Fellowship interview with Massimo Babieri

Massimo Babieri

Massimo Babieri - Photo: CC BY-NC Elena Gazza

Massimo Babieri is an IT manager at the Earth Science Department, of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. As well as holding a Ph.D in Geology, Massimo leads the band The Radiostars, releasing their music under a Free license. As well as being a member of the LUG Scandiano, he has been very active in the ongoing success of the PDFreaders campaign in Italy.

Chris Woolfrey: As an artist who believes in the merits of Free culture and Free Software, why do you think it is that more musicians, photographers, and film makers haven’t gone down this road?

Massimo Babieri: There are a few reasons why artists don’t usually use Free licenses. The first is probably caused by the money: if you sell a lot of records you may collect a lot of money, even from royalties, and probably most artists don’t want to lose that money. But I think there is also a problem of knowledge. A lot of artists don’t know what “authors’ rights” really means and they think that if you want to gain paternity over your work, or if you want to protect your art from theft of paternity, you have to do some formal stuff like join a society of authors and publishers, like SIAE, ASCAP, and so on. What I’m trying to say is that many artists don’t know what their rights are when it comes to their art.

CW: Radiohead come to mind. Back in 2007 when they released In Rainbows, it was a bold move, as such a big band, when they told fans they could pay what they wanted for their album. But they didn’t change the copyright. Should they have?

“Music is as old as man, but copyright is very, very new”

MB: Probably asking people to pay what they want for Radiohead’s album is a good thing for music and for people too because every kind of art is culture, and I think you shouldn’t have to pay to get culture; everybody should be able to take benefit from it. Radiohead didn’t use a new license for their album but I think that it’s great that everybody can listen to it. Every artist holds the rights to their art so I do not think there’s a wrong here, as long as the music can be enjoyed freely. Next year The Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do’, should become Public Domain License. This is a great thing for culture.

CW: I suppose the question is whether art can be enjoyed freely, though, without the release of copyright?

MB: If you think about music, it’s maybe as old as man, but the terms of copyright are very, very young; the idea that you can make money because someone plays one of your songs on the radio is very young. Culturally, we say “play music” and not “work music”, because music is a part of humanity, is a part of our culture, and copyright is only a recent invention. For that reason it should be quite natural for an artist to use a Free license.

CW: Do you use the free license because you think it represents what’s natural about music?

MB: Yes, but also because I like to get my music to people. I like it when someone says to me “Hey, I listened to your album and I like this song…”

CW: So, Free licensing also has a commercial appeal?

MB: I didn’t make any money with Jamendo, but I think it can represent commercial appeal for Free art. You have to consider that, for a musician, money comes also from the selling of the album and from shows, so a Free licence can be also an important way to promote music.

CW: Do you think then that there is a greater need for education about Free Culture, as there is for Free Software? Do you see a need to set an example by producing and promoting Free art?

“Free art means Free education”

MB: Free art means Free education. There are a lot of things that we can learn form art. Using a Creative Commons (CC) license can be a good way to promote your art and make it known to a wider audience. For the artist it also represents the control that you have on your art. Our first three albums were, unfortunately, published with ‘All Rights Reserved’ licenses. In 2008 we moved away from that, to CC, and now we feel more free with our music.

CW: And more able to make it the way that you want to?

MB: Exactly!

CW: Let’s hope more follow your example! Free art is getting more popular, and now that there is more of a public debate about it do you think it’s inevitable that the majority of art might once again become “Free”? Isn’t that part of what worries the industry about ‘piracy’?

MB: I hope that art will again become Free, but I strongly regret that piracy exists because every artist has their rights on their own art and we have to respect that. I hope that art becomes Free, but in a natural and legal way, with Free licenses adopted by artists. I think that things will change, maybe in few decades, maybe a few hundred years.

CW: You’ve spoken about art as a cultural tool, and its use in education; another important part of culture is history. Document Freedom Day is coming up at the end of March: how important is it for you that culture which is stored digitally remains Free for future generations?

MB: It’s absolutely fundamental, of course! But not only if we think about the story in decades, centuries or millennia; it’s fundamental even if we think about the few years that make up our own lives. Open Document Formats are the only way to keep alive the possibility of choosing your software, protecting you from vendor lock-in and assuring the life of your data.

CW: Do you see Document Freedom Day and the PDFreaders Campaign as twin warriors, in that case?

“The value of these campaigns lies in the opportunity to speak to public bodies”

MB: Well I think that the PDFreaders campaign is mainly focused on neutrality, and this is the thing: that’s more easy to understand from the point of view of a public institution. When we are able to open that dialogue with them there is often the opportunity to talk with them about FS and Open Standards. So I think that the high value of both campaigns is that we get the opportunity to speak with public bodies. I’m really enthusiastic about this approach: I sometimes think that if you want to bring FS and Open Standards to public bodies you simply have to talk with them. Talking to people is the best way to help FS and Open Standards, and to protect both; there are a lot of people that do not consider the value of their data.

I think there are only two possibilities: either we talk with people and try to convince them to use Open Standards, or we simply wait for the day when most people won’t be able to access their data or choose the software that they use. Recently I’ve seen this second case at work: one of my colleagues uses Macromedia FreeHand. Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia in 2005 and started to control the line of Macromedia products, including Freehand. In 2007, Adobe said that it would discontinue development and support of the program. So what about his data? I took this opportunity to convince him to use Inkscape and to save his work in .svg, which is an Open Standard.

That’s the risk here: dependence on a single company. If you use a proprietary file format you will of course always be locked with the company who own this format; if we continue to use proprietary file formats we will lock future generations with the company who own the format, choosing not just for ourselves but also for future generations.

Fortunately there are a lot of people and technologies which already use Open Standards. We, the LUG Scandiano, recently convinced our Municipality to distribute files from their website using only Open Standards.

CW: Lobbying and activism have an important role to play. But is education the best place to fight the battle? Do you find that, working in a university, a lot can be done in education?

MB: Yes, by talking about education we are talking about the future. As an FS lover I think that school should never propose to the students the use of non-Free Software. And of course many good students and teachers could benefit form FS, but it’s not always easy to persuade teachers to change. I recently acheived an important goal in my department. For 3 years we had the Microsoft Campus contract for the use of MS Office; after a lot of pressing I persuaded the leader of my department to stop paying for it. It can take a long time but I think that insisting every day we can obtain results.

CW: With smaller campaigns like these, plus the bigger campaigns run by groups like FSFE, we might really be on to something!

MB: Yes, I think! And I hope. If people talk about FS to their friends, talk about FS to their boss, talk
about FS to the mayor of their city, and so on, I really think so.

Fellowship interview with Anne Østergaard

 Anne Østergaard

Anne Østergaard

Anne Østergaard is a veteran of the Free Software community, and attended the first Open Source Days, back in 1998. She holds a Law Degree from The University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and after a decade in government service, international organisations, and private enterprise, she has become a devoted Free Software advocate. Her interests lie in the long-term strategic issues of Free Software; in the social, legal, research, and economic areas of our global society. A former Vice Chairman at GNOME, she’s heavily involved in political lobbying, and has been fighting for changes in software patents and copyright for a number of years.

Chris Woolfrey: As somebody who’s been involved with the implementation of Free Software at government level, tell me about the developments in policy, as you’ve seen them, in recent years.

Anne Østergaard: I became involved actively with questions concerning Free Software when the software patent battle in the European Union was put on the agenda of the European Commission, and it later also came on the agenda of the European Council of Ministers, as the European Commission was pushing to change the “Software Patents Directive”. I joined the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) and Free Software Foundation Europe, and worked on common mailing lists. I assisted in meetings with our local government in Denmark, in The European Parliament, and with representatives from the Free Software communities in various European countries.

It was a big and not-too-promising looking task at the beginning. I thought that it would be near impossible to explain to the members of parliaments in Europe, and to the general public, just how dangerous software patents are for innovation. It took a very long time until the main newspapers in Denmark and other countries were starting to write about software patents, but the ball was rolling. With the help of friendly mailing lists, both public and non-public, it became clear to me that with the infrastructure that the Free Software community offered, anyone who is dedicated and willing to respect the ethical rules of group collaboration could join in and join forces.

My friends and I all learned so much in the process. For me and many others the patent battle was a case story that demonstrated to us that a critical mass of dedicated persons from all the European countries can have significant political influence when fighting for better regulations for our society. Now, under the latest European Treaty, Official Journal of the European Union C 115/21 Article 11, a group of one million people from different member states can ask the European Commission to take up a specific topic to initiate or change legislation. It has not yet been decided what exactly the conditions are, but Green Peace has already been knocking on the European Commission’s door.

CW: And groups like the FSFE are knocking on the door, too.

“Large countries in the world have the opportunity to do things right from the start”

AØ: There’s a question that the FSFE need to think about, and that’s “How Can Software Freedom Fighters be the First Movers to use the Citizens Rights Initiative?” We, the FSFE community, have the infrastructure to organize such citizens’ initiatives. The new European Treaty states that broad consultations should be carried out to ensure that the Union’s actions are coherent and transparent. The concerned parties can ask for a public consultation, or simply send a letter to the European Commission or the European Parliament to state their position and to be heard.

Using these new citizens’ rights are a challenge to us, because we need to spend a lot of time finding out about all the steps in the political decision making process. But I know of many people who would rather be part of only the creative process. To those I would like to say this: think of the political and legislative process as creative; one can learn much from participating in this process alone.

CW: How do you think Free Software will develop in the political sphere in future?

AØ: We have seen that documentation and knowledge sharing in the form of case stories, presentations, or consultations etc., can be helpful when you want to convince the government in your country. We have seen from these results of openly sharing knowledge that ideas and inspiration are spreading rapidly from country to country and over the continents. Right at this moment we are seeing that large countries in the world have the opportunity to do things right from the start.

Take, for example, the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap, which says that “In light of the considerable resources of the BRIC Countries (Brasil, Russia, India, and China), in light of the aspirations and proven abilities of many other countries to make intellectual capital a valuable global resource and a viable basis of commercial services, and in light of the enormous changes occurring both in the world itself and our collective and individual worldviews, the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap suggests how Free / Open Source Software can be used to transform ICT from yet another unsustainable hold-over from 20th century economics into a viable, valuable solution for 21st century challenges”.

