The BUZZ - Free/Libre Open Source Software

We’ve all heard of Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora and Mandriva. But how about RIP, Damn Vulnerable and Zeroshell Linux? Here are five specialised Linux versions worth bookmarking.

By its own admission DVL is the “most vulnerable and exploitable operating system ever”. Fortunately those weaknesses are by design rather than by accident, because Damn Vulnerable Linux is designed for security training. The distro includes training materials and exercises and the developers have spent all of their time packing it full of broken, badly-configured and dated applications. So if you want to learn how to exploit Linux, DVL is the way to go.

While Damn Vulnerable Linux leaves the security gate unlocked, Tinfoil Hat Linux, as its name suggests, is the exact opposite. Designed for the more paranoid user (including those that suspect the Illuminati of spying on them) Tinfoil Hat Linux locks absolutely everything down. THL started life as a single-floppy Linux distribution that could be used for storing PGP keys and encrypting, signing and wiping files. At some point, the developers admit, “it became an exercise in over-engineering”. Tinfoil Hat is not going to replace your pretty Ubuntu desktop but if you need a little bit of tight security, give it a try.

This article first appeared in the newsletter published last week. Subscribe to get future issues.

Not a memorial for Linux but rather a resuscitation device. RIP stands for Recovery is Possible. RIP Linux is a specialised Linux distribution designed to recover and restore damaged filesystems. RIP can be run from a Live CD or a USB drive and can be used to test drives, recover deleted files, rescue data from a dying disk and much more. There are two flavours of RIP available: one with the X Windows System and one without.

True to its name Zeroshell Linux is designed to be solely administered through a Web interface. That may not sound all that useful unless you consider its purpose: to be used on servers, routers and embedded devices. All of its features, including load balancing, support for 3G mobile broadband connections and RADIUS support, can be managed through the Web front end. Zeroshell is available in the form of live CD or compact flash image for use on USB drives.

Kickstart your old router with a little tomato juice. Tomato Linux is a small distro customised to be installed on Broadcom-based routers such as the Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS routers. Once installed Tomato can be administered through a web interface, Telnet or SSH. But more importantly it adds a bunch of new features to your router, including bandwidth monitor, QoS controls, DynamicDNS support, multiple wireless modes as well as the ability to manage the signal strength of the router. And, because it’s essentially an embedded Linux version, there are all manner of extra things you could configure your router to do. It also works like a bomb. I ‘ve been using it on my home router for the past year.

This article first appeared in the newsletter published last week. Subscribe to get future issues.

Findings of a new study show that the current copyright regimes in Africa in general, and South Africa in particular, are not promoting access to knowledge and the authors have called for an urgent revision of copyright laws.

Published by UCT Press, Access to Knowledge in Africa: The Role of Copyright was launched on Saturday at the Cape Town Book Fair.

It is based on research in eight countries carried out by the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) project.

The ACA2K project has been examining the relationship between copyright and access to learning materials in Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, Egypt and South Africa. The project, which began in 2008, is supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and South Africa’s Shuttleworth Foundation, and managed by the Wits University LINK Centre in Johannesburg.

“Some books should not just be read, but be calls to action. On a continent still ravaged by conflict and hunger and lacking in many freedoms, free or government-funded education would be meaningless without open access to knowledge,” said Luci Abrahams, director at the LINK Centre. “These are for the attention of governments and policy makers. Authors, including authors of this book, are activists for intellectual property freedom, so that policy makers can make the necessary changes to laws and regulations.”

The South African ACA2K research team included Dr. Tobias Schonwetter, Caroline Ncube of the University of Cape Town (UCT), and Pria Chetty, Principal Attorney at Chetty Law.

“While the South African government spends a healthy 5 percent of GDP on education, we still have unacceptably high levels of illiteracy. There was an overarching acknowledgement among those we interviewed that ICTs could assist in access to knowledge, but there remains a disconnect between many of our laws.” explained Chetty.

As part of the study, the 1978 Copyright Act was tested against other South African legislation and policy including the Constitution, the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act and the government’s free and open source policy directives.

The South African research team found that there is no exception allowing permission-free adaptation of works for use by sensory-disabled people. They believe this gap could be in conflict with the South African Constitution’s guarantees of the right to equality and the right to education. The team has also said that the “fair dealing” exception in the Act was found to be too vague to provide reliable to users.

According to the team, the Act does not cater for the digital age – “in which ‘reproduction’ has been transformed and even the simple act of opening a website is potentially an act of illegal copying”.

