DoctorMo's Blog

This weekend has been very fun, we’ve come up to Vermont to spend some time with the family. Part of the events scheduled for the weekend was a cycle ride round Burlington Vermont, in the dark, wearing crow costumes, croaking and cawing at all the bemused passers by.

Unfortunately there were no photos of the actual ride. *damn*

So instead I’m posting a couple of pictures of me in a witches hat, playing with the twins (both two) helping them draw chalk animals and reading:

Happy Wikken everybody!

I’ve got Ubuntu 9.10 installed on my only computer laptop from System76.

There have been problems, I have taken a day to get everything back to some kind of order. I still have some problems, but working through them.

This isn’t a review, I’ll do that after a month or so.

Yesterday there was a an interesting discussion kicked off by Nick Fox about the economics of Free and Open Source Software. Numerous other people joined in adding their thoughts as either comments on our posts or as their own posts.

Nick responded to my criticism of him article and invited me to respond. And I do owe it to him for kicking off this journey into discussion and it’s certainly not a topic that is touched on nearly enough for a maturing creative community.

So lets get into Nick’s new post:

Producing open source software can be quite lucrative. Some great examples of corporations making money from open source software are, Oracle, Sun, Canonical, and so on. There are so many I am sre I wouldn’t be able to research and name them all.

If you look into each of those companies, I know of only Canonical that leans heavily of the money it makes off of pure development. It does this not from common users, but from OEMs such as HP and Dell, who are constantly asking Canonical to develop custom interfaces and various other things for their releases. All the other companies aren’t making money off of the development work, but off of the result of that work through services.

It’s a slight distinction, but it’s what separates the idea of earning money from performing an action on a customer’s behalf, to developing something which you give away, and for you to offer them further products on top which they buy. In each case your thinking about which work was paid for and which work was not. In the services model, the programming wasn’t paid for directly.

I was making the point that while FOSS is commercial through support services and other means, the software itself is generally rejected by the community unless it is Free (and I mean Free as in Freedom) itself.

And there are very good reasons for that. Proprietary software isn’t useful to the community, it’s useful to individuals. You can’t collaborate on proprietary software, there is no crowd sourcing closed source. Freedom is more than just a throw away ideal, discarded at the first sign of convenience, it’s a culture, an ideal and a social good. The commons works by making things common, accessible to all. Deliberately slicing parts off into enclosures break the nature of it.

What I’m trying to say is that people in the community are not rejecting proprietary software just to be spiteful or grumpy. They do it because to accept it would be a step backwards for the community.

It however does not afford a person or business the right to infringe/reproduce or otherwise make money directly from another person or business’ goods or services without their direct consent.

The law of properties isn’t quite as clear cut, you have to transcend for a few moments the normality in our culture that suggests that attribution is the same thing as control of copies. You can reproduce works that are in the public domain, there is not infringement. The only time infringement even crops up is when you introduce a government regulation, a wholly unnatural legal property system which seeks to make monopolies and controls content from afar.

It was originally created as a balance, a technical fix to a market problem. That problem is that creative works are not profitable to make because anyone naturally has the right copy them. The only fix was to go against nature and prevent or make illegal the copying of those works.

Making a copy of a Monet Painting and reselling it as your own painting is forgery, the creativity behind creating applications is nearly the same.

Making a copy of a Monet painting is very legal. His published works are now in the public domain, you can take a photo of his painting or repaint the work from the eye. What you can’t do is claim that you were the original creator, or claim that Monet himself painted the result. That’s a VERY different set of laws from copyright and has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.

Now the physical copies of the paintings obviously have owners, but they only own the paint and canvas, not the image that they make up. Of course I think paintings might have some legal grey area about weather they’ve been published or not. But it’s still important to distinguish between copyright, trademark, authentic authoring, attribution and even patents. They’re all very different mechanics that shouldn’t be confused.

In a perfect world, this would be great. everyone would get compensated for their creative productions and contributions to the whole.

Part of these kinds of discussions is attempting to figure out exactly how you can make that perfect world. What’s the point otherwise.

However, being this is a less than perfect world, and less scrupulous people are out there trying to make money from other people’s hard work,

Making money from other people’s hard work is something that we do all the time, it’s not wrong, mostly because we end up adding something of value from ourselves. Either ease of access, verification, extra add ons. Very few economic activities are done without other people’s work being involved.

