Interview.lici.it

LICI: Do you use free software in your artistic activity?

Luciano Paccagnella: No, I don’t feel like an artist.

LICI: When do you use free-software products and services?

Luciano Paccagnella:  Always, for any kinds of activities I must carry out, every days, mainly office suite, communication and database tools.

LICI: Do you think free software is a kind of art?

Luciano Paccagnella:  I dont kwnow, I don’t care about art!

LICI: In which projects are you involved actually?

Luciano Paccagnella:  studying the networking collaborating procedures, knowledge production and sharing, the role of new information intermediaries (search engines, blogs, portals, etc.).

Luciano Paccagnella
Professor of Sociology of Communication at the University of
Turin (Italy)

LICI: in which way free software is useful in the management of the library you are involved?

Andrea Zagli: quality, open source, flexibility, saving money.

LICI: the end users have some difficulties with free software and open source software?

Andrea Zagli: I don’t know

LICI: which are the training procedures to teach free and open-source software to library staff?

Andrea Zagli: no kind of training courses developed by the public body but self-training.

Andrea Zagli
Comune di Scandicci – Centro elaborazione dati
http://www.comune.scandicci.fi.it

LICI: in which way free software is useful in the management of the library you are involved?

Michele Pelagatti: the possibility to let access library’s end users to software products like libre office, gimp, and vlc without licence costs is a great possibility.

LICI: the end users have some difficulties with free software and open source software?

Michele Pelagatti: end users often use open and free software by themlseves but they can get help if they meet difficulties.

LICI: which are the training procedures to teach free and open-source software to library staff?

Michele Pelagatti: library staff has received no kinds of training otherwise free software while some fellows of library staff has a god know-how in free software matters because of self-interest needs.

Michele Pelagatti
Cultural Worker
Municipal Library of Sesto Fiorentino (Florence-Italy)

LICI: When have you applied free software to your activity?

logu: During a VJing Performance based on contemporary dance

LICI: Do you think free software is Art by itself?

logu: No. From my personal point of view Art is based on an aesthetic and visual component, or on a content one (like writing). I will put Free Software more on a “social” level, a way to spread the know-how and resources “sharing” concept.

LICI: In which projects are you involved actually?

logu: I am involved in a photgraphic project named “back tto the roots” taking inspiration from the last two  Lars Von Triers films: a reasoning on the man-nature realtionship and on the need to be in contact qith the earth again and with naturale energies relating to nature.

Name: Lorenzo “logu” Guasti

Bio and professional notes: Fotografo, Graphic Designer.

blog, social, and Web: http://flavors.me/logu

EVOLUTION OVERVIEWS

LICI: Debian is a project with an important history. In which countries Debian has been adopted? Relating to the several social revolution occured throught the world, have you noticed a grow of the project in some specific areas?

Stefano Zacchiroli: It is difficult to measure the final users of a free software project. Users are free and invited to help each others copying and downloading software withou logging. Debian, as other distro, try to measure its users: taking account of its project membres, measuring the traffic of its mailing lists, etc. We think to be well inside Europe and North America and emerging in South America, Japan and Oceania while we have some difficulties in China and in India where it is more difficult to get volunteers for the projects.

LICI: Debian is radically changing its multiarchitecture strucutre. All this is due also to the mobile technology? Are there any specific projects about mobile opportunity?

Stefano Zacchiroli: One of the top advantages of Debian is the support to several differnt kinds of informatic architectures. The Debian Squeeze developed on February support embedded as super-computers ones with two different kernels (Linux and FreeBSD).

Relating to mobile technology we are being the first ones to adopt ARM for smartphone and tablet devices in front of a general misunderstanding about ARM. We are implementing a Wheezy ad un port “armhf”
(ARM Hard Float) solution to speed-up high-level tablets. We continue to involve ourselves in the MIPS architectures recently connected to the Android technology. Debian’s future on mobile devices is a great future as you can see!

Multi-arch will be a great change in Wheezy and will support end-users in adopting different architectrures on the same computer without the need of specific recompilation. The most common solution will e the desktop one, to take advantage of 32 and 64 bit on the same computer and specifically on some servers for private clouding procedures. There is also an important multi-arch utility specifically oriented for sostware developers  as multi-arch is going to improve cross-compilation in a simpler way.

SAAS AND FREE SOFTWARE FUTURE.

LICI: With the SAAS spread there always more users taking advantage of great data centers for their daily storage procedures. Which the impact on next open-source software devolepoers generation?

Stefano Zacchiroli: SaaS  and the so-called “Cloud” are a real revolution: the processing is getting far from end-users and getting near to out-of-control computer farm.  Unfortunately, it is a negative revolution connected to two great problems for free software. The first one is the very known privacy and data control problem, as data are owned by end users but managed by Saas providers. The second problem is that some defensive strategies are no more effective: GPL licences cannot permit to end users to process, study, edit and share softeware in a free way. Renewed licenses like AGPL offer more granting conditions but are less known ad perhaps developed too late.  In this way, distro are less important for end users while are of great interest for daily SaaS service provider activities.

