Microsoft and software morality
Martin Owens recently asked the question “Why do you like Microsoft?” It’s a pretty brave thing to ask an free/libre/open source Linux community like Ubuntu. While some have taken up the challenge, it made me pause and think for a minute. Do I like Microsoft? Do I hate Microsoft? I suppose the answer is somewhere in between. Here’s some reasons that I could like Microsoft:
- It was my introduction to computing. In particular Windows 3.1 was my intro to a GUI and Windows 95 was my intro to the Internet (where I first downloaded Debian on 11 floppy disks).
- It basically just works. There are certainly frustrations (why must I reboot so much, why is setting up a printer so difficult) but by-and-large Microsoft OSes work pretty well.
- There is so much software available for it and it’s a defacto standard. Whether it be the latest game, tax preparation software, or even state of the art scientific software, one can almost always find a Windows version.
- Microsoft Office is an excellent, if aggravating, software suite. PowerPoint and Excel in particular can provide good quality output with minimal effort.
- Windows is fairly easy to give support to for family, etc. because there is not hundreds of different “distributions” of it running around and a new release comes out every 5 years or so, not every 6 months.
- Despite some “interesting” methods, I find the story of a young “nerd” making it big a bit inspiring. These days it seems not uncommon to have < 30 year olds running multi-millon dollar companies but when I was growing up it was pretty unheard of.
- In the end, it’s kinda nice to be a “consumer” sometimes rather than having to scratch itches to get what I want done.
Of course there are many reasons to not like Microsoft:
- When Microsoft products are frustrating there’s really not a lot you can do about it but hope the next version is better.
- It’s expensive. Windows alone isn’t usually a problem, but adding on MS Office and the “niceties” can get expensive for people on a student’s budget. This is the primary reason I haven’t purchased a Microsoft product in a few years and I’m relegated to using ancient software I’ve already purchased the couple times a year I find I need it.
- For me personally I have some moral issues with organizations Microsoft has donated money to in the past. They’re certainly not alone but they are still on my naughty list.
- Microsoft products just are not that fun. I think it’s fun to get to test, twiddle, and tweak my OS. Of course I pay for it but still, lots of fun.
- FLOSS is a more inviting, educational, and community-driven. Microsoft is pretty boring.
So in the end, Microsoft seems to work fine for ~ 90% of people and that’s OK. To me open-source software is a much cooler and hopefully useful way to develop software but I understand why it’s not for everybody. I’m not sure that it will ever be the dominate or even most efficient development model, but I certainly wouldn’t mind if it was 
I think I view open-source mostly as a fun hobby that sometimes produces great software and can even be turned into a profitable enterprise occasionally. I just don’t see a moral or philosophical imperative to software. Proprietary software does not restrict or take away any freedoms or rights I might have, it’s just not as open and inclusive as it could be. I believe it is a grand mistake to try to cast proprietary software (and companies that produce it) as somehow inherently evil. Open-source software wins when it is the better, more useful, and more valuable product, not when we guilt people into thinking they’re somehow criminal or immoral for not using it. Attaching some sort of morality or idealism to the proprietary/FLOSS software struggle just seems silly to me. It is just software after all, it’s not that earth-shattering or deeply important in the grand scheme of things.
Edubuntu Meeting Minutes
The meeting was well attended with lots of new people (awesome!), attendees included:
bencrisford, nestor, Timequeezer, abruptus, Svenstaro, Lns, LaserJock, asanchez, pygi, Ahmuck, davidgroos, alkisg, jt4sugar, nubae, and some stragglers.
Agenda Item: Lns / nubae – Are they in Edubuntu-members yet?
Due to having only 2 out of 5 Edubuntu Council members still available, it is necessary to reestablish the Council, which is tasked with approval of new members. The Ubuntu Community Council, who has delegated the membership approval to the Edubuntu Council, should be consulted.
Action: LaserJock will send email to edubuntu-devel and Ubuntu Community Council to figure out how to reestablish the EC
Agenda Item: How to effectively advocate/market Edubuntu to schools/school districts
Because the future of what Edubuntu will look like is still in process it is difficult to have a specific discussion on potential marketing and advocacy initiatives. However the idea of collaborating with the Ubuntu Students team was brought up as a general strategy.
