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Hi guys
Given that everyone is taking about why Free Software (and our new license) is a good idea...perhaps it's worth bringing up the fellowship conference that is going to happen shortly in Italy!
As you may (or may not) know there is going to be a conference in Italy in November that will provide an excellent opportunity for everyone in the fellowship to sit down together and have a discussion. There are so many things to talk about. Right off the top of my head: (1) Positive advocacy and how do to it effectively (2) Ways to increase the fellowship in each country (3) Ways to help people feel more involved in the Free Software community
One thing that I think would be interesting is to sit down with everyone and get a chance to know the faces behind the email address. The are people from all over Europe (and beyond) in the fellowship. I'm sure we have a great deal to say to each other.
My personal 'hobby horse' topic is advocacy. Free Software is a great idea and I think it's so important to tell people why this is so. Through positive advocacy we can accomplish a great deal. I think the November conference will provide an excellent opportunity for us to share ideas and to work out new ways to get our message across.
To find out more about the conference as a whole have a look at: http://www.sfscon.it/
To read more about the fellowship bit: http://www.fsfe.org/events/
To register have a look at: http://sfscon.it/registration
Regards
Shane
On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 17:55 +0100, Shane M. Coughlan wrote:
Given that everyone is taking about why Free Software (and our new license) is a good idea...perhaps it's worth bringing up the fellowship conference that is going to happen shortly in Italy!
Yep, talking about Free Software is what we all like to do :) But there is a strong need to talk to others that never heard of 'free software' except from spam messages.
As a coincidence yesterday a Italian friend wrote to me announcing his new book "The Family Guide to Digital Freedom" and website http://digifreedom.net/. His book is not free-as-in-freedom neither is completely public, but from what I saw his web site and collection of essays have enough 'meat' to contribute to a discussion on 'how to effectively advocate Free Software to moms and dads and kids'. His language is provocative and sometimes confused, but it's worth reading it because I agree with him: the average rhetoric of FS advocates is not effective when pointed to average computer users.
As you may (or may not) know there is going to be a conference in Italy in November that will provide an excellent opportunity for everyone in the fellowship to sit down together and have a discussion. There are so many things to talk about. Right off the top of my head: (1) Positive advocacy and how do to it effectively
Fioretti has done a nice essay titled 'Seven Things We're Tired To Hear
From Software Hackers'. I don't agree with most of the points he makes,
but indeed we can learn something from that essay and draw inspiration. For example, it would probably be useful to have a list of things that should be important for average people, voters and citizens that don't use computers or high school students. Maybe we should invite professors to the this discussion and listen to their experiences, what do you think?
bye stef
On 27-Sep-2006, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 17:55 +0100, Shane M. Coughlan wrote:
Given that everyone is taking about why Free Software (and our new license) is a good idea...perhaps it's worth bringing up the fellowship conference that is going to happen shortly in Italy!
Yep, talking about Free Software is what we all like to do :) But there is a strong need to talk to others that never heard of 'free software' except from spam messages.
Won't people instead be talking about "software libero"? Do Italians really see a lot of spam mentioning that?
The whole "free software" money-and-freedom problem is special to English only. The FSF recommends that speakers of other languages use the more precise term available in their own language.
URL:http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/fs-translations.html
On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 17:06 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
Won't people instead be talking about "software libero"? Do Italians really see a lot of spam mentioning that?
