Archive for 2014

Ubuntu Ten

Thursday, October 23rd, 2014

Retrospective on 10 years of Ubuntu (LWN discussion). I ran Ubuntu on my main computer from 2005 to 2011. I was happy to see Ubuntu become a “juggernaut” and I think like many hoped for it to become mainstream, largely indicated by major vendor preinstallation. The high point for me, which I seem to have never blogged about, was in 2007 purchasing a very well priced Dell 1420n with Ubuntu preinstalled.

But the juggernaut stalled at the top of the desktop GNU/Linux distribution heap, which isn’t very high. Although people have had various complaints about Ubuntu and Canonical Ltd., as I’ve written before my overriding disappointment is that they haven’t been much more successful. There are a couple tiny vendors that focus exclusively or primarily on shipping Ubuntu-preinstalled consumer hardware, and Dell or another major vendor occasionally offers something — Dell has had a developer edition Ubuntu preinstall for a couple years, usually substantially out of date, as the current offering is now.

Canonical seems to have followed Red Hat and others in largely becoming an enterprise/cloud servicing company, though apparently they’re still working on an Ubuntu flavor for mobile devices (and I haven’t followed, but I imagine that Red Hat still does some valuable engineering for the desktop). I wish both companies ever more success in these ventures — more huge companies doing only or almost only open source are badly needed, even imperfect ones.

For Ubuntu fans, this seems like a fine time to ask why it hasn’t been even more successful. Why hasn’t it achieved consistent and competitive mainstream vendor distribution? How much, if any blame can be laid at Canonical’s stumbles with respect to free/open source software? It seems to me that a number of Canonical products would have been much more likely to be dominante had they been open source from the beginning (Launchpad, Ubuntu One) or not required a Contributor License Agreement (bzr, Upstart, Mir), would not have alienated a portion of the free/open source software community, and that the world would overall be a better place had most of those products won — the categories of the first two remain dominated by proprietary services, and the latter three might have gained widespread adoption sooner than the things that eventually did or will probably win (git, systemd, wayland). But taking a step back, it’s really hard to see how these stumbles (that’s again from an outsider free/open source perspective; maybe they are still seen as having been the right moves at the time inside Canonical; I just don’t know) might have contributed in a major way to lack of mainstream success. Had the stumbles been avoided, perhaps some engineering resources would have been better allocated or increased, but unless reallocated with perfect hindsight as to what the technical obstacles to mainstream adoption were — an impossibility — I doubt they made much of a difference. What about alientation of a portion of the free/open source community? Conceivably had they (we) been more enthusiastic, more consumer lobbying/demand for Ubuntu preinstalls would have occurred, and tipped a balance — but that seems like wishful thinking, requiring a level of perfect organizing of GNU/Linux fan consumer demand that nobody has achieved. I’d love to believe that had Canonical stuck closer to a pure free/open source software path, it’d have achieved greater mainstream success, but I just don’t see much of a causal link. What are the more likely causes? I’d love to read an informed analysis.

For Ubuntu detractors, this seems like a fine time to ask why Ubuntu has been a juggernaut relative to your preferred GNU/Linux distribution. If you’re angry at Canonical, I suggest your anger is misdirected — you should be angry instead that your preferred distribution hasn’t managed to do marketing and distribution as well as it needed to, on its own terms — and figure out why that is. Better yet, form and execute on a plan to achieve the mainstream success that Ubuntu hasn’t. Otherwise in all likelihood it’s an Android and ChromeOS (and huge Windows legacy, with some Apple stuff in between) world for a long time to come. I’d love to read a feasible plan!

Posted in Computers, Economics, Open Services, Open Source, Peeves | 5 Comments »

Global Columbus/Columbia/Colombia/Colón rename

Monday, October 13th, 2014

Today is not World IP Day (nor that one), which is August 9. Some celebrate today as IP Day counter to Columbus Day, but that puts too much emphasis on Columbus as a singular actor/great man/abominable person with respect to all pre-1492 western hemisphere populations. Had Columbus never been born, or his first voyage swallowed by the Atlantic before reaching land, it is hard to imagine the result for said populations over the next centuries being any different — merciless conquest by eastern hemisphere humans and microbes. So celebrate World IP Day on August 9, and rub out Columbus Day because he was a murderer and slaver. Criminal procedures, not clash of civilizations ones, are to be recommended for Columbus, as they are for any modern day terrorist.

