Although voting by prospective attendees is only “about 30%” of the decision making process, I figured I should promote my submissions here, and hope that readers of this blog might be interested in commenting on them or voting for them in the panel picker. (Although they call it the panel picker – no one can resist alliteration – it includes sessions which are solo speakers or dual speakers as well as more tradition 4-5 person panels).

So here are the sessions I proposed (links go directly to the Panel Picker):

Managing User Generated Content

The age of content being managed only by authorized professionals is over. Users expect to contribute to, rate, review, recommend, filter, tag, and moderate their experiences on the web. What does this mean for designers and content management professionals? How do you encourage appropriate behavior and discourage spam and vandalism, without completely reverting to non-participation?

Open Source and Design: Ideologies Clashing

Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

Managing Your Online Identity Outside the Walled Garden

(Dual talk with Joshua Porter). This talk will cover 3 basic ideas: 1) What Managing Identity means these days and why it is important 2) Off-the-shelf technologies that help you manage your Identity 3) A DIY (Do-it-yourself) approach to managing your Identity…how you can roll your own identity services using existing pieces

The first is really an updated version of this talk from Web Content 2008, which seemed to go over well.

The second is inspired by r0ml’s series of OSCON talks over the last 3 years: rambling, philosophical, and entertaining in addition to being educational and thought-provoking. I’m sure I’ll fail to live up to his example but have fun in the process. I tried to update the description in the panel picker but failed – here’s what I was trying to add:

The context for me is in trying to articulate why free and open source projects have historically found it difficult to recruit / retain / attract designers as contributors. (Or, depending on your point of view, why open source projects have been so inhospitable to the design-oriented contributors who show up).

Thesis: Open Source and Design are philosophically incompatible.

Open Source is about enabling anyone and everyone to share the same code base. Open source pushes markets toward commodity status, leveling the playing field by making the same technology available to all. Design, by contrast, is about differentiation; standing apart from the crowd and being unique on the basis of creative innovation.

Besides, Open Source projects are ugly, and only engineers can use them. Well designed, beautiful, and easy to use projects have always come from proprietary approaches.

Antithesis: Open Source and design are profoundly similar in core beliefs. Open source and design are both based in solving problems based on known patterns. Good artists copy, great artists steal. Maybe some very small portion of “design” is about differentiation, but design is much broader than that subset. Also, many open source projects differentiate and innovate – sometimes on ease of use.

Besides, many open source projects are now actively pursuing design contributions, running usability studies, encouraging themes/skins, and working to compete with proprietary software on both “eye candy” and ease of use.

Synthesis: How can open source projects benefit more from the talents of the design community (across visual design, interaction design, information architecture, usability, and branding)? How can designers and design communities benefit from the lessons of free and open source software?

The third is a joint talk with Joshua Porter, whose book Designing for the Social Web is a must read. He’ll be talking about some of the “off the shelf” services available to help you manage your online identity (like Chi.mp), and I will be talking about the DIY approach, assembling together from free and open source software an online identity management toolbox.

The OWF tagline / elevator statement is “The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.” The OWF goals, from their home page:

Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks.

This is wonderful, and it is great to see the large number of significant companies and well known advocates for open source which are part of the foundation and it’s efforts.

But I worry about two specific things.

First, is this foundation itself an example of the “yet-another-foundation” syndrome? Why is it that none of the existing organizations would suffice? This is not the Open Social Foundation, not part of OSI, not part of the FSF, not closely related enough to any of the existing non-profits? Why do open source efforts so often end up making their own new group? (Developers always feel they need to invent yet another protocol or start yet another project, rather than adapting an existing one).

Second, is this foundation too focused on a broad, commercially friendly vision of the open web, and not enough focused on user freedom? Is this about continuing to run services based on open source software but services in which the data is captive? Is the focus on non-proprietary specifications too narrow to ensure real freedom, if the implementations of those specs achieve lock-in through data rather than code?

I know it is early days – there’s much discussion which will need to happen to see what OWF can really contribute.

