Good discussions about copyright control

Over at The Digitalist blog there is a very good discussion about eBook DRM. Cory is excellent as usual but the highlight must be Clay Shirky's quote:

You say “I’m a strong believer in the rights of creative artists to control the distribution of their copyrighted content.” Sure, why not? And while we’re at it, we can be strong believers in breathing under water, or living to 130. Those ideas are similar to the idea of controlling distribution, in that there are a whole bunch of people who think they would be really really great. They’re all similar in another way too. Can you guess what it is?

EuroPython 2009 - What happened?

Last week I attended EuroPython 2009 in Birmingham, both as a speaker and as an attendee. This post won't reflect on my talks (one was not good, one was actually very good, I might do more posting about that later) but rather something interesting that I observed during the conference this year.

EuroPython have always been a very nerdy conference, no surprise there, so it struck me as very odd that several talks and seminars this year didn't include that much technology at all! They talked about politics and freedom.

First out was Cory Doctorows keynote "The Copyright Wars" which I unfortunately missed, but Reinout van Rees have a excellent summary here. Hopefully the audio recording of that keynote will posted soon. It does bring up a very important point about the future of open source software in a world controlled by paranoid content makers.

During the lightning talks (which was hugely entertaining at whole) two talks had the topic of politics.

First out was Holger Krekel who talked about the internet and how the information about us could be used for mass surveillance and the need to do something about it. He touched on the very recent problems we have seen in Iran, how the state has been filtering the access to the internet. Holger went on and suggested that there are two ways to attack the problem.

The first involves political activism ("We know it works, because we stopped the software patents"), he mentioned the Pirate Party (which makes me very happy) and that he considered joining it (Holger: You are very very welcome!). We need to start talking to the politicians and convince them that internet needs to be free!

The second option for people that have a more technical approach to things (almost everyone at the conference!) is the need for new technologies that can't be filtered as easy as a centralized system for passing messages. Holger encouraged people to develop other ways to distribute information and getting around filtering equipment. My colleague and me was very inspired by this and started to scribble some notes on how a system like that would look like. I might blog about this later.

All in all I really liked Holgers lightning talk, it was very inspirational and well delivered, thank you.

The second lightning speaker that had politics as a topic was Jacob Hallen. Jacob strikes me as a very soft spoken and timid man (I actually talked to him right before his speech), which is why his talk really surprised me. He delivered a very passionate (improvised?) speech about how big content are using methods that are really scary and he drew a direct parallel to "men in high boots, abducting people in the middle of the night". Thanks Jacob, it was inspiring!

For me it was very inspiring to hear this types of talks and speeches in a area so technology heavy (nerdy?), because this means that we are many that cares. Now we need to transform that care into action!

Not really a secret

I have already voted for Piratpartiet in the Swedish EU elections. For people who know me that can hardly come as a surprise. I just wanted to briefly talk about why I went with PP instead of MP (that I usually vote for), when they actually have the same opinions about integrity and the future of Internet. I think it can be summed up in: I wanted to make a statement. There you have it. I want people in "power" to understand that it's not OK to ignore these questions (internet, freedom, integrity), it's not OK to push through new laws (FRA, IPRED) without consequences.

I might be naive, thinking that voting for PP is a "consequence" for the sitting parties. At least it seems like most politicians seems to understand that they have to tackle this question these days, that's a start.

Let's keep internet FREE, as in speech.

Apple: Be more transparent!

Apple is a very secrative organization, they value their secrecy because it builds up a hype around the products. I love Apple products, I am what most people call a Apple fan-boy. But I think recent events regarding the App Store aproval process must be addressed in a negative fashion.

I love the fact that Apple have created great development tools for the iPhone and they have done so for free. This have given the iPhone eco-system a great boost and in less than a year they have succeeded in creating a development community that it’s competitors haven’t succeeded with yet.

I really believe that the App Store is a big reason for the success, all applications gathered and easy to browse / search. But the App Store is also the big sign of weakness in the iPhone eco-system. As you might already know, Apple is the gatekeeper for everything going into the App Store to make sure that “malicious” and “offensive” applications stay far away from the iPhone. While this makes sense (you don’t want viruses spreading via the App Store) in some ways the big problem is actually that Apple have so far refused to share any details on the approval process.

This creates big problems, not only because it’s hard for developers to know if their application will ultimately be accepted or not, but also because currently it seems like the process is very random, some of them have gotten a lot of attention. The latest application that have gotten the metaphorical cold hand was Nine Inch Nail own application. The application was actually first accepted (and put on the “featured” page in App Store), when NIN then submitted a minor update it was rejected because of “objectionable content”.

