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23 July, 2010
If you want to know the state of the Arabic Linux User Groups just have a short visit to their websites. They are not only unwilling/unable to have some community activities, but -even online- they are not able to create a virtual space for Linux fans, professionals or newbies.
These are some screenshots of the home pages of these groups, ordered from the biggest #FAIL to the biggest #OK :)
Linux Arabia (http://www.linuxarabia.com)
I think this was expected to be a Linux portal for all Arab countries. Actually I do not remember this website, but as others mentioned here, I found it on Arabeyes.org (I will write my opinion about Arabeyes in another post).
Anyways, the Linux Arabia site shows only cheap ads, they do not own the domain anymore. #FAIL
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Saudi LUG (http://www.linux.org.sa)
It looks the Saudi LUG (if there was one) do not have anymore both the website and the domain name. It is sad that the biggest Arabic country in the Middle East has no groups for Linux. #FAIL
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Iraqi Linux Users Group (http://www.iraqilinux.org)
"It works!", not really... These guys did not even remove the default Apache index.html page. #FAIL
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Jordan Linux User Group - JoLUG (http://jolug.net)
It shows only this text: "jolug.org". I remember a website was here (I am a "member"), but since no activities or news never happened it became extremely outdated. They used to have an old Drupal 5 CMS with no design at all. #FAIL
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Kuwait Linux Users Group (http://www.q8linux.net)
You will get this scary message when you try to open their website: "Your attention please: You have attempted to access this site with an invalid IP". Of course there is nothing else. #FAIL
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Linux Dubai (http://www.linux-dubai.com)
I got a "509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" error, the only thing you can get from this website is that they use Apache and -obviously- Linux. This is hypothetically the only LUG in United Arab Emirates. #FAIL
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Lebanese GNU/Linux Users Group (http://www.leglug.org)
This latest news on this website are 3 year old. The LUG was very technical oriented and no community events were held, their site shows a list of technical meetings, the last from 2007. #FAIL
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Palestinian Linux Users Group (http://www.plug.ps)
Good website (it is in Arabic), it seems they organized an InstallFest in April 2010, unfortunately the event before was in October 2007 and the last posts in the forums are from 1 year ago, do not expect this group is very active but let's wish them all of luck! #OK
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GNU Linux Maroc (http://www.linux-maroc.org)
For this website I had to re-open my school's French books. It seems that Moroccan LUG is doing some activities, in 2010, they had some lectures, free software days and an Open Source competition. Chapeau! #OK
[inline:linuxmaroc.png]
Egyptian Linux Users Group (EGLUG) (http://eglug.org)
The last months of EGLUG were really busy: training sessions, courses, installation festivals from what it seems to be an energetic and vibrant community. The group has an active Facebook group and a Twitter account. #OK
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8 June, 2010
Dinar after Dinar the poor Jordanian citizen is paying money to big multinational Software vendors; companies that provide most of the times proprietary and closed source software to our government and public administration.
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(CC-BY stuartpilbrow)
The decisions are taken from top without taking into consideration local and public needs, most of the times without even requiring some rational technical specifications. See it this way, IT managers and teams of the governmental institutions have no idea -on the average- about Open Source and Free Software, so even if they want to save some good money and not throwing them to foreign companies they will not ask for a free alternative.
The situation is not better for proprietary software that government purchases, a catastrophic example is EduWave, the e-learning system which is now implemented in every single public school of Jordan, for Ministry of Education teachers and students and for storing Tawjihi marks.
Although EduWave has several Open Source alternatives, the Ministry of Education opted for delegating the implementation of the system to a local company.
The costs were very high, the details were not released to the public, but sources in the ministry confirmed to me an astronomic price for the system, although it could have been surely implemented using Open Source technologies by less than half (or even a quarter) of what our government generously paid.
Anyway, this is not the core problem: The issues that Ministry is now facing are caused by the bad agreement with the company which implemented the project. EduWave is not only licensed using a non-free license, the Ministry does not have the source code, cannot see it and cannot make any change. They have a system with bugs and other issues and they can't do anything, even asking another company to fix them. This is not the only thing, the support and maintenance agreement with the original company will end soon, what will stop this company to ask for even more money to renew the agreement? There is also the possibility that this company will not be able or will not want to provide support anymore, or that the company will fall in bankruptcy. What will the government do in such situations?
This is for sure a bad case in which the government paid a lot for a bad solution. We can learn from our mistakes
At least this was what I thought at first when I heard about the plan of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology to adopt Open Source in the government. But after less than a month, the ministry renewed the "strategic" agreement with Microsoft, this time paying more, every year we pay more than the year before and this time they took from us JD 14 Million ($19.7 Millions). All these millions were taken from Jordanian taxpayers to allow public employees to play on Windows 7 solitaire (as MoICT experts previously said there was no need to renew the licenses), this happened in a year in which the Prime Minister explicitly asked ministries to reduce the expenditures in order to face the economic crisis.
And we keep paying for others' mistakes.
23 April, 2010
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Finally, Jordan's Arabic country code top level domain (ccTLD) has been approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Until recently, domains of the websites were restricted to Latin characters.
