DoctorMo's Blog

For today’s video blog I’m tackling the ideas behind Ubuntu the platform and Ubuntu the product, courtesy of Ayatana Mailing List. Nobody doesn’t like good Ayatana! Basically I dig into the problems between a One and Only vision and the more flexible, but harder to do, platform model of design.

With visual aids thanks to Inkscape!

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

What are your thoughts?

PJ of Groklaw is shuttering groklaw, so there’ll be no more new content on the website. Groklaw has been a fantastic reference, both in following the SCO saga and with learning more about copyright and other legal issues. The newspicks were some of the best selected of any linux related website I know and they will be missed.

For you PJ, a cartoon that took me all day to draw:

Thanks for all the fish. Can’t wait to see what your next case is!

I’ve been highly critical¹ of corporate copyright assignment policies, especially those that effect me personally. Canonical, one of those I’ve complained about, has been working to try and standardise the wording and formation of the contracts that you have to sign in order to assign copyright over.

This is called Project Harmony and it kicked off today an alpha release, which we can get involved with and try and fix and bug report.

To be fair to the process (and in hope that it can fix Canonical’s current utterly ghastly wording) I’ve put together a diagram so you can understand what the options are in the new alpha contract:

What is interesting is that while diagramming² , I could see the difference between the FSF’s³ assignment agreement (2.1 > iv) and Canonical current agreement (2.2 > v) and they do show up in stark contrast.

What are your thoughts on this project? Will it improve the situation with contributing to Canonical’s Unity, Mozilla’s Firefox or even the FSF’s Gnu project?

¹I’ve likened it to corporate theft, misappropriation of volunteer work and powerful coercion from the project maintainers project’s coherence. Similar to an optional serfdom.
²This isn’t a legal diagram, just an illustration to aid comprehension. I am not a lawyer, please check with your legal council on these matters.
³Interestingly I’ve just signed two FSF copyright assignment forms, hopefully I’ll be able to blog about what I’ve been up to with them soon.

Here we go, got the photos for the jam, look at how happy everyone is:

To celebrate the release of revision 16 of my Free Culture Tabloid sided poster, I’ve put together each section into it’s own US letter poster so that a multi-poster display can be created using all of the pieces.

Do you like the edits that have gone into each revision? Is the wording easy to understand and direct enough for public consumption? Please give me your thoughts in the comments below.

Just caught this picture which was made for Ubuntu 10.10 release, I didn’t see it posted to any of the channels, so enjoy:

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.

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?