Mike Linksvayer

Also at today’s Singularity Summit, Jamais Cascio spoke about Openness and the Metaverse Singularity. The metaverse (and other scenarios) portion seemed to be merely a lead into a call for a democratic singularity. Cascio rightly said that we probably don’t know what that means, but he has a prescription that I’m all for:

My preferred pathway would be to “open source” the singularity, to bring in the eyes and minds of millions of collaborators to examine and co-create the relevant software and models, seeking out flaws and making the code more broadly reflective of a variety of interests.

The funny thing is the extent to which “democracy” and open source, open access, and transparency are conflated. Voting was not mentioned in the talk. Which is fine by me — I suspect that such forms of openness do much to promote freedom and other liberal values, which are themselves often conflated with democracy. (The most interesting parts of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks concern how peer production facilitates liberal values. I’ll blog a review in the fullness of time.)

However, in Q&A Cascio expressed some preference for representative democracy — or rather that’s the sense I got — the question prompting the expression had a lot of baggage, which I won’t try to describe here.

My unwarranted extrapolation: the ideal of free software has some potential to substitute for the dominant ideal (representative democracy), but cannot compete directly, yet.

Update 20070912: Baggage-laden question mentioned above explained.

microPledge looks like the most interesting effort to provide a platform for funding creation of public goods through donations that I’ve seen in awhile (which isn’t saying much). Their projects could be thought of as assurance contracts — you either get the software or your money back. Would be interesting to see them attempt to offer dominant assurance contracts — … or your money back, plus. They also have what looks to be a reasonable approaches to payments to creators while a project is in progress and quitting creators.

But the amounts pledged so far are micro.

Via Erik Möller and Jeff Bone.

There’s been a fair bit written about ‘Moore’s law for software’, usually complaining that there isn’t one. My guess is that’s nuts, but I’d love to see some rigorous analysis (I bet I’m just ignorant of it).

Interesting tidbit from San Jose Mercury-News article two weeks ago Penny-pinching entrepreneurs changing world of venture capital:

Ten years ago, six or seven programmers would have been needed to achieve the results of one programmer today, valley veterans say.

If true, that’s an annual increase in programmer productivity of about twenty percent. Let’s say it’s actually half that due to exaggeration or Brooks’ Law (adding headcount to a software project doesn’t scale well–though on second thought Brooks’ Law could magnify productivity increases, by allowing teams to get smaller). That would make for a doubling time of about seven years. Not nearly as impressive as Moore’s Law doubling of transistor density every two years, but still exponential. And my wild guess is that it has been fairly consistent over the history of programming.

For my five year old impressions on the matter, see this thread.

Addendum: Depending (in part) on how far back you consider the history of programming to go, of course a consistent doubling time for software (or hardware) doesn’t make sense, but rather accelerating change. Doubtless Ray Kurzweil has many graphs attempting to demonstrate this for software in his books. I didn’t intend to go there in this post, but it is timely, as I’ll probably attend the Singularity Summit in a couple weekends.

I’ve been meaning to comment again (see constitutionally open services from last July) on free services as in free software, discussion of which has picked up noticably in the past few months (see Luis Villa’s evaluating a free/open service definition rough draft and comments on that post for one entry into that discussion).

I may get to it eventually, but a big part of my commentary would be on the pragmatic “open source” argument for open services, which I think has hardly been made in that context. Matthew Gertner makes the case in Facebook and the Case for Open Source:

From my perspective, the most interesting thing about the recent leak of Facebook source code is what a non-event it was. As such it’s one of the strongest arguments for open source that I’ve seen in a while.

Gertner goes on to explain how of the possible downsides from the leak could be seen as benefits. Of course open source isn’t magic and a source code leak isn’t going to help any more than a source code dump with no process. But for at least some sites willing to invest in that process, there is almost all upside to opening the code that runs the site.

Wikiclock is so ridiculous I’m not surprised it took so long for someone to invent it. But it is a thing of sublime beauty. Reminds me of some of the projects at last weekend’s Maker Faire.

pageoftext.com, which hosts wikiclock, is only ridiculous in its simplicity. Why didn’t I think of that?

Both projects via Evan Prodromou reporting on RoCoCo. I’m sad that I couldn’t make it to Montreal but glad to hear it’s coming to the SF Bay Area next year.

