Copyrighteous

I wrote this for the FSF's annual membership drive where it was originally published. I am reposting it here.

At its core, I think of free software as about the ability of computer users to take control of their technology. Insofar as our software defines our experience of the world and each other, software freedom is an important part of what allows us to determine the way we live, work, and communicate.

Free software is not really about software in this fundamental sense; it's about bringing freedom to users through software.

In free software's incredible success over the last two decades, many people have lost sight of this simple fact. We have created an incredible array of applications, libraries, and tools. We have created vibrant development and support communities. We have created new development methodologies, powerful copyleft licenses, and massive collaborative projects. But these are all how we give users freedom. They are not freedom itself. They are not what we were trying to achieve. They are our instruments, not our goal.

This distinction becomes central in a world where technology is in flux. Indeed, we live in such a world. We can see signs of this in how, as most users' primary computers become mobile phones and new types of network services make up most of many users' interactions with computers, the free software movement's old applications, communities, development methodologies, and licenses can become ill-suited to, or ineffective at, protecting user freedoms.

And indeed, in the next few years, bringing freedom to computer users will need to involve new software and new forms of advocacy. It will need to involve new licenses and new techniques for their enforcement. It will need to involve new forms of collaboration and organization. If the free software movement is to succeed, it must stay focused on computer users' freedom -- on the question of why we do what we do -- and then work creatively on how to best respect and protect the freedom we are working toward. If we are overly focused on how we've done things in the past, we may lose sight of the most fundamental goal of supporting users' control over their technology in general.

There are many organizations that support the how of today's free software in various ways -- they are law firms and companies and nonprofit organizations supporting various free software projects.

The Free Software Foundation is, by far, the most important organization focused on why --- on the underlying principle of software freedom. As such, it plays an essential role in keeping our broader community focused on the key issues, threats, and challenges that will affect the success of every free software project, and every computer user, in the present and in the future. In this period of rapid change in computer technology, its role is more vital than ever. The consequence of any failure is more dire.

Here are some of the ways that I will be encouraging the FSF to serve the free software movement in the coming year:

Mobile Phones

In a short essay I wrote earlier this year, I pointed out that there are now billions of mobile phones and that, although these phones are increasingly powerful computers, they represent one of the most locked-down, proprietary, and “unfree” technologies in wide use. The implications of this fact for users' control over their technology are dire. Although some widely used phones make extensive use of free software, most “free” phones are locked down and Tivoized and their users remain fettered, divided, and helpless.

We must raise awareness of free software issues among users of phones, communicate to users that phones are powerful general purpose computers, and explain that control over these devices has critical implications for individual autonomy in the future. Toward this end, the FSF staff will launch an advocacy campaign around mobile phones and software freedom in the coming year.

Network Services

As network services -- like those built by Facebook, Google, and others -- have continued to grow both in scope and penetration over the last year, the importance of a meaningful free software responses grows as well. The launch of products like Google's network-centric ChromeOS offers one glimpse of what a future computing platform may look like. The implications for user freedom, and for the effectiveness of traditional free software approaches, are frightening. The fact that many network services are built using free software does not make the effect of these services on users' autonomy and freedom any less catastrophic.

In the next year, the FSF is planning to release the first of what I hope will be several statements on software freedom and network services. Building off the work of the FSF-supported group Autonomous, the Foundation will help provide guidelines for those implementing network services, for users deciding whether to use services, and for developers trying to build services that go further to respect their users' freedom.

Reaching beyond our traditional communities

Successfully fighting for user freedom is going to mean successfully reaching out to users outside the FSF's historical “base”. The FSF continues to do so with its Defective By Design anti-DRM campaign and its End Software Patents work. In the last year, the FSF has also reached out to younger users through its "GNU Generation" campaign run by and for high school students. Additionally, the FSF convened a summit this year on women in free software. The FSF plans to build on these successes in the coming year and to expand similar outreach projects.

Of course, fighting for and promoting software freedom is more work than today's FSF has the resources to accomplish. Each of my three points above represents an ambitious undertaking, and yet just a portion of the items on the plate of the FSF's small but dedicated staff. Even just continuing its existing projects will require that the FSF adds hundreds of new members by the end of this period. Your membership and donations help make goals like this possible.

A strong free software movement focused on the principled issues of software freedom -- and a strong FSF in particular -- will determine what freedoms the next generation of computer users will enjoy. At stake is no less than that next generation's autonomy.

I know that this is not the first fundraising appeal you've read this season and I know that the weakened economy makes giving difficult for many. I understand that the cost of a membership or donation may be less easy to afford this year. But we also cannot afford a weakened FSF at this important point of technological transition.

If you are not an FSF associate member, now is the time to become one. If you've read my appeal the last two years and decided to wait, now is the time to take the plunge. Membership is $120 per year ($60 for students) and payable monthly. If you are already a member, please join me in giving generously through a tax-deductible donation, or encourage a friend to sign up. The FSF is a small, humble organization of passionate individuals working tirelessly for our software freedom. I've seen firsthand that even small gifts make a difference.

Join now with a $10 monthly donation

Over the summer, there was a bit of a tussle at the highest level of Ubuntu governance over whether or not Canonical Ltd., the company that funds the majority of work done directly in Ubuntu, should name its file syncing and backup service Ubuntu One.

Canonical's service involved a freely licensed client included in the Ubuntu distribution but, as a network service running on Canonical servers, it was not clearly a part of Ubuntu (the GNU/Linux distribution) or Ubuntu (the community) in the way the term was usually used within the community. Although the network service itself was not Franklin Street Statement free, this was not the most important issue for everyone who objected to the name. The major issue for many seemed to boil down to the fact that, free or not, Ubuntu One is a service run entirely by Canonical outside the reaches of the Ubuntu governance structures.

Decisions were made and not everybody -- and maybe not anybody -- was absolutely happy with the outcome. My goal is not try to revive old arguments here. As far as I'm concerned, the issues are settled and the service is called Ubuntu One. That said, the questions raised during the episode are fundamental to Ubuntu and to other firm-sponsored FLOSS projects. Now that the dust has settled, they are worth reflecting on.

From a legal perspective, there never was any ambiguity. Canonical "owns" the Ubuntu trademark. In this important sense, "Ubuntu" means whatever Canonical says it means. This is hardly new. As just one example, the Official Ubuntu Book (of which I am an author) was written by community members but became official because Canonical blessed it. But despite the fact that they don't need to, Canonical has often consulted with the community and its governance structures about trademark licensing policy.

This was also not a case of Canonical not listening to the community. Canonical employees approached the Ubuntu Community Council (Ubuntu's highest governance board of which I am a member), listened carefully to concerns, and responded thoughtfully.

The question was not even about a clash between what Canonical and the CC thought about the issue. An unambiguous majority of the board, including all the Canonical employees and several of the community members, supported the idea of Canonical using the trademark.

The question was one about who gets to make the decisions about the Ubuntu name and about what role the community and Canonical would each play. Despite the fact that a majority of the Ubuntu community council was likely to support the proposed name, the CC was told by Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth that a vote was irrelevant. Canonical made it clear that decisions about the Ubuntu trademark were simply not in the CC's purview. The decision on how the name was to be used was something that Canonical was not willing to delegate to an "outside" (the firm) governance body. Few businesses would. And although I don't agree with the decision as a community representative, I might have even made the same call from Canonical's shoes.

In traditional firms, it's usually pretty clear where the organization's boundary lies. In FLOSS projects -- and especially in FLOSS project like Ubuntu who are sponsored in very large part by a single for-profit company -- boundaries are fuzzier. The conversation about "Ubuntu One" can be seen as a fight over what "Ubuntu" refers to, and, more importantly, who gets to answer that question. In deciding whether to call a service "Ubuntu", a decision is made on what Ubuntu is. Names are powerful.

Is Ubuntu just a Canonical project? Are Ubuntu's contributors really just Canonical contributors by proxy? I think the answer to both questions is "no" but the boundary issues involved are complicated and under constant negotiation. Every time Canonical uses the Ubuntu name itself or grants others the ability to do so, these boundary issues are negotiated, one way or another.

This boundary setting work reveals an important tension that firms releasing FLOSS must all struggle with. To what extent and in what ways do communities get to decide what a FLOSS project is and to what extent do sponsoring firms get to do so? How should projects and firms do this most effectively? What should we even be optimizing for?

I think that any resulting balance has a huge effect on whether a FLOSS project is, on one hand, released under a free license but run like any old corporate project or, on the other, a true "bazaar" style project where no single firm dominates -- or where they fall on that spectrum. Names and trademarks are one way that projects define their own identities and act as an important frontier in this balancing act. As every firm/project negotiates their own answers to questions of names and boundaries, there are important implications for the project's ability to attract volunteers, solicit contributions from other firms, and more. The confusion around conversations about Ubuntu One shows that we still have a lot to learn.

Very often, folks want to refer to both the free and open source software communities in a way that is inclusive of and respectful of groups who identify with either term. Saying "free and open source software" is a mouthful. That said, there was no been consensus on what we should do instead.

The Wikipedia article on alternative terms for free software suggests that FOSS, F/OSS, FLOSS, and "software libre" are contenders. I've heard all. Of course, the choice of 4+ competing alternative terms is probably worse than the problem we were seeking to solve.

In academic circles, the big debate seems to be between FOSS and FLOSS. I was always a FOSS partisan. But I've seen increased momentum on the FLOSS side and I'm ready to declare that FLOSS has won.

I know it makes you think of dental hygiene and I agree that it is unfortunate. It wasn't my first choice either. But I can see where things are going. FLOSS Manuals and the folks at the FLOSS Research Group at Syracuse who launched the FLOSSHub and the associated FLOSS Papers deserve some of the credit.

If we can get over the irony of having spent so much time arguing over what was intended to be compromise terminology in the first place, lets see if we actually start talking to each other.

Earlier this summer, I wrote a blog post on taking a principled position on software freedom where I argued that advocates of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) should take a principled position because the pragmatic benefits associated with open source --- "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost" in OSI's words --- are simply not always present. More often than not, FLOSS projects fail. When they survive, they are often not as good as their proprietary competitors.

Over the last year, I've been back at MIT taking classes, reading extensively, and otherwise learning how to act like a social scientist. My research goals, which I'm now beginning to focus on, are to help build a stronger understanding of the social dynamics in free software and free culture communities.

With a slightly skeptical view toward my involvement with groups like the FSF and my work in the FLOSS community, at least one academic tried to suggest that taking a principled position in favor of software freedom might compromise the positivist social science research program in which I am engaged. "An advocate is too biased," they said. After many months of thinking seriously about this warning, I believe that this criticism can be addressed.

After all, a principled position in favor of software freedom is a statement of how things should be, not a description of how they are. OSI will argue that open source leads to inherently better software. This statement, of course, is one that can be empirically tested and, in fact, there seems to be plenty of evidence that it is often wrong. On the other hand, the FSF's position that software should be free is ethical in nature. One can disagree with it, just like one can disagree with any other ethical position, but it can not be proved either right or wrong --- only convincing or unconvincing, logical or illogical in the context a certain set of other values that others might or might not share.

Research has shown that the vast majority of FLOSS projects fizzle. A advocate who argues that FLOSS is inherently better is left trying to explain this fact and make excuses. As a result, OSI-style beliefs can certainly be a source of problematic bias in a social scientist. However, a person who believes that software should be free is welcome to recognize that it both fails and succeeds and to ask why. A principled idealist can argue in favor of behaviors that may be disruptive, difficult, or inefficient. Indeed, Stallman has never suggested that free software will be easier or better. Indeed, he routinely asks people to sacrifice their convenience for freedom.

My goal, as a social scientist, is to understand why some FLOSS and free culture projects succeed and why many fail. I never take FLOSS's success for granted and, in fact, believe that proprietary software may often leads to better software in OSI's terms. Unlike an advocate who tows the OSI line, embracing evidence of the effectiveness of proprietary software is no way in conflict with my belief that software should be free. In fact, my desire to see software freedom grow becomes the driving force between trying to understand FLOSS's shortcomings!

I am no more biased --- which is not to say completely unbiased --- than the person who both thinks that crime is wrong and who wants to study criminal behavior. In an analogous sense, starting out with the belief that all people are naturally law-abiding may be a problem in a way that beginning with the belief that people should be law-abiding is not. Starting from the fomer assumption, one has to explain away evidence to the contrary. Starting from the latter assumption, one can build an understanding of what drives people to obey or violate laws which, in turn, can help build a stronger society.

To me, the question is not why FLOSS will succeed. Indeed, I believe its success is an empirical matter that remains very much up in the air. For me, the question is how it might. Embracing a principled position lets us face the facts and puts advocates and practitioners in a position to devise laws, social structures, and technologies to insure that it does.

Due entirely to the efforts of one inquisitive and indefatigable A. Dehqan, a web search for the phrase "In The Name Of God The compassionate merciful" now almost exclusively turns up hits to a wide variety of free software mailing lists, forums, and IRC channels with questions on everything from what is a kernel (in a minimum of half a line, no less), to how to send a FAX, to the intersection between Islam and copyright and much more! I've now run across in five distinct projects. Maybe you have too!

I know it's old news but I couldn't resist pointing out this item from the "all the things my software freedom advocacy and activism has been based around recently" department:

Apparently, Apple filed for an software patent on an antifeature that uses a DRM-like system and a proprietary network services to lock down people's mobile phones.

If someone can figure out how to work in a revealing error, I think I can make it a sweep.

The Computer in My Pocket -- which I intended mostly as a one-off blog-post -- ended up having some legs. First, Carolina Flores Hine translated the essay into Spanish. More recently the FSF published a slightly patched-up version in the Fall 2009 bulletin, sent to all members, along with a bunch of more interesting writing by other free software folks. Certainly, there is growing recognition in our communities that phones are a critical battleground in the fight for software freedom.

More exciting for me though, my post elicited a bunch of comments from folks pointing to promising projects (Replicant was just one often cited example) making real progress toward freedom for all the computers in our pockets. I knew about most of them, but growing knowledge and excitement about problems and potential solutions was striking. There is an enormous amount to do, but there are reasons to believe that all is not lost.

In preparation for LCA, I'm going to be giving my new Antifeatures talk a few times to smaller local audiences.

The first is going to be today in Boston (apologies for the late notice!) at Northeastern University at 11:45 and it's being hosted by the ACM chapter there.

The second one will be at my alma mater Hampshire College in Amherst this Friday. A draft flier (ignore the unpluralized "antifeatue") is below.

The Ubuntu Code of Conduct is one of the most surprisingly successful projects I've ever had the privilege of working on. On my first day working for the company that would become Canonical, I talked with Mark Shuttleworth about some ideas for community governance. Partially in reaction to some harsh behavior in other free software projects we'd worked on, Mark and I agreed that some sort of explicit standard for behavior in Ubuntu would be a good thing. Over lunch of what was my literally first day working on Ubuntu, I wrote a draft of code of conduct that was essentially the version that Ubuntu has used until today. Shuttleworth made a series of modification to my draft but I don't think either of us took it too seriously. We figured it would be easy to update it later.

Over time, that code has become a central piece of the Ubuntu community. Every new Ubuntu member cryptographically signs the code. When conversation in any Ubuntu forums, channels, or lists becomes disrespectful, users almost instinctively remind each other of the code. Through this process, the code has become a sort of constitution of our community and a widely enforced standard. People treat the code as a reflection of what "ubuntu" --- both the concept and our project --- stands for.

Over time, the original code has spawned a Leadership Code of Conduct (which I also worked to draft), and has been modified and employed by scores of free software projects and by many projects that have nothing to do with free software at all. This is all wonderful, but a side effect has been that updating the code has become a more a difficult process that we originally imagined.

Despite it success, the code remains a text written in an afternoon in Mark's flat. At times, this fact shows. For example, the code contains some off-hand humor that now seems a little akward and the text was a bit too developer centric at points. And there was a lot that, quite simply, we would have done better if we had realized that the code would be so important. So this summer, Daniel Holbach and I spent another afternoon in Berlin discussing and crafting a new version of the code along with a detailed rationale document that describes all the things we'd changed and why.

We believe that what we've created is fully in the spirit of the original code. We've made efforts to minimize the delta in terms of text as possible. Daniel and I realize that changing the code out from under our community is a dangerous game, and we've make exceptional efforts to make sure that the new code doesn't say anything substantively different than the old code --- but that it does say it better.

So I'm thrilled that, after being posted since early June and after incorporating a series of revisions with members of the Ubuntu Community Council, the new draft was approved at a council meeting earlier today.

Of course, we are continuing to think about how we might improve the text going forward. One important goal we've thrown around, for example, is the creation of a code that is no longer Ubuntu specific and that can be employed by a wide range of different groups and different free and open source software projects.

An updated version of this article was published in the FSF's Fall 2009 members' bulletin. Additionally, the article was translated into Spanish by Carolina Flores Hine.

If we've kept up with projections, by the end of this year, the world will be home to 3 billion mobile phones. That's nearly one phone for every other living human being. Although these phones open up a world of important new opportunities in communication, creativity, and cooperation --- and it's important not to understate this fact --- they also represent a step toward a sort of technological dystopia not unlike Stallman's Right To Read. Phones represent one of the most locked-down, proprietary, and generally unfree technologies in wide distribution. The implications for software freedom and technological empowerment are dire.

But despite the fact that mobile phones represent what may be the greatest threat to software freedom today, the free software community has --- with a number of notable exceptions that I want to both thank and draw increased attention to --- been mostly silent on the issue.

I know passionate advocates of software freedom who work tirelessly to rid themselves and the world of a handful of binary blobs in the Linux kernel --- important work that we all benefit from. And yet, even some of these "hardliners" don't seem to hold their phones to their same standards as their laptops. Ubuntu's decision to ship a new binary driver remains more controversial than the fact that the vast majority of the world's computer using population knows nothing other than phone-based computers that remain almost unthinkably unfree and which remain almost entirely unfreeable when compared to personal computers. For most of the world's computer users', there is no option of, and essentially no hope for, freedom on their current devices.

It shocks me that anyone, especially free software advocates, would happily put up with such non-free computers.[1] I think part of the reason lies in the fact that most users of mobile phones, and even most phone users that care about software freedom and technological autonomy, don't think of their phones as computers. Thinking that our phones as computers will not solve any of the problems I've alluded to. But doing so remains an essential first step toward any solution. Although we must still work to build viable, widely accessible, and compelling free phones, we must first convince both users and developers that this is an important goal. Reminding people that our phones, both free and non-free, are powerful general-purpose computers remains an important and still largely unfufilled part of this process.

We must find ways to remind ourselves and others of the fact that modern phones are powerful computers with powerful interfaces that are useful for a unimaginable variety of arbitrary applications. We must focus on the fact that these computers have microphones, sensors, and other sensors and that we trust them with our closest secrets and most sensitive data. We must not forget that, in almost all cases, these computers remain controlled, completely and ultimately, by companies that very few of us trust at all.

I'm not sure how we will accomplish this task. But more of us need to think long, hard, and creatively about this problem. I'll be calling my phone "my computer" as a first, very personal, step. I have done this over the last week and it has led to some conversations with slightly confused acquaintances. Of course, this doesn't make my phone any less free. But it does mean I'm talking more about the non-freeness most of us have put up with too silently. At this stage, that seems like progress.

As I am attempting to focus on writing projects that are more scholarly and academic on the one hand (i.e., work for my day job at MIT) and more geared toward communicating free software principles toward wider audiences on the other (e.g., Revealing Errors), I have little choice but to back away from technical writing.

However, this last month has seen the culmination of a bunch of work that I've done previously: two book projects that have been ongoing for the last couple years or more have finally hit the shelves!

The first is the fourth edition (!) of the bestselling Official Ubuntu Book. Much to my happiness, the book continues to do extremely well and continues to receive solid reviews. This edition brings the book up to date for Jaunty/9.04 and adds a few pieces here and there. Although I was less active in this update than I have been in the past, Corey Burger continued his great work and Matthew Helmke of Ubuntu Forums fame stepped up to take a leading role. As I plan to retreat into a more purely advisory role for the next edition of this book, I'm thrilled to know that the project will remain in such capable hands. I'm also thrilled that this edition of the book, like all previous editions, is released as a free cultural work under CC BY-SA

For years, I have heard people say that although they like the Official Ubuntu Book, it was a little too focused on desktops and on beginners for their tastes. The newly released Official Ubuntu Server Book is designed to address those concerns by providing an expanded guide to more "advanced" topics and is targeted at system administrators trying to get to know Ubuntu. Kyle Rankin planned and produced most of this book but I was thrilled to help poke it in places, chime in during the planning process, and to contribute a few chapters. Kyle is a knowledgeable sysadmin and has done wonderful job with the book. I only wish I could take more credit. The publisher has promised me that, at the very least, my chapters will be distributed under CC BY-SA.

Many barriers to the adoption of free software are technical and a good book can, and often does, make a big difference. I enjoy being able to help address that problem. I also truly enjoy technical writing. I find it satisfying to share something I know well with others and it is great to know that I've helped someone with their problems. I'll assure I'll be able to do things here and there, I'll miss technical writing as I attempt "cut back."

Two organizations I care deeply about are having elections this month. The first is the Wikimedia Foundation who is electing three community representatives to their board of directors. The second is Ubuntu who will soon be electing a new Community Council.

The Wikimedia Foundation is perhaps the most important organization working on issues related to free culture. Wikimedia elections are currently ongoing and will close on August 10th. Editors who have more than 600 edits to their name across all Wikimedia wikis and 50 edits in 2009 made before July 1st are eligible to vote. The vast majority of eligible contributors to Wikimedia projects have not voted in previous elections.

Ubuntu will be electing all members in a new --- larger --- Community Council. I have been a member of the council since it was created and I will be standing for election once again --- the last time I plan to do so. Work in setting up the election is being finalized and all Ubuntu Members will be able to vote in the election.

Both Wikimedia and Ubuntu are struggling to find the right relationship between the communities who produce most of the value at the heart of their projects and the organizations and leadership structures that try to support and, from time to time, direct it. Ubuntu and Wikimedia are very different. What's at state at these elections is different too. But both elections are are extremely important and at pivotal times in their communities' growth. Both elections will have an important impact on the process of creating new organizational forms.

My message in regards to both elections is also the same: If you are eligible to vote, please do. No governance system I've seen has as healthy and close relationship to the community it serves as it should. Wikimedia and Ubuntu are not exceptions. The result is a strange, and unhealthy, relationship between governance systems and the organizations at the heart of our community-driven projects and the communities themselves. We can all do better. There are not enough opportunities for community members to help push this balance in a better direction. These elections are one. I urge everyone who can to vote and to become involved.

On Luis Villa's urging, I wrote up a short response to this article on "why Google Chrome OS will turn GNU/Linux into a desktop winner." I've posted my article over at Autonomo.us where it seemed most important.

