REHIS Elementary Food Hygiene in Edinburgh

I went on a 1 day REHIS Elementary Food Hygiene course.  It’s the most recognised qualification for food hygiene certificate but it’s surprisingly hard to find a provider.  You can probably do it online but I was more interested in a in-person course.  Not for any special reason but I make soup and run barbeques and, like first aid, it seems like generally useful knowledge to have.  Edinburgh College didn’t know when they would run them, other Lothian councils ran seemed to run out of spaces immediately, eventually a place came up on a course by Edinburgh charity the Cyrenians who have a warehouse by Leith Walk where they take in excess food from supermarkets and do good things with it as well as run cooking courses and these REHIS courses.  It lasts a short work day and finishes with a simple multiple choice exam.  The course was well run with friendly competent staff and I’d recommend it to others.  Here’s some notes for my own use and anyone else who cares.

Four types of hygiene hazards in food are: chemical, microbiological, physical and allergens.

Store cleaning and other chemicals away from food, not high where they can fall, don’t decant into other containers.

Critical temperatures are: -18C for a freezer, 1-4C for a fridge, danger zone is 5-63C (especially rapid at body temperature), cook food to at least 75C (or 72C for at least 2 mins), reheat food to at least 82C.  When checking temperature stir liquids and check at widest point.

Main causes of problems are:

  • prepared too far in advance
  • cooling too slowly (use a wide container to cool, no longer than 90 mins, don’t cool infront of window)
  • unreliable food sources
  • undercooking
  • not thawing poultry
  • cross contamination
  • raw food, check e.g. beansprouts are ‘ready to eat’ and don’t cross contaminate
  • storing hot food below 63C
  • food handlers being unhygenic

Bacteria are classed 2 ways. Food spoilage e.g. mould, visible and tasteable, cause toxins and food poisoning, quite quick symptoms. Microbacterial and pathogens cause disease cause food borne illness and can take a couple of days to show.

Bacteria can double in number every 10 minutes, 1 hour = 8 bacteria, 3 hours = 4000.

Bacteria slow growth when cold but some can still grow at fridge temperatures e.g. lysteria.

Don’t reheat rice because bacillus cereus spores can germinate and make toxins, if you must do this at home then put in fridge quickly and wash first. If making a cold rice salad then cool quickly and store in fridge.

Some bacteria can multiply when in unfavourable conditions by producing spores which then grow into bacteria when favourable conditions return.

High risk foods are ones which are ready to eat without cooking, e.g. cold meat products, dairy products, eggs, shellfish, rice.  Eggs can be bought pasturised in milk-carton which can be easier and safer than using fresh.  Pasturisation means holding at a below-cooking temperature for a long time to reduce bacteria.

Cross contamination occurs from raw food to ready to eat food.

Buffet food must be held above 63C.

Raw foods e.g. vegetables should be washed in running water.

Utensils in a cold buffet should be left out of food to prevent contamination.

Wash hands before cooking, after touching hair and face, after touching bins, after going to toilet.  Wash by lathering soap, washing between fingers, thumbs, nails, wrists, dry with tissue, turn off tap with tissue.

Don’t wear nail polish and watch for other objects that can pollute such as name badges.

Everyone is now responsible in law not just employers.  You must note and report problems.

After sickness wait 48 hours after symptoms stop.

Don’t wash dishes in hand wash basin to prevent cross contamination.

Only 10% of food poisonings are reported (because many aren’t too serious, it’s unclear to me what you should do with non-serious cases).

Common problem bacteria for toxins:

  • Salmonella – from e.g. poultry
  • C Perfinges – from meat and soil
  • Staphylococcus aures – from body fluids
  • C botulium – from cans (and beauty injections)
  • Bacillus cereus (pronounced basillus sereus) – from rice

Common causes of food bourn illnesses:

  • campylobacter
  • e-coli 0157 – from guts of ruminants
  • listeria – fermented food, cheeses
  • typhoid – water bourn
  • norovirus – everywhere. causes vomiting and diarrhea, can survive for 12 days on stainless steel, little warning before symptoms, wait 48 hours after symptoms stop before handling food, pressure clean room to fix

Notable allergens listed by FSS:

