DoctorMo's Blog

I’ve been keeping a curious tab on the Distributionist’s Review which is a news blog with the focused aim of distributing the ideas of the easry 20th Century catholic philosopher G. K. Chesterton called Distributionism.

I’ve talked before about how the system of thought surrounding the old distrobutism has remarkable similarities to Free and Open Source models and I’m not the only one to think so. But in this blog entry I’d like to outline where I fundamentally disagree with a lot of distrobutionists: Religion and absolute Morality.

As a good apathist I’m not keen on god. By not keen I mean to say I think it’s a brain disease, a mental disorder which poisons reason and is the resting place of unfounded faith and the denial of evidence. The undoing of self understanding and in an attempt to explain the outside world with inside your head data really misses the point of philosophy.

OK so now I’ve made it clear that I’m not a supporter of religion or gods (whether they exist or not I don’t care), the one thing about the Distrobutionist’s review that sticks in my craw is the way there is often a forced joining of moral thinking, religious fundamentalism and economic process.

It’s true that many factors of economics do need to include morality, but morality isn’t absolute, you can find yourself in a position of having to commit immoral acts by virtue of being stuck between decisions which are all immoral, all cause suffering and in these cases I will have to apply the same underlying personalisation of moral responsibility which governs the rest of the distrobutionist philosophy.

Take abortion, which is far harder a topic than contraception which I consider to be perfectly solved, it is a hard question because the assessment of what is life, what is murder and what is suffering give us a negative sum game. No matter what you do, you loose. I’m happier giving this question over to the people and person who will ultimately loose from the decision: the mother. they are the ones who must make the decision because child-in-potentia is their responsibility, not the state’s. But why should the state not punish the murderer after the act?

So long as the state can’t take responsibility for a life immediately, it has no business being a moral authority. Take an extreme case; if a child born can not be looked after by the mother animal and there is no society to take responsibility then it’s very hard to force the mother animal to have a morality that respects the sanctity of life and at the same time rejects the suffering of life; often nature has right the answer where excessive stress in a mother will cause them to kill their children (and possibly eat them).

But where would religions possibly find footing in this apparent abhorrent behaviour? Often this is summed up by the quip about American Calthics: “the foetus is precious, the mother is sinful and the born child is a nuisance to be ignored”. Basically that religions concern themselves will unrealistic absolutes like “life for everyone” without considering the resulting suffering that it causes. This perhaps why my own morality is based on suffering and not on life, to me it’s quite possible for “Thou shall not kill” to become immoral in rare instances.

And besides we can’t very well go around convicting mothers on a morality which is based on their own internal responsibility, it’s not societies place to force individuals into responsibility and suffering. Of course the question then becomes; well how can you support society helping abortion with medical practice?

Another hard question but I put it like this, the mother after careful consideration has requested the help of their community to both help with the consideration and help with the safe medical procedure that will ensure a minimisation of suffering. In this way the community can be more sure the decision was not made lightly and the mother can be sure of not dying from the procedure. Surely this must be the most balanced approach for both women and community.

To the conclusion.

Plenty of anarchists would suggest that as well as being economically distributed an ideal society must also be morally distributed. This might be a little extreme for most who need the reliability and security of a normalised legal morality with which to work from and with other people around them. So a rejection of a moral consensus is not really the way to go.

But I would argue that when considering how your moral consensus ties together with your ideal world view about economic distrobutism, that you must consider it to be an under-developed philosophy and not as many Catholics see it; an absolute perfection delivered by god. Because unquestioning religious dogma has no place in a truly compassionate, thoughtful and moral world view.

Your thoughts?

An excellent post by txwikinger on his blog called Is open source under siege? Let’s hope not! paints a picture of all the recent movements in the business world which seem to undermine free and open source in economics (withdrawal of support) and in philosophical backing (maybe working together isn’t good?).

When it comes to the ideas surrounding free and open source, the commons and free culture in general we have to remember that our cultural values are subject to dialectic interpretation as much as any set of ideas. Our main mooring has been the sometimes radical and always socially objectionable Free Software community who has been very strong on purpose and clear on what it considers to be for and against the free software ideal.

