Three years ago, I was elected to the board of directors of Software in the Public Interest, Inc. About halfway through my three year term, I was elected by the board to the (largely ceremonial?) role of Vice President of the organization. This month, my term is up and after a good deal of soul searching over the last weeks, I've decided to not run again. With time, I've become busy with other projects including work and graduate school at the MIT Media Lab, Debian, Ubuntu, One Laptop per Child, several book projects and more. Recently, I've found that I've simply had less time to put toward SPI than I have had in the past. Of course, I continue to care very much about SPI and its mission and feel that I done a good job of fulfilling my responsibilities throughout my term. The real reason I'd like to step aside to let some new blood and energy take a more active role and to let SPI take off in new directions. Since I've served a full term, I thought I would take the opportunity to look back at my work with SPI over the last three years and to the future. SPI's Recent Past Three years ago, I ran for the SPI board on a platform that I would like to see SPI work more like a real pro-active non-profit organization and less like Debian's legal shell. SPI was at at transition point then and the board spent a lot of time thinking about it was that SPI should do and what role it should fill in the free software community. Many of these questions are still open but the following is my round up. There are two types of non-profit organizations in the free/open source community. The first is the large-project foundation. Example are the GNOME Foundation, KDE Foundation, and Plone Foundation. These support and work closely with one large and otherwise institutionally independent project. The second type is concerned with advocacy or issues of concern to many or all free software projects. The FSG/LSB, Open Source Initiative, Software Freedom International, Linux International, and the Free Software Foundation are all examples of this type (although the FSF also supports the GNU Project so can be put into both camps). Three years ago, SPI was basically the Debian Foundation under a different name. However, SPI also supported a handful of other medium-sized projects (at the time, this included Berlin and OFTC). In this way, SPI provided some of the benefits of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization to groups that were large and important enough to care about issues like the tax-deductability of donations, but small enough that starting their own foundation didn't quite make sense. This, I am convinced, is SPI's niche and its where the organization can make the greatest difference. While Debian continues to be the driving force behind SPI, this mirrors Debian close relationship with other free software projects as a downstream and a distribution. Debian may ultimately decide its has outgrown SPI and wants its own foundation but it's role in providing an umbrella for other free software project also makes a lot of sense. Over the last years, SPI has added several new member projects including GNUStep, Drupal and PostgreSQL and members of these projects have played an increasingly important role in SPI. OFTC members including SPI secretary David Graham have continued to drive the organization. I am thrilled to see that PostgreSQL's Josh Berkus is running for a seat on the board and wish him the best of luck. He has put a huge amount of effort into SPI in the past several months and I believe he would make a great board member. Of course, not everything has been rosy. While our organization is in slightly better shape than it has been in the past, SPI still suffers from a lack of interest and activity by participants in its member projects. SPI handles Debian's money and every Debian developer should be interested and involved in SPI; yet only a relatively small percentage are. I've run SPI sessions, talks, and BOFs at three of the last four Debian conferences but haven't been able to make a satisfactory dent in either the Debian community or SPI. The next board of directors will need to work actively and creatively to help do what the last board did not accomplish. While things are currently much better than they have been in the past, SPI has continued to be mired in a number of bureaucratic issues. Simple issues like accurate, timely and transparent bookkeeping have proved more difficult than the board or those brave (or foolhardy) enough to take on the treasurer position seem to have thought. I worked with the treasurer and our lawyer to meet with a bookkeeping service in New York City. The Future In the future, I'd like see to more members projects and more active participants from all members projects. I'd like to see a more active organization in general but am beginning to conclude that a fully volunteer "staff" is only going to be able to do so much. In terms of bureaucratic issues, several board members have lobbied hard to spend money to hire full or part time help either in an administrative capacity or as some sort of combination administrator/executive director. For a number of reasons, the board has been reticent to do this but I think it's become increasingly clear that our growth and relevance as an organization is going to require this. I think hiring the bookkeeping service was a good first step. I think at the very least, SPI should "outsource" most of the non-fun administrative work to others so that the board can focus on the important work of advocating free software and helping our member projects. I'm famously concerned with introducing paid labor into voluntary free software projects but I think that, if done right, this could be a very good step. In terms of my own involvement, I'm planning to stay involved as a contributing member or perhaps even as an adviser if the board will have me. I'd like to continue work on the SPI-Trademark committee and look forward to the day that we can create a general policy for helping folks use and license the Debian mark (and other trademark SPI may hold in the future) as permissively as possible. I'd also like to see a better documented process for becoming an SPI member project. This should explain to projects what SPI expects from them (e.g., democratic decision making, an active representative to SPI, etc), what they will get from SPI, and what is necessary to make it all happen. I'd like to work with some of the recent member projects to help document their experience and make easier for the next batch. I'm looking forward to taking some time off and look forward to the possibility of running for a seat on the SPI board again at some point in the future.

