A Bit About Ubuntu Edge

A couple days ago, Canonical announced a crowd funding campaign for the Ubuntu Edge, a phone sized device that is able to function as a phone but is firmly designed to be a PC replacement. Just in case someone stumbles on this page after finding such crappy reporting as this, here is the deal with Ubuntu Edge as I see it: The Ubuntu Edge is about shaping the future.

Now, it is no secret that I like Canonical, one of the only companies fighting for (and throwing money at) GNU/Linux on the desktop. Frankly, despite recent missteps in quality control and their tendency to not go with 100% Free Software, I think they are doing more for the Free Software Movement than basically anybody else out there. But I have to say that Ubuntu Edge, and it's associated crowd funding campaign, is a particular point of brilliance for the company.

Canonical has been working for the last few years on something they call converged computing. The idea is to have every consumer electronic centered around a screen controlled on a very fundamental level by one device (one device that happens to run nearly 100% Free Software). As most of you are aware, every piece of consumer electronics out there has a small, typically underpowered, computer in it. The Ubuntu Edge vision is to take all of those computers out of the electronics and simply have the manufacturers build screens with an HDMI port and power supply attached. For all of the computation, something like the Ubuntu Edge will handle it.

The way I see Canonical's end game vision is something much like the technology seen in the Total Recall remake from a few years ago. In this movie, people have technology that they carry with them (actually implanted inside their body) and may use any piece of glass as a display for that technology by pressing their hand against it. Canonical's vision is similar. Computational devices will be mobile, private, secure, personal device that you carry with you while displays will be stationary, plentiful, pseudo-public devices you hook into when needed. In such a world, every hotel room you rent, every office, every coffee shop table, and every room in your house will have a display and input devices (keyboard and mouse, or touchscreen) and a cradle to place your "phone" into. The way I see Ubuntu Edge is the way it is presented, as a taste of the future.

But that is not entirely fair. There is one place where the Ubuntu Edge fits perfectly in the current world. If you have a computer at home and a computer at work (or if you have one laptop that you use for both and you lug it back and forth), the Ubuntu Edge makes a lot of sense for you. You should think of the Ubuntu Edge as a PC tower and UPS that fits in your pocket. There is no need to sync between different disk drives because you bring your drive with you. If you have ever emailed a file to yourself, or left your computer on at home so that you would have SSH access to it in case you needed it, or if you simply have so much data that you cannot store it in something like Dropbox or some analogous cloud file storage, an Ubuntu Edge like system is a great fit. In addition, there is no need to worry about software differences between your applications and files (no Excel 07 can't read Excel 09 XML files file problems) or incompatibilities during software development because you bring the hardware and software with you. If you have ever wasted a few hours or days configuring a new computer or tweaking a computers configuration, Ubuntu Edge seems like a useful platform. Canonical isn't the first company to sniff around this idea, but they seem to be the closest to actually achieving this.

An extra benefit of something like Ubuntu Edge is that it solves many problems that people that value freedom, privacy, and freedom from vendor lock-in have felt mounting. Ubuntu Edge resonates very well with us freedom loving people as it is a solution that is centered around a well standardized interface. It means that anybody can use this with whatever device they like. It is of course not lost on me that this device will be close to a completely freedom respecting device. There will probably be proprietary device drivers, but I expect that user land will be Free as in Freedom. This also resonates with us people that support competition in the market. Any time we have a technology where any new inventor can enter the market and leverage it for their invention, my free market loving self smiles a little bit. Standardized interfaces are great for competition (e.g. see the Internet).

Even further, this also resonates very well with us privacy loving people and people that haven't drank the "cloud" Kool-Aid. The current solution to the woes of syncing multiple computers (be they PCs, tablets, phone, or whatever) is to have something like Dropbox shuffle files around. This is actually a pretty crappy solution, if we are being honest. Don't get me wrong, it is good for the world we have constructed, but it is far from optimal. For example, on any system that I am familiar with, it is not possible to sync installed applications via something like Dropbox.

Of course there is nothing wrong with cloud services in principle, and in many instances they are extremely convenient for transferring files to friends. I'm not proposing that we move away from Internet services in total, but I think there is an argument to be made for only using Internet services for things that need to be Internet services. The problem is that cloud services are run by corporations and corporations only have allegiances to their share holders and, if required by law, the government that they operate under. In addition, in the world we currently live in corporations tend to also have a disturbing level of control over "mobile" devices. In this data syncing/sharing scheme there are many points of weakness when it comes to privacy. By buying into the "cloud", we have transitioned from the normal state where files that are not shared with others are basically safe into a world where our files are more vulnerable (to either attackers, corporations, or government agencies) because we have implicitly shared them in order to sync them. Something like Ubuntu Edge is a way out of this, it is a solution for many of the problems that the cloud was designed to solve. If my files are local (i.e. they are in my pocket) and third party devices that I interact with are nothing more than a screen with no general purpose processing capabilities, I have much less to worry about.

