This post is in response to two things that I’ve observed recently:

1. A Misinformed Critique of the Debian Project

2. The largely unfair dismissal of free software/open source/hackers on the grounds of purported zealotry.

Debian, Critiqued

The above linked article, presents a number of critiques, leveled at the Debian project. While these complaints with user experience are valid, I was left with a serious, as we say on the Internet “WTF” moment. Read the article if you haven’t already before you get to my response, if you’re so inclined.

Also I’d like to challenge the Editors of that website to exercise a little more digression in what they publish in the future.

My response:

1. Stable releases of Debian are for the most part not intended to be run as desktop operating systems. The software in Debian Lenny is, at this moment nearly two years old. That’s fine (and even desirable) for a server, but most users want things that are a little more up to date than that. This is why we have distributions like Ubuntu, which manages to walk a much better line between stable (and benefits from the efforts of Debian) and current.

2. It’s possible to install Debian packages that aren’t contained in the repository, or provided in older versions of the operating system. Download the package with wget and then use dpkg -i [package-file].deb. There may be GUI tools that support this. While we might like to have Linux systems for “new comers” to the platform that don’t require using the command line, Debian stable isn’t one of these operating systems.

3. Installing fonts on most systems is usually as simple as putting the files in /usr/share/fonts or $HOME/.fonts and and running fc-cache -f. The complainer focuses a great deal on the absence of a familiar font management program (which appears to be a command line tool that exists in Ubuntu 9.04 which is a “newer” system than Lenny).

I still don’t see how “contempt” is the right word, to describe the fact that a massive project that is the result of a loose organization of hundreds of people, failed the address a few specific needs of a user using the system in a non-standard/non-recommended pattern qualifies as “contempt for users.”

As it stands it sort of feels like the author is attempting to stir up controversy by attacking a historical weak spot, and stretching the bounds of reasonable criticism in the process. I think editors of any publication should be above this sort of thing. thumbs down.

Dismissal of Free Software on the Grounds of Zealotry

We see this a lot, and I’m kind of sick of it.

I’ve seen a lot of people--who actually agree with almost every tenant of the most “ideologically pure” free software advocates--dismiss version 3 of the GPL, or RMS, or the FSF for being “too radical,” or obsessive, or “communist,” which is both intensely interesting and intensely troubling. It’s often in the form of “I wouldn’t say that like RMS,” or some such.

For starters, I think its interesting to note the prevalence with which “communist” is used as a dismissal of the “Free Software” movement, particularly because while there is a very vague “anti-corporations” and “anti-trust” vein in the free software world, in point of fact the biggest “big picture political” ideology around is a very ad hoc libertarianism. The “communist” jab is, probably more at the sort of heavy-handed ideological positionally of the “copy left” movement. Furthermore, I think it’s probably clear that Free software as we know it today wouldn’t be possible without commercial interests, input and, energies, and resources.

And yet. Free software/open-source, gets red baited. Interesting. And disappointing.

This is I think part of a “phase two” of a series of articles I wrote a few months ago about political economies, about corporate structures, about “hacker centric” business models. In that vein of thought, I suppose this post was inevitable.

My argument, in “phase one” was that big “corporations” were poorly constituted to develop sustainable business models, to act in the public interest, and to further the best interests of their employees and customers. I made the argument that we needed structures in corporate law (and in culture at large) to recognize “co-operative” (coops) organizations that promoted organic self-organization, and more nimble institutions that could participate in “authentic economic exchange.”

I’ve been having a lot of conversations in the past few weeks that have revolved around the current progress of the health-care “reform” process in America, and I find that I keep coming to the same conclusion:

The rising costs of health care in the United States, is largely due to the overhead imposed by the insurance industry. Both in the increased bureaucracy that service providers have to endure (so service providers raise their fees to cover this cost,) and secondly in the form of the insurance companies' own profit margin.

As a result, I’ve become convinced that the problem with rising health care costs is the insurance companies themselves and that any scheme that sees legitimacy in attempting to address “the health care problem” by taking the interests of the insurance companies as being integral to the solution, rather than the root of the problem has already failed to address the problem at hand.

