ANN: DataBasin 0.4

[Riccardo Mottola]

D A T A B A S I N
------------------

I am pleased to announce the release of DataBasin 0.4

-- What's new --

* Select identify: execute select on records identified by Id or Unique
identifier
* http / https connection choice

-- What is it? --

It is a data access tool for Salesforce.com, it allows querying,
deleting and inserting records. It accesses the APIs through the usage
of web services. Of interest might be its core, DBSoap, which implements
the access to the APIs. It is designed to be reusable for other
projects. As far as I know it is the only "Open source" implementation
of its kind. It is released as LGPL.

DataBasin runs both on GNUstep and Mac>= 10.3

-- Where do I find it? --
Data Basin is hosted in the GAP project:

http://gap.nongnu.org/databasin/index.html

DataBasin uses the GNUstep Webservices, which Richard extended to
support SOAP right for this application.

http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/WebServices

Enjoy,

Riccardo Mottola
(GNUstep Application Project Team)

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Richard Stallman wrote:
> This program is free software, but Sales Force seems like SaaS.
> How about making a free local replacement for it, starting from RT?
>
>
Indeed, the program is free, but Salesforce is SaaS. That's the main
point of DataBasin, allow people using free operating systems and
platforms the freedom to interact with Salesforce. A longer term goal is
to allow direct integration with free applications.

I don't think that a "local" version makes much sense at all. However,
the "free" world will eventually need to make up its mind on how to cope
with Saas and "the cloud". That's where the current hype is going and
even with all the hot air and smoke, there is some substance. I don't
have idea what the answer or the answers will be. But it is something
that must be taken in consideration.
GNUstep could expand its GSWeb and use it as a foundation, however there
is much more behind it to build a platform.

On the short term, one can build open stuff using the platform service
like Heroku or more limitedly the force.com platform itself. However it
doesn't feel like the real solution of course. Neither is just slapping
a free app on an amazon E2C instance. The cloud itself is pretty
undefined yet... so much ado.

However, I hope it doesn't turn out how the "free" desktop alternatives:
many versions, none really complete, stable or better than the
proprietary ones, when the world is already moving beyond the
traditional desktop.

Just some thoughts and rants of course.

Riccardo

[Richard Stallman]

This program is free software, but Sales Force seems like SaaS.
How about making a free local replacement for it, starting from RT?

--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/

[Richard Stallman]

I don't think that a "local" version makes much sense at all.

Why do you think so? Our stance is that is the right way to do things.

However,
the "free" world will eventually need to make up its mind on how to cope
with Saas and "the cloud".

"The cloud" is just a nebulous confusion, the result of lumping together
things that are different. Thus, to try to have an approach to "the cloud"
is misguided. However, SaaS is specific enough to have a policy about.

We define SaaS as doing your own computing in someone else's server.
That is always bad, because you lose control of your computer that way.
We must develop local replacements to do the computing people want to do.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html.

On the short term, one can build open stuff using the platform service
like Heroku or more limitedly the force.com platform itself.

I don't know about them -- could you tell me in one sentence about each?

2) Please understand the eStationery-computing-hybrid and changes
to office furniture relating to eStationery about to take place to
usher in very low cost computing... it is where GNU OS will excell
in very lowcost computational stationery (it uses ePaper screens
and can be written on digitally by biro with the silver tip of the
biro digitally scanned by a clipboard IR pen reader).

There is nothing wrong with using a separate client and server,
but if the server does your computing, it must be under your control.
That means it runs your copy of free software.

It could be the freedom box, perhaps.

[Ivan Vučica]

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 13:02, Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> wrote:

We define SaaS as doing your own computing in someone else's server.

That is always bad, because you lose control of your computer that way.
We must develop local replacements to do the computing people want to do.

I'm using Gmail because I don't have the finances to run my own hosting and backup infrastructure, and I want to be able to access my data on any machine I log on to. I'm pretty sure that people that use Salesforce and other conceptually similar platforms also want to cut costs.

Having own server is definitely always great. It's however not cost effective for me, especially since I am a student. But if Google makes a bad move, I can still pull out, since most people are directed to contact me via an email address on my personal domain. At the moment, I'm not switching away, despite Gmail software being locked down and despite potential privacy issues.

