DoctorMo's Blog

Last night I went out with my wife to a local political event. Sam Yoon, A candidate for Mayor of Boston was doing a meet and greet near by and I thought it’d be a great opportunity to ask a few questions and give out some Ubuntu CDs. After all, I’m particularly interested in how FOSS appears to our elected representatives and if the principles and working methods in our community can find a home in the more traditional governmental process.

Sam’s main concerns are education in Boston. The local schooling system is under-performing and many people want to see more structural resources going into the system as a whole (both charter and public schools), from this main platform I can appreciate the position Sam was coming from when I pressed him about Free and Open Source Software.

I’ve actually sent a number of letters out to representatives and candidates for various things. I usually send my Understanding FOSS pdf to see if it helps understanding the mechanisms of commons based collaborative work. I’m happy to report that in this one case I think at least to do with schools, he was willing to listen to the arguments and even promote and compare it to collaborative educational course materials (think text books and such).

We shall see if he gets in and if it’s possible to effect change in some of this cities IT misuse.

How have other people got on when contacting their local politicians?

I was curious enough to day to have a look at a link-back to yesterday’s blog post. It was at Neowin. The article was about the FSF’s claims for Windows 7 to be shunned and while I don’t fully support their methods or their solely negative event organisation (they never seem to do anything in Boston except complain). So I have my beef with the FSF, I’m going to focus on the comments section to the linked news page.

The reason I was linked-back was because someone had posted my Understanding FOSS pdf and yesterdays blog post about balancing FOSS philosophies. The responses he got were not only insulting and degenerate, but they made me damn glad I work and communicate in a much better community with more manners. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with my politics, but I expect people to have some decorum.

Now the neowin news site does seem to be a bubble of Microsoft lovers and fanatics that seem to put all rational discourse to one side while they savage the “opponent”. Their main argument seems to be: “Well if you can serve me with the exact this I want, then I’ll be your friend”.

I’m sorry but the world doesn’t work like that. There is no free lunch in FOSS and If you don’t agree with the principles, methods and economics then stay away. We have no need for users who only think about their own short term contentment and never of what they can do for others. You’re welcome to use what we have written, it’s already paid for after all.

But I don’t really want these people making up a part of the community until they can reform into decent balanced human beings. I don’t want these people ranting and raving wasting our time and money while contributing nothing of value.

Most of these people are probably just misinformed. But with the egging on that they get from being in a social pro-windows bubble without any code of conduct… they seem to cultivate hatred and an over confidence of the mis-information. I’d attempt to post this message to their community but I don’t think it’s worth it.

As I was explaining to someone yesterday; It’s no our job to save people from their own foolishness, if people are content to ignore our warnings and give away their control of their technology so cheaply, then we can’t really stop them.

Although I was surprised at myself at how much their trashing of ubuntu’s bug #1 got up my nose.

Update: This is just a clarification note, I wanted to highlight the face that I enjoy being in the Ubuntu community because it seems to reduce (but not eradicate) some of the more nasty elements of social echo chambers (bubbles). But we could learn a lot from other communities inability to cope with these things.

I’ve been thinking lately that the way we approach the difficult wall between idealism and practicalism. Mostly I’m concerned with software in the Free and Open source communities and how we can navigate the issues. Let me explain.

Because of the way Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation conducts himself, he can be considered either as a leading light of self sacrifice. Being the first into cutting off his own functionality in order for the world to match his ideals of free speech software. This can lead to beating a path of necessity which can lead to positive creation of free replacements or it can reduce attractiveness and economics of the whole platform. As time goes on many wish to marginalise Richard’s voice because he wants everyone to painfully sacrifice just as he does.

On the other hand you have practicalists who see no problems with using closed source anything. It’s all fair game and the only good aspects of FOSS is that it’s free as in cost. If you can add a closed source library, module, plugin or driver. Then it’s your duty to do so or look stupid in the eyes of these practicalists. But then being practical about the situation your in can lead you to being able to utilise features and expand the user base without forcing people to confront painful sacrifices.