All of these aspects packed together makes this a pretty awesome project. But now the brilliant part. By making this a crowd funding campaign, Canonical has made it clear to the consumers what is possible. I have been hearing rumblings about a system like this for years, but perhaps the ordinary people out there have not. This is certainly a way to get the word out. On the flip side, this tells the manufacturers that there are people that are willing to pay money for something like this. Just the fact that this crowd funding campaign existed, regardless of whether it is actually funded, will affect the trajectory of technology in the future. This is a win-win scenario and it is brilliant, pure and simple. I would love to see Canonical make their goal and make their phone, but in my estimation, they have already changed the world for the better.

So, no, buying an Ubuntu Edge isn't the best fit for everyone (but to be honest, neither is a tablet, which try as you might, is a poor platform for anything but consuming information). Ubuntu Edge doesn't fit in perfectly with the world as it is. It isn't even designed to fill a gap, or at least not a gap that exists today. It is designed to be that device that is necessary to make the future that many of us envision come true. That said, it is priced competitively for the package that they promise and, for people that lug a laptop back and forth from work or for people that have a two or more computers that they struggle to keep in sync (e.g. me), this will be a useful device right now. If I had $700-830 to spend on a speculative device, I would. The real question is whether they can actually deliver what they promise.

Rogoff, Reinhart, and Research: Four Questions

First, this is not a post about economists or about how we need more stimulus spending or something like that.  This is actually about software, primarily.  So, be not afraid fiscal conservatives.  If you are interested in the economics, Krugman's articles and blog entries make up a pretty thorough analysis of the whole ordeal.

This has been irking me for the last week or so.  From Krugman's article in the NY Times:

Finally, Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff allowed researchers at the University of Massachusetts to look at their original spreadsheet — and the mystery of the irreproducible results was solved. First, they omitted some data; second, they used unusual and highly questionable statistical procedures; and finally, yes, they made an Excel coding error. Correct these oddities and errors, and you get what other researchers have found: some correlation between high debt and slow growth, with no indication of which is causing which, but no sign at all of that 90 percent “threshold.” 

After reading about this a bit, as a person that performs publicly funded research for a living (at least right now) I find myself with four questions.  First...

Why are you using Excel for important, presumably mathematically involved, statistical work?

Now this is a minor issue, more of just a curiosity really and a particular pet peeve of mine: Excel is a spreadsheet program.  It is meant for things like making invoices, calculating grades, and balancing your check book, and even for those purposes it is not the best tool for the job.  Each of those tasks have specialized programs written expressly for them.  Excel is a "jack of all trades" sort of program, which is good (I tend to like those types of programs), but if your profession is to run statistics on data, is that the tool you should use?  We have tools that are designed specifically for statistical analysis.  We even have tools that look basically exactly like Excel but have a bunch of statistical tools built in as well.

Yes, Excel can be used for more complicated things.  I knew a guy who used Excel to perform a discrete element method calculation of the heat flow throughout the complex geometry of an internal combustion engine.  It worked, but it is not what Excel is meant to do.  I'll even go so far is say that you should not use Excel to solve PDEs in complicated geometries; just a blanket no, don't do it.  Excel is certainly Turing complete, that doesn't mean that you should use it for everything.  I can use LaTeX to compute as well (TeX is also Turing complete), but I would never use it for something that wasn't document formatting.

Should you use tools for things that they are not intended to be used for?  Sure, if the tool is well suited for that task.  Sometimes tools are well designed and they can be used for tasks that the designers never intended them for, sometimes wildly outside the target use case.  This usually falls under what we would call a hack.  Should you use hacks routinely in your professional code?  Probably not.

Perhaps I am off base.  I'm not a statistician or an economist, perhaps the mathematics/calculations involved in economics is so brain-dead simple that Excel or a pocket calculator is the perfect tool for the job.

Why is it that the simple coding error resonates so well with the public whereas the general bad statistics falls flat?

The answer (which Krugman draws attention to elsewhere) is actually pretty obvious, one is embarrassing because people understand it and have probably made a similar mistake themselves while the other is considered complicated.  Thus, people tend to give a pass on the latter.  There is also the fact that the coding error resonates better with the media.  It is a much easier story to tell, and media outlets routinely talk to the lowest common denominator (how else are you going to make money on the news?).

My understanding is that the paper did some pretty sketchy things regarding selecting what data to include and what to exclude in their analysis.  There was also some pretty bad logic involved as well: the paper was published based on a correlation found in some data but never made a causality argument.  I think that this is actually pretty common in social sciences, but data mining for correlations and then never attempting to figure out the reason behind them is a pretty shoddy research method.

Of all of the errors that seem to have gone into this research, the error in the spreadsheet seems to be the least offensive.  That is until you consider my next question.

Why did this take so long to uncover?

The answer to this is almost certainly the fact that the code that was used for these calculations was not made available to the public.  This was a contentious result and others have attempted and failed to reproduce the results.  This is exactly the time when having source available to others would have helped this dispute get resolved much faster.

