Free software projects are informal (though becoming more formal) institutions that function in multiple capacities. Foremost, they are sites that facilitate the production and distribution of technology but they certainly allow for and produce all sorts of other social facts and processes. And one of the most important is that free software projects function as quasi-educational institutions that are structured quite differently from formal educational institutions. And this blog entry by Justin Podur that reviews a book by Alfie Kohn of alternative eduction, reminded me just how much F/OSS projects are informal educational spaces but deviate significantly from traditional learning.

I have more thoughts on the type of “schooling” F/OSS allows but since I am moving to my new apt. in a few hours, it will have to wait until later.

So, we did manage to have some pancakes to celebrate Debian’s Big 10 (Social Contract) anniversary, though albeit, they are not your traditional sort of pancake, but certainly close enough and really tasty.

This FUD is not spreadable, but it does make… , and was previously noted in Mexico last year.

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 naïve 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.”

The online journal re-public: re-imagining democracy has a handful of articles on collaboration and wikipedia, adding to two special issues on reimagining the commons.

Many are good.

But I am disturbed over the true paucity of diverse voices, including women. The recent slew of articles does not have even one authored by a woman and there are only 2 represented in the re-imagining the commons special issues.

Given that there are many woman researchers and practitioners who do work on this material, I honestly don’t think this represents a lack but a problematic oversight. Problematic most especially because they are “re-imagining democracy,” and this does not look to imaginative to me.

Recently a Debian user left a really nice note letting me know “It makes
me happy and proud to learn that boricuas are Debian developers! (Hopefully you are not the only one). This is for me the best Debian News since Etch released. Proud and happy for you.”

Here I have to confess, however that I am neither a DD nor really a true Boriqua. I have studied Debian for many years, but have never officially joined. In terms of PR, none of my family is originally from there as my father is Jewish American and my mom was born in Russian, wandered as war refugee for many years in Europe and eventually landed in Venezuela, where I was born. But I have made my home in PR for many years and do consider it one of my many homes.

Speaking of many homes, I also feel, even though I am not a DD, that Debian is an important touchstone in my life. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Manoj recently related to this topic, who almost mistook me for a DD:

[biella] who is that DD that wrote an anthro thesis on debian? [08:55]
[biella] he is brazilian

[manoj] I was gonna say that the dd who did an anthro thesis on debian
was you, then it struck me that you are not a dd, but I still
think of you as one now, and then it struck me further that
making you a dd might compromise your postiion as an observer

After many years following the project, I have grown quite attached to it, and every year, a few months before Debconf I am reminded of this attachment. I have managed to make Debconf only every other year, and usually when I face this fact, a sense of melancholia and slight sadness sets in, especially when I hear of everyone making plans to go. I always start to question my decision to stay back, then hit all sorts of websites for cheap tickets, and start to wonder if I can perhaps manage to complete some work there, which is the main reason this year I am staying away.

I then make myself confront REALITY and remind myself that the whole reason I love attending Debconf is because of its extreme vitality, which after a week, leaves you wrung out and tired, because you put so much of your attention and mind, soul and heart in the events. So even if I go for a week, or longer, you usually need a week ore more to recover. I am not sure I can spare such time this year, especially since less than a month after Debconf, I am packing my bags and moving back to the east coast of the United States. And as I learned last year and the year before and two years before, these sorts of long-distance moves take a lot of your time.

My longing reminds me of how important it is to celebrate those things in life you love. And while there is more to Debconf than a celebration, much of it is just that, a chance, a space, a place by which and where you celebrate. And since I sit only in the shadows of Debian, I imagine the pleasure and joy runs deeper and wider for those who sit at its heart. So if you are on the fence on whether to go, this is your friendly public service announcement that it is, indeed, so worth your while.

Spring has arrived in many parts of North America. But in Edmonton, North America’s largest and most northernly city, spring has sort-of-come-but-not-really as it recedes fairly quickly. There will be a day of “explosive” warmth (you know, a balmy 45-55 F) and of course locals strip down to near nakedness, wearing shorts and, the more flamboyant will don an 80′s inspired cut-off tee. Hot. This sartorial statement says WE are SO ready for the long winter to leave … for good. Despite the collective sentiment, which is probably shared by 99.999999% of Edmonton’s inhabitants, the winter cold, snow, and breeze are indifferent to our deepest pleas and they come right back, making us sport at least a few layers of winter clothes.

