On Friday 2007-11-02, I watched
Larry Lessig give a presentation at the University of Washington entitled
Is Google (2008) Microsoft (1998)
? Since it was Lessig, the talk was articulate and thought-provoking, and he used his slides very well (unlike many presenters who just read bullet points).
The argument he made is that Google is like Microsoft in some ways (and so are other companies like Facebook). In his analysis, the problem with Microsoft was that so many companies made themselves Microsoft-dependent, which both forced other companies to follow suit (due to network effects) and gave Microsoft leverage they could use against everyone in their ecosystem (e.g., Netscape). According to Lessig, Microsoft was not evil to use this leverage, but you have to recognize that Microsoft will do what is best for Microsoft, and this may not be what is best for you. He then suggested that we should be aware of the potential for the same thing to happen; in support of this point, he quoted excerpts from the terms of service from the APIs of Google and Facebook, which contain typical statements like
we reserve the right to terminate your use of this service for any reason or for no reason
, and asked:
What if Microsoft had written this license agreement?
But it seemed to me that this wasn't his main point. He was using this observation as a springboard to talk about issues revolving around competition and public policy. Specifically, he feels that we should work towards a more just model of interaction between companies and users whose work makes the company more valuable (by contributing to a software ecosystem, by posting content on the Web site, etc). But the correct way to do this (he says) is not via competition, after-the-fact litigation, or voluntary codes of conduct: competition may not be around to enforce good behavior (as we've seen with Microsoft), litigation may be too late and ineffective (again, see Microsoft), and voluntary codes of conduct will disappear as soon as they get in the way of the bottom line. The correct approach, he argued, is across-the-board regulation so that all the companies have to play by the same rules.
From there he went on to talk about governmental corruption. He said (quoting Robert Reich's book
Supercapitalism
) that the reason we consistently look for solutions in the market and in voluntary compliance is that our governmental system is broken and does not effectively regulate corporations in the public interest. But Lessig is optimistic that we can change things (he joked that his publisher was unhappy with this point of view, because his
brand
has been built on pessimism). In his view, the politicians in Washington, by and large, want to be honest and do good, but they aren't able to within the current political system. For instance, on the few occassions that he managed to get access to lawmakers to discuss copyright issues, it was often the first time they had heard that there was more than one side to the argument. He thinks we need a national political movement that will shame politicians into being less corrupt.
This is all a simplification of what he said, of course; unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a recording of this talk on Lessig's
Web site, or I'd point you at primary source material. I don't know if this is because he chose not to post it, or because it just hasn't been made available yet.
My view
In general, I thought that the speech was very interesting and well thought out. But as much as I'd like to buy into his optimism that we can fix our system, I don't think it's well-founded, for two reasons.
First, he argued that competition will resolve some of these problems (that was before and after he said we can't rely on competition, which I found confusing and may indicate that I misunderstood something). His evidence for this seemed to be that when Microsoft was dominating the world, users responded by reducing their dependence on Microsoft products and by switching to alternatives such as Linux. But, in fact, although more people may be using Linux than in the past, virtually everyone is still only using Windows, it's still almost impossible to find a programming job that isn't Windows-only, and Microsoft is still raking in money hand over fist; indeed, they're doing so well that they're planning to
expand their workforce by a third. To take just one data point of many: I ride the bus to Seattle and back, and I regularly see other people using laptops as they commute. Virtually all the laptops run Windows. Occasionally I'll see a Mac, and every few months I'll see a guy running Linux on his laptop; I say "a guy" because it's the same guy every single time. So by my estimation, use of Linux on laptops in buses on the 545 route from Redmond to Seattle is way below 1%, with Macintoshes somewhere around 5%.
To broaden my point, I think Lessig has fallen into a trap that highly intelligent people, particularly those in academia, tend to fall into. In academia, you are surrounded by people who value learning and thinking deeply about the world. These are people who will give serious and unbiased consideration to questions like
what is the social effect of my acceptance of the Facebook Terms of Service?
and
If I become dependent on this service, will that possibly affect me in five years if the company decides to act against my interests?
The problem with this is that these people are not representative of the population at large. The population at large thinks
why is this check-box getting in the way of me sending pictures to my friends?
And I have no doubt that any kid who, e.g., refuses to sign up for Facebook as a protest against their TOS will be roundly mocked in their social circles for being a weird antisocial nonconformist. (of course, this may not apply to the small minority of people like myself whose social circles consist of weird antisocial nonconformists)
Second, Lessig's optimism about the political system seemed to be based on his observation that the people in government are, by and large, not venally corrupt: they want to do good, but the system is constructed in a way that makes this impossible. To me, that's a tremendously disheartening statement. If our problem were simply a few, or even many, corrupt politicians, this would be a solvable problem: even nowadays, Americans have some ability to choose who gets elected, and I believe that a sufficiently well-coordinated campaign could replace bad politicians with good ones.
But if the problem is that the system is corrupt even when the individuals are honest, it's a much deeper problem and frankly one that I don't know how to solve. While individuals have some direct control over who gets elected, we have no way to directly change the system that produces the corruption; the levers to do this are in the hands of the politicians elected through that broken system. It's unlikely that the politicians themselves will fix the problem, because they've benefited deeply from it: if the system is left as it is, well over 90% of Congress members will
keep
their jobs in the next election cycle, and any effective change seems likely (by definition) to disrupt this cushy arrangement.
On the other hand, running new candidates for office will not fix the problem. After all, if the problem is that the system is corrupt even when the participants are honest, then putting more honest people into government will have no effect. In order to get elected, these new politicians will have to become just as corrupt as the old ones, because that's how the system is set up. So we might change the faces, but we'll have the same old problems.
I recall two specific concrete proposals that Lessig made to make the system more responsive. First, he suggested shaming politicians who engage in corrupt behavior -- presumably taking large donations from interested parties. I don't see how this will help. Americans generally have a very low regard for the political class as it is; will pointing out particular examples of politicians taking money really make a difference when it comes to votes? And if it doesn't, will it really produce any change in their behavior? Politicians are motivated by votes the same way corporations are motivated by money; unless they stand a chance of losing their job (which is
virtually impossible in any event), there's no reason for them to change how they behave.
His second proposal was for a system of contributions where it's impossible for any individual to prove they had donated a particular amount of money to a particular candidate. Even assuming it could be implemented perfectly, I don't think this will really solve the problem, for two reasons. First, it's not generally a secret what moneyed interests want. Politicians who want to attract large
donations
can just take positions that they know will appeal to donors of that sort. The donors themselves can make this easier on the candidates by, e.g., posting public position statements on issues of the day. Secondly, and this is far more insidious, even if politicians honestly represent their positions, then because success in running for office is so tied to the amount of money the candidate can raise, only candidates who hold opinions favorable to large corporations and wealthy individuals will be able to get elected. In fact, for all I know this is what happens already!
But with all that said, it was a really interesting talk and Lessig tied together some things you might not think would go together. If a video or Flash presentation becomes available, I would recommend watching through it. And hopefully my pessimistic predictions will be wrong; it's certainly
happened before.
I recently
ranted about Ubuntu not giving much credit to Debian.
I have to complete this by thanking the Merge-o-Matic feature which (for a
few months now) sends to package maintainers a diff file with the Debian
package when a new Ubuntu package
is uploaded. This sometimes make it quite easy to spot modifications done by
Ubuntu and eventually adopt them.
This already bringed me, as maintainer, a few interesting patches for
iso-codes, console-data and geneweb.
In the case of iso-codes, samba and geneweb, the Ubuntu patch was even reported
manually as a Debian bug by a Ubuntu contributor/developer (no later than
today, Martin Pitt took care to suggest us to adopt bzip2 compression for
iso-codes and Mathias Gug
proposed a patch to enable usershares in samba).
So, well, even if things can still be improved, many Good collaboration
also often happens.
Up until 
One of the things I have been tasked to do in my current
assignment is to create a dashboard of the status of various
software components created by different contractors (participating
companies) in the program. These software components are built by
different development groups, utilizing unlike toolsets, languages
and tools though I was able to get an agreement on the VCS
(subversion yuck). Specifically, one should be able to tell which
components pass pre-build checks, compile, can be installed, and
pass unit and functional tests. There should be nightly builds, as
well as builds whenever someone checks in code on the release
branches. And, of course, the dashboard should be HTTP accessible,
and be bright and, of course, shiny.
My requirements were that since the whole project is not Java,
there should be no dependencies on maven or ant or eclipse projects
(or make, for that matter); that it should be able to do builds on
multiple machines (license constraints restrict some software to
Solaris or Windows), not suck up too much time from my real job
(this is a service, if it is working well, you get no credit, if it
fails, you are on the hot seat). And it should be something I can
easily debug, so no esoteric languages (APL, haskell and Python
:P)
So, using continuous integration as a google search
term, I found the comparison matrix at 
Is there a causality relation between 
NEW is currently nearly empty (
Dear Blogger,
Your CAPTCHA (word verification or whatever) doesn't test whether someone is spamming. It tests
whether someone has good eyesight, hearing, literacy, numeracy or browser-configuration, which
is correlated in one way (few spambots include captcha-crackers yet,
but there are some and they already have an 80% success rate IIRC) but
it is not strongly correlated for humans (are blind people more likely
to spam? I doubt it) and now some spammers are using porno-trojans to
get humans to crack the eyetests for them - see
in case my last post was not cynic enough yet:
"XUL is the Java of the new millenium"
John Goerzen 
Quite a few people seem impressed with the new release of Leopard, and are now looking for a CalDAV server to use with their shiny new iCal app. Unfortunately it seems that Apple wrote this primarily to work with their own (free, open-source) calendar server, which has the side effect that it doesn't work with 
gives some useful insights into the field. One thing I learned from his book is the basics of queueing theory. One important aspect of this is that as the rate at which work arrives approaches the rate at which work can be done the queue length starts to increase exponentially, and if work keeps arriving at the same rate when the queue is full and the system can’t perform the work fast enough the queue will grow without end. This means that as the load average approaches the theoretical maximum the probability of the system dramatically increasing it’s load average increases. A machine that’s bottlenecked on disk IO for a task where there is a huge number of independent clients (such as a large web server) may have it’s load average jump from 3 to 100 in a matter of one minute. Of course this won’t mean that you actually need to be able to serve 30 times the normal load, merely slightly more than the normal load to keep the queues short. I recommend reading the book, he explains it much better than I do.
I made a new release of 