In the mid-90s lots of companies sold expensive attempts to make web development more like desktop or client/server development (e.g., by shoe-horning state, UI builders and controls and object-relational mapping into the web paradigm), when all developers really wanted was a way to reliably connect to a database from scripts running on a webserver.

10+ years later similar companies have taken a sharp turn (but not 180 degrees) and are now shoe-horning web development concepts (e.g., URLs, markup and other declarative programming) into their desktop and client/server frameworks. This is what it seems to me Rich Internet Applications are about, though admittedly I have not been following all that closely and am even more in the dark about what exactly is “in” the Apollo, Silverlight, or JavaFX “stack” than I was about the specific features of what came to be known as application servers in the late 90s.

I gather there is lots of fear about damage proprietary RIA frameworks could do to the open web. There’s plenty to be concerned about, and RIA vendors and developers should be encouraged to go open source and for maximum interoperability with the web. Perhaps I’m less than worked up because I see proprietary RIA as a rearguard action (NB web applications are complicated for open source completely independent of their use of “rich” frameworks), albeit one that may significantly improve some desktop and client/server application development.

Mike Shaver has a nice post related to this:

The web can eat toolchain bait like this for breakfast. And, if Mozilla has anything to say about it, it will do just that. You won’t have to give up the web to work offline any more, or programmable 2D graphics, etc. Soon you’ll have the power of 3D and great desktop/application integration as well, via projects like canvas3d and registration of content handlers, and you’ll have it in a way that’s built on open specifications and a tool ecosystem that isn’t a monoculture. Why wouldn’t you choose the web, given its record and power and openness?

Shaver’s post also concerns a debate about whether Mozilla should put more of a focus on its desktop development platform, in addition to its applications, primarily Firefox. I haven’t been following closely, but at first glance the debate strikes me as idiotic. XULRunner is just yet another desktop application development platform. Who cares? Yes, I think Songbird is a neat application that also happens to be built on XULRunner. But the web is a far more interesting platform, and Firefox (or to a large extent, just Gecko), not XULRunner, is the client development environment for the web. If Firefox had not been built on XULRunner, how many people would care or notice?

Mozilla has the right focus for another reason, hinted at by Mitchell Baker:

The Mozilla Foundation will continue building the Mozilla platform. And application developers who have high quality improvements to make are very welcome contributors. But the idea of the Mozilla Foundation de-emphasizing applications in order to transform ourselves into a general purpose “platform” organization — giving up the fundamental focus on the human being a application focus provides, reducing our ability to help individuals directly — seems an absolute non-starter to me.

Development frameworks have no moneysearch box.

LimeWire is supposedly installed on nearly one in five PCs. “Current installation share” for filesharing programs according to BigChampagne and PC Pitstop:

1. LimeWire (18.63%)
2. Azureus (3.43%)
3. uTorrent (3.07%)
4. BitTorrent (2.58%)
5. Opera (2.15%)
6. Ares (2.15%)
7. BitComet (1.99%)
8. eMule (1.98% )
9. BearShare (1.64%)
10. BitLord (1.38%)

It’s a little odd to include all those BitTorrent clients, given their very different nature. All but LimeWire, Ares, eMule, and BearShare are BT-only (their P2P download component — Opera is mainly a web browser, with built in BT support). Recent versions of LimeWire and Ares also support BT, so another provocative headline would be “LimeWire the most popular BitTorrent client?”

Most recent (for surveys publishing numbers in 2007) usage share for Firefox ranges from 11.69% to 14.32%. Of course usage share is very different from installation share (compare Opera installation share above at 2.15% and recent usage share between 0.58% and 0.77%) and P2P filesharing and download clients have different usage patterns, so any comparison is apples to oranges. However, if one could extrapolate from the Opera numbers for installation and usage, LimeWire is not more popular than Firefox.

LimeWire is still impressively popular. This probably is mostly due to open source being less susceptible to censorship than proprietary software (which has a half-life shortened by legal attack in the case of P2P). Still, I’d like to see LimeWire gain more recognition as an open source success story than it typically gets.

The really interesting speculation concerns how computing (and ok, what may or may not have been called Web 2.0) would have been different had P2P not been under legal threat for seven or so years. Subject for another post. We can’t go back, but I think it’s very much worth trying to get to a different version of there.

