When my friends Karen and Annina were confronted with an offensive sticker on the laptop of someone working at our lab, they organized a very constructive and effective intervention.
I was so impressed that I made a short illustrated write-up of the story on my wiki.
I took a little time today to make a new release of the Free Software Project Management HOWTO. Nearly eight years after I wrote it, much of the document is out of date or has been replaced with better, more comprehensive write-ups. In particular, I think Karl Fogel's book, Producing Open Source Software says everything insightful I say in the HOWTO, a whole lot clearly -- plus adds a lot I missed.
That said, my HOWTO is short and is apparently still useful to folks. I updated it to include links to a new German translation courtesy to Robert F. Schmitt, to fix a bunch of links that time broke, and to address a few obvious mistakes that readers have pointed out.
Thinking about the documents' future, I'm happy to release it under Creative Commons BY-SA in addition to GFDL and would love to help out on a wiki book project to merge a few of related efforts into a comprehensive wiki reference work.
After a late-night IRC conversation about egg corns, shaggy dog stories and feghoots the idea for a short story came to me in the bathtub this morning.
I give you, The Story of Josephville. Apologies in advance.
I watched Citizen Kane several weeks ago and was shocked to learn that the major villian in the film is a political boss named Jim Gettys. Of course, a real Jim Gettys is a well known X Window System contributor who is currently working at an OLPC manager.
Last night someone reminded me that OLPC's new President and COO -- who I'd always just thought of as Chuck -- is named Charles Kane!
Here's a short clip from a video of the fictional Charles Kane giving a rather long speech decrying the fictional Jim Gettys! (Also in Ogg.)
I haven't been this amused since I learned that the head villian in the cartoon Jem was named Eric Raymond!
Nothing is more embarrassing than a website announcing that something will happen on a particular date -- e.g., a product will be released, a feature will be turned on -- after the date has come and gone! Even worse, putting things off repeatedly can be a lot of work!
To help such people, I just did a very quick 10 minute hack I'm calling The Vaporizer. It looks like just a date on a webpage. However, if the date originally listed has come and gone, a little bit of Javascript will change the site so that it shows tomorrow's date instead. Vaporware providers of all types can use it to safely (and effortlessly) put things off without worrying about looking overdue!
I have seen the future, and the future is tomorrow.
One thing that has always annoyed me about most wiki is the way they handle images. MediaWiki, like most wikis, allows users to upload images and embed pictures. However, if you want to change an image, you need to download the file, open it up in GIMP, Inkscape, or Photoshop, edit it, save it, and re-upload it. Somewhere in this long process, the ease of editing that makes wikis so wonderful gets lost. Basically, I'm annoyed because images in wikis aren't very "wiki."
I had a talk with Brianna Laugher at Wikimania about ways to make it easier to folks to edit pictures from within the browser -- even if it is only simple stuff. Yesterday I took the afternoon to write a new MediaWiki extension which gives a working example of in-browser image editing. It provides the ability to crop images using David Spurr's wonderful Javascript cropping user interface and uses ImageMagick to do the actual image manipulation.
It is in the form of an extension to Mediawiki I've called EditImage. It's an afternoon hack from an under-qualified PHP hacker so it's nothing special. You can read it about on its page in the Mediawiki wiki and you can try it out on my personal wiki where I have it installed.
I'm certainly not the first person to think about doing this. In fact, some old pages in the MediaWiki wiki imply that I'm not even the first person to play around with the idea of using Spurr's code to do image cropping for MediaWiki. Hopefully though, my code can act as a nice first step and a framework for folks wanting to add additional image manipulation features. For example, I think it would be quick to add the ability to do in-browser brightness and contrast manipulation and I would love to see this in a future version of the extension.
When I gave a Revealing Errors talk at Lug Radio Live USA, I had the misfortune of being up against Robert Love's talk on Android which many people at the conference wanted to see -- myself included! One person who showed up to my talk anyway was Allison Randall. She was apparently entertained enough to invite me to give a short version of the talk as one of the keynote presentations at OSCON 2008!