You can’t make money off of someone else working, that is wrong, I think it’s called slavery. You can’t force a programmer to build you something, but you can pay her to build you something. The fact that there are 100 people waiting in the wings to make money from that thing is irrelevant for the buyer and the programmer, or at least it should be if the buyer understands what he’s doing.

In the end, the sad fact is, businesses need that level of comfort that closed source brings to attract them to the venue. Businesses need to make money and continue to do so over the long term. Most traditional businesses do not feel that is possible by sharing their code with the entire world.

The problem with this sad fact is that businesses are only after the comfort in an unsustainable monopoly from which they could extract rents in a very unrefined way. If they don’t want to engage in breaking the free market, then they have to start making money from the work that they do, instead of the work that they have already done.

Most traditional businesses, I have to admit, don’t understand FOSS. We in the community can’t explain these ideas to these businesses if we can’t even understand it ourselves. That’s why it’s important to have these kinds of discussions in the community.

FOSS isn’t some hippy trippy excuse for programmers to have a 70s revival. It’s a real, effective economic and social method of creative production that just needs to develop further in society’s understanding and expectations.

So many people have attempted to describe, explore and probe the economic workings of the Free and Open Source Software business. Recently Nick Fox has given us his thoughts on what this means.

And this is my critical article explaining why he is wrong, sorry Nick got to be critical. The first half of the article is fairly correct as far as I know. so I’m just going to skip to the bad parts:

Commercial software being generally closed source is a necessary evil.

This assumes proprietary software is the only model for profitable commercial software. It is not. It also assumes that FOSS can’t possibly be commercial, a big mistake and a common myth. You can take a copy of a GPL licensed program and sell (that’s right, for money) the software to someone. So long as you don’t remove the recipients freedoms and they get to redistribute, that may sound like it crushes your commercial opportunities and it does sort of, but I’ll get to that.

However creating software as a business requires a level of production protection that is not usually accepted in the Linux circles. Compiled and protected sources are a bad thing for software freedom and progress, however they are good for free market business.

This part floored me. The idea that proprietary software could be in any way free market is so absurd that I can’t understand how this idea has come about. The nature of the free market is that goods or services will be priced very close to the costs of replication and distribution when supply is above demand, software had infinite supply and will always be above demand.

The costs of software replication and distribution are very close to zero. So in a free market, all software is free of cost by order of the invisible hand. What is NOT free of cost is the creative production. But because the creative industries can not yet find a secure way of funding their production; they have gotten government regulation (copyright) to warp the nature of the free market to create temporary monopolies on distribution instead. Shifting costs around. And if you’ve been following your economics, a monopoly will tend to price things at the very maximum a customer is willing to pay, not the minimum it’s economically sustainable to charge (as in the free market).

The separation of first creation and replication of copies, I think is important to understanding the nature of these economic processes. Writing software is creative production, copying software is replication production, they are not the same thing.

So, what we have here is an industry that is not only removing user and developer freedoms, but it’s doing it at the expense of the free market too. On the other hand, FOSS is free market, it doesn’t claim to have created an economic rewards system to drive the cost of one economic activity into another one. It’s goal is to create a social and legal framework for collaboration. The software production is priced accordingly through commission or (more normally) through the needs of the user’s time and the distribution is priced very close to zero.

The incentive to make money inside the Linux community will help to break the cycle. When businesses find there is money to be made by producing Linux based applications for busness users, it will help bring Linux to more desktops. While I very highly advocate the Free and Open Source movement, I am suggesting that closed source software for sale does have it’s place, and in fact may help bring Linux to more desktops.

I recommend watching this video on motivation first:

As we’ve already discussed, there is money to be made from FOSS, it’s just you have to follow the economic landscape. You can’t go begging on government to bail you out of your unprofitable software distribution business with anti-free market copyright laws. You have to make your money from the development of software, not the distribution of it. This shift in thought needs to accompany the shift to FOSS, because without it FOSS will be uneconomic in the old mindsets.