  • nuts
  • peanuts
  • milk
  • eggs
  • gluten from wheat and barley
  • celery
  • sulfur dioxide (used in wine and dried fruit)
  • shellfish
  • soya
  • mustard
  • fish
  • lupin (fancy flower)
  • molluscs
  • sesame

Food preparation surfaces must be cleanable, well lit and all kit movable. Kitchen layout should separate dirty and uncooked food from ready-to-eat food.  This can be done by space or time e.g. prepare raw meat earlier in day or take out rubbish after close. Colour code your mops and cleaning cloths.  Antibacterial cleaners reduce bacteria, bacteriacide kills bacteria.  Detergent removed grease. Sanitiser is detergent + antibacterial.  You must know the necessary contact time for antibacterial and bactericide cleaners.

A 2 sink wash can be done using bactericide + rinse or washing liquid wash + 82C hot water.  Or just use dishwasher.  Air drying is the best way to dry although not always possible.

HACCP – hazard analysis critical control points.  A risk assessment for food.  All food operators must implement and keep current.  Identify hazards, find control points, set limits, monitor uses, decide on corrective action.

Legislation is from Food Safety Act 1990, then following regulations.

Environmental health and food safety officers can enter premises and any reasonable time to check up on you.

 

Plasma Sprint: Legacy Media Support in KDE Applications

Boudhayan Gupta dropped by for the final day of the Plasma Sprint because he had 3D printed that save icon and wanted to test it.  Coincidently I found a treasure in the glove compartment of my dad’s car, a Eurythmics Greatest Hits audio CD.

So how does KDE applications do for legacy media? Mixed results.

Dolphin works even if it does report it as a 0B media [Update: fixed by the awesome Kai Uwe]

However classic KDE tool KFloppy less so, it hard codes locations in /dev to find the floppy but my USB floppy drive just appears at /dev/sdc, even one I fixed that it uses an external tool which breaks fdformat.

Meanwhile CDs are also something we ship apps for but never test.  This makes the Plasma Sprinters sad because they desperately want to hear Love Is a Stranger.

kio-audio CD didn’t work but then when we looked at it again it worked perfectly, don’t you hate when that happens?  This was a killer feature of KDE back when everyone was ripping CDs to their hard disk for the first time.

Playing Audio CDs natively less successful, Amarok shows it as a source but says it has 0 tracks.  Dragon plays it fine but Dragon has no concept of a playlist so you can’t select a track.  kscd works but is a perfect example of why skins and client side window decorations are a bad idea because it still looks like it did years ago.

We also tried k3b which works for making a new audio CD but doesn’t let you add files to a data project (bug 375016) so shouldn’t be released quite yet. [Update: also fixed by Kai Uwe, what a useful chap.]

Where else does KDE support legacy formats that need checking up on?

 

Plasma Sprint: KDE neon Docker Images Now Support Wayland

The KDE neon Docker Images are the easiest and fastest way to test out KDE software from a different branch than your host system.

Coming live from the Plasma Sprint sponsored by Affenfels here in Stuttgart, the KDE neon Docker images now support Wayland.  This runs on both X and Wayland host systems.  Instructions on the wiki page.

Below you can see my host system running Plasma 5.9 on X is running Plasma master with Wayland.

Hugs to David E.

neon-docker-wayland

KDE at FOSDEM and Plasma Sprint 2017 Pics

We’ve had a busy weekend at FOSDEM in Brussels for the last two days and now I’ve travelled into my fifth country of the trip picking up a few hackers on the way for the KDE Plasma Sprint which is happening all this week in Stuttgart, do drop by if you’re in town.

DSC_0001KDE and Gnome looking good at the Friday beer event

DSC_0004Busy busy on the KDE stall

DSC_0010Food and drinks at the KDE Slimbook release party.

