This weekend I’m lucky enough to be going to Michigan for Penguicon. There I will get to spend time with wonderful people like Cathy Raymond and Molly Sauter. Then, I will write [more] about them both.
This trip is for research, not for the delicious vegan ice cream I will be making.
Yesterday morning I was sitting at the table reading a Usenet group. As a kid, Usenet scared me. It was more involved than typing URLs into Netscape. There was a complicated, or seemingly complicated, system of not just finding Usenet groups, but navigating the connections between them and your connection. Plus, I was too scared to ask anyone for help. I didn’t want to look like an idiot, which I certainly felt like in asking things that people talked about as though they were basic. But somehow, recently, I ended up on a Usenet group. Subscribing and connecting to it proved to be so simple I hadn’t even realized its true nature until sometime after the fact. The conversation I was reading was about open internet.
Molly came into the kitchen. As I am one to do, I began talking to her about the conversation.
I told her about a part of the discussion where the idea of techie versus non-techie definitions came up. The implication being definitions of “open web” for tech people and those not in technical fields. She got angry.
“This dichotomy,” she said “is what created things like the iPad.”
She doesn’t like the iPad.
Molly has a complaint about culture around technology. Technology is divided into two categories: there is technology for techies and technology for non-techies. “So easy even your mom can use it,” she said. I think this divide is bad for several reasons, such as limiting the potential of someone to start batting for the other team, for example, but really it perpetuates an idea that technology is somehow magical.
Once we got past that we began talking about the history of the internet. It wasn’t created as this free open thing. It was created, in some way, by DARPA. Go DARPA! I love the internet, so I think it’s spiffy that they, in some small way, began networking computers together to share information. However, in the internet there’s been a tradition of change and innovation. Some people associated with universities began playing around on a fledgling, proto-version of the internet. It was open to people with computers and phone lines. Schools got computers and phone lines. Students were connected. Businesses. Libraries. Molly’s cell phone connects to the internet.
“The internet is for Westerners,” she said. “It’d be nice if it was for everyone.”
“But it isn’t,” we finished together.
This is a lot more personal than most of the posts so far–in the sense that it almost exclusively talks about me. Even worse, the other person present is also named Molly. I’ve traveled a bit. I talk about this a fair amount, but I just came back from being abroad for work. It’s hard to separate these experience from me because I feel as though they are fairly quintessential to who I am.
When I was living in Mongolia, I talked to a friend of mine actively involved in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project. He’d said to me that there was uncertainty about the effectiveness of the laptops outside of the population centers. About one third of the population there lives in the capital city. The average population density of Mongolia is around one person per square kilometer. In some places it’s less than half a person per square kilometer. The internet was not only not designed for a significant part of the Mongolian population, it’s completely out of their reach.
This is not just true from a functional level, but from a linguistic one as well. The internet, much like New York City, is divided into regions where people speak, predominantly, a single language. Sometimes these regions overlap in location, but the content rarely matches up. There are limits on interactions. The internet, as it stands now, is for Westerners. It is a medium that can connect the world–I know this firsthand claiming friendships in countries I’ve never visited–but it being able to do something and doing it are the same thing.
It’s a lot like the iPad. The Dev Team, a group of nerds who do these things, hacked an iPad. They changed the operating system. This may or may not directly violate the Terms of Service (TOS), meaning changing their iPad could have been illegal. Yes, they could change things–similarly to how on the internet some people can connect–but it’s not accessible. In some places you can get the internet, but not with the same accessibility we can in America (and other Western countries) by going to a library. Or San Francisco.
One of the struggles in defining open web is trying to have ideals and truth match up in language. It’s great to be able to say things like “The internet is a human right,” but it’s not. It’s a privilege. We can say it should be, but that’s not as catchy. Saying that it embodies the ideal of “one world, one internet” is possibly true, but sure leaves a lot of people out. What I see is a struggle to say, simply, “people have rights to access and expression, and the internet is the place to fully actualize these rights.” To me, that’s what open web is about. It’s about having a place to explore the joys, and experiences, certain freedoms give us. Being able to connect to the internet is a privilege, but what people do there is a right. I think opening up the internet, demysticizing how it works, ensuring and protecting the same first amendment rights that Americans have in the physical world, not limiting access, and not disclosing information about what people do on the internet is necessary.
Mashup – A literal mashing up of two or more songs to create a new song. D.J. Dangermouse released “The Grey Album” in 2004, a mashup of The White Album (The Beatles) and The Black Album (Jay-Z). Since then mashup artists and parties have formed a culture of their own mixing songs together, usually without approval of the copyright holders to those songs. Mashups are also known by other names, but “bootlegs” (and therefore “boots”) is all the rage in Europe.
