DoctorMo's Blog

David wrote: Do we [have free will]? We like to think that we do, but a look at the psychological research into the subject of priming leads to some interesting questions with respect to this.

It’s an interesting philosophical question. One that science can’t really answer because of the nature of science as an externalised view on the subject of reality.

We may be completely nailed down to our pre-defined destinies as the supernaturalists would have it. Or we might be completely predictable from a neurological aspect.

Either way, it doesn’t mean we don’t have free will.

The problem is how we think of ourselves and how we think about embodiment. If I am a brain in a body that as a system is predictable, then I am still making my own choices because I _am_ that system.

It only really gets into a lovely problem when you have a soul that sits outside of the universe pulling levers and creating a discrepancy between what the natural reality can predict and the choices we actually make. That discrepancy would be fairly easy to spot too.

All neural science is able to prove is that we have no soul, but it would be unable to get rid of free will without discounting the material that makes up the person as embodying of what that person really is.

Scientists love to have an externalised viewpoint though, so it’s no surprise to me that a lot of scientists (even atheists) subscribe to the supernatural out of body free will argument.

Martin,

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?

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?

Between the early adopting individualists and the aesthetically pleased seems to be a rift growing wider and wider. Unity is a not customisable, read the comments too.

The culture that surrounds the community is certainly one of individualism. We like to think ourselves as cool outsiders doing something beyond the norm. There are users who don’t care so much, but the majority of us involved in advocacy and development have come to like the ownership and the sense of self style that comes with Free and Open Source Software.

The culture of Apple is a little different, it’s one of polemic design. A place where there is one right way to do something and there is a special person who will decide what that principle must be. Because this design philosophy has produced aspiring designs there are signs that others are copying. The problem is that polemics isn’t compatible with individualism, it’s not even compatible with science or rhetoric.

My own struggle with polemic design is rhetoric. I’m far more interested in dialectics than positivism for certain classes of problems, but software engineers don’t understand dialectics and so tend to simply stick with dualism. As if argument was about proving the other person wrong instead of working out a solution that solves the problems and resulting conflicts.

Dualism has gotten us into trouble especially when it comes to design. We have often looked blind to design because we add options to solve every conflict. Not having design skills available in the ecosystem has meant the community has been unable to come up with solutions to complex design problems preferring to copy instead. This is why Mark says “the community can’t do design” and it’s “design by committee”.

It has frustrated me how hard it is to work out design problems in the community in the past; but I don’t think the answer is to jettison faith in the community as Mark has done. I think with the design skills people are learning from the new Canonical design team and some studying of dialectic rhetoric we should be able to come up with good designs without the need for Apple’s polemic philosophies.

Your thoughts?

If like me you were paying close attention to Mark Shuttleworth’s key note introduction to UDS you may have noticed he used an adoption graph like this one:

The idea is that right now we’re stuck between 15% market share of early adopters and the magic 20% market share of the early majority… after which the adoption momentum will be a self sustaining. What I took away from this graph was that there are a spectrum of people in the world who progressively need great numbers of friends to already be familiar with the product/idea and the more happy people the more of the majority can be won over.

But hang on a second we need to know what we’re talking about first. If we’re talking about computer desktops then Ubuntu (and all other distros together) could barely be said to be 3% of the general population market share, far short of the 15% of the adoption chasm that Mark was targeting.

Of course we might be talking about a subset market, maybe netbooks where I think Ubuntu does better? Perhaps we’re at the chasm of early adopters, perhaps we have 15% of the market of Innovators and Early Adopters (2.25%) maybe going after the general majority shouldn’t be attempted until we’ve conquered even a significant proportion of the early adopters in this model.

That would mean that we need to stop serving the innovators (the programmers in this case) and start pushing early adopters, people who will put up with a bit of grief but will if they fail forever label the brand as a reject (and will be sure to tell the early majority it’s to be avoided).

Perhaps this is what I find when I go out into the street, the early adopters know Linux is failure, it didn’t work when they tried it 10 years ago and it’s certainly not going to work now. On the other hand Ubuntu is new, a fresh brand… it doesn’t help perhaps that there is a lot of marketing promoting the link between Linux and Ubuntu, dragging Ubuntu down.

Then again perhaps Ubuntu really is that crap that it should be rejected. There’s a whole pile of support questions in my email archive that are from frustrated early adopters who can’t get their printer working, their scanner, ipod, wacom tablet. Or perhaps it was that website, that game or something else. A computer is a very many to very many device and we’ve decided we’re audacious enough to attempt to service the greater proportion of those combinations without any very many to very many organisational procedures to test any of the combinations above casual testing.

I’ve heard that some have said Ubuntu won’t take off until we’ve stripped away some of the excessive expectations and slimmed down what is possible to do until we have a manageable subset. Perhaps netbooks and similar small devices are an aim to do just that. I believe that Canonical knows this well enough and is preparing a solid system for a very small set of functionalities which can be supported by an individual company.

