Musings

Tue - April 18, 2006

LWE Boston, politics, and more

On LWE Boston, ODF, and the politics of choosing what works and is logical.

Posted at 12:37 AM Read More

Wed - March 29, 2006

Article Contest

Posted at 10:47 PM Read More

LinuxWorld Boston...

Posted at 10:31 PM Read More

Mon - March 27, 2006

Post-Dated Musings

I think that much of the point of an open source project should be the creation and distribution of source code from which others can create competitive derivations, with, one might hope, interesting new software, which they can then contribute back to the community, or perhaps more accurately, the commons.

Posted at 05:51 PM Read More

Mon - February 20, 2006

Interview, EFY News Network

The following is an interview conducted via email mid-February by Anannya Nath of the EFY News Network (see www.efytimes.com). I had met with some of the EFY/LFY journalists while in Delhi for the LinuxAsia 2006 conference. The questions Nath asked are in fact quite good.

Posted at 07:06 PM Read More

Wed - February 8, 2006

Sun and OpenOffice.org

An interview published today, 8 February, carries the really unfortunate headline, "Sun urged to give up OpenOffice control". It headlines an interview of me by Tom Sanders and the headline is wrong. I did not argue in the interview that OpenOffice.org wants Sun to give up control of OOo (not that it really has it) nor did I argue that I, personally, wished it. Rather, I argued that a foundation that would hold copyright of the code could make sense, especially if it brought in the contributions of a company like IBM, which has yet to contribute to the community.

Posted at 03:01 PM Read More

Fri - October 28, 2005

OpenDocument and OpenOffice.org: Make It Yours

There are four things that make OpenOffice.org important.

First is that it is Free and Open Source (FOSS). That means that its source—the human-readable code making up the application—is open for inspection, modifcation, distribution.

Third is that OpenOffice.org 2.0 is as capable a suite as any and interoperable with Microsoft Office, WordPerfect, StarSuite (which uses the code), and many others.

Fourth is that OpenOffice.org uses the OASIS standard OpenDocument file format.

We know why the others are important but why is this last so important? The OpenDocument format (ODF for short) is something that is now very appealing to governments and enterprises; it's more appealing even than open source. Why? Because it does not demand any change in production techniques while promising many of the same benefits of FOSS: democracy, civil participation, an open future. It promises these things because it is an open standard.

But what is an open standard? It is a protocol that is agreed upon by the international community and which is open for examination and implementation by any application. To repeat: Any application, free or not, can use the standard. A closed set of protocols (not sure if “standard” really makes sense if it is closed) in contrast is only available for use under license. The Web uses open standards and is globally popular and usable because it uses them, despite the best efforts of some companies. In the case of ODF, the OASIS standardising technical committee for office suites has agreed upon a set of specifications for an XML file format--the standard--and any equipped application can use this standard. OpenOffice.org, KOffice, both uses this standard, with OpenOffice.org being the best supporter of it. In theory, Microsoft Office could also use it, but it would take serious engineering effort for it to do so, on the order of 18 months, and so far there has been no indication that Microsoft is interested in investing this amount of work. In fact, Microsoft has repeatedly indicated it is not interested.

Now as to the point of the standard. Because any application can use the ODF, it is therefore resistant to the effects of time and space. A file saved using ODF today will be legible, in all likelihood, by an application using the standard years, even decades from now, for it does not depend for its existence on the market. In contrast, a proprietary standard depends for its continued existence on the luck of the market. If the company goes out of business or decides to arbitrarily change its standard--and both have happened--then everything created by that application becomes illegible and is lost. And to personalise it: If I created work using such an obsolete application my intellectual property, my property, is now lost. What seemed to be my property is now revealed not to be mine at all. Rather, it turns out I had only been leasing the space on which I wrote my thoughts and when it came time, the owner took it away.

Not so with an open standard. What is mine stays mine, is mine. For now, forever.

