On Apple Air
Jon Grant is thinking of running GNU+Linux on an Apple Air and asking Apple for a refund.
He’d make major primetime TV network news if he gets them to preload GNU+Linux or even get a refund, and would probably also send their stock down a few pegs :-)
“Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don’t. Apple doesn’t.”
I got an XO last week and someone recently said, “I’m surprised Apple isn’t involved with these things.”
To me, Apple is the total antithesis of OLPC: expensive, exclusive elitist kit, and in terms of learning about computers, an agent of ignorance - they hate sharing software and anyone but Apple employees knowing how their software works. (Update: Tim Dobson reminded me that Apple offered OS X to OLPC and it was turned down precisely because of this.)
I mentioned this to another friend and they suggested that Raskin and the team who made the original Macintosh in 1984 had similar aims, although they too were distributing proprietary software. I find it curious that the behavior of a team in a company over 20 years ago can still effect the perception of an utterly different company today in 2008.
Over the years, Apple’s hardware has become increasingly less upgradeable, and the Air laptop - no battery replacement, hermetically sealed - is the latest and most extreme example of this.
Sony and Toshiba are selling super-thin laptops too, and all three are under-powered in terms of computation power, and top-line expensive. But Apple is going to sell millions of these by making these aspects secondary and another value primary: beautiful product design.
To me, the free software movement is very clear that freedom is a more important primary value than the others. It always takes longer to get the other values to a similar level as any proprietary alternative while keeping our freedom, but our freedom to share software and have anyone improve it for us is hard-won and valuable.
As my friend Ian says, in his endearing West Country manner, “Macbook Air my arse”
iPlayer In Review, Ashley Highfield Hints At Freedom Due Soon
(Personal opinion only, not the views of any employers past or present)
The Register has two article this week about BBC iPlayer, the first reporting an MP who has courageously stepped up to criticize the BBC of “illegal state aid” and the second confirming that the streaming version is EIGHT TIMES more dominant than the download version.
This was anticipated by independent traffic analysis of UK internet useage and in that article the Register echoes my belief that the BBC ought to simple withdraw the DRM download service altogether. I’m sure that everyone protesting the iPlayer last year would congratulate them for doing so :-)
Sadly, the BBC has said in response to the MP that it will be doing just the opposite - bringing a download version to Mac OS X and GNU+Linux users soon. I really hope this is not going to be proprietary software, but I assume the worst from the BBC while it continues to shove DRM on people with the existing download version. Withdrawing DRM from all its services must be a priority of the BBC if it is to have any credibility for supporting open innovation.
The BBC could be really nasty and permit redistribution of its proprietary player, and because all GNU+Linux distributors - famously Debian and Ubuntu which distribute proprietary software directly on their servers, but also OpenBSD and Fedora who provide recipes for where to get them from other archives - will package it and provide even less advantage to the free ones. And if it is proprietary software, it is likely to be just as spying and as DRM laden as the Windows versions.
Why is DRM a problem? Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, recently explained that DRM is typically presented only “as a system to prevent copying, but it is much more than that. DRM simply means any feature to restrict users’ use of their copies of published works, and it can restrict any kind of usage. Nor should we assume DRM means the blocking of illegal uses only. Keeping your copy of a book for years, reading it again and even copying all or part it are all lawful uses of a copyrighted work in certain situations; nonetheless, DRM could stop you from doing so.”
The DRM Download iPlayer is a clear example of this kind of restriction on use. Restrictions on use do the most harm to people who need to access media in unusual ways because of their disabilities - “accessibility issues.” For example, epileptics can enjoy IP TV safely with special software that removes the kind of flashing that can trigger a potentially fatal seizure, but with DRM restrictions on use, they cannot use their alternative software.
However, I think there are rays of hope for the BBC, having kept an eye on its new blogs.
Ashley Highfield recently blogged about Internet TV and asked, “How can the BBC help make an open market in the UK for hybrid DTT/IP boxes a reality?”
Simple, really - support the development of GNU Gnash, the most advanced free software Flash player.
Here’s why:
Adobe’s Flash seems set to become the “de facto” standard for delivering IP TV for the next few years. However, Adobe’s massive license fees are holding it back for set top box vendors.
