Free Software Foundation Recent blog posts

April and May 2018: Photos from Ottawa, during the discussion "Two lessons from the Phoenix payroll puzzle," and from Montreal, at the Adte's annual colloquium

vendredi 1 juin 2018 à 19:09

Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman (RMS) was in Canada in April and in May 2018 to participate in a couple of events.

On April 30^th, he was in Ottawa, to support an initiative to create a free software solution to the Canadian government's employee payroll debacle. He and Joseph Potvin, executive director of Xalgorithms Foundation¹, led a breakfast discussion titled "Two lessons from the Phoenix payroll puzzle: Software freedom & algorithm accessibility."¹

Phoenix is the Canadian government's new payroll system, which was supposed to provide "an employee self-service vehicle to decentralize data entry and increase access to information"; since its rollout in 2016, however, it has been plagued with malfunctions, which have led to under-, non-, and over-payments to over 200,000 federal employees.

The resulting stress and hardship for all affected has been considerable and, more than two years later, in spite of national outrage and ballooning costs ($1.2 billion and counting), the system is still not fixed.

As RMS points out, "Phoenix shows that state use of nonfree software can create a continuing disaster from which the only escape is a free replacement."

On May 29^th, 2018, Canada's auditor general reported on the enormity of the failure. In the search for the causes of the problem, few have considered a practical software solution; in their event on 30^th April, however, Potvin and RMS did just that: they proposed that (a) nonfree software being used by a government and (b) inaccessible rules are the two root causes behind the fiasco.

The auditor general "concluded that the Phoenix project was an incomprehensible failure of project management and oversight"; however, Potvin, who for six years lead IT expenditure analysis and reporting for the Chief Information Officer Branch of the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, says, "It's only incomprehensible if the essential questions are not asked."

Because the Phoenix pay system relies on nonfree software, according to Potvin, the first root cause is that "the Canadian government does not have the source code for it and, due to restrictive licensing, can't change suppliers. Nobody beyond the original contractors are allowed to run a copy of the system independently, to study how it all works, to run tests on it, or to adapt it with improvements."

RMS added,

Government exists for the people, and does its computing—all of it—for the people. So every public agency's responsibility to the people includes maintaining control of that computing. Any time government uses a non-free computer program, then logically, its owner controls that part of government's computing. We the people must insist that our government maintain full control of its computing, and must not let any other party take control of it.

Potvin went on to explain how the second root cause was inaccessible payroll rules: Not only are they idiosyncratic, poorly documented and convoluted, but in the Phoenix system each rule is a hard-coded procedural step instead of being dynamic and declarative. He said, "They famously claim there are around 80,000 rules. But we say: How many rule patterns are there? Less than a hundred? Maybe two dozen?"

RMS added that, when it comes to data-driven decision algorithms that a government uses, there is no accountability unless the algorithms are published.

Going well past merely analyzing the problem, Xalgorithms Foundation plans to fix the Phoenix problem with an initiative, called MyPayChecker (CheckerMaPaye, in French), that "can provide those employees and payroll officers the most consistently accurate and transparently documented pay information, while also respecting their privacy."

According to Potvin,

The MyPayChecker Working Group will enable the world’s first digitally automated collective labor agreement. This means every clause, deduction and entitlement, and every priority notification, would be expressed in a transparent computable form in a free/libre schedule (i.e. annex) to the agreement, in addition to its conventional expression in natural language text. And each computable clause would be automatically and accurately discoverable on the Internet, to be efficiently retrieved without restriction for use in applicable transactions by at least three independent payroll platforms.

Again, Potvin:

We're going to throw down the gauntlet and issue a clear challenge to the companies behind the Phoenix project. We claim that a free software community can independently finance, create and operate within a year, a more respectful, more accurate, and more economical self-service portal for pay validation to support employees and payroll officers, than those companies can provide within a year.

According to Xalgorithms Foundation, the "Paycheck Target Challenge" (« Défi des salaires ciblés »), which Potvin announced during the breakfast discussion, will begin officially on June 1^st, 2018:

Some lead time is required for the rules of this unusual competition to be discussed and finalized with stakeholders, and to invite other investors, companies, and technically inclined individuals, including Canadian Government employees, to collaborate with Xalgorithms Foundation in making MyPayChecker the service to beat. [...] And if the free software community wins this bet, the companies behind Phoenix can adopt it, since MyPayChecker will 100% shared.

Which Potvin jokingly referred to as being something akin to "wearing the other team's hockey jersey" and, more seriously, as a huge incentive.³ As the reporting this past week has shown, the Phoenix failure is currently a huge issue in Canada, and Xalgorithms Foundation's challenge could not be coming at a more opportune time.

Some photos from the breakfast discussion…

…and, clockwise from top right, RMS checking e-mail above the Ottawa river after the event, RMS and Joseph Potvin, and David Graham, a member of the Canadian Parliament for the riding of Laurentides-Labelle and an outspoken supporter of free software, who had attended the breakfast discussion. Three weeks after the event, on May 22^th, 2018, in an appeal in favor of Net Neutrality, in the House of Commons he commented, "In the words of Richard Stallman, the father of the free software movement, either the user controls the program or the program controls the user."

After Ottawa, RMS then headed to Montreal, for the 5^th free colloquium of the Adte (an association for free software, free science, free educational resources and free data for colleges and universities). This was RMS's second appearance at the event, and he gave his speech "Logiciel libre et éducation" ("Education and freedom"¹).

For all the photos from the event, along with comments, see here.

Thank you to everyone who made all these trips possible!

Please fill out our contact form, so that we can inform you about future events in and around Ottawa and Montreal.