Closed, proprietary software has no place in a rational, enlightened, scientific and honest economic world. It is NOT a necessary evil, it is a plain misunderstanding of economic mechanics. An attempt to create rents on distribution instead of maintaining the economic costs of production. It’s is not good, useful or progressive and the longer we hold onto some of these mythologies the longer it’s going to take to drag our industry out of the dark ages.

My own thoughts are that in order to fund software production properly, we need to have ways of getting money from users who want software to be made or changed, to programmers who want to earn money writing software. It’s not an easy task.

New Ubunchu Creative Commons Licensed Art Work!

Big thanks to C-quel for commissioning great works and pushing creative commons, hayashinomura for doing great art work and of course Seotch for the original ideas and designs.

If you’ve not seen Rebecca Saxe’s TEDTalk about how we are really very good at reading other people’s minds. I recommend it:

The interesting part is the disquiet in the audience that the idea of deactivating a person’s morales provoke. As Rebecca says, right now we can only interrupt certain regions in a very imprecise way. But a lot of the reasons not to worry about this mind altering technology are simply technical limitations.

I think it’s fascinating to watch a well educated audience grasp the magnitude of this kind of science and what it can teach us about ourselves as human animals. I think quite a fair few of them were also thinking about misuses that would be harmful.

I was reading The Register as I do from time to time and was struck by the nature of comments concerning the European commissions battle to redress some balance to Microsoft’s illegal monopoly abuse with regards to internet browsers.

to give you some background: The EU convicted Microsoft of abusing it’s Operating Systems monopoly in order to gain a web browser monopoly.

The proposed solution from Microsoft was originally to not include any browser at all, effectively hobble the operating system in the EU in order to blackmail the EUC into a simple fine. It’s called playing hard ball. Unfortunately for Microsoft the EUC have decided to play hard ball back to them, deciding that that option wasn’t good enough.

Enter idea number two. To present all users of windows (XP, Vista and 7) who have Internet Explorer as their default browser, with a ballot screen. Effectively asking every user what internet browser they would like. The EUC are considering this idea, although Opera objects on grounds of I can’t quite tell.

OK back to the comments from the article above. There are a number of commentators who are of the opinion that it’s Microsoft’s business as to what to include and what not to include in their operating system, and that if we do not apply the same restrictions to the FreeDesktops like Ubuntu and Apple’s Mac OSX then it wouldn’t be fair.

Since the EU isn’t calling for a ballot screen in Ubuntu, the EUC must be trying to do something improper. Since it’s obviously not very good for a Free Market to have a commission simply making stuff up as it goes along in order to disadvantage one competitor in a market place.

This is a quote from the noted Economist Adam Smith:

The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. – The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VII

The problem with Microsoft is that they are a monopoly. This is an economic term for a business who controls the market through being it’s only supplier. This means that the invisible hand of the free market is in chains, so long as there is only one to which all the control is focused.

What regulators attempt to do is redress some of the balances by supporting the competition (financial or regulatory) and/or creating anti competition laws which restrict some of the actions that a company can take in order to use their existing monopoly in order to gain a new one.

For instance, say there was only a single petrol/gas company who sold fuel. Now lets say that the company decided to get into the Hackney Carriage business (taxies). Because of their monopoly status, regulators would be (or should be) keeping a keen eye on what they do in order to break into this market and if they do something to restrict competition unfairly. If it’s seen that this fuel company is using it’s unfair advantage as a fuel supplier to create a taxi monopoly; the regulator has the power to step in and split the monopoly up into a separate taxi business and fuel business and making sure they stay separated in operation.

Let’s say a single company (Microsoft) manages to get a monopoly of the computer operating systems on desktop computers, through the bad handling of another monopoly owned by a different company (IBM). At first everything is going fantastic. Then they miss the boat on a new technology platform called “The Internet” and they’re finding that lots of people are using web browsers such as Mosaic/Netscape to get content via the world wide web on the internet.

Now suppose this company buys/borrows a browser for it’s self. They bundle this browser into their operating system for which they have a monopoly and they do not charge for it. Suddenly all the browser software makers have to compete with a product which is not only free (undercutting their business economics) but is also delivered to every single desktop user. Each of which is forced to buy IBM compatible desktop computers with a single operating system.

Through monopolisation they have rolled one monopoly (desktop computers) into another one (web browsers) and destroyed an entire market for software in the process.

