Bon sans nom

Once upon a time there was a farmer called Johnson. He lived in Iowa and was cropping grain. Every year he brought his best grain to the year market downtown. He participated in a contest “who has the best grain”, and every year Johnson won. Every year the other contestants asked how he managed to crop grain of such a high quality. And every year he told the other farmers exactly how he had done it: How he cultivated the field, how he composted, and when he harvested. The farmers eagerly noted everything down he said and the next year they did exactly as Johnson told.

Once a neighbor asked whether he was not afraid of losing, because he told his secrets every year. Johnson replied: when the grain of my neighbors will raise in quality, my fields are circled with high-quality grain, which will take care of the pollination of my crops. In that way my harvest gets better every year.

This work is in the Public Domain.

The first thing you learn when taking a course in software design is this:

You’re never done developing a computer program

This is a huge contrast with business-models in which we’ll produce hammers: we’ll need a metal bar and a wooden stick; and once you finished designing the production process, on which you will probably want to take a patent because you want to benefit from your great invention, you will have perfect products which do not ask for modification. In this model patents stimulate the quest for better solutions.

The Ones We Don’t Mention (from now on: TOWDM) copy this model to this digital environment, but instead of stimulating improvement they are slowing it down to minimum speed. Patent trolls appear: companies who’s only goal is to register new patents and to sue anyone who’s infringing them.

geekandpoke.typepad.com - CC BY-ND

It becomes a major problem when those companies’ only interest is to sell more copies of their product. They will try to create monopolies through closing down standards, implementing their own closed protocols, closing their source code, patenting their frameworks, … This only leads to bogus software which will require the end-user to pay another sum of money to fix a small problem.

What if the head of our hammer fell off? Right! We’ll glue it on! What if there’s an error in closed proprietary software? You’re not allowed to fix it and should wait for an update which can take for ever, or you’d better buy a newer version.

Verbapuces

My father is a famous (at least, that’s what he claims) linguist which has done, and is still doing, very interesting research on computer assisted language learning (CALL). Our Saturday morning chats mostly consist of discussions on how to make even better software designs and coffee. One of his first projects was a program on which people could study French verbs: verbapuces. This program, released 20 years ago, was a big hit, and it was the best software for studying verbs ever. I’m 20 years old, and when I was 12 I studied my verbs using verbapuces. Verbapuces was written in pascal, and it was written so it could fit on one of those large wobbly floppy discs (sure you remember those, but you probably don’t remember them containing 3000 different verb conjugations). I’m not exaggerating: A quick google query returned this forum in which this topic asks in 2009 how to copy verbapuces diskettes from 1995 onto a usb-stick to use the software on the train. This probably won’t work, since the program is written for MS DOS, not longer supported by MS.

http://geekandpoke.typepad.com - CC BY-ND

What has become of verbapuces? The source has never been released (even I never had a glance at it) and this timeless piece of software (equally timeless as emacs/linuxkernel) is gone. No-one will ever be able to use the software he was using in his youth. Do you call this technological innovation?

.NET

I’m afraid the same destiny awaits any .NET application you write. The patented .NET framework is constantly changing to be able to bring new products which could sell more copies of the latest version of visual studios. It is not portable to any other upcoming operating systems you would want to develop for.

There have been attempts to port the .NET framework to other operating systems by implementing the .NET specification: eg mono by novell which is ‘protected’ by microsoft’s community promise. Although microsoft seems to do a great deal for the communities driven software world here it is not a big gift at all. Why would we trust a devil’s promise? They have sued tomtom for implementing FAT in the linux kernel in the end. And… If you read the ‘promise’ a little deeper you’ll notice only the basic packages are protected, but the more advanced packages someone might need are left ‘sueable’.

I do not want to sound disrespectful towards my parents. I look up to my father and when he talks about software design I try to be attentive as possible. He’s the best at finding incredible effective solutions for questions that sound incredibly simple. He taught me programming is much more than typing code into a computer. On the contrary, programming in the open source way is only 10% coding, and 90% thinking without implementing it on modern/old technologies.

Although I’m your son and I’m programmed to disagree with you, you’re right: a software design should be made without thinking about technology at first, but please, don’t make your software depend on patented software.  1% of that 10% consists of choosing which technology you’re going to use and which developing model you’re going to apply. This choice cannot be overrated and it makes the difference between a timeless product and a product that will survive for 2 years.

-Pieter — follow me on identi.ca

Persistent middlemen

Back in the old days, when the Internet was only among a very few companies, making music for a large audience was not easy. There were a lot of steps to go through before you finally could have your song on an LP, and each of those steps cost a lot of money. The listener on the other hand had only a few options how he could enjoy music: he could go to a concert, listen to the radio or buy an LP. Obviously, to make things more easy for both the listener and the artist, middlemen were needed. These middlemen had the right amount of money, had the right contacts and they had the noble goal to make life easier for both listener and artist.

http://robmyers.org/weblog/2009/12/14/ - Remix of Rob Myer's slides

Nowadays, things got quite different: sharing music on-line is easy, recording music does not require highly advanced technology anymore, recording has become quite affordable, etc. However, sharing music got this funny name ‘piracy’, given by companies who once were the middlemen with the noble goal to protect consumer and artist. Instead of those protectors they became the consumer’s worst enemy: we can no longer share files with our friends, because sharing became theft, and artist tend only to get a very low percent of their music’s gain. With pitiable words, these middlemen nowadays try to keep doing the same as they were doing in those days.

