Recently in Society Category

The FSF wants you to avoid the iPhone 3G in favour of OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner.

Some of the FSF's points have merit, but some are outright deceptive - for example that the iPhone exposes your whereabouts without your knowledge. It doesn't; in fact it always pops up with a confirmation before accessing the "location services", whether GPS or cell-tower triangulation. And you can turn it off through a global setting.

The biggest joke is the alternative. Freedom to modify and tinker and extend means little when the basis is barely useable. People will often tradeoff one freedom for another freedom. A more usable device arguably is just another form of freedom -- from hassle, annoyance, and wasted time.

Open source makes economic sense in many contexts, but I think they're at least 10 years away from even denting the mainstream in this market. Which is why, BTW, I think the FSF is targeting the iPhone. The iPhone represents a refutation to the idea that open, free, collaboration will necessarily lead to better products, and that proprietary software makers cannot compete.

The OpenMoko counter-argument is "give it time, in the long run, it will win". And look, in a way, I hope so. Using the iPhone is a great case of following Keynes' adage, in the long run, we are all dead., where we optimize for short term gratification at the expense of our future. By using the iPhone, we're supporting and contributing something that doesn't build something open for our collective future, but instead leases our future over to Apple. On the other hand, the iPhone does represent something that is important to our future -- the triumph of entrepreneurship over bureaucrats and technocrats. More on that in a moment.

I'll note that the economic angle isn't usually the FSF's preferred line of argument. It's more the OSI's tactic, though the FSF has certainly referenced it. On the other hand, the FSF argues for free software from an ethical stance. Without getting into the muck, my opinion basically is that the sort of freedom the FSF advocates is not, IMO, political freedom, and thus I don't consider it sacred. Whether one chooses to be imprisoned by license is an economic tradeoff, not capitulation to evil. I believe the author should have the option to retain certain limited rights, for a limited time, over its users. I believe in entrepreneurship and the Schumpeterian model of the economy. Profits should go to the innovators for a limited time, as profit is the source of tomorrow's jobs and developments.

The iPhone represents a triumph of entrepreneurship -- the Cathedral over the Bazaar. The user experience loosens the telecom bureaucrat's insistence on device control, or the technocrat's desire for infinite options. The rules of bazaar development are flipped: Scratch the user's itch, not the developer's. Release "when it's ready", not early. Users are not co-developers, and developers aren't even co-developers, they're cordoned off into their controlled area for the sake of the user experience.

But wait, several complications to this picture:

- Open source is not incompatible with entrepreneurship. The Mozilla Foundation demonstrates this regularly with Firefox. OTOH, the market dynamics of browsers imply that there's not a lot of money to be made through direct distribution. Moz is funded largely by complementary product placement: redirecting searches to Google.

- The iPhone OS X already uses plenty of open source: its web browser is open source, as is much of its operating system layer (including both BSD and GPLv2 code). They're both complex, mature areas of computing, where it's (again) hard to declare some kind of "secret sauce" that needs protection. So it is a great place for open source collaboration.

- Apple is exceptional in its ability to successfully deliver great software and build a thriving community with a cathedral model. Most aren't. Though, looking through Freshmeat, I'm not sure the ability to build solid software with a thriving community is intrinsic to either model. It's just hard to do.

One perspective is that the architecture of a project likely has more to do with its success, quoting Roy Fielding:

In spite of the hype and hysteria surrounding open source software development, there is very little that can be said of open source in general. Open source projects range in scope from the miniscule, such as the thousands of non-maintained code dumps left behind at the end of class projects, dissertations, and failed commercial ventures, to the truly international, with thousands of developers collaborating, directly or indirectly, on a common platform. One characteristic that is shared by the largest and most successful open source projects, however, is a software architecture designed to promote anarchic collaboration through extensions while at the same time preserving centralized control over the interfaces.

Which may bode well for Apple's approach to applications.

- Apple also has found a "secret sauce" that free software rarely measures up to: usability and aesthetics. "Taste" is a hard thing to replicate, especially when it's delivered as a tight coupling between software and hardware.

Read the comic book; write to your MP.

