Wiki started as this weird idea that seemed to work against all odds. And then it seemed to really work. And now wiki is just a way to make and host a website without taking full responsibility for the generation of all the content. To say wiki is to say “collaboration” and “distributed authorship,” in some vague handwaving way.

But clearly, getting a wiki “right,” is more difficult than just throwing up a wiki engine and saying “have at it people.” Wiki’s need a lot of stewardship, and care, that I think people don’t realize off the bat. Even wikis that seem to be organic and loosey-goosey.

I have this wiki project, at the Cyborg Institute Wiki that I’ve put some time into, but not, you know a huge amount of time particularly recently. Edits have been good, when they’ve happened. But all additions have come from people who I have asked specifically for their contributions. I don’t think this is a bad thing but this experience does run counter to the “throw up a wiki and people will edit it” mindset.

I’ve started (or restarted?) [a wiki that I set up for the OuterAlliance][oa-wik]. You can find out more about the OA there (as it gets added) or on the OuterAlliance Blog. Basically, O.A. is a group of Science Fiction writers, editors, and critics (and agents? do we have agents?) who are interested in promoting the presentation and visibility of positive queer characters and themes in science fiction (literature).¹

In any case, the group needed a wiki, and unlike the C2 Wiki, the people who are likely to contribute to this wiki are probably not hackers in the conventional sense. As I’ve sort of taken this wiki project upon myself, I’ve been trying to think of ways to ensure success in wikis.

Ideas, thoroughly untested:

Invite people to contribute at every opportunity, but not simply by saying “please add your thoughts here.” Rather, write in a way that leaves spaces for other people to interject ideas and thoughts.

Create stubs and pages where people can interject their own thoughts, but “red links” (or preceding question marks in my preferred wiki engine) are just as effective as stubs in many cases. The thing is that wikis require a lot of hands on attention. While stubs don’t require a lot of attention and maintenance, they require some. My favored approach recently is to make new pages when the content in the current page grows too unwieldy and to resist the urge to make new pages except when that happens.

Reduce hierarchy in page organization unless totally needed. You don’t want potential collaborators to have to thing very much about “where should I put this thing.” The more hierarchy there is the greater the chance that they’ll have to either think about it and/or that they’ll not find a place to put their contribution and then not contribute. This is undesirable.

Hierarchy is problematic for most organizational systems, but in most wiki systems, it is really easy and attractive to divide things into lots of layers of hierarchy because it makes sense at the time. The truth is, however, that this almost never makes sense a couple of weeks or months down the road. Some hierarchy makes sense, but it’ll take you hundreds of thousands of words to really need 3 layers of hierarchy in most wikis.

Leaders and instigators of wiki projects also, should know that creating and having a successful wiki represents the output of a huge amount of effort. There’s a lot of figuring out what people mean to say and making sure that their words actually convey that. There’s a lot of making sure people’s comments really do belong on the page where they put them. And more often than not leaders put in the effort to write a huge amount of “seed” content as an example to contributors in the future. It’s not a bad gig, but it’s also not the kind of hting you can just sit back and let happen.

Other thoughts? Onward and Upward!

Maybe it’s just be but I think notifications of events on our computers suck. On OS X there’s Growl, and GNU/Linux desktops have the libnotify stuff, and I’m sure there’s something on windows, but I don’t think this really addresses the problem at hand. Not that the software doesn’t work, becuase it mostly does what it says it’s going to do. The issue, I think is that we need, or will very shortly need, much more from a notification system than anything around can handle.

Lets back up.

I don’t know about you but there are a lot of events and messages that I get or need to get, including: new mail, some instant messages, mentions of cerain words on IRC (perhaps only in certain channels), notifications of when a collaborator has pushed something to a git repository, updates to certain RSS feeds, notifications of the completion of certain long-running commands (file copies, data transferes, etc.) and so forth. I think everyone likely has their own list of “things it would be nice if their computer could tell them about.”

The existing notification systems provide a framework that enables locally running applications to present little messages in a consistent, and unified manner. This is great. The issue is that for most of us the things that we need to be notified of aren’t locally running. At least in my case, instant messaging, IRC, git, and the key RSS feeds that I want to follow aren’t “locally running applications.” And to further complicate matters, no matter how your slice things, I use more than one computer, and in an ideal world it would be nice for one machine to know what notifications I’d seen on another computer when I sat down. In other words, my personal notification system should retain memory of what it’s shown me and what I’ve awknowladged across a number of machines.

That doesn’t happen. At least not today.

I have a few ideas about the implementation that I will probably cobble together into another post, and I’d love to hear some feedback if any of you have addressed this problem and have solutions.