Microsoft is offering them its “Flash killer” Silverlight software at a discount, - but only initially, as it is sure to be just as ruthless as Adobe if the strategy pays off and it became as dominant for IP TV as it is on the desktop.
Apple has focused on the patent-locked H.264 format, and although Flash can transport this format, Apple also won’t pay Adobe’e ridiculous fees either and uses their own QuickTime transport. (That’s why there is no Flash on the iPhone too.)
To support any of these proprietary software platforms would be to give illegal state aid to those companies. Now that MPs are aware of the BBC doing this already, the BBC would be foolish to carry on doing it.
But without doing that for some companies, how can hybrid DTT/IP boxes become a reality?
Free software is the answer.
“Free” doesn’t refer to price, but to freedom - freedom for all companies operating in the UK, large or small, to innovate new IP TV technology.
The BBC lobbied to make sure that Freeview and DAB were DRM-free, and this is part of the reason we license fee payers who are concerned with software freedom felt betrayed when the DRM Downloads iPlayer was announced.
Being DRM-free means that businesses that write their own software, and businesses that make software available to the public and respect the public’s freedom to share and improve it in a community
The GNU Gnash project is developing a Flash player that runs on all the different kinds of hardware that set top box makers use.
It is working to write software that supports the Adobe Flash transport at both ends, with the Gnash player and the Cygnal server. Most importantly, it also support free software formats like Theora and Vorbis in addition to patent-locked formats like H.264 and MP3.
Many set top boxes are built using GNU+Linux these days, and GNU Gnash is primarily developed for “embedded devices” like them. It doesn’t require GNU+Linux though, just a Unix-like environment, so Apple would also be free to support iPlayer steams on its AppleTV devices with GNU Gnash.
The Xbox Media Center, which you included an image of running on Ubuntu GNU+Linux in a prior blog post, will support iPlayer when Gnash can support it, as will community developed media centers for the PlayStation 3.
But Gnash is under heavily development today, and needs support.
The BBC could make a real difference to the project by contributing.
One simple way is found in the BBC’s so-called “10% time” for its engineers, similar to that of other leading software engineering firms, and it could easily put those developer resources to use. It could also publish an API and documentation about how to query the iPlayer catalog and access the RTMP streams. More elaborate contributions could be direct funds, or assigning a full time engineer.
Python Tutorial For Kids
Snake Wrangling For Kids is a Python Tutorial for “children 8 years and older, who would like to learn computer programming. It covers the very basics of programming, and uses the Python programming language to teach the concepts. Examples are presented for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.”
Alternatives To Amazon.co.uk For Old Books
I bough a copy of the old 1968 “Atlas of Typeforms” from AbeBooks and it was a third cheaper than from the cheapest 2nd hand seller listed on Amazon.
Good to know; can anyone recommend any others? :-)
Precisely why DRM is so awful
The article defined DRM as a system to prevent copying, but it is much more than that. DRM simply means any feature to restrict users’ use of their copies of published works, and it can restrict any kind of usage. Even the practice of keeping your copy of a book for years, and reading it many times, is blocked by the DRM in some e-books.
Nor should we assume DRM means the blocking of illegal uses only. Keeping your copy of a book for years, reading it again and even copying all or part it are all lawful uses of a copyrighted work in certain situations; nonetheless, DRM could stop you from doing so.
A copyleft public domain?
Free culture is a tightly defined ‘term of art’.
This mirrors the way “free software” is tightly defined. Spending a lot of time in a community that understands the term, its all too easy when not in such communities to blather on about “free software” and then have someone say, “But err, how does anyone make money if its free?” - completely missing the discussion is about freedom, not price.
It is legally possible to copyright a work derived from a work in the public domain. But unless you have the sole copy of something, this isn’t a problem because everyone else can also go to the original public domain source.
It is not ethically legitimate to turn what is already free culture into proprietary culture, though. To protect against this, we use “copyleft”: we copyright a work and add a restriction that maintains the freedom of the work for all later recipients.
If you transcribe a book from 1668 and freely pass out copies on a webserver, it does not become part of what many think of as the intellectual commons.
This does mean that others cannot combine it with their proprietary works though, and if they do, you have a slam-dunk copyright infringement case against them. I suggest looking in the business directory for “no win no fee” lawyers if they do this to you :-)
However, if you are in the USA and dedicate your work to the public domain, this may be possible. But that dedication is only valid in the USA jurisdiction, and that’s only when its done properly.