In the talk, I covered the ideas behind my Revealing Errors project and quickly walked through a few examples that showcase what I'm trying to do. I'm happy with the result: a couple thousand people showed up for the talk despite the fact that it was at 8:45 AM after the biggest "party night" of the conference!
For those that missed it for whatever reason, you can watch a video recording that O'Reilly made and that I've embedded below.
A larger version of the Flash video as well as a QuickTime version is over on blip.tv and I've created an OGG Theora version for all my freedom loving readers.
I'm in Portland, Oregon for the week where I'll be at OSCON. I'll be giving two talks on the final day of the conference (July 25): the first will be a 15 minute keynote on Revealing Errors at 8:45 in the Portland Ballroom; the second is a full-length normal talk on Selectricity at 11:35AM in Portland 255. It will be my first long-form talk about Selectricity and I'm looking forward to it.
Because myself, a few Free Software Foundation staff members including Campaign Manager Joshua Gay, and quite a few FSF associate members will be in town, we're going to hold a small FSF Associate Members event in Portland (the first outside Boston!). It's going to be in the form of a pizza party with a few small talks from FSF folk including myself. Here are the details:
FSF Associate Members (& friends!) EventJuly 22nd 6:30-9:00PMOld Town Pizza226 NW Davis StPortland, OR 97209
It's free and open to all but is designed to provide a forum for members and friends. If you are an FSF member, please consider coming. If you're not a member yet, please don't let it keep you away; staff will be able to sign up new members there. RSVPs to Deborah Nicholson aren't necessary to attend but would be welcome.
I'll be heading to Seattle right after the conference for a few days. If you would like to meet up in Seattle or Portland this week, please don't hesitate to get in contact.
Once again, Wikimania was wonderful. I gave my scheduled talk on Autonomo.us and network freedom and network services. I also filled in for a few speakers to give a "Zotero for Wikipedians" demo and to say a few words about the BY-SA/FDL work as part of a Creative Commons panel.
Perhaps the most memorable part of the conference was the writing and performance of I Will Revise. A couple days before the conference, a small group of Wikipedians -- The Difftones -- wrote the song at a karaoke bar in Alexandria. We had a wonderful time leading a room full of lightning talk attendees in song and a final rendition by a massive, fully-packed, stage at the party on the final night!
It's online on meta.wikimedia.org. You should feel free to revise it, add verses, and improve it!
At the hotel I'm staying at in Alexandria for Wikimania, there is wifi from a closed network that requires login and that has no user-accessible way to gain increased access.
However, they have defined a set of "exceptions" to their closed network policy. The exceptions are described on the page users are redirected to upon connecting. Essentially, the exceptions boil down to any website that ends in google.com.
You can use Google search (but not click on the links), use GMail, Google Talk, Google Reader (but not see any images on the blogs you are reading), Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Checkout, Google Docs, and so on.
A few people at the conference seem only barely inconvenienced by the arrangement and most seem to be able to get work done! I can't help feel like I'm experiencing some dystopian version of the Internet from 10 years in the future.
Recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking -- and a bit of talking -- about what software freedom means in the context of network services. I gave a talk on this subject at the most recent FSF members meeting and at Sun's Community One. In a few days, I'll be giving another at Wikimania in Alexandria, Egypt.
A few months ago, I worked with the FSF to organize a meeting of free software hackers and scholars to talk about the issues. Today, that group is announcing the first two concrete results of that project.
The first is a blog and a wiki called autonomo.us. The project aims to provide a space to continue, expand, and open up the work that was done at the FSF in March. Our aim is to explore the implications and responses to network services in relation to software. We're going to do that by continuing to take notes in the wiki and by publishing articles, essays, and documents that help inform the discussion about software freedom and network policies. We will be working independently from, but closely with, the Free Software Foundation, and with others in the free and open source software communities. Our goal is not to set policy, but to explore the space and inform the discussion about autonomy and user freedom in cloud computing and software as a service.
