Elastix is a complete GNU/Linux distribution with Asterisk, DHADI, Openfire, Postfix and many other free software packages. It has a user-friendly interface that integrates the best tools available for Asterisk-based PBXs, as well as its own set of utilities which allows the creation of third party modules. The software was created by PaloSanto Solutions, an IT company from Ecuador, and released to the public for the first time in March 2006. Elastix has a good support for telephony hardware … you can see the complete list at their hardware compatibility list. Elastix was used during the last presidential elections in Ecuador and what they have to say about it is very interesting:

… it was decided to optimize the communication system in all the locations where the voting counting was taking place to help monitor the process. Elastix was chosen as the communication platform because of the technical and economic benefits it offered for this project. […] Elastix was able to provide smooth communication between more than eighty (80) locations involved in the vote counting process. Thanks to Elastix it was possible to implement a communication system of this size all over the country in only two (2) weeks!

Elastix made life easier for those who are looking for a VOIP solution, proven out by its rapid popularity growth. The project has been nominated in various categories for Source Forge’s Community Choice Awards (CCAA) in the years of 2007 and 2008. This year they are recommending that the votes go for the following categories:

• Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything
• Best Project for the Enterprise
• Best Project

If you want to help this amazing project to win for the first time Sourge Forge CCAA, vote for them at this link (you can select multiple categories). Remember that Friday, May 29, is the last day to vote for nominations!

We are currently living in a historical moment which will define and shape digital rights and information freedom on the internet for generations to come. It’s one of those rare moments where the issue is black and white and where the two opposing camps can be identified without over-simplifying the issue. On one side, there are those fighting for the information revolution’s culture of sharing, co-operation and the public commons. On the other side is a powerful, industry cartel who would stomp out the commons to salvage proprietary information that they can buy and own.

It’s for this reason that the global free and open source software community has been paying close attention to specific battles which could have significant ramifications within this overall conflict. Right now, one of those battles involves a website operated in Sweden called The Pirate Bay. The website’s founders (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm & Carl Lundström) have recently been found guilty of criminally providing “assistance to copyright infringement.” They were sentenced to one year in prison and have been fined $3.62 million USD. Their website, like hundreds of thousands of other websites, provides a search interface for files available using the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol, designed by Bram Cohen of San Francisco, California in 2001.

The trial against The Pirate Bay has highlighted a number of important issues related to digital freedom. It has shined a light on the corruption between corporate lobbyists and the judicial systems that decide the public’s fate — just after the trial ended, the defense found out that the judge, Tomas Norström, is a board member for a Swedish association which has lobbied for stronger copyright laws and also belongs to a couple other copyright-oriented organizations. The defense has filed a request for a new trial based on the judge’s conflict of interest.

The Pirate Bay is also demonstrating the power of distributed political action by launching a DDo$ (Distributed Denial of Dollars) campaign to pay the fine from their trial, a play on words based upon a widely-known attack which can bring down websites (Distributed Denial of Service).

The trial also exposed the implications of current legislative debates within the EU about an ISP’s obligation to either delete or keep traffic logs which can associate a user with their actions online. In this case, the Swedish ISP, Bahnhof, opted to support user privacy by declaring that they won’t keep logs about what users are doing online … data which would be necessary to know which users have downloaded information owned by a corporation.

One of the world’s largest free software conferences, the FISL gathering in Brazil, has invited Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay to participate in this year’s panels and debates.

The Pirate Bay case is particularly relevant to an ongoing debate in Brazil about the Internet Law Project — nicknamed ‘AI-5 Digital’. The nickname references a set of laws called the Institutional Acts which were created during the dictatorship in Brazil, with each of the acts destroying more and more civil liberties in Brazil until almost the entire government was gutted, leaving only the military despots in power. The last of these acts, AI-5, severely restricted civil liberties in Brazil and established complete media censorship.

On May 14, a public forum was held in front of the São Paulo Legislative Assembly, with over 300 people speaking and demanding that the Internet Law Project be blocked by the government. The group of citizens included artists, university professors, politicians, free software programmers & activists, internet users and the high-profile Senator Eduardo Suplicy from the Workers Party. Another forum is being called in the south of Brazil at the Rio Grande do Sul Legislative Assembly on May 25th.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the French National Assembly, ignoring a vote by the European Parliament, this week (05/13) passed a draft law that would automatically disconnect a customer’s internet service, for up to one year, after they receive three warnings about illegally downloading privately-owned or copyrighted information or software, without due process that would allow internet users to challenge the claim that their behavior was illegal. Furthermore, users would have to continue paying the internet bills even though they would not be able to get online and they would be placed on a blacklist, preventing them from obtaining service from a different ISP.

A similar law passed in Sweden led to an incredible decline in internet traffic, confirming that restrictive laws like these naturally result in a decrease in the free flow of information.

The international free software movement has decisively placed themselves in opposition to laws which restrict information freedom by prioritizing intellectual property and the ownership of information by corporations over the civil right to information and software. In part, this is because free software activists believe that the “information commons” is far more legitimate than a corporation’s claim that they “own” an algorithm, or some piece of knowledge. Free software activists believe that proprietary software and privately-owned knowledge is a severe detriment to information-based societies. John Sullivan of the Free Software Foundation has argued that attacks against websites like The Pirate Bay is a step towards the criminalization of legitimate sharing, even citing cases where school teachers have believed that students who were sharing copies of GNU/Linux with each other were breaking the law.