You can begin to see how this relates to civil and governmental institutions interested in preserving their intellectual property. Such institutions have a responsibility to posterity (the future) and to present citizens to ensure that the nation's intellectual wealth stays available to the nation's citizens: the people making up that nation now and in the future. Using an open standard like ODF to preserve the wealth is thus a responsible act. Using proprietary formats is irresponsible, at best.

But that's only part of the story. For an open standard does not specify open source. The creators could use whatever application they choose, even costly ones, though again, it would be financially irresponsible of government agencies to waste tax payer money on an application that does precisely what a free one does. It makes for good politics, I think, to say: I will save taxpayers millions by using FOSS applications like OOo and not proprietary ones. And not only will I save money, but I'll be also investing in applications with a future. And not only do these have a future but that future, I would argue, is the people's: For the great thing about FOSS if not open standards, is that FOSS encourages local development and local economies.

The story of OpenOffice.org then, is a compelling one: It not only utilises an open standard that ensures open access for now and forever but it also is built using open source, which promotes local enterprise and local economies while engaging in global development. With OpenOffice.org, the future is yours. With its proprietary alternative, the future is Bill's. Make it yours.

Posted at 09:50 PM Read More

Tue - October 25, 2005

War of the Worlds

Posted at 06:37 PM Read More

Taipei

October this year is brutal: From Slovenia to Stockholm to Amsterdam to Taipei to Osaka to Tokyo to November and I'm in New York. Then a rest, of at least a month, I hope, in wintry Toronto. But why Taipei? Because I was invited to keynote at the inaugural "OSS Global Emerging Technology Executive Summit", being held today, 27 October. How could I resist such an honour? And besides, the conference offers the rare opportunity to meet with government and business groups and talk about open source and OOo. Cost is always an appeal, but not only: governments as well as businesses understand that the real virtue in FOSS and now OpenDocument lies in being able to move way from the MS hegemony and to develop local companies.

The conference has been immensely interesting in no small part because of the people in attendance as well as the professional management of the event. I hadn't known this beforehand, but it appears that the Taiwanese government is indeed strongly backing FOSS, both in use and development. Further I was able to meet with people here and discuss how they can work on OOo, provide support for OOo, and deploy OOo more effectively. As I say to all developers: if you have questions, if you have frustrations, if you need assistance reaching the project leads, contact me now. I work very effectively as an ombudsman and one of the purposes of my travels is to reach out to developer communities and bring them into the project's mainstream, if they are not there already.

Unfortunately, I have to leave Taipei this afternoon. But I am confident that I shall be returning.

Posted at 06:18 PM Read More

Thu - October 20, 2005

Why OpenOffice.org 2.0 is important

Why is OpenOffice.org 2.0 important? and why is this post not marketing? The two questions get the same answer.

But first, in case you want OOo but the mirrors are busy, use the P2P system: http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/download.html.

Now to the question at hand: Why is 2.0 important? The most obvious answer would place the application in some Manichean frame, a good vs. evil, light against dark, and that would be silly, if not entirely wrong. Yes, the technology is better and is open, yes, the file format lends itself to democratic discourse and is open, yes, the process is efficient and is open and yes, I think these are good things and that their opposite--closed, proprietary, secretive--generally less good. But I'm not a religious opponent of proprietary software or production, nor blind to the serious problems of cooperative collaboration. OOo, as I've argued in Brazil, Russia, India and elsewhere for the last year, suffers from opacity in key decision making, for instance, and so do many other FOSS projects.

But I think the main reason OpenOffice.org 2.0 is important is because it gives many, many users the possibility of meaningful difference. They can see that open source works. They can see that it produces commodities that they like. They can perhaps begin to see even *how* it works, and that it depends on an active community of users as well as producers, and that the two often blur.

