DoctorMo's Blog

I was reading the comments on the interesting Mint blog about Mint testing a Debian derivative so they can take advantage of rolling releases and get away from Ubuntu’s instability. Some of the comments allude to a different sentiment:

Ubuntu is so commercially driven, whereas mint is such a nice community effort, I’d be so much happier to use mint.

– fred

Ubuntu started to annoy me a bit with all this commercially oriented development of the distro.

– Miro Hadzhiev

But above all I believe that Ubuntu will change direction and become increasingly turned to a more commercial aspect. At the same time they will lose the * community * Exchange.

– F.Dionne

My response to this anti-commercial sentiment is this quote:

You keep on using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Simply that users and members of the community are confused by what commercial actually means. Commercial is not against the community, the community is commercial, people are employed to work on Ubuntu, work with Ubuntu and to be a part of the community. A varied commercial community would actually be kinda nice, imagine if we had a Dell community manager, or a system76 guy in IRC who was chatting away to the rest of the community of users *and* business people. Take a look at Organisations Learning to contribute to FOSS the right way.

I don’t think *making money* is the real fear of these people, I think the fear is Canonical with their often over bearing unfair influence with Ubuntu that often seems like they are on one side inviting development of their features that they decide are cool and on the other side ignoring and diminishing the features that others who are not Canonical want to work on or would like Canonical to help with.

There is also a fear that Canonical will only really want to work on what makes Ubuntu attractive to OEMs and other large organisations that they have a commercial relationship with. I know that aint true and lots of Canonical people continue to work on things which are good for the whole platform, but sometimes Ubuntu’s certainly had the flavour of feature stuffing and Mark hasn’t helped with the way he words his posts about new features in the past makes it seem like they distrust users opinions.

My personal concern is the lack of commercial involvement of Ubuntu’s users, basically it goes like this: Canonical is a business and is interested in making enough money to pay it’s developers a wage. What they work on is based around what makes money. The money comes from Dell and HP. The developers work on what Dell and HP want. Users never get a direct say in the development of Ubuntu because A) They have no commercial relationship with Canonical and B) Canonical doesn’t co-operate wonderfully on DX with other programmers (commercial or non) preferring instead to announce features at the last minute and rail-road decisions and opinions of others.

OK I’m not on a rant against Canonical, both of these might actually be solved/able:

B) We’ve seen a turn around in Caonical’s DX team shenanigans, announcing Unity at UDS was a very good thing and shows leadership instead of authority. Hopefully the flavour of the team has shifted from assuming all users are idiots and need to be told what’s good for them, to something a little more progressive.
A) If the continued redesign of the Software Center can include the ability to pay for FOSS, then we can introduce the commercial relationship with Canonical _and_ App developers and provide a way for non-technical people to have an economic relationship and thus a say in the future development direction.

All signs point to common sense and progress, mistakes were made but I don’t see more on the horizon. So lets make sure Ubuntu isn’t considered “too commercial” let’s consider FOSS “not commercial enough”, because only through demanding the right commercial terms in our transactions can we make sure that developers get to eat and users get rights to the software they use and we’re not forced to accept traditional locked down software because we’re too eager to get free beer and not responsible enough to pay for Free Speech.

Your thoughts?

The FOSSed conference was certainly very interesting and although the heat was almost unbearable, the sleeping and presentation rooms un-air-conditioned at least the event fed us well (a little too well as I note by budda belly this morning) and we got to talk with some very interesting people with a different take on Ubuntu and FOSS.

First of all there are plenty of people using Ubuntu, both strait up and as a basis for educational distributions. But almost everyone at this conference was using an Apple Mac, it’s something a lot of schools have invested in. I maintain that the bastards are going to be Apple in this and upper-middle class residential markets.

