The above extract is from a paper we are submitting to the Innovation Taskforce as requested by the Department of Taoiseach. The draft paper is available at Positioning Ireland as an International Innovation Hub

Please note, we are submitting the paper ahead of the deadline which is Friday the 18th of September. We appreciate any feedback, support or criticisms you may have. Please post them as comments below.

“In the 1980s there were lots of computer magazines that used to publish programming articles with BASIC code, that everyone could input and run on their own computers. However, in the 1990s such large scale end user computer programming pretty much died out – tweaking the odd web page isn’t quite the same thing. One of the assumptions that the Free Software movement makes is that every user is also a programmer of some sort, who is able to tweak the software on their computers. I hope we can get back to that spirit, and change the way that people think about KDE programming, because at the moment there is a tendency to think it is hard and that only the ‘C++ gods’ like David Faure or Thiago Macieira can do it. In fact it is pretty easy to write small Python and Ruby apps and plasmoids, or to write a little script to message an app over DBus. We just need to get communities of like minded people together who write tutorials on TechBase, create blog entries with code (like the 1980s BASIC articles), and help beginners get started. These ubiquitous end user programming environments in Kubuntu (and other distributions I hope) will make it possible to do that.”

This really sums up something that would be fantastic to see over the next few years. There’s so many gadget lovers and technology geeks out there – the type of people who would’ve probably punched those BASIC tutorials into a Commodore 64, an Amstrad CPC464 or ZX Spectrum back in the good old days – that feel left behind as they perceive professional programmers to have blazed ahead a path that cannot be caught. But in many ways nothing could be further from the truth. For any programmer, there’s always some guy or gal that’s coding something more challenging or doing cleverer(er) stuff on the next machine. It’s all relative. And since software turned into a mainstream industry over the last couple of decades, it’s been the programmers doing the simplest tasks that have made the megabucks whilst the hardcore wizards of machine code and assembly have seen their demand dimish.

So next time you think there’s no point in picking up a few programming skills give a language like Ruby or Python a shot. Hopefully, with the continuing progress of Kubuntu and other distro’s to make programming more accessible, you’ll have the perfect environment to do so!

Read more on OpenWriters.org.

The Irish Penguin is a die-hard market fanatic. The reason is not just because it’s the most efficient way to run an economy but rather that it is the best for the consumer (Note: The Penguin doesn’t think that its the best way to run some things like health care but that’s another story altogether). The bottom line is the customer truly is always right. Remember this for later. Which is way todays announcement is not just bad news for budding business entrepreneurs within Europe’s software economy but also a smack in the chops for European consumers. One of the frantic undertones of the EU is often one of desperation – an attempt to try and emulate America – in order to somehow shed the image of a union which is hamstrung fragmented markets and business unfriendly polices. Unfortunately, it sometimes goes about it the wrong way. Instead of the Japanese tradition of copying a process and improving it, the EU cumbersomely ambles towards the wrong target and periodically releases sound bites which it thinks will make it sound economically competent. Today was a comical case in point. Here is an excerpt from its press release.

“The European Commission has decided today to give a new boost to Europe’s online content sector. EU citizens should be able to enjoy easier and faster access to a rich variety of music, TV programmes, films or games via the Internet, mobile phones or other devices.”

Let’s read that first line again. The European Commission has decided what? This opening sentence sounds like the EU is trying to convince itself that this is a good idea. In reality, the European Commission has NOT decided today to give a boost to Europe’s online content sector. This is because included in its announcement the EU has decided that DRM (a completely misnamed and dangerous Digital Rights Management technology) should be forced on the European customer at every turn – in order to stifle the promising multimedia sector. It is highly useful to see that DRM has roundly been rejected by media consumers right across the globe. All of the major record company’s used to have DRM woven into their CDs and products at the turn of the year. DRM prevented users playing music on more than one music playback device. For example, it locked customers who had purchased an album online into playing it back on an iPod only; the user could not choose to play that same album on their home computer. And it also locked users who had bought CDs from playing them on their iPod. As sales plumetted and customers rebelled, EMI was the first to reject this notion and give back consumers the right to play their music on any device. That the left the remaining labels with an inferior product and they all quickly followed suit. Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group all now sell ‘clean’ products in United States which are not contaminated with DRM. This shows the power of the Free Market to correct problems like DRM. So if it makes sense for these major players to roundly reject DRM then how on earth can it make sense for the EU to move towards it? The answer – it doesn’t!