What makes me optimistic is the individuals behind Open Web Foundation – all of which I respect for their contributions to open source and free software. What makes me concerned is that throughout David’s talk this morning he kept focusing on “the big companies that make up the web.” I’d rather see the DiSo approach to social networking, or the Laconi.ca approach to microblogging, be the types of applications the Open Web Foundation helps bring into existence.

In short (as I said on this thread at Get Satisfaction), I’d hate to see us all replicate the FSF/OSI history, with Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement on one side and OWF on the other.

(This is a pretty drafty post for me with lots of initial thoughts – please do let me know what you think about this!)

One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube‘s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause – both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].

Two things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Miro and Kaltura.

In other words, YouTube may suspend your account at virtually any time and for virtually any reason. Remember, since you’re also not allowed (per the Terms of Use) to download videos from YouTube, if the copy stored at YouTube gets deleted in theory it vanishes entirely, making your web browser connected to YouTube one giant tethered appliance. (“You agree not to access . . . YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate”).

And don’t even get me started on DRM, which aims to replicate the experience of a tethered appliance with content on your own computer.

Last week Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation came to visit the Berkman Thursday blog group to talk about Miro.

Miro, which I’ve blogged about many times in the past, is an open source, multi-platform, standards aware video player, as well as a collaboratively edited channel guide. If you spend any significant amount of time watching video on your computer, you should have it. (It’s especially great for longer-form video, high definition video, and disconnected mode – planes, trains, and automobiles).

(Yes, those are actually my subscriptions – click for full size image).

Two things I did not know about Miro that Dean showed us:

1. You can add additional web sites as “Guides” inside the Miro player. If they aren’t formatted as guides they won’t quite work the same way, but this makes it possible to have multiple guides from different sources, ensuring distribution of control of the media.
2. You can create an account on the Miro guide, which tracks your ratings of channels and then can suggest channels you might like, on the basis of those recommendations.

I’ve also been looking at (and talking to the team behind) Kaltura, which bills itself as:

The first open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration.

Kaltura not only enables you to embed video on your site (a la YouTube, Blip.TV, or several dozen others), but lets users collaboratively edit video, providing a complex and full featured editing environment all hosted in the user’s browser.

Kaltura has an interesting partnership with the Wikimedia foundation (see Yochai Benkler’s blog entry about it) and make a video extension for MediaWiki is available now from their downloads page; extensions for Drupal and WordPress are “coming soon.” These extensions let you integrate Kaltura’s SaaS offering inside your hosted application.

The “Community Edition Video Platform,” which will let people provide the full Kaltura functionality from behind a firewall or on their own server, is work in progress, but you can register on their site to be notified when it becomes available.

While it may sometimes seem that free software is not required for generative platforms – an argument Zittrain makes in his presentations above – free and open source solutions do help us to avoid the kind of contingent generativity Zittrain describes, since the worst case scenario is to take the software and run your own, or modify it in order to remove whatever restrictions (intentional or unintentional) the platform imposes. You just can’t do that with most hosted offerings.

[1] From the YouTube Terms of Use:

YouTube reserves the right to decide whether Content or a User Submission is appropriate and complies with these Terms of Service for violations other than copyright infringement, such as, but not limited to, pornography, obscene or defamatory material, or excessive length. YouTube may remove such User Submissions and/or terminate a User’s access for uploading such material in violation of these Terms of Service at any time, without prior notice and at its sole discretion.

Two recent videos stood out as worth sharing. Both focus on creative visualization, and are inspiring in terms of how some relatively simply changes in visual display of information can have a tremendous impact.

The first is from TED Talks, and it’s Jonathan Harris talking about “The Web’s Secret Stories“:

You can view We Feel Fine and play with it yourself – but I’ll warn you it is ponderously slow on my Linux machine – much more engaging in Windows or Mac OS.

It’s also open – at least in the “here’s an API, go mash up something cool” sense. (Free as in beer and free as in API but not as in Free software – Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike).

I wish I could spend a week just playing with what this API makes available, maybe using Yahoo! pipes to connect feelings to news stories about locations?

The second is from OSCON, and it’s Ben Fry talking about Processing, a design and prototyping tool:

Click To Play

Processing is Open Source – GPL/LGPL – so you can not only try it out and see what goodness you can make, you can also contribute to its development.

