rebel with rather too many causes
This last week, I gave a couple talks at OSCON including a fun talk on Antifeatures I hope to give a few in some form a more times in the next year.
After a weekend bike tour, the plan is to stick around San Francisco for another week. If you are around and want to get together to talk wikis, free software, or free culture, to have a keysigning, or to share a drink, please don’t hesitate to get in contact.
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.
Perhaps my favorite thing about library books — and used books if I’m lucky — is finding that a previous reader has fixed a printed error in pen or pencil.
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.
I saw Lewis Lapham give a talk a couple months ago at the Boston Athenaeum on new media, the Internet, and civic discourse. My one sentence summary:
The problem with giving everyone the ability to raise their voices online is that it makes people less likely to raise their voices, or their fists, in the streets.
Mika is at the Mexican Secretaría de Salud doing research on H1N1 this whole summer. I got into Mexico City yesterday to visit. I’ll be here for the next 10 days or so before I’m off to San Francisco for OSCON and related festivities.
Since I’m just here to visit, I’ve got very little else planned. If folks in or around Mexico City are interested in meeting up for dinner, drinks, a key signing, or to talk about free software, free culture, Debian, Ubuntu, Wikimedia, or whatever, don’t hesitate to get in contact.
Given it’s single letter name — and a common letter both in general and in statistics where it often represents correlation — searching for documentation on R on the web is difficult enough that folks have put together a custom search engine, RSeek. I’ve been doing quite a bit of R in the last year and can testify that RSeek is indispensable.
That said, using a custom search engine seems like a funny way of solving an problem that could be easily avoided. RSeek is sort of like the flessenlikker of search engines.
I got an email from my friend Mary Lou Jepson of OLPC and Pixel Qi. Turns out, she was in line for the red carpet at the Time 100 awards and was chatting to my friend moot of 4chan. Both were singled out as among the world’s 100 most influential people this year. As they chatted, they realized that they both knew me. They chatted about me as Whoopi Goldberg, Cornell West, Kate Hudson, Barbara Walters and others walked by.
I feel like in in a weird, very indirect way, I’ve made it.
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.
After a week at the International Open and User Innovation Workshop 2009 in Hamburg, I’m in Berlin again this week. I’ve got nothing concrete planned other than spending most of my days hacking on a few projects. Let me know if you’re around and would like to meet up.
I’ll post more about my travel and talks schedule this summer as things firm up in the next couple weeks.
When he was my adviser at the MIT Media Lab, I used to feel bad that I had trouble spelling Chris Csikszentmihályi’s name. As this screenshot from Chris’ Dopplr page shows, I am apparently in good company.
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.
About a year ago, I read American Gothic by Steven Biel and the book has left a surprising lasting impression on me. The book describes the background, history, and life of "American Gothic: America’s most famous painting" by Grant Wood. Even if you don’t recognize the name "American Gothic", you are likely to recognize the picture or the scene. The book is a serious and — as far as I can tell — reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject that is interesting, insightful at points, and a breeze to read.
Of course, the book is not actually about the painting that hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago — although it will certainly teach you more than you probably ever wanted to know about that painting, its subjects, its settings, etc. The book is really the story of how that paining has been received, understood, and used. Nearly half of the book focuses on examples of people who have remixed, reworked, reimagined, and reproduced the painting in myriad forms, formats, settings, and ways. The book contains scores of photographs of celebrities posing in American Gothic style settings, dozens of political cartoons based on the paintings, images of talk shows, magazine covers, Broadway plays, product advertisements, toys, gifts, kitch, and more, done up in recognizeable representations of the basic American Gothic form. There is a very incomplete of references to American Gothic in popular culture at Wikipedia that can give a tiny taste of what is out there.
The last chapter of the book is devoted to these "parodies" and there’s some brief talk of issues around copyright and control of the image. Wood’s sister Nan was the owner of the copyright for much of the second half of the twentieth century and is also the woman in the painting. She famously charged several makers of more lurid take-offs with defamation and successfully blocked a number of remixes. In 1988, Nan transferred ownership to the Visual Artists and Galleries Association (VAGA) which will hold the copyright until 2025. VAGA also claims "rights of publicity" in Nan’s image which will last until 2060. VAGA takes a very expansive view of its copyright claims and argues that it has both veto power and royalty rights to any recognizably similar work. For example, VAGA does not want the American Gothic image used in alcohol advertisements and has successfully had such ads pulled. Biel’s book contains no reference to the amount of money made from licensing the work but one can only conclude that it must be massive. VAGA blocked a plan by Iowa to use the picture on the back of the Iowa state quarter due to licensing disagreements; instead Iowa used a different Wood painting that was clearly in the public domain.
What struck me most about Biel’s book is related to just how deeply ingrained in American culture the American Gothic image has become. The book cites simple surveys that show that almost every American recognizes the painting (although only a small fraction know the painting’s name or who painted it). The thousands of parodies that the book documents are testament to the fact that the painting has become a way of representing something essential about American culture and its values. But in a strange way, the painting’s popularity and incessant reuse has also made it part of the culture that it so effectively captured.
We can think of culture as a set of shared values and references that help us related to each other and to communicate. Just like idioms in language, culture helps us communicate more effectively, certainly, but also lets us communicate messages that would not be communicable otherwise. When Out Magazine, Coors, or any of several dozen others replace the figures in American Gothic with a gay or lesbian couple, they are succinctly sending a message about homosexual relationships and American traditional values that could not be made any other way. In this way, American Gothic — both the painting and Biel’s book — represent a strong argument for free culture.
If American Society has infused American Gothic with so much value, how can it be fair to let one person or organization own it? Are they not owning an essential mode through which a society can relate, experience, and communicate? I can’t help but conclude that it shouldn’t matter if VAGA does not like alcohol, advertisements, homosexuality, or wants to make a some money every time someone makes a cartoon parody. These are trivial concerns next to the importance of our society’s need to communicate about these issues. If doing so requires the use of a shared cultural reference in VAGA’s painting, I find it hard to justify VAGA’s position of control.
We need to be able to reproduce and reimagine American Gothic because it has become part of us. It’s a striking example of the way that art becomes culture and the reason that truly free culture is the only appropriate response. We can’t afford to let our experience of the world and each other — to let ourselves at a very fundamental level — be owned and controlled.