Many other countries are on their way. Recently the Cenatic Foundation in Spain has issued a very informative Report on the International Status of Open Source Software 2010. It is a long report and well worth reading.

Of course, it took 10 years of fighting to avoid software patents in Europe in the first place. The battle is still ongoing. Luckily even the U.S (Public Patent Foundation) and the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) are involved. However, we need international legislation as Free Software travels fast and knows no boundaries.

CW: If it travels fast then the decision making of government might not be the best ground for it to flourish; given your experience, is this top-down legislative approach best?

“Only together are we strong enough to successfully continue our ongoing battle”

AØ: Experience shows that it is best to have a real need for any new legislation, and to know if there is such a need; a bottom-up approach is clearly the best starting point. But without acceptance and adoption by governments there will not be any sustainable results, because companies are rightfully reluctant to make investments in an unclear situation. This is why the smallest unit of freedom, the individual Fellowship Member, or the equivalent in other freedom commons, is so important: only together are we strong enough to successfully continue our ongoing battle, maintaining the freedoms we have gained and to go on fighting for those freedom rights, we still need in a modern democratic and global world.

Smaller or bigger national or regional groups that share the same goal are our most important representatives when it comes to convincing governments. It takes an understanding of all the nuances of respective cultures to get the message across in the right manner, else it risks being rejected. Like language barriers, cultural barriers are important to acknowledge; wrong approaches could harm or block your efforts before the argument is heard. After all we must not forget that human beings are making decisions based on their inner feelings on what would serve their own agenda best.

CW: If that’s how people make decisions, how best can we help others to enter into the argument?

AØ: When these questions are asked we tend to point to our educational systems. But school systems are very different from place to place. I think it is up to us to think of ways to spread the message of not only Software Freedom rights, but also personal freedom rights in our local communities, as the personal freedom rights are the back bone of freedom. Until we have spread the fundamental freedoms of Free Software further there is little chance that we can make individuals understand the importance of being in control of your own life, and being the one to decide from case to case with whom you want to share information on matters you consider to be of a private nature.

Take Facebook. For most young people it is important to be seen, to have many friends and to be popular. This is why social platforms such as Facebook have become so popular. However, the wider perspective, that Facebook’s members are giving away important personal information and thus making themselves into a product to be sold to private companies, is not so obvious to a vast number of the website’s users. And when important politicians are on Facebook it gives a signal to people that it’s OK to be there. But don’t forget that politicians want to be exposed to get re-elected, and marketing departments of companies wants you to buy their products. To be in control it is safer to be able to remove things that you’ve written in a social forum that are no longer relevant or suitable.

“When important politicians are on Facebook it gives a signal to people that it’s OK to be there”

And there is also the debate about Cloud Computing. Until there is a real possibility for fair competition, and this means that there must be a a secure right to get your own content back, it is a risky thing to base your business on. In his essay “Declouding freedom: reclaiming servers, services and data”, Philippe Aigrain is clearly describing why the open cloud movement is falling short of addressing some important challenges facing user autonomy and capabilities. As Aigrain comments, “The open cloud movement will become one of those activities whose very business rests upon enabling customers to leave it.”

We need a legal framework to ensure effective protection for network neutrality that ensures equitable treatment of decentralized Web services by prohibiting and sanctioning discrimination against protocols, applications, sources and contents. But we also need community and policy; to invest in the development of decentralized, user-controlled, free software-based Web services for all essential social/collaborative applications and promote their usage.

So called “intellectual property” rights are causing problems for free access to knowledge. In my opinion, developed countries have an obligation to share with developing countries so that these countries are able to play on a level playing field in the not too distant future, and without having to pay someone for content that has already been published on the internet.

Having access to the internet is taken for granted by many of us. Many people have only had this privilege of searching for information on the internet for less than ten years and are still not very familiar with how this modern infrastructure is constructed, and is functioning. Let us not forget that several millions of people haven’t even had the chance to use ICT yet. We are living in times where we are expected to make use of electronic self service systems by our governments; systems of an often non-free, and less mature and user friendly nature. If around 30% of a population have severe problems, our governments have a problem.

Fellowship interview with Alexander Kahl

Alexander Kahl

Alexander Kahl

Alexander Kahl is currently working for Nokia in Berlin as a front-end developer. He is a long-term and active member of FSFE, not to mention a Fedora packager, and a Lisp, JavaScript and Perl programmer. We conversed over Jabber, in our respectively cold houses, about developments at Nokia, the transformative power of Free Software, and the potential dangers posed by the use of Free Software by large organisations.

Chris Woolfrey: Tell me about working for Nokia, and your involvement with FSFE’s website.

Alexander Kahl: I’ve just recently started working for Nokia. Mostly it’s to do with research and development, and Qt. A particular technology that we’ve been eagerly anticipating is QML, which is provided as Free Software in the latest Qt versions. It speeds up front-end development by leveraging an optimized declarative approach to programming GUI logic. Nokia’s well-known credo is “connecting people”, and QML is enabling us do this.

The FSFE website is still in the works, and in competition for my spare time with all the other interesting Free Software projects on my list.

CW: And what are the other projects on your list?

AK: I’m trying to write a next-generation software build system, and in the process of writing it split its components up into multiple side-projects in order to have everything as re-usable as possible, in case I resign from the idea someday. Aside from that, I’m playing around with different non-browser based JavaScript implementations, and trying to integrate TAP (Test Anything Protocol) in a way that means as many implementations as possible can use it at the same time. Most probably this is just one of life’s many distractions from what really matters, though.

CW: What do you mean by ‘what really matters?’ It seems to me like you’re working on several interesting and worthwhile applications.

“My work with Nokia feels right to me”

AK: What matters is that my work with Nokia feels right to me, which is often the case when passion and self-commitment can be felt during development. Right now I’m having to question the outcome of some of my side projects however, because despite my motivation, everyone else who originally shared my ideas for the build system now seem to be disinterested. Furthermore, this project involves completely rewriting GNU M4 (a compiler front-end and macro processor). This is something that most people would consider rather insane.

CW: So for you,’what matters’ is that a community can get behind a project, and if everybody thinks working on something like that is insane, then the project must be flawed?

AK: Yes, the desired net effect is that a community is going to emerge around the created software. This could happen indirectly, but what’s important from my perspective is the inception of a development process that will evolve naturally, instead of one which is artificially designed.

I love to assemble complex things from very basic units, instead of combining mature giants of software. The latter may promise quick feelings of success, but the former has greater potential to create something that will live on after its creator is forgotten.

There is a danger however that a gap could arise between my own ideas (in which I’ve invested passion and energy), and the needs of potential users (with whom I’ve been working since the earliest phase of the project). One could also see this as the contention of ‘ego versus altruism’.

CW: Much of Nokia’s work with Free Software has not yet been published. It would be good for both Nokia and Free Software if the company released more Free Software; why don’t they?

AK: One must not forget that Nokia is just a name for something that is many places, products, people, ideas. The Free Software community is incredibly lucky that Nokia employees have been compelling enough to convince the company to invest in FS by buying Trolltech, taking over the Qt team, continuing to fund Qt’s development as Free Software, and using it as a fundament for new technologies.

Don’t expect Nokia to become the next Red Hat soon, but rest assured that if Nokia’s Free Software development teams deliver successfully, Free Software will get a real boost and people will benefit world-wide.

CW: Do you feel that there is a danger that the result of Nokia buying important FS companies like Trolltech will be that people fail to separate the concept of Free Software from the company?

“The dangers I see lie in the dilution of ideas”

AK: Yes, there is such a danger. This has happened with other groups several times before, is still happening right now, and won’t stop any time soon. Remember who got the credit for the stack that makes up the GNU operating system, and who’s getting it now. Nowadays, the majority of gratitude gets thrown at names on the surface of things, at names that are far from the original makers and ideas. This has happened to inventions and ideas throughout the history of mankind.

But in the end, what really matters is not where people go, but how. Free Software is a concept which is basic and fertile enough to spawn more complex individual and collective ideas. Through these ideas people transform and become something that is more valuable to society. The dangers I see rather lie in dilution of the original ideas; this has brought us things like “open core” concepts, “open source” development models, non-copyleft licenses and the like. Hence, it’s less about the people receiving credit, and more about whether people are guided by the progressive ideas behind Free Software.

CW: Free Software is certainly a fertile concept, but sometimes its very fertility can make it vulnerable to manipulation. Is there a danger that large companies will take Free Software and use it for selfish, rather than collective, benefit?

AK: You mean that there are people basically ripping off FS. It’s more like this: communities, peer review, etc., are all just resulting ideas, sometimes conclusions, drawn by the interpolation of Free Software and reality. Let’s recall what makes up Free Software; it’s just the name of a category of software which we’ve labelled as such; software that grants all of its users four elementary freedoms in a non-discriminatory manner. Thus, what’s behind FS is not a matter of technology but a political, philosophical concept that – at least in part – reveals both its advocates’ and opponents’ views on humanity or even life itself.

Now, there are people who try to argue against Free Software by condemning it as something extremist, radical, business unfriendly, even communist etc., and this is where the actual dilution takes place: some people have created minced versions of FS that look like essentially equivalent, more business-friendly or less “boring” (ostensibly non-political) versions, but really mean something completely different. And this is what the aforementioned “large companies” and many other people feed on. I’ve talked to so many people about FS, both developers and users, and discovered that their most prominent blocker is either fear of the unknown or the result of successful FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

I’d even go so far as to say that the business concept of a company like Nokia does not play much of a role for the future of Free Software. What matters is the individual embodiment, or manifestation, of what makes up FS through people like you and me: “Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are”. What really matters about using Free Software at work is what people perceive as the symbiosis between you and the “FS essence” and this will change them. The only thing special about Nokia is the exuberant momentum that amplifies every one of your actions as an employee there.