Posted at 09:57 AM Read More

Sun - October 16, 2005

Amsterdam

Amsterdam for EuroOSCON and for the meetings possible only at important conferences like this. Flying into Amsterdam from Toronto via Chicago (don't ask) just three days after Stockholm doesn't so much roll me with jetlag as with airplane disorientation. I don't suffer from jetlag, which is just as well. My trick: don't sleep.

EuroOSCON has not begun yet but it should be interesting, if only because of its relevance. For the last several years (like, five), I have noted that open source takes place elsewhere than the U.S.; that it is a arrogant conceit to presume that the momentum and importance, production and distribution, and general acceptance of open source is located in the U.S. In fact, it probably has not been for some time, especially if one includes distribution logic. In Europe, governments have been endorsing FOSS for at least the last couple of years. In the US, it is only no that Massachusetts has taken the plunge. Here, in Europe, it is a serious economic strategy, or so it would seem. Or perhaps it's still located in government offices? Thus, we see the French administration using OOo; Munich (slowly) migrating to Linux; Mannheim, too.

But where are the businesses, the enterprises? Where are SAP, Phillips, Bull, Nokia, Ericsson, and so on? Yes, some, like Nokia, have some FOSS endeavours. But they seem small and wan in comparison to, say, Sun's. And DRKW, of course, has OpenAdaptor. But that's again relatively small fry. What's missing is a large effort by any of those enterprises. Perhaps we'll see something at EuroOSCON or at some subsequent meeting. But I think that the situation in Europe for now precludes major efforts, though that could change, given the right circumstances. Perhaps we'll see some such changes in this EuroOSCON.

Regardless of the particular reasons--and I think a careful examination is needed--what the lack suggests is that in approaching regions one must deploy a set of arguments, with one taking precedence over the other according to the exigencies of the situation.

* Efficiency of production: For large projects, at least, FOSS is more efficient; or to refine the argument even more, horizonless collaboration. It's more efficient in that software does not hinge upon the constraints of any one company's resources nor on the limitations of any one person's imagination or specs. (It's for this latter reason that Linus Torvalds has recently railed against specifications in FOSS production.) However, FOSS production is actually not the same across the board, in every country. In the US and Europe, it may depend, for instance, more on horizontal structures; in India, I've noticed, it depends more on hierarchical structures: A professor, or other lead determines the work to be done by a cadre. The *licence* in each case is the same, but the *structure* of work differs, as does thus the community produced. Any argument then that pretends to be successful needs to take into consideration therefore the local circumstances. Selling FOSS as a libertarian medicine that will cure diseased hierarchies of production won't work everywhere. Politics is always local, even though its effects are always global.

* Corollary but not necessarily following from the first, cost is reduced for producers and consumers. In production, the cost is reduced by the interleaving assistance of other developers. Overall expenditure goes up, to be sure but only becauuse more people are participating in creating the commons.

* Distribution in FOSS is superior but not necessarily a given: Many entities, especially the larger and more institutionalised ones, will resist accepting FOSS just because it seemingly forces the user to deviate from accepted models of consumption. That is, one often just downloads it for free; or can, even if one pays. But that said, many, many people are more than happy to act as nodes in the rhizome and help distribute FOSS if only because they support the idea and take pleasure, more and civic, in participating in this example of civic behaviour.

* Which brings us to: Moral responsibility. Responsibility to whom? In the case of libertarian models of open source, this is pretty much a non-issue. But these theories take on the perspective of the developer, who evidently has *no* moral ideas at all (except that he loves himself) and don't really touch on the groundwork for FOISS.

But, in fact, nearly all of key FOSS technology has been born and incubated by government money. More recently, now that the basic economy of the government funded Internet is enabled, secondary economies have grown into being. it is the responsibility, I'd argue, of companies to be good citizens and contribute to the common good; not repay a debt but to ensure rather that the commons is replenished, enriched. After all, the nature of the social bond is that the contributions you make, that I make, benefit us all, not more one person over another.

I am sorry I'll be having to leave Amsterdam and EuroOSCON tomorrow; Amsterdam is a wonderful city. But I'm sure I'll be back.

