Mike Linksvayer

Glenn Greenwald’s September 20 piece on the decision processes leading to the Iraq invasion and the current bailout is right on:

I don’t pretend to know anywhere near enough — in terms of either raw information or expertise — in order to opine on the necessity or lack thereof of The Latest Plan in terms of whether the alternatives are worse. But what I do know is that an injustice so grave and extreme that it defies words is taking place; that the greatest beneficiaries are those who are most culpable; and that the same hopelessly broken and deeply rotted institutions and elite class that gave rise to all of this (and so much more) are the very ones that are — yet again — being blindly entrusted to solve this.

Of course the non-financial toll of the Terror War makes it a far greater tragedy, but the financial tab of each will be of the same order of magnitude — US$trillions.

Although the US$0.7 trillion number being cited is apparently made up, Barry Ritholtz’s guess that it could end up costing US$1.5 trillion is entirely plausible, given the systematic underestimation by politicians of wars and public works. Ritholtz’s upcoming book on bailouts will presumably have data on the misunderestimated (really) cost of bailouts. Watch his brief WSJ video interview or on his own blog.

Stop the bailout, which will only prolong the pain and ensure future bubbles. Instead take this “crisis” as an opportunity to eliminate all of the various politically imposed causes of expensive housing.

If the rent seeking dinosaurs of finance die I look forward to new mortgage products designed to hedge risk rather than play chicken with politicians (see beginning of post for how well that turns out). Incidentally, see a recent post on what current housing futures say.

The GNU project turns 25 on September 27. Not much to add beyond what I wrote on the Creative Commons blog. Watch the Freedom Fry video.

I do have some meta commentary…

The video, featuring British humorist Stephen Fry, is very British. That is, Americans might wonder if there is any humor in it at all. I’m fine with that.

It’s great that the video is posted in Ogg Theora format and works seamlessly in my browser via Cortado, and download links are provided. However, HTML to copy & paste for direct inclusion in a blog post or other web page should also be provided, as is typical for sharing video. I haven’t tried making such yet, though I should and might.

Finally, there’s a hidden jab at some in the free software movement in my CC blog post:

One of the movements and projects directly inspired by GNU is Creative Commons. We’re still learning from the free software movement. On a practical level, all servers run by Creative Commons are powered by GNU/Linux and all of the software we develop is free software.

So please join us in wishing the GNU project a happy 25th birthday by spreading a happy birthday video from comedian Stephen Fry. The video, Freedom Fry, is released under a CC Attribution-NoDerivatives license.

Emphasis added. The free culture/open content world lags the free software/open source world in many respects, one of those being an understanding of what freedoms are necessary. Some from the free software world have pushed Creative Commons to recognize that in many cases culture requires freedoms equivalent to those expected for free software/open source (that’s the first bolded link above), while some in the free software world (not necessarily the exact same people, but at least people associated with the same organizations) publish documents and videos under terms that do not grant those same freedoms (that’s the second bolded link above).

The Free Software Foundation has probably published documents under terms roughly equivalent to CC BY-ND probably before CC existed. Currently the footer of fsf.org says:

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Does the FSF really want to reserve the right to use copyright to censor people who might publish derived versions of their texts? They probably are concerned that someone will alter their message so as to be misleading. Perhaps there was some rationale for this pre-web and pre-CC, but now there is not:

• People can easily see canonical versions by going to fsf.org. (DNS also should obsolete much of trademark as well, but that’s for another post.)
• CC licenses that permit derivatives include the following (see 3(b), 4(a), 4(b), and 4(c) for the actual language):
  • Licensor can specify a link to provide for attribution
  • Derivative works must state how they are altered
  • Licensor can demand that credit be removed from the derivative
  • Unfortunately, in some jurisdictions licensor could press “moral rights” to censor a derivative considered derogatory

So one can pre-clear the right to make adaptations and retain some legal mechanisms to club creators of adaptations (ordered from best practice to distasteful, according to me).

The Software Freedom Law Center does worse, publishing its website (also, see the SFLC post on 25 years of GNU) under CC BY-NC-ND. Do they really want to prohibit commercial use? SFLC (a super excellent organization, as is the FSF!) is dedicated to software freedom, but still it seems silly for them to publish non-software works under terms antithetical to the spirit of free software.