I find it nearly impossible after watching these to go back to standard office docs – but I think that’s a good thing.

Yesterday while I was in New York these emails arrived at license-discuss – submitting the Ms-PL and the Ms-CL:

Subject: For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License
From: “Jon Rosenberg (PBM)”
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:16:05 -0700
Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:16:05 -0700

Microsoft is pleased to submit the Microsoft Permissive License to the OSI for consideration as an OSI approved license. Microsoft believes that this license provides unique value to the open source community by delivering simplicity, brevity, and permissive terms combined with intellectual property protection.

The three sections below provide the information required for the discussion portion of the approval process. We look forward to working with the OSI on this submission process and discussing this submission with the open source community.

Jon Rosenberg
Director, Source Program
Microsoft Corporation

[Full text]

and

Subject: For Approval: Microsoft Community License
From: “Jon Rosenberg (PBM)”
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:16:42 -0700
Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:16:42 -0700

Microsoft is pleased to submit the Microsoft Community License to the OSI for consideration as an OSI approved license. Microsoft believes that this license provides unique value to the open source community by delivering simplicity, brevity, and clearly delineated reciprocal terms.

The three sections below provide the information required for the discussion portion of the approval process. We look forward to working with the OSI on this submission process and discussing this submission with the open source community.

Jon Rosenberg
Director, Source Program
Microsoft Corporation

[Full text]

This means it was really only about two weeks delay – not at all unusual in a company Microsoft’s size.

I assume the Ms-RL will not be submitted as it would clearly fail – it basically enables viewing of source code only.

As much as everyone is wary of Microsoft’s entry here, I think it is great to see these licenses submitted and reviewed.
[/Update]

[Original: 8/8/07]

One of the announcements at OSCON was from Microsoft, who announced that they would be submitting some licenses to the OSI for approval. (See the story on EWeek, InfoWorld, and InternetNews).

This has lead to some spirited debates and questions about just what it would mean for any Microsoft license (I have yet to see confirmation from Microsoft on which licenses will be submitted) to be OSI approved, including:

• Tim O’Reilly at O’Reilly Radar: Microsoft to Submit Shared Source Licenses to OSI (also with a good vibrant comment thread
• Glyn Moody at Linux Journal: Why Microsoft is Going Open Source
• Matt Asay at C-Net: Microsoft’s motives in seeking open-source blessing

My questions are much more basic:

1. When, exactly, will Microsoft submit licenses to the OSI for approval?
2. Which licenses will they submit? (Ms-PL, Ms-CL, and/or Ms-RL)

I went back and listed to Bill Hilf’s keynote again – he refers to the over 500 projects released under shared source licenses, and the question he has long gotten about why those projects weren’t released under OSI approved licenses.

He then announces that:

today we are, today we – we are submitting them right now -we’re working with the OSI right now to get them into the approval process, it’s an important step for us

What does that mean? Getting “them into the approval process” would seem to involve following the approval process as clearly spelled out on the OSI site – but I haven’t seen anything on license-discuss yet . . .

Although the video hasn’t yet surfaced, some interesting commentaries have.

Stephen Walli’s “Tim O’Reilly, Eben Moglen, and Jane Jacobs” links the tensions between O’Reilly and Moglen to the “two value systems” which Jacobs argued are at the root of all communities:

Jane Jacobs (originally famous for “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”) wrote a small Socratic dialog called “Systems of Survival”. The characters debate that there are exactly two value systems in existence. One leads to politics (protecting) and the other to commerce (trading). These value systems are not opposite ends of a spectrum, but rather different and incompatible. For each value in one syndrome there is no equal and opposite value in the other.

For Walli, the Moglen / O’Reilly confrontation is the embodiment of the debate between these poles:

Tim is the embodiment of the trading value system. Indeed, I would suggest that not only was the attack on stage unwarranted, but that the Free Software movement has been able to deliver its important message to a broader audience faster because of the stage Tim built with O’Reilly Media.

Likewise Eben is a veritable intellectual and rhetorical lion for our political value system around software freedom. Eben may be the perfect person to engage in the necessary debate going forward around conflicts of rights that I believe are invariably created by friction between the two value systems.

