Post Open Source

Your public domain day

Saturday, January 1st, 2011

January 1 is public domain day, where in many parts of the world, some old works become free of copyright restrictions. In the U.S. no works will become so free due to the passing of time until 2019 — assuming the duration of copyright restriction is not again retroactively extended before then.

Fortunately you can add your contemporary works to the public domain right now, using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. I try to put all of my “creations” into the public domain. See the footer of this post’s original location for a deployment example.

For software, using the Unlicense may be more familiar: copy the unlicense text into a file called COPYING, LICENSE, or UNLICENSE in your source tree — see the site.

One nice thing about well-crafted public domain dedications is that there ought be no interoperability problems among them, so there can be innovation (branding, legal language, community, supporting infrastructure) that would be harmful among more restrictive instruments. That’s not to say public domain instrument proliferation ought be encouraged willy-nilly — the instruments have to be well-crafted and users shouldn’t have to evaluate an infinite variety of them.

None of this is to deny that every single day ought see massive growth of the public domain — it should be the default — nor that copyleft licenses are useful tools for getting there in the long term and mitigating some damage in the short term. Eventually I will speculate on the tradeoffs between using public domain dedications and copyleft licenses for contemporary works, but for now, today is public domain day!

This post is an expansion of two conversations on identi.ca.

Addendum: I further recommend Lucas Gonze’s recent post Why I put my work into the public domain.

Another: See Arto Bendiken’s The Unlicense: The First Year in Review.

Posted in Creative Commons, Open Source, Public Domain | 3 Comments »

Collaborative Futures 5

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

We finished the text of Collaborative Futures on the book sprint’s fifth day and I added yet another chapter intended for the “future” section. This one may be the oddest in the whole book. You have to remember that I have a bit of an appreciation of leftish verbiage in the service of free software and nearby, and seeing the opportunity to also bundle an against international apartheid rant … I ran with it. Copied below.

I’ll post more about the book’s contents, the sprint, and the Booki software later (but I can’t help noting now that I’m sad about not getting to a chapter on WikiNature). For now no new observations other than that Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals put together a really good group of people for the sprint. I enjoyed working with all of them tremendously and hope to do so again in some form. And thanks to Transmediale for hosting. And sad that I couldn’t stay in Berlin longer for Transmediale proper, in particular the Charlemagne Palestine concerts.

Check out Mushon Zer-Aviv’s great sprint finish writeup.

Solidarity

There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. That is a choice we face as a society. The way we develop will, in significant measure, depend on choices we make in the next decade or so.

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

Postnationalism

Catherine Frost, in her 2006 paper Internet Galaxy Meets Postnational Constellation: Prospects for Political Solidarity After the Internet evaluates the prospects for the emergence of postnational solidarities abetted by Internet communications leading to a change in the political order in which the responsibilities of the nation state are joined by other entities. Frost does not enumerate the possible entities, but surely they include supernational, transnational, international, and global in scope and many different forms, not limited to the familiar democratic and corporate.

The verdict? Characteristics such as anonymity, agnosticism to human fatalities and questionable potential for democratic engagement make it improbable that postnational solidarities with political salience will emerge from the Internet — anytime soon. However, Frost acknowledges that we could be looking in the wrong places, such as the dominant English-language web. Marginalized groups could find the Internet a more compelling venue for creating new solidarities. And this:

Yet we know that when things change in a digital age, they change fast. The future for political solidarity is not a simple thing to discern, but it will undoubtedly be an outcome of the practices and experiences we are now developing.

Could the collaboration mechanisms discussed in this book aid the formation of politically salient postnational solidarities? Significant usurpation of responsibilities of the nation state seems unlikely soon. Yet this does not bar the formation of communities that contest with the nation state for intensity of loyalty, in particular when their own collaboration is threatened by a nation state. As an example we can see global responses from free software developers and bloggers to software patents and censorship in single jurisdictions.

If political solidarities could arise from the collaborative work and threats to it, then collaboration might alter the power relations of work. Both globally and between worker and employer — at least incrementally.

Free Labor

Trade in goods between jurisdictions has become less restricted over the last half century — tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade have been greatly reduced. Capital flows have greatly increased.

While travel costs have decreased drastically, in theory giving any worker the ability to work wherever pay (or other desirable quality) is highest, in fact workers are not permitted the freedom that has been given traders and capitalists. Workers in jurisdictions with less opportunity are as locked into politically institutionalized underemployment and poverty as were non-whites in Apartheid South Africa, while the populations of wealthy jurisdiction are as much privileged as whites in the same milieu.

