Being Free - why it matters

Hi all,

Ok, so the blogs about being free are done (last one) - I just want to add a few thoughts here before I throw myself on the blog about my earlier LinuxTag Flames. FYI this will probably be more controversial than that one, so brace yourself (or don't read if you don't like honest yet strong opinions).

This is related to some discussions on the web about the FSF, the FSFE, and pragmatism vs idealism. And prompted by Ben Martin's blog about Meritocracy.

Let me tell you my point up front: those who see a difference between pragmatism and idealism in FOSS are wrong.

Read on to figure out why I say that...

Basic assumption
We want as much Free Software as possible, right? Let's first look at why we want that:

• Because it is better for Freedom. "In a world where speech depends on software, Free Speech depends on Free Software." (Donald B. Marti Jr). Need I say more?


• It helps companies to be independent of a few large businesses, it is better for the economy. FOSS promotes a free market where everyone can choose from a series of vendors.


• It's good for second- and third world countries because they don't have to waste dollars on big US or European companies and they can learn from the code.

And I'm sure there are more reasons. So, our goal should be simple: spread as much Free Software as possible, and educate people about it. Firefox does great in this regard (at least as much as can be expected) by showing the why on their site and in the browser when you start it for the first time. Oh, and they do it this way: FIRST get them the software (free as in free beer), then try to educate them. Firefox has been very instrumental in me explaining what I do for KDE to completely IT ignorant people. I say, I am part of KDE. It's an international blablabla doing FOSS. FOSS? Yes, ever heard of open source, linux? Nope. Firefox? Yes, I know $friend using it. Ok, so that's developed by volunteers in their free time. They do that because they believe it helps make this world better. blablabla. Thank you Firefox!

Idealism vs Pragmatism

So where is this idealism vs pragmatism? Well, some people apparently dislike Ubuntu because it makes it easy to get non-free codecs. Or dislike openSUSE because it ships binary firmware. Or firefox because they make money thanks to Google. Well, screw that. Sure we must try to get such things to be opened up, but what end user is interested in those niche 'pure FOSS' distro's which barely run anywhere, can't play mp3's or can't visit Facebook, gmail and other popular sites?

Others are against making money with FOSS. Doesn't get any sillier. I'd rather have Novell make a deal with MS, letting our 'friends' from Redmond distribute SUSE licenses, than not have these customers at all. Sure such a deal has disadvantages and I don't know enough about the details to properly argue about it, but the basic principle I have no problem with. And there are plenty more examples more or less like this. Google's deal with Firefox. Ubuntu One. Darn, if BP sponsored me to do marketing for a year, fine, as long as they don't expect me to say to the world I think they're doing great in the Mexican Gulf ;-)

Idealism is going for the BIG WIN. Pragmatism is how you do it. They're two sides of the same coin. That's what I think.

It's about the world, stupid

I want *the world* to use Free Software, not 1% geeks. Commercial parties can play a huge role here, and I'm happy to let them experiment, stumble and fall, get back up and *spread the darn software* in the process. Because I believe in the end, it will work out. Take dual licensing. Is it evil? Hell no, in the end it turns out the 'free' version becomes so much better the model doesn't even work anymore... See MySQL, for example. In the end, money goes into improving Free Software, and the FOSS model ensures domination ;-)

Let me put one thing straight: I'm perfectly fine with those who hack on FOSS because IT IS FUN and don't care much about anything else. Power to you. I'm argueing with those who say they want everyone to be free and use FOSS but at the same time restrict people in what they can do!

Conclusion

So pragmatism vs idealism is wrong. You need pragmatism if you want your ideal world, and by only idealism you get - fairly litte. And the FSF has done plenty of pragmatic things, which is why they made a huge difference. The reason I mentioned them is that lately, some actions seem a bit too extreme to me... But there are ppl out there in 'our world' who are FAR more extreme, and hindering FOSS adoption that way. Either by opposing things, stopping others who're doing great, or just being negative and thus giving a bad impression to the outside world.