What should this city and county in Ohio be renamed to? Photo: Derek Jensen, Public Domain

But one day is only a beginning. Wikipedia:

Veneration of Columbus in America dates back to colonial times. The name Columbia for “America” first appeared in a 1738 weekly publication of the debates of the British Parliament. The use of Columbus as a founding figure of New World nations and the use of the word “Columbia”, or simply the name “Columbus”, spread rapidly after the American Revolution. Columbus’ name was given to the federal capital of the United States (District of Columbia), the capital cities of two U.S. states (Ohio and South Carolina), and the Columbia River. Outside the United States the name was used in 1819 for the Gran Colombia, a precursor of the modern Republic of Colombia. Numerous cities, towns, counties, streets, and plazas (called Plaza Colón or Plaza de Colón throughout Latin America and Spain) have been named after him. A candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church in 1866, celebration of Columbus’ legacy perhaps reached a zenith in 1892 with the 400th anniversary of his first arrival in the Americas. Monuments to Columbus like the Columbian Exposition in Chicago and Columbus Circle in New York City were erected throughout the United States and Latin America extolling him.

There should be no veneration or extolling of slave owners. Everything named after Columbus (fun fact: Colombo, the city in Sri Lanka, is not) should be renamed, along with everything named after Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Pierce, Buchanan, Johnson, Grant, Penn, Franklin, Houston, Austin, and many more.

Posted in Peeves, Politics | No Comments »

wiki↔journal

Thursday, October 2nd, 2014

The first wiki[pedia]2journal article has been published: Dengue fever Wikipedia article, peer-reviewed version (PDF). Modern medicine comes online: How putting Wikipedia articles through a medical journal’s traditional process can put free, reliable information into as many hands as possible is the accompanying editorial (emphasis added):

As a source of clinical information, how does Wikipedia differ from UpToDate or, for that matter, a textbook or scholarly journal? Wikipedia lacks three main things. First, a single responsible author, typically with a recognized academic affiliation, who acts as guarantor of the integrity of the work. Second, the careful eye of a trained editorial team, attuned to publication ethics, who ensure consistency and accuracy through the many iterations of an article from submission to publication. Third, formal peer review by at least one, and often many, experts who point out conflicts, errors, redundancies, or gaps. These form an accepted ground from which publication decisions can be made with confidence.

In this issue of Open Medicine, we are pleased to publish the first formally peer-reviewed and edited Wikipedia article. The clinical topic is dengue fever. It has been submitted by the author who has made the most changes, and who has designated 3 others who contributed most meaningfully. It has been peer reviewed by international experts in infectious disease, and by a series of editors at Open Medicine. It has been copy-edited and proofread; once published, it will be indexed in MEDLINE. Although by the time this editorial is read the Wikipedia article will have changed many times, there will be a link on the Wikipedia page that can take the viewer back to the peer-reviewed and published piece on the Open Medicine website. In a year’s time, the most responsible author will submit the changed piece to an indexed journal, so it can move through the same editorial process and continue to function as a valid, reliable, and evolving free and complete reference for everyone in the world. Although there may be a need for shorter, more focused clinical articles published elsewhere as this one expands, it is anticipated that the Wikipedia page on dengue will be a reference against which all others can be compared. While it might be decades before we see an end to dengue, perhaps the time and money saved on exhaustive, expensive, and redundant searches about what yet needs to be done will let us see that end sooner.

I love that this is taking Wikipedia and commons-based peer production into a challenging product area, which if wildly successful, could directly challenge and ultimately destroy the proprietary competition. The editorial notes:

Some institutions pay UpToDate hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for that sense of security. This has allowed Wolters Kluwer, the owners of UpToDate, to accrue annual revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars and to forecast continued double-digit growth as “market conditions for print journals and books … remain soft.”