Yes, I know about significant digits. I’m just repeating what the surveys say.

Will this post get Chris Masse to stop bothering me for a promised post on invention vs. innovation?

Many people have written on this, a few recent links, not all precisely relevant to the question.

One way of putting it is that six billion people generate a huge number of ideas, some number of which could be called inventions. Most are hopeless (the inventions; the people at least manage to survive for a time). Most of the rest are not actively pursued. The only way to test whether an invention is hopeless or useful is to attempt to deliver it at scale. So innovators (think of them as idea entrepreneurs, or whatever) both figure out which inventions are not hopeless and deliver the useful ones at scale. Innovators create all of the surplus, inventors do little more than breathe.

I’ve had an idea in my head for a few years that Masse recently mentioned in passing (not the moronic one he has recently written at length about). Have I done anything with the idea? No. Without implementation the idea is worthless.

Read Robin Hanson’s short The Myth Of Creativity article. Excerpt:

What society needs is not more creativity or suggestions for change but better ways to encourage people to focus on important issues, identify the most promising ideas, and tell the right people about them. But our deification of creativity gets in the way.

Do read the whole thing. Hanson’s target is slightly different than mine.

Before Masse calls me a Robin Hanson fan-boy again (I don’t mind), I’ll pose the obvious question: how much of an innovator is Hanson? He’s clearly a fantastic ideas person, but ideas don’t matter. He seems a more productive innovator than the average academic, but that bar is probably very low.

A recent and very apropos Seth Godin post on Meeting Needs spurred me to finally write this. Godin:

Almost no new idea meets the needs of shareholders and CEOs. That’s because most of all they need predictability and apparent freedom from risk. This is why public companies are almost always on the road to disaster. They flee from change in order to do what they think is meeting the needs of those constituents. They fight changes in laws, policies, technologies and markets because their CEO (especially) wants a nice even flight pattern while he racks up big time options.

Shrink wrap software feels safe. Secure. Supported. Beyond reproach.

But…

It turns out that open source can do a brilliant job of meeting their actual needs (lower overhead to install and maintain, higher productivity to use, more stable over time) but the problem is that apparent needs (playing it safe, making your boss happy) almost always get in the way. Until it’s too late. When it’s too late, the competition has leapfrogged you.

Godin also mentions blogging, read the full post. One could substitute prediction markets for open source or blogging. Put that in your marketing pipe and smoke it, Mr. Chris Masse. :-)

As in your brain on drugs = scrambled eggs.

At a small business, designer has a document fancily laid out in an expensive proprietary desktop publishing application. Editor needs to make substantial edits throughout the document, but does not have a copy of the desktop publishing application, so prints out a copy of document, marks up edits with pen, hands to designer to transcribe (with errors, of course).

Had this business used free software, editor would have simply installed the desktop publishing application.

I had completely forgotten this simple case for free software, probably because I haven’t touched a desktop publishing or other specialized document creation application in years; I just happened to overhear a conversation relating the above situation, without reference to the irony of collaboration using closed software devolving to printout, pen, and data entry.

I initially installed Ubuntu Linux 5.10 on my new Dell Inspiron 6000 in November, 2005. I fully expect it to begin having assorted hardware problems this year with the amount of use I give it, though hopefully using an external keyboard (excellent, and only $4.99) and mouse at work will extend its life.

I upgraded to 6.06 shortly after its release but didn’t get around to blogging it. I encountered two problems:

• I had to re-install i915resolution to get back full 1920×1200 screen resolution (1600×1200 without it)
• Resume from suspend-to-memory was broken. A fix in the form of an upgraded acpi-support package was available in the next couple days.

I didn’t upgrade to 6.10 upon release, mostly because I just didn’t get around to it. I saw a couple days ago that 7.04beta is out, so I finally upgraded to 6.10. The upgrade process went without a hitch, but resume from suspend-to-memory was broken again. I’m sure there’s an easy fix, but I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to 7.04beta.

Everything now works, though as Brad Templeton notes the upgrade process stopped several times, waiting on my answers to unnecessary questions. Apart from this annoyance, which hopefully will be fixed before 7.04 gets out of beta, I remain impressed with Ubuntu and how it is progressing. I’m also reminded of how rapidly free software projects are doing new feature releases. I don’t think there are any visible applications I use on this laptop that haven’t been significantly improved in the last 17 months.