Within this dance between winter breeze and spring warmth, I have spent most of my time staring at my computer doing everything possible to transform half-baked ideas, hunches, sentiments, and theories into coherent words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters for my book. I am working on it full-force and am enjoying it more than I have in a year though from time to time I get fed-up, lost, sick of it, and my writing soul descends back, deep into one of Dante’s infernal rings, where I fester with my frustration, convinced that I should have become an organic flower farmer/acupuncturist that I almost became (well not really, but I have always fancied that combination as an ideal and fulfilling career path). Slowly I usually make my way back up, brush off the cobwebs of despair, and proceed anew.

Within this highly secluded life of monastic-like repetition, thankfully, I have been enjoying some new things this spring. Once a week I head over to an University of Alberta off-site library facility to pour over archive material for a new project, which I am not going to talk about here (it is super-duper-top-secret) but it has been interesting working at an archive, especially one that is housed in an old Ikea.

Since I am one of those right-brained people, I like to listen to music while I work, and lately I have also become pretty obsessed with house & electronic music, mainly thanks to a local DJ, David Stone whose weekly radio show on CJSR, BPM, is simply the bomb. He claims to bring the “latest and greatest of electronic dance music from around the world” and I think he is totally right. If you like this type of music, do catch his weekly show on Sat nights at 6 PM (MST).

I sometimes get a little sad when I listen to some good music or see some stellar performance because it reminds me that what I may one day have to offer to the wider world—an academic book and article here and there—simply cannot bring the type of joy that musical performance and other creative expressions can bring. While you can listen to songs and over again, a book, if it is really superb, may attract a second or third reading. An academic book or article may at times light an inner light of joy, but let’s face it, it is usually a pretty cerebral light oh’ joy, leaving untouched those part of the brain, soul, heart, where more visceral, mysterious, yet fully self-enveloping feelings of joy reign high (but I am trying my hardest to stick a funny section or two in every chapter to leave a trace of laughter because if I can’t manage that with an ethnography on hackers, I will have failed miserably).

Every track David Stone plays is something I want to listen to over and over again and thanks to mplayer stream dump function, I can. And funny enough, is that in the last month software—believe it or not—has brought me much joy as of late. I have been using free software since 1997 and I used to get A LOT more annoyed—no make that a downright frustrated—with programs (or lack of programs) than I do now. In fact, now, I am simply stunned whenever I upgrade to a version of a program. For example, Word Press 2.0 is like so much nicer in terms of usability and functionality than 1.5. The same goes for Open Office, the Gimp, and even Firefox, which has some bugs, but is so much better than its predecessors.

I once described free software using the well-worn cliché as “the gift that keeps on giving.” And I think that this is becoming more and more true. And like wine, with the passing of time, these gifts usually get better and better. And like a unexpected present that arrives on your doorstep, these software packages induce some joy, because it is actually pretty neat to see these programs develop and grow into something stronger and more useful; so thanks to those who spend their time hacking away at making and improving this software and thanks to those (you know who you are) who helped with my recent WP upgrade!

Mr Chopra, at Decoding Liberation has made some very fine points concerning why so-called high-failure in open source is nothing to fear. He is responding to a piece by Chris Holt who is responding to a piece by Clay Shirky recently published in the Harvard Business Review. I tried today and faild miserably to getthe Shirky piece. Can anyone get access to the HBR? If yes, please do send me a copy!

GNU bars. Maybe they help you code better if you are coding free software.

My friend Jonah has written a provocative post that asks how the example of free software can be applied to the environmental politics as to create a free energy movement. His suggestion is a good one and it centers on the clear and accessible provision of information of labeling so as to create the conditions for meaningful choice and action.

There is a line of critique launched against free software and the free culture movement accusing it of being myopic, privileged and limited. It is composed of a lot of well educated, white (many boys), honing in on liberating a set of artifacts—software, music, movies—etc, that are seen not to have all that much consequence in the world, compared to other more pressing matters, like famine, genocide, global warming, disease etc. I think this is somewhat of a negative critique that actually misses the point about why so many folks are attracted to the free culture movement in the first place and why it should be considered in a more positive light as a model for other forms of politics not because of its content but because of its form (and this is what Jonah basically says).

In a world in which the mere thought about how to change the world is utterly paralyzing, seemingly futile, and just completely depressing, open source and free culture, by providing a set of tools along with a political message, has broken through the armour of apathy many of us are strangled by. It provided an opening to practically engage in politics, and thus allow many to taste the fruit of political action. And it is the taste, which keep people coming back to try to change the conditions of life.

So the lesson to draw from free software is less whether its politics are radical or important enought, but that it provided an avenue and framework for alternative action. And it is this abililty to build the capacity for empowerment, which is one of its greatest virtues.