Photo by Adam Fagen of Display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History - http://www.flickr.com/photos/afagen/3155132290/

Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker this week: “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” is a really compelling read, and a nice antidote to technological determinism in our understanding of social meda (the idea that the new technologies shape behavior and determine outcomes rather than interacting with behavior and both shaping and being shaped by the interaction) but ultimately I think he gets it wrong. Gladwell represents networks of weak ties as an absence of organization incapable of achieving meaningful change, and mistakes what has been done via Twitter and Facebook for all that social media and free/open source approaches could be capable of.

Gladwell’s piece centers on two key arguments. First, he debunks the notion of “twitter revolutions” in Iran and Moldova, noting that in both cases the view from the West at best greatly exaggerated the role of social media if not created it out of whole cloth:

As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution . . . . In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation.

The second, more central argument is that:

there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Gladwell demonstrates this by contrasting the lunch-counter sit-ins and voter registration drives of the US civil rights movement of the 1960s with the opening anecdote of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, in which a woman’s lost sidekick is located and returned via social media. Where real activism combines intense ideological commitment and strong ties (this is what drives the civil rights movement), the new faux social media activism relies on networks and weak ties. Participation is high in social media activism specifically because so little is asked of those participating:

Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. . . . Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Or as he more memorably puts it in his concluding salvo:

A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.

But is that all that networked, weak-tie oriented worlds are good at? Gladwell doesn’t mention the key concept of the Coasean ceiling and Coasean floor, or Shirky’s other examples (the lay Catholic organization Voice of the Faithful for example), other than to mention Wikipedia as a successful example of what weak networks are good for:

Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

Which, of course, is more or less what Shirky argues about it as well – though with more nuance about wikipedia’s existing control structures. (It’s far from a free for all, as anyone who’s followed the arguments between inclusionists and deletionists or has had a page edit reverted knows). It would be interesting to see what Gladwell would make of Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks, or Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, both of which take a less “popularizing” approach to understanding the key shifts embodied in free software and open source modes of production.

Ultimately I’d say Gladwell mistakes new forms of organization for a complete lack of organization. In trying to define the differences between true activist groups who ferment revolution (high degree of ideological fervor and strong ties) versus faux activism online (weak ties, no significant commitment), Gladwell makes the following comment almost as an aside:

There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

Leaving aside for the moment the OSCar project and it’s attempt to design/build an open source car, has Gladwell never heard of Linux, or other free software projects on which large numbers of people collaborate quite effectively and in a self-organizing fashion?

It seems to me that there are many clear coherent design principles in Linux, and that the network of participants – while not organized in a traditional corporate hierarchy – does have a centralized leadership structure and lines of authority. Without knocking the insights of Raymond’s Cathedral and the Bazaar, a less hierarchical organizational framework doesn’t mean no organizational framework. Open Source projects have project leads, committers, associations, and all kinds of other organizing mechanisms.

Further, take a look at an organization like the Debian project (organizational structure). They not only have the core organizational structure to keep the project moving, but a quite rigorous new maintainers process which essentially brings those new maintainers into the culture and clarifies the ideological commitments inherent in the community. Just because online ties don’t resemble the strong ties of the past doesn’t mean they are all weak ties. (See Gabriella Coleman‘s wonderful work on ethics in the Debian community).

Contrast Debian with some large traditional, national charitable organizations where the great majority of those involved are really just voting with their annual donation, but have no real insight into the activities of the organization as a whole. Ultimately, what Gladwell fails to see is what importance the new tools – of which Twitter and Facebook are just the most media-celebrated examples – might have for activists who do understand activism. The tools won’t make committed activists out of the uninterested, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t transform the activism of the committed as well over time.

Is it possible to use social media tools as Gladwell describes, to get high participation rates by asking little of the participants? Of course it is. But it’s also possible to use these tools (and others like Status.net, CrabGrass, Drupal, WordPress, etc) to combine together people with high degrees of ideological fervor and a compelling mixture of strong ties and weak ties.

In other words, weak activism (renew your annual membership in the large national organization whose goals you vaguely agree with,, or sign a petition expressing your dislike of something) co-existed with strong activism before the advent of the Internet, and will continue to do so despite it. The more interesting question is what will strong activism groups be able to do more effectively now than they could before.

When strongly committed activists with strong ties to each other are supported and maintained via networks of weak ties and new forms of organization made possible by global scale internet-powered interaction we may well yet see what activism 2.0 looks like.