The frustrations of the ACA2K team have been echoed by many others in South Africa. An online petition was launched some months ago by the African Commons Project (TACP) in cooperation with South Africa’s National Consumer Forum. The petition calls on the South African Department of Trade and Industry to conduct a “consultative, development-focused copyright review”.

The South African team acknowledged the government’s efforts in adopting their Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) policy, but said that it stopped short of being effective due to the conflicting wording in the current Copyright Act.

In positive news, the study is already having some effect in the Kenyan policy environment where their copyright laws, last revised in 2000, are undergoing a fresh overhaul.

In the South African context, Chetty says the lack of relevant case law has contributed to the fallacy that copyright law is complicated and difficult to enforce. She believes it is up to the judiciary to produce some clarity.

The local team has called for the following recommendations:

• Access barriers for disabled people should be removed by allowing permission-free conversion of copyrighted learning material into Braille or audio format;
• Detailed and clear provisions are required for uses by libraries, archives, educators and learners, including clarification of the rules around compiling course packs composed of portions of copyright-protected materials;
• The law must protect user access to, and reproduction/adaptation of, digital materials, including use of digital materials to which user access is blocked by technological protection measures (TPMs); and
• The Act should be amended in order to permit the use of “orphan works” on reasonable terms when a work’s copyright-owners cannot be identified or located.

The research team also recommends that the South African Government should retain, and not extend, the current 50-year term of copyright protection in place. After the term expires, researchers say a work should fall into the public domain and should be freely used in any manner.

A full copy of the book can be accessed at http://link.wits.ac.za/papers/aca2k-book.html.

Policy briefings based on the study can be found here.

And those wishing to add their signature to the petition calling for a Copyright review can visit: http://www.africancommons.org/

Bronwen Kausch runs PSI-Communications and specialises in ICT communications. She is reading for her Masters Degree in ICT Policy and Regulations at Wits University and is passionate about ICT for Development (ICT4D) in Africa. You can follow Bronwen on Twitter: @Bronwen_Kausch

Audio and video podcasts are nothing new but recently there has been a boom in the number of good quality technology podcasts coming out of South Africa. From serious business-focused podcasts to geek talkshows there are at least four worth checking out.

http://zatech.co.za/

The granddaddy of SA podcasts, the ZATech show is now well past its 100th show and continues to be highly entertaining and informative. Hosted by tech Simon Dingle, the show has a regular line-up of technology journalists including Duncan Mcleod, Brett Haggard, Ben Kelly and Jon Tullet as well as a selection of guests. Well worth a listen every week.

http://opentechexchange.org

Jointly hosted by Mark Clarke from SA and Darlene Parker from Canada the Open Tech Exchange is a regular technology show focusing on issues around open source and open standards. Topics range from users groups and community to free and open source in Africa, around the world and in business. The show generally focuses on one interview or a primary issue in each episode. The best thing about the OTE podcast is that gives coverage to open source people and issues that otherwise wouldn’t be heard from.

http://www.letstalkgeek.net/

One of the newest podcasts is the Lets Talk Geek one. As the name suggests the show is heavy on the geek talk and is an entertaining look at issues of the week. The usual hosts include Stewart Allen, Tim Haak, Barry Reid, Jeff Hinds as well as a guest of the week. The show is available as a video and audio podcast and while not explicitly focused on open source, regularly includes free software topics. The podcast has also done good interviews with a number of local open source personalities.

http://www.techcentral.co.za/category/podcasts/talkcentral-podcasts/

The newest tech podcast is the Tech Central one. Produced by TechCentral the podcast is primarily focused on business technology. Duncan Mcleod and Candice Jones, editors of the TechCentral publication, discuss the main business technologies of the week in this regular podcast. Entertaining and informative.

Got a favourite local podcasts? Tell me about it.

Need to get up to speed with NetBeans? The good news is that SA company Jumping Bean has teamed up with Munich-based Eppleton, to offer a NetBeans training series.

NetBeans is an open source development environment for creating Java applications.

Mark Clarke of Jumping Bean tells us that the courses will be held in Johannesburg and Cape Town between 23 August and 3 September. The courses will include a three-day introduction as well as a five-day advanced course.

The training courses will be run by Geertjan Wielenga, a technical writer for the NetBeans project.

If you take the time to read the South African government’s free and open source software policy (PDF) you’ll find on page three the following commitment:

The South African Government will encourage the use of Open Content and Open Standards within South Africa.