Using their economic strength and their distribution monopoly Microsoft have killed off effective competition in a number of desktop fields: Web Browsers, Media Players, Word Processors, Spreadsheets, Networking Services and many more have all fallen to Microsoft and the companies that developed those ideas and software industries have been swept into the dusts of time.

Web Browsers was a particular worry, since as soon as Internet Explorer had destroyed the market for Netscape. The very standards of the World Wide Web as set up by the W3C began to erode. Everyone doing web development felt it, you developed for IE because it was what everyone had, no one cared that it didn’t follow the standards and it didn’t take long for a great number of websites to be completely incompatible with any other web browser.

So, what have I learned about monopolies? Well firstly they are economically damaging, they serve only to remove fair prices from the market and to stagnate the development of ideas. They are the very opposite of a free market economy and should not be allowed to occur, either through regulation or support for competition.

But what about now? Apple and Free Software is giving Microsoft a run for it’s money isn’t it? That’s fair competition, they can’t be a monopoly if there is competition right? Consider that I’m concerned with the IBM compatible desktop PC market.

Apple is a hardware and glorified life style product company, they don’t sell software to IBM compatible PC users. And if they did, Microsoft would just use it’s other newer monopoly in Office Productivity software to change their minds. Free Software on the desktop computer, it’s not a business, is very small and has no control over the supply. We in the community don’t tell OEMs what they will ship, we give OEMs choices and they choose to do the wrong thing for the market by shipping Microsoft Windows. Free Software is not a competitor because it’s an idea and a principle, not a business, and would be like Goliath vs the moon. Microsoft’s failed attempts to battle Free Software development actually look very similar to that image of a giant trying to battle the moon in my mind.

I believe that the EUC’s goal of regulating Microsoft is right and proper and that the commentators on those articles are simply misinformed about the nature of the beast. Economic freedom and fairness are all well and good so long as everyone is on an even playing field, but good government comes from knowing how to achieve that balance and not loose it to unfortunate history.

As a side note, I would love for the competition commission to award a great deal of money to Free Software development as a way of spuring on competition.

According to the blog of ever increasing entropy, HP have decided to kill off it’s FreeDesktop based Mi netbook on the same day that Microsoft Windows 7 came out.

In a way this is both surprising and not surprising to me.

It’s a surprise because I never figured Hewlett Packard for being this short sighted. Throwing away large sums of development money in order to help short term OEM deals with Microsoft? Well sure, HP might be in pain from OEM contract terms from Microsoft Windows and it might make business sense this quarter. But surely someone in HP must have a sore arse, or are they all cowering behind their “good for business” mantra which must be fairly strong to protect them from doing the right thing for their future business strength and independence.

Now I’m not surprised that the Mi with Ubuntu pre-installed has ended. Yes that’s right folks, it was Ubuntu and it was even developed by Canonical on behalf of HP. They paid a pretty penny to have their own interface and customizations put into the OS.

But look at what they did, they rejected the idea of including the Ubuntu brand with their shipments. The only mention that it was a FreeDesktop at all comes from a note about it being “Linux based” (whatever that means these days).

There is a mutually beneficial arrangement when it comes to brand marketing in the community. Dell sells machines with Ubuntu on them and both Dell and the Ubuntu community benefit from that arrangement. Instead of my LoCo group marketing Ubuntu for just old machines that came with Windows, I could safely point people at Dell and let them buy new computers complete with Ubuntu. Dell benefits because they get customers from the community advocacy and the community gets a big well known OEM to give it credibility and a partner that can ship working systems for cheap.

But HP didn’t want that, they wanted to control the branding of the OS and it’s not a surprise that they didn’t get many people from the Ubuntu community recommending their products. It’s not a surprise that every time someone said “Lets get me an Ubuntu machine” they went to Dell instead of HP.

Which is shame, because HP’s printer division is a much better collaborator. And most of my LoCo peers recommend HP printers simply because we can be almost pretty assured that no matter which one is bought, it’ll work.

So to get back to Microsoft, they’ve shaped the market to make Windows more attractive than it would be on a level playing field, they’ve manipulated OEMs to such a degree that it makes a mockery of anti-competition laws. If you’ve got any doubt of the reasons why bug #1 has to be fixed, it’s because we shouldn’t have to put up with this reduction in fair competition.