I know that there are people that don't share my opinion that Free/Libre Software is (to first approximation) always to be preferred over proprietary alternatives, but there are places where it is wholly inappropriate to use proprietary software.  Perhaps the most important place for Free/Libre Software is the source code and interpreters/compilers for that source code that is used in public research.  Note that I'm not talking about Open Source development; we are talking about the freedom to inspect the code, use it in your own research, and distribute it to others, not a development model, though that might be a good fit for some projects.

In my opinion, and hopefully more and more researchers share this opinion, this research is flawed largely because it is not available for inspection.  It is not available for inspection for two reasons: 1) Excel, the interpreter, is not Free Software nor gratis, and 2) the Excel document that they performed the calculation in was not made immediately available.  Though, to their credit, it was made available to another researcher upon request and Excel is widely used and has several Free Software spreadsheet programs that very likely would run these files.  Think of how much better things would have been if the files were posted where anybody could get at them on a whim rather than by request.  Anybody could execute them without buying a software license (due to gratis software) and understand what is happening in the software (freedom 1) and have the right to pass on altered versions to other researchers (freedom 2 and 3).

In addition, the proprietary nature of Excel causes concern as well as there may be internal errors in Excel that invalidate user programs that are correct.  I should point out that errors within Excel itself become more and more likely as you start using Excel for things that it really wasn't made for, like advanced statistical analysis/modelling.

Thus, I think that people performing public research should publish any associated code to the public.  And yes, I know that this is a scary prospect.  I recently found an error in some code that I had written for a paper after it had been submitted to a journal.  I had neglected to initialize a floating point variable in my program.  Luckily, it did not effect the end result, and I really appreciate the luck in being able to fix this before someone else found it.  If I am honest to myself, I am grateful that I didn't get caught making a huge mistake; I am grateful that I avoided shame, and that I got to analyze the situation and (if it had been necessary) get a head start on damage control.

But scary as it is, let's face it, the right thing to do for the advancement of research is to have open access of source code to other researchers and have that source code licensed in such a way that others can use it in their work.  After all, what is worse, your work misleading people for years before it goes down in flames, or someone pointing it out early before anything bad happens?  More eyes mean errors get caught faster, even if some of those eyes are out to completely discredit your work; perhaps even more so when this is the case.

Do we need a "Free/Libre Research" Movement?

When pondering this last question, I initially thought that it might be useful to define a sort of "Free/Libre Research" movement, where publications themselves and all source code and data associated with it are made available to the public (or at least the portion of the public that funded the research) at approximately the cost required to package and deliver it if not free and can be freely reused in derivative work.  There are hints of this happening, particularly in the field of Computer Science.  After some thought, I realized that such a movement shouldn't actually be necessary.

Defining such a movement is akin to saying that we want to do scientific research, i.e. we should be doing it this way already.  These conditions I've described in a so called "Free/Libre Research" movement clearly falls under the very definition of scientific research.  It is all part of reproducibility (i.e. have other researchers attempt to reproduce your results) and falsifiability (allowing other researchers to potentially challenge your hypothesis).  And, while it is not absolutely necessary to provide source to people in order to maintain reproducibility and falsifiability, shouldn't we be actively trying to make the scientific process work better rather than hindering it?

Stallman on Steam on GNU/Linux

In July, Valve announced that they were in the process of porting Steam and a handful of games to GNU/Linux. Shortly after, Stallman put forward this statement on the benefits of porting Steam to GNU/Linux. In this delightful and surprising opinion statement, he argues that the gains of video game loving people switching their OS, the foundation of all of the their computation, to a Libre alternative displaces the damage done by Steam moving to GNU/Linux. Now, we should all note that while Stallman can give his opinion until he is blue in the face and it doesn't necessarily mean anything. GNU/Linux is Libre Software and, by the definition of Libre Software, has nothing to say about what software can or cannot be run on the system.¹ Be that as it may, Stallman's opinion does hold some weight for some for the community.

What is interesting is that this is a huge departure from the opinions Stallman typically expresses. From what I've seen, Stallman has never been one for compromise when it comes to Libre Software, even when that compromise would almost certainly result in benefit to the Libre Software community. As an example, you can listen to Bryan Lunduke and Chris Fisher's conversation with Stallman on the "GNU/Linux Action Show." Lunduke, who dominated the discussion, was looking for tips on how he could transition from a proprietary software developer into a Libre Software developer. In particular, he was looking for information on how he could do this and still support his family. Now, I'm not claiming that Lunduke is a programming superstar, or that Lunduke's software is so great that having it released as open source is a clear and substantial benefit for the community. I don't really know what effect his software would have for anybody. I will say that having a guide of how to transition to Libre Software development, even if only partially, would be a great help to the community, and reiterating the message of the Free Software Movement to any captive audience is likewise a benefit. Stallman's response was implicitly that that an independent developer (i.e. someone that makes their living selling digital copies of their software) simply cannot currently support themselves with Libre Software development. What he actually said, however, was that Lunduke should seek a new career. Specifically, his point seemed to be that comparing the viability of "for profit" Libre Software development to proprietary software development was a futile exercise since proprietary development is unethical and akin to "burglary". It might or might not make you money, but it should not be done for ethical reasons. While I agree with the gist of the statement, arguing with extremes like comparing a relatively minor restriction of people's freedom to something like burglary is frowned upon by most people. More to the point, I feel that many more minds can be won over when an understanding and softer, but still firm, voice is used. I invite you to watch the whole interview, as infuriating as it is. By the way, if you come off thinking that this Lunduke fellow was treated unfairly and that Stallman is a d-bag, you might watch the following week's episode where Lunduke throws a multitude of ad hominem attacks against Stallman, which will probably make you reassess where the d-baggery lies.