From what I can understand from the DataBasin's GAP page (especially the screenshots), without having an actual knowledge of what Salesforce offers:

  http://gap.nongnu.org/databasin/index.html

one of DataBasin's primary uses is to extract ("liberate") the data. It also appears to me that a free software alternative to Salesforce is, for example, SugarCRM. There are other free CRMs.

Using DataBasin with a local equivalent of Salesforce also seems to make little sense, since the data is already easily accessible via the database backend's admin tools (for example, PostgreSQL's or MySQL's admin tools). 

Perhaps I am missing something. :)

-- 

Ivan Vučica - iv...@vucica.net

[Scott Christley]

On Nov 5, 2011, at 7:02 AM, Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> wrote:

>
> We define SaaS as doing your own computing in someone else's server.
> That is always bad, because you lose control of your computer that way.
> We must develop local replacements to do the computing people want to do.
>

> See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html.

This is an interesting essay, but it poses a conundrum for some academic research. Biological research is undergoing a significant change whereby large quantities of biological observations can be made quickly and cheaply, but extracting useful knowledge from this data requires significant computation, for example assembling a genome from millions of sequence reads. Is free software available to do this computation? Yes, debian-med is an example of a group that collects and packages such software. Does every research lab have the computing resources to do this computation on their own machine? Typically no, and requiring every lab to have their own locally sufficient computation means a much greater amount of limited research dollars would be spent on computer hardware versus for other scientific activities, thus to be cost effective they use SaaS.

It can become even more fuzzy as the instruments used for observation combine both measurement and computation. These devices are almost exclusively proprietary and expensive, so labs must send genetic material to a company which performs the measurement and computation, thus SaaS, for them. Doesn't sound very much like freedom does it?

An argument might be made that this scientific data should be free anyways, except it can put a person's individual liberty at risk. What if that DNA was your own? An insurance company might deny you coverage because of a genetic mutation. A company might not hire you because you have a mutation in the "works well with others" gene. More covertly, somebody may make a change which leads a doctor to make an incorrect diagnosis and prescribe the wrong medicine. These decisions might be made without you ever being able to look at the underlying source code used in the computation.

So while I agree with some of the basic tenants of your SaaS essay, I feel the broad statements of "Don't use SaaS!" and "this is always bad" inhibits scientific progress.

Scott

[Richard Stallman]

It can become even more fuzzy as the instruments used for
observation combine both measurement and computation. These
devices are almost exclusively proprietary and expensive, so labs
must send genetic material to a company which performs the
measurement and computation, thus SaaS, for them. Doesn't sound
very much like freedom does it?

I am not sure. Correct me if I have misunderstood, but I think the
company is doing a physical measurement and then analyzing it,
providing the analyzed result. It seems that the computing is
ancillary to the measurement itself. If so, I would not say it is
SaaS.

An argument might be made that this scientific data should be free
anyways, except it can put a person's individual liberty at
risk. What if that DNA was your own?

I don't think your DNA data should be public, but these two issues are
separate ones.

So while I agree with some of the basic tenants of your SaaS
essay, I feel the broad statements of "Don't use SaaS!" and "this
is always bad" inhibits scientific progress.

When a practice that denies people freedom becomes widely accepted,
several phenomena put more pressure on people to follow it. (One is
the network effect.) Thus, if we resist it, we will less often find
we are pressured to do it.

[Richard Stallman]

I'm using Gmail because I don't have the finances to run my own hosting and
backup infrastructure, and I want to be able to access my data on any
machine I log on to. I'm pretty sure that people that use Salesforce and
other conceptually similar platforms also want to cut costs.

You are probably right, but you're talking about a different subject.
I raised the issue of a grave ethical flaw. You're talkimg about
practical benefits. I am sure Salesforce has a benefit -- people
would not use it if they had no motivation -- but that doesn't
make it ethical.

Gmail and SalesForce are different cases. Gmail does pure
communcation, so it doesn't try to do your computing for you. I have
not seen SalesForce, but my understandimg is the main job it does for
you is deciding what to communicate with whom. That's doing your
computing for you.

It
also appears to me that a free software alternative to Salesforce is, for
example, SugarCRM. There are other free CRMs.

If SugarCRM is indeed a free software equivalent to SalesForce,
I am glad to know we already have one.