“Free Software is founded upon insight into the inevitability of human error”

Being a cheerful and helpful human being through living the ideas of and behind Free Software is more convincing than every single argument I could possibly give during this interview. General suffering is the one collective, personal crisis. General suffering is the one collective, nevertheless individually perceived human crisis that needs to be solved and if Free Software is able to make you smile just a few times per day, it adds to our lives something that is substantial. It is able to do so because it is founded on the ideas of love, sharing and the insight into the inevitability of human error that can only be solved in freedom with – as opposed to from – all of the others.

CW: So Free Software isn’t just a political tool, it’s a tool for personal enhancement. Perhaps computers too?

AK: One thing that is important for me is the transformation of mind and character through use of natural and computer languages. It may seem like language was a mere tool for data serialization, but there is a lot more to it: we use language and figures to evaluate emotional and cognitive processes, or in short, to think. Due to the complexity of languages in general, and and the effect of interaction with language, its structure has an immediate effect on us. It is not only culture that brings forth language, it is language that forms character, and thus, culture.

For instance, I start cheering up when I switch to speaking English as opposed to German, my native language; the effect gets stronger when I also switch to thinking in English. It seems to me like the same applied for use of programming languages as well, hence there must be an impact on the programs created and on the programmers mind and feelings.

One specific family of programming languages that deserves appreciation and attention for its effect on one’s mind, is Lisp. It has an astonishingly simple grammar, making it symmetric enough to treat all data as code and vice versa, yet it does allow for solutions to problems so complex that other languages have failed to provide proper techniques for. For example, the ability to implement a new language on top of the existing one that is in turn used to solve the actual problem; this technique is know as Domain Specific Language programming and could be viewed as a means of self-transformation.

Apply this to its user and you might observe her improve herself through gaining reflective abilities. Symmetry is beautiful because it keeps your mind clear and free of twists, in effect making you happier. This is why I use Lisp languages almost exclusively for my Free Software projects: any effort that does not make me a happier human being on its course is most literally insane.

Fellowship Interview with Brian Gough

Brian Gough

Brian Gough

Brian Gough is one of the core developers of the GNU Scientific Library, which he has been contributing to for many years. He runs Network Theory Ltd., which publishes Freely licensed printed manuals and tutorials for Free Software projects, such as GCC, Perl, Python and PostgreSQL. He lives in Guildford in the United Kingdom, and regularly attends Free Software conferences and meetings.

Chris Woolfrey: Tell me how Network Theory got started.

Brian Gough: It’s been going since 2003, about 7 or 8 years. It all started when I was working on the GNU Scientific Library: I’d written the manual and couldn’t find a publisher that would want to publish it under a Free documentation license. And as I’d previously been in a job that was related to digital libraries and scientific journals, I knew a bit about the publishing industry, and decided to publish it myself. It was basically just to make the book available to people: I didn’t think of it as a business at the time. But once I’d done one manual, I saw that there were other great Free Software manuals out there that weren’t available as printed books. And for those of us who like printed books over reading on a screen, it would be a good service to publish other books as well. So I set up the company to publish manuals for Free Software that are published under Free documentation licenses.

CW: Why the struggle with finding a publisher for these books? Free licensing is an established trend in the software world, yet this practice hasn’t been adopted by many publishing firms.

BG: Just as with software, it’s more profitable to publish under a proprietary license than a Free license, generally. I didn’t even try going to traditional publishers because you could just tell that they weren’t interested in publishing free manuals at that time. It was a new thing.

CW: So you decided to do things for yourself. How have things developed?

BG: Well, the idea of the business was to be able to put the money back into Free Software; so to give a donation, typically of $1 for each book that’s sold. And we’ve currently donated over $24,000 to different projects from sales of the books. We’ve published over 25 titles so far. All the books are produced entirely using Free Software, as far as possible. So internally everything is done with Free Software: the graphics, the typesetting, all the editing is done with Free Software, using Emacs, Ghostscript, and so on. And we submit the proofreading corrections that we find back as patches to the original project.

CW: How important is it that what you publish is Freely licensed? Is it integral?

“Without documentation being kept up to date under a free licence, people lose the ability to understand how software works”

BG: Absolutely. There’s an original essay by Richard Stallman on the subject called ‘Free Software Needs Free documentation‘ and the basic idea is a very simple one, which is that if you can modify the software – as you can with Free Software – then you should be able to modify the documentation as well. And if you can’t do that, then really your freedom to modify the software is limited because the documentation, if it’s under a non-Free license, can’t be kept up to date. So over time, without current documentation being kept up to date by everyone under a free licence, the ability of people to understand how the software works and how to use it is impacted. Documentation needs to be free so it can evolve with the software.

CW: Network Theory has published an impressive number of titles; how many people are working on these?

BG: There are two of us who are actively working on all the projects, and I have a few other people who help out on a freelance basis. We’ve got a lot more books coming out in the pipeline. The “Perl Language Reference manual (v5.12.1)” is 700 pages and is the most up to date Perl manual that’s out there right now. And we’ve got the W3C standards for XML. The other ones we’ve got coming out are the latest PostgreSQL manuals for PostgreSQL 9 in four volumes, and the latest Apache Reference manual (version 2.2.16).

The one which is my favourite is the Emacs Org-Mode Reference Manual: a GTD Emacs mode for time management. It lets you organise your tasks, your notes, your appointments, in Emacs – basically to organise your whole life according to the ‘Getting Things Done‘ philosophy. And honestly, it’s the greatest Emacs mode in 20 years. We use it in the company and it just works so well in a Free Software environment. Everything is plain text, so you can put it under version control, you can check out the latest task file, edit it, go offline and work while you’re travelling, update tasks and open new tasks, and then commit back to the repository so other people can pick them up. It really works well with the Free Software approach to doing things, of keeping things in plain text and not being tied into proprietary web-service task tracking systems. I love Org-Mode, so I’m really happy to be publishing the manual for it!

CW: Would you say Org-Mode is one of the more exciting projects in the Free Software world at the moment?

“Something that’s adapted exactly to your needs can be so much more powerful…that’s one of the advantages of Free Software”

BG: Definitely. Maybe it’s even the most exciting! Certainly it’s transformed the way that I organise my work, and I think it has for a lot of other people as well, so it’s software that can revolutionise your life, not just perform a function. One of the great things about Free Software is that you can do things differently. So many of the paradigms of proprietary software are really inefficient, and although Free Software maybe doesn’t always look as nice, doesn’t maybe have the fancy graphics, or whatever, in terms of actually getting things done, if you’ve got something that’s adapted exactly to your needs then you can be so much more powerful and efficient. It can give you a real advantage in whatever your doing. That’s certainly something that’s really valuable to businesses, if they can adapt software specifically to their needs, and other businesses using proprietary software are stuck in a particular way of working that doesn’t suit them. And I think that’s really one of the advantages of Free Software: that you can adapt it.

CW: Many people seem to share the strange perception that computers are something that you don’t need to know about, and even shouldn’t know about; that you shouldn’t mess with them.

BG: Well, I always start from the assumption that the computer should do what I want, and that’s why I use Free Software. I think that’s how people should approach it: they shouldn’t just accept what’s given to them, because computers are such powerful tools that you really want them to be working exactly the way that suits you, not that suits somebody else.

CW: You use the word ‘tools’. Some people seem not to see that computers are tools. People who are only familiar with proprietary software often don’t realise that computers can be used in this way, or that they may be modified to suit a particular task . What are your thoughts on how to educate people about the wider possibilities of computing and Free Software?

BG: I don’t have any big insights into advocacy, but I would say that people shouldn’t passively accept what they’re offered by corporations. They should always seek out something better and with computers that means Free Software, if you want something better, meaning that you want it to do what you want, not what somebody else has designed it to do.

The word ‘tool’ can be misleading because we think of it as something that just does a single job, whereas the computer, a general purpose computer like a PC, is just completely different to anything that has existed before in history because it is completely reconfigurable in the way that it processes information, so that although it is a tool in a sense, it is a tool which is infinitely modifiable and like nothing else we’ve seen. So we shouldn’t just accept the very limited types of software we get from proprietary software companies: we should really have a much bigger vision of what computers do, and I think that’s what Free Software offers. So maybe that’s a way of explaining to people what Free Software is about: it’s a much bigger vision of what computers can do than just being provided with a product.

Network Theory Ltd. is looking for new books to publish. If you would like to see your Free documentation in print, get in touch with Brian at bjg@network-theory.co.uk.

Fellowship interview with Leena Simon

Leena Simon is studying philosophy at Potsdam University and is currently completing a dissertation on problems with the concept of “intellectual property”. She also works with FoeBuD, and was involved in the organisation of this year’s “Freedom Not Fear” demonstrations which took place throughout Europe. We sat down to discuss the dangers of state surveillance, the importance of the politicisation of software, and how organisations like FoeBud and The Pirate Party, as well as the Free Software movement, must be careful not to succumb to dogmatism. For more, check out leena.de.

Leena Simon
Leena Simon

Chris Woolfrey: For those who might not know it so well, tell me a little about Freedom Not Fear.

Leena Simon: Freedom not Fear is an international alliance of people who fight for civil rights in the digital cross-linked world. Not every technology is good for the people and we want the good things, like better communication and maybe a more democratic world, without the bad things like surveillance and manipulation of the masses. That’s what we go on the streets for: freedom needs risk and it can not be achieved in a totally secure society. But governments use fear – for example the fear about terrorism – to cut civil rights, and this is something really dangerous for all citizens and for democracy itself. We state, that freedom is more important than security. History taught us, especially in Germany, more than once, that it is never good if information or it’s broadcasting is confined to just one group.

The beauty of the World Wide Web is that it, theoretically, connects everyone with everyone. This could destroy some very basic structures that make society nowadays work. I myself think this is a good thing. But a lot of people are scared and want to confine the new technology to those abilities the old ones have, or use these possibilities to help those in power to become even more powerful. And of course they want to use these possibilities.

CW: And people have long been told that those in power are increasing power and control in ‘the public interest’, are using fear to control and to protect their own interests; have you found that people agreed with the alliance? Plenty of people who see European ‘collective security’ as a success would not see The Stockholm Program (European wide standardized state run collection of information) as a bad thing.