This I think has allowed us to be protected in a lot of ways from being swept away by dialectic diffusion; where your ideas mix up so much with other people’s that identifying the core values become impossible. The gentle sound of the waves of free culture crashing against the seemingly impossibly immovable shore of commercial reality has over time not changed radically commercial reality, but the shape of commercial advantage and where there is easy and attractive exploitable resources.

It’s not a surprise to me that as the impending beat of market forces in conjunction with the reality of software and all soft media increases in tempo, the fear of the old world companies is leading them to seek even more government protection. Every governmentally supported artificial barrier conceivable is being employed by the biggest and most well resourced organisations to try and keep a status quo that can not be.

To conclude I would say that the free and open source ideas are changing the world, they are as well being changed as you’d expect. Sometimes for the better and sometimes in ill advised ways that should be rejected by everyone who wants to keep their free software ideals. The proprietary companies and people who think as they do that protectionism and government monopolies are better than the free market will struggle something fierce while they either morph or die into something survivable.

Remember your concern over what Microsoft, Apple and Oracle are doing is nothing but a fraction of the fear and dread that they have over a real open free market in software and the work we all do to hasten it.

I have no idea how my animated avatar will come out in the new planet theme. Although it does look like every other ubuntu website I don’t see the point in the top navigation bar when it’s just a choice between Home and Planet Ubuntu which seem to be the same thing?

I was also at first confused between where one person’s post started and where another began.

We shall have to see how it goes.

Ubuntu gets bad rep for having releases which have an unfortunate number of bugs which is partly due to the higher number of users and partly due to the size of the testing community compared to user number. But give me a flakey Ubuntu release any day of the week compared to Android…

This new phone I have (Samsung Vibrent) I love, it does a bunch of useful things and has been one of the first devices I was excited to own and test out. So don’t get me wrong when I say:

I’m mightily annoyed that I can’t upgrade it from Android 2.1; at least Canonical doesn’t stop me upgrading Ubuntu even if it will break, at least they don’t stop the community getting involved to fix issues with getting the latests and greatest software working on the latest and greatest hardware. This is particularly poignant since the GPS on this phone under Android 2.1 is known to have a serious bug which can place with hundreds of meters away from your location. Bit of a flaw there.

Anyway, I’m stuck because tmobile, samsung and google all have their own little plans for what I should be allowed to do with my phone and how much they want to put into upgrades for phones they’ve already sold. I am now as convinced as ever that the mobile phone sector is not the greatest opportunity for linux, but the greatest danger to freedom if we as a community can not hold tightly onto some of out even basic rights to install what we like, modify as we like and mess up our stuff and paint it black like the punks of yore.

Update: I wanted to make clear that this is a rooted phone, but what use is that for installing upgrades to devices when there are no releases, no installers or guides. It’s pretty much every man for himself and everyone must be a programmer to get these things upgraded. The phone networks and manufacturers have created a drag on the economy with this sort of thing and I have half a mind to say that it should be illegal to put any sort of lock on any sort of hardware or software owned by the customer.

Your thoughts?

One common thread among dissatisfied Ubuntu community members¹ recently is that they’re concerned with the speed and haste with which new untested features are being dropped into the main Ubuntu release. To find out how people feel about feature introduction:

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Please respond only if you use Ubuntu or have used Ubuntu within the past two years for an extended period.

¹ Internally to the Ubuntu community, not from other communities, see Aseigo’s excellent post on community identity.

I was reading last week the new OpenRespect website by Jono Bacon, where he is attempting to create a set of standard communication self applying rules to how we all can criticise respectfully each other’s opinions.

Today I read an interesting blog post about Did UbuntuJono disrespect fedora. The interesting part is not the article which is based on an error of timing and judgement, but instead the comments which seem to fall into three categories:

• Destructive – Anything to do with Ubuntu or Canonical is obviously Hitler related.
• Counteractive – Anything Ubuntu related is obviously Ghandi related.
• Jef Spaleta – The only person who can be critical and still talk sense it seems.

