Liberty and the Librarian [Guest commentary by Beverly C. Lucey at The Irascible Professor]

Access to computers in libraries is also critical to learning and a pathway to the outside world. It's a small attempt to even the divide among economic classes. Many libraries now subscribe to a pricey database that can allow sophisticated research beyond the clutter of regular search engines. A self-directed learner could gain quite an education by employing the new technology with some old fashioned digging. We have a smart, productive population. But millions of poor or newly arrived people do not have a free ticket to ride the campus bus.

It would be good if this 25-31kGBP/yr post was filled with someone who knows a lot about free software and can present it.

Apologies for the lame misquote of the Queen song, but I just couldn't resist it... (Steve commented: "Great film, and great song! I'm going to go find my soundtrack album now!" and Luis Villa added: "Anyone who likes that particular Queen owes it to themselves to check out the Kleptones Night at the Hip-Hopera, which I think I'm now going to run off and play myself." ) Flash is a bit of a problem for me in two ways:

1. Free software players don't handle very much of it;
2. Most Flash file authors make inaccessible rubbish;

It's not really surprising that free software players don't handle much of it, because Macromedia/Adobe have dragged their feet about open support for the format. That makes it a frustrating and difficult reverse-engineering task and most people who are good at reverse-engineering seem to concentrate on hardware drivers so far, which is A Good Thing in my opinion. On 7 November, Alex Hudson reported that Adobe make Flash scripting Free Software with Mozilla Foundation [FSFE Discussion via GMANE] - will this improve things? Ross Burton commented:

"The Adobe donation to Mozilla is just an EcmaScript 4 VM, which is a common language used by JavaScript, VBScript and whatever the Flash scripting language is called."

Students for a Free Tibet are keeping a list of google alternatives and Alternative, innovative search engines [madduck's droppings] is another list.

Debian and mplayer FAQ: updated after prodding from A Mennucc, now that mplayer is in unstable.

interalia commented:

"As a native speaker of English I would understand the statement, "you've never had to run a business" to imply that the writer thinks running a business is not particularly fun or enjoyable. Obviously people still do it anyway for other reasons, but "had to" here doesn't have to imply compulsion. It just expresses mildly the writer's lack of enjoyment of the task. I can see how this is a nuance that could be missed though, especially by non-native speakers."

That may be a big part of why that turn of phrase irritated me. It suggests something similar to Dickens's "it is considered a discreditable station - though it must be filled by somebody" defence (from Tale of Two Cities) that some Englishmen may know. I spend much time reminding people that the currently-common US-English money-above-all plc approach to business is not the only way. People can run responsible businesses if they choose - business can be fun and enjoyable. I think Dunc-Tank should be fun and enjoyable, but there's precious little sign of it yet.

Wouter Verhelst replies again:

"With all due respect, but I can't shake myself free of the feeling that you're being intentionally obnoxious here." "When I said "[...] these people never had to run a business", that wasn't intended to say that people who run a business "have" to do so, for lack of anything else. I mean, sure, there's choice, but that doesn't mean you can make this choice every day. Does the word "expression" mean anything to you?" "Additionally, the numbers I gave were meant to give people a general idea; while they're roughly accurate for my case, they certainly aren't completely correct in the general case, and were never meant to be." "Please stop putting whatever I say under the microscope like that, thank you very much."

I didn't need a microscope to spot the cracks in those numbers - our right-wing news media repeatedly points out that it's cheaper to do business in the US and casual web browsing finds figures. As I asked elsewhere, the general idea that net pay is less than the bill to the customer is widely known, so why use a detailed breakdown with higher figures to advocate US$6k? If the point is just "the 6k isn't net pay" then just write that. Personally, I think that point is mostly irrelevant, but the misleading breakdown looked like the sort of thing that dunc-tank should be publishing and isn't. As for "these people have never had to run a business" - yes, it's an expression, but it suggests a compulsion which doesn't exist - why use it? If the point is just "these people have never run a business" then just write that. It's shorter and more honest, although probably wrong: you don't need to have run a business to know that the bill to customer isn't the worker's net pay. I can think of many, many possible reasons for misdescribing something that some people choose to do as something they had to do, but I can't think of one I like. At worst, it's insulting to people who don't do their own business administration. "With all due respect" maybe I am being "intentionally obnoxious" about the breakdown and misleading phrasings: I want to discourage people who post comments without any obvious attempt to get their facts straight, or who exaggerate. Both of those take us away from discussing more basic points like: dunc-tank's execution has damaged debian; and dunc-tank is buying from neither an open market nor an openly regulated one.