LS: Of course, on the demonstration we find those who agree with that. But the problem is more to convince those who do not really take an interest in these topics that their civil rights are at stake too. Surveillance is most efficient if you do not notice it, so the more dangerous surveillance gets the more difficult it gets to get people to stand up against it. As they see it, there isn’t really an obvious threat.

CW: And I guess the problem, ultimately, is that many people don’t see ‘information’ as a political concept?

LS: Right. Everyone keeps talking about us entering the information age, but a lot of people do not really seem to know how far this goes.

CW: And that’s something you’re trying to show people with The Pirate Party?

LS: Well, The Pirate Party has a similar direction of impact but not the same. For instance data retention is not one of their main topics. The pirates want to make sure that the importance of the Internet, finally, is talked about in politics. Obviously a lot of politicians have not yet understood how important the web is and how far-reaching the consequences of their decisions are on that topic.

CW: Absolutely: one is about data, the other about a political use of the Internet. But I’m reminded of Lessig’s statement about computers becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, and that the code behind them – who controls it and who can use it – is becoming more important too. Do you think that Freedom Not Fear and the Pirate Party are fighting the same battle?

“Surveillance is most efficient if you don’t notice it”

LS: I think there is a huge intersection, like with the Free Software movement: the main goal and the way of achieving it is a little different. But in the end, it seems like the same battle.

CW: Do you think that FSFE and the Free Software movement are in some ways the bridge between groups like Freedom Not Fear and The Pirate Party?

LS: I would not say that. I am fighting within The Pirate Party, as well as in the Freedom not Fear movement, for Free Software. In both movements a lot of people haven’t understood yet how important Free Software is: FS does not really connect the one with the other. They are connected in different ways and I can also understand their critique about Free Software.

CW: Would you say it’s a failure of the Free Software movement that people don’t necessarily see the connection between FS and those movements, then?

LS: I wouldn’t call it a failure. It is something we could work on. But it also shows that there are people who are narrow-minded in every movement, and we should be careful that we do not get too arrogant about the things we think we understand better than others have. These movements can work together but they can also criticise each other and have insights the others may not have. I see them as different players of one team. They have the same goal but slightly different positions. A political party can work with mechanisms that a non-government organisation can’t. And our movement needs all the players. The FS movement is one of the players. Everyone has different tactics, and sometimes it is really good if one of the players can correct the other player. If he becomes selfish, for instance, if her movements help her alone, but not the team. Even the FS movement sometimes gets too dogmatic about Free Software and forgets that there are other important topics as well. Just like many pirates use proprietary software.

CW: Dogma is something you seem very careful to avoid.

LS: I know the problem from my own experience. One of the most dangerous things is if you think you understood something but you really didn’t. But how should you find out? I stand in-between the different players and I try to keep my head clear. Try to intercede. And therefore I try to keep an open mind. We are doing great things and we understand important things. But we are not without mistakes. And the biggest mistake would be not being aware of this.

CW: People could end up not liking you for that. Nobody likes to hear they’re dogmatic! But it’s an important role to play, isn’t it, as a movement like this gets closer to ‘the people’?

LS: Yes it is a risk. But I try also to communicate, that it is a very natural thing, that you see the world through your eyes only. There is nothing bad about this. It only becomes a problem if you start to forget that you have a point of view and that the world would look quite differently from another perspective.

CW: Which is why, even though people might disagree, an organisation like The Pirate Party using proprietary software is OK as long as it spreads the message.

LS: The FS-movement is very right to criticise the pirates for not using Free Software (and for not supporting it more), and hopefully keeps in mind that it also has faults to be criticised. But of course we should not hate or fight each other because of such things.

CW: I guess it’s just as important to fight a monopoly of ideas within a popular movement as it is within a goverment, which Freedom Not Fear and FoeBuD are trying to do. At the end of the day, it’s an open conversation about the best approach that gets the job done!

“Some guys seem to think that women are treated equally if they treat them like they treat any other guy. But this is not equality”

LS: Exactly. But this is not everything. How we get the job done is very important as well. And that’s where the FS idea kicks in.

CW: Like the engine in a car, the bit nobody sees?

LS: I don’t know if it is the right metaphor. In my opinion the special thing about the Free Software movement is that they understand the issue as something political and philosophical; it is important to understand that software works in the background and has a lot of power without people noticing it but it is one step further to understand how important that is for freedom and democracy. It influences society and all our lives.

CW: For you, are these things a part of a wider liberation movement?

LS: It may be the last chance for the liberation movement. But only if people realize it and use it. And as long as it stays a “nerd topic” in the heads of the people, it is not really a part of it.

CW: You mean that, despite the political ramifications, ‘computers’ are still seen as a nerd’s play toy? Do you think that, by extension, women aren’t part of that group?

LS: There is the stereotype about computers being toys especially for boys. These movements need women and their skills. But more importantly women need this movement. We’ve talked about how software and computer influence our lives. And it would be very dangerous for equality if women lost this opportunity to participate.

CW: That isn’t an easy process by any means.

LS: If a woman overcomes those stereotypes and wants to take part in this world, she has to face many difficulties. She has to be OK with being one of very few women in the group. She has to be OK with being hit on all the time. And she has to cope with sexist jokes or with the phenomenon that her needs are not as important as others, sometimes even not taken seriously. Some guys seem to think that women are treated equally if they treat them like they treat any other guy. But this is not equality. This is making women act like men and it disregards their needs. I know many men in the movement who think of themselves as treating women equally, but really don’t. How should you know that your behaviour is making others uncomfortable if you never experienced it yourself and no one tells you? Homogeneous groups don’t have a high sensitivity for the needs of the minority. This is totally normal. But what I am trying to say is that a group of many guys can only oversee things that are important for women, and this is why women have to be present and tell them. But for this, also the guys have to listen to the women. And it has to happen without the fear of “yet another gender debate”. Talking about gender is a very personal topic. Therefore it tends to get dirty very easily. A lot of people are sick of these discussions and I can’t blame them.

CW: You believe that it’s important not to let the “gender issue” divide things?

LS: Yes. A lack of equality is also bad for the guys. Guys are also trapped in stereotypes that don’t ask how a person wants to live. We need to work together as best we can without stereotype or subtle manipulation because this gets us nowhere.

CW: As you said, the team needs lots of players and also lots of different kinds of players.

LS: Totally right. Because these differences are our strength.

Fellowship interview with David Reyes Samblas Martinez

David Reyes Samblas Martinez is the founder of Spanish Copyleft Hardware store Tuxbrain, and attended the famous Open University of Catalunya. He’s also the subject of this month’s Fellowship interview, in which he answers questions on hardware manufacturing, e-learning and Free Software politics.

Stian Rødven Eide: For well over a year, your main activity has been Tuxbrain, a shop dedicated to open, hackable devices, and, in particular, Copyleft hardware. Initially inspired by the community success of Openmoko, your selection has since grown to include several other products as well. Could you tell us a bit about how you came to start Tuxbrain, and how the first year has been?

David Reyes Samblas Martinez
David Reyes Samblas Martinez

David Reyes Samblas Martinez: My business partner Victor Remolina and I discovered the FOSS world about 7-8 years ago. Since then, we have always been thinking about doing something together around Free Software. When the name Tuxbrain first was mentioned about 5 years ago, we immediately decided that whatever we do has to carry that name. We soon created a manifesto outlining the philosophy of Tuxbrain. The main aspects of it were that the company should be integrated inside the FOSS community, be part of it, and dedicate part of its time and resources to help initiatives that we found interesting grow. We felt that this would help us grow as well.

When we discovered Openmoko, we were fascinated by the idea of the FOSS philosophy being ported to the hardware world. While software can be replicated ad infinitum with barely no cost, physical devices carry a huge cost even in the first draft. With Openomoko there was, for the first time as far as I know, information available on the design and production that could be shared and improved by the community – the same way software was. Lacking the distribution networks of larger manufacturers, Openmoko promoted the idea of group selling, where customers would share shipping costs and get volume discounts. I began organising a Spanish purchasers’ group, which soon was joined by Portugal as well, and that was how the first Openmokos arrived to the Iberian peninsula. It felt great making all those geeky people happy, who, like me, believe that other ways of making hardware was possible. We then decided that Tuxbrain should be a Hardware distributor, a Copyleft Hardware distributor.

As such, we started out by selling the Neo FreeRunner from Openmoko, and immediately began evaluating other hardware to expand our catalogue. Some products came in and were included even though they were not really open hardware. For instance, the GP2X Wiz, a game console that has a brilliant and active community who started with the old GP32, developing games and software (a lot of them under GPL or other Free licences), as well as the Sharp Netwalker, a totally closed hardware, but of really good quality, that came with Ubuntu from the manufacturer. After focusing on these “end user” oriented products for a while, we discovered Arduino. I must admit that we started selling it simply because it was totally open hardware, and not really understood what the objective of such a board was (being a software guy myself, and Victor a designer). However, as soon as we started learning about Arduino, and getting to know the community around it, we fell completely in love with the whole concept. I read somewhere that Arduino can be regarded as the duct tape of electronics; you can join together whatever you can imagine, and then make it work. Last, but not least, the NanoNote arrived, and we fell in love again.

The first year was, as for all start-ups, not easy. We still must work on finding an equilibrium between what we want to do and what we can do right now, but, basically, what we do is learn, spread what we have learned, and grow stronger as the communities around our products grow. We help spread the Copyleft idea in events we organise, or assist in, and support other advocates as much as we can. And of course we’re selling some devices along the way, providing assessment services, and doing development around them. We are a company after all.

SRE: For the last several months, your blog has revealed a lot of work being done with the 本 (Ben) NanoNote from Qi-Hardware / Sharism. What do you find particularly exciting about this device? Do you find that awareness of Copyleft hardware is increasing among manufacturers?

