[DMCA-Activists] FSF Initiatives for Libraries

[Seth Johnson]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [lib-info-society] Free Software Foundation Initiatives
for Libraries (alternative to Microsoft and other privateers of
software)
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 06:42:47 -0700 (PDT)
From: Zapopan Martin Muela-Meza <address@hidden>
To: Lib InfoSociety
<address@hidden>,Progressive Library
International Coalition <address@hidden>,ALA
International Relations Round ALA-World
<address@hidden>,ubmls list
<address@hidden>,Biblio-Info-Sociedad
Biblio-Info-Sociedad
<address@hidden>,fsidyb software libre
<address@hidden>
CC: Pat Eyler <address@hidden>


You may like your shrunk budgets and limited energies make Bill
Gates richer while his MS privateer products privatee library
computer users freedom. I would rather suggest you and invite you
to join forces on the Free Software Movement for libraries.
Certainly we will not increase privateering profits of Bill Gates
and alike Band of Brothers, but we will be more satisfied by
giving library users computing freedom from liberation.

I rather invite you to save tax payers money investing on the
cheapest and best computing solutions for your libraries by using
the Free Software Foundation initiatives for libraries computing
systems, while at the same time, mainly, you give yourselves and
your library users freedom of domination and expensive software
like Microsoft and all private and privateering software
companies.

The budgets of your library are not yours, certainly, it's funded
by tax payers, it belong to the public --while still there is a
public domain belonging to the public, not to corporations and
corporate rulers--. I'm sure any citizen, following the common
sense, would buy the best sofware solutions (like any other
product), to the cheapest prices. Free Software based systems are
most of them free of charge, or the cheapest, but the main thing:
they are free (of freedom and liberty) from domination. The
freedom Bill Gates, Microsoft, and all band of brothers steal,
and usurpate from all the citizens of the world, who buy their
products. Thus, if you, for your home you would buy /or download
free of charge from the Web the cheapest solutions, which give
you freedom: Free Software (GNU/Linux, Mozilla, Firefox,
OpenOffice, OpenCalc, you name it), why then you would buy in the
name of library users and citizens, the most expensive, private
and privateer computing systems, i.e. as Gate's Microsoft or most
of all automated library systems, or bibliographic suites such as
OCLC and the like? Or either librarians have invested interests
with corporations, or corporations bribe them, or simply put,
private and privateer corporations rule what used to be a public
and open to debate domain, more than hundred years ago used to
called Public Domain.

For the librarians who care about the ethical professional
principles, mainly for the benefit of the public domain, for
citizens, for the tax payers, for all the people in the
communities, specially those who are neglected, excluded,
deprived and alienated, they need to become the strongest
resistence to the hollowing-out of public domain values such as
democracy and freedom. Learning, researching and developing on
the benefits of free software will guarantee our users millionth
times more computing solutions and benefits with the same dollar
they'd invest in Microsoft. (Oh, Bill Gates donates for the first
year some computers... oh yes, like some other businessmen give
you something free until you have to steal or kill to keep up
with the price). Private and privateer software is not free, only
free software.

For those who care about the public domain, this is just a short
list of benefits of using free software. If you want to learn
more, you may as well read my article published in an Open Access
Chilean journal: "An introduction to the theoretical and
practical challenges the stakeholders of the repositories of
public knowledge face on the information society phenomenon"
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00003577/ or more recently read
this one published in a Mexican Open Access journal: "The age of
the corporate state versus the informational and cognitive public
domain" http://www.razonypalabra.org.mx/actual/zmuela.html

See list below and some working examples by librarians who care
for the public domain by giving the most affordable and freest
computing solutions.

Regards,

Zapopan Martín Muela-Meza, Librarian
P.S. OCLC, in its origins it used to be a public domain coalition
as it used be the Dialog system... people, including
corporate-minded librarians let the free, public, and democratic
information-knowledge get corporativizedly enclosured, it is to
us to re-open it and restore it for the public, for the
citizens... the Free Software Movement; the Open Access Movements
are these kind of movements for those librarians who still adhere
to ethical principles and who still call library users as such...
Koha: Free Software Library System (free as freedom and free of
charge)
http://www.koha.org/

Koha: Free Software Library System (free as freedom and free of
charge)
http://www.koha.org/

Quiet revolution: Librarians teach and preach Free Software for
Libraries at convention Monday June 17, 2002 (03:43 PM GMT)
http://www.newsforge.com/software/02/06/17/1514234.shtml?tid=11.

- By Ben Ostrowsky -

Fresh from a victory against Internet filtering, many librarians
are celebrating and demonstrating Free Software that can automate
a public library for under $1,000, organize information into Web
portals, and manipulate data in arcane formats.