It strikes me that there are two larger themes at work here:

1. Personal computing events occur locally and remotely, and notification systems need to be able to seemlessly provide these kinds of notifications. While I think a lot of the hype around clound computing is--frankly--absurd, it is fair to say that our computing is incredibly networked.

2. People don’t have “a computer,” any more, but rather several: phones, desktops, “cloud services,” virtual private servers, and so forth. While we use these systems differently, and our own personal “setup” are often unique, we need to move between these setups with ease.

These two shifts, networked computing and multiple computing contexts, affect more than just the the manner in which we receive notifications. But really, I think, outline the ways that the way we use computing has changed in the past few years. There’s a lot of buzzwords around this shift, in the web appliacation and cloud computing space particularly, and I don’t think that the “hipster”/“buzzword” experience is widely generalizable. It’s my hope that these conclusions are more widely applicable and useful: both for the development of a notification system that we need, and for thinking about application development in the future.

Like I said above, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subect, and perhaps we can work on collecting thoughts on the Cyborg Institute Wiki. Take care!

There’s an issue in tiling window managers, that I think a lot folks who are used to floating window managers never expect. I wrote a post to the Awesome listserv a while back explaining this to someone, and it seems to have struck a chord (I saw the post linked to last week). I thought I’d write a brief post here to explain what’s going on in a more clear and general way.

The Problem

When tiled, windows don’t seem to take up all the space that’s available to them. This creates weird “gaps” between windows. But only some windows: Firefox is immune to this problem, while terminal emulators like xterm, and urxvt, and gVim, and emacs get all funky.

What’s Happening

The application that are affected by this draw their windows based upon a number of fixed width columns. We’ll note that terminal emulators, as well as GUI versions of programmer’s text editors like vim and emacs, all used fixed-width fonts and often allow you to set window sizes based on the number of columns (of characters).

As a result, these applications are only able to use space on the screen in increments of full characters. Most of the time, in floating window managers, we never really notice this limitation.

In tiling window managers you do notice, because the window manager forces the windows to use all available space, except in some windows it leaves these weird gaps at the bottom and right of the window. Sometimes the gaps end up in the window, as unusable buffers, and sometimes they end up between windows. It looks funny, pretty much no matter how you slice it.

What You Can Do About It

The truth? Not much.

The Awesome Window Manager, by default shows the gaps between the windows. I always found this to be the “more ugly” option. You can alter this behavior by searching your configuration file for size_hints_honor and making the line look like this:

c.size_hints_honor = false

This tells Awesome to ignore windows (client’s) when they say “I want to have these dimensions.” It doesn’t fix the problem but it does get rid of the gaps.

The real solution is to tweak text sizes, fonts, and any buffering elements (like a status bar, mode line, or widget box), and window borders so that the windows aren’t left with extra space that they don’t know how to cope with.

By real solution, I really mean “only option:” it’s really impossible to get all of your fixed width applications to have exactly the right number of pixels. You can get close in a lot of situations, and I’ve always found this to be much less annoying than using floating window managers.

The Original Post

Just for giggles, I’ve included a quoted portion of what I posted original to the listserv on the topic.

The one big of information that might be important: The urxvt terminal emulator, when not “honoring size hints,” is unable to really properly draw the “extra space” with the proper background. I suspect this is a bug with the pseudo-transparency system they use. As a result there are often a few pixels with the background in an inverted color scheme. Same problem as above, but it looks funny if you’re not used to it.

What’s happening is that urxvt (like many terminal emulators) can only draw windows of some specific sizes based on the size of the characters (eg. x number of rows, and y number of columns.) So while you may have larger and the equivalent of say 80.4x20.1, urxvt can’t do anything with this extra space.

If you honor size hints, the windows will end wherever they can, and use as much space as they can, but leave gaps between windows if the total space isn’t properly divisible. If you don’t honor size hints, the windows themselves take up the extra room (but they can’t do anything with the extra room, so they just leave it blank, and sometimes the transparency is a bit wonky in those “buffers”).

So there you have it. I hope this helps!

I was talking to my grandmother (Hi!) last week, as I do most weeks, and we discussed the blog. She’s been a regular reader of the site for many years, and lately, we’ve enjoyed digging a little deeper into some of the things that I’ve written about here. She said, I think of the Owning Bits, and I agree, that it sort of seemed that I was building something… more.

But of course.

I don’t know that I’ve connected all of the dots, either in my head or on the blog, but I think that the things I’ve been blogging about for the last year or so are all conected, interwoven, and illuminate incredibly interesting features of each other when considered as a whole. There is “something building” here. To recap, so that we’re on the same page, the nexus of subjects that I’ve been milling over are:

• Free Software and Open Source Software Development.