What does this have to do with collaboration? This system of labor is immobilized by politically determined discrimination. It is not likely this system will change without the formation of new postnational orders. However, it is conceivable that as collaboration becomes more economically important — as an increasing share of wealth is created via distributed collaboration — the inequalities of the current sytem could be mitigated. And that is simply because distributed collaboration does not require physical movement across borders.

Workers in privileged jurisdictions will object — do object — to competition from those born into less privilege. As did white workers to competition from blacks during the consolidation of Apartheid. However, it is also possible that open collaboration could alter relationships between some workers and employers in the workers’ favor both in local and global markets.

Control of the means of production

Open collaboration changes which activities are more efficient inside or outside of a firm. Could the power of workers relative to firms also be altered?

Intellectual property rights prevent mobility of employees in so forth that their knowledge are locked in in a proprietary standard that is owned by the employer. This factor is all the more important since most of the tools that programmers are working with are available as cheap consumer goods (computers, etc.). The company holds no advantage over the worker in providing these facilities (in comparison to the blue-collar operator referred to above whose knowledge is bound to the Fordist machine park). When the source code is closed behind copyrights and patents, however, large sums of money is required to access the software tools. In this way, the owner/firm gains the edge back over the labourer/programmer.

This is were GPL comes in. The free license levels the playing field by ensuring that everyone has equal access to the source code. Or, putting it in Marxist-sounding terms, through free licenses the means of production are handed back to labour. […] By publishing software under free licences, the individual hacker is not merely improving his own reputation and employment prospects, as has been pointed out by Lerner and Tirole. He also contributes in establishing a labour market where the rules of the game are completely different, for him and for everyone else in his trade. It remains to be seen if this translates into better working conditions,higher salaries and other benefits associated with trade unions. At least theoretically the case is strong that this is the case. I got the idea from reading Glyn Moody’s study of the FOSS development model, where he states: “Because the ‘product’ is open source, and freely available, businesses must necessarily be based around a different kind of scarcity: the skills of the people who write and service that software.” (Moody, 2001, p.248) In other words, when the source code is made available to everyone under the GPL, the only thing that remains scarce is the skills needed to employ the software tools productively. Hence, the programmer gets an edge over the employer when they are bargaining over salary and working conditions.

It bears to be stressed that my reasoning needs to be substantiated with empirical data. Comparative research between employed free software programmers and those who work with proprietary software is required. Such a comparison must not focus exclusively on monetary aspects. As important is the subjective side of programming, for instance that hackers report that they are having more fun when participating in free software projects than they work with proprietary software (Lakhani & Wolf, 2005). Neither do I believe that this is the only explanation to why hackers use GPL. No less important are the concerns about civil liberties and the anti-authoritarian ethos within the hacker subculture. In sum, hackers are a much too heterogeneous bunch for them all to be included under a single explanation. But I dare to say that the labour perspective deserves more attention than it has been given by popular and scholarly critics of intellectual property till now. Both hackers and academic writers tend to formulate their critique against intellectual property law from a consumer rights horison and borrow arguments from a liberal, political tradition. There are, of course, noteworthy exceptions. People like Slavoj Zizek and Richard Barbrook have reacted against the liberal ideology implicit in much talk about the Internet by courting the revolutionary rhetoric of the Second International instead. Their ideas are original and eye-catching and often full of insight. Nevertheless, their rhetoric sounds oddly out of place when applied to pragmatic hackers. Perhaps advocates of free sotftware would do better to look for a counter-weight to liberalism in the reformist branch of the labour movement, i.e. in trade unionism. The ideals of free software is congruent with the vision laid down in the “Technology Bill of Rights”, written in 1981 by the International Association of Machinists:

”The new automation technologies and the sciences that underlie them are the product of a world-wide, centuries-long accumulation of knowledge. Accordingly, working people and their communities have a right to share in the decisions about, and the gains from, new technology” (Shaiken, 1986, p.272).

Johan Söderberg, Hackers GNUnited!, CC BY-SA, http://freebeer.fscons.org

Perhaps open collaboration can only be expected to slightly tip the balance of power between workers and employers and change measured wages and working conditions very little. However, it is conceivable, if fanciful, that control of the means of production could lead to a feeling of autonomy that empowers further action outside of the market.

Autonomous individuals and communities

Free Software and related methodologies can give individuals autonomy in their technology environments. It might also give individuals a measure of additional autonomy in the market (or increased ability to stand outside it). This is how Free and Open Source Software is almost always characterized, when it is described in terms of freedom or autonomy — giving individual users freedom, or allowing organizations to not be held ransom to proprietary licenses.

