People who use and promote free software cite various reasons for their choice, but do those reasons tell the whole story? If, as a community, we want free software to continue to grow in popularity, especially in the mainstream, we should understand better the true reasons for choosing it especially our own. Some believe that it offers higher quality, that the availability of source code results in a better product with higher reliability. Although it s difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison of software, there are certainly instances where free software components have been judged superior to their proprietary counterparts. I m not aware of any comprehensive analysis of the general case, though, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence on both sides of the debate. Others prefer it for humanitarian reasons, because it s better for society or brings us closer to the world we want to live in. These are more difficult to analyze objectively, as they are closely linked to the individual, their circumstances and their belief system. For developers, a popular reason is the possibility of modifying the software to suit their needs, as enshrined in the Free Software Foundation s freedom 1. This is reasonable enough, though the practical value of this opportunity will vary greatly depending on the software and circumstances. The list goes on: cost savings, educational benefits, universal availability, social rewards, etc. The wealth of evidence of cognitive bias indicates that we should not take these preferences at face value. Not only are human choices seldom rational, they are rarely well understood even by the human themselves. When asked to explain our preferences, we often have a ready answer indeed, we may never run out of reasons but they may not withstand analysis. We have many different ways of fooling ourselves with regard to our own past decisions and held beliefs, as well as those of others. Behavioral economics explores the way in which our irrational behavior affects economies, and the results are curious and subtle. For example, the riddle of experience versus memory (TED video), or the several examples in The Marketplace of Perception (Harvard Magazine article). I think it would be illuminating to examine free software through this lens, and consider that the vagaries of human perception may have a very strong influence on our choices. Some questions for thought:

• Does using free software make us happier? If so, why? If not, why do we use it anyway?
• Do we believe in free software because we have a great experience using it, or because we feel good about having used it? (Daniel Kahneman explains the difference)
• Why do we want other people to use free software? Is it only because we want them to share our preference, or because we will benefit ourselves, or do we believe they will appreciate it for their own reasons?

If you re aware of any studies along these lines, I would be interested to read about them.

The recordings for Linux Conf Australia 2010, held this year in Wellington, are finally online. The recordings include a video of my keynote on Antifeatures. I was deeply honored to be invited to give a keynote at LCA and, as a result, felt more pressure than usual to put together something that was novel, relevant and entertaining and that spoke to core issues and problems facing free software. Although it's always hard for me to watch myself speaking, I've made it through the video and am reasonably happy with the result. Although perhaps it's a minor distinction, I think this lecture is probably the best talk I've given given to date! I hope to give the talk again so, as always, I welcome comments and feedback. If you'd like to watch it, the talk is available in a number of free and non-free formats:

• Video in Ogg Theora -- Should "just work" in new versions of Firefox
• Audio in Ogg Vorbis
• New Zealand Mirror with media in Flash, Theora, Vorbis, and MP4/MP3 versions

Free network services A discussion session led by Bradley Kuhn, Mako & Matt Lee : Libre.fm encouraged last.fm to write an API so they didn t need to screen scrape; outcome of the network services story still unknown netbooks without local productivity apps might now work, most users of network office apps are using them because of collaboration. We have a replacement for twitter status.net, distributed system, but nothing like facebook [yet?]. Bradley says like the original GNU problem, just start writing secure peer to peer network services to offer the things that are currently proprietary. There is perhaps a lack of an architectural vision for replacing these proprietary things: folk are asking how we will replace the cloud aspects of facebook etc tagging photos and other stuff around the web, while not using hosted-by-other-people-services. I stopped at this point to switch sessions the rooms were not in sync session time wise. Mentoring in free software Leslie Hawthorne: Projector not working, so Leslie carried on a discussion carried on from the previous talk about the use of sexual themes in promoting projects/talk content and the like. This is almost certainly best covered by watching the video. A few themes from it though:

• for anyone considering joining a community, they are assessing whether that community is people like us and for many people, including both women *and* men, blatant sexuality, isn t something that fits the people like us assessment. Note that this is in addition to offensive and inappropriate aspects of the issue.
• respect is a key element here: respect your community, respect potential contributors, and don t endorse (even silently) disrespectful behaviour
• Codes of conduct might be a good idea
• The lack of support in the community has for at least one project led to a complete loss of the women contributors to that project and they are still largely lacking many years later.