I’m interested in how communities form around these projects, how work is accomplished, both technically, and organizationally. I’m interested in how innovation happens or is stifled. How the communities are maintained, started, and lead. From a social and economic perspective there’s something fundamentally unique happening in this domain, and I’d like to learn a lot more about what those things are.

This topic and area of thought have taken a backseat to other questions more recently, but I think it’s fundamentally the core question that I’m trying to address at the moment. I think that I’m going to be making a larger point of addressing open source methodologies in the coming weeks and months as part of an attempt to pull things back together. I think.

• The Information Technology Industry.

I started writing about the IT industry because I found itreally difficult to think about Free Software without really knowing about the context of free software. One really needs to understand the entire ecosystem in order to really make sense of what open source means (and doesn’t mean.) Particularly in this day and age. Initially I was particularly interested in the Oracle/Sun Merger, and the flap around the ownership of MySQL; but since then, I think I’ve branched out a little bit more.

I’ve tried very hard to not frame the discussion about the IT industry and open source as a “community” versus “enterprise” discussion, or as being “free” versus “non-free,” or worse “free” versus “commercial.” These are unhelpful lenses, as Free Software and Open Source are incredibly commercial, and incredibly enterprise-centric phenomena, once you get past the initial “what do you mean there’s no cost or company behind this thing.”

• The Cyborg “Moment,” or the way people actually use computers and technology, and the ways that people *might* use technology in the future.

In the same way that thinking about the IT Industry provides much needed context for properly understanding why “open source communities” exist and persist: thinking about how we actually use technology, how we relate to techno-social phenomena, and how these relationships, interfaces, and work-flows are changing. Both in changing response to technology, and changing the technology itself. It’s all important, and I think the very small observations are as useful as the very large observations.

In some respects, certainly insofar as I’ve formulated the Cyborg Institute, the “cyborg” moment can really be seen as the framing domain, but that doesn’t strike me a distinction that is particularly worth making.

• Corporate Law and Structure and Cooperative Economics.

Interestingly, my discussion of cooperatives and corporate organization began as a “pro-queer rejection of gay marriage,” but I’ve used it as an opportunity to think about the health care issue, as a starting point in my thinking regarding EconomyFail-2008/09. The economics of open source and Free Software are fascinating, and very real and quite important, and I found myself saying about six months ago that I wished I knew more about economics. Economics was one of those overly quantitative things in college that I just totally avoided because I was a hippie (basically.)

While it could be that my roots are showing, more recently I’ve come to believe that it’s really difficult to understand any social or political phenomena without thinking about the underlying economics. While clearly I have opinions, and I’m not a consummate economic social scientist, I do think that thinking about the economics of a situation is incredibly important.

• New Media and the Publishing Industry.

I’ve been blogging for a long time. And I’m a writer. And I want to write and publish fiction as a part of my “career,” such as it is. As you might imagine these factors make me incredibly interested in the future of publishing of “content,” and of the entire nexus of issues that relate to the notion of “new media.”

Creative Commons shows us that there has been some crossover between ideas that originated in the “open source” world with “content” (writ large.) The future of publishing and media is a cyborg issue, an ultimately techno-social phenomena, and thinking about the technology. that underpins the new media is really important. And of course, understanding the economic context of the industry that’s built around content is crucial.

So what’s this all building to? Should I write some sort of monograph on the subject? Is there anyone out there who might want to fund a grad student on to do research on these subjects in a few years?

The problem my work here so far--to my mind--is that while I’m pretty interested in the analysis that I’ve been able to construct, I’m not terribly satisfied with my background, and with the way that I’ve been largely unable to cite my intellectual heritage for my ideas and thoughts. I never studied this stuff in school, I have a number of books of criticism, potentially relevant philosophy, and important books in Anthropology (which seems to fit my interests and perspectives pretty well.) I’m pretty good at figuring things out, but I’m acutely aware of a lacking in my work of reference, methodology, and structure. As well as of any sort of empirical practice.

So maybe that’s my project for the next year, or the next few months at any rate: increase rigor, read more, consider new texts, pay more attention to citations, and develop some system for doing more empirical work.

We’ll see how this goes. I’d certainly appreciate feedback here. Thanks!

Thought I’ve gotten away from it a bit in recent months, tychoish has a long history of being an outlook of lists of various things. While I’m not sure I want to post all of my lists for everyone to point and laugh at, the following might be worth exploring.

This is a list of things I need to get worked out with my new computer, with technology in general. I post it both because I need an excuse to do a little brainstorming, and because it might be nice to get a little feedback from you all. Without further ado:

• Get USB Mounting/Auto-mounting to work more smoothly.