Those of us in the free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) community know the routine by now. Despite the fact that "free software" and "open source" refer to the same software and the same communities, supporters of "free software" like the FSF would have us advocate for FLOSS by talking about users' rights to use, modify, share, and cooperate; open source supporters like the Open Source Initiative would have us advocate for software by talking about how securing these rights produces software with "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost."

One reason I tend to stay away from "open source" claims in my own advocacy is that I'm worried by the way that these arguments rely on a set of often dubious empirical claims of superiority. Free software, on the other hand, can be seen as statement of principles. Regardless of whether we say "free software" or "open source," I've found that a focus on principled statements is both more robust against counter-arguments and does a better job of describing the motivations of most contributors.

Principles can be thought of like opinions. They may or not be compelling but are neither right or wrong outside of a particular ethical framework. Most people won't demand evidence for someone's commitment to nonviolence or an adherence to the Golden Rule. What would you need to prove? Principles are based on a type of Utopianism; they are a statement of how we think things should be.

On the other hand, open source's argument that openness leads to better software or a better software development methodology can be measured, tested, and declared right or wrong. A FLOSS program might be better or more reliable than proprietary software. Or it might be worse. The open source methodology might be lower cost for a consumer or more profitable for a producer. Or it might not. There are plenty of FLOSS success stories. There are many more failures.

The problem for open source advocates is that while FLOSS is often better than proprietary software, this is not always the case. I was using FLOSS in the early 1990s when GNU/Linux was indisputably less featureful and buggier than its proprietary competitors. On the business side, we learned in the Dot Com boom and bust that, despite Eric Raymond's assurances, building a successful FLOSS project turned out to be harder than a COPYING file and a tarball on a webserver: Netscape is essentially gone; VA --- the single largest Dot Com IPO --- is a shadow of its former self; LinuxCare became a proprietary software company.

If, as open source advocates would argue, the reason we're here is to build software more efficiently or at greater profit, we must also advocate for proprietary development methodologies in areas where evidence seems to show that they are more effective. Where are these advocates? Where are the open source advocates applauding LinuxCare for saving themselves by abandoning FLOSS. Don Marti has observed that this doesn't seem to be what is going on:

Do people really spend their weekends helping annoying new people install free software because it has a more efficient development methodology? Of course not. If it were only about efficiency, hobbyists would volunteer to replace the old ballasts in companies' fluorescent lights.

Of course, Marti is right. The reason that hundreds of thousands have spent their time assisting FLOSS efforts has less to do with a passion for efficiency and more to do with a set of implicit principles.

Humans are driven to imagine worlds that they would want to live in. For a growing group of people, that's a world where software can be used, shared, and collaborated without restrictions or discrimination. We may think of this in ethical terms, in terms of an attitude toward innovation, or as a set of political or economic positions. But we should realize that these are, ultimately, principled stands.

And if we are taking principled positions, it is in the long-term interests of both our cause and our credibility to frame our arguments and our advocacy in those terms. We can use empirical evidence to help bolster our arguments but we should be careful to not confuse these empirical claims with the principles themselves. They can, and sometimes will, be proven wrong.

By honestly highlighting our principles and not shying away from explicit Utopianism, we can return to questions of efficiency as means toward achieving our principled ends. Approached from this angle, we need not seek to explain why FLOSS is better than proprietary software --- which it may or may not be at any given point in time and for any given project --- and can instead ask how we can make it better.

Humans are creative, innovative problem solvers. We set goals and devise social structures and technologies to achieve them. The fact that we have created socio-technical means of creating better software through free ways in so many areas is a reflection of this ingenuity applied toward principles at the heart of FLOSS. We would be well served to remember that this is how FLOSS will win, not why.

Note: This essay has also been posted on Advogato.

A couple weeks ago, I gave a talk to all of the folks who received grants from the Knight Foundation as part of the Knight News Challenge. I gave a pretty basic "this is what free software and source are all about" with an emphasis on history, licenses, and community management. Knight asked me to give the talk because they require their grantees to release any software produced as part of the grant under a free/libre open source software (FLOSS) license but many of the grantees don't know much about FLOSS. Knight makes FLOSS a requirement because, as a charity committed to the promotion of the public good, they feel that they can better live up their own mission by ensuring that grant-funded code is released freely. The positive impact is already being seen. For example, as part of the requirement, we recently saw the release of the code behind Adrian Holovaty's wonderful EveryBlock.

Then last week, I heard from my friend Jean-Baptiste Soufron about two calls for grants (announcement is in French) by the French Government that will finance projects around Web 2.0 and serious gaming to the tune of 20 and 30 million Euros. One of the requirements of the grants: projects must be released as free software and built using open standards. I know that, in the past, the Open Society Initiative has gone out of its way to fund FLOSS projects as well.

It's exciting news but it also had me scratching my head. Why are funders dedicated to the public good --- groups like foundations and governments --- ever not making FLOSS a requirement of grants that involve software development?

One good way to ensure that grant-givers live up to their own obligations to improve the public good is to make sure that the products of their grants are, themselves, public goods. FLOSS is an easy way to make this happen. As in Knight's case, requiring FLOSS can also make it easier for funders to support work by for-profit companies while making it clear that the grant is not just free money to help enrich a commercial entity. Even if a company is doing the work, the product will remain under the control of its users as long its free.

I hope that these examples are the beginning of a trend. I look forward to the day when charities and governments take such requirements for granted.

At OSCON this year, I'm going to be giving a talk about "antifeatures." Antifeatures are a way to describe a particular practice made possible by locked down technologies. Antifeatures, as I describe them, are functionality (i.e., "features) that a technology developer will charge users not to include. You can read my short article on the topic published in the FSF bulletin in 2007 for a series of examples and a more in-depth description.

One thing I want to do is put together as large a collection of these antifeatures as possible before the talk. Please read the article if you haven't already and send me examples of other antifeatures either as a comment or in email to mako@atdot.cc. Credit and my deep gratitude will be given to anybody who sends me something. A prize in the form of a real Dutch flessenlikker will given to the best example I get.

Dafydd Harries pointed me to this announcement of a "Firewall Install" version of GitHub. Basically, it's a locally installed version of GitHub designed to serve those that, “wish to enjoy the benefits of GitHub, but are unable to do so because of corporate restrictions or laws that prevent you from hosting your code with a third-party service.”

Daf and I put a little time in writing up a short reflection which I've posed over on autonomo.us. Our key points are that this represents an important compromise in the rough direction of autonomy by an important cloud player and that, unexpectedly perhaps, it has been motivated by organizations under strong institutional pressures — groups like large firms and governments. Although it certainly makes sense that these players would be reluctant to “outsource” to centralized systems, we argue that these groups might provide an unlikely ally in at least part of the fight for autonomy.

I finally got around to pushing out a new version of AttachCheck --- a trivial little program I wrote several years ago that tries to prevent people from having to send followup emails with subjects that include phrases like, "REALLY attached this time," by asking you for confirmation when you send an email that says you've attached something when it looks like you haven't.

The release fixes a single bug that affected a few users --- thanks to Iain Murray who sent the patch in and apologies to him and others for taking a while to push it out.

There's very little to AttachCheck and, if I remember correctly, it was the very first program I wrote in Python. I'm only mentioning this revision because it's been quite a few years since I last mentioned the program and, while the script doesn't do much, it continues to save me a little embarrassment and effort every other week or so.

If you're interested in free software --- and free network services in particular --- and should try to join me in Boston for the weekend of March 21st and 22nd.

The FSF is organizing its annual members meeting again. This year the model is very different. For a start, the audience isn't limited to FSF members and the conference is not just about FSF projects and work.

Instead, the meeting has been rebranded LibrePlanet and has been broken up into a two-day event that is going to talk about and then try to tackle some of the biggest problems facing the world of free and open source software. Saturday March 21st will feature a series of talks about major issues facing free software. Sunday March 22nd will be focused on an unconference attempt to tackle and explore several of the key themes or tracks: network services, high priority projects, and the nascent LibrePlanet activism network.

I'll be focused on the track around free network services which I'm helping organize in part through Autonomo.us. For more information on that angle, please take a look at my blog post over at Autonomo.us. We're going to have a great group of people at the track and I'm excited by the idea that that we'll be able to make some real progress on the issues.

I encourage anyone who thinks they might be able to make it to consider doing so. There are details including travel, location, hotel information and much more on the event web page and wiki (login is required to RSVP). Please spread the word!

When I explain the importance of free software, I often use some variation of the following example:

Suppose I see a beautiful sunset and I want to describe it to a loved one on the other side of the world. Today's communication technology makes this possible. In the process, however, the technology in question puts constraints on message communicated. For example, if I pick up my cellphone, my description of the sunset will be limited to words and sounds that can be transmitted by phone. If I happen to have a camera phone and the ability to send a picture message, I will be able to communicate a very different type of description. If I'm limited to 150 characters in an SMS message, my message will be constrained differently again.

The point of the example is this: the technology I use to communicate puts limits and constraints on my communication. Technology defines what I can say, how I can say it, when I can say it, and even who I can say it to.

This is neither good nor bad. It is simply the nature of technology. But it means that those who control our technology control us, to some degree. As information technology becomes increasingly central to our lives, the way we experience, understand, and act in the world is increasingly controlled by technology and, by extension, by those who control technology.

I believe that the single most important struggle for freedom in the twenty first century is over the question of who will set these terms. Who will control the technology that controls our lives?

Free software can be understood as an answer to this question: An answer in the form of an unambiguous statement that technology must be under the control of its users. When free software triumphs, we will live in a world where users control their technological destiny. We simply cannot afford to fail.

The Free Software Foundation is the most important organization fighting for the rights of users in this struggle. Here are some of the ways that I plan to direct the FSF to support software freedom in the coming year:

Network Services

Last year, the FSF organized a meeting on software freedom and network services that lead to the creation of the Autonomo.us group and the release of the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. As network services --- like those built by Facebook, Google, and others --- continue rise in popularity, progress in this conversation is of increasing importance.

This year, I will direct the FSF to build on the work of Autonomo.us to launch the first of what I hope will be several FSF position statements on software freedom and network services. More importantly, the FSF will begin to provide support and planning for solutions --- technologies, social campaigns, and legal steps --- that will protect computer users whose freedom is currently threatened by network services.

Enforcing free software licenses

Early on, people who decided to work on free software did so because they agreed with --- or, at the very least, were willing to abide by --- the principles and rules laid out in our licenses. In our push for software freedom, we have created software of immense value and attracted companies and individuals to our community who are less willing, or simply less interested, in protecting users' freedom.

In December 2008, the FSF went to court for the first time in the organization's history to force Cisco to uphold the freedom of the users of FSF copyrighted software. This lawsuit asks Cisco to live up to its obligations under the GPL and to ensure that it does so in the future. The FSF needs the support of its community in this and in future enforcement actions.

The FSF has operated a compliance lab for several years and has ensured software freedom for countless users. As free software becomes more successful in the next year, the FSF will be playing an increased role in protecting software freedom from those who do not share its principles.

Continuing the fight against software patents

As I said last year, one cannot write non-trivial software today without running a serious risk of infringing patents. The software patent minefield we've found ourselves in is a very fundamental threat to the success of free software and we've already begun to see the first casualties and costs. We must eliminate software patents. Now. The FSF will continue its work toward this end.

The FSF's End Software Patents project's major contribution this year was a brief submitted in the In Re Bilski case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Recently, an opinion was issued which seems to mark an important shift away from broad protection for software patents. With this victory, now is the time to keep up this momentum. The FSF is drawing up a strategy to do just this and will be announcing the relaunch of its campaign on February 9,2009 led by Ciaran O'Riordan.

Every recent fundraising appeal seems to mention the difficult economic climate and it seems to cliche to do so here. That said, the effect of a bad economy is, in fact, felt most strongly in non-profits dependent on donations. The FSF is not immune.

The FSF's work is essential for success on the issues I've described here and on all of its other campaigns and projects. Although the cost of a membership or donation may be less easy to afford this year for many of you, the free software movement cannot afford a weakened FSF at this important moment.

If you are not an FSF associate member, now is the time to become one. If you are already a member, please join me in giving generously through a tax-deductible donation. The FSF is a very lean, very humble organization of passionate and dedicated individuals working tirelessly for software freedom. Every single gift makes a difference.

Over two years ago, the FSF started its BadVista campaign with the goal of educating the public on problems related to software freedom, DRM, and more, with Microsoft's latest operating system. Today, the FSF is declaring victory; the name "Vista" is synonymous in the public eye with failure.

The real credit, I suppose, should go to Microsoft. Vista's design put the desires of big media companies, software companies, and Microsoft itself ahead of the desires of users. Vista defeated itself.

But the FSF's campaign drew a huge amount attention to the problems with Vista --- especially early on --- and provided a central location aggregating and amplifying criticism of Vista. In doing so, the FSF played an important role in helping the whole process along and in balancing this criticism with a more positive message about free software alternatives.

Gratitude is due to the FSF staff, members, and supports who made BadVista a success. Please read the announcement, Digg the article, support the FSF, and follow its other work in its other campaigns so that all the FSF's work can be as successful as BadVista.

I was thrilled to be part of a successful Debian bug squashing party organized by MIT's Student Information Processing Board on December 13th. Greg Price, who helped organize the event, did a wonderful write up which he sent to the debian-devel email list.

I though it was worth mentioning the BSP now because I think it's a wonderful model that I'd love to see replicated in Debian and beyond. The event was initiated, organized, run, and executed by people with little or no direct experience with the project. While the organizers went out of their way to recruit several Debian developers and other experts to the party, these experts' role was more in answering questions and helping others. The the majority of the participants -- around 30 of them in total -- had no previous experience doing Debian development.

While the 11 bugs closed or dealt with are the most visible outcome, I'm not sure that it is the most important. The event acted as an important learning experience for everyone involved and, perhaps most centrally, an important first step for most participants from using free software to giving back and participating in the community.

You don't need experience, connections, or a @project.org email address to organize a party like this for Debian or your own free software project. All you really need is a few people, some technical knowledge, an Internet connection, and the desire to make it happen.

Other things can help, of course. In particular, the SIPB folks have packaged up some scripts they used to select bugs to work on and put them online.

I spent more time than I would like to admit massaging the process that ultimately led to the release of the the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 (GFDL) by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Hours counted, it was probably one of my biggest personal projects this year.

The effect is to allow wikis under the GFDL to migrate to the Creative Commons BY-SA license or, as Wikimedia's Erik Möller has proposed, to some sort of dual-license arrangement.

There are many reasons for this change but the most important is that the move reduces very real barriers to collaboration between wikis and free culture projects due to license compatibility. BY-SA has become the GPL of the free culture world and Wikimedia wikis were basically locked out from sharing with a larger community, and vice-versa; projects will no longer have to choose between sharing with Wikipedia and sharing with essentially everyone else. The GFDL has done a wonderful job of helping get Wikimedia projects to where they are today and Möller's proposed switch seems, in my opinion, the best option to continue that work going forward.

The FSF gets a lot of credit (and a lot of flack) for what it does. Offering to "let go" of Wikipedia -- without question the crown jewel of the free culture world -- represents a real relinquishing of a type of political control and power for the FSF. Doing so was not done lightly. But giving communities the choice to increase compatibility and collaboration by switching to a fundamentally similar license was and is, in my opinion, the right thing to do.

Everyone who has worked hard to make this happen deserves the free culture movement's thanks. This list includes Richard Stallman, Brett Smith and Peter Brown of the FSF; James Vasile and Eben Moglen of the SFLC; Erik Möller, Mike Godwin and Shunling Chen of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The FSF in general, and RMS in particular, deserves a huge amount of credit for what it has decided to not do in this case and for giving up control in a way that was responsible and accountable to its principles and to GFDL authors and in the interest of free culture movement more generally. It has not been easy or quick. If you support or appreciate work like this, please support the FSF and express this while doing so. Doing so is an important way to support these essential and almost inherently underappreciated efforts.

For those that are curious as to I've been up to recently, you might be interested to read this portrait of Eric von Hippel on Linux.com. The article mentions that I'm currently studying with von Hippel in my own effort to try to help build a more evidence-based understanding of how free software works and explore some of the ways I might help it work better.

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!

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!

I took a little time today to make a new release of the Free Software Project Management HOWTO. Nearly eight years after I wrote it, much of the document is out of date or has been replaced with better, more comprehensive write-ups. In particular, I think Karl Fogel's book, Producing Open Source Software says everything insightful I say in the HOWTO, a whole lot clearly -- plus adds a lot I missed.

That said, my HOWTO is short and is apparently still useful to folks. I updated it to include links to a new German translation courtesy to Robert F. Schmitt, to fix a bunch of links that time broke, and to address a few obvious mistakes that readers have pointed out.

Thinking about the documents' future, I'm happy to release it under Creative Commons BY-SA in addition to GFDL and would love to help out on a wiki book project to merge a few of related efforts into a comprehensive wiki reference work.

I watched Citizen Kane several weeks ago and was shocked to learn that the major villian in the film is a political boss named Jim Gettys. Of course, a real Jim Gettys is a well known X Window System contributor who is currently working at an OLPC manager.

Last night someone reminded me that OLPC's new President and COO -- who I'd always just thought of as Chuck -- is named Charles Kane!

Here's a short clip from a video of the fictional Charles Kane giving a rather long speech decrying the fictional Jim Gettys! (Also in Ogg.)

I haven't been this amused since I learned that the head villian in the cartoon Jem was named Eric Raymond!

One thing that has always annoyed me about most wiki is the way they handle images. MediaWiki, like most wikis, allows users to upload images and embed pictures. However, if you want to change an image, you need to download the file, open it up in GIMP, Inkscape, or Photoshop, edit it, save it, and re-upload it. Somewhere in this long process, the ease of editing that makes wikis so wonderful gets lost. Basically, I'm annoyed because images in wikis aren't very "wiki."

I had a talk with Brianna Laugher at Wikimania about ways to make it easier to folks to edit pictures from within the browser -- even if it is only simple stuff. Yesterday I took the afternoon to write a new MediaWiki extension which gives a working example of in-browser image editing. It provides the ability to crop images using David Spurr's wonderful Javascript cropping user interface and uses ImageMagick to do the actual image manipulation.

It is in the form of an extension to Mediawiki I've called EditImage. It's an afternoon hack from an under-qualified PHP hacker so it's nothing special. You can read it about on its page in the Mediawiki wiki and you can try it out on my personal wiki where I have it installed.

I'm certainly not the first person to think about doing this. In fact, some old pages in the MediaWiki wiki imply that I'm not even the first person to play around with the idea of using Spurr's code to do image cropping for MediaWiki. Hopefully though, my code can act as a nice first step and a framework for folks wanting to add additional image manipulation features. For example, I think it would be quick to add the ability to do in-browser brightness and contrast manipulation and I would love to see this in a future version of the extension.

I'm in Portland, Oregon for the week where I'll be at OSCON. I'll be giving two talks on the final day of the conference (July 25): the first will be a 15 minute keynote on Revealing Errors at 8:45 in the Portland Ballroom; the second is a full-length normal talk on Selectricity at 11:35AM in Portland 255. It will be my first long-form talk about Selectricity and I'm looking forward to it.

Because myself, a few Free Software Foundation staff members including Campaign Manager Joshua Gay, and quite a few FSF associate members will be in town, we're going to hold a small FSF Associate Members event in Portland (the first outside Boston!). It's going to be in the form of a pizza party with a few small talks from FSF folk including myself. Here are the details:

FSF Associate Members (& friends!) Event

July 22nd 6:30-9:00PM

Old Town Pizza

226 NW Davis St

Portland, OR 97209

It's free and open to all but is designed to provide a forum for members and friends. If you are an FSF member, please consider coming. If you're not a member yet, please don't let it keep you away; staff will be able to sign up new members there. RSVPs to Deborah Nicholson aren't necessary to attend but would be welcome.

I'll be heading to Seattle right after the conference for a few days. If you would like to meet up in Seattle or Portland this week, please don't hesitate to get in contact.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking -- and a bit of talking -- about what software freedom means in the context of network services. I gave a talk on this subject at the most recent FSF members meeting and at Sun's Community One. In a few days, I'll be giving another at Wikimania in Alexandria, Egypt.

A few months ago, I worked with the FSF to organize a meeting of free software hackers and scholars to talk about the issues. Today, that group is announcing the first two concrete results of that project.

The first is a blog and a wiki called autonomo.us. The project aims to provide a space to continue, expand, and open up the work that was done at the FSF in March. Our aim is to explore the implications and responses to network services in relation to software. We're going to do that by continuing to take notes in the wiki and by publishing articles, essays, and documents that help inform the discussion about software freedom and network policies. We will be working independently from, but closely with, the Free Software Foundation, and with others in the free and open source software communities. Our goal is not to set policy, but to explore the space and inform the discussion about autonomy and user freedom in cloud computing and software as a service.

The second announcement is the first concrete product of autonomo.us's work: a statement we're calling the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. It lays out our initial consensus on positive steps that developers, service providers, and users can take.

If you want to follow our work, please subscribe to the autonomo.us blog and check out some of our work so far. If you've got thoughts and things to contribute, you can mail or get to work in our wiki. You can read our about page for more information about us and our goals.

In a coordinated move, the Open Knowledge Foundation (which I help advise) is launching the 1.0 version of their Open Software Service Definition.

There is a whole lot we need to learn, think through, and do before we have reasonable answers to the problems to freedom posed by network services. Today marks the beginning of several wonderful steps toward some of these answers.

Another year has past and another edition of the Official Ubuntu Book has been finished and will be released soon. Over the last two years, the two previous editions of the book have grown along-side Ubuntu. The book has continued to sell very well, received almost universally favorable reviews, and been translated into more than half a dozen languages

While Jono Bacon has mostly been pulled into other projects, Corey Burger stepped up to help play the major supporting role in this version of the book's production. The whole text was updated to reflect changes in Ubuntu over the last year including a major rewrite of the chapter on Kubuntu and important work on the Edubuntu chapter. If you use either, you'll understand that there's plenty of churn to report.

In a sort of experiment, Barnes and Noble will also be selling a custom edition with an extra chapter by Matthew Helmke on the Ubuntu Forums which I hope to include in the next edition of the book. It's an excellent introduction to the best support resource Ubuntu has to offer that I hope many beginners -- the group that always been the book's audience -- will find useful.

You can pre-order the custom edition from B&N or get the book from Amazon or many other sources.

Like all previous editions, the book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license and soft-copies should be up on the publisher's website once the book is released. Please support commercial free culture publishing by buying a copy if you find the book useful.

Over the past couple months, I gave a couple talks on Revealing Errors -- my project to try and use errors to teach non-technical people about technology, the effects it has on our lives, and the ways in which we (as users) might want to control it.

The first version was at LUG Radio Live USA and went off reasonably well. A couple weeks later, I gave a version of the talk again at PenguiCon which went great. Unfortunately, neither recording seems to have worked out.

I'll be giving talks on the subject at least twice more this summer. The first will be on June 18th at Boston Linux Unix at 19:00 at MIT in E51-315. It will be my first talk to BLU in something like three years. I'm also currently scheduled to give an abbreviated version of the talk as a keynote at OSCON under the title Advocating Software Freedom by Revealing Errors.