See the WikiProject Medicine collaborative publication page for more background on the process and future developments. Note at least 7 articles have been published in journal2wiki[pedia] fashion, see PLOS Computational Biology and corresponding Wikipedia articles. Ideally these 2 methods would converge on wiki↔journal, as the emphasized portion of the quote above seems to indicate.

Peer review of Wikipedia articles and publication in another venue in theory could minimize dependencies and maximize mutual benefit between expert authoring (which has historically failed in the wiki context, see Nupedia and Citizendium) and mass collaboration (see challenges noted by editorial above). But one such article only demonstrates the concept; we’ll see whether it becomes an important method, let alone market dominating one.


…

One small but embarrassing obstacle to wiki↔journal is license incompatibility. PLOS journals use CC-BY-4.0 (donor-only relative to following; the version isn’t important for this one) and Wikipedia CC-BY-SA-3.0 (recipient-only relative to previous…and following) and Open Medicine CC-BY-SA-2.5-Canada (donor-only relative to the immediately previous) — meaning if all contributors to the Dengue fever Wikipedia article did not sign off, the journal version is technically not in compliance with the upstream license. Clearly nobody should care about this second issue, except for license stewards, who should mitigate the problem going forward: all previous versions (2.0 or greater due to lack of a “later versions” provision in 1.0) of CC-BY-SA should be added to CC-BY-SA-4.0’s compatibility list, allowing contributions to go both ways. The first issue unfortunately cannot be addressed within the framework of current licenses (bidirectional use could be avoided, or contributors could all sign off, either of which would be outside the license framework).

…

Daniel Mietchen (who is a contributor to the aforementioned journal2wiki effort, and just about everything else relating to Wikipedia and Open Access) has another version of his proposal to open up research funding proposals up at the Knight News Challenge: Libraries site. Applaud and comment there if you like, as I do (endorsement of previous version).

…

Near the beginning of the above editorial:

New evidence pours in to the tune of 12 systematic reviews per day, and accumulating the information and then deciding how to incorporate it into one’s practice is an almost impossible task. A study published in BMJ showed that if one hoped to take account of all that has been published in the relatively small discipline of echocardiography, it would take 5 years of constant reading—by which point the reader would be a year behind.

A similar avalanche of publishing can be found in any academic discipline. It is conceivable that copyright helps, providing an incentive for services like UpToDate. My guess is that it gets in the way, both by propping up arrangements oriented toward pumping out individual articles, and by putting up barriers (the public license incompatibility mentioned above is inconsequential compared to the paywalled, umitigated copyright, and/or PDF-only case which dominates) to collaborative — human and machine — distillation of the states of the art. As I wrote about entertainment, do not pay copyright holders, for a good future.

Posted in Commons, Creative Commons, Open Access, Peeves, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »

Do not pay copyright holders, for a good future

Sunday, September 28th, 2014

The Unrepentant Bootlegger profiles Hana Beshara, a founder of NinjaVideo, who spent 16 months in prison for defying censorship. Cut to the logic of censorship (emphasis added):

People watch more paid, legal content than ever, but they also continue to download huge amounts of illegal content. “Piracy is putting pressure on antiquated business models, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” said Brett Danaher, an economics professor at Wellesley College who studies Internet piracy. “But the prevalence of piracy shows that people are growing up in a culture of free, and that is not good for the future of entertainment, either.”

That we should be concerned for the future of entertainment, at all, is itself bizarre. Freedom and equality should absolutely trump incentivizing a surfeit of entertainment. If we must choose between spectacle and communications, spectacle should be destroyed. We do not need to choose. We can destroy the censorship regime, but entertainment, including for better or worse some of the spectacle variety, will continue to exist and be produced in vastly greater quantities and quality than it is feasible for anyone to even begin to fully appreciate in a lifetime. If the spectacle portion does not include projects with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, that is OK — we will love what culture does get produced, as that love and cultural relevance is largely based on being immersed in the culture that exists — we love the culture we’re in. If that culture is less dominated by U.S.-based high investment productions, so much the better for the U.S. and the world.