However, communities that exist outside of the market and state obtain a much greater autonomy. These communities have no need for the freedoms discussed above, even if individual community members do. There have always been such communities, but they did not possess the ability to use open collaboration to produce wealth that significantly competes, even supplants, market production. This ability makes these autonomous organizations newly salient.

Furthermore, these autonomous communities (Debian and Wikipedia are the most obvious examples) are pushing new frontiers of governance necessary to scale their collaborative production. Knowledge gained in this process could inform and inspire other communities that could become reinvigorated and more effective through the implementation of open collaboration, including community governance. Such communities could even produce postnational solidarities, especially when attacked.

Do we know how to get from here to there? No. But only through experimentation will we find out. If a more collaborative future is possible, obtaining it depends on the choices we make today.

Posted in Apartheid, Blogs, Books, Economics, Open Source, Patents, Politics | 3 Comments »

Collaborative Futures 2

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Day 2 of the Collaborative Futures book sprint saw the writing of a number of chapters and the creation of a much more fleshed out table of contents. I spent too much time interrupted by other work and threading together a chapter (feels more like a long blog post) on “Other People’s Computers” from old sources and the theme of supporting collaboration. The current draft is pasted below because that’s easier than extracting links to sources.

Another tangential observation about the group: I noted a fair amount of hostility toward Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Mediawiki on the notion that they have effectively sucked the air out of other potential projects and models of collaboration, even other wiki software. Of course I am a huge fan of Wikipedia — I think its centralization has allowed it to scale in a way not possible otherwise — it has made the community-centric collaboration pie bigger — and we are very fortunate that such a dominant service has gotten so much right, at least from a freedom perspective. However, the underlying criticism is not without merit, and I tried to incorporate a productive and very brief version of it into the draft.

Also see Mushon Zer-Aviv’s entertaining post on day 2.

Other People’s Computers

Partly because they’re location-transparent and web-integrated, browser apps support social interaction more easily than desktop apps.

Kragen Sitaker, “What’s wrong with HTTP”, http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-November/000841.html

Much of what we call collaboration occurs on web sites (more generally, software services), particularly collaboration among many distributed users. Direct support for collaboration, and more broadly for social features, is simply easier in a centralized context. It is possible to imagine a decentralized Wikipedia or Facebook, but building such services with sufficient ease of use, features, and robustness to challenge centralized web sites is a very difficult challenge.

Why does this matter? The web is great for collaboration, let’s celebrate that! However, making it relatively easy for people to work together in the specific way offered by a web site owner is a rather impoverished vision of what the web (or more generally, digital networks) could enable, just as merely allowing people to run programs on their computers in the way program authors intended is an impoverished vision of personal computing.

Free software allows users control their own computing and to help other users by retaining the ability to run, modify, and share software for any purpose. Whether the value of this autonomy is primarily ethical, as often framed by advocates of the term free software, or primarily practical, as often framed by advocates of the term open source, any threat to these freedoms has to be of deep concern to anyone interested in the future of collaboration, both in terms what collaborations are possible and what interests control and benefit from those collaborations.

Web sites and special-purpose hardware […] do not give me the same freedoms general-purpose computers do. If the trend were to continue to the extent the pundits project, more and more of what I do today with my computer will be done by special-purpose things and remote servers.

What does freedom of software mean in such an environment? Surely it’s not wrong to run a Web site without offering my software and databases for download. (Even if it were, it might not be feasible for most people to download them. IBM’s patent server has a many-terabyte database behind it.)

I believe that software — open-source software, in particular — has the potential to give individuals significantly more control over their own lives, because it consists of ideas, not people, places, or things. The trend toward special-purpose devices and remote servers could reverse that.

Kragen Sitaker, “people, places, things, and ideas “, http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-January/000322.html

What are the prospects and strategies for keeping the benefits of free software in an age of collaboration mediated by software services? One strategy, argued for in “The equivalent of free software for online services” by Kragen Sitaker (see http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-July/000818.html), is that centralized services need to be re-implemented as peer-to-peer services that can be run as free software on computers under users’ control. This is an extremely interesting strategy, but a very long term one, for it is hard, being at least both a computer science and a social challenge.

Abstinence from software services may be a naive and losing strategy in both the short and long term. Instead, we can both work on decentralization as well as attempt to build services that respect user’s autonomy:

Going places I don’t individually control — restaurants, museums, retail stores, public parks — enriches my life immeasurably. A definition of “freedom” where I couldn’t leave my own house because it was the only space I had absolute control over would not feel very free to me at all. At the same time, I think there are some places I just don’t want to go — my freedom and physical well-being wouldn’t be protected or respected there.