In addition to all that, I'm having a whole lot of fun updating the Revealing Errors blog (although not as often as I'd like) and am currently in discussions about publishing a longer version of the Revealing Errors article as a book chapter at some point in the next year.

Thanks to everybody who has been supportive of the project and read the blog, has told their friends, and who has told me about telling technological errors they've seen around. Please keep it up!

In the last week, Nicholas Negroponte gave this unfortunate interview decrying "open source fundamentalism" and hinting the possibility of a warmer relationship with Microsoft. Predictably, this has elicited an ongoing response by OLPC News and on the OLPC development mailing lists.

Just a few days before Negroponte's statements hit the press, I gave a talk at Penguicon called Laptop Liberation where I talked about why I thought that OLPC's use of a free software operating system and embrace of free software principles was essential for the initiative's success and its own goals of education reform and empowerment. I've been saying similar things for some time.

My main point boiled down to something that, appropriately enough, Nicholas Negroponte was fond of saying back when the project was still called the $100 laptop: an extremely cheap laptop is not a matter of if, but of when and how. This technology will define the terms on which students communicate, collaborate, create, and learn. These terms are dictated by those with the ability to change the software -- by those with access to computers, the source necessary to make changes, and the freedom to share and collaborate.

Constructionism -- OLPC's educational philosophy -- is about putting powerful tools and control over those tools into the hands of learners. It is about learning through exploration and creation -- about shaping one's own educational environment. Constructionist principles bear no small similarity to free software principles. Indeed, OLPC's stated commitment to free software did not happen by accident. OLPC convincingly argued that a free system was essential for creating a learning environment that could be used, tweaked, reinvented, and reapplied by its young users. Through these processes, the XO becomes a force for learning about computation and an environment through which children and their communities can use technology on their terms and in ways that are appropriate and self-directed.

We know that laptop recipients will benefit from being able to fix, improve, and translate the software on their laptops into their own languages and contexts. Much more importantly, however, are all of the uses for the laptops that OLPC has not -- and can not -- think up. OLPC is a powerful tool for learning, but ultimate power is only in the hands of those that can freely use, change, and collaborate in defining the terms of their learning environments. In its commitment to software freedom, OLPC chose not to be arrogant by assuming that it knows how its users will use their laptops. Flexible environments designed for constructionist learning and a free software platform protect against this arrogance.

Constructionism and free software, implemented and taught in a classroom, offer a profound potential for exploration, creation, and learning. If you don't like something, change it. If something doesn't work right, fix it. Free software and constructionism put learners in charge of their educational environment in the most explicit and important way possible. They create a culture of empowerment. Creation, collaboration, and critical engagement becomes the norm.

OLPC does not get to choose if educational technology happens. If we work hard at it though we might get to influence the "how" and the "who." Proprietary software vendors like Microsoft want the "who" to be them. With free software, users can be in power. What's at stake is nothing less than autonomy. We can help foster a world where technology is under the control of its users, and where learning is under the terms of its students -- a world where every laptop owner has freedom through control over the technology they use to communicate, collaborate, create, and learn.

This, to me, is the promise of OLPC and its mission. It is the reason I've been involved and in support of the project since nearly day one. It is the reason I left Canonical and Ubuntu to come back to school at MIT to be closer to the then nascent unincorporated project. It is the reason that OLPC's embrace of constructionist philosophy is so deeply important to its mission and the reason that its mission needs to continue to be executed with free and open source software. It is why OLPC needs to be uncompromising about software freedom.

As an adviser and sometimes contractor to OLPC, OLPC does not need to listen to me. But I hope, for all our sake, that they do.

Update: Richard Stallman and the FSF have published another essay on the same topic focused more on pure free software (i.e., less education specific) objections.

In the last leg of what has been marathon traveling over the last two months, I'm going to be heading back to San Francisco to give two talks at CommunityOne.

CommunityOne is a new one-day conference that Sun is putting on -- along side it's massive JavaOne conference -- that focuses on free software, open source, and non-Sun projects.

I'm going to be there talking about free software and free culture. I will be giving updated versions of the two talks that I have at the FSF members meetings over first two years. In the first talk, I'll be making the case for a strong free culture movement and in the second I'll be talking about liberating network services.

If you will be at the conference, or just in the Bay area, and would like to meet up, I'll be in the area for most of a week and would love to arrange something. Just get in contact.

I've been on the road quite a bit lately. During my manic travel, I have been rather lax about blogging many of my recent talks.

After a talk at CHI in Florence on the 7th and a talk at LUG Radio Live USA last Sunday, I'm in Troy, Michigan for Penguicon. It's an incredible combination of a science fiction and a free software/open source conference and it's a huge amount of fun.

This morning I gave my Laptop Liberation talk and tonight I'll be helping judge the Open Source-ry Masquerade costume contest -- the very contest were Tron Guy premiered his now famous costume!

Tomorrow I'll be giving my Revealing Errors talk which I premiered last Sunday at the LUG Radio event and which I'm really excited about. If you're around and at the event please find me and introduce yourself! If you're in the area, I may have some free time tomorrow night. Don't hesitate to get in contact.

I wrote an essay several years ago called The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth: My Story of Unlearning. It's buried on my website but still manages to attract a consistent stream of readers.

It's essentially the story of how I became a geek, about school, ADD, and free software. It is by far the most personal thing I've ever published. That said, several people have told me that it's influenced them deeply -- changed their views, politics and attitudes in important ways.

In December, my friend Marcell asked me to give a version of the talk as part of his G33koskop series. I was hesitant to give such a personal talk but I did it anyway. I've finally got around to cleaning up the recording and have posted it online. You can download and listen to the talk here in Ogg Vorbis or here in MP3).

My partner Mika is doing a research project on geek nutrition. In addition to being a geek herself, she's got degrees in human nutrition and public health. She works at Harvard School of Public Health. So she seems pretty qualified and I'm looking forward to the results.

She's trying to get a little bit of data on the food culture and eating habits of GNU/Linux's users and developers. If you can take a couple minutes to fill out a survey, it would be very helpful to her. The survey is anonymous and only takes results from the first 100 people. Analyzed anonymous results will posted publicly. Comments should be sent to 5colorsaday@gmail.com. The survey took me under 3 minutes to fill out.

The survey itself is online here.

Mika will present initial results and analysis on her blog and at Penguicon which both of us will be attending.

I'm in Amherst, Massachusetts from now until Friday visiting my alma mater. I'll be giving a redux of my "Laptop Liberation" talk today (March 12) at 12:15 in Adele Simmons Hall for anyone that is around and wants to come. The talk is about free software and OLPC.

I'll be around and speaking to several classes at Hampshire College this week. If you're around Amherst and want to meet up, don't hesitate to get in touch.

It's very short notice but I'm giving a talk tonight (2008-03-03) at the Joan Jonas Performance Hall at the MIT Visual Arts Program. It's rather last minute.

I'll be talking along with Mark Tribe as part of a series called Zones of Emergency. I'll be speaking a bit about free and open source software and why it's particularly important in the context of emergencies. Think Sahana. There's more information about the talk online here.

Last week, the Free Software Foundation announced an important new initiative called End Software Patents whose goals are pretty evident from the project's name. So far, the initiative is backed by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center.

There are several organizations who are taking on specific bad patents but ESP is unique in that it is activitely working toward the abolition of software patents in the United States. While the organization is focused on work in the US, it's deeply important globally -- much of the world's patent law is "exported" from the US.

The FSF is stretching extremely limited resources in backing ESP to help it get off the ground because we believe two things:

• First, software patents are a fundamental threat to free and open source software (but not just to free and open source software). The FSF must oppose software patents because they provide a fundamental threat to free software's continued success. That sounds like hyperbole but is unfortunately not.
• Second, we can win this fight. For a whole set of reasons, the successful abolition of software patents is a goal that, while extremely ambitious, is also within grasp. These issues, of course, are much bigger than free software. Companies spend billions of dollars in litigation over software patents that are not novel and that should not exist. ESP can reach out farther than the FSF alone and build a coalition that can destroy software patents for the good of much more than the free software community.

Please read the new ESP report on the state of software patents written by the ESP Executive Director Ben Klemens to understand why we are optimistic. And please, support ESP financially in this fight. ESP's continued work is not ensured past the immediate future. Your support will help endow a bright future for the next generation of software developers and users.

Today, I orphaned AUB -- my very first Debian package and the first free software project whose maintenance I took over. I had been helping and doing work in Debian and the free software community for some time but AUB was the first package I uploaded into Debian with my own name in the maintainer field and with my key in the Debian keyring.

AUB is a program for working with Usenet binaries. As late as 2002 perhaps, it was a pretty useful tool for a variety of things. Today, however, it doesn't seem to be useful for much more than indiscriminately downloading large amounts of porn and spam. The software is crusty and written in Perl 4 which, today, seems almost unforgivable. Like Usenet, AUB's day has come and gone.

During my maintenance of the package, I ended up taking over upstream development and writing and integrating quite a few new features and patches. In fact, there still seem to be a few users! Unfortunately, I am not one them and I officially gave up on upstream maintenance a few months ago and contacted the submitters of all pending bug reports. Today I'm orphaning the Debian package and completely letting go.

None of this is particularly noteworthy, I suppose. If AUB was ever important, it hasn't been for a long time. I think its worth mentioning because it's symbolic of the completion of the life cycle of a free software project that was important in my own growth. Languages, the world, and even I have moved on. In the process, I've grown hugely as a developer, programmer, and free software activist and advocate. Minor as it be, AUB played an important role in this whole process.

If you are interested in taking over AUB, please let me know. Otherwise, I'm just as happy to let it disappear.

On Saturday February 9th, at 13:00, I'm going to be joining free software and anti-DRM activists to protest the use of DRM by the Boston Public Library on parts of its electronic collection.

Those of us protesting are unhappy because the BPL has launched a new service powered by a company called OverDrive. The system gives BPL patrons access to books, music, and movies online -- but only if they use a Microsoft DRM system.

There are lots of problems with the introduction of this system: it bars access to users of GNU/Linux and MacOS and creates a dependence on a single technology vendor for access. These are important issues, certainly. The worst problem, however, is much more fundamental.

By adopting a DRM system for library content, the BPL is giving OverDrive, copyright holders, and Microsoft the ability to decide what, when, and how its patrons can and cannot read, listen, and watch these parts of the BPL collection. They are giving these companies veto power over the BPL's own ability to access this data -- both now and in the future. Cryptographically, BPL is quite literally handing over the keys to their collection. In the process, they are not only providing a disservice to their patrons. They are providing a disservice to themselves.

The first-sale doctrine says that libraries can do essentially whatever they like with copies of books they purchase short of duplication, modification, or performance. Of course, copyright holders would prefer to charge a toll every time someone checks out a book. Public libraries were possible in spite of this desire because they were able to exploit power over the possession and control of their books in the interests of their patrons. With DRM, libraries will reduced to powerlessness.

Of course, times have changed. As media and the ways we interact with it is increasingly digital, libraries have changed and will need to change more. But if public libraries are to succeed at their fundamental mission of spreading knowledge and serving communities, this change can't be at the expense of patrons' ability to control their own technology and libraries' ability to control their own collections.

I've supported my academic library, MIT Libraries, as they took a risk and stood up to DRM when other institutions did not. And they won.

BPL is the largest municipal library in the US and the third largest US library overall. It is the first library to be supported publicly, to be open to the public in the US, and to allow patrons to take home books to read and use them. BPL has an opportunity now to continue this history of leadership, of access, and of patron empowerment.

If BPL stands up against DRM and in favor of its patrons' freedom and its own control of its technical destiny and collection, it may set an important precedent. If you're in or near Boston, please join me in Copley Square on Saturday to help make this happen. If you're not near Boston, please help put pressure on similar efforts in your own communities.

As I mentioned I would a month or so ago, I attended a workshop on Computing in the Cloud organized by Ed Felton's Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. The conference aimed to discuss the policy issues that are raised by the shift from computing on machines we own and have direct control over to computing on servers owned by others. Think Google, Facebook, MySpace, and that lot.

I talked about what all this might mean for free software and for open source and our communities, a bit about the AGPL, and discussed some ideas of how might proceed as a community. Princeton has been organized enough to post audio and video of the whole conference, including recordings of my talk, in a variety of formats and qualities (although unfortunately not in Vorbis and Theora).

As I said in my FSF membership appeal last month, I think complications raised by "cloud computing" are one of the most important sets of challenges facing free software this year.

In the "bits from the Planet Debian maintainer" department...

Steve Kemp has been running a little index and search script for Planet Debian for a couple years now that lets you search for old entries that have showed up on Planet Debian. He was going to take his system offline but, since it was in use by a variety of people, he opted to move it into the default Planet Debian instead.

You should be able to see and use the search box in the sidebar on Planet Debian now. Feedback is welcome, I'm sure. Thanks to Steve for the fantastic addition to our aggregator.

I'm going to be giving a reprise of the Laptop Liberation talk I gave at Cornell University in November at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in the Kansai region of Japan on January 7th. If you around, please feel free to show up. If you are in Osaka, Kyoto or Nara and would like to have lunch or dinner, please email me and we can try to arrange something.

Details on the talk is online here in English and Japanese (thanks Mika!) although the talk itself will be in English.

On January 15th, I'm going to be giving a talk on a panel at the Computing in the Cloud conference held by Ed Felton's Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. The conference description says:

“Computing in the cloud” is one name for services that run in a Web browser and store information in a provider’s data center — ranging from adaptations of familiar tools such as email and personal finance to new offerings such as virtual worlds and social networks. This workshop will bring together experts from computer science, law, politics and industry to explore the social and policy implications of this trend.

I'm going to talk about the AGPL 3.0, why it's important that we put effort into figuring out what freedom for different technologies means, and what the components of freedom for web services might be.

Registration is free and bags you a name-tag and lunch.

Worth noting perhaps, the conference is sponsored by Microsoft.

Sun's Barton George just published an audio interview he did with me a few months ago at FOSSCamp.

We talked mostly about my joining the FSF this past year, what it means for myself and the organization, and how I got there. Check it out!

It's an end of year tradition for non-profit organizations to do big fund-raising and membership pushes. As I mentioned several days ago, I am personally giving to two organizations this year: the Wikimedia Foundation and the Free Software Foundation.

The FSF has a goal of 500 associate members by year-end and it's an important goal that will sustain the foundation's activities. While membership dues keep the lights on, the fact that the foundation has a robust and growing membership is equally, if not more, important.

FSF executive director Peter Brown put an appeal online in both video and text versions. In it, he lays out some of the most important issues for the next year. You should watch the video version in OGG Theora or this YouTube version (requires Gnash or non-free Flash). The appeal briefly lays out the FSF's plans for next year. My partner Mika Matsuzaki and my friend Oliver Day shot and edited the video. Please pass the link around to those you feel might be interested.

Here's my appeal:

Now is the time to join and give to Free Software Foundation. 2008 is going to be extraordinarily important year for free software.

Eben Moglen likes to quote Gandhi's "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" progression when describing the free software movement. As I pointed out when I joined the FSF board, we're beginning to see powerful interests fighting free software. It's going to increase in the next few years. Things will probably get a lot uglier for free software before they get better. We can win but things are far from settled. The FSF is the front-line organization in this fight and we need a robust and proactive foundation, and an active and involved membership, if we're going to win.

Here are the issues that I'm going to pushing the FSF to pursue in the next year.

Expanding activism outside our traditional technologist communities:

In part through the work of projects like Defective By Design, we've seen the tide turn for DRM on music in what what may be the FSF's greatest success last year. I'm going to push the FSF to continue the campaign to attack DRM for video, eBooks, and the other places it is cropping up.

The most remarkable thing to me about Defective By Design is that its participants and supporters are not, for the most part, people who develop or use GNU/Linux or even know what GNU is! If advocacy for software freedom involves a conversation we can only have with people who understand what POSIX is and how one uses it, we've already lost. Through DbD, BadVista, and other projects, the FSF has made major strides in the last year. It need to do much more and needs your support to do so.

Get proactive about software patents:

As a community, we've had our head in the sand about software patents for far too long. There are companies and patent trolls sitting on massive, growing piles of software patents. They are not our friends and they do not mean us well.

One cannot write non-trivial software today without running a serious risk of infringing patents. The software patents minefield we've found ourselves in is a very fundamental threat to the success of free software and we've already begun to see the first casualties and costs. We must eliminate software patents. Now.

The US is very important in this fight (much patent law is "exported" from the US) and almost no organization is working on software patent elimination there. Not enough people are thinking and acting strategically on this issue. The FSF is planning to make major steps in this fight in the coming year and we need your support to do so.

Web services and the changing face of software:

This last year, I worked to help launch the new version the AGPLv3. The license addresses the role of copyleft for software like web-services which, due to the legal particulars of the GPL, did not extend to the purveyors of web services. Of course, access to source code does not make the users of all web-services free (e.g., the GMails and the Facebooks).

Nobody seems to know what freedom for webserver entails. There might not even be good answers. In the next year, I'm going to push the FSF to help start several conversation and to begin to follow up on what I think was an important first step with the AGPLv3. While this is not a major organizational priority yet, it's a major action item that I will be pursuing through the FSF. If you feel strongly about this issue, whatever your position, become a member, stay involved as these projects develop, and have your voice be heard. We don't know the answers yet and we need your input as much as we need your action.

Please, support the FSF in the efforts listed above, and in others, by giving generously.

If you're not a member, please join the FSF as an associate member. If you are already a member, please consider making a tax-deductible donation. The FSF is a very lean, very humble organization of passionate and dedicated individuals working tirelessly for software freedom. Every little bit helps.

Members pays USD $120 ($10/month) and student members pay half that. FSF has members across the world -- where a weak dollar often makes it even cheaper. Member support and participation builds capacity and credibility for the foundation and keep the organization responsible, responsive, and in tune with our community.

The FSF's fall members bulletin is out. For it, I spent some time refining the blogpost I recently wrote on antifeatures into an article. I got a whole lot of feedback last time (Thanks!), most of which criticized my choice of examples. I've structured this version around different, and I hope less controversial, examples.

Please read the new article and leave comments here, especially if you criticized the old one.

The bulletin also includes two pieces introducing a campaign against software patents that the FSF plans to launch early next year and a discussion of the AGPL by Brett Smith. This bulletin hints at what I think are the big issues that the FSF plans to take on next year: software patents, web services, and creative new takes on the free software message that are designed to resonant beyond our historically very technical community of hackers. I'll write more on this in the next week or so. To support this mission, and to receive future copies of the bulletin directly, please consider becoming an associate member today during the FSF's year-end members drive.

I've posted an an article on my website called Free Culture Advanced which I wrote for the last edition of the Free Software Foundation Members' Bulletin which went out several months ago. The bulletin is one of things you get when you become an associate member of the FSF.

The article makes the case for free culture and a freedom definition in terms that are directed to and I hope will resonate with folks from the free software community. I've posted versions of the article in HTML, PDF, and LaTeX.

The Free Software Foundation sent out a press release today announcing a new addition to the FSF stable of licenses: the Affero General Public License or AGPL. The FSF has also published a set of answers to anticipated questions in the GPL FAQ.

The first paragraph of the release explains what the AGPL is:

This is a new license; it is based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3), but has an additional term to ensure that users who interact with the licensed software over a network can receive the source for that program. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to begin fostering user and development communities around free software web services and other network-oriented software.

The GPL is designed to ensure that users of software have access to the source code -- source is prerequisite to freedom and to the type of collaboration that has made free software successful. However, the GPL doesn't say "users" when it talks about who gets freedom; instead, it references people to whom the software is distributed. It doesn't say users for two reasons. The first is that, under copyright, "distribution" is a much more meaningful term and a powerful hook than "use" which is not, in most cases, one of the copyright holder's exclusive rights. The second is that, until very recently, having a copy of software was prerequisite to using it; possession was prerequisite to use.

Things have changed. A large part of many people's computing experience involves running web applications. These include email clients (e.g., GMail or other webmails), office applications (e.g., Google Docs), social network systems, and others. These applications all run on servers -- i.e., on other people's computers. The providers of these services, the Googles and the FaceBooks, build upon, modify and improve GPL software without giving back to their users or the community that they took their software from.

The AGPL was created several years ago by FSF board member Henri Poole as a way to address this issue. The license took the form of the GPLv2 with one extra clause. It was a first stab at a license and was imperfect. The language and methods were clunky and, most problematically, the license was incompatible with software under the GPL.

The new AGPL is based on the GPLv3 and the extra clause has been rethought and rewritten. It has been vetted using the GPLv3 comment process and dozens of insightful comments from dozens of lawyers, hackers, and users of free software have been incorporated. The new license fixes the issues that many folks -- including myself -- had with the first version of the license. More importantly it can now be linked to GPLv3 code which makes the license a whole lot more practical.

I am quoted in the release being excited about the license and I really am. I've got 2-3 major development projects (including Selectricity) which I've been waiting to distribute so that I could do so under the AGPLv3.

The AGPL isn't a complete answer to the problem faced by disempowered users of web services. Without data or the capacity (in terms of servers, money, and expertise) to run web applications, the state and quality of these users' freedom remains far from clear. Thankfully, there are a whole bunch of folks thinking about what freedom for users of services might be -- it's a conversation that I'm going to push the FSF to participate in and pursue moving forward. The AGPLv3 marks a first solid contribution to the process of answering that question. If you'd like to help supporting or assisting the FSF in this effort, please consider becoming an associate member or donating.

Yesterday, when I posted the list of talks that I'll be giving this week, I forgot to mention that I will be giving a Cluedump at MIT tonight organized by SIPB. It will be in the form of a simple hands-on workshop to teach folks how make Debian or Ubuntu packages. The session is not aimed at teaching folks to make policy compliant packages or how to pass Debian's NM process but rather to be more of an, "Everything a Sysadmin Needs to Know about Debian and Ubuntu Packages," style introduction.

The talk is tonight, November 12, 2007, at 20:30 at MIT in room 56-114. Feel free to read the longer description and to show up if you're interested.

The Ubuntu Code of Conduct is probably the most widely read document I've written. Agreement to it is prerequisite to participation in the Ubuntu community in all official and many unofficial capacities. It is has successfully set a positive tone and helped turn Ubuntu into what is probably the most friendly and civil free software project I've worked in.

Over time, quite a few free software projects have copied or adapted the CoC. Tired of giving folks permission, the project went ahead and licensed the CoC under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license to explicitly allow reuse as long as attribution to the Ubuntu project is given and derivatives are similarly modifiable.

In a recent development, it was adapted by the Fort Erie, Ontario town council for use government interactions of their business improvement areas! It's amazing to see the document gain so much traction! Unfortunately, the person who repurposed the CoC did not attribute the document correctly and was publicly accused of plagiarism by another council member!

Ubuntu is happy to have Fort Erie, and anyone else, use or adapt the CoC. Folks should just take care to be honest about where it came from and maintain the BY-SA license.