DRSM: When I first learned of the specifications on 本 NanoNote, I must admit I was not really impressed. However, knowing the team behind it, most of them being part of the Openmoko community, I quickly become interested nonetheless. The philosophy behind the device was very appealing, and it already had some interesting use cases; dictionary, offline Wikipedia reader, music player, serial console, calendar, gaming device. Also, its dimensions were amazing! You don’t really know how small and light it is until you have seen one with your own eyes.

本 (Ben) in Chinese means beginning, and that’s what 本 NanoNote is: A starting point. The 本 is the first product from the Qi-Hardware community that was launched into the real world. While Openmoko Inc (the company, not the community) abandoned the Neo FreeRunner project and deviated from the idea of Copyleft hardware, a lot people who worked there still believed in those ideas and joined forces with the community to form a new company called Sharism. Along with the Qi-Hardware community, Sharism is committed to bring hardware that follows the following three principles: Copyleft hardware, Public Patents and Upstream Kernels. Any piece of hardware that fits those ideas can be part of the Qi-Hardware community.

As an active participant in the Openmoko community, Tuxbrain was invited to be a part of Qi-Hardware, and here we are. Many interesting things have happened since the 本 was released. A lot of great software has been or is being ported to it (Debian was just ported by the people from pyneo.org), it has been included among the devices officially supported by OpenWrt, and it has successfully been been hooked up with the Arduino board. This is also just the tip of the iceberg. Due to the Copyleft nature of the 本, projects like the SAKC (Swiss Army Knife Card) are underway. SAKC is basically the 本 NanoNote with an FPGA added and a lot of I/O available to do hardware hacks. To put it simply; it’s like an Arduino, but a lot more powerful.

With regards to other manufacturers, I think there still is a lot of work to do in order for them to understand the benefits of Copyleft hardware compared to traditional hardware production. This is basically what the Qi-Hardware community was formed for. Anyone who is interested and wants to know more is welcome to ask.

SRE: Tuxbrain is participating in the 20+20 project, in which the EOI Business School (Escuela de Organización Industrial) is working towards a new economic model for Spain, based on sustainability, responsibility and IT. Could you explain briefly how the project works? You are representing the Open Economy sector. How would you describe your business model in that context?

DRSM: Due to the economic crisis, and in light of how the traditional mechanisms have failed to avoid it, the EOI, with the support of the EU, is searching for new business models that can prevent such a crisis from happening again, or at least have more mechanisms that can predict and mitigate against it. The 20+20 project starts out with a period of intensive research on various economic sectors, 20 in total, selecting 20 companies from each sector. Presently in its first phase, the five sectors that are being studied at the moment are Social Economy, Digital Economy, Creativity Economy, Open Economy and Green Economy. Because of our focus on being an integral part of the communities around our products, some community members have pointed out that Tuxbrain should be included as an example of an Open Company.

Despite being classified as a distributor, Tuxbrain is not content with moving boxes from one side to another. First we must be able to rely on what we are selling, so before we incorporate a product into our catalogue, we test and play with it for a while. If it convinces us, only then can we convince others to trust in it as well. Openness is the most important criteria on which we base our analysis, even more so than the commercial margins. The more open a product is, the more easily can we participate in its development and help improve it. Since we are in direct contact with our customers, we are familiar with their needs and can relay that information to the developers and hardware designers. This way we also help in guiding the product towards a wider audience. Also, when the product is open, we know a lot more about it and can provide better service to our customers. Another interesting aspect is the fact that our customers are part of a community that actively shapes our products. This community follows meritocratic rules, just like a lot of Free Software community projects, and, for us, a customer that contributes to the project with development or advocacy has just as much a say as someone who places large orders. Both contribute to the project. I believe those were the qualities that led to Tubrain’s inclusion in the 20+20 Analysis.

SRE: Several of your products are running ARM processors, providing more computing power for less electricity. While much used in smaller devices, there still aren’t many laptops running ARM. Do you think that this might change in the near future? Is ARM generally more hacker friendly than x86 processors?

DRSM: Sadly, the reason why ARM and MIPS architectures are scarce in laptops is the software, and not the hardware itself. As you said, they are more energy efficient than the x86 architecture, and thus a lot more suited for mobile solutions. This should include laptops as well, but I think large manufacturers are afraid of being rejected by the market if they do not offer the latest Redmond monster, ups.. sorry, I mean operating system, inside their boxes, and they are limited to the hardware this can support, which for me is total nonsense. Software is ductile; it’s easy to change the code, and it can be reproduced n times. Thus it’s the software that has to be adapted to the hardware, so that hardware engineers can focus on innovative design and produce the most powerful/efficient/cheap hardware possible, without thinking of limitations on the amount of software that will run there. Eventually, common sense will finally hit the head and the budget of hardware companies that want to offer better solutions to their customers.

I don’t think ARM and MIPS are more hacker friendly per se, it’s just that the operating systems running on them are; GNU/Linux, Android, Symbian, all having a strong developer community helping them to reach their goals.

SRE: You attended the Open University of Catalunya (UOC), which famously has run a Masters Programme in Free Software since 2003. Can you tell us a bit about your years there. Is the sharing culture embedded in all aspects of the curriculum?

DRSM: The UOC is a really great initiative and an example to follow in e-Learning in all aspects, from the continuous evaluation system to the ways and the quality of communication with teachers and the institution itself. In the beginning, circumstances, such as having a family and a job, forced me to miss a lot of classes and study on my own. After a year, I started regretting that I hadn’t done so before. I learned a lot more from this system than I do from attending a conventional class. During those first years, I read all of my course material on the train to work, and I also made my first contact with the GNU/Linux embedded world there. I had some C programming assignments, and I also had a HP Jornada 680. Looking for ways to match my needs, I discovered that the JLiMe project already had ported GNU/Linux there, and so I was happily editing and compiling in the bus. Since then, I have loved little devices with GNU/Linux in them.

I was really amazed with how the whole Free Software world works. All kinds of people collaborate together, and we are extremely self organised. Some projects rise and some fall, but everything is reused for the benefit of the community. I really think the Free Software ecosystem is the largest technical collaborative effort ever made, and I’m very passionate about the whole idea.

SRE: Free Software has also been heavily politicized in several of Spain’s autonomous regions. What is your impression of the politcial climate for Free Software in Spain? Is it all handled regionally? Are there certain competitive aspects between the regions that have affected adoption of Free Software?

DRSM: Yes, there is a very diverse institutional support for Free Software in Spain, depending on the region. The central government, I think, has really missed the point of it, and lost a golden opportunity with a One Child – One Laptop program they tried to start some time ago, which would have included only Free Software, saving money and teach kids about diversity of software. The curious thing is that the same politicians often have differing views in different political formations. For example, Extremadura is one of the public institutions that is strongest on Free Software integration, but its politicians are mostly the same who run the government! I believe the problem basically is a lack of information, and strong pressure from proprietary software lobbyists. But it’s not that bad, really. There are quite a few dedicated organisations, both governmental, like CENATIC, and NGO’s like ASOLIF, who, together with the Spanish Free Software community, are fighting to be heard.

Our warmest thanks to David for answering our questions. You can follow his progress on the Tuxbrain blog.

Fellowship interview with Simon Josefsson

Simon Josefsson is a Fellow and GNU hacker with a special interest in security. His contributions to the Free Software world include such ubiquitous projects as GnuTLS and Libssh2, and he was recently presented with the Nordic Free Software Award[1]. I sat down for a jabber session with Simon, asking him about his projects and other security matters.

Stian Rødven Eide: While proprietary software vendors often tout security by obscurity as an advantage, you are involved in several Free Software projects that are regarded as among the most secure software there is. Can you explain how Free Software can provide better security?

Simon Josefsson
Simon Josefsson

Simon Josefsson: To answer that, one should study the history of security incidents in software. Once you do, it becomes evident that no matter how much effort is put into an implementation or specification, or even how much effort you put into analyzing it, sooner or later someone will figure out a way around it. This means that security really is a process rather than anything absolute. And here Free Software has many advantages, some technical, but even more important ones are the social aspects. For example, Free Software is open for people to scrutinize, and people help each other by scrutinize software they use, and the result is that widely used software is better analayzed. In comparison, security by obscurity does not invite people to review the system, so there are much fewer improvements to the system, and only those inclined to attack the system will analyze it. And, as we’ve seen, no software security is absolute.

SRE: One point that you have stressed in several talks is that security should be treated as a process. This affects both how the community should be involved and how businesses should treat potential security issues. Can you tell us a bit about the background for this notion and how it would work in practice?

SJ: The background is witnessing really complicated designs by smart people be cracked relatively quickly. This reflects older software design principles, where you spend a lot of time on design stages, whereas Free Software is typically engineered in an iterative process — you add one small feature, release it quickly, people start to use it, starts thinking about it, and some may realize that there is something wrong with the feature, and it gets reported back. The small feature can then be re-designed, or even removed because it was a bad idea. The point is that if every addition is done in this somewhat modular and piecemeal way, you are less likely to make major design issues. Free Software is good at making frequent releases that correct minor things, and users have adapted to that habit. If you only do one major release every 5 years, you are more likely to break some things heavily that require a lot of work for people. So I tend to recommend businesses to work in an iterative way and involve the users early on to avoid embarassment.

SRE: You are maintaining quite a few security libraries such as GnuTLS, GNU SASL, GSS and more. Which ones do you find yourself spending the most time on improving, and which ones receives the most attention and/or help from other people?

SJ: I have spent quite a lot of time during the development cycle on my own projects, but after that it becomes more of a maintainer’s work. The most development time I’ve spent is probably on Shishi, which is my Kerberos V5 implementation. But as a maintainer, my time is more directed on what people use, and right now that tends to be GnuTLS. There is also a factor of maturity; the Libidn project is used in critical places (including glibc) but I rarely spend any time on it these days because it is mostly feature-complete. On some projects, like Libssh2, I also get paid for doing certain things, which naturally make me spend more time on that project. Lately I have found myself working a lot on Gnulib because it contains re-usable components used by all my other projects.

SRE: You have provided security services for a range of various clients, including hospitals, wireless providers and web applications. Are the concerns of these very different or should the same security standards more or less be applied in all cases?