Librarians               have always understood the value of sharing
information. The hacker librarians in Atlanta for the American
Library Association's annual convention, which continues through
Tuesday, have been living out their creed by developing freely
distributable software and teaching others how to use it. Their
peers -- human search engines at the public library, scholarly
bibliographers in academia, and the rarefied ranks of competitive
intelligence researchers -- have arrived by the busload for
sessions on GNU/Linux, BSD, and Free Software tools.

The host of Friday's hands-on tutorial, Emory University
Library's Martin Halbert, says he encourages his staff to look
first for Free Software software because "it's philosophically
aligned with the values of academia." And it doesn't merely save
the library money; it brings in more money. Grant funding to
develop metaScholar, a toolkit for describing scholarly
information, was contingent upon sharing the results. Halbert
said the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation insisted that "if you want
one of these grants, you'd better do Open Source."

When public libraries need money from the city government for
books, staff, and software, they often have to compete with the
dogcatcher. Linux appeals to some librarians simply because
they'd rather buy books than licenses. "We were in desperate
straits with our budget, and Free Software bailed us out," says
John Brice, director of the Meadville Public Library in
Pennsylvania. His library's Web server runs FreeBSD, its
firewalls use OpenBSD, and his own desktop machine runs Mandrake.

"We've been acting as a money laundry for software vendors, and
I'm getting sick of it," agrees Jeff Huestis of Washington
University in St. Louis. Most library software vendors offered a
blank stare or a flat "no" when asked if their products were Free
Software, but some are beginning to realize that Linux is
cost-effective. When Haywood County Schools in North Carolina
insisted on a Linux-friendly version of the catalog used in the
district's 25 libraries, Follett Software Company did something
unusual: rather than lose a customer, Follett ported its catalog
to GNU/Linux. A competitor, Geac Library Systems, has made sure
its new Vubis system runs on GNU/Linux as well.

That's not going far enough, according to the developers of Koha,
a catalog created by Katipo Communications as a bespoke library
system for the Horowhenua Library Trust. Horowhenua asked the
Wellington, New Zealand, company to write a library catalog when
Y2K loomed over its legacy system. Katipo convinced the library
to make it Free Software, and Koha (the name is Maori for "gift")
is now installed on four continents. Pat Eyler, a Free Software
devotee since he saw the GNU Manifesto
<http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html> in 1991, acts as the
Kaitiaki ("guardian") of the project. He says he sees the
alliance as inevitable: "Librarians bring a level of activism and
commitment that rivals that of Free Software hackers. They also
bring a set of skills that we don't do all that well at:
classification, information architecture, searching, and user
interaction. I think a blending of librarianship with hacking
will be good for both communities."

And blend they did. On Sunday afternoon, hacker librarians
attended a session called "How To Automate Your Library For Under
$1000." The star of the show was Greenstone, a digital library
creation suite that turns a ragtag menagerie of documents in
various formats into an easy-to-use collection that can run on a
standalone laptop in a Ugandan village's information center.
UNESCO distributes Greenstone CDs with information about farming,
animal husbandry, economic development, and other topics to help
people in developing areas improve their lives. Naturally, it
handles Unicode gracefully, so material in Arabic, Chinese, and
other non-European languages work as well as English. It runs on
GNU/Linux, BSD, and MS Windows 3.1 or later. The software was
developed under the GPL at the University of Waikato in New
Zealand. When asked why Free Software for libraries often has a
Kiwi provenance, professor Ian Witten explained: "We do stuff for
fun, and this is a lot of fun."

Library science departments are beginning to teach and use Linux
and Open Source tools. Proprietary software vendors often gladly
give away their products to hook young librarians on closed
systems. But "we don't want our students to just be customers. We
want them to influence the direction of the technology they work
with," said Shawn Collins, an instructor at the University of
Tennessee's library school. "Putting an Open Source catalog up
for the school's own library would be the best example. It's
important to show them that there are alternatives that work and
are under budget." The school, he hopes, will soon teach novice
librarians to use Koha.

Recommended reading: Other Free Software librarians love

The Free Software Systems for Libraries site keeps tabs on
notable projects. Here are a few of the most popular and powerful
tools librarians use:

# iVia helps librarians catalog the best of the Internet
cooperatively, building collections like InfoMine without all the
junk a Google search throws at you. iVia suggests author, title
and subject headings based on the content of a Web page, then
lets a librarian make an expert determination.

# MARC.pm is a Perl module for manipulating records in an arcane
but perennial format designed in the punch card era. The MARC
(Machine-Readable Cataloging) standard allows librarians to share
bibliographic records instead of recataloging every book they add
to the shelves.

# MyLibrary allows librarians to set up a portal to online
databases, the library's catalog, lists of bestselling and
recently purchased books, and anything else they can get their
hands on. Users can then change the portal to suit their needs
and access their creation from any browser.