Probably this occurred because different people reviewed the first submission and the update. This really makes the flaw in the process really apparent, the developer can never trust the Apple approval process. If this continues I wouldn’t be surprised if small indie developers think twice before they start develop iPhone applications and that would really be a shame, because it will in the long run kill the community.

I think that Apple have to be more transparent, really post the guidelines that are used for the approval process or even better, small developers should be able to “test drive” their idea and get a pre-aproval. That would make it easier for the small developer to justify the investment they need to do to create a iPhone application.

Maybe another solution would be to “do a Maemo”. Maemo have a staging area called the “garage” where third party developers can upload basically anything they want, users needs to manually install them. This would allow Apple to review applications for the App Store, but applications that are deemed “offensive” can still be installed on willing users iPhones.

Please Apple, don’t destroy a good thing you have going on here, a free SDK was a great idea, the App Store was a super idea as well but your approval process can throw it all overboard. Be transparent, let the developers in on the secrets in this case.

Open Source is about Participation

As I have talked about earlier I am holding an education for company management about Open Source Communities. Since I can't release the slides directly I am going to blog a bit about what these slides contain.

One of the things I am trying to get across the table is that getting involved in a Open Source Community as a company is hard work and often counter-intuitive to old business practices. To illustrate this I have created some case studies about companies that have tried to involve them-self in the community and the different outcomes of that. In my examples I use Nokia, Apple, Google and Sun as examples (and some more of them), all these companies are interacting with the Open Source community in different ways. All of these companies have both succeeded and failed with their interactions (I won't comment on the individual cases in this blog post, but I am still interested in your feedback, what do you think about the companies listed above and do you have other examples of companies failing or succeeding with Open Source?).

While I was researching these different companies (most of my research was based on google searches like "opensource at X") I ran across Sun's Open Source webpage, this page states that 'Open Source is about Participation'. I think that is one of the most accurate one-liners about Open Source I have ever heard. In order to be able to accepted and successful with a Open Source Community you must show that you can participate, create code and work together with the community with it rules.

I think very few Open Source Communities would accept companies that tries to 'buy' their way into gaining influence over a certain project. But companies that can send relevant, well written patches that implements a feature or fixes a bug in a project they are using can succeed. Many nerds just care about code and that is the way it should be.

Interacting with a Open Source Community is not like interacting with business partner, few communities will implement features that they don't like just because your company needs it. Many community volunteers have a lot of pride invested in their projects and will place code-style and technical aspects before the needs of their end-users. This is very different from how a company works, because companies needs to see to the user needs before the technical aspects of the actual code (this might actually explain why most proprietary code is such a mess - "We need this now, or else!").

This means that companies have to care about things like this when they are contributing to Open Source projects, otherwise they might never get their patches merged.

So to sum up, if you want to gain the trust of a Open Source Community, participate and show them the code!

Open Source Community Eduaction

Purple Scout was contracted to do a Open Source Education a while back. The customer wanted a education that gave them the history, business and legal aspects, but they also wanted a section with some "real life" stories, from someone that have worked in a Open Source community already. While both my bosses handled the business and legal aspects I tackled the community section.

After almost a month of preparation, we held the pilot in front of a smaller group today. I was a bit nervous at the start but managed to hold a very engaging talk about the different inner workings of a community and a generalization of what drives open source hackers. It was a fun and interactive group that I managed to provoke a couple of times :-)

I would love to share the slides I did, but unfortunately they contain some information that I can't spread, therefore I will try to blog a bit about the conclusions that I managed to draw from all of this.

Also a question: What do you people think is the driving factor for participating in open source communities as a company, i.e. not for you personally, but what would drive your company to work with open source?

Sony Reader PRS-700

I got myself a Sony Reader PRS-700 the other day. Imported from the USA of course, since we can't get fancy things like that here in Europe. Actually I am evaluating this unit for some friends and co-workers so they know what Reader to buy later.

So far I must say that I am impressed. I have been using it on my weekly trips back and forth to Malmö and more or less left all my books at home. The built-in light is pretty slick, I can actually read books in bed without disturbing my lovely fiance.

A word about the display, a lot of people hate it because it "glares", my guess is that these are the same people that "can't" use a glossy macbook either. I on the other hand have never had any problems with it. So I will continue to read my books digital going forward, no more big books that weigh a ton in my backpack.