Saying “you may have a copy” is not legally binding; you need to state two things; one, a copyright notice - “Copyright (c) Ty Coon 2008” - and two, a copyright license.
That could be a public domain declaration, but that is no longer recommended because of the international problem, so I recommend a simple attribution license.
The web works because when you post something on a public website, you give an implicit copyright notice to download a copy for viewing it - but that is all. Google News is mired in controversy because by aggregating and republishing ‘real’ newspapers websites, it goes beyond that implicit license; Google tries on a “fair use” defense, but here in the UK there is no flexible fair use, only stiffly defined “fair dealings.”
The RIAA recently sued someone in the USA for copying music on a CD into their iPod, and this is a dumb move in the USA where fair use flexes to include this activity. In the UK, it is illegal - but fortunately politicians bought iPods already and so recognized it as stupid, so the fair dealings definition is being updated. In Sweden, politicians started using bittorrent already and so recognized that making p2p illegal is stupid, and have been in the news this week because they are working to decriminalize it.
The GPL is a “strong” copyleft license for software (although it is used for other kinds of works) and its terms are that you can only combine GPL works with other works no more restrictive than the GPL. So you can combine a GPL program with a public domain program, but not with a “non-commercial use only” program.
If you use a simple all-permissive non-copyleft license, like the Creative Commons Attribution license (“CC-BY”) then proprietors can combine your work (that is still copyright to you) with their redesign of it, and make the whole available under proprietary terms.
Therefore I recommend strong copyleft for all free culture works unless it is strategic not to; when the alternative is to have no use of the work. For example, the “MP3 killer” audio format Vorbis is released under all permissive terms to encourage its widespread adoption. My sister’s “USB music stick” portable player supports 3 formats - MP3, Microsoft Windows Media Audio, and Vorbis - and I didn’t recommend that model to her :-)
Perhaps the public domain should be retrofitted with copyleft terms! :-)
Will TV Audiences Become The Biggest Distributors?
(Personal opinion only, not the views of any employers past or present!)
Erik says in that video, “Ultimately, the BBC believes that - this is pretty radical I think - is that the user will ultimately will become our number one distributor.”
However, this is in the context of how users recommend media to each other online at a much faster rate and to a wider social circle (even, publishing their recommendations) than in previous media eras.
It is current fashionable to talk about that happening on “social networking” websites which are limited to sending simple messages with links to actual distributors and perhaps redistributing certain kinds of small files, since these websites have central points of control - webservers - and thus bottlenecks on redistribution.
I’m also unaware of any BBC media which is redistributable by users today.
So I think what was intended was something more like “Ultimately, the BBC believes that the user will ultimately will become our number one director of programming” or whatever the people’s job titles are in BBC TV who do the same job people we call “editors” do in the newspaper industry: Selecting what’s worth watching today.
Which isn’t some far off radical idea; its something the iPlayer already achieves within a time limited window.
As we fall into the future, the iPlayer’s catch up window could start expanding back in time from 7 days to 14 to 52 weeks all the way back to 1922 (which is how far Erik says Auntie’s archive goes) and increase the ability of people to direct their own programming. In the earlier part of the presentation, this is something that Erik seems to imply could happen.
On Nasty Nerd Syndrome
I’ve heard this hacker folklore described as “Nasty Nerd Syndrome” before, but this was an especially good explanation of it:
All people have a “tact filter”, which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most “normal people” have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. This is because when they were growing up, their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all!”
“Nerds,” on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. This is because when nerds were growing up, they continually got picked on, and their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, “They’re just saying those mean things because they’re jealous. They don’t really mean it.”
When normal people talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they say, and no one’s feelings get hurt. When nerds talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they hear, and no one’s feelings get hurt. However, when normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people’s feelings often get hurt because the nerds don’t apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.
So, nerds need to understand that normal people have to apply tact to everything they say; they become really uncomfortable if they can’t do this. Normal people need to understand that despite the fact that nerds are usually tactless, things they say are almost never meant personally and shouldn’t be taken that way. Both types of people need to be extra patient when dealing with someone whose tact filter is backwards relative to their own.
The only gripe is that it could be funnier :-)
How to get a free software job?