Similarly, I think that using network services makes my computing life fuller and more satisfying. I can do more things and be a more effective person by spring-boarding off the software on other peoples’ computers than just with my own. I may not control your email server, but I enjoy sending you email, and I think it makes both of our lives better.

And I think that just as we can define a level of personal autonomy that we expect in places that belong to other people or groups, we should be able to define a level of autonomy that we can expect when using software on other people’s computers. Can we make working on network services more like visiting a friends’ house than like being locked in a jail?

We’ve made a balance between the absolute don’t-use-other-people’s-computers argument and the maybe-it’s-OK-sometimes argument in the Franklin Street Statement. Time will tell whether we can craft a culture around Free Network Services that is respectful of users’ autonomy, such that we can use other computers with some measure of confidence.

Evan Prodromou, “RMS on Cloud Computing: “Stupidity””, CC BY-SA, http://autonomo.us/2008/09/rms-on-cloud-computing-stupidity/

The Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services is a beginning group attempt to distill actions users, service providers (the “other people” here), and developers should take to retain the benefits of free software in an era of software services:

The current generation of network services or Software as a Service can provide advantages over traditional, locally installed software in ease of deployment, collaboration, and data aggregation. Many users have begun to rely on such services in preference to software provisioned by themselves or their organizations. This move toward centralization has powerful effects on software freedom and user autonomy.

On March 16, 2008, a workgroup convened at the Free Software Foundation to discuss issues of freedom for users given the rise of network services. We considered a number of issues, among them what impacts these services have on user freedom, and how implementers of network services can help or harm users. We believe this will be an ongoing conversation, potentially spanning many years. Our hope is that free software and open source communities will embrace and adopt these values when thinking about user freedom and network services. We hope to work with organizations including the FSF to provide moral and technical leadership on this issue.

We consider network services that are Free Software and which share Free Data as a good starting-point for ensuring users’ freedom. Although we have not yet formally defined what might constitute a ‘Free Service’, we do have suggestions that developers, service providers, and users should consider:

Developers of network service software are encouraged to:

  • Use the GNU Affero GPL, a license designed specifically for network service software, to ensure that users of services have the ability to examine the source or implement their own service.
  • Develop freely-licensed alternatives to existing popular but non-Free network services.
  • Develop software that can replace centralized services and data storage with distributed software and data deployment, giving control back to users.

Service providers are encouraged to:

  • Choose Free Software for their service.
  • Release customizations to their software under a Free Software license.
  • Make data and works of authorship available to their service’s users under legal terms and in formats that enable the users to move and use their data outside of the service. This means:
    • Users should control their private data.
    • Data available to all users of the service should be available under terms approved for Free Cultural Works or Open Knowledge.

Users are encouraged to:

  • Consider carefully whether to use software on someone else’s computer at all. Where it is possible, they should use Free Software equivalents that run on their own computer. Services may have substantial benefits, but they represent a loss of control for users and introduce several problems of freedom.
  • When deciding whether to use a network service, look for services that follow the guidelines listed above, so that, when necessary, they still have the freedom to modify or replicate the service without losing their own data.

Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services, CC BY-SA, http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/

As challenging as the Franklin Street Statement appears, additional issues must be addressed for maximum autonomy, including portable identifiers:

A Free Software Definition for the next decade should focus on the user’s overall autonomy- their ability not just to use and modify a particular piece of software, but their ability to bring their data and identity with them to new, modified software.

Such a definition would need to contain something like the following minimal principles:

  1. data should be available to the users who created it without legal restrictions or technological difficulty.
  2. any data tied to a particular user should be available to that user without technological difficulty, and available for redistribution under legal terms no more restrictive than the original terms.
  3. source code which can meaningfully manipulate the data provided under 1 and 2 should be freely available.
  4. if the service provider intends to cease providing data in a manner compliant with the first three terms, they should notify the user of this intent and provide a mechanism for users to obtain the data.
  5. a user’s identity should be transparent; that is, where the software exposes a user’s identity to other users, the software should allow forwarding to new or replacement identities hosted by other software.

Luis Villia, “Voting With Your Feet and Other Freedoms”, CC BY-SA, http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/12/06/voting-with-your-feet-and-other-freedoms/

Fortunately the oldest and at least until recently most ubiqitous network service — email — accomodates portable identifiers. (Not to mention that email is the lowest common denominator for much collaboration — sending attachments back and forth.) Users of a centralized email service like Gmail can retain a great deal of autonomy if they use an email address at a domain they control and merely route delivery to the service — though of course most users use the centralized provier’s domain.

