Colin Charles Agenda

First up, I want to say, I’m truly impressed with Brazil. One day I will visit this amazing place, and spread the good word of open source with projects that are close to my heart: MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Fedora, and in due time, a lot more. This is a live-blog, from a most interesting talk, at JavaOne 2008. As I wrote on Twitter, “Brazil, simply impresses me. Their use of open source in government, makes me think that the rest of the world has a lot to learn from them”.

Free and Open Source Software: Use and Production by the Brazilian Government
Rogerio Santana <rogerio.santanna@planejamento.gov.br> +55 61 313 1400, Logistics and Information Technology Secretariat
Planning, Budget and Management Ministry
Brazilian Government

Households with Internet access: 70% in the US4k household income range. 70% of households have mobile phones (even when total revenue is USD$2k). Middle and upper class are all, generally on the Internet.

In 2007, 98% of Income Tax has been sent by the Internet. By 2009, there’s only going to be use of a Java application for this. About 17.5 million people filed via the Internet. Impressive.

Brazil has 142k public schools - 26k are connected to the Internet now (18%), and 92% are connected at low speed, while 8% have 512kbps connections.

Plan? Free Internet for schools, from 2008-2025. 1mbps for each connection, growth plans in the next 3 years.

There exists Computer Reconditioning Centres (CRCs) for recycling PCs.

www.eping.e.gov.br (e-PING: e-Government Interoperability Standards)
www.governoelectronico.gov.br (e-MAG: e-Government Accessibility Model)

Brazil has been using electronic voting since 1995. 136.8 million people voted in 2006 election. Next version of vote machines will use GNU/Linux!

Open Standards. Interoperability. Free Software. Free License. Community.

e-PING: uses XML, browser compliant, they have metadata standards

Many organisations of the Brazilian Government use Java as a primary development platform. Remember, Java is important because its the first that allowed even Linux users to interact with government applications.

Brazilian Digital Television? Middle-ware responsible for the interactive process of digital TV also developed in Java. (Ginga is the name of the application).

In education? Enrolment is done via the Internet for universities. e-Proinfo is an e-learning project that has already trained 50k students.

Developing clusters and grids, with focus on high availability, load balancing, database replication, distributed mass storage, and virtualization. The government is backing this, since 2006.

In an interesting twist (interesting for Microsoft and their OOXML apologists), about a month ago, MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, decided that they were going to go OpenOffice.org and go ODF, and dump Microsoft Office by year-end 2008. This made its round around news sites, and everyone was naturally talking about it.

Now, you can hold them to their word, as they update a Wiki page, informing you about how many agencies are moving to OpenOffice.org. Big wins, once all of the Malaysian government related agencies are on OpenOffice.org (open source software in general). Again, read OpenOffice.org and ODF Adoption!

As a current Malaysian tax payer, I wouldn’t want the government misappropriating money, on proprietary software.

One interesting bit from that? OpenOffice.org being taught in matriculation colleges (11 currently), as lecturers are trained to deliver it to their students. It all starts in schools, though, but this is much better than what was previously around.

Go OpenOffice.org! Go ODF!

Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, odf, mampu, migration

Who is the Dick on my site?
Dick Hardt

Most interesting keynote. About 1,000+ slides. Many slides per minute. Definitely a new way of presenting :)

• What is identity? What is Identity 2.0?
• Identity is a complicated topic, and you normally get the tip of the iceberg. Identity changes during your stages in life.
• Works at SXIP Identity.
• I wondered what the German’s thought about identity. Identat. “They’re German” <applause>
• Answers.com had the best answers for identity.
• There’s lots of different personas about a person. Women really are the masters of different personas (clothes, wife, mother, etc.). Reinventing oneself.
• Identity allows you to predict behaviour…
• When someone is in a “role” (fireman, etc.), you think you can predict behaviour. Is this identity? It’s who you are, not really, no.
• blame.ca (his website)
• Identity transactions… on where is identity used? Party identification, authorisation, profile exchange (information about a person so you know them better).
• “Do you want to present ID at a bottle shop? If no, you can rollback the transaction!” <applause>
• Photo ID is a reusable credential. This is an identity transaction.
• Reputation built up on eBay? You can’t take it over to Craigslist. Identity 1.0 is site centric, its a walled garden.
• identity20.com
• Facebook is becoming a new silo. URIs enable things to be open (LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, etc.)
• DataPortability.org - user centric
• Kim Cameron - Laws of Identity (read it)
• Device convergence - near field communication, phones doing more than make calls, etc.
• Digital natives and immigrants. What are you? CNN == news source for natives, immigrants tend to use newspapers. I wouldn’t use CNN as an example myself, but the drift is there. Digital camera (immigrant) vs. just a “camera” (native). The younger generation are all digital natives…
• OAuth spec - take a gander at this…
• Reputation services: blogosphere (”pagerank”), open source contributions, wiki, “human” (so stop typing captchas!)
• Viagra. You’re excited to take it. You can do new things!
• myhealth.sg was mentioned. Singapore on the forefront of Identity 2.0 and OpenID? Or is it CardSpace (Microsoft) related?
• What happens when you die? Your domain can be taken by someone else. Do they then become you, if that was your OpenID? Very interesting thought.
• He flies Air Canada, and loves to talk about his Star Alliance Gold status :) Jives well with me, I’m Star Alliance Gold.