The second announcement is the first concrete product of autonomo.us's work: a statement we're calling the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. It lays out our initial consensus on positive steps that developers, service providers, and users can take.
If you want to follow our work, please subscribe to the autonomo.us blog and check out some of our work so far. If you've got thoughts and things to contribute, you can mail or get to work in our wiki. You can read our about page for more information about us and our goals.
In a coordinated move, the Open Knowledge Foundation (which I help advise) is launching the 1.0 version of their Open Software Service Definition.
There is a whole lot we need to learn, think through, and do before we have reasonable answers to the problems to freedom posed by network services. Today marks the beginning of several wonderful steps toward some of these answers.
My friend Aaron is moving back to Boston and in the process getting stuff for his apartment from Ikea. A lot of Ikea stuff is secured with hard plastic strapping. Luckily, Ikea also sells scissors to help you cut your way through it! The scissors are secured with hard plastic strapping.
I've always been bothered by those "Property Of Blank University" t-shirts that used to actually be the loaned (or stolen) property of college athletic departments but have now become popular enough that you can find them, for sale, in nearly any university store or gift shop in the US. Few people would assume that somebody with a "Property of" shirt had stolen their clothing. In fact, it's often impossible to find the shirts except on sale anymore -- and rarely from universities themselves.
Here's my response.
For those that don't know (and that's certainly many), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is the nineteenth century French anarchist and mutualist most famous for saying, "La propriété, c'est le vol!" In English: "Property is theft!"
You can buy my t-shifts (red on black, where possible), in my Printfection store. Source SVG is here. Please share variations in a comment.
Another year has past and another edition of the Official Ubuntu Book has been finished and will be released soon. Over the last two years, the two previous editions of the book have grown along-side Ubuntu. The book has continued to sell very well, received almost universally favorable reviews, and been translated into more than half a dozen languages
While Jono Bacon has mostly been pulled into other projects, Corey Burger stepped up to help play the major supporting role in this version of the book's production. The whole text was updated to reflect changes in Ubuntu over the last year including a major rewrite of the chapter on Kubuntu and important work on the Edubuntu chapter. If you use either, you'll understand that there's plenty of churn to report.
In a sort of experiment, Barnes and Noble will also be selling a custom edition with an extra chapter by Matthew Helmke on the Ubuntu Forums which I hope to include in the next edition of the book. It's an excellent introduction to the best support resource Ubuntu has to offer that I hope many beginners -- the group that always been the book's audience -- will find useful.
You can pre-order the custom edition from B&N or get the book from Amazon or many other sources.
Like all previous editions, the book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license and soft-copies should be up on the publisher's website once the book is released. Please support commercial free culture publishing by buying a copy if you find the book useful.
As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I'm giving a talk about my Revealing Errors project tonight at the Boston Linux Unix meeting. It will be at MIT in E51-351. More information is on the BLU website.
Revealings Errors is a very different kind of project from what I've done. Please show up if you can. I'd love support, feedback, suggestions, and the like.
My mobile phone has a 206 area code (Seattle). People sometimes ask me why I don't have a 617 number (Boston/Cambridge). In fact, I had a Massachusetts number in college but switched to a 206 several years ago on a trip back home in order to get a "permanent" Seattle number.
With a move to mobiles phones, the idiosyncratic fact that US mobiles remain tied to geographic area codes, and the effective elimination of domestic roaming and long-distance, an area code in the United States is increasingly not about where you are but about where you are from. Or, perhaps more accurately, about where you want people to think you are from.
Over the past couple months, I gave a couple talks on Revealing Errors -- my project to try and use errors to teach non-technical people about technology, the effects it has on our lives, and the ways in which we (as users) might want to control it.
The first version was at LUG Radio Live USA and went off reasonably well. A couple weeks later, I gave a version of the talk again at PenguiCon which went great. Unfortunately, neither recording seems to have worked out.
