DoctorMo's Blog

With the passing of the NHS reform bill in the UK last week, I’ve been reflecting on the discussion that went on between the conservative supporters and almost everyone else in the country who was deeply worried about any bill which would seem to meddle with a system that was fairly ok and doing quite well.

The frightening proposition is that health in the UK would be privatised. Not just like the system in the USA, but having to possibly pass through a system far worse in order to finally be dragged towards the regulated compromise the Americans have found themselves in.

The point we’re told from conservatives over and over is that capitalism and corporate business practice can bring many efficiency gains to the way health businesses operate. Competition is sighted as a key mechanism to achieving this result. Much needed capital could be found in the private sector and the whole system would be closely monitored to make sure it kept on curing people and setting broken bones.

But, as readers of my blog will know, I’m not really attached to any particular mechanic in achieving what we wish to happen in society. If a privately capitalised, for-profit business which takes it’s organisational strategy from Cadburies really is the best was to set up a hospital, then so be it. But on the other hand if you believe in capitalism in your heart, but not in your head; then one’s politics might be driven towards operational and funding mechanics which might be ill fitting. Politicians who probably aren’t evil or even that naughty, get confused by positive bias and fallacies from popularity and especially group think and persistent ideas.

Really thinking about the simple rules which allow such a mechanic to work well enough to provide all those great examples isn’t simple. Let’s start with a simple rule of markets: ‘Buyer must have the option not to buy’, do we think that health is something we can opt out of? Do we get a choice not to be saved if we’re in an accident and picked up by a private ambulance? That’s the unsettling thing about the USA’s ‘fairer’ health care bill, forcing people to buy products isn’t right there and it wouldn’t be in the UK either.

Here I’d like to slide into a wider concern. Health is something of an important system, without this service the economy would be very quickly loosing people to illness and injury. The pain felt in the USA is not just by individuals, but keenly by companies big and small. They often pay for some or all of the health coverage for all their employees because having employees without health care would be detrimental to their own operation. So clearly some functions are so important, that organising them collectively has great benefits.

Then there’s competition. Is it a good thing? Well the first thing to ask is what competition hopes to achieve. In market terms, competition is a group selection process which hopes to push forward the fitness of each organisation as it strives to out bid other organisations for available resources, other organisations that can not claim enough resources are deemed unfit and are allowed to fail. This system of evolution does require (system-wide) a larger amount of resources to invest. In organisations which will fail and organisations which will perform activities outside of their core function to innovate. It’s a bet on the future which requires a trade off between cost today and expected organisational innovation tomorrow.

But with a system like the NHS, which will always be tightly controlled. Will there be added resources to cope with this new evolutionary requirement? Will there even be the flexibility to change the organisation in such a way as to find new and brilliantly innovative organisational methods?

Then I see we have a combining. If I like the idea of competition, does it follow I have to swallow private capital funding too? So often we fail to be able to articulate well when we’re talking about funding source and the organisation’s market forces. The lack of distinction and separation of the two probably doesn’t allow us to come up with more interesting rules or more innovative funding ideas. Although it’s amazing to think that the Government of a G8 country, can’t seem to put the money together for anything any more.

In conclusion: When the government says they want to privatise a working public service, what they probably mean is: “We don’t have the money to make it better and we don’t trust the current public sector operators to know their job well enough to improve it’s operation.” and not “We have some added cash to turn this inappropriately publicly operated function into a number of well functioning business concerns.”

It’s time for impossible to prove conjecture Tuesday! Today I’ll be looking at freedom and price. Those two great pillars of our movement from barbaric propriety and gouging monopolies into a bright future of open sharing and low-low prices.

I read about the Future of Open Source Survey and according to it’s findings most respondents value ‘open source’ and will be deploying it. But more intriguingly this time around instead of valuing ‘open source’ for costs reasons, the value is more firmly placed in Freedom.

This freedom can mean all sorts of things depending on what you do, and unlike what far too many commentators say about access to source code not being important to non-programmers; it isn’t actually about the source code at all.

So what happened to all that low-low price hype? I think that we’re reaching maturity. First FOSS is attractive to anyone who doesn’t quite understand it because of it’s apparent cost benefits. That is, what has already been written is free for anyone to use. Explaining the benefits of Free Software to someone who doesn’t see the problem of proprietary software is impossible.

Once you’re using an open source platform, of course it’s much easier to calculate the benefits of investing in the improvement of the code (hiring/contracting developers) against simply buying a replacement off the shelf product. This is what makes advocating FOSS so interesting, you never know if the person you’re convincing to use Ubuntu will turn around and spend money on helping it grow later.