I admit, I might have went a bit over the top in the text above and there are probably plenty arguments to explain why some examples were wrong. And I admit, there are things you shouldn't be doing, there are boundaries. But in the end, it boils down to: do you want to spread Free Software everywhere, or are you just focusing on your own narrow group of fellow hackers?

I go for world domination. I want the vast majority of people on this planet to use Free Software, knowingly or not. What about you?

On Being Free pt 3

This is the second time I wrote this blog (wanted to publish before LinuxTag already) so I'll really try to keep it short. It is based on my talk on this subject at LinuxTag, which in turn was based on the earlier blogs about Being Free and discussions I had the night before the talk.

I'd like to refer to my earlier post where you can find links to earlier blogs.

Topics I'll go through:

• Good and Bad sides of Being Free


• 7 reasons why we're Free and What We Can Do


• The Challenge

The Good and the Bad

So the way our community works as I described in my previous blogs has good and bad sides. Good is that we're the most innovative and fastest growing FOSS desktop community, having a lot of fun developing truly Free Software. But there is Bad. I've touched on that in my flameworthy LinuxTag blog (and I will come back to that topic in a future blog). The way we develop software is often bad news for the end user experience, and makes it hard to work with companies. We don't have a strong single point of contact for them.

So in pretty bullets:
Good

• Lots of fun


• Much innovation


• New volunteers & large growth


• freedom

The bad

• Too little focus on end user experience


• Difficult cooperation with companies

7 Reasons & Actions

The question: can we improve our end user experience and work more closely with companies, while not losing the advantages of how we currently work? Let's move to the 7 reasons Why we're Free..

1. Strong focus on technology and cool things
We're a technically oriented community – in a discussion everybody is equal (assuming you're also willing to do the work). This is deeply embedded in how we in KDE think and work. This is something for our communication. Talk about this with each other. Every time you blog about a very cool thing you wrote or difficult problem you solved in an original way, you share our culture. So, blog! Even if it’s short!

2. Flat organization, little hierarchy
We don't really do 'bosses' and 'code monkeys' in KDE, and we shouldn't. New developers are coming in, paid to support come projects. They’re no different from us, so don’t treat them different!

3. Having a diverse ecosystem
Getting more companies with different business models involved in our community would be good. The increased interest in Qt thanks to Meego can help here, but we, as in the community and esp marketing people, should be working on this. And we are ;-)

We're pretty successful in reaching out to local contributors. I think we owe a great debt to some of our contributors who are very active in their local communities, getting people closer to the international community. But we need more reaching out - seen my series on who is KDE? Join that theme and bring outside contributions to the light!

This is something I'm working on behind the scenes, expect an announcement during Akademy.

4. The role of KDE e.V. is strictly supportive
The e.V. is our legal 'mother', supporting and protecting us in doing what we do. Officially, mommy has no say in what we do - in reality, most core contributors are a member of KDE e.V. and of course heavily influence development and the board sometimes does represent us to companies. However, that doesn't happen very often - the central role the Gnome Foundation plays is certainly not copied by KDE e.V. which has lost us (according to some ppl I spoke with) some potential important commercial contributions.

If a company asks the board: "We want to do this, will you accept the code which follows out of it?", and the board has to say "I dunno, ask $RandomBunchOfVolunteers", the company might go like "Yeah, right..." and move on.

So, should the board be more active in working with companies, approaching them, even? Personally, I think yes. But we should be very conscious of the risk of influence by the companies they work with. We're spending more and more money, the majority of which comes from big companies.

The Join the Game (supporting membership program helps make us less dependent on the big sponsors. A reason to join! Another thing is that we simply need to be aware of this issue and talk about it. Maybe we need to come up with some rules and agreements in this area.

5. Regular developer meetings - keep talking
The regular meetings our developers attend keep the community bonded together and increases cooperation with corporate contributors. So let's keep on doing this, the way we're doing it...

6. Meetings are funded by KDE e.V.
See 4 and 5. While I voiced some concerns, generally this is going great.

7. Having had to deal with Qt licensing - history helps
This reason for our 'being free' is very much a historical one, but one we can keep alive by talking about it and thus keeping it in our collective memory.