I use USB mass storage devices so rarely that I’m totally oblivious as to how I should go about setting this up with Arch Linux.

• Reformat and server-ify my desktop.

Since I’m basically not using my desktop as a desktop anymore… and there are some things that just don’t work… and there are no files left on it that I don’t have backed up elsewhere… I think it’s time to do a system wipe. I want to put Arch on it. I had thought about putting Xen on it and using virtual machines, but I’m now in a place where the increased management burden of that would outweigh the benefits of that. So I think I’m just going to set it up like a server, (but I suppose setting up a lightweight desktop wouldn’t be a big stress). Mostly I think having a server at home will be useful for testing, development, and othersuch projects. In any case, it’s not terribly useful as it is.

• Reorganize my music collection (now on laptop).

I copied over my music collection and while I’ve had a bunch of luck with mpd, I need to spend some time reorganizing the music. It’s on the list, and I shall do it.

• Straighten out the situation with my external hard drive.

Yeah, no clue here. I hope it’s alright. I’m going to try and use the Mac at work to see if I can’t make it work better. I may crack the enclosure and put it in my desktop once that’s in better working order.

• Acquire accessories:

There’s stuff I’ve had on my shopping list for a while. In no particular order:

• A more suitable laptop sleeve.

As it turns out, I have this backpack that’s great for lugging stuff around, but it’s bigger than I need most of the time, and the laptop padding could handle my 15.4" PowerBook back in the day. Current laptop is quite small, so it’s sort of overkill. This is lower priority.

• Additional power adapters.

The battery on this puppy is amazing. Having said that it’s nice to have a power adapter that can just live in my bag so I don’t have to fuss with repacking the power adapter every time I leave somewhere. I think one at my desk at work, one for home, and one for my bag is my usual complement and Lenovo power adapters are a lot cheaper than mac ones…

• Wireless access point for home.

Somehow I don’t have one. Oversight. Must procure soon. The thing is that I have an ancient 100 foot Ethernet cable that seems to do the job pretty well.

• Sort out Sleep/Wake Cycle

I think I mostly have this one sorted out. Basically, I had problems with the new laptop freezing when waking up from suspend/sleep when the network state upon return was different than when the laptop went into suspend. A little tweak to the ACPI event script, and everything seems to be in order.

• Write Network Management Triggers

I’m using the preferred network manager suite for Arch Linux (e.g. “netcfg”) and it works great, except it’s sometimes a bit bothersome to mange things, when I think it ought to just work. So I think I have a solution: create shortcuts and triggers in the window manager to get network stuff working a bit more smoothly. Now I just have to make it work.

• Tinker with StumpWM contrib packages

Once I got Stump WM working and set up, I mostly abandoned it. There’s all sorts of cool lisp things in the contrib/ directory that I haven’t tinkered with. Well, except for mpd.lisp, and even then not terribly much. I think I’d get something out of playing with those and so it’s on the list.

• Figure out what to do with the x41.

I’m not sure. The old laptop works, and I feel like I should do something with it… But what?

This post is an attempt to ask “what next?” in the world of contemporary application development. I’m disturbed by the conveyance of applications in this format. This is not news to popular readers, but, rather than complain extensively about the state of the contemporary technology, I think it would be more productive to muse on possible improvements and some of the underlying structural concerns in this space

In No Particular Order…

Today, we routinely design and implement user interfaces in HTML and JavaScript these days. I’m not convinced that HTML, or any XML based format is really all that good for conveying well formatted structured text, much less pixel perfect graphic design and application interface.

Lightweight text markups like Markdown, reStructuredText (for all it’s warts), and Textile are human readable, provide structure, and convey text well. Furthermore, it’s very possible to efficiently translate them into very high quality output formats, including XML formats and LaTeX.

One of the driving forces behind the convergence on “web-technologies” is that JavaScrpt/HTML/CSS are all thought to be “cross platform” technologies. It doesn’t matter if you’re running on a Mac, or a PC, or UNIX system, if it has a web browser it’ll run there. The web application movement realizes the “write once run everywhere,” notion that Sun attempted with Java in the 90s (except, that Java never really worked for that.) Except that every browser implements JavaScript/HTML/CSS in a different way which means, that it’s really “write once and tweak it to death so that IE/Firefox/Webkit don’t break.” There are some things (like jQuery; HTML5) that make this better, but the browser market is dirty and browser makers will never be incentivized to comply with the standards.¹

RESTful APIs² are, I think, leading to more desktop applications. Or at least making them more possible. It used to be very much the case that if you wanted web-connected data you had to go to a website. Now, if you want data from the Internet, in most cases it can be gotten in an easy to process formant (i.e. YAML/JSON) and then folded into a desktop application. In addition to “rounded corner power” and “social media,” the biggest impact of “Web 2.0” has been the increasing awareness and interest the API[^quality] in the more general public.

