The Communication-Driven Economy

(This posting originally appeared on the LiMo Foundation blog...)

I recently read an extremely interesting special section in The Economist, concerned in particular with how mobile communications, and "mobile finance", was positively affecting emerging economies. One figure that stuck with me was that adding ten cell phones into a population of 100 people had the net effect of raising the country's GDP by 0.8%; that's a simply staggering figure relative to the investment involved. Particularly in countries that have been historically lacking in infrastructure, mobile communications can be paradigm-changing: it allows instant communication with places and people that might have been days off, or otherwise inaccessible. By providing a flow of information of all kinds, where none existed before—especially over long distances, mobile communications make new markets and new products possible in ways that would have been out of reach otherwise.

Today, more people access the Internet, globally, from cell phones than from traditional computers. Many people have never accessed the Internet any other way. This is a continuation of the major "paradigm shift" which began in 1995, when "the Worldwide Web" moved from being a province belonging solely to the technically adept to something which was accessible and usable by anyone at all—with the right equipment, anyway. The "right equipment" was, of course, hideously expensive in global terms: a computer costs at least a couple of thousand dollars.

Today, we see cell phones that are, in terms of power and performance, the full equivalent of "desktops" or "laptops" of only a few years ago, at a fraction of the cost. And the cost only keeps getting pushed down. A phone that is capable of accessing the Internet, and hence the world, is within the reach of more and more people in the world. And, as The Economist points out, having that phone enriches and improves people's lives in tangible and quantifiable ways.

But cell phones and mobile devices don’t only drive economic change: they can drive political change as well. Five years ago, cell phones and text messaging played a crucial role in Moldova’s “Orange Revolution”; today, it’s at least as likely to be Twitter that is used for mass communications. Communications of this sort cannot be censored, and we can expect to be seeing such facilities playing an increasing role in all kinds of political discourse.

The device-manufacturing members of the LiMo Foundation ship on the order of a quarter of a billion phones worldwide annually. The economics of the electronics industry keep driving the cost of a device with a given feature set ever-downward; efforts both in the open source world and in organizations like LiMo do the same with software. Virtually every phone on the market comes with a web browser of some sort—ACCESS alone ships scores of millions of new installations of our browser product a year on phones at all price points.

Change on a global scale is rarely sudden. It’s a series of small changes - incremental ones. In the past twenty years, cell phones have gone from being a luxury available only to the wealthy to something that’s within the reach of the majority of people on the planet. At the same time, the power and functionality of the devices themselves has only increased. With that increased availability and functionality has come better flow of information and news, improved economic prospects, better education, and the ability to stay in contact with those who are physically distant, for people around the world. We’re only beginning to see the changes that will come out of a transition like this.

The "One Laptop Per Child" effort set out to produce a general-purpose, portable computer suitable for children's education at a cost of $100. It didn't quite achieve all of its goals, but it led to a number of interesting and useful experiments and results. It may be that the modern and increasingly functional cell phone turns out to be, to a large extent, the real "hundred dollar laptop" and not just for children.

[Lefty will be presenting at eComm, the Emerging Communications Conference, in Amsterdam, on behalf of the LiMo Foundation, on Oct. 28. For more details on the conference, please see http://europe.ecomm.ec/2009/]

A Quick Note...

I got an email from Bruce Byfield yesterday, from which I learned that one of my stealth projects had been "outed" by my pals Miguel and jdub. This is actually a good thing, since I'd gotten distracted for the last month or so on paying work. In any case, the site was actually pulled together enough that it was good to get the kick in the ass and get it out there.

So, I actually did what I was threatening to do at GCDS, and put up boycott-boycottnovell.com. Enjoy! I'm happy to have outside contributions if anyone wants to provide some. Traffic's going up nicely, and it's getting a lot of mentions on Twitter and elsewhere.

Love,

Your friendly, neighborhood "troll-like enemy of the free software movement" (still no word on whether this represents the official position of the FSF...)

T-Shirt Designs for the FSF

or perhaps

Some might prefer this one, I suppose.

Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est La Même Damned Chose...

I didn't attend LinuxCon this year for a variety of reasons—chief among them being that I'd have had to go straight to Portland from Amsterdam rather than get to visit my home—so I missed out on the talk by Mark Shuttleworth. I did read about it on the geekfeminism blog, however.