If working for a new project of a startup-like nonprofit in San Francisco involving [open] education, [copyright] law, and [semantic web] technology, perhaps you should look into applying for Executive Director of CC Learn. I could imagine an education, legal, or technology person with some expertise and much passion for the other two working out.

Student programmers, Creative Commons is participating in Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organization.

It is too late to apply for a summer technology or “free culture” internship, but keep CC in mind for next summer and (possibly) this fall.

Update 20070409: There are three open positions in addition to CC Learn ED above:

• General Counsel
• Web Engineer
• Administrative Assistant

I missed Tuesday morning’s Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields for sleep and the Creative Commons moderated Open Knowledge vs. Controlled Knowledge, but noticed two very interesting items from Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich’s blog post:

I am pushing to make add-on installation not require a restart in Firefox 3, and I intend to help improve and promote GreaseMonkey security in the Firefox 3 timeframe too.

Please do! Drop all other Firefox 3 features if necessary.

And from Eich’s sixth slide:

Working with Opera via WHATWG on <video>

• Unencumbered Ogg Theora decoder in all browsers
• Ogg Vorbis for <audio>
• Other formats possible
• DHTML player controls

I’ve barely thought about <audio> and <video> but if their presence could encourage non-obfuscated media URLs I’m predisposed in their favor, but universal deployment of unencumbered audio and video decoders via browsers would be excellent.

Evan Prodromou gave an excellent presentation on Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community That Pays the Bills. Check out his slides.

A few points:

• Other stuff will be recognized as having wiki nature, e.g., LibriVox.
• Four categories of wiki businesses: service provider (Wikispaces, Wetpaint, PBWiki), content hosting (wikiHow, Wikitravel, Wikia), consulting (SocialText), content development (WikiBiz). My comment: at first blush Wikia would seem to be a service provider, but they are also deeply involved in content creation and community management.
• Down with crowdsourcing and the notion that wiki contributors are suckers or sharecroppers. Better to think of wikis (and wiki businesses) as platforms for knowledge. Contributors use your wiki to help each other, not to give you free content. My comment: I’m not so down on crowdsourcing. Yes, it is MBA language, but the typical examples usually involve compensating contributors. Crowdsourcing shouldn’t be conflated with sharecropping, nor confused with community purpose.
• For wikis purpose more important than friends or ego for blogs (cf. blogs and social networking).

Seven rules for commercial wikis:

1. Have a noble purpose — e.g., shared knowledge (use a free license), help a community.
2. Demonstrate value — most interesting example is “carry the torch”; wiki communities can be transient, an entity that keeps focus helps.
3. Be Transparent.
4. Extract value where you provide value — most obviously, advertising for hosting.
5. Be personally involved.
6. Run with the right crowd — e.g., open source and open content, or you will be suspect of being a crowdsourcer.

It appears that Prodromou’s Wikitravel lives by these rules and has succeeded.

Update 20070317: Prodromou has a roundup of blog responses to his presentation. It was great indeed catching up with him.

Ross Mayfield on how to destroy the Silicon Valley:

But if you want to destroy the advantage of the the Valley, work in the collaboration industry.

That’s “destruction” in the best sense — enabling other locales to be just as good.

But I’d go further — if you want freedom, work in the remote collaboration industry (writ large), which is slightly different from the entire collaboration industry. The more remote collaboration is effective, the more location, and jurisdictions, can be treated as subjects of arbitrage rather than held in esteem by bound subjects.

Far more promising than going to sea or buying an island.

I’m also saving Mayfield’s very next post on entrepreneur hindsight — generally excellent, but for this:

Maybe because in hindsight all risks are clear, but I always find myself regretting not taking bigger risks earlier. For example, open sourcing the Socialtext code was something we waited on until the company had strong footing. Partially because we thought there would be cannibalization, partially because we were understaffed to really engage with the community. But I believe if we bought this bullet earlier in the history of the company we would be reaping better rewards. As a planning exercise, now I always try to ask two questions: “How could we take more risk?” and “What risk can we take that creates the greatest amount of options?” I find there is always a way to do a little more, in particular by getting past instinct to control prevalent in so many entrepreneurs.