On a brighter note, the FSF is publishing promotional images for Freedom Fry under a free as in free software as applied to cultural works license (CC BY-SA), one of which has already been taken under those terms for use on Stephen Fry’s Wikipedia article. Ah, the power of free cultural works. :)

Do wish GNU a happy 25th birtday — watch and spread the video!

Google Chrome looks really interesting. Given that the web is the interesting platform, more web client innovation is welcome, especially in open source web clients (but let’s not forget the servers).

The way Google apparently has announced the project is also interesting. As of this writing www.google.com/chrome is not live, but printed comics drawn by Scott McCloud describing the project have been mailed to journalists.

Philipp Lenssen scanned the comic book and posted it as a series of 38 images, each with its own page. Google had the foresight to give permission for this in advance by releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license, noted on the comic book’s back cover.

This is one rare case in which I find reading a PDF easier than web pages (page down has lower latency and requires less movement than clicking ‘next page’) so using sam2p and pdftk I made a PDF version of the comic book.

Note that although Creative Commons licenses containing the ‘No Derivatives’ term do not allow altering the license work, they do allow moving the otherwise unaltered work to a new format. (Ideally Google would have released the work under a more permissive license, but we’ll take what we can get.) Lenssen’s scanning and my PDFing are examples of such format shifting.

Recently Nathan Yergler posted what ought to be the preferred way to install and upgrade WordPress:

First, install WordPress from a Subversion checkout; do:

$ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6/

instead of downloading the .zip or .tar.gz file. Configure as directed.

Then, when a new version is available, log into your webhost and run:

$ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.1/

from your install directory.

I’ve been doing this for ages and consider installing from and overwriting with tarballs on an ongoing basis just short of insanity. Unfortunately the WordPress Subversion Access page says it is for developers only and doesn’t describe using svn switch to upgrade — indeed, what they describe (which will always obtain the very latest, usually unreleased, code checked in by WordPress developers), really is only appropriate for WordPress developers and testers. The MediaWiki site does a much better job but still doesn’t push revision control as the preferred deployment mechanism.

WordPress and MediaWiki were pioneers several years ago in making web application deployment and even upgrade painless relative to what came before (mostly by automating as much database configuration and schema migration as possible), but it may take a new generation to make deployment from revision control systems (preferably distributed) the norm. WikiTrust sets a good example:

There are two ways of getting WikiTrust: via Git (recommended), or via tarballs (easier at first, but harder to keep up-to-date).

[...]

Our preferred way to distribute the code is via Git. Git enables you to easily get the latest version of the code, including any bug-fixes. Git also makes it easy for you to contribute to the project (see Contributing to WikiTrust for more information).

As I’ve mentioned several times in passing, such practices will facilitate open web applications and other network services.

Andrew Dubber has a much linked-to post recently in which he declares that music copyright should last for five years, renewable on the condition of commercial availability. That would make a gigantic improvement over the current effectively perpetual (50-70 years depending on jurisdiction, retroactively extended as necessary). Not as gigantic, but much more tenable than the one year usufruct proposal I noted a few years ago.

It’s great to see someone who appears to be well respected in the recorded music industry providing such a radical and rational (in today’s context) proposal, but the key insight has nothing to do with the specifics of his proposal. Dubber writes (emphasis added):

Current blanket copyright terms ‘protect’ (I use that term in the sense of ‘racket’) copyright owners so that they can continue to be paid over and over again for work they did years ago. It prevents anyone else from making money out of works that have been shelved.

It does not, in any real sense, ‘incentivise creativity’.

So obvious, so completely ignored by policy.

Via Techdirt.

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Under US law, pretty much anything you write down is copyrighted. Scrawl an original note on a napkin and it’s protected until 70 years after your death.

Note: None of this post should be taken as criticism of Zuckerman. I’m just using his sentence as a foil. He is a great blogger, the above is a great post of his, which furthermore talks about the great work of some of my colleagues…

In what sense is the hypothetical scrawl above “protected” by copyright? A scrawl might be protected by a glass case or digitization, or even (somewhat remotely) by secure property rights in napkins, glass cases, and computers.