It is worth noting that the more recent and widely used if not ubiquitous instant messaging protocol XMPP as well as the brand new and little used Wave protocol are architected similar to email, though use of non-provider domains seems even less common, and in the case of Wave, Google is currently the only service provider.

It may be valuable to assess software services from the respect of community autonomy as well as user autonomy. The former may explicitly note  requirements for the product of collaboration — non-private data, roughly — as well as service governance:

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.

Mike Linksvayer, “Constitutionally open services”, CC0, https://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2006/07/06/constitutionally-open-services/

Software services are rapidly developing and subject to much hype — referred to by buzzwords such as cloud computing. However, some of the most potent means of encouraing autonomy may be relatively boring — for example, making it easier to maintain one’s own computer and deploy slightly customized software in a secure and foolproof fashion. Any such development helps traditional users of free software as well as makes doing computing on one’s own computer (which may be a “personal server” or virtual machine that one controls) more attractive.

Perhaps one of the most hopeful trends is relatively widespead deployment by end users of free software web applications like WordPress and MediaWiki. StatusNet, free software for microblogging, is attempting to replicate this adoption success, but also includes technical support for a form of decentralization (remote subscription) and a legal requirement for service providers to release modifications as free software via the AGPL.

This section barely scratches the surface of the technical and social issues raised by the convergence of so much of our computing, in particular computing that facilitates collaboration, to servers controlled by “other people”, in particular a few large service providers. The challenges of creating autonomy-respecting alternatives should not be understated.

One of those challenges is only indirectly technical: decentralization can make community formation more difficult. To the extent the collaboration we are interested in requires community, this is a challenge. However, easily formed but inauthentic and controlled community also will not produce the kind of collaboration we are interested in.

We should not limit our imagination to the collaboration faciliated by the likes of Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, Twitter, or other “Web 2.0” services. These are impressive, but then so was AOL two decades ago. We should not accept a future of collaboration mediated by centralized giants now, any more than we should have been, with hindsight, happy to accept information services dominated by AOL and its near peers. 

Wikipedia is both held up as an exemplar of collaboration and is a free-as-in-freedom service: both the code and the content of the service are accessible under free terms. It is also a huge example of community governance in many respects. And it is undeniably a category-exploding success: vastly bigger and useful in many more ways than any previous encyclopedia. Other software and services enabling autonomous collaboration should set their sites no lower — not to merely replace an old category, but to explode it.

However, Wikipedia (and its MediaWiki software) are not the end of the story. Merely using MediaWiki for a new project, while appropriate in many cases, is not magic pixie dust for enabling collaboration. Affordances for collaboration need to be built into many different types of software and services. Following Wikipedia’s lead in autonomy is a good idea, but many experiments should be encouraged in every other respect. One example could be the young and relatively domain-specific collaboration software that this book is being written with, Booki.

Software services have made “installation” of new software as simple as visiting a web page, social features a click, and provide an easy ladder of adoption for mass collaboration. They also threaten autonomy at the individual and community level. While there are daunting challenges, meeting them means achieving “world domination” for freedom in the most important means of production — computer-mediated collaboration — something the free software movement failed to approach in the era of desktop office software.

Posted in Books, Open Services, Open Source, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »

Collaborative Futures 1

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Day 1 of the Collaborative Futures book sprint was spent with the participants introducing themselves and their relevant projects and thoughts, grouping of points of interest recorded on sticky notes by all during the introduction, and distillation into a high level table of contents.

The other participants had too many interesting things to say to catalog here — check out their sites:

Incidentally, I was fairly pleased to see 5 participants running Linux (counting Adam Hyde, who doesn’t seem to have a blog, and me) and only 2 running OS X. All also are doing interesting Creative Commons licensed projects, not to mention mostly avoiding licenses with the NonCommercial term.

A good portion of the introductory discussion concerned free software and free culture, leading to a discussion of how to include them in the table of contents — the tentative decision is to not include them explicitly, as they would be referenced in various ways throughout. I believe the tentative high level table of contents looks like this:

This doesn’t adequately give an impression of much progress on day 1 — I think we’re in a fairly good position to begin writing chapters tomorrow morning, and we finished right at midnight.

Also see day 0 posts from Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and me.

Posted in Books, Creative Commons, Open Services, Open Source, Peeves | 1 Comment »

The singularity university is open

Saturday, August 1st, 2009

Tuesday afternoon I visited ‘s graduate studies program to participate in a session on open source with (Google Open Source Program) and (WordPress). It was pretty interesting, though not in the way I expected — lots about contemporary licensing issues (which DiBona called roughly “the boring yet intellectually interesting part of his job”, a hilarious characterization in my book), not so much about how open source development will impact the future, nothing about an open source singularity. I sped through slides which include a scattershot of material for people interested in open source, a grand future, and not necessarily familiar with Creative Commons.