GNU Herds is a global free software job site and there is a UK free software jobs mailing list which has a healthy amount of traffic. (I subscribed to the list in 2005, and many thanks to MJ Ray for reminding me about it in the discussion on FSFE-UK that inspired this blog post)
Many healthy companies wholly or mostly working in free software sponsor of the GNOME and KDE annual summits and similar free software conferences. That’s a good list to start with if you don’t know many yet; try submitting your project URLs and CV to them. If they don’t have vacancies now, as they grow they’ll have you on file :-)
If you want to do consultancy, I’d recommend going self employed to begin with and then starting your own company or cooperative when things are underway - and getting listed in the Debian/Ubuntu/etc consultants/3rd party support pages, and doing some local marketing.
I’d also recommend going to conferences like the GNOME and KDE ones (FOSDEM is coming up soon) and chatting to people there who do work you admire.
Bruce Perens on the Microsoft Take-Over of OLPC
Bruce Perens has written a good screed about what I understand as his feelings that Microsoft making a play to take over OLPC.
Scary stuff, but I think that its a bit of a no brainer that with all the powertop style improvements, no matter if governments get pre-installed OLPCs to kids - the kids will hear they can get longer battery life and plain better software off the net and get rid of Windows themselves.
Like every other kid in the 1/6th of the world already part of network society is doing these days.
Free Software SatNav
So it seems that the TomTom devices are not tivoised and there are free GNU+Linux distributions for them like the OpenTom MP3 Player project.
My friends have been on at me to get a satnav, and with OpenStreetMap and a free software distro running, I’d love one.
When Gnash gets going, these things are going to really rock :-)
Sadly other people will have to work on this instead of me, though. There is even commercial promise with Dash - proprietary maps, but even more freedom preinstalled.
What is wrong with making copies of money?
Today a friend asked me, “What about making copies of money? What are your opinions on that? Isn’t it stealing? Why is it illegal to create copies?”
To call counterfeitting “stealing” an exaggeration error, specifically, an oversimplification exaggeration, similar to the exaggeration that confuses making unauthorised copies of bitstreams with stealing.
Counterfeiting currency is a kind of fraud, not theft.
It is illegal and unethical to create copies because it tugs at the thread that binds society together and would destroy society if left unchecked. That is, it undermines the social contract between the sovereign will and the people in a social order. For example, when the sovereign will was a King, it was treason.
The various theories of social contract that have developed are largely differentiated by their definition of the sovereign will, be it a King (monarchy), a Council (oligarchy) or The Majority (republic or democracy).
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
The gruesome forms of punishment were due to the two’s acts being construed as “treason”, rather than simple crime.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit#History
Since it harms other people, this is unethical even if it were legal. Things are illegal so that when people do unethical things the people who are harmed have a way to achieve justice. When the sovereign will is harmed, its criminal law, and when its just another dude, its civil law. I am not a lawyer, do not base your defense in court on this.
The point of a currency is that it is issued by the sovereign will of a state who manages its value to keep the economy running smoothly. If anarchists counterfeit money, they dilute the value of the currency in the economy and seriously damage it - for everyone, including themselves, in the long term, though they may profit a little in the short term.
That’s why the Nazis started counterfeiting Allied money in WW2, about which there was a Hollywood film recently.
And with that, this discussion is over as quickly as it started.
RoboFab Goes Free Software!
Massive thanks to Erik, Just and Tal for this excellent and high quality toolset!
Why The DRM Download iPlayer Should Be Scrapped
(Personal opinion only!)
Some people are frustrated in the short term that the BBC iPlayer uses new, complicated “RTMP” streaming technology, so playing the streams with free software like Gnash is not yet possible.
But this situation is better and more sustainable in the long term.
The BBC is using the latest Flash technology - Flash Media Server - which necessitates RTMP, and all the other sites that use HTTP, like YouTube, are using an old deprecated way of doing things.
I expect them to migrate to RTMP this year, especially when Cygnus, the Gnash Media Server, kicks its tires off; I can see Google having plenty of fun with a free software solution for the backend of YouTube!
By using RTMP and putting Gnash through its paces, the BBC is spurring on myself and others to try raising developer time and funds to raise Gnash’s game sooner rather than later.