Please see www.fsf.org/events for a full list of all of RMS's confirmed engagements,
and contact rms-assist@gnu.org if you'd like him to come speak.

^{1. Xalgorithms
Foundation convenes the primary Internet of Rules Working Group to
design, produce, test, maintain and document Xalgo, XalgoAuthor,
Lichen, and Interlibr, and to ensure that they operate well as a
loosely-coupled system to express, publish and fetch computational
algorithms on the Internet. As of May 2018 six Working Group charters
are being drafted and discussed with sector stakeholders:}

^{Xalgo4Trade (for automated inter-jurisdictional trade agreements),

MyPayChecker/CheckerMaPaye (automated labour agreements),

Benchmarks (for dynamic pricing linked to verifiable reference data),

Reciprocal Data (for data empowerment of individuals, and "mutual loyalty"),

Industrial Control Systems (for dynamic manufacturing process control),

AlgoRisks (for management of algorithm errors and omissions liability risk).}

^{You can see its source code, architectural
documentation, and organizational
structure ↩}
^{2. See here
for the event's presentation file.↩}
^{3. For more on this, see Xalgorithms's media
advisory.↩}
^{4. Slides available here.↩}

Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup time: June 1st starting at 12:00 p.m. EDT/16:00 UTC

mardi 29 mai 2018 à 18:10

Help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. Every Friday we meet on IRC in the #fsf channel on irc.freenode.org.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

When a user comes to the Directory, they know that everything in it is free software, has only free dependencies, and runs on a free OS. With over 16,000 entries, it is a massive repository of information about free software.

While the Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world for many years now, it has the potential to be a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help! And since it's a MediaWiki instance, it's easy for anyone to edit and contribute to the Directory.

Henry Heimlich published the Heimlich Maneuver in the journal Emergency Medicine this week in 1974. This innovation in medical care proved life-saving shortly after the procedure was published. While innovation in software doesn't actually involve treating patients, being able to store, retrieve, and transfer patient information can prove to be just as crucial in a medical crisis, so this week, we're honoring Heimlich by working on health and medical software.

One dynamic and multifaceted project in this area is GNU Health. This project is a Free/Libre project for health practitioners, health institutions, and governments. It provides Electronic Medical Record (EMR) functionality, a Hospital Management (HMIS) module, and a Health Information System (HIS). The Directory entry contains the panoply of information you expect. This is just one example though: this section in the Directory is large, which means an opportunity to update entries, and naturally, if one is missing, its addition would be quite the feather in our cap.

If you are eager to help, and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today! There are also weekly Directory Meeting pages that everyone is welcome to contribute to before, during, and after each meeting. To see the meeting start time in your time zone, run this in GNU bash: date --date='TZ="America/New_York" 12:00 this Fri'

Free Software Directory meeting recap, May 2018

mardi 29 mai 2018 à 17:51

Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. We had an exciting month working on the Directory with our wonderful stable of volunteers. These folks show up week in and week out to improve the Directory. It's also important to note the valiant efforts of those volunteers who can't make an appearance at the meeting proper, but still plug away at Directory entries during the week.

This month saw our backlog of entries reduced by 75%, but the big news is that the Directory welcomes, and is lucky to have David_Hedlund as a Directory intern this summer.

One area that will see improvement is the introduction of a dedicated and tailored IRC bot addressing the specific needs of the Directory. This will better highlight the Directory meetings both before and during. Work is also going to be done this summer on the entry import scripts, which among other things allow for the importing of full repositories into the Directory.

If you would like to help update the Directory, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. EST (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).

Success for net neutrality, success for free software

vendredi 25 mai 2018 à 20:25

We've had great success with the United States Senate voting in support of net neutrality! Congratulations and thank you to everyone in the US for contacting your congresspeople, and all of you who helped spread the word.

However, it's not over yet. Here are more actions you can take if you're in the United States.

Now that the (CRA) has passed the Senate, it moves to the House of Representatives. Just as we asked you to call your senators, now it's time to call your House representatives. Find their contact info here and use the script below to ask them to support the reinstatement of net neutrality protections.

The timing hasn't been set for future votes and hearings yet, but that's no reason to wait: make sure your representatives know how you feel.

Looking for a sample script?

Hello,

I live in CITY/STATE. I am calling to urge you to support net neutrality.

I hope REPRESENTATIVE will do the right thing and vote for the CRA to overturn the FCC's repeal of net neutrality protections.

Thank you for your time.

Want some bonus points?

If your senator voted in support of the CRA, call and thank them for their work. (See a list of senators and their votes here.)

Call your senator directly. Find their number here.
Or, dial the Senate at (202) 224-3121 and they will connect you.

We'll be updating you as things develop.

Share on social media!

Tell your friends by sharing on social media! Use the hashtags netneutrality and freesoftware.

Net neutrality in the US is a global issue

Even if you don't live in the US, what happens with net neutrality here still matters to you.

When companies -- and free software projects -- within the US are burdened by extra fees being charged by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), everyone in the world loses access to these pages and services. For example, blocking VoIP services in one country affects communication at a global scale. Access to the tools we use to build, download, and share free software are at risk when net neutrality is no longer there to protect them -- and users -- from ISPs controlling access to those sites.

Read these posts by the Free Software Foundation (FSF)

Want to know even more? Check out these posts from the FSF.

Looking for more ways to support digital rights? Consider becoming an [FSF member][12] today!

GNU Spotlight with Mike Gerwitz: 18 new GNU releases!

vendredi 25 mai 2018 à 18:08

For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu.

To download: nearly all GNU software is available from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors from https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the URL https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html.

If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

As always, please feel free to write to us at maintainers@gnu.org with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.