Adobe AIR is a wonderful idea. Even smaller lightweight devices like smartphones and netbooks are so powerful that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have them operate as such “dumb” clients. Conventional web development has developers cobble together server applications that put together content and then chuck it off to the client for rendering. With APIs (see above) it doesn’t make a lot of sense to leave all the heavy lifting on the server. Adobe understood this with AIR, the problem with AIR? It’s wildly proprietary, applications look out of place on every platform, and performance is miserable relative to “real” native applications. Its a great idea, and I’m terribly interested to see what comes next in this space.

I’m grumpy about HTML 5 because I remain unconvinced that web standards are really a viable way of regulating sane design and development practices. It also seems too likely that HTML 5 solves the problems we were having 2 years ago, rather than the problems we’ll have over the next 10 years. Also, I think this world needs a hell of a lot less XML, in any form.

What are your thoughts?

[^qualit]y]:I’m not sure there is any singular aspect of the whole “Web 2.0 thing” that is unequivocally bad or good. I think on the whole web design is better now than it used to be, but “rounded corner power” at this point all looks the same, and it’s really difficult to achieve in a clean technological sort of way. And the web has always been social; so while that’s not new, it’s nice that the web has caught on even if the whole “social networking silo” phenomena is less than desirable. The same thing goes for RESTful APIs: it’s great that data is more accessible, but it sucks that APIs can be so proprietary and I’m not convinced that HTTP is the “right” or “best” protocol for this technology. But these things happen.

I fear I’ve been posting too many posts in the vein of “so here’s what I’m up to folks,” rather than you know writing about things that may be interesting to folks out there in Internet land. Nevertheless, here’s another slightly more technical post.

I’ve mentioned in passing a few times over the past few months that:

• I’ve been interested in shifting to Arch Linux. While I’ve been running Arch in a VM on my work desktop, I have been quite slow to move additional machines over to Arch. It’s not for lack of wanting, but I have a hard time disrupting something that works when it’s already working.
• Also on the software front, I’ve switched to using the Stump Window Manger, and while I’ve talked a bit about this on the blog, I’ve done virtually no reporting of my ongoing progress with this.
• I missed the days when I only had one computer and it went everywhere with me. While I like having all this computing possibility around, I’m moving around enough these days that it doesn’t make sense to be tied down to a desktop. I like sitting on the couch and writing, and I like being able to go off for a weekend and be able to work on the projects that I really need/want to work on. That’s hard when you have a desk and an “office.”

This post provides updates with regards to these subjects.

Moving to Arch Linux and StumpWM

A few weeks ago, I had this massive cascade of software issues. Mostly things were provoked by the switch to Stump. Basically, the issue was that Stump wasn’t embedded in all of the desktop frameworks that are so popular these days, there were a number of system resources that just didn’t work with the new Window Manager.

The thing was that my systems were running a terribly hacked up version of Ubuntu. I was running weird kernels, I’d mostly given up on the display managers, and the systems were just messy. So the problem wasn’t so much with Stump, as it was with the way that Ubuntu packages and manages certain aspects of the system inside of desktop functionality. I’m thinking specifically of the ways that networking and sound are managed by dbus. If that didn’t make sense to you, don’t worry.

Since the chief problem boiled down to “this system is too complex for me to be able to manage,” and it no longer became an effective use of my time to maintain the system as it was… I wiped everything and finally put Arch on the laptop.

And it went on smoothly, and everything worked. Arch is a tinkerers distribution, there’s no doubt about that. Since I did have Arch experience it wasn’t a terribly traumatic experience. It took a little while to figure out how to make Suspend and Resume work (i.e. for the laptop when the lid closes,) and manually managing network connections isn’t incredibly straightforward until you get the hang of it, but it all works now. And I couldn’t be happier

The Experience of StumpWM

This isn’t really a full report, but more a note to say that my brain has really adapted to Stump, and I’m quite happy with the experience. Stump doesn’t in and of itself increase the ways I’m able to be productive, but… I do think that I work more efficiently when using Stump.

There’s still a lot left to be done with regards to the tweaking of stump for me. I need to play some more with the MPD (music player) integration, and there are a number of other contributed Lisp packages that I really want to play with. Also, I finally figured out how the Key Binding Map works when I had gotten my basic keybidning needs taken care of and I haven’t touched it since then. Now I know how I use the system and I’m ready to tweak things again, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Additional thoughts regarding Stump, from a more “objective” perspective: it is incredibly stable, and while it’s not blindingly lightweight, it lives in 20 megs of ram and that’s about it. I never need to restart the window manager or X anymore, and that’s kind of nice.