Ironically, the second sentence is also meaningless rhetoric. The EU Commission’s announcement today does NOT make it easier or faster to access rich multimedia. The only thing that can do that is solid broadband policies and Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is crucial. It guarantees that the all services provided over the Internet are treated equal. This allows the separation of the bandwidth providers (such as European telecom companies and ISPs) from the content providers (movie distributors, news channels, websites, email services) in order to prevent the bundling of content with services. The big word there is ‘bundling’. If your telecom company is providing your movies via cable TV and an online company seeks to compete with them by providing movie downloads it is unwise to let the telecom company to control the bandwidth available to the online company – clearly it would be in the Telecom’s interest to restrict bandwidth for movies thus ruining the challengers business model and locks consumers into the telecom company’s cable movie offering. Thankfully, thus far Net Neutrality is not under serious threat in Europe. However, DRM certainly does nothing to make your Internet connection any faster. All is does is make digital media that you purchase over the Internet into an inferior product than it otherwise could have been.

One of the driving forces of the damaging policies is Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for the Information Society and Media. She says “We have to make a choice in Europe: Do we want to have a strong music, film and games industry?” However the report issued goes on to call for the “establish(ing of) a framework for DRM transparency concerning, amongst others, the interoperability of different DRMs, and ensuring that consumers are properly informed of any usage restrictions placed on downloaded content…” The question remains, why create ‘usage restrictions’? Why not let the user just play their music how they want. It’s like selling someone a car and then letting them drive down only one street. It defies logic. Not to mention the that fact that every digital item you purchase will be more expensive as the cost of DRM will be included in each product. A more expensive and less functional product is not what the consumer wants. And the consumer is always right! They have rebelled against DRM before and they will rebel again. And the EU Commission wants to drag down European software houses and content providers with this sinking ship. With a ratification on the Lisbon treaty coming up in Ireland with guaranteed influx of the “No” vote protesters from neighbouring countries, we can only hope that Europe starts to give its citizens reasons to vote for Europe than against it.

For a more technical analysis of the announcement, as well as an open letter which you can sign that argues against the EU’s position, check out this link.

This has caused great entertainment for those browsing the net as, for some, this has broken down into a full scale Europe vs America battle. The ruling is Microsoft’s first court loss of significance that stands to have genuine legal ramifications as most other similar cases have been settled out of court by deep pockets and hamstrung prosecutions. Although it’s always hard to pick the legal meat off the bones in a lot of software related court cases, other articles have mentioned that the ruling means limited scope for MS to appeal, possible requirement of protocols disclosure and of course the small matter of hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Small change to a big fish perhaps but no one likes to throw away money.

Those who support the decision are proudly strutting the streets with their vin rouge in one hand and their petit pain in the other singing “Vive la Revolution” as they go. Some have changed to spelling color with a ‘u’ and prefer to organise their day than organize it. Those against, see the fleeting head of communism attacking capitalism’s finest hour. Cries of “Red! Reds! Under the beds” can be heard from those who shun the European Courts ruling. Particularly entertaining is the comments at the end of the article Microsoft’s Stunning Court Defeat. I don’t normally mange to keep chugging through the comments but I did find this little flame quite amusing.

So what does the future legal direction of this case hold? Well that’s anyone’s guess, but the interesting thing that FFII correctly pointed out in one of their recent press releases is that patents are where the battle is at. Whatever respect Europe can garner by being the first one to call a spade a spade – or an illegal monopoly an illegal monopoly – will be soon squandered if software patents are allowed in the back door. How anyone could be stupid enough to repeatedly bring software patents to the brink of legality in Europe is amazing. But that is what’s happened time and time again. Software lifecycles are measured in months (not decades like in big pharma) and innovation has always occurred by building on the ideas of others. But yet there are those who are scared that taking a stance against software patents means being anti-intellectual property – when the reverse is the case. Let’s hope that the next time software patents are on the European menu, that there will be enough intelligent people in the room to call the spade again.