Matt Asay, on the other hand, argues in “Pendulum has swung in the open source debate” that Moglen’s criticisms were a “wake-up call”:

The wake-up call about the necessary freedoms came from Eben Moglen at last week’s O’Reilly Open Source Conference. . . . I wasn’t in the room to hear Eben. At any rate, I’m not one for handwringing and am just glad it was said.

Ultimately, I do think it is important – at OSCON of all places – to keep the discussion about freedom as part of the conversation, but I agree with Tim O’Reilly, who commented on Matt’s post:

Eben didn’t want to talk about freedom – He just wanted to talk about his idea of freedom, which is different from mine.

O’Reilly was trying, this year as he did last year, a conversation about what freedom means in a software-as-a-service world. Eben wasn’t interested in that conversation, and chose instead to use the moment to create buzz and be provocative in support of his agenda.

If you’re interested in the actual discussion, I’d recommend taking a look at:

1. My notes from Eben’s session on The Republic of Open Source for more of what Eben means by freedom and what he thinks we need to be focused on. (I know, two links to my own blog in one post – but I can’t resist).
2. Tim O’Reilly’s keynote from the next morning on Degrees of Freedom

First, check out the Presentation Materials page on the OSCON site. If you were attending, but couldn’t make every session you wanted to see (with 14 parallel tracks this is unavoidable) or if you were unable to attend, this page is the place to pick up slides and other materials.

(This being OSCON, some folks include code- but it is still mostly slides).

This year, the presentation materials page also includes video for some of the major talks – including James Larsson’s “Pimp My Garbage” – Leather Fetish Pong and all.

Click To Play

If you want just video, head to oscon.blip.tv where you can get just the sessions that were videotaped.

Or, if you’re using Miro (and you should be), just search Blip.tv (it is one of the choices in the search drop-down at the bottom of the interface) for OSCON and then save those search results as a channel.

–

Licensing is not where it is going to be at for the next while, and there are other public policy issues where it will be at instead.

Licenses are a part of community building – they are constitutions for communities.

But the words of licenses are just the beginning – just as written constitutions are just the beginning of the republics which they give birth to and organize.

In the 21st century it is no longer factories or individuals which are the units of production and distribution – it is communities. This is the reality of mass culture.

You can’t see a cola ad today, without seeing a reference to a web site associated with that cola, and if you visit that website you will see a community under construction – a community of people who encourage each other to drink more cola.

You can’t be in the syrup business today without a community of syrup-suckers.

Communities experience disruption – both hostile disruption from competitive communities outside but also from internal disruption based on the stresses and strains inherent in social life.

I talk to lots of people about licensing. But the most important conversations are really about public policy and quality of community – the community itself improves the quality of dialog within the community.

The licensing discussions are serious, and are treated as serious public policy discussions to be engaged in with a clear sense that community interests much be preserved – these are public policy issues.

We are now in a position to say that we have turned a corner – we will never go away. That we are seen as powerful competitors to the existing business model is historically significant.

It is true that we are entering a period of contention about patents in particular – the industry’s dominant competitor is seeing it needs to change, and that is disruptive – but are not in any fundamental danger due to the strength of our communities.

GPLv3 – successfully addressed the issue of discriminatory patent pledges – and all the yelling and hand waving from one geographic corner of the IT universe won’t change that.

Most of the work my colleagues do at the Freedom Software Law Center you never even see. Problems that may arise years down the road arise and are discussed and resolved before the become major issues.

Example – paper on wireless drivers due out shortly- unique only in the sense that it is resulting in a public document.

The way that licenses work is that they need preventive care – its not just about fixing holes but strengthening communities.

The global software industry spends tens of billions a year in order to earn tens of billions – and they spend a billion or so on litigation.

We cost nothing, make little, and have zero litigation – even though the companies around us make tons of money.

When the litigation in your town drops to zero, it is time to have a block party, not time to have a name-callign argument about who is and isn’t open source.

The communities are working with a level of smoothness and frictionless operation at a level unheard of in commercial development in any period in the industrial age.

If we have done well – and we have – it is incumbent upon us to understand why, and how to preserve that. . . . we are the best example that the world can show in how the reduction of barbed wire can result in more productivity and less conflict – and we are not getting the reputation for that which is deserved.