One sys-admin was explaining to me how their school is ditching Ubuntu in favour of Apple Macs because he (as a sysadmin) is not paid enough to do his job properly and just doesn’t want any more work to deal with. Of course far be it from me to suggest that doing a job at all is worth doing right, but I can’t imagine how a fleet of rented Apple Macs could be easier to manage even on a larger scale. I chalk this one up to professional folly and lack of imagination.

There were plenty of positive thinkers too, lots of people really wanted to learn some of the available programs in depth so they could go off and teach other people. this is great and it’s certainly something we should be doing more of. I know Inkscape has really good how-tos and guides available to download in manual format.

In the end though we got to talk a lot about all the challenges, politics, dumb decisions and rotten thinking that goes on in education. There was certainly a lot to complain about, most of the time it didn’t seem like it was malicious, just that old problem of pushing incompetent people further up stack into management instead of firing them. Of course I also remember being told: “No one likes being their own boss, because suddenly it’s hard to tell yourself just what a dumb boss you really are to yourself”

Your thoughts?

I’m off to Maine to attend FOSSED, I hope to see some of you there if you can make it and if not maybe next time. I’m hoping I can be the voice of Ubuntu and Free Culture and I’m excited to see what opportunities are available here.

This is the current evolution of the FOSS icons I’ve been using for posters and flyers, as you can see I’ve been focusing on a number of concepts to iconify the powerful rights given to users with Free and Open Source software. The ones with the blue glow are by current choices.

Any thoughts on these icons yourself?

Have you ever wondered if the people who claim to want to use “open source” don’t really understand what it is?

I get this feeling a lot, mostly from the media, government politicians and organisational administrators. Very few people understand Free and Open Source Software enough to be able to understand the difference between that and proprietary software. So is it any wonder so few people are able to grasp the importance of it in their organisation?

At times I feel it’s as if they’ve heard about some mystic buzz word that can solve technical problems they never knew existed and all they have to do is observe some religious behaviours and the wonderful results of doing science properly (i.e. publishing results and peer review) will magically be yours without any requirement to understand what it is your actually doing.

I’m also cynically wondering if this same process of belief is how a lot of well to do people understand economics. Perform XYZ and get godly justified rewards! Magic until it all falls to bits as a giant pyramid scheme.

Perhaps I’m just frustrated at the lack of understanding, the promiscuity of misinformation and bad explanations that seem to grind the clear message down into an indecipherable mess.

Your thoughts?

People who read my blog regularly know I’m big on looking into discovering what it is that will allow software creators, bug fixers and all the other people involved in producing functional products with a sustainable income.

Only two weeks ago I was talking with Matt Lee of the Free Software Foundation about this problem and apparently someone he knows had sold himself online for 6 months as a free software hacker by setting levels of pledges and some rewards and products for people who invest in the project and although the FSF doesn’t consider economics important enough to be a goal (much to my disappointment) the activists there are aware of it.

Now computer world uk is reporting on the exact same system, one where the artist, programmer or team sets out to raise money for a project and does so by setting a structured list to encourage higher amounts of money to be pledged.

Just like me they’ve avoided using words such as “charity” and “donation”, which I think are really not applicable to what we’re trying to do: viz. find a way to make Free as in speech economically sustainable.

What do you think about a stepped pledge model? Do you think that the model requires far too many direct supporters and existing backers before it can be made to work? Should I conduct myself in a similar fashion by creating a set of pledges for the ground control project and advertising it very widely?

We’ve been at Anime Boston today (reports will come in the following days) but it’s being held across the road from the Boston Apple Store. There was a queue outside of the Apple store for their new product… the iPad.

After the show I figured I’d go in and try it out. Obviously I’m biased and would never actually buy one. But it’s worth keeping tabs on what kind of gilded cages the fruit company is selling this time.

I’m not fond of Apple, their products are mediocre, their use of FOSS is one sided, their lock in is extreme and in my opinion should be made illegal and their censoring of the critical reporting of news about their products of company. It’s a bastion of arrogance and the kind of Machiavellian “we know what’s best for you” attitude that I utterly despise.