SJ: There are some places where my contributions haven’t been as successful as in others, which could be due to many reasons, but I think generally that where I’ve failed to get my point across are the places where people don’t understand (or agree) that security is a process — they want something that is Absolutely Secure, and then never touch that piece of component again. It then becomes difficult for me to have any effective discussion. Also, some organizations have established traditions about how to deal with security incidents — obscurity rather than openness, including the bank world, some parts of governments, and so on. I think having a process-like view of security would help many places, but I also understand that some companies have business reasons why they cannot use an open community process. The Free Software world has been learning from this, and we now follow something called responsible disclosure, which I think is one example of where Free Software has been improved by learning from the “old” way of handling security.

SRE: Your Master’s Thesis dealt with the concept of storing personal encryption certificates in DNS. While still not a common practice, you wrote in a recent blogpost that some work has begun to happen in the area. How do you currently regard the promise of this way of distributing keys? Have keyservers in general improved since your thesis was written?

SJ: The problem is not so much about technology here, but social matters. The person responsible for managing DNS for an organization is typically not the same person responsible for managing user certificates for an organization, and people have been reluctant to change their habits here. After all, DNS is a pretty critical piece of any company’s infrastructure. So I haven’t seen much uptake in this, even if it continues to be a interesting possibility, especially for the OpenPGP world. One part of my thesis was about the privacy issues around the then-current DNSSEC standard, the so called NXT record. I identified and explained that it will lead to problems when people can enumerate entire DNS zones, and even wrote a IETF draft on how to solve the problem using hashing of the names instead of storing the names directly. People in the IETF felt that the threat didn’t exist, and thought they were ready to roll out DNSSEC quite soon anyway (this was in 2001/2002!) so they didn’t want to change DNSSEC. I gave up on the draft, but years later people who were actually deploying this identified the same problem, and ended up re-inventing my solution, which is now standardized (the NSEC3 record). So at least some of it ended up being used, although not in the form or way I anticipated.

SRE: Another project you have worked on is the YubiKey, a physical USB device that aims to make secure communication simpler. Has the YubiKey been successful so far? Do you think that this approach could end up being adopted by computer manufacturers as well?

SJ: The YubiKey popularity is growing, and given the amazing number of community contributions we’ve received I’d say it has been a success. Technically we are now changing to support new standards like OATH HOTP which will make it even more relevant. The difference between the YubiKey and other authentication devices like smart cards is that it is based on a process-oriented and cost-efficient way of working with security. Rather than purchasing smart cards, readers, and spending a fortune on device driver installation and user education, we focused on getting something that was good enough security (one-time passwords based on AES) but pushed strongly on ease of use (no device drivers or software!), and to support the kind of compromises people do. For example it also supports a mode where it outputs a static password, which is not a good idea in general but many people were asking for it and are now using it. We are open for it to be used by anyone, including manufacturers, but as there is no integration required on computer manufacturer side (in contrast to smart card readers or fingerprint readers), the solution isn’t depending on support from computer manufacturers.

SRE: During the GNU Hackers Meeting in Göteborg, you had a presentation on Code Quality Assurance. What is, in your opinion, the best way of aquiring quality assurance and how will this be implemented in the GNU project?

SJ: I believe it is important that quality assurance isn’t something done by a separate set of people, and after the product is otherwise finished, but rather that it is integrated into how hackers work daily. So my goal is to setup a GNU QA site where people can help a project by setting up a build server, either from version controlled sources (to build daily snapshots) or from a daily snapshot to see if it works on their favorite architecture. It has to be a opt-in system, so that people don’t feel it is a burden. The goal is to be able to present Code Coverage reports (based on GCOV/LCOV), provide Cyclomatic Code Complexity charts, GIT/CVS statistics, and so on. All of it should be done in a distributed way, so people feel involved in the effort, but also to reduce the work-load on me and other people who run the servers.

A big thanks to Simon for sharing his valuable insight into these matters. You can learn more about him and his projects at josefsson.org.

[1] The award was split between Simon Josefsson and Daniel Stenberg.

Fellowship interview with Leif-Jöran Olsson

Leif-Jöran Olsson is a language technologist and XML enthusiast with a long history in the Swedish solidarity movement. I sat down for an interview with Leif-Jöran and asked him about his background, his education and the various projects he’s been involved in.

Stian Rødven Eide: A major part of your work has centered around language technology (LT). What was your point of entry to this field, and how does it relate to your dedication to Free Software? Were you already interested in Free Software when you started your education?

Leif-Jöran Olsson
Leif-Jöran Olsson

Leif-Jöran Olsson: I was initially very interested in usable design, and joined the Mechanical Engineering programme. But, after two years, I found out that human communication was much more fascinating. My introduction to Free Software came after Gymnasium, where we mostly used proprietary software like turbo c++ and turbo prolog. Since I come from a rather unprivileged background, and could not afford to buy software, this prompted my search for free tools. I later moved to Uppsala with my own family and attended the Master’s programme in Language Engineering, which, coincidently with my search for education in human communication, was started in the autumn of 1994.

SRE: Some of your earlier projects have had a focus on machine translation. How does that relate to your later involvement with Språkbanken (the Language Bank) at the University of Gothenburg? Has Free Software played a part in your work?

LJO: While not the best venue for Free Software historically, machine translation was one of the primary areas when I worked in the Department of Linguistics at Uppsala University from 1998 until 2003. Here at Språkbanken, however, we have a heterogenous research environment for language technology infrastructure, primarily focusing on Free Software. Which is really great. We are not doing machine translation at all here. Being a rather shy business, machine translation has got many proprietary and secret tools involved – quite contrary to Free Software ideals. Instead, there is a focus on hard results, meaning that statistical methods, which are cheap in labour, are favoured. The machine translation research/work in Europe is mostly carried out in EC projects with large companies involved. This makes the real knowledge and gain for society rather small. In Uppsala, we did rule based transfer translation and chart parsing, which connects more to linguistic theory than statistical methods, and one of my tasks was to manage a controlled vocabulary. That makes the translation easier. But here, in my work at Språkbanken, Free Software has played a major and contributing role. I am also grateful to the director of Språkbanken for letting me use some of my time to work on eXist-db.

SRE: That leads me to the next question. One of your most active software projects at the moment is the eXist XML database. Why did you choose to get involved in that project? What are the advantages of using eXist-db rather than an SQL database?

LJO: We had been working with sgml and later xml-technologies for a long time, annotating the corpus materials used in the research. We were using eXist-db in our work and wanted to contribute back. This resulted in an active involvement in the project. SQL databases are good for strictly regular or structured (the S in SQL) relational data. Xml on the contrary is all about hierarchy and sequence. This is the power of the information model. Making irregular relations and annotations of
language material are very good examples for using xml technologies. Many people draw the conclusion that xml is too verbose and bloated, confusing the serialised human readable format with the information model. Remember, there are highly compact binary serialisations too. Almost all previous and current LT tools are using different input and output formats, which makes the interaction hard. Being so easily able to do things, like transformations of materials with standard tools, is invaluable. Since we are working on infrastructure, it is a natural choice to use an xml database, since you can avoid the overhead of parsing the data every time you want to use the linguistic annotations and corpus materials in interaction with yet another tool. We also have the sematic web technologies coming. Of course, you are better off with a relational database in a data shuffling situation, but, as soon you need to do irregular, read hierarchical and/or sequential, queries, it mostly boils down to a few easily intelligible rows in XQuery, rather than pages of SQL code.

SRE: You have also taken it upon yourself to maintain the recently liberated bookkeeping software JFSAccounting. As such software often needs to be adapted to every country’s specific laws, Free Software solutions are not always available without a certain amount of work involved. Do you find that there still are missing pieces in the Free Software ecosystem, with regards to the basic tools needed to run a business or organisation in Sweden?

LJO: Accounting software has certainly been one of the map’s white spots, and administrative tools for managing organisations are generally scarce. This I had experienced first hand through my involvement with solidarity movement organisations, and that’s why I took the opportunity to begin liberating the accounting and administrative tool JFSAccounting. The first publicly available liberated version is to be released at FSCONS 2009 (I will prepare fribokföring.se for the
promotion of this to organisations). The piece missing in the tool is a member register (matricle), as it initially was aimed at businesses. But the customer register part can hopefully be adopted with the right terminology for a release next year.

SRE: You’re also involved in the Swedish Syndicalist movement, especially through SAC (a federation of local workers’ unions). According to its principles, SAC is built upon political independence, a decentralised structure, local democracy and solidarity. To a certain extent, this seems to mirror some of the basic values common in the Free Software movement. Do you think that workers’ organisations such as SAC can help Free Software adoption among businesses and public institutions?

LJO: Actually, it was quite a hard job to make the federation accept a policy on primarily using Free Software, something that was finally achieved during the spring of 2008. The federation’s servers have been running Debian GNU/Linux for years, but it was much harder to get a policy for using Free Software on the client machines. Fear of the unknown and the comfort of the habit were the main reasons for this. There are still quite a few Free Software advocates in the different local unions, so yes, I think it can help the adoption of Free Software in other organisations. Many are engaged in several local, national or international organisations beyond their union. Eventually, people get used to the concept of Free Software and regard its freedoms in the same sense as the working class struggle. They realise the common ground they share with the Free Software hackers, and then, they don’t want to go back to proprietary software.

SRE: Through your involvement with SAC and your own company, aptly named Friprogramvarusyndikatet (The Free Software Syndicate), you have also established Serengeti, a network for solidarity and Free Software that offers free hosting for non-profit organisations, as well as a mailing list for discussions. Can you tell us a bit about the background for Serengeti? Do you have plans to expand its activities?

LJO: As I mentioned, I have met quite a bit of fear of technology, and an ignorance of the negative consequences from putting yourself completely in the hands of proprietary market actors. At the same time, many people that are attracted to Free Software are afraid of politics and only see Free Software as neutral and apolitical. This resulted us forming a loose network called Serengeti. We are aiming for a more stable network that can promote the use of Free Software in solidarity movements, and also help bridging the surplus of knowledge from therein. Building on tradition, we do it bottom up, starting out with a mailing list.

