Digifesto

December 5, 2008

Self referential metablogging about a horse

I recently had an IRC chat with friend and colleague David Winslow. It is of zero consequence, but provides a convenient way of breaking my own ice.

[15:25] <sbenthall> you made a post in november which egregiously demonstrates [your] bash fu.
[15:25] <sbenthall> I should totally grab stuff from the #opengeo channel and use it for material
[15:26] <dwins> i like posting snippets from irc conversations
[15:26] <dwins> they don’t lose much in the translation if you choose carefully
[15:26] <sbenthall> yeah.
[15:26] <sbenthall> i keep thinking I should start blogging again
[15:27] <sbenthall> but for some reason fell off that horse
[15:27] <sbenthall> the blogging horse

Perhaps I can remount this thing.

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October 19, 2008

MIT CourseWareThatIsMerelyAjar

Yesterday I started looking into MIT OpenCourseWare and got very excited.  The range of courses for which there is open material available is enormous.  With these curricula at my fingertips, the way was open for me to educate myself, on my own time, without significant expense.

Then I dug a little deeper, into the available content for their introductory course on Nonlinear Dynamics I: Chaos.  To my dismay, I learned that their assignments involved code snippets written for MATLAB, proprietary mathematics software for which you need to purchase a license.

MATLAB is an excellent product and a standard software package used in universities, so it makes sense that courses transitioning to openness would initially depend on it.  However, it presents a serious obstacle to the open distribution and use of the course content.

Fortunately, Ryan Morlock has listed several open source alternatives to MATLAB, and some use languages that are “mostly” compatible with it.  It looks like the most of the assignments wouldn’t be difficult to port over to something like Octave.  It’s just a little shocking that nobody has done it yet.

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October 12, 2008

FOSS4G Erratum

Thanks to Jody Garnett and Archeogeek for their correcting my misrepresentation of OSGeo in my first post from FOSS4G.  As they point out, OSGeo does not, as an organization, have it in for ESRI.  Rather, their mission is a purely positive one: “support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data.”  Indeed, I had no right to speak for the organization at all, having been exposed to it directly really only for a few days at that point.

Apologies for being caught up in the irrational exuberance of the moment, projecting my own opinions on the rest of the community, and generally overstepping.

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October 3, 2008

Free software and capitalism

As the global capitalist economy tanks, and as I attend a free software conference, my mind alights on the subject of the role of free software in global capitalism.

My verdict: it is a radical departure.

Capitalism is an economic system whose foundation is the private ownership of the means of production.  Software is, among other things, a means of production.  Free software is not privately owned.*  So each successful free software project shifts the foundation of the economy towards…something else.

But what?

As Arnulf Christl has exhorted throughout the conference, the opposite of free software is proprietary software, not commercial software.  The proliferation of open source software has brought with it an open source industry that operates in the market just like other industries.

I’m certainly not the first to say this, but it seems high time for an economic theory that takes intellectual goods, and their tendency towards freedom, as fundamental instead of grafting them onto theories about trade in “normal,” material commodities.

* pace, licensing quibblers.

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October 2, 2008

Computers are for computing

One of my favorite talks from FOSS4G this year was Josh Livni‘s talk on Walk Score, a web service that calculates the “walkability” of an area based on publicly available data.  Walkability is calculated efficiently right against the database according to an algorithm that takes into account how easy it is to get around–and get to points of interest–by walking.  Then it displays the results using Google Maps.

It took me a while to realize what I liked about Walk Score so much.  It isn’t a fully open source stack, and though “walkability” is important to me, I don’t really have a use for this service beyond checking out the walk score of my home town.  And yet it appeals to me and has been a generally popular site.

Then I realized: this project appeals to me because it computes something interesting.

A frustrating aspect of the world of open source web GIS is that most projects appear to be hung up on the problems of making data available over the internet–in various formats, in certain combinations, with certain metadata, but otherwise essentially untouched.  Where modifying data is supported (say through WFS-T), it has to be done painstakingly by hand.

I don’t want to minimize the challenges of building the foundations that have taken so much effort so far.  But I think that what gets missed in the process is the fact that the most compelling applications compute something useful.  What people really want and need is software that thinks for them.  Or, maybe, discovers something for them.

What Walk Score does, which few applications I’ve seen this week do, is calculate something interesting for people.  Livni had the creativity to turn a human interest into a quantitative, algorithmically calculable metric, and found a way to report that metric back to people in a way they could understand.  It provides people with something two steps ahead of them, just beyond the horizon of what they can imagine.  That’s true progress.  I hope to see more of it in FOSS/Web/GIS applications in the coming year.