I've written a little lately on the Dunc-Tank (a project to pay some key debian post-holders) and it's drawn some comments about running a business. I've owned businesses for years and there's a lot I don't know, but I've been frankly shocked by some of the comments. Here's two more. I wrote:

Double-taxation seems like something a good accountant should help to avoid - not heard of it being a significant problem often;

Today, I read a comment from Joe Buck:

"Self-employed people or contractors have to pay double Social Security taxes in the US. That's because, for salaried workers, the worker pays half and the employer pays half." "This is one factor contributing to why anyone considering leaving regular work and setting up shop as a contractor in the US needs to bill 2x their regularly hourly salary to wind up with the same standard of living. In addition to higher taxes, there's time between contracts, no paid time off, etc."

That's not double taxes. That's one tax split between two parties. Half plus half is one, not double. If the two parties (employer and employee) are the same (as in self-employment), you're still only paying the one tax. If the business is run half-decent, that tax will be figured into the cost of the worker, even if it's not in their posted gross salary. If the employer part is not widely known, that sounds like government slyness to me. Double-taxation is paying the same tax twice, not paying one tax split between employer and employee. By the way, I'm slightly surprised US contractors need to bill 2*gross. When taking on new contract staff at a UK university, I think the cost was estimated at 1.6*gross, and I think I've already mentioned that the cost for a UK SME seems to be about 1.5*gross. We're told that the US taxes less, so maybe work is much rarer there, or something. Which brings me to when I wrote:

I think running a business is a choice, not something anyone ever "had to" do.

to which Scott Robinson replied:

"That is certainly an odd perspective wrt. the choice of becoming an entrepreneur. Have you only lived in places where employment is guaranteed?"

As far as I know, I've never lived in a place with no jobs at all. Sometimes the jobs are crap and sometimes the terms for joining an existing business are crap (so in my opinion, they might as well not exist), but if you didn't want to run a business, you could avoid it. These are all things you weigh up when making your choice whether or not to run a business. Is there anywhere which forces workers to run businesses?

Wouter Verhelst kindly replied to my comments on his calculation of Steve's net pay :

"The point wasn't getting a "correct" number; only Steve could produce those, if he wanted to. The point was proving that if you get 6000 for one month of work as a business, then those 6000 aren't what you can spend on your personal life. Whether the exact number is 2400 or 3400 is, thus, totally besides the point." "But, yeah, thanks for the clarification :-)"

I agree that 6000 gross works out as a lower net figure. So what? That's obvious to anyone who works and has noticed their gross pay isn't what they actually get to use, even if these "people have never had to run a business". (And I think running a business is a choice, not something anyone ever "had to" do.) If whether it's 2400 or 3400 net wasn't the point, why use inflated figures to advocate paying 6000 gross? My main point was: Dunc-Tank is not buying in a free market, so how can we tell what the fair rate is? Brian M. Carlson explained the lack of VAT:

"States in the US have either an income tax, a sales tax, or both. In the general case, non-profit corporations are exempt from taxation, as long as they have the proper paperwork. Also, certain essentials, such as necessary foods (cheese, but not soda) are exempt from sales tax where it exists." "Since Steve is almost certainly not a non-profit, he will have to pay income tax to both the state and federal governments; the rate depends on his annual income. He will have to pay FICA (social security) taxes, which are approximately 7% of the income. Any amount over $90,000 is not taxable under FICA."

Thanks for the explanation. I hope it'll help other non-US people. Of course, the actual payment rate is minor to me, compared to the problems of dunc-tank being designed as a market for lemons and being driven through by brinkmanship.

First, my position: I'm in favour of paying people to work on debian, but I think the one-person job markets, lack of openness and trading on debian's goodwill makes the current configuration of Dunc-Tank unacceptable. This should not be a surprise: I questioned the one-person-time contracts right near the start, but - like so many questions - it went unanswered. Secondly, I think this is wrong for the project. Damage was forseeable and maybe could have been mitigated, but Debian Project Leader Anthony Towns chose to raise the stakes, taking the funding outside the project, leaving no control for the developers except a recall vote, as far as I can see. The DPL wasn't recalled, but is still partly to blame for the damage, no matter whether more than half of DDs support him or not. Finally, I'm unconvinced by Wouter Verhelst's arguments that USD 6000 is a fair price. The one-person market is nothing like a free market and that particular rationale seems wrong because:

