The Zero Room

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.