No, copyright restricts the ability of others to use representations of the scrawl legally, without obtaining permission from the scrawler or a party the scrawler has transferred this right to censor to.

Which brings us to another inaccurate phrasing, which has many variations, all along the lines of “copyright is the right to … a copyrighted work” where the ellipsis are filled by words like “publish”, “distribute”, or “perform”. Not true! Copyright is not required to have the right to publish a work, or public domain works would be illegal to publish. Instead, copyright is the right to legally restrict others from publishing, distributing, performing works.

So use of the term ‘copyright protection’ (2,930,000 Google hits) instead of ‘copyright restriction’ (19,300 Google hits) is a peeve of mine and seeing copyright equated with censorship a small joy.

I’ve mentioned before that free software and its ilk decreases opportunity for taxation and regulation. Tim Lee wrote on the same topic a couple months ago. So I’m slightly pleased to see the argument endorsed by the Business Software Alliance, as told by Russell McOrmond (emphasis added to all quotes below):

The claims in the recent press release included the following:

Software piracy also has ripple effects in local communities.  The lost revenues to the wider group of software distributors and service providers ($11.4 billion) would have been enough to hire 54,000 high tech industry workers, while the lost state and local tax revenues ($1.7 billion) would have been enough to build 100 middle schools or 10,800 affordable housing units, or hire nearly 25,000 experienced police officers.

Of course the BSA’s concern for tax revenues is disingenuous, in a totally unsurprising fashion:

I guess any money not paid to BSA members just disappears and is not spent on other things in the economy that also involve jobs and taxes. In the real world we know that money not spent on software will more likely be spent on other things which are taxed the same — or even higher, given how BSA likes to also lobby to get software taxed at a lower rate than other products or services.

McOrmond also makes a slightly surprising claim about the BSA’s studies that I’d love to have verification of:

I know that people choosing legally lower cost software such as FLOSS are included as “piracy” in these studies. I guess my supporting FLOSS (both commercially and as an individual) could be blamed for their not being enough money to adequately equip the Canadian military in Afghanistan. I guess this makes me a terrorist sympathizer, by the BSA “logic”.

Regardless of whether FLOSS is counted as “piracy” in studies, the logic that it doesn’t directly facilitate the collection of taxes to fund military (or state schools, housing, or police) is pretty unassailable. Of course it could reduce costs and increase quality for each of these functions, as for anyone else.

Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services launched today.

I’ve written about the subject of this group and statement a number of times on this blog, starting with Constitutionally Open Services two years ago. I think that post holds up pretty well. Here were my tentative recommendations:

So what can be done to make the web application dominated future open source in spirit, for lack of a better term?

First, web applications should be super easy to manage (install, upgrade, customize, secure, backup) so that running your own is a real option. Applications like WordPress and MediaWiki have made large strides, especially in the installation department, but still require a lot of work and knowledge to run effectively.

There are some applications that centralizaton makes tractable or at least easier and better, e.g., web scale search, social aggregation — which basically come down to high bandwidth, low latency data transfer. Various P2P technologies (much to learn from, field wide open) can help somewhat, but the pull of centralization is very strong.

In cases were one accepts a centralized web application, should one demand that application be somehow constitutionally open? Some possible criteria:

• All source code for the running service should be published under an open source license and developer source control available for public viewing.
• All private data available for on-demand export in standard formats.
• All collaboratively created data available under an open license (e.g., one from Creative Commons), again in standard formats.
• In some cases, I am not sure how rare, the final mission of the organization running the service should be to provide the service rather than to make a financial profit, i.e., beholden to users and volunteers, not investors and employees. Maybe. Would I be less sanguine about the long term prospects of Wikipedia if it were for-profit? I don’t know of evidence for or against this feeling.

Consider all of this ignorant speculation. Yes, I’m just angling for more freedom lunches.