Our warm thanks to Leif-Jöran for taking the time to answer our questions. You can read more about him and his projects on his Gothenburg University page.

Fellowship interview with Andreas Tolf Tolfsen

Andreas Tolf Tolfsen is a web technologist, developer and aspiring musicologist – who works at Opera Software, and regularly fights for digital freedoms. I sat down for a Jabber session with Andreas, asking him about his work, his life and his music.

Stian Rødven Eide: Through your employment at Opera Software, you work quite a lot with web standards. What are the difficulties in making a browser display pages correctly? Has HTML 5 posed particular problems?

Andreas Tolf Tolfsen
Andreas Tolf Tolfsen

Andreas Tolf Tolfsen: The great thing about the web is that anyone can do it. The concept behind it is the principle of universal accessibility; that anyone should be able to read its contents. I am convinced that the web will have a greater impact on the world than the advent of the printing press, in that everyone, irrespective of their technical experience, is invited to participate.

The bad thing about the web is that anyone can do it. With more people contributing, the higher the chance that someone will break something. The use of invalid code syntax, lack of standards-compliancy, proprietary formats, and uncharted behaviour are all challenges facing anyone who attempts to make sense of various de-facto web tag soups.

Luckily we have browsers which actually facilitate, and at times encourage, this kind of behaviour. Traditionally, web standards have advocated one way of doing things, while web browsers, on the other hand, have tried to make the best out of what they are presented with. Because probably as much as 94 % of the web consists of pages with invalid syntax, we should rather be asking ourselves if there is a better way of designing standards.

Web standards have generally been about telling people how to do things, and not so much about what the expected results are. In particular, web standards do not cover how browsers should handle exceptions to the sets of strict rules in the event that the syntax is not semantically correct. Additionally, few web standards are concerned with backwards compatibility, which is a major concern for web browser manufacturers.

So, the biggest part of the job with getting web pages to be displayed correctly is actually to figure out what the correct behaviour is. In this respect, HTML 5 solves more problems than it creates. A big part of this involves fixing HTML 4, which contains parts known to be wrong. HTML 5 will still be a big advance in attaining open standards on the web. For the first time, all browser manufacturers, and dozens of volunteers, are involved in the drafting of the specification.

SRE: Like Mozilla, Opera has decided to implement Theora and Vorbis support for the <video>- and <audio>-tags. Do you think HTML5 has a chance of making Ogg Theora and Vorbis more established standards, even though they were left out of the official specification?

ATT: Currently, there is no good way of embedding video and audio in web pages. A web developer must follow different approaches dependent upon operating system and web browser species. This is inconvenient, and most fall back to using a proprietary Flash solution. This is unfortunate, because it defies the entire point of open web standards.

With the HTML 5 specification, using the Ogg codecs was initially proposed. Apple, however, decided not to implement Ogg in Safari, citing “submarine” patents as a key issue. The result is that we end up in a “plugin prison”, where the video and audio files that are supported are entirely dependent upon what codecs Quicktime (or Windows Media Player, for that matter) supports.

There is no point for HTML 5 to specify something that we know browsers cannot implement. But in reference to your question, I think what Chromium, Mozilla and Opera do will have only limited effect, seeing as they control only a small segment of the market, compared to Microsoft Internet Explorer. Still, with Ogg being the standard of the world’s largest website, Wikipedia, I think Ogg has come to stay. It’s good to see Ogg natively implemented in the majority of browsers, but the goal of having a universal video and audio codec for the web will take a few more years.

However, I find it interesting that the Chromium Project has implemented Ogg support in their fork of WebKit. I hope that the folks over in the official WebKit Project camp will follow Chromium’s example, and do the same thing. Even if Safari is without Ogg support, there is no reason why the free software alternative WebKit should be.

SRE: You also work at E-tjenesten, a Free Software cooperative that you co-founded and that focusses on web development. Can you briefly describe the projects that you work on there, such as talko and Bikube? What are the long-term goals for the cooperative?

ATT: Bikube (Norwegian for “beehive”) is a tool for collaboration. It lets you keep track of work and deadlines, share files, discuss, and get stuff done. talko is actually the software that runs beneath this website, which is yet to be launched.

At E-tjenesten SA we are trying to phase out various consultant work we have been doing, and focussing more on web application development. One of our goals is to develop useful tools that let people do what they want, the way they want to do it: We don’t force our own beliefs on to our customers.

SRE: As a dedicated communist, you have been active in the political party Rødt (“Red” in English), particularly working on campaigns for Free Software, integrity and filesharing. Do you regard these causes as a natural part of contemporary socialist ideology? Is the dedication to such issues widespread among the Norwegian Left?

ATT: Certainly! The thread is that knowledge should be made accessible to all, and that the fantastic things made possible through internet and collaboration might lay the foundation for a new form of society. I think this concept is quite widespread, in the sense that if people are given the right tools, and access to free knowledge, one is taking large portions of market-governed areas out of capitalistic control, and in to communistic control.

File-sharing benefits society, but violates the old model of payment for film and music. Unfortunately, the industry is waging war on their own customers instead of exploiting the possibilities that new technology offers.

Many see file-sharing as a question of right and wrong according to today’s legislation, but this is not what the campaign for legalizing file-sharing is about. According to present legislation, file-sharing copyrighted material is almost always illegal. The campaign, however, raises a political question of whether this legislation holds any function today.

Through collaboration, millions of people all over the world have built the world’s largest library and made it accessible to all. One is able to share music, film, software, and knowledge in a scale not before possible. The distribution of this material is for all practical purposes free. Ten years ago, it was virtually impossible to have access to all the world’s culture 24 hours a day, but as my generation grows up, it’s seen as a necessity.

Most will agree that the internet is the future for distributing film, music and digital content. Subsequently, most will also agree that the industry needs money to continue production of good music and film. The most important divide is, however, between those who want to apply the same old models of financing that we have today on the internet, and those who understand that a market economy with a “pay by track” solution doesn’t work, and is never going to do so.

The number of digital copies is not limited. What limits the distribution of arbitrary copies of a song is the speed of the network you are on, and modern peer-to-peer file-sharing programs have solved this issue elegantly: Millions of computers in ordinary homes ensure that everything is available, at any time, and thus also solves the problem of net neutrality with “high-speed” lanes to facilitate distribution of this, and other kinds of online content.

A digital copy that is distributed in this way is an abundance. In the real world, when a person buys a CD from the record store, there is one less CD for the rest of us to acquire. On the internet, on the other hand, when someone downloads a CD from someone else, it becomes multiplied. The irony is that the more people who are interested in something, the more accessible it becomes. This should be an ideal situation, but for the record industry it becomes a nightmare when their business model collapses.

The question of file-sharing is largely tied up to the question of copyright. Recently, the people behind the Swedish torrent tracker Pirate Bay were convicted of violating copyright legislation. Among other things, I created the widely popular Filesharer.org campaign to support the accused, and it had an overwhelming response. In just a few days, almost 4000 people uploaded a picture of themselves to show the industry who the “real” criminals were. The campaign got covered by the media all across the world, and even made national television in a couple of countries.

My point here is to show that today’s copyright legislation is outdated and needs to be revised. Richard Stallman has made sensible suggestions as to how we can approach this issue. Interestingly, all political parties in Norway answered “yes” to the question “[i]s the current copyright legislation sufficiently adjusted to today’s digital society?” in a campaign by EFN (Electronic Frontier Foundation, Norway) and FriBit. This means that the climate for a new copyright debate in Norway is good.

SRE: You’re also personally involved in EFN on similar issues. How much momentum has the organisation gained, and how difficult has it been to work for these issues in Norway?

ATT: I’d like to first explain what the EFN is: Electronic Frontier Foundation in Norway is a loosely organized discussion list concerned with civil liberties, privacy and freedom of expression in the digital society. Over the past year, EFN has been organizing several events, such as a debate on file-sharing where Cory Doctorow was present, and a demonstration for a free internet in front of the Norwegian parliament, made comments on the Norwegian government’s proposal for the use of open standards in public sector, and been involved in battling the Data Retention Directive.

EFN plays an important role in Norway, but unfortunately often as a single critical voice in the information politics discussion. I would say they are regarded as a group of enthusiasts worth listening to. There are a lot of highly talented people in EFN, who’s been working hard since 1995 (180 members) to build the organization to what it is today (around 1000 members).

With a possible Norwegian implementation of the EU’s Data Retention Directive (directive 2006/24/EF), requiring telecommunications companies to store traffic data on the citizen’s electronic communication (e-mail, SMS, telephone, internet) for up to two years, Norwegian’s right to privacy will be grossly violated. This is an issue EFN, and many of EFN’s members, have been deeply involved in.

The Data Retention Directive was adopted by the EU on 15 March 2006, but the Norwegian government has not officially decided whether the directive should be made Norwegian law or not. According the EEA agreement, Norway holds a reservation right, as we are not members of the EU. This right has never thus far been exercised. But then, we have never faced a directive representing this great a threat to democracy’s fundamental values, as what the data retention directive does at present.

The director of the Norwegian Data Inspectorate, Georg Apenes, has warned about yielding to “totalitarian passion”, and Thomas Finneid, board member in EFN, is calling it “[t]he most important debate about democracy in [N]orway since the war”.

SRE: As a pianist, composer and musicology student, you have no doubt been exploring Free Software alternatives for music production and notation. Do you find that Free Software solutions are sufficient for your musical needs? Are there any particular programs you’d recommend to others in your situation?

ATT: Oh, absolutely! I would argue that the most aesthetically beautiful notation software out there is GNU Lilypond. It beats the proprietary alternatives by a good margin. It’s an absolutely fantastic piece of software, as is often the case with GNU software in general.

When I write papers, I use the tool lilypond-book to compile LaTeX articles with Lilypond notation embedded, which is much better than having to export graphic files from proprietary alternatives. I don’t think Lilypond’s gained much hold in the musicological field yet, but it’s certainly encouraging that it’s the best out there.

I also use a piece of software called SPEAR (Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Resynthesis), which allows you to edit and manipulate partials in sound files. There’s also Audacity, a tool for recording and editing sounds, which I use a lot.

