[Media] Online interview for OpenFest web site and press releases

[Georg C. F. Greve]

Hi Silvia,

let me try to answer your questions. Let me know whether I succeeded and
feel free to suggest improvements, I typed this down quickly.

In case you need them, you can find my CV and a link to pictures at
http://fsfeurope.org/about/greve

Regards,
Georg


On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:54:35 +0300
Silvina Georgieva <silvina at silvina-bg.com> wrote: 

 sg> 1. How did you decide to set the FSFE and what issues you wanted to
 sg> work on through it?

I worked with Free Software since the early 90s, and became European
speaker of the GNU Project in 1998. Very quickly it seemed obvious to me
that we needed to grow the idea of the Free Software Foundation to be
able to address the challenges of a growing movement.

After talking to Richard Stallman, who supported the idea, we announced
the intention to found FSFE in late 2000, asking for anyone interested
to participate.  In early 2001, we founded FSFE with a group of European
Free Software advocates and started working.

Our priorities were determined by the philosophy of the Free Software
Foundation, applied to Europe. In consequence, FSFE has a very
pronounced long-term orientation in its work, which it views somewhat in
the tradition of a second enlightenment. Education and spreading of
information is therefore one of our priorities.

We seek to identify the bottlenecks or sticky spots for Free Software
and address them in the most long-term oriented way, preferring to do
the work that we understand to be very important, but isn't done by
anyone else at the time.

That includes much of the political work, especially at the UN or EU.


 sg> 2. Do you have any experience working with the state
 sg> administrations in Eastern European countries? If so, what are your
 sg> impressions?

We don't have much experience with Eastern European governments,
unfortunately. Software often does not seem to be the most immediate
priority, and many government officials appear to be overly willing to
accept investments by Microsoft which are camouflaged as gifts. This is
quite dangerous, though, as they often do not understand the
consequences of agreeing to such investments.

Providing that information to the public and governments will be a
challenge for the next years, and we hope to find many people in Eastern
European countries that we can support and work with in doing this.


 sg> 3. What is the FSFE practice in approaching and working with
 sg> institutions?

I am not sure I understand this question. Do you mean public
institutions? Generally we seek to find people in such institutions who
are willing to talk about software, and explain our view.

We then provide a point of information and reference that people can
talk to privately and off the record to help them form their opinion
without having to fear that every question will immediately become
public news. We usually work towards mutual understanding and solving
problems through dialog in a friendly way whenever possible.

So we adopted a more cooperative than confrontational approach, which
means it often generates less public visbility, but in the end allows us
to build long-term relationships with various groups and people.


 sg> 4. You have visited many countries and met many local FOSS
 sg> communities. Could you tell us about a specific story or case that
 sg> especially impressed you?

One of the things that moved me most was visiting the Telecentros in
Brazil. The Telecentros are community centers, usually with a little
library included, sometimes with other services, sometimes with courses
for Capoeira, but always with a computing lab.

These Telecentros are placed in the middle of the favelas, where the
social structures have broken down almost entirely, and the majority of
people live in fear of each other, with no perspective in life. Poverty
in Brazil means something radically different from poverty in Germany,
where I come from.

The government seeks out local people, who get training, support and a
salary, to run the Telecentro. Because they are of the place, they can
help integrate the center into the society. People go there to learn how
to use computers, to surf the internet, look for jobs. They also
suddenly discover they have a voice: There are courses for journalism,
people get together to do newspapers, courses for NGO management help
them to get a political voice.

All of this is based on Free Software, which people make their own as
they make the Telecentros their own. And while not everyone wants to be
a programmer, some people will. They can take the software, learn from
it and change it. There is also no problem for people to take home the
software they are using in the Telecentros.

To me, the Telecentros are one of the best expressions of how Free
Software can bring real perspective and help people with real problems,
and this works very well. At one of the Free Software Forums in Porto
Alegre, I listened to a police officer, who showed how areas with
Telecentros show a visible reduction in crime rate.


 sg> 5. Can you give us a brief explanation for non-technical people on
 sg> why open standards are important to the government, the business
 sg> and the communities, and your position on MS-OOXML?