Atwood argues that:

when you buy a new Mac, you’re buying a giant hardware dongle that allows you to run OS X software.

and that:

When the dongle– or, if you prefer, the “Apple Mac”– is present, OS X and Apple software runs. It’s a remarkably pretty, well-designed machine, to be sure. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s also one hell of a dongle.

I’m a Free Software Foundation member, and a big supporter of Free and Open Source Software. But I’m also a Mac user. More accurately, I use – at various points and for various projects – Windows XP, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux – typically Ubuntu. But I recently switched back to Mac OS as my primary environment, on a new MacBook Pro.

So is it that I don’t care about Freedom Zero?

Not at all. I think Freedom Zero is important – in fact, using Mac OS and VMWare Fusion lets me run all three operating systems named above on the same machine, and that’s part of what attracts me to it. I refuse to buy songs from the iTunes store because they contain and encourage DRM (and hide the urls for podcasts to make it difficult to switch podcatchers), and run Rockbox on my iPod.

But Atwood’s right, that in switching to a MacBook Pro I’m supporting (indirectly, since it is really an Optaros laptop I get to use) proprietary development models, paying Apple Inc. for software I don’t get source code to, can’t run on my other machines, and can’t (legally) modify even for my own use.

But the combination of Apple’s user experience smarts and a BSD core, which lets me run X11 apps from the GNU/Linux world, is seductively attractive, and I can run the GIMP and NeoOffice (based on Open Office) and Firefox and Miro, and do PHP/MySQL development.

It’s a weird kind of lock in – I can bring virtually anything in (running many open source apps and frameworks in OS X directly, or worst case running them in virtualization) but there are some things I can’t take out (the proprietary Apple bits, other third party software).

Any piece of software I might write (yeah, like I’ve got time these days to create a software application) or contribute to (that may be possible) can retain Freedom Zero – I wouldn’t necessarily want to create or contribute something that only other Mac OS X users could run.

So, to get to the point, does the increasing popularity (at least perceived – look around at the crowd next time you’re at a *camp or an open source conference) of the Mac as a hardware platform reflect a general lack of concern over Freedom Zero, even among groups of developers who are otherwise insistent about freedom in the FSF sense?

This means I can turn on internet sharing on the phone and get online from my laptop while on the Acela between NY and Boston, without the tether cable.

I’ve got a Dell Latitude D810, running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, and a cheap IOGear USB Bluetooth adapter, model #GBU221.

The “bluetooth” package in the Ubuntu universe repository is a metapackage which installs the “bluez” utilities – I have that installed as well.

All I had to do to get online via Bluetooth connection was:

1. Start bluetooth on the blackjack, since I don’t normally leave it running
2. Start internet connection sharing on the blackjack
3. On the laptop, do: hcitool scan (this looks for nearby bluetooth devices – note the address of your phone, which is a hexidecimal string like 12:34:56:78:90:ab)
4. Issue the command: sudo pand -c
   
   , using the address discovered above
5. Issue the command: sudo dhclient bnep0

Of course, once you know your phone’s address you can skip step 3.

I also tried the various instructions for tethering to USB and using the Gnome PPP application, but for me this would connect and automatically disconnect. Bluetooth’s preferrable for me anyway as that way I have one less cable to carry.

I’ve left a brief comment there, but wanted to expand on it here. This isn’t just a question of two different approaches to delivering Internet TV – it’s a fundamental difference of passive consumption versus active participation.

The fundamental difference between Joost and Miro is seen in these two quotes.

From the Joost FAQ, section on “Content Related Questions, ” the question is “Can I upload my own videos?“:

Not at the moment. Right now, we’re concentrating on high-quality TV content from well-known TV brands, so that we can provide entertainment to the widest possible audience. Future versions of Joost may allow you to upload your own material, but we have no immediate plans for this.

As opposed to, on the GetMiro site, the entire first-level tab called create, where one reads:

How do I get my Videos on Miro?

Miro converts any media RSS feed into a channel. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of RSS — it’s an open distribution format that works with Miro, iTunes, and lots of other tools. Many blogs and video sharing services automatically generate an RSS feed. Once you have a feed that works in Miro (please test it first!), you can submit it to the Miro Guide.

With pointers to the Make Internet TV site, where you’ll find:

We have created a detailed set of guides for shooting, editing, publishing, and promoting internet video. We think it’s the best resource anywhere. If you are getting started with creating internet video or if you want to learn more about a specific topic, it’s the best place to start.

To me, this is the clear difference between Internet TV imagined as something brought to you by “well-known TV brands” (turning the internet into TV) versus Internet TV imagined as something inherently participatory (turning TV into the internet).

