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For almost two years now I have been working on a project we have been calling Open. This project started off as a dream to *really* introduce open source applications to African health systems. From its inception in which a few of us were sitting around a table in Open Eye cafe till now there have been many changes and many ideas on how big of a scale it should all be. Despite it all though, the dream to raise money to bring open source health apps to African health workers, while taking time to let African IT students join in on the development of those apps has remained. In addition we hope to take the ideals of open source and apply it to all areas of our work, from open information to gender equality – you name it, and we will be transparent about it.

How we are raising money makes my heart warm too – we have been generously been given a song by Youssou N’Dour (who has been wonderful to us) which is now being released under Creative Commons. We then asked a bunch of other stars to remix the song and we are releasing these remixes on every music distributor who said yes. Isn’t that excellent! The songs are free, but we do ask you for a donation to help our cause out. I think its a pretty fair trade.

So I’d like to officially let all you, my friends, know that today we are finally releasing IntraHealth’s Open.

Please do me a big favor and check out the songs, then donate whatever you can afford to to help us with this dream. If you would like a recommendation – I think the remix by Toubab Krewe is amazingly good and it features one of the original “Last Poets” – plus, their from Asheville, NC! who knew?

By the way, a few of you friends helped me out a great deal by either giving me advices, connecting me to others, or joining the Open Council. To you I am most grateful. Thankyou.

• OPEN website
• OPEN on Facebook Causes
• OPEN on MySpace
• YouTube channel
• Follow OPEN on Twitter

We have a woman at work whose job is to take a look at gender issues in our projects, in other’s projects, and in general. Of course, she mostly focuses on gender issues as they relate to health. This morning I sat diagonally behind her and was prompted to think about the inclusion of females in IT in developing countries (this came to mind as I misread over her shoulder the title of the book she was reading). OK, so lazyweb helped me search on this topic and I’ve found one rather interesting report called Gender, Information Technology and Developing Countries: An Analytical Study. written by USAID and Learnlink.

I’m still delving into the report, and I am sure there are other reports out there, but a couple things already stand out to me. First is the complete lack of data on the subject from Africa. I think this is mostly a matter of these data not specifying gender at all, but I sure would love to see something for the continent most of my work focuses on. Second is this nugget of information:

Statistics by country are particularly puzzling because there does not appear to be any correlation between women’s Internet usage and expected indicators such as female literacy rate, female GDP per capita, female representation in professional and technical jobs, or gender empowerment. Developing countries with high female Internet use have low overall Internet use. In countries where the Internet is used primarily by an urban elite, women are well represented. But as GDP rises, the overall dominance of men edges the percentage of female use lower.

At first this paragraph gives a brief hope that as a country develops, the “digital divide” wouldn’t be affected by literacy rate and GDP in developing countries (HUGE problems for females many of these places) but then the last sentence seems to quell that hope.

This is really quite interesting – there must be loads more to learn in relation. Of course, I’d also love to see more information about females working in IT, not just using these technologies.

As a side-note, I am convinced that the larger software companies have so disruptively hijacked IT education in the developing world (more attempts to get folks tied into their licensing just in case there is an IT bubble in that region) that the options for anyone to enter the industry is limited by the costs of learning, and the narrow scope of that education.

Now that my Australian friends aren’t talking to me anymore (I can’t help it, the Simpsons are funny!) I’ll turn my attention back to the world of licenses (I’m a party guy)

I read on the New York Times’ Freakonomics Blog a pretty interesting and clever article about making anti-EULA clauses via email. The EULA, of course, is End User License Agreement most famously used by Microsoft in their “if you break this shrinkwrap, you accept the terms…” maneuvers. This article posits that maybe the customer can send their own EULA right back to the company whose software or service presented them with a EULA to begin with.

Something like:

READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (”BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

I like it. This appeals to some mischievous side I have and to my non-legal brain has about as much merit as most presentations of EULAs. Still, I do think it misses the point a bit.

There was one passage in this article that caught my attention which leads me to why they are missing the point:

In thinking about this issue, it’s useful to separate the question of whether the seller’s or the buyer’s terms are reasonable. There are certainly plenty examples of obnoxious EULAs that have prohibited users from criticizing the seller’s product. But anti-EULAs could also be oppressive — for example, voiding even the reasonable restrictions of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License.

I wonder if our friends at Freakonomics have actually looked into what has happened to those who have broken the conditions of the GPL? If my memory serves me correctly, only the most recent case has someone actually been taken to court for doing so. Mostly people are sent letters asking them to correct their mistake. Am I wrong in this? I really don’t think so. If anything, the FSF probably could have been more aggressive in this regard.

But let’s not forget that the GPL and a EULA are very much the same thing: copy-right: the right to copy. All this is is a method that defines the rights a creator is granting for someone to have a copy. If you really don’t agree with the rights you are being granted – by all means don’t use it. You can make a fuss about it. You can tell your friends, or even tell the company why you aren’t using it. Yes, the shrinkwrap acceptance is backhanded but just because you don’t like that practice, the license the company has chosen isn’t somehow magically voided. If you want to use their software, you accept the terms. It doesn’t get much simpler.

The Freakonomics guys suggest that we can get around these pesky rights decisions through online payment systems offering anti-EULA protections when paying through their service (of course, that comes after accepting the EULA for their services). Is the idea to use the muscle of Paypal or Google Payments to come down on the evil EULA-doer? This cheapens the law…. or at least moves it into a market-driven corporate realm where the bigger the market-cap, the more correct they are. “I paid you through Google whose market cap is $211B, therefore your copyright is void.” That, to me, is scarier than a EULA.

The system that really needs to be in place is one of education. Lets inform companies that overly-protective rights are not consumer-friendly and are simply bad business. What better way to start that education than clicking on “I do not agree”?

I mentioned yesterday that I want to hear someone give a more focused talk on the issues of patents and IP in Universities. I am sure there are many such talks, but I want to hear one that is critical of IP in Universities.

A while ago I had a job at UNC which exposed me to the issue quite forcefully. Everything I saw and will relay derives from the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. To summarize it, the Bayh-Dole Act stated that Universities could retain patents for research even if the funding came from Federal and State sources.

Let me summarize this way: The government can give money to a University in order to do research on something – say HIV medicines. If the University comes up with something they get to hold patent rights and are even allowed to build a for-profit venture around it. The taxpayer who funded the research gets nothing. If they have HIV and need the results from the research they must either pay or have their health insurance pay for it. Up until the Bayh-Dole Act all Federally funded research resulted in the findings being under Public Domain.

So why exactly did this happen? Because politicians have equated patents and copyright with innovation and ignored the fact that 99.999% of what we know comes from shared and collaborative knowledge… the “Commons”. What we know and how we improve upon that knowledge is innovation.

The commons is exactly what education should be about. At my time at UNC what I saw was not educators who wanted to educate, share, and be a part of the greater common. Rather, I saw people who saw an opportunity to create a company on their research and make millions and millions of dollars. Or so they thought. What no one is telling them is that most ventures don’t make money, they end up losing it. Further, to start and run a company requires a great deal of time, far more time than the average professor has. Still, what I cringed at most often was the fact that I couldn’t find anyone who actually wanted to teach! I am sure they are there, but again, I was working with folks who were doing their best to cash in on Bayh-Dole as well as working at a cash-strapped state University that is trying its best to become more of a research institution than a liberal arts haven.

In the end I came away with a gut feeling that Bayh-Dole was not in the best interest of the American people. Our Universities should be participating in the greater commons and pushing our society forward, especially when the money is coming from the taxpayer! Instead they have become businesses intent on finding the next great money-maker.