Another item to cite the n’th time someone has tired reasons for not opening their source.

Open source can of course be thought of as a remote collaboration technology.

Tom Evslin says Apple Fails to Reinvent Telecommunications Industry:

Steve Jobs claims that iPhone will “reinvent” the telecommunications sector. Wish it were so but it ain’t!

The design of the phone – no hard buttons, all touch on screen, sounds like everything we expect from Steve and from Apple: it’s all about the GUI and that part’ll be fun. But the business relationship is as old school as it can get: exclusive US distributorship through Cingular
…
Short term this is a good tactic for Apple because it protects the iPod franchise for a while. Long term I think it’s terrible strategy. It invites an endrun from someone who IS willing to reinvent the industry or simply allies themselves with a Cingular competitor.
…
Remember how wonderful the Mac GUI was? But it only ran on machines from Apple. Remember how crappy Windows was at first? But it ran on machines from everyone and their brother. And now there’s Linux – even less restricted – running on anything that moves. Tell me again why it makes sense to have a phone that runs only on a service from at&t (in the US).

Like other Apple products, the iPhone is eye candy (ugly to me), but not revolutionary.

It looks like the FIC Neo1973, showing at CES, due to ship this quarter for US$350, running the OpenMoko platform (presentation), will be more in the right direction — unlocked and open for developers. Andy on the openmoko list has a very early comparison.

The Neo1973’s big missing feature, at least initially, is apparently Wi-Fi, due to a lack of open drivers. As a late adopter of gadgets, I can wait. I acquired my first and only mobile phone in 2003, and it’s easy on the eyes.

That said, I’d really like Portable online by 2010 to be true:

This claim is judged YES if and only if, by January 1, 2010, in any state with more than 5 million inhabitants, at least 25% of the adult population are “portably online”. A “state” can be a country or a member state in a federation.

Read more for how “portably online” is defined (the contract was written in 1995). My current guess (and the market’s; last trade at 30) is that without a more significant smartphone revolution than we’re seeing the criteria won’t be met before 2010, but not terribly long after.

OpenMoko via Jon Phillips. Second word in post title refers to a silly slide found at Engadget.

Do you eagerly await confirmation of rumors and surprises from on high, despite abuse?

You have a problem. When it comes to controlling your computing environment (i.e., much of your communication, your work, your life), you’re stupid.

Sniff the wind in Cupertino or trust those who claim to have seen top secret documents? Or read the code, developer mailing lists, wikis, planets, or trust those who have? Your choice.

When conformists’ slogan is “think different” (the white collar version of “no fear“), it’s time for revolution.

…

Each time Macworld rolls around I remember, too late, to organize a zombie flash mob for the occasion. Or rather mention the idea to cacophony people.

Wikimedia Foundation is over halfway through a fundraiser. I hope that when you give you leave the following public comment:

I support advertising on Wikipedia.

Evan Prodromou summarizes a completely unwarranted controversy regarding a matching fund (bottom of page):

All fine so far, right? But a small logo in the donations notice — seen by non-logged-in users on every page of every WMF site — was considered by many Wikipedians and other WMF editors as dangerously close to the line on advertising — or over it. There have been several prominent users who have left the project because of it.

I’m not sympathetic with these folks; in fact, I’m in solid opposition. I think that Wikipedia’s huge amount of Web traffic is a resource that the Foundation is squandering. Traffic like Wikipedia’s is worth tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue per year. That’s money that could go to disseminate free (libre and gratis) paperback pocket encyclopedias to millions of schools and millions of children, in their own language, around the world.

It’s irresponsible to abuse that opportunity.

I strongly agree and will repeat exactly what I said during last year’s Wikimedia fund drive:

Wikipedia chief considers taking ads (via Boing Boing) says that at current traffic levels, Wikipedia could generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by running ads. There are strong objections to running ads from the community, but that is a staggering number for a tiny nonprofit, an annual amount that would be surpassed only by the wealthiest foundations. It could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has asked what will be free. Would an annual hundred million dollar budget increase the odds of those predictions? One way to find out before actually trying.