It shouldn’t be hard to tell which one runs on my machine(s).

Help spread the word:

The opening session was Wednesday afternoon with Mark Driver : Gartner’s Open Source Scenario for 2007: Risks and Rewards for Mainstream IT.

This was the session which led to this Network World article and corresponding Slashdot flame-fest. But both missed what I thought was a perfectly rational set of statements:

1. that commercial software vendors cannot ignore open source as a disruptive innovation
2. that commercial software vendors are increasingly incorporating open source in a non-trivial fashion, and
3. that this trend will continue to deepen over the next four years.

Driver walked through some basic definitions and argued that we’re in a Third-Wave of Open Source reactions from Corporate IT: whereas many people in Enterprise IT departments first reacted to open source with some mixture of indifference and irrational emotion (that is both pro and con), the current phase is one characterized by “realism” – which will lead ultimately to “leverage.”

I suppose one could argue it is because of the company I keep, but I’d argue a large number of commercial enterprises passed realism and have been enjoying leverage for some time – but otherwise I think the model is accurate enough in describing the process many organizations go through in learning about open source.

One interesting point Driver made was that open source tends to create “Investment Protection” where proprietary software creates / ensures Intellectual Property protection. In the open source world, the investment the user or adopting organization makes gets preserved, because there is real vendor independence. In the commercial world there is real protection for the investments of the producing organization.

In addition Driver showed Gartner research which demonstrated that many organizations are using open source in “mission-critical” applications – that the percentage of open source software used in a mission critical application was almost the same as the percentage of internally developed or commercially purchased (non-OSS) software used in mission critical applications.

Driver argued that the adoption prioties are changing as open source moves further into the adoption curve and becomes more maintstream or is adopted b more conservative adopters. Where earlier adopters (“technology aggressive adopters”) focused on open source because it provided flexibility and independence, later adopters will be more focused on cost savings and risk mitigation. (All four motivators are important to both audiences – in Driver’s argument it is just their relative priority which changes).

Driver talked about the possibility of an increasing bifurcation within the open source community between “community class open source” projects versus “business class open source” – differentiated not some much by their features or specific license but by the goals, aims, and cultures of project governance. For conservative adopters whose focus is cost and risk avoidance, community class open source may not be a viable option, whereas for technology aggressive adopters the business class open source may be too slow moving or non-innovative. Additionally, he described the emergence of “gated source” options, which lie somewhere between the open source and proprietary models,

Driver listed four factors enterprises should consider in planning open source adoption:

• Fitness of Purpose (does the software do what you need it to do, well)
• Maturity (is the software project well governed, and capable of reliably producing quality?)
• Your technology adoption profile (is your organization an early, mainstream, or late adopter of new innovations?)
• Deployment scenario (how will the app be used, in the context of the organization’s mission? Is it mission critical?)

He closed by noting that “ignoring open source is not a viable option” and that the days of “skunk works” adoption are over. Enterprises should be planning adoption strategies, just as they have corporate management strategies around procuring commercial / proprietary / closed source software.

—

Unfortunately, given the overlap of the Web Innovation and Open Source summits I didn’t get to attend Nikos Drakos‘ session on “Open Source in the Workplace: What it Promises and What it Delivers,” but based on the ppt from the session I think I would have enjoyed it . He covered the growth of open source outside the “infrastructure and development tools” categories – into areas like content management, collaboration, and customer-facing communications. He also went into the leverage of open source collaboration principles in other contexts – perfect lead up to Yochai Benkler’s Keynote on Thursday.

Luckily, despite some overlapping sessions, the keynote by Yochai Benkler was shared across summits and I was able to attend.

If you’re not familiar with Prof. Benkler, you should be. His book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is the treatise on /study of commons-based peer production. (It’s available in many formats including free versions under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution Share-Alike License).

He’s also the author of “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in which he argues that:

while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

What follows are my rough outline notes of his talk. Benkler’s the kind of speaker where the notes or even the slides don’t do justice to seeing him speak – but at least I’ve got some of the highlights and examples down.

Benkler:

We now live in a world in which:

• The most important inputs into the world’s core economic activities are widely distributed (the ability for globally distributed populations to create information and culture)
• Behaviors once on the periphery of economic concern are moving to the core (social relationships, friendships, concerns about decency and fairness)

Example: The Encyclopedia – used to be thousands of dollars to get a 24 volume set of bound encyclopedias. That pressure drove the price of the Brittanica down to $500 in 1989. That was then followed by Encarta for $59.95 in 2000. Finally, wikipedia which is free.