DSC_0008KDE neon goes smart

DSC_0013After a road trip into the forest of baden württemberg we arrived at the KDE Plasma Sprint sponsored by von Affenfels

DSC_0017Plasma Sprint also sponsored by openSUSE

DSC_0015Plasma Sprint also sponsored by Meat Water

DSC_0016Plasma Sprint also sponsored by Kai Uwe’s mum

A Visit to Polwarth Mosque, Idara Trust

For a decade I’ve lived along the road from a mosque, a fairly rare being in Scotland where we have comparatively low migration compared to say London. It’s an old shop front with smoked out windows. It’s nice to know your local community and I’ve been into the church at the other end of the street plenty of times for garden parties, concerts, meetings and Scouts. But I could never find an excuse to go and visit the mosque, a local community that can’t communication within itself is a potentially dangerous thing so I was pleased to find a Facebook page and ask for a visit.

I was met with a friendly young man who invited me in. I took off my shoes as asked and was shown around, there’s a couple of main rooms in it and each had half a dozen boys in a class learning Arabic from an Iman. The decor was simple enough if a bit dated. They spoke Urdu to each other and the junior Iman gave me a long shake of the hand while the children, who seem to go to the same primary school I went to, were very friendly and asked about which footballers I knew.

Invited into the back room I met the chair of the mosque, an older man with a well maintained beard, and got a cup of tea. He said this was everyone’s mosque, not just for Muslims. He showed me some security videos of the prayer from last Friday, it looks like a cross between a yoga move and the hokey-cokey and he said it was indeed exercise for the body. He gave me a copy of the Quoran in English and recommended I watch a TV channel called Peace TV of which he seemed to be a big fan.  He explained how jihad was any struggle but using violence with guns is forbidden in Islam, only states can do that.

He showed me the timetable for prayer, 5 times a day at varying times depending on sunrise and set.  He showed me their washing area to clean feet, hands and face before prayer and said it was very important to be clean for prayer, although if you don’t pass air or go to the toilet or urinate between prayers you don’t need to clean yourself again.

He said that men and women pray separately, when I asked why he used the idiom of if you put cheese next to a fire it will melt.  Women have to cover the heads with a scarf and their hands, I didn’t ask why men didn’t have to do the same.  He said that men and women shouldn’t look each other in the eye.  Girlfriends aren’t allowed in Islam and men can only have up to four wives he continued.  These wives can be at the same time but you have to treat each of them equally in every respect, he wasn’t sure if anyone in Edinburgh did this, it wouldn’t be legal but in Islam marriage is a simple arrangement he continued. Having multiple wives is ok because there are more women in the world than men.

He said that it is now far more common to be gay or lesbian, that 30 years ago if you asked a room full of people only one would be ok with it, but now almost all would.  Eventually everyone might be gay and lesbian and then there would be no more humanity, this is why it’s not allowed in Islam.  He said, and this would apparently shock me, that he thought in 50 years time society would consider it ok to have sex with children.  This seemed to be a strong concern oh his. He continued that there was even a bill in the London parliament last year to allow fathers to have sex with their daughters.  I assured him this was untrue and there was little danger of that happening and the change in attitudes over the last 30 years was incredible and a great thing but he continued to go on like this.  I tried a different topic and asked if they had a testimony to the earth which is the major problem for the next 50 years, he said yes indeed and that if you invade your neighbour you are not allowed to steal their crops. This wasn’t exactly what I was after.  Time up I shook hands with all and they said I should come back for a curry at Ramadan.

So a slightly surreal meeting, it feels that, like most religious people, they are very happy to have visitors and talk about themselves but not so interested in the wider world, but it was mostly just one guy I got to talk to and I would have liked to speak to more younger members.  A curry at Ramadan sounds good.

 

Reports of KDE neon Downloads Being Dangerous Entirely Exaggerated

When you download a KDE neon ISO you get transparently redirected to one of the mirrors that KDE uses. Recently the Polish mirror was marked as unsafe in Google Safebrowsing which is an extremely popular service used by most web browsers and anti-virus software to check if a site is problematic. I expect there was a problem elsewhere on this mirror but it certainly wasn’t KDE neon. KDE sysadmins have tried to contact the mirror and Google.

You can verify any KDE neon installable image by checking the gpg signature against the KDE neon ISO Signing Key.  This is the .sig file which is alongside all the .iso files.

gpg2 --recv-key '348C 8651 2066 33FD 983A 8FC4 DEAC EA00 075E 1D76'

wget http://files.kde.org/neon/images/neon-useredition/current/neon-useredition-current.iso.sig

gpg2 --verify neon-useredition-current.iso.sig
gpg: Signature made Thu 19 Jan 2017 11:18:13 GMT using RSA key ID 075E1D76
gpg: Good signature from "KDE neon ISO Signing Key <neon@kde.org>" [full]

Adding a sensible GUI to do this is future work and fairly tricky to do in a secure way but hopefully soon.