In somewhat related news, Mozilla just reported 2005 financial information, showing 800% revenue growth:

In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. $29.8M of this was associated with the Foundation (both before and after the creation of the Corporation). The bulk of this revenue was related to our search engine relationships, with the remainder coming from a combination of contributions, sales from the Mozilla store, interest income, and other sources. These figures compare with 2003 and 2004 revenues of $2.4M and $5.8M respectively, and reflect the tremendous growth in the popularity of Firefox after its launch in November 2004.

The combined expenses of the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation were approximately $8.2M in 2005, of which approximately $3M was associated with the Foundation. By far the biggest portion of these expenses went to support the large and growing group of people dedicated to creating and promoting Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla open source products and technologies. The rate of expenses increased over the year as new employees came on board. The unspent revenue provides a reserve fund that allows the Mozilla Foundation flexibility and long term stability.

An advertising-fueled Wikimedia Foundation could fund dozens of much needed Mozilla Firefox sized projects. And many Creative Commons (which just successfully completed its much more modest annual funding campaign) initiatives. :)

Update: Welcome Slashdot readers. The major objection to ads on Wikipedia takes two forms:

• Advertising is profane.
• Advertising would compromose Wikipedia’s neutrality.

A common response to the first is that those who don’t like ads can run an ad blocker. Easier still, those who don’t like ads can log in — there’s little reason to display ads to logged in users, who probably generate a tiny fraction of pageviews. But I don’t think either of these responses will satisfy this form of the objection, as it is basically emotional. Some people object to the knowledge that ads exist, even if not experienced personally. I suppose these people don’t use search engines. It’s a wonder they can stand to use the net at all. I discount them completely.

The second is completely unrealistic. How would third party text ads, e.g., via AdSense, compromise neutrality? There’s simply no vector for an advertiser to demand changes and zero reason for Wikipedians to comply. Wikipedia is not a small town newspaper beholden to the local department store, not even close. It isn’t even Slashdot, which as far as I can tell has not been compromised by years of running ads. To people with this objection: show me a community site that has gone astray due to advertiser influence.

Sponsors, “being managed by Wikipedia staff (like in newspaper ads, i.e. no uncontrolled 3rd party feeds)”, as suggested by Kuba Ober, are far more dangerous than third party ads, because then there is a vector between advertiser and someone with power at Wikipedia.

There may be an opportunity for Wikipedia to completely rethink and remake advertising, or merely compete in some fashion with what some are calling Google’s near monopoly, but now it would make tremendous sense to use AdSense or Yahoo! or both — and I suspect Wikipedia could manage to keep a greater share of revenue than a normal web publisher. Rick Yorgason mocked up what AdSense would look like in the place of the current fundraiser’s donation banner.

Slashdot commenter jklooserman summarizes objections from Wikiproject no ads:

1. Wikipedia’s philosophy is non-commercial
2. Ads put at risk Wikipedia’s principle of Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
3. The information that constitutes Wikipedia is wealth for the community

I don’t see “non-commercial” in any form on the Wikimedia Foundation home page. I do see this, in large text:

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

The next line, all bold, asks for help in the form of donations.

Much more money, hundreds of millions, would speed the arrival of that world and fulfillment of that commitment.

As above, there is no realistic scenario for ads undermining neutrality on Wikipedia.

The third objection strikes me as a non-sequitur. In any case, the point of obtaining more resources would be to increase the wealth of the community — of all human beings.

jklooserman also pointed out that there’s a category of Wikipedians who think that the Wikimedia Foundation should use advertising. Add it to your user page if you agree.

Last October I attended BoCon, an “open source arts” conference held in Boise. I enjoyed BoCon, probably as much as any conference since CodeCon. Good mix of talks and performance, great space, and the first-time organizers (Joseph Coffland & co.) pulled it off without a hitch as far as I could tell.

I gave the first talk, covering as much open source, arts, and business related to Creative Commons as possible, slides here.

Boise musician and jack of all trades James Stevens gave a talk on “open source for musicians” based on research done for the talk. I was pleased to see that he discovered most of the major sites and tools I know of and presented them accurately.

Alex Feldman gave a talk on the history of open source, including much pre-history I was not aware of, e.g., a source clearinghouse within NASA called COSMIC, about which I could find nothing on the web. Feldman’s talk made me hope someone is documenting this pre-history.