Sorry, Mark: explaining this stuff to anyone is hard, not just to "girls". Here we go again, falling into the bad and distancing habit of using women as the archetype of technical non-adeptitude. I do it myself: I've worked hard to break myself of the habit of using my mom or my daughter as someone who something is "easy enough for", with incomplete success. Moshiwake gozaimasen. Ganbarimasu.

Look, it's awfully easy to say bone-headed things: I've done it (and still do it, occasionally) and so have you. What's a lot harder is being able to step back from the knee-jerk need to defend oneself and look at the situation from the point of view of the person who's complaining about it.

(Let me also note that, in fact, not every single complaint of offense may have merit: I do not, personally, feel obligated to apologize to platypus fanciers for saying that platypi are funny-looking, or to creationists who are upset that I'm somehow abridging their freedom of religion by looking askance at mythology being taught as "scientific theory". However, my bar for having offended others is pretty low, "reasonable doubt" that the person's offense might be out-of-line, rather than my own perception of "preponderance of the evidence"...)

The appropriate response at that point is not to counsel the other person that they're wrong to feel offense, but to acknowledge their feelings (which doesn't mean agreeing with them) and to apologize. Not "I'm sorry that you're feeling offended", but "I'm sorry for having offended you", ideally with some actual sincerity. At that point, one is well-advised to rethink the behavior that caused the offense, and to find some more useful substitute behavior for future use.

I've met Mark several times, and I think he's an essentially reasonable guy. I hope, and expect, that he'll respond to Skud in a reasonable way. We'll see.

On a somewhat related note, I was interested to read the minutes of the FSF's "mini-summit" on increasing the participation of women in free software, with a stated mission "to increase women's participation in the free software movement and work to make sexism in person or online unacceptable within our community". Sadly, there's no suggestion among the various "Initiatives" along the lines of "Discourage FSF leaders and representatives from telling jokes in keynotes which portray women as in need of technical assistance of an intrusive and nonconsensual sort, from the sound of things". I'm a little surprised they missed that one, frankly.

I'm likewise fascinated at the performance of Bruce Perens on LWN in the discussion on the "mini-summit" there. Bruce is pretty sure that there's no problem at all, or at least no problem for us to address. Additionally, Bruce's experience as a white-water rafting guide apparently allows him to assure us that the sort of behavior that people are finding upsetting is caused by Asperger's Syndrome, and therefore cannot possibly be fixed, and it's wrong of us to draw attention to it. Interestingly, Bruce has also only encountered one single solitary woman in all his years who knew how to use EMACS. Says Bruce, "What I meant was that there are more women who hold technical jobs than there are women who so love the technology that they will work on it whether they get paid or not. That seems to be an especially male thing." You can't make this stuff up.

I was likewise not at the Boston "Software Freedom Day", but I read on the GeekFeminism wiki that a question regarding the Gran Canaria keynote was put to Mr. Stallman there, and he responded that "The person who brought that up seems to be a troll-like enemy of the free software movement." This was, by the way, the same event at which Mr. Stallman felt it necessary to label Miguel de Icaza "a traitor to the free software movement". (Was there a loyalty oath? I missed that...)

At least I'm in decent company. Maybe Miguel and I can get t-shirts made up or something.

The 2009 Open Source in Mobile Pub Quiz!

I was at the Open Source in Mobile conference in Amsterdam last week, both to present on "Strategies for Enabling Innovation with Open Source" and to act as quizmaster for this year's 2nd Annual Pub Quiz (and having done it two years running, I think it's an official "tradition" now...)

People expressed some interest in seeing the questions and answers, and I promised to post them here. Adam Shaw of Informa, the conference's producers, worked up the first four categories this year; the last four were mine. So, without further ado:

[Well, much further ado, anyway. Sorry for the remarkably idiotic markup problems, fixed now. The quiz started its life as a MS Word document from Adam Shaw to me, and stayed that way. The amount of nonsensical horsecrap that Word throws in with a simple paste is amazing, and the editor that Blogger provides you with doesn't help...]

