rebel with rather too many causes
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.
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, Gerry 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:
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:
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.