To those relentless speeches on piracy however, I say «amen». Because that’s what you say when a prayer comes to its end. It’s a reckless effort to keep this business in copyrights alive.

You know, at one time there must have been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now, how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company?
Other people’s money, DeVito’s speech

steal_this_comic.png - xkcd.com

Free culture (as in freedom)

Today I can say with almost no doubt that you agree with my opinion on free culture, since you are already living it. You listen to some music and when you like it you might want to buy a CD, get to attend a concert, or share the music with other friends. I stand for all those things, except, I want to legalize it in a very nifty way. Artists have to realize these middlemen nowadays cause more problems than anyone else. Get rid of these guys who say your fans cannot listen to your music unless they pay. Fans want to promote your music and want to put it on their site without having copyright claims, they want to play it on their birthday-party without being scumbags since they’re promoting your music.

Yes, you got it right, I do not want you to change whatever you were doing. I only want you to realize this can be legal and can exist without all these uncertainties. If you’re an artist then please read about the creative commons licenses. They allow you to make free culture, as in freedom, the freedom to experience your art in any way.

-Pieter – follow me on identi.ca

–sidenote

A lot of artist are already using free culture licenses on their music. Check out jamendo.com, http://creativecommons.org/audio/, CC mixter, The Archive

I got 4 main reasons why I do not use you and I will try to explain these quite thoroughly.

1. Personal reasons

I don’t like the idea that my entire social life should revolve around the Internet. Some things I do are only known by my best friends and this is the way it should be. I’m not very complicated, neither do I have a lot of secrets, but getting birthday cards because someone cares is so much more romantic than because facebook said so.

By xkcd.com

2. Ethical reasons

If the previous reason, which I think is not sufficient for persistently rejecting facebook, would not be applicable to you, there are some ethical reasons. Privacy is a human right and a company who’s changing its privacy policy at least once in two weeks is violating those. If anyone knows what facebook’s privacy policy is today (not tomorrow/yesterday), please let me know.

You can’t step out whenever you’d like to. Your data is saved and any attempt to delete your data will be fought. (eg. Web 2.0 suicide machine got blocked)

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I had this discussion with Drew Roberts and Rob Myers about the NC creative commons flag.
You can find the CC BY-NC-SA license here

Why people (shouldn’t) use NC

• They think they might get more money out of their project, which in most cases is not true. (eg. Sita sings the blues)
• The permission culture looks attractive, but it only restricts fans to do what they like. This is a freedom-violation.
• A more problematic point of view: when you use NC to ensure only you can make money with it, you’re technically creating a monopoly on what you created. You certainly have the right to do so, yet I think, like in each case of a monopoly, this leads to bad products, and mad customers for any of your commercial attempts.

More reasons not to use NC you can find here

Why it isn’t that bad after all

You may want to protect your art against capitalistic influences if you’re a fan of «l’art pour l’art». I think the freedom to choose whether your art should never be used for profit equals the freedom to choose whether your art should be shared alike or not, if that involves you don’t use it for commercial purposes yourself.

Simplified version of how I see these licenses. Blue: culture Red: software

This being said I think the NC is a very dubious way of being good for free culture. You still keep the right to use your work in bad ways, … and who says your heirs think alike?

Better alternative?
A better alternative, and still free enough in my opinion, would a NP-flag: no profit. To ensure the artist’s purpose is not to create a monopoly, the NP-flag should automatically drop the moment the artist uses it for profit.

- Pieter
Follow me on identi.ca: @pietercolpaert

Hello Blogosphere,

Some years months ago I thought blogging was something old people did to cherish their last moments of comprehensibility. Nowadays I think little different, but the beauty about blogging is no one has to read what you write.

Nevertheless there are several reasons why I wanted to create a blog. First of all I was afraid of losing my comprehensibility. Not because I’m aging, but because on new year’s eve my best friends wondered why I disliked using microsoft, DRM’ed content, etc. Awaiting my condemnation to the center of all spot, while I eagerly insisted not to bring on such subjects on happy events like these, someone noticed I’m not having any coca-cola products neither. Quickly I become the one that hates multinationals and does not like money (which I’m not (just to be clear)).

Since I’m writing this in a foreign language I might not have intended this to be a for-friends’-eyes-only-blog. Since I use my identi.ca/pietercolpaert account quite regularly, I will use this blog to clarify things that are left unsaid in the 140 character limit.

Finally, I had some thought that needed publishing and I hope these will get here soon enough.

-Pieter
follow me on identi.ca – @pietercolpaert

yet another blogosphere virtualisation