KDE neon Inaugurated with Calamares Installer

You voted for change and today we’re bringing change. Today we give back the installer to the people. Today Calamares 3 was released.

It’s been a long standing wish of KDE neon to switch to the Calamares installer.  Calamares is a distro independent installer used by various projects such as Netrunner and Tanglu.  It’s written in Qt and KDE Frameworks and has modules in C++ or Python.

Today I’ve switched the Developer Unstable edition to Calamares and it looks to work pretty nicely.

However there’s a few features missing compared to the previous Ubiquity installer.  OEM mode might be in there but needs me to add some integration for it.  Restricted codecs install should be easy to add.  LUKS encrypted hard disk are there but also needs some integration from me.  Encrypted home holders isn’t there and should be added.  Updating to latest packages on install should also be added.  It does seem to work with UEFI computers, but not with secure boot yet. Let me know if you spot any others.

I’ve only tested this on a simple virtual machine, so give it a try and see what breaks. Or if you want to switch back run apt install ubiquity-frontend-kde ubiquity-slideshow-neon''.

Screenshot_generic_2017-01-20_18:05:56
Screenshot_generic_2017-01-20_18:06:07
Screenshot_generic_2017-01-20_18:06:25
Screenshot_generic_2017-01-20_18:06:57
Screenshot_generic_2017-01-20_18:07:12
Screenshot_generic_2017-01-20_18:07:29
Screenshot_generic_2017-01-20_18:07:34
Screenshot_generic_2017-01-20_18:09:50
Screenshot_generic_2017-01-20_18:11:24

Get Yourself on www.kde.org

Google Code-in has just finished where school pupils do tasks to introduce themselves to open development.  I had one to update the screenshots on www.kde.org.  The KDE website is out of date in many ways but here’s a wee way to fix one part of it.  Despite me having about half a dozen students work on it there’s still some old screenshots there so if anyone wants the satisfaction of contributing to www.kde.org’s front page here’s an easy way.

www.kde.org has screenshots of all our apps but many still use the old KDE 4 Oxygen widget theme and icons.

For 10 screenshots which is using the old theme take a new screenshot using the new theme.

They can be checked out from Subversion here https://websvn.kde.org/trunk/www/sites/www/images/screenshots/ also provide one the resized screenshot which is 400 pixels wide exactly.

Keep the filenames the same and in lower case.

Upload as a single .zip or .tar.gz containing the screenshots with the right file name and a folder resized/ with the 400px screenshots

For bonus points you could go through the index file to make sure it’s current with KDE applications https://www.kde.org/applications/index.json

Plasma Wayland ISO

Plasma is nearing a new release and with 5.9 coming shortly we have the question of should we switch Neon to use Wayland by default for the Developer Unstable edition. To evaluate it I updated the Plasma Wayland ISO and found it pleasingly functional on VirtualBox.  Time to install this setup on my real hardware and see what breaks.

VirtualBox_neon_09_01_2017_17_58_35

KDE neon Now Available on Docker

KDE neon provides an easy and elegant way for people to test the latest from KDE, or use the latest releases of KDE Software.

Our mission statement above is what we try to do and having continuous integration of KDE development and continuous deployment of packages is great, if you have KDE neon installed.  You can test our code while it’s in development and get hold of it as soon as it’s out. But wait, what if you want to do both? You would need to install it twice on a virtual machine or dual boot, quite slow and cumbersome.  Maybe you don’t want to use neon but you still want to test if that bug fix really worked.

So today I’m announcing a beta of KDE neon on Docker. Docker containers are a lightweight way to create a virtual system running on top of your normal Linux install but with its own filesystem and other rules to stop it getting in the way of your OS. They are insanely popular now for server deployment but I think they work just as well for checking out desktop and other UI setups.