I bring up all of this so that the context is clear of what Stallman's opinion of compromise has been in the past. This opinion on Steam seems nearly 180 degrees out of phase from the standard Stallman opinion. It is not that I see this as antithetical to the advancement of Libre Software, quite the contrary as I will argue, but I do see it as not keeping with Stallman's usual position on the mixing of Libre and proprietary software, much less DRM laden software. It should not be lost on us that Steam is perhaps the most visible DRM peddling marketplace in existence today. This is the software that Stallman is tacitly ok with.

I wonder if this is a change in Stallman's strategy for promoting Libre Software usage. I wonder if he now sees more benefit performing a bit of social engineering rather than just leading by example. At the very least, for people that say that Stallman is not able or not willing to compromise or see the bigger picture (which I have been guilty of a few times) this should demonstrate otherwise. Whatever the reason behind this change of opinion, tone, or otherwise, I think that this is a good thing that hopefully we will see more of.

A Libre Software ecosystem

I think that Stallman might be understating some of the indirect benefits of having Steam on GNU/Linux. Windows dominates the computing world because it has many users. It has those users because it has developers writing software. It of course has those developers writing software because it has all those users, who are willing to pay money. This self-sustaining ecosystem is something to be sought in the Libre Software world. Anything that can be used to bootstrap this, should be sought out. And yes, this means that people in the Libre Software world will need to get used to the idea of paying for what they want if the desire this kind of ecosystem.² This is not difficult to work out. A developer only has so much time, some of this time needs to be used to make money to live, thus if they can make money developing free software there will be more free software. This is the reason I feel that the funding problem is the number one problem to tackle for the Free Software Movement.

The problem is, an ecosystem takes a long time to build up unless you are willing to pump vast amounts of money into it, and maybe it doesn't grow even if you do. It takes a long time to build, but what if you can have an already established ecosystem migrate to you? Valve has been relatively candid about their dislike of the direction that Microsoft is headed in, and who could blame them? There are some shaky decisions coming out of Microsoft and things are probably going to get much worse before they get better (if they do). I am expecting a pretty large exodus of users fairly soon.

The question becomes, where will these users go? Presumably, many will switch to OS X. However, as many have noted, Apple has some quite disturbing opinions (along with the track record to back it up) about what rights the users and developers of software for their iOS should have. When these limitations by Apple land on OS X, I expect that it will very likely discourage many Windows users from moving to that OS. This is made all the more troubling when you see Microsoft starting to tread down the same path Apple travelled as they seek to regain some of their lost market share and profits. These kinds of decisions by the major players in the field are a strong incentive for diversifying your product to a stable, yet non-restrictive OS.

Thus Valve decided to port Steam to GNU/Linux. I think the motivation of Valve's decision is just plain business sense. They want to buy some "Windows and Microsoft falls apart and not everybody likes Apple" insurance. This is a good way to hedge their bets on where their users will end up and ensure a longer life should Microsoft continue to make poor decisions. Further, they will have a substantive advantage over late comers to the GNU/Linux platform if it does indeed become popular amongst gamers. But the reasons for their decisions aren't what I am focusing on; I am interested in what effect we should expect for Libre Software.

The benefit and harm of Steam on GNU/Linux

In a recent post (see the last section), I made a particularly Raymond-esque argument that the importance of having something be Libre is directly proportional to how important that software is to your life and livelihood.³ I concluded that proprietary video games are "ok" so long as they don't come with even a hint of DRM. Because of this "no DRM" standard, I will most likely never pay any money for any software sold via Steam, nor do I think anybody should for that matter, though I know and accept that many will.

The point is, once you accept this argument for proprietary games and proprietary stops being your cut-off for completely unacceptable, you start seeing shades of gray and you will most likely come to the conclusion that proprietary may be bad, but DRM is worse. It is a matter of degree. DRM in software marks that extra step past software that is merely proprietary but non-abusive to something which is, in fact, abusive. DRM is in its very essence not in the users best interest, the epitome of an anti-feature. In addition, DRM is very often more abusive than the original authors intended it to be, hurting "legitimate users" as well as copyright infringers. DRM is almost by definition the act of abusing the proprietary nature of the application in order to actively restrict a user's freedom in a very overt and measurable way. DRM is the actual boogie man, or one of them, that the FSF has been warning about for all these years. Here he is, in the flesh, right where we can all see him.