What I’ve been saying, is we need to work backwards through this problem. The prevailing logic seems to be to figure out how much procedures cost, how much we as “clients” need to pay, and how much our employer/the government can afford based on those projections, and then how much we have to pony up to cover the gap. I think it makes much more sense to figure out how much people (doctors, nurses, technicians, clinical providers, etc.) need, how much supplies cost (lab work, supplies, chemicals, physical plant things,) include some fringe expenses (e.g. educational expenses, preventative outlay, technological infrastructure), and then figure out how to pay for these costs: co-pays, tax funding, health care trusts. That’s at least a viable solution.

With the base expenses taken care of, providers are more free to organize in complementary groups, in co-operatives that provide various kinds of general purpose and centralized services. Alliances can be formed to distribute clerical and management responsibility, on smaller scales. Makes sense.

Good luck in seeing that happen.

In my post against the venture capital model I think one key question that I think I failed to answer is “If we do away with venture capital, where does innovation happen?” This post locates a number of potentials answers to this question.

1. Innovation happens in academia and research-oriented institutions. This is where innovation has often happened, and it makes sense: you get smart driven people together and you give them resources and you say learn about the world, and see what new things you can make and think that haven’t been made and thought of before. The problem is that research is hard to fund and support, and the Academy is often drawn toward the other great role it fulfills in our society (education).

2. Innovation happens in external communities. Red Hat, and Sun both externalize innovation via the Fedora Project and Open Solaris projects. Many web-development consultancies externalize their innovation to Open Source projects like Ruby on Rails, and Drupal. It’s a pooling of research and development via externalization, and I think it’s a trend that we’ll probably begin to see more of.

3. Innovation will happen during 20% time. Google was famous for doing this, initially and I think it’s something that we don’t hear much of as corporate purses begin to tighten as maximum productivity reappears as the leading way to save corporate business models (See, flawed system,) but I think the concept that some measure of unstructured time will lead to innovation is generally a sound concept.

4. Innovation, start-ups, the same way that they are formulated now, except without venture capital, so that innovation still happens in start-ups, but business plans will have to be focused on sustainable growth, scaling practices, and profitability. This shifts the focus of start-ups to think about “how do we implement this cool idea in a way that will work,” rather than “what would happen if we did this cool thing.” Seems a productive nearly-paradigm shift.

Other ideas?

I read this article by Joel Spoolsky about the first dot-com bust and it help crystallized a series of thoughts about the role of venture capital in the development of technology and software, particularly of Internet technologies. Give it a shot. Also, I think Cory Doctorow’s “Other People’s Money," is a helpful contributor to this train of thought.

The question I find myself asking myself is: to what extent is the current development of technology--particularly networked technology--shaped by the demands of the venture capital market? And of course, what kind of alternative business models exist for new technologies?

I guess I should back up and list the problems I have with the VC model. And by VC model I mean private investment firms that invest large sums of money in “start up” companies. Those issues are:

• Breaking even, even in--say--five years, is exceptionally difficult from a numbers perspective, let alone turning a profit of any note. This is largely because VC funding provides huge sums of money (it is after all really hard to give away 20 billion a year in 60-120k a year tops.) and so seed sums are larger than they need to be, and this has a cascade effect on the way the business and technology develops, particularly in unsustainable ways.
• VC-funded start-ups favor proprietary software/technologies, because the payoff is bigger up front, which is often the case. It’s hard to make the argument that you need seed money for a larger, more slow moving product… Small and quick seem to work better.
• The VC-cycle of boom and bust (which is sort of part and parcel with plain-old-capitalism) means that technology development booms and busts: so that a lot of projects tank when the market crashes, and that the projects that get funded during the booms are (probably mostly) not selected for their technological merit.
• VC firms tend to be very responsive to fads and similar trends in the market. (e.g. dot-com bubble, web 2.0, Linux in the mid nineties, biotech stuff, etc.) which means that VC firms generate a great deal of artificial competition in these markets, which disperses efforts needlessly, without (as near as I can tell) improving the quality of software developed (eg. in the microblogging space, for example, the “first one out of the gate,” twitter, “won” without apparent regard for quality or feature set.)

Venture capital funding provides outfits and enterprising individuals with the resources for “capital outlay” and initial research-and-development costs, and in doing so fills an economic niche that is otherwise non-existent, and this is a good thing indeed. At the same time I can’t help but wonder if the goals an interests of venture capitalists aren’t--in some ways--directly at odds with the technology that they aim to develop.