Benkler mentioned the Nature study on the quality of Wikipedia entries, and Britannica’s response (PDF) to it. (Nature‘s since responded to the Britannica objections).

The reality is that most hands on practicing scientists felt both were equally lousy. (Never ask a deep expert to evaluate a paragraph level summary of a complex topic – they always find it lacking). But that this was even a serious question to be tacked – that Wikipedia could be said by a reasonable person as potentially comparable in quality to Brianicca – is Benkler’s point.

“Information Production” is now the critical economic activity – at the same time that our ways of producing information are shifting to commons based production.

Benkler outlined a number of concepts (and drew distinctions between them) related to Commons Based Production:

1. Peer Production
2. Shared Resource Utilization (things like SETI @Home
3. Free/Open Source Software

Examples included (I added links):

• The search for Steve Fossett
• Craters outlined by volunteers for NASA
• The BBC Help Us Make News
• Threadless
• Learning to Love You More
• Kaitura
• Porkbusters and the Secret Holder
• The Sunlight Foundation Earmark Map
• Black Box Voting and the campaign to decertify certain electronic voting machines
• Media Volunteer (as I’m writing this their site seems to be down – asking for authentication for public pages)
• Cambia BioForge

This is really a new kind of production in that it is not market driven and it is not centralized. We’ve had market-driven, decentralized production (standard firms in the US), we’ve had market-driven, centralized production (large corporations), we’ve had non-market, centralized production (governments and NGOs, non-profits). What we have not had is non-market, decentralized production. (This echoes Clary Shirky’s assertions about Perl being an act of love).

Benkler showed a typology of different ways peer production works, in terms of the types of inputs people are asked to make and the types of organizational strategies they use, as well as the kinds of motivations (extrinsic and intrinsic) driving them. The more creativity and knowledge necessary in the types of contributions people are asked to make, the more you have to move to a many to many type collective form of organization. The major examples here are things like Google and Digg, where the effort required by the user is low (making links on the web means helping Google’s algorithm but you don’t think of it that way, digging something is a single click activity); on the other hand Free/Open Source Software requires much more complex structures. (Not sure if he’s overestimating the “volunteer” nature of open source here given the number of developers on may open source projects who are employed and do this contribution as part of their job).

The key question isn’t whether peer production is a fad – it clearly is here to stay – but how it operates and how we can design to encourage the right kinds of collaboration.

Too much of the theories of cooperation has classically depended on “rational self-interest” but newer explorations in a number of fields (sociology, economics, psychology, evolutionary biology) has started to move beyond that.

Benkler’s argument is that people respond in ways which are not always or first self-interested: people resond in ways which are predictably cooperative under certain conditions:

• Communication
• Humanization
• Trust Construction
• Explicit Norm Creation
• Monitoring / Peer Review / Discipline
• Transparency in Governance
• Fairness (in context – concepts of fairness vary widely)
• Self-Selection (as opposed to assignment to tasks)
• Group Identiity and Investment
• Leadership (older sibling style, not parent)

Benkler made a great point about being wary of introducing extrinstic motivators (ie, money) in systems which have been driven by intrinsic motivators. For example, systems which try to introduce shared ad revenue in the user-contributed-video context may alienate existing users who were motivated by other factors. You try to match love with money and some folks end up not wanting the money and no longer wanting to work for love.

Benkler closed with some of the political impacts of social production – ways in which social production is changing the political reality of people all over the world and ways in which industries, governments, and corporations threatened by social production have tried to push back – the DCMA, Trusted Systems, etc. (Unfortunately by this point he was trying to wrap up very quickly and I didn’t get a good list from his last few slides).

Because Benkler’s operating at a high level of abstraction – thinking about the impacts of peer production at a global and historical scale – it can be hard sometimes to connect his concepts to what companies are trying to do in the “Web 2.0″ space – but his elaborations should help us understand the real fundamental shifts underlying what otherwise might look like a “fad.”

Unfortunately, no such luck (cue the “No soup for you!” clip from Seinfeld):

Was the problem that I was running Firefox rather then Netscape (Netscape? Really?), or that I was running Linux?

I clicked through, to find:

My SHC Community currently supports the following operating systems and browsers:
Operating Systems:

• Windows 2000
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista

Browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 and higher
• Netscape 7.0 and higher
• AOL 5.0 and higher
• Firefox 1.0 and higher

If your browser or operating system is not supported by My SHC Community, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

In this day and age, no Mac support, no Linux support? Why?

Is there some elaborate MS Silverlight functionality in this community? Some kind of Adobe AIR based application to install?