Another policy significant quote from the article:

Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation […] said the law should shift its focus to making sure that copyright holders are paid for their work, rather than trying to stymie how people gain access to it. […] He suggested a legal framework to retire the “exclusive rights” aspect of copyright law that requires permission to publish — and that allows copyright holders to seek exorbitant damages from infringers — and move toward a system that requires sites and people who make money from another’s work to share any profits. Solutions like these, Mr. Eckersley says, would create different priorities that go beyond chasing small-time pirates like Ms. Beshara and her colleagues.

No, copyright holders should not be paid. Any payment by virtue of holding copyright only makes the censorship regime self-perpetuating. Funding of entertainment should be completely decoupled from the censorship regime of copyright. I understand the appeal of paid speech over permissioned speech (of course a tax is usually better than a prohibition, and that applies to privatized regimes as well), but neither is free speech. The paid speech approach would indeed create priorities that go beyond chasing small-time pirates (note Beshara earned $210k over 3 years; note also existing paid speech regimes which involve monitoring and shakedown of small-time restaurants) — it would invite further pervasive and destructive surveillance of communications in the interest of ensuring copyright holders get paid. It is appalling that EFF is still willing to invite sacrifice of everything they fight for at the alter of paying copyright holders. I don’t blame the EFF specifically; this just shows how deeply intellectual parasitism has burrowed in general. Intellectual parasites (which includes most reformers, including me often) need to fully shift to being commons policy advocates (and scholars).

Regarding people and projects like Hana Beshara and NinjaVideo, I’m ambivalent. Performing unpaid marketing and price discrimination services for the censorship industry is distasteful and harmful. But sharing culture (putting the regime aside) is tasteful and helpful. There is too little known about informal circulations and their effects, this lack of knowledge itself a collateral damage of the regime (compare being able to study cultural flows and surveillance required for paid speech; they are of different orders) and far, far, far too little direct competition for the regime.

Posted in Commons, Economics, Free Speech, Inequality Promotion, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Politics | 3 Comments »

The jobs case for a police state

Saturday, September 13th, 2014

Partly to make up for not blogging on the issue in awhile (category), I recommend the Vox story/interview on the case for open borders. If a prediction can be sterile, sanguine, and desperate at one time, this is it:

My longer-run prediction is the world will have open borders once it doesn’t make much difference anymore. Once development has happened almost everywhere, and there are virtually no desperate backwaters left, that’s when countries will finally relent and say, “Fine. You can come here if you want,” and then they’ll open the borders, and then there will be very little migration. To me, a big point of open borders is just to fast forward to the world of the future where everyone can enjoy a First-World standard of living rather than making people wait 100 years.

I agree with the desperate part (waiting condemns billions to poverty and tyranny). But a big point of the international apartheid system to to ensure that there will always be desperate backwaters. Even if virtually everyone reaches a level of wealth at which migration declines, there will be disasters. Another big point of restrictions on movement, work, and living, particularly at borders but increasingly everywhere, is to impose on everyone (especially but not only migrants) police state controls/thug checkpoints.

My prediction (in US-centric terms, but applicable elsewhere) is that in 100 years ICE will be evaluated to have had far greater negative impact than the NSA, if they aren’t running things wholly that is. I predict this metastasizing apartheid enforcement apparatus will make justice impossible, even in the face of a massive shift in elite opinion (note mini-refutation) — like the drug war, not like marriage equality.

Regarding the title of this post: seriously, what could be politically better than creating jobs for citizens that protect jobs for citizens! It is surprising we don’t already have an ICE dictatorship. We don’t because the cost of regulation is too high. But it is coming down. Monitoring of all movement and required third party (ICE) approval of all economic arrangements are both getting cheaper every day.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Politics, Refutation | 2 Comments »

Proprietary profitability as a key metric for open access and open source

Thursday, August 7th, 2014

Glyn Moody in Beyond Open Standards and Open Access:

Like open source, open access is definitely winning, even if there is some desperate rearguard action by the publishers, who are trying to protect their astonishing profit margins – typically 30-40%.