So, if that is the case, then how come the Companies and Intellectual Properties Registration Office (CIPRO) demands that visitors use Internet Explorer when visiting the site? The site has this warning (in red):

“Customers must use Internet Explorer for any CIPRO transaction. To download it, click here.”

Why exactly users need Internet Explorer is not entirely clear because the site appears to still work even if you’re using another browser. There may well be sections of the site that don’t work unless you use Internet Explorer but they’re not immediately obvious.

You would think that having already spent R90 million of a planned R153 million on a new enterprise content management system CIPRO could at least have done something about browser compatibility so its website was in line with SA FOSS policy.

Of course, now that the tender has been annulled, any work that was done on improving CIPRO’s website is unlikely to be seen any time soon.

For the record this is a shot of the actual message:

What better way to contribute to free and open source software than to help translate applications into your home language?

Anloc, the African Network for Localisation, has put out a call for language teams to do exactly this. The organisation’s Localise Software sub-project aims to finalise these teams by the end of the month with translation beginning in earnest from August and running through to January 2011.

Each of the teams will be assisted by a small team of technical experts who will assist them with the localisation of various applications.

The applications earmarked to be translated are Tux Paint, Pidgin, Pootle (a web-based translation system), Virtaal (a multi-platform offline translation tool), VLC and Abiword.

Successful translation teams will be awarded US$2,500 at the conclusion of the project to promote the translated applications in their own communities.

A year after it was first announced, the South African department of education yesterday kicked off its teacher laptop initiative. The initiative aims to subsidise teachers so that they can purchase a laptop from one of the department’s approved suppliers.

It’s a welcome addition to the education arena except for one detail.

Despite a national open source strategy and a well-publicised set of minimum interoperability standards for government, the laptops prescribed by the education department exclude free and open source software options.

In fact, the specifications laid out by the department explicitly favour Microsoft software and services.

The software specifications for the approved laptops.

Government Gazette 32077 (PDF), which details the approved specifications says that the laptops must run “Windows XP or higher”, include Microsoft Office as well as use Windows Live. Other approved software includes a range of Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Digital Literacy and Microsoft Partners In Learning.

The department does not specify any open source alternatives to the Microsoft software for the initiative.

The decision by the department of education to specify proprietary Microsoft software as the minimum requirement for the purchase of laptops by teachers runs contrary to the South African national strategy of open standards and open source software.

Government’s Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS) for information systems in government, for example, specifies a set of standards for information sharing within government departments as well as between government and citizens. These include formats such as text, OpenDocument Format, XHTML and CSV for document sharing but does not include Microsoft’s Word format.

The exclusion of open source software by the education department also runs contrary to the Policy on Free and Open Source Software use for South African Government which was approved by the Cabinet in February 2007.

Teachers will receive a R130 grant under the initiative and will have to pay between R250 and R390 a month for the approved laptop and services.

Giving teachers access to technology is a big step forward. Not giving them the option of a free and open source software version of the laptop is not only short-sighted but also against public policy.

In huge win for anti-software patent activists, New Zealand has announced that it will not change legislation to make software patentable in the country.

It is, however, a partial victory only as New Zealand’s Commerce minister, Simon Power, also announced he would instruct the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand to draft guidelines that would allow inventions that contain software (embedded) to be patented.

Nevertheless, it’s a significant step forward for anti-patent activists.

Paul Matthews of the New Zealand Computer Society says that the decision is “great news for software innovation in New Zealand”. In a blog posting Matthews wrote:

We believe it’s near impossible for software to be developed without breaching some of the hundreds of thousands of software patents awarded around the world, hence many software companies in New Zealand, creating outstanding and innovative software, live a constant risk that their entire business will be wound up overnight due to litigious action by a patent holder.

He said that the NZCS would continue to monitor the guidelines for embedded software to “remove the possibility of software patents by stealth”.

Unlike New Zealand, South Africa still lacks clarity in the area of software patents and this uncertainty is being exploited by a number of international software companies. This despite a Patent Act which precludes software from being patented.

Microsoft is, unsurprisingly, one of the main registrants of software patents in South Africa. A search of the patent listings at the Companies and Intellectual Properties Office (when it is working) turns up more than 300 patents held by Microsoft. Among those are the controversial OOXML patent, which has been contested around the globe, as well as patents on selecting a tab in a tabbed browser window, splitting software downloads into smaller parts, and selecting view modes and settings on a PC. The majority of these patents have been filed since 2003.

Section 25 of the South African Patents Act No.57 of 1978, says that “Anything which consists of … a program for a computer” can not be patented under the Act.