So in short, the Stump WM is a great thing and I need to write a bit more about the actual using of it. But first I need to do a little more tinkering. Because I’m like that.

The Consolidation of the Gear and Laptops

What a strange heading. In any case. I gave in and bought a new laptop, last week. I found a great deal on a used Lenovo x200 with great specs, and I thought that it would solve the majority of my issues with my existing technology.

First, it was considerably newer than the laptop I have been using for most of the past year: more RAM, dual core system, bigger and faster hard drive. Second, it had all of the qualities of the old laptop that I adored: it’s a 12" laptop which means very portable without making sacrifices, and it forgoes a trackpad for a “ThinkPad Nipple” for a mouse. Finally (and perhaps most importantly,) the screen resolution is 1200x800 (up from 1024×768) which makes it possible to comfortably tile two windows next to each-other at once. This is the same resolution as my 15" PowerBook G4 (and I think all of the 13 inch MacBooks). It’s a good size, and I was really aching for the increased screen space.

It turns out that all of these concerns were addressed fully with this new system. The screen is perfect, it’s peppy. it’s also nice to return to the modern computing world. I continue to be mightily impressed with the build quality, design, and functionality of IBM/Lenovo hardware.

My computer consolidation isn’t yet complete: my desktop hasn’t yet been backed up and converted to Arch, but it’s getting there. I’m also not quite sure what happens with the old laptop. I’m thinking of keeping it around as a spare, but if anyone has a need for a really awesome ThinkPad x41 they should be in touch.

Onward and Upward!

I have a confession to make. I really want a Kindle. Bad.

No really. I do. The DRM scares me, and I think the books are just the other side of “too expensive,” and because I come from a long line of “book collecting people” I think there are a lot of books that I would want to own in the paper. Furthermore, I have a great laptop for reading books (a small tablet), and I have a very long history of using small form computing devices (think palm pilots and pocket pcs) to read books. And yet, I returned to paper a few years ago, and don’t feel really bad about that.

I’m not going to get a Kindle, at least not yet. I want to see what the Barnes and Nobel “Nook” looks like. I need to upgrade the laptop more, and I think something like the Nokia n900 might end up being a better device in this space and even if it isn’t, I think we’re going to see a lot of development in the “tablet” space in the next year, and it seems premature to buy now. For me.

Given all these caveats, I think its interesting to think about why I want the Kindle so bad. Here are some questions and answers:

So given all these caveats, why do you want a Kindle so bad?

I’ve held one on a number of occasions, and I’ve always been struck with how nice they feel. They’re solid and they’re thin. The text is clear and readable, the page advance buttons fall wonderfully under your thumbs. The experience, at least on these second generation devices, is really quite good.

I’ve rather famously, taken an entire bag of books along with me for a long weekend trip. A weekend where, I ended up reading about two and a half pages. So, the fact that you can take a whole pile of books or more properly the potential for getting the one right book you want, is appealing in a practical way.

Is this just about the hardware, or is there more?

I think the Kindle is the ideal distribution mechanism for periodical literature. The codex is likely to be of enduring importance for quite while, but I’m almost certain that the magazine and newspaper isn’t. While blogs are great, don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a need for publications that are in-between the “book” and the “blog,” and I think the Kindle is a great space for those kinds of texts. Practically, I’d like to read more content of that sort, and if I had a kindle, I suspect that I’d get a lot of use out of it.

The instant distribution model is a huge plus, and I really like to read. Cory Doctorow says something to the effect of “Ebook readers will fail, because a ‘good’ ebook reader would need to remove distractions and malfunction possibilities as effectively as paper, and devices that ‘only’ read books, won’t sell very well next to devices which also check your email and play games.” And I think that’s probably a true observation, but it looks like the Kindle does single-function pretty well. I think the next year, or so, will be really interesting as we see more tablets in the market.

You’re obviously not going to get one today, so what would make you change your mind?

The DRM and the price of the books. The DRM really needs no additional condemnation. I think 10 dollars is a bit steep for books, particularly because it’s so flat rate, and while it’s cheaper than the hardcover (and that’s good,) it’s also more than a paperback in most cases. And at least in a paperback you have something on your shelf. And the DRM really adds insult to injury. If they distributed the files in plain text/html and some weirdass XML format that would be one thing, but they give you a blob that is certain to be next to useless in a year or two. If books were 3 bucks, or 5 bucks, or even 6 or 7 bucks--even if the device was 300--or there was some sort of subscription service, I wouldn’t mind the DRM, but as it is… the DRM makes the economics difficult for me to compute.

