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> but this summary just does it - it makes so much "no sense" that
> i have no fucking idea what is it about and i'm just going to skip
> the topic.

which is real a shame, because what is happening is nasty, evil, theft (in the correct IP usage of the term) from a long established volunteer community by newly arrived greedy corporate. Or just take a moment to listen to the linked 2 minute mp3?

here is the real project's "about" page: http://koha-community.org/about/

"Koha" is a Maori word meaning gift (often in a quid quo pro sense). Note that Wikipedia lists it as a custom. It is a truly wonderful name for a GPL'd project for the public good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koha_(custom)

read the mailing list plea from the librarian here:
http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/pipermail/openchat/2011-November/008940.html

a blog post:
http://news.tangatawhenua.com/archives/14545

and the thread that follows.
http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/pipermail/openchat/2011-November/thread.html#8943

favourite quote from the ensuing thread:

Oh, and that you can't win a Wikipedia fight against librarians.

listen to more audio from NZ public radio than what's in the /. submission here:
(Scroll down to the Ogg @ 9:44 am)
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon

The project was founded by a small country town library in 1999 when the Y2K bug was taking out their existing solution and they couldn't afford to buy another one. Since then it has grown to be a large and wonderful FOSS success story. Until last year, when an associated company that held the domain name and provided commercial support got bought out by a big corporate bully, who took ownership of the DNS and domain name, taken over the home page, obfuscated links to and existence of the community (which has had to rush out and register http://koha-community.org/ instead of their original koha dot org site), and now are trying to block the community from being able to use their own name, on their own turf. It seems that Liblime has grabbed the trademark already in the US; the original koha-community.org group after they got over their shock was able to get in first in the EU, but not Liblime (a US company) has moved in to grab it in the community's home country of New Zealand.

PTFS/Liblime's actions here are truly despicable, and if I were a customer I'd have to wonder if they are willing to screw over the people who built up the project from nothing, what is stopping them from screwing me over too?

Please visit the Koha-community.org site, read the plea: http://koha-community.org/plea-horowhenua-library-trust/

and help out their non-existent legal fund with a small donation:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=FQ6JH3L48LV5Y
(your dollar goes far here; they are a registered legal non-profit, paypal's freezing of funds typically happens to unregistered projects who are basically ignoring tax laws, so they should be safe from that)

written article here:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/91830/lawyer-labels-overseas-trademark-of-'koha'-offensive

> but this summary just does it - it makes so much "no sense" that
> i have no fucking idea what is it about and i'm just going to skip
> the topic.

which is real a shame, because what is happening is nasty, evil, theft (in the correct IP usage of the term) from a long established volunteer community by newly arrived greedy corporate. Or just take a moment to listen to the linked 2 minute mp3?

here is the real project's "about" page: http://koha-community.org/about/

"Koha" is a Maori word meaning gift (often in a quid quo pro sense). Note that Wikipedia lists it as a custom. It is a truly wonderful name for a GPL'd project for the public good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koha_(custom)

read the mailing list plea from the librarian here:
http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/pipermail/openchat/2011-November/008940.html

a blog post:
http://news.tangatawhenua.com/archives/14545

and the thread that follows.
http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/pipermail/openchat/2011-November/thread.html#8943

favourite quote from the ensuing thread:

Oh, and that you can't win a Wikipedia fight against librarians.

listen to more audio from NZ public radio than what's in the /. submission here:
(Scroll down to the Ogg @ 9:44 am)
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon

The project was founded by a small country town library in 1999 when the Y2K bug was taking out their existing solution and they couldn't afford to buy another one. Since then it has grown to be a large and wonderful FOSS success story. Until last year, when an associated company that held the domain name and provided commercial support got bought out by a big corporate bully, who took ownership of the DNS and domain name, taken over the home page, obfuscated links to and existence of the community (which has had to rush out and register http://koha-community.org/ instead of their original koha dot org site), and now are trying to block the community from being able to use their own name, on their own turf. It seems that Liblime has grabbed the trademark already in the US; the original koha-community.org group after they got over their shock was able to get in first in the EU, but not Liblime (a US company) has moved in to grab it in the community's home country of New Zealand.