I'll be in New York State for the second half of this coming week. On Thursday, I'll be in New York City giving a talk as part of a interdisciplinary colloquium discussing free software and structured around Decoding Liberation, the recent book by Brooklyn College professors Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter. The talk will be Thursday, November 15, 2007 between 10:50 and 13:30 in the Glenwood Lounge in the Brooklyn College student center. See this flier for details.

I'll be heading straight to Ithaca where I'll give a talk the next day at Cornell for the Code Review student group. My talk will try to introduce and discuss free software issues in the context of the OLPC project. The talk will be on Friday November 16th at 17:00 in Rockefeller 115. There's some more details on the Code Review website.

Folks should feel free to attend either event.

I'll be leaving soon after on a bit of a Balkan tour being organized by some of my friends from mi2 and will be spending a couple weeks in or based out of Zagreb. The details are still being ironed out but I'll be sure to post them here once I know dates, places, and times.

I've written a short essay about anti-features. An anti-feature, I argue, is functionality that technology producers charge you to turn off. Apple's new, "pay-more to get DRM-free" is one example of an anti-feature but one can find them everywhere.

It's a quick read and, I believe, an important but largely missing argument in most free software advocates' arsenal. I've posted it the on the FSF blog here:

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/antifeatures

There are quite a few important events related to Ubuntu -- and to free software communities more generally -- in the Boston area in the next few weeks. I plan to participate in many of them.

First, this coming Saturday, October 13, there will be an Ubuntu install party hosted at MIT and organized by the Ubuntu Massachusetts local community team. It promises to be a lot of fun and a great opportunity to have a gaggle of geeks install a free OS on your computer for you. If you've been thinking about installing free software but been hesitant (my guess is that this is not the majority of my readers), this is the event for you. I'll probably be doing RockBox installs as well so backup your music and bring an iPod if you're unfortunate enough to have funded Apple through the purchase of one.

Next week on October 18, Ubuntu Massachusetts will be hosting a party at the Globe Bar and Cafe to celebrate the (scheduled) release of the Gutsy Gibbon. I am not thrilled about everything in this release -- like Compiz by default -- but I am happy about the progress of the distribution both technically and in reaching out to an ever-wider and ever-larger group of users.

On the week of October 29-November 2, Canonical is hosting the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Cambridge. I'll definitely drop by for a least a day or two to make some strategic interjections and to participate in a few specifications that I care about. The summit is just down the street from my office at the Hotel at MIT so I have little excuse to not show up. I'll also being hanging out with friends from Ubuntu during the week.

Finally, as part of the Ubuntu conference, Canonical is sponsoring FOSSCamp. It promises to be a Foocamp/Barcamp style "un-conference" with a focus on free software and open source. I'll be there and, if there's demand, will run sessions on Selectricity and a quick Making Debian/Ubuntu Packages for Sysadmins talk -- basically a more polished version of what I did at the Ubucon in New York.

All events are open to the public although people who are not Ubuntu developers may be a little bored at the developer summit. I look forward to seeing both old and new faces around the project in the next month.

I'm going to be giving the opening keynote presentation at the K-12 Open Minds conference tomorrow. I was supposed to be talking on Thursday but will be filling in for David Thornburg who will be a day late. Apparently, he's been described as one of the top 21 speakers in the United States. Yikes!

I'll be talking about the free software movement and hacker culture. I've heard that the whole thing will be streamed.

Due to the fact that my favorite Window manager is now licensed non-freely (and then some), I award Tuomo Valkonen the Jörg Schilling award for free software project management.

Tuomo can console himself with his award while I console myself with Tritium. With the new dock feature announced today, I think it just turned into something I can switch to.

Inspired by Mitchell Charity's printable paper rulers and Steve Pomeroy's CSS ruler, I wrote a little python script to generate an on-screen ruler for the OLPC XO-1. The XO-1 screens are super high resolution (200dpi) and are each identical. This makes for a very accurate ruler. It's one of a few project I've done or am working on that tries to take advantage of the physical qualities (and physical consistencies) of the XOs. Also, a ruler is just a really useful thing for a school child -- or anyone else for that matter.

Of course, different screens have different pixel sizes so the ruler for the XO won't work on another screen. This made some of my friends jealous. To appease them, I spent a couple hours and hacked up a little web frontend to my ruler generator which allows anyone to create custom on-screen rulers and to save them and share them with others who might have the same screen. I've called it YouRule. Please check it out or download the source and send me improvements.

http://projects.mako.cc/yourule

This Saturday, September 15, is Software Freedom Day 2007. With more than 300 teams registered, there's a good chance that there's something going on near you.

I'll be helping at the Software Freedom Day event in downtown Boston where I'll be giving a talk on a still undetermined topic. I'll also be helping out with GNU/Linux and RockBox installs and letting folks play with my XO and OpenMoko.

If you are into free software, open source, or GNU/Linux, please show up to your local SFD event. Go ahead and bring your friends who are not yet familiar with free software -- this event is primarily for them.

In Boston, there will be refreshments, talks, demonstrations, and installs. Bring your laptop, desktop, iPod, or other DAP -- or just bring yourself and a friend.

Last week, Raphaël Hertzog mentioned a transition in progress that was going to change the way that Planet Debian updates. As part of the plan to deprecate cvs.debian.org, Raphaël helped me move Planet Debian away from the old CVS repository and to a new Subversion repository in Alioth.

Readers of Planet Debian should not notice any differences.

When it comes time to change or disable a feed, contributors to planet Debian will have to update their feed slightly differently. Documentation on how the new method is now in the wiki and at gluck:/org/planet.debian.org/README.

As Raphaël mentioned, all Debian Developers have write access to the configuration file in the Subversion repository through their Alioth accounts. Unlike the old setup, non-DD's who have blogs in Planet can have write access to it as well, but they'll need to have an Alioth account and they'll need to be added to the ACL by me. As before, it's only OK to modify one's one feed and anyone who violates this in bad faith will have their privileges to the repository removed.

The old CVS repository remains crudely broken. Please help update any references to the old CVS-based method or alert me to documentation that's public and out of date that you don't have access to change yourself.

At the risk of seeming a self-aggrandizing, I wanted to point folks to a nice biographical profile that Linux.com is running about me upon my election my to the FSF board. I'm pretty honored, and excited, by the whole thing.

The article talks a little bit about my road to free software and the FSF board in particular and about some of my ideas about the foundation and its work.

There are three little footnotes I thought I would add to what I think is a great article:

• The phrase "rebel with rather too many causes" was a phrase originally directed at protest.net -- a event calendaring system for activists that I was briefly involved in over a summer during college. I like the phrase and use it frequently but I didn't want to take credit for it. Google indicates that it originates in NTK #53 I'm not at all surprised.

• My parents worked as doctors in Kenya, Papa New Guinea, and elsewhere before they had children. This probably doesn't matter to anyone else but they worked with an organization that was like MSF in that it was a humanitarian organization that sent physicians around the world but it was not actually MSF as the article states. I don't think MSF had grown beyond French doctors when my parents were practicing overseas.

• When LWN pointed to the article, and in the original was well, there a focus on some comments I make about non-profit organizations. Since in a context of talk about my political work I just want to clarify my comments in a little more depth here.

  I think that one problem that has stemmed form Open Source's emphasis on businesses and efficiency is that free/open source software people end up making arguments in business terms: you should use application X because it is more efficient and faster. For many of the folks who have built this whole movement though, and for most in the free software camp, it's about freedom, not efficiency. By targeting businesses, we encounter a skeptical audience. More importantly though, we end up making arguments that, while true, are not the ones that motivate us.

  I think that low-hanging fruit for free software activists might include groups that already support free software ideas of sharing and user empowerment and that are looking for ways to use free software already. Groups we don't need to be afraid about saying "freedom" around. Not so coincidentally, these are sometimes organizations that I have a lot in common with politically. But that's far from always the case.

  There's a big group of philosophically aligned organizations in the NGO/non-profit community and the problems keeping them away are often technical. This is good news, of course, since solving technical problems is the free software movement's core competency. This is something I've been thinking about for a long time: Debian-NP was one project I helped start that tried to address this issue.

  Now, many people involved in the FSF, including myself, have political convictions that go beyond software. I do not want these convictions, and my statements about philosophically aligned organization, to be interpreted as call for a political shift in the organization in mainstream political terms. I deeply respect the way that RMS has kept his political opinions separate from the Foundation's. Biella and I have ever written about the importance of this political demarcation to free software's success. It's certainly not something I would want to change.

I announced the Official Ubuntu Book roughly a year ago. Several months ago, I wrote this in the preface of the second edition:

As we write this, it is one year since we penned the first edition of The Official Ubuntu Book. The last year has seen Ubuntu continue its explosive growth, and we feel blessed by the fact that The Official Ubuntu Book has been able to benefit from, and perhaps in a small even contribute to, that success.

It's an honor indeed. The first edition received almost universally good reviews and sold very well. Due to the book's success, most of the group that brought out the first edition (plus a few others) reunited to update the text for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

After months of hard word and waiting, printed copies of the Official Ubuntu Book Second Edition arrived in my office today! They should be shipping out of the online stores very soon.

The new version is updated throughout to reflect changes in Ubuntu over the last two releases and to document new features and improvements. Trying to keep a book like this up to date is a great way to learn about just how fast moving Ubuntu is (answer: very). Meanwhile, Edubuntu has blossomed over the last year. Through the work of Peter Savage, we've included a new chapter that deals with Edubuntu in depth.

The book is bigger (almost 450 pages!), better, and more up-to-date. It provides a great introduction for those that are uninitiated to Ubuntu or to GNU/Linux and free software in general. We've tried to keep the price down (it is available for $27 plus shipping from most online stores) and should ship almost immediately. Best of all (at least to me), the whole book is released under a free culture license (CC BY-SA).

The book is a major improvement on what was already a very solid piece of documentation. Everyone who contributed to the book (the list is too long to put up here) should feel proud. It was a lot of work but it shows. The opportunity to represent the Ubuntu community in this way, and to try to live up the distribution's high technical standard with the "official" branding, is a challenge and a reward that is worth the effort.

You can order the book from Amazon or find it in any of many other sources.

Just a couple years ago, music and technology companies would advertise their DRM schemes. While these technologies only served to prevent users of computers and consumer electronics devices from doing things, the media and technologies companies tried to spin it positively. Think of all the wonderful media that the music, film, and publishing industries will be willing to distribute to you at the click of a button, they said. All they asked for in return is the keys to your computer and the legal right to attack and sue you if you try to take control.

As everyone who purchased iTunes music and made the mistake of buying a non-Apple DAP incapable of reading Apple DRMed music knows, DRM is a bad deal for consumers. Users are always better off with an unencumbered media file. In all the excitement over major label content, some consumers didn't see this immediately.

With time though, the inconvenience of a computer that does the Apple and the RIAA wants over what you want hit home. This, combined with activist projects like the FSF's Defective By Design, have turned the tide. The DRM label that used to be a badge of honor is now a stigma that smart companies are going out of their way to avoid.

This past weekend, I saw this flier from Calabash Music in the crepe store across the street:

The store served a general, non-technical audience. DRM-FREE, it turns out, is a good way to sell music. Not just to geeks but to any consumer who has been stymied unfairly by DRM or knows someone who has. That, it turns out, is a whole lot people. Consumers know what DRM is and they know don't like it.

As consumers learn more about DRM, they want to avoid it. Seeing this, the companies that produce DRM are looking for ways to escape. The Apple/EMI deal seems to be an attempt to protect market share that the use of DRM is threatening. Others, like HBO's Bob Zitter, are disingenuously attempting to escape the stigma of DRM by simply rebranding the technology.

Of course, DRM suffers from a much more fundemental problem than bad branding. The problem with DRM is that consumers don't like what it does and are only sometimes willing to suffer through it when not given the choice. Increasingly often, as with in the example of the flier I found, consumers have a choice. Things don't look good for DRM. For DRM opponents, the self-defeating nature of the technology is our greatest ally.

When I was 12 years old, I discovered free software. That discovery changed my life and I've never recovered.

Over what is now more than half of my life, I have looked to the Free Software Foundation for vision, guidance, and an example of a free world and I have rarely been disappointed. The list of directors of the FSF -- Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Lawrence Lessig, Henri Poole, Jerry Sussman, Hal Abelson, and Geoffrey Knauth -- doubles as a list of some of my greatest heroes and role models.

As such, I lack the words to describe how it feels that, just yesterday, I was elected to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation. With Moglen having stepped down I have staggeringly large shoes to fill. I'm more than a little intimidated.

At 26 years old, I suspect that I'll be the youngest person on the board by quite a bit. This means I'll have to try and make up with hard work and passion what I lack in experience and wisdom. It's a challenge I look forward to.

With free software becoming increasingly successful and widespread, we've already begun to see push back. I suspect that in the next years, we'll see much more. We reaching the dangerous part of the, "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" progression. I'll do what I can to defend freedom until we've won.

In order to ensure that I have the time necessary, I'm going to be resigning from the board of Software Freedom International and will consider reducing and resigning some of my other commitments as well. If you want to support my work with the foundation, you can become an associate member.

I'm off on a short European tour for the next weeks -- in all likelihood my only trip to Europe this summer. I'll be visiting three conferences where I have planned talks. These include:

• The iCommons iSummit (essentially, the Creative Commons conference). I'll be talking about philosophy of free culture movement and continuing my pitch for a set of goals for free culture and the Definition of Free Cultural Works. I'll be in Dubrovnik Croatia between 14-18 June and will be giving a talk 16 June.
• After missing last year -- my first absence since DebConf 1 -- I'll be at DebConf 7, this years instance of the annual Debian Conference. I'll be giving a an overview of academic work on Debian on 21 June and facilitating a round-table discussion among Debian derivatives on 22 June. I'll be in Edinburgh for the shin-dig between 18-23 June.
• For 26-28 June, I'll be a guest of Eric von Hippel in Copenhagen for a small meeting/workshop of people interested in and working on issues around von Hippel's idea of, user innovation -- an area of research I am seriously considering pursuing full time next year.

Between 23-26 June, I'll be traveling through the UK from Edinburgh. I have tentative stops planned for a variety of places along the way including Manchester, Cambridge, and London. I suppose there will be pub nights or something similar in each place. Get in contact if you want to meet up along the way.

As I mentioned previously, I was graciously given the opportunity to speak the crowd at the Free Software Foundation's Members Meeting in March about some of my work and activism around Free Culture. In front of what was probably the friendliest audience possible, I compared the free software and free culture movements and explained why I think that free culture movement may be off track -- and, of course, what we as a community might be able to do about it.

If you listen to it, please try to forgive my faults as a speaker. The message I tried to convey is what I think is one the most important tactical issues facing free culture. If this talk dwells a little too long on free software and the lessons we might take from that world, please consider my audience.

You can listen to the talk here:

• Talk (OGG Vorbis or MP3)
• Q&A (OGG Vorbis or MP3)

Very quietly, the Ubuntu community reached a major milestone today when we held a Community Council meeting, like it does fortnightly. The only thing different was that the council included five new members -- Mike Basinger, Corey Burger, Matthew East, Jerome S. Gotangco and Daniel Holbach. These members are, with the exception of Holbach, not employed by Canonical and were each confirmed by a vote of the full Ubuntu membership. Before the recent elections, I was the only member who was not a Canonical employee -- and I used to be one.

From a technical perspective, the founding Ubuntu team was able to benefit from everything that Debian had built -- a running start if there ever was one. From a community perspective though, we had to start from scratch and had to deal with the very difficult situation that paid labor and closely entangled corporate interests. Working with the rest of the team, I drafted a set of community norms (the Code of Conduct) and governance structures designed to keep both the community and Canonical under control. They seemed like good ideas but, because we didn't have a community yet, only reflected the sensibilities of Mark Shuttleworth, myself, and the rest of the early Ubuntu team. The highest Ubuntu governance board, the Community Council was initially filled with people that were in the room in Oxford when we came up with the idea: myself, Mark, James Troup, and Colin Watson. We decided that the council members should, and would, be approved by a vote of the membership. With no members though, we faced a bit of a bootstrapping problem.

Three years later, Ubuntu has a vibrant community with hundreds of enfranchised members who have an up-or-down say on the members of the council itself. When we looked for new potential council members to propose to the community, we tried to pick the most active, most level-headed, and most representative group we could find. It was pleasing to see that only one member of the new CC board works for Canonical; Canonical employees are now outnumbered.

It has been interesting to see announcements by Fedora, FreeSpire, OpenSuSE over the last few years proposing systems of more inclusive community governance structures that, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, look a bit like what Ubuntu has built in its attempts to empower users in that sometimes awkward community/company environment. Whatever the reasons, I think it means there's more pressure on us at Ubuntu to keep raising the bar. I see today as a great example of how we've done just that.

More than a year ago, I published an election methods library called RubyVote. Interest in the library surpassed any of my expectations: I know of at least one startup using the library heavily in their core business and a number of fun sites, like Red Blue Smackdown, that are using it as well. The point of course, was to make complex but superior election methods accessible in all sorts of places where people were making decisions suboptimally. It its own small way, it seems to have succeeded enormously.

Over the last year, I've been asked by a variety of people if they could use RubyVote for their own organizational decision making -- tasks like electing leadership of a student group or members of a non-profit board of directors. Since RubyVote was just a library without a UI of its own, I had to tell them "no." I caved in eventually and got to work on a quick and dirty web-based front end to the library.

That project grew into Selectricity which is a primarily web-based interface to a variety of different election methods and voting technologies. You can currently try out quickvotes which can be created in half a minute and voted on in a quarter but which bring all of the power of preferential voting technologies to bear on very simple decisions. Prompted by Aaron Swartz, I also built a mobile phone version that's lets you send a short email or SMS to create or vote in a election.

For those that follow research in voting technologies, there's not a lot of new stuff here. What's new is that this project, unlike the vast majority of voting technologies, is interested in the state of the art for everyone but governments. Clearly government decisions are important but they're one set of decisions, usually only once a year. Selectricity is voting machinery for everything and everyone else.

It was announced in a variety of news outlets today that Selectricity was selected for grant from mtvU and Cisco as part of their Digital Incubator project. As part of that, I'm going to be working with some other voting technology experts to bring tools for auditable elections, cryptographically secured anonymity, and voter verifiability to the platform (I have only rudimentary functionality today). There are a couple people who will be joining me on the project this summer and we will building out what I hope will be an extremely attractive platform for better every-day decision-making.

More than the grant though, I'm excited about the visibility that use by MTV will bring to the project. Most of all though, I'm just excited about more free software and more (and more accessible) democratic decision making. My adviser Chris Csikszentmihályi put it well:

One of the big arguments against preferential voting, or new voting technologies, is the fear that they would disenfranchise the average person who doesn't yet understand how they work. Certainly, making all voting technologies open source is critical, but the issue of familiarity is worth considering. We’re hoping that MTV — and eventually American Idol — will move their voting over to Selectricity, allowing it to work as both a technical tool but also pedagogically, training future voters. Why not integrate democratic processes into all your software and communications tools? Why not use the best democratic processes available, so long as they're available to everyone?

I'm giving a talk today as part of Media in Transition 5 (MiT5) conference organized by the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. The topic this year year is right up my alley: "creativity, ownership, and collaboration in the digital age.

Everyone else is talking about free culture issues so I'm branching out a bit and delivering a paper I wrote with Harvard Law School and Harvard Free Culture's Elizabeth Stark on "the politics of piracy" with a focus on political action around P2P filesharing. We'll have a paper in the proceedings which I'll post with our talk notes and slides.

You can find information on our talk on how to attend on the conference website.

At DebConf7 in Edinburgh, I'm going to moderate a derivatives round table. At DebConf5 I put on a similar sort of panel. Here's the description I submitted (please ignore the placeholder list of panelists on the DC7 site):

The Debian-Derivers round-table will bring together representatives of organizations involved in producing Debian derived distributions to discuss the political, organizational, and social barriers to collaboration with Debian and with each other.

The idea is to bring together a representative group of folks from our derivative community -- groups like Ubuntu, Linspire, Knoppix, Guadalinex, Maemo, etc. etc. -- and provide a space where they can describe their successful and unsuccessful experiences working with Debian and with each other. On the other side, it will give Debian developers a chance to ask questions of the group, both individually and as a whole.

My first step, of course, is to build that panel. If you have worked on or represent a Debian derivative and think you will be at DebConf, you may have a spot on my panel. Give me an email at mako@debian.org and lets talk!

With the Debian 4.0 (etch) release parties out of the way, it's time to devote a little energy to celebrating the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

A few of us from the nascent Massachusetts Loco Team in the Boston/Cambridge area have planned a release party -- a Feisty Fiesta if you will -- for Saturday April 21, 2007 19:30 at the Cambridge Brewing Company.

For more details, answers to your questions, or to RSVP for the party so we can reserve a big enough table, please visit the party wiki page.

Bostonian and Cantabrigian Debianistas should waste no time in celebrating Etch's release. Join a group of us celebrating the release tonight (April 8) at Grendel's Den in Harvard Square.

Things you should know:

• We'll meet up at 21:00.
• Directions are online.
• Food is either half-price or $1 with a drink.

Call me if you're lost in the neighborhood or have questions. I hope to see a few of you there. New faces are, of course, welcome.

While I've been making an effort in the recent past to cut down on talks -- so that I can focus on getting work done that will give me something to talk about in the future -- I'm thrilled to be giving a presentation at the upcoming Free Software Foundation Members Meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While normally the members meetings are reserved for talks by the FSF board and staff, I've been invited to give a talk on my work around movement and definition building for free culture as part of a short members forum at the end of the day. I'll also be running a mini RockBox install party over lunch.

You need to RSVP for the meeting by this coming Friday (2007/3/17) and, in order to do so, you need to be an FSF member. Fortunately, joining is easy to do. I won't lie and suggest that my talk could possibly be worth the membership price. Luckily, I don't have to lie to suggest that rest of the things that the FSF does are more than worth supporting with membership dues.

Last November I wrote about an iPod liberation party we held in Cambridge. As I mentioned then, it was a huge success. Mika just got around to polishing up a short documentary video she made from footage at the event and a few interviews afterward. The documentary is called, What's Wrong With My iPod? and it acts as an introduction to DRM on iPods and what we can do about it.

The video introduces the concept of DRM, the dangers it brings, and describes the role it plays on the iPod. The second half is about iRony, our iPod liberation party, and RockBox.

Please pass the video links around to your friends -- especially those who might not be up to speed on DRM. If it inspires you, think about running your own iPod Liberation Party (instructions here).

You can view it on blip.tv (only MP4 until their converter catches up), on YouTube, or you can just download the OGG theora file (also in high quality).

I forgot to mention the coolest thing about the last Ubucon in my summary.

I heard that my friend Sean Moss-Pultz (the person who started the OpenMoko project) would be in New York the week of Ubucon so I managed to contact him and get him to drop by on his way to the airport so we could have lunch.