Caleb Chung and John Sosoka of Ugobe gave talks on Furby, Pleo, and making stuff with electronics that moves generally. Animal pets only have a few generations before they are replaced by artificial pets that perform utilitarian functions in addition to providing companionship and don’t eat or produce feces.

Chung is hyper, and the world is probably a better place for it. “Art is the experimental end of design” is perhaps the most memorable quote from his talk. On the other hand, his slogan for pitching some sort of multimedia institute to Boise State is “I[daho] is for innovation.”

On that note, I have never before encountered the level of boosterism from locals that I did in Boise. They are very convinced that Boise is a place with great promise, reflected in everything from several ethnic restaurants doing well in downtown this decade to white supremicists being sued out of northern Idaho to Californians moving in. Boise does feel like a nice place. Reno sans tawdriness was my initial impression.

Friday and Saturday evenings concluded with music, including nerdcore performances from Beefy, MC Router, and MC Plus+ with DJ Lord Illingworth. They seemed to really enjoy the camaraderie of physical proximity. Whoever did the programming had a very good idea.

On Time magazine’s person of the year, Chris F. Masse writes:

TIME is right on target, but their thematic articles are banal and not engaging. Complete crap.

Agreed on both points.

I am happy to see that in praising dispersed contributors to the net Time took the opportunity to bash “great men” (emphasis added):

The “Great Man” theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006.

Yes, because it is only possible to be “great” through doing great harm. Time:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Yes, it is the anti-authoritarian age. Time:

But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.

Even more of a stretch, I’ll take opportunity to link in another of my pet peeves.

The short person of the year article also references directly or indirectly Wikipedia, blogs, open source, peer production, and free culture.

…

I occasionally wonder what it would feel like to read a mass media article and more or less think “right on!” Now that I have encountered such an article, should I enjoy it, reconsider what makes me agree, considering the source, or reconsider my assumption that Time and similar are emotionalized diarrhea magazines rather than news magazines, just like TV?

Eben Moglen’s talk Software and Community in the Early 21st Century expresses an aspiration and belief that as nonrivalrous components of the economy become more important peer production can produce radical equality where previous movements with the same ostensible aims have used violence, killed many people, and failed. An excerpt (transcript), emphasis added:

Ownership of software as a way of producing software for general consumption is going out, for economic reasons. But as I said, the economic insight that we can get from watching the transition from steel to software is far less important than the moral analysis of the situation. The moral analysis of the situation presents where we are now as, if I may borrow a phrase, a singularity in human affairs.

One of the grave problems of human inequality for everyone who has attempted to ameliorate the problem of human inequality – which is most thinkers about the morality of social life – the greatest problem of human inequality is the extraordinary difficulty in prising wealth away from the rich to give it to the poor, without employing levels of coercion or violence which are themselves utterly corrosive to social progress. And repeatedly in the course of the history of our human societies, well-intentioned, enormously determined and courageous people willing to sacrifice their lives for an improvement in the equality of human life have had to face that problem. We cannot make meaningful redistribution fast enough to maintain momentum politically without applying levels of coercion or violence which will destroy what we are attempting. And again and again, as Isaiah Berlin and other late 20th century political theorists pointed out, through hubris, through arrogance, through romanticism, through self-deception, parties seeking permanent human benefit and an increase in the equality of human beings have failed that test and watched as their movements of liberation spiraled downward from the poison of excess coercion.

We do not have to do that anymore.

The gate that has held the movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by software, more and more of the value in society becomes non-rivalrous: it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if it is held by a few.

This reminds of a 1992 Richard Stallman quote:

If we don’t want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate, not one who is successful at taking from others.

There’s much to debate concerning the speed, scope, and desirability of political and social change led by peer production. However, I find observations like the above rather satisfying and I believe deeply underappreciated. Peer production will not lead to absolute equality, but it does increase the scope for equality, freedom, autonomy, and decrease the need for violence or threats thereof. In other words, liberal ends achieved through liberal means, for a very broad range of meanings of “liberal.”

This I find more compelling than discussion of liberal/libertarian fusionism embedded deeply in the context of current U.S. jurisdiction politics. But perhaps my thought is too embedded in the free software context, and too cynical about power politics.

Moglen talk via Slashdot, also blogged at Creative Commons. Stallman quote via Dan Connolly.