BSD

Just a quick update. On Friday, July June 21, 2008, the server that hosts this website suffered a drive failure. As the techs went in to hot swap and rebuild the drive, the master drive also failed resulting in complete data loss.

Being my personal site, I hadn't been making backups regularly so I lost about 3 months worth of stuff, including the Freerunner review and the Photo tour of the ASU.

I decided at that point that my website sucks. :) I currently use Jaws CMS which is decently good but not great. The reason I chose to use it, though, was because I like pictures and all of the other blogs suck at managing pictures the way I want them – taggable and on my server. Flickr is probably the closest, but I didn't want to be limited to their storage space, service changes and stuff. Jaws lets me put images in multiple albums without duplicating the images, so I used it.

Unfortunately, the AJAX in the admin interface causes conflicts and sometimes I have to reload a page. The search system suck badly, sometimes matching falsely and not displaying matches. But the ugliest part, frankly, is the RSS feed. When I'm editing an article, it auto-saves to draft mode, but for some stupid reason, it actually posts to the RSS feed, so if my article is long (and unless this is your first visit to my site, you know I post long posts often. I actually meant “quick update” and I'm on 250 words.) it actually syndicates a half finished, often broken, blog post which may or may not be updated later.

Because of this, I'm actually writing this blog post in OpenOffice.org Writer which I'll cut and paste into the CMS. Jaws CMS does a remarkably poor job in all of helping me manage my content so I'm ditching it.

I've been trying to teach myself Python, but at work I deal primarily with PHP so I can't really sit down and just hack. I decided to take this opportunity (the drive failure, if you've already forgotten) to force myself to resolve two issues – my site that sucks and my laziness preventing me from exploring Python.

I've decided to try, at the least, to redo my site using Python, and more specifically, using the Django framework which Debian actually packages. :) This means that my normal few-times per week content won't be posted even though there's some infringement of liberty or some advance in Openmoko's progress or something else worth chatting about. Frankly, I'm lazy, and the less content I need to transfer, the happier I am. So this may be my last blog post for “a while” as I learn Django and ask questions and devote my spare time to that for a bit.

In the mean time, this site will remain up, with some broken articles. :)

For the past several years, I've been a proud supporter of the Free Software Foundation. The ideals of Free Software have always rung true to me, and I've not only adopted Free Software solutions in my home (even my wife runs GNU/Linux) but advocated for others to evaluate what they find important and adopt free software themselves.

So when I pulled my funding last month from the FSF, I was asked "Why?" from some friends. "Do you not care about free software anymore?"

I still care deeply.

Free Software is, at it's most very basic for me, a matter of property rights. To me, it is an affront to property rights to sell or give something someone and enforce conditional restrictions upon them. If Oster sells you a toaster, they have NO right to prevent you from taking that toaster apart, studying it, adapting it and using those adaptations in the marketplace. Free Software then, has ALWAYS been about me holding my right to study that which is mine - and affirms that everything on my computer is in fact MINE.

Due only in part to Free Software, the activist nature within me has been awoken. Even more than with free software, I feel it's important to stand for what I beleive in and make decisions that reaffirm that believe. The newest belief if that government, in some way shape or form, is the cause of most of the day-to-day gripes I have. That isn't the point of this blog entry though...

What has become clear to me is that the Free Software Foundation is not truly comitted to user freedom. Furthermore, they're quite willing to use the guns of government to enforce their "freedom". Freedom is free market freedom. Freedom is, at it's very base, the right to choose. I'm still firmly comitted to the ideals of Free Software, but I stand against the Free Software Foundation, as I stand against anyone, who feels it's morally justifyable to use the guns of government to enforce compliance with ANYTHING.

If free software is better, free software will stand it's own ground, and hundreds of men with military weaponry can't part with it. Bad ideas, however, don't seen the threat of violence to be abandoned, as it makes no sense to continue with it. Free Software stands and fights it's own battles, using only consumer opinion to oppose Microsoft and Apple and Adobe. I'm quite content to leave it there, and in order to do that I found it necessary to pull my funding of the Free Software Foundation.

Viva Libre!

Danijel Orsolic (Libervisco of The Libervis Network) and I were having a chat yesterday, inspired by his article "Merging Open Source and Free Software".

Generally, he feels that it's time to return to using the Free Software moniker instead of Open Source, and create an organization called "The Free Software Business Initiative" to (like Bruce Perens's original goal) enlighten business to why freedom is important. While I agree that it is important for show businesses why freedom is important, I disagree with his hope of "merging" Open Source into Free Software.

Why?

Because people who use the term "Open Source" have rejected the freedom aspects of the software. They rejected the ethical issues attached with restricting users with non-free software. To them, it's not a matter of freedom. Just like the people who use Windows, blissfully unaware that they could be doing better. "Open Source" advocates are no more for the cause of Free Software than Microsoft itself. They, like Microsoft, sometimes release Free Software. They, like Microsoft, seem to believe that Free Software and business can't work together. They, like Microsoft, do NOTHING to further freedom for the sake of freedom.

I already hear Libervisco saying "But Open Source OSes bring users to freedom." It's the "adoption" arguement which I've always found to be faulty. There are those who believe that the more people adopting GNU/Linux, the more potential people there are who will come to value freedom. On the surface, this makes sense, it's playing the odds, essentially. However, this view fails to take in to account "the other side". For every person now using GNU/Linux that MIGHT come to Freedom, you've got another person vehemently arguing how "Linux shouldn't be political". GNU/Linux adoption, at the very least, merely adds numbers to both sides of a "war" that's existed since 1991.

Admittedly, I'm a rather black-and-white thinker. I couldn't really grasp WHY encouraging Free Software use on Vista helped... How you could care about freedom and STILL use a non-free OS baffled me. But the more I think on it, that's the BEST way to advocate Free Software. When you make it a "Linux" thing, people sometimes become resistant. Having worked in the "enterprise sector" I found that change is slow. Often, change is scourned, simply because it is change. But even in people's homes, change is frowned upon, except by a small core of people... The people who have already made a change for freedom.

For years I've been advocating people switch to GNU/Linux by explaining how they're being restricted and the benefits of Freedom. Some have switched, some haven't. Those that HAVE switched all gained an appreciation for freedom. However, I'm now feeling as if I could be doing more to spread Freedom - by focusing on Windows users and Mac users. Spread freedom has ALWAYS been what I've advocated, not "adopt Linux".

There are signs that I'm not the only one. Joshua Gay, the campaign director of the Free Software Foundation discussed this in the FSF Bulletin while introducing Libre Planet. By quoting the Ithaca Free Software Association's "How to spread Free Software" he covered this idea - a way to more effectively spread the ideas of Freedom which are central to the "adopt GNU/Linux and they'll learn about Freedom" concepts. Exposure to Freedom will lead to Freedom.

This is a call to Free Software advocates. Stop advocating GNU/Linux for a moment. Take a deep breath, and think about what it is that you value about your freedom. Think of the things you're able to do with Free Software. Think of the peace of mind the added privacy and control gives you. Now think of ways to help give that message to someone around you without advocating they try GNU/Linux. Is that goal viable?

Why haven't you started?