In my mailbox today (links are added):

Dear Boston Vegetarian Society List, The curator of the World Carrot Museum will be joining us at Happy Buddha on a visit from the UK!

I've never met anyone who has created a museum about a vegetable but I'm intrigued. I'm also pleased to see that similar ventures exist for vegetables that I enjoy even more than carrots.

If you're in the Seattle area and are concerned about DRM, you should be at a "flash" protest against DRM tomorrow (Tuesday May, 23) before work (8-9AM) to kick off a major anti-DRM campaign. There will be costumes and fun to be had by all. These sorts of things are great if a bunch of people participate and just seem impotent if not enough do. This is important enough that I would consider flying back to Seattle for it if I had a little more time and money to do so. It's worth it to make sure this campaign starts off on the right foot. We have a lot to lose if it doesn't. If you are in the area and can possible spare an hour or two and be in downtown Seattle tomorrow morning, I think it is really important that you do so. You can get more information from someone at the FSF by emailing action@defectivebydesign.org and announcing that you want to participate.

In my infinite spare time, I think it would be fun to make a parody of an MTV style "documentary" about one day in the life a person with a Hitler mustache to show ridiculous that genre has become. The video will be done with 15 second cuts and and with a bumping soundtrack by an eclectic selection of artists from the full spectrum of popular music. It will follow around a person for one day as they have a barber chisel out a Hitler mustache and then spend one day in that form. These scenes will, of course, be interspersed up with snippets from interviews with vapid onlookers, fashion gurus, and celebrities weighing in on all sides of the many "issues" that wearing a Hitler mustache raises. These issues might include:

• Is it now or will it ever been long enough to make the Hitler mustache OK again? Did Hitler really ruin that mustache for ever and for everybody? Do fashionistas believe that this is that a good or a bad thing?
• What about Charlie Chaplin and others who wore similar mustaches before or concurrent with Hitler?
• In what sense does living with a Hitler mustache teach either the wearer or the public that "it's what inside that really counts."

If you would like to donate resources or time to this project, please let me know.