I'll be giving talks on the subject at least twice more this summer. The first will be on June 18th at Boston Linux Unix at 19:00 at MIT in E51-315. It will be my first talk to BLU in something like three years. I'm also currently scheduled to give an abbreviated version of the talk as a keynote at OSCON under the title Advocating Software Freedom by Revealing Errors.
In addition to all that, I'm having a whole lot of fun updating the Revealing Errors blog (although not as often as I'd like) and am currently in discussions about publishing a longer version of the Revealing Errors article as a book chapter at some point in the next year.
Thanks to everybody who has been supportive of the project and read the blog, has told their friends, and who has told me about telling technological errors they've seen around. Please keep it up!
In the last week, Nicholas Negroponte gave this unfortunate interview decrying "open source fundamentalism" and hinting the possibility of a warmer relationship with Microsoft. Predictably, this has elicited an ongoing response by OLPC News and on the OLPC development mailing lists.
Just a few days before Negroponte's statements hit the press, I gave a talk at Penguicon called Laptop Liberation where I talked about why I thought that OLPC's use of a free software operating system and embrace of free software principles was essential for the initiative's success and its own goals of education reform and empowerment. I've been saying similar things for some time.
My main point boiled down to something that, appropriately enough, Nicholas Negroponte was fond of saying back when the project was still called the $100 laptop: an extremely cheap laptop is not a matter of if, but of when and how. This technology will define the terms on which students communicate, collaborate, create, and learn. These terms are dictated by those with the ability to change the software -- by those with access to computers, the source necessary to make changes, and the freedom to share and collaborate.
Constructionism -- OLPC's educational philosophy -- is about putting powerful tools and control over those tools into the hands of learners. It is about learning through exploration and creation -- about shaping one's own educational environment. Constructionist principles bear no small similarity to free software principles. Indeed, OLPC's stated commitment to free software did not happen by accident. OLPC convincingly argued that a free system was essential for creating a learning environment that could be used, tweaked, reinvented, and reapplied by its young users. Through these processes, the XO becomes a force for learning about computation and an environment through which children and their communities can use technology on their terms and in ways that are appropriate and self-directed.
We know that laptop recipients will benefit from being able to fix, improve, and translate the software on their laptops into their own languages and contexts. Much more importantly, however, are all of the uses for the laptops that OLPC has not -- and can not -- think up. OLPC is a powerful tool for learning, but ultimate power is only in the hands of those that can freely use, change, and collaborate in defining the terms of their learning environments. In its commitment to software freedom, OLPC chose not to be arrogant by assuming that it knows how its users will use their laptops. Flexible environments designed for constructionist learning and a free software platform protect against this arrogance.
Constructionism and free software, implemented and taught in a classroom, offer a profound potential for exploration, creation, and learning. If you don't like something, change it. If something doesn't work right, fix it. Free software and constructionism put learners in charge of their educational environment in the most explicit and important way possible. They create a culture of empowerment. Creation, collaboration, and critical engagement becomes the norm.
OLPC does not get to choose if educational technology happens. If we work hard at it though we might get to influence the "how" and the "who." Proprietary software vendors like Microsoft want the "who" to be them. With free software, users can be in power. What's at stake is nothing less than autonomy. We can help foster a world where technology is under the control of its users, and where learning is under the terms of its students -- a world where every laptop owner has freedom through control over the technology they use to communicate, collaborate, create, and learn.
This, to me, is the promise of OLPC and its mission. It is the reason I've been involved and in support of the project since nearly day one. It is the reason I left Canonical and Ubuntu to come back to school at MIT to be closer to the then nascent unincorporated project. It is the reason that OLPC's embrace of constructionist philosophy is so deeply important to its mission and the reason that its mission needs to continue to be executed with free and open source software. It is why OLPC needs to be uncompromising about software freedom.
As an adviser and sometimes contractor to OLPC, OLPC does not need to listen to me. But I hope, for all our sake, that they do.