No doubt open source and open access have progressed, but the competition maintaining astonishing profit margins contradicts “definitely winning.” For publishing, see Elsevier, £0.8b profit on £2.1b revenue, and others. For software most pertinent to Moody’s post (concerning Open Document Format), see Microsoft’s business division, $16b profit on $24b revenue.

These profits coupled with the slow relative progress of open source and open access give proprietary vendors huge range to not only take “desperate rearguard action” but also to create new products and forms of lock-in with which the commons is continually playing catch-up.

We know what the commons “definitely winning” looks like — Linux (server software) and Wikipedia (encyclopedias) — and it includes proprietary vendor profit margins being crushed, most going out of business, and those remaining transitioning to service lines of business less predicated on privatized censorship.

When libraries begin mass cancellation of toll access journal subscriptions and organizations of all sorts cancel Microsoft, Adobe, and similar software subscriptions, then we can consider whether open access and open source are definitely winning. Until then the answer is definitely no.

As for what’s next for open standards and open access (Moody suggests further ODF mandates, which would be fine), the obvious answer is open source. It’s what allows realization of the promise of open standards, and the cancellation of Microsoft subscriptions. It’s also what’s next for academic publishing and everything else — what is not software will be obsolete — though cancellation of those toll access subscriptions is going to require going back to basics.

…

Free/open/commons advocates should consider destruction of proprietary competition profitability a key aim and metric of success or lack thereof, for both open products and policy. This metric has several benefits:

  • Indicates relative progress. Any non-moribund project/movement can make seeming progress, blind to different and potentially much greater progress by competition.
  • Implicates role of knowledge economy and policy in increasing or decreasing equality (of income and wealth, not just access).
  • Hard numbers, data readily available.
  • It’s reasonable to multiply destruction of proprietary profits when characterizing gains (so as to include decrease in deadweight loss).

Posted in Commons, Creative Commons, Economics, Inequality Promotion, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Access, Open Source, Politics, Wikipedia | 1 Comment »

Generative acknowledgement

Thursday, July 31st, 2014

Robin Sloan, The secret of Minecraft: And its challenge to the rest of us

In the 2010s and beyond, it is not the case that every cultural product ought to be a generative, networked system.

It is, I believe, the case that all the really important ones will be.

Nathan Matias, Designing Acknowledgement on the Web:

A system which acknowledges the beauty of cooperative relationships can’t be based on the impersonal idea of hypertext or the egocentric notion of authorship. It can’t rely on licenses to threaten people into acknowledging each other.

Via 1 2 3 and confirmation bias about which I can’t think of anything smart to say, so I’ll include a fun word: contextomy. Neither of the above reaches that bar, but I’ll try harder next time.

Posts on the ought of generative, networked production and intellectual parasite debasement of acknowledgement.

Posted in Commons, Creative Commons, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Public Domain | 1 Comment »

LegacyOffice?

Wednesday, July 30th, 2014

LibreOffice 4.3 announcement, release notes with new feature screenshots, developer perspective. Perhaps most useful, a feature comparison of LibreOffice 4.3 and Microsoft Office 2013.

Overall a great six month release. Coming early next year: 4.4.

Steady progress is also being made on policy. “The default format for saving [UK] government documents must be Open Document Format (ODF)” — the genuinely open standard used by LibreOffice; Glyn Moody has a good writeup. I occasionally see news of large organizations migrating to LibreOffice, most recently the city of Tolouse. Hopefully many more will manage to escape “effective captivity” to a single vendor (Glyn Moody for that story too).

(My take on the broad importance of open policy and software adoption.)