Formats and protocols are the language of computers. Different programs
and computers use them to exchange information much like humans use
languages to exchange information. Open Standards are languages with an
agreed upon vocabulary and grammar rules that are available to everyone
equally, so everyone is able to participate in the conversation.

These are so important because software is not isolated, it works in a
network and all parts need to be able to talk to each other. If the
computers cannot talk to another, you have a problem.

Without Open Standards, products of one vendor would only work with
products from that same vendor. So if you buy from that vendor once, you
would no longer be able to choose between different offers and choose on
the grounds of the merits. Transferred to the real world, this would
mean that after buying a TV from Sony you would need to buy all other
devices in your home from Sony in the future, including your phone.

If someone else wants to call you, they would also need to buy a Sony
phone, and then they would also have to buy everything else from Sony.
The is a monopoly situation, with everything that it entails: high
dependency, less technological progress, higher prices, social
exclusion.

Open Standards are the basis of competition.

They mean that people can choose independently of each other which
software they like and still communicate and exchange information.

Competition is essential for both companies and governments, but
governments also have a responsibility to communicate with citizens. If
they don't use Open Standards, they damage competition and freedom of
choice in their country, as they force all citizens into dependency.


Regarding Microsoft's Office OpenXML (MS-OOXML) format, it is important
to understand that it is a proprietary specification that Microsoft
calls "Open" to imply that it was an Open Standard. But it falls short
of being an Open Standard in many ways.

Concerns include the licensing grant, which explicitly excludes
referenced technologies, which are largely proprietary to Microsoft. But
there is also the issue of complexity caused by 6500 pages of
specification with contradictions, omissions and inclusion of
proprietary sub-specifications that are being used instead of the
corresponding Open Standards for the same purpose. All of this ensures
that only Microsoft could ever hope to implement MS-OOXML, but in fact
they don't.

Sun recently made compatibility tests of Microsoft Office against the
MS-OOXML specification and found read-only support only. So while
Microsoft pays multiple of its partners to work on MS-OOXML converters
and implementations in order to be able to make claims to wide support,
there is in fact not a single implementation of MS-OOXML in existance
today.

Since Microsoft representatives already made it clear that they have no
intention to stick to a faithful implementation of OOXML, it seems
unlikely that ECMA 376 will ever be implemented completely, regardless
of whether or not it will be approved by ISO.

But ISO approval is the backdoor into governmental procurement in many
places in the world, and Microsoft has been using ECMA, an organisation
in Switzerland that enjoys special priviledges with ISO and makes the
value proposition of getting standards approved with minimum changes, to
push MS-OOXML into ISO as ECMA 376/DIS 29500.

In theory, national standardisation bodies should have committed a
technical review of the proposal, and made proposals for turning it into
an Open Standard that can be used by any vendor equally.

In practice, many national bodies failed to review the standard and
voted in favor of accepting it without corrections. Some national bodies
were even convinced by Microsoft to ignore ISO rules and vote "Approve,
with comments" although the ISO rules state clearly that if a country
has comments to make, it should vote "Disapprove, with comments."

How any person can make a credible claim of having reviewed 6500 pages
of technical specification in 5 months is beyond me. But even a cursory
study reveals many obvious problems. So bodies that voted "Approve, with
comments" obviously either approved it blindly, or lack competency.

Either way, they are malfunctioning from a standardisation point of view.

This is especially worrysome because MS-OOXML is motivated by political,
not technical, reasons to prevent usage of an existing, true Open
Standard for office documents, spreadsheets and presentations, called
"Open Document Format" (ODF), which already has been approved by ISO.


 sg> 6. What will the topic of your talk on OpenFest be? What are your
 sg> expectations regarding this conference and your participation in
 sg> it?

It is the first time that I will be at OpenFest, so I am not entirely
sure what to expect, but am very curious. My talk will be about Free
Software as Social Innovation, and I will talk a bit about Free
Software, what it means for society, why FSFE does what it does, and how
Free Software plays a central role in education. I also intend to talk
about SELF, which is a project that FSFE is doing together with various
partners, the ISOC Bulgaria included, to create free educational
material on Free Software and Open Standards.

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
What everyone should know about DRM                   (http://DRM.info)
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