Thought Shrapnel

The talented Abby Cabunoc Mayes, who I worked with when I was at the Mozilla Foundation (and who I caught up with briefly at MozFest), was interviewed recently by TechRepublic. I like the way she frames the Open Source movement:

I like to think the movement really came together with The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an essay by Eric Raymond. And he compared the two ideas. There's the cathedral, or free software, where a small group of people are putting together a big cathedral that anyone can come to, and attend a service or whatever. He compared that to a bazaar, where everyone is co-creating. There's no real structure, you can set up a table wherever you want. You can haggle with other people. So open source, he really compared that to the Linux foundation at the time, where he was seeing so much delegation, so many people taking on tasks that would have been closed, in the cathedral model. So that idea that anyone can get involved, and anyone can participate, is really that key. Rather than just giving away something for free.

If you do an image search for Eric Raymond, you'll find some of him holding guns, as he's an enthusiast. I don't like guns, nor do many people, but I'd like to think we can separate someone's ideas about organising from their thoughts in a different area. I know some would beg to differ.

The interviewer goes on to ask Abby what the advantages of working openly are:

There's a lot more buy-in from people. And having this distributed model, where anyone can take a part of this, and anyone can be involved in running the project, really helps keep the power not centralized, but really distributed. And so, you can see what's happening to your data. So there's a lot of advantages that way, and a lot more trust with the population. And I think this is where innovation happens. When everyone can be a part of something, and where everyone can submit the best ideas. And I think we saw that in the scientific revolution, when the academic journals started. And people were publishing their research, and then letting other people use that and build upon that and discover more things. We saw the same thing happen with open source. Where you can really take this and use and do whatever you want with it.

I think it's important to keep linking and talking about this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, I feel like our cultural default is to try and take all the credit and work in silos.

Source: TechRepublic

This week, tens of thousands of open source projects migrated their codebase away from GitHub to alternatives such as GitLab. Why? Because Microsoft announced that they’ve bought GitHub for $7.5 billion.

For those who don’t spend time in the heady world of software and web development, that sounds like a lot of money for something with a silly name. It will hopefully make things a little clearer to explain that Git is described by Wikipedia in the following way:

Git is a version control system for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people. It is primarily used for source code management in software development, but it can be used to keep track of changes in any set of files. As a distributed revision control system it is aimed at speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.

Despite GitHub not being open source, it did, until this week host most of the world's open source projects. You can currently use GitHub for free if your project's code is public, and the company sells the ability to create private repositories. As far as I'm aware it's never turned a profit.

I’ve seen lots of reactions to the Microsoft acquistion news, but one of the more insightful posts comes from Louis-Philippe Véronneau. Like me, he doesn’t trust Microsoft at all.

Some people might be fine with Microsoft's takeover, but to me it's the straw that breaks the camel's back. For a few years now, MS has been running a large marketing campaign on how they love Linux and suddenly decided to embrace Free Software in all of its forms. More like MS BS to me.

Let us take a moment to remind ourselves that:

• Windows is still a huge proprietary monster that rips billions of people from their privacy and rights every day.
• Microsoft is known for spreading FUD about "the dangers" of Free Software in order to keep governments and schools from dropping Windows in favor of FOSS.
• To secure their monopoly, Microsoft hooks up kids on Windows by giving out "free" licences to primary schools around the world. Drug dealers use the same tactics and give out free samples to secure new clients.
• Microsoft's Azure platform - even though it can run Linux VMs - is still a giant proprietary hypervisor.

Yep.

I’m thankful that we’re now starting the MoodleNet project in a post-GDPR and post-GitHub world. We’ll be using GitLab — initially via their hosted service, but longer-term as a self-hosted solution — and as many open-source products and services as possible.

Interestingly, Véronneau notes that you can use Debian’s infrastructure (terms) or RiseUp’s infrastructure (terms) if your project aligns with their ethos.

Source: Louis-Philippe Véronneau

I’m so used to working openly by default that I sometimes forget that for many (most?) people it’s a new, and sometimes quite scary, step.

Alfonso Sánchez Uzábal pointed to choosealicense.com from GitHub, which makes it simple to choose an open license for your software project. Moodle, for example, is GPL but it gives other examples such as MIT and Apache.

For everything other than software, you’re probably best off with Creative Commons licenses. I’ve been using these for the last fifteen years now on my work and highly recommend them.

This article is entitled ‘How not to replace email’ and details both the demise of Google Wave and it’s open source continuation, Apache Wave:

As of a month ago, the Apache Wave project is “retired”. Few people noticed; in the seven years that Wave was an Apache Incubator open source project, it never had an official release, and was stuck at version 0.4-rc10 for the last three years.

Yes, I know! There's been a couple of times over the last few years when I've thought that Wave would have been perfect for a project I was working on. But the open source version never seemed to be 'ready'.

The world want ready for it in 2010, but now would seem to be the perfect time for something like Wave:

2017 was a year of rapidly growing interest in federated communications tools such as Mastodon, which is an alternative to Twitter that doesn’t rely on a single central corporation. So this seems like a good time to revisit an early federated attempt to reinvent how we use the internet to communicate with each other.