Round 1- Sport

1. Q-Due to superstition, what did Bjorn Borg not do during the Wimbledon fortnight?
   
   1. have sex
   2. wash his hair
   3. shave
   4. wear underpants
   A- Shave


2. Q- Nigel Mansell won the World Drivers’ Championship for which Formula 1 team?
   A- Williams


3. Q- Who was the first unseeded man to win the Wimbledon Singles title?
   A- Boris Becker


4. Q- Which sports playing area is 2.7 metres by 1.5 metres?
   A- Table Tennis


5. Q- In which country will the 2014 Football World Cup be held?
   A- Brazil


6. Q- In 1988 who became the first boxer to have won world championships in five different weight categories?
   A- Sugar Ray Leonard


7. Q- Which piece of sporting equipment is 3 inches in diameter and weighs 6 ounces?
   A- An ice hockey puck


8. Q- At which sport did Scotland become world champions in 2005?
   A- Elephant Polo
   

Round 2- Geography

1. Q- What is the home country of Van Morrison?
   A- Northern Ireland [NB: I want to acknowledge that this answer is disputed by Mr. David Neary, who informs me that Northern Ireland is a "province", not a country, and that Mr. Morrison was, in fact, born in the country of Great Britain the United Kingdom.]
   [NB: I want to further acknowledge that I know something between "jack-shit" and "fuck-all" about the geographical vagaries of the United Kingdom. Sorry for the Inconvenience.]


2. Q- In which country was OPEC founded?
   A- Iraq


3. Q- Which country is the world’s largest coffee exporter?
   A- Brazil


4. Q-If you flew due east from New York City, what would be the first country you would reach?
   A-Portugal


5. Q- Bollywood is the nickname for the Indian film industry. The film industry of which country is known as Lollywood?
   
   1. Pakistan
   2. Laos
   3. Portugal
   4. Luxembourg
   A- Pakistan (Lahore)
   


6. Q- Paris attracts the most visitors in France each year. Which French town attracts 5 million visitors a year and has more hotels than any other French city except Paris?
   A- Lourdes


7. Q- At 29,029 ft Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth. The tallest mountain in our solar system is Olympus Mons on Mars. Plus or minus 10,000ft, how tall is Olympus Mons?
   A- 88,600ft, it stands 27kms above the surface level


8. Q- What Mexican cactus is tequila made from?
   A- Agave

Round 3- Wordplay

1. Q- What kind of mixed drink takes its name from the Hindi or Sanskrit word for five?
   A- Punch, from the Hindi word Panch as punch initially had 5 ingredients, spirit, sugar, lemon, water, tea


2. Q- If you were awarded 10 points in the UK for using it but only 1 point in Poland, what would you be doing?
   A-Playing Scrabble with the letter Z


3. Q- Which animal does a Hippophobe fear?
   A- Horses


4. Q- Who wrote over and over again: ‘I will not yell she’s dead during roll call’
   A- Bart Simpson


5. Q- The Toyota MR2 had to change its name in which European country?
   A- France- MR2 sounds like Merde


6. Q- Which five letter word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it?
   A- Short


7. Q- What is the Romanian Word for ‘Son of the Devil’ or ‘Son of the Dragon’?
   A- Dracula


8. Q- There exists only one word in the English language that when it is capitalised has a completely different meaning. What is that word?
   A- Polish, polish

Round 4- Entertainment

1. Q- Which TV Shows spawned the following spin offs? (1 point per correct answer)
   
1. Frasier
2. Mork and Mindy
A- Cheers and Happy Days

2. Q- Which singer appeared on stage at both Wembley and Philadelphia during the Live Aid concert?
   A- Phil Collins


3. Q- How is singer Paul Hewson better known?
   A- Bono


4. Q- If you allow for inflation what is the highest grossing movie of all time?
   A- Gone With the Wind


5. Q- How is Annie Mae Bullock better known?
   A- Tina Turner


6. Q- What was the name of Anthony Edwards character in Top Gun?
   A- Goose


7. Q- Who was the boxer portrayed by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull?
   A- Jake LaMotta


8. Q- Which three presidents does Forrest Gump meet in the film Forrest Gump? (all three needed for a point)
   A- Nixon, Kennedy, LBJ

Round 5- Open Source Trivia

1. Q- How many children does Linus Torvalds have?
   A- Two.


2. Q- How is “dead beef” used in a running operating system?
   A- Freed memory is frequently overwritten with this value, which is guaranteed to generate a page fault if dereferenced (in, e.g., Solaris).