[Pirmin Braun]

Am Sun, 06 Nov 2011 12:45:17 -0500
schrieb Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> :

> It
> also appears to me that a free software alternative to Salesforce is, for
> example, SugarCRM. There are other free CRMs.

yes, IntarS
http://87.106.2.1/GSWeb/Aprica3000230.woa?pw=root&loginname=Administrator

>
> If SugarCRM is indeed a free software equivalent to SalesForce,
> I am glad to know we already have one.

Only the Community Edition of SugarCRM is free.

>
> --
> Dr Richard Stallman
> President, Free Software Foundation
> 51 Franklin St
> Boston MA 02110
> USA
> www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
> Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
> Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/
>

> _______________________________________________
> Discuss-gnustep mailing list
> Discuss...@gnu.org
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep


--
mit freundlichen Gruessen/best regards

Pirmin Braun
seat-1 Software GmbH - Sinziger Str. 29a - 53424 Remagen
+49(0)2642 308288 +49(0)163-6290887 - skype:pirminb
Fax +49(0)2642 308626
http://www.seat-1.com p...@seat-1.com
http://intars.sourceforge.net

Geschäftsführer: Pirmin Braun, Ralf Engelhardt
Registergericht: Amtsgericht Coburg HRB3136

[Richard Stallman]

> If SugarCRM is indeed a free software equivalent to SalesForce,
> I am glad to know we already have one.

Only the Community Edition of SugarCRM is free.

How useful is the Community Edition of SugarCRM?
Does it do the needed jobs?

[Pirmin Braun]

Am Sun, 06 Nov 2011 18:13:01 -0500
schrieb Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> :

> > If SugarCRM is indeed a free software equivalent to SalesForce,
> > I am glad to know we already have one.
>
> Only the Community Edition of SugarCRM is free.
>
> How useful is the Community Edition of SugarCRM?
> Does it do the needed jobs?

depends on what you need: http://media.sugarcrm.com/datasheets/EditionsComparison_CE.pdf

>
>
> --
> Dr Richard Stallman
> President, Free Software Foundation
> 51 Franklin St
> Boston MA 02110
> USA
> www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
> Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
> Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/

[Maarten Sander]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 08:35, Pirmin Braun <p...@seat-1.com> wrote:
> Am Sun, 06 Nov 2011 18:13:01 -0500
> schrieb Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> :
>
> >     > If SugarCRM is indeed a free software equivalent to SalesForce,
> >     > I am glad to know we already have one.
> >
> >     Only the Community Edition of SugarCRM is free.
> >
> > How useful is the Community Edition of SugarCRM?
> > Does it do the needed jobs?
>
> depends on what you need: http://media.sugarcrm.com/datasheets/EditionsComparison_CE.pdf

And don't forget that it's relatively easy to add missing
functionality using "contributions" from the community (or do it
yourself).

For example, SugarForge (http://www.sugarforge.org/) is a directory of
all kinds of SugarCRM-related software. Not all of it is open
source/free, but at least you can filter out non-free licenses.

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

On Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:02:47 +0100, Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> wrote:

> I don't think that a "local" version makes much sense at all.
>
> Why do you think so? Our stance is that is the right way to do things.

Well, I think we all love our own stuff. We love our freedom.

However, I think it is pretty clear that business is oing to explore the
way of the "service" in terms of SaaS and PaaS.
Like it or not. Maybe and perhaps hopefully it might not last in its
current form, but ignoring it or "fighting" it is useless.
We all liked the command line, we liked fvwm, Emacs... there were clones
of OpenLook and Motif. Now? Well at the end you can see many Linux
distributions (just not to make names) as a slow, inefficient windows
reimplementation.

> On the short term, one can build open stuff using the platform
> service
> like Heroku or more limitedly the force.com platform itself.
>
> I don't know about them -- could you tell me in one sentence about each?

Well, to put it shortly, they allow you to build your own stuff, on their
servers.
To make salesforce CRM they developed technology to give the software as a
service. That makes it highly customizable, not just a "shrink-wrapped"
software. That is, their built a platform
You can choose not just to use their software (and thus SaaS) but get the
platform as a service, and thus PaaS (to throw in another buzzword). You
can use the same database and the same language (Apex) to build your own
stuff. You can even develop "free" stuff, although it runs on a strictly
proprietary platform. It is thus your code on their base.