If I were dictator of the world, I’d tax any desktops shipped without a FreeDesktop dual boot.

If you’ve not heard, the BBC did an interesting thing when it was advertising showing off Microsoft Windows 7 on it’s Breakfast program on Wednesday. It mentioned Ubuntu. Wait, hold the celebrations, we haven’t cracked the BBC’s FOSS enigma just yet….

Rory Cellan-Jones mentioned in his second broadcast that it was a bunch of enthusiasts and that most people wouldn’t want to use it because it’s not what everyone else uses. (see the transcript by Alan Pope for exact wording). He’s since explained that it was clumsy and that he was fairly stressed. I think he was well meaning, but the under current of culture is very Windows orientated, so I guess it wasn’t that bad if you consider the bias he was working against.

OK, so queue lots of complaints. I made an official complaint since the BBC should be neither advertising products or picking favourites by dismissing competitors. Especially when the favourite just so happens to be the two continent convicted monopolist and primary controller of ALL IBM compatible PC operating systems distribution. A company that in a better world would have never been allowed to get into such a dangerously powerful position in the first place.

Today, Rory Cellan-Jones, the reporter who made the gaff in the original show has posted a blog entry. Firstly we should be happy Ubuntu was mentioned at all, why? because it’s so insignificant that under normal circumstances it wouldn’t ever be mentioned without the kindness of a few brave souls. (that’s balance for you kids, balance so long as your perceived as relevant by the BBC).

They’ll do a more thorough review of Ubuntu on the blog, which I welcome. Although I doubt we’ll get a Breakfast TV presenter stressing himself out over showing off Ubuntu to the public.

The reason for the review is because Canonical have very kindly given a Dell Mini to Rory and his blog post is his first 24 hours with the device. Here is where I have to turn and complain a little bit at Canonical.

At the SETC where we refurbish computers, NO ONE is allowed to take a computer without first going through a two hour introduction session. We run the Tuesday sessions EVERY WEEK, so we can gather together the public into one place and introduce them to Ubuntu in a way that makes them comfortable with using it.

There are some difficult classes to teach. Those that already think they know how to use computers. Give me 20 computer newbies for every classic windows expert student. It’s not that windows experts are incapable of learning, they’re just so god damn dogmatic and you see that with Rory’s blog post, it’s obvious that he’s got an Ego the size of a planet when it comes to computers.

So given this, why did the device not come with serious sit down teaching session?

There have been a few from our experience that have slipped though, they’ve rushed the process or told porkies in order to just get their hands on the computer. These people are destined to return. they always do, because the computer is not familiar and they don’t know what they’re doing or even why they got Ubuntu instead of a nice $20 windows xp license. They don’t know how to install things, they don’t know how to load things or find files and most importantly of all, they don’t understand what Free and Open Source Software means, why it’s free, why it’s important, how it works and why they should care.

The machines that go out also have codecs, Skype, Java and a couple of other things to help make the ride as smooth as possible. The number of people who come back to complain are very low, most have problems with hardware, one had 300 wmv encrypted files which he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t play them (impossible without breaking law).

I’m aware that in the UK installing these codecs is fine. Unless your scared of the boggy men at Accatel and somehow believe that the EU patent office has more power than the EU Justice department. IANAL. So this mini should have very probably been loaded up with the extras too.

Perhaps my friend at the Union is right, what’s needed is a large scale introductory event and mass participation. Maybe Canonical or the UK LoCo can just set up something in London and invite every single BBC person, get some familiarity with what we do, how we do it and why it matters. (i.e. the rationale beyond simple technicalities of the software it’s self)

Learning on your own is fine if you have the time, but these guys aren’t that forgiving.

One of the persistent problems we’ve had at the SETC when refurbishing computers is the lack of understanding about the requirements Ubuntu has. There is a certain myth that Ubuntu can be installed on anything and it’ll work just like it does on a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM.

So to aid understanding and to give some instructions, I’ve prepared this (very alpha) set of instructions with a set of minimum requirements. Currently showing 9.04, but after testing will be moved over to 9.10 once I’ve confirmed these requirements are accurate for the new version.

Thoughts?