This makes me wonder if this move by Stallman is a bit more diabolical than it initially seems. I suspect that if there is one place where proprietary software is unlikely to "teach users that the point is not freedom," video games are it. To the average user, a video game is a piece of software that is the epitome of luxury. From a practical point of view, a video game is only as good as the art that goes into it, and from Stallman's point of view, Libre art is of much lower priority than Libre Software (which I agree with). What I think might be the ultimate result of DRM video games in GNU/Linux is a better appreciation and understanding of the main goals of freedom in Libre Software rather than an erosion of these ideals.

By letting the boogie man run around your town and terrorize your citizens, it often has the result of people increasing their support for the white knights that have devoted their life to protecting users from that boogie man. What better way to ensure a boogie man that will be noticed but not cause too much damage than to let in DRM, which is today basically synonymous with proprietary software abuse, but only in video games, which are hugely popular but basically synonymous with luxury? We may even get a few new white knights out of it. When these new GNU/Linux users boot up and find a wealth of software, in fact an entire operating system, all of which is devoid of DRM, lock-in, and excessively high pricing, they might, just might, start to associate proprietary with restriction, DRM, and "annoying to use" while, at the same time, start to associate Libre/Free/Open Source with freedom and, gasp, "easy to use." In fact, if we continue to produce these pretty impressive Libre video games, people might start to wonder what they need Steam for at all.

And if Steam isn't overtly abusive? What if people accept it and like it? You don't get this effect I describe, true, but you still have Stallman's original point: more users of Libre Software means more freedom for users. You alse get more people familiar with developing for GNU/Linux and, arguably, increase the pool of developers that might write Libre Software in their free time. More or less, this is a win however you cut it, but it might be a bigger win than Stallman lets on.

The year of the GNU/Linux Desktop?

I know, this has been speculated about to death. But with MS actively imploding under user disappointment and Apple encroaching further and further on users' freedoms, there could very likely be a sizable of portion of the community that is just lost enough to jump to Ubuntu or similar.

The upshot of all this is that GNU/Linux is actually is a very good position to accomplish at least Torvald's initial dream, a sizable install base for Linux based systems on the desktop/laptop, and a large part of the FSF's goal, to get more people using more Libre Software. I know it has been said before, but right now I see a possible inflection point. If Microsoft continues to tank on their desktop/laptop software (which seems very likely), Apple continues to make their desktop/laptop computing environment more like the restrictive iOS, GNU/Linux gets Steam and game developers start to develop for GNU/Linux, and provided we find a good way to financially support Libre Software, there is a very good chance for a vast increase of the install and developer share. This increase will, at the very least, increase the number of users that have control over their own computers even if there will be a few, non-essential, pieces of software that will be out of their control due to DRM. Stallman is correct to encourage Valve's port of Steam to the GNU/Linux platform.

Footnotes:

¹ It should also be noted that prior to fairly new positions by Apple in their iOS, this would be a silly thing to even bother to say. Before that it would be considered financial suicide to do so. Thank you, Apple…

² That is not to say that I don't see the great benefit in having Libre Software also be gratis, but these ideas are not totally at odds with one another.

³ I actually have walked back my opinion a bit. I got to thinking about my sister, who sees video games as a social tool. As a social tool, this now becomes an important part of her life. I would wager that there are many people out there just like my sister. It would be arrogant of me to argue that just because I find something to be "purely a luxury" means that this is true for everyone. If I wish others to respect my opinions on what is important enough to be Libre Software, I should respect that others might find something I think of as non-essential as important enough as well.

Why I Have a Flattr Button

Update (Jan. 9, 2015): Many new services have come into vogue since I originally posted this, many of which are close enough to what I initially had in mind that they deserve mention here. Of these, Patreon comes to the forefront as nearly optimal, not exactly what I wanted, but pretty good. Also, I found that my idea that I allude to in this post turns out to not be such a good idea. I thought that developers would be happy to see people providing funding mechanisms to them, even if they didn't request it. I legitimately felt that, during the bootstrapping phase of the service, it would be a good idea to have bots crawl websites, repos, and mailing lists, train a model to determine how funds should be distributed amongst a project, and then distribute them via unintrusive email notifications to the developers. Turns out someone else was doing something similar to this and got seriously chewed out by several developers, so, that was a bad idea.

At the same time as I was rethinking my idea (which never found traction with people I pitched it to) Flattr changed something about their buttons so now they rarely show on my pages, and other stuff. So, yeah, nothing other than sending BTC is likely to work right now and I haven't gotten around to fixing it.

Flattr is a micropayment service geared towards funding artists (primarily bloggers) and community tech support. I am writing this blog as a hobby, as a sort of portfolio and record of things I have worked on, and as a motivation to learn new things and learn them to the point that I can explain them to others. Direct monetary gain has never come into the equation. I am also of the opinion that nothing I have written here actually warrants "Flattr"-y. However, perhaps someday something will. I would just let this silently go up and see if it reaps any rewards, but I have had the idea of funding in Libre Software and art in general on my mind a lot lately.