So it was quite hard keeping an honest judgement of their new product. It’s nice I guess, the hardware is certainly nice enough, very thin very light. Their software reminded me of Ubuntu (or is it Ubuntu that reminds me of Apple products these days), but has glaring flaws which go beyond simply not being FOSS.

The zoom makes everything pixelated, not even the icons are vector based so they look awful. This I guess is to get iphone sized apps to work at all on the bigger screen, but seriously it’s time to move to SVG for your icons and to re-render text to suite the size. Or at least at a little bit of anti-aliasing to your scale up.

The apps were limited, even the demos with a ton of stuff installed. It all seemed very mediocre. There was stuff for reading, stuff for watching, stuff for listening. Nothing for making of course, the new generation should be contented with simply consuming “what is best for them to see”TM and not bother with making things. Ironic considering that Apple’s main line of computer is misconceived as an artists/designers platform by many ignorant people.

Apparently the CPU in these Pad devices is proprietary, not an intel, not an Arm, some custom Apple thing. So it’s unlikely to ever run any Linux variant. Which is a deep backtrack for freedom of hardware platforms.

So how does this change what we do in Ubuntu? Well I don’t think it changes what we do very much. We may need to have some new UI considerations if we want Ubuntu pre-installed on tablets of competing manufacturers. But that’s Canonical’s job and the community isn’t really involved in that process since there are very few solid products the community can get hold of to try and experiment with new ideas and advice for new users.

I’m sure we’ll have something to offer eventually though, but I think the FOSS community is going to be playing catchup so long as the IBM-a-like hardware manufacturers are behind the curve in delivering workable alternatives to the iPad that are popular with FOSS users.

What are your thoughts?

Greetings everyone interested in FOSS economics, ok so this week NickFox has written another great blog entry with some arguments against and for my last blog entry about making money with FOSS.

And now for my reply, as requested, to continue this interesting debate (your interest may vary), so lets get stuck in:

This is indeed true. The community itself and it’s development of software has no use for software it cannot touch. However, that said, closed source software does have its uses.

I wouldn’t deny that proprietary software has it’s uses, to the individual. It’s easy to see how it’s useful for the immediate task. What it doesn’t have though is a future. The cost to the community of maintaining compatibility, of supporting these closed offerings is not zero. Very often the companies who put these things out do not bare those costs and instead it’s the community serving the community that pays the integration price.

My point is that we must be careful, account for all costs.

I also think there will require a bridge between the two business models, a stop gap if you will. That stop gap is in-fact the FOSS community semi-adopting and supporting closed source applications.

Mr Fox may be right that supporting some commercial apps will make us more attractive in the immediate short term, but in the long haul it will discourage users from investing in and developers from making compatible or comparative software.

For instance, if flash for linux was not available, the community would have already have developed gnash to a much more advanced state. We’d have a much better flash experience than most other platforms and it’s likely that the gnash project would be a more serious competitor on mobile and alternative platforms. We might also have seen faster progress and pressure on the svg standard.

Now I’d never stop any one person from taking advantage of these proprietary offerings to improve their own experiences. But I would encourage them to also think of them as stop gap measures and proceed with investing time and money into the free software alternatives. This is more of the “Use but Pay for Future Freedom” model, rather than the OSS’s “Doesn’t matter so long as it works” and the FSF’s “It must be Free Software or you can’t use it”.

As users, if we don’t value freedom then we loose it. But conversely if we don’t value functionality, then we loose people. A balance is needed, the communication of the importance of Free Software ideals with some of the practicalism of OSS, a balanced approach that sees the short term satisfied without the long term forgotten to complacence.

there is no real competition in the market for Microsoft.

Microsoft are a monopoly, this is not a problem for the community alone to solve, but it is also a problem for competition commissions and legal systems around the world to not let Microsoft get away with it’s licensing arrangements with OEMs. Fairness won’t come about until either we in the FreeDesktop world have something 50x better or monopoly regulators start doing their jobs.

what reason does a development company have to try to change to the open source business model when they are targeting the largest audience possible?