The first post Open Source Is Dead, Long Live Open Patents? by David DeJean, which took a commonly cited angle on GPL3 hurting Open Source by fragmenting the community. But that is to not understand the community. Bare in mind one important fact about community-oriented Open Source developers, of which I am one – we write the software because we love to. For the vast majority of SMD’s (Small-to-Medium size project Developers, for want of a better term) we don’t really care whether our project is GPL2 or GPL3 – why? Because they are both effective Open Source licences and they will both serve our personal purposes fine as either licence would suit our pet projects. Of course, we’ll all still get our goat up as to whether Linux or the GNU Compiler Tools should be GPL 2 or 3 – but that’s a separate issue – it’s won’t stop us writing the software we love. It is naive for commentators to think that because a new licence comes out that it will hurt the amount of FOSS produced. As for businesses, if it made sense to switch to Linux before GPL 3, it will still make sense after GPL3 – irrespective of what or who adopts GPL 3. It technically affects Tivo (although they will be able to stick with Linux 2.4 kernel) – so what? Such cases only make up a small part of the econosphere. Plenty of business providers seem to be happy. Even embedded solution providers are saying that GPL 3 won’t turn customers off, with Jason Wacha of MontaVista saying “Our customers are used to working with licenses that are much more restrictive than the GPL. In my opinion, typical proprietary licenses are much more restrictive in pretty much all instances than the GPL.”

The second article Why Open Source and Linux Are Losing Momentum seemed a bizarre choice of title for a engineering philosophy and a platform which is currently experiencing stellar momentum towards ever greater adoption. As one commenter at the end of the article said – check out the Gartner and IDC statistics. But being a lazy developer I’ll just speak from my own experience. I’m finding that small to medium sized Microsoft shops are getting squeezed as Microsoft have made it more difficult for such companies to maintain partnership status. Today, a given company is required to have more and more MCSE’s or MCAD’s on the books in order to get any level of partnership. But obviously it is easier for 100 employee company to get X number of MCSE’s than it is for a company of 4 employees. Despite the fact that small tight teams tend to deliver better results (in a traditionally managed non-bazaar environment). So why penalise the small guys? Why make them fork out more licencing costs for things such as Visual Studio and Team Studio while the big fish get these through the partnership program?

Perhaps, Rob Enderle, the author of this second article might reflect on this as a reason for lower software project margins than blindly (I don’t mean to be offensive, I really don’t, but the following assertion amazed me) stating that GPL and Linux drove developers to India. If Microsoft want to help boost profit margins for software houses then help developers in small business. Otherwise the trend showing that Microsoft’s Windows platform is losing traction as a target for application developers in North America is likely to continue. In this article, John Andrews, the CEO of Evans Data, says “We attribute [the decline] largely to the increase in developers beginning to target Linux and different Linux [distributions].”

One reason that seems to be driving this shift is that customers like web apps more than desktop applications and even though C# marches forward, making big progress on the taking Java on head to head, it is being flanked by the likes of Ruby and even Python on the web app development scene. It also is interesting to note that if you have recently had your Microsoft partnership cut short and you still want to dog food you will probably be using SourceSafe to manage your source code. My advice – don’t. Because similarly positioned competitors are most likely using Subversion and this will give them a technical advantage that you will find hard to bridge. SourceSafe is interesting in that, despite it’s name, it does not source control code. Unless you like tagging every revision – there is no way to see what you project looked like for a given revision – something that is trivial in Subversion and in particular TortoiseSvn. It’s a sign of the times when it makes so much more sense for Microsoft Shops to use Free Software alternatives to dog food.