Hearing Mullenweg’s commitment to software freedom in person made me feel good about using WordPress. There was some discussion of network services and relatedly the . Mullenweg made a comment along the lines of silos like Facebook being less than ideal (not discussed, but , built on WordPress, as well as , used for SingularityU’s internal social network, are open replacements, though it seems to me that federation a la is needed).

DiBona indicated that Google doesn’t use AGPL’d software internally because it might cause them to share more than they’ve decided to (and they consciously decide to share a lot) while Mullenweg wondered whether complying with the AGPL would be difficult for WordPress deployers, including the question of whether one would need to share configuration files that include passwords. One could argue that such doubts are very self serving for Google and to a lesser extent WordPress.com (which use tons of free software and aren’t forced to share their improvements, though as mentioned, they both share lots), however, I hope that AGPL advocates (including me, with the caveat that I consider the importance of copyleft of whatever strength relative to release under any open license and non-licensing factors an open and understudied — consider possibilities for simulation, econ lab, and natural experiments — question, and I’m happy to change my mind) take them as strong signal that much more information on AGPL compliance is needed — sharing all source of a complex deployed web application is not often a simple thing.

Not explicitly but much more than tangentially related, probably the single most interesting thing said on the panel was Mullenweg saying that any internal WordPress.com developer can push changes to production at any time, and this happens 15-20 times a day, and he wishes he could do this for other deployments. My longstanding guess (not specific to WordPress) is that making deployment from revision control the preferred means of deployment would facilitate both more deployments running the latest changes as well as sharing their own.

I got a sense from questions asked by the students that the current Singularity University program might be more mainstream than the name implies. I understand that each student, or perhaps group of students, is to write a plan for using emerging technology to positively impact the lives of a billion people in one of the areas of health, climate change, or (I forgot the third area) in the next ten years. In any other context those parameters would sound very aggressive. Of course they could be met by first becoming rationalist jedi masters and then turning all available matter into . Alas, ten years is a hurdle.

If the previous paragraph reads snarkily, it is not — I fully support the maximization of computation and the rationality of the same. In any case congratulations to all involved in SingularityU, in particular Bruce Klein, who I know has been working on the concept for a long time. It was also good to see Salim Ismail and David Orban. I’m especially happy to see that SingularityU is attempting to be as open as possible, not least this.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Open Services, Open Source | 8 Comments »

Content layer infrastructure

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Last Sunday I appeared (mp4 download) on a tech interview program called Press: Here. It went ok. Most of the questions were softball and somewhat repetitive. Lots more could have been said about any of them, but I think I did a pretty good job of hitting a major point on each and not meandering. However, one thing I said (emphasized below) sounds like pure bs:

this has been done in the open source software world for a couple decades now and now that people are more concerned about the content layer that’s really part of the infrastructure having a way to clear those permissions without the lawyer-to-lawyer conversation happen every single time is necessary

I could’ve omitted the bolded words above and retained the respect of any viewer with a brain. What the heck did I mean? I was referring to an argument, primarily made by Joi Ito over the last year or so, using a stylized version of the layers of a protocol stack. David Weinberger’s live-blogging of Ito provides a good summary:

Way back when, it was difficult to connect computers. Then we got Ethernet, then TCP/IP, and then HTTP (the Web). These new layers allow participation without permission. The cost of sending information and the cost of innovation have gone down (because the cost of failure has gone down). Now we’re getting another layer: Creative Commons. “By standardizing and simplifying the legal layer … I think we will lower the costs and create another explosion of innovation.”

Protocol geeks may object, but I think it’s a fairly compelling argument, at least for explaining why what Creative Commons does is “big”. The problems of not having a top layer (I called it “content”, the slide photographed above says “knowledge” — what it calls “content” is usually called “application”, and the note above says “legal”, referring to one required mechanism for opening up permissions around content, knowledge, or whatever one wishs to call it) in which a commons can be taken for granted (ie like infrastructure) is evident, for example in the failure by lawsuit of most interesting online music services, or the inaccessibility of much of the scientific literature to most humans and machines (eg for data mining), as are powerful hints as to what is possible where it exists, for example the vast ecology enabled by Wikipedia’s openness such as DBpedia.

I didn’t make that argument on-screen. Probably a good thing, given the previous paragraph’s tortured language. I shall practice. Critique welcome.