1. VAT is a Tax on Value Added, so the payment of 21% or whatever would be reduced by the VAT paid on any supplies, which reduces the effective total rate. Also, small businesses are VAT-exempt in some states. Finally, Stephen R. Langasek seems to be in Oregon and Oregon has no state sales tax [Oregon Department of Revenue] - does that mean no VAT either? So, still 6000 left;
2. Suburban office space in Oregon looks like it costs USD 13.50/sf/yr fully-serviced (source), so a month for one person (175sf) would be about USD 200. Even downtown Portland is only about USD 300. (Where did 500 come from?) So, 5700 left;
3. Utilities: it's GBP 40 for phone+internet here and the rest are included in fully-serviced, as far as I know, so let's say USD 100, even though USA is reputedly cheaper? 5600 left;
4. Accountant fees are pretty much constant if you have a working business, but USD 3600 for a year? I'd expect closer to USD2000 (so about 200 per month) for a one-person business. SPI seems to pay USD1000 for bookkeeping, but I can't find a direct comparable - anyone know? 5400 left;
5. Social and other insurances tend to be related to income, working out around to a third or so in the UK IIRC, so USD2000? What's the current US rate? 3400 left;
6. Double-taxation seems like something a good accountant should help to avoid - not heard of it being a significant problem often; 3400 left.

So, that leaves USD 3400, less some % for VAT maybe. Not well-paid IMO, but much more than living cost for many DDs. If any of the above figures are too high or low, please tell me and I'll update this. Of course, the actual payment rate is minor to me, compared to the problem of dunc-tank being designed as a market for lemons and being driven through by brinkmanship.

Google's hosting service seems to share Sourceforge's non-free code problem. I've not many reports about the hosting yet, but I'll be surprised if old problems like the registration pressure, accessibility failures, .coop bans and so on from above aren't repeated. I'd avoid Savannah and GNA for now, unless you know you are happy with their policies (such as required early adoption of FDL, or HTTPS-only). BerliOS.de and TuxFamily.org seem more relaxed, but that does mean you have to check each licence - a problem for browsers more than publishers, I guess. If there's a debian angle, alioth.debian.org is another option.

New town, so new cycle forum. I'll be going along to the Weston-super-Mare cycling forum in the evening of Wed 25 October, which apparently will be seeing proposals for cycle route signing. I'm a big fan of "Cambridge-style" rectangular destination+arrows route signing on the approach to junctions. "Finger" post signs are not much good: they encourage cyclists to be looking up and away from the junction right at a critical moment. If you know of any good cycle route signs and general design principles, please leave a comment today and I'll pass it on.

To try and make it easier for non-Francophone Anglophones to understand this complaint and response in English, an attempt at translating the email is below. Errors are all mine:-

Our community (Debian) has a defect: the noisiest (and evidently the most extreme) are always the most visible. It is very regrettable that the people who say they represent Debian at JDLL, who are always only some of the 70 French developers of a thousand-developer project with many thousands of contributors, can have given you this totally false image. Their provocation was totally purile, even if the subject is a true subject of discussion. Unfortunately, this sort of position will always exist. I hope simply that the people who have been shocked by this childish behaviour and the also-totally-purile comments appearing in 24 hours on various blogs will have the intelligence not to fall in the same trap as their opponents, notably the easy amalgamation. Extremism doesn't always win in Debian (and not even as often as that), compare the last votes: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/10/msg00018.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/10/msg00017.html and so on. I would appreciate it if this appears in your blogs to temper a little the unacceptable comments that you have received from certain people... and I allow myself to give you respectively meetings at the next Solutions Linux to discuss all this calmly over $BEVERAGE. [ENDS]

I think posting the above without making it clear that it is a one-man initiative and apparently sent without consulting those criticised was downright sneaky and always going to offend. The daft acts of people at JDLL cannot be corrected honourably by more daft acts! The message also seems to me to suggest that it's somehow extreme to object to the Mozilla Corporation using trademarks to stop Firefox and friends being freely-modifiable free software (by requiring inclusion of material with no copyright permission to modify) and to try to dictate what goes into distributions. Unlike the firmware problem, Mozilla's trademark terminators are an obvious and active practical problem for debian maintainers and downstream. I hope the Mozilla fans who were upset by such a "childish" non-obvious reminder [JPEG, 70Ko] about the MozCorp trademark offensive will bring MozCorp into line. If not, I hope that the next time is better satire that informs more people and avoids the "purile" tag.

For those that don't know, Katelyn has become a sadist. Her idea of a slow 4 mile run.

Other recent events, I got learned about San Pablo. The fuzzy vodka party with some hot tub time was worth the confusion though. I wasn't as silly
cycling home though.

I hiked up Half-dome the other weekend. It was an amazing night hike. Too bad I wussed out on the cables. I think the world may be telling me to get a car, because this is the second time I've gone camping where my ride has left a day early without room for me. The last time I split my stuff up and hitched a ride home, this time I split my stuff up again, and went in one vehicle until the first BART station, then took the BART home.