Scott, the first thing I want to say in response to your post is that you are not alone. I did not know someone was attacked for wearing an Ubuntu shirt in Helsinki, but I did witness at least one "Fuck Ubuntu" incident, and it seemed that Ubuntu jokes and snaps at the new distro were very common. I find this utterly childish and stupid. I am sorry for everyone who was offended. But please don't blame or condemn everyone in Debian or the whole project for the actions of some of its members or followers. You've already linked to my thoughts on the Ubuntu-Debian situation, so I need not cover any of that anymore. I wouldn't want to either, because believe it or not, this article got me flamed by Ubuntu developers just way too many times, in personal mails as well as in forums. Instead, let's look at the now and then this time. I've heard a few developers express their unhappiness with Debian in the past year, much in the same way that you did. Not always was it related to Ubuntu, but quite often it was. There are newcomers to Debian who shake their head in disbelief how anyone can work in a project such as Debian, and there are the veterans among us who seem to concede that Debian has slipped away from their ideals and it's just not fun anymore. It's not hard for me to understand each of them. I've followed Debian for nearly a decade now and thus tracked how it changed over time. We are one of the largest free software projects, and size never comes without problems. So while the Debian project used to be an association of geeks enjoying their focus on technical excellence, the sheer growth of our project called for many other fields to be managed, and we did not always handle this increase in complexity very gracefully. After all, we are all just geeks who want to have fun, aren't we? As a result, several aspects of our project have been said to "stagnate", and parts (and parties) have diverged. As a volunteer developer, it's not always fun to run up against walls and find that your innovativeness is met with stubborness or simple silence. I say "not always" because I think it's really just a matter of perspective. Over the years, Debian has seriously affected my life, the way I look at things, the way I interact with people, and the way I do stuff. I am eternally grateful for much of that. But the learning process has not stopped. What Debian needs is a stronger grasp of the big picture. In joining all the other developers who are already doing excellent work in that direction, what better learning opportunity could there be to approach large-scale project management, away from academia and the corporate world. For me, this is a very interesting perspective of a fascinating project, one that directly relates to my current research endeavour. I was asked recently how we "control the anarchy", and the first thing I said was that "control" was not the right word. Debian is not about control, it's about the flow. If it's not going your way, you can swim against it, you can pull out, or you can try to find ways to change that flow, bottom-up rather than top-down. I think David's idea of a steering committee is an excellent one, and I'd be happy to dedicate time to such an effort. I wouldn't call it "steering" though, as that seems too active. Rather, I envision a group of people dedicated to keeping track of the big picture (obviously in close contact with the release team) to which developers can turn if they need advice. In the last few years, I've often asked myself why the heck I don't just give up, instead of continuously running up against problems that seemed hopeless. Even now, I sometimes think that I should have just pulled the plug, but my answer has always been no, and it looks like it'll remain that way. Why? Because we've come an incredibly long way, and that by itself provide for a lot of motivation. Mostly, however, I decided to hang in there because I tend to like challenges, even if at first I have no idea how to conquer them. When I then look at what some of the people are doing for the project, I come to realise that there are solutions, even if the road is a long one. You (Scott) strike me as a very innovative person, and not only because the problems you and I are looking at tend to overlap to a large degree. I strongly respect you for your work, and Canonical certainly deserves a tip of the hat for providing you with the environment to do so. Sometimes, I even envy you a little, simply because I haven't been able to get down to coding solutions as much as I would have liked to and you've beaten me to the punch on things like HCT or upstart -- even though my work in that area has been mostly vapourware, so there was no real punch to which you've beaten me... I think you'll know what I mean. Yet, scanning some of your older blog posts, I got the impression that you weren't always happy with the way you have to do things at Canonical. And still, you're enthusiasm for working on your projects is astounding; it wasn't hard to come to that conclusion just a week ago, even though we've only talked briefly in Cambridge. Have you asked yourself why that is? I'll go out on a limb and postulate it's because of your innovativeness, because of your urge to push technology further, to implement cool things, and to break free of the cruft that comes with 13 years of Debian and several decades of standards la POSIX and SysV. Debian is too conservative for you, and all the cruft weighs heavy. Ubuntu, on the other handy, is "fluffy" and not afraid to forge ahead, and you've been an active part of it from day one. As much as I hate to see you "with them" rather than with us, I think you've found your place. And so have I. I'm less about coding than I am about integration, and there's work to do. Debian is a massive project with an amazing track record of achievements to look at. And it has problems. Well, great! Let's attack them. Never give up. Another reason why I've stayed with Debian is because there are people who think alike. Three years ago, I would have been able to give you a long bullet lists of hopeless problems in Debian. If you ask me today, I would have problems arguing their hopelessness, for I've seen plenty of developers taking it up with these problems, and in the meritocratic way. Our release team is doing a fantastic job and I've never felt so positive about the promise we made with the next release. People like J rg, Zobel, Rapha l, the two Alex, Meike, Christoph, and the many others I'll leave out only in the interest of brevity (the list is longer and doesn't only span Germany and France) are doing great work, and that is truly motivating. And I ought to mention explicitly our leader, Anthony, who's been doing an excellent job so far. I hope he can keep it up. Also, take a look at our IRC channels. I would have to be lying if I'd say nothing has changed. And the same applies to mailing lists. We still have a reputation to deal with, but if you stop listening to what people say and actually take a look, I think we've come a long way. I'd even say it's become more fun to work on Debian again! I think we owe a lot of that to Debian Women. I am definitely proud to be a member of this community (with which I mean Debian as a whole, not just Debian Women). I think I could continue this blog post endlessly. Let's not. You (Scott) may not be a fellow DD any longer, but you remain a fellow D, and I hope we'll continue to let our cooperation prosper. Now if only you had told me that "getting upstart installable required changes to twelve different packages, including sysvinit itself" when you approached me with what sounded like a simple sponsorship request... I've started to have a go at the "herculian effort", step by step. Seems like an interesting experiment. NP: Eels / Daisies of the Galaxy (it's really hard to find a better band for a grey Sunday morning) Update: Maybe our reputation isn't all that bad, or Slashdot posts suddenly became all useful. A lot of insightful and interesting posts in the first batch of comments...