I was honored to participate in a summit called by the Free Software Foundation to discuss these issues March of this year, along with far greater thinkers and doers. Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement (named for the FSF’s office address) are the result of continued work among the summit participants, not yet endorsed by the FSF (nor by any other organization). Essentially everything I conjectured above made it into the statement (not due to me, they are fairly obvious points, at least as of 2008, and others made them long before) with the exception of making deployment easier, which is mundane, and service governance issues, which the group did discuss, but inconclusively.

There’s much more to say about this, but for now (and likely for some time, at the rate I write, though this activity did directly inspire me to propose speaking at an upcoming P2P industry summit, which I will early next month–I’m also speaking tomorrow at BALUG and will mention autonomo.us briefly–see info on both engagements) I wanted to address two immediate and fairly obvious critiques.

Brian Rowe wrote:

“Where it is possible, they should use Free Software equivalents that run on their own computer.” This is near Luddite talk… It is almost always possible to use an app on your own comp, but it is so inefficient. Networked online apps are not inherently evil, should you back up your work
offline, yes. Should you have alternative options and data portability, yes. You should fight to impove them. But you should not avoid them like the plauge.

The statement doesn’t advocate avoiding network services–see “Where it is possible”, and most of the statement concerns how network services can be free. However, it is easy to read the sentence Rowe quoted and see Luddism. I hope that to some it instead serves as a challenge, for:

• Applications that run on your own computer can be networked, i.e., P2P.
• Your own computer does not only include your laptop and home server, but any hardware you control, and I think that should often include virtual hardware.

Wes Felter wrote:

I see a lot about software licensing and not much about identity and privacy. I guess when all you have is the AGPL everything looks like a licensing problem.

True enough, but lots of people are working on identity and privacy. If the FSF doesn’t work on addressing the threats to freedom as in free software posed by network services, it isn’t clear who would. And I’d suggest that any success free software has in the network services world will have beneficial effects on identity and privacy for users–unless you think these are best served by identity silos and security through obscurity.

Finally, the FSF is an explicitly ideological organization (I believe mostly for the greater good), so the statement (although not yet endorsed by the FSF, I believe all participants are probably FSF members, staff, or directors) language reflect that. However, I suspect by far the most important work to be done to maintain software freedom is technical and pragmatic, for example writing P2P applications, making sharing modified source of network applications a natural part of deployment (greatly eased by the rise of distributed version control), and convincing users and service providers that it is in their interest to expect and provide free/open network services.

I suggest going on to read Evan Prodromou (the doer above) on autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement and Rufus Pollock on the Open Software Service Definition, which more or less says the same thing as the FSS in the language of a definition (and using the word open), coordinated to launch at the same time.

See Evan Prodromou’s post on launching identi.ca, good background reading on open services.

I love the name of Prodromou’s company, Control Yourself. Presumably it is a reference to discussions of user autonomy as a better frame than freedom or openness … for discussions of concerns addressed by free/open source software and its ilk.

You can follow Evan’s microblogging at identi.ca/evan.

I’ve only used Twitter for an ongoing joke that probably nobody gets, but for now I’ll be trying to honestly microblog at identi.ca/mlinksva.

Lew McCreary, writing on the Harvard Business Review Editors’ Blog, covers two of my favorite topics (prediction markets and nipping stupidity in the bud) with How to Kill Bad Projects:

Project owners creatively spun results for political reasons—mainly to prevent funding from being yanked. Consequently, there was a gaping disconnect between the project people down at ground level and the business leaders farther up the food chain when it came to understanding how projects were actually progressing. The leaders tended to think things were going much better than they actually were.

The problem of corrupted information flows stayed with Siegel and ultimately led him to found his current company, Inkling Markets, a software-as-service venture aimed at helping companies conduct successful prediction markets. What does a prediction market have to do with eliminating spin? Siegel sees an opportunity to produce higher quality decision support in businesses by tapping anonymous input “from people who aren’t normally asked their opinions, in samples large enough to filter out individual agendas.”

In the case of an internal prediction market, employees might be asked to weigh in anonymously (wagering a sum of token currency) on a statement like this: “The Voldemort Project will meet all of its defined performance targets by the end of 2008.”

Unfortunately, the post includes just a bit of its own stupidity (emphasis added):

While many are naturally captivated by the black-swan-finding potential of prediction markets, another sweet spot may be their use as a form of institutional lie detection—guaranteeing the integrity of internal reporting and keeping the progress of business initiatives transparent.