3. Q- How many PhDs does Dr. Richard Stallman hold? How many are honorary?
   A- Six. All of them.


4. Q- What is the birthday of the Linux kernel?
   A- August 21, 1991.


5. Q- What was the first software project that Apple, Inc. released under an open source license?
   A- Rendezvous support for “zero-configuration” networking, later renamed “Bonjour”, under a BSD license.


6. Q- What was the first “live CD” Linux distribution?
   A- Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X (LGX), released in December 1992.


7. Q- From where does the Jokosher project derive its name?
   A- It’s a play on the name of the project’s creator, Jono Bacon: Jo-no-bacon == jo-kosher.


8. Q- The “Jargon File” has existed since 1975. What is it, and who maintains it?
   A- The Jargon file is a glossary of “hacker terminology”, originally created at Stanford, but great expanded at MIT. It is maintained by Eric S. Raymond.

Round 6- Geek Movies

1. Q- What does an “oscillation overthruster” enable you to do?
   A- Drive through mountains/enter the 8th Dimension (Buckaroo Banzai)


2. Q- How much power is required to energize a flux capacitor?
   A- 1.21 gigawatts (Back to the Future!)


3. Q- What do the characters Elrond (from Lord of the Rings), V (from V for Vendetta) and Agent Smith (from The Matrix) have in common?
   A- All are played by Hugo Weaving


4. Q- In what movie does a character save the day, exclaiming, “This is a UNIX system! I know this!”
   A- Jurassic Park


5. Q- What 2001 movie featured Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond and a host of other open source and free software luminaries?
   A- Revolution OS, directed by J.T.S. Moore


6. Q- What was the first appearance of a laser in a motion picture?
   A- Goldfinger, 1964


7. Q- What is the relevance of banging a radio antenna guy-wire with a hammer to the film Star Wars?
   A- Ben Burt used this sound for the blasts of the ray guns.


8. Q- Where would you not go to buy a “phased plasma rifle in a 60-watt range”?
   A- 1984 Los Angeles (The Terminator)

Round 7- Technology Free-for-all

1. Q- If you were to look at “NMEA data”, what would you be looking at?
   A- GPS information.


2. Q- The third time definitely wasn’t the charm for this well-known computer company. What is this a reference to?
   A- The Apple ///, released in 1980, proved to be extremely unpopular. It’s the only computer Apple ever produced which was replaced by one with a lower model number (the Apple IIe).


3. Q- What does “DLNA” refer to?
   A- The “Digital Living Network Alliance”, a standard used by manufacturers of consumer electronics to allow entertainment devices within the home to share their content with each other across a home network.


4. Q- Which of the following has not been used to access the internet: carrier pigeon, semaphore, morse code, catapult?
   A- Catapult


5. Q- ENIAC, the US Army computer which ran continuously from 1947 to 1955, was based on vacuum tubes. How many did it contain (to the nearest thousand)?
   A- 17,468


6. Q- Smalltalk was originally designed to be run on a specific device aimed at giving children access to digital media. What was the name of that device?
   A- The “Dynabook”, designed by Alan Kay.


7. Q- When was the notion of “hypertext” first proposed?
   A- In a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article by Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”, which described a proposed device called a “Memex”.


8. Q- Tim Berners-Lee is credited with the development of the world-wide web. When did Berners-Lee first propose the “WorldWide Web”?
   A- In November, 1990.

Round 8- Name that Distro!

(Visual round: teams had to correctly identify the distro from its logo)

1. Q-
   A- Xandros


2. Q-
   A- Mepis


3. Q-
   A- Gentoo
   


4. Q-
   A- Mandriva
   


5. Q-
   A- Arch
   


6. Q-
   A- Knoppix
   


7. Q-
   A- Kubuntu
   


8. Q-
   A- Puppy Linux

The Disappearing Desktop

[This posting was originally published on the LiMo Foundation blog...]