Directed by jd & adn Genre: Action / Adventure / Sci-Fi / Thriller / Horror / Drama / Humor
Runtime: several weeks
Country: A lot
Language: English
Color: Color (Technicolor, QT, GTK and ncurses) Tagline: They stole their project, now they want it back. Plot Outline: In September 2006, a group of developpers from the Debian planet rise against the corruption leading the government.
User Comments: Great action, great suspense, great cultural satire, and a great mind-bender. Awards: Waiting for nomination. Quotes:

• Bah, if you don't want to read me, just don't , Sven Luther
• Oh my. , Clint Adams
• Or maybe I'm withdrawing my support because I'm busy with my chainsaw. , Josselin Mouette
• "I'm withdrawing my support because the developers might agree with AJ rather than me"? Come on. , Matthew Garett
• OH NO YOU DON'T. This thread is _not_ about you, it is _not_ about Frans Pop, and it is _not_ about debian-installer. , Peter Samuelson

Cast overview

	Anthony Towns (aj), as the Debian Project Leader		Denis Barbier (bouz), as The Recaller
	Aurelien Jarno (aurel32), as one Seconder		Clint Adams (schizo), as one Seconder
	MJ Ray (mjr), as one Seconder		Pierre Habouzit (madcoder), as one Seconder
	Martin Schulze (joey), as one Seconder		Marc Dequ nes (duck), as one Seconder

The Samsung ML-4500 works perfectly with ghostscript, according to linuxprinting, but the supplied changes didn't compile for me with v8.54. Searching doc/Changes.htm showed that the gs_malloc and gs_free calls now take an extra pointer, looking at other drivers suggested that it should be pdev->memory, and adding pdev->memory to the calls produced something that compiled. I announced an updated Samsung gdi patch to the list. Now to unpack the printer and test it properly!

...has listed lists.gnu.org again on 2006-10-04, thereby taking away all subscribers who stupidly use it to reject email. Darwin rules list subscriptions too.

I had an email a while ago from Seeds for Change Oxford, which is a consensus based non-profit worker's co-op that offers training in most of the skills needed for a grassroots campaign groups to work together effectively - campaigning skills and co-operative group-working skills. They're looking for donations so that they can continue their work. I went on one of their courses some time ago and it changed me. I think for the better, on the whole, so I repost this request.

Strange comments from Release Manager Andreas Barth predicting that this resolution would mean:

'The debian-installer has to be changed prior to release of Etch. This change alone would delay by at least 6 months, according to Joey's estimations.'

The resolution does not specify how it should be implemented technically. I'm pretty sure other options (such as dropping some hardware support from the official release) have been mentioned and there are probably suggestions that I'm unaware of. If the release managers choose to delay the release until debian-installer is changed, then that is their choice.

'Even fonts and videos would fall into the category where we would need source - but what is the source of a font? or a video stream? (and yes, fonts are "works that are executed by other means", i.e. displayed on the screen) That is a great new place for lots of new discussions that don't really help our users, but will definitly waste lots of time.'

The source of a font is what you used to make that font. Similarly for other work. It's pretty obvious in most cases. As far as I understand the concept of streaming video, we don't have it in the release, so that one seems a strange argument to me.

'We would be in a very bad situation e.g. with the debian-keyring (and all other sort of crypthographic stuff) - I definitly don't plan to distribute the sources for my public key (as the sources can also be used to generate the private key).'

I think this is the only interesting point: but is the debian-keyring made up of programs, rather than data that is input to a program? Do the private keys contain instructions which are executed by GnuPG? If not, note that source provision is only "strongly recommended" not required and there is a pretty strong reason for it not to be included in this small case.

'In summary, this proposal would delay the release of Etch by at least 6 months, probably even one year. Of course, any of the pending GRs can still overrule the result of this GR, but - that is not something we should be proud about, or even plan.'

In summary, I think we should remember that predictions can be wrong as well as right, even from a release manager, whether or not they are being paid for their time by an external organisation. Of course, the release manager could try to make those predictions true, but that would be pretty cynical. Vote to reaffirm DFSG 2! Update: shortly after publication of the above, someone at TU Wien wrote "yay for debian-legal fuckheads". Good argument(!) I can see why you are at university(!) Also, Andreas Barth's last blog post keeps changing the date, so it sits in the top place on planet for ages. I didn't think it was so weak as to need that sort of help. This update suggests it might be a software bug, though. Update 2: Hoho, guess I found part of the problem!

"Debian developer Eric Dorland confirmed to internetnews.com that Debian will re-name Firefox and that the re-naming process could be completed as soon as next week." (in Firefox Not Really Free? [Sean Michael Kerner], tip to /Jonas) Another hat-tip to /Jonas for this thought-provoking suggestion: are MozCorp deliberately trying to mimic X-Oz's role in the XFree86 farce?