented, concluding that it is difficult to make a distinction of which form of “openness” is the most appropriate. (More …)
IT vendors are not asked to prove that their software products are meeting open standards‘ specifications. Declarations of conformity to a file format standard is a self-certification process.
In the European Economic Area the CE mark is a mandatory conformity mark for certain product groups to indicate conformity with the essential health and safety requirements set out in European Directives. In short you need a CE mark to sell a plug or a toy, but you can sell software without any external test house which evaluates the product and its documentation. At the end of the day there is no organization that assess standards compliance, we can just rely on implementors’ statements of compliance.
Ken Krechmer over the last ten years spent time and efforts to define the meaning of Open Standards, and he was the first to clearly explain the different views of all standards’ stakeholders.
It is common to think of standardization as the process of standards creation, but this view excludes those who implement the standard (implementers) and those who use the implementations of the standard (users).
Krechmer identifying each constituency’s view gives us a complete description of Open Standards emerge, and a key to understand what is in our interests. I introduced the OMAT’s audience to the ten rights that enable open standards using the following visual presentation.
I went through all criteria, stressing the importance of some of them, like the “Open Meeting” one, establishing that all stakeholders can participate. A right not addressed by many Standard Specification Organizations like ISO, OASIS and W3C, all having in place a pay-to-become-a-member policy.
“Open Documents”, the right to see any documents from a Standard Specification Organization included individual technical proposals and meeting reports, is a standardization right connected to Open Meeting. It come no surprise that the transparency of a meeting is related to the availability of all the documents from the meeting. Again, ISO and other organizations do not fulfill this right.
I stressed also the importance of “Open Change”, the right that gives the ability to prevent predatory practices through license terms that protect against subversion of the standard by embrace and extend tactics.
Last but not least “Open Use” identifies the value of conformance for implementers and users. While multiple implementers can gather together to check if their implementations work with each other (plug-fest), users do need a formal entity taking care of the conformance process. Apparently ETSI is a candidate, it is up to you to judge whether it is a good or a bad thing.
Note that only when all ten rights are supported will standards be really open to all.
Thank you for your very kind comments on my work. I think your suggestions about the need for specific aspects of openness are excellent. One aspect you did not mention, I think should be emphasized – open interface. This is the most difficult aspect to understand, but perhaps the most useful today as it offers a means to support both public and proprietary features in a standard. This provides a way around most of the intellectual property issues that bedevil standardization today. The paper The Entrepreneur and Standards http://www.csrstds.com/IECChallenge2006.pdf given an introduction to this aspect and the paper The Fundamental Nature of Standards (http://www.csrstds.com/fundtec.html) under etiquettes gives a more technical description.
Roberto Galoppini
3:13 pm on June 16, 2008 Permalink
Hi Ken,
I am glad to disseminate your message on open standards, is really important to let people know that standardization is a process, not a product.
I always mention “open interface” in my speeches, explaining the importance of it. I also mention that “open interface” should go along with “open change”, in order to avoid predatory practices. I will try to cover these topics more extensively in the next future, thanks for your hint!
Not much has been heard after a loud announcement last autumn that Russia is going to migrate its secondary education to a Free Software operating system developed locally. There have been many announcements of this kind in past, and only few of them eventually led to some worthwhile results. For example, China’s Jiangsu deployment of Linux in secondary education was deemed to be the largest in history, but the feedback gained from it was so poor (only few messages were posted in the online forum that was taken down eventually) that there is almost no doubt as to the outcome of this project. It could have played its role, however, in trading China’s deal with Microsoft that now allows students in China to legally buy Windows+Office bundles for only $3.
And what about Russia? Maybe the school project is just another example of someone’s ungrounded ambitions and poorly made estimates? It may be too early to say for sure, but there is already some evidence that the project will not remain unfruitful.First of all, first deliverables have already become available. Openly and publicly (Russian). Among others, you are able to download the specially tailored Linux distributions, including a version tailored for older PCs with 128-256 MB of RAM and P-233-class CPUs and a Terminal Server edition that allows to use older PCs as thin terminals provided a decent server is available in the classroom.Secondly, the information is now coming from more than one source, which indicates that the regional participants of the project have both freedom and willingness to act (Perm, Tomsk, Moscow, all in Russian). The most curious is the website of the Perm region, where a map of the integration progress is available. The numbers in black correspond to the total amount of schools (first number is for city/town schools, second is for rural schools), the numbers in red correspond to the schools where Free Software is already being used.
And what do the teachers say? The forum threads devoted to FOSS usage in schools are numerous, and are thus hard to summarize. Those of the teachers who are FOSS proponents are enthusiastic, and they try to reaffirm their position by pointing to the work that is being done by the Armada consortiumand ALT Linux in particular as its most visible participant. The attitude of their colleagues varies from reserved support to skepticism, which sometimes comes from their inability to make computer peripherals work properly under Linux, and sometimes from the belief that the Microsoft monopoly is unbreakable.
Are these skeptics wrong? We will see by the end of 2008.
FR: Software fund selects first four Open Source projects – The French software research and development fund System@tic Paris Region’ has selected its first four Open Source projects for funding, it announced early this month. Même for myself: contact Roberto Di Cosmo to know more about that.
DE: Open Source reduces costs for national air traffic control – Using Open Source software has helped the German air traffic control service provider, Deutsche Flugsicherung (DFS) to lower its costs, while maintaining high quality IT services. When is it going to happen in Italy as well?
With a six-page letter sent ten days ago by Beatrice Magnolfi, undersecretary for Innovation Policy, the ministry responded to a request by the Italian PostgreSQL user group, the Italian translators working on OpenOffice, the Italian Free Software Association and several Italian computer scientists.
Roberto Galoppini, one of the submitters of that request, says the ministry’s letter does not provide enough details and hardly mentions concrete Open Source projects. “It still is hard to tell if those ten million euro were spent on Open Source or not.” Galoppini and his colleagues will ask the minister to organise a public event. “Here, the ministry could disseminate informationabout Open Source and explain how these funds were spent.”
The ministry writes how it last year decided to primarily fund projects dealing with digital innovation, education, health and on information projects meant for Italians abroad. The ministry writes it will support the application of Open Source solutions and will favour those projects allow public administrations to share and collaborate on software.
The reply also details how it has spent some of the funds earmarked to favour Open Source projects. It lists agreements with the Italian region of Tuscany and Trento province, legal advice concerning projects at elementary schools and agreements with the ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Culture.
The ministry adds that for projects in 2008 it will again give priority to Open Source software and other applications that allow sharing and reuse of software. It also expects to spend money on agreements with the ministry of Labour and Foreign Affairs, on projects for elementary schools and is defining measures to support the creation of a federal interoperable IT infrastructure.
Roberto Galoppini and 
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