The “desktop” has been getting all the attention for the past score of years or so, and it was a big improvement from the “command line”, which is what we had to deal with prior to that. The desktop metaphor opened up all kinds of possibilities for people who had never used computers before, and unleashed a wave of new applications development the likes of which had never been previously seen.

But the desktop itself—the notion of the “computer” as a completely general-purpose device, a sort of “Swiss Army knife”, if you will—is itself an artefact of the fact that, at the time the metaphor hit the street, as it were, computers were extremely expensive devices; few people could afford to have more than one of them. However, times have changed and are still changing, in dramatic ways.

Computing power is cheaper than ever: if you compare a current cell phone (at around $400) with a desktop system of five years ago (at around $2500), they’re remarkably comparable in terms of their general specifications. In fact, the phone does more, in terms of being able to support GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi and other capabilities right out of the box; it probably has at least as much memory and, more than likely, a larger amount of mass storage. We don’t, however, tend to think of it as a “computer”.

Don Norman has observed that the more skilful we become at using a technology, the less visible the technology itself becomes, as it gets subsumed into the purpose to which it’s being put. When cars were new technology, you had to be an automobile mechanic to own one; the same was true of bicycles before that.

Open source development grew up in an environment where the desktop was the landscape in which one worked. But that’s a landscape that’s becoming increasingly less relevant. The sale of cell phones and mobile devices of increasing sophistication and capability has far outstripped the number of “desktops” being shipped each year. However, our understanding of development models and use cases hasn’t really kept pace with that.

There’s a great potential opportunity, one which we’re at the very beginning of seeing realized, for open source developers in the increasing number of Linux-based phones coming onto the market, and it’s measured in hundreds of millions of potential customers a year. Right now—and unlike the classic desktop market—there’s no entrenched “winner” in the mobile device space. There’s less likely to ever be one, since the investment people make is smaller and they’re more prone to replace a cell phone than a desktop or laptop system. People’s investment in applications for their smart phones also tends to be smaller than for their desktop systems: they tend to have fewer applications, and those applications are cheaper in cost.

Successful development for mobile devices calls for a rather higher standard of quality than we’ve typically been used to delivering in the open source world. In an environment where it was at least tacitly expected that everyone was capable of programming, the assumption developed that, if a problem wasn’t bothering me, then it wasn’t my problem; those whom it did bother could fix it if they liked. That won’t work on the mobile devices your grandfather and your teenagers use. This is an area where partnership between open source community-based efforts and the work of carriers and device manufacturers could be especially fruitful: the folks who make up the membership of organizations like the LiMo Foundation have a lot of experience here.

Another difference is the target audience and understanding the expectations of that audience. Open source development began as, in essence, a hobby: people wrote code for themselves and, eventually, for one another. But they were always writing for people who had a technical skill set and a certain level of ability with it. This made for a very different outlook than the one which is required to develop for end users and for consumers. We’ve learnt a pretty good amount about this in the community, especially over the past five years or so, but there’s still a long way to go. This is an area where collaboration with device manufacturers and carriers, who have long experience (not always good experience, admittedly) in things like usability, can really pay off.

But successful development for the mobile world requires—even more importantly—an entirely different way of thinking about how applications are used and even what applications actually are! As the various activities in our lives leave increasing online “impressions” (e.g. By our writing movie reviews, or purchasing books online, or engaging in various “social networking” activities). the ability of applications and web-based activities to interact, support and reinforce one another will enable new sorts of capabilities on the devices we use the most. I can already be notified (by a web site which tracks airplane flights) when one of my flights is delayed, and I can reschedule myself onto a different flight—all from my phone. I can take a photo of a business card, have it OCR’ed, added to my contacts, and then synchronized to a web-based server, so that it ultimately winds up on my desktop system—all from my phone. (It’s impossible for me to ever lose a contact any more: I have too much redundancy.)

This is an area that is evolving now, and evolving so rapidly, that no one has really been able to get their head around it yet. People continue to ask whether “the future” is “on the web” or “on the device”. The answer, as usual, is “yes”—and new potential applications like “augmented reality” are underscoring that—how that evolution plays out is the key area in which I expect to see organizations like LiMo working increasingly with the open source community as we discover what “computers” are going to be like as we become less and less directly aware that they are computers.