We have to be more sensitive that this is, in fact, a political accomplishment. What we have done is to build a good republic, and we need to ensure that we keep it. We need to understand what the commitment to success primarily involves, and we confuse ourselves if we think that is primarily a question of business organization, or how companies are funded, or even how programmers are paid. It isn’t that these questions are not important, but that they are small beer compared to the questions of how we ensure that the community continues to strengthen rather than becoming less free over time.

When we were of no interest to the wealthiest interests in the world, our community was more equal because it was only us in it. When they arrived, the neighborhood got more expensive, and our community now looks more like the world outside, with a full range of wealth. But we have preserved in the midst of this stratification many mechanism of egalitarian impact and intent.

It is good – and fundamentally right and just – for people to begin from a presumed equality – inequality of access to ideas and each other is a fundamental corrosion of community.

Service provision and the GPL – an extraordinarily heated subject about which there is lots of noise and concern – but most of the discussion comes at it from the point of view of business strategy. (Ultimately comes to Google bashing). The problem in my view is that we don’t start in the right place – which is, oddly enough, in that American individual focused question of what we think people’s rights ought to be.

The fundamental right with which Stallman has always begun is anyone’s right to run any program anywhere at any time for any reason – this has to include the right for people to run a program at any time *for anyone* – that is, provision of software as a service for other people. That is an important aspect of sharing. You cannot take that away, and slice off that major aspect of freedom, in order to limit the size of an organism in the republic, or limit competition or whatever, unless you can prove that some more important aspect of freedom is being injured.

It is a key element of the freedom of speech to have the freedom to not speak your thoughts. Thus one of the key freedoms of the ability to share is the right to not share.

If the discussion about service provision is a rights conflict issue, it is critically important to frame that discussion in clear terms based on the rights perceived to be in conflict.

No rights based argument sufficient has been articulated which should compel the release of code which some people choose to run for third parties benefit. That doesn’t mean such an argument doesn’t exist – and the conversation should continue – but the GPLv3 provides a framework in which that experience can happen.

People who want to experiment with this approach will continue to have access to the GPL commons. What will not do is allow people who have made conclusions about service provisioning back into that commons and force those decisions on the commons.

But this is only one public policy issue we need to continue to argue about in order to continue to protect and evolve the republic – not because of some crisis but as a matter of continued maintenance.

In addition there is the patent issue – our neighbor to the north’s patent saber rattling is just a blip in this larger conversation about what patents are and ought to be.

Patent policy needs to be an issue on which there is real public policy debate – in which it is up to us to be involved as citizens. We need to be heard on this – it will not be prominent public debate but we must be heard.

The same is true with respect to ODF and the representation of public data in proprietary formats. All public data ought to be in a format that any citizen can access without purchasing commerical software, obtaining a patent grant from anyone, or relying on software based partially on proprietary algorithms.

We can as citizens of our republic decisively affect this issue on all of our behalfs and for the greater public good.

We need to move as far as we can and as fast as we can in the direction of institutions in which decisions are made through voting and leaders derive their leadership from the consent of those who choose them.

We will do better in our republic if we increase the ability of our leadership to legitimize itself over time.

The republic is not going to be kept strong by speeches made by me – the republic is going to be kept strong by speeches made by you.

Degrees of Freedom, Open Source in the Web 2.0 Era

How do we preserve freedom when:
- Running the program requires a hundred thousand cpus and terabytes of data
- When open source software increasingly uses services based on proprietary algorithms and proprietary data
- When redistribution is no longer necessary for everyone to have access to the program?
- When “improving the program” is less important than “improving the shared data”?

What Eben [Moglen in yesterday's interview with O'Reilly] was trying to tell me was to pay attention to freedom and not just the success of businesses. But it is important to remember that businesses shape our culture – but it is important to say that the open source movement has shaped how businesses think about these issues and that needs to be recognized as well.

Influence of the freedoms of open source outside the “pure source code” realm
- Wikipedia
- Freebase
- DabbleDB
- Swivel
- Many Eyes

Web 2.0 – I know people argue about the name but it is a good handle to a group of issues. What’s going to be owned online.

