J5’s Blog

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• Identi.ca is a twitter like service that is licensed under the AGPL - [my ident.ca micro blog]

Reading the comments in Zeeshan Ali’s blog make me a bit sad that the issue of giving credit was somehow brushed aside instead of fomenting a good debate on the nature of credit within our communities.  I would have to agree that Zeeshan’s post was a bit polarizing and in any polarized situation people tend to retreat to their corners and bend their arguments around the space they feel they need to defend.  For the sake of academics let’s take it from a different angle and examine the nature of credit in GNOME.

Being that no license that is used by GNOME has an attribution clause (besides having to keep copyright notices intact) is it legal not to give attribution in a document which references a licensed work?

Perfectly legal.  It has been noted that there are attribution licenses but only one is accepted by the OSI and none are compatible with the GPL or its derivatives.

What about ethical, especially if the author has requested it?

This one is up for debate.  If the author has not legally bound you to do so it is correct that it could be needlessly burdensome to list out every contributor in every press release.  This is the number one reason why attribution licenses are frowned upon.  However it behooves an entity to point out and acknowledge the contributions of others, a topic I will go into later.  It is utterly unethical to claim credit for others work or use language that implies such.

Why is credit important then if things can be taken and used legally without attribution?

Like it or not, everyone has their own reasons for contributing to the Open Source ecosystem (shockingly we are a diverse bunch).  Far from being the vestige of communism that many people tried to paint the Free Software and Open Source movements in the early days, the ecosystem is a true free market.  Remember the free in Free Software is about freedom not price.  The price paid for people releasing their code into the wild increasingly these days has been money but is still overwhelmingly supported by code being contributed back, recognition from peers and credit for the time spent not doing something else.  To push aside giving people credit for that work that they have done runs the risk that they will not contribute in the future.  Credit is the grease that allow our cogs to spin freely.  Karl’s contribution to some may seem small but if it wasn’t him would anyone else step up to the to do the same things?

So if putting every author of every package on a press release is prohibitively expensive what should we be doing?

Language and attitude are key here, especially in public.  If an author feels they aren’t getting enough credit it is something to look into.  Words should spell out what has come from the hard work of external contributors, because if after all we are willing to praise ourselves for our own contributions then acknowledging that we stand on the shoulders of giants shouldn’t be a burden.  Blogs and talks are excellent places to give credit.  The kernel talks often do this very well even though they can’t list out every contributor, and I recently saw an animation of the development of python that excellently visualized all of the contributors over a period of time.

Credit where, credit is due.  It is an important part of our culture.  Without it the ecosystem breaks down and that is a large price to pay for not saying thank you. Viva La Upstream!!!

Piling on to Colin’s post:

If you knew what I needed to do already why didn’t you just do it?  Just popping up the dialog that I now have to go searching for would have been somewhat passable.  Besides Jython is not even usable right now so just assume I want my system python.  That is just plain laziness and the reason why I keep trying eclipse and then thinking better of it a couple of minutes later.

To be fair I hear it is a great app but I can’t get past the UI.  It gets in my way.  The run dialog alone has forever traumatized me.  Let’s see if the bugzilla plugin will allow me to file this bug or I will be back with another ranty update. I’m going to try to give eclipse a longer benefit of the doubt but if I run into much more of this it’s going to take a lot of people telling me it has since gotten better, before I try again.

I feel I owe this blog post to Chris being that I’ve been cited as one of the catalysts for some in the GNOME community aligning themselves with WebKit.  Not that I think that is bad that there is competition in the browser market (competition is one thing but a line in the sand is just counterproductive here) but my original intent was merely to ask what are our priorities and what projects would align closer to those priorities.

In any case it was reported on Slashdot that according to an article at Dot Net Perls, Firefox is now one of the most efficient browsers when it comes to memory usage.  This meshes with the internal tests Mozilla was doing and Chris blogged about.  It was one of my main gripes with Firefox when using the XULRunner and Gecko engine as the basis for an embedded browser.  At the time I was a bit nonplussed as the work that was being done to make Firefox better revolved around blaming and removing important libraries instead of fixing the root causes.

If the data is to be believed (and be transferable to Linux as the tests were run on Windows) then it does point to significant improvements in Firefox and I thank the Mozilla community for listening and dealing with the issues head on.  Software is hard and we shouldn’t turn our backs on a friend of the Linux community even when they might not be walking lock step with us.  The flip side is Mozilla does need to be concious of the needs of downstream developers and not use its market position as bludgeon to get its way. To that end there are still the issues of a stable embedded API and better platform integration. I hear those are being worked on so hopefully it won’t be an issue going forward.