We then got Leslies actual talk. Sadly I missed the start of it I was outside organising security guards because we had (and boy it was ironic) a very loud, confrontational guy at the front who was replying to every statement and the tone in the room had gotten to the point that a fight was brewing. From where I got back:

• Check your tone
• help people be productive in your community
• cultivate creativity
• know yourself
• do not get caught up in perfectionism
• communicate both big stuff, but also just take the time to talk how are you going, etc.
• Share your mistakes
• Guide don t order
• Recognition = Retention
• Recognition = Delegation its ok to let other people be responsible for stuff
• http://bit.ly/MentorGuide
• http://bit.ly/MentoringArticle

Chris Ball, Hanna Wallach, Erinn Clark and Denise Paolucci Recruiting/retaining women in free software projects. Not a unique problem to women things that make it better for women can also increase the recruitment and retention of men. Make a lack of diversity a bug; provide onramps small easy bugs in the bug tracker (tagged as such), have a dedicated womens sub project and permit [well behaved ] men in there helps build connections into the rest of the project. Make it clear that mistakes are ok. On retention recognise first patches, first commits in newsletters and the like. Call out big things or long wanted features by the person that helped. Regular discussion of patches and fixes rather than just the changelog. CMU did a study on undergrad women participation in CS : Lack of confidence preceeds lack of interest/partipation . Engagement with what they are doing is a key thing too. Women are consistently undervaluing their worth to the free software community . Its the personal touch that seems to make a huge difference . More projects should do a code of conduct kudos to Ubuntu for doing it Chris Ball. I found the mentoring and women-in-free-software talks to have extremely similar themes which is perhaps confirmation or something but it wasn t surprising to me. They were both really good talks though! And thats my coverage of LibrePlanet I m catching a plane after lunch . Its a good low-key conference, and well put together.

I wrote this for the FSF's annual membership drive where it was originally published. I am reposting it here.

At its core, I think of free software as about the ability of computer users to take control of their technology. Insofar as our software defines our experience of the world and each other, software freedom is an important part of what allows us to determine the way we live, work, and communicate. Free software is not really about software in this fundamental sense; it's about bringing freedom to users through software. In free software's incredible success over the last two decades, many people have lost sight of this simple fact. We have created an incredible array of applications, libraries, and tools. We have created vibrant development and support communities. We have created new development methodologies, powerful copyleft licenses, and massive collaborative projects. But these are all how we give users freedom. They are not freedom itself. They are not what we were trying to achieve. They are our instruments, not our goal. This distinction becomes central in a world where technology is in flux. Indeed, we live in such a world. We can see signs of this in how, as most users' primary computers become mobile phones and new types of network services make up most of many users' interactions with computers, the free software movement's old applications, communities, development methodologies, and licenses can become ill-suited to, or ineffective at, protecting user freedoms. And indeed, in the next few years, bringing freedom to computer users will need to involve new software and new forms of advocacy. It will need to involve new licenses and new techniques for their enforcement. It will need to involve new forms of collaboration and organization. If the free software movement is to succeed, it must stay focused on computer users' freedom -- on the question of why we do what we do -- and then work creatively on how to best respect and protect the freedom we are working toward. If we are overly focused on how we've done things in the past, we may lose sight of the most fundamental goal of supporting users' control over their technology in general. There are many organizations that support the how of today's free software in various ways -- they are law firms and companies and nonprofit organizations supporting various free software projects. The Free Software Foundation is, by far, the most important organization focused on why --- on the underlying principle of software freedom. As such, it plays an essential role in keeping our broader community focused on the key issues, threats, and challenges that will affect the success of every free software project, and every computer user, in the present and in the future. In this period of rapid change in computer technology, its role is more vital than ever. The consequence of any failure is more dire. Here are some of the ways that I will be encouraging the FSF to serve the free software movement in the coming year: Mobile Phones In a short essay I wrote earlier this year, I pointed out that there are now billions of mobile phones and that, although these phones are increasingly powerful computers, they represent one of the most locked-down, proprietary, and unfree technologies in wide use. The implications of this fact for users' control over their technology are dire. Although some widely used phones make extensive use of free software, most free phones are locked down and Tivoized and their users remain fettered, divided, and helpless. We must raise awareness of free software issues among users of phones, communicate to users that phones are powerful general purpose computers, and explain that control over these devices has critical implications for individual autonomy in the future. Toward this end, the FSF staff will launch an advocacy campaign around mobile phones and software freedom in the coming year. Network Services As network services -- like those built by Facebook, Google, and others -- have continued to grow both in scope and penetration over the last year, the importance of a meaningful free software responses grows as well. The launch of products like Google's network-centric ChromeOS offers one glimpse of what a future computing platform may look like. The implications for user freedom, and for the effectiveness of traditional free software approaches, are frightening. The fact that many network services are built using free software does not make the effect of these services on users' autonomy and freedom any less catastrophic. In the next year, the FSF is planning to release the first of what I hope will be several statements on software freedom and network services. Building off the work of the FSF-supported group Autonomous, the Foundation will help provide guidelines for those implementing network services, for users deciding whether to use services, and for developers trying to build services that go further to respect their users' freedom. Reaching beyond our traditional communities Successfully fighting for user freedom is going to mean successfully reaching out to users outside the FSF's historical base . The FSF continues to do so with its Defective By Design anti-DRM campaign and its End Software Patents work. In the last year, the FSF has also reached out to younger users through its "GNU Generation" campaign run by and for high school students. Additionally, the FSF convened a summit this year on women in free software. The FSF plans to build on these successes in the coming year and to expand similar outreach projects. Of course, fighting for and promoting software freedom is more work than today's FSF has the resources to accomplish. Each of my three points above represents an ambitious undertaking, and yet just a portion of the items on the plate of the FSF's small but dedicated staff. Even just continuing its existing projects will require that the FSF adds hundreds of new members by the end of this period. Your membership and donations help make goals like this possible. A strong free software movement focused on the principled issues of software freedom -- and a strong FSF in particular -- will determine what freedoms the next generation of computer users will enjoy. At stake is no less than that next generation's autonomy. I know that this is not the first fundraising appeal you've read this season and I know that the weakened economy makes giving difficult for many. I understand that the cost of a membership or donation may be less easy to afford this year. But we also cannot afford a weakened FSF at this important point of technological transition. If you are not an FSF associate member, now is the time to become one. If you've read my appeal the last two years and decided to wait, now is the time to take the plunge. Membership is $120 per year ($60 for students) and payable monthly. If you are already a member, please join me in giving generously through a tax-deductible donation, or encourage a friend to sign up. The FSF is a small, humble organization of passionate individuals working tirelessly for our software freedom. I've seen firsthand that even small gifts make a difference.

Join now with a $10 monthly donation

Over the summer, there was a bit of a tussle at the highest level of Ubuntu governance over whether or not Canonical Ltd., the company that funds the majority of work done directly in Ubuntu, should name its file syncing and backup service Ubuntu One. Canonical's service involved a freely licensed client included in the Ubuntu distribution but, as a network service running on Canonical servers, it was not clearly a part of Ubuntu (the GNU/Linux distribution) or Ubuntu (the community) in the way the term was usually used within the community. Although the network service itself was not Franklin Street Statement free, this was not the most important issue for everyone who objected to the name. The major issue for many seemed to boil down to the fact that, free or not, Ubuntu One is a service run entirely by Canonical outside the reaches of the Ubuntu governance structures. Decisions were made and not everybody -- and maybe not anybody -- was absolutely happy with the outcome. My goal is not try to revive old arguments here. As far as I'm concerned, the issues are settled and the service is called Ubuntu One. That said, the questions raised during the episode are fundamental to Ubuntu and to other firm-sponsored FLOSS projects. Now that the dust has settled, they are worth reflecting on. From a legal perspective, there never was any ambiguity. Canonical "owns" the Ubuntu trademark. In this important sense, "Ubuntu" means whatever Canonical says it means. This is hardly new. As just one example, the Official Ubuntu Book (of which I am an author) was written by community members but became official because Canonical blessed it. But despite the fact that they don't need to, Canonical has often consulted with the community and its governance structures about trademark licensing policy. This was also not a case of Canonical not listening to the community. Canonical employees approached the Ubuntu Community Council (Ubuntu's highest governance board of which I am a member), listened carefully to concerns, and responded thoughtfully. The question was not even about a clash between what Canonical and the CC thought about the issue. An unambiguous majority of the board, including all the Canonical employees and several of the community members, supported the idea of Canonical using the trademark. The question was one about who gets to make the decisions about the Ubuntu name and about what role the community and Canonical would each play. Despite the fact that a majority of the Ubuntu community council was likely to support the proposed name, the CC was told by Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth that a vote was irrelevant. Canonical made it clear that decisions about the Ubuntu trademark were simply not in the CC's purview. The decision on how the name was to be used was something that Canonical was not willing to delegate to an "outside" (the firm) governance body. Few businesses would. And although I don't agree with the decision as a community representative, I might have even made the same call from Canonical's shoes. In traditional firms, it's usually pretty clear where the organization's boundary lies. In FLOSS projects -- and especially in FLOSS project like Ubuntu who are sponsored in very large part by a single for-profit company -- boundaries are fuzzier. The conversation about "Ubuntu One" can be seen as a fight over what "Ubuntu" refers to, and, more importantly, who gets to answer that question. In deciding whether to call a service "Ubuntu", a decision is made on what Ubuntu is. Names are powerful. Is Ubuntu just a Canonical project? Are Ubuntu's contributors really just Canonical contributors by proxy? I think the answer to both questions is "no" but the boundary issues involved are complicated and under constant negotiation. Every time Canonical uses the Ubuntu name itself or grants others the ability to do so, these boundary issues are negotiated, one way or another. This boundary setting work reveals an important tension that firms releasing FLOSS must all struggle with. To what extent and in what ways do communities get to decide what a FLOSS project is and to what extent do sponsoring firms get to do so? How should projects and firms do this most effectively? What should we even be optimizing for? I think that any resulting balance has a huge effect on whether a FLOSS project is, on one hand, released under a free license but run like any old corporate project or, on the other, a true "bazaar" style project where no single firm dominates -- or where they fall on that spectrum. Names and trademarks are one way that projects define their own identities and act as an important frontier in this balancing act. As every firm/project negotiates their own answers to questions of names and boundaries, there are important implications for the project's ability to attract volunteers, solicit contributions from other firms, and more. The confusion around conversations about Ubuntu One shows that we still have a lot to learn.

My sister just got a lower back tattoo that says "No Regrets." She does not seem to appreciate the potential for irony. That's too bad. In my book, that potential is the best reason to get such a tattoo.

A few years ago, the MIT Media Lab, working with the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, created the Center for Future Civic Media. It's a great project and one I've been involved in since the beginning. Not too long after, the lab announced the Center for Future Banking through a partnership with Bank of America. One couldn't help but notice the similarity between the names. The meme became further entrenched when, not too long after, the lab announced the Center for Future Storytelling in collaboration with Plymouth Rock Studios. But perhaps the very first in the pattern is the the Okawa Center for Future Children announced in 1998 as a way of bringing together and supporting the labs work with kids. And no, it has nothing to do with zygotes.

For a very long time my laptop (running sid for a few years now) has been booting kind of slowly. It looked like there was a 2-3 second delay every time a kernel module was loaded, which resulted in something like 3 minutes total boot time. Never bothered me enough, but yesterday I've finally got some time to investigate. After increasing the verbosity of udev logging in /etc/udev/udev.conf I've found lots and lots of messages like this in the log:

Dec 18 00:41:46 droopy udevd-work[425]: wait for '/sys/some/path/bInterfaceProtocol' for 20 mseconds

The only udev rule file containing a reference to bInterfaceProtocol was /etc/udev/rules.d/z60_libccid.rules with the following lines in it:

# last file created by the kernel, if this is present everything should be
WAIT_FOR_SYSFS="bInterfaceProtocol"

The libccid package itself is long gone (I don't remember installing it at all), and the versions of the package starting with 1.3.4-1 (uploaded in February 2008) do not contain this rule. However, the file survived on my system, so this rule was continuing to trigger for every device, even the ones not providing the bInterfaceProtocol at all. Removing the now-redundant file resulted in a dramatic boot speedup (it now takes about 30 seconds), so if you are experiencing similar problems, you might want to check it out.

Dan Gilbert gave an insightful TED talk about our mistaken expectations of happiness [1]. Don Marti has an insightful post about net neutrality and public property [2]. When net access requires access to public property then it should be sold in a neutral manner. Rachel Pike gave an interesting TED talk about the scientific research behind a climate headline [3]. The people who claim to be skeptical of the science should watch this. Mark Peters wrote an interesting article A Happy Writer Is a Lousy Writer about the correlation between emotional state and work quality [4]. Apparently watching a film about cancer will make people more careful and focussed on details. CERIAS has an interesting short article about Firefox security as well as some philosophy on why web browser security generally sucks [5]. Cory Doctorow writes in the Guardian about Peter Mandelson s new stupidity in trying to legislate against file sharing [6]. This is going to seriously damage the economy of every country that implements it. Charles Stross has been blogging a series of non-fiction essays about space colonisation, in The Myth of the Starship he describes how most ideas of space travel are bad and how the word ship is always going to be unsuitable [7]. Brent T. White is an associate professor of law at the University of Arizona who has written an interesting paper about mortgages [8]. He says that anyone who is underwater (IE owing more than the value of their house) should walk away. The credit damage from abandoning a bad mortgage apparently isn t that bad, and there is the possibility of negotiating with the bank to reduce the value of the loan to match the value of the house. Mako is working on a project to allow prisoners to blog [9]. It s basically a snail-mail to web gateway as the prisonsers are not allowed Internet access. PracticalEthicsnews.com has an article about the special status that homeopathy is given [10]. It also notes that homeopathic medicines include arsenic and mercury. Such quackery should be outlawed, a life sentence for homeopathy would be appropriate IMHO. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting essay about why he is not selling one of his books in audio form (he s giving it away) [11]. He concludes by noting that he wants no license agreement except don t violate copyright law . The fact that he can t get anyone to sell an audio book under such terms is a good demonstration of how broken the marketplace is. Thulasiraj Ravilla gave an inspiring TED talk about the Aravind Eye Care System a program to bring the efficiency of McDonalds to eye surgery [12]. Hopefully that program can spawn similar programs for other branches of medicine and spread to more countries. In many ways they are providing better service (both in quality and speed) than people in first-world countries who pay a lot of money can expect to receive. Scott Kim gave an interesting TED talk about his work designing puzzles [13]. He is also a big fan of social networking, unfortunately (for people like me who don t like social networking) his web site ShuffleBrain.com relies on Facebook. Gordon Brown (UK Prime Minister) gave an inspiring TED talk about global ethic vs the national interest [14], with a particular focus on the global effort required to tackle the climate change problem. Now if only we could get Kevin Rudd to listen to that. Brough has written an interesting analysis of the AT&T network problems that are blamed on the iPhone [15]. His essential claim is that the problem is due to overly large buffers which don t cause TCP implementations to throttle the throughput. This seems similar to my observations of the Three network in Australia where ping times of 8 seconds or more will periodically occur. One particularly nasty corner case with this is when using a local DNS server I can have a DNS packet storm where basic requests time out while BIND uses a significant portion of available bandwidth (including ICMP messages from receiving ports that BIND has closed). To alleviate this I am now using the Google public DNS service [16] (the Three DNS servers never worked properly).

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html
• [2] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/freedom/property-rights/
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_pike_the_science_behind_a_climate_headline.html
• [4] http://www.good.is/post/a-happy-writer-is-a-lousy-writer/
• [5] http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/firefox_vulnerabilities_souvenirs_of_windows_95/
• [6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/digital-economy-file-sharing-mandelson
• [7] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth_of_the_starship.html
• [8] http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2009/10/30/its-ok-to-walk-away-a-law-professor-argues/
• [9] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091201-00
• [10] http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2009/12/diluted-evidence-is-there-anything-special-with-homeopathy.html
• [11] http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6709919.html
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/thulasiraj_ravilla_how_low_cost_eye_care_can_be_world_class.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_kim_takes_apart_the_art_of_puzzles.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/gordon_brown_on_global_ethic_vs_national_interest.html
• [15] http://blogs.broughturner.com/2009/10/is-att-wireless-data-congestion-selfinflicted.html
• [16] http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

As is becoming my custom, I'm planning to spend much of December and January on the road. This time I'll be in Seattle, Japan and Wellington, New Zealand. Here's the rough schedule:

• December 18-28: Seattle
• December 28-January 2: Tokyo
• January 2-14: Traveling in Japan
• January 15-17: Boston to compete in the MIT Mystery Hunt
• January 19-24: Wellington, New Zealand to give a talk at LCA

Mika will also be around for everything but the NZ leg and SJ seems likely to make an appearance in Japan during the first week of January. Feel free to get in contact if you'd like to meet up in any of the places above for a coffee or beer. I'm also open to hanging out with giving talks at LUGs, GLUGs, Wikipedia groups, free culture groups, colleges or Universities along the way. Most of my time in Japan is still basically unstructured so I'm quite open to suggestions during the first couple weeks of January.

Very often, folks want to refer to both the free and open source software communities in a way that is inclusive of and respectful of groups who identify with either term. Saying "free and open source software" is a mouthful. That said, there was no been consensus on what we should do instead. The Wikipedia article on alternative terms for free software suggests that FOSS, F/OSS, FLOSS, and "software libre" are contenders. I've heard all. Of course, the choice of 4+ competing alternative terms is probably worse than the problem we were seeking to solve. In academic circles, the big debate seems to be between FOSS and FLOSS. I was always a FOSS partisan. But I've seen increased momentum on the FLOSS side and I'm ready to declare that FLOSS has won. I know it makes you think of dental hygiene and I agree that it is unfortunate. It wasn't my first choice either. But I can see where things are going. FLOSS Manuals and the folks at the FLOSS Research Group at Syracuse who launched the FLOSSHub and the associated FLOSS Papers deserve some of the credit. If we can get over the irony of having spent so much time arguing over what was intended to be compromise terminology in the first place, lets see if we actually start talking to each other.

I've been working with Charlie DeTar and the Center for Future Civic Media on a project called Between the Bars which is a blogging platform for prisoners. The current platform is essentially a snail-mail to web gateway: prisoners send letters which semi-automatically scanned and posted to the site; comments are printed and mailed back. As we plan the launch of the project, we are trying to talk to as many stakeholders as possible -- this includes ex-prisoners, families and friends of people who are or have been in prison, non-profits working with prisoners, victims of people in prison, people who work in prisons or in corrections, probation officers, or almost anyone else with a perspective or set of experience that might help us understand the difficult space our project is trying to negotiate and who might be able to help influence the design. At the moment, we're not talking to current prisoners due to rules regulating research involving prisoners, but almost anyone else would be someone we'd love to connect with. We're interested in hearing from people about their experience with prisons or prisoners, about staying connected to families and friends while behind bars, and, ultimately, about how we might design, deploy, and support technology to help folks out. If you or someone you know are stakeholders and would be willing to talk about your experience and opinions with prisons, communication, and technology, please drop us a line at betweenthebars@mit.edu.

Earlier this summer, I wrote a blog post on taking a principled position on software freedom where I argued that advocates of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) should take a principled position because the pragmatic benefits associated with open source --- "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost" in OSI's words --- are simply not always present. More often than not, FLOSS projects fail. When they survive, they are often not as good as their proprietary competitors. Over the last year, I've been back at MIT taking classes, reading extensively, and otherwise learning how to act like a social scientist. My research goals, which I'm now beginning to focus on, are to help build a stronger understanding of the social dynamics in free software and free culture communities. With a slightly skeptical view toward my involvement with groups like the FSF and my work in the FLOSS community, at least one academic tried to suggest that taking a principled position in favor of software freedom might compromise the positivist social science research program in which I am engaged. "An advocate is too biased," they said. After many months of thinking seriously about this warning, I believe that this criticism can be addressed. After all, a principled position in favor of software freedom is a statement of how things should be, not a description of how they are. OSI will argue that open source leads to inherently better software. This statement, of course, is one that can be empirically tested and, in fact, there seems to be plenty of evidence that it is often wrong. On the other hand, the FSF's position that software should be free is ethical in nature. One can disagree with it, just like one can disagree with any other ethical position, but it can not be proved either right or wrong --- only convincing or unconvincing, logical or illogical in the context a certain set of other values that others might or might not share. Research has shown that the vast majority of FLOSS projects fizzle. A advocate who argues that FLOSS is inherently better is left trying to explain this fact and make excuses. As a result, OSI-style beliefs can certainly be a source of problematic bias in a social scientist. However, a person who believes that software should be free is welcome to recognize that it both fails and succeeds and to ask why. A principled idealist can argue in favor of behaviors that may be disruptive, difficult, or inefficient. Indeed, Stallman has never suggested that free software will be easier or better. Indeed, he routinely asks people to sacrifice their convenience for freedom. My goal, as a social scientist, is to understand why some FLOSS and free culture projects succeed and why many fail. I never take FLOSS's success for granted and, in fact, believe that proprietary software may often leads to better software in OSI's terms. Unlike an advocate who tows the OSI line, embracing evidence of the effectiveness of proprietary software is no way in conflict with my belief that software should be free. In fact, my desire to see software freedom grow becomes the driving force between trying to understand FLOSS's shortcomings! I am no more biased --- which is not to say completely unbiased --- than the person who both thinks that crime is wrong and who wants to study criminal behavior. In an analogous sense, starting out with the belief that all people are naturally law-abiding may be a problem in a way that beginning with the belief that people should be law-abiding is not. Starting from the fomer assumption, one has to explain away evidence to the contrary. Starting from the latter assumption, one can build an understanding of what drives people to obey or violate laws which, in turn, can help build a stronger society. To me, the question is not why FLOSS will succeed. Indeed, I believe its success is an empirical matter that remains very much up in the air. For me, the question is how it might. Embracing a principled position lets us face the facts and puts advocates and practitioners in a position to devise laws, social structures, and technologies to insure that it does.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting little column for Make magazine about Wikipedia and the way that it contains facts about facts [1]. One of the issues with this is that you can t (or at least shouldn t) make corrections based on your own knowledge of a subject, you need to cite references. Cory gives a hypothetical example where a world renowned expert couldn t simply fix an error in Wikipedia, but they could give an interview with the New York Times decrying the quality of Wikipedia and citing the correct data then once the NYT article was published it could be referenced as an authoritative source and the page updated. Mako wrote about the Wikireader (an offline reader for Wikipedia) and advocated a facility for writing changes while offline and uploading them [2]. From the perspective of improving the state of the art in computer science and making new features available for more users this sounds like a great idea. But in terms of fitting in with the way Wikipedia works it doesn t seem viable to me. Any time that you need to use an offline Wikipedia reader it seems that it will either be impossible or unreasonably difficult to gain the net access necessary to find the reference that Wikipedia requires. Sure you could fix spelling errors, reformat paragraphs, etc but not do anything serious. I wonder how many people actually put any serious effort into Wikipedia with the sole purpose of making it more readable. In terms of my own editing I have made a number of changes that improve readability, but all of them were due to reviewing pages for technical accuracy. One of the comments on Mako s post suggested that instead of having an option to directly edit pages there be an option to take notes on pages which could then be used for later editing. Maybe something like a two button combination to flag a particular paragraph as being of dubious accuracy so that the user could later do some Google searches for references. Of course another problem with this is the delay in updating a Wikireader. For most reading of Wikipedia it doesn t matter if the content is 6 months old, so we should expect that most users of the Wikireader don t have the latest data. The Wikireader company offers an update service of posting a new memory card twice a year [3]. Given postage delays etc we should expect that the average age of the content is about 4 months for people who subscribe to the update service, and probably a lot greater for people who download the updates. The popular pages of Wikipedia change fast, in the space of 4 months a page can change significantly. In terms of general Wikipedia operation I wonder if it would be beneficial to have a button to flag content as possibly not meeting the Wikipedia guidelines. It seems that the number of people who can recognise low quality pages is going to be significantly higher than the number of people who have the skill and time to fix them. I m sure that there are many people who would just love to be able to choose from a list of Wikipedia pages that have received many negative votes. Such votes could be stored offline and uploaded later, but again that would rely on having recent content on the reader (it would be annoying for a recently fixed page to keep getting voted down). One area where offline editing of a Wiki would work well is that of niche Wikis. For example if I downloaded a copy of the Debian Wiki (which would only take a tiny fraction of the space in a Wikireader) then I could easily update it every week and the incidence of other people editing a page in the mean time would often be low. I could write long updates that make significant changes to SE Linux related pages while offline without needing any references and in many cases without much risk of conflicts. Implementing a distributed version control system to manage such updates shouldn t be difficult in principle, although the VCS might have to run on a laptop or desktop system after taking raw data from the Wikireader (tools like GIT seem memory hungry and might not fit on a small device). Also Mako refers to the already indefensibly large gap between the number of readers and editors on Wikipedia . Like Mako I don t have a TV watching personality. I agree that it is desirable to facilitate read-write access for everyone, but that doesn t have to involve write access to Wikipedia. I am not convinced that there is a difference between the number of readers and editors of Wikipedia that indicates a problem here. As something becomes more popular the number of people who use it without being committed to it increases, and it also becomes more integrated into society. I don t think it s a problem that many people use their writing time for other tasks such as blogging rather than editing Wikipedia. Wikipedia makes a great reference for blog posts and blog posts drive readers (and thus potential editors) to Wikipedia. Finally I think we should consider the fact that different people have different skill sets. Maybe the Wikipedia reader base gained a significant portion of the people who have the skills to make good editors a long time ago and now the majority of new users just don t have the skills. If that is the case then having the ratio of readers to editors change in favor of readers while the number of readers expands would be a good thing. I don t think that I am being elitist in acknowledging that different people have different skill sets, and that some portion of the population will lack the skills necessary to make good contributions to Wikipedia (good enough to outweigh the mistakes that they make). I think that valuing the contributions of all people in society does not require that we value all contributions to Wikipedia.

• [1] http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol20/?pg=16
• [2] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091123-00.comment
• [3] http://thewikireader.com/update.html

Between second and seventh grade, I went to a school that required that I wear grey corduroys. Every day. I loathed them. When I left that school, at twelve years old, I swore to myself that I would never wear a pair of corduroys again. And I kept that vow until earlier this year when, in Germany, I came across a couple carpenters in Germany on their one-year traveling post-apprenticeship waltz. As it turns out, journeyman German carpenters wear some pretty wild bellbottom corduroys --- zimmermanhosen. Although I tried, I couldn't resist acquiring a pair at a local work clothing store. A year and a couple more trips to Germany later, I now own several pair of zimmermanhosen and wear them nearly every day. They are tough, distinctive, and have pretty awesome double-zipper flies. And although I love them, I still feel a little conflicted every time I put them on.

Due entirely to the efforts of one inquisitive and indefatigable A. Dehqan, a web search for the phrase "In The Name Of God The compassionate merciful" now almost exclusively turns up hits to a wide variety of free software mailing lists, forums, and IRC channels with questions on everything from what is a kernel (in a minimum of half a line, no less), to how to send a FAX, to the intersection between Islam and copyright and much more! I've now run across in five distinct projects. Maybe you have too!

My friend Sean from OpenMoko recently gave me one of OM's new WikiReaders. It's essentially a touchscreen-based device dedicated to displaying Wikipedia articles offline. And while I'll never forgive the thing for not having an Edit button, I've got to admit the device is pretty cool. Not only does it make it possible to bring WP to a bunch of places that are otherwise impossible or impractical, the thing is built entirely with free software. One of my colleagues at the Center for Future Civic Media suggested we should put one in every bar to help settle drunken arguments. Think of the lives we might save! I hope the device becomes successful but I'm worried about what success will mean for the already indefensibly large gap between the number of readers and editors on Wikipedia. After all, the ability to change and contribute is the thing that makes Wikipedia interesting, empowering, and successful; cutting this functionality out kind of misses much of the point. I think it is important to start implementing a simple method to allow users of these types of devices to contribute back. Over the last few years, Sj and I have talked repeatedly about a simple method for contributing back from offline devices that would even be possible from devices like the Om Wikireader where editing the articles is probably impractical. Perhaps the device could be extended so that people could write short comments about articles from their reader --- there's an on screen keyboard after all --- which could be saved to a log on the SD card. When the data on the card is updated, messages from this log could be uploaded somewhere --- perhaps the talk pages of the articles in question or some dedicated page or ticketing queue. Editors could help merge these changes back into the articles.