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October 1, 2008

Get Real

Internet is expensive in South Africa, since all uploaded data has to travel via satellite.  So I will try to keep myself terse.

On the first day of FOSS4G2008, Sindile Bidha delivered a “lighting talk” on “GIS in schools programme and Quantum GIS.”  Quantum GIS, or QGIS, is open source desktop GIS software. Bindha spoke about how in Eastern Cape, one of the poorest provinces of South Africa, they were trying to introduce QGIS into the high school curriculum.  The challenges?  Among others: no trained teachers, no documentation, and no computers.

The next lightning talk was delivered by Arnulf Christl, president of OSGeo.  He rexcitedly read passages from the book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and interspersed his own commentary:

This is a revolution.  No, it’s an evolution.  The whole world can connect instantly, everywhere!

There was a talk given today on the subject of “Mapping the Sanitary Sewers of a South African City – First Experiences with FOSS GIS.”  Somebody is apparently making tentative steps to use open source geospatial software to make sure shit is disposed of properly.  First steps.

I didn’t go to that talk.

Instead, I went to a talk entitled “Participatory Free and Open Source GIS in the Web 2.0.”  A Brazilian masters student studying in Osaka told us that  the Web 2.0 was exciting because…well, I forget the specifics, but the reasons were displayed on a slide in the form of a tag cloud.  She told us that her thesis was on the future of the web and GIS.

“Studying the future is very popular in Japan; when I went there for the first time, I thought it looked like the future!”

Because crowds are wiser than individuals, she needed to talk to several people–maybe 30 total–about their predictions of the future, for her thesis.  She breathily asked the audience of nerds “who are so passionate about their work”–on the word passionate she turned to a slide displaying a red heart on a white background that was reminiscent of the Japanese flag–if they would agree to be interviewed by her.  To tell her what they thought.  About the future.

Q&A begins.  The first question from the audience, loud and clear: “How do I sign up for an interview?”

Another talk I missed today was about the “Development of a Malaria Decision Support System based on Open Source Technologies.”  Each talk–about malaria, about sewers, about the Web 2.0–was twenty minutes long.  About every three seconds, a child dies of malaria.

One issue that has come up frequently at FOSS4G is the importance of having free (as in “freedom”) data to be used with all the FOSS geospatial software that the conference is about.  The software is useless without data.  We are reminded of this most stridently by the OpenStreetMap community, which holds “parties” where they collect data by walking through streets with GPS in their hands.  They held one of these parties to map Hout Bay, a suburb outside of Cape Town, last Sunday just before the conference.  They put their data on the web under a CC-by-sa license (though, admittedly and regretably, the license cannot legally apply to the data because data does not fall under copyright law).

Late in the afternoon, I attended a workshop about GIS education.  It was attended primarily by people from South Africa’s GIS community; they were trying to figure out how the hell they could teach people how do work with GIS software.  At some point, somebody asks about how schools can get data for GIS students to work with in the classroom.  Ideally, it’s data that is local and relevant to the students’ lives.  Some guy from the South African government piped up:

“Oh, we have lots of data–on roads, lakes, vegetation, everything–and we want to make it free.  We just don’t have the bandwidth to host it!”

The government doesn’t have the fucking bandwidth.

Internet is expensive in South Africa.

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September 30, 2008

Governments in open source

As I write this I am sitting in on the “FOSS GIS in Government” working session at being put on by SITA (State Information Technology Agency, the South African government created IT strategy company).  The working session is attended mostly by members of South Africa’s government, who are coming with questions and skepticism about using free software.

A lot of what I’m seeing here is unsurprising.  Arno Webb, the representative of SITA, delivered a presentation that was full of slides showing hierarchies and taxonomies of institutions and initiatives that SITA believes are necessary for the use of free software in government.  The acronym, FOSS, is a convenient encapsulation for them–it is peppered throughout the presentation and then paired with government-ese.  You would not be able to tell what the presentation was about if you didn’t know what that acronym meant.

As it should be.  There is a palpable difference between the culture and expectations of the government community and the open source development communities here.  Nevertheless, the alliance is a perfect one.  So it wonderful to see people working from both sides to bridge the gap.