PTFS/Liblime's actions here are truly despicable, and if I were a customer I'd have to wonder if they are willing to screw over the people who built up the project from nothing, what is stopping them from screwing me over too?

Please visit the Koha-community.org site, read the plea: http://koha-community.org/plea-horowhenua-library-trust/

and help out their non-existent legal fund with a small donation:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=FQ6JH3L48LV5Y
(your dollar goes far here; they are a registered legal non-profit, paypal's freezing of funds typically happens to unregistered projects who are basically ignoring tax laws, so they should be safe from that)

written article here:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/91830/lawyer-labels-overseas-trademark-of-'koha'-offensive

In New Zealand the minister responsible for this, Judth Tizard, was kicked out the parliament after losing in the recent NZ election. Many people in the IT community worked against her.

Getting kicked out didn't stop her from going on a radio tirade about how it was necessary to remove due process and oversight by cutting off people who *might* be infringing. Yes, she even says "might". She actually believes she's doing this for the good of New Zealand and many other people in power do too.

The law will come into effect in February 2009 after a parliamentary vote so we've got until then to change minds. People against these parts of the law should join the groups working against this such as Internet NZ and the NZOSS.

The Labour party (which she was part of) lost the last election and now the National party are in power. It remains to be seen whether they're going to do better but we can only try.

You mean like the slur made by a Microsoft employee against a Standards New Zealand representative?

Yes, you're correct, and here's a fuller description of the backwards compatibility claims.

It would be great if ODF could benefit from this too and -- as you say -- keeping quirks in a separate XML namespace would help this.

This is starting to sound like the French and New Zealand opinion of harmonizing the two formats (which even Microsoft developers have told me is quite possible, see my meeting notes from Standards New Zealand.

Thanks. A lot of the credit goes to the members of the New Zealand Open Source Society http://nzoss.org.nz/

OK, I'm a member and I helped draft the response. This isn't about grabbing credit for ego, but about the way the response was done. It was calm, didn't call for Open Sourcing everything, and didn't demonize Microsoft. The response was a coordinated, reviewed group effort containing constrictive and well-researched cristicism presented in a non-confrontational way. Coupled with a very receptive attitude by the SSC, the combination resulted in what you can see is a very reasonable and useful document.

Vik :v)

The New Zealand Open Source Society's website says that Chapman Tripp represents Microsoft in New Zealand.

According to this link, Chapman Tripp Sheffield Young represents Microsoft in New Zealand. Can you say "conflict of interest"?

The publically available summary of the research doesn't give much information on whom was surveyed. Perhaps the survey group was primarily composed of small businesses, which make up the largest number of enterprises here. Those businesses would likely not be using servers, which is where you'd expect to find more Linux users (cf. the desktop).

The survey aside, there are lots of companies using Linux in New Zealand (including yours truly). In a week's time we are hosting one of the three biggest Linux conferences right here in Dunedin. And even companies like Microsoft are making the most of Linux down here.

The end is perhaps not quite nigh.

--
One of those rare antipodean companies using Linux

The NZOSS is opposing this patent

In New Zealand we are fighting software patents by making it a national issue that the political parties will have to face.

The NZOSS is arranging a meeting in which MP's from various political parties will be speaking about their parties position on software patents. The meeting will be in early May on Parliament grounds, Wellington. To find out more join the NZOSS openchat mailing list. Please mod up. ;)

The NZOSS is opposing this patent

In New Zealand we are fighting software patents by making it a national issue that the political parties will have to face.

The NZOSS is arranging a meeting in which MP's from various political parties will be speaking about their parties position on software patents. The meeting will be in early May on Parliament grounds, Wellington. To find out more join the NZOSS openchat mailing list. Please mod up. ;)

The NZOSS is opposing this patent

In New Zealand we are fighting software patents by making it a national issue that the political parties will have to face.

