The Zero Room

I suspect there is a rich seam of jokes to be mined here.

Richard Stallman "recently" (don't you hate it when people don't attach a date to material posted on the Web?) delivered one of his regular talks,"Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks", to the University of Waterloo in Canada, who have put the video of the event online. Richard is an inspiring individual; one of only two people on Earth I'd count as a hero. Despite having heard recordings of earlier renditions of this talk, I would still have dashed out of the house to change the world immediately after watching this, were it not for the fact it was around 1am and I was not dressed for world-changing.

Also highly recommended is the video of Eben Moglen, of the Software Freedom Law Centre, talking about "The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3" in June this year. Anybody who's bandwidth-impaired can get copies of these (they are appropriately licenced for free redistribution, of course) from me at the next Club Linux meeting.

While addressing the question of "how to get started in Linux", Andrew Cowie offers this graph, which I think is bang on the money, of ease of installation versus ease of subsequent upgrading for a number of popular free operating systems. (Ease of upgrading is not considered so important in non-free operating systems since users of these systems routinely wipe their hard drives and reinstall from scratch every six to twelve months to rid their computers of bloat and malware.) For a very long time these two qualities were present in any one OS in inverse proportion, so it's hardly surprising that any system that bucks this unwritten law should receive a lot of attention.

Long ago, I used to read a magazine (no longer in print; a victory of the Web over dead tree publication) which carried Matt Groening's "Life in Hell" comic strip. At the end of each year, it was customary (I don't know if it still is) for Matt to list the "Forbidden Words" for the following year; terms relating to the fads, scandals, cause celebres, and all the cringe-inducing cliches of the previous twelve months.

Carrying on this tradition (good artists copy, great artists steal, bloggers carry on traditions), here's my provocatively heretical list for 2007, with accompanying ranting. Add your own in the comments.

• "Commercial" Software
• "Ready for the Desktop"
• Eric Raymond
• Open Source
• Linux
  

Linux.com has reviewed the new releases from Mandriva and Ubuntu, both generally favourably. Mandriva's package management system(s) still appear to be letting it down, and Ubuntu "Edgy" disappoints for it's lack of "edginess". If you've used either, leave your impressions in the comments below.

LinuxForums has published yet another review of the options for Windows refugees. Highlights include a comparison table featuring minimum and recommended system requirements for four GNU/Linux distributions plus two proprietary operating systems (I nearly choked on my muesli reading the stats for Vista), and a pleasing absence of the misleading generalisations, ignorance, and FUD-repeated-as-fact that one often finds in these sorts of articles.

At Software Freedom Day, Hugh mentioned the burgeoning art form of machinima, and I played an example of a music mashup. Well, here's a machinima mashup (try saying that after a few shandies), combining Monty Python's "How Not to be Seen" sketch with the first-person shooter game, "Halo", to humorous effect.

Even the mainstream media is waking up to the fact that proprietary software is no longer viable. While it's far from true that all contributers to GNU/Linux are "working for no pay", it is amazing to see something like this printed in the Guardian:

"The Vista saga has two interesting lessons for the computer business. It raises, for example, the question of whether this way of producing software products of this complexity has reached its natural limit. Microsoft is an extremely rich, resourceful company - and yet the task of creating and shipping Vista stretched it to breaking point. A lesser company would have buckled under the strain. And yet while Microsoft engineers were trudging through their death march, the open source community shipped a series of major upgrades to the Linux operating system. How can hackers, scattered across the globe, working for no pay, linked only by the net and shared values, apparently outperform the smartest software company on the planet?

"Microsofties retort that Vista is much more complex than Linux. But it's not the whole story. It could be that purely networked enterprises like the Linux project are actually a better way of producing very complex products, much as Toyota's 'lean' production system is the best way of making cars."

This article made it to the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald's website. Not immune to the usual journalistic inaccuracies, of course. (The GIMP doesn't need to be "sourced and downloaded individually" - it's included in the default install in Ubuntu, which was the distro cited in the article, and even if it wasn't it would just be a matter of selecting it from a list and clicking on "OK" .)

In the wake of their very successful Defective By Design campaign, the Free Software foundation will soon be launching a new campaign to "deliver its message about ethical software to social activists outside the technical communities".

I've met a lot of people in political, community, and even church (!) groups who are quite openly proud of their ability to deploy cracks and warez for their organisation, and are strongly opposed to having to learn how to use the GIMP rather than using a cracked version of Photoshop. Given that these people are prepared to devote an enormous amount of time and effort volunteering for the causes they believe in, this attitude doesn't seem to stem from a lack of concern for ethical issues, but a lack of awareness of the ethical issues surrounding software.