The new Arabic Internet address for Jordan will be ".الاردن", and will not replace the more famous ".jo" but Jordanian websites that will have Arabic domains (if any) can use the new ccTLD. Some examples: الملكة-رانيا.الاردن for queenrania.jo and الغد.الاردن for alghad.jo
Of course these websites have to re-register themselves under an Arabic name by the National Information Technology Center (NITC): the responsible of Internet domains assignment and registration in Jordan.
Non-Latin domains became a trend recently, most Arab countries asked and applied for domain names in Arabic, back in the last Internet Governance Forum, Egypt was the first country to announce an Arabic ccTLD followed by Saudi Arabia.
In my own point of view, I have some doubts about the success of Arabic domains in Jordan, they are not easy to type and people are not familiar with them (in addition with some other Arabic-related issues). In addition, there's a typo in the Jordanian domain: It should be "الأردن" with Hamzeh and not "الاردن".
12 March, 2010
Back in 2007, the USA, EU, Switzerland and Japan started the negotiations to create an international agreement on intellectual property rights, the claimed goal was to reduce the trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works through a legislative framework. The agreement is now known as Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA.
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The government of Jordan seems it has joined the negotiations in one of the phases but its position remains unclear. The agreement parties are not the only issue which still unknown, the draft of the agreement has not been publicly disclosed and many civil organizations are accusing the un-transparency of the whole ACTA process and substance.
Probably you think that blocking counterfeit drugs and respecting intellectual property are good things. Right, but there are several issues you have to be really afraid of in ACTA:
- No real negotiations with civil society and open forums were held in the drafting of ACTA, in addition, details of the agreement are still kept secret. A leaked discussion paper shows that the 'wishes' of industry groups are taken into consideration.
- ACTA includes legal regimes to encourage ISPs to cooperate with right holders in the removal of infringing material. This can be done by network filtering -mandatory to Internet Service Providers- the method can be implemented by inspecting citizens' Internet communications but it raises big concerns for citizens' civil liberties and privacy rights.
- Citizens' content and private communication stored by ISPs may be provided to authorities in an easier and legal approach: a threat to freedom of expression and communication privacy in Jordan.
- ISPs may be asked to implement a Graduated Response (a.k.a Three Strikes). The solution consists in the termination of Internet connection and block of web access to citizens who commit copyright infringements.
- Jordan is a small developing country that is negotiating with developed countries with huge economies. Other countries and ACTA will not care about Jordan's domestic priorities and the Jordanian industry will have no say in the matter.
- New legal standards and restrictions will have negative impact in Internet innovation and Jordan's economic and IT development.
- The ACTA can be implemented in the Jordanian legislation under many forms, even within the new Cybercrimes Law, as the content of the draft law remains unpublished (as well as the point of view of the government) there is no warranty that civil rights will be respected.
Our government has to understand that civil rights on the Internet should be respected, the web, by its nature, cannot be practically censored or monitored, it managed to de-link our social and political reality from the world of sovereign states. Jordan has also to know that joining ACTA will not only represent a threat to the rights of its citizens but will build a new barrier in front of our technological development.
Read More:
http://www.eff.org/issues/acta
http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/acta
http://boingboing.net/2009/11/03/secret-copyright-tre.html
27 February, 2010
First of all, congratulations to Minister of Information and Communication Technology on his new blog and Twitter account. After fifteen years the same person who first invented "Ask the Government", a web service which allowed citizens to ask questions to government officials and public administration, is focusing again on the social impact of technology.
"Social Media is a revolution that affects our lives and our knowledge", it was written in the brand new blog. No sooner said than done, Minister Marwan Juma started blogging and tweeting, and the fact that the "IT Minister" is not the first government official with a Twitter account in our tiny country is interesting; Foreign Minister, Minister of Energy and Mayor of Amman, as well as HM Queen Rania, are all well-known figures in the Jordanian twittersphere.
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As it was expected, Juma talked about Internet Freedom in his "Hello World" post, he said he will defend and protect the freedoms of the cyberspace and its openness and integrity.
Juma was replying to the new decision of the Supreme Court of Jordan to equalize websites, blogs and any other electronic media with other type of publications and therefore applying to them the controversial Press and Publication Law.
"This decision was taken to organize the Journalists' work and to fill the legislative gap by providing the tools against irregular actions committed by electronic papers, like defamation and libel." he said. "The government does not want to interfere with the operations of these sites, to discourage people to interact with them or to decrease their level of freedom. On the contrary, the government supports the technological progress, as we understand its economical and social importance, with respect to others' rights and privacy. For this reason, the Government is finalizing the draft of the "Information Systems Crimes Act" to enhance confidence and safety in the use of IT and to address the gaps and lack of legislations related to the new crimes committed against Information Systems or crimes done on the Internet, as well as the traditional crimes committed by using Information Systems or the web."
A law to deal with cybercrimes can be accepted, but it should be widely discussed with civil society and IT experts. The fear comes from our expectations that government will have too much authority, power and it will be given the permission to telecommunications surveillance and monitoring. If an authoritarian process will be chosen, freedom of expression and privacy will be highly affected, in addition to more cases of web censorship and threats to human rights.
I believe the Minister is sincere, and the government will try to encourage a free Internet, but we cannot even imagine to have such a restrictive and unprogressive law. This is the right time to start with open source governance in the Ministry by asking civil society, IT professionals and citizens to participate.
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