I wrote earlier this week at length about why I think the BBC should be directly involved in developing (or funding the development of) Gnash. Who knows what will happen?
Also, as I understand it, the BBC has agreed to accept DRM on “download” versions of iPlayer. So I would rather they scrapped the download version completely!
I wonder what the radio of download:streaming users is? Hopefully it is so much imbalanced towards streaming (since its more convenient, despite the slightly lower image quality) that the BBC will find a business reason - like the cost of support and maintanance, and the ongoing bad publicity about the DRM - to scrap it.
Free Software Alternatives to iPlayer
Tribler is a free software alternatives to iPlayer developed at the Technical University of Delft.
They are hiring - including a testing job suitable for students with “interesting salary.”
1/4 of the population of the UK is in debt trouble
Shopping addiction appears to be unstoppable:
1/4 of the population of the UK is in debt trouble. Amazingly, “excessive Christmas shopping” will push many people over the edge. Perhaps schools should teach teenagers how to resist this pressure or teach them to celebrate Grav-mass instead.
ADSL Modem That Runs Free Software: Netgear DG834GT
My old ADSL modem has been playing up (I think the number of BitTorrent sessions might have made it run hot, it was just sat on carpet, but its basically dead) so I found myself on the market for an ADSL modem or router that runs free software.
Typically this is a cut down OS built mainly with Busybox, ulibC and the Linux kernel. I was aware of the OpenWRT project for many wifi routers, but I didn’t know if it supported routers with modems.
My good friend Chris Buckley, currently of Red Hat employ, recommended his “Netgear DG834GT 108Mbps Wireless ADSL Modem Firewall Router with 4-port 10/100 switch.” - £60 from Amazon
It seems there are a lot of these routers in the UK because Sky has been distributing them, but with a poor quality distribution:
There are three firmwares available for the router as mentioned earlier. The Sky Firmware is restrictive and un-reliable, so if your router is the Sky branded one you may wish to flash it to either UberGT or the Official firmware. Common problems with the Sky Router include WiFi Drop-Outs and the Router locking up.
Fortunately, Netgear doesn’t Tivoise these computers so enjoying software freedom is possible.
Chris uses the UberGT software, and there is also OpenDG project on GNA (with a more informative wiki elsewhere)
The OpenDG wiki has a page of Tips and Tricks for the preinstall Netgear software that includes the URLs of pages that exist but are not linked to via the Netgear user interface. This kind of nutty behaviour is typical of proprietary software - having functions that are totally useful, but totally undocumented and unavailable to all but a knowledgeable cabal.
Still, there are some even more cool “advanced” features made possible with software freedom:
This utility will allow you to switch any of your PC on from the internet, even if you have only the router switched on. It provides another important feature: the wol is protected by the router password instead of being open to everyone.
And it seems that OpenWRT isn’t planning to support this device (although the non-ADSL version, the DG834G, is currently working) but kindly list the hardware specifications of the computer:
- BCM6348 big-endian system
- MIPS CPU at 256MHz
- 16Mb RAM
- 4Mb flash storage
- Atheros MiniPCI wifi network
- BCM5325 wired network (4 ports)
The Atheros MiniPCI wifi makes me nervous, as I heard that Atheros wifi is notoriously proprietary.
Dear Lazyweb: Please start a company that builds and sells desktops and laptops fully supported by gNewSense and common peripherals like ADSL Wifi routers, printers and digital cameras that run free software themselves (instead of hardware that is supported by free software on the main computer but the peripheral computer is proprietary)
One Terabyte Now Under £150
The Audio End Game approaches.
Pixmania are selling 0.5Tb (500Gb) hard disks for £59 including VAT, so it is now under £150 for 1Tb of storage.
This contrasts nicely with the RIAA suing someone for copying music from CDs they had purchased onto their computer recently.
Inkscape 0.46 out soon - About Screen Artwork
The “About Screen” artwork competition entries for the upcoming Inkscape 0.46 are available and some of them look really great!
Adobe Should Make Flash an ISO Standard
There was a discussion today on the FSFE-UK list today complaining about how Gnash was unstrategic for the free software movement and SVG+ECMAscript would be better. Which is nonsense, of course.
When Adobe was betting on SVG as a Flash killer, it could have been. That Adobe bought Macromedia was IMO chiefly for Flash; which demonstrates to me that it would have been more expensive for Adobe to develop SVG into Flash killer than buy Flash.