Update: Richard Stallman and the FSF have published another essay on the same topic focused more on pure free software (i.e., less education specific) objections.
In the last leg of what has been marathon traveling over the last two months, I'm going to be heading back to San Francisco to give two talks at CommunityOne.
CommunityOne is a new one-day conference that Sun is putting on -- along side it's massive JavaOne conference -- that focuses on free software, open source, and non-Sun projects.
I'm going to be there talking about free software and free culture. I will be giving updated versions of the two talks that I have at the FSF members meetings over first two years. In the first talk, I'll be making the case for a strong free culture movement and in the second I'll be talking about liberating network services.
If you will be at the conference, or just in the Bay area, and would like to meet up, I'll be in the area for most of a week and would love to arrange something. Just get in contact.
I've been on the road quite a bit lately. During my manic travel, I have been rather lax about blogging many of my recent talks.
After a talk at CHI in Florence on the 7th and a talk at LUG Radio Live USA last Sunday, I'm in Troy, Michigan for Penguicon. It's an incredible combination of a science fiction and a free software/open source conference and it's a huge amount of fun.
This morning I gave my Laptop Liberation talk and tonight I'll be helping judge the Open Source-ry Masquerade costume contest -- the very contest were Tron Guy premiered his now famous costume!
Tomorrow I'll be giving my Revealing Errors talk which I premiered last Sunday at the LUG Radio event and which I'm really excited about. If you're around and at the event please find me and introduce yourself! If you're in the area, I may have some free time tomorrow night. Don't hesitate to get in contact.
I wrote an essay several years ago called The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth: My Story of Unlearning. It's buried on my website but still manages to attract a consistent stream of readers.
It's essentially the story of how I became a geek, about school, ADD, and free software. It is by far the most personal thing I've ever published. That said, several people have told me that it's influenced them deeply -- changed their views, politics and attitudes in important ways.
In December, my friend Marcell asked me to give a version of the talk as part of his G33koskop series. I was hesitant to give such a personal talk but I did it anyway. I've finally got around to cleaning up the recording and have posted it online. You can download and listen to the talk here in Ogg Vorbis or here in MP3).
Yesterday I speculated that Lamers Bus Lines was the most disproportionately photographed, unintentionally insulting, bus line name on the Internet.
Apparently not. Several readers pointed out that, while a Flickr search for lamers bus returns 81 photographs, a search for fücker bus and fucker bus return a combined 84 photos not unlike these.
With Lamers, PUTA, Fücker, SCAT, and the SLUT, I'm beginning to wonder if something very fundamentally wrong with the way human society is choosing the names for its mass transit systems.
I suspect that Lamers Bus Lines, Inc. (golamers.com) may be the most disproportionately photographed bus line in America by young Internet-savvy photographers.
These photographs, and many more, are taken from Flickr:
When it comes to the most insulting bus company, however, the unfortunate typography that rendered the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority buses dangerously close to "puta" may give Lamers a run for their money in Spanish speaking communities.
Unhappy Birthday -- a website that tries to educate the public and encourage folks to snitch on their friends for singing the (copyrighted!) Happy Birthday song in public places -- is perhaps the most widely read thing I've ever written. It's been seen by millions and I continue to get hate mail several times a week.
Last Sunday, the nationally broadcast CBC show WireTap aired an pseudonymous in-character interview with me about the site where I pretended to be a copyright high-protectionist. I think it turned out pretty well.
You can listen to it on the unofficial WireTap podcast. My interview starts at a bit more than 10 minutes into the show.
My partner Mika is doing a research project on geek nutrition. In addition to being a geek herself, she's got degrees in human nutrition and public health. She works at Harvard School of Public Health. So she seems pretty qualified and I'm looking forward to the results.
She's trying to get a little bit of data on the food culture and eating habits of GNU/Linux's users and developers. If you can take a couple minutes to fill out a survey, it would be very helpful to her. The survey is anonymous and only takes results from the first 100 people. Analyzed anonymous results will posted publicly. Comments should be sent to 5colorsaday@gmail.com. The survey took me under 3 minutes to fill out.