CMCC says... "As we feared, this bill represents an American-style approach to copyright. It's all locks and lawsuits," said Safwan Javed, the drummer for the band Wide Mouth Mason and a member of the CMCC. "Rather than building a made-in-Canada proposal to help musicians get paid, the government has chosen to import American-style legislation that says the solution to the music industry's problems is suing our fans. Suing fans won't make it 1992 again. It's a new world for the music business and this is an old approach."

"Who gains from this bill?" asked CMCC member Brendan Canning, co-founder of Broken Social Scene. "It's not musicians. Musicians don't need lawsuits, we don't need DRM protection. These aren't the things that help us or our careers. What we do need is a government that is willing to sit down with all the stakeholders and craft a balanced copyright policy for Canada that will not repeat the mistakes made in the United States."

... is smouldering.

I live 4 blocks away from the area... waking to lots of smoke this morning. My girlfriend's bike shop, open since 1914, is gone. I eat almost weekly at Shanghai Cowgirl directly across the street, and two of my favorite alternative clubs (BSC and Savage Garden) are across the street too -- all of those seem to be OK thankfully but closed for now.

In reading Gary Taubes' new book Good Calories, Bad Calories, along with his recent UC Berkeley webcast, he drew my attention to the great and quotable Claude Bernard, who was the father of the science of medicine, and the man who discovered homeostasis.

Some quotes I think are quite worthy of reflection:

"Particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science."

"A great discovery is a fact whose appearance in science gives rise to shining ideas, whose light dispels many obscurities and shows us new paths."

"In experimentation, it is always necessary to start from a particular fact and proceed to the generalization....but above all, one must observe."

Some ways to look at this:
- If you observe something that contradicts your prevailing theory, perhaps that theory is wrong.

- If you observe something that no mainstream theory explains, perhaps an alternative hypothesis is worthy of further study.

- One does not improve knowledge in a scientific manner by just building, specifying, or explaining new things. One improves knowledge by observing effects, and working back and fitting a consistent hypothesis.

I find in our profession, we most often fall back on arguments from authority over arguments from empirical evidence. This takes several forms: "If a particular vendor/community/person builds it, it MUST be good.", "if the experts agree, it they MUST be right", "if the analysis say it will be so, we MUST invest in it", etc.

Perhaps all of this is because it's so hard to create a controlled experiment when dealing with systems science (except perhaps as simulation). Or because most empirical observations in our field are anecdotal, because we don't have an open environment sharing results due to competition. I also think it may have to do with business managers' need to make technical policy decisions where a YES/NO is required, and tend to be taught that deferrment is bad.

Taubes' book, by the way, is a very deep technical read on the science of obesity, heart disease, fat accumulation and a political history of how policy makers mixed with inconclusive science may lead to a generation or more of disastrous consequences.

I take heart that technologists aren't the only ones known for their great blunders, but I pity the victims. The world needs paradigmatic subversives.

I fear for our country's future. If our economy is increasingly based on trade of intellectual works, draconian IP laws are not the way to make this economy flourish.

Canada's current copyright legislation is antiquated and in need of update. It does not have the assumed definitions & scope of "fair use" that currently is under fire within the U.S., whereas we have fair dealing. There are threats that what little fair dealing we have will be taken away if the copyright lobby gets its way with current legislators. The CRIA, Canadian Recording Industry Association, supports Canadian artists less and seems to be more of a shill for US copyright interests. A signficant number of major Canadian artists, including Avril Lavinge, Barenaked Ladies, Feist, Sam Roberts, Sloan, Brocken Social Scene, Billy Talent, Sarah McLachlan, etc., have split from the CRIA and started their own (Barenaked-founded) association, the CCRC, which advocates an end to P2P lawsuits, elimination of DRM, and liberalization of copyright law.

Meanwhile, Canadian CD sales are tumbling, 35% in Q1 of 2007, and 50% annually overall since 1999, while digital distribution is surging. Canadian blank CD-R sales have a copying levy that effectively makes music P2P distribution legal, which amusingly is based on the short-sightedness and slow reaction time of the recording industry lobbyists and legislators, who somehow thought that the CD would be the primary vehicle of copying for 15+ years. Now the CRIA is fighting the very beast they helped create.

