Friday Opinion Request 2: Are Your Free Software T-Shirts Ethical?

2008-09-05 by mjr

News reports have described the use of forced child labour for cotton harvesting in Uzbekistan, which is then used in t-shirts and so on, including those sold by some major shops in England like Asda/Wal-Mart, as I mentioned on the debian-project email list last autumn. When you buy badly-produced T-shirts to support free software projects, you may be helping provide freedom for more software users in your country, but you may also be helping to enslave vulnerable workers in other countries.

If you buy Debian T-shirts from the UK, you’re probably OK. This is something that the Debian UK Society seems to do right. Their buyer (and current Debian Project Leader) Steve McIntyre wrote:

“[Fruit of the Loom premium Ts, Kustom Kit Augusta/405 polo shirts …] both FotL and KK have ethics statements that describe their standards. The KK one is linked off the front page of their website; the FotL details I have in .doc format that I’ll pass on if people would like to see them.” (original)

I also asked my local perl mongers group to do similar but there’s been no response to that yet (or any t-shirts AFAIK). I’ve been told that all of the FSF Europe gear is Fair Trade but it doesn’t say that on their web shop.

How about other free software projects? Have you asked about your T-shirts? Is there a central site for this sort of information?

Posted in Education, Training and Information, SPI | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Canada: Land of the Non-Free?

2008-09-03 by mjr

I’ve been seeing a bit about Canada recently, what with plastic-bottled water (more on that next month), the airline I used for my last trip (Zoom) going bust and stranding passengers and being a fan of Co-op Radio‘s documentaries, so I was particularly interested to see this news:

“FACIL, a non-profit association, which promotes the collective appropriation of Free Software, contests the Quebec government purchasing methods for software […]” (first seen at Lawsuit, etc – Diary of a CrazyFrench)

In England, discrimination against free software has been less obvious, with the whole national, county and district government system being officially open to free software (or rather, open source that meets gov.uk’s own definition of the term), but very biased towards large service providers. Like most countries, England doesn’t seem to have large pure-free-software service providers yet, so this usually means that the best we can do is get some mix of free and non-free software. This only gets beyond token gestures towards free software when lots of the project development and leadership is internal, as in nearby Bristol City Council, or the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

I’m surprised that Quebec has been overt enough to make a lawsuit possible and I’m very encouraged that FACIL is the group to do this. I’ll suggest to SPI and a few other groups that they should join to show support, but I don’t know whether the “political interventions” policy of FACIL will cause problems for non-profits.

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Plesk open_basedir and PEAR: the missing step

2008-09-02 by mjr

I hate the Plesk server control panel webapp but our webmaster cooperative still maintains one (but only one) server that uses it. That non-free software means that it’s under our “limited support agreement” which essentially says “you understand that the lack of copyright permissions means this system may break in ways we’re legally forbidden to fix and you have to go beg the copyright holder for help”.

Recently, a site broke because it wanted to use a PEAR module and Plesk’s PHP configuration includes an open_basedir which forbids access to /usr/share/pear – that’s stupid. If someone has enough permission to install dangerous stuff into that folder, they definitely have enough permission to edit the PHP configuration.

The httpd.include file which contains that PHP configuration has a comment at the top that helpfully tells you to create a vhost.conf file alongside it, instead of editing the httpd.include which gets regenerated by Plesk (wiping out any changes at some near-random time in the future). It doesn’t mention that you need to run /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=your.domain after creating it, else no amount of reloading the Apache httpd configuration will make it use the new file. I found the idea from this Re:morse.nl blog post and then read the –help output to pick the best options for me. It’s not obvious on SWSoft’s Plesk help, which is also stupid.

Finally, you can’t edit the httpd.include template (to mention the websrvmng command to future sysadmins, or to change the open_basedir across all sites) because it is a string inside websrvmng and not a template file – very very stupid.

I didn’t find the source code for websrvmng and I doubt we have permission to modify it, so I guess this is another thing we can’t fix in a reasonable way, like the limited support agreement says. I could recompile PHP to ignore those open_basedir settings or add /usr/share/pear to it, but that’s one hell of a work-around. It seems like having non-free software (like Plesk) rewrite the configuration files of free software (like PHP) is a good way to cripple the free software.

