DoctorMo's Blog

I wanted to take this comment I made in an email and post it to my blog. I’m fairly principled and I try my best with all sorts of things. There is something about principles which I think is not well understood and I’d like to offer a tentative explanation:

Principles are a view of the world which can be seen to be idealistic, they are in their nature the very way in which given the way you understand the world to work you could see things being made better and more ideal. Ideals are not always practical, you have to deal with real world issues that are not ideal.

Practicalism isn’t a principle, it’s the ways real world problems can be solved. You use your principles to weigh up the cost of actions that solve the problem. You do _not_ replace your principles wholesale with a view that cheapens and makes light of principles in general but instead use them to dialectically make new and creative solutions to the problems.

Free and Open Source as a principle: It’s both a long term practical benefit (investment) and a universal social good which respects users and brings down the cost of computer software development. I would say that FOSS is one of those unique common sense type principles that have immediate and far reaching effects. The difficulty with spreading the ideas and philosophies are not due to the general public not being able to understand, but instead relate to how tightly vested interests hold onto their own principles about the appropriateness of their product’s terms.

All these things have cultural and political consequences in my view. You don’t have to be a raving supporter or a crazy Ubuntu advocate. I think just being more aware of exactly what the proposition is and why proprietary software is very costly and not worth your time would be very valuable in bringing about a cultural shift.

Thank you for reading my ramble, what are your thoughts? Am I talking out of my hat again? Should I be less concerned with the adoption of practicalism as a principle?

I went to six flags, on the way in they were checking t-shirts. I assume for fun. The lady said my t-shirt was good and that I should see out Scooby-doo as he’d be into that sort of thing.

So as well as going on a whole bunch of rides in this mini-american-but-almost-the-same Alton Towers. I got my picture as promised.

Taken by my wife for free and well it was interesting to be in line with 4 year-olds. But great all the same to do something social instead of thrill seeking.

I also gave them a hug. I mean if a 4 year-old can, I can’t see why I can’t!

I have a love/hate relationship with gnome. I use it, I develop for it and at the same time I dislike the way the gnome project produces functional libraires.

Take for example librsvg, an awesome library for turning svg files into pngs for display and for making thumbnails. For some unintelligent reason installing or compiling librsvg requires gtk and thus also requires avahi and hicolor-icon-theme, xrandr and libcups2. Does making a png out of an svg require us to send icons to a rotated screen connected to a networked discovered printer? No? Then why do I need all this stuff?

The problem as I see it is that librsvg should be split out more into it’s none-gtk library parts and it’s pixbuf/gdk parts. Making it a useful library to a wider audience from servers to other desktop systems. Larger audiences mean more attention and more attention means more bug fixes.

The gnome project historically I think didn’t have much of a culture of serving a wider ecosystem and saw gaps and filled those gaps with gnome-only libs. It pains me to say but as a programmer I’m disappointed by the lack of foresight even though I understand resources were always tight. A “do everything with gtk deps” culture produces inflexible libs with rare logical separation between layers and fewer opportunities to share with the wider community because of it.

I’ve always hoped that the FDO culture of sharing APIs and working towards standard consensus would help the culture along and promote a culture of making libs for everyone.

Does anyone know of any alternatives to librsvg that produce good results? imagemagik failed to meet standards as it doesn’t support most of the filter effects, but I don’t know of many others.

just my 2 cents, what are your thoughts?

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.

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?

When I ask Microsoft Windows users to try out Ubuntu should I be telling them that using Ubuntu is socially harder than using Windows? Sure Ubuntu is awesome technically, very easy to use and much better than windows, plus it’s FOSS, moral, science and all. But none of that helps the social barriers.

So I am more aware now that I’m not only pushing a technology but also perhaps a fight. Something that many users just don’t want to have to deal with. Some new users are enthused, well armed and well prepared to go into fight for their ecosystem and we welcome these new early adopters.

But Microsoft windows is normal and using anything else isn’t normal. We have a long way to go before Ubuntu is more recognised as a good technology, well made and not just used by social misfits and people who want to use obscure products to look cool.

Even if you just think about the technical aspects there is just a barrier from service providers, shops and the media.

One of the really nice things about Ubuntu is that it’s managed to improve (slightly) this by replacing the Linux brand in a lot of people’s minds¹. More people seem to know about Ubuntu and FOSS by extension because of the work we do to be welcoming and accommodating to new users. But are we doing enough? What more could we do to reduce some of the social stigma of using none Microsoft products?

Thoughts?

¹ I’ve come to see Linux as an ingredient, like flour. You can’t sell flour to a person wanting to buy cakes.

Talking some time off from my blog for the summer. See you all in two weeks.

This is the kind of bad attitude problem that we try to get away from in the Ubuntu community, why this program was accepted into universe (I presume from debian) I have no idea. This is my attempt to try out a game from the archives:

doctormo@delen~/$ conquest
Can not connect to locahost
doctormo@delen~/$ conquestd
conquestd: Common block ident mismatch.
You must initialize the universe with conqoper.
doctormo@delen~/$ conqoper
Poor cretins such as yourself lack the skills necessary to use this program.

I have only one response to the socially challenged individual who thought that was a good message:

doctormo@delen~/$ sudo apt-get purge conquest-gl conquest-server

Bye!

I took the bus down to New York and any travelling for me seems to leave be dehydrated and haggard. No matter what kind of transport I just get in a bad mood about it. I think it’s all the bumping, noise and people around me.

Anyway, I’m here now so I can start to relax and enjoy the big apple again.

Here’s to DebConf!