DoctorMo's Blog

I’ve been thinking about my time and how much I spend on actual project work.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I should not disregard the time I spend struggling or the time I spend relaxing enjoying some entertainment.

This seems to also be a facet of history in general. We hear about important points in history and important people, but are we really any good at knowing what was and wasn’t important? Doesn’t it seem more likely that all sorts of individuals did all sorts of small amazing things which we will never really know about or be able to appreciate.

There is a lot of enjoyment which is disregarded.

I wanted to play with brush lines and I was thinking back to a chat I had with my good friend David about Free Software and lack of User attachment to sticking with Free products when their only desire is practicality. This of course can make a very transient user base who will leave at the first sign of trouble.

Of course any time spent with a particular piece of machinery like software will develop an educational and brand familiarity attachment. I want to put those to one side because I believe they are useful over long time periods but not the short term.

Contributors (and if you reading this then your more than likely a contributor) are of course different, they’re invested in time, philosophically and socially and so are much more likely to stick it out and may actually know how to not only work around problems but we hope through training programs like UDW and UW that we can train people to know how to deal with problems in a more sustainable way. Treating bugs as problems for everyone and not just the individual.

Of course what the mainstream pattern looks like is different, they don’t have contributors or contributing developers, everyone is locked into working around problems. The key difference is that because users are customers, they’re invested in the product. They feel like they own it (even when they don’t) and feel like they ort to stick out problems so that they can get their money’s worth. Of course what do you do in both this and the above case when you have a major headache that you don’t know how to work around or even if you manage to work around? You complain like crazy on your blog, to your friends and to anyone that will hear your pain.

Your complaining is a direct reflection of your ties to a particular product, even to it’s defects.

In the most ideal case and one I was trying to make the case for a few days ago, we’d be able to either turn users into contributors or if that’s not possible then into paying customers that pay for real solutions and code patches, not just work-arounds.

The training that’s going on is a great start, but with better training materials in the community we could be making more contributors aware of the ability of solving problems more permanently and thus improve their input into progress (blogs showing you how to work around a problem are not progress in code terms).

Software isn’t perfect and we need to get lots of people with lots of energy (or money) to invest that energy into the community and to the community collaboration that so effectively benefits everyone. And in my mind the best way to get people quickly attached to FOSS and Ubuntu is to get them to invest into it sooner rather than later, then we have time to get people familiar with the brand and educate them.

Your thoughts?

Just having some fun.

Seems like the summer is just grinding on, most people have gone very quiet indeed. Bit boring to be honest.

I’ve deactivated my account of facebook, firstly because I just can’t be bothered with it and secondly to see if my friends are really my friends and will email me and if they’re interested watch my identi.ca feed and blog.

Obviously I think very few of them will actually be that bothered, not least because most of them use inferior operating systems that don’t deliver their social systems to the desktop like mine

Anywhoo, email me.

Also works with pictures, now have some fun!

I was watching the amazing tedtalk by Isabel Allende as she described some of the women who dedicate their lives to making the world better and the incredible cultural sexism they faced in their journeys.

Near the end of the talk Isabel talks about the world as it is and how unsatisfyingly bad it is and how much better it could be if we could promote women’s rights and embrace women in jobs.

What’s striking to me is that I’ve noticed the tendency of not just the lack of women in various job roles, but also that any women that do get into those jobs tend to need to act like men in order to advance. I’m not just talking about sexism, but about aggressive social interaction, bullying and inconsideration for the wider implication of action. Their patriarchies are not familiar matriarchies or tribal relations.

There is an interesting thought that we should be investing more in enterprises run by women, especially in the third world where women can really make a difference for their families and society.

Isabel also mentions teaching young men how to understand and embrace their feminine energy. something I assume is code words for social organisation such as the idea that the people we talk to may actually be important enough to care about, empathise with and think about in a less self serving manner. I know it seems hard to think of people as people and not as ways to further one’s personal agenda, but it’s possible to teach I think.

I guess I’d be a feminist if I thought it should be a movement and didn’t just think of it as common sense. Rather than thinking I need to join a social group of people, I think I’m rather more comfortable imagining everyone a feminist and anyone who behaves sexist is simply that: outside the realm of acceptable behaviour.

Thoughts?

This image from George Smoot’s tedTalk back in 2008 is something which inspired me to think about the way people think about what is possible. This blog post may seem a little airy for some, but that’s because it’s going to be hard to explain what I mean when I try and compare the model for dark matter distribution in the universe (above) with the realm of possibly in an abstract way.

Normally the way individuals see possibilities is that they assess the data, the facts of the world and their model of the world and come to a set of conclusions which predict the likelihood of a given outcome. When you have the data of several examples this becomes easier to do. This isn’t a good way to think about it for large questions.