Posted at 06:11 AM Read More

Mon - October 10, 2005

Sweden

I'm here in beautiful Stockholm for the Linux/Open Source Forum 2005 , where I'm keynoting, representing OpenOffice.org and CollabNet. The interesting thing about FOSS in Sweden is that some of the usual arguments that work so well in poorer countries fall flat here. Like cost. Like anti-colonialism. Rather, what I think will work better is the argument of better software for more people and responsibility: to one's customers, to citizens, to the future.

That last part is fairly important. Yes, FOSS makes for better software, as it is predicated on a meritocracy, not a spec sheet, so that whatever counts as meritorious work gets noted, not just work that satisfies abstract specs. Of course, things are always more complex than that, and it's a poor company that really follows its own specs so closely. But the general thrust is nevertheless true: that open source and equivalent collaborative techniques make for better works, if only because one is working with a larger crowd, just as in academia. And just as in academia, one can also ignore that crowd.

But it's the future that counts. And here FOSS working with open standards makes a real difference. With proprietary software involved in the production of intellectual property using proprietary formats, not open, the longevity of the work depends on the fragile persistence of the company. Think that's enough? It's like printing scrip that reads, "Pay to the order of..., Guaranteed by Plastico Compnay," and then what happens when the Plastico melts? The scrip is good for burning and little else. Maybe it will regain shadow value as a collectible, but that's it.

Already, documents, files, created decades ago on software no longer supported is unreadable. I recently went through files from my first year as a grad student; they were written in WP 4.2, on an old, old machine. if I had not had OOo.... Well, imagine that we advance ten, twenty, thirty years into the future. What about all those files? What can read them? Work with them? It won't just be an individual's problem, but a governmental problem; a social problem.

Enter open standards and open source. Open standards work by engaging the international community to agree on a standard that will last unto perpetuity; they are also necessarily open for inspection and implementation (see Perens' description ). Because the effort is international and designed to last, it future proofs files or intellectual property. And how does open source feature in this? Open source, for instance, makes no guarantee on the longevity of any product's identity. But it does do something more interesting: it puts a hold on decisions made for purely market reasons and provides a better mechanism for incorporating minority views. Furthermore, the logic of open source enjoins a kind of developmental momentum that transcends any particular project manager, vice president or spec writer.

It is thus, I want to argue tomorrow, the responsibility of governments to use FOSS and open standards.

Posted at 04:36 PM Read More

Thu - October 6, 2005

After OOoCon

OOoCon, everyone agreed was a success. A fabulous success. It built community and also gave everyone the space to publicly discuss how they thought things could be better. I think that most of the complaints could be aggregated under issues relating to process--how things are done--and structure--how they can be done. Both, substantially revolve around Sun's longtime involvement and effective control of OpenOffice.org. I'm not saying Sun's involvement is bad--far from it!--I think rather that the project has reached a level of maturity where it is important to consider how to improve matters so that more developers and other would-be contributors can participate within the meritocracy.

How can we solve these problems? Well, OOo has the Community Council and Engineering Steering Committee. The former is charged with addressing general community problems, as well as doing some strategy, the latter with developer concerns. I'd suggest that a special meeting, perhaps held via IRC, be held in the ESC to directly address the lack of trust, the false conceptions, and so on. The CC can also engage in a related meeting, and make an effort to promote *what* OOo is, *how* to contribute, and how to resolve problems in communication and representation.

But these points are all well and good but they run up against the fact of the limits of the CC and ESC's power to effect change among those actually making the code that OOo uses. In short, given that Sun is the primary sponsor and creator of code for OpenOffice.org, it is substantially up to them to resolve some of the problems sketched above and relating to how submissions of code are handled.

Would a Foundation, by which I mean the creation of a non-profit independent organisation holding OpenOffice.org's intellectual property, change things? or, rather, How would it change things? What opportunities would it provide us?