The Future of Funding Art

There is a deeper reason behind the Flattr button and the Gittip button right beside it. I put the Flattr button up as I feel that they got a lot of things right when designing their funding service. I mostly support their method of micropayments, and just using their service is in some way a support of their business, as is writing this post. But it isn't just Flattr that I support, it is other services like Gittip, and to lesser extent Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and a slew of other payment systems that have popped up recently. Each of these services, as I see it, strike a blow towards toppling an empire built on false scarcity, built on copyright. This is a false scarcity because scarcity of art that can be represented electronically simply doesn't actually exist. Once actually produced, software, literature, music, and movies are not a scarce commodity. They are commodities which are infinitely reproducible at next to zero cost. The sole purpose of copyright is to allow us to integrate those perfectly copyable things into our current market system in which value is based on scarcity. This act of limiting reproducibility via legality using copyright and, more recently, via technology using DRM is the act of setting up a false scarcity. The fact that this is a false scarcity is the reason that people reject the propaganda campaigns to relabel copyright infringement as theft, and the reason that some don't see it as wrong at all.

I don't think that the proliferation of services like these is a coincidence or that the recent success stories are a fluke. Services like these are the first harbingers of a fundamental change to the market for these non-scarce things. This change will be so fundamental that we will probably not even say that there is a "market" for software, literature, music, or movies in a few decades as there will be something else, something based on pledges and donations that has yet to be completely defined. This won't be the death of art, quite the contrary, it will be a rejuvenation. It may, however, be the death of companies that make their money by limiting the freedom of users. How do I know this? I don't, I just have hope. But as Kay says, "the best way to predict the future is to invent it." I still feel that these services, or any service I have seen, haven't quite gotten it right for the markets I care the most about (Flattr and Gittip seem quite close but slightly misdirected). From my point of view, there is ample area for innovation in this "sector", and I (and a few friends) have an idea that is in the works which I hope to announce not too long from now, if things go well and someone doesn't beat us too it.

Why no Advertisements

What about advertisements?, you might ask, they are certainly a funding model that nobody would argue with. After all, they cost the user nothing. Ads are certainly a good fit for some situations. However, I do disagree with advertisements based on the same principles as above. They actually do cost the user something in terms of time, and once again, ad revenue is based on the fact that the user cannot, for either legal or technical reasons, copy the content, extract the ads, and re-host it. I don't see using AdBlock Plus or a DVR with commercial skipping technology as that different from extracting DRM from a piece of media other than the fact that removal of DRM is illegal in the USA and circumventing ads is not (though this could change in the future). Ads add a new negative aspect as well in that they degrade the content by cluttering it with ads and have a tendency to produce biased information. So, no, I don't think ads are a funding system to be embraced if you have another option available, and if there are no other options, we should be actively seeking new solutions.

To make a long story short: even if you think all that is a bunch of nonsense, I hope that you at the very least find this little Flattr button to be much less intrusive than ads and much more easily ignored.

Kickstarter Video Games and GNU/Linux

I actually don't play video games very much (maybe a couple hours per week at peak, but more commonly zero), but I have been buying a lot of them the last few years (Humble Bundle), and helping to fund several game development initiatives on Kickstarter. What the heck is going on?

Long video game hiatus

First, this is coming from someone who as a young man, adored video games and spent way too much money on them. But when I got to college I stopped for financial and study reasons. Up until a few years ago, I bought very few video games. To put it in perspective, I stopped buying games back when they came in gigantic boxes, back when actual voice acting was reason enough to buy any game, when DRM was called copy protection and it often times involved looking up a particular word in the manual, or a spinny decoder wheel thing. However, the way I see it now, video games are more important than ever to my future happiness.

Something new has started recently. Relatively well known developers are starting Kickstarter campaigns to fund video game development. This is pretty cool in itself, but what makes it much cooler is that many the developers are going to be making truly cross-platform games (MS Win, MacOS, GNU/Linux).

I am putting out money for these games that I might, in all reality, never play. I'm doing this for one reason, they are showing a willingness to support GNU/Linux systems. Now, don't pigeon hole me as a person that thinks all software should be FOSS (even though that is what I believe), my reasoning is more that I want and need a more stable platform from GNU/Linux than is currently available and I think that video games are an important first step towards that goal.

Video games drive stability

Here is the way I see it. Video games make beaucoup bucks. With that money, people start to think about how they might make it easier to make more money, and that is where the stability will increase. If you look at the shortcomings of GNU/Linux as compared to MS Windows systems, the most glaring problem that I see is that hardware is poorly supported. The best way to get hardware supported is to impose a financial incentive to have them work and work well. That financial incentive scales with the number of users. The number of users is highly correlated with the number of well programmed flashy computer games. I will go so far as to say that there is likely a causal relationship where a vibrant games market draws more users.