The ownership of processing, data and digital rights is the real challenge of our time. Do not understand this concept means to implement GNU/Linux in every desktop and mobile devices while the “processing” stand in other places. There are some interesting solutions to face these kind of problems such as the implementation of very cheap plug server, connected eac others by mesh
networks, with distributed softwares starting from social network applications.

One of the most itneresting project is the one proposed by the FreedomBox foundation. Debian is a very good distro for plug server as it is collaborating with the foundation for designing this kind of vision.

LICI: Among all software licenses, Debain select the free ones (rif DFSG) as GPL and BSD.
Form software developers point of view, what do you think about CLA (Contributor License Agreement) nowdays a very common solution in the open source world?

Stefano Zacchiroli: It is a very complicted reasoning.

Relating to a common reasoning model every fellows engaged in a free software project have the same duties and rights: there are copyleft licences as GPLs or some more liberal solution as BSD ones related to each project. Contributors (inbound) and users (outbound) design the “inbound=outbound” model.

Copyright Assignment Agreement (CAA) relates to different degrees of rights as some privileged users (as for example a company) can change the licence of a whole software project. This difference of rights is actually a problem.

CAA/CLA should not be used as an evolution towards new licens that should protect free software in a better way as GPL licences already offer the possibility to choose X version or above ones including also the possibility to choose new third party version.

CAA/CLA  solution can be applied for “license enforcement” duties although it would be better to sign CAA/CLA agreements with non-profit organizations rather then with for-profit companies. In recent times we have seen too often companies collaborating with free software projects changing idea in a very fast way due to commercial partnership and every software developers should take into consideration these kinds of reasoning before making its choice.

LICI: Which kind of licence should adopt an open source startup company implementing a SAAS service?

Stefano Zacchiroli: We can and we must do business by means of free software and also in the SaaS field. Otherwise a startup involved in the SaaS business should provide “freedom for its users” by menas of right to manage data including also the right to move its services to other companies. For many people these reasons will be good reasons to *stay* in a free service like that.

No doubts AGPL licence is the right licence for SaaS and cloud service as AGPL licence has the same importance of GPL one 20 years ago for personal computer field.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONSHIPS

LICI: Which are the most impostant relationships for Debain and its growth?

Stefano Zacchiroli: We have a lot of industrial partners within our “Partners Program”, and no special ones.  There are not some companies that can be considered more important for Debian. The project decisions are taken by project managers realting to the work’s quality and quantity  developed.

Nevertheless there are several companies that have strategical interests in the Debian development and support the project with financianl efforts, useful for our events as the DebConf [1] and the sprint program [2]. Other companies give us hardware (top servers), hosting and other hardware services or some times take into account the development of specific packets.

[1] http://www.debconf.org
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/Sprints

LICI: Canonical and Ubuntu project are DebConf sponsors: which relationships between these two linux projects?

Stefano Zacchiroli: I have faced this topic recently at the Ubuntu Developer Summit 2011 [3]. I have pointed out the state of the art of Debian-Canonical relationship after some troubled years.

[3] http://upsilon.cc/~zack/talks/2011/20111031-uds.pdf

Nowdays the realtionship between Debain and Ubuntu is a clear one.
Debian is the base-software of Ubuntu, at least 3/4 of Ubuntu archive (75%) is made up of Debian recompiled packages, some 15% packages are modified and recompiled Debian ones.

Each distro has an important mission and role.
The vision is a fluid free software distributed ecosystem  where different vendors cooperate each others towards a common upstream developing linux in the best way as possible, reaching many users as possible, and being in some way good free software citizens.

A lot of work made by Ubuntu turn into Debian and the figures of this involvment grow year after year: a direct effect of the several communication channels (as for the Derivatives Front Desk [4]) enstablished between Debian and its derived distributions all of them (about 130) involved in turning back developments inside Debian.

[4] http://wiki.debian.org/DerivativesFrontDesk

This kind of standard must be implemented in the furue along with with more involvments Debian based technologies within the same Debian: there are a lot of  such kinds of technologies but some times meet difficulties to reach the upstream.
I understand the need to find different and specific markets but a technology upstream means long distance successful goals.

LICI: We invite our readers to give donations (http://www.debian.org/donations) to your important project and along with money what do you need for your growth?

Stefano Zacchiroli: new project members , as it is a volunteer project.
<https://nm.debian.org>
<http://wiki.debian.org/HelpDebian>.

Stefano Zacchiroli also on identi.ca

LICI: In which ways free software has been a useful device for the
devoloping of your business?

Marco Pini: We currently use Open Office and other software like Filezilla, Gimp and some others for images “resizing and crop” function. Free software is a real economic opportunity as it is nowdays quite easy to find effective alterantive solutions to commercial and professional ones. We must also admit that, in fact, Gimp do not provide the same performance level of Photoshop.

LICI: Which are the economic advantages coming out by adopting free
software within your business?

Marco Pini: Earning money due to less licences…

LICI: Which kind of realtionships and partnerships have yoy developed
with the free software certification world?

Marco Pini: we have no kinds of certifications, actually…

Marco Pini is a teacher in the ITC and communication fields. He has studied Political Sciences. He is manager of the koris.com Web Agency where there is an emerging effort to use open source applications.