I also continue to question the ongoing role of this kind of “funding structure” (for lack of a better term). I think it’s pretty clear that the effect of continuing technological development is the fact that the required “capital outlay” of any given start up is falling like a rock as advanced technology is available at commodity-prices (eg. VPSs, Lulu.com), as open source software tightens development cycles (eg. Ruby on Rails, JQuery). Both of these trends, in combination with the long-standing problems with VC funding, means that I think it’s high time we ask some fairly serious questions about the development of this technology. I’ll end with the question at the forefront of my thinking on the subject:

Where does (and can) innovation and development happen outside of the context of venture-capital funded start ups in the technology world?

One of the aspects of “BloggingFail”¹ during the most recent technology/new media bubble, is the emergence of “blog post formulas,” which are basic post formats that people use to provide structure to a post, and produce content in a way that’s more readable for casual visitors, and better for search engines.

Interestingly, not all of these formats are as bad as the BlogFail that they helped create, and I’ve been interested in collecting/creating a few new and different formats for blog posts. This is a collection of those post templates.

The “N Things Post”

This is big, and very mainstream we see this a lot as filler, and I think it grows out of the kinds of articles you see on news stands. Basically the gimmick (and I think it works) is that it promises a post that will be easy to read, provide information in clear ways, and won’t encumber a collection of information with complicated rhetoric.

It works, there was a long time when digg was filled with “N Things posts” of dubious merit. Having said that, it’s a great format for presenting some kinds of information.

Tip: While we’re at it, it helps if the N is a prime number (eg. 5, 7, or 11 make good Ns for N Things Posts)

The RedMonk Interview

This is mostly Stephen O’Grady’s invention, though I’ve seen it elsewhere. The basic idea is that you ask yourself a bunch of questions and then answer them yourself.

While this might sound contrite by my description, the posts that result are often quite successful at communicating information. In a sort of not-very-subtle way, you’re able to frame your discussion by communicating to your reader what questions you think are the most important. It again wins by stripping away potentially complex and linear rhetoric, and lets you sort of jumpstart the conversation that inevitably follows.

The Synthetic Review

I’ve started doing this more, and it’s a form I’ve totally yanked from Academic journals and other similar sorts of outlets. Basically, you take two or three articles--potentially related, sometimes not--put links to them at the top of the post and then respond to each post and to the juxtaposition created by putting the links together in one post.

The questions I (try to) ask myself are both “what do I think of each of these articles,” and “what would these articles say about each other.”

The Pattern/Tutorial

This is the “here’s how to do something” post. We see this in a lot of genres, from knitting, to technology, to cooking and back again. These posts tend to be both extremely popular and successful, but they are also quite useful to readers, new and old.

When I got into blogging, we were much closer to the “journal” end of the spectrum (as a community), but I think the transition to being about providing/creating value is something that’s really emerged in blogging in the last ten years, in part because of the prevalence of a class of posts like this. So there you have it.

I may be a huge geek and a hacker type, but I’m a writer and reader first, and although while I’m blathering on about my setup it might seem like all I do is tweak my systems, the writing and reading are really more “my thing.”

I wrote that sentence a few weeks ago, and I’ve written a great many more sentences since then, but I’ve felt that that sentence needs some more exploration, particularly because while it seems so obvious and integrated into what I do from behind the keyboard, I think it bares some explanation for those of you playing along at home.

What “I do” in the world, is write. And that’s pretty clear to me, and has only gotten more clear in the last few years/months. There are a couple of important facts about what “being a writer” means to me on a “how I work” on a day to day basis. They are:

• There’s a certain level of writing output that’s possible in a day, that I sometimes achieve, but it’s not sustainable. I can (and do) do the binge thing--and that has it’s place--but I can’t get up, pound out two thousand or more words every day on a few projects and go to bed happy. Doesn’t work like that.

• Getting to write begets more writing, and it’s largely transitive. If I write a few hundred words of emails to blog reader, collaborators, and listservs in the morning, what happens in the afternoon is often more cogent than if I spend the morning checking twitter.

• Writing is always a conversation, between the writer and other writers, between the writer and the reader, between the writer and future writers. I find it very difficult to write, even the most mundane things, without reading the extant discourse on the subject.

• Writing is an experimental process. I’ve said at work a number of times, “you can’t edit something that isn’t there,” and in a very real sense, it is hard to really know “what you want” until you see the words on the page. Written language is like that I suppose. That’s what the blog is about, I guess.