I assume there’s just some overzealous javascript useragent detection at work here, but won’t know until I find time to boot up my Windows virtual machine and check it out on IE on Windows XP. (You can actually click around on the site, but I don’t see anyone to join the community without the right brower user-agent. I suppose it might be faster to just spoof my user-agent, I know I used to have a plugin for firefox which would make it pretend to be on Windows).

Then I’ll likely never go back. Welcome to community!

Hoping to avoid significant “I can’t get to that file now” problems, and not wanting to try out read/write mount of NTFS+ in Linux, I took a multi-partition approach, breaking up the hard drive thusly:

1. ext3 format, onto which Ubuntu is installed
2. ntfs format, onto which Windows XP is installed
3. vfat (aka Fat32) format, as a shared partition accessible from Windows or Linux
4. small linux swap partition, ignored by windows

This was great, as it enabled me to put things like firefox profiles on the shared drive, and then whether I booted Windows or Kubuntu I ended up with the same set of bookmarks, cookies, and the like.

It also meant all my “documents” (client folders, project folders, and so on) went to the shared partition. (In windows I mapped “My Documents” to point to what it sees as the E: drive, and in Linux mapped the mounted drive to /media/shared/).

Since then, however, I’ve decided that rather than dual booting I should move windows into a virtualization container, and run Windows XP inside VMWare Player without having to reboot.

(Experienced virtualization users at this point have likely already anticipated the problem).

Using a number of online guides (see here and here – the latter was more useful for my case), I was able to get WindowsXP booting inside VMWare using the existing WindowsXP installation on the NTFS partition. Very nice. That triggers, unfortunately, a bunch of windows activation hooey, but you can eliminate that as well.

Now, to the problem. When Windows boots inside VMWare, it mounts the E: drive. Problem is that partition is also already mounted in Linux. Now we have two different operating systems, both of which are potentially reading and writing to a single VFAT / FAT32 partition, and neither of which “knows” about the other’s access. Surely a recipe for trouble.

So what are my options?

Here are some I’ve considered – let me know if there are others:

1. Make windows forget that the VFAT partition exists. Not sure how to effectively do this – won’t windows keep trying to “discover” the drive and assign it a drive letter when it boots up?
2. Trigger (via script) unmounting of the VFAT partition in Linux whenever the Windows VMWare player is booted. That way Linux would let go of the partition while I’m using windows, and I could then remount it when I close the VM.
3. Backup the partition and reformat it as ext3. Windows will now ignore it, and I can enable a samba share on the linux side which the Windows OS inside the VM will see as a network share and access appropriately.

This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)

The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.

Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:

• Getting Involved with WordPress, by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith
• Kicking Ass Content Connections, with Lorelle VanFossen
• Blogs vs. Journalism, with John Dvorak and Om Malik
• Blogs at the New York Times, with Jeremy Zilar
• Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing, with Dave Winer
• State of the Word, with Matt Mullenweg

Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”

Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.

(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)

Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.

As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule – there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.

Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.

Head over to GetMiro and download the Public Preview 1 (v. 0.9.8) release.

Miro is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and pre-packaged for a number of Linux distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, with Debian and Gentoo coming soon) as well as source code for the true DIY.

Miro lets you:

• Play virtually any video file, across different platforms
• Download and play full screen, high definition video
• Subscribe to video podcasts, video blogs, any rss feed with enclosures
• Locate new video content using the Miro channel guide
• Download videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Video and others
• Download BitTorrent videos and watch them in the same application

Miro’s based on the Mozilla XULRunner framework, and is an excellent example of cross-platform, non-proprietary alternative approach to taking Internet-based applications beyond the browser context, without losing the open, standards based approach that made the web successful in the first place.

Tapscott

Happy to be here. Flew in late last night – but hey, sleep is overrated.

I totally believe there are fundamential shifts underway: from closed hierarchy to the open networked enterprise.

(Which is from my 1992 book – paradigm shift).

We started, in response to some of my debates with Nick Carr, a syndicated project: “Winning with the Enterprise 2.0″ – one of the summary reports has been made available on the enterprise 2.0 conference site.

Four drivers for change:

1. Web 2.0
2. The Net Generation
3. The Social Revolution
4. The Economic Revolution

Old web was html, new web is xml.

Kids who have grown up net enabled – see Growing up Digital – it isn’t even technology to them, it is like air. Baby boom echo. Instead of a generation gap we have a generation lap.

World Conference of IT panel last year – video at www.newparadigm.com.