The NZOSS is arranging a meeting in which MP's from various political parties will be speaking about their parties position on software patents. The meeting will be in early May on Parliament grounds, Wellington. To find out more join the NZOSS openchat mailing list. Please mod up. ;)

The NZOSS is opposing this patent as pointed out here

The NZOSS is opposing this patent as pointed out here

Given that you're a troll, I guess I shouldn't be terribly surprised to discover that you haven't pointed out that Microsoft applied for a patent on XML document formats:

Working Link

Amen. I blogged more open file formats for my wishlist just last week and I've just received abuse from the anti-XML faction ("too hard", "too fiddly", "just a fad"). OK, so I haven't exactly been polite about programmers who don't grok XML in the past, but believe me there is still a hard core of non-Microsofties out there who still want XML to die :-)

The fact that the format is XML is rather meaningless [...] For many things XML is unsuitable/non-optimal...

Yes, it could have been a number of formats (ODIF, anyone? :-) but XML was explicitly designed for (well, inherited its application to) textual information, so it's a little captious to say it's unsuitable for binary data, but the important long-term reason is not just that it's documented, it's that it's based on an international standard, so it's public, stable, and cannot be hijacked by corporate factions (they'll try).

You should care that it's XML...

Here's the correct link: http://www.nzoss.org.nz/portal/modules.php?name=Ne ws&file=article&sid=284

And from the followup to that article:

it is unclear why Microsoft would go to the trouble of filing a patent only to then give it away in a free license

Yes, the article goes on to say that it may be incompatible with the GPL, but so what else is new? If it was compatible with the GPL, they would lose all rights, and as a commercial corportation, it is easy to see how they would want to maintain ownership.

I'm more than familiar with those links. The fact is NZ would love one of these even if this is the price to be paid.

You may also not be aware of this application causing a bit of a world wide stir.

If you had browsed the MED site a bit further you would have found this statement:

"IPONZ, when deciding whether or not to grant a patent, must give applicants the benefit of the doubt, and can only refuse to grant a patent if it is "practically certain" that a court would find the patent invalid. As a result patents which might be likely (but not almost certain) to be held invalid will be granted. The uncertainties and expense of challenging the validity of a patent mean that few patents are ever challenged. If patents are granted that the courts would find to be invalid, the rights enjoyed patent owners are greater than they are entitled to. These greater rights have the potential to restrict competition and raise prices to consumers, and may restrict the activities of local businesses that lack the resources to challenge the validity of the patent"

In summary, cheap and cheerful to get a patenthere and start setting a world precident/portfolia - pain in the arse and expensive to challenge it once granted.

Use proper W3C XML or OOo filetypes...

Didn't OOo do this kind of thing first with their XML filetypes? MS filed this in June 2002 in NZ, so surely OpenOffice.org has precent for a "Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML" maybe sans the "single file" part, which would have to be an obvious follow on?

BTW, more info is on the NZ Open Source Software portal.

They're trying it on in NZ, too.

The NZOSS has put together this summary of the issues and is requesting a copy of the license, but not telegraphing its plans so blatantly (ya gotta love Kiwis).

Check out http://WWW.SCO.CO.NZ for a larf.

They're trying it on in NZ, too.

The NZOSS has put together this summary of the issues and is requesting a copy of the license, but not telegraphing its plans so blatantly (ya gotta love Kiwis).

Check out http://WWW.SCO.CO.NZ for a larf.

Maybe they could read this and suggest improvements to the case being made.

NZ Open Source Society is here

But everybody can do their share by simply educating people
If only it was that easy. I try all the time to point out some of the issues that we discuss on /. but most people just don't care as long as they don't think it's effecting them.
I've recently joined a group here that promotes open standards in government, education etc: NZOSS , but it's so hard to convince people who just don't grasp the concepts. Here in sheepland^W New Zealand at least.
The dutch are perhaps a bit more forward thinking, zmooc.

I don't think you understood Richard Stallman, then. By chosing these examples, he was really trying to draw the line of appropriate behaviour under circumstances.

What you're saying would imply his wish to associate himself with the women demanding the vote, as well, since he has used that example in the same sentence.

Standing up for his believes on the subject of computer software for over 30 years, he has pulled his moral position to the heights most of us, ordinary, although geek people, would hardly ever have a chance of reaching. I am trying to do my bit.

Do you?