Theresa sat on the couch. The couch was that kind of generic, complex multicolored pattern that soaks up stains and dirt. It was surprisingly comfortable–more comfortable than it had any right to be. She was on a laptop. A lappy, she called it. We were working, or try to get work done. That was the general state of our union, trying to get work done in some group capacity. There were often futile attempts to be in the same room together, working independently. It never worked out quite as well as we hoped.
I looked over at her screen. A cartoon penguin zoomed down a snow covered slope on his stomach. Theresa steered the penguin around objects. The penguin is known as “Tux,” the Linux mascot. She was playing “Tux Racer,” a freeware game. Anyone could, and still can, download it and play it.
Theresa explained to me once that she really liked Tux. That was just as good as liking Linux. At the time, she didn’t run Linux at all. Her boyfriend did. She just played Tux Racer. She was pretty good at it too.
I had a few facts wrong.
To quote Will “[the] machine was a 486SX/33, and it would’ve gotten Linuxified around 1997.”
My math estimates from seventh grade were full of failure.
The 482 Gardella had been given was not the best machine on the market in 1999. Windows 3.1 was cumbersome. It didn’t like to work in ways he wanted it to. Microsoft was moving forward. They already had Windows 95 and 98 out. Windows 2000 and ME were on the horizon. Machines like the 482 were being left behind simply because they couldn’t handle the newer, bigger operating systems.
Frustrated with the pressure, the amounts of computing power needed for Windows to run just Netscape, he did what people do when they have problems that really bother them: he sought a solution. Uncle Charlie had made noises about this Linux. Reading computer magazines and searching through stacks at the Yale Co-Op–an opportunity made available to a young Gardella by his father, a Yale alumnus who remained in New Haven–he had heard that Linux would not only work on his 482, but it would work better.
Pragmatism was not the only reasons driving this decision. All of his life, Gardella has had a contrarian nature–his words, not mine. Some teenagers respond to the awkward process when the body decides it’s time to become an adult by fitting in and striving to be like other people in the group. Some people take a certain pride in being different and rather try to do things that simply aren’t the same as everyone else–seemingly for the sake of this alone. Some people grow out of this stage. The most lucky among people find a way to just be how they are most comfortable. For some people, being the most comfortable means having an esoteric hobby, something particular and unique to be into in their own way. Gardella’s comfort zone whole heartedly encompasses things that allow him to be fidgety. He’s a fidgety kind of person. Linux can be a fidgety kind of system.
Running Linux started out as a way to set himself apart. It was a special hobby, a part of himself, that set him aside from his peers and bonded him with his family. It also worked. Now, running Linux has become a passion. It’s a special hobby that bonds him to his family and his peers. It also doesn’t always work.
Cathy Raymond is perhaps most well known in the FLOSS (extra “s” for software) for being the wife of Eric Raymond. In her own life, she is a lawyer, blogger, and all around geek. She switched her personal machine from Windows 3.1 to Red Hat, and spent some time after that doing community advocacy.
I met Will the first week of the slow beginning to my adult life. We sat next to one another in the university orchestra. We began to form an interactive friendship months later over the summer. We’d gotten to know one another before this in the modern fashion–over the internet. It was silly, really, he lived a building over from me. We could have had tea and chatted about how scared I was, and how scared he was, at this life we found ourselves in, but we rarely did. That summer we spent time together in a desperate attempt to have something real in lives choked by academia and interactions filtered through miles of cabling. That summer I also found out that he hated being called by his last name–a habit I quickly adopted.
He moved further into my life when he began dating Amanda, my roommate, after what most people would have considered a night of bad decisions. Our lives moved in an unplanned parallel over the next four years, structured by an occasionally inter-dependent group of friends. During this time Gardella and I became inexorably close. I don’t even remember when I first learned about his computer, how I began to hear about his Uncle Charlie, or realizing that he was the modern interpretation of an old school hacker. I don’t remember when his youth and baby fat melted into a leaner face and a distinguished paunch. I don’t remember when he transitioned from an intellectual wild child into someone who could look respectable as long as he remembered to shave.
I remember very few firsts about Gardella: his first date with Amanda, his first semester of law school. His first trip to Russia. I remember the blurring whirl of the life I’ve had with him in it as a large picture that, only upon pausing, I can pick out anything but sporadic, specific moments of no special import. Watching him put his clarinet together. The way his shoulders move when he laughs against a green screen series of backgrounds. Him hungover. The excitement brightening his face with a conspiratorial light as he announced something wonderful, and potentially horrible, he purchased. Him, sick, sitting on the floor of someone’s apartment that first summer, sweat staining his shirt and his hands at his sides, limp and impotent, as all he could say was “Sorry” repeatedly while people cleaned up the vomit that had risen from him unbidden by alcohol.