One initiative Arno and other speakers from the government sector have describe has especially convinced me that these people get it.  When discussing the transition to open source, these government representatives often talk about how they will be producing training materials for the software they depend on.  And if anybody asks whether these materials will be made publicly available, the answer is, “Absolutely.  Yes.  We are adopting the same principles of openness as the software.”  Arno Webb describes a “Trilogy of Openness”– open software, open standards, and open content. The latter refers to the content that the government created training materials.

What this means is that governments will not only be users of open source software; they will also be contributing back to FOSS communities.  That’s awesome!  Free software developers are notoriously bad at providing documentation for their work, but everyone acknowledges that documentation is an important part of the software project and crucial to the software’s adoption.  And governments, who are real users with real needs, are highly qualified to contribute that documentation.  Those contributions are the perfect way for people in government to become part of open source communities.

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September 29, 2008

Culture shock

I have the privilege of attending FOSS4G 2008 (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) in Cape Town this year as an engineer for OpenGeo.  This is my first time attending a technology conference, and so came with few expectations.  But what I had gathered from colleagues who have attended in the past was this conference is primarily for hackers and open source entrepreneurs who are committed to the free software paradigm and bringing it to the GIS world.  The event is put on by OSGeo, which is unguarded about its goal to piss off ESRI, the monopolistic proprietary GIS giant who we believe misserves their costumers and, indirectly, the general public. (Author’s note: Please see comments below and retraction, here.)

So far, most of the people I have met are coming to the conference from this angle, and it creates an exciting atmosphere.  What I didn’t understand until today was that there are other major groups attending FOSS4G this year.

The reason why FOSS4G is being held in South Africa this year is because FOSS4G is being co-sponsored this year by GISSA, the Geo- Information Society of South Africa.  They have contributed to an otherwise technical conference a humanitarian focus.  The first few talks given today were sober ones about the crises of developing nations, beginning with the health and crime problems in Cape Town itself.  The theme of the conference is oddly cautious: “Open Source Geospatial: An Option for Deveoping Nations.”  GIS professionals from government and NGO’s have been invited from developing countries around the world, with a couple hundred from South Africa itself.

The result is a strange cultural mix.  The FOSS crowd is lively, reliably laughing and applauding when a speaker makes a dig at proprietary software (PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Apple).  Their speeches are deliberately humorous and irreverent.  After Ed Parsons gave a rather cluelessly untargeted talk about how Google’s (proprietary) products are awesome and how easy it is for people ot use them to make (proprietary) data, the crowd dragged him over the coals during the Q&A.

The government and GIS groups must find this strange.  Their tone was consistently more serious, more cautious, and less confrontational.  The pace of their presentations was slower.  They presented their tragic facts and their strategies to overcome them without the exuberance and confidence that this was their time to rally.

The point of bringing these two groups together is so that groups like GISSA can evaluate the appropriateness of geospatial FOSS for their very serious needs.  In many ways it’s great that they can see the FOSS developers in their element, since the transparency of the open source process and the enthusiasm of its participants is one of the software’s selling points.  But on the other hand, I worry that the two groups are speaking different languages.  I’ll be interested to see whether there’s any convergence by the end of the week.

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September 29, 2008

OneWebDay

A week ago I attended the OneWebDay event held in Washington Square Park.  OneWebDay is “Earth Day for the Internet”–a day for global awareness and celebration of the internet, and a not-so-subtle PR event for the cause of net neutrality.  There was an impressive line-up of speakers: Lawrence Lessig, John Perry Barlow, and Jonathan Zittrain were the most prominent, but there were others who were accomplished as entrepreneurs (The Craig of Craigslist, the Guy Who Started Pandora) or who could be classed as web advocates or activists in some sense or another.  A video of the event can be found here.

These were my reactions, in no particular order:

