DoctorMo's Blog

Thanks to Sirrus for providing an interesting comment for me to respond to. I’m making a new blog entry because the original one wasn’t as seriously intellectual and I want a space to talk about this more:

Any machine-based redistribution is bound to fail just like the human-based one, because it does not take the human nature into account. Real world economics work because of human greed; communism failed because of it as well.

I think the best way of going about it is having market economics with constraints, which is more or less what many capitalist economics of today are using.

Coming back to your pretzel economic theory on capitalism vs communism. Human greed is a very interesting psychological mechanism which isn’t as absolute or as pervasive as the capitalism culture tends to teach. In fact this this is an inside, outside box problem. Greed is generally split between gluttony and selfishness and from what I’ve been able to gather we are wired to be in a constant state of contention between consuming as much as possible and doing whatever suites our own self interest (in the way _we_ think it’s best served) and taking care of our social obligations, collaborating and dare I say it: caring about other people.

So what do I mean by an inside, outside box problem? If greed is counter weighted internally by social obligation then a culture that teaches both the virtues and naturality of personal greed removes all those pesky social obligations. The culture becomes self fulfilling through a quirk in human social mechanics.

Mechanisation isn’t actually a big scary thing to me. Capitalism is mechanisation and it basically, mostly, sort-of works because it does fit the majority of resource exchange interaction psychology. It’s not a _machine_ in the same way a printing press is a machine, it’s a systematic rule based software which runs upon an existing machine; that of course being society in general.

Having software that works on this machine requires that it take account of the way the social machine is organised, how it self assembles and how new mechanics can be run on it without error. Capitalism mostly works, but at the same time it doesn’t. It’s at a loss for 2/3rds of the economy, and that’s a lot of work to be done that isn’t recorded anywhere and doesn’t involve money. It’s probably a good thing that doing your chores isn’t run like a business to be honest; I’d rather prioritise teaching children the importance of looking after each other then the art of business making.

At the same time as not coving a lot of interaction; capitalism as a system of rules is failing to keep itself internally consistent, in check, in balance and not attempting suicide every 8 years. If as a social system it was so good at matching the nature of human interaction then these things would not happen, or would not happen nearly so much.

Thoughts?

After some research and discussion we’ve put together a plan to get much cheaper, closer and nicer accommodation for everyone who wants to come to UDS. the price is about ~$350 for the whole 6 days for your own room and about $180 if you want to share your room.

Wiki Page with full details

As before, please email me doctormo@ubuntu.com if you would like to participate.

UDS is only a month and a half away and there was again a very tight selection for places for Canonical to sponsor us community folk. I’m interested in finding people who didn’t get sponsored this time but may still have some means to go or would still like to go.

The first goal I want to see if a number of people clubbing together can reduce the cost for rooms, travel and anything else in order to make UDS less stressful on the budget. If you’re interested, I’d like you to email me at doctormo@ubuntu.com and let me know what your means are. So far I’ve discovered rooms and resorts near by which are very cheap when sharing.

The second idea is to make a Kitckstarter funding drive to sponsor community members who would be able to give valuable input at UDS. I’m sure there are lots of Ubuntu users who would like their thoughts carried to UDS and for them I was thinking of making a to get some of the more important community people flights and accommodation. With this you could each give $20 and have your per peeves and notes of consideration brought in. For a higher donation the person could attend a session on your behalf with your notes and try to get your thoughts brought into the discussion live.

Would you sponsor someone to go to UDS?

The folk that follow my blog will be aware that’s I’m fairly politically active and tend towards a left leaning consensus on political thinking.

One of the capitalist notions that always struck me as odd was this whole notion of trickle down economics. (leave aside that it’s been disproven for a second).

The idea is that we as the lower-class, down trodden masses, shouldn’t fear or resent our richer and more superior peers. Instead we should congratulate them on their good fortune and reward their fortitude in gaining so much wealth in the first place. Because what is good for the rich is good for the poor. The rich, they say, are consumers just like everyone else and will spend their wealth on consuming things and who those things will be mostly made by is the lower classes and thus the money will trickle down to the lower classes.

When I looked at this I thought: Well that’s a fascinating children’s story and one of those idealistic happy-and-know-your-place ideals that was such fun in the Victoria era. But what does it look like systematically?

1) If you get a rich section of the community spending all of their money, which is say 20% of total wealth, on non-essential goods which benefit the very few. Then 20% of the economy will be dedicated towards making non-essential goods for the benefit of the very few. The worse the gap between the rich and the poor and the more of the economy is busy making extravagances and less of it is doing real work, working on essentials and making that more efficient.

2) That assumes the rich spend all their money, which so rarely happens. One of the things wealthy people do is invest, they own. And so what tends to trickle down isn’t money, but landlord ownership over everything. Investing is spending, unless you count bad investing.

3) The companies that these goods and services are made by (and most goods are made by) generally have a policy of paying the owners as much as possible and the workers as less as possible. So where economic inequality exists, there is an abuse of resources by owners to exert a lower trickle down and an increase in up-flow.

Conclusion: Trickle down is a fairy story invested as an excuse to abuse capitalist economic mechanics for the benefit of the few. the up-suck is a far too strong a current and the gravitational like effect of masses of money in one pocket is surely a warning to any economy that it’s better to have lots of people with some money then a few with most of it.

