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.
I'm a notoriously late adopter of new technologies. Sure, if I
think that something is potentially a good idea, I'll go for it,
but for the most part, I assume that things are stupid. I refused
to use the WWW for many years, thinking it was idiotic. Now I use
the WWW. I find microblogging to be inane and narcissistic at best,
but I have derived mild amusement from Shaq on Twitter. Microsoft
Windows is something I thought would be ridiculously unsuccessful,
because it didn't do anything I would find useful.
The list goes on and on, and includes something known in the popular
vernacular as configuration management . I've been hearing about
BladeLogic and Opsware for quite some time, and idly wondering who
the incompetent fools are that need something like this. Back in
my day we could manage 100 servers with relative ease; no centralized
authentication (because it was a running argument about whether
NIS sucked more than NIS+ or vice-versa), no cfengine, no prebuilt
server images or any of that jazz. If, for some reason, we needed
to make the same change to all servers at once, or some subset thereof,
we would just script it.
So when one of my acquaintances started raving about Puppet, I
assumed it was equally pointless. We'll call him Downs.
Downs exhibits a pattern of behavior where he will rave about
something for a few weeks, sometimes without having even tried
it first, and then eventually become disillusioned with it and
start ranting with the same fervor with which he had insisted
that whatever fad of the week was the greatest thing ever.
It came as no surprise to me when he fell out of love with
Puppet and started raving about how much better Chef is.
In case you're wondering, he still has not tried Chef to
this day.
Finally someone convinced me of the value of Puppet. I do not
think it is the Way and the Light, but I do see a few situations
wherein it makes sense to sacrifice efficiency, flexibility,
sanity, and system resources to gain a way of building a
near-identical machine from scratch. Now, beyond the flaws
inherent to a solution like this, Puppet does have some annoying
flaws which I find unnecessary, and which Downs ranted about back
when I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
I disregarded his alleged preference for Chef, but I have heard
intelligent people extoll the virtues of Chef, and to a lesser
extent Bcfg2. So I took a very brief look at each of those, and
was pretty much horrified by what I found.
If I need something Puppet-like in the very near future, I will
probably be choosing Puppet. I have no intention of running
Puppet on machines I manage all by myself though.
For that eventuality I am NIHing something with what I consider
a better design. The current code is published, but it does
not do very much, and requires linking with libdpkg.a which does
not exist in any package (but Guillem's working on that, I think).
I have no idea whether or not I'll have the motivation to finish
it all by myself, but it is Free Software.
This post is intentionally weak on details, or deets as the
kids call them.
Occasionally, there are concerns expressed about the adoption rate of Python 3. Now that 
He might too shy to tell everybody, but the world must know. Luca Capello successfully defended his PhD thesis today at Universit de Gen ve, getting a Tr s Bien mention.
I must admit that my last biology lesson was 13 years ago, so I m not sure I can really comment on his work on Vomeronasal Receptors: from Monogenic Expression to Axon Guidance. But I was very impressed by the quality of the experimental process, especially compared to what we do in computer science.
Debian was well represented at the defense, since Axel Beckert, Didier Raboud and the Debian kilt were also there.
Welcome to the list of Debian Developers holding PhD degrees, Luca!
In more than 11 years in Finland, I've been politically involved in a couple of political parties on the Right side of the spectrum - mainly because those parties tend to favor a free market economy and a work-oriented immigration. In one case, I was invited by fellow immigrants to attend the meetings of their favorite party's English section, because of my expertise on Immigration legislation and common practices. In an other case, a member of the Finnish parliament invited me to participate in his party's immigrant workgroup, which resulted in my getting involved in a number of proactive initiatives and eventually joining that party as a card-carrying member.
Simultaneously, I was approached by no less than 4 Finnish political parties to become a candidate in the municipal elections (in Finland, foreigners who have lived at least 2 years on an A-status residence permit can vote and stand as a candidate in municipal elections).
Despite this, I've come to the conclusion that none of these Finnish political parties is genuine:
On one hand, there's politicians who claim to know everything about the Immigration question and yet their speeches tell an entirely different story than what immigrants experience. On the other hand, there's politicians who complain about the immigrants' lack of participation in political life, but who quickly add that their personal group of supporters is all they're interested in hearing from.
Correlating these facts, it's been found by many politically-involved immigrants that Finnish political parties don't genuinely want to involve immigrants; all they are interested in is acquiring a few extra votes from the immigrant population and in transferring those votes to their party's star Finnish candidate, who often is someone favored by the party's old-timers but disavowed by the majority of grassroot members. In a few more extreme cases, party brasses will sheepishly admit that all they want is a couple of niggers in the candidate list to show a vague sense of adhesion to the multicultural agenda - despite the assurances they have given to often naive immigrant candidates that they "genuinely" hope that they'll be elected.
As it turns out, many immigrants are actively involved at the grassroot level and receiving the praises of their Finnish colleagues for their innovative and proactive initiatives. As a result, genuinely interested Finns have joined forces with active immigrants to launch various initiatives for improving Finland's competitive position in the global economy through a thriving cosmopolitanism and a stronger culture of entrepreneurship. For instance, I am personally involved 
I received a number of comments on my "
This is a bit of a silly note for a Saturday while I m currently working on translating the co-op s web pages into Esperanto. The old site was translated, but the new site launched as English-only. I d like to have other languages too, but I ll start with the one that s easiest for me as a test case to get the internationalisation working again. That means that I m currently lost in django-blocks language settings.
Apparently both 