To my surprise, he had one of the early versions of the free-phone for me (I wasn't expecting one for several weeks). I had brought my OLPC XO so, for the first time ever (as far as we know) we managed to get the two coolest, and most important, technology platform projects in the world together.

While the XO and OpenMoko share a commitment to freedom, the similarities between the projects are, in fact, also skin deep. If we all work hard, we can look forward to a future that is free. Apparently, it's also white with bright trim.

Apologies for the pictures taken from my current inferior, both ethically and technically, mobile phone.

I had a great time at Ubucon a couple of weeks ago. I ended up running two sessions.

After an initial opening, I opened the conference with a talk on how folks can participate in Ubuntu. The talk was roughly based on Andreas Lloyd's absolutely wonderful Contribute To Ubuntu page in the Ubuntu wiki. His page was, in turn, based on my own Participate In Ubuntu page. The talk tried to provide a solution to the common question of, "I love Ubuntu and want to give back! How can I?" -- when I was answering info@ubuntu.com (for my sins), I would get this question several times each day.

The talk was a relatively straight forward walk through the different teams and group working in Ubuntu along with examples of their projects and fun anecdotes from my experience in the community along the way. I worked in a bit of talking about different community governance structures and issues and the membership process. Trying to cram an overview of the community and its different subsections into an hour is a pretty sobering experience. There's a lot going on and I barely had a chance to give a poor description of the most visible things going on.

In the afternoon, I reminded folks (and myself) that I know a little of this tech stuff too by walking folks through a quick introduction to building and modifying Debian or Ubuntu packages. It was a quick variant on the "Debian Packaging for Sysadmins" talks that I've given in the past.

Of course, the best part was getting to hang out with some folks I know from the community and to meet a bunch of new people. It was a blast and I'm definitely looking forward to the next one.

I'm coming down to New York this Friday for the second Ubuncon. Ubucon is a small(ish) user organized and oriented Ubuntu "unconference." Apparently, that means that it's not very organized -- which adds flexibility and is considered a good thing!

Both Ubucons to date have been held at Google offices. This one will be held in the Google office in New York City. I'll be giving at least one talk. In all likelihood, I will be giving a talk about participation in the Ubuntu community and another more technical crash introductory course in building Ubuntu packages. Finally, I've had Pearson's ship a dozen or so copies of the Official Ubuntu Book which I'll be signing and handing out.

If you want to go, you should check out the schedule, and the info pages in the wiki and maybe even RSVP. You will need a LP/wiki account to do so.

See you in New York! Please contact me if you want to get together while I'm in New York.

I'm been perplexed by the recent fracas around the possibility of Ubuntu shipping non-free drivers by default as part of the feisty release goal to bring the bling. The issue has been discussed by many people, most recently and eloquently in a blog post by Scott James Remnant.

I have never been 100% comfortable with our (Ubuntu's) decision to ship proprietary drivers. The Ubuntu philosophy document -- which Mark Shuttleworth and I drafted originally -- says quite unambiguously:

Every computer user should have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees.

I believe this deeply. Consequently, I feel that binary drivers in Ubuntu are, and always have been, a failure to live up to our principles. If our philosophy document is still representative, most people in our community should be a little uncomfortable with them -- even if they think, as most of us do, that shipping them is the correct thing to do.

Early on Ubuntu decided that binary firmware and hardware drivers would be distributed and quasi-supported in restricted. While not completely comfortable with the move, I could understand and defend it for three reasons:

1. The drivers were easily removable and not enabled by default unless necessary to achieve functioning hardware.
2. As part of this process, we promised to work with vendors to accelerate the freeing/open-sourcing of their drivers.
3. Perhaps most importantly, I couldn't imagine not using them if it were the choice between non-free drivers or inoperable hardware.

The proposal to include proprietary nVidia driver in place of the existing free nVidia driver is important because it changes, or eliminates, the first and third justifications. Since the first issue has been discussed in depth, it seem appropriate to focus on the third and final point. The point is perhaps best introduced with an observation:

While I have met many people who research and buy hardware to avoid the need for non-free drivers, something I do myself, I have never met anyone who voluntarily chooses inoperable hardware on a computer they use over working hardware through a non-free driver.

While not airtight, this observation is precisely why the old policy of using non-free drivers only when no free drivers exist works so well. By effectively synonymizing use of the non-free driver with use of the hardware, the crisis created by non-free drivers is rendered paradoxical: anybody using a piece of hardware that only works with non-free drivers is, by definition, either using non-free drivers or not using the hardware. The only way to not use non-free drivers in situations where no free drivers exist is to not use hardware that requires them. If you use different hardware, you will not need to use non-free drivers. This important justification is completely inapplicable to the proposal to include non-free drivers in place of free (but not perfect) alternatives.

Second, while shipping non-free drivers is wrong because we lose our freedom and violate our philosophy, the desire for basic hardware support is universal and important enough that it's defensible. One reason that the "binary by default for bling" situation alarms me is that I don't believe that the desire for desktop bling is as universal, or as strong, as the desire for working hardware.

An analogy might be stealing food to feed your family and stealing a CD from the record store. Both are wrong because stealing is wrong, but I have a lot more sympathy for the hungry thief in the first example because CDs are not as necessary as food and because many people would rather go without a new CD than steal. We can ask: "Which is worse: selling your soul for a decent job or selling your soul for a PS3?" In an absolute sense, neither is worse; but it's easier to support the former than the latter. I'm very impressed with Beryl -- but I have trouble empathizing strongly with the need for a spinning desktop cube.

New users may be impressed and attracted to an Ubuntu desktop powered by proprietary drivers. They might also be impressed by proprietary applications. However, it is self-defeating to attract new users to our free platform and principles by compromising our core values. Many users already make the decision to use non-free video drivers and Ubuntu makes it very easy to do so once they have made that choice. Installing binary drivers by default is choosing for the large number of users who will stick with any default. It may be a conservative stance but as long as we believe that a non-insignificant number of users would choose to live without bling before compromising Ubuntu's philosophy and goals, we should make the difficult decision to side with freedom by default.

When discussing this issue, many people say, it's not my decision or it isn't my call. Regardless of whether anyone agrees with me and regardless of who the final decision is up to -- and it's not clear to me now -- I believe that the Ubuntu community has the power to inform and shape the development of their distribution. As the Ubuntu community, we can make our position heard. The best place to do that right now seems to be the Accelerated X specification comments page. One can also email the the Technical Board (for technical comments) and the Community Council (for principle or philosophy related issues).

Over the years, I've published some of the articles I am most proud of on Advogato. As you can imagine, I was sad to see demise of Advogato announced early September and thrilled to see that by the end of the month, Steve Rainwater had stepped up to save the site.

For a belated welcome of Advogato back from the edge of the grave, I've published a short essay about the effectiveness of an analogy of software and writing on the site. In it, I introduce the analogy and argue that it is useful in advocating free software and programming education and in justifying the disproportionately large amount of programming related projects in the free software world. Here's the intro:

Advocates of free and open source software, myself included, like to talk about the "democratizing" effect of free software. Others, especially non-programmers, are quick to point out that the only technical people can take advantage of half of the enumerated freedoms in FOSS. The freedoms to modify and collaborate mean little if you don't know to program. Over time, I have come to the conclusion that the only good solution to this problem -- and one that I was initially quite opposed to -- is to teach everyone to program. In considering this position, the processes of reading and writing provide a useful analogy when considering the processes of using and creating computer software. Additionally, the analogy provides an powerful justification for the fact that FOSS programmers produce a disproportionately large amount of software that is primarily of interest to FOSS programmers.

Please check it out on Advogato and feel free to leave a comment on my blog if you don't have an Advogato account.

I was very happy to hear that the Masters of the Universe (MOTU) loved my suggestion and named their nascent governing board Council Grayskull.

I apologize for boring the vast majority of my readers who do not use PyBlosxom but I'm trying to at least mention each "released" projects here once for the sake of completeness — even if it's only interesting to a small number of them.

I posted a note a few months ago mentioning a stronger CAPTCHA I had created to deal with blog spam. A few friends pointed out that they were having excellent luck with Akismet which filters using a model similar to some of those old collaborative spam filters.

Building off earlier work, I build an Akismet plugin for PyBlosxom. I've gone through a couple of iterations on the PyBlosxom lists and the results have been great. If you use don't use PyBlosxom, there are plugins for Wordpress (where the system originated) and I imagine for other blogging systems as well. Its an effective and attractive alternative to a CAPTCHA.

You can grab my plugin on my PyBlosxom hacks page

About a 6 weeks ago, I uploaded a great piece of software into Debian. The package is libwww-mediawiki-client-perl but you can also get it by installing the package mvs. The software seems to be a couple years old -- but it's new to me and I'm been thrilled with it so I thought I would share.

The package is a library but its usefulness to me centers around a cute little command-line wrapper to the library called mvs. mvs essentially provides a simple CVS-like interface to an instance of Mediawiki that facilitates offline editing of Mediawiki pages and much more.

Here's a quick little walk-through that I wrote for the README.Debian file that might give someone a pretty good description of how the software works:

Step 1: make a directory to store pages from this Mediawiki instance:

mkdir en-wp
cd en-wp

Step 2: log in to the host with your username/password:

mvs login -d wikipedia.org -l en -u 'Benjamin Mako Hill' -p password

Step 3: download a page that you want to edit by adding ".wiki" to the end:

mvs update Granrojo.wiki

Step 4: edit the file to make changes:

vim Granrojo.wiki

Step 5: preview your changes:

mvs preview Granrojo.wiki

Step 6: commit your changes into the wiki:

mvs commit --minor yes -m 'made spelling fix' Granrojo.wiki

And that's all there is to it! It brings a whole series of things that were almost prohibitively difficult through the web interface into reach (e.g., diffing two different pages to see if they've diverged) and its changed the way that I interact with Wikipedia in some exciting ways.

Thanks to Mark Jaroski for writing and maintaining the software!

Since my weblog catastrophe a few months ago, I've been spending a little more time getting my PyBlosxom setup on copyrighteous into shape.

Initially, my efforts were focused on a series of patches to PyBlosxom and to several important plugins. As I became a little more familiar with the code base, I realized that in an evening or a little bit of downtime, I can pretty easily create my own plugins. I've already managed to accumulate a few of them.

I've created a page on my website to hosts these and have put what I've got publishable so far up there. I've got two more that I'm still in the process of vetting on the PyBlosxom mailing list but that I'll post there (and announce on this blog) soon.

The first plugin that I've published there is a very simple plugin I wrote to display ads (I am experimenting with Google ads but it should work with other ad providers or even for non-ads) but only to those who get to my old blog entries by searching for them.

My thinking was inspired by an old post by my friend Evan where he described setting up Google advertisements in a way that would not affect his core readership but might allow him to use blogging to make his activism financially sustainable. While I suspect (and hope!) that most my own readership's Internet experience is mediated by Adblock and Filterset.G, the plugin will spare even those that don't while showing ads to those I don't know yet.

I've been spending more time that I want to in the last week talking about should or should not be on Planet Debian. In particular, there is some disagreement on what should happen to the blogs of people who resign from the project.

In the interest of my own sanity, here is the text I just posted on the wiki page that talks about Planet Debian:

Planet Debian is for any active and directly involved participant in the Debian development community. Inclusion in Planet should reflect a relationship that already exists -- it is not meant to create one. Inclusion is not restricted to people who are currently Debian developers nor are ex-developers necessarily barred from inclusion.

Defining activity and direct involvement is tough and there are many ways of participating in Debian (e.g., packaging, translations, administration, etc). I am happy to consider all of these types of involvement for the purposes of inclusion in Planet. In terms of deciding what is enough activity, I am daunted by the fact that there has been academic research on the difficulties of deciding what an active member in Debian is. As a result I will continue to rely primarily on what blog owners themselves feel unless the evidence available to me points to the contrary.

Planet participants should include feeds that provide stable permanent URLs so that they do not flood planet repeatedly and should include content in English only. An inability to do either of these will be grounds for exclusion from Planet until this can be fixed.

In the past, I've made incorrect assumptions about whether people did or did not want to be included in Planet. I've apologized to those involved. In the future, I will ask people that appear inactive to me or that have resigned from the project if they feel that they still qualify under the terms above. If I approach you about inclusion in Planet, please don't be offended or assume that I, or the project, doesn't want you on Planet. There are feeds in Planet Debian that annoy me but I have yet to remove a feed from Planet that I dislike.

Over the past few months, I've dealt with something of a blog spam nightmare on Copyrighteous: my blog running the PyBlosxom weblog software.

Wiser and less stubborn individuals might given up on either PyBlosxom or the ability to receive public comments. However, I find PyBlosxom unique in its flexibility and great ReStructured Text support and am always frustrated with others' blogs that don't accept comments. At the end of the day, I couldn't bring myself to part with either.

Historically, my blogspam protection has been to use a simple weak CAPTCHA and to have my blog software email me each time a comment is successfully submitted so that I can (with a built-in macro in mutt) delete each spam comment that slips in. This has worked well for the last couple years.

This summer, Mika pointed out that my blog was full of Chinese link spam that I had not noticed or been notified about. Around the same time, I realized that my website had been dealt a massive spam penalty by Google and was basically not showing up in any search results.

I have spent a significant amount of time over the last month repairing the damage and working to prevent it from reoccuring. I'm documenting this process here in the hopes that it might save other time and energy.

Upon reflection, the situation could have been prevented the in three relatively easy ways -- all of which I have now implemented.

• Had the PyBlosxom comment.py plugin's mail function been working properly, I would have known that I was being spammed.
• Had PyBlosxom been configured to only make blog entries (and not comments) indexable by search engines, Google and others never would have seen the link spam.
• Had I installed a stronger CAPTCHA, I might have blocked the spam from being submitted in the first place (although at the expense of the participation in comments by visually impaired users).

A month or so, hours of work, and a Google reinclusion request later, my website is beginning to show up in search entries again. Hopefully this message will help save others from a similar fate.

Fixing PyBlosxom's Comment Notification

The most critical problem was a bug in PyBlosxom's contributed comment.py plugin and its comment notification system. In short, the email based comment notification system failed silently if the body of the email -- which included the full text of the comment -- included any non-ASCII UTF-8 encoded text.

I've filed a bug against PyBlosxom and included a patch that fixes this issue. However, since this is a rather critical problem and because PyBlosxom releases tend to be few and far between, it might be worth patching your system now. My patch is against version 1.3 but can easily be modified and applied to version 1.2.

Hiding Comments from Search Engines

The major reason that the successful spam became a problem was that it triggered Google's abuse detector, resulted in a spam penalty, and made all of the (non-spam) material on my website more difficult for others to find. A simple way to prevent this is to hide all comments from the search engines.

I've done this by creating a new PyBlosxom flavor that shows comments (and allows them to be input) which is not indexed by search Engines and to remove comments altogether from the default indexable flavors.

To do this, I removed all of the comment-* templates from html flavor and created a new flavor called comment.flav that included the comment templates. I also had to make the comment submit action point to the new flavor and to change the "Comments: N" link to point instead to .comment flavor rather than the .html. The rest of the template is simply symbolic links to the the HTML template.

The next step is to ensure that the comment flavor is not indexed by search engines. I found two ways of doing this and did both. The first was to add a "no index" meta tag to the header of each .comment page. It looked like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

This is necessary because the robots.txt standard, the normal way to tell search engines not to index a page, does not support wildcards.

Luckily, Google (and others I imagine) do support an extension to Robots.txt that allows you to use wildcards. To take advantage of this, I created a robots.txt for mako.cc that blocks indexing all of the comment flavor. The following robot.txt did the trick for me:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /copyrighteous/*.comment$

An Improved CAPTCHA

Ultimately, the best solution would be to keep the spam from showing up on the blog at all.

The only decent PyBlosxom CAPTCHA is the "nospam" plugin by Steven Armstrong. It is a simple image-based CAPTCHA and I was running it when I was spammed. It uses PIL but generates purely number-based strings and does some minimum obfuscation. Basically, spambots were able to break the CAPTCHA and toward the end, I was receiving thousands of pieces of a blog spam a day.

I've incorporated the PIL image generation code from Mediawiki's ConfirmEdit/FancyCaptcha extension into nospam.py with this patch which I have also sent to Steven Armstrong -- nospam.py's original author. It's much stronger.

Apologies, of course, go to all of my vision impaired users. Image-based CAPTCHAs really are evil. In this situation though with many thousands of attempts of a day, the alternative is that I will turn off comments altogether -- the standard (and poor) lesser of two evils argument.

Ultimately, I will write a python implementation of a new strong text-based CAPTCHA I've invented that uses commonsense knowledge and pulls off some cool data acquisition in the process. I presented this project at the Wikimania Hacking Days and at a Media Lab open house for AAAI 2006 where I got universally positive and useful feedback. CAPTCHA inventor and recent genius-grantee Luis von Ahn seemed to like the idea too. I'll write more about this on another day though.

I've upgraded Planet (the software that runs Planet Debian) to version 2.0. It's been a while since I touched the planet software so many issues that had annoyed users of planet should now be remedied by this upgrade. I think people will very happy with the upgrade.

In the process, I really screwed up planet for the moment. New posts from the last day or so may not be showing up. Other people may appear to have flooded planet when in fact they've done nothing at all. This is not their fault but I've had a hard time going through and picking up the pieces left by the upgrade. Please just bear with me.

If you notice a little bit of funkiness in Planet Debian in the next day or so, please wait a day or two (or a post or two) before contacting me to debug the problem. Thanks for your patience everyone.

If you have questions, don't hesitate to get in contact with me.

I wish the nascent Debian France organization all the best of luck on the implementation of the Vandoeuvre Prospectus.

May your organization be run with égalité. Nobody likes being a second class citizen.

It's a bit late at this point but I thought I would point out that I recently wrote two articles on Newsforge about the most recent Ubuntu Developer Summit held at Paris' lovely Charles de Gaulle airport.

I you care about the summit or the next release of Ubuntu, and you missed the summit, and then missed the articles on Newsforge. Well, then you might be interested in checking them out.

Three years ago, I was elected to the board of directors of Software in the Public Interest, Inc. About halfway through my three year term, I was elected by the board to the (largely ceremonial?) role of Vice President of the organization. This month, my term is up and after a good deal of soul searching over the last weeks, I've decided to not run again.

With time, I've become busy with other projects including work and graduate school at the MIT Media Lab, Debian, Ubuntu, One Laptop per Child, several book projects and more. Recently, I've found that I've simply had less time to put toward SPI than I have had in the past.

Of course, I continue to care very much about SPI and its mission and feel that I done a good job of fulfilling my responsibilities throughout my term. The real reason I'd like to step aside to let some new blood and energy take a more active role and to let SPI take off in new directions.

Since I've served a full term, I thought I would take the opportunity to look back at my work with SPI over the last three years and to the future.

SPI's Recent Past

Three years ago, I ran for the SPI board on a platform that I would like to see SPI work more like a real pro-active non-profit organization and less like Debian's legal shell. SPI was at at transition point then and the board spent a lot of time thinking about it was that SPI should do and what role it should fill in the free software community. Many of these questions are still open but the following is my round up.

There are two types of non-profit organizations in the free/open source community. The first is the large-project foundation. Example are the GNOME Foundation, KDE Foundation, and Plone Foundation. These support and work closely with one large and otherwise institutionally independent project. The second type is concerned with advocacy or issues of concern to many or all free software projects. The FSG/LSB, Open Source Initiative, Software Freedom International, Linux International, and the Free Software Foundation are all examples of this type (although the FSF also supports the GNU Project so can be put into both camps).

Three years ago, SPI was basically the Debian Foundation under a different name. However, SPI also supported a handful of other medium-sized projects (at the time, this included Berlin and OFTC). In this way, SPI provided some of the benefits of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization to groups that were large and important enough to care about issues like the tax-deductability of donations, but small enough that starting their own foundation didn't quite make sense. This, I am convinced, is SPI's niche and its where the organization can make the greatest difference. While Debian continues to be the driving force behind SPI, this mirrors Debian close relationship with other free software projects as a downstream and a distribution. Debian may ultimately decide its has outgrown SPI and wants its own foundation but it's role in providing an umbrella for other free software project also makes a lot of sense.

Over the last years, SPI has added several new member projects including GNUStep, Drupal and PostgreSQL and members of these projects have played an increasingly important role in SPI. OFTC members including SPI secretary David Graham have continued to drive the organization. I am thrilled to see that PostgreSQL's Josh Berkus is running for a seat on the board and wish him the best of luck. He has put a huge amount of effort into SPI in the past several months and I believe he would make a great board member.

Of course, not everything has been rosy. While our organization is in slightly better shape than it has been in the past, SPI still suffers from a lack of interest and activity by participants in its member projects. SPI handles Debian's money and every Debian developer should be interested and involved in SPI; yet only a relatively small percentage are. I've run SPI sessions, talks, and BOFs at three of the last four Debian conferences but haven't been able to make a satisfactory dent in either the Debian community or SPI. The next board of directors will need to work actively and creatively to help do what the last board did not accomplish.

While things are currently much better than they have been in the past, SPI has continued to be mired in a number of bureaucratic issues. Simple issues like accurate, timely and transparent bookkeeping have proved more difficult than the board or those brave (or foolhardy) enough to take on the treasurer position seem to have thought. I worked with the treasurer and our lawyer to meet with a bookkeeping service in New York City.

The Future

In the future, I'd like see to more members projects and more active participants from all members projects. I'd like to see a more active organization in general but am beginning to conclude that a fully volunteer "staff" is only going to be able to do so much.

In terms of bureaucratic issues, several board members have lobbied hard to spend money to hire full or part time help either in an administrative capacity or as some sort of combination administrator/executive director. For a number of reasons, the board has been reticent to do this but I think it's become increasingly clear that our growth and relevance as an organization is going to require this. I think hiring the bookkeeping service was a good first step. I think at the very least, SPI should "outsource" most of the non-fun administrative work to others so that the board can focus on the important work of advocating free software and helping our member projects. I'm famously concerned with introducing paid labor into voluntary free software projects but I think that, if done right, this could be a very good step.

In terms of my own involvement, I'm planning to stay involved as a contributing member or perhaps even as an adviser if the board will have me. I'd like to continue work on the SPI-Trademark committee and look forward to the day that we can create a general policy for helping folks use and license the Debian mark (and other trademark SPI may hold in the future) as permissively as possible.

I'd also like to see a better documented process for becoming an SPI member project. This should explain to projects what SPI expects from them (e.g., democratic decision making, an active representative to SPI, etc), what they will get from SPI, and what is necessary to make it all happen. I'd like to work with some of the recent member projects to help document their experience and make easier for the next batch.

I'm looking forward to taking some time off and look forward to the possibility of running for a seat on the SPI board again at some point in the future.

As part of the Defective By Design anti-DRM campaign which I've been rabble-rousing for recently, there are going to be a series of protests at Apple Stores across the United States Saturday, June 10th. Events will be in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and Plano.

There will be costumes and cameras and plenty of people attempting to warn Apple customers about the dangers of DRM in iTunes and Apple hardware and software.

If you are going to come to any of the events, you can find more information on the Defective By Design website and you can RSVP by mailing appleflash@defectivebydesign.org.

If you are coming to Boston, there's a tentatively planned after party at the Acetarium. If you have an iPod or other DAP with DRM, we can attempt to liberate your iPod with RockBox there.

If you live in or near any of these places, you should come. If we don't win some serious mindshare in the next year and before the next holiday season, it will become much more difficult. As consumers of technology, we have a lot to lose to inaction right now.

I was very happy to see that the anti-DRM protest that I suggested people go to seemed like it was a success!

It would have been nicer if even more people had gone out for it but I guess that's just one of the problems with organizing such a thing on short notice. Given the time from announcement to protest, I think it went pretty well. It seems like there were definitely enough people to make it work.

Of course the Defective By Design folks let you sign up now so you won't miss the next one if its in your town. If DRM is going to be successfully opposed this decade, it will be through education and activism in the next months and year. I think that it is very important that people get involved.

If you're in the Seattle area and are concerned about DRM, you should be at a "flash" protest against DRM tomorrow (Tuesday May, 23) before work (8-9AM) to kick off a major anti-DRM campaign. There will be costumes and fun to be had by all.

These sorts of things are great if a bunch of people participate and just seem impotent if not enough do. This is important enough that I would consider flying back to Seattle for it if I had a little more time and money to do so. It's worth it to make sure this campaign starts off on the right foot. We have a lot to lose if it doesn't.

If you are in the area and can possible spare an hour or two and be in downtown Seattle tomorrow morning, I think it is really important that you do so. You can get more information from someone at the FSF by emailing action@defectivebydesign.org and announcing that you want to participate.

In a few weeks, I'm going to be giving the keynote address at the the Conference on Engaging in Open Source at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The conference is organized by the student chapter of the ACM at Dalhousie and looks like a unique, and very interesting, gathering. My talk will build on some of my previous critical analyses of the unique process of principle-setting in the free and open source software communities and will try to introduce some new and challenging concepts while framing the broader discussion that will continue in the rest of the conference.

The conference will be held on June 1 & 2, 2006. Ping me if you're in the area and would like to meet up.

I was very concerned by Martin Krafft's appeal to voters in the Debian Project Leader election to shut up about their own "biased" opinions on the race. He argued that the candidates should campaign and that anyone who wants to spread their point of view should be running themselves or keeping their opinions to themselves and getting real work done.

Perhaps I just buy into the whole deliberative democracy concept but I think this attitude is dangerous. In fact, I think it's essential that Debian publicly weigh the benefits of possible decisions and discuss, argue, and debate as a group. I think that every instance of public discourse (and no, flaming is not discourse) on project policy or leadership is a sign of a healthy and involved electorate and I'd like to see more of it.

The leadership of the Debian project is at stake in this election. Our organization is more complex than a wheel with the DPL at the center. Our decision should be made as a project with a complex organization. That means conversations need to work the way the project does.

Obviously, we vote as individuals. But that's precisely why conversations and discussions, through which we can make decisions as a community, play such an important role in informing our votes.

I'll leave talking about enfranchisement in Debian, and the lack thereof, for another day.

I kicked a new version of RubyVote out the door last week. This version has support of Instant Runoff Voting contributed by Alexis Darrasse. Thanks! I'm not a huge IRV fan but others are so it's important to have it in the library.

There's a gemified version with range voting plus an improved IRV implementation that may have landed in the SVN repository by the time you read this. I'll release another version in the next week or so once everything has settled.

I submitted the following proposal for a talk at Debconf6:

This talk offers a "Debian Themed" quick tour through the academic, legal, and business worlds. It overs insight into what everyone outside of Debian is saying about, doing with, and learning from the Debian project.

In doing so, it hopes to give Debian participants some insight into fields and areas that they are largely unfamiliar with (e.g., management, sociology, anthropology, economics, computer supported collaborative work, etc.). It illuminates what others -- especially academics -- find useful or inspiring about the project and to facilitate self-reflection and self-improvement within Debian. It reflects on the impact that Debian has had in the world beyond the Debian project and, in particular, in those areas that many Debian developers may not be familiar with.

The good news is that the proposal was accepted. The bad news is that this means I actually have to finish doing the research to make the talk happen.

To make the talk excellent, I wanted to solicit examples from you, great Debian community. I've already got my own list but I'd like to hear what you think I should talk about?

What I'm not looking for is examples of people or organizations that use Debian. This talk is not about people who use the OS or the people who build it. This is about people who have learned from Debian as a community.

Primarily, I'm looking for academic publications on Debian. However, anyone who has learned and designed a system or community based on such a paper or from observation would be good as well. People who use or have learned from our voting structure might be a good example as would communities with a Debian-derived social contract. Software engineering research is fair game.

Be creative but remember that I've got a limited time on the podium and may be forced into the unpleasant position of being ruthlessly selective.

Please add examples to this wiki page or just email mako@debian.org.

That's if for now and I'll see you in... Umm... Oaxtepec.

Who ever said that the rewards of free software hacking are immaterial?

Last summer, I described how Debian hackers traveling through 106 Haven in New York tended to leave leave with lighter bags than they arrived with.

After the GPLv3 kick-off a couple weeks ago, I can say the Acetarium's visitors have been no less generous. That said, Mika and I are not as confident in our ability to identify the owners of misplaced items. Perhaps you can help.

They say that the sum can be greater than its parts. Mika has discovered that this may, in fact, be the case with the Acetarium's lost and found.

If you recognize this man is or can lay claim to any of his parts or possessions, please contact me and help us get him home.

I've finally recovered from hosting a significant (in quality and also in quantity) chunk of the GPLv3 conference in the Acetarium. Over the last week, I've taken some time to reflect on and digest some of the license itself and, more importantly I think, the process by which it the license is being evaluated.

While most of us try not talk about the products of our digestion, I've put together an essay with some of my thoughts on the issue. In particular, I talk about what I think is really at stake in the GPL revisions process and how we, as a community, can best proceed to the best possible license.

The article is currently a feature on Newsforge. Comments and feedback are welcome!

Authors who name their software using a one-word combination of the language the software is written in followed by a word that describes functionality are advertising their own unoriginality. Such names are slightly more acceptable when describing libraries where the language might actually matter.

Then again, I might just be trying to rationalize RubyVote. RubyVote, of course, is the very descriptive, accurate, and uninspired name of a new election methods library I've just written and released in on RubyForge. Here's the short description:

An election methods and voting systems library written in Ruby. It provides a simple, consistent and well documented interface to a number of preferential, positional, and traditional election and voting methods.

Yes. Condorcet and Cloneproof-SSD are supported.

The homepage and project pages, both of which are also descriptive, accurate, and uninspired, can be found here:

• Homepage: http://rubyvote.rubyforge.org
• Project Page: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyvote

The software is distributed under the GNU GPL.

I've recently been speaking quite a bit about people who are principled, and sometimes not so principled, about free software.

Now, I'm not convinced that name calling has ever done any movement much good but I won't let that stop me when I want a few concise way to describe different groups of unprincipled, hypocritical, struggling, or just plain confused free software users -- at least not when it's all in good fun. I do not, as I've mentioned before, consider myself immune from either my criticism or my epithets. To appreciate either term, you merely must recognize that the term FLOSS is often used to mean Free, Libre and Open Source Software.

The first great term is the brilliant neologism flip-flosser, a creation of Dafydd Harries. It is perfect for describing the on-again off-again free software user.

My own addition is the more edgy flosstitute: an solid poke at anyone willing to sell out their principles and their movement for a little political good will or a slicker desktop.

I was very pleased to hear that my recent scribblings on free software and principles managed to get some air time on the last LugRadio broadcast (46:30 into the broadcast). I was even more pleased when I listened to the show.

Not everyone agreed with my argument, my tactics or my motivations but they, as a group, managed to uncover many of the metaphors and lines of thought that led to my writing the piece in the first place. More importantly, they engaged in exactly the type of discussion that I hoped to prompt.

I'll embarrassingly admit that it was my first time listening to the show. I tend to not be a fan of recorded speech in general as it strikes me as an inefficient use of bandwidth (both mental and DSL). That said, I have to admit that the show sounds like a whole lot of fun!

Apologies to anyone that finds this preachy or holier-than-thou. I don't consider myself immune to this criticism: my mobile phone still runs non-free software. I realize that what I describe here is a process for everyone. I'm just trying to make sure nobody gets too comfortable with the status quo.

It's been interesting to see non-hackers finding inspiration in the free/open source software movement. In particular, I've been watching this phenomena for a couple years in the the non-profit and NGO sector. Folks in these groups are often very philosophically aligned with the freedom movement behind free software and there are a number of organizations that are involved in promoting free software and the ideas behind it to NGOs and beyond.

What's amazing to me is that in many situations, major advocates of free and open source software in these areas -- people who are advocating the software because of the freedom and not only for the pragmatic benefits -- don't actually use free software on their desktops or in other places they could.

Sure, everyone uses Firefox. Sure, everyone uses Apache and GNU/Linux for their web servers. Sure, everyone uses Drupal, Mambo, Plone, or another free CMS. But one can't help but notice that Firefox, Apache, and free CMSs are higher quality, more featureful, and easier to use than the proprietary alternatives.

People arguing for free software from a principled position need to remember that principled positions are sometimes inconvenient. Free software is no exception. It's frequently different, sometimes incompatible and a bit more work. In some situations (dare I say it?), it's not as good as the proprietary alternatives.

We all need to remember that living a principled life is not always the easiest path. If you take a principled position against GMO foods or in favor of organic produce, you'll probably spend more and shop farther from your house. Your favorite fruit may not be in season year-round. If you only buy fair-trade clothing, your garment choices will be cut down in ways that will sometimes be inconvenient.

It's nice when taking a principled position also means you get to do what is most convenient. But there's little principle in taking a principled position only when it's convenient.

Yes. There are problems -- often major -- with free software: usability, documentation and otherwise. There are also ways to address these problems. Few of them require that you be or become hacker but almost all of them involve using the software first. I don't have to think hard to recall all of the times I've received contributions (e.g., documentation, suggestions, translations, patches, etc.) from people who don't use my software.

If you don't think that spreading free software is an ethical act, you can happily ignore me. If you agree that it's the right thing, think hard about your principles and challenge yourself to take the next step -- whatever that is.

The press, others, and even myself have made much of the Media Lab and One Laptop Per Child's decision to embrace a platform that is fully free and open. There are two major reasons for working with the free world on this project. The first is the philosophical reasons that I've laid out recently. The second is the fact that a free platform will help us leverage the work of a large community to accomplish building, testing, and improving what we believe will ultimately develop into a new and more relevant type of software platform for the world's children.

In terms of building community, our first goal must be harnessing the power of the existing free software world and interested parties therein. Later on (i.e., once the machines exist) we can focus on getting governments, non-profits, and ultimately some of the students using the machine, to contribute as well. While there's clearly a bootstrapping phase, we unfortunately, we haven't done much of either so far.

Up until now, Red Hat has been doing the legwork in the realm of software. So much so that at points it has been difficult even for some of us officially working on the project (e.g., myself) to make meaningful contributions. While we've had many people express interest in helping with the project from elsewhere in MIT and in non-MIT world, we've been at a loss for ways to plug folks in.

As part of a larger effort to address these issues in the next month or so, Walter Bender, myself, and David Cavallo are organizing a short workshop on getting involved in the OLPC/$100 laptop project for people at MIT. We will also be posting information from that workshop online for everyone. If you're at MIT and are interested, please show up. If you are in the area but without an MIT or Harvard affiliation, contact me. If you're out of the area and are interested in getting involved, just stay tuned.

The workshop is being offered as a three hours one-day-only IAP class. You can check out the IAP web page and then show up.

We will be done with plenty of time to rest up before the MIT mystery hunt begins. It looks like I'll be hunting with Codex Dresden.

Quim Gil asked a number of good questions about the One Laptop Per Child initiative. I will not answer all of his questions now and am not sure answers exist yet for every question. With that said, I will try to answer his final question with the traditional disclaimer that the thoughts expressed here are my own and may or may not be shared by others within the project are not the official position of OLPC.

Quim asked, "what measures will be taken to avoid or [inhibit] the spread of a (unconscious or well-intentioned?) cultural neocolonialism?" I have been asked this question many times. It is an issue that concerns me personally. As such, I'll give you my personal feelings on the subject.

Discussion of cultural colonialism, Westernization, Americanization or techno-imperialism are hardly limited to OLPC. Sometimes it comes in the form of reactions against what is seen as the homogenizing or Americanizing effect of US-based multinationals (e.g., McDonald's or Nike) or against the culturally oriented US-based motion picture or recording industries. In terms of technology, the debate is often framed in terms of Appropriate Technology.

There is an argument that modern information technology -- designed and developed in highly industrialized countries to address their particular set of cultural contexts and needs -- may be inappropriate and potentially dangerous in the developing world. This is a fair critique. But while there may be a danger, insisting that the technology be kept out is unrealistic and may miss the larger evil.

These discussions can not responsibly ignore the fact that, depending on whose numbers you trust, there are between and 1 and 2 billion mobile phones in the world today and that number will reach something like 2.6 billion operational units in 2009. That's nearly half the world population and it's not hard to find out where most of those phones are going:

All the growth in subscribers is coming from emerging markets," says David Taylor, Motorola's director of strategy and operations for high-growth markets. Researchers predict that of the 1 billion cell phones expected to be sold in 2010, half will be in developing economies. (link)

Information and communication technology is, in one form or another, on a fast track into the developing world. That may very well be a problem but it's not the biggest problem in this field. The bigger problem is the nature of the technology that is being imported.

People in the, rich and developed countries may have cellphones, but they frequently also have computers: full-fledged, reprogrammable, hackable computers; computers that they can use to write software, design hardware, install new OSes on, and even -- if they are really adventurous -- use to reprogram their mobile phone.

People in the developing world will have information technology (in the form of cellphones at least) but do not have the ability -- no matter how interested, talented, or intelligent they are -- to change the way they work. This is the greater danger.

The most powerful and empowering quality of information technology in the context of personal computers is that as communication is being mediated, facilitated, and defined through software on computers fully within users' control, each user has the ability to determine the terms on which they communicate. In a world where people are communicating, trading, voting, learning, working, and organizing through digital channels, massive power lies in the hands of those who have the tools (e.g., computers and development platforms) and access and permission (e.g., Free and Open source software) necessary to make the necessary changes.

In three years, there will be a billion people in the developing world who are using information technology on the terms and at the whim of the today's global elite and they will not be able transcend their role and consumers and subservients in this context. Their ability to transcend their depressed role in larger economic contexts will be highly influenced by this fact. The developing world's "computers" will not be able to create or change the software that define them. The code that runs these devices will be proprietary and will remain immutable even in the context of additional hardware.

Unless we do something about it.

As far I'm concerned, that something is two steps:

• We need to create and distribute -- real computers that can be used as development platforms -- at a price that can begin to compete with their alternatives (e.g., phones, thinclients, WebTVs, etc).
• We need to make sure that these machines are hackable -- totally hackable -- on every level. That means open hardware. That means Free and Open Source software. That means open specifications, protocols, and data formats.

That is my personal goal in OLPC and it is one that has seemed to have been echoed by others involved in the project.

Of course, I have hardly washed myself or my project of the stigma of cultural imperialism yet. That said, while making a completely malleable machine allows every user to, if they choose to, transcend their role as a consumer of technology and technologically-defined culture, one side effect of this process is that it also allows them to do so on their own terms. Because the machine is completely free and open, users are free to use the machine in ways that not only have the originators not considered, but that they could not imagine. With time, the machine -- and its software in particular -- can be rewritten, reshaped, and eventually replaced with something of, by, and for its users.

Of course, this will not happen overnight. As the first step, OLPC will attempt to create something we think provides a compelling and flexible platform with which the world can learn and build. With this in hand, governments and ministries of education that purchase the machine will get to shape (or replace?) the platform in line with their own ideas and curricula. As the students and communities to which the machines are deployed learn and build with and upon the machine, another transformation will occur. As those communities grow in relation to their technology, this change will be sustained.

The potential for this dynamic and empowering relationship is the reason I'm here.

After a unfortunate bout of downtime, I'm happy to announce that Sam Hartman has officially revived the Debian-Boston-Social mailing list and our community is back in business.

If you're in Boston and would like to participate in key signings, meetings with local and traveling free software hackers (Debian and otherwise) and to stay keyed into a crowd of people in Boston working on and using Debian and its derivatives, this is your list.

You should feel free to attend events and to plan and announce your own in pubs and other points of interests.

With its strong academic predisposition and its important place in the history of free software, the Boston/Cambridge has no excuse being shown up by places like New York City when it comes to having a happening Debian scene.

You can sign up here.

My talk at BLU seems to have been carried out successfully.

The talk was nothing new for folks who follow this blog and know my other Ubuntu talks. It was a long (nearly two hour) number given to an audience with mixed experience with Ubuntu. As such, it covered a lot of ground by pulling from both my introductory Ubuntu talks and my To Fork or Not to Fork talk that I gave several times this summer. The talk was given at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Steve Ballmer gave a talk at Sloan two days later. His talk was better attended. Of course, I doubt he told people how to get free copies of his projects OS offering shipped to their homes at no cost.

Slides and notes follow.

Slides:

• HTML
• PDF
• OpenOffice Impress Source

Talk Notes:

• HTML
• reStructured Text Source

Next month in Dublin is going to be the Darklight digital film festival. In preparation for the festival is a now traditional symposium that has a reputation for bringing together a collection of interesting people to, "identify, profile and respond to the current transformations in the distribution of cultural production enabled by the proliferation of digital and wireless networks."

I'm thrilled to have been asked to attend and give a speech there along with fellow Media Lab inhabitant Barry Vercoe (of course, he helped found the lab -- I've only been there for a month). I'll be talking about intellectual property and will try to describe some of the history of the current mess we're in, offer a rough classification of the types of solutions that are being offered and then go into some depth on the Free/Open Source Software model. I'll talk about the reasons Free Software has been successful and try to describe some of the benefits and limitations of applying this model to the production of other types of creative works.

You can check out the symposium schedule and register now for a free spot in the audience. Please keep in mind that registration is limited.

If you will not be able to attend but are in Dublin and would like to meet up (for keysigning, chatting, etc.), please get in contact and we'll work something out.

I've never been to Ireland before am excited. The one (major) downside of course is that this talk will mean I will not be able to attend the most relevant parts of Ubuntu Below Zero conference and so am currently not planning to attend at all. I send my regards to the rest of the Ubuntu team. I'll see you at the next one am looking forward to the tsunami of new specs that will define Dapper and am looking forward to participating in whatever way I can from remote.

Mika pointed out a striking similarity between the official business addresses of Apple and Canonical:

A friend I trust tells me that Infinite Loop is not, in fact, infinite. I have every reason to believe that Circular Road is everything the name implies.

Honesty is very important to me.

Last night, I decided to check out the Boston Linux Unix webpage to find out when the next meeting would be and what the talk would be on.

To my surprise, the talk is tomorrow and is slated to be given by none other than Benjamin Mako Hill. Hmmm.

I vaguely remember agreeing to give a talk like this in general sense but don't remember ever agreeing to a specific day. In any case, I'm not one to disappoint and am working on my slides.

If you're interested in some post-Breezy action in Boston, please show up! If you can't make it, I'm trying to arrange a proper release party for some point after I receive my Breezy CDs (a week or two I guess).

I'm sorry for the short notice. Of course, I'm giving the talk on short notice so I'm not too sorry. Additionally, I am missing both a class and a Media Lab sponsors dinner that I was already double booked for. You should be able to cancel up to one of your prior engagements to attend.

Information on the talk is on the BLU website. The talk will be held at MIT in E51-315.

I've been reading First Monday for several years now. It's probably the only academic journal that I take the time to scan every single time a new issue is released. As you might imagine, I was felt honored to be asked by Sandeep Krishnamurthy to submit a set of reflections on Free and Open Source Software's from a "where have we been, where are we going" perspective for a upcoming special issue of First Monday on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

First Monday has published or republished some of the most important articles on FOSS -- both academic and non-academic -- over the last few years and this issues tries to highlight many of the best pieces.

The issue was released today and can find the whole issue here. You can jump direction to my reflections on free software past and future as well.

Overall, Krishnamurthy puts together a solid collection. My only critique is that I felt that at least one piece from someone on the Free Software side of the Open Source/Free Software divide would be essential to a complete collection. I found it conspicuously missing.

Thinking along these lines, I could not help but remember that Eben Moglen's Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright was published in First Monday early on and I'm sad that it was no included. I understand that Moglen's piece is more radical and less "academic" than others but I'm not convinced it would be any more out of place than the Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar which was included. While less visible, Moglen is at least on par with Raymond in terms of the impact and importance of this thought in the FOSS world.

Moglen's piece was one of the two articles that first brought FM to my attention and, whether you agree with it or not, it is a controversial and important piece. The other article on FOSS that I an think of in relation to FM was George Dafermos' Management and virtual decentralized networks. Looking at again, I'm not sure it's aged very well (or perhaps I haven't aged well in relation to it) but I was happy to see that it make it in.

Biella Coleman recently finished her dissertation in Anthropology after studying Free Software communities for most of a decade. It's a hefty tome and I'll admit that I have only read the chapter on Debian but I am definitely impressed. As many of my favorite arcade games would say, "CONGRATULATION!" Only one.

I think that a certain amount of "outside perspective" from people who are trained to observe, compare, and analyze social interactions can be an incredibly healthy and useful thing for a community. Since I'm interested in the social and political aspects of free software development, I have read more than my share of work from sociologists, anthropologists, and economists studying free software. I can say with whatever authority that gives me that Biella has one of the best understandings of Free Software of any "outsider" studying the field.

Of particular interest to me is her chapter on the cultivation of ethics within Debian. I think Debian folks should check it out if they are interested and have the time.

My only warnings to Debianistas are about the length and the language. This is a paper written to impress anthropologists. In particular, it's written to impress a committee of anthropologists who got to decide whether Biella would get a doctorate. Basically, this means jargon, references, and a style of writing that is perhaps only totally transparent to other anthropologists. That said, Biella has put effort into making it "translucent" to the rest of us and has mostly succeeded but folks should still be warned. It's definitely worth a read.

To Everyone

Many people already know this but I thought I would make a more "public" announcement so everyone knows.

In about two weeks, I'll be leaving Canonical Ltd. to return to academia at the MIT Media Lab. I'll be in Walter Bender's Electronic Publishing research group working with Marvin Minskey and others.

I'll be doing as-yet-undecided research at the lab and I've got a number of very attractive options to choose from or try to balance. One of these is Negroponte's $100 Laptop Project which, for a number of reasons, seems like an incredible opportunity.