I’ve been following an interesting blog/agrigation of thoughts from generally scientific people. It’s quite interesting to see a whole group of people set themselves up to defend the virtues of science, the principles of reason and rationality over groups who like to confuse issues of religion and science.

http://www.leagueofreason.co.uk/

following my previous post exploring Ubuntu insurance:

Sirrus Submitted on 2010/09/10 at 2:27pm:

1. If users insure themselves for release X, then given distribution’s architecture, it is likely things will work in X+N if the user does not change his hardware (as I am assuming driver stability in the kernel – sure, there are other things that can go wrong). Hence the user pays a one-time fee and is done with it.

Even better, if the user is able to observe an insured user’s working configuration, he can freeload immediately.

Otherwise, he or she simply sits with the current configuration for as long as it is supported and waits for a working release. In the worst case, he only has to pay once again and repeat this cycle.

2. I am not sure this is economically viable for the producing company, as I assume some bugs might require a piece of the concerned hardware in particular configurations to test it out. Aside from this, there simply may not be enough developers available, because you have to pay them for the job in the first place, and the insurance inflow might not be enough to cover it.

3. This model does not take innovation into account. I am not familiar with the internal assembly of new versions of Ubuntu at Cannonical, but I would assume it is more than just pulling upstream versions at particular time and putting it all together. So, when you spend all your money on fixing things just putting it all together, you won’t have money for adding new features in. If the product (Ubuntu) then does not provide a satisfactory experience, users lose the incentive to pay for support, since they won’t be using it.

4. The biggest problem in general is that the income stream is simply unreliable (partly because of 1., but mostly because people don’t pay when they don’t have to), as is the case with donations. And as R wrote – no target demographic.

In a more general case – as much as I like FOSS, we’re into software for making money. In cases where you have to pay for software beforehand, the developer has some income guarantee and security, and thus can work on supporting the product/developing a new one. In this case, the income fluctuates and as has been indicated above, would not be big enough. This would result in situations where the developer might be needed only for a month or two, and then become essentially redundant.

I wonder – if Ubuntu introduced an upfront fee prior to downloading, how much would the income increase, and how much would the people be willing to actually pay for it. Because that would serve as a much better indicator of value than reliance on their goodwill. I am not familiar with GPL in all its details, but it is it possible to restrict access to Ubuntu and not make it available for free, and freely redistributable? Because the individual parts are (mostly) FOSS, and are already available on the internet free of charge on different websites. Of course, this would break the Ubuntu promise of always being free of charge, but if it’s possible, I think this is worth investigating.

Just my 0.02.

I’m in the business of making money so that I can make software. Money is just a tool and what we choose to do with it counts more to me than how you accumulate. Stability of position requires a certain amount of pre-investment into personal situational elements and I understand that necessitates the earning of money beyond immediate requirements in order to make such investments possible. But I fear some people go too far and let the earning of money become the goal.

Charging for Ubuntu would be a situational irony, even if Canonical gained $10m per year in sales (and about $1 billion in liabilities) they’d be cutting off about $100 million in production from the community and at the same time decapitating the actual point: To make good software, morally, responsibility and sustainably. Proprietary software isn’t sustainable in technical terms and the problem we’re trying to solve is making FOSS sustainable in economic terms.

Of course anything we can do to make things economic shouldn’t require us to deny the principles of foss, we’d be loosing a lot more than gaining there.

Tomorrow in a rational protest against senseless book burning there is a movement to mark the day by reading the Koran, or at your choosing another book.

Read Koran Day / Read Any Book Day

At the heart of this idea is the fact that burning books is aberrant, it doesn’t matter what the book is; Rhoald Darl’s The magic finger, Koran the holy book or the King Jame’s bible. Nothing can be solved by destroying knowledge and denying ones self the opportunity to understand and know more.

This idea popped up in a completely different conversation and I haven’t explored the full dynamics of the idea and how it would play out legally but:

What if Ubuntu users paid into an insurance fund. The fund’s aim would be to record the primary software and hardware used by the customer and to employ programmers and QA people to ensure that this software and hardware works in the next release and with critical updates?

Payout would essentially be getting people in to fix problems if they cropped up.

This would be in contrast to the idea of paying individually for bugs to be fixed. Such as having bounties or pay only bug trackers.

The goal of course would be to collectively take responsibility for maintaining the code we have that makes our computers do amazing things. Make sure that this is sustainable and reduce the requirement for guides and “toxic workarounds” for sets of problems that crop up in releases.

Would you pay into such a scheme? Do you know users who would? Is there enough money in our ecosystem to really pay people to do a good job on fixing problems or are we just not big enough yet?

What are your thoughts?

Or to put it more clearly: Peer reviewed software design knowledge accumulation using statefull mechanical embodiment as formal proofs as a basis of mechanical understanding of Turing-space.

I think design engineering is a science by virtue of requiring a hypothesis of the mind which needs to be tested to fail mechanically, modifying the model as tests fail. Then your implementation engineering is making both tests the pure engineering for utility which produces a written documentation of the result.

I’d even put product design, architecture (at least with models) into the same mix which of course is contraversal because traditionally half the steps have been done entirely in the mind. The finally built product is probably not science, but the rest of the process?

I admit that none of these fields have great track records of recording their research in published journals or even formalising their testing in automated suites. And although software mathematics does publish a great deal of interesting things, are we not considering a lot of published code as potentially rough drafts of interesting mechanics in code?

Your thoughts?

As a member of the Ubuntu community I consider myself as much a part of the Free Software community as any member of any other distro. Each distro has it’s strengths and I have absolutely no problem with users flowing out of Ubuntu and into other FreeDesktop systems such as Debian, Fedora or even closer distros like mint. I don’t even mind users leaving Ubuntu to compile their own distro: