So it seems ars technica picked up on Codethink’s little pet project! Obviously the little amount of info on the wiki isn’t enough for everyone who’s interested and enough has changed since the GUADEC talk that I should write a bit here to clarify what’s going on and where we’re going. First off, we’re currently not using GVFS or FUSE - the core Wizbit component is simply a versioning, distributed object store. The current plan is to later hook up with a metadata service, maybe tracker, and use this to export a FUSE filesystem using the metadata. This core Wizbit service is just a library with its own api, maybe hooking up to gio streams for ease of use from GLib based applications. The current focus of our work is solidifying this store and the synchronization between multiple machines. We’re prototyping its use in Tomboy. Karl is also working on making some of these pretty widgets for navigating history work. We’re not actually using Git underneath, but using our own implementation of concepts from both Git and Bzr. This is for a number of reasons, partially that making a library from git’s code proved more trouble than just reimplementing the concepts (as things like JGit found). Also the nature of the problem is sufficiently different that things like the packed format don’t behave in a suitable way for general file system usage. The work on packing is yet to be started but we’ll probably use Robert Collin’s groupcompress idea from bzr. I promise we’ll make the wiki a bit better when the code’s stabilised a bit!

The other night I was relishing in the irony that during the era when the American government became most regulation averse, fully touting and embracing the idea of free markets, it also had to save a core sector of our market, leading effectively to a partially nationalized financial sector. I was going to write about the irony made visible by our current financial crisis but Karl beat me to it and said it better than I could or did. Most papers have not mulled over this irony but here is one place where it was raised

The strongly connected set of the GPG keys graph contains a bit more than 40000 keys now (yes, that’s a lot of geeks!). I wondered what was the biggest clique (complete subgraph) in that graph, and also of course the biggest clique I was in. It’s easy to grab the whole web of trust there. Finding the maximum clique in a graph is NP-complete, but there are algorithms that work quite well for small instances (and you don’t need to consider all 40000 keys: to be in a clique of n keys, a key must have at least n-1 signatures, so it’s easy to simplify the graph — if you find a clique with 20 keys, you can remove all keys that have less than 19 signatures). My first googling result pointed to Ashay Dharwadker’s solver implementation (which also proves P=NP ;). Googling further allowed me to find the solver provided with the DIMACS benchmarks. It’s clearly not the state of the art, but it was enough in my case (allowed to find the result almost immediately). The biggest clique contains 47 keys. However, it looks like someone had fun, and injected a lot of bogus keys in the keyring. See the clique. So I ignored those keys, and re-ran the solver. And guess what’s the size of the biggest “real” clique? Yes. 42. Here are the winners:

CF3401A9 Elmar Hoffmann
AF260AB1 Florian Zumbiehl
454C864C Moritz Lapp
E6AB2957 Tilman Koschnick
A0ED982D Christian Brueffer
5A35FD42 Christoph Ulrich Scholler
514B3E7C Florian Ernst
AB0CB8C0 Frank Mohr
797EBFAB Enrico Zini
A521F8B5 Manuel Zeise
57E19B02 Thomas Glanzmann
3096372C Michael Fladerer
E63CD6D6 Daniel Hess
A244C858 Torsten Marek
82FB4EAD Timo Weing rtner
1EEF26F4 Christoph Ulrich Scholler
AAE6022E Karlheinz Geyer
EA2D2C41 Mattia Dongili
FCC5040F Stephan Beyer
6B79D401 Giunchedi Filippo
74B11360 Frank Mohr
94C09C7F Peter Palfrader
2274C4DA Andreas Priesz
3B443922 Mathias Rachor
C54BD798 Helmut Grohne
9DE1EEB1 Marc Brockschmidt
41CF0322 Christoph Reeg
218D18D7 Robert Schiele
0DCB0431 Daniel Hess
B84EF12A Mathias Rachor
FD6A8D9D Andreas Madsack
67007C30 Bernd Paysan
9978AF86 Christoph Probst
BD8B050D Roland Rosenfeld
E3DB4EA7 Christian Barth
E263FCD4 Kurt Gramlich
0E6D09CE Mathias Rachor
2A623F72 Christoph Probst
E05C21AF Sebastian Inacker
5D64F870 Martin Zobel-Helas
248AEB73 Rene Engelhard
9C67CD96 Torsten Veller

It’s likely that this happened thanks to a very successful key signing party somewhere in germany (looking at the email addresses). [Update: It was the LinuxTag 2005 KSP.] It might be a nice challenge to beat that clique during next Debconf ;) And the biggest clique I’m in contains 23 keys. Not too bad.

I took a little time today to make a new release of the Free Software Project Management HOWTO. Nearly eight years after I wrote it, much of the document is out of date or has been replaced with better, more comprehensive write-ups. In particular, I think Karl Fogel's book, Producing Open Source Software says everything insightful I say in the HOWTO, a whole lot clearly -- plus adds a lot I missed. That said, my HOWTO is short and is apparently still useful to folks. I updated it to include links to a new German translation courtesy to Robert F. Schmitt, to fix a bunch of links that time broke, and to address a few obvious mistakes that readers have pointed out. Thinking about the documents' future, I'm happy to release it under Creative Commons BY-SA in addition to GFDL and would love to help out on a wiki book project to merge a few of related efforts into a comprehensive wiki reference work.

Yesterday I was visiting the Open Source Expo Karlsruhe, a new, quite small conference, at which the guys from OpenStreetMap hat a booth. I was amazed by the progress of OpenStreetMap while I wasn t looking (which is just a few months, I guess); their level of detail in some places like Karlsruhe is astonishing.Anyways, I got hooked and started to try out some of the tools and websites and finally, by tracing the Yahoo satellite image, added my first way to the map: A small footpath in Herrenberg that I know quite well: The live data can also be seen on the OpenStreetMap map, of course.Unfortunately, there is not much to map around where I live in Karlsruhe, even the driveway to my dorm is included, but maybe I can do some proper mapping (with a GPS device) in Herrenberg someday.

A few weeks ago, NYU hosted an interesting event about the future of the Internet, appropriately tittled The Futures of the Internet, the video of which is now available here. One of the panelists was Jonathan Zittrain (who recently wrote an important new book bearing the same name as the event) and during the talk he provided a few ideas about how geeks and developers can help secure the Future of the Internet. While I agree with a lot in fact most of his assessments about the state and fate of the Internet as he lays out in his book and his talks, his characterization of geek/hacker/developer politics is not one of them. Basically, one of Zittrain’s claims is that developers are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet and it is their rampant, Atlas-like libertarianism, which is, in part, to blame (first made 37:20 minutes into the video for those who want to listen to the actual comments). They have little-to-no political consciousness, are too cool to care about the fine print and they don’t care about the broader politics of the the Internet because they assume that they can just hack around any sort of barrier and impediment. While we can, without a doubt, identify a strain of libertarianism among hackers, it is by no means representative of all of geekdom and in fact, is becoming more and more a worn out 1990s stereotype/clich as time passes than an accurate representation of what is a far more variegated set of ethics and practices among hackers (and I will soon publish an article on this topic). It also completely fails to capture the ethical spirit as well as sociological, and political workings of one of the most important strains of hacking free and open source software which not only powers most of our (open) Internet but which in fact has provided a pretty hefty ethical backbone by which to conceptualize one of the ways we should think about the fight for the future of the Internet. Ok, time for a rant now Geeks not only designed the Internet, an indisputably revolutionary medium, but also implemented, and continue to maintain it, and then in their copious spare time, also engage in fighting back the political, legal and corporate encroachment which threatens to limit the very revolutionary nature of the Internet (as Chris Kelty’s new book on Free Software argues). If these acts by geeks are not enough political action, then maybe the development of not just one, but multiple entirely open and free alternatives to the only two proprietary operating systems that exist today might be a political act that would satisfy? Many would agree that even simply using a free operating system is a political act. It would be better to claim that individuals, lawyers and other political actors are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet, rather than imploring the already overtaxed geeks to set aside everything that they are already doing to do something even more. (end rant) It also seems that when it comes to political questions related to the Internet, net neutrality being the hot topic now, or fighting restrictive and problematic laws like the DMCA, one of the only groups of people (outside of lawyers and librarians) to actually understand and dissect the fine print (and geeks actually are pretty attuned to and like to dissect the fine legal print), to protest these unsavory laws, and to support the organizations who are doing something about it (like the EFF), are geeks and hackers. While many geeks are not necessarily keen on conceptualizing their labor in traditional political terms, or aligning their technical projects with a political affiliation, and yes would rather just be writing good code, they do fight for their productive freedom and this productive freedom just happens to relate to most questions and concerns related to an open, accessible, and tweakable Internet, built by the geeks, lest we forget What was perhaps most surprising was that he also seemed to think that geeks and developers have not turned to “apprenticeship,” nor policies and procedure to coordinate their development projects, unlike Wikipedia, which he considers a shining example that geeks should look towards as a beacon of policy that geeks should consider emulating in their projects (comments made answering my question). He clearly has not been hanging out with any Debian developers in the last 10 years nor has he gone through their New Maintainer Process In other words, he seems to think they are allergic to regulation due to their accentuated libertarianism, or are against structure because of their anarchism, neither which is remotely true. I think I found this characterization most ironic and problematic for before Wikipedia was even an entry on a Wiki, projects like Debian (and most other F/OSS projects) were transforming and changing to integrate normative procedures and policies that allowed a group of people to work together, scale, grow and deal with crises’. No, they don’t have the Wikipedia badge system, but that system is emblematic of Wikipedia’s own transformation into integrating its own normative procedures and policies for working together, not an example of an idealized policy system that other projects are too primitive to have evolved into yet. About one hour into the talk when questions opened up, I objected to his characterization, but given his answer back to me, I did not make much of a dent in his thinking. Another lawyer Tim Wu (who also wrote a wonderful book on the Internet) chimed in to give me some props and also made a good point that even if geeks are the only groups of people who would storm AT&T and know intimately about the importance of net neutrality, there is a lot of room for thinking about how to strengthen and improve the tactics and politics among geeks and developers so that we can ensure the type of open and generative Internet and set of technologies we value. As part of thinking and rethinking new strategies, it is as key to acknowledge and honor the past. In this regard, free software development has been pivotal both in terms of providing software (and making it is an important political act as is choosing to use free software over propriety software) and a set of important set of ideas that a lot of lawyers like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig have run with to make some important political claims of their own. So despite my rant above, which was a rant and thus exaggerates things to some degree, I do think there is much more that geeks and non-geeks can do, such as help translate these uber-geeky issues into less geeky terms (and actually this is already being done by some geeks as the work of Jelena Karanovic has shown, or translate the technical issues into new domains as the uber-geek Karl Fogel is doing with question copyright but first lets give credit where credit it due and recognize that labor is political

So a few folks left some interesting comments in response to my link to the article on the rise of the alpha-girl based on the research of Harvard psychologist, Dan Kindlon. My response to both Joe and Karl is that it is worthy to lower the barriers to entry not because girls will change the cultural ecology of geekdom in positive ways (though they may) or because geekdom is inherently “omg totally awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” but for a much more mundane reason: it may allow girls to follow interests and eventually discover a passion. I think it is a great idea if more women were involved in geekdom and open source development not because it is inherently great but because I am sure there a lot of women out there who would enjoy it (and by extension, I am sure a lot who would not). By highlighting this article I am not advocating some forced hacker-female-labor-migration-policy but pointing to the fact that social conditions outside of geekdom play a role in ensuring more participation among women. But let me explain a few things before I argue my position a little further. First a little clarification, especially now that I have read the article. By alpha the author does not mean dominant, aggressive, and totally jerky, which is what might immediately come to mind when you read/hear alpha (especially if one knows any alpha-geeks or alpha-lawyers for that matter, who are much worse, imho). And I certainly don’t want any more alpha-anything (alpha-women, alpha-dogs, alpha-cats, alpha-hamsters ) given our world is already chock-full of alpha-jerks. By using the term, the author basically means confidence, which apparently is on the rise among girls, leaving them much more likely to be go-getters, undaunted by explicit and implicit barriers and obstacles and thus more likely then ever to enter arenas that have been thought of as traditionally male or in fact totally dominated by males. If this trend is indeed in place, I think it is great and I hope that this eventually translates into more girls/women populating traditionally male areas whether it is neurology, movie directing, hacking, or surfing. What I appreciate about the article is that his research can help us question the idea that women are naturally averse to competition due to their estrogenic hormones while boys, brimming with testosterone, just love it and exude it. I never identified with that conventional well-worn script, in part because I guess I am fairly confident and somewhat competitive. Being in academia for the last 10 years, I have witnessed a lot of really confident women that have helped inspire me and keep me going, especially when times got rough. What is fascinating about the article (and by extension probably his book) is that gender parity and equity and changes in the psychological makeup of women have not changed overnight but have taken a much longer time to settle in place. We are only now bearing the fruits of structural and educational changes first instituted decades ago and that tackled some serious forms of discrimination. As a result, we are seeing girls and women donning a deeper confidence that may help them participate with more success in the arenas they want to whether it be sports or in the workplaces (though there are certainly still major barriers and issues, which are addressed in the article). So why would someone want to participate in the world of free software and hacking in particular? My first answer is there may be any number of reasons why anyone, female or male or transgender or whatever, may want to do so for the love of technology, to feel an intense belonging to a community who share your passions and who work together to create something with a lot of value, to enjoy the challenge of learning, to spread freedom to every corner of the earth, etc… It is not that geekdom is inherently fun and exciting but that it will be interesting to some slice of the population men or women (or other) and what is the harm in lowering the barriers to entry, especially if it brings enjoyment and frankly a lot of economic security too? There are a number of girls/women who already find it worthwhile and I am sure many more who would. And the point is not to create some policy to make sure that we shuttle women into hackerdom but as a society we should equip them with the necessary psychological tools so that if they think this is worthwhile, and discover that they love it, etc, they will dare to venture in there and more importantly, stay if they want to. In terms of Karls point that a lot of people are professional geeks in part because they d have trouble being anything else; like being gay, it s not a choice, I think that is far too narrow of an assessment, not to mention an outdated caricature of geeks. While there is certainly a class of socially awkward geeks (if that is what you mean??), I would say they are in the minority though they may certainly stand out precisely because they are the odd ducks and because the stereotype is so entrenched. Many geeks I have met, while they may pretty darn focused on geekdom, also have full and rich lives/personalities that cannot be easily collapsed into one immutable personality type. Yes they may be obsessed with tech but aren’t doctors, academics, musicians, lawyers sort of fanatical too? I spend like my whole week working on academic stuff (part of necessity, part out of love). And at least hacking has way better conferences and economic perks, which may help explain why people stay Finally, I think you assume a little to strongly that we do what we do because we have a pre-formed existing desired to do so. While I think this is the case for many things (and I knew the minute I learned about anthropology, I wanted to be one, which was odd but it proved to be correct), I think desire is also formed as much through experience and hence the importance of exposure to different worlds and experiences. I know that there are many things I could have never imagined I would have loved–karoake and sailing are two things that come to mind—until I tried them about both took some degree of courage. In the later case, it took a lot of guts to move onto some ship at the age of 18 instead of going to college and I am so glad I did. This is an instance where confidence and an initial curiosity led to discovering a love and passion I never knew I had. So if desire can be formed and not just expressed, I think it is key to make sure people have all sorts of opportunities to cultivate the passions they never knew they had.

A party calling themselves Oslo Byaksjon this year entered the elections, with the tagline “P parti med byen” (roughly, “On the city’s side”, or “With the city”). Their platform wasn’t horrible, and I briefly entertained the notion of voting for them. In the end I didn’t, for some important reasons; but that’s not very relevant. A Norwegian tradition is for the political parties to set up stands leading up to the election, along Karl Johans Gate (Main street, the street between the Royal Palace and the Storting (the parliament building), and this year was no exception. However, almost a month after the September 10th city elections, Oslo Byaksjon still haven’t removed the fiber boards after taking the thing apart. They’re now an orange eyesore in the middle of Oslo’s main street. Ironic! (More pictures here) Update: ZOMG, I am on Planet Debian. Hello, friends

A new law is being made in germany, which will make consentual sex between minors a crime, which has to be punished with four years of prison at least, plus ending up in a sexual offenders database for life. I, for one, do not welcome our new taliban overlords.

These two articles explain the situation in full detail (in german).

In other news, it's 102 days until all electronic communication in germany (as in the EU) will be logged for half a year. (Until a terrorist attack happens which was planned for more than half a year...) This includes all emails sent, the location data of all mobile phones, every webpage visited and so on. From everybody. If you are in Berlin tomorrow, go demonstrate. I, for one, do not welcome George Orwells lack of imagination, 1984 looks really pale today. (But it's still a good read.)

My next blog post shall take place in teletubby land again and shall feature smileys as well. Sigh.

Peter Suber provides a nice summary of the debatesaround Open Access for books vs. journals. The debate started when Karl Fogel posted a comment on my blog asking about the licensing terms for the recently released Decoding Liberation. Tonight Karl, Scott, and Samir will meet for the first time at my house. I imagine the conversation will continue to be lively!

Thanks mostly to David Berry and Karl Fogel, there is a debate unfolding in the comment section of my post on whether it makes sense to open source books and in what ways the model of free software is transferable (or not) to book publishing. It is worth reading if you are interested in this debate as the back and forth volley is pretty illuminating. Somewhat independent of the content, Karl Fogel wrote something that I love, mostly because I often try to remind people of this, although I have not said is as eloquently and tersely as Karl:

I do not understand how you can have libre freedom without free as in beer freedom. While the latter does not necessarily imply the former, the former always implies the latter. If everyone can share X freely with others, than the cost will always be driven down to zero (hence X will have both freedoms); if people cannot so share, then X is, by definition, not libre free.

Much more there, so check it out.

Karl Fogel’s recent comment asking why Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter did not publish Decoding Liberation with some sort of open licenses, especially since they are such unabashed advocates of open licensing, spurred a flurry of further comments from the authors on my blog as well as some more thought out blog posts and commentary. I don’t have too much to add except perhaps to state the obvious: the economics of book publishing and software are quite distinct creatures. When it comes to software, one can pull in revenue from support and services, while this is pretty much impossible for most books. Software also has a much shorter shelf life, which is why making it open access, fast, is key. Books however have a longer shelf life, which is why I am personally not opposed to some sort of limited copyright for books (around 5 years, give or take a couple) so that publishers can recoup their costs (and in academic publishing, no one is making a bundle of money, that is sure) but then it should be made free to the world, never to die that awful death of “out of print” (in so far as it can be thrown on the web, legally). Journal publishing is another matter and I firmly believe that articles should spread far and wide and quick because of their shorter shelf life, which tends to be shorter mostly because there are just so many articles… As Alex Golub has informed us, my own professional association has really failed not only in providing more open access journals, they are not even allowing the members of the organization any say in the matter. But thankfully other disciplines and academics are taking open access and the possibilities afforded by new media a little more seriously and here is an edited volume by CT Watch Quarterly The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure that provides an important node in what is an important conversation.

Michael Hirschorn in this month’s Atlantic reduces my generation’s entire cultural zeitgeist to a single word: quirk.

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It s easy for David Cross s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the 90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn t mean you should.

Hirschorn makes a fair point which, I think, can be restated that much of the content I enjoy is really just candy. The Atlantic seems to have recently figured out its readership (or at least figured out me). Hard to Swallow (by B.R. Myers, who more typically writes about Korean issues) is a pointed moral critique of modern food lovers (chowhounds?) and food writing (including Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, much read by my contemporaries). If I weren’t already a vegetarian, I might take umbrage. “Insider baseball” pieces on Karl Rove and Michael Gerson are also excellent, and in the case of the former quite timely. To wrap up this encomium, props to the magazine for its clean new website design, which I believe premiered today, and for including an embedded Youtube video in the online version of the quirk article.

Share This

Wow, what a day, desrt’s post on cool new gnome stuff, Alex’s crackful-but-very-cool glick, and Alp and George’s Webkit work, and just now the first of Karl’s sexy cairo-rendered widget library. The future is looking very bright indeed for GNOME!

I am finally catching up with the remarkably thick goulash of email and blogs entries that comes from traveling for well over a month and today I read one in particular When is Open Source not Open Source? that captivated my interest for it compellingly addresses the dangers that follow from diluting, or one might say hijacking, the term open source. When people learn that I study “free software” one of the most common questions I get asked is: why did I chose free software over open source? The answer is quite simple: given that the bread and butter of my research covers ethics, freedom, and liberalism, free software is the obvious path to follow, yet I also feel like a lot of my work is still relevant to the open source camp because of the affinities between the two. I have long maintained that the ideological gulf between open source and free software is not so great nor impassable, but more modest. As most know, both share a certain strong commitment to access and in a strict technical sense they refer to the same set of licenses. Philosophically there is agreement that openness and, especially, non-discrimination are essential for the quality of software and often by close extension, the vibrancy of community responsible for the software. Of course, when pontificating the ramifications and implications of openness, they do part company and enter into different territories. Free software tends to flag rights and freedoms, while open source meanders into a discussion of markets, business, and competition and in this regard they do craft different visions of the social world and human behavior, etc. But the case that Karl Fogel writes about, where OSI is strongly opposing the use of the term open source for licenses that don’t adhere to the definition demonstrates where the two positions join. As Michael Tiemann from the OSI succinctly put it:

The FSF may have got the orthodoxy wrong, and the OSI may have got the interpretation wrong, but we both agree that prohibition of commercial use without special permission is antithetical to both positions.

There is a unmistakable kernel of agreement and it is great to see the OSI taking such a strong stance in this regard. Now, David Richard’s response, who seeks, I think, to essentially dilute the term open source, is as (or perhaps even more) fascinating for in a nut shell, and using a lot of florid religious imagery, it accuses the OSI of being too rigid! In his own words:

I believe the OSI has a wonderful opportunity to continue being relevant and helping to lead the movement forward. If, however, y’all choose to define your denomination of this religion in a way that we don’t fit in, that’s fine. No hard feelings. It’s your choice. You’ll ultimately be excluding a large congregation and we for one will continue trying to build a church made up of others like ourselves.