The “desktop” is increasingly going away, except for fairly specific, usually business-related uses. Outside the US, many more people are already accessing the internet from their phones rather than from a desktop system. As social networking, online shopping and content creation become even more important, the devices which will be most important to us are those which are supporting those activities, the devices we spend the most time with, the ones we carry around with us.

We used to talk about “the paperless office’, and—in some ways, anyway—it sort of happened: I don’t get a lot of paper bills and other documents as I used to anymore; now, they’re web pages of PDF files. On the other hand, my desk has vanished...

Microsoft, the GPL, and Nonsense from Folks Who Know Better

The big news this week, causing much contortion and hand-wringing among the Phoney Fundamentalists, is Microsoft's submission of its Hyper-V drivers to the kernel driver tree. Those pre-disposed to view Microsoft as Satan Incarnate are sure that there's a trick, a devious plot, in there, since Microsoft is, of coure, Satan Incarnate.

What I'm finding disturbing this morning is that none other than Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center has apparently added his voice to the chorus of those claiming that "Microsoft violated the GPL!" What's disturbing is that Bradley certainly knows better.

Stephen Hemminger, the Vyatta engineer who initially turned up the issue (and no one is claiming that there was no potential compliance issue with these drivers) denies that there was a violation. Microsoft has likewise denied that there was a violation (but, of, course, Microsoft is Satan Incarnate...)

Just to remind the folks who should know better (and enlighten the folks who have not actually read the GPL), a violation will occur under the following set of circumstances:

1. Microsoft distributes a binary copy of a "program" (in this case, the Hyper-V drivers), which includes GPL-licensed code, to a third-party, sources not included.
2. The third party makes a request to Microsoft for the sources corresponding to the binary they received.
3. Microsoft fails to provide those sources, in a timely fashion, for no more than the cost of creating the media and shipping it to the requester.

Absent that specific chain of events, there's simply no violation. If Bradley doesn't use hasn't received a copy of the Hyper-V drivers, from Microsoft, through legitimate channels, he's got no standing to be requesting sources, and he can't assert a violation. However, that doesn't inhibit the untruthful propagandists from using Bradley's (unfounded) claims to support their own (inaccurate) assertions of perfidy on Microsoft's part.

The SFLC has absolutely no business making such a claim unless they're prepared to support it, and the only way they can do so is by producing the third-party mentioned above, something which has so far not happened. The SFLC should issue a clarification immediately: they've called Microsoft liars, which is about par for the course, but they've also called Stephen Hemminger a liar, which is completely unreasonable.

A FURTHER CLARIFICATION FOR THOSE WHO DON'T
READ COMMENTS BEFORE POSTING THEIR OWN

Microsoft could have failed to comply by either the sequence of events noted above, or by failing to include an appropriate notice of how to get sources. There are assertions (and I don't personally know for a fact that there isn't an appropriate offer buried in the wad of stuff one gets with a Windows Server 200 license, I don't have one) that no such offer was tendered by Microsoft.

Assuming, for the sake of the discussion, that this was indeed the case, then the copyright holder of the code being infringed (so far unidentified) could indeed have cause to complain about a violation—since the copyright holder is the only one in a position to actually do anything about it—but it would be difficult for him-or-her to start complaining after the sources had been published and submitted, and the code was brought into compliance with the license's terms.

Which seems to be exactly what Bradley's doing, albeit at second hand. Usually this sort of rhetoric gets saved for when the SFLC files an actual suit, but it's being dragged out here when such action was avoided, thanks to Microsoft's deciding in this instance to play by the rules. That the SFLC is doing this strikes me as either grandstanding or ambulance-chasing after the case has already been settled out of court. My comments about "sore winners" still stand.

AND SOME NEW INFORMATION,
CASTING FURTHER DOUBT ON THE WHOLE THING

directhex has pointed out that what Microsoft evidently did in the Hyper-V drivers is to have a GPL-licensed driver shim, which pulled in a hitherto-proprietary binary blob at boot time, no different than what Nvidia and ATI do with their drivers. About which no one is screaming "Violation! Violation!", even though neither Nvidia nor ATI appear to have corrected those situations...

Which of these things is not like the others...? This seems to be some sort of a trick question...