Well, no the spam I personally get is mainly in English or asian languages I don't recognize. You're right that in proper Italian Free Sw must be translated as Software Libero, but Italian is becoming rapidly 'italianglish': we use regularly words like weekend, meeting, business; not to mention the complete computer vocabulary that is pure English (file, directory, hard disk, etc) So for Italians it is more normal to chose English when talking about computers and business (two fields I know, probably it's the same in medicine and engineering). This translates into a wide diffusion of the term 'open source' because it's 1) English, 2) not to be confused with 'free software' as in spam messages. This lead to a very idiotic paradox: the recent laws and documents from the government talk about 'Software a sorgente aperto', a word-to-word translation of 'open source software'. Stupid, but we couldn't convince the people that Software Libero is what they really meant to say.
cheers stef
From: "Stefano Maffulli" stef@zoomata.com
As a coincidence yesterday a Italian friend wrote to me announcing his new book "The Family Guide to Digital Freedom" and website http://digifreedom.net/. His book is not free-as-in-freedom neither is completely public, but from what I saw his web site and collection of essays have enough 'meat' to contribute to a discussion on 'how to effectively advocate Free Software to moms and dads and kids'. His language is provocative and sometimes confused, but it's worth reading it because I agree with him: the average rhetoric of FS advocates is not effective when pointed to average computer users.
Back to open source, just towards a different direction, then? Now instead of selling FS to CIOs it's selling FS to non-programmers? Genuine inquiry here, not accusation.
Fioretti has done a nice essay titled 'Seven Things We're Tired To Hear
From Software Hackers'. I don't agree with most of the points he makes,
but indeed we can learn something from that essay and draw inspiration. For example, it would probably be useful to have a list of things that should be important for average people, voters and citizens that don't use computers or high school students. Maybe we should invite professors to the this discussion and listen to their experiences, what do you think?
People who don't use computers are 1) extremely rare and 2) not much affected by FS one way or the other.
I've read that essay, and I disagree with most of it. Most people might want not to care about what software is, but wanting flying ponies doesn't make them get()able.
Software isn't like in the 60s, a province of a few. Almost everyone uses software one way or the other these days. While I don't see the average person becoming a kernel developer, it seems clear that the level of ignorance about software and computers is unsustainable and cannot continue into the future indefinitely. People have learned what electricity is, after all.
Beyond that, though, I agree that the FLOSS community doesn't target non-programmers all that well, but if it is true that what people want is to forget about what a computer does, what a program is, what a file format means, then it's just not going to be possible to target them.
--David.
On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 09:59 +0200, David Picon Alvarez wrote:
Back to open source, just towards a different direction, then? Now instead of selling FS to CIOs it's selling FS to non-programmers? Genuine inquiry here, not accusation.
Not exactly what I meant to say. Let me try with one example: when I started my involvement with Free Sw I tried explaining to my mother what I was doing in my spare time. She didn't use computers at the time, and I had as only reference Richard's basic speech and the GNU Manifesto. Well, my mother didn't understand anything, and it was that bad for many years. Then I read Lessig's 'Code is law' and I happened to hear one of his stunningly good presentations. I went home and explained to my mother her everyday world of DVDs, cell phones, credit cards and all digital things she had around. Now she starts understanding what I mean with "freedom in digital society".
So, we still have to talk to CIOs but mainly we need to address the whole society because what we have at stake is not in the basement anymore: we won there, Free Software is already in everybody's basement powering business. We need to convince our dads and moms that digital citizens risk of being governed by technology companies instead of elected parliaments. The battleground is now what they call the 'consumer' and what really is a citizen: we need to prepare, otherwise citizens will get used to HDMI and other DRM, surrendering freedom without fighting.
Software isn't like in the 60s, a province of a few. Almost everyone uses software one way or the other these days. While I don't see the average person becoming a kernel developer, it seems clear that the level of ignorance about software and computers is unsustainable and cannot continue into the future indefinitely. People have learned what electricity is, after all.
Exactly, this is a good point. Culture is important, so we have one important point here: advocacy of free software should start from culture of the digital world. How would you start the lesson about Free Sw to a class of high school students? Lets find practical suggestions and examples so that the values of our community spread within younger generations.
cheers stef
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Stefano Maffulli wrote:
So, we still have to talk to CIOs but mainly we need to address the whole society because what we have at stake is not in the basement anymore: we won there, Free Software is already in everybody's basement powering business. We need to convince our dads and moms that digital citizens risk of being governed by technology companies instead of elected parliaments. The battleground is now what they call the 'consumer' and what really is a citizen: we need to prepare, otherwise citizens will get used to HDMI and other DRM, surrendering freedom without fighting.