The survey itself is online here.
Mika will present initial results and analysis on her blog and at Penguicon which both of us will be attending.
I'm in Amherst, Massachusetts from now until Friday visiting my alma mater. I'll be giving a redux of my "Laptop Liberation" talk today (March 12) at 12:15 in Adele Simmons Hall for anyone that is around and wants to come. The talk is about free software and OLPC.
I'll be around and speaking to several classes at Hampshire College this week. If you're around Amherst and want to meet up, don't hesitate to get in touch.
There are many blogs called No Comment. Most of them allow comments, but not all. Unavailable for Comment is in fact available for comments, although it seems that few have taken advantage of the fact.
Most blogs called Comment also allow comments although the blog Daily Comment (which is not daily) does not.
The blog Leaveacomment.com does not seem to have the domain leaveacomment.com but allows its visitors to leave comments.
It's very short notice but I'm giving a talk tonight (2008-03-03) at the Joan Jonas Performance Hall at the MIT Visual Arts Program. It's rather last minute.
I'll be talking along with Mark Tribe as part of a series called Zones of Emergency. I'll be speaking a bit about free and open source software and why it's particularly important in the context of emergencies. Think Sahana. There's more information about the talk online here.
Last week, the Free Software Foundation announced an important new initiative called End Software Patents whose goals are pretty evident from the project's name. So far, the initiative is backed by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center.
There are several organizations who are taking on specific bad patents but ESP is unique in that it is activitely working toward the abolition of software patents in the United States. While the organization is focused on work in the US, it's deeply important globally -- much of the world's patent law is "exported" from the US.
The FSF is stretching extremely limited resources in backing ESP to help it get off the ground because we believe two things:
Please read the new ESP report on the state of software patents written by the ESP Executive Director Ben Klemens to understand why we are optimistic. And please, support ESP financially in this fight. ESP's continued work is not ensured past the immediate future. Your support will help endow a bright future for the next generation of software developers and users.
I'm going to be traveling and giving talks quite a bit this spring. Here's what my schedule looks like now. I don't think much will be added to it:
I'll be giving at least one talk at the FSF Members Meeting, the Renaissance Panel, Lugradio Live, Penguicon, and Community One.
Matt's wedding is private. To join the FSF members meeting you must become an FSF Associate Member if you are not already. All of the other conferences require some sort of registration. Penguicon, Lugradio Live, and ROFLCon are each cheap and each promises to be a lot of fun. The talk at Hampshire should be free and open to the public.
I'll be posting more about each of these as things get closer including details about what is that I'll be talking about.
If you'd like me to talk to another group or at another event while I'm town for any of the events above, now would be a good time to ask. If you just want to meet up for a beverage of your choice, that's good too. In either case, get in contact.
Recently, the EFF reported that the European commission had responded to a request by European Parliament member Satu Hassi about tracking dots in printers. European Commissioner Franco Frattini replied that tracking dots may constitute a human rights violation saying that:
"..to the extent that individuals may be identified through material printed or copied using certain equipment, such processing may give rise to the violation of fundamental human rights, namely the right to privacy and private life. It also might violate the right to protection of personal data."
Intriguingly, the request text includes a mention to and link to the Seeing Yellow project I started last year as an example of the fact that consumers have complained to printer manufacturers and that these complaints have fallen upon deaf ears.
Everyone who called their printer manufacturer in response to Seeing Yellow deserves come credit for the raised visibility to the issue that we've created and the set of actions that have brought the issue this far. Please, keep it up! If you've not complained to your printer manufacturer, visit Seeing Yellow and call today.