What I want to do is avoid both painful sacrifice and the complacency of practicalism. And the balances that the Ubuntu community have tried to strike are a good starting point in my mind. “Free where possible, Closed where absolutely required”. But I think I can do better.

It’s not wrong to use Closed Source (non-free) software, if…

1. You understand the consequences and nature of closed software AND
2. You make a reasonable attempt to find a free speech alternative AND
3. You fund or put time into a free project, whilst using the closed version OR
4. You put money into a bounty to start a replacement project whilst using the closed version.

It’s not so much a problem that people use closed nvidia drivers or flash-nonfree. It’s a problem that people do not understand closed nature limitations and do not have the will or method to support the creation or further development of the free alternatives. We may not be able to have the free alternative right now, but that doesn’t mean we should stop fighting for it, but at the same time it doesn’t mean we should stop using the closed solution.

I’d be interested in hearing about your thoughts, because this is a codification of my thoughts I will try and follow. As such I’ll be happy to do my duty and put some money into Gnash, SVG tools, Nouvou and other replacements to closed tools I use.

This class is all about getting into a remote computer using ssh. It’s not a very comprahensive class yet, but it does provide the basics. Alpha!!

Go here for the source files, or below for each of the PDFs.

• Lesson Plan for teachers
• Presentation Slides (Not done)
• Overview Sheet
• Practical Sheet

Your help in making these classes better is needed! Email me for more information.

This is an artwork done on request while I was at Pi-Con, Ubunchu character receiving Ubuntu CDs. I’ve vectorised it using inkscape:

I know this story is a bit old, but I thought I’d share it anyway. Google have been working on a way to show svg content via flash to browsers that don’t have svg support (Read: Internet Explorer) and they do this via javascript so the developers don’t need to focus too hard on deployment differences between clients.

For me this is interesting for my map work and some other svg works. Especially since it makes it easier to argue for the use of svg, even if for now it ends with flash being used. What we need in the SVG world is leverage.

Thoughts?

Once again this year the Ubuntu Massachusetts Local Community team was invited to take part in Pi-Con (not Py-Con), it’s a local science/fiction/geek/nerd conference with a ton of different stuff going on. At well as the boat loads of authors, book sellers, comic artists and geeks. There was also shadow cast opera, LRPGs, board and card games, a console games room as well as the meat of the con which was all the very informative and well executed panels.

Our team comes to inform and give out cds to people who are geeks and nerds, but might not be aware or confident in using/install Ubuntu. Since last year was so successful we decided to do it again. My thanks goes out to Jonathan Prigot who organised and held the fort at our table all of the time.

People came to our table, but the dealers room was fairly out of the way this time. So I went out a few times to give out CDs and go around with my t-shirt on (ubuntu t-shirts for the win at geek cons). Lots of people I talked to were already using it or had already tried it, those left over were genuinely interested and took CDs and stickers.

The weekend was 3 days long and I do admit to being less than planned, I ended up bringing my printer in order to get some posters, biz cards and some other stuff (printer always useful) and that worked out ok but I would have rather had our banner (where ever it’s gone) and some larger posters and such. The laptops worked out great, we didn’t have any desktops with us, but the one netbook and two laptops were very useful in showing and demoing features.

I’ve just experienced on of the most entertaining and funny events of this summer. While at Pi-Con doing some Ubuntu promotion, I got to see Repoman “The genetic opera” with live actors (and the original film playing in the back) as well as massive audience participation.

Some of the references and jokes caused hysterics, specially the Doctor Who episode “The Lost Child” reference with the gas mask “Are you my mummy”.

If you ever get to see an event like this, do go. It’s as much fun as a party with entertaining plots with all your friends and b sure to go with a crowd of geeks, they really have wit turned up to 11.