There is a race on to see who will own various aspects of the online experience – therefore there needs to be a corresponding race to keep these things open.

We need to think about the things that need to be open, that need to be free that need to be in the commons – and we need to build software that enables this.

Open Source Success Factors

1. Frictionless software distribution10
- Free as in beer, or SaaS gets you this to
- Source code not needed
- Redistribution matter

2. Collab development

3. Freedom to build on, adapt, or extend
- Source code helps, but not essential [really?]

4. Freedom to fork
- Source code needed

The consumer-reports table – free redistribution, extensibility, network effects, “platform” more important than source code?

It started off with Moglen arguing that the whole notion of a “web 2.0 era” is pure “hooey.”

Then it went downhill from there. O’Reilly seemed a bit unprepared for the confrontational nature of Moglen’s discussion.

Moglen challenged O’Reilly, arguing that while the FSF has spent the last 10 years talking about freedom and rights, O’Reilly (and by extension the whole “Open Source” movement as opposed to the “Free Software” movement) was busy making money and talking about who was going to have what IPO.

He basically argued that the FSF has “done the heavy lifting” and “carried your water” for the last decade, and that the era of Web 2.0 distraction (buzz about who is making money, who will get acquired, etc) will need to be replaced by a serious conversation about freedom.

O’Reilly asked him: What would you do with OSCON?:

Scrape the name of the thing, put freedom up there, and start talking about real freedoms- which requires a discussion about public policy and long-term consequences of all this technology we’ve all put into the world. . . . GPLv3 gives us 10 years strategic time to think about this – I’ve just given you 10 years, hope you make better use of it than you had for the last 10 years.

Moglen’s direct (and very deliberate) ad hominem provocations aside, he’s clearly hitting on an issue that is at the heart of O’Reilly’s discussion of freedom, and of what it means to preserve the kinds of freedoms open source makes possible. Where “Open Source” as a term arose at least in part in order to “keep politics out of it” Moglen did a great job this morning reminding us that politics (by which I mean public policy, legal reform, and discussions about competing rights) are exactly at the heart of it.

All this before 11am.

Tim O’Reilly interviewed Dave Morin from Facebook – they’re building on a LAMP stack, and have contributed some things back, but clearly the main core of facebook is not an open source project.

His basic response was that “We will continue to release as much as we can, when it makes sense.”

Two reasons why it might not make sense came up:

1. The functionality the code offers is so tied to your services as to not be useful to outside folks
2. The codebase isn’t mature or professional quality enough – not “ready” to be released

For example, he said “we want to make sure that when we release something it is something of value, and something that the community can use.”

Then O’Reilly interviewed Mike Shaver from Mozilla, along with Matt Gertner from AllPeers and Garrett Camp from StumbleUpon, talking about the Firefox platform for extensions.

The Mozilla approach, as I suppose one would expect, is entirely different: release everything.

We don’t provide a tightly controlled API we let people access a lot. If you write an extension, it is as though you were writing code in the browser itself.
What we did was we gave people possibility.
What you get with source access is a very rich, and sometimes messy, set of points of contact with the overall platform.

I wish O’Reilly had gone further down the path of this question. Rather than deciding on behalf of the community which pieces they are likely to find valuable, Firefox takes the approach of allowing the community to determine what is valuable. Rather than waiting for code to be “mature” to release it, they let the community help make it mature.

It’s the difference between a platform designed to be extensible – which really means developers can write applications to run on our platform, as in Facebook, and designing a platform to be an open platform for anyone to do anything.

Is the difference just that the Mozilla foundation is a non-profit community, and Facebook a for-profit company?

He talked about a number of different freedoms, beyond the “free as in beer” and “free as in speech” dichotomy:

• Freedom to use
• Freedom to build on and adapt
• Freedom to participate
• Freedom to fork
• Freedom to switch

And then asked a series of thought-provoking questions.

How to we maintain these freedoms in a world in which “runnung the program” requires a data center? (It isn’t about programs I can run on my machine but global web services with enormous data needs)

How do we maintain these freedoms when applications are delivered as services and don’t distribute code?

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.