If the DRM is such an issue why have you gotten this far?

A lot of times in the paper-book world you buy a book. Read a hundred pages (or maybe twenty?), and then are so disgusted by the book that you can’t bare to read any more, and you set it aside. And often times a trip to the bookstore (particularly in advance of a trip) means buying a number of books, when only some of these books will be of worth (to you) to justify their expense.

These situations are less likely to happen with a Kindle. There are significant samples, and you carry the bookstore around with you. I suspect the chances are that you only really need to “buy” the books that you read, which might end up being significantly cheaper in the long run.

The Kindle is a physical manifestation of a shift away from the physicality of information, but it’s only really a symptom and not a leading cause this shift, right? If you accept this, if you accept that most information and knowledge only exists as bits and photons, then all of the rituals that we build around books (collections, libraries, shelves) are less important.

What about the *Nook*?

The nook is a more impressive platform. For sure, it fails the Doctorow test of (potentially) being too interesting for tasks that aren’t reading books.

I think I probably have some more writing to do on this subject, but, in general I think Amazon is a better and smarter company than Barnes and Nobel, and if the name of the game in ebook readers is “vendor lock-in” then I trust Amazon a bit more. In a lot of ways, I hold B&N responsible for the ongoing/impending collapse of the publishing industry.¹

In any case, mostly, at the moment I just want to wait and see before I make any sort of decision on the subject.

Thoughts?

In “Radicalism in Free Software, Open Source” I contemplated the discourse of and around radicalism in and about Free Software and Open Source software. I think this post is a loose sequel to that post, and I want to use it to think about the role.

I suppose the ongoing merger of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, particularly with regards to the MySQL database engine weights heavy on many of our minds.

There are a number of companies, fairly large companies, who have taken a fairly significant leadership role in open source and free software. Red Hat. Sun Microsystems. IBM. Nov ell. And so forth. While I’m certainly not arguing against the adoption of open source methodologies in the enterprise/corporate space, I don’t think that we can totally ignore the impact that these companies have on the open source community.

A lot of people--mistakenly, I think--fear that Free Software works against commercialism¹ in the software industry. People wonder: “How can we make money off of software if we give it away for free?”² Now it is true that free software (and its adherents) prefer business that look different from proprietary software businesses. They’re smaller, more sustainable, and tend to focus on much more custom deployments for specific users and groups. This is in stark contrast to the “general releases” for large audiences, that a lot of proprietary audiences strive for.

In any case, there is a whole nexus of issues related to free software projects and their communities that are affected by the commercial interests and “powers” that sponsor, support, and have instigated some of the largest free software projects around. The key issues and questions include:

• How do new software projects of consequence begin in an era when most projects of any notable size have significant corporate backing?
• What happens to communities when the corporations that sponsor free software are sold or change directions?
• Do people contribute to free software outside of their jobs? Particularly for big “enterprise” applications like Nagios or Jboss?
• Is the “hobbyist hacker” a relevant and/or useful arch-type? Can we intuit which projects attract hobbyists and which projects survive because businesses sponsor their development, rather than because hobbyists contribute energy to them. For example: desktop stuff, niche window managers, games, etc. are more likely to be the province of hobbyists and we might expect stuff like hardware drivers, application frameworks, and database engines might be the kind of thing where development is mostly sponsored by corporations.
• Is free software (or, Open Source may be the more apropos terminology at the moment) just the contemporary form of industry group cooperation? Is open source how we standardize our nuts and bolts in the 21st century?
• How does “not invented here syndrome” play out in light of the genesis of open source?
• In a similar vein, how do free software projects get started in today’s world. Can someone say “I want to do this thing” and people will follow? Do you need a business and some initial capital to get started? Must the niche be clear and undeveloped?
• I’m sort of surprised that there haven’t been any Lucid-style forks of free software projects since, well, Lucid Emacs. While I’m not exactly arguing that the Lucid Emacs Fork was a good thing, it’s surprising that similar sorts of splits don’t happen any more.

That’s the train of thought. I’d be more than happy to start to hash out any of these ideas with you. Onward and Upward!

The background:

• zonker on Selling vs. Shaming
• bkuhn on Denouncing vs. Advocating: In Defense of the Occasional Denouncement
• Various other conversations on identi.ca over the past few weeks.

In light of this debate I’ve been thinking about the role and manifestations of radicalism in the free software and open source world. I think a lot of people (unfairly, I think in many cases) equate dedication to the “Cause of Free Software,” as the refusal to use anything but free software, and the admonishment of those who do use “unpure” software. To my mind this is both unfair to Free Software as well as the radicals who work on free software projects and advocate for Free Software.