One day I want us to be like Bristol Wireless and have a policy of refusing to deal with such non-free-software systems, but that’s a decision I’ve never won in any organisation I’ve joined yet.

Posted in GNU/Linux, SPI, Web Development | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Oddments from Planet Debian

2008-09-01 by mjr

Three replies to things I saw today on Planet Debian on blogs of people that don’t have fully-working web comment systems:-

  1. Professional Slide Installer (usual buggy blogger.com CAPTCHA) – yes, they exist. My village’s council sometimes hires them. I think they’re carpenters who have specialised. There are also professional slide inspectors (well, childrens’ play area safety inspectors, but professional slide inspector sounds cooler).
  2. Internet Speed Hype (usual buggy wordpress kind-a captcha) – ThePhone.Coop (UK) doesn’t cap, but charges extra if you go over your subscription amount. We have a monitoring system that lets you check your usage fairly easily and set up email alerts when your prepaid amount is almost used up. (I work for agent AG_471 of ThePhone.Coop but I think I’d like them anyway.)
  3. home of the madduck/ blog/ Recovering a lost default route (site under construction – see bottom of page) – I was told by a very wise man to always start a delayed reboot (shutdown -r +5) before messing with anything to do with the networking on a remote machine.
Posted in Education, Training and Information, GNU/Linux, ThePhoneCoop, Web Development, Wordpress and Blogs | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

The Phone Co-op: interview, phorm, challenges

2008-09-01 by mjr

Among other things, my webmaster cooperative is an agent for the Phone Co-op. Particularly with Free Software, cost-efficient ways of downloading data is a good companion service to have and the Phone Co-op has given a good ADSL and calls service to my own home and office for a few years now. When there are problems, they’ve worked pretty well to fix them. Just last week, I had a phone call to tell me when routing problems in LINX were fixed… which was a great help. I don’t remember an ISP doing that for me for years. I think the last one was my university’s dial-up service, 10 or more years ago.

Another unusual thing for a UK ISP is the excellent public position on the Phorm ad-snooper that I mentioned previously: We strongly oppose these practices, especially the loss of privacy […] Phorm is not operating on our users’ lines and we have required and received assurances from our suppliers that this will remain the case.

Our Chief Executive Vivian Woodell gave an interview to the FT (accept the first two cookies, then block the rest, else you only get two paragraphs) which has a pretty good explanation of how the business side of the cooperative works. We’re recruiting for Line Rental (PSTN and ISDN) until the end of the year, including special offers like residential Unlimited Anytime Calls for £7.95 a month (normally £9.99) at the moment, as well as the great climate-neutral and ethical policies – if your landline contract renewal comes up, give it a look.

The Phone Co-op was ten years old in June, but there are still big challenges: I’d love to see a cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service and the mobile contract offers still look a bit expensive to me (no bundled data on phones, £25 per month for a 3G data card). I’d also love to see support for some daring innovative solutions like customers owning their own tails (tails are the last link to their house, where most of the UK has a choice of one provider: BT), using that as a way to upgrade small towns and villages to fibre-optic, or offer resident-owned wifi.

Update: As if by magic, Ofcom has started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Go comment.

Posted in OSCommerce, ThePhoneCoop, Web Development | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Friday Opinion Request: Shaping the Future of Social Enterprise

2008-08-29 by mjr

As you may know, our webmaster cooperative is classed as a Social Enterprise by gov.uk because it has social primary aims and isn’t run for shareholder benefit – we have neither shareholders nor employees, which screws up lots of surveys. Although its workers make a little money from it, I think it’s better than many Social Enterprises because it’s in common ownership rather than private ownership (which means, as I understand it, if we kill the company for whatever reason, its copyrights and so on would go to other common-ownership organisations, else fall into the public domain – the ultimate free software guarantee).

Social Enterprise seems very popular at the moment. We keep getting asked our opinion by both government (public sector) and other social enterprises. I think this is because most public sector bodies seem to struggle to get enough input from the third sector and most third sector bodies want to make sure they’re not squashing other bits of the third sector.

Next Thursday, I’m going to a “consultation to identify priorities for support for the South West’s social enterprises” but I’m really not sure what to say. I’m going to ask my cooperatives for suggestions, but I’d welcome suggestions from anyone else interested in social enterprise too. Any ideas?

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

More Free Software for Libraries

2008-08-28 by mjr

Two interesting nearly-free-software articles about Free Software for Libraries:-

Four more libraries upgrading to free software systems:-

Posted in Koha, SPI, Web Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why I Didn?t Buy Some Online Courses

2008-08-28 by mjr

I was just looking to buy some online classes.  I haven’t bought one yet and here’s three ideas I think online course sellers should follow to get more customers:-

  • Telephone courses – it’s the world-wide web, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I want to make an international telephone call for the course.  If the course includes a teleconference, publish the area code(s) so I can include the cost of my calls when budgeting, please. Even better, offer a local (UK) number or Voice-Over-IP (VOIP, or internet phone) access for SIP phones, so it won’t cost me extra.
  • Web classes – web browsers have plugins, but not all web browsers have all plugins and sometimes I’d prefer to watch your video stream on my TV instead.  That’s easy if it’s a video stream I can load in a standalone player (I can even remote-control some players with my bluetooth phone), but it’s a right pain if it requires Adobe Flash, locked down with javascript, DRM and so on.  Make video streams that can be used in Videolan or MPlayer, please.
  • Web classes – if a class uses its own special downloadable program (even if it’s Java), then it’s not a web class.  Please make the class usable in a web browser and please publish a small test class so I can make sure my browser works before the class starts.
  • Ordering systems – one site gave me no fewer than three big red error messages while I was trying to buy.  The first said the site requires Javascript.  I changed that setting, pressed back and re-ordered, then the second big red error said it requires cookies .  I changed that setting, then it said it needed Internet Explorer.  I closed the Firefox/Iceweasel window and gave up.  Please test your ordering system and show a full list of system requirements as soon as there’s an error, to avoid wasting my time.

Are there any good online course providers out there which do all of the above?

Posted in Web Development | Comments Off on Why I Didn?t Buy Some Online Courses

Forthcoming Attractions: Software Cooperative Events for Late 2008

2008-08-27 by mjr

Some interesting events that I’ve heard about recently, with a bit of a focus on software, cooperatives and the South-West:-

I’m pretty sure I’ll go to the *d ones – which others do you think I should go to? Will you be at any of these? Any comments to make on/to any of them? Any more to add to the list?

Posted in Drupal, GNU/Linux, Koha, OSCommerce, ThePhoneCoop, Web Development, Wordpress and Blogs | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Solved but Why? Belkin F5D7630 to Realtek 8139 Drop-outs

2008-08-26 by mjr

I’d been having problems connecting my laptop to my router to the Phone Coop using a new network cable that I laid under the floor just after the new heating system was installed. It’s a 1970s building – cat-5 wasn’t installed with the original wiring and mains homeplug networking is tricky on this wiring layout. The growing number of people with WiFi and video senders on my hillside (70% of UK users “never or rarely switch off their broadband wireless routers”) seems to be causing more interference and slow-downs, so it seemed worth installing a wired connection while the floors were up.

The connection seemed to work fine, but then kept stopping for 20 seconds at a time – that’s just long enough to break network connections, but barely long enough to start up debugging tools, let alone get useful output.

I was pretty sure the cable wasn’t at fault – Paul tested it with his fancy test gear when he completed the wiring for me. That left the hardware: my much-hated Belkin F5D7630 and the Realtek 8139 in the bizarre Compaq Evo N1015v. I’ve still not got around to replacing that Belkin and it’s been behaving itself well enough recently, while the Compaq has run smoothly once I actually got Linux onto it.

I found the end of this Ubuntu Forums thread which pointed to this archlinux bulletin board thread which suggested pnpbios=off pnpacpi=off in the boot options. After adding that, the 20-second network pauses have stopped. But why? The ACPI and BIOS in this laptop are generally troublesome (and it looks like this also happens on some Presarios), but what in particular is going wrong this time? Will I suffer ill effects from switching off PNP options? Time will tell, I guess.

Posted in Education, Training and Information, GNU/Linux, ThePhoneCoop, Web Development | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment