When talking about free culture or free software, many people suggest
that they would love to support free models, but that they don't see
how to make it all work. Until they have an alternate model in front
of them, they cannot bring themselves to argue for a more ethical
alternative. I disagree with this approach. Instead, I say, "this is
the world I want to live in and, even though I don't know exactly how
to get to there from here, I'm going to refuse to settle for anything
short of this ideal." Most people dismiss such thinking as
"impractical" and "unrealistic." I think most people are being
unimaginative.
Robot jockeys are one recent illustrative reason, among
many,
that I feel comfortable taking this position. Some background is
necessary for those that are unfamiliar with the example. A decade
ago, several Gulf emirates used thousands of young boys from Sudan and
South Asia as jockeys for
camel racing. Human rights groups
campaigned against the practice and suggested that these boys were
at sometimes held as slaves and intentionally underfed to keep their
weight low. Despite criticism, camel racers resisted moving away from
young boys as jockeys. If they moved to heavier adults instead of
young boys, they reasoned, the camels would be much slower. Of course,
they were right. But they were being unimaginative in the alternatives
they were considering.
As the young jockeys became a increasingly unjustifiable public
relations disaster for the states that supported it, law-makers in
several Gulf states gave in to calls from
UNICEF and others and
created laws to outlaw the practice. Within three years of UAE
passing strict laws against child jockeys, Swiss engineers, funded
by racers desperate for an alternative, had created
the first robotic
camel jockey. Within several years these jockeys were lighter,
cheaper, more responsive to the owner, and well on their way to being
more effective than any young boy. When forced, by law and by an
ethical prerogative, to come up with an alternative to young boys,
racers created a solution that was superior, along nearly every axis,
to the system they had fought to keep.
Although the costs to society of proprietary software cannot be
compared to slavery and abuse, the basic same pattern of
solution-seeking can be seen in the example of free software. Early
free software advocates
suggested that most programmers would likely
need to take a paycut. As it turned out, vibrant and successful
economic models to support free software have supported a large and
growing free software industry. But we have free software business
models only because a small group of principled individuals refused to
settle for what they knew, came up with creative ethical business
models that "just might work," and put their own paychecks on the line
to try them out. As
open source has shown, some of these creative
solutions offered models superior to what we had before. In the world
of software development, free software redefined "practical" and
"realistic."
One can think of solving human problems as like searching for the
highest point in hilly terrain in thick fog. It's easy to get stuck on
the top of the first little hill you walk up (i.e., a
local maximum)
and then conclude you can never do better. If we refuse to
compromise and force ourselves to leave that first little
hill, chances are pretty good we'll find a "higher" peak.
Of course, it is also possible that we will find the
global
maximum or the best
possible solution to a given problem. In
those cases, any change will mean a sacrifice. But when dealing with
most most social and legal dilemmas, there are enough variables
involved that this seems very unlikely. Indeed, most big problems can
be thought of as having
many interacting dimensions -- and only some
of these will be ethical concerns. In other words, most social
problems are more like the problem of child camel jockeys than they
are like trying to transcend the laws of physics.
Business models and laws for the regulation of technology and
knowledge are
extremely complicated human creations. Do we really
think we cannot create ethical systems to compensate cultural creators
that are at least as good as what we have now? If we never force
ourselves to be "impractical" and "unrealistic", we will never find
out.
Another month ending and you still have some clicks left on flattr.com? How about these then?
A couple of month ago, my step-father-in-law encountered quite some
problems with the Windows installation on his Notebook and therefore
showed a great interest in 
I use 
For people who do not follow the 
The 
Kanzepharaz of the one thousand and eight spires. Kanzepharaz capital of the Empire of K'thorv and since the succesful end to the war that led to the annihilation of the Pleiadic Oligarchy in K'threl, the richest and most splendid city in the Middle World. Kanzepheraz whose real estate prices have soared e'en beyond the calculation of the rainbow abacus of Thobis Himself.
Anathomelis, a princeling of the Imperial Clan needs a location for his new and expanded orgy dome. Yet the only available and affordable on a seventh rank civil allowance place left in the city of one thousand and eight spires is the tomb of Pharaz the First and Subsequent, lich-emperor of the Jerelite dynasty and his eldritch retainers. Before the construction-serfs can move in, the tomb must be cleared of its unshriven and non-rent-paying denizens.
As His Principalities' chief swordbearer it has fallen to you to make the tomb of Pharaz safe for gentrification. Treasures and honors await you if you succeed. Aeons of torment in the Planes of Unlife await you if you fail.
So I got a 
While I have spent countless hours working on the new source format known as 3.0 (quilt) , I ve just realized that I have never blogged about its features and the reasons that lead me to work on it. Let s fix this.
The good old 1.0 format
Up to 2008, dpkg-source was only able to cope with a single source format (now named 1.0 ). That format was used since the inception of the project. While it worked fine for most cases, it suffered from a number of limitations mainly because it stored the Debian packaging files as a patch to apply on top of the upstream source tarball.
This patch can have two functions: creating the required files in the debian sub-directory and applying changes to the upstream sources. Over time, if the maintainer made several modifications to the upstream source code, they would end up entangled (and undocumented) in this single patch. In order to solve this problem, patch systems were created (dpatch, quilt, simple-patchsys, dbs, ) and many maintainers started using them. Each implementation is slightly different but the basic principle is always the same: store the upstream changes as multiple patches in the 
For some time now, we ve been gearing up to begin development on Ubuntu 11.04. While some folks have been putting the finishing touches on the 10.10 release, and bootstrapping the infrastructure for 11.04, others have been meeting with Canonical stakeholders, coordinating 
Debian NYC will be holding a workshop next week: 
paste is one of those tools nobody uses [1]. It puts two file side by side,
line by line.
One application for this came up today where some tool was called for several
files at once and would spit out one line by file, but unfortunately not
including the filename.
After a somewhat long hiatus,