Why free software activists should work to oppose these cases is best explained in a position paper entitled “The War on Sharing: Why the FSF Cares About RIAA Lawsuits“:

[T]hese lawsuits represent a concerted attempt to rewrite copyright law in a way that threatens to undermine the ultimate goals of the free software movement. Second, a vocal minority in the entertainment industry uses these lawsuits as warrants to justify DRM technology and other measures to monitor and control the flow of information over the internet. Third, if unopposed, these lawsuits create a culture in which people are afraid to share, presuming sharing to be theft.

A French publishing company, Les Editions de Minuit, has brought criminal charges against a professor in Argentina for making Spanish translations of classic works of philosophy available for free on the internet, including Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. In February, Les Editions de Minuit filed a complaint which was then sent to the French Embassy in Argentina and, probably because of multilateral law enforcement treaties, the Argentina Book Chamber brought legal action against Professor Horacio Potel.

Ironically, Les Éditions de Minuit began as an underground publishing company in Paris in 1941, as part of the resistance to the German occupation of France. The Nazi occupiers controlled all media and publishing and, therefore, Les Éditions de Minuit’s founders were fighting against state control of information.

Decades later, the people who now run this French company insist that they “own” important philosophical works and, therefore, will use the force of governments to shut down any unauthorized distribution of these works. In Argentina, around 90% of academic books are imported from Spain and, therefore, are priced in euros, making them extremely expensive. Professor Potel was helping to make this knowledge available to people who don’t live in Buenos Aires and who don’t have the money to purchase expensive imports from Europe.

Les Éditions de Minuit has been very open about their intention to aggressively pursue action against anyone who violates their ownership of these philosophical thoughts: “Horacio Potel has posted, over the course of several years, without authorisation, and free of charge, full versions of several of Jacques Derrida’s works, which is harmful to the diffusion of his (Derrida)’s thought.”

This enforcement of copyright has started to border on the surreal, with the Argentina Book Chamber instigating a police raid at the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, ostensibly searching for copyright violations.

As the values of free software sweep across Latin America, the logical extension that the collected wisdom of humanity should also be free and open. This has been most evident in Venezuela, which has held International Forums on Free Knowledge in Maracaibo. As for Professor Potel, he maintains that this French company does not have the right to speak on behalf of philosophers such as Derrida and that “they have inflicted a new death on the philosopher by taking his work off the internet.”

The Open Source Index is a collection of rankings based on research at Georgia Tech. Recently, Red Hat made the findings available via this cool online web application. It might be arguable that Spain and France rank higher than Brazil (rank: 3) in government adoption of free software but the rankings show that large governments who could be doing amazing programs like the United States (rank: 28) are being beaten out by developing nations like Venezuela, Peru, South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam — even Costa Rica (population: 4 million).

A lot of people have blogged about this web app from Red Hat. But, perhaps the OSI data could be used as a Technology Policy Corruption Index when combined with lobbying data for companies like Microsoft. After all, when was the last time an impoverished kid who would benefit from a free software telecentro wined and dined a U.S. Senator?

The real world impact of technology policy failures in the US, using an example from the public education system:
To illustrate what it means to be “left in Brazil’s dust” on technology education policy, you can go to Adams Memorial Middle School’s “Computer Lab” homepage — graciously hosted by Tripod — and you’ll get a pop-ad ad when you click to enter the site (we got a scantily-clad woman selling a weight-loss scam … what will you get?).

Venturing further inside, there were 3 amusing Google AdWords ads: “Online High School”, “Homeschooling” and “Stratford Private School” … ahem … meanwhile, their “Technology Strategy” includes “Upgrade word processing programs to Microsoft Word” some time in FY 2008 and “Standardizing on district wide word processing to two tiers of Office 2007″.

When one takes a look at their Technology Plan Financial Worksheet, one can see that an astounding $50,000 dollars is allocated to this “Standardizing on district wide word processing to two tiers of Office 2007″ task. How can upgrading a word processing program take so much away from this school’s technology budget?

Meanwhile, the Brazilian government supports the Brazilian version of OpenOffice and has already installed 40,000 copies at 2,000 schools in the state of Paraná for $0 in software fees. Nationally, Brazil is building 53,000 computer labs that will serve 52 million students, using entirely free software. According to the World Bank, the US is the 4th richest country in the world, compared to Brazil’s ranking of 66.

We don’t mean to pick on the Adams-Chesire Regional School District in Massachusetts … they honestly were just the first public school to come up in a Google Search and we don’t really know anything outside of what we’ve learned via online searches. They seem to be relatively better-off than many parts of the country. But, that’s kind of the point. One can take any public school in the US and see what the policy of “proprietary knowledge” and “closed technology” has wrought.

That said, there is a glimmer of hope in that one of the line items on their Technology Strategy document is: “Investigate new software that would actually be used to enrich / extend / supplement curriculum” … we would urge this school district and all the public school systems who are fighting the well-known battle to provide quality education to U.S. students to “investigate new software” that could provide a more coherent, cutting-edge technology education at lower costs, with the help of the free software movement. For more information on the impact of technology policy on U.S. education policy, see a previous item from this website: Public tech education in United States lags behind poorer countries.

ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) is an organization designed to foster co-operation amongst Latin American countries and currently includes Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras and Dominica as member states.

In response to the controversial Organization of American States, which is viewed by many in Latin America as a way for the United States to apply economic and political pressure against countries in the region, ALBA has a released a statement which strongly condemns the recent OAS summit and pronounces their world view.

In their statement, which covers a broad range of issues, ALBA calls for universal access to telecommunications (phone, internet, etc) as a human right in a world which increasingly relies on networked communications:

Basic education, health, water, energy and telecommunications services should be declared human rights and cannot be subject to private deal or marketed by the World Trade Organization. These services are and should be essentially public utilities of universal access.

This ideal has driven many of the policies of Latin American countries inside and outside of ALBA, including Brazil.