Conclusion

So in short, we should try and keep us free and independent by doing the following:

• Be Nice


• Reach out


• Share and talk

Moreover, we should think about how we've organized some things. Maybe we can improve the way e.V. works? We are already working on getting community support through the Supporting Membership program; we might want to do more to diversify where our money comes from and give the e.V. more power in talking to companies.

And of course I'm going...

Everybody is prancing around with their 'I'm going to Akademy' pretty pictures. I don't want to be left behind, so...


Edit: and thanks to our sponsors and the supporting members, I'm sponsored to go there - wouldn't be able to visit otherwise so thank you again!

Announcements at Akademy

If you're a participant of Akademy, speaker or not, and you have any news you want to announce @ akademy: please please give the promo people a heads-up! Either now (mail kde-promo, dot-editors or one of us privately) or come to the press room at Akademy. It will help us prepare it, and help you get a cool announcement out with good timing (eg not at the same time as another big announcement, for example).

Think about it!

Influence of Money

Part of my blogs about Being Free is talking about the influence of money on (volunteer) contributors.

This is something discussed by a lot of people, so I won't add to this discussion, but it's interesting for sure so I include a few links for those who want to read up on it. For me, it started with this blog about money and motivation by Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier and I initially followed a few links in there. A very early blog about the subject comes from the Gnome community (by Luis Villa) where this issue has been playing for some time. Stormy has also written a few excellent blogs about the subject. Stormy's opinions are worth following in general, and her experience in this area make for some insightful articles.

Let my give a quick summary here:
You can put money into development in 4 ways:

• Bounties (bad, often hurts motivation of others)


• Job (seems to work pretty well)


• Grants (works very well)


• Giving Shiny things (works very well)

Read on in this overview by Bruce Byfield from 2007, he painted a clear picture. For the latest insights, I'd say talk to Stormy...

KDE Promo is Cool :D

Hi all,

I just wanted to say thanks for the responses to my earlier blogs about helping KDE promo. Yes, there weren't a lot of comments on the blogs but I did receive quite a few mails and a couple of things were picked up by new contributors. Super cool! You'll see articles by them appear on the dot soon, and other things are also moving now. We've got a cool and growing team here at KDE-promo - if you want you can be a part of it!

At Akademy especially we'll need some help. We're still looking for someone who wants to make photo's dedicated for the dot articles. Which means shooting, selecting, retouching, and delivering by mail or USB in small and large size to the writers. Should be a fun job - so who feels like doing it? No, we don't require ANY special skills or camera - in earlier years pictures quickly made with my N95 made it to the dot for lack of better. So, really, ANYTHING is a step forward compared to nothing as we have now...

Oh and at Akademy during the e.V. meeting I will report on what the marketing team has been doing over the last year. I'll post that in a blog too, it's actually ready to go ;-)

grabin' them at a tradeshow

So our cool booth dudes and dudettes are regularly hard at work at booths on tradeshows, telling people about our great community.

I've been there many times, and there are a few thoughts I'd like to share. This isn't just meant as a how-to or a finished plan but also to start a discussion - we can improve in some area's and why not discuss it in public so anyone can weight in and add comments ;-)

So here a few insights from others and me since the last happening at Linuxtag:

• first of all, the booth must be clean. Either we 'work' at the booth, or sit/hack somewhere else.


• We must make sure we know what we're selling. We should have a list of selling points. The promo team is on this, and we'll distribute it to booth attendants once it's done!


• Reciprocity: giving something makes ppl want to give something back. If we want to get them to sign up for our supporting membership, having some give-aways is important. This is related to the booth box, also in the works. But we currently don't have many give aways, as funds are limited. Should we put money in this?


• Have pretty things at the booth. We should have one or more cool devices in our booth box which ppl will want to play with. Touch screens +1! However, again something which might be costly, so we should probably ask sponsors for things.


• Ask questions. Not only to figure out what people want or are interested in to find an angle to talk to them, but also because questions simply make people more open.


• Use examples: talk about successful KDE deployments, how we have millions of users and how we get a lot of positive feedback!

I could go into the evil psychological schemes behind the these things, but they're probably clear. So who knows other things we can and should improve on at the booth?