So, with this backdrop, it drives me absolutely nuts to read that the RCMP has completely fabricated levels of counterfeiting at $10-30 billion annually, a number that has no basis in fact, but has been trumpeted around by lobby groups and vested interest.

In the words of Stephen Colbert... "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty."

For all the wonders of the 'net, the cruelty, bile, and childish selfishness in forums sometimes boggles the mind.

From Tseric, a World of Warcraft CM, comes this thread.... The following was particularly apt:

Can't help it.

Posting impassionately, they say you don't care.

Posting nothing, they say you ignore.

Posting with passion, you incite trolls.

Posting fluff, you say nonsense.

Post with what facts you have, they whittle down with rationale.

There is no win.

There is only slow degredation.

And

When you can understand how a group of beligerent and angry posters can drive away people from this game with an uncrafted and improvisational campaign of misery and spin-doctoring, then perhaps, you can understand the decisions I make. Until you face mobs of psychology, you will not see my side.

Until you see some bright-eyed player coming onto the forums wanting to know what they should spec as this class, and see them shat on and driven away by petty and selfish people who are simply leveraging for game buffs, you will not understand.

You will not understand until you have to see it daily, for years...

Until you understand that many people will trod over you to get where they're going, or to get what they want.

Until you understand that so many people will agree, completely, 100% with a loud, vulgar and assertive individual, not because he is right, but because he is making a stand against "the Man"; to take no critical thought in what they say, but simply to hop on board.

Until you actually try to acknowledge those who do not speak on the forums, for whatever reason they have, you will not understand.

If you think an archaic business formula like "the customer is always right" works, you fail to understand customers, not a customer. It is a collective. No one person, even myself, is truly above the whole.

On the bright side, my guild has a bunch of very respectful & mature people, some families even, and forums are well behaved there.

Michael Geist seems to be one of the few public personas fighting the good fight against the copyright fascists south of the border, and within our own borders. There's also the Canadian Music Creators Coalition, which contains most major Canadian bands that have split from the CRIA, to the point that the CRIA now basically looks like a U.S.-artist Lobby Group within Canadian borders.

I really hope this becomes an election issue. Copyright is not ACCESSright, but that's exactly what large monied interests are turning it into: making it a criminal offense to access any form of content in a way they don't approve of -- perpetually until the end of time. No public domain. No free exchange of ideas. Every original expression with a price tag.

I believe the free market can certainly encourage art, ideas, music, and new expression, and that such things should be protected. But the point is to incent the creation of *new*, *innovative* ideas, not to create perpetual annuities for the distributors of such services.

From Jack Yoest....

"How does Peter Drucker write so much and write so clearly?"

All writers have that moment of looking at a blank page before words form. But Drucker wrote some 30 books.

Mr. Russell shook his head in disbelief. "Peter would start with a large yellow legal pad and write out page after page after page. His first draft."

"Lots of writers do that," I said. "But maybe on a computer."

"Sure," says Russell leaning forward. "But Drucker then rips it up. Throws it out. He never keeps any first draft."

He went on to explain that Drucker knew his subject with such depth and richness that he would use the draft merely as a warm-up exercise before doing the 'real writing.'

On capitalism....

"I am for the free market. Even though it doesn't work too well, nothing else works at all. But I have serious reservations about capitalism as a system because it idolises economics as the be-all and end-all of life."

And an insightful 1 hour podcast from several months ago.

Drucker, management guru, social ecologist, and probably the most influential author in my life, passed away, fittingly on Rememberance Day, November 11, 2005. He was the king of communicating complex issues. In my opinion, his first 4 books (The End of Economic Man, The Future of Industrial Man, The Concept of the Corporation, and The New Society) remain some of the most insightful political and social commentary since Marx.

Obitutaries from the NY Times, Financial Times, BusinessWeek, and Bloomberg.

Just finished watching the 1st season finale (got a copy of the BBC airinig). Fantastic. The BBC's website has a great banner for the ep right now; chilling. Doctor Who is the best TV I've seen since Joss Whedon's shows (Buffy, Angel, Firefly) ended. I can't wait for next season.

"Now where was I... Barcelona!"