# Prospero sends magazine articles from library to library in
response to a patron's request. Instead of paying international
telephone rates to fax the latest findings on cancer treatments
across the globe, librarians use Prospero (or its proprietary
cousin Ariel, with which it plays well) to send the document
online. The end user can then use a Web browser to pick up the
article she requested.

# WIBS (Windsor Internet Booking System) settles arguments over
the ever-popular Internet PCs available in libraries by booking
computers for specified time periods. Librarians can see at a
glance which computers are available and who has overstayed his
time slot.

 
Related Links                    
· American Library Association
· metaScholar
· Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
· Meadville Public Library
· Washington University in St. Louis
· Follett Software Company
· Geac Library Systems
· Koha
· Katipo Communications
· Horowhenua Library Trust
· asked
· Greenstone
· UNESCO
· University of Waikato
· University of Tennessee
· Open Source Systems for Libraries
· iVia
· InfoMine
· MARC.pm
· MARC
· MyLibrary
· Prospero
· Ariel
· WIBS
· Ben Ostrowsky
· a victory against Internet filtering
· More on Open Source
· Also by Guest
--------------

GNU/Linux at the Right Price
Walter Minkel -- 4/1/2003
School Library Journal


Current Issue > Article

"Those of us using Linux in schools have a motto," says Paul
Nelson, technology director of the small Riverdale school
district in Oregon. "It works. It's free. Duh."

Nelson is talking about the Linux operating system, a no-brainer
purchase that doesn't cost schools a cent. Last year, when Nelson
and his colleagues were considering what to buy for the
district's soon-to-be-opening high school, they opted to go with
Linux's K12-LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) operating
system, which is tailor-made for K–12 schools. They also made
another shrewd, money-saving decision: they bought 80
workstations (with 15-inch, flat-panel screens) for $500
apiece—roughly half the price of new PCs. Why so cheap? The
workstations are thin clients—computers that are slow, old, and
lacking hard drives but are just fine for connecting to a server.
(For more information about thin clients, see August 2002,
"Stretch Your Network," pp. 52–53.)

With their Linux-based server now up and running, Riverdale's
staff and students have access to the same sort of software
that's found on PCs or Macintosh computers. Linux's Open Office
Word Processor program, for example, is comparable to Microsoft
Word; Mozilla, a Linux-friendly browser, is a good substitute for
Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers; and Open
Office Impress takes the place of Microsoft's PowerPoint program.
The K–12 LTSP Linux software is free to download or, if you
prefer, operating system installation disks—which include a copy
of Open Office—may be ordered online at www.k12ltsp.org for a
modest $15.

Nelson originally figured that most teachers and students would
want to use Microsoft Office for their word-processing needs, so
the district spent $10,000 on a districtwide license. "Then I
discovered that we didn't need it," says Nelson. "Almost everyone
was happy using the Linux software."

Like Nelson, Kirstin Tonningsen, the district's only library
media specialist, praises Linux. Thanks to the virtually
trouble-free operating system and software, Tonningsen says she
now spends most of her time working with students and teachers,
instead of dealing with cranky hard drives and other assorted
computer woes. Her sole complaint is that Follett doesn't offer a
Linux version of its automation system. To compensate, Tonningsen
runs Riverdale's Follett system on a separate Windows-based
server. But since Microsoft's server software is frequently a
victim of Internet viruses, Nelson is reluctant to let students
access the library's online catalog from home. (Follett Software
spokesperson Kathy Sharo says that the company is aware of the
problem, and "we do have plans to fix it.")

Even though Linux's operating system is free and the cost of
maintaining its software is low, school technology directors have
been slow to jump on Linux's bandwagon. Nelson, LTSP's number-one
cheerleader, knows of only 86 schools in the Pacific Northwest
that are using the K12-LTSP operating system, and "a few others"
elsewhere. He attributes much of the slow acceptance of Linux
into the K–12 world to simple inertia, and to the same kind of
perception that a school can't survive without Microsoft Office
that made him initially reluctant to do without it.

But Jeanne Hayes, president of Quality Education Data, an
education research company, thinks great things are in store for
GNU/Linux. "Right now, Linux has barely raised its head in the
school market—it's still a blip," she says. "But my son is a
programmer, and he tells me that it's the next big thing."


ENG: "Corporations are not democratic institutions --their
directors and managers owe no accountability to anyone but the
shareholders that employ them."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ESP: "Las corporaciones (empresas) no son instituciones
democráticas: a sus directores y gerentes no se les puede fincar
responsabilidades ante nadie excepto ante sus accionistas que les
emplean."

-- Bakan, Joel. (2004). The Corporation. The Pathological Pursuit
of Profit and Power : La corporación (empresa). La búsqueda
patológica de ganancias y poder. London: Constable & Robinson, p.
151

 
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