…

Press: Here is broadcast from its SF bay area home station (NBC) and I’ve heard is syndicated to many other stations. However, its website says nothing about how to view the program on TV, even on its home station. I even had a hard time finding any TV schedule on the NBC Bay Area website — a tiny link in the footer takes one to subpages for the station with lame schedule information syndicated from TV Guide. I found this near total disconnect between TV and the web a very odd, but then again, I don’t really care where the weird segment of the population that watches TV obtains schedule information. Press: Here ought to release its programs under a liberal CC license as soon as the show airs. Its own website gets very little traffic, many of the interviews would be relevant for uploading to Wikimedia Commons, and the ones that got used in Wikipedia would drive significant traffic back to the program website.

Posted in Creative Commons, Music, Open Source, Peeves, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 11 Comments »

Conjectured impact of Wikipedia license interoperability?

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Wikipedians voted overwhelmingly against kryptonite — for using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) as the main content license for Wikipedias and their sibling projects, permitting these to incorporate work offered under CC BY-SA, the main non-software copyleft license used outside of Wikipedia, and other CC BY-SA licensed projects to incorporate content from Wikipedia. The addition of CC BY-SA to Wikimedia sites should happen in late June and there is an outreach effort to encourage non-Wikimedia wikis under the Free Documentation License (FDL; usually chosen for Wikipedia compatibility) to also migrate to CC BY-SA by August 1.

This change clearly ought to over time increase the proportion of content licensed under free-as-in-freedom copyleft licenses. More content licensed under a single or interoperable copyleft licenses increases the reasons to cooperate with that regime — to offer new work under the dominant copyleft license (in the non-software case, now unambiguously CC BY-SA) in order to have access to content under that regime — and decreases the reasons to avoid copylefted work, one of which is the impossibility of incorporating works under multiple and incompatible copyleft licenses (when relying on the permissions of those licenses, modulo fair use). Put another way, the unified mass and thus gravitational pull of the copylefted content body is about to increase substantially.

Sounds good — but what can we expect from the actual impact of making legally interoperable the mass of Free Culture and its exemplar, Wikipedia? How can we gauge that impact, short of access to a universe where Wikipedians reject CC BY-SA? A few ideas:

(1) Wikimedia projects will be dual licensed after the addition of CC BY-SA — content will continue to be available under the FDL, until CC BY-SA content is mixed in, at which point the article or other work in question is only available under CC BY-SA. One measure of the licensing change’s direct impact on Wikimedia projects would be the number and proportion of CC BY-SA-only articles over time, assuming an effort to keep track.

I suspect it will take a long time (years?) for a non-negligible proportion of Wikipedia articles to be CC BY-SA-only, i.e., to have directly incorporated external CC BY-SA content. However, although most direct, this is probably the least significant impact of the change, and my suspicion could be upset if other impacts (below) turn out to be large, creating lots of CC BY-SA content useful for incorporating into Wikipedia articles.

(2) Content from Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects could be incorporated in non-Wikimedia projects more. The difficulty here is measurement, but given academic interest in Wikipedia and the web generally, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the requisite data sets (historical and ongoing) and expertise brought together to analyze the use of Wikimedia project content elsewhere over time. Note that a larger than expected (there’s the rub) increase in such use could be the result of CC BY-SA being more straightforward for users than the FDL (indeed, a major reason for the change) as much or more than the result of license interoperability.

(3) New and existing projects could adopt or switch to CC BY-SA when they otherwise wouldn’t have in order to gain compatibility with Wikimedia projects. One sure indication of this would involve major projects using a CC license with a “noncommercial” term switching to CC BY-SA and giving interoperability with Wikipedia as the reason for the switch. Another indicator would simply be an increase in the use of CC BY-SA (and even more permissive instruments such as CC BY and CC0, to the extent the motivation is primarily to create content that can be used in Wikipedia rather than to use content from Wikipedia) relative to more restrictive (and non-interoperable with Wikipedia) licenses.

(4) Apart from needing to be compatible with Wikipedia because one desires to incorporate its content, one might want to be compatible with Wikipedia because it is “cool” to be so. I don’t know that this has occurred on a significant scale to this date, so if it begins to one possible factor in such a development would be the change to CC BY-SA. How could this be? As cool as Wikipedia compatibility sounds, having to adopt a hard to understand license intended for software documentation (the FDL) makes attaining this coolness seem infeasible. Consideration of the FDL just hasn’t been on the radar of many outside of the spaces of documentation, encyclopedias, and perhaps educational materials, while consideration and oftentimes use of CC licenses is active in many segments. However, in most of these more restrictive CC licenses (i.e., those prohibiting commercial use or adaptation) are most popular. So if we see an upsurge in the use of CC BY-SA for popular culture works (music, film) the beginning of which coincides with the Wikimedia licensing change, it may not be unreasonable to guess that the latter caused the former.