The limited resources of the free software movement are therefore better spend on making a free Flash runtime and developer tools.
Gnash is sponsoring Ming, lets not forget, which will underlie content creation tools, Flame being the first example since Macromedia Captivate is a small subset of Flash focused on a useful purpose.
PDF was controlled by Adobe and recently became an ISO standard. MS-DOC was so bad that ODF became an ISO standard instead, and MS is now fighting that tooth and nail. Flash is a technically sound multimedia platform. Adobe has said that it tightly controls Flash runtimes for the same reason Sun kept a grip on Java runtimes: because “works the same on all runtimes” is compelling.
Given that there are several Flash runtimes in development as free software, and given that the are free and run nicely on GNU+Linux they will be appearing in many embedded computers in 2009, it would make sense for Adobe to make Flash a “open” standard at ISO or similar, so that all clients can work towards ISO compliance and the “write many run many” apocalypse is avoided.
If they don’t, perhaps Gnash will become a “defacto” Flash standard, with its extra features like support for all the codecs in ffmpeg (eg, Oggs) and not the Adobe runtime, because freedom matters to embedded hardware vendors who together (and certainly some on their own) dwarf Adobe in the total economy.
Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control
Dylan Wiliam made a speech, “Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control” that I thought was excellent.
Transcript, slides and audio recording are all available :-)
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain in the UK!
http://www.learn-to-draw-right.com is the first UK licensee of the USA Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain drawing workshop franchise.
I met Anna when I did the USA workshop in the UK in 2006, when she was still learning in order to pass their high quality standards that all franchise licensees must pass. That workshop was a lot of fun and I expect Anna is going to do great things with her workshops here in the UK!
If you’re in the UK and think you can’t draw or have no artistic talent, I hope you’ll check out her site and consider attending one of her workshops :-)
Why The BBC Should Support Gnash
(Note: This is purely personal opinion and is not the views of any previous, current or future employers or organisations I have, do or will belong to.)
I think the BBC should be putting some effort into Gnash development since that’s the fastest way it will support viewing the streaming iPlayer with free software.
The BBC has said its committed to doing this, but will do the most popular platforms first. Despite the massive punch that free software packs, it is seen as a minority platform and so I don’t expect the BBC to work on supporting viewing the streaming iPlayer with free software any time soon, sadly. Perhaps the engagement with “exotic devices” communities that Ian Forrester is promoting will alert the BBC to the impact that supporting free software can have, despite its apparent unpopularity.
So, I think if the BBC put active effort into Gnash, like giving a BBC software engineer “20% time” on it (which would be a good idea anyway to stop the brain drain to companies that famously have such 20% time) that would be awesome and I’d be sure to applaud and congratulate their efforts. When the BBC puts passive effort into Gnash, like inviting Gnash developers to meet the iPlayer team, that is also outstanding.
Still, the BBC’s policy on contributing to free software projects is not totally clear to me; as I understand it, there isn’t one.
Michael Sparks (the primary author of Kamaelia) started the thread “[backstage] How do things actually become open source at the BBC (was Please release Perl on Rails as Free Software)” a while back, that explained this from his personal perspective, and for which I’m very grateful as it as illuminating. Sadly I did not kept that thread going for lack of time, but the main point we got to was,
On 08/12/2007, Michael Sparks ms@cerenity.org wrote:
On Saturday 08 December 2007 14:06:37 Dave Crossland wrote: I think its important to distinguish between the publication of private, internal tools as free software, and the publication as free software of software required to view BBC media.
I think you have to be careful here. … your point is, in my opinion, a good example of something that directly impacts or should be impacted by section 87 paragraph 4 of the charter agreement, and why, again in my opinion, “best/common practice” might be better than policy.
Here’s what Michael refers to:
Section 87 (4) The Executive Board must keep the BBC’s research and development activities under review, and must (in particular) ensure that an appropriate balance is struck between— (a) the potential for generating revenue through commercial exploitation of its intellectual property, and (b) the value that might be delivered to licence fee payers and the UK economy by making new developments widely and openly available.