To the Ubuntu Community

Of course, by no means does leaving Canonical mean I will be leaving the Ubuntu community. On the contrary, I intend to continue my work with the community council, play a leadership and/or advisory role in the budding Ubuntu Foundation, and suspect I will even be able to raise my involvement in a couple other technical and non-technical areas of Ubuntu that my work for Canonical sometimes left little time for. I don't think anyone, except maybe folks from the business side of Canonical, will be seeing much less of me and many of you will probably be seeing more. I will no longer be involved in the distribution of CDs so email info@shipit.ubuntu.com and not me if you have a question along these lines. :)

I think that in a number of ways, this is actually a very good thing for the Ubuntu community. Not everyone realizes this but both top governance committees in Ubuntu -- the Ubuntu Community Council and the Technical Board -- are made up of Mark Shuttleworth and people he employs. While our community is less than one year old and this is unavoidable in the process of bootstrapping a young community like Ubuntu, this fact has made me increasingly uncomfortable over the last year.

I think that through a departure from Canonical and a sustained role on the council, I can help introduce real community and institutionally independent involvement at the highest level of our project. I believe that I can help Ubuntu grow as project distinct from and in symbiosis with Canonical in a ways that I couldn't -- for symbolic reasons if nothing else -- while my rent was being paid by Mark.

To Bostonians

Going to MIT means I'm also going to be returning from New York City to Boston, Massachusetts. Mika and I will be living in Harvard Square, Cambridge and already have a place. Since I seem to have no social life distinct from my free software life, I will probably be seeing some of you much more often. If you're in the area and I don't talk to you regularly yet, contact me and we'll get together.

To Canonical

I've said this already but I think a good job is about working with and for good people and I can say without hesitation that Canonial is best job I've ever had. It's been a complete pleasure and I won't be surprised at all if I find myself back with Canonical again in a couple years.

To Boston Debianistas

It's simple really: Get ready to show those New Yorkers that despite the fact that our subways are clean, look like toys and close at midnight, our bars close at two, our milkshakes are in no way actually milkshakes and our international airport is comparatively tiny, we can still have a way better Debian Social Scene.

As I mentioned recently, in what became a small European tour, I gave a number of versions of a technical talk based around a paper on Ubuntu and the way we build our distribution on top of Debian.

To Fork Or Not To Fork, was presented at LinuxTag, Libre Software Meeting and What The Hack. As I said last time, the talk describes some aspects the way that Ubuntu is developed as a Debian derivative and some reasons folks from a wide range of different Free Software projects might be able to learn something from our experience.

The talk is aimed at a rather technical audience of free software developers. Hopefully, this fills a void by acting as an Ubuntu talk that is more technical than the standard Introduction to Ubuntu without limiting its appeal to only current or prospective Ubuntu developers.

Although I gave this talk several times, I'm just including a single set of notes and slides. These are the versions from the third presentation at What The Hack. You can get the talk slides and notes in the formats listed below.

Slides:

• HTML
• PDF
• OpenOffice Impress Source

Talk Notes:

• HTML
• reStructured Text Source

Enrico Zini suggested that I don't stir up stinking shit unless I want it to keep stinking. I find that he's almost always right so I'll try to keep this short as I ignore his advice.

A number of people didn't see the humor in my pledge. I was, in fact, joking around to make a point. I thought the fact that it was phrased as a pledge would reveal the joke. If you want to do something strongly enough that you might create a pledge, just do it instead of risking action on the interest or apathy of others. Pledges -- and especially pledges of this sort -- are silly in this respect and I didn't think people would take my pledge so seriously.

In terms of my point, Joey Hess was right. My point was bigger than Andrew and it wasn't fair to pick on him to make a point. I apologize to Andrew and to anyone else offended.

Those concerned about killfiling may have missed the comment where I revealed that I don't actually killfile. If we can achieve the maturity to not respond to messages when we read them as provocations (whether they were intended that way not), killfiles are unnecessary. I think we should all grow up a little bit. That was the point and I apologize if it didn't get across.

But I realize that talk is cheap. So to end this saga on the absurd note it was supposed to start on I've gone ahead and started another pledge...

"I will never start another pledgebank.com pledge to killfile anyone but only if 50 others will agree not to create such pledges as well."

—Benjamin Mako Hill

You can sign up for the pledge here.

I will killfile Andrew Suffield so I do not recieve Debian list email from him but only if 100 other people on Debian lists will too.

-— Benjamin Mako Hill

I have created a pledge over at PledgeBank with the title above and am looking for your support. Here's the explanatory text:

If you read the Debian private email list, you understand my immediate motivation for starting this pledge. If you do not but interact with the Debian community in other ways, there's a good chance you can come up with many other examples of why agreeing to pledge might be a good idea.

I think the Debian project would be a better place if people stopped responding to comments that, in effect and often in intent, are little more than provocations, put-downs, and trolls. Andrew Suffield's emails to Debian lists fall in this category all to often.

However, since responses that quote unecessarily provocative messages are visible by folks who have ignored the sender, blocking email from a person (also known as killfiling) only works if done en-mass.

While Andrew is by no means the only person whose comments have a disruptive effect on Debian lists, he is a one example of a person whose negative effect outweighs his positive contributions in the minds of many. While those fulfilling this pledge would miss Andrew's positive contributions on the lists, I believe it would be worth it.

The point of course, is not to pick on Andrew Suffield. It's just that his behavior makes him a good example.

The point is to raise a little awareness about (and get a few names behind) the feeling that messages that are not intending to troll can have the identical effects -- and that perhaps the best policy is to treat them accordingly. If the only outcome is that people understand this, it will have been a success.

You can sign up for the pledge at: http://www.pledgebank.com/killfileandrew

I've been perplexed for quite a while by the fact that in a lot of areas (in academia in particular but may other places as well), people try to explain free software or open source and it's freeness or openness in very reductionist or essential terms. The argument can start with some variation of one of these statements (or something similar in spirit):

• "Free Software is inherently anti-capitalist."
• "Open Source is an example of pure uninhibited capitalism."
• "Free Software provides a model through which we can put limits on capitalism."

I touched on this issue in a talk I gave at LSM in 2003 called Lessons from Libre Software Political and Ethical Practice and then even managed to write it up in what became a published journal article with Biella Coleman.

Well the folks at Libroscope ran another track at LSM in Dijon this year and they managed to talk me into opening the theme with an attemp to give a practitioner's view of freedom in free software and the important role it has played in the movement as a way of deflating the reductionist and essentialist analyses I alluded to above and explaining how they are neither completely wrong, nor completely correct.

You can get the talk slides and notes in the formats listed below.

Slides:

• HTML
• PDF
• OpenOffice Impress Source

Talk Notes:

• HTML
• reStructured Text Source

Dafydd Harries, Hanna Wallach, and Moray Allan gave an interesting Debconf talk on the Debian New Maintainer (NM) process and thought I would throw in my two cents. If this looks familiar, it's because I made the second half of this argument on debian-newmaint a long time ago without much effect.

I see two major problems with NM as it stands right now:

• The idea of "developership" in Debian collapses package maintainership and membership or citizenship into single quality.
• Quite simply, NM focuses too little and too indirectly on the qualities that make good Debian developers.

At a certain point, the end result of each of these is the same: we create barriers to entry that block good developers. Some believe that the procedure also fails to block bad developers although I'm personally less concerned about that.

Developership and Citizenship

Being a Debian developer means that you have a key in the Debian keyring. This allows all developers to upload packages into Debian but also allows them to vote in General Resolutions and Project Leader elections. There is only one keyring for both of these things. Because all developers can upload packages, the process to become a developer tests packaging skills. While it is possible for non-technical folks (e.g., documentation or translations folks) to become developers, there is a understandable queasiness about adding keys to the keyring for folks who have not and do not intend to upload.

My favorite example was always Greg Pomerantz who is Debian's lawyer. In terms of time, effort, and impact, Greg contributes to Debian more than most developers. However because he did not maintain packages and was not interested in doing so, he was not enfranchised within the Debian political system. Greg's example is now less good because he's started maintaining packages and jumped into the normal NM queue but I think his example highlights a serious shortcoming in the Debian system.

In Ubuntu, we have split "membership" from upload privileges. Members are people who have testimonials from trusted members of the project, who can demonstrate a history of substantial contributions, and who have agreed to our foundation documents. Membership conveys voting rights but -- unlike Debian -- expires with inactivity. While only members can upload, members cannot upload by default. They must first be checked off by a board of technical guardians who will look at their sponsored package history.

Now, I'm not convinced that Ubuntu's model is the best way for Debian. However, if Debian really can't separate uploaders from voters, I think that our NM process should test less on specifics and more for people that know their own limitations. Branden Robinson had an interesting idea I'll let him propose on his own but I think might be a great retroactive fit for Debian.

Selecting For Quality Maintainers

On the second point, I am increasingly frustrated with the way that tasks and skills are handled in Debian. When I went through NM I was asked (and answered) exactly zero task and skills questions. I made packages, upgraded packages and fixed bugs. My work was vouched for by others and left to speak for itself.

What I ask to my NMs is similar to what was demanded of me. I ask few, if any, questions but look for, and require, active engagement with the Debian and free software communities. If people are doing good work and have great technical reviews from sponsors and are creating clean, well documented packages, and demonstrate that they know when and how to read a manual, this should be enough. I heard a talk from a famous biologist a couple years ago who told a story that went something like this:

A group of scientists bred mice so that they were really good at running through a maze. Many generations down the line the mice that made it through the rigorous breeding selection process were really good at running through the maze; but they were also partially deaf and partially blind. Partially blind and deaf mice are less distractable and are better at running through mazes. The mice were no smarter or better than other mice -- just worse in a way that was helpful in the narrow case of the test.

I'm afraid the length and depth of the NM process is, in many cases, selecting for something other than competence, reliability, and knowledge of and adherence to our policy, philosophical, and quality standards. I half-jokingly believe our system is selecting for people who like researching and writing very long series of emails over people who enjoy going out and getting high quality programming work done in a consistent and reliable way.

Imagine the flame wars of the future.

A bit more than a month ago, I posted about an essay I'd written on Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects. Thank you to everyone who sent me feedback.

As I mentioned then, I wrote the paper for a talk at this years Linuxtag in Karlsruhe, Germany. I gave the talk as planned and am using this opportunity to upload the talk notes and the slides. They are based quite heavily on the pre-paper version of the talk I gave at FISL 5 in Porto Alegre, Brazil a bit more than a year ago.

I'm not sure that these notes add much to the paper but if people couldn't make it to the talk and liked the paper, they're here for you to check out in the following shapes and formats:

• Slides in the following formats:
  • HTML
  • PDF
  • OpenOffice Impress (Source)
• Talk notes in the following formats:
  • HTML
  • ReStructured Text Source

Yesterday, I heard a Plan 9 developer laugh when he hear someone said they were a Hurd developer. He thought that the Hurd was a marginal and trivial operating system.

I laughed harder.

Tomorrow I will be at the Sixth Libre Software Meeting or Les 6èmes Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre. I'll be giving a talk on Ubuntu as part of my aforementioned Ubuntu Does Europe tour and, due to my own weak will and the persistent nature of the conference organizers, also be giving two other talks.

Here is the line-up:

• On July 5, I'll be opening the "taking Free Software beyond IT" theme with a talk called Broadly Defined Freedom and Radical Non-Discrimination based off of some of the writing I've done with Biella Coleman including How Free Became Open And Everything Else Under the Sun. It's some of my older work but I think it's still important to repeat every once in a while.

• On July 6, I'll be giving a LinuxTag redux of To Fork Or Not To Fork: Lessons From Ubuntu and Debian on the Ubuntu derivation model and how other projects can learn from our successes and challenges and why I think the model is an important step toward the way that free software will be built in the future.

• Later on July 6, I'll be giving a final talk on Creative Commons and why I think it has fundamentally misunderstood (or at least misapplied) the structure (and goals, but that's another talk) of the Free Software movement.

  I've had a concise and rather stinging article on this I've been circulating semi-privately for over a year and that I've been unsure about what I wanted to do with it. Cory Doctorow read it and compared me to a trot and Richard Stallman somehow managed to get a copy and has been repeatedly urging me to release it -- along with a number of other people I respect in the movement. As a result, I'm going to give the topic a go at LSM and then, if all goes well, incorporate any meaningful and helpful criticism I receive and release the article afterward.

  If you're not at LSM but you want a preview of the article or know of someone who might be interested in publishing it, please get in contact

You'll have to check the posted conference schedule for details, precise times, and rooms. Please find me if you'd like to sign keys or introduce me to an excellent French wine.

Slides, notes, and the like are on their way from my LinuxTag talks and I'll link to them some time this week.

After the sarge release party last weekend, I ended with at least the following items and (none of their owners) in my apartment:

• David Nusinow's "Obey Gravity: It's the Law" t-shift
• David Nusinow's laptop (and only computer) AC adapter
• Anthony Town's fleece sweatshirt/jumper
• Andres Salomon's only suit (never worn)
• Erinn Clark's towel
• Ari Pollak's towel
• What is apparently Fernanda Weidan's hair-styling goop (the packaging is written in Portuguese)
• What is apparently Fernanda Weidan's Sorin eyedrops (writing in Portuguese)
• Hanna Wallach's passport (!)
• An insurmountable amount of Clint Adam's cheese

Any Debian developers traveling through New York City with large quantities of fine single-malt whiskey are welcome to stay at my place.

After taking one year off, I will be back in Karlsruhe for Linuxtag this week. I have two papers in the Linuxtag conference proceedings and will giving talks based on each. These include:

• Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects - The talk will be at 16:00 on June 24th. I've already distributed a draft of this paper and received some good feedback.

• To Fork or Not To Fork: Lessons from Ubuntu and Debian - There are, believe it or not, two Ubuntu talks running head to head at 17:00 on June 25th and mine is one of them. It seems that Michael Kofler (who I did not even realize was giving a talk on Ubuntu until I saw the schedule ) is giving more of a general overview and introduction to Ubuntu. My talk will go into a good deal more technical detail and be geared more toward developers who want to learn from Ubuntu's experience in trying to create a project that is developed in parallel with an existing project by diverging and maintaining a sustained inter-project relationship over time.

  It's tricky stuff and I don't claim to have all the answers but I hope I can shed some light on the situation. There's been a lot of noise about this lately on Debian lists -- some positive and some very critical. I hope that my talk can help describe the processes so far and the thinking behind them, distill some solid advice out the criticism we've all heard, and package it all in a way that is educational and helpful for folks working on very different types of projects.

I'm going to work a little more on my paper for the second talk and I'll link that that here when I'm done. As always, I'll also post slides and such for people that want to give similar talks of their own.

I am told that the Ubuntu community in Germany has arranged for some space sharing with GNOME and will have a bit of table space in that booth. I'll be there there for some time handing out CDs and answering questions. There will also, I'm sure, be a great Debian booth packed full of hackers and you should be able to find me there as well.

I'll be staying in Europe until the very beginning of August and will be at RMLL/LSM, Debconf5, and WhatTheHack. I'll have a bit of time in between and will be popping up here and there for talks on Ubuntu around Europe and in areas nearby. If you'd like to host such a talk, and especially if you've got a great LoCo Team, get in contact with me and lets see if we can arrange something.

Yesterday, I posted an example of package name poetry. I had such a good time writing that poem that I decided to write a few more on a variety of other subjects.

If you'd like to check out the full list of package name poetry, you can visit the package name poetry webpage. You might also be interested in visiting if you're thinking about writing some of your own and want a good wordlist to begin with and some example for inspiration:

• http://mako.cc/fun/package-name-poetry/

Here are some other poems to whet your appitite:

Bash and Slash!

This is my second poem honoring the release of sarge. It's overly harsh on a couple other distributions. In reality, I have no problems with either of the projects in question. This was really just a matter of engaging in few good natured jibes with other competing distributions.

Redboot: Greed.
File inn latrine (apoo).

Gentoo sux!
Velocity? Ne!
Crash? Yepp!

Sarg felt most tardy.
Foremost, nice.

Untitled Poem #1

Usually, the first two poems I write in any new genre or under any new set of limitations are a political poem and a sex poem. This poem is my political poem. It describes and calls for an anarcho-syndicalist violent uprising against an overzealous United States police-state using only the names of packages in Debian (which is not something, for the record, that I personally advocate):

The tripwire felt apt-Spy.
Whois kommander? FBI.

Meld worker members: Kontact.
Spread crimson mercury extract.

Guarddog toppler: Unison!
Subversion! Flamethrower! Arson!

Roundup, recover, remind.
Recite anarchist verse inn rhyme
Freedroid? Ne! Recode freemind!
Update freedom inn gnotime.

Untitled Poem #2 (Click Through To Read)

I also wrote a sex poem that that is not work safe. I think it may be the best one I've written but you'll need to click here to read it.

What better way is there to honor and immortalize an important event than through poetry? There is none. It is with this in mind that I set out to immortalize Sarge's release in verse.

What more appropriate way is there to honor the Sarge release in poetry than to write the poem using the names packages in sarge? Perhaps only by further constraining the poem to a well established genre of poetry.

It was a tall order but here you have it: a proper rhyming limerick honoring Sarge's release composed entirely of words that are also packages in Sarge. It tries to describe my happiness as I read the Sarge release announcement email:

Woody: the stone and the jail.

Dynamite newsflash. Coolmail!

"Sarg: Happy Birthday!"

Thy cruft thrust away!

Bonsai! Foremost odyssey: Ale.

In my dealing with Debian, SPI and more recently with Ubuntu and Canonical, I've spent some time in the last few years thinking about the best way to go about funding voluntary free software projects without losing all of the benefits that volunteerism brings. As with many things, it always seemed easier to identify the way to screw things up than the right ways to act. Some people who read grants for large foundations and who have funded free software projects in the past (with mixed results) were nice enough to listen to me rant a few times and encouraged me to write up my ideas. Since then, I've been talking to folks off and on, reading, and noting relevant experiences. Last June, I gave a talk on the subject at FISL 5.0.

Over the last year, I've continued thinking about this and finally went ahead and wrote it up for the conference proceedings of the upcoming Linuxtag 2005 where I will be presenting this work and a paper on problems and strategies in regards to Ubuntu, Debian, and the tricky process of deriving a distribution.

I'm interested in expanding this document with the help, experience, and suggestions of others. If I get enough good feedback, I'd like to wrap this up as a sort of funding HOWTO for the Linux Documentation Project. Please get back to me with comments or suggestions -- or, better yet, patches. It's also in GNU Arch for those that swing that way and want to hack on it.

Without further ado, the essay is called, Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects. You can read it in HTML or get in a number of other formats (including the DocBook XML source) or out of Arch over here.

Update: I've gone and posted this essay as an article on Advogato because I'd never done that before, I've always wanted to, and it seemed relevant. It might be nice to post any comments over there.

My most recent communiqué to the Debian-NYC social-listas includes the following (edited) message:

OMG IT FINALLY HAPPENED!

YES! SARGE RELEASED! THAT MEANS IT'S PARTY TIME!

THE DEBIAN-NYC RELEASE PARTY WILL BEGIN OVER BELGIAN BEERS AT 530PM THIS SATURDAY (JUNE 11)! ALL ARE WELCOME! INVITE YOUR FRIENDS!

I'll stop yelling now. I'm just so darn excited.

I really am that excited.

Read the full message for more information or if you are coming from out of town. Look at this message for directions to the normal meeting place. I hope to see some new folks there!

Sarge is Frozen! Long live Sarge!

No wait...

Short live Sarge!

On the car-ride from Canberra to Sydney (LCA to UDU), I was told the story of a recent cock-up regarding a t-shirt printed up for the Redhat Localisation Team -- the team that does translations and localization of Redhat into a number of target languages and locales.

By complete chance, the brother of one of the team members shared an airplane with me from Sydney to Los Angeles and was wearing the t-shirt in question. The shirt proudly advertised the Redhat Globalisation Team.

Use of the word globalization to refer to what is more commonly called internationalization and localization -- and recently even multilingualization -- is not unheard of. However, globalization is a loaded term with lots of implications one might want to avoid. While imagining the translators at Redhat as champions of international trade and global capitalism can be fun, globalization is probably not what they meant.

On a tangentially related note, I've always been amused by the term globalization. It presents an interesting philosophical question: how does one globalize something that is already a globe?

I own a pair of lace-up leather pants (i.e., trousers, thanks) but, while it helps, the costume doesn't make the rock star.

The Debian and Ubuntu teams that I'm on are (in a weird, dysfunctional way) slightly like rock bands. We have the long hair. We have the late nights. We have the binge drinking. Putting out a release is a bit like putting out a album.

So, to round it off, I've decided to go on tour. It's a pretty wimpy tour but it's a start. After some time locked in the studio, I'm out to promote Ubuntu's newly released "Hoary Hedgehog" and to play a few tracks from Debian's upcoming "Sarge" offering.

The two next stops include:

• On Sunday April 10, I'll be rocking out with the Southern Connecticut Open Source User Group in New Haven, CT. I'll talk about Ubuntu, the latest release, and the derivation process in relation to Debian. The event will be held at Innovation Software and feel free to drop by.
• On Monday April 11, I'll be playing at the The Northern New Jersey Linux Meetup in Fort Lee, NJ. You should reserve a spot on that web page if you plan on attending.

Both events promise to be relatively laid-back with manageably-sized groups that should leave enough time and space for questions, chatting, food and drink. I'll bring key fingerprints if anyone wants to trade keys while I'm there.

Here's a message I sent to Debian-NYC-Social:

Lots happening this week:

1. Ubuntu, the new Debian-based distribution, is making their second release this Friday. A celebration is in order.
2. There are a couple folks visiting town this week that need to pick up some GPG-signatures from Debian folks.
3. It's becoming increasingly imperative that I drink large quantities of delicious Belgian beer. I suspect some of you may be in the same situation.

We're all busy people so lets do a 3 for 1. Lets all meet up at 630pm on Friday at what is quickly becoming the official bar of Debian-NYC-Soc. Directions are online.

I hope to see you there! Call or email me if there are any questions.

If even with its world-class International Airport, New York City is out of your reach this Friday, other Ubuntites are throwing parties in their neck of the woods.

If your city isn't on that list, reflect for a moment on your favorite pub, cafe, or park. Then reflect on the fact that the page I linked to was a wiki. You'll know what to do.

I hope that the developers of GNU Hurd are enjoying the headlines about HP's new CEO as much as I am. Here's a sample:

• HP Giving Hurd $20 Million 'Golden Hello'
• The Word from Hurd
• HP Hopes Hurd's Low-Key Style Aids Company
• Following the Hurd Mentality
• What Hurd brings to HP
• Analyst: Loss of Hurd will hurt, but NCR will be OK
• Can HP's Hurd Handle Servers
• HP looks for steadiness with Hurd
• Hewlett-Packard Rides Hurd

There's lots more on Google News.

As announced earlier, I recently gave a talk on Ubuntu and its relationship to Debian and the process of derivation and the difficult process of balancing forking and collaboration in Manizales, Colombia. This talk ended up being more of an introduction to Ubuntu and to Debian and Debian derivation and I didn't really get to dig my teeth into the key issues that the title might imply to the degree that I'd hoped. The talk was mostly a combination of my recent talks Customizing Debian given at NYLUG and BaDoPi and Introducing Ubuntu given at GULEV.