FOSS is not just about making things available on a FreeDesktop like Ubuntu. It’s about choosing to respect your users, even if it means that some of those users will port it to Ubuntu for you. If they are FOSS, then they don’t need to really concern themselves with any of the small players, and can focus on windows all they like. FreeDesktops will take advantage of what they need to.

Proprietary software on Ubuntu will still require investment, but this time it’s static and not very future proof. It’s functional now perhaps, but it’s not secure, it’s not efficient and it’s not very stable. It’s easy to see how skype could drop it’s “Linux” support like a lead balloon and leave us powerless to stop them.

Finally, the point is while the closed source business, due to lack of competition among other things will not make the change to open source, I believe if the FOSS community were to build the bridge, they would use it.

As well as convincing users of the usefulness of using FreeDesktops, we must at the same time be able to convince them of the necessity of demanding FOSS licenses from their software providers. Just like users are already demanding organic and other valuable, non mass produced ideals. The time is right for Linux and the time is right to communicate to users, the general public, that what they buy matters.

Businesses will follow, so long as we have a way for users to buy something from a FOSS marketplace.

I also would like to respond to Simon who commented on my last entry:

Your model assumes that users know what they want and while that may sometimes be true, most of the time it is not. There is a big difference between what users THINK they want, and what they ACTUALLY want. You can see that in many forms in FOSS, for example, there are users wanting option A to be added to program Z, when what they actually want is a better application behavior (and that option A is not really necessary).

That’s very true, users have to not only be able to ask for what they think they want, but they have to trust producers that communicate why they think that’s a bad idea. There needs to be a trusting relationship and to some degree users will have to be convinced to invest in pure R&D. Purely idealistic because users aren’t that future proof when it comes to spending money.

Perhaps some kind of governmental or organisational research fund? or some website which developers and project managers can get together to get users interested in further development? I’m confident these problems can be solved if people really push in that direction.

All of this is my opinion, I would appreciate everyone’s thoughts on this subject below in comments or on your own blogs.

I had the very good pleasure today of meeting with Joe Golden of the old Green Mountain Linux company up in Vermont. He expressed to me a strong desire to help people get in touch with Free and Open Source ideals and importantly get people to recognise the community efforts that go into making all this great software.

So I had a bit of a think, some of my in-laws up there took me to the local farmers market. It’s a great market if you’ve never been to Burlington town center, lots of fresh produce, cider, wine, bread, excellent stuff.

Well they’re involved with the Diggers Mirth farming cooperative where they all get involved and all get to share the rewards for their hard work. The food is even sold in the local supermarket.

So since people obviously value food cooperatives, why not explain the software that we write in those terms?

To experiment a bit and see what kind of results this could turn up, I’ve drafted a simple, alpha quality leaflet which could be used at markets such as these as well as other places such as libraries or whole food type supermarkets:

Update: I’ve updated it to version 2.1, to fix a whole bunch of issues reported in my comments section.

Update: Download svg on deviantArt, click image for link through. also licence terms are specified.

Yesterday there was a an interesting discussion kicked off by Nick Fox about the economics of Free and Open Source Software. Numerous other people joined in adding their thoughts as either comments on our posts or as their own posts.

Nick responded to my criticism of him article and invited me to respond. And I do owe it to him for kicking off this journey into discussion and it’s certainly not a topic that is touched on nearly enough for a maturing creative community.

So lets get into Nick’s new post:

Producing open source software can be quite lucrative. Some great examples of corporations making money from open source software are, Oracle, Sun, Canonical, and so on. There are so many I am sre I wouldn’t be able to research and name them all.

If you look into each of those companies, I know of only Canonical that leans heavily of the money it makes off of pure development. It does this not from common users, but from OEMs such as HP and Dell, who are constantly asking Canonical to develop custom interfaces and various other things for their releases. All the other companies aren’t making money off of the development work, but off of the result of that work through services.

