it.gen.nz

A few weeks ago I blogged and talked on air about how Vodafone had decided to lock the phones it sells in New Zealand from now on, so they would only work with the Vodafone network, unless you paid Voda another $50.

Today, I’m delighted to be able to say that Vodafone has changed its mind.

Apparently it’s because of customer response. There was a storm of protest from customers who couldn’t see how this was good for them at all, and the Commerce Commission agreed with them.

Well done everyone who complained, and well done to the people at Vodafone for listening.

I talked today on Radio New Zealand National about the contrast between pay-for software and software that is free to use. Why would you pay for something you can get for nothing?

I’ve blogged about this before, but this radio programme has some different angles. Read on for my speaker notes, or pull the podcast.
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Don Christie, El Presidente of the Open Source Society and blogger on newspaper site Stuff, has written a pretty direct piece about the OOXML standard and processes that led to it. The article was written for and published in the Standards NZ magazine, where it ran next to an article from Microsoft’s Brett Roberts, who is in favour of OOXML.

The Standards NZ magazine is a paper-only publication, but Don has put the text of his article online here. It’s hard-hitting and well worth a read.

Update: Brett’s article is now online as well.

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about Vodafone’s announcement that it will be locking the mobile phones it sells from now on. This is a bad move for consumers in the short run – but it may in the long run break Vodafone’s and Telecom’s hold on the retail phone market. Read on for my speaking notes or down load the podcast. (more…)

How to compete against something that’s free? On the face of it, you can’t. But that’s what companies and people find sometimes find themselves trying to do when the rules change around them. To a large extent, we are defined by the way we react when the world changes.
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Another ISO document format standard.

There already is an ISO document format standard – it’s called ODF. But Microsoft refused to work with ODF and has insisted that its own format be made a standard as well. New Zealand, I am delighted to say, voted against this, correctly noting that having more than one standard increases everybody’s costs. Unfortunately it has passed anyway.

To people who say: there should be competition in standards, let the market sort it out – I say “rubbish”. There should be competition in software, but if that software doesn’t implement common standards there’s no real competition. Refusing to implement common standards is anit-competitive. Letting the market sort out standards means the poor old consumer gets it in the neck. Did you buy an HD DVD player? That standard has just lost in the marketplace and your investment is wasted. And with the size of the market in word processors and spreadsheets – we all use them, after all – imposing additional costs there is a drag on the whole developed world’s economy.

Getting this spurious standard approved was ugly. Have a look at Herald journalist Adam Gifford’s take on the whole thing. And while you are thinking about it, check out the British government’s advice to schools on the matter. Both are worth a read.

As Don Christie has blogged, the government is releasing the software that drives the new government web portal at newzealand.govt.nz under the General Public Licence -the GPL. That makes the portal free software.

This is a really good thing for several reasons. One is that the portal code becomes available for anyone to use, tweak or re-implement. And that’s entirely appropriate – we taxpayers have paid for this software to be developed, why shouldn’t we have access to it?

But the main reason this is so important is that it shows the government getting into step with many other players in the field. Free and open source software is the norm for infrastructure software – look at the Apache webserver, look at Firefox, look at Linux, look at just about every program that makes the Internet work. Here in New Zealand our domain name registry released its registry software under the GPL.

That’s right, without free and open source software there would be no Internet. That’s not just empty rhetoric – lots of companies tried to build internets – remember Prodigy and Compuserve? But the open Internet, built using common, open standards and open source software, eclipsed all the others.

The government is keen to use the Internet to suit its purposes, and to suit ours as well. This way, it’s putting something back. Good on it.

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about being in Geneva at an international standards meeting. There’s a lot of passionate and engaged people here. Read on for my speaking notes. (more…)

Back in September I talked about a company called SCO that had been falsely claiming that it owned Linux – and it lost badly in court, and quite right too. In September it went into Chapter 11, as the US calls its bankruptcy legislation.

Well, SCO has just been acquired by some investors in the Middle East. It’s really not clear why because the company appears to have massive liabilities and no real hope of any income. Here’s some speculation by an analyst suggesting that this is some kind of move to get one of the big players to buy the company out of sheer annoyance value. I’m not sure if things work that when millions are at stake, but we may – sadly – not have heard the last of this yet.

Sorry about the dreadful pun! I’m on my way to Geneva to represent New Zealand at a meeting of the International Standards Organisation, ISO.

Geneva was the home of the protestant reformer John Calvin. Calvin held that adherence to biblical precepts was far important more than any act of charity or kindness. These days, we’d call him a fundamentalist. And, like so many charismatic religious leaders, he got to define exactly how people lived according to those precepts. People who opposed him, or whose theology was a little different, tended to come to a sticky end. He gave his name to particularly dour branch of protestantism. There are echoes of Calvinism in a lot of modern Christian thought.

Anyway, I’m going to Geneva to attend a Ballot Resolution Meeting for a draft standard – DIS29500, commonly known as OOXML. New Zealand voted “no” on this standard last time round, as did sufficient other countries to prevent it being made a world standard on the spot. This meeting is to discuss the various objections that the different countries have to the technical quality of the draft standard and to see if changes can be agreed to it. Countries which have already voted, like New Zealand, then get 30 days to decide whether they wish to change their votes.

This will be a very solid 5 day meeting. Even so, at 6,000 pages with another 2,300 pages of comments the draft standard is so big that the meeting can’t possibly do justice to the whole thing.

According to ISO rules I’m not allowed to blog or broadcast about the contents of the meeting, which is closed to the public and the press. I’ll do my regular Thursday radio broadcast from Geneva (Wednesday night, my time) and I’ll talk about the process and about what it’s like to be involved.

I’m looking forward to the meeting, and I’m also looking forward to meeting some people I have worked closely with round the world, but have never actually met. Ain’t the Net marvellous?