Action Item: bencrisford is to email edubuntu-devel with more details for the idea of working with the Ubuntu Students team on marketing
Agenda Item: How teams will be structured in future.
There are currently 14 non-LoCo Launchpad teams related to Edubuntu. Many of the teams are no longer in use or are owned by people who have left the project. A review needs to be done on the teams, and evaluation of what teams are still needed, and work with Launchpad administrators to do the cleanup. It was suggested by nubae to look at how Sugar has organized their teams.
Action Item: Lns will spearhead the Launchpad team cleanup process
Agenda Item: Attracting developers/contributors to the Edubuntu project.
There was a lot of discussion about the lack of developers and contributors in Edubuntu. There were lots of suggestions including:
- demo videos to show potential contributors what kind of things are available
- getting Ubuntu Students involved
- something like Google Summer of Code, but for Edubuntu/Education
- having more specific objectives and tasks for people to do
- better documentation
- mentoring
Action Item: pygi to start thread on edubuntu-devel about building the developer community
Action Item: bencrisford to look into collaboration opportunities with the Ubuntu Learning project
At the end of the meeting there was a general discussion of where Edubuntu is heading and how to move it forward. A major concern is that having Edubuntu as an add-on CD to Ubuntu has been a detriment to users and caused a decrease in interest and users. Anecdotal evidence indicates that a single installation medium is very desirable. Everyone was also encouraged to read the draft Strategy Document and comment on it.
Action Item: nubae and alkisg to look into the possibility of going back to single install disk/media
P.S. The raw log is available. The meeting starts at 19:00
Future of Edubuntu meeting
Tomorrow (Friday the 22nd) the education community in Ubuntu will be gathering at 18:00 UTC in the #edubuntu channel on the freenode IRC network.
The topic will be if or how to move the Edubuntu community forward towards Karmic and beyond. The Edubuntu community has had a rough go of it for the last year or so but it looks like some “fresh blood” is wanting to re-energize the project and get Edubuntu back to being a leader in the educational Linux market.
If you’re a K12 educator, an educational app developer, school IT adminstrator, or an Ubuntu developer/contributor who is interested in Ubuntu for education and/or young kids please drop by the meeting. The possibilities are pretty wide open and community is seeking input, feedback, and contributions of all kinds.
Landing on the GeekDeck
As Og has already pointed out, our good friend Pete has managed to rope us into another one of his crazy projects, GeekDeck. It’s basically getting together a group of computer geeks who like to write and putting together an eclectic “zine/blog thingy … to expand peoples geek palettes”. It’s going to have monthly issues covering a large range of topics and will hopefully have a nice looking PDF version as well soonish.
This month I talked about a couple personal examples of how I’m using open source software in undergraduate and graduate science (specifically physical chemistry) education. Og’s “Cherry Picks of the Month” is fantastic, a great read, as was Pete’s interview of our very own Alan Pope. GeekDeck Issue 1 has a total of eleven articles so go check it out!
Who’s in your Ubuntu fav 5?
So Jorge just posted about nominating people to the Ubuntu Hall-of-Fame. He also hit on something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. While the HOF is a cool place to so who’s rockin’ the distro, for me it’s still a little impersonal. Maybe it’s just me, but I love to share why the people who rock have made such a huge impact for me. I also like talking about the “unsung heroes”. So here’s a meme for you all:
- Think of 5 people in the Ubuntu community who have influenced you the most, or helped you the most, or who you most idolize.
- For each person write a couple sentence summary of why they are in your Ubuntu Fav 5 and post somewhere.
- Nominate at least 1 person from your Fav 5 for the Ubuntu Hall-of-Fame.
Here are my Ubuntu Fav 5:
- Oliver Grawert (ogra) – One of the first developers I talked to back in 2005 when I first got involved with Ubuntu. A great motivator for wanting to make MOTU. We worked together quite a bit on Edubuntu and he’s a great mentor and reminds me that open source is FUN. He also loves cats, ’nuff said.