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysqlconf, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, dick hardt, keynote, identity management, identity, identity 2.0, openid

My friend Ditesh, is performing the tireless task, of following and updating the list of countries voting on Microsoft OOXML, at The Last Lap. If you’re interested in the freedom of document formats, this is a list you should keep a close look on this week. The comments feed is also particularly interesting.

In other news, today is Document Freedom Day. Have you freed your documents yet?

Technorati Tags: ooxml, odf, document freedom day, microsoft, ditesh kumar

In a mere eight days (March 29, 2008), the vote for the fast-track of ECMA-376 will have to be concluded. In the APAC region, the Participating (”P” member countries) countries are Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Korea, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. Back in September 2007, Australia and Malaysia abstained, while Singapore voted to approve, and the rest, voted to disapprove.

So, will there be a change in votes, come eight days? India, has chosen to lead the pack and say that they still disapprove (much kudos to Venky for this information).

I’ve largely not followed the debate, but seeing Doug Mahugh’s blog posts, and how he seems to act rather immaturely, I can only hope that PIKOM, and naturally SIRIM look at the previous abstain vote, and decide to change it to a disapprove. Naturally, that’s not the only reason (that in itself will seem childish) - its just that the OOXML specification seems largely incomplete, despite the 8,000+ pages that exist out there (I’m including edits in the specification in that number).

Now, back to the real point of this. I challenge an adult to read, the following entries, and tell me if Doug doesn’t seem childish:

• PIKOM Meeting in Malaysia - Note the misinformation on the “IBM’s side”. It seems that Microsoft views that everyone anti-OOXML must be from IBM (its not only this blog post, I’ve spoken to Microsofties who utter the same corporate line). How untrue. This is not an IBM agenda against Microsoft - please wake up. Please do read the comments, because its really useful to the entire blog post
• An “open standards” meeting in Malaysia - This one takes the cake, clearly. I simply love the conspiracy theory on how Doug was removed from the meeting. Problems with Yoon Kit and Ditesh not showing up on time, and them waiting 30 minutes? Sure, it was bad form to be late, but being late happens everywhere, even in the US, Doug. I’m surprised that he also adds Madam Tan (from MAMPU) into the conspiracy mix. Its just an amusing read, something that maybe you’d have read in a Nancy Drew novel, when you were eight.

Naturally, one must read Yoon Kit’s response to all this childishness. Its interesting (but not surprising) to see that Microsoft goes through great lengths, to sully the standards process. But Yoon Kit brings up an interesting point.

Can someone, not from the nation, participate in a standards discussion, with having the nation’s interest at heart, over their companies interest? I believe its generally impossible. Its similar to applying to go work in the military/army - the requirements are simple, in that you have to be a citizen of said nation. After all, in war, where do your loyalties lie?

Anyway, the next eight days will be interesting. But if you’re to look at the antagonist behaviour in that blog post, I am just so glad that no matter what happens in the next eight days, MAMPU has opted to drop Microsoft Office from their stable of machines by year’s end, and the government agencies can only follow suit, and back ODF. Naturally, I’m hoping from an abstain to a disapprove, but I shall not count any eggs before they hatch (this analogy seems weirder, during the Easter vacation).

And… if you believe the Microsoft FUD about OpenOffice.org 3.0 supporting reading/writing of OOXML, and support should equate to a standard, that is an untruth. OpenOffice.org needs to support file formats that are out there in the wild. It supports reading from WordPerfect 5.1 documents (via libwpd), does that make WordPerfect’s document format a standard? No.

The opinions here in no way reflect the opinions of my past, present, or future employers. Standard blog disclaimer applies to this post.

Technorati Tags: brm, ecma-376, ooxml, odf, india, doug mahugh, standards, document formats, pikom, sirim, yoon kit, opendocument, microsoft