In addition to the fact that there was a packed gym of more than 1,500 highly receptive people, the talk will probably be most memorable for the fact that I managed to spill water onto and severely damage my laptop during the talk and for the fact that the power went out for 10 minutes in the middle of the speech.

For folks that are interested in a general introduction to Ubuntu and its relationship to Debian, or who want to give their own version of the talk, you can use all of the information I have:

• Slides in English in the following formats:
  • HTML
  • PDF
  • OpenOffice Impress
• Slides translated into (Colombian) Spanish in the following formats:
  • HTML
  • PDF
  • OpenOffice Impress
• Talk Notes (which I didn't actually stick to very closely and was mostly recycled from the earlier talks) in the following formats:
  • HTML
  • reStructured Text

I hope to revisit this topic again soon and do a small part to stimulate a productive discussion in Ubuntu on ways the relationship to Debian can be improved and reinforced and in Debian about ways that we can manage relationships with derivers more constructively.

Clearly, Ubuntu folks are learning a lot, through things done right and through things we can do better in the future, on how to collaborate in doing what I really believe has the potential to become a new, better kind of fork that -- if we can pull it off -- may have a lasting impact on the way that Free and Open Source software (and distributions in particular) and developed. The CDD folks are shedding light on the issue from another interesting angle.

After a last minute offer and an impulsive decision, I arrived today in Manizales, Columbia for the XIV Congresso Nacional de Estudiantes de Ingeniería de Sistemas and its co-conference, the IV Congresso Internacional de Software Libre GNU/Linux. I'm one of a small number of international speakers they've shipped in. I'll be speaking about Ubuntu and about customizing and building on Debian this Thursday March, 17. See the conference schedule for details. Notes and slides will follow.

At the beginning of the trip here, airport security spent more time checking my backpack than I spend packing it. At the end, landing in Manizales was the first time I've been on a flight where the degree of mountain dodging would have qualified it as a "difficult" level in a computerized flight simulator. It's my first time in Colombia and it's been great so far.

Short of RMS, I don't know many attendees. If you're going to be around, get in contact with me or just find me and introduce yourself.

There are sometimes jokes in the free and open source software communities about leaders of prominent community organizations needing to be restrained...

This cage was found by -- of all people -- employees of the Free Software Foundation at -- of all places -- Linuxworld:

In the last year, I have heard a couple very smart people involved in the free software movement call open source dead or dying. This is clearly intended as a provocative statement -- the nature of the critique is not immediately apparent -- but I think that it might be true.

Most people reading this will know that open source is a movement started to distance the software created by the free software movement from the movement's people and ideals. Open source exists as an answer to the fear that people who wear suits will run away every time they hear the word freedom. Open source folks argue that you can sell free software by emphasizing the practical benefits and wrapping the code in new, more business-friendly term.

For a period of time, open source seemed spectacularly successful. The people in suits latched onto the idea and thrust the movement into the spotlight. Open source could be found in the business sections of the newspaper, and the NASDAQ's swelling list of explosive tech IPOs in the late 1990s.

With Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" freshly thumbed on their bedside tables, executives and engineers alike stuck the GPL and the source code for their latest development project into a neat little package and onto a website. They sat back waited for bugs to start disappearing. They were usually disappointed.

There are many practical benefits to open source, but with time and with the sense of self-reevaluation that the bursting of the dot-com bubble brought, many people looked more closely at open source's claim that their software was, in all situations, inherently better than proprietary software. Open Source is inherently better -- but only for some definitions of better. For those whose definition of better involves the immediate and constant growth of a company's stock price, there may be reasons to be less uncritically optimistic than we all were in 1999.

Since the peak of the bubble, we've seen many companies abandon their faith in the gospel of open source. Linuxcare has a new name an a new business model selling proprietary software. Red Hat is betting on Red Hat Enterprise Linux which, while still embracing the letter and licenses of open source, seems to depend more on the restrictive power of trademark law than Eric Raymond's word and the inherent power of the community. In some situations, the open bug tracking systems from the boom have shriveled and disappeared. The GPL is still in effect, but development has moved back inside the shops.

But my story so far is one of ideology, not of terminology, and not of the software in question.

While the ideology of open source seems to be waning in popularity, the term "open source" is growing in strength. More importantly, the software itself is bigger than ever and growing quickly. In Spain, regional governments are embracing "open source" and software libre. In Munich, in Brazil, and in non-profit organizations and schools around the globe, "open source" is a familiar phrase.

People haven't stopped talking about and deploying open source, but the people who do this today are not the people who bought stock in VA Linux's IPO. Ironically, those talking about open source today increasingly use the term to refer to the ideals and ideas of the free software movement which the open source initiative sought to deemphasize. When people say "open source," they are increasingly often speaking about "free software."

A handful of examples can illustrate this point:

• Ubuntu, which uses both the terms open source and free software, paraphrases important parts of the free software Definition (FSD) in their philosophy page -- so even when they use the term "open source", they are talking about freedom.
• David Turner, licensing guru for the Free Software Foundation, has told me that he has seen the term open source defined verbatim as the FSD.
• Sergio Amadeu, technology czar for the Brazilian presidency sued for libel by Microsoft, routinely talks about the essential role of freedom in software.

In these examples and in non-profit organizations and in groups of computer users from across the developing world, people are as much driven by their desire for software freedom and institutional independence as they are by their desire for a cheap OS and an alternative to DRM. People are increasingly often talking about free software -- even when they are using the words "open source".

Richard Stallman throws a fit every time he hears the word "open source" used in reference to his work. What he should be angry about is the confusion of the goals of the free software movement with the goals of open source. Stallman doesn't seem to see that the term open source's relationship to the two sets of goals is increasingly confused.

I will continue to talk about free software because I like disambiguating the term and explaining why I think that software and information freedom is a good thing. But I'm increasingly skeptical that the term "free software" can win. While the label "open source" will triumph, the concept will not. It's not my ideal world but I think I will be happy.

I've recently given two talks on Custom Debian Distributions and on deriving distributions from Debian more broadly. I finally got around to putting the information on my website so I thought I would mention it here for anyone that was there and wanted the notes/slides, for those that want to derive their own version or just for anybody who is interested.

The first talk was given on November 17th at my current "local" LUG, the New York Linux User Group (NYLUG). It was called Customizing Debian: Fork Yours With Debian GNU/Linux (a name I can't and won't take credit for). The talk was two hours and focused on the goals and techniques used by a number of groups that are deriving new distributions from Debian. I introduced Debian and gave an overview of the universe of Debian customizers. I then broke down the idea of customizing into a number of logical pieces and, using the examples of UserLinux, Ubuntu, and Debian-NP and Skolelinux (representing internal "CDD" groups), I walked the audience through the nitty gritty of customization using in-depth descriptions and a couple code samples.

You can get information on the talk in the following forms:

• Announcement: link
• Talk Notes: HTML, ReST,
• Slides: HTML, PDF, Openoffice.org Impress

The second talk was simply a shorter stripped down version of the NYLUG talk. It was only 45 minutes and was given at the Grupo de usuarios de Software Libre de Barcelona, AKA, Badopi. The modified versions of the slides I used are below. I gave the talk without notes.

• Slides: HTML, PDF, Openoffice.org Impress

Here in Mataró, I tremendously enjoyed a brief bit of confusion between per version documentation (i.e., documentation that is unique to each version of a program or project) and perversion documentation.

I think that any distribution shipping dselect documentation has perversion documentation covered.

I am writing this from the plane returning from Veracruz, Mexico where I gave a keynote talk on Ubuntu at GULEV's Congreso de Software Libre. The keynotes at the conference were given by Randall Schwartz, Maddog Hall, Richard Stallman and myself talking about Ubuntu. Another Ubuntu developer asked me, "you were in parentheses, right?" Well, apparently not! There was massive turnout for the talk which went extremely well and generated a lot of energy that culminated in what nearly turned into a physical tussle over who got the last Ubuntu CDs. It was an honor to share the stage with both the other keynote speakers and the local Mexican hackers and just to be able to address the extremely interested and active Mexican Free Software community. I had a great time and hope I can make it next year.

In any case, direct from the parentheses, I've got notes and slides for folks that want to derive and present Ubuntu at their own LUG or who just couldn't make it and would like to know what happened:

• Slides are in the following format: HTML, PDF, Openoffice.org Impress

• Talk notes for the narrative part of the talk: HTML, ReST

For the last bit of the talk, I should have paid attention to the two cardinals rules of technical talk-giving:

1. Doing a live demonstration of software is an invitation to Murphy's law.
2. Doing an untested demonstration -- for example, an install onto untested hardware -- basically eliminates any ambiguity about Murphy's appearance in rule 1.

I didn't. I did an Ubuntu install, on the projector, onto a brave soul's laptop. Through a stroke of luck (and the hard work of everyone in Debian and Ubuntu who ironed out all the bugs), it worked perfectly and gave me the opportunity to highlight many things I didn't make it to in the formal talk.

At the risk (read: sure thing) of appearing to self promote, I want to plug two talks I'll be giving soon:

• Tomorrow (Wednesday November 17, 2004), I'll be talking at the New York Linux User Group (NYLUG) giving a talk on customizing Debian. The talk will be about customizing in a general sense pulling from my experience with Ubuntu and in a specific CDD sense pulling sense pulling from my experience with Debian-NP. You need to RSVP to attend and should do it quickly. If you miss the RSVP, you can meet up in the bar across the street for the Real Event afterward. Details are on the NYLUG website.
• Next Friday (Friday, November 26, 2004), I'll be giving a keynote address on Ubuntu at the GULEV Congreso Internacional de Software Libre in Veracruz Mexico. It's just been finalized so it hasn't even hit the conference website as I write this. You'll need to visit the conference website for information on attending.

I know I'll see some old friends and I hope to meet some new folks as well. Feel free to get a hold of me if you'd like to meet up at either event.

I recently gave a talk at Gnubies: the New York City GNU/Linux group for beginners. The talk was aimed at complete beginners so it won't have a lot of new information for anyone who is already familiar with the topics covered.

The talk discussed both Debian and Ubuntu and explored the overlap to introduce the concepts of Free Software philosophy that are important to both projects.

For those that are interested, I've posted the notes I used (I gave the talk without slides) for those that want to give their own talk in HTML and ReStructured Text source.

I've been using Frederico Di Gregorio et al's PostgreSQL Python module psycopg since June. Only a couple days ago did I hear it pronounced and realized that it was pysco-pg (like "psyco PostGres") and not psycop-g (like psycops -- or mind police). It makes a whole lot more sense now.

The three primary problems I have with GNU Arch are:

• The user interface is nearly unusable. Without zsh tab completions, it is unusable.
• Arch is very slow over a network.
• Arch is very slow not over a network.

However, Arch is only VCS that makes branching and merging so natural that I do it regularly. As a result, I develop software and even documents in a way that is fundamentally differently (and better) than the way I have in the past.

Arch is the worst kind of good software; or perhaps the best kind of bad software. The more you use it, the more you hate it; unfortunately, the more you use it, the more you hate all the alternatives more.

Using arch is not a type of masochism, but sometimes it reminds me of masochism a tiny bit.

One think I liked about living in Boston was that there was an email list of all the local Debian developers that was used to coordinate meetings and keysignings when Debian folks stopped over in Beantown.

A number of local developers including myself did a decent job of replicating this in Seattle. Now that I'm in New York City, I've decided it's something I'd like here as well.

If you are:

1. A New Yorker (or you're nearby);
2. Interested in Debian and in meeting with other Debian-minded folks at infrequent and irregular intervals over beverages -- caffeinated and/or alcoholic;

...you should definately join the new Debian NYC Social email list. If you're only one or neither of these things, you're still welcome to join but I suspect you'll get a lot less out of it.

There are two blog entries that have been at this URL and, unfortunately, I'm not sure which one you're looking for. It could be one of these two:

• DRM, Pop-ups and Rise of Free Software
• Royalties and Reality about royalty systems and the short film Pol Pot's Birthday.

A few months ago, I went to pick up a computer for a friend at the Apple store and had to wait for 45 minutes while memory was installed. While I waited, I listened to conversations of people coming in to ask technical support questions at the "Genius Desk."

In the 45 minutes I was there, every question asked was about getting around iTunes' Digital Rights Management (DRM) for legitimate and legal reasons. Every answer was a "sorry" and a shrug.

Here's an example: "I have a desktop computer, a laptop computer, and an iPod. My laptop broke and you guys just gave me a new one. Now I can't copy my music over to the new computer." That iTunes users has every legal right to copy the song onto their new computer but the DRM won't let them do it. What are the chances of someone that spends $200 on iTunes music files and gets locked out from their own legally purchased files by DRM goes back to buy more songs or re-download the ones they lost? Very low. They'll buy a CD or just go download those songs on a P2P network they know is secure or unmonitored.

In response to this, iTunes' DRM has become more permissive but it's not enough -- nor can it be. Ultimately, iTunes is competing with P2P systems and ad-hoc systems of swapping amongst friends. The RIAA is wrong in their characterization of the fundamental difference between these systems: the difference is not one of price -- the price can (and will) get cheap enough that very few people will care. The core issue is one of software failing to respect its users by privileging the desires of outside interests (in this case the RIAA and its member companies) over its users'. The users get screwed and they won't come back.

Here's another example. The last three times I've introduced the concept of Free Software to folks, they've asked if Mozilla, which they use, is Free Software. Mozilla has taken off in the non-Free Software crowd in large part because of its ability to do pop-up blocking and some related features. Mozilla is doing something that Internet Explorer doesn't and they're sick of IE.

Nothing is stopping Microsoft from adding this functionality to IE. In the absence of patents, Free Software shouldn't assume it can "out innovate" well-funded proprietary software (which seems to be one claim of the Open Source camp); functionality can and will be copied. The reason Internet Explorer can't compete with Mozilla is that Microsoft places the desires of some (their executives, their executives' friends, their shareholders, advertisers, pop-up-makers, Hotmail users, the RIAA and the MPAA) over the desires of their users. Microsoft chooses to not incorporate functionality that their users want.

The mistake that both the RIAA in demanding DRM and Microsoft in designing web browsers that don't block pop ups are making is that they're taking their de facto monopoly for granted. Their software is annoying -- or worse -- and as long as viable alternative exist, a growing number of people will turn to them. At some point, things will tip. As people become aware that there are alternatives, these monopolies will be eroded. Ultimately, they will be dismantled. The incumbents, chained down by deals and alliances and promises made to advertisers, recording industry executives, shareholders and their ilk, will find themselves unable to react in an appropriate or timely manner. Free Software is already poised to capitalize on this.

[ For the record, I am speaking for myself and not for Ubuntu, Debian-NP, Debian, or anyone else. ]

I have a vision for Debian; rather, I have a number of (sometimes contradictory) visions. One idea that I've fussed a lot about over the last couple years is Custom Debian Distributions. I have helped make a few things happen in one little corner of the CDD world (Debian-Nonprofit) but haven't been as active as I'd like in the general CDD framework yet except through advocacy.

The idea behind a Custom Debian Distribution is, to borrow Enrico Zini's terminology, to be global and local at the same time: to create an OS and set of applications that is targeted to a specific group of people and to contribute and collaborate within a larger community in a way that lets people without interest in that niche group benefit and for you to benefit from the work of people without interest in that niche. This is basically what Bdale Garbee talked about when he was talking about flavors in his 2003 DPL platform. I suspect people are hanging on to their one-flavor-fits-all model because they haven't seen a compelling implementation of an alternative. I think that its the job of those of us that are sold on the idea to give them one (Thanks to everyone that has and continues to work on this in the CDD community).

Now as a few people know, I'm complicit in this whole Ubuntu Conspiracy. When Mark Shuttleworth first approached me about the project, the first thing I thought about was Custom Debian Distributions. I wasn't, and am still, not exactly sure how those things relate exactly.

I was (and continue to be) tempted to think of a spectrum of "Debianness" with officially blessed Debian releases at the center, testing and unstable slightly outside of that, CDDs farther outside but just within the circle of what's "officially" Debian, Ubuntu beyond that trying its best to hug the line, LinEx y sus hermanas in there somewhere, and Lindows almost on the periphery of our vision denying -- to some but not all -- that its on the spectrum at all.

But it's not that simple.

From a technical perspective, it's manageable. Ignoring project affiliation and institutional relationships, we might say that CDDs are about creating and maintaining a derived version of Debian over time and in way that offers all changes back to the pool of Debian (Debian won't take all). Forking in the traditional sense is one thing -- and it's relatively easy; going out of your way to share and collaborate within the Debian community is one way to define a CDD.

So it's simple if we, for the moment, think of Debian as a single monolithic blob -- forget subprojects and CDDs. We can break the goals of a any Debian derivation down into three basic types of customization:

• Package selection: Which software in Debian does the deriver want to include?
• Package configuration: What configuration changes does a deriver want to include (anything you can do with debconf/cfengine)?
• Package replacement (for lack of a better term): What packages does a derivative want to ship that has diverged from the package in Debian in terms of code (bug fixes, features, whatever)?

The problem (for my simplified model for explaining Debian derivatives -- I don't think it's a problem in general) is that some people are working within this framework in ways that are visibly connected to the Debian community and some people are not and don't want to be. Basically, Debian is whole lot more complex than just a ball of code.

In Jeff Licquia's blog, he mentioned that Ubuntu is a fork. In a way he's correct and in a way he's not. I think part of the problem is that "Debian" refers to a long list of things. Just to start we've got:

• Debian: the group of volunteers;
• Debian: the "project" with a Constitution, leader, and decision making structure;
• Debian: the ball of code (But which ball of code? Stuff on Alioth? Stuff in contrib? Stuff in the Debian-NP archive?);
• Debian: the infrastructure that runs the code together;
• Debian: the shared goals and the action of sharing (you share within the Debian community -- you are part of Debian);

This creates problems and uncertainty that we in the CDD community has been grappling with for a long time: Is Debian-Nonprofit Debian? Can any CDD really be Debian?

Of course, coming from the Debian community, the CDD community began with the answer ("yes") and then went about trying to create and argue a justification. We've even defined the technology based on what would or would not allow us to honestly call ourselves "Debian" and have attempted to grasp onto definitions of "Debian" that make that possible. Debian-NP and every CDD is still trying to figure out what it means to be Debian and Debian-NP at the same time -- how does one strike that balance?

Ubuntu starts out with an answer as well. Ubuntu is not Debian and I suspect this is what Jeff was referring to. Ubuntu wants to do things that Debian can't, won't, or just isn't all that good at and thare is great room for synthesis here.

My concern is that the political side of things -- the "who is Debian and who is not" -- risks driving a wedge between the technologies being used by those customizing Debian from the inside and from the outside. People don't work together because they are "not part of the same project" when they have every technical and strategic reason to collaborate.

Basically, I think we should let Debian stand for something political: an organization. When it comes to code, I think we should forget about this and find creative ways to work together.

I want to see Ubuntu, Progeny and the other Debian derivers work closely with the Debian derivers within Debian. I want this work to lead to systems of common infrastructure that makes applying the the different types of customization something resembling a standard. That's only going to happen if we all try. That doesn't mean there will be One True Way -- there won't. It does means that everyone is going to have to be flexible. I think ultimately, it will be worth it.

Last week, I met Graham Seaman while in London and we talked about Oekonux, Hipatia, and lots of ideas about extending principles of Free Software beyond the IP sphere. I finally got around to reading the transcript of Graham Seaman's talk from last year's Oekonux conference -- of which I'd heard a lot of hype.

The talk covers a lot of ground but, in large part, it is a response to a number of the conversations within Oekonux about the production of material goods under models of free software in major society-changing sort of way. My personal interest (of course) is in the production of non-software knowledge based products but I still find the question interesting.

Like a lot of work in Oekonux, Graham's piece looks into the future -- way into the future. It not only looks at Free Software's effect on the economics of a particular industry -- say, the recording industry -- but at major changes to the way that our world's economic system works. These sorts of questions are intriguing -- and certainly fun to think about -- but I think they tend to focus so much on some much on the major points that they ignore some of the steps along the way that will shape the way that the everything works.

Personally, I tend to prefer focusing on the more immediate questions like "how do we go from the current situation of highly proprietized production of, say, fiction to free production of fiction." That said, I think this talk is of the best treatments and I think Graham's analysis goes into depth about the way that Free Software actually works. I think it includes observation, analysis, and critique in a way that -- if nothing else -- can teach us a good deal about the nature of Free Software production.

So Graham's talk is all about how the world could be reshaped by the principles of sharing and cooperation that are in a germ form in Free Software. HE first goes through two proposed alternatives (I assume from the Oekonux list before I joined it) and talks about what he thinks can work, what he likes and why. He covers:

• The idea of using "fabbers" or all purpose production machines.
• The idea that material goods will become so cheap and easy to produce that nobody really cares about them and all the important issues in society will be about producing immaterial goods.

Graham thought that the idea of fabbers was more science fiction than anything else -- and I tend to agree. I've read a couple papers that are all about the philosophical and economic consequences of a world when fabbers and nanotechnology turn material goods into information and I, like Graham, just find it implausible. I think Graham does a pretty good job of deflating this idea.

In terms of the second proposal, Graham found the idea believable in a very long-term (hundreds of years) sort of way but still found it unpleasant. He ties that sort of change to mass-poverty, migration and worse and doesn't feel comfortable going down this path.

Graham's talk is about a third social solution based on some serious observation of Free Software practice and some deep thinking about the way that the economy of the future will look. Graham says:

It's becoming increasingly hard for the old system to produce software products. There are many products - especially ones that require cooperation of some kind, that require some kind of sharing, even commercially, that simply can't be produced under commercial constraints.

Basically, Graham describes a system where Free Software is created and fostered by a system that will undose itself. I'm not totally convinced of his conclusions but I definitely think there is something there.

Even if you have no interest in his conclusions or discussion of the way that Free Software can or will reshape the world. As just one example, Graham talks a connection he saw between Free Software and the business cycle:

Free software is not totally independent of the business cycle. I thought it might be. I went to Freshmeat and got all the stats for Freshmeat of the projects that were added over the life of Freshmeat, to see whether it reflected the current downturn in the economy and in IT and commercial IT in particular, hoping that it would show a line like that. But it didn't ... Now this is very odd for me, because the FLOSS survey said unemployment plays no part in free software. Basically, people in free software don't get out of work; and my guess, especially for people I've noticed, is that people who are out of work treat it as temporary. And the first thing they do is to put more time into writing free software anyway. But it appears that that's not the case, that free software is still, somehow, dependent on the business cycle.

It's not totally clear to me -- or to Graham -- whether or not his data is representative. I think the issue deserves a good hard look.

There's a lot of good stuff in the article. It's definitely worth checking out in the Oekonux archives:

• http://www.oekonux.org/list-en/archive/msg02563.html