But there aren't enough GNU/Linux users out there

Of course, to a studio that sells millions of copies of a game, the number of home PC GNU/Linux users might seem negligible. I actually don't think this is the case. Now, I don't know if anything can ever de-throne MS Windows in the PC game market, but if we look at the numbers from such promotions as the Humble Indie Bundles, we see that a good chunk of that money is coming from GNU/Linux users. Fairly consistently, we have seen the money from GNU/Linux users hit around one eighth to one quarter of the total money raised. In the last bundle, GNU/Linux contributions hit around the one sixth mark; that's \$100k that would have been lost if not for the GNU/Linux support. We can discus why this is the case (my guess is a combination of record numbers for GNU/Linux users and a form of video game starvation), but I think it is hard to argue that this number is negligible.

For a project like Double Fine Adventure, perhaps it is not too far off to think that \$550k was due to the GNU/Linux support, and perhaps \$350k for Wasteland 2. To contrast, one wonders what to expect for another project I would have been very interested in, Shadowrun Returns, which has announced that they will not have GNU/Linux support. Are they missing out on one sixth of their possible funding? Is the cost of porting to GNU/Linux more than that lost funding? Update: Shadowrun Returns has announced that if \$1M dollars is reached, there will be an effort to port to GNU/Linux after the release. This is pretty nice and while it would be great to have Linux support promised now and without the post release delay, I'm pretty sure that \$1M will be reached and any support is better than none. Yay! I won't pick on Al Lowe here, as budget is his primary concern right now, and it is too soon to tell what is going on with Jane Jensen's project. I wish you both the best and I'll be watching for other (hopefully new) titles on Kickstarter. I will say that I am kind of over LSL (much more of a Space Quest and King's quest fan) but if there was a GNU/Linux version, I'd throw \$15 at it to support it.

So, here is the point. I think these projects should be supported. Go do it, now. But I also think people might want to start considering GNU/Linux as a deployment platform, and not for the novelty of it ala Id Software, but for the profit of it. Now, I realize that game developers are not reading this blog (I know this is true because no body is reading this blog ;) but maybe if you are reading it, and you run into someone that does make these kinds of decisions, some of these ideas will leak through during your conversation.

Also, since I don't want to post on this stuff again, a quick note. The Humble Bundle started as a promotion where the games were released as FOSS after a certain goal was reached. This is no longer the case or this goal is very high. I guess I just want to relay my own data point to the world on the value of libre source. I paid \$30 for the first bundle after I heard of the possible source release. Now I have dwindled to around \$5 for each. Just a word of advice, releasing the code as FOSS is valuable to people and people are willing to pay more for it.

Uh, did you forget about Libre Software?

Oh, right… Well all of this stuff happening in our little nook of the world of video game development is great, but not exactly perfect. However, I have a differing opinion on video games than the FSF has.

To me, closed source is 'okay' for DRM-free, non-mission critical software.

Contrast against something like a computer algebra system that you use for your job, a financial books program that you use for your personal or work finances, or an operating system where you run everything. Having these be closed source means that you have relinquished a great deal of knowledge of how useful your work is, and correct and accurate your financial records are, and how safe any of your private data is. Having these be open source but non-Libre means that you have relinquished control over these things, but at least you know where you stand. In an ideal world, everything would be FLOSS and we would have come up with a widely applicable funding mechanism, but this isn't an ideal world yet. If there is going to be something non-Libre in the mix, I suppose that a video game that is fundamentally a luxury, is the best one to have, but only so long as there is no DRM attached to it. This is a big 'but' and I cannot stress this enough. If there is one place where we have demonstrative proof of the abuse of proprietary software, year after year after year, it is with DRM for video games.

So, let me reiterate. Libre games would be a boon for gamers. I would like games better if they were Libre, all else being equal. But, the importance of a particular piece of software being Libre Software is directly proportional to how much of my life depends on it. For video games, this is sufficiently unimportant to the point that I feel that it is okay to support DRM free video games, particularly if there are fringe benefits like attracting more users, developers, and hardware vendors to GNU/Linux.

On LaTeX and Microsoft Word

Sorry, this is a ranty post. Adjust your desire to read appropriately.

I was busy writing my APS abstract this last week. When we got near the end I was having a heck of a time getting Bibtex to work with Latex and insert my references properly. Later on I realized that APS doesn't really allow for citation ala Latex and Bibtex, but whatever. I was struggling with this, and mentioned to my advisor, jokingly, "Man, I hate Latex." He says, also jokingly, "you could use Microsoft Word." I say sure, despite the fact that the APS website says they prefer Latex and that Latex is actually easier for the submitter, MS Word is no problem. In fact, that is kind of the point. I wrote my abstract using Org-Mode precisely because it made little to no assumptions on the end result. I can export to Latex or one of the many other formats or just grab my text and paste it into MS Word with no problems. I can also send it to any human being in the world with a computer and that person can open it and understand what they are seeing. Hell, in a handful of keystrokes I could post it to this blog.