So why is freedom now important to all these cost conscious businesses? I believe that the successful foss product in any market pretty much sets the commodity cost and any propriety software will have to either beat the cost or improve on features in orders of magnitude better. The problem of course is that a lot of these businesses have gotten a taste of what it’s like when you can take your internal tools and change them to do anything in any way your business requires. This is something that proprietary software vendors find hard and expensive to do well.

So, my conjecture today is: “People will be attracted by the price and with enough time, stay for the Freedom”

Your thoughts?

Our venerable friend Jono Bacon has posted an interesting blog post concerning the outcome of the bug to enable the nonfree installation of Flash on Ubuntu. It would have manifested itself in the installer, by having the nonfree checkbox switch on by default.

1. The problem: We can not have what we want in the default install.
2. The current solution: Provide a set of proxy packages which can install the functionality after the installation, moving the liability and problems from Canonical to the user.
3. The problem with the current solution: It requires manual user interaction.
4. Problem with checkbox solution: It’s against Ubuntu policy and the Technical Board Voted it down.

I’m a big proponent of “nonfree offsetting” (few people are, but I’m sticking to my guns); If Canonical wants to ship nonfree Flash instead of almost fully working GNU Gnash, then they should be willing to offset their balance with adequate investment into the free software alternative; i.e. they should be putting money into Gnash.

It’s funny because I was talking to Rob Savoye, winner of this year’s free software award, at LibrePlanet 2011. Overcoming the technical barriers to finishing Flash 10 support in Gnash, now that there is good documentation from Adobe, is so close. But the only businesses investing in Gnash are embedded systems; systems who need a Flash player to work on ARM and other architectures. Red Hat isn’t one of them, neither is Canonical, and I tire of not hearing from these companies on why they can’t invest more into solving these issues with an economic nudge.

Even if you don’t want to give the money to Rob, then send in your own engineers to get the job done!

Back to Jono: his position is that this issue is down to design. In his world view, installing nonfree Flash is required, it’s the only option and the one that we offer when you install Ubuntu; let’s assume that’s right for a moment. He’s asking designers to mull over how to achieve the right kind of communication to users to encourage them to click on the checkbox: This in itself is a policy paradox.

Anything we do to encourage users to install nonfree, nonessential components, is simply against the Ubuntu policy of shipping free software and encouraging its use. It’s hard to claim that this is a balance of free vs. nonfree with a straight face when your stated aim is to encourage users to install nonfree components.

In the comments to the blog post there are some very good responses from Alan Bell and ethana2, but there are also some comments from users who I think are more pro-compromise then they are pro-free-software. An example from Cleggton (I don’t mean to pick on you personally Cleggton, you’re just the easiest to quote):

If we take philosophy out of the argument for a second, then it seems clear that the users who care whether they are non-free, patent questionable etc are the ones that are most able and informed to uncheck a checkbox. And the ones that aren’t aware of the difference are our new users, who need YouTube just to work out of the box, lets make it work and then lets educate them later.

I hear this kind of appeasement argument an awful lot. Users don’t care (so we’re told) and free software is too hard to achieve. Not everyone of our users is going to care, especially when we so rarely tell them about free and open source software and it’s practical ramifications to them personally. But even that doesn’t make it irrelevant. Our users expect us to care about the things that will benefit them. In fact they expect us to care for them with careful policies. Even if polices get in the way of jam today; they’re there to make sure there’s jam tomorrow and users trust us to make those calls on their behalf.

Besides, you know what your mother always said about getting your own way without putting any work in: It trivialises the issues involved and waylays expectations and the reality of our situation. Then it’s much easier to ignore real solutions like spending the time creating free software and instead continue to make excuses on why we should keep the toxic workarounds like the nonfree Flash player in our ecosystem.

What are your thoughts?

In response to Bruce Byfield’s article on how We shouldn’t feel bad when businesses have no morals. I feel compelled to point out the flaw in his logic and hopefully add some sense to why moral outrage is the correct response to unscrupulous behaviour by companies.

It’s not a surprise when companies are inconsiderate/naughty/evil, but that doesn’t make what they do any less wrong and it doesn’t make a negative reaction any less justified. The most important thing to remember as a consumer is that your aversion to certain behaviours of others directly affects your willingness to engage in business with someone. To put it another way: What we think about a business being bad, effects their profit. Just ask BP or Toyota.

The purpose of a corporation is to fulfil all of it’s responsibilities. It’s responsibilities to it’s capital investors is to maximise the return on their capital investment through profits, but it’s responsibility to their employees is to pay them the contracted amount. Two conflicting responsibilities… and yet somehow companies manage to balance them.

To list just a few possibly conflicting responsibilities that all companies have: Shareholders to extract profits, employees to pay, business to continue, customers to serve, environment to maintain, suppliers to pay and even maintain, society to improve and government to appease. Here’s Bruce Schwartz doing a much better talk on why scruples are a good idea.