Four startling new principles for running a company:

1. Peering
2. Being Open
3. Sharing
4. Acting Globally

What are the new business models for future:

1. Peer pioneers – Linux, MySQL, but also in financial services
2. Ideagoras – like Innocentive Network
3. Prosumers
4. The New Alexandrians: The Sharing of Science
5. Open Platforms and APIs
6. The Global Plant Floor (Mass Collaboration)
7. The Wiki Workplace

Final thought: This is a paradigm shift.

Paradigm shifts are almost always recieved with coolness if not worse. Those with vested interests will fight change. The shift demands such a different view of things that established leaders are often last to be won over.
(Marilyn Ferguson?)

• Put users into plug-in hell.
• Create Web ghettos.
• Don’t provide accessibility.
• Make search a pain.

It’s a great beginning to a real debate about the place of technologies like Silverlight that many others have been fawning over.

He doesn’t mention one that I would add:

• Require users to accept closed, proprietary software. You can have a completely Free/Libre experience of using the web, until you hit Flash / Silverlight content, which cannot be accessed in a pure open stack, and may never be ported to Linux (Flash Player has finally been ported to Linux – no word on Silverlight).

My only nit to pick is that Apollo’s really not the target here so much as Flash itself is – Apollo’s really about extending web apps (which can be in Flash or Ajax) to the desktop. (The media loves an opportunity to put Adobe up against Microsoft – and painting Silverlight as going up against Flash would require acknowledging how long Flash has been in use).

That said, similar criticisms can be extended, since Apollo only deepens the distinction between those who have it and those who don’t, and extends the life of Flash as a web-delivery mechanism.

This week, add Microsoft’s Silverlight 1.1 and Dynamic Languages Runtime to the mix alongside Adobe’s Flex SDK.

Jeff Gould argues that open source has “jumped the shark,” and that:

the magical words “open source” have come to function as the software equivalent of carbon offsets. . . . some software vendors are cleverer than others, and have learned to buy indulgences for their sinful profit-craving ways by selectively building open source components into their stack. . . . Their own software remains every bit as proprietary as the Microsoft products they compete with.

Interestingly, his argument comes the same day that Microsoft announces the Dynamic Language Runtime at MIX 07.

The DLR will enable developers to code .NET applications in Python, Ruby and other dynamic languages to come (alongside JavaScript and VisualBasic) in addition to C# and VB.NET.

Adding in Silverlight 1.1, which will be a browser plug-in, this means that “developers building browser-based applications can now use their preferred language even for client-side code.”

How does this relate to Gould’s argument? The DLR, along with IronPython and IronRuby, will be made available under the Microsoft Permissive License, which they characterize as their “BSD-style” license. (For now code is available as part of IronPython ).

What isn’t clear is what this will mean in terms of deploying applications. Silverlight so far has only been described as “cross-platform” – and a specific version of cross-platform at that. As Gavin Clarke notes in his reporting from MIX 07:

. . . while Silverlight works in Safari, Firefox, and Mac versions 10.4.8 or higher on PowerPC and Intel in addition to Internet Explorer and Windows, support for Linux and Opera – to name just two other popular alternatives – is missing, with little prospect of support coming from Microsoft

In other words, you can develop with whatever dynamic languages you like, so long as you are working on a .NET platform. You can even deploy those dynamic language applications to browsers, so long as it is IE or Firefox on windows or Safari for Mac OS X, and using the Silverlight 1.1 plugin, which itself may or may not be open source.

(Elizabeth Montalbana at IDG says here that “Microsoft will release the source code to part of its Silverlight technology at MIX 07 this week,” but the Silverlight site merely says “Microsoft will make the Silverlight browser plug-in freely available for all supported platforms.” It looks to me like some of the DLR will be under the Microsoft Permissive License, but not the Silverlight plug-in itself).

This resembles / echoes Adobe’s recent move to open source parts of the Flex SDK, and portions of the ActionScript interpreter used in the Flash plug-in, but without opening the key portions of Flex (Flex Data Services, for example) and without opening the Flash player itself. (As well as not open sourcing Apollo, though they have promised Linux support at some future date).

While I think it will be interesting for .NET based developers who want the ability to flex their Ruby or Python skills on the platform on which they arleady develop, I don’t see any vast migration of open source developers into the Redmond camp, any more than I see Adobe’s gestures in the direction of open source moving those accustomed to open source ajax frameworks and libraries.

In fact, perhaps this becomes a way to expose even more .NET developers to joys of Ruby on Rails, Slingshot and Django.