First, lets back up and talk about RMS¹. RMS is often held up as the straw man for “free software radicals.” RMS apparently (and I’d believe it) refuses to use software that isn’t free software. This is seen as being somewhat “monkish,” because doesn’t just involve using GNU/Linux on the desktop, but it also involves things like refusing to use the non-free software written for GNU/Linux, including Adobe’s Flash player, and various drivers. In short using the “free-only” stack of software is a somewhat archaic experience. The moderates say “who wants to use a computer which has been willfully broken because the software’s license is ideologically incompatible,” and the moderates come out looking rational and pragmatic.

Except that, as near as I can tell, while the refusal to use non-free software might be a bit traumatic for a new convert from the proprietary operating system world, for someone like RMS, it’s not a huge personal sacrifice. I don’t think I’m particularly “monkish” about my free software habits, and the only non-free software I use is the adobe flash player, and the non-open-source extensions to Sun’s Virtual Box. I’m pretty sure I don’t even need the binary blob stuff in the kernel. For me--and likely for RMS, and those of our ilk--sticking to the pure “free software” stuff works better and suits the way I enjoy working.²

In short, our ability to use free software exclusively, depends upon our habits and on the ways in which we use and interact with technology.

To my mind, the process by which the pragmatic approach to free software and open source radicalizes people like RMS, is terribly unproductive. While we can see that the moderates come away from this encounter looking more reasonable to the more conventional types in the software world, this is not a productive or useful discussion to entertain.

In any case I think there are a number of dimensions to the free software (and open source world,) that focusing on “how free your software” is distracts us from. Might it not be useful to think of a few other issues. They are, as follows:

1. Free software is about education, and ensuring that the users of technology can and do understand the implications of the technology that they use.

At least theoretically, one of the leading reasons why having “complete and corresponding source code” is so crucial to free software is that with the source code, users will be able to understand how their technology works.

Contemporary software is considerably more complex than the 70s vintage software that spurred the Free Software movement. Where one might have imagined being able to see, use, and helpfully modified an early version of a program like Emacs, today the source code for Emacs is eighty megabytes, to say nothing of the entire Linux Kernel. I think it’s absurd to suggest that “just looking at the source code” for a program will be educational in and of itself.

Having said that, I think free software can (and does) teach people a great deal about technology and software. People who use free software know more about technology. And it’s not just because people who are given to use free software are more computer literate, but rather using free software teaches people about technology. Arch Linux is a great example of this at a fairly high level, but I think there’s a way that Open Office Firefox plays a similar role for a more general audience.

2. There are a number of cases around free software where freedom--despite licensing choices--can be ambiguous. In these cases, particularly, it is important to think about the economics of software, not simply the state of the “ownership” of software.

I’m thinking about situations like the “re-licensing” such as that employed by MySQL AB/Sun/Oracle over the MySQL database. In these cases contributors assign copyright to the commercial owner of the software project on the condition that the code also be licensed under the terms of a license like the GPL. This way the owning copy has the ability to sell licenses to the project under terms that would be incompatible with the GPL. This includes adding proprietary features to the open source code that don’t get reincorporated into the mainline.

This “hybrid model” gives the company who owns the copyright a lot of power over the code base, that normal contributors simply don’t have. While this isn’t a tragedy, I think the current lack of certainty over the MySQL project should give people at least some pause before adopting this sort of business model.

While it might have once been possible to “judge a project by the license,” I think the issue of “Software Freedom” is in today’s world so much more complex, and I’m pretty sure that having some sort of economic understanding of the industry is crucial to figuring this out.

3. The success of free software may not be directly connected to the size of the userbase of free software

One thing that I think Zonker’s argument falls apart around is the idea that free software will only be successful if the entire world is using it. Wrong.

Lets take a project like Awesome. It’s a highly niche window manager for X11 that isn’t part of a Desktop Environment (e.g. GNOME/KDE/XFCE), and you have to know a thing or two about scripting and programing in order to get it to be usable. If there were much more than a thousand users in the world I’d be surprised. This accounts for a minuscule amount of the desktop window management market. Despite this, I think the Awesome project is wildly successful.

So what marks a successful free software project? A product that creates value in the world, by making people’s jobs easier and more efficient. A community that supports the developers and users of the software equally. Size helps for sure, particularly in that it disperses responsibility for the development of a project among a number of capable folks. However, the size of a projects userbase (or developer base) should not be the sole or even the most important quality by which we can judge success.

There are other issues which are important to think about and debate in the free software world. There are also some other instances where the “hard line” is over radicalized by a more moderate element, nevertheless I think this is a good place to stop for today, and I’m interested in getting some feedback from you all before I continue with this idea.

Onward and Upward!