Perhaps it’s up to the community to bring in the rest of the possibilities that we’ve vested ourselves to.

Your thoughts?

An article has caught my eye; it’s a semi Free Software, semi philosophical entry about freedom and how it is traded. That to consider the importance of free software we have to consider the importance of the freedoms we have to deny ourselves in order to pay for software freedom.

You can read the whole article here: The Magic Black Box Paradox of Freedom

This is my response to that article.

Freedom is really a fascinating philosophical object. What most people consider to be freedom is in actuality the certain prospect of not being punished for conducting ones self in a known fashion. When we talk of the balance of freedoms we’re now getting into what is considered to be acceptable behaviour in people who’s actions relate to each other, even if the people are not in any formal relationship.

No one will stop and punish you if you walk out the door and run to Lands End, no matter how hard and gruelling the journey. So one might say that your freedom is just the prospect and not the cost of carrying out that action. What the article above confuses is this natural difference between freedoms not taken away and heavy costs and responsibilities.

The nature of the costs of an action are not anti-freedom, I’d love to go to Mars and I’m free to do so, but I can’t afford to build my own rocket system. Natural economics can stifle your progress but they are not culling your freedom. If on the other hand the law or society that is removing your natural ability, then that can be said to be a curbing of freedoms through economic means.

So if we’ve got a distinction between prospects and costs, and the difference between natural and social retardation you should be able to see the confusing nature of considering the costs of Free Software to be anti-freedom.

Educational freedom plays as much of a part of this prospective freedom, what I know controls what I can imagine I can do with my time and I’m a full supporter of Walter Bender’s idea that education and it’s prospects should be a much more highly valued attribute of the common Free and Open Source Software cause.

There is one more important definition of freedom and that is it’s systematic, social implication. We are reliant heavily on the freedom of the press which protects journalists from reprisals for the words they publish, while very few of us have printing presses the law effects everyone because the situation of not having that freedom would lead to bad things for everyone.

Proprietary software is reprehensible socially, it’s an illness of the respectful relationship between supplier and user of software that should exist. While freedom does not seem that important to anyone outside of the relationship, the systematic consequences of denying users ownership and control over their own property sets a bad example and shifts social power so that it can abuse the many for the benefit of a few.

Any sort of proprietisation of intellectual control is a curb of our prospective freedom, it isn’t that reverse engineering is hard that is problematic, it’s that the engineer who engages in that activity may have to face reprisals from the law for trying to exercise control over their own property.

Situations that we see already and a marked disrespect for all freedoms seems to emanate from the companies who are most resistant to a codified legal framework for software licensing. These companies attempt to believe that they are immune from the laws about freedom of the press just as they are seemingly immune from the laws which govern freedom of property and the guarantees of ownership on sale.

If we must support Freedom then you can be inwardly looking and consider that in supporting it you will get better software for yourself and mostly likely you will get it for free as it will have likely been paid for by someone else; or you can be outwardly looking and support software freedom because it is socially and morally important for us as a society to respect each others prospective freedoms, the interconnectivity of what we do effects everyone and the more people push for freedom, the more we will not have to spend time and money on costly workarounds.

Thoughts?

A debate, seemingly endless in the Free and Open Source landscape between purest Free Software activists and Practicalist Open Source is starting to find it’s way into a recognisable, worthwhile settlement. At least in my own head.

Freedom Through Production

I’ve never been very fond of the Free Software Foundation’s recent destructive, abstinence only, political approaches to advocacy. It may seem that they’re no longer concerned with Free Software as a social issue, but as only a political issue, but I don’t believe this is the only thing the FSF is up to, only what they are most loud about in the press and the way they allow themselves to be perceived.

The difference of course is how you fight. Back in the days when the FSF was finding it’s feet Richard and others began this amazing process of taking functional proprietary tools and recreating these tools as free software, drop-in replacements. This process of “doing all the boring bits” really set the technical foundations and I think is why a lot of people were really amazed by the principled dedication and out of this grew respect.

You could of course be strong by simply denying yourself the pleasures of technology, because it’s not Free Software. But this is something that only a very small majority will do and while it does show conviction, It’s not producing anything and it implies negative guilt in those unwilling to give up their Wii or Blackberry. Protests are great, but they have to resonate with the public and can’t just be about showing how rotten everyone is for being human and wanting nice things.

I know the FSF is still producing software, taking troublesome closed software and making new free versions of it (hence OpenSocial), but the strength of that production has not been keeping up with it’s ability to be loud, vocal and political. What we’ve ended up with is a political organisation, but not a guiding light that executes and demonstrates the way forward as it used to.

My key consideration: Support Free Software, have conviction, be strong on the issues and be principled. But don’t whine protests, instead make solutions. Let creation do the talking (and advertise it) and invite others to come together to make Free Software solutions. Freedom through production.

