I like Latin America a lot, and as you may already have figured out from my first "Latin Experience report", I am getting a good dose on this trip.

Today there was another highlight: driving a car through the rush hour in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Since Fernanda did not feel like driving today, she let me drive her car -- the same one in which she took Ken Coar through Sao Paulo.

The Background

We had to go to an industrial park in the North of Porto Alegre to a cooperative that produces clothes and also does printing. Fernanda is having them make the new set of FSF Latin America t-shirts for Recife, and I am experimenting with some Fellowship bermuda shorts.

As this cooperative did not have the capacity to also do sleeveless Fellowship shirts, though, we had to take the printouts of the motives downtown to a place we found yesterday. So it was drive from her aunts place (where the internet is) to the cooperative, to downtown Porto Alegre, and then back to the internet.

The Experience

Today is a hot day in Porto Alegre. Everyone is sweating quite a bit. And Fernandas car does not have air conditioning. But that is okay, because it also has almost no suspension left. In fact: It is a small, white Ford, produced in Spain, that definitely has seen better days. That very much includes the stickshift. The clutch is almost all the way down, and the handling is very wobbly.

Imagine a street crowded with large, loud buses that have obviously seen encounters with other drivers, lots of small motorcycle couriers, and a wide variety of cars, including several models that you haven't seen in Europe for 20 years.

Movement of all these components is somewhat erratic, and only sometimes accompanies by signalling, unless you count the honking. And street markers are not something that people take very seriously. Who would have thought: Brazilians drive as they live.

So the closest approximation to the experience is probably a gigantic auto-scooter in the desert in which you have buses, motorcycles and pedestrians and the major difference that you try to avoid hitting people.

In short: I loved it.

I think I got the hang of driving in Brazil pretty quickly: You have to be much more attentive and pay a lot of attention to the condition of the road, but as a motorcycle driver, I am used to that.

And it seems that Fernanda agreed with this, because on the way back she told me that I drive like a Brazilian. I hope she meant it as a compliment. ;)

And now I am definitely going into the pool.

It seems that the blatant manipulation of the "Digital Rights and Creative Commons" panel outcome has created quite a storm. Besides those already referenced in earlier blog entries, I found this featured in Linux Weekly News, derStandard.at, de.internet.com, boingboing.net, netzpolitik.org, , Slashdot and some others.

Yesterday, ITworld.com carried a feature by John Blau of the IDG News Service, who apparently interviewed Thomas Lutz, public affairs manager and a member of the management board at Microsoft Austria GmbH. I found

We did nothing behind closed doors.

the funniest quote. It seems short enough to go on a t-shirt. He apparently also reiterated Microsofts unhappiness with the part of the panel conclusions that read:

Increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital
works, as they can be freely distributed at almost not cost, but by
offering services on top of them. The success of the Free Software
model is one example.

Given that all proprietary approaches at bringing about something like the internet (including Microsoft Network) failed miserably, it was freedom and openness that made the internet possible. The internet, in fact, largely runs on Free Software today. Maybe that is why Microsoft considered the internet something that would pass and realised so late that networked functionality would be important for Windows.

 

That digitalisation in general and the internet in particular made it possible to distribute works at almost no cost is a fact. So is the existance of Creative Commons or the business success of companies like IBM, who are transforming themselves into companies primarily offering services and know-how.

While no official numbers exist, conservative estimations say that IBM alone is making billions of USD based on Free Software. But IBM is only one of many companies, although a very large one. But there are thousands, if not hundrets of thousands small and medium sized companies successfully incorporating Free Software in their business model.

So what their statement really seems to say is: Microsoft is unhappy about reality and prefers denial over adaptation, ignoring a multi-billion dollar industry.

I can't help but wonder. Does Mr Lutz know that his company apparently just released three Free Software licenses, one of which with distinct copyleft characteristics? Is this a sign of Microsoft Austria having no idea what Microsoft is doing in the United States? Or is this simply saying one thing, and doing another?

But as the summary of the quintessenz e-zine correctly points out: It is normal that a paid spokesperson will make any statement for a company, no matter how nonsensical or stupid. If the railway company paid someone to say that planes would never fly, I am sure they would also say that.

But it would be odd for a 2005 UN transportation conference to remove a statement that "people are increasingly travelling by airplane" from the conclusions of a panel simply because the spokesperson of the largest railway company felt "unhappy" about that statement and insert notions about the need for legislation to prevent air travel.

This, however, is exactly what Prof Peter Bruck did.

So far he has not given reasons for the modification of agreed-upon language that had officially been accepted by parties involved, including the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Changing agreed-upon language is highly irregular at the United Nations, and it has (to my knowledge) never happened anywhere else in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

Changing it without giving the original parties a chance to participate in that process is outright scandalous.

Background

As the whole story is getting bigger and bigger, here is a wrap-up of links to the different parts that together make up the whole story:

• 16 November 2005: The Vienna Conclusion: Sponsorship+Politics=Influence
• 22 November 2005: The next Vienna Conclusion: So it WAS Microsoft that asked to delete Free Software
• 22 November 2005: And the price for DRM promotion goes to...
• 23 November 2005: Vienna manipulations in the press
• 25 November 2005: More news about the Vienna Manipulations
• 25 November 2005: Microsofts implementation of democracy

The best overall analysis and description of the situation so far was written by Germanys largest IT news provider, the Heise Verlag. They have the story online in both English and German.