Posts filed under 'Free/open source'
I spent most of last week at LCA2010. For those of you not familiar with it, LCA is short for linux.conf.au, a conference held annually in Australia or New Zealand that focuses on free and open source software, particularly Linux. Because the conference was held in Wellington this year, I decided to go, even though I am not the typical attendee. For a start, I’m the wrong gender (female), and the wrong age (middle), and I certainly don’t identify as a ‘hacker’, at least not any more.
I was initially attracted to the conference because of the three overseas keynote speakers:
- Gabriella (Biella) Coleman, an anthropology professor from New York University
- Benjamin Mako Hill, a researcher and student from MIT, who is associated with many free/open source software and open culture projects; and
- Glyn Moody, a journalist who writes about free and open source software and related issues.
I owned Glyn Moody’s book Rebel Code, and had cited an article by Colman and Hill in the research proposal for my PhD, and I thought it be very silly to pass up the opportunity to hear what they had to say when they came to Wellington. However, when I looked at the draft conference programme, other sessions caught my eye, particularly the ones to do with building and supporting a project’s community, and the threats software patents pose to FLOSS development. In addition, the miniconfs on Monday and Tuesday covered a number of my interests, including Education, Business of Open Source, and Haecksen and Linuxchix. So I decided to go, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed.
Each of the keynote speeches was very different, but at the same time they all had a common thread: the importance of software freedom and its broader implications for our society. I found that there was plenty to choose from for the rest of the day, and overall I enjoyed the talks I attended very much. I was particularly struck by what appears to be an increasing emphasis on supporting and encouraging members of a project’s community who fall into the ‘user’ category, and I got a strong sense that some members of the the hacker community are starting to acknowledge that there is more to life than coding. However, this is still a conference aimed predominately at hackers, and the Wellington Perl Mongers organised a ‘HackOff’ event (subtitled ‘Coding Just For Fun!’) on the Wednesday evening (see HackOff2010 for more information).
The conference is described as being “run by the community, for the community”, and I definitely got the sense that people who attend lca regularly see themselves as a community. One person I chatted to told me that he planned his year around going to lca, and I can now see why. The people were friendly, and easy to talk to during the breaks, and overall the tone was casual. One thing that I noticed was the lack of any trade exhibits, which meant that people at the conference didn’t feel pressured to ’support the sponsors’ during the breaks, and could instead talk to each other without feeling guilty. The sponsors weren’t overlooked, though; their names were displayed in the main auditorium during the announcements and keynote addresses, and they all had an opportunity to have stands at the Open Day, which attracted a range of people.
As a first-time attendee, I was particularly struck by the strong traditions that have built up since the first conference (initially known as CALU: Conference of Australian Linux Users) was held in Melbourne in 1999. To take just two examples, the conference dinner is known as the ‘Penguin Dinner’, and the conference ends with an ‘open day’ to promote free and open source software to the public. This was also worthwhile, and the stands included representatives from Google, Status.net, Wikimedia Australia, the New Zealand Open Source Society, CatalystIT, Moodle, IBM, Canonical (Ubuntu), AmberDMS, RimuHosting, and Digital NZ, to name just a few of the ones that caught my eye. I managed to buy a copy of Geek Prayers, a self-published book by David Merritt, as a memento of the day and conference.
One other bonus was that I was able to meet a number of people I had previously only known through email or Twitter/Identi.ca, including Dave Lane (@lightweight) from Egressive, Lynne Pope (@elpie), and Nic Steenhout (@vavroom), and had some good conversations with them and others. Next year’s lca will be held in Brisbane, and I’m already wondering if I should go.
January 26th, 2010
Last month I bought an HP Mini 5101 netbook computer, and was particularly pleased because I managed to buy it without Windows. It came running SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition (SLED), which I used for the first month while I was waiting for the next release of Ubunutu: Karmic Koala, in particular the Netbook Remix. There was nothing particularly wrong with SLED, but it was a bit too ‘corporate’ in look and feel for me. I also wanted to have the sense of ‘ownership’ that comes from choosing (and installing) my own operating system.
Last week I installed UNR 9.10, and so far I’ve been happy with it. Overall the installation process was fast and smooth, with just one annoyance. I needed to install a proprietary driver for the wireless card, and that didn’t go quite as smoothly as it should have. Fortunately someone else has already documented what to do on the Pass the Source blog: Koala Bites Man (thanks, John).
Most of the time I’ve been writing plain text using gedit (it’s easy to use, came as part of the basic installation, and I’m lazy), but yesterday I decided to try OpenOffice Writer. The first thing I discovered was that the spell checking didn’t work—I’m not sure if I missed a step in the installation process because it was new to me, or if it happens to everyone. This post documents how I fixed it.
The first thing I did was install a New Zealand dictionary. This involved:
- using the Extension Manager to download the file (via Tools -> Extension Manager -> Get more extensions online -> Dictionaries),
- choosing the New Zealand dictionary and downloading it,
- activating the dictionary in the Extensions manager, and finally,
- setting the locale to New Zealand (via Tools -> Options -> Language settings -> Languages).