The BBC on occasion publishes software developed wholly internally as free software, and lists these publications at www.bbc.co.uk/opensource (which I hope one day might be www.bbc.co.uk/floss or better, www.bbc.co.uk/softwarefreedom :-)
Before Michael’s post, it seemed to me that only a couple of things (notably Kamaelia which is awesome!) are published for the same reason that Backstage is hobbled with non-commercial restrictions; the BBC can’t ride roughshod over the private market and must carefully evaluate its market impact.
So a website management system like “Perl On Rails” and a research project like Kamaelia is going to have little impact, since there are thousands of website management systems and research projects, both free and proprietary.
Gnash, on the other hand, is going to give Adobe a good kick in the shins; as I explained earlier in this thread, they are making loads of money from banning the Adobe Flash runtime, which they distribute without a fee, from being used by hardware vendors unless they pay a fee (amongst other antisocial nonsense).
If the BBC is involved with Gnash directly, it risks damaging “vendor relations” with Adobe, although given how friendly Adobe engineers I’ve met at conferences and on the web like Tom Phinney and John Dowdell are, I wouldn’t expect that. Adobe seems to be passively friendly to the free software movement, but is a huge and thus slow moving organisation (like the BBC.) Still, if Gnash really smacks Adobe in the kisser, their lawyers might lash out at the BBC for helping Gnash. Adobe lawyers ain’t so nice.
And hey, Gnash is going to kick Adobe’s shins anyway :-) I do think its unlikely that Adobe lawyers would lash out at Auntie, but if that is a real risk, Gnash has legal structures for accepting funding via USA charities like the FSF (and another that’s legally structured to be more favourable for large corporate donors is due shortly I hear) which would be anonymous and would sheild the BBC from such risk.
After Michael’s post, I figured that the BBC isn’t too worried about that kind of thing :-) Reading the charter, I think its main problem with free software is that “the potential for generating revenue through commercial exploitation” is less for free software than proprietary software. Obviously free software revenue is less for individual organisations, but it is not zero, and may be higher in the economy overall.
Wonderfully, the BBC recognises this! That is, that the revenue difference is offset by “the value that might be delivered to licence fee payers and the UK economy [overall] by making new developments […] available” as free software.
So yes, in my opinion the BBC should support Gnash directly, either with in-house engineer time or by funding the project on a kind of freelance basis or whatever, because the value that will be delivered to licence fee payers and the UK economy by making streaming iPlayer accessible with Gnash is huge.
And not just iPlayer: The BBC ought to support accessing BBC media with free software in all cases because it ought to respect and value the freedom of license fee payers.
However, if the BBC doesn’t value freedom much, it might also be persuaded on secondary practical grounds: The BBC is meant to be serious about supporting innovation; respecting the British public’s freedom to tinker is the best - cheapest, most efficient - way to do so.
Software Freedom Makes Us Happier
It seems like software freedom is important for avoiding depression. Not that I have depression, but still, an unusual line of argument for advocating software freedom:
When I got to college, I learned about an important theory of psychology called Learned Helplessness, developed by Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman. This theory, backed up by years of research, is that a great deal of depression grows out of a feeling of helplessness: the feeling that you cannot control your environment.
The more you feel that you can control your environment, and that the things you do are actually working, the happier you are. When you find yourself frustrated, angry, and upset, it’s probably because of something that happened that you could not control: even something small. The space bar on your keyboard is not working well. When you type, some of the words are stuck together. This gets frustrating, because you are pressing the space bar and nothing is happening. The key to your front door doesn’t work very well. When you try to turn it, it sticks. Another tiny frustration. These things add up; these are the things that make us unhappy on a day-to-day basis. Even though they seem too petty to dwell on (I mean, there are people starving in Africa, for heaven’s sake, I can’t get upset about space bars), nonetheless they change our moods.
Aaron Swartz points out why this is important:
The economist Richard Layard, after advocating that the goal of public policy should be to maximize happiness, set out to learn what the greatest impediment to happiness was today. His conclusion: depression. Depression causes nearly half of all disability, it affects one in six, and explains more current unhappiness than poverty. And (important for public policy) Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy has a short-term success rate of 50%. Sadly, depression (like other mental illnesses, especially addiction) is not seen as “real” enough to deserve the investment and awareness of conditions like breast cancer (1 in 8) or AIDS (1 in 150).
Review of Scribus in January 2007
A good review of Scribus in January 2007 :-)