I’ve created two Docker repos each available with the same flavours we have for the Neon packages: Developer Unstable & Stable and User normal & LTS.  The repos are kdeneon/plasma (2GB download) which has image with the same Plasma and limited apps our downloadable ISOs do, and kdeneon/all (getting on for 4GB download) which has all the apps built by Neon.

To give it a try first set up docker as you would for your distro.  For Ubuntu distros that means running:

apt-get install docker.io xserver-xephyr
sudo usermod -aG docker $(whoami)

and log out and in again

Then if you want to run a full Plasma session you can:

Xephyr -screen 1024x768 :1 &
docker run -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix kdeneon/plasma:dev-unstable

This starts the X-server-in-a-window Xephyr then it runs the Docker client which tells your local Docker server to fetch the kdeneon/plasma image from the Docker Hub server and run a full Plasma session.

If you just want to test one application, that’s no problem too:

xhost +
docker run -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -e DISPLAY=:0 kdeneon/plasma:dev-unstable okular

This drops access restrictions to your X server (should be safe because network access is still off but reverse it once you’re done if you want to be sure), grabs kdeneon and runs okular.

Here’s me running dev-unstable and user edition at the same time as running Okular from dev-stable to check the recent save-open dialog bug is fixed.

It runs as user ‘neon’ with password ‘neon’ with unrestricted sudo access.

Let me know how you get on (here, Reddit, neon@kde.org mailing list, bugs.kde.org, Telegram, IRC, whatever), I’m quite new to making Docker images so any improvements welcome.

docker


In other news, our friends at OMG Ubuntu tried out KDE neon

KDE neon User LTS Edition Out Now

KDE Plasma 5.8 is designated an LTS edition with bugfixes and new releases being made for 18 months (rather than the normal four months).  This will please a category of user who don’t want new features on their desktop but do want it to keep working and bugs to be removed.  Because Neon aims to service Plasma and its users in every way we have now created the KDE neon User LTS Edition.

This comes with Plasma 5.8 LTS, updated for new bug fix releases (e.g. 5.8.5 is out at the end of this month) and will not change to Plasma 5.9 when they becomes available.  A common critisism of LTS editions is that it just means users get old versions with known bugs.  KDE neon User LTS Edition comes with the latest KDE Applications and it comes with the latest KDE Frameworks release and Qt 5.7, so all the KDE software we ship is the latest stable version.  Along with other KDE neon editions we’ll also ship the HWE updates for Linux and Mesa when they become available.

For those interested in archive details it’s

deb http://archive.neon.kde.org/user/lts xenial main

Switching from User Edition to User LTS Edition archive is unsupported but will likely work.


KDE Neon is so stable I completely forgot I was using it.

A recent Reddit post gave some pleasing feedback about KDE neon, allow me the indulgence of picking some pleasing quotes from it:

I feel like the KDE neon team has done such a great job with an out-of-the-box experience with this distro that it feels insanely polished.

Jep, I’m even using KDE neon at work. I’ve been able to simply focus on my tasks, and not worry about troubleshooting the OS.

KDE neon cured my distro hopping as well.

KDE neon is the bee’s knees.

Anyone else feel this last should become an official marketing slogan?

Upgrade for KDE neon Security Issue

Last month we moved the neon archive to a new server so packages got built on our existing server then uploaded to the new server.  Checking the config it seemed I’d made the nasty error of leaving it open to the world rather than requiring an ssh gateway to access the apt repository, so anyone scanning around could have uploaded packages.  There’s no reason to think that happened but the default in security is to be paranoid for any possibility.  The security advisory is out, the archives have been wiped and all packages in User rebuilt so upgrade now to get the new package builds, or for extra security do a reinstall.  The new User Edition ISO is out and I’ll update the website once that gets mirrored enough.  Developer Editions packages are being rebuild now and go directly into the archives so you should start seeing those appear shortly as they are built. Sorry for the hassle folks, you wouldn’t want us to just hide it I’m sure.

 

Appstream Generated

Appstream has had a long history of getting its very sensible features into the hands of users. It’s an XML format which describes applications so that projects such as KDE can ship files with their apps which give a name, description, translations of this and pretty screenshots.