It’s a slight distinction, but it’s what separates the idea of earning money from performing an action on a customer’s behalf, to developing something which you give away, and for you to offer them further products on top which they buy. In each case your thinking about which work was paid for and which work was not. In the services model, the programming wasn’t paid for directly.

I was making the point that while FOSS is commercial through support services and other means, the software itself is generally rejected by the community unless it is Free (and I mean Free as in Freedom) itself.

And there are very good reasons for that. Proprietary software isn’t useful to the community, it’s useful to individuals. You can’t collaborate on proprietary software, there is no crowd sourcing closed source. Freedom is more than just a throw away ideal, discarded at the first sign of convenience, it’s a culture, an ideal and a social good. The commons works by making things common, accessible to all. Deliberately slicing parts off into enclosures break the nature of it.

What I’m trying to say is that people in the community are not rejecting proprietary software just to be spiteful or grumpy. They do it because to accept it would be a step backwards for the community.

It however does not afford a person or business the right to infringe/reproduce or otherwise make money directly from another person or business’ goods or services without their direct consent.

The law of properties isn’t quite as clear cut, you have to transcend for a few moments the normality in our culture that suggests that attribution is the same thing as control of copies. You can reproduce works that are in the public domain, there is not infringement. The only time infringement even crops up is when you introduce a government regulation, a wholly unnatural legal property system which seeks to make monopolies and controls content from afar.

It was originally created as a balance, a technical fix to a market problem. That problem is that creative works are not profitable to make because anyone naturally has the right copy them. The only fix was to go against nature and prevent or make illegal the copying of those works.

Making a copy of a Monet Painting and reselling it as your own painting is forgery, the creativity behind creating applications is nearly the same.

Making a copy of a Monet painting is very legal. His published works are now in the public domain, you can take a photo of his painting or repaint the work from the eye. What you can’t do is claim that you were the original creator, or claim that Monet himself painted the result. That’s a VERY different set of laws from copyright and has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.

Now the physical copies of the paintings obviously have owners, but they only own the paint and canvas, not the image that they make up. Of course I think paintings might have some legal grey area about weather they’ve been published or not. But it’s still important to distinguish between copyright, trademark, authentic authoring, attribution and even patents. They’re all very different mechanics that shouldn’t be confused.

In a perfect world, this would be great. everyone would get compensated for their creative productions and contributions to the whole.

Part of these kinds of discussions is attempting to figure out exactly how you can make that perfect world. What’s the point otherwise.

However, being this is a less than perfect world, and less scrupulous people are out there trying to make money from other people’s hard work,

Making money from other people’s hard work is something that we do all the time, it’s not wrong, mostly because we end up adding something of value from ourselves. Either ease of access, verification, extra add ons. Very few economic activities are done without other people’s work being involved.

You can’t make money off of someone else working, that is wrong, I think it’s called slavery. You can’t force a programmer to build you something, but you can pay her to build you something. The fact that there are 100 people waiting in the wings to make money from that thing is irrelevant for the buyer and the programmer, or at least it should be if the buyer understands what he’s doing.

In the end, the sad fact is, businesses need that level of comfort that closed source brings to attract them to the venue. Businesses need to make money and continue to do so over the long term. Most traditional businesses do not feel that is possible by sharing their code with the entire world.

The problem with this sad fact is that businesses are only after the comfort in an unsustainable monopoly from which they could extract rents in a very unrefined way. If they don’t want to engage in breaking the free market, then they have to start making money from the work that they do, instead of the work that they have already done.

Most traditional businesses, I have to admit, don’t understand FOSS. We in the community can’t explain these ideas to these businesses if we can’t even understand it ourselves. That’s why it’s important to have these kinds of discussions in the community.

FOSS isn’t some hippy trippy excuse for programmers to have a 70s revival. It’s a real, effective economic and social method of creative production that just needs to develop further in society’s understanding and expectations.