In response, I would say that the goal of F/OSS is not to be inclusive of anyone who wants to release bits of source code, but to create the conditions under which software, as it has been defined by the community, can be created. Join the church if you would like to make free/open source software as defined and you can go elsewhere (i.e., create a different term) if you are creating something different, even if it is only slightly different. Integrity matters. And again inclusiveness, if it comes at the expense of the main goal, is not a boon but a danger to F/OSS. The OSI will remain relevant by halting the dilution of the term OSI, not by expanding the definition so that it is left with no substance. And in contradistinction to what David Richard maintains, however, there is a great degree of flexibility within this domain but it does not lie in the strict definition of F/OSS but in the realm of interpretation. You are also free, as Mako and I have argued elsewhere to interpret the significance of F/OSS in multiple ways. And I think this is where the political strength of free software lies. There is interplay between a well-defined goal (in this case for creating free software) and a more flexible realm of interpreting the significance of these technical practice. And we wold lose and I might add, a lot if we became flexible about the strict definition of F/OSS and inflexible about its political significance. I get irked with folks like David Richards who would like to bend open source rules to meet their (often commercial) interests and I find it pretty na ve when folks say the political significance of F/OSS is just x (or worse should be x) for in reality its political significance lies in the fact that it has spawned multiple types of political and economic projects. And there is something almost playfully ironic, (or at least it makes me smile) in this fact. Though there is strict definition contained withing F/OSS, this strictness has, at least to some extent, encouraged by an extreme and very healthy form of political proliferation and promiscuity. More than anyone else I know, Mako has most passionately and thoughtfully argued for the importance of what I would call political clarity and integrity. That is, the importance of having a well articulated definition for social movements, for they act, as he says a rallying point to realize a social movement. Urging the Creative Commons to learn from F/OSS and dare to simultaneously narrow and more clearly define their goals, he states it quite nicely in the following terms:

Free software advocates have been able to use the free software definition as the rallying point for a powerful social movement. Free software, like the concept of freedom in any freedom movement, is something that one can demand, something that one can protest for, and something that one can work toward. Working toward these goals, free and open source software movements have created the GNU/Linux operating system and billions of lines of freely available computer code.

In essence, a definition that people can abide by, respect, and perhaps eventually cherish is the condition of possibility to make working political code. And given how hard it is to make social change happen (at least in comparison to build computer code), we should learn from what F/OSS has to offer. And at the same time there is another lesson embedded in F/OSS. The Free Software Definition is well defined; but it must be emphasized, narrowly so. It does not try to do everything and have everyone pledge allegiance to an inordinately complex set of commitments. Clarity, narrowness, and well-defined goals –> these three attributes have powered it far and wide and I hope it remains so. Now, since the term open source is not trademarked, we are left with the problem of how to challenge the current hijacking of the term. For the solution, I will leave you with Karl Fogel, who I think proposes a good solution:

Note that the OSI s objection is not to the Zimbra license per se. The objection is just to Zimbra s calling that license open source . They can use any license they want, but they shouldn t call it open source unless it actually is. Freedom is freedom, and no amount of spin will change that. So what should we do about this? The term open source isn t trademarked. Years ago, the OSI tried to register it, but it was apparently too generic. …But there is public opinion. What Danese and Michael are proposing doing is organizing a lot of open source developers (and I mean open source according to the traditional definition, the one the OSI and I and most other open source developers I know adhere to) to stand up and, basically, say All of us agree on what the definition of open source is, and we reject as non-open source any license that does not comply with the letter and spirit of the Open Source Definition.

Since the LinuxTag took place in Berlin this year, I was able to attend it. LT in Wiesbaden, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart or whereever else was just to far away for me for a short trip. But this year it was near enough to plan a short trip to Berlin and stay some days at the home of the relatives of my girlfriend.
Anyway, the LT itself was, well, smallish. After the show it was said, that there have been 9600 attendees. My impression during my visit on Thursday and Friday was the same: very few people visiting.

On one hand, this is nice, because it gives you the possibility to have some in-depth talks to people, which is more difficult when there are lots of visitors. On the other hand, this is bad, because it reflects the importance of the show: nearly null.

When I remember my visits to the Amiga fairs in Cologne in the 90s, the numbers are somewhat different: 65.000 visitors in 3 days.