The first step is getting the Appstream metainfo files into the applications. KDE has this in many places but not all, if you spot an application please add one. It’s been supported in Extra CMake Modules for a while but the install directly changed recently just to confuse matters.

Then your archive has to extract the appstream files, in Neon we use Appstream Generator written by the Appstream master Matthias Klumpp and Harald set up some time ago but it broke last month.  That meant we had to update to a new version so Scarlett had to add a load of new packages to Neon to get Appstream Generator to build and I had to work out how to debug D to convince it to work. Then we moved our archive to a new server for space and because it was fun so parts of the job which runs it had to been rewritten to work remotely.  Finally there’s a pesky bug which means it looks at the oldest package not the newest one so any problems with the Appstream files stay around forever.  So for now I deleted old packages.

So at least you can install Minuet from Discover, it gained an appstream file back in 16.04 but it was broken so we had to wait for 16.08 to get a working one.

discover-minuet

But wait, this infrastructure for package managers is fiddly. Discover is showing the most popular installed app as Dilbert cartoons, which makes no sense.  Turns out the popcon data for applications is made using fancy Docker scripts on an obscure server we’ve largely forgotten about but Cron doesn’t like Docker and doesn’t let it output anything when running even though the same command works fine when run manually.  So I regenerated the popcon data manually in the hope we can work out how to cron it later on.  And finally Discover is back showing popular apps and all the latest ones at that.  Sorry for the delay folks.

discover-popcon

Getting it to work in Neon developer editions is future work I fear.

 

KDE 1 neon LTS Released: 20 Years of Supporting Freedom

To celebrate KDE’s 20th birthday today, the great KDE developer Helio Castro has launched KDE 1, the ultimate in long term support software with a 20 year support period.

KDE neon has now, using the latest containerised continuous integration technologies released KDE1 neon Docker images for your friendly local devop to deploy.

Give it a shot with:

apt install docker xserver-xephyr
adduser <username> docker
<log out and in again>
Xephyr :1 -screen 1024×768 &
docker pull jriddell/kde1neon
docker run -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix jriddell/kde1neon

(The Docker image isn’t optimised at all and probably needs to download 10GB, have fun!)

Plasma 5.8 LTS now in KDE neon, Time to Look Again at Comprehensive Features; Gwenview Plugins Install

Plasma 5.8 LTS has been released, it’s time now to look again at Plasma’s comprehensive features.  Chris From the Linux Action Show voiced our Plasma 5.8 video so you can review the comprehensive features we’ve been polishing for the last couple of years and the shiny new ones in this release to make a desktop we’re proud to advocate to enthusiasts, home users, businesses and developers alike.


The KDE neon builders have been firing away this afternoon and Plasma 5.8 LTS is now available in the User Edition archive.  If you don’t already have KDE neon installed you can grab the latest User Edition ISO to install it on your hard disk.


A feature I’ve been wanting for ages in KDE is the ability to install plugins from within the application.  This was made more urgent when we added Gwenview in KDE neon and had to choose between either an empty Plugins menu or adding a dependency on Kipi Plugins which brought in Konqueror and several KDElibs 4 tools.

So I got round to coding the feature based on discussions I’d had previously and work on the Samba browser in Dolphin I’d done before.  Using Packagekit and Appstream libraries directly to find the package and install it.  But some reviewers convinced me to use an external app to care about the install.  So now all Gwenview does it launch the Appstream URL and wait until a plugin gets installed.  In Plasma’s case that means Discover starts up and uses Packagekit or whatever backend it’s set up with to install Kipi Plugins.  A nice bit of integration there. Future work would be to put this functionality in Kipi Plugins directly so all apps can use it without much effort.  Where else can KDE apps benefit from being able to install addons within the app?

Gwenview’s Kipi plugins installer now in master

 

In Defence for Permissive Licences; KDE licence policy update

In free software there’s a disappointing number of licences which are compatible in some cases and not in others.  We have a licence policy in KDE which exists to try to keep consistency of licences to ensure maximum re-usability of our code while still ensuring it remains as free software and companies can’t claim additional restrictions which do not exist on code we have generously licenced to them.

Our hero and (occasional chauvinist god character) Richard Stallman invented copyleft and the GNU GPL to ensure people receiving Free code could not claim additional restrictions which do not exist, if they did they lose the right to copy the code under that licence.