• Ideas aren’t real until they’re written down. I’m not much of a Platonist, I guess, and I think writing things down really helps clarify things, it helps point out the logical flaws in an argument, and it makes it possible for other people to commend and expand on the work that you’ve done. That’s a huge part of why I blog. It’s very much not publication in the sense that I’ve created something new and I’ve finished and I’m ready for other to consider it. Rather, I blog what I’m thinking about, I use the blog to think about things.

  Though I think it’s not clear to me (or to you) at this point, I’m very much in the middle of a larger project at the nexus of open source software communities, political economies, and units of authentic social organization. The work on free software that I’ve been blogging, the stuff about economics, the stuff about co-ops. I’m not sure how that’s all going to come together, but I’m working on it. Now, four months into it, it’s beginning to be clear to me that this is all one project, but it certainly never started that way.

The technology that I write about is something that I obviously think has merit on it’s own terms--hence the Cyborg Institute Project--but it’s also very true that I use technology in order to enable me to write more effectively, to limit distractions, to connect with readers and colleagues more effectively, to read things more efficiently. Technology, hacking, is mostly a means to an end.

And I think that’s a really useful lesson.

I just wanted to post something to point out that I’ve updated my about page and I think you might enjoy having a look. I always do enjoy reading other peoples'. Also another question:

How are you all feeling about the archives of this site? I’ve been slow on the uptake with regards to updating tychoish.com’s new archive system. Which makes it sound as if I have something in the works, when really all I did was grep through the archives and got lists of posts that seemed relevant to a couple of key topics.

I’m not terribly keen on just throwing up an archive with links to everything, becuase there are probably getting close to 1400 entries, and I think not all of them are particularly relevant or interesting. So I guess the question is: what do you find most useful in terms of website archives, and what format works the best for you? What do you want me to do?

Also, I think we’re slowly creeping up on 600,000 words in the blog, only a month or two more, I think.

Cheers, tycho

For a few days last week, in between the time that I wrote the Personal Desktop post and when I posed it yesterday, I had a little personal computing saga:

1. One of my monitors developed a little defect. I’m not sure how to describe it, but the color depth suffered a bit and there was this flicker and I really noticed it. It’s not major and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it, except I look at a very nice screen all day at work and I had a working display right next to it, I saw every little flicker.

2. I decided to pull the second monitor, and just go back to one monitor. While I like the “bunches of screens” approach, and think it has merit, particularly in tiling environments, I also think that I work pretty well on one screen, and with so many virtual desktops, it’s no great loss. Not being distracted by the flicker is better by far.

3. I pulled the second monitor and bam! the computer wouldn’t come back from the reboot. Shit. No error beeps, nothing past the bios splash screen. No USB support. Everything plugged in. Shit.

4. I let things sit for a few days. I was slamed with stuff in other areas of my life, and I just couldn’t cope with this. It doesn’t help that I really like to avoid messing with hardware if I can at all help it. Fellow geeks are big on building custom hardware, but the truth is that my needs are pretty minimal and I’d rather leave it up the to the pros.

5. On Friday, I sat down with it, pulled the video card that I’d put in it when I got the machine (an old nvidia 7200 series), and I unplugged the hard drives and futzed with the ram, and after re-seating the RAM it worked. I’m not complaining, and I figure it was just some sort of fluke as I jostled the case.

6. So now I’m back, with one monitor, no other problems have been fixed from the last post, but I can live with that.

As I was fretting with the implications of having a computer die on me like this, and thinking about my future computing trajectory. I realized that my current set up was deployed (as it were) under a number of different assumptions about the way I use computers. I got the desktop with the extra monitors when I was starting a series of remote jobs and needed more resources than I could really expect from my previous setup (a single macbook.) I also, in light of this downgraded my laptop to something smaller and portable that was good for short term tasks, and adding mobility to my setup, but that really didn’t work as my only computer for more than a day or two.

Now things look different. I’m not doing the same kind of remote work that I got the desktop for, and I have a killer machine at work that I’m only using a portion of (in a VM, no less). I have a VPS server “in the cloud” that hosts a lot of the “always on” infrastructural tasks that I needed from my desktop when I first got it.

I’m not sure what the solution is. Make the desktop at home more “server-y” (media files, downloading stuff + writing) exchange the laptop at some point for: a 15" notebook that would be my primary machine--particularly useful for long weekend trips, un/conferences and so forth, and some sort of small netbook-class device, for day-to-day portability.

It’s a thought. Anyway, on to more important thoughts.

Cheers!