(5) The weight of Wikipedia and relative accessibility of CC BY-SA could further consensus that the freedoms demanded by Wikimedia projects are some combination of “good”, “correct”, “moral”, and “necessary” — if some of these can be distinguished from “cool”. In the long term, this could be indicated by the sidelining of terms for content that do not qualify as free and open, as they have been for software, where and similar obvious competitors for important free software niches are strategically irrelevant.

Obviously 3, 4, and 5 overlap somewhat.

(6) I conjecture that making more cultural production more wiki-like (or to gain WikiNature) is probably the biggest determinant of the success of Free Culture. More interplay between the Wikipedia, both the most significant free culture project and the most significant wiki, and the rest of the free culture and open content universe can only further this trend — though I have no idea how to measure the possible impact of the licensing change here, and wouldn’t want to ascribe too much weight to it.

(7) Last, the attention of the Wikipedia community ought to have a positive impact on the quality of future versions of Creative Commons licenses (there shouldn’t be another version until 2011 or so, and hopefully there won’t be another version after that for much longer). Presumably Wikipedians also would have had a positive impact on future versions of the FDL, but arguably less so given the Free Software Foundation’s (excellent) focus on software freedom.

Will any of the above play out in a significant way? How much will it be reasonable to attribute to the license change? Will researchers bother to find out? Here’s to hoping!

…

Prior to the Wikipedia community vote on adopting CC BY-SA it crossed my mind to set up several play money prediction market contracts concerning the above outcomes conditioned on Wikipedia adopting CC BY-SA by August 1, 2009, for which I did set up a contract. It is just as well that I didn’t — or rather if I had, I would have had to heavily promote all of the contracts in order to stimulate any play trading — the basic adoption contract at this point hasn’t budged from 56% since the vote results were announced, which means nobody is paying attention to the contract on Hubdub.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Open Source, Prediction Markets, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 7 Comments »

Happy Hacking

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Laroia, Linksvayer, RMS
Asheesh Laroia and Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons accept the 2008 Free Software Foundation Award for Project of Social Benefit from Richard Stallman. Detail of photo by Matt Hins / CC BY-SA.



Icing on the cake of a highly successful Libre Planet Conference. Other highlights included great talks by Evan Prodromou on engineering for free network services and Rob Savoye on , which turns out to be much more than just an Adobe Flash browser plugin replacement, and the free network services unconference.

Addendum 20090330: Audio of Stallman’s talk and the awards ceremony, Asheesh’s writeup.

Posted in Creative Commons, Open Services, Open Source | 4 Comments »

Free Software: Foundation for a Libre Planet

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Support the Free Software Foundation. It’s good for a free planet and you can attend the just announced Libre Planet Conference, March 21-22 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an outgrowth of the FSF’s annual member meeting.

I’m really excited that the conference will have software freedom and network services as a major focus. This will be the first public conference on the topic, following last year’s meeting from which followed the Franklin Street Declaration and Autonomo.us.

If you enjoyed my rambling call to support Creative Commons a couple months ago, you might enjoy reading Benjamin Mako Hill’s somewhat less rambling call to support the FSF.

I’ve donated to the FSF off and on since at least 1998. You should get started now, if you haven’t already. My only regret (apart from not giving every year) is still not having relevant prediction markets enabling me to be a futarchist donor. I mention that here both because it is a necessary disclaimer for me to make (my philanthropy suggestions are not based on handwaving, not consensus projected impact) and because perhaps my most highly desired free network service is a prediction market exchange. I’ll explain more another day.

Posted in Creative Commons, Open Services, Open Source, Politics, Prediction Markets | 7 Comments »

5 years of posts as wordles

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

Composition of wordles / CC BY

Unsatisfying, or perhaps this blog is just that uninteresting. Code used to produce yearly wordlists. Some possible improvements:

  • Rewrite as WordPress plugin OR abstract from WordPress
  • Case insensitivity
  • Suppress common words (used Wordle menu for this, but it isn’t very aggressive), perhaps using a word frequency dataset
  • Use free software alternative to Wordle to generate wordclouds (suggestions?)
  • Automate generation of wordclouds (very difficult using Wordle, would involve browser automation, thus previous bullet)

I started doing this in part to see five years of topic changes on this blog, but mostly because if it worked well, I’d use it on the Creative Commons blog, which is a 6+ year mass of around 2,500 almost completely uncategorized/untagged posts. In that vein, I intend to look into automated term extraction and user tagging code.

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Open Source, Programming | 1 Comment »

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