- Colin Watson (cjwatson) – Colin is like the epitome of an Ubuntu Developer, he’s smart, efficient, and helpful. He’s the force behind Ubiquity and much of what makes Ubuntu, Ubuntu. He’s been on both the Community Council and Technical Board and I trust him eminently to guide Ubuntu into the future.
- Barry deFreese (bddebian) – Barry is the guy that got me involved with Ubuntu development back during Breezy Badger. He was a fun part of the MOTU community, and even though he’s come and gone over the years as life dictates, he’s always just quietly done what he could to make Debian and Ubuntu a better place, with his typically self-deprecating and humble attitude.
- Martin Pitt (pitti) – Martin is pure awesome and is one of the most upbeat guys I know. What I like about Martin is that he’s very cheerful and friendly, even in the mist of imminent freezes and deadlines. And whenever I’ve had to ask him for help on something he’s always thanked me for my work, when he’s often the one that makes it really work.
- Steve Langasek (slangasek) – Steve is the Ubuntu Release Manager, a long time Debian Developer, and a really cool dude. What impresses me the most about Steve is that even though he’s like THE MAN and works for Canonical, he participates in the, mostly volunteer, MOTU community.
Why we need Edubuntu to succeed
This evening I had a great chat with a guy named David. He’s a 9th grade science teacher in Minnesota. He’s working on a project called Growing Communities Of Scientists in his school. He plans to use a set of “computer enabled science classrooms” which embed thin clients into a student group workspace. David’s also got a great blog where he’s been journalling his experience. This means students have access to computers without interfering with they’re normal learning/social area. A common sight I’ve seen in most computer labs is individual students with hardly any working space and fairly isolated from each other and the instructor. It’s sort of like a cubicle effect. For sciences were you’re trying to get a lot of hands on instruction it’s rather difficult.
So, back to Edubuntu. While David’s been working on the hardware of his computer enabled science classroom he’s also been working on getting LTSP set up along with Ubuntu/Edubuntu software he needs to manage his classroom and teach his students. He’s run up against a problem that is fairly common to educators but is pretty difficult to work with on Linux systems. Simply, he needs to control access to applications. He wants to implement a rewards system where students gain computer privileges (getting to use Firefox, etc.) based on being responsible with current privileges. One of the things that’s great about Linux OSes is that you can install software system-wide and is supposed to be multi-user friendly. However, in this case, that freedom is a problem. I’d love to hear some suggestions on how to accomplish an application whitelist system in Ubuntu.
OK, but back to the title, why we need Edubuntu to succeed. The reason I say that is that Ubuntu and Linux/FLOSS in general needs advocates on behalf of students, educators, and the next wave of technolgy users. People generally tend to stick with the OS they first learn so one of the best ways to make Linux maintstream is to get it into schools.
The problem is that most software development in FLOSS is not centered around education. There are education-specific applications out there (Sugar, gcompris, KDE Edu) for sure, but the OS itself is not always education-friendly. I’ve seen a lot of educators trying to deploy LTSP servers in their schools struggle with applications that don’t behave well with multiple users, even common ones like Firefox and OpenOffice.org. On top of that key needs such as practical user and group management for educators is almost non-existent.
In many ways, one of the primary jobs of Edubuntu is to provide an advocate for educators and students to Ubuntu and upstream software developers. It’s not just about a making a way to install Ubuntu educational software easier, it’s about it’s about listening to educational user’s needs and trying to make some of those dreams reality. If Ubuntu can’t be “Linux for learning human beings” I’m not sure it can really make it mainstream. I’ll go out on a limb and say, as we start 2009, forget the “Year of the Linux Desktop” and look towards the “Year of Linux in Education”
Edubuntu Meeting Minutes
Today we had another great Edubuntu team meeting. Here is a condensed version of what we covered:
Review of the Edubuntu Strategy
Much of the meeting was spent going over the Edubuntu Strategy Document and related issues including:
- Clarification of educational level categorizations by mapping student age ranges with categories
- DISCUSSION: Grade level and educational categorizations vary from country to country. Teachers and administrators need to know what software, artwork, etc. apply to them and their students.