When you have a vested interest in getting dissenting views silenced..and want to accomplish that as respectfully as possible…the information at openrespect.org is a wonderfully excellent resource…written by someone who needs to do that day in and day out as a “community manager” working for a corporate entity who doesn’t really want people rocking the boat with regard to questioning corporate policy. – Jef read whole comment here

Canonical does seem to have a strong position on not rocking the boat, but we can do a little experiment to see what will happen when I make a list of my current disagreements and how I think the community can resolve them by rocking the boat:

Underinvestment in Plumbing – It’s true that very few companies are investing in the Free Desktop plumbing. Well a little, but it’s not a lot considering how much is being invested elsewhere. There isn’t a lot the community can do, Canonical and Mark are free to invest in whatever they like. But being critical of Canonical’s investment in plumbing and upstream plumbing especially is appropriate since a lot of technical user problems in Ubuntu are directly traceable to this underinvestment.

Weak Technical Board – Mark is the man and where once he was a Benevolent Dictator for Life, the person who could come in and break tied or tired argument; not any more. the position in a number of communities has morphed into plain dictatorship. And that perhaps is because of the weakness of the technical board and the fact that there is no resolution board for user experience and design. What we end up with is a whole bunch of employees who can’t tell Mark he’s wrong and a community who is denied the opportunity. End result is contributor dissatisfaction and a melting meritocracy. My advice is to question vigorously everything that seems to be pre-made decisions and champion community everywhere, refuse to engage in activities such as testing when decisions are dictated.

Antisocial Contributors Agreement – This really does boil down to a cultural problem, Canonical as an Upstream (ayatana etc) do not believe hand on heart in Free and Open Source. Because if they did, there would be no issue with accepting patches from anyone. This is a really big issue that sticks in the craw of many Open Source advocates. My best advice is that upstream should consider all Ayatana projects objectively and fork all code that seems attractive, create new repositories and encourage downstream contributors to contribute to the fork instead. I see no difference between what Sun/Oracle are doing with OpenOffice.org and the Ayatana projects at Canonical, and I see no other remedy at this time.

So, the question is, does my boat rocking constitute disrespect at all? Do I have my facts wrong or is my view out of step? Your comments are welcome:

This post will either go one of two ways, either people will get more irritated or it will shed some light on why seemingly rational people keep on doing seemingly irrational things.

From near as best I can tell, we look like this:

Your agreement may vary, post below (politely) if you do or don’t agree with my graphic.

I was excited to hear from Ted Gould ironically at the Gnome Boston summit about the Unity Places system and the opportunity to create custom places which can expose all sorts of collections and online connections to the user in interesting ways.

This is not that file system deprecation that people keep on mistakenly banging on about, but instead a way to view interesting data objects in a user session context and even perhaps search on them.

My own ideas range from exposing openclipart to integrating a list of projects from ground control. All seem like pretty interesting candidates. From the wiki the only thing that concerns me is the canonical user space, I’ll live with it but the anti-social contributors agreement makes me uncomfortable to be involved any closer than simple plugins. Hopefully there will be something similar in gnome shell or kde (although preliminary questions on the topic suggested that gnome shell would be a rigid as a board of plywood so perhaps not).

See here for more details: Unity Places Wiki

Time once again to feature my personal favorite images from the last month which have been submitted to the Ubuntu Made category in our Ubuntu Artists deviantArt community.

Mel Ancho Lic by LucasHappy

Lost by OhNoAndrej

In My Heart a Place by Naini

Der General Bauinspektor by Belazikkal

Enrique by Peileppe

Dignity by Jorge Rodrigues

Daxter by OgreInside

Doodle 264 by Parady

God damn this game and it’s attractive graphics and addictive game play physics.

There is another game that we designers and game players could learn from when it comes to addictive and attractive qualities in software interfaces. I mean take a look at the way the interface is laid out:

It’s a selection of levels, you can see how many you’ve got to go through, enjoy, it’s not too many like a giant block of levels like you would see if every level was present at the same time. And most importantly it’s cute and attractive with drawn graphics on everything and decorating every space.

Your thoughts?