European governments wait for a Democratic debate

Bruxelles, Copenhagen, London, Madrid, Munich, Paris. 2000-11-22.
With
the exception of Austria, Lichtenstein and Switzerland, all European
countries voted in Munich yesterday against an extension of the
patent
system to software. The exception on computer programs will be
maintained in the European Patent Convention after its revision.
This
move is a clear victory for democracy, since it allows the European
Commission to proceed with its public consultation on software
patents, together with the European Parliament. National governments
in Europe which are currently reviewing in detail the pros and the
cons of an extension of the patent system to software, will also be
able to participate in the debate.
Nicolas Pettiaux, belgian representative for the EuroLinux Alliance
of
software publishers and non profit organisations, warns however that
“yesterday’s vote should not be interpreted as a vote against
software
patents, but rather as a vote to postpone any decision on this
matter
until the consultation launched by the European Commission is
closed”.

But, according to Stéfane Fermigier of AFUL, member of EuroLinux:
“the
General Directorate for Internal Market at the European Commission,
which is in charge of the consultation, has approached the software
patent issue with an ideological point of view. Both their
interpretation of the Law and their call for the consultation are
obviously biased in favour of software patents. Furthermore, until
very recently, they paid no attention to the economic effects and to
other side effects of software patents, as they should have
according
to the Rome and Amsterdam Treaties. We are still very far from a
decision to ban software patents in Europe.”

Future EuroLinux actions will be targeted at convincing the European
Commission to take a balanced approach on software patents. As the
FFII/EuroLinux Software Patent Horror Gallery shows, the European
Patent Office is already abusively granting many patents on pure
software methods. Such kind of patents are then cancelled by
national
courts in case of dispute. A clarification is still needed in
Europe,
either in favour or against software patents. EuroLinux considers
that
software patents should clearly be banned in Europe because they
harm
innovation and that software should be protected through copyright.

References
European Patent Office –
http://www.european-patent-office.org
Software Patent Horror Gallery –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/examples
Statements for a Software Patent Free Europe –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/statements
The EuroLinux Public Consultation –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/consultation
The EuroLinux Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe –
http://petition.eurolinux.org
The EuroLinux File on Software Patents –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/reference

About EuroLinux – www.eurolinux.org
The EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is an
open coalition of commercial companies and non-profit associations
united to promote and protect a vigourous European Software Culture
based on Open Standards, Open Competition, Linux and Open Source
Software. Companies members or supporters of EuroLinux develop or
sell
software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses for operating
systems such as Linux, MacOS or Windows.

The EuroLinux Alliance launched on 2000-06-15 an electronic petition
to protect software innovation in Europe. The EuroLinux petition has
received so far massive support from more than 50.000 European
citizens, 2000 corporate managers and 200 companies.

The EuroLinux Alliance has co-organised in 1999, together with the
French Embassy in Japan, the first Europe-Japan conference on Linux
and Free Software. The EuroLinux Alliance is at the initiative of
the
www.freepatents.org Web site to promote and protect innovation and
competition in the European IT industry.

LinuxWorld reports that IBM announced CSK Network Systems
Corp., or CSK-Net, will use an IBM S/390 server running
TurboLinux for its data centre’s Web server platform. CSK-Net
is the first company in Japan to run a Linux application on a
mainframe.

From Linuxtoday: “As the commercial market for Linux grows, vendors are coming under increasing
pressure to deliver a definite roadmap to their customers with features, milestones and deadlines.
Will the uneasy alliance between vendors and Free Software developers break down? Is there a
way to reconcile the demand for a scheduled roadmap with the Free Software development
philosophy that regards deadlines as undesirable?”

The Register: “In what must be one of the most surreal stories we’ve ever covered,
Microsoft has awarded a Linux devotee with one of the company’s
most coveted patents awards -even though the recipient has never
worked for Microsoft.”

A Massachusetts hardware reseller reinvents itself as an open-source co-op. Spindletop System Dynamics will become the GNU Cooperative and will discount hardware to open-source developers. From Wired.com.

– By Grant Gross –

Sometimes, building the tools to fix democracy can be as messy as democracy itself. For the past week, developers interested in working on an Internet voting system with FreeDevelopers.net have been locked in an argument over when the primary author should release some of the source code.

Marilyn Davis has created the Clerk, a software module “designed to emulate ‘The Clerk’ of a Quaker meeting for business,” on which FreeDevelopers is basing its eVote project. But Davis has so far declined to release the source code, saying she’s concerned about the possibility of coders building in ways to cheat the voting system.

Davis has urged other programmers to be patient while she trusts her inner voice to develop the project further before releasing the code. About seven years ago, Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation himself, unsuccessfully tried to convince her to release the code she’s been working on for 12 years, she says.

Davis doesn’t want “a rigged direct democracy poll in a community group using eVote.
One guy pulling the wool over all our eyes, If big brother … had the source, maybe he could rig the politics,” she adds. “Like [one developer] says, he wants the source so that he can hack. He can’t without it. Everyone running eVote is running an uncorrupted eVote.”

The debate about the release of the Clerk’s source code has been happening on the eVote discussion list through the FreeDevelopers.net Web site for about a week. FreeDevelopers.net has been making discussions on its mailing list public by archiving them monthly.

“What can I say to convince you to GPL it now?” asked developer Daniel Baumann on the list. “I would just like to ask that you release it now so that we may get comfortable with the code and get others to join in our efforts and/or we can get a hold on what’s there. In my mind this the only way an organization like this is going to get anywhere. How can we say this is a free software entity and yet not have the code for one of the most important projects readily
available? Surely, we must be more open than this?”

Tony Stanco, a former Security Exchange Commission attorney who heads the democratically run FreeDevelopers.net, says eVote will eventually be GPL’d. All projects on FreeDevelopers.net must be GPL’d or get a waiver from the Free Software Foundation, and eVote won’t seek the waiver, Stanco says.

Stanco says he received Stallman’s blessing to work with Davis’ project. “I understand your concern,” Stanco wrote developers on the list. “We all had it at the beginning and on
an objective standard, there is still a risk to us, because Marilyn has control over the situation. But I trust Marilyn COMPLETELY on this. She strikes me as particularly honorable and I don’t think anyone can corrupt her by even promising her the world once she gives her word.”

eVote is one of several Internet voting projects being developed. In fact, Jason Kitcat of the Java-based free software project FREE (Free Referenda & Elections Electronically) is on the eVote discussion list. While Kitcat argues that Internet voting systems should be open, the coordinator of FREE has been talking about how to work with eVote.

“I have difficulty being convinced by security arguments for keeping software NOT Free,” he wrote late last week. “Surely if the code is freely available it will be easier to detect malicious changes in a particular implementation? I think this issue needs to be resolved before people start
contributing time and effort to something.”

FREE is database independent, so Kitcat and Davis believe it will work with eVote. “While the Clerk/eVote were written from inside out, by starting from first principles and the server, Jason is building a fancy Java user interface that can work on any database,” Davis says in an email interview. “Sort of a flower meets the bee kind of thing, if we take advantage of it.”

The Clerk, the foundation for eVote, as Davis describes it: “More than a vote-counter, The Clerk of a Quaker meeting *facilitates* the meeting, impartially allowing each person equal access to the floor, equal ability to bring an issue to the group’s attention, equal ability to call a vote. S/he allows show-of-hand votes, transparent for all to count, as well as secret ballot. S/he allows discussion and voting to go on simultaneously, with repeated calls-to-vote on the same issue, to facilitate consensus.”

Stanco, who describes premature code sharing for the Clerk as “releasing a monster on the world,” describes the Clerk as a specialized vote-server, as opposed to the generalized vote-server of other systems. “Specializing the server grants more power to the user, i.e., the power to check the vote, to change the vote before the poll closes, and to trigger a recount of the statistics,” he says. “Our plan is to network Clerks together for election voting. Besides
the security of having the ballots distributed over many machines, this will enable the Clerks to check each other, ensuring absolute accuracy and giving each ballot the respect it deserves.”

Stanco says enhancements such as external executable verification or networking of Clerks to check on each other would solve the “big-brother” worries about eVote. “Davis, who authored The Clerk, and who believes in its awesome power, is afraid of it,” Stanco says. “Marilyn believes we need to have at least one of these facilities in place before we publicly release the source. When we are funded, there will be an internal release on a need-to-know basis.”

FreeDevelopers.net expects to release some ports of the system, and possibly some enhancements, maybe even before the project is funded and security layers are in place, Stanco added. Those releases would be marked “beta” and, he says, “we will warn our users of the dangers, both of the big-brother model, and the secret source model.”

Stanco, while acknowledging issues with security and equal access with Internet voting, predicts eVote will be ready to use for the 2004 presidential election.

But the eVote project first has to get beyond the issue of releasing the code. Lyn Headley, a developer who’s been working on electronic voting* for a year and a half, wrote Friday that developers are dying to work on the project.

Headley compared closed source code to strict gun ownership laws. “Personally I think Marilyn should release the code because … I think voting software, guns, and computers are all the same thing: power, which can be used for or against the people,” Headley wrote. “The way I see it if the people don’t take the power they will be screwed by it. I think many of us feel the same way about software.”

*This is the google cached link; the page itself, www.hacktree.org, did not load consistently when we tested it.

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Under a particular configuration, ServletExec AS v3.0C will disclose
the source code of JSP pages when some special characters are
appended to HTTP requests. Net-security.org reports.

Browers, databases, education, and more, at LWN.net.

UpsideToday reader says PDAs and cell phones will be capable of playing MP3s soon.

MSNBC tells us, “all times may be off by two hours
during daylight savings time in these versions:
Outlook 2000, 98 8.5, 97 8.x, or SR-1 Enterprise
Update.”