What the heck is he talking about? I have never heard of anyone claiming that a prediction market could find black swans — to the contrary, a black swan is almost by definition something a prediction market will fail to signal — the knowledge does not exist to be aggregated. Chris Masse quoting Nassim Taleb:

If, as Niall Ferguson showed, war bonds did not forecast the great war, it was a Black Swan

Now prediction markets and black swans both have something to do with prediction and probability, but they’re otherwise ships passing not in the night, but on opposite sides of the globe — with one in the night.

DRM strikes me as another example of people fooled by common interest, in this case of cryptography and censorshipcopyright enforcement. Both have something to do with preventing someone from getting access to information. That doesn’t make one a tool for the other (in either direction). Of course that knowledge was distributed, but apparently not visibly in the right places, resulting in lots of bad projects.

Via Inkling.

Keith Wolfe, Global Mobility Manager (cool title) writes on the Google Policy Blog:

Google hires employees based on skills and qualifications, not on nationality.

Great, Google doesn’t have an apartheid hiring policy. They aren’t actively doing evil. So they’re in a similar camp with South African businesses who didn’t want to hire based on race, but failed to stop Apartheid. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t mind pandering to neanderthals who think Amurricans deserve some kind of advantage:

Other commenters suggested that Google should fund education for underprivileged American students, to better prepare American students to fill technical jobs. We agree

Underprivileged Americans (by which they certainly and unfortunately mean U.S. citizens)? Please.

Google also says the cap on H-1B visas is “artificially low.” More pandering. Any cap at all is “artificial”, as is any limit at all on the legal ability of any human from working anywhere they’d like to for a willing employer.

Global mobility with no artificial restraints — abolish international apartheid. Surely Google can take a stronger stand than mine owners in South Africa did a century ago.

I was going to post this at Midas Oracle, but there seems to be a software problem there [fixed, edited version posted there], so I’ll post here, with added vitriol and pejoratives I would not have used there.

Yesterday at about 5:30PM EDT the Libertarian Party (U.S.) nominated ex-Congressperson Bob Barr for temporary dictator. Barr’s nomination does not appear to have been certain — it took five rounds of voting, including two rounds where he tied for first and one in which in placed second.

So what do the relevant prediction markets make of this new information? Is Barr a contender, a potential spoiler, or irrelevant?

At Intrade, PRES.FIELD2008 has attracted no trades since May 22, three days before Barr’s nomination. We didn’t need a market to tell us a Libertarian Party nominee would not be a contender, nor help the chances of another non-Democrat and non-Republican.

The idea that Barr could be a spoiler is not completely ridiculous on its face (Barr and Wayne Allen Root, his running mate, are both recent ex-Republicans). However, PRES.DEM2008 has attracted no trades since May 24, the day before Barr’s nomination, while PRES.REP2008 did not trade between 18 hours before the nomination and over 3 hours after.

I think we can conclude that traders believe Barr’s nomination will have no impact on the outcome of the U.S. temporary dictator election. And, sadly, that volume on Intrade is pathetic.

It should be no surprise that traders dismiss the impact of the Libertarian Party’s choice. The last time they nominated a marginally credible candidate — in 1988, another (then) ex-Republican ex-Congressperson, Ron Paul — they received 0.5% of the total vote.

Regarding the Libertarian Party generally, I can’t say it much better than Tim Lee:

Ultimately, I wish the LP would just go away. The structure of American elections dooms third parties to perpetual failure and obscurity, and that, in turn, creates a vicious cycle where the most talented activists and potential candidates go elsewhere, causing the party to be even more out of touch and politically tone-deaf in the next election. But given that the party is going to nominate somebody, Barr was probably the best choice. He’s a reasonably credible candidate, he’s got decent media skills, and so far, at least, I haven’t seen him take any positions that I strongly disagree with (since his road-to-damascus conversion in 2006, anyway). But I don’t plan to support his candidacy because while he may be the least-bad option on this November’s ballot, he certainly isn’t the kind of person I want associated with libertarianism. And every vote he gets will mean more visibility for the embarrassing candidate the party is likely to nominate in 2012.