I’m not completely sure if the last step is necessary, but everything is working now, and I’m happy.
November 18th, 2009
Somehow ten months have gone by since I last posted. It’s been a busy year. I was the LIM Programmes Director until the end of June, and then was busy teaching and organising a national speaking tour for RMS, which finished with him in Christchurch, where he was a keynote speaker at the LIANZA annual conference. I’m really glad I took on the role of RMS tour organiser, but it was pretty intense at times, and definitely interfered with PhD progress.
Nonetheless,I’ve been chipping away at my research, looking at the data I so painfully converted into something usable, and am now on Research and Study Leave until the end of October 2010. It should come as no surprise to anyone that my top priority is getting my results written up as soon as possible, and then moving on to turn the PHD into two (or maybe more) journal articles. Watch this space for more regular updates.
November 16th, 2009
Somehow I never seem to have much to say about my research project, but that’s going to change over the next 6 months. I need to have the thesis finished by June 2009, which means that my priority for the first half of 2009 is going to be analysing the data and writing the thesis.
I was very pleased with the response to the online survey: I received 206 responses, from all over the world! Most of them look usable, and many more individual free/open source projects were represented than I expected, and one of the things I’ll do here is mention some of the ones that were new to me. The range of responses means that the data is more ‘random’ in some ways than I expected, which is probably a good thing. I’ll start summarising my findings here once I start working with the data.
One comment: the open source software I used to gather the data is from an abandoned project, and hindsight now tells me that I shouldn’t have relied on it, even though our systems administrator told me that other people had used it for big surveys. I used it for a shorter survey in 2007, and I thought that I understood its quirks well enough to use it for this one. Unfortunately, that wasn’t true, and I’ve spend the last two days converting the data from its rather idiosyncratic (and verbose) XML output to something I can work with more easily. The biggest challenge was the fact the it only output data for the questions that people had answered, so I had to identify the missing values before loading it into an anlysis tool. This was complicated by the order of the results, which were not sorted by question number, but were instead presented in the order I had defined them. But I have finally gotten the data in the form I want, through a combination of XSLT, a text editor, and a short php program. I’ve done enough double checking to be confident that everything’s there, and correct (whew!).
If I do something on this scale again, I’ll probably use LimeSurvey, which looks good and seems to have a very supportive community.
January 1st, 2009
This very short entry is just to record the TinyURL for the survey: http://tinyurl.com/4wgce7. I plan to print it on some small cards and hand them out at the LIANZA conference if anyone I talk to is a free/open source software user and is interested in completing the survey.
October 20th, 2008
Yesterday morning I issued the invitation to complete the survey that will gather the bulk of the data for my research. It’s surprisingly hard to stop tweaking and send it out for ‘the world’ to view.
I wouldn’t be surprised to get some feedback about the distribution method: I sent it to a number of project and library-related email discussion lists, rather than collecting email addresses and sending out individual invitations. Is it OK to send a message to (potentially) thousands of people, only a small fraction of whom might be interested in the topic of the survey? Of course, I think that my topic is so important that everyone who gets the invitation should respond, but I realise that’s not the case. So why use a list?
First, I have a problem with large-scale harvesting of email addresses from discussion lists. It seems to me that most people don’t post messages in order to broadcast their email address, and that this type of harvesting is dubious from an ethical perspective.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, I wanted to offer people who lurk on the lists an opportunity to complete the survey. There is no way of knowing who they are, and I suspect that their contributions will be very important to bring out a perspective that we usually don’t see in the list conversations. Time will tell how successful this will be.
I suppose I should also post the link to the survey here, just in case anyone is reading this and hasn’t received a copy of the invitation. If you use or are otherwise involved with a library/information management free/open source software project, and would like to contribute to research into factors that influence participant satisfaction with the software, you’ll find it at:
http://surveys.sim.vuw.ac.nz/survey.aspx?surveyid=205
The survey will be available until 14 November 2008.
October 17th, 2008
Ranganathan expressed his second law as ‘every person his or her book’. As with the first law, he came up with this law in response to his observation that books were restricted to a small number of privileged people. Interpreting this law in the context of open source software is easy: conditions 4 and 5 of the Open Source Definition say that software must not be restricted from individuals or groups or from specific fields of endeavour. It is tempting to suggest that Ranganathan saw the second law of library science as the most important, since he spent three chapters (of 9 total), comprising 178 pages (roughly 1/3 of the book) to discussing its struggle, global uptake, and implications.
March 23rd, 2007
Today I started reading Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice. On page 3 of the prologue, he talks about the difference between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. Schwartz came up with these phrases based on Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty”, published in 1969.
I immediately wondered how this applies to open source projects, and what I’ve been hearing in the various interviews I’ve been doing over the last few months. I’ve thought for a while that ‘freedom’ is an undervalued concept in the open source movement. It’s unfortunate that many people first think of cost when they hear term ‘free software’, hence the widely used advice to ‘think free kitten, not free beer’
The FSF’s four software freedoms are all ‘freedoms to’, and they definitely represent the developer perspective. Some of the people at the ‘user’ end of the spectrum have focused more on ‘freedoms from’. Three of them are:
- freedom from license fees;
- freedom from compulsory upgrades; and
- freedom from vendor lock-in.
