Hey planet, reporting in after a very froody evening with the local Ubuntu fans celebrating the release of the Ubuntu 9.10 release.
Big thanks to everyone and especially James Grey who organised this time round. We didn’t have a cake as we usually do, but we did have plenty of food and plenty of drink. No informational events, but plenty of social meanderings, talking about all sorts of things.
And here is my ugly mug to show you what you’ve won:
I must report that it seems TNT did deliver them, but the address was missing an apartment number, so fortunately TNT here in Boston are really cool dudes, they called me and asked to make sure I’d be in and told me what time to expect the guy. He turned up on time and everything, he even knew what apt number from previous visits. Awe.
Because it’s 2 days before the Ubuntu Massachusetts Party, yay!
Yesterday Elizabeth Krumbach (pleia2) gave an Ubuntu Open Week presentation describing the Ubuntu Community Learning Project. This is the project that aims to create the materials that teachers can use to teach Ubuntu and other Free Software tools to everyone.
Firstly I would like to thank Elizabeth for gathering together all the details about the project into an Open Week session, making sure that we stay connected to more parts of the Ubuntu community and hopefully attract more people that want to teach, organise, write and/or illustrate.
Do go read the log here: Learning OW Session
Now that you’ve read the Open Week presentation and have a want, nae a thirst to provide the community with high quality learning materials. What do you do?
Go over to the wiki page and take a good look at the five sections, they’re huge big buttons, can’t miss them. Now inside each on of these lies a page where all the sections are organised.
One of the jobs for those with only a few spare minuets in the day is to go through those pages, cleaning up, organising and pruning. It’s a job of research too, since any useful sources of information should be linked into that page for class writers.
Once you’ve had a look at those sections, if you see one that your just dying to write as a class, then you should check out the bazaar branch and get writing. Open up a terminal (for now) and change into your projects directory and run:
bzr branch lp:ubuntu-learning-materials
This will get you a copy of the current source files, and you can have a look around to see how things are shaping up. Now you’ll need to pay attention to each of the directories, the maintain, teach, using, develop and community directories are where classes related to the five sections go.
You change directory into one of those, say develop and then have a look at existing classes (if any), be sure that what ever your going to write, that someone isn’t already working on it by noting your name on the wiki page next to the subject your going to be writing about.
cd develop
mkdir python-basics
cd python-basics
Create a directory for your class, say if I wanted to teach python-basics, I’d make that my directory name. Now copy in everything from the commandline-basics class, which I’ve left as a sort of template until our helper scripts are written:
cp -R ../../maintain/commandline-basics/* .
Now all these files make up the source of the class they will be compiled into various published formats such as a website, pdf documents and moodle classes. So things are split out. First things first, edit the authors file and put your name there instead of mine.
Next you’ll want to edit the lesson-plan.txt, this text file that looks like a wiki document and is your starting point. It’s where you go to plan out your class, how it will flow from introduction to topics which neatly come together to explain, demonstrate and then have students perform. Each section should be given thought over it’s order, it’s basically a list that looks like a wiki formatted list.
Each of your sections in that list will be hopefully taught in a single sitting, so don’t put too much in there and try to keep things logical. So for instance for our python-basics I might put:
Python Basics Lesson Plan
===================
Martin Owens
:Author Initials: MOClass Sections
————–.List of Sections
* What is Python
* Opening up a Python Shell
* Basic Statements
* Conditional Blocks
* Looping Blocks
* Including Modules
* …
Once you’ve brought order to the chaos by naming your sections, you’ll have to write each one. But we will come back to that part at some other time. Now you have some changes, you should commit them. This part requires you to have a launchpad account and to have your ssh keys set up with launchpad. If you don’t, we’ll be giving classes on it in #ubuntu-learning or you could read this guide.
Assuming you have those set up, you can do the following to change directory into the parent directory of the checked out data and add, commit and push your branch:
cd ../../
bzr add develop/python-basics
bzr commit
bzr push lp:~[lpusername]/ubuntu-learning-materials/python-basics-class
Now you’ve pushed your changes, you should come and tell us in the mailing list and the IRC channel. We can show you where to move on from here and you can talk to other contributors to learn from each other and how we are putting these courses together.
If you’ve got this far, then your probably chatting in the IRc channel aready, it’s where we do most of our chatting so please do joinif you have any questions, problems or ideas.
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 saw the release of a website I’ve been working on for a friend, it’s something that you get asked to do from time to time, and the chance to earn a little bit of money on none Ubuntu/Free Software projects.
It’s something that has to be done until the community of Free Software users (including the Ubuntu community) really believes in a paid developer driven model. The full time Ubuntu community junkies will have to do projects like this or face the problem of jugeling a full time job working on propritary software and trying to fit free software advocacy on top of that.
Which is the lesser of two evils? I’d prefer of course to be working on Free Software and earning money from it, but that is ultimatly in the hands of users and if they can be convinced of the neccessity of opening their wallets for developers and project organizers to get much needed work done.
So, back on topic, in this project I did both the design and production, I like some of the creepy vibes I managed to get in. Cudos to Inkscape, Gimp, Vi, Firefox and Gnome for all the tools I used creating it. If any of you are into the whole Irish Celtic mythology or horror stories, I’m sure my friend’s writings and poems will interest you too:
This weekend has been very fun, we’ve come up to Vermont to spend some time with the family. Part of the events scheduled for the weekend was a cycle ride round Burlington Vermont, in the dark, wearing crow costumes, croaking and cawing at all the bemused passers by.
Unfortunately there were no photos of the actual ride. *damn*
So instead I’m posting a couple of pictures of me in a witches hat, playing with the twins (both two) helping them draw chalk animals and reading:
Happy Wikken everybody!
I’ve got Ubuntu 9.10 installed on my only computer laptop from System76.
There have been problems, I have taken a day to get everything back to some kind of order. I still have some problems, but working through them.
This isn’t a review, I’ll do that after a month or so.
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.