This has been regularly contested by patent lawyers, among them Spoor&Fischer which acts as Microsoft’s representative in most of its patent applications and defences. (See one response here)

But, wrangling over the wording of the Act is just part of the problem. As big a problem is that South Africa is a “non-examining” patent office. In other words, anyone with any invention can apply for a patent and having it granted. It is essentially a bureaucratic process rather than one that examines the validity of patent applications.

Or, as Freedom to Innovate South Africa (FTISA) describes the problem: “Exceptions to patentable subject matter (such as computer programs) in the Patent Act are effectively ignored in the awarding of patents. This creates an environment of great legal uncertainty for indigenous software developers and consumers.”

South African developers constantly run the risk of breaching the ever-increasing number of software patents in the country, most of which are held by global corporations. And until clarity is achieved in South African patent law these companies will continue applying for software patents and the CIPRO patent office will continue to grant them.

The US State Department has thrown its weight behind an initiative to promote software development for the good of East African residents.

The Apps 4 Africa contest was launched earlier this month and aims to encourage developers to produce software that will improve the quality of life for residents of this region.

The contest is open to all developers from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. The applications can be built for any platform but the code does have to be made available as open source software.

The contest is also calling on citizens of the region to get involved by submitting ideas of problems that could be solved through the use of software. Submissions can be made on the website, through Facebook, Twitter (#apps4africa) and through SMS in Kenya.

The contest runs until August 31.

CMS-Maestro is a new PHP-based content management system (CMS) released by South African Web development company Valente Online.

Easy to install and use, CMS-Maestro offers the basics such as page and article management and adds to that the ability to add additional widgets, and manage menus and a range of media formats. In a release the company says that “CMS-Maestro is built with extensibility in mind and is designed in a modular fashion, therefore additional features and functionality can be added easily to the Maestro”.

Core features of CMS-Maestro include:
- Pages
- Articles
- Form builder
- Category management
- Widgets for additional content blocks
- Menu management, and
- Media management.

CMS-Maestro also integrates Google Analytics into the administration dashboard, includes a tinyMCE WYSIWYG editor, supports clean urls and template support.

CMS-Maestro has been released under the GPLv3 open source licence.

Linux giant Red Hat has announced that Linux System Dynamics (LSD), an open source consulting firm, has been appointed a Red Hat Premier Business Partner for the Southern Africa region.

Red Hat Premier Business Partners are top-tier Red Hat partners, who have demonstrated expertise in the Red Hat product portfolio and have met the stringent technical, sales and training requirements specified by Red Hat, in order to deliver the benefits of Red Hat services and products to customers.

“Over the past year and a half, Red Hat has enjoyed excellent growth in Southern Africa, thanks to the efforts of partners such as Linux System Dynamics,” said Louis Seyffert, country manager for Red Hat. “This partnership is significant as we expand our partner ecosystem and more customers turn to open source solutions to take advantage of performance gains and cost savings.”

Linux System Dynamics specialises in providing enterprise computing solutions based on Linux and open source software. The company offers extensive skills and experience in areas such as infrastructure, applications, system integration and software migration.

Linux System Dynamics has earned Red Hat Premier Partner status by building a strong base of Red Hat-certified technical and product expertise as well as helping to grow Red Hat’s business in Southern Africa, which has grown since it opened a representative office 18 months ago.

“Linux System Dynamics welcomes the new partnership agreement with Red Hat as an endorsement of the skills that the company has developed in Red Hat solutions over the past few years,” said Sven Lesicnik, managing director at Linux System Dynamics.

A week later than originally scheduled, the FreeBSD team has issued a first release candidate (RC1) for version 8.1 of its popular Unix-like operating system.

The final release of FreeBSD 8.1 was scheduled for July 9 bit with the current delay that may be pushed out by a week.

Major changes include improvements to Solaris ZFS support and added support for superpages, a new USB stack and a rewritten NFS client/server with NFSv4 and multicast updates.

Via H-Online

VLC, the Swiss army knife of multimedia viewing, has released a new version. Already a top-class video player VLC 1.1.0 adds a number of new goodies, including WebM support and GPU-decoding.

The highlights:

GPU decoding on Windows Vista and 7, using DxVA2 for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
GPU decoding on GNU/Linux, using VAAPI for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
DSP decoding using OpenMax IL, for compatible embedded devices
Improved support for MKV HD, including seeking fixes, and 7.1 channels codecs
Support for new codecs, like Blu-Ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless and VP8

Dell today confirmed that it was in talks with Google to ship Chrome OS on its netbooks.