Related posts:

• Talking Ruby and Dynamic Language Support with John Lam (Video, at Port25)
• Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Support (video, at Port 25)
• Mix ’07′s Sleeper Announcement: Cross-platform CLR
• Silverlight Glow Dimmed by Cross Platform Concerns
• Mix 07, Silverlight, Dynamic Language Runtime, and Open Source (Miguel de Icaza)
• Microsoft Adds Open-Source Twist to Silverlight
• A conversation with John Lam (Jon Udell) points out that the DRL-based Ruby can’t run Rails
• At Mix07, is Microsoft bottom-trolling for developers with weak knees?
• Silly Season – wonderful rant at Dive Into Mark about Silverlight and Apollo

or, tired of rebooting into windows just to upload photos?

I just discovered kflickr – it’s in the Ubuntu repository for Edgy. (Looks like it is in Dapper and Feisty as well)

(At a terminal, sudo apt-get install kflickr, or use aptitude and look for it by name)

Very nice. Take a look later today or tomorrow for some Zurich photos from today and yesterday.

This April 26th, Jim Getty’s will be speaking (at MIT) on “How We Built the OLPC (the $100 laptop for 3rd world children)”

It’s a joint meeting of the Computer Society and the GBC/ACM.

He says:

The ability to design hardware knowing that the software can be modified as needed is liberating.

It isn’t – as the “insidious tight coupling” article makes clear, the author is referring to “the situation where one module depends on another module having some special state, or set of string literals, but where the compiler doesn’t know.”

But it’s an easy mistake – after all, more than a few folks are convinced that something quite insidious is driving the recent agreements between the Redmond software giant and Novell, related to the SUSE Linux platform.

Michael Swaine, in the cover article “Microsoft Loves Linux: What’s With That?” points to the increasing important of virtualization, and specifically the Xen Hypervisor, which was added to SUSE Linux back in November, and argues that “Microsoft wants more than just to play in this market – it wants to control it, and that requires astute technological and legal strategy.”

Swaine plays out some of the conspiracy theories but ultimately doesn’t settle on any particular interpretation, other than to point out Microsoft obviously feels the threat of Linux, and feels that one way or another this deal helps them in that engaging that threat.

Swaine also points out that “both the Oracle move and the Microsoft-Novell deal increase the legitimacy of Linux” – but if this is what it takes to be legitimized, perhaps it would be better to stay under the radar . . .

The first was related to my Dell Lattitude D810′s touchpad – an Alps Glide touchpad. Ever since the upgrade it has been fundamentally unusable, moving the cursor so slowly I’d have to drag across the trackpad itself two dozen times to get the cursor halfway across the screen.

The second was related to using XGL and Beryl – hitting the keyboard combination Shift-Backspace would terminate and restart XGL, making me lose whatever unsaved work I had in that session. (I never knew how many times I hit Shift-Backspace until this).

Fixing the touchpad was ultimately a matter of downgrading the synaptics driver back to the version from the Dapper Drake repository. Based on this forum posting, I was able to locate the .deb file here (i386 version), and install the 0.14.3 version over the 0.14.6 version that is current for Edgy.

Not sure how the problem got introduced, or if it is a bug in the driver itself or elsewhere, but I know that as soon as I got 0.14.3 installed all returned to working order. Your mileage may vary. (It may be that if I futzed with my xorg.conf enough, I could get it working with the 0.14.6 version – but for now I’m happy just to revert to 0.14.3).
Fixing XGL was also relatively simple. Turns out to be a fairly common user complaint, as a google search of “shift backspace crashes XGL” shows you.

Adding this line:

xmodmap /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.us

To my /usr/bin/startxgl.sh (and restarting) was all it took. (The startxgl.sh, as the name suggests, is the script which starts xgl, as specified in /usr/share/xsessions/xgl.desktop, which I created when I installed Beryl and XGL). I put it before the calls to XGL itself. This maps shift-backspace away from terminate app to delete, which is a sensible enough action for that key combo.

Nice to finally have (K)ubuntu back to it’s normal self – hopefully this post will help others who hit these same hiccups.

Configuring your desktop (right click on the desktop and choose “Configure Desktop … ” or go to the K-Menu -> System Settings -> Desktop) gives you the option (in the behavior pane, under the Device Icons tab) to show device icons for various kinds of devices, mounted and unmounted.

Because I like having my mounted drives on the desktop, I went in a checked “Mounted Hard Disk Volume” to get my hard drive partitions (windows, shared, and Linux root) to show up.

That works, but they show up with names like “39 GB Media” and “9 GB Media.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember volumes by their size, and kept having to open and close volumes to know what they were.