Another bone of contention I have with the article is it’s stance on outsourcing. The reason that jobs get outsourced is simple because the destination countries have well skilled professional people who can help lower costs for a business if properly utilised. It is the U.S. that agrees trade pacts with these countries, not Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds – those happy bed fellows – or Eben Moglen. If you don’t like that then vote accordingly but I’m a little confused at how GPL/Linux could be blamed. On the subject of Google rising on the hard work of FOSS, it’s worth noting that Google does participate in the community – Google Web Toolkit, Google Summer of Code and Google’s Open Source Project Hosting service to name but a few – and in addition, Google pays lots of top notch Linux dev’s a handsome salary.

Another point I took from the article was how Bill Gates almost ‘invented’ the notion of software developer jobs and turned a bunch of hobbyists into professionals – from the Microsoft history link provided. But realistically it just so happened that Microsoft came on the scene just as desktops started becoming useful to business in this manner. There were plenty of others out there to pay developers – I certainly think that IBM would have paid a few along the way. A more interesting trip back in time would be to 1991, when Bill Gates said Patents exclude competitors, lead industry to standstill compared to the anti-Linux saber rattling patent assault going on at the moment. No doubt you’ve all seen the now infamous Fortune magazine article linked to on more than one occasion.

So that’s another day in the life of the Internet. I’ll sign off on the following note. At one point in the latter article I’ve covered, Rob Enderle, asks of GPL 3 “What has it done to increase software value, programmer salaries or software company profitability?” My answer is simple, by championing the goal of removing the scourge of software patents from the software industry, the GPL encourages the development of programs without the fear and persecution of anti-competitive legal intervention from 3rd parties. It’s message is clear ‘Spend your precious cash on paying software developers, not lawyers’. Rob says that Microsoft is no longer a danger… We’ll all believe that when they sign up to the patent non-proliferation treaty. Until then, look up, sit back, and watch them pigs fly!

Digg this story and email it 500 friends within the next hour and you will win $2000 and eternal happiness.

But I think the above header was worth it. Veronica, my glamorous girlfriend and graphic design mentor, didn’t like it much to start with. At least I managed to pacify her by throwing in a cute penguin pic, which I did up in the absolutely fabulous Inkscape. Inkscape has to be one of the best Free Software programs ever. It’s just so easy to use and yet things just always turn out good. It’s magic. And that’s just the kind of thing you’ll be hearing more about on this blog over the coming months along with other news and discussion from the filthy dirty world of Open Source.

Just a heads up for anyone trying to change their WordPress header image – make sure that you haven’t changed the header’s colours or anything previously in WordPress. If you have made changes then you should revert them – which can be done from the dashboard. Otherwise all the image uploading and CSS styling in the world won’t be enough to get that flamin’ header to change! Now there’s an hour of my life that I won’t get back! At least I had The Irish Rover playing away in the back of my head to keep me going…

Doo do doo…

On a lighter note, here’s a clip of Steve Balmer trying to rally the Redmond programmers in better days before lawyers led software development. I wonder does he exhibit the same passion today when he stands in front of his devs or does he prefer to go into the TV lounge and flick on an episode of Boston Legal…

The most obvious way to help is for bloggers or people with websites to display a prominent ad for Dell Linux boxes. Let’s show Dell that by listening and embracing the Linux community that we can help them out. Each and everyone can be a partner to Dell and it is in everyone’s interest that Linux market share grows. A bigger pie means that more hardware vendors will support Linux and having the Open Source desktop OS in the limelight will mean more development work for Open Source programmers. For consumers, it brings choice like they’ve never had before – the modern day Linux OS thoroughly outshines it competitors. I do not make this comment lightly. But this week I got my first glimpse at the 3D accelerated desktop for Linux – it is incredible! It leaves Vista for dead. And comparing the two side-by-side there is only one winner.

So let’s help Dell sell Linux. I’m going to be emailing them after the official announcement to get my Dell Linux ad. Never has marketing been such a pleasure! And never has the Linux Desktop looked so good!

[digg=http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linux_Community_Must_Help_Dell_Sell_Linux ]