I remember stories about Gardella’s Uncle Charlie.
Uncle Charlie is Gardella’s uncle in every way but blood. He was a man among men. He built things. He fidgeted with electronics the way some people do with the strings hanging down from the hood of a sweatshirt. He gave Gardella what became his first computer. This isn’t to say there wasn’t a computer around before, but the 486 33MHz was Gardella’s.
In seventh grade he dual booted–running Red Hat 4.2 with the help of a book from the Yale Co-op.
This meant several things to him: he could run Netscape without fear of it breaking the machine while he did something else. The internet opened in its late 20th Century form to the seventh grader. Beyond that, he didn’t just have a computer. It wasn’t just a tool for him to fight with. His machine became a partner, something that he could work with. He could look at the parts that made it go and begin to understand them and how they fit together. He could change these parts to better suit what he needed. He could be aware of what was really going on as he connected himself to the world, on his own, for the first time.
He wasn’t just given a computer by his Uncle Charlie. He was given a revolution.
Signal Boost: The Blog is what you’re reading now. My intention with it is to use the blog to produce loads of content, far more content than I actually intend to put into the book. I will trim this content and pick pieces of it to form a cohesive narrative. In order to achieve this I will likely be changing what I’ve already written and add more.
Because of this, the styles used will likely change throughout the blog. I greatly appreciate any feedback.
Did you see the otter episode of South Park? I don’t remember the actual name, but it was the episode with the otters in it. Intelligent, talking otters. In it, Richard Dawkins had spread atheism and rationality to such an extent that in the future there was no religion at all. There was a war between two factions of humanity and the intelligent, talking otters. The war was over what the name for the atheist group should be.
FLOSS is a bit like the compromise they couldn’t reach in the South Park episode.
In 1986, the term “free software” first appeared. Richard M. Stallman used it in the first GNU’s Bulletin.(1) He went on to specify:
The word “free” in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.
“Open Source” was coined nearly a decade later in 1998.(2) They wanted to create a new image for what they were doing, free from the history associated with “Free Software.” They believed the term “open source” would “sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated [the creation of] Netscape”(2) as well as address any confusion about whether the “free” in “free software” referred to beer or speech–that is to say whether it was about cost or liberty.(3)
However, this has proven to not just be a matter of nomenclature. Both schools of thought have provided extensive and specific definitions of their respective term. These definitions include licenses that fall under their name. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) sums it up:
The term “open source” software is used by some people to mean more or less the same category as free software. It is not exactly the same class of software: they accept some licenses that we consider too restrictive, and there are free software licenses they have not accepted. However, the differences in extension of the category are small: nearly all free software is open source, and nearly all open source software is free.(4)
Free Software and Open Source Software are like the Baldwins. There are things that can be used to differentiate one from the other, but you can’t always tell what they are unless you know what you’re looking for. Some things are Free, some things are Open Source, and some things are both. Largely, the groups differ on philosophical grounds, preferring associations with ideas like freedom and concepts like openness.
“Libre” was later offered as another term. The word is related to libere, the Latin root from which words like “liberty” also descend. It was meant to offer an alternative to the ambiguity of “free,” specifically referring to the freedom rather than the lack of cost. I can’t find anything to cite here, but the term was coined because of its relation to languages like French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
FLOSS was used as a compromise by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh in 2001. The term was adopted by the European Commission in some official documentation starting in 2001.(5) “FLOSS” is becoming the preferred term among academics, people not invested in either side of the nomenclature debate, and people who generally don’t want to offend anyone. While “Free” and “Open Source”–and to some extent “Free/Libre”–come from different philosophical backgrounds and do have slight, but important, differences in licensing, they are the same in overall message and mission.
But, this isn’t just about software. I use the term “FLOSX,” pronounced “floss-IX” to mean “Free/Libre/Open Source X.” X is a standard variable, like you used back in algebra class (or still use today in countless other ways.) FLOSX–which will inevitably become “flosx” at some point–refers to anything that is free/libre/open source. It can be about art, culture, hardware, software, or anything else. FLOSX is about a set of ideals and practical methods for creation and distribution applicable to anything you’re passionate about.
(1) Stallman, R.M.. “What is the Free Software Foundation?” GNU’s Bulletin. 1(1) February, 1986.
(2) Open Source Initiative. “The History of OSI”
(3) Raymond, E.R.. “Goodbye, ‘free software’; hello, ‘open source’”. February, 1998.
(4) Free Software Foundation. “Categories of Free and Non-Free Software” GNU Project. April, 2010.
(5) European Comission. “Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study” June, 2001.