The Thursday, April 20, 2006 PLUG meeting is at 7:30 in room 2M70 at the University of Winnipeg. The GPL V3 launch video will be shown. (http://gplv3.fsf.org/av)

Open source is a popular term invented in 1998 as a marketing alternative to Free Software. We in the Free Software Movement continue to say "free software" because we do not want to deemphasize our values of freedom and cooperation for the shallow goal of being popular.

Advocates for "Open source" argue that the vagueness of "free" causes problems. Open source has the same kind of problems. Taken literally, one could easily think that open source means "you can see the source code". Anyone familiar with The Free Software Definition or The Open Source Definition knows that being able to see the code is not enough.

Unfortunately, there are companies who abuse this misunderstanding and call their proprietary software "Open Source". Today I discovered one such product. Centric CRM.

The Canadian Commission for UNESCO is hosting a conference in preparation for the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society. They are gathering views from a "Canadian Civil Society perspective". Free Software seems to be given a high profile in the conference agenda, with the likes of organizations like the Linux Professional Institute and Creative Commons Canada making presentations at the workshops. Unfortunately, there seems to be very little local representation. The event starts tomorrow, May 13th, at the Delta Winnipeg. The description of the conference follows. A programme is available online.

I went to the Steve Kurtz speaking at Mondragon last night and found it very a interesting talk. The talk was about Steve Kurtz who I will give more background to follow the story.

Early morning of May 11, Steve Kurtz awoke to find his wife, Hope, dead of a cardiac arrest. Kurtz called 911. The police arrived and, after stumbling across test tubes and petri dishes Kurtz was using in a current artwork, called in the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Soon agents from the Task Force and FBI detained Kurtz, cordoned off the entire block around his house, and later impounded Kurtz's computers, manuscripts, books, equipment, and even his wife's body for further analysis. The Buffalo Health Department condemned the house as a health risk.

I like the way CAE is challenging boundaries of free speech, critical dialog of cultural, dna, and patent ownership, and the freedom to tinker. They are being exposed in a way that is challenging law, culture and society I fully endorse. He spoke many many times about "owning your tools" and how he endorsed computers during the 80's when the left and artists were suspicious of it.

In a few short hours PLUG was able to haul 40-50 nearly complete computers from the University of Winnipeg to the Tux Cave (Syd's basement). They were in great shape and we have two recipients so far. The Urban Shaman Gallery of Contemporary Aboriginal Art will receive 5 pc's to be used as thin clients served by a Mac G5 server running Gentoo PPC64. The Orioles Community Centre will receive 5 as well. If you know of a worthwhile not for profit project to receive some computers send an email to info[AT]plug[dot]ca. See more pix here.

Huge thanks goes to the University of Winnipeg and all the volunteers who helped move them!!

Further to our discussion from Thursday's meeting, here are the links to some copyright resources. If we are going to be successful in calling for fairness and balance in copyright, we certainly need to familiarize ourselves with these resources. I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

NOTE: This has been updated to include links to the legal text of the BMG vs. John Doe decision that some say made music downloading legal in Canada.

Shall we change the textual information, name of the group and domain so Richard Stallman will come speak at OpenCity (the PLUG hosted celebration of participatory culture)? He wants us to refer to Linux as GNU/Linux (to give recognition to the significant contributions made by him and the http://www.fsf.org Free Software Foundation) as a precondition for speaking at our event. I would dearly like RMS to come, make his impassioned speeches and everything else he has to say but not within the context of an ultimatum. Following is some of the discussion thus far on the http://mail2.plug.ca/mailman/listinfo Sparkplug Mailing List, both for and against as well as RMS' position. Let's be careful and judicious in this since it means a radical identity change for the group (and funding to make all the legal changes since we are registered as a not for profit corporation under the Corporations Act).

After publishing a short diatribe on the dangers of MS-Excel monoculture in government, I stumbled upon an article about scientists losing genetic data because of Excel's "helpful" autoformatting feature.

I have complained from time to time that the Government of Canada could be doing more to support the growth of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS or FOSS). That's why I'm always pleasantly surprised when I find evidence that there is movement in that direction.