- ACTION: RichEd to send email seeking comment on age ranges for preschool, primary, secondary, tertiary designations
- ACTION: RichEd will draft the South Africa and out the UK mapping tonight and send to the others for input … LaserJock for US, nubae for Austria, Spain, Germany
- Edubuntu’s Launchpad team structure needs review and reworking.
- DISCUSSION: A development team is needed to provide for things like bzr branches and PPAs. The creation of an ~edubuntu-contributors team was discussed as a less “harsh” term than “-dev”. There is also confusion as to what the difference between the ~edubuntu and ~edubuntu-members teams are for.
- ACTION: LaserJock to create edubuntu-dev Launchpad team and arrange for ~edubuntu as an umbrella team to hold all official Edubuntu Launchpad teams
- Clarification of Edubuntu’s goals/branding/naming
- DISUCSSION: The debate about the use of “Edubuntu” and “Ubuntu Education” continued. RichEd explained that Canonical would like to use “Ubuntu Education” for the .iso and contents (Canonical-supported applications) for purposes of marketing to OEMs and leveraging of Ubuntu’s brand strength. The community members agreed with this. Further, the “Edubuntu” term will be used for the project, community, and community-supported packaging.
- ACTION: LaserJock to draft “Edubuntu and Ubuntu Education” clarification statement and run it by RichEd et. al
Review of Jaunty specs and tasks (see Roadmap)
The Edubuntu RoadMap was reviewed and several ideas for Jaunty tasks were added. LaserJock encouraged everyone to think of bitesized, feasible tasks for the Jaunty timeframe and add them to the RoadMap. This will allow the team to track efforts and give a place for new contributors to “plug in”.
- ACTION: Everybody is going to help fill out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Edubuntu/Devel/RoadMap
Set date/time for next meeting
Same time, same place, in two weeks. That is January 21st, 18:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.
going mouseless
I’ve been using my laptop quite a bit lately. I’ve been working on my PhD dissertation and taking my laptop back-and-forth from home to school every day. I started noticing that my wrist was really beginning to hurt. I decided to try to find a better window manager for keyboard use.
I tried a bunch and ended up using Xmonad in Gnome for a while. Xmonad is a really nice tiling window manager written in Haskell (which I don’t know). Since I normally run my two primary apps, Firefox and gnome-terminal/terminator, maximized I didn’t notice to big of a difference. However, some apps just don’t fit all that well in a tiling WM model and I’m thinking of switching back to metacity/compiz. However, I want to keep the ability to primarily use the keyboard.
So, I wonder what kind of tricks/tips you all have for running “mouseless” in Ubuntu?
KDE Kudos
After Jonathan Thomas’ nice overview of KDE 4.2 Beta 1 I decided to give it a go. I’ve been mostly a Gnome guy for the past few years but I’ve been keeping my eye on KDE 4, as many people have. Each time there’s a new release I give it a test drive and while it’s certainly flashy I usually find too many bugs, incomplete implementations, and a lacking usability. That’s certainly to be expected for a platform that large changing as much as it is, but it’s still not great when you’re just trying to get some work done.
So, today I installed Kubuntu 8.10 on a spare partition and upgraded it to to 4.2 Beta 1 and I’m really impressed. KDE 4 is really getting to be functional for me. It’s always looked slick and had that new technology “smell” but with 4.2 I think it’s really getting to where I could use it daily. So well done KDE! Well done to the Kubuntu packaging team!
book meme
I wasn’t going to do this but a couple of my Aussie and Kiwi friends convinced me last night that I really ought to 
At work, nearest book Demtröder’s Laser Spectroscopy:
With the initial conditions a(0) = 1 and b(0) = 0 we find for the coefficients
and
.
That’s pretty boring, 2nd nearest book, Castellan’s Physical Chemistry:
Equation 4.14 (which is
) is one of the most fascinating results of the kinetic theory, for it provides us with an interpretation of temperature.
A bit better but still pretty uninteresting unless you’re into that sort of thing like I am.
So to redeem my post from utter boredom I whipped this up especially for William Grant:
Modified from http://flickr.com/photos/duluoz_cats/1218036819/