Utility Through Liberty

The open source movement grew out of the lack of compromise in the Free Software community, but it’s grown further from being just about inviting businesses into a friendly arena and into a more pragmatics’ hiding hole, there are no difficult questions to answer, and free as in beer software is how it’s all advertised with no further explanation about how it became free in the first place.

It’s disappointing because while the open source movement should have be trying to figure out the best ways to execute Free Software ideals in a realistic economic and business sense, it instead set off with a more vague set of principles that are simply less strict, but with the same intention as the FSF. Sure there is much more practical movement, more code production, but there is also a lot of confusion and grey areas being produced which are not helpful.

How many licenses are ratified by OSS? Why did they need to ratify licenses at all? or even bother with definitions? There is quite a good set of principles right there ready to use from the FSF, all that was needed was a more business, less political direction and advertising strategy. Something that business pragmatists would look at and be happy understanding and supporting based on it’s practical benefits, but also not shy away from explaining it’s long term reasons.

For me I find being practical in the immediate sense is important, but far too often this id-like satisfaction eclipses my responsibility to make sure I prepare for the future. Far too often you’ll find practicalism going hand in hand with myopia and an inability to see the future beyond next month. Even if I need to use some closed source bit of code, or some driver firmware to get everything working. I think I should always be mindful of making sure I am a) not investing further into the closed source ecosystem and that I can b) invest something into the FOSS alternatives in order to help the future of that functionality dig it’s way out of the hole.

These are long term practical and economic considerations for the open source philosophy that I wish were much more widely practised. We certainly can’t be thinking of how to construct new and exciting economic opportunities for free software development when in for example Ubuntu we shall have closed source programs with economic incentives (that users pay for) and Free Software programs with no economics beyond self interest (they’re all free and not linked to any sort of donations or investment information).

A deplorable imbalance in consideration of the future of Free and Open Source which I hope can be solved with some discussion with the distribution organisations and perhaps the organisations that manage projects financially. A standard formula and way to advertise that to end users would be most welcome.

My key consideration: Practicalism is good, but I’m weary that it doesn’t lead to complacency and myopia on the future issues. Free Software principles are very strong foundations for the long term and closed source solutions are very weak stop gaps in comparison. Be sure to invest in that long term solution even while using the short term stop gap.

Your thoughts on my whole ramble today?

If you watch the BBC you may have seen a recent episode of “It’s only a theory” where they had as a guest Andrew Keen, author of “The Cult of the Amateur”. His theory was that The internet (and in essence Free Culture) is killing our culture and our economy.

I won’t go into the narcissist arguments, we could all be better at considering others and being more humble. I’m also going to ignore the irony of writing a blog post which is a part of the problem in Andrew’s eyes.¹

The theory managed to squeak by on a change of vote from Reginald D Hunter. His argument was very interesting though, he said that Andrew was afraid of the changes and that we hadn’t learned how to “make money” from the internet yet. That there changes were good and that killing the old culture was a good thing and we just need time to figure it all out.

Of course I was hoping to see the fear-inspired conjecture thoroughly rebuked. But after seeing why it was passed, I’m actually more impressed with Mr Hunter.²

Big media needs to die because it’s just an inefficient and too centralised way to make media. I find myself more and more simply enjoying content online and trying to pay for it. I have no problems with paying for content of course, but I’m altruistic, so of course I’m going to pay for content as much as I can, I actually commission plenty of artworks for Free Culture.

Free Software is sort of like the older brother of the free culture philosophy. Software has the advantage that it has a few extra advantages to being participatory, the fact that more of it can be compartmentalised and mixed together with other code without having to consider context as much. But just as much as Free Software has to find it’s way from the proxy funding of support contracts, Free Culture has to find it’s way from the proxy funding of advertising.

Thoughts?

¹ I write this blog to get better at writing, it’s nice to get readers, but it’s not why I do it.
² Of course recent episodes of Andy Hamilton’s overruling and general incompetent silliness has reduced my respect for the guy, so I was expecting him to vote silly.

I read today a fascinating interview with some Tea Party politicos about how they were perhaps planning on taking over the Republican Party. For those not in the USA, the Tea Party movement is a ultra far right wing group dedicated to authoritarian ideals of increasing the police and army, the destruction of social services and economic anarchy in at attempt to get a free market.

All rather silly and naive since the people in the party are the very people such policies will hurt the most, but what is interesting is their want of taking over. This is interesting because the traditional Republican philosophies are not present in the modern day republican party and I believe are missing _because_ of the move towards the exact authoritarianism that the Tea Party personifies.

If the tea party can purge the ranks of moderates (normal conservatives to me and you) then it will futher pressure the USAs ridiculous federal two party system. Since there will then be a whole set of conservatives without a party. Perhaps then they can remake the Republican party with it’s original, less destructive, more distrobutionist ideals.

Thoughts?