Copyrighteous

It's late notice but Boston area folks should drop by the local Software Freedom Day events today. It goes from 10:00-16:00 and is located in a great space in Chinatown. More information in on the wiki.

I'm teaming up with John Sullivan of the FSF to talk about free software on in your pocket on unexecpted platforms. We'll show off CHDK (for cameras), the FreeRunner (a phone), and probably also talk about RockBox, iPodLinux, and more. It should be laid back and fun!

The whole point of SFD (and this SFD event in particular) is create a space that's appropriate to folks that don't already know about free and open source software and that aren't necessary technical. If you are a hacker or an advocate, show up and meet some like minded folks and introduce new people to the ideas that inspire you. If you are just curious about this stuff this event is designed for you.

If you're not in Boston, check the SFD webpage. There are hundreds of events around the world and may even be one near you!

It's been a year or so since I last reported what I was up to in my "day job." The last year has been a productive, if sometimes schizophrenic, period.

I've had a good time working with Eric von Hippel (innovation and free and open source software research guru) and have decided I'd like to do a bit more of that.

So I'm taking classes again -- mostly sociological methods courses -- to try to learn a bit about becoming a social scientist. To do so, I've enrolled in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship PhD program at the MIT Sloan School of Management and am working on putting together an interdisciplinary -- probably even interdepartmental -- research program. My basic research questions remain the ones that have motivated all my work: How can I get a better understanding of communities producing free stuff? How can I help those communities do so more effectively?

MIT has a large number of people who share these goals and interests. Who knows, if I can put together enough of them and an academically rigorous research proposal that will provide a real benefit to the free software and free culture communities I care about, I might even manage to get a degree out of it!

I'll also be staying on as a fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media where I'll continue to maintain and expand Selectricity, work on Revealing Errors, and more.

Nearly a week after its release, I suspect most of my audience has seen the FSF's Freedom Fry video of Stephen Fry wishing the GNU project and the free software movement a happy birthday. While I'm not usually one for birthdays, I thought I'd at least reflect on it briefly. Certainly, it's a wonderful video -- for which Matt Lee at others at the FSF should be proud. But it's fact that the GNU project is now twenty-five years old that is truly noteworthy.

Wikipedia says that a generation (i.e., the average interval between the birth of parents and of their offspring) is somewhere between 25-30 years in most of the Western world. Twenty-five years isn't just a big number divisible by five, it marks a generational shift.

Certainly, GNU has matured and accomplished wonderful things in last quarter-century. More importantly perhaps, it's produced wonderful progeny. It has spawned hundreds of thousands of free software projects, thousands of free or nearly-free operating systems, and an unbelievably vibrant global free and open source software community. Beyond the software realm, the free culture movement, most free licensing projects, and much of the access to knowledge movement can trace a connection back to GNU. We are living, and building, a new generation of the free software movement.

It's not been an entirely smooth ride, feelings have been hurt, and it's hard for GNU's proponents -- myself included -- to not wince at some of what has been done in GNU's name and because of its example. But even cynics must admit: the world is an undeniably better place because of GNU and the efforts and ideas that it has motivated.

I turn 28 in December and have spent my entire computing life in world where free software was a viable option and an active form of resistance. Here's to another generation! May we be half as productive and positive as the last!