DoctorMo's Blog

This is my response to some very good comments on my last video entry which I felt should be addressed with another vlog entry.

I’ve attempted to explain why Free Software is politically important, as much as open source is important to creators; we must be supportive of Free Software for user reasons and not just consider our own hacker culture issues.

Video Problems: Go directly to the video on blip.tv here and download the source mp4 here.

Personal: The reason for begging your indulgence with the video blogs is that I’m inspired to practice my speaking skills in order to further eliminate my stammer. From a young age I was bullied and called names and I have gotten much better since, but seeing The Kings Speech really brought it all back for me.

Thought for the day:

If you have a problem with the embedded video player: click here to play video and here for source avi.

Updated for Narwhal:

Artist ICantThinkofAName has updated his wallpaper of all the Ubuntu versions as plush toys. The last version I helped spread was just at the Karmic release. Visit his gallery and add your comments!

My good friend ScottL, the leader of the UbuntuStudio project, is asking for new artists and especially people who can theme and pick the best icons to ship with the the UbuntuStudio release. If you are interested, you might qualify for the leadership position and be able to make calls about how the distro should look to all who install it.

For those who don’t know what UbuntuStudio is, it’s a popular distribution of Ubuntu specially designed for artists and musicians. It contains all the art tools by default; as well as pulse audio installed and enabled to allow good midi and audio recording with a low latency kernel.

If you are interested, please contact Scott directly: scottalavender@gmail.com

Thanks for reading!

According to network world, Canonical were asking for 75% of Amazon referral revenue from the sale of music through the newly selected Banshee music player.

I must note, that I don’t use Banshee and this isn’t about that program. This move by Canonical is a demonstration of lack of long-term consideration which can not be ignored by the larger Ubuntu community.

As I’ve been warning about in the past with the UbuntuOne services; the main issues weren’t the closed server code but a far bigger issue was the ability of Canonical to over-ride the best interests of the Ubuntu community in order to promote it’s own corporate interests. Historically Canonical have had fairly good self-control with their platform control, making sure to defer to the technical board for decisions. Since UbuntuOne however, we have progressively less self-control and in my eyes, less trust.

What worries me is that this is a continuation of a line of manipulations of the platform for UbuntuOne. We have Microsoft and Apple as a measuring stick of platform manipulation; if it looks like they would do it, you probably shouldn’t. Which in this case, removes revenue from a key software supplier or at the very least degrades our ability to work with Gnome.

I think we need a company with Canonical’s control to be thinking about money in Ubuntu the ecosystem and not only to it’s own business; a healthy ecosystem requires many different and overlapping organisations, all able to make money from the platform. Although I admit that Canonical is young, it still should be focusing on a foundation of models that it hopes to take forward.

Every time this sort of thing happens, it makes it harder and harder to recommend Ubuntu to new users. I just can’t guarantee that their experience has been considered in their best interest. Sooner or later it’s going to be easier to recommend other platforms.

Your thoughts?

Update: I reworded some of the text for clarity and directness.

I had this idea for a diagram from maco, we were talking about Religion and got to discussing this. I wanted to explain it and I was being casual. But take a look at my diagram and you’ll see there is a very strong pattern which is used for both resolving idealogical conflicts and resolving code/patch conflicts.

And just as we as programmers need access to lots of good and bad code to build our skills and patterns of how to program in the best way. We as human beings need to experience lots of thoughts, feelings, cultures and conflicts in order to build wisdom and insight in our human problem solving.

What are your thoughts?

Hey everyone,

I had this idea for a work-flow for creative commons, but instead of repeating the same questions as the licenses, I wanted to make the ideas more personal and conceptual.

My opinionated diagram is based on experience working with communities, discussing this issue more times then I could ever want to and attempting to educate and introduce creative commons ideals.

What are your thoughts?

I made you a card to celebrate your new release:

I have finally managed to get the fabled groundcontrol instructional videos uploaded and linked into the website. For all those who are curious as to exactly what the point of groundcontrol is or didn’t quite know how to use it; I invite you to watch me explain and show how everything works:

http://ground-control.org/videos.html

Your comments are welcome.

A post by Bradford White as reported by LXer has a fear that the new AppStream project will create a mono culture which makes everything boring and everything a corporate decision.

I wanted to make a post about my thoughts on three separate issues raised in Bradford’s post, some of which I think were raised unintentionally.

We must fight consolidation!

When industries consolidate, we, the consumer of these industries products loose out. The reduced competition in the market place causes inevitable rises in prices and eventually leads to monopoly situations. So, the theory goes, if in my gut I need to fight off consolidation, then I must be fair and fight any attempt to unify the code used for Linux/FreeDesktops.

The problem with this sentiment is that it’s wrong. When an industry consolidates it’s combining production and reducing market sellers. When multiple system distributions opt to use the same package management software, they are adopting a standard. In fact for free and open source this is more a kin to another industry deciding to take up a mechanical free and industry agreed standard.

Fear not! Consolidation of standards, formats and free software code bases is a good thing and should almost always be welcomed.

But We Should Hate Corporate Interests Right?!

The anti-corporate movement is another reflection of the modern age of corporate abuse and government corruption. But I think it’s application in free software is misguided and worse a distraction. So long as the code and projects being worked on by any corporation (Red Hat and Canonical included) are free software. I don’t think their interests are anything more than a much more honest reflection of their economic situation involving a complex dynamic between their investment stratedgies and their customer’s demands.

More important is to pay attention to where free software is being contorted. I speak of course of closed project development practices (android), required code assignment (ayatana, unity) and branding and platform control (Canonical/Ubuntu). These things are normal done for honest enough reasons, but of course that’s why we have to speak up when they’re implemented in ways that harm the free software ecosystem and culture. They’re most certainly wrong and we must work out ways to fix them without breaking the bugs they were brought in to fix. But then that gets you back to corporate interests…

But Making Things Easy Will Make Things Harder!

There is a growing backlash against the design movement from seasoned linux admins/users. The theory is that as development is funded and the funding is focusing most strongly on making things easier for the new users, that all the old tools and methods will be neglected as their economies fall apart.

I know some tools are rubbish in design and probably should be replaced. Things like find and gnupg are the extreme examples of inhuman interface design. But just because money is following design at the moment, doesn’t mean it isn’t also following functionality. The thing we have to be most aware of, is that in our free software ecosystem we’ve had an abundance of good functionality for so long, that the design has been neglected.

And besides, if there is enough people who want certain tools to exist and work in certain ways, then there will always be a distribution or tool-set providing just that set of functions in just that way. Our objective as geeks is to make sure we never loose the ability to form communities around those ideas.

Your thoughts?