[snip]
Exactly, this is a good point. Culture is important, so we have one important point here: advocacy of free software should start from culture of the digital world. How would you start the lesson about Free Sw to a class of high school students? Lets find practical suggestions and examples so that the values of our community spread within younger generations.
I think Stef is talking about something really important here.
Digital infrastructure alters the way the human race deals with information.
Free Software ensures that digital infrastructure is freely usable, modifiable, improvable and distributable. The copyleft license does something smart from the perspective of everyone who will encounter the software created with it.
This matters to everyone. It does affect every phone, computer, car and television on the planet. What we have to do is ensure that the message is not confused; we need to think about our audiences and speak to them using a context that they understand.
Shane
"Shane M. Coughlan" shane@shaneland.co.uk writes:
It does affect every phone, computer, car and television on the planet.
When using this argument, we have to be ready when the person responds: "but my phone works fine, so does my TV, car, and often my computer".
We need to highlight the differences in software developed by a community and software developed by a company. I think. But we also have to be careful not to fall into open source style arguments about collaborative development making better software.
Free software is sometimes limited, but the limits are not there because they have to be there to support a company's business model or contracts or business relationships. Any limitations in our software are due to an honest lack of resources and those limitations can be fixed as soon as the resources are available.
(My digital camera won't let me record audio without also recording video, so my gigabyte of memory can only record 47 minutes of audio. This causes frustration, which could be fixed if users of that camera were free to modify the software. The next technology purchase I made was a digital music player. I made sure it could run the Rockbox GPL'd firmware.)
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Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
"Shane M. Coughlan" shane@shaneland.co.uk writes:
It does affect every phone, computer, car and television on the planet.
When using this argument, we have to be ready when the person responds: "but my phone works fine, so does my TV, car, and often my computer". We need to highlight the differences in software developed by a community and software developed by a company. I think. But we also have to be careful not to fall into open source style arguments about collaborative development making better software. Free software is sometimes limited, but the limits are not there because they have to be there to support a company's business model or contracts or business relationships. Any limitations in our software are due to an honest lack of resources and those limitations can be fixed as soon as the resources are available.
You made an excellent point here, though I do think that there is a great deal of overlap between the open source route of 'better' software and the assertion that Free Software allows limitations to be fixed.
Perhaps the key thing here might be the idea of software flexibility; Free Software - as you rightly pointed out - can have it's limitations reduced or removed by either the original author or any subsequent author. Closed-source software leaves a reliance for advance on the original author and thus is less flexible in this regard.
Moving away from technical arguments I guess one thing that could also be pointed out is that Free Software is social software; the technology is truly available to the entire user community. That's an idea the market as a whole is not yet used to. However, there is serious room for it.
For instance, my Nokia phone says it plays (non-DRM) ACC. It's refusing to do so. Must be a bug in the code. Likewise, when I go to standby on the phone the screen goes dark and then 30 seconds later lights up for no reason. That's annoying when I look at the phone in the middle of the night and go back to bed. It illuminates my room.
If the Nokia was running Free Software these bugs could be removed. Heck, even a code idiot like me could fix that 'light up again' issue.
Society is used to tolerating technology with flaws. Free Software gives society a wonderful chance to really be able to engage with the technology it uses; flaws are no longer necessary, nor is dependence on any particular supplier. Free Software allows a society to take full advantage of the technology that the society possesses as a whole.
(My digital camera won't let me record audio without also recording video, so my gigabyte of memory can only record 47 minutes of audio. This causes frustration, which could be fixed if users of that camera were free to modify the software. The next technology purchase I made was a digital music player. I made sure it could run the Rockbox GPL'd firmware.)
You were showing me this in Berlin. I was seriously impressed with Rockbox.
Shane :)