Now a harder problem, evolution, why do species evolve the way they do and why do we have the patterns we do. Well imagine evolution is playing a gambling game where in each move it’s got a chance to move somewhere on that colourful diagram above, the lighter the coloured area the more possible it is to survive in with that pattern, the pattern can be said to be more stable.

When we reflect upon the journey evolution has taken, it certainly seems to have a direction for a lot of adaptations, the species could be said to be complete at any stage (because it managed to survive in it’s environment) but still time marches on and the journey isn’t done and the next million years go by and now we have bigger teeth and better running.

This is how I visualise such a process on a global scale, trying to not think of single journeys, but what could have been and could not have possibly worked in that given environment and the pattern it all makes in a sort of “stability pattern matrix”. It’s this visual idea that allows me to speculate that say if we were to meet aliens then there are likely to be two kinds: those that are very much like us and those that as so different from us it’ll be hard for us to recognise them at all.

Anyway, enough fairy cake for today.

Interesting thought I got via email today:

Open Source will happen with or without us I believe. The production model is already taking over. Red Hat is now the backbone of the NYSE that is a barometer.

Yes Red Hat is looking after the NYSE and did release record revenues, they’re doing quite well with business up 19% this time. So this part is obvious to me:

I have no doubt that FOSS will take over software production, it’s just an economically more successful model of production. I repeat that this is an industrial revolution, but too few want to believe that we might actually be living in such an exciting time as that.

But the question on my mind is whether individuals, home users and small businesses will be in on this ride of freedom or whether they will be left behind by a corporate culture that only want to take money from OEMS, large enterprises and other easy sources of revenue.

Not only is it apparently impossible to make money from individuals, but it’s equally impossible to listen to them. A set of enigmas which are most certainly of the same knot and I’m looking forward to picking over the problem in the future.

Perhaps we’re just waiting for the big success, but I don’t hear FOSS being praised in the media or seized upon in OEM advertisements as loud as the production line was back in that revolution (I’m looking at you Android). It’s disappointing to me that there are still so many people even in our Ubuntu community that continue to explain that “home users don’t care how it was made”.

It’s disappointing because it’s wrong, it’s wrong to think that people are only consumers. It’s also wrong because it’s that same culture of ignorance of where our wealthy possessions come from that has driven the wrongs that laid a path to child labour and environmental problems. We’ve only begun to start fixing some of these problems and yet still a culture of “ignorance is good and normal” keeps FOSS down, that perhaps it’s something worthy for just the self-chosen few.

I do not subscribe to that notion and I will gladly tell every person, even my dear ol’ mum and granny what it’s about, reforming the words I use and the imagery I employ to help make it even easier to communicate. The market isn’t just about business it’s also about perceptions, only when individuals understand FOSS will the market solidify around the best of what we have and not the worst of what open source is according to a few bad Apples.

My thoughts are obviously long and ranty, but I’d still like to hear your thoughts?

I was catching up on some groklaw news picks and found myself reading this little gem. It’s a list of excerpts from James Plamondon in Exhibit plex_2456. What follows is a rant, you’ve been warned.

Reading this I felt sorry for James, not like one would feel sorry for a cute little pig about to be made into sausages but more like feeling sorry for Darth Vader as he realises his fate is at Darth Sidius’s side. The guy is evil and I don’t mean in any over dramatic way, the guy admits it.

What is disturbing is the way in which he objectifies people, turning social relationships into controllable terms of negotiation. It’s the kind of sickness that must inflict every red braces wearing socio-path in wall street to the cape wearing dictators in far flung tropical countries of fantasy.

What is it that turns a man’s life into nothing more than a string of social engagements where the act of being friendly is all an act to exert control and dominance in some game? What is it that leads a person into believing that using other people with underhanded socio-abuse is something to hold up as a badge of honour.

I get accused of hating Microsoft, well Martin so why do you hate? Actually I have nothing against the basic premise of outmoded and nostalgic software production methodologies they embody. I instead reserve my righteous contempt for the culture that the people at the top there cultivate, their abuses of political and social power which have absolutely nothing to do with economics.

Notice the language in use, it’s very telling of where James draws the line of morality, it’s *way* over there where most other people would have stopped already. The language shows that this is a war with allys and enemies, mercenaries to be bought and battles to win. Oh sure Free Software isn’t about morality, that’s just about economic efficiency, social cooperation and trading standards. On the other hand Microsoft…

…Perhaps bug one is more than just stopping an economic drain and industrial stupidity, perhaps it’s also for some about sticking two fingers up to the industrial socio-paths. Those who would gladdy use their friends as shields or weapons and who think of their actions as nothing but a big game where those who break the social rules get to win.

End of rant, next time join me in a celebration of cute bunnies and puppies.