Later, when printing, my advisor changes from his joking suggestion to insist that I use MS Word (presumably so that I can export to a Rich Text Format document that the APS accepts). This will make it easier, right… So, I copy/paste it over to a document and save it as an RTF file. Low and behold, of course, the equations are not interpreted by word. It would take at least 15 minutes and perhaps up to an hour to figure out how to get the proper symbols, fonts, and kerning into the document for submission. The last kick to the nuts is that the APS provides an RTF template, but in order to use it, you must actually type the document into it yourself, by hand. If you copy and paste it into the template something, apparently, will get screwed up. I will repeat that, the American Physical Society requires you to actually, physically, press the keys on your keyboard while their template is open in order to submit an abstract (though I imagine something like xdotool might serve me well here). This is what happens with you use things you don't understand people. You get black magic crap like this.

Point is, I miss my previous colleagues and advisor, nay entire department, nay entire institution where they held the opinion that any individual in the sciences should be using Latex as their format for correspondence. Also, bravo to the APS for encouraging people to use Latex for submitting abstracts.

Time Lapse Fun with FFMPEG and Mencoder

I was in the office early this morning and saw the sun rising. I captured some video of it (my phone can do 30 minutes of 720p, though it doesn't look that good). However, the thirty minutes of video is rather boring to watch in real time. So I decided to speed up the video.

Speeding up the video was actually much more difficult that I thought it would be (and I am somewhat acclimated to the troublesome nature of FFMPEG and Mencoder). Anyway, in order to perform the speed up I used the FFMPEG filter select to only pass every n^th frame. The large the n, the faster the speed up. At the same time I chose to convert to WebM (the phone puts out H.264+AAC and placed in an MPEG4 container format). This produces a video file with only every n^th frame, but the video just hangs for the time it would have been displaying the other frames. To fix this, I then passed it through another program, mencoder. This program fairly similar to ffmpeg in purpose. The mencoder program has a special option, -speed, that will speed up the video stream by a factor you specify. This means that if we use -speed n then we should get the desired video frame rate. Refer to the man pages and FFMPEG manual for more insight for what is happening here.

ffmpeg -i VID_20111025_071454.m4v -vf select='not(mod(n\,50))' -an temp.webm
mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy -speed 50 temp.webm -o faster.webm

This would have been all it would take, however, since I am using Maverick Meerkat, the version of FFMPEG included doesn't have support for filters. This means that, ugh, you can't use the first command. Not unless you install a newer version. I avoid compiling libraries from source like the plague. Instead I added this PPA to my software sources and updated my software. This actually gave a lot of scary errors and almost tricked me into a dist-upgrade to Natty, (shame on you apt, I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy). But in the end, those commands did work (as evidenced by the videos).

The end result, we have a video where only every 50th frame show up in the output. This resulted in a pretty good effect. I didn't actually point the camera at the sunrise as that would cause problems with the contrast and I couldn't balance the camera on the window sill pointing that direction from my office. So it's not as dramatic as an actual sunrise.

I also captured another 30 minutes later that morning as the clouds forming as the air passed off the flatirons was a pretty cool dynamic effect.

Of course, all of this is kind of stupid (neat, to me, but stupid), as time-lapse is usually done by taking individual frames spaced seconds to minutes (or more) apart. Also, there are several options available on the Android Market. Though I wouldn't install them without researching the application and developers.

The difference between Open Source and Free Software

I have heard a lot of talk from the Android folks over on Reddit about how Google has locked down Android, mostly from people hailing the glorious fall of Android's "openness".  People are complaining that although Android is still released with source under an open source license, still allows people to install whatever software, whenever they want, and anybody who wants to use their OS on their device is free to do so, it was somehow closed down.  I think that what people are stumbling over is the distinction the FSF has always made between Free Software and Open Source software, but with an interesting twist.

To quickly paraphrase the FSF's position, Open Source describes a method of developing, distributing, and supporting software, whereas Free Software deals with the rights people should be granted when receiving software.  These are two very different things.  Looking at this, I would say that what people are coming to realize is that Android is certainly Free Software, but it is not Open Source.  It is Free Software because it is released under a Free Software license; your rights are protected, period.  However, Android is not developed in the same way most Open Source software is.  It is not so much open to community patches and development.  It is developed behind closed doors by a team that may choose to listen to outside opinion but is in no way obligated to.

RMS remarks that by and large Open Source projects are Free Software projects.  He poses it as an extension of Open Source, a step further, a statement of commitment to protecting user and developer rights.  If we all remember correctly, the term Open Source was first coined to act as a synonym for Free Software that didn't have the same anti-corporate stigma and later evolved into something with its own foundation.  People introduced the term FOSS or FLOSS (Free (Libre) Open Source Software) to lump the two together.  I find it interesting to see how we really shouldn't lump them together at all; they truly are independent.  Projects can be Open Source, projects can be Free Software, and they can be both.