  • Nick Grossman pointed out to that “OneWebDay” is an overly cumbersome name that will probably cripple the adoption of the day on the calender.  Also, camel casing–really?  “Web Day” would be much catchier.  I fear the former name has stuck already, but somebody really ought to try to get the alternative out there.
  • It is absolutely fantastic that the Web Movement, or whatever you want to call it, has a poet among its founding members.  John Perry Barlowt–summary–is s striking figure against a backdrop of nerds, and will give this historical moment a memorably Romantic aspect.
  • One of the most contentful speeches, in my opinion, was Gale Brewer‘s.  She directly addressed the problem of the digital divide, and explained how it was a problem even within the borders of New York City and how connectivity is being fought for as a local political issue.  Since the theme of the event was “Participatory Democracy on the Internet” (double check), I think it was especially important that the day’s speakers address this point.  If political access becomes more tied to internet access, that will only reinforce the existing political inequalities unless there is a concerted effort made toward universal connectivity.
  • One of the more interesting comments was made by the Guy Who Started Pandora.  While most of speeches and Q&A discussion were a harmonious choir singing praises of the internet and calling for a united movement for its liberties, this Guy (whose name I forget) pointed out that there is one point of discord within the web community.  “People have to remember that they still have to pay for things,” he said.  “People have to get out the mindset that all of this can be free, free, free.”  He had solved this problem with advertising.  But as a businessman in the digital music industry and also a former musician who had tried to make a living, he was clearly making a reference to music piracy and the common attitude that there is nothing wrong with it.  I believe that the tension he highlighted is a deep one, and that the politics of the web are not as unified as “One Web Day” implies.
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September 22, 2008

Software Freedom Day (Party!)

Last Saturday was Software Freedom Day, and the New York City celebration was held at the familiar Lime Group roof deck/offices in downtown Manhattan.

The event was inspiring, largely because of the presence and words of luminaries. Eben Moglen offered a benediction for the event that combined optimistic gaiety with a sense of historical scope. The gist? (paraphrased:) “We have been fighting for this for a long time. And we are going to win. And to win you just have to keep doing what you are all doing now. So I have nothing to say but to say it’s a lovely day and let’s have a wonderful party.”

Eric S. Raymond was also there, though less noticeably. If I had to guess I would say he was deliberately negotiating a tension between obscurity (he mentioned at some point having “gone stealth”) and wanting to be recognized. He succeeded on both fronts, with a shocking number of people not knowing who he was, but with several of those who did crowding in around he and Moglen as they discussed the history and future of the movement.

Several interesting topics were discussed while I listened in on the conversation.

Medical Devices

Moglen gave an account of why the GPL 3 license was delayed for so long beyond his self-imposed deadline for it. The completion of the license was hindered by Richard Stallman‘s insistence that the license should include prescriptions against the use of proprietary code in implanted medical devices. I have no idea how that prescription could be accomplished within the legal context of the license–perhaps I heard wrong. Or maybe I didn’t. Moglen was apparently convinced that such a clause was unenforceable in court and kept that language out of the GPL.

What I found interesting is that while normally I find the Stallman-esque deontological arguments for free software pretty crude and uncompelling, the thought of proprietary technology in my body does send a chill down my spine. It’s the sort of thing that too easily unfolds into a grim dystopia, at least in ones imagination.

Apple

Apple was discussed at length, almost to the exclusion of Microsoft, which was mentioned only to acknowledge its decline. From where I was standing it sounded like Steve Jobs was believed to be the biggest threat to the free software movement around. Between Apple’s recent rise in popularity and his association with Disney, he is now a poster boy for the sinister success of unfree intellectual property.

There was real fear here, and the devil was in the details. Moglen explained how Apple’s use of LLVM as an alternative compiler to the GCC represented a threat to the movement. If I followed correctly, this is due to the fact that LLVM has a more permissive, “BSD-style” license.

At this point, ESR, true to his reputation, began to object: What was wrong with the more permissive license? What’s wrong with BSD licensing? Isn’t that open source? Fears and scars of FSF dogmatism were inflamed.

The problem is patents. LLVM’s license allows more room for Apple to use software patents than the GCC’s licenses do. And Apple now has the opportunity to maneuver themselves into a place where through those patents they can dominate the software that can be run on their machines. Those bastards!

EDIT 8-24-08: Commenter Owen (see below) points out that LLVM’s license actually stipulates better guarantees about the use of patents than i originally thought. It’s quite possible that I misunderstood the discussion on Saturday, or that somebody there was misinformed about the LLVM’s license.

Reflections

It was a great party, and the conversation there made me feel maybe for the first time like I was playing a part in a real political movement that had originated decades ago, even though I’ve been enthusiastic about open source principles for years and now write free software for my day job.

What I found both entirely appropriate but somewhat distant, however, was how narrow it seemed like the struggle being celebrated that day was. It was 100% a day about free software, and the discussions plumbed the depth of that topic without reaching out to related areas of free culture, the science commons, net neutrality, etc.

Lately, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the broader social and economic consequences of open source software, and it has occurred to me that its import for me is embedded in a network of other values and ideas that often require an abstraction from the particulars of the software movement. It was refreshing and grounding to be closer to that point of origin for an evening.

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