Another year, another fine day to honor draft dodgers, deserters, and anyone with enough sense to not join the murderous gangs sponsored by any jurisdiction.

Some say it is a fine day to criticize politicians (emphasis added):

One would hope that this day, above all others, would be a time for condemning those whose lies and failures resulted in thousands of their fellow citizens being killed.

Though it may annoy to see the current temporary dictator strut with former murder gang members/slaves, now hilariously motorcycle gang members, the above leaves me with two reactions, following.

First, boredom. What day does not pass for a good day to criticize hypocritical politicians? I reserve this day for honoring those who have not taken part and those who got a clue and got out. If anyone must be condemned today, let’s keep it on the level of those actually doing the killing. Take for example this so-sad story of a gang member and gang recruiter who killed himself:

“He told me he kicked down over 1,000 doors,” Maxey said. “He was the lead guy, the first one to go in, and most of the time it was the wrong place. There would be terrified old people and little kids sitting there.”

Good riddance.

Second, the author of the first quote above is part of the problem, for buying into nationalist rhetoric. If he really had to dwell on the higher ups, he should have written this:

One would hope that this day, above all others, would be a time for condemning those whose lies and failures resulted in thousands of murders.

On a mailing list I’m on someone just pointed to no-www.org. It’s been awhile since I’ve run across that site (or, before it existed, Slashdot commenters condemning use of TCWWW — The Cursed WWW), but I strongly agree — www. in a domain name is pointless.

Even worse is index.php in the path. You’ve taken the time to publish a website, now take a few minutes to make its URLs less ugly. I’m not going to bother setting up no-index-php.org, but someone should. However, in the spirit of no-www.org, here are a couple resources for removing index.php from popular software installations:

• WordPress Codex on using permalinks — in many cases WordPress will produce the right .htaccess file automatically, but if you have to fiddle, the default behavior of identifying a post in the querystring with an integer (e.g., ?p=1913) has a strong appeal, while the “almost pretty” option is extremely ugly.
• MediaWiki Manual:Short URL — when this page lived on meta.wikimedia.org, it was appropriated called Eliminating index.php from the url.

Please remove index.php from your URLs, or signal that you have no taste, no technical abilities, or both.

Thanks!

April 23 I saw Gene Healy speak in San Francisco on his book The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Presidential Power. I’d noticed recently that Tim Lee thinks Healy is great, I’m extremely sympathetic to the idea that the temporary dictatorship is a problem, and the event was held on the top floor of (sadly) San Francisco’s second tallest building, with great views.

I found the talk pretty uninteresting, consisting of too many quotes indicating people expect the U.S. president to be a parental figure and warlord at the same time and a standard libertarian critique that simply says presidents who do a lot are by definition bad — Healy likes Harding and Coolidge. I tend to agree (though I favor Cleveland), but none of this is remotely news. Healy used a cute name for partisan interpretation of rules — “situational constitutionalism” — but didn’t bother to spell out why he thinks partisanship leads to the expansion of executive power rather than (or at least more than) a check on it.

Overall I got the impression Healy knew a whole lot of facts about the U.S. presidency and its baneful impact on the polity and culture, but not much more. His responses to questions from the audience indicated he hadn’t really thought about excessive executive power relative to judicial and legislative abuses, executive power in other jurisdictions, nor any approach to limiting executive power, each of which is many times more interesting than any particular collection of facts about any U.S. president or the presidency. To me.

I hope the book does very well and is read by many people who either don’t think the U.S. presidency is too powerful or is only too powerful when their preferred party is not in power.

Jim Lippard blogged about Healy speaking in Phoenix and had a more favorable impression.

View from 52nd floor of 555 California, looking southeast.

Gene Healy speaks.

So are Clinton and McCain. They all consider themselves worthy of the temporary dictatorship.

If I took a more sanguine view of the U.S. presidency I would demand only elite candidates. The most abominable, I mean powerful, person in the world had better be the smartest and wisest possible person available.

The alternative to demanding an elite is demanding a demagogue. It never fails to stun and embarrass me to see the preponderance of discourse demanding the latter, while politicians comply by running away from any charge of elitism while reveling in demagoguery.

This weakness is one reason I try to only follow electoral races in highly digested form, though it is hard to avoid reading headlines, thus this post.

A post about a child’s reaction to a party at which people apparently mentioned their blogs a lot reminded me of a name that last summer Jon Phillips and I gave to people who don’t talk about their blogs but do sound as if they were reading their blogs aloud — and every “conversation” with them sounds like this.

Of course these people existed before blogs and were perhaps simply called insufferable.

Although it isn’t nice to call someone insufferable and “blog reader” is snarky, I have some admiration for these people. At least they have something non-generic to say and with aggressive questioning one can learn from them.

A few observations and things learned from the last eight days.

Go to a page with a table, for example this one (sorry, semi-nsfw). Hold down the control key and select cells. How could I not have known about this!? Unfortunately, copy & paste seems to produce tab separated values in a single row even when pasting from mutliple rows in the HTML table (tried with Firefox and Epiphany). Still really useful when you only want to copy one column of a table, but if you want all of the columns, don’t hold down the control key and row boundaries get newlines as they should rather than tabs. (Thanks Asheesh.)

I feel really stupid about this one. I’ve assumed that a (US) Health Savings Account was a spend within the year or lose your contributions arrangement, but that’s what a Flexible Spending Account is (I have no predictable medical expenses, so such an account makes no sense for me). A HSA is an investment account much like an IRA, except you can spend from it without penalty upon incurring medical expenses rather than old age. You can only contribute to a HSA while enrolled in a high deductible health insurance plan, which I’ll try to switch to next year. (Thanks Ahrash.)

I saw a few presentations at LugRadio Live USA, in addition to giving one. Miguel de Icaza’s on Mono (content roughly corresponding to this post) and Ian Murdock’s on OpenSolaris were both in part about software packaging. Taken together, they make a good case for open source facilitating cross polination of ideas and code across operating system platforms.

Aaron Bockover and Gabriel Burt did a presentation/demo on Banshee, showing off some cool track selection/playlist features and talking about more coming. I may have to try switching back to Banshee as my main audio player (from Rhythmbox, with occasional use of Songbird for web-heavy listening or checking on how the program is coming along). Banshee runs on Mono, and both are funded by Novell, which also (though I don’t know how their overall investment compares) has an enterprise desktop linux product.

John Buckman gave an entertaining talk on open source and open content (including the slide at right). My talk probably was not entertaining at all, but used the question ‘how far behind [free/open source software] is free/open culture?’ to string together selected observations about the field.

Benjamin Mako Hill did a presentation on Revealing Errors (meant both ways). I found myself wanting to be skeptical of the power of technical errors to expose political/power relationships, but I imagine the concept could use a little hype — there’s definitely something there. The talk made me more sensitive to errors in any case. For example, when I transferred funds from a money market account to checking to pay taxes, an email notice included this (emphasis in original):

Your confirmation number is 0.

Zero? Really? The transaction did go through.

Tuesday I attended the Media Web Meetup V: The Gulf Between NorCal and SoCal, is it so big?, the idea being (in this context pushed by Songbird founder Rob Lord; I presented at the first Media Web Meetup and have attended a few others) that in Northern California entrepreneurs are trying to build new services around music, nearly all stymied by protectionist copyright holders in Southern California. I really did not need to listen to yet another panel asking how the heck is the music recording distribution industry going to use technology to make money, but this was a pretty good one as those go. One of the panelists kept urging technologists to “fix [music] metadata” as if doing so were the key to enabling profit from digital music. I suppressed the urge to sound a skeptical note, as investing more in metadata is one of the least harmful things the industry might do. Not that I don’t think metadata is great or anything.