Every since I found out that the first digits of any credit card denote the issuer identifier (i.e., folks can tell who issued a credit card and what type it is just from the first digit or two) I've been annoyed almost each time I have to input credit card information on the web. Any decent credit card system knows that if a sixteen digit credit card number starts with 4, it's a Visa. And yet, each time anyone buys anything on the web, they must select "Visa" from the drop-down box. On a certain level we all know this; People in stores and restaurants never have to select the type of card before swiping.
When I'm feeling generous, I imagine this is so that the credit card companies can give an extra reminder that they only accept certain credit cards -- not being able to select a card type in an "essential" input field constrained to multiple choices is a pretty strong reminder.
When I'm feeling less generous, I suspect it might be so that the companies can subtly remind us that they have their own brand credit cards that we might like to acquire.
Yesterday witnessed the most important step forward for the Definition of Free Cultural Works (DFCW) since its adoption and endorsement by the Wikimedia Foundation a year ago.
Although I might have wished things otherwise, Creative Commons is not a social movement fighting for essential freedom or the essential freedoms at the core of the DFCW in particular. From the movement's perspective, CC is more like a law and advocacy firm that works for us -- a very sympathetic one. CC writes, hosts, and supports a variety of licenses. Some are free. Some are not. Last year they took steps to explicitly limit the extent of restrictions they are willing to tolerate in their licenses.
Yet, while CC has resisted taking a stand in favor of the Definition of Free Cultural Works, they continue to produce some of the best free licenses, tools, and metadata available and they seem honestly interested in helping users interested in social movements based around these definitions organize more effectively.
In perhaps its most important move to date in this area, Creative Commons announced yesterday that it was placing a seal on each of its licenses that provide the essential freedoms laid out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works. The seal links to the definition over at freedomdefined.org. In Creative Commons' words:
This seal and approval signals an important delineation between less and more restrictive licenses, one that creators and users of content should be aware of.
A very practical reason users should be aware of these distinctions is that some important projects accept only freely (as defined) licensed or public domain content, in particular Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites, which use the Definition of Free Cultural Works in their licensing guidelines.
The seal is currently on two CC licenses that provide for essential freedom (Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike) and their public domain dedication. Thanks go to Erik Moeller at the Wikimedia Foundation and everyone at Creative Commons to helped make this happen.
Recently, Students for Free Culture -- a non-profit organization dear to my heart -- elected its new board. Several months ago, the group voted to hold its elections using the same preferential election method system that Debian uses. To help make their election easier I agreed to support them with a new set of features in Selectricity aimed at more structured organizational decision-making. Currently Selectricity is more geared toward more informal QuickVotes.
From a democratic and voting technology perspective, the election was a huge success. With 16 voters and 13 candidates, a traditional plurality or "first past the post" election would have been a poor match for their group -- the 16 first-place votes were very split among the candidates. The results also show one very polarizing candidate who won the plurality but was in the bottom third of most preferential rankings! The use of Selectricity helped SFC select a board who better represented the preference of their group than they would have otherwise. Exciting stuff! You can read more on the Free Culture website or on the Selectricity blog.
Thanks are due both to the previous SFC board who took the risk on the technology and to all of the candidates and voters! I'm currently integrating feedback and improvements based on the SFC election and will open the feature up the public in the next couple weeks. If you want hear about this when it happens, you should subscribe to the Selectricity Blog or drop an email to team@selectricity.org.
Today, I orphaned AUB -- my very first Debian package and the first free software project whose maintenance I took over. I had been helping and doing work in Debian and the free software community for some time but AUB was the first package I uploaded into Debian with my own name in the maintainer field and with my key in the Debian keyring.
AUB is a program for working with Usenet binaries. As late as 2002 perhaps, it was a pretty useful tool for a variety of things. Today, however, it doesn't seem to be useful for much more than indiscriminately downloading large amounts of porn and spam. The software is crusty and written in Perl 4 which, today, seems almost unforgivable. Like Usenet, AUB's day has come and gone.
