Michael Sparks & Whence GNU?
There is an interview titled “10 questions to Michael Sparks, Open Source Guru at BBC” (Part 1 & Part 2, and each with nasty page-breaking) that is well worth reading.
The stuff about the conceptual origins of Kamaelia is especially fascinating:
it’s also inspired by a naive engineers view of biology. In animals we have 2 main communication systems which allow the billions of cells (which don’t know of each others existance) to operate as whole. We have the neural system (which Kamaelia’s core - Axon - deliberately alludes to) which can be viewed as the brain’s main (or most obvious) way of controlling the body. The other main system the body has of communication is the hormonal system which provides essentially mechanisms to say “starvation mode, conserve energy”, “horny mode, reproduce”, “pregnant mode”, and so on. This is much slower acting, but provides global useful information.
He also echos Tom Lord’s ideas about software freedom being a user-facing feature, the way it is in Emacs, and from the little I know about Kamaelia, it seems likely to deliver this eventually:
An eventual aim would include a generic application as putting the same sort of power as the spreadsheet does for the average user into the average users hands but for generic applications using multimedia, and network systems. This is some time off however!
— 10 questions to Michael Sparks, Part 1 Page 4
Pretty much the only thing Michael and I disagree on is his “Open Source” philosophy, since I prefer that of “Software Freedom.” (and we’ve (well, I have, at least) had fun chatting this over a lot on the Backstage list :-)
Michael has some thoughtful things to say about the need for the Affero GPLv3 (Part 2 page 4 and page 5) (finally released today!) although he doesn’t mention it. I hope he’ll write some more about it at some point.
He does mention the Google superior privately help anti-spam technology, and recently made some of his own using Kamaelia :-) And Michaels blogs has some thoughtful posts too, like this one on DRM vis-a-vis GPL. (Although there’s lots to discuss there too)
Also, I often wonder how software engineers come to decided their position on software freedom movement, so this part of the interview was really interesting to me too:
After reading the GNU manifesto however, I personally came down heavily on the side of the BSD license. Developers do have a choice in our society (rightly or wrongly) on how (or if) they charge for their services.
— 10 questions to Michael Sparks, Part 1 Page 2
Its a shame that the old GNU manifesto wasn’t persuasive. Richard’s writing errs towards clarity rather than rhetoric, and in doing so becomes less persuasive but more useful when you have been convinced, in my experience.
Perhaps a new manifesto should/could be written, since the challenges faced by the GNU project are much different today. Tom Lord wrote this summer:
Proposal: The GNU project needs a newly revitalized, specific, principled, technical agenda. That is to say that the project needs a statement of what it aims to achieve in terms of specific technical objectives, and an explanation of why the principles of software freedom make those objectives worth achieving. With such a statement, it will begin to be possible to work on organizing to achieve the objectives.
Maybe the FSF is more appropriate than the GNU project, though, with its 3 full time paid-up campaigns managers. Perhaps the FSF could have a manifesto, meant to be more persuasive about why software should be free-as-in-freedom, and why its worth joing them as an associate member. Perhaps it shouldn’t be primarily text, but done in video, given how much milage Creative Commons got from its “manifesto video” when it launched, and how much the “viral is everything” concept was touted at the Silicon Valley in Cambridge event last week.
(Grabbing the link for the GNU Manifesto, I noticed that the Portuguese translation is high up the rankings for some reason. Must be popular in Brasil ;-)
The Michael Sparks & Whence GNU? by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments
One Response to “Michael Sparks & Whence GNU?”
Leave a Reply
Michael has some thoughtful things to say about the need for the Affero GPLv3…I hope he’ll write some more about it at some point.
Be careful what you wish for… :-) I’ve never mentioned any need for the Affero GPLv3. The links you mention don’t mention the Affero License. To think that affero license “solves the problem” is to miss what the problem is (for the free software community, not me). Personally I’m not fussed about whether the Affero GPLv3 exists or not because it doesn’t relate to any personal agenda of mine. (ie I don’t personally see a need for it, but understand others motivations well enough to understand why they think its necessary and why for their goals its insufficient)
All that said, I like thought experiments.
I’m not the least bit convinced that the Affero GPL v3 protects the user in the way those who adhere to the FSF’s definitions of freedoms woud want. Furthermore, I’m not convinced it can be changed to do so (and even if it could be changed whether this would be desirable (see last para for why) Aside from anything, else in order for the license to be triggered I have to perform an act which under copyright law is otherwise prohibited. (A license is required to perform acts restricted by copyright)
As I recall, execution of software doesn’t require a license in the UK. Thus for, example, you can’t regulate the output from a wordprocessor with a license, since that’s mere use.
Even then we’re not talking about individual pieces of software or individual machines, but systems of heterogenous software and hardware run by multiple individuals. So let’s assume Wombat, Piggle and George all run web services. These are all running copies of code from Mr Gazelle, protected under the Affero GPL v3, and as a result they all offer the source.
All is happy.
But then, OH NO! Alice, Bob and Charles set up web services that do the same thing. They’ve written their own software that use the same web API (which consist in this case of RSS documents from specifically formed URLs), but they don’t release their software. Alice’s is compatible with Wombats, Piggles with Bobs and Charles with George.
Then nasty Matt comes along. He creates a fun mashup that mashes up the services from all 6 people. His app is completely closed, and he provides a social lock in mechanism that’s based on data meaning the users don’t want to leave. They can’t get the source from him either. And the fact he’s providing a service based on the APIs of (Alice, Wombat), (Piggle, Bob) and (Charles, George) means that he can switch at runtime between these things and isn’t dependent on any of them. (much like the issue of “I use readline, do I have to GPL my code?” - which is a well known usecase)
Given this, Matt doesn’t have to release his code. As a result all the hard work taken by Mr Gazelle to release his code as free software is undermined because he viewed the computer as a single system and application as running on that single system rather than the network as the computer and the application as cross site mashups.
It’s THAT scenario which is becoming more common (and likely to get more common as time continues), and its extremely unclear (to me) whether any software license does address that higher level system or indeed can do so.
Furthermore, unless you want to start regulating the output of these systems or controlling the way a software system may be used, you can’t deal with this new, higher level kind of software app running at a higher level on the internet. The question is can you really regulate the output and still actually protect the FSF’s view of Freedom 0 ?
It’s not for me to personally worry about, since I have good faith in human nature.
(I also can’t officially worry about on professional level either since I can’t speak for the BBC here, and all of the above is personal opinion & not legal advice :-)