But not only the numbers of visitors were disappointing, the exhibition itself was it as well. Many booths from community projects showed generic information about themselves. This might be nice and interesting for new users, but when the subtitle of the fair is "where .com meets .org" this is really what one might expect.
Of course, maybe you could have asked the people there for details, but when the booth is looking rather dull and the flyers just have some buzz words on it without more information (like on the FreeWRT booth), it made me passing on to the next booth.

Something positive: I think the lectures were good. At least those I attended.

Sitting around at the GPN6 conference in Karlsruhe at the moment, I thought it s time to write the instant DHCP server I blogged about. So I took the code from udhcpd and, instead of parsing an config file, figure out the settings myself. So I can run simpledhcpd eth0 now, and will get a DHCP server that waits for DHCP request and answers them with an IP from eth0 s subnet, the correct netmask, my own IP as the gateway and the first entry of /etc/resolv.conf as the nameserver that s all it needs to quickly connect any other computer to mine and, if routing is enabled, provide it with internet connectivity.I have uploaded the simpledhcpd binary as well as debian binary (.deb) and source packages. It is all very hackish, bad code and comments are welcome.

Though I am not all that fond of Karl Fogel’s so called “cozy” San Francisco heater(because it does not work), I am more fond of his ideas on copyright. And I think his recent modest proposal that calls for a shorter term period for copyright and proportional registration is a good one. I agree with 90% of it although I am not sure that all types of creations are “created” equal in so far as I would be more comfortable with having software under a shorter term and books under a slightly longer one.

It finally happened. I installed Debian Etch on my last Woody box, a 400 MHz Pentium II with 576 MB RAM named gsa which is my home desktop since I bought it at LinuxTag 2003 in Karlsruhe. And no I didn’t do a dist-upgrade, neither direct no via Sarge. As already planned I removed some no more necessary operating systems from that box and installed Etch on the freed disk space. Woody is still installed on that box in parallel and was recognized perfectly by Etch’s installer. I took a few hours but also was big fun to go through Etch package list and to decide what to install. Overall the installation of 5 GB of software took about half a day. In general everything went fine, the only thing I’m yet missing is sound. Etch didn’t seem to recognize my soundcard at all although it’s a well-known brand and defacto standard for many other soundcards: a Creative Labs Soundblaster. Well, the 16-Bit ISA version, needing the full length of the slot. Worked fine under Woody. Well, I hope I’ll get it working again manually. What on the other hand is really nice with udev hell —eh— hal and all those new automatic bells and whistles: The desktop (well, at least GNOME Nautilus as well as XFCE, but probably also KDE) recognises when I insert a 3.5” floppy into the drive and shows me a nice floppy icon on the desktop. You think, that’s impossible? Floppy drives don’t inform the rest of the system when a floppy has been inserted without you polling the drive every few seconds? Well, USB floppy drives can. And they do. :-) I still need time to migrate all the old settings from Woody to Etch. I’ll probably stick with FVWM, but perhaps will use the GNOME enabled version. What’s already done is the migration from tcsh to zsh. On all new or dist-upgraded systems after Etch I’ve chosen zsh so with my last Woody installation retiring I’ve also fully migrated to zsh. So I’ve got now most of my active private boxes running Etch. Only the noone.org web and mail server “sym” (an amd64 box) as well as my 133 MHz ThinkPad “bijou” are still running Sarge, both with 2.6 kernels. So with switching to Etch on gsa, I also got no more Debian box running a 2.4 kernel. The only 2.4 kernel I run is on my FreeWRT WLAN router named pluriel, which runs 2.4.33.3. But I expect that 2.6.18 will be as stable and long lasting as the famous and rock-solid 2.4.18 from Woody. 18 seems to be Debian’s favourite kernel minor version recently. ;-)

Karl MacMillan writes an interesting review of a Sun article about SE Linux. Not only does he correct errors in the Sun article but he also summarises some of the features of SE Linux design and terminology that we use. If you are interested in computer security and want to learn some of the basic concepts then Karl's review is worth reading.