It would be foolish to imagine that a Foundation would be a panacea and magically improve processes in handing code submissions and community integration. We need before we get to that step to fix things where we can. We've already started. I have not posted the minutes to the latest Council meeting, but it was agreed there that the release cycle would be shortened and accelerated, meaning that the features and code that community members contribute would be presented that much faster. But that's just one part. We need also to be more attentive to the mentoring needs of new contributors, and to generally make it easier for contributors to engage with established members, as well as to learn the process, project, code. Better developer documentation has been cited as a desiderata, and I think it is something we should encourage the development of.

All this, our growing pains, can and should be addressed as soon as possible; they already are, but we need to be insistent in improving things. We need to include the community, or communities, in the process of making the product from the ground up; OpenOffice.org is the community's but only insofar as they make it theirs.

Posted at 05:35 PM Read More

Sat - October 1, 2005

From OSS to ODF

Posted at 07:02 PM Read More

About me

In brief, an introduction to me and my history. But of course, they can't be separated, each one accuses the other. i grew up in Mexico, where I was born, Spain, Australia, and the US; by the time I was 18 I had gone to 21 schools and lived in an equal number of cities and towns. I studied literature at Berkeley after trying a dozen majors, and I still wish I'd majored in them all: learning new things is one of my greatest pleasures. That's why I ended up doing a PhD in English: At Berkeley, in the 90s, to get a PhD in English, or more expansively, cultural studies, you had to know an awful lot, and the usual joke is that literature was the last thing to know. When I first met my future wife, Tina, I think I was most impressed not just by her intelligence and general wonderfulness but by the fact that she had been getting her PhD in molecular biology before she switched to English.

Now, I am the community manager for OpenOffice.org , the open source project sponsored by Sun. CollabNet employs me. As community manager, I chiefly represent the project and coordinate community work. I now travel a lot, and all of it is unfunded by the project. OpenOffice.org does not pay my travel; rather, I am invited by conference organisers to present on OOo and open source. They see the value in getting the spokesperson for OOo to come to their conference and present on OOo and why it is important, and that is what i do. I probably travel too much, now. As I write this, I am sitting in the airport of Trieste waiting for a 06:50 flight to Munich and thence to Toronto. I then leave 11 or so of October for Stockholm, where I present at a business conference, then go on to EuroOSCON in Amsterdam, then Taipei, then Osaka, then its 2 November and I'm home. A pause of nearly two months then Washington DC for the MLA convention, where I am presenting two papers, one on Mark Twain, the other on open source and governments, and boy have I got a story to tell on the latter. But that is meat for another blog.

What is the relation, though, between what I do and what I did? In a way, sciencephilia can be said to thread the two. I still love literary discourse and analysis: things are beautiful when seen by the clear light of philosophy. But there is also the real fact of political relevance. When we first started graduate school, shortly after Michel Foucault had died of AIDS, there was still the incredibly exciting possibility that being philosophical, engagé, and sufficiently analytical was in itself a politically just act. We believed that by being critics we were being revolutionaries, not Ivory Tower dwellers. Pierre Bourdieu, marching with the workers, and the complement, in a way, to Foucault, was a living model.

But then as the 90s progressed that spirit seemed to die. Oh, to be sure, people like Berubé maintain it still, but I suppose the details of the situation came to play, as did, more importantly, the unremitting attacks by the Right on "political correctness" (aka ethical behaviour) and the terrible, terrible job market, which required, requires, will require absurd levels of "professionalisation" and professional caution.

Open source on the other hand captures much of the spirit of Foucault and Bourdieu and other engagé theorists: it strongly posits that there is a connection between the sort of intellectual flow characteristic of academic exchange and the economy of work. In fact, it insists upon that relation and claims that the way we work will change, must change, if we are to work at all with any degree of freedom and not purely as disciplined subjects in the infinite panopticon of patents and history and property.

Posted at 05:57 PM Read More

The social contract

Forgetting history

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