Since I finished the last face-to-face interview transcript yesterday, and am just waiting for two of the email interviews to be completed (I’ll send out follow up messages again tomorrow), I’m finally ready to start analysing the data. I’m looking forward to seeing what additional ‘freedoms from’ and ‘freedoms to’ I find, if any.
I’m still mulling over how Ranganathan’s second law, ‘Every person his or her book’ can be applied in the context of open source software. Watch this space for my conclusion. I also have a movie/DVD catch up post to write. We’ve recently seen Borat, Pride and Prejudice (the 2005 movie), A Prairie Home Companion, and The Corpse Bride. Eclectic is probably the only word to describe the list.
March 1st, 2007
Ranganathan came up with his first law, Books are for use in response to his perception that, at least in the 1930s, many librarians believed that books are primarily for preservation. In discussing the consequences of this first law of library science, he talked about extending library hours, improving library furniture, hiring the right type of library staff, and providing a readers’ advisory service, all of which contribute to increased use of books. We tend to take many of these things for granted now, largely as a result of Ranganathan’s vision. However, he didn’t talk about what ‘using’ books involved, perhaps because he thought it was self-evident: people use books by reading them.
In considering whether the first law of open source software is that Software is for use, the question that comes to me first is “what does ‘use’ mean?”. Most people would probably respond by saying that to be able to use software, the code needs to run without errors, and the prospective user needs to have enough information about its requirements (for example, the operating environment and any dependencies) to be able to get it working. In other words, documentation is needed in order to be able to ‘use’ software. I don’t think this necessarily means that developers need to write complete user documentation, though. Well-commented code, with some brief instructions, might be all that’s needed for a simple program, but as the software increases in complexity (as the number of scripts/components increases, say), there is an increased need for good documentation, if end-users are to be able to use it.
However, unlike books, which have one primary use, source code can be used in other ways. The Free Software Foundation’s four software freedoms identify other types of use, including being able to study the software to learn how it works and being able to improve it.
While it seems clear that developers release code under an open source license so that it can be used in some way, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are thinking of end users with limited technical skills when they do so. They might simply be hoping to encourage other developers to study and then improve the software. This could be one of the reasons for the Jekyll and Hyde personality of open source projects Karen Coombs recently discussed, with some developers releasing their code primarily for other developers, and not for end users.
One other point to mention here is that one route to ‘opening’ up source code seems to come from funders. I’ve never seen anyone else talk about it, but the Mellon Foundation Intellectual Property Policy gives people a strong incentive to release software funded by a Mellon grant as open source. Some of the high-profile library/information management open source projects, such as dSpace and Fedora, have received Mellon Foundation funding. I suspect that IMLS grants carry a similar requirement, since many IMLS-funded projects are also open source.
February 23rd, 2007
Open source, open standards, open access: what’s the difference?
Last week I went to one of Russell Brown’s (the media commentator and journalist, of Hard News | Public Address fame) Karajoz Great Blends. It was held at the Boatshed in Wellington, a great venue on the waterfront.
The first half was a discussion with Matt Heath and Chris Stapp of Back of the Y, featuring clips from their various videos, and a trailer for The Devil Dared Me To, which premieres at SXSW next month. Even though splatter movies don’t usually appeal to me (with the exception of Shaun of the Dead), Matt and Chris were very funny, and I might even go to their movie.
The second half was a panel featuring Chris DiBona, currently employed at Google and a former editor at Slashdot; Rob McKinnon, the developer behind theyworkforyou.co.nz, Alastair Thompson, from Scoop, and David Hume from the e-government unit at the State Services Commission. The discussion covered a range of topics, including the Google Maps API, voting machine software, and One Laptop Per Child (Chris DiBona had one of the prototypes, and they’re very cool).
theyworkforyou is an interesting mashup of information primarily from Parliamentary Services, intended to help voters understand what our elected representatives are up to. But what struck me most was a question that indicated quite a lot of confusion about the difference between open source software, open standards, and open access. The questioner suggested that they were all more or less the same thing, and to me they are very different, but related.
An open standard means that the definition of a data/information structure is available to anyone; the Wikipedia article on open standards says an open standard can be implemented by anyone, and that one of their purposes is to promote interoperability. The article also identifies an ‘open format’ as a format for data that has no royalties or other limitations. Open source software involves providing access to a program’s source code. To me, software involves an exectuable process, and that’s what the code does: expresses an algorithm that can be executed (or studied, changed, or redistributed). Open access is the most straightforward of the three: it just means that anyone can access the data/information/publication, without any barriers (assuming they have access to the necessary hardware and/or software).
So where does the confusion come from? I remember a conversation I had with someone a number of years ago (probably 12, or even 15), in which they argued that software and data were the same thing. I was never convinced. To me data is something that software acts on, and it exists independently of the software. Do people have to write code to understand the difference, or am I being too literal in making such clear distinctions between the three?
February 13th, 2007
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