With Heroku you can go a step further and instead of using a proprietary
platform, you can use Ruby or Java and you can also run those locally and
have the benefit of local vs. remote.

With that, I state again the goal of DataBasin: it is a tool to allow you
to interact, develop, extract the Data existing on the remote platform or
service. Its goal is to be able to do that without tricks and by using
free code that is capable of running on a free OS. Otherwise you will be
again forced to use something proprietary to interact with such a system.
It may be beyond your freedom to choose to ignore that.

Just an explanation without a judice.

Riccardo

[Richard Stallman]

For example, SugarForge (http://www.sugarforge.org/) is a directory of
all kinds of SugarCRM-related software. Not all of it is open
source/free, but at least you can filter out non-free licenses.

This sounds like an example of a problem frequently caused by the idea
of "open source". People develop a program that in itself is free,
but maintain a list of extensions which include nonfree programs.

The result is that if we recommend that free program to the public,
we are indirectly recommending the nonfree extensions too.

We had to make our own list of Firefox extensions because Mozilla's
list includes nonfree ones. We started our own list of extensions for
OpenOffice, but fortunately the LibreOffice fork was started and they
adopted our list. Because (as you can tell from the name they chose)
they endorse the free software movement, not open source.

[Richard Stallman]

However, I think it is pretty clear that business is oing to explore the
way of the "service" in terms of SaaS and PaaS.

It is pretty clear that many businesses will pay no attention to what
we say. So what? People don't all follow our guidelines, but we still
need to provide them for the sake of whoeverwill follow them.

Like it or not. Maybe and perhaps hopefully it might not last in its
current form, but ignoring it or "fighting" it is useless.

It's not only useful, it is necessary. We must show people what must
be avoided if they are to have freedom. Even if many ignore our
advice, some will pay attention.

[Scott Christley]

On Nov 6, 2011, at 3:32 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:

> It can become even more fuzzy as the instruments used for
> observation combine both measurement and computation. These
> devices are almost exclusively proprietary and expensive, so labs
> must send genetic material to a company which performs the
> measurement and computation, thus SaaS, for them. Doesn't sound
> very much like freedom does it?
>
> I am not sure. Correct me if I have misunderstood, but I think the
> company is doing a physical measurement and then analyzing it,
> providing the analyzed result. It seems that the computing is
> ancillary to the measurement itself. If so, I would not say it is
> SaaS.

In my opinion, analysis in this context is computing and attempting to differentiate leads to a slippery slope, so if somebody wanted to sidestep the rules then they just declare their computation is "analysis". For the high-throughput biological research I mentioned before, that "analysis" is critical to the interpretation and understanding of the physical measurements. So while such analysis may be ancillary, it really is required for extracting biological meaning from the data. One good thing is that I recently heard about the Polonator project (www.polonator.org) which seems dedicated to a providing a free software and hardware system. Regardless this still leaves the issue that significant computation, e.g. assembling millions of sequence reads into a genome, is beyond the capacity of the computers in a typical scientific laboratory, so investigators rely upon SaaS to do their research.

Scott

[Richard Stallman]

I am answering the messages that got piled up during the year.
Please forgive the delay in my response.

In my opinion, analysis in this context is computing and
attempting to differentiate leads to a slippery slope, so if
somebody wanted to sidestep the rules then they just declare their
computation is "analysis". For the high-throughput biological
research I mentioned before, that "analysis" is critical to the
interpretation and understanding of the physical measurements. So
while such analysis may be ancillary, it really is required for
extracting biological meaning from the data.

You may be right. I had better think further about this.

The difficulty is that there are always small computing activities
associated with doing anything with data. To say that those small
activities make any service that does things with data into SaaS seems
like going too far. So it is a matter of where to draw the line,
and I am not sure there has to be one right place, or where it would
be if it exists.

Regardless this still leaves the issue that significant
computation, e.g. assembling millions of sequence reads into a
genome, is beyond the capacity of the computers in a typical
scientific laboratory, so investigators rely upon SaaS to do their
research.

I wonder, is it really SaaS? Using a remote supercomputer
is not necessarily SaaS. It depends who controls the software
that does the work, and on other aspects of the situation.

Even if it is SaaS the way it's done now, it doesn't
inevitably have to be SaaS.