Again I would like to thank the Mozilla community for putting out a great browser that is a serious competitor with Internet Explorer. I would also like to thank the Mozilla Foundation for helping fund accessibility work in GNOME. By working with each other instead of butting heads, as happens every once in awhile, the ecosystem grows and benefits both communities.

Fudcon is great but when I like to unwind I go to the American Craft Beer Fest. Right now I’m getting ready for the beer and food pairing seminar. Like wine, beer is very versatile as an ingredient (if you have ever had a beer can roasted chicken you would understand). In any case we are about to start
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In other related news Gravity of Debian X fame was here. Great minds think alike and Linux hacker’s minds often think of beer.

Update

I tried to sneak off with the cutting board the food for the tasting was served on but to my dismay they let us just take them. Way to take the thrill out of the equation. I was however happy enough to get a high quality cutting board with the phrase “Here’s to BEER” branded on the top, and here is the proof:

I’m at the Red Hat Summit and FUDCon listening to Joel Cohen’s keynote. If his name doesn’t ring a bell, he is the associate producer of the Simpsons. What does this have to do with Linux? Scenes from the Simpsons are actually rendered on Red Hat Linux before being approved and going the more traditional, and expensive route of hand drawing the cells. It is a cool example of how technology and specifically Linux can streamline traditional work flows.

Well it has happened.  Bryan left yesterday and Chris is out on the cape doing his national guard duties.  I think he gets back here for a couple of days and then hitches up his trailer and heads down to Charlotte. It was only about seven months ago when I was in Italy for a friend’s wedding and got a call from Bryan asking if my lease was coming up and if I would like to move in. I might not have picked up but as chance had it I had just gotten back from an fun yet exhausting day of touring and was itching to hear from someone back home. To make a long story short I moved in in February and haven’t looked back since.

It has only been four or so months since I moved in but in many ways it has been life changing. When the new roommates move in, Nate in July and Aaron in August, hopefully we will keep up the social atmosphere. Sometime this summer a fourth roommate will also join the fray as I search for a dog to adopt. I really do miss having Moose around blocking my view of the TV, farting for attention or giving the I’m sorry eyes when knocking down tables, hitting the eject button on the PS3 while we are playing or generally being mischievous. He did leave me something to remember him by though - a pulled back muscle from carrying his fifty pound body up the stairs when I had to go to work but he wanted to stay outside. You so crazy Moose.

Me: So I’m thinking about going back to school.

Bryan: Don’t do that, you are throwing your money away.  I think you learn so much more by reading books, talking to others and actually doing.  Why do you really want to go back to school?

Me: You know I think you may be right.  I learned programming mostly on my own.  I’ll have to think about it more and get back to you.

… a couple of days pass …

Me: I know why I want to  go back to school, so I am surrounded by like minded people who come from different backgrounds so they approach problems from different angles.  I want to have this constant debate so I am challenged to find the underlying reasons for my own decisions and actions.

Bryan: Hmmm, that is a good answer.  You should do it.

As many may already know, Bryan Clark is leaving for Vancouver to join the Thunderbird Team while learning how to properly say “ay” to piss off the locals. Chris Hartz our other roommate also got an awesome job down in Charlotte protecting our freedoms from behind a desk using an occasional paper clip. Hey those paper clips can be dangerous. They will be vacating this Thursday.

I’m going to miss the constant friendly debates we had which allowed the ability to flesh out my own arguments and understand and examine my beliefs more fully. I hope they took something similar from the experience.

Disclaimer: While yes, I am looking at going back to school, most likely for some buisness/operational type of degree with an engineering background (is it weird to get excited about process efficiency?), that is a year away and will most likely be part time. I don’t intend to leave Red Hat or the work I do for the larger FOSS community if I can help it.

Well it seems my service provider, 1&1 has finally got the server with my content back up.  It was quite frustrating because they never contacted me and when I contacted them the standard response was, it is a known issue and we have no further explanation. To make things worse they never sent me to a page to check on status or e-mailed me with updates unless I asked. I found out my site was up again by simply checking it every morning. It boggles the mind and makes me think they had some accident and didn’t want to fess up to it. Four days without an explanation is unacceptable.

However, in the four years I have been with them this is the first major hiccup but now they are on notice. If it happens again I may need to take my business elsewhere.

Well perhaps not but I am taking off this weekend to a place I have been in spitting distance of but have never crossed the border. I find it strange that I have been all around the world and to almost every state in America and still have not bothered to visit our kind neighbours to the north. So with my roommates Bryan and Chris leaving this summer for far off jobs we decided to take a trip with a bunch of friends up to Montreal. I went down to NY last weekend for mothers day and to swap my car for my parents van just for this trip. It should be fun.

Oh and Les Halles, Anthony Bourdain’s home base, is fantastic. If you are down in New York City and in midtown I highly recommend it