Author: Benjamin Mako Hill

Rebel with rather too many causes. And your host!
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Software Freedom Day Boston

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!

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What I’m Up To

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

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

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

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

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

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Happy Birthday GNU

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.

/copyrighteous/images/freedom_fry.png

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!

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Free Software Project Management HOWTO

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.

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Charles Kane and Jim Gettys

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!

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Vaporizer

Nothing is more embarrassing than a website announcing that something will happen on a particular date — e.g., a product will be released, a feature will be turned on — after the date has come and gone! Even worse, putting things off repeatedly can be a lot of work!

To help such people, I just did a very quick 10 minute hack I’m calling The Vaporizer. It looks like just a date on a webpage. However, if the date originally listed has come and gone, a little bit of Javascript will change the site so that it shows tomorrow’s date instead. Vaporware providers of all types can use it to safely (and effortlessly) put things off without worrying about looking overdue!

I have seen the future, and the future is tomorrow.

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Making Wiki Images More Wiki

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.

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Revealing Errors OSCON Keynote

When I gave a Revealing Errors talk at Lug Radio Live USA, I had the misfortune of being up against Robert Love’s talk on Android which many people at the conference wanted to see — myself included! One person who showed up to my talk anyway was Allison Randall. She was apparently entertained enough to invite me to give a short version of the talk as one of the keynote presentations at OSCON 2008!

In the talk, I covered the ideas behind my Revealing Errors project and quickly walked through a few examples that showcase what I’m trying to do. I’m happy with the result: a couple thousand people showed up for the talk despite the fact that it was at 8:45 AM after the biggest "party night" of the conference!

For those that missed it for whatever reason, you can watch a video recording that O’Reilly made and that I’ve embedded below.

A larger version of the Flash video as well as a QuickTime version is over on blip.tv and I’ve created an OGG Theora version for all my freedom loving readers.

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OSCON and More

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.

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I Will Revise

Once again, Wikimania was wonderful. I gave my scheduled talk on Autonomo.us and network freedom and network services. I also filled in for a few speakers to give a "Zotero for Wikipedians" demo and to say a few words about the BY-SA/FDL work as part of a Creative Commons panel.

Perhaps the most memorable part of the conference was the writing and performance of I Will Revise. A couple days before the conference, a small group of Wikipedians — The Difftones — wrote the song at a karaoke bar in Alexandria. We had a wonderful time leading a room full of lightning talk attendees in song and a final rendition by a massive, fully-packed, stage at the party on the final night!

It’s online on meta.wikimedia.org. You should feel free to revise it, add verses, and improve it!

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The Googlenet

At the hotel I’m staying at in Alexandria for Wikimania, there is wifi from a closed network that requires login and that has no user-accessible way to gain increased access.

However, they have defined a set of "exceptions" to their closed network policy. The exceptions are described on the page users are redirected to upon connecting. Essentially, the exceptions boil down to any website that ends in google.com.

You can use Google search (but not click on the links), use GMail, Google Talk, Google Reader (but not see any images on the blogs you are reading), Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Checkout, Google Docs, and so on.

A few people at the conference seem only barely inconvenienced by the arrangement and most seem to be able to get work done! I can’t help feel like I’m experiencing some dystopian version of the Internet from 10 years in the future.

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Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement

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.

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One Step Behind

My friend Aaron is moving back to Boston and in the process getting stuff for his apartment from Ikea. A lot of Ikea stuff is secured with hard plastic strapping. Luckily, Ikea also sells scissors to help you cut your way through it! The scissors are secured with hard plastic strapping.

If only he'd bought another pair of scissors...