When a company hurts the FOSS ecosystem (in this case Novel), it’s neglecting it’s responsibility to maintain it’s suppliers, it’s hurting it’s relationship and ability to serve it’s customers and it’s endangering the continuation of it’s business. We don’t even need to bring in it’s possible legal responsibility to know that what Novel did was damaging and wrong. Yes I used the word ‘wrong’, because sometimes there is a right way and there is a wrong way to “maximise profits”.

Having a social responsibility shouldn’t be impossible for companies and we shouldn’t put up with companies that have the audacity to claim it isn’t their responsibility. Too often they hide behind “My responsibility is to the share holders” which is about as nonsensical as looking after sun, but not the earth.

If your business has short sighted, profit motivated share holders, my advice is to get rid of them as soon as possible. As a business owner you don’t have to take up extra responsibilities of having investors…. No wonder Canonical and Facebook don’t want to float on the stock market, I know I wouldn’t want to have share holders in the current ethical climate.

Your thoughts?

Keynote

Mark Shuttleworth kicked off this week’s UDS with a couple of interesting messages.

First was the focus on quality now that we’ve got a fair way through both the cadence and design pushes which Mark has been keenly interested in. We’re told to be super attentive to little issues and to demonstrate this Mark got together all of the best Canonical people involved in the Maverick release and gave them ice cream as a special treat. He then revealed that one of the bowels of ice cream had a fly in it. “This sweet ice cream doesn’t look so sweet now” he said. We need to pay attention to all the little flies like flickering screens and slow shell use because no matter how sweet we make Ubuntu, it won’t be attractive if there is even one fly in there. “we can do much much more, and be much much better”

The Unity interface will be coming to the default desktop. Thanks to demand and feedback the unity interface will be enabled for all users who have the hardware support and it’s being promoted as an easy to use interface. I agree with this, I’ve had the netbook launcher on my mum’s desktop for years now.

There was a note about Ubuntu’s relationship with the Gnome project. Part of this was the emphasise that Unity is a shell on Gtk/Gnome just as much as gnome shell will be, everything is the same Gnome in all other regards. The second part was a short clip of Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the Judians People’s Front is raving about how their not any of the other groups. This is trying to show us that groups that are trying to change the world too often focus on the very small differences between themselves instead of the main goals. The main message is: “We’re here to fight the Romans”

I was personally very happy with the mention of Ubuntu economics. Mark affirmed that the Ubuntu Software Center will support Free and Open Source software sponsorship where anyone can push money into projects and programs in order to move development forward. Improving the position of Free Software projects in the software center and allowing non contributing members to still contribute to projects. I know this is a bit of a dirty subject to a lot of people, but economics is _really_ important for Free Software and we ignore it at our peril.

Content Media Library

A really interesting project to create a multimedia sharing and collaboration platform which involves sharing and streaming your content around. It’s early days but it’s looking like Shotwell, Ubuntu One and PiTiVi are all excited about the possibilities presented here.

Development Learning Events

We’re discussing the organisation of further events to teach people development skills and introduce them to key technologies in the FOSS ecosystem. Brought up was linking up more of the existing documentation, making screencasts and having the information available on the project pages. Having development sessions which focus on how to get involved with projects rather than the basics on some technology was also brought up.

I was listening to an interesting video of the rather flamboyant Jimmy McMillan of the rent is too damn high party campaigning for the New York Governor’s office and he brought to mind the recent insistent views of Katie Hopkins on last week’s Young Voter’s Question Time on BBC Three. I should say that I don’t agree with either person as the first seems to lack rationality and the second both compassion and ironically economic understanding.

These two are rather far a part I admit, but something in their radical and disagreeable views created a new idea for me. That perhaps “rent is too high” because “the market will bear” much more when the goods are a requirement to productive living and increase with the degree to which people are able to not buy and even exit out of agreements easily.

So the main economic factor needed to reduce the amount of rent (because it is too damn high) being paid on average is to provide sensible, comfortable and easily accessible alternative housing to as many people as possible from either the government directly or non-profit chartered organisations at a stretch.

My conjecture is that lowering the tolerance of customers (that’s renters) by providing alternatives to private rented accommodation will reduce the rent burden by reducing the amount the market will bear. After all the amount the market will bear is only the amount to which people will/need to pay in order to get the services.

Ironically it means the people who are right wing poor and middle class are inadvertently increasing their own rent by virtue of being indignant about government provided housing. I know plenty of normally sensible people who would like government housing to be as horrid and uncomfortable as possible in order to encourage people’s independence form the state. Of course economics bites them in the arse on that one.

Never let it be said that doing the right wing doesn’t move you left and doing the left wing doesn’t make you right. This is complex man.

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?

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.

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.

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?