As the author notes, the problem was the overblown hype around it, causing Google to pull it after just three months. He quoted a friend of his who at one time was an active user:

We’d start sending messages with lots of diagrams, sketches, and stuff cribbed from Google Images, and then be able to turn those sort of longer-than-IM-shorter-than-email messages into actual design documents gradually.

In fact, I’d argue that even having a system that’s a messaging system designed for “a paragraph or two” was on its own worthwhile: even Slack isn’t quite geared toward that, and contrariwise, email […] felt more heavyweight than that. Wave felt like it encouraged the right amount of information per message.

I feel this too, and it’s actually something we’ve been talking about for internal communications at Moodle. Telegram, (which we use kind of like Slack) is good for short, sharp communication, but there’s a gulf between that and, say, an email conversation or threaded forum discussion.

Perhaps this is the sweet spot for the ‘social networking’ aspect of Project MoodleNet?

Wave’s failure didn’t have anything to do with the ideas that went into it.

Those ideas and goals are sound, and this failure even provided good evidence that there’s a real need for something kind of like Wave: fifty thousand people signed a petition to “Save Google Wave” after Google announced they were shutting Wave down. Like so many petitions, it didn’t help (obviously), but if a mediocre implementation got tens of thousands of passionate fans, what could a good implementation do?

Helpfully, the author outlines some projects he’s been part of, after stating (my emphasis):

I’d say the single most important lesson to take away here, for a technology project at least, is that interoperability is key.

• Assume that no matter how amazing your new tech is, people are going to adopt it slowly.
• Give your early adopters every chance you can to use your offering together with the existing tools that they will continue to need in order to work with people who haven’t caught up yet.
• And if you’re building a communication tool, make it as simple as possible for others to build compatible tools, because they will expand the network of people your users can communicate with to populations you haven’t thought of and probably don’t understand.

It's a really useful article with many practical applications (well, for me at least...)

Source: Jamey Sharp

I didn’t used to think that who came up with the name of a thing particularly mattered, nor how it came about.

I’ve changed my mind, however, as the history of these things also potentially tells you about their future. In this article, Christine Peterson outlines how she came up with the term ‘open source’:

The introduction of the term "open source software" was a deliberate effort to make this field of endeavor more understandable to newcomers and to business, which was viewed as necessary to its spread to a broader community of users. The problem with the main earlier label, "free software," was not its political connotations, but that—to newcomers—its seeming focus on price is distracting. A term was needed that focuses on the key issue of source code and that does not immediately confuse those new to the concept. The first term that came along at the right time and fulfilled these requirements was rapidly adopted: open source.

Tellingly, as it was the 1990s, Peterson let a man introduce it for the term to gain traction:

Toward the end of the meeting, the question of terminology was brought up explicitly, probably by Todd or Eric. Maddog mentioned "freely distributable" as an earlier term, and "cooperatively developed" as a newer term. Eric listed "free software," "open source," and "sourceware" as the main options. Todd advocated the "open source" model, and Eric endorsed this. I didn't say much, letting Todd and Eric pull the (loose, informal) consensus together around the open source name. It was clear that to most of those at the meeting, the name change was not the most important thing discussed there; a relatively minor issue. Only about 10% of my notes from this meeting are on the terminology question.

From this point, Tim O'Reilly had to agree and popularise it, but:

Coming up with a phrase is a small contribution, but I admit to being grateful to those who remember to credit me with it. Every time I hear it, which is very often now, it gives me a little happy twinge.

Source: opensource.com

The Mozilla Foundation may have shut down pretty much all of its learning programmes, but it’s still doing interesting stuff around Open Leadership. Chad Sansing writes:

We think of Open Leadership as a set of principles, practices, and skills people can use to mobilize their communities to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. For example, Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox, was developed with an open code base with community contribution and support.

They're using the Web Literacy Map (work I led during my time with Mozilla) as a reference point. It's early days, but here's what they've got so far:

There’s also a white paper which they say will be updated in February 2018. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. Along with great work being done at opensource.com’s community around The Open Organization it’s a great time to be a open leader!

Source: Read, Write, Participate

There’s a perpetual joke in open source circles that next year will be ‘the year of Linux on the desktop’. GNU/Linux, of course, is an operating system that comes in a range of ‘distributions’ (I use Ubuntu and Elementary OS on a range of devices).

In this article, the author outlines 10 reasons that Linux isn’t used by more people. I think he’s spot-on:

1. Fragmented market
2. Lack of special applications
3. Lack of big name applications
4. Lack of API and ABI stability
5. Apple resurgence
6. Microsoft aggressive response
7. Piracy
8. Red Hat mostly stayed away
9. Canonical business model not working out
10. Original device manufacturer support

That being said, I'm all-in on Linux now. I can't imagine going back to the vendor lock-in provided by macOS, Windows, or Chrome OS.

Source: Christian F.K. Schaller