During my maintenance of the package, I ended up taking over upstream development and writing and integrating quite a few new features and patches. In fact, there still seem to be a few users! Unfortunately, I am not one them and I officially gave up on upstream maintenance a few months ago and contacted the submitters of all pending bug reports. Today I'm orphaning the Debian package and completely letting go.
None of this is particularly noteworthy, I suppose. If AUB was ever important, it hasn't been for a long time. I think its worth mentioning because it's symbolic of the completion of the life cycle of a free software project that was important in my own growth. Languages, the world, and even I have moved on. In the process, I've grown hugely as a developer, programmer, and free software activist and advocate. Minor as it be, AUB played an important role in this whole process.
If you are interested in taking over AUB, please let me know. Otherwise, I'm just as happy to let it disappear.
On Saturday February 9th, at 13:00, I'm going to be joining free software and anti-DRM activists to protest the use of DRM by the Boston Public Library on parts of its electronic collection.
Those of us protesting are unhappy because the BPL has launched a new service powered by a company called OverDrive. The system gives BPL patrons access to books, music, and movies online -- but only if they use a Microsoft DRM system.
There are lots of problems with the introduction of this system: it bars access to users of GNU/Linux and MacOS and creates a dependence on a single technology vendor for access. These are important issues, certainly. The worst problem, however, is much more fundamental.
By adopting a DRM system for library content, the BPL is giving OverDrive, copyright holders, and Microsoft the ability to decide what, when, and how its patrons can and cannot read, listen, and watch these parts of the BPL collection. They are giving these companies veto power over the BPL's own ability to access this data -- both now and in the future. Cryptographically, BPL is quite literally handing over the keys to their collection. In the process, they are not only providing a disservice to their patrons. They are providing a disservice to themselves.
The first-sale doctrine says that libraries can do essentially whatever they like with copies of books they purchase short of duplication, modification, or performance. Of course, copyright holders would prefer to charge a toll every time someone checks out a book. Public libraries were possible in spite of this desire because they were able to exploit power over the possession and control of their books in the interests of their patrons. With DRM, libraries will reduced to powerlessness.
Of course, times have changed. As media and the ways we interact with it is increasingly digital, libraries have changed and will need to change more. But if public libraries are to succeed at their fundamental mission of spreading knowledge and serving communities, this change can't be at the expense of patrons' ability to control their own technology and libraries' ability to control their own collections.
I've supported my academic library, MIT Libraries, as they took a risk and stood up to DRM when other institutions did not. And they won.
BPL is the largest municipal library in the US and the third largest US library overall. It is the first library to be supported publicly, to be open to the public in the US, and to allow patrons to take home books to read and use them. BPL has an opportunity now to continue this history of leadership, of access, and of patron empowerment.
If BPL stands up against DRM and in favor of its patrons' freedom and its own control of its technical destiny and collection, it may set an important precedent. If you're in or near Boston, please join me in Copley Square on Saturday to help make this happen. If you're not near Boston, please help put pressure on similar efforts in your own communities.
I don't think I've been this amused since Reebok accidentally named a shoe after a demon that sexually assaults women.
Want to contribute to my list of unintentionally offensive product names?
In Brazilian Portuguese, "bombeiro" is the word for both a fireman and a plumber. If someone asks you to call a "bombeiro," their statement is usually unambiguous due to context. Usually.
Both SVG source and t-shirts are available at cost.
As I mentioned I would a month or so ago, I attended a workshop on Computing in the Cloud organized by Ed Felton's Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. The conference aimed to discuss the policy issues that are raised by the shift from computing on machines we own and have direct control over to computing on servers owned by others. Think Google, Facebook, MySpace, and that lot.
I talked about what all this might mean for free software and for open source and our communities, a bit about the AGPL, and discussed some ideas of how might proceed as a community. Princeton has been organized enough to post audio and video of the whole conference, including recordings of my talk, in a variety of formats and qualities (although unfortunately not in Vorbis and Theora).
As I said in my FSF membership appeal last month, I think complications raised by "cloud computing" are one of the most important sets of challenges facing free software this year.
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