An older class of licence is the Permissive Licences, these include the BSD licence, MIT licence and X11 licences, each of which have multiple variants all of which say essentially “do whatever you like but keep this copyright licence included”.  They aren’t maintained so variants are created and interpretations of how they are applied in practice vary without an authority to create consensus.  But they’re short and easy to apply and many many projects are happy to do so.  However there’s some curious misconceptions around them.  One is that it allows you to claim additional restrictions to the code and require anyone you pass it onto to get a different licence from you.  This is nonsense, but it’s a myth which is perpetrated by companies who want to abuse other people’s generosity in licences and even by groups such as the FSF or SFLC who want to encourage everyone to use the GNU GPL.

Here’s the important parts of the MIT licence (modern variant)

Permission is hereby granted...
to deal in the Software without restriction...
subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be include

It’s very clear that this does not give you licence to remove the licence, anyone who you pass this software on to, as source or binary or other derived form, still needs to have the same licence.  You don’t need to pass on the source code if it’s a binary, in which case it’s not free software, but you still need to pass on this licence.  It’s unclear if the licence is for patents as well as copyright but chances are it is.  You can add your own works to it and distribute that under a more restricted licence if you like, but again you still need to pass on this licence for the code you received it as.  You can even sublicence it, make a additional licence with more restrictions, but that doesn’t mean you can remove the Free licence, it explicitly says you can not.  Unlike the GPL there’s no penalty for breaking the licence, you can still use the licence if you want and in theory the copyright holder could sue you but in practice it’s just a lie and nobody will call you out and many people will even believe your lie.

Techy lawyer Kyle E. Mitchell has written an interesting line by line examination of the MIT licence which it’s well worth reading.  It’s a shame there’s no authority to stand up for these licences and most people who use such licences do so because they don’t much are about people making claims over their code.  But it’s important that we realise it doesn’t allow any such claims and it remains Free software no matter who’s servers it happens to have touched on its way to you.


I’m currently proposing some updates to the KDE licencing policy.  I’d like to drop use of the unmaintained FDL in docs and wikis in favour of Creative Commons ShareAlike Attribution 4.0 which is created for international use, well maintained, and would allow sharing text into our code (it’s compatible with GPL 3) and from Wikipedia and other wikis (which are CC 3).  Plus some other changes like allowing AGPL for web services.

Discussion on kde-community mailing list.

Diff to current.

 

Andy Jackson Fund for Access 2015

There’s still no information on the web of the highly spoken about but little visible charity Andy Jackson Fund for Access.  My last request in 2014 showed a little active charity receiving money from the Whitewater and Touring guidebooks, receiving money from one grant that didn’t happen and giving a couple of grants out for projects.

I sent off for the current latest annual report and accounts which came promptly back.

The 2015 accounts show income from books, £358 in year ending 2014 and £1145 in year endings 2015.  They show zero outgoings.  There’s £13,000 in the bank account sitting doing nothing at all.

The trustees are the same as in my previous request.

There’s also a report from an independent examiner for the year ending 2014.  Maybe the one for year endings 2015 hadn’t been done yet (it’s required for all charities).  This says that no matter came to the attention of the examiner to suggest the requirements have not been met.

There’s also a note at the bottom of this page which says the fund has supported the building of a footpath on the Orchy for £5000 and is offering support for steps at Luncarty for £600.  The Orchy footpath was reported in places at the end of last year such as this Forestry Commission article. However there’s no indication of the £5000 in the accounts.  Was it not needed in the end?  There’s also no indication of the £600 for steps at Luncarty so I presume this hasn’t gone ahead yet.

I do wonder what could be done with £13,000 to help canoeing access in Scotland.  A staff member could be paid for a day or two a week to do something, but it would need some oversight on what.

Anyone who is interested in how canoeing is funded in Scotland should also look at the financial report which the SCA has on their Self Service website by my dearest dad, it gives a really good summary for the first time of how’s the SCA’s activities are funded.  I’m also pleased to see the SCA committees are being put on a more formal basis with terms of reference and people being asked to help which I haven’t seen happen before.  Maybe next year I’ll have the energy to help in some interesting way.