Zum Schutz der Datenbankintegrität muss die Datenbank-Software über ein vollständiges Transaktionssystem verfügen, welches dem ACID-Prinzip genügt.

(In order to assure data integrity, the database software must feature a full-blown transaction system which adheres to the ACID principle.)

As it is widely known, MySQLs transaction system, which was introduced only in version 4.0, does not satisfy the ACID criteria. Since the BSI also offers the BSI Grundschutzzertifizierung, which follows the guidelines laid out in the IT-Grundschutzhandbuch, this means that in order to obtain this certification, one cannot use MySQL — at least not as a database system.

As a side note, a number of German contract partners as well as numberous government agencies require their suppliers to have a BSI Grundschutzzertifizierung.

As a rather funny side note: according to a recent analysis by Alvar Freude, it is very likely that the new E-Petition site of the German parliament will fail not only the tests outlined in its own requirement specifications as well as accessibility guidelines, but also the very IT-Grundschutz certification.

Nowadays, most Linux distributions use the Novell build of OpenOffice.org for historic reasons. Originally, the OpenOffice.org community did not have the capabilities to offer an up-to-date build in a timely manner, so everyone fell back to the Novell build, which was usually very much up to date.

Nowadays, OpenOffice.org provides its own, very useful and stable build. However, most distributions did not adapt their packaging tools to this fact so far, and are still distributing the Novell build. Which – as it turns out – has some interesting fallacities. These are mostly bugs or build environment incompatibilities which cause the experience of running OpenOffice.org to be significantly impaired.

It is of course nevertheless a good question whether or not this is caused by a policy on behalf of Novell, or pure negligence of their build environment. Either way, it does not show a high value associated with the Open Source Community on behalf of Novell.

History

In the past, speculations about the questionable usefulness of Novell to the Open Source community had already been raised – especially in the question of the Mono-ization of Gnome. Also, concerns had been raised about partiality in the debate about OOXML, which is closely related to the Office debate since OpenOffice.org is the most popular implementor of the Open Document Format (ISO 26300) and as such in direct competition to the MS-Office-only newcomer standard OOXML.

OpenISO is an organization which set out to create truly open standards, not based on a reasonable and not discriminatory (RAND) basis. OpenISO wants all information required to implement its standards to be free, so everyone can freely develop competing poducts that implement its standards.

So far, OpenISO has released a number of standards in the network area (such as the telnet protocol), and is now aiming at ECMA 376 in a Call for Participation.

According to the paper, the standard itself contains a number of questionable regulations which might pose a threat to the ability of the programmer to make the implementing software accessible to disabled people. The main point of criticism is that some proprietary formats have been used in areas where free W3C standards are already in existence and covering the same functionality. However, while the W3C standards have been developed with accessibility in mind, the notion of accessibility is apparently missing entirely from the OOXML standard.

As an example, some of the specifications for insertion of images do not allow for image formats which permit access to disabled users. The ATRS then goes on to demand the revision of these issues. A long list of references to objections regarding accessibility and related issues is referenced at the end of the paper.

For more details about OOXML, visit the FFII Switzerland OOXML documentation.

Reasonable doubt has been rased to whether or not Mono can actually be deployed freely. Mono itself is basically a free and halfway portable implementation of the .NET framework developed by Microsoft. However, the .NET framework itself is subject to a large amount of software patents, which cover the concepts used within the .NET framework. Since these are concepts and not individual implementations (which are covered by Copyright, which is certainly untouched by a reimplementation), they most likely also apply to the Mono framework.

To Novell itself, Icazas employer, this is not a significant problem, since Novell has closed a patent deal with Microsoft which undoubtedly also covers the .NET patents. However, all conventional Linux and Open Source vendors would not be able to distribute Gnome as it would be covered by the .NET patents Microsoft owns.

This amounts to an easy way for Novell to effectively lock in Gnome users to their own products. Gnome would no longer be a real Free Software project, even though the code remains freely available. It is expected that this type of patent issues will be raised many times, causing severe damage to the economy with the time. The only way of mitigation will be a transatlantic patent agreement which clarifies Art. 52 EPC: Software is not patentable.

After 2004's antitrust decision against Microsoft, declaring the company a monopolist, many voices have been raised that the imposed sanctions do not satisfy the requiremends of effective procurement. Concerns have been raised that the sanctions would not help to change the behavior of the corporation in question.

On the OpenOffice.org website, there is a full press release on the new alliance as well as a collection of Frequently Asked Questions.

In this bug report, Onitake complains about the lack of portability in curl, which uses the glibc<2.4-only feature of a definition of PAGE_SIZE in a system header named <asm/page.h>. The POSIX base specification issue 6 (xpg6) defines a portable interface named sysconf to access system information such as the page size. Additionally, the definition was removed from <asm/page.h> in recent versions of the GNU libc, making this definition a no-go for the future.

In this light, the response of the developers seems even more blatant:

 1. When asm/page.g is not defined there is a custom definition of
 PAGE_SIZE.

 2. We do not care about neither non-linux platforms, nor about POSIX.

 Thanks, however, for your caring and attention.
 Closed,
 Robert Iakobashvili

A candidate for is-broken.ch?

Groklaw has a whole collection about articles: Norway and OOXML, Sweden's new abstention and France still looking for consensus in the actual vote.

Another source of lots of news is ZDnet. They interviewed Georg Greve of the Free Software Foundation, and have a summary of all technical problems with the standard. In their conclusion they give the standard bad marks.

The progressive swiss german news paper WOZ Die Wochzeitung has an article summarizing the problems with OOXML and the procedural issues that have been raised by independent experts. Similarly, the german Computerwoche reports about the manipulations.

Even the Wall Street Journal has discovered the issue and is reporting on the committee stuffing and about Microsoft accusations against IBM to be the driving force behind ODF.

With all these interesting news, we all are looking forward to the ISO decision.