But, I found a simple workaround, which works without having to think about disk labels and whether the partitions are ext3, NTFS, or FAT32.

Rather than using the “Configure Desktop” method to show device icons for mounted drives, I just used the “Create New Link to Device” command (right click on desktop again, and choose “Create New … -> Link to Device -> Hard Disk Device”). You can edit, on the “General” tab of the resulting window, the name which will be displayed, and choose the Device in the device tab. You’ll need to know what device you’re after, but you can see both mount point and device when you choose. For example, in my case it shows: /dev/sda6 (/media/shared).

You get basically the same effect, but with the ability to edit the name to something meaningul.

The screen cap shows the mounted volumes in the column on the right, and the device links in the column on the left.

I have to say I’m very impressed. While it has been more than a couple of years since I’ve set up a dual boot system (I used to dual boot Yellow Dog Linux and Mac OS on early PPC Macs, then OpenBSD and Windows on intel), so it isn’t really fair for me to compare my Ubuntu experience with other distros, this was a fairly simple install, once I got past an initial partitioning scare.

My first step was to adjust the partitions on the laptop’s 60GB drive to make room for a linux boot partition, a swap partition, and a shared data partition. My first attempt, using the partition editing portion of the Ubuntu installer (from the Ubuntu Live DVD) resulted in disaster: the installer failed to resize the NTFS partition appropriately, leaving not enough room for the Linux boot (ext3) and swap partitions, and thus dying mid-install.

This lead to a frightening set of “error loading operating system” and “no operating system found” messages, as the installer had set my Windows XP partition to inactive, but had provided no other information to the bootloader. Booting into XP in recovery mode (from CD), fixmbr, fixboot, kneel facing Redmond and chant (“Developers, Developers, Developers”) and it was back.

After waiting a few days, I was ready for try #2. Booted from the Ubutnu Live DVD, ran gparted (had to sudo gparted to give it the necessary permissions – I can see why a Live DVD shouldn’t normally do such things lightly), and resized the NTFS partition. Beautiful – no need for defragmenting, no data loss, 58GB partition down to 30GB.

Side note #1: Started the partitioning while riding the bus to the airport, thinking it would be done in plenty of time, and I could spend the flight, or time waiting for the flight, installing from the DVD. Turns out it took longer than I thought, and I was walking up to the security checkpoint with my laptop still in the process of being partitioned. Luckily right as I got to the point of no return it finally completed and I was able to shut down safely. I had momentary visions of being forced to turn off the machine in the middle of the operation in order to board – but I was safe.

Next step was adding an ext3 partition, bootable, with a mount point of /, and a swap partition at 3GB. (2 GB of RAM in the laptop, I figure 1.5x should be fine, and disk space is at a premium, even with 60GB overall).

I reserved 10GB for a shared data partition – FAT32 so that it can be read and written to from both Linux (where it is mounted as /media/shared) and Windows (where it is now the E: drive). In addition to making it easy to share documents between the two OS’s, as a few helpful blog/forum posts pointed out (thanks matchless and Kevin Farnham) this lets Firefox and Thunderbird access a shared profile.

Now, whether I boot into Kubuntu (I installed kubuntu-desktop after Ubuntu) or Windows XP, I can run Thunderbird and get access to my inbox, address book, and all email folders, or run Firebird and get access to a consistent set of bookmarks, toolbars, saved passwords, and settings. Next step is to tackle calendaring – I understand Mozilla Sunbird can share a profile across platforms as well, but haven’t really settled on a single calendar app yet.

Another helpful tool is Automatix, which can script the install some of the “non-free” pieces of software like codecs for certain formats which the media junkie in me can’t do without. It’s available for the 6.06 release as well as the 5.10 release, for Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

Side Note #2: What’s with the Ubuntu release naming? The alliteration, the cutsey animal names? Time for a revision of the old “Porn Star or My Little Pony” game? Breezy Badger? Dapper Drake? Hoary Hedgehog? Warty Warthog? But, I suppose silly names with some character are better than corporate “codenames” like longhorn or Fiji. Maybe alphabetical order would have made more sense – I see the next Ubuntu will be “Edgy Eft.”

All in all, I’ve been very happy. Feels good to have a choice at startup. Maybe good enough to put off that MacBook Pro I’ve been coveting, at least for a few months . . .

Mike Melanson, the blog’s author, says he “may” ask for input on issues.

I’m hoping that means development of a Flash player for Linux is actually occuring, to the point where it has issues on which input could be required.

So far, there’s only one post (the “origin story”) and 73 comments – I’m assuming that ratio will even out over time.