In recent musicological research, especially with work related to music cognition and movement, there has been a surge of new, interesting software developed as a result of a need to find better and more accurate ways of empirically documenting body movement in relation to music. In particular, the research centre fourMs at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Oslo have made some very interesting software that’s used, among other things, for movement analysis of video, real-time audiative analysis, production of sound with embedded control devices (such as a game controller), and for producing sound based on motiongrams of video recordings.

Of course, this software is available under the GPL. This not only encourages others to use and improve it, but also allows critical readers and other musicologists to verify the empirical data collected with the tools. Today, research projects are often granted funding even though the results of the research are not possible to verify (or even to falsify, to check that experiments can be reproduced), because one needs to buy access to closed platforms, or even licenses for the research material itself. This is a good reason why we, by principle, should not trust research done with proprietary, closed-source tools.

SRE: You have been involved in FSFE for several years as a translator and web developer. What is your personal take on FSFE’s current web presence, and what do you think should be improved?

ATT: FSFE is a wonderful organization that does a lot of exemplary work. One of its biggest strengths is its diversity: That we have translations in 30 languages of our website is an incredible achievement, and the fact that we are able to influence debates on free software and open standards on a European level is a proof of the significance of FSFE.

However, despite good results, I don’t always think we are good enough at showing off the results of our work. Another point is that we likely have a good potential to involve our Fellows and other activists better in our activities.

FSFE’s web presence consists mostly of one-way communication through newsletters and news articles on our homepage. There are many great resources there, although as discussed on the web-list some time ago, most of it is poorly organized, and a lot of content is hidden away.

I think it would be good if we started a discussion, not only on web presence, but about communication in general in FSFE, with emphasis on developing tools to help Fellows and other sympathizers, and on improving the general structure of our website.

Even though our policies are good, how we present them counts also. I’m a bit reluctant about going too much into detail on what I see as the biggest rooms for improvement, but I hope that people will either heartily disagree, or wearily agree with me; and be inspired to participate in such an effort. Either is good, really, for I think a good discussion on this is needed.

Many thanks go to Andreas for his insightful comments. You can read more about him and his projects on his home page at E-tjenesten.

Fellowship interview with Smári McCarthy

Smári McCarthy is a thoughtful anarchist and practical chaos technician – with a deep interest in Free Software and democracy. Currently serving as project manager for the Icelandic Innovation Center, Smári works on digital fabrication and peer-to-peer education, while spending his spare time breaking the fundamental assumptions of how we organise society. I sat down for an interesting interview with Smári, in which he explained his projects and how they can contribute towards a more sustainable world.

Stian Rødven Eide: One of the most profiled projects you have been involved with is the Fab Lab, having headed the Icelandic branch for over a year now. While best known for its use of 3D printers, the Fab Lab is actually a much broader concept that goes far beyond technical innovation. Can you tell us a bit about your work there, and what you hope to achieve?

Smári McCarthy
Smári McCarthy
Photo by Alda Jónsdóttir

Smári McCarthy: There are two sides to the Fab Lab story. On the one hand, there’s the research side, which is all about developing the universal constructors, figuring out the hard science of digital fabrication. In that realm I think our work is done when we can download chicken sandwiches off the Internet.

On the other hand, there’s the social side. People want to be empowered by technology, and want to get access to it as soon as it comes out of the research. There are early adopters, and people who follow later, but it’s imperative that whenever we finish developing the technology that can make anything at the touch of a button, people know what it is and how it works, because otherwise there’s a high chance of bad people using that kind of technology for bad things.

SRE: Earlier this year, you visited Afghanistan and helped set up the Fab Lab there. With regards to the current Afghan infrastructure, or rather lack thereof, it seems like a major challenge. What were the main obstacles? Is the project going as planned?

Smári McCarthy: The Lab was actually there when I arrived, thanks to the efforts of Amy Sun and some other people last year, so when I went there the main mission was to build and deploy a wireless mesh network. We did that, and the reason we chose that kind of project was that of all the things people need in Afghanistan, one of the greatest challenges is getting access to good information. In European history, we developed water tech and food tech and building tech and so on in a fairly linear order – much like it’s portrayed in games like FreeCiv – but leapfrogging can change the game a lot. Give people access to vast pools of technical know-how and hopefully a lot of infrastructure questions will solve themselves.

What surprised me was how few obstacles there were. We used a lot of “tape engineering” (extreme usage of gaffer tape should be a mandatory course in engineering schools) and a lot of patience, and everybody did their homework. The project is going great: When we left, four FabFi links were active. Since then, locals have built links five and six, and are planning on at least two more. We have no control over the growth, nor do we want such authority – it’s just good that people want to use it.

SRE: A lot of your motivation for working on digital fabrication seems to stem from the wish for a more sustainable technology. Could you elaborate a bit on how you see the connection between the digital fabrication and sustainability?

Smári McCarthy: Back in the 1950’s, there was a bunch of people like John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener who were thinking about computation and industrialization in very abstract terms, and did a whole lot of work in figuring out that there needn’t be much difference between the kind of mechanisms we have in software and the kind we have in hardware. I always liked that idea, the idea that computer science might be able to seep through into reality, and I’ve also always been a big fan of harsh environments and extreme situations. Naturally, I’m inclined to bind those two together. The situation on Earth right now is getting a bit complicated though – the exact situations that fascinate me the most are economical and political instability, global warming, excessive regulation and general foolishness, threatening to destroy humanity. Sustainability is one of the keys to solving that problem – as my friend Vinay Gupta noted, 6 billion people living the way the two billion richest humans live – a six billion person suburbia – is a situation that will get us all killed very very fast, because it’s not sustainable at all. How then do we make harsh environments pleasant? Digital fabrication and, more generally, thinking about the computational capacity of the universe, may be one of the answers to that question.

SRE: In some of your last talks, you even bring free software principles to economy, democracy and law. Using technological infrastructure that is more or less already in place, you envision a rather simple plan to instate a radically direct democracy. Can you briefly explain how this organizational model works? Do you regard Iceland as a suitable testbed for this?

Smári McCarthy: Yeah, that’s another point in the same realm – right now it’s not just our industrialization and suburban organization that’s unsustainable, it’s our political and economical systems. So, thinking about how democracy works, I realized that the best democracy I’ve ever seen is the Internet, and the beauty of it is that there’s no assumption of preordained structure in it. No explicit hierarchy. There’s a bunch of implicit hierarchies and cryptohierarchies that come and go, but nothing as clearly defined as “this guy here is the president of the Internet”. A lot of people complain that direct democracy doesn’t work because of scaling issues – too many things to discuss and each person doesn’t have enough time to spend on each problem. So what about taking a page from the book of the Internet, and say: Let those who wish to participate do so, and keep the entry threshold as low as technically possible.

Giving everybody a say is really easy, and people like being able to have a say. If the question is relevant to them they’ll chime in, and if it isn’t they’ll just go with the flow most of the time. What follows from this is a bunch of meditations on an arbitrary networked structure for democracy – I’ve called it crowdsourced democracy. After the financial collapse in Iceland last October, a bunch of people started thinking along the same lines and we’ve formed a sort of “shadow parliament”, which is just a website that copies all the issues going through the real parliament and allows people to have their say. It’s doing really well, and I think Iceland is a great testbed for it – mostly because it’s a small population with a lot of opinions, a lot of distress these days due to a ton of prosperity being pulled from underneath their feet, and people are generally very tech savvy.

SRE: You’re also a board member of the Icelandic Society for Digital Freedoms, and recently wrote an article indicating a substantial movement towards Free Software in Iceland. How do you regard the current development in this matter? Has the economic crisis, which hit Iceland especially hard, had any effect on how Free Software is regarded?

Smári McCarthy: Just last week we were on the campaign trail for this. Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary from the Software Freedom Law Center came over and we met with the President, the Ministers of Education, Health and Industry, people from the Prime Minister’s office and the Finance Ministry, as well as the Reykjavík municipality, and generally we’re sensing a huge shift towards Free Software. The financial situation opened a door that we “free as in freedom” people rarely acknowledge, which is that Free Software actually typically is free as in free beer, and that’s the kind of incentive the government needs right now.

So Reykjavík has signed a deal. They’re switching to Free Software before the end of the year, and the education ministry is going to be switching some schools and institutions to Free Software as a trial effort. It’s too early to tell what else will come from last week’s efforts, but it’s clear that proprietary software is going to have a very tough time.

SRE: As a high-school teacher, you have taught courses in civil liberty and technological literacy. With regards to your work on peer-to-peer education, how do you generally structure the learning process in such courses? Do you see the shift towards a peer-to-peer mindset as transformative for education in general and, if so, in what way?

Smári McCarthy: I agree very strongly with people like Paul Lockhart and Ken Robinson in that the entire education system as we know it has a completely devastating force on people’s creativity and interest. I try to address this when I teach, but it’s very hard. When I get a class of 16-year-olds who’ve been raised to hate school and hate mathematics and just simply hate thinking, it’s very hard to get them to open up and participate. You ask them a question and they just sit there waiting for you to tell them the answer, because they’ve been trained to know that you’ll do that anyway. It’s almost as if Pavlov had rung the bell and eaten the food too.

The civil liberties course that I’ve been teaching (in which I use Cory Doctorow’s brilliant book “Little Brother” as course material) starts off by focussing on technology, and I manage to pry the kids open by forcing them to crack Caesar ciphers and calculate RSA keys whilst feeding them this historical yarn about why people were inventing this kind of thing, and then branching off into privacy and freedom and the hippie/yippie/hacker thing. By the time I show them Big Buck Bunny as an example of collaborative editing they’re interrupting the screening every two minutes with a highly political question – they realize the deep philosophy of Big Buck Bunny, and that is the win.

Take that kid right there and stick him in a Fab Lab, where he has the ability to collaborate with people all over the world, developing technology for himself and others. That’s just magic. I love it. It’s a whole lot of work getting people out of the shackles of the education system, but when it works it’s totally worth it.

A big thanks to Smári for giving us this interview. Make sure to check out his blog at smari.yaxix.org/blag.