The company’s president of Greater China and South Asia, Amit Midha, said that Dell devices were in development although he didn’t add any detail.

Google’s Chrome OS is a Linux-based web-focused operating system that is intended for ultra-portable laptops. Google is expected to release Chrome OS later this year.

“Adopting Chrome OS would be a wound for Microsoft,” said Electronista. “Dell already uses Ubuntu Linux on a handful of netbooks, but the new platform would give it a higher-profile OS and one that could help further reduce the price of a Mini netbook.”

Reuters, Electronista

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is a flagship product for free and open source software but could be doing so much better than it is. What’s wrong?

Michael Meeks a long-time OOo and Gnome developer and Novell employee argues that among the chief problems are a lack of leadership, a half-hearted open source strategy and copyright assignments that discourage external contributions.

In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved … In addition – we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began.

Richard Hillesley looks at Meeks’ criticisms of OpenOffice.org and asks whether OpenOffice isn’t at a crossroads. Read the full article (H-Online)

Forget web applications, the future is the command line! Google releases a command-line tool for controlling services such as YouTube, Blogger, Google Docs and Calendar.

And judging by user response, the command line is still cool.

GoogleCL is a pure Python application that uses the Python gdata libraries to make Google Data API calls from the command line. If you didn’t understand much of that last sentence then this is probably not for you.

Initially this targeted at the geekiest of users – Linux fans – but can also be run on other platforms with a bit of effort.

There are some good examples of how to use the tool on the http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/ page.

The calendar feature appeals to me but I’m pretty sure this could come in handy if tied to a couple of scripts.

Are you using this (or have plans to)? Let us know in the comments.

The latest episode of OTE podcast features an interview with Tectonic in which we talk about open source software in Africa.

I don’t normally write about myself but allow me this one indulgence.

Following my decision to start working on Tectonic again Mark Clarke and Darlene Parker of the Open Tech Exchange podcast approached me to come on their show.

Naturally I jumped at the opportunity and the result is the almost hour-long show posted today.

In it I talk about open source software in Africa, South Africa, the government and in general.

You can download the episode from the OTE website or jump straight to the direct link (MP3). You can also subscribe to the OTE podcast via RSS or iTunes.

Thanks Mark and Darlene.

The third issue of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review has been released.

And even if you’re not a lawyer there is food for thought. With everything from a profile of the BSD licence, to issues around copyright in free software and a review of case law related to free software, the journal makes for interesting reading for anyone involved in free software advocacy.

Details of this issue (and previous ones) can be found on the IFOSSLR announcements page. The current issue can be downloaded as a PDF (5.4MB) or viewed as chapters online.

Adventurous Ubuntu users can now install test versions of Maverick Meerkat with a btrfs root filesystem.

Ubuntu’s Colin Watson today announced this on the Ubuntu developer list. Maverick Meerkat is Ubuntu’s current development version which is expected to be released in October.

Naturally, because btrfs is still very much in development, this is not a wise thing to do on your production machines. Watson makes this very clear: “This is still NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PRODUCTION USE and MAY EAT YOUR DATA.” (That’s pretty clear.)

User will need to manually partition their drive and install using btrfs.

Watson writes: “You cannot yet use btrfs for /boot (although we’re working on this), so you’ll need to create an ext3 or similar /boot filesystem. I assume anyone able to use an experimental filesystem can cope with doing that in the installer’s manual partitioner.”

The first release candidate for OpenSuse 11.3 has been released and the team looks to be well on track for a final release on July 15.

Chief changes in 11. 3 are btrfs file support, which will be offered as an option during installation, and the integration of the Noveau driver to support NVIDIA graphics cards.

The new btrfs filesystem has a number of advantages over pre-existing filesystems. One of these is the ability to take filesystem snapshots and then revert to those at a later stage. Btrfs is still under heavy development so you probably don’t want to install this on production servers but if you’re keen to take a look-see then go ahead.

The Nouveau driver is gradually becoming a fairly standard addition to Linux distros and OpenSuse 11.3 RC includes this as well.

OpenSuse’s KDE has a new feature in 11.3 that could best be described as “packages on demand”. When a user opens up a new filetype but they don’t have an appropriate application KSuseInstall kicks in and finds the best application for the task. Sounds very cool.

For a more detailed look at what to expect from OpenSuse 11.3 it’s worth reading Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier’s Seven Reasons to Upgrade to openSUSE 11.3. After all, until recently he was community manager for OpenSuse so has a fairly good handle on what’s good about OpenSuse.