Wendy Seltzer / CC BY

Thursday evening I was on a ‘Copyright 2.0′ panel put on by the American Society of Media Photographers Northern California. I thought my photo selection for my first slide was pretty clever. No, copyright expansion is not always good for the interests of professional photographers. The other panelists and the audience were actually more open minded (both meanings) than I expected, and certainly realistic. The photographer on the panel even stated the obvious (my paraphrase from memory): new technology has allowed lots of people to explore their photographry talents who would otherwise have been unable to, and maybe some professional photographers just aren’t that good and should find other work. My main takeway from the panel is that it is very difficult for an independent photographer to successfully pursue unauthorized users in court. With the sometime exception of one, the other panelists all strongly advised photographers to avoid going to court except as a last resort, and even then, first doing a rational calculation of what the effort is likely to cost and gain. The best advice was probably to try to turn unauthorized users into clients.

Friday evening I went to San Jose to be on a panel about New Media Artists and the Law. Unlike Thursday’s panel, this one was mostly about how to use and re-use rather than how to prevent use. This (and some nostalgia) made me miss living in Silicon Valley — I lived in Sunnyvale two years (2003-2005) and San Jose (2005-2006) before moving back to San Francisco. Nothing really new came up, but I did enjoy the enthusiasm of the other panelists and the audience (as I did the previous day).

Staturday I went to Ubuntu Restaurant in Napa, which apparently does vegetable cuisine but does not market itself as vegetarian. I think that’s a good idea. The food was pretty good.

I’ve been listening to Hazard Records 59 and 60: Calida Construccio by various and Unhazardous Songs by Xmarx. Lovely Hell (mp3) from the latter is rather poppy.

Red Hat on What’s Going On With Red Hat Desktop Systems? An Update (emphasis added):

we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future

Somehow Slashdot reads this as Red Hat Avoids Desktop Linux, Says Too Tough.

Obviously not true, as the Red Hat post goes on to say they have an enterprise desktop product, a community supported desktrop distrubution, and an upcoming desktop product for emerging markets.

More importantly:

Other desktop related projects where Red Hat has been the primary developer, or a major contributor, include:

• X Revitalization effort (kernel modesetting, randr, dri2)
• Screen size control panel
• PolicyKit & ConsoleKit
• Gnome (screensaver, gvfs/gio, GtkPrint, etc)
• Liberation Fonts (with sponsorship of the Harfbuzz font shaper project)
• Theora encoder improvements
• Sponsorship of Ogg Ghost (successor to Ogg Vorbis)
• NetworkManager and Network driver work - developed by Red Hat
• OpenOffice.org 64-bit port
• OpenOffice.org integration into the rest of GNOME: Port to cairo, dictionary unification, print/file dialogs
• PulseAudio
• Bluetooth file sharing
• Ongoing hal maintenance and revitalization
• DBus and DBus activation
• Multiple power management activities:
  • Tickless kernel
  • Gnome power manager and the quirks list
  • Suspend/resume enhancements
  • Laptop backlight intensity autocontrol
  • www.lesswatts.org project support (such as Powertop)
  • CPUfreq
  • AMD PowerNow!
• and of course, lots and lots of bugfixes!

Although I think 2001-2002 is the only time I’ve primarily used a Red Hat desktop (before I used Slackware then Debian, since I’ve used Mandrake then Ubuntu), I’m certain that many of the things that make using a free software desktop (any distribution) so nice today have been built by engineers at Red Hat. Thanks!

Richard Stallman in Gnu’s Bulletin Vol. 1 No. 1, February 1986:

There are plenty of ways that programmers could make a living without selling the right to use a program. This way is customary now because it brings programmers and businessmen the most money, not because it is the only way to make a living. It is easy to find other ways if you want to find them. Here are a number of examples.

A manufacturer introducing a new computer will pay for the porting of operating systems onto the new hardware.

The sale of teaching, hand-holding and maintenance services could also employ programmers.

People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware, asking for donations from satisfied users, or selling hand-holding services. I have met people who are already working this way successfully.

Users with related needs can form users’ groups, and pay dues. A group would contract with programming companies to write programs that the group’s members would like to use.

In the intervening twentysomething years much practical experience has been gained, evidenced by large businesses employing many programmers following these models. Well, except for the last one, which has turned out to be insignificant so far, though perhaps there remains lots of experimentation before it plays out.

What the above misses is that most software is not created for licensing (commercial or public) and most programmers’ jobs do not depend on licensing, much as most musicians are not in the pay of the recorded music distribution business.