Also, recent news of work on a version of LibreOffice for Android. But nothing on LibreOffice Online (in a web browser) which as far as I can tell remains a prototype. WebODF is an independent implementation of ODF viewing and editing in browser. Any of these probably require lots of work to be as effective of a collaboration solution as Google Docs — much of the work outside the editing software, e.g. integration with “sharing” mechanisms (e.g., WebODF and ownCloud) and ready availability of deployments of those mechanisms (Sandstorm is promising recent work on deployment, especially security).

From what I observe, Google Docs has largely displaced (except for large or heavily formatted for print or facsimile) Microsoft Office, though I guess that’s not the case in large organizations with internal sharing mechanisms. I suspect Google Docs (especially spreadsheets) has also expanded the use of “office” software, in part replacing wiki use cases. Is there any reason to think that free/open source software isn’t as far behind now as it was in 2000 before the open source release of OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice’s predecessor?

Still, I consider LibreOffice one of the most important free software projects. I expect it will continue to be developed and used on millions of “legacy” desktops for decades after captivity to Microsoft is long past, indeed after desktop versions of Microsoft Office long EoL’d. Hopefully LibreOffice’s strong community, development, governance, and momentum (all vastly improved over OpenOffice.org) in combination with open policy work (almost non-existent in 2000) and other projects will obtain much better than even this valuable result.

Posted in Open Services, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics | 2 Comments »

Edit Oakland wiki events

Wednesday, July 9th, 2014

Saturday, July 12, there’s a big open streets event in my obscure flats neighborhood where Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley meet. A small stretch of San Pablo Avenue will be closed to cars (sadly not only human-driven cars, which would momentarily meet my suggestion). E’ville Eye has a comprehensive post about the event and its origins.

There will be an Oakland Urban Paths walk in the neighborhood during the event, during which obscurities will be related. Usually these walks are in locations with more obvious scenery (hills/stairs) and historical landmarks; I’m looking forward to seeing how they address Golden Gate. Last month they walked between West Oakland and downtown, a historic and potentially beautiful route that currently crosses 980 twice — edit it out!

Monday, July 14 18:00-19:30 there’s a follow-on event at the Golden Gate Branch Library — an OaklandWiki edit party. I haven’t edited Oakland Wiki much yet, but I like the concept. It is one of many LocalWikis, which relative to MediaWiki and Wikipedia have very few features or rules. This ought greatly lower the barrier to many more people contributing information pertinent to their local situation; perhaps someone is researching that? I’ve used the OaklandWiki to look up sources for Wikipedia articles related to Oakland and have noticed several free images uploaded to OaklandWiki that would be useful on Wikipedia.

Saturday, July 19 11:00-16:00 there’s a Wikipedia edit event at Impact Hub in Oakland and online: WikiProject Open Barn Raising 2014 which aims to improve Wikipedia articles about open education — a very broad and somewhat recursive (Wikipedia is an “open educational resource”, though singular doesn’t do it justice, unless perhaps made singular the open educational resource, but that would be an overstatement). If you’re interested in OER, Open Access, open policy and related tools and organizations, or would like to learn about those things and about editing Wikipedia, please participate!

Tangentially, OpenHatch (my endorsement) got a nice writeup of its Open Source Comes to Campus events at WIRED. I view these as conceptually similar to introduction to Wiki[pedia] editing events — all aim to create a welcoming space for newcomers to dive into participating in commons-based peer production — good for learning, careers, communities, and society.

Posted in Commons, Creative Commons, Oakland, Open Access, Open Source, OpenHatch, Politics, Wikipedia | 2 Comments »

Let US join EU

Friday, July 4th, 2014

Enough past symbolism. U.S. Independence Day is also a good day to reflect on the paramount governance challenges of the present and near future. The U.S. War of Independence helped usher out the era of kings. Now is time to hasten the demise of the nation-state, born of the previous era.

One non-revolutionary (violent revolution, of whatever intention, is bad as it enables trolls) path forward is the creation and expansion of legitimately democratic super-states which submerge joining nation-states: the legitimate constituents are individual citizens, not the states themselves (contrast with the United Nations). The European Union is the only such super-state, and perhaps should be the only one, eventually submerging all current nation-states.

Posted in Peeves, Politics | 9 Comments »

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