The Substantially Similar Weblog

Instapundit· writes about· a “support the troops” rally Near Seattle·. According to Instapundit, the rally was organized “in response to plans by antiwar types to protest the deployment.”

The article suggests only 20 antiwar protesters showed up, which makes a lot of sense. None of the peace movement people that I know and respect would be protesting against American troops. The troops aren’t any more responsible for what’s going on than are General Motor’s assembly line workers for air pollution.

What surprises me is the false dichotomy of “support our troops” vs. “oppose the war” works at all. It strikes me as such a transparent and puerile discourse, yet thousands of people appear to buy into it.

People who oppose military involvement in Iraq, in my experience, do not oppose soldiers at all, and would be the last ones to protest their deployment or return. As many others have noted, the idea of “supporting our troops” is quite consistent with bringing them back home.

Presidential Candidate John Edwards· has been a guest blogger this week on Larry Lessig’s weblog·. I hadn’t given him much consideration before, but I was actually impressed by his understanding of some important intellectual property issues (particularly the problems with the pharmaceutical patent regime·. In his final entry·, he squarely addressed the importance of open source licensing:

When a government official stepped forward and opposed an international forum on open source, that was a mistake—just as it would be a mistake to oppose a discussion of proprietary licensing. As I said, the role of government is to establish a level playing field, not pick a winner.

It probably helps that he represents the home state of Red Hat·, but so far he’s the only candidate who seems to know anything about the Free Software movement.

Howard Dean was also a guest blogger back in July·, and Dennis Kucinich in August·. Both Dean· and Kucinich have “personal” blogs as well. Although it’s all a little gimmicky, much of the blog writing has a slightly more sophisticated flavour than what you see in the debates, campaign speeches, and TV ads. This can only be a good thing.

Howard Strauss, “manager of technology strategy and outreach” at Princeton University, recently published a terrible article in Syllabus Magazine (“the only monthly publication that focuses on the role of technology in higher education”), entitled The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet. The article puts forth numerous unsupported assertions about the failings of the open source/free software development model, and if it hadn’t actually survived editorial review and been published would probably best be left ignored as flame bait.

I don’t usually get involved in the affairs of my alma mater, but this article struck a nerve. Here’s the note I sent to Howard Strauss as well as two of the supervisors at Princeton OIT:

 Mr. Strauss: While I am sure you have received a lot of email in response to your recent article in Syllabus magazine entitled "The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet," I am compelled to write a short note expressing my surprise that you would publish such an article without expressly disclaiming that your views are not those of the University. As an alumni, I am embarrassed to see this article so widely publicized in connection with my alma mater. I am sure you are aware of the extent to which Princeton and other institutions of higher learning depend on free or open source software, particular in math and sciences. As a chemistry major at Princeton, I frequently depended on high quality open source software like the GNU system to do my research. Since I graduated from Princeton, open source software has come to occupy an increasingly crucial role in my life, to the point where I now use it exclusively and have no need for proprietary systems at all. In any case, I won't go on to correct all the inaccuracies that appear in your article, as I'm sure others have already done this. But I hope that you will consider at least publicly distancing your views from those of the University, as they are on their way to becoming the laughingstock of the academic scientific community. Adam Kessel '98 

A fellow Princeton alum, who wishes to remain nameless, sent the following, more comprehensive note:

 Dear Mr. Strauss, I was shocked and upset after reading your article in Syllabus Magazine yesterday. The piece purports to debunk myths of open source software as being useful in business, education, and society in general. Your article was a gross misrepresentation of the facts of Open Source in general, and the widespread use of Open Source at Princeton University in particular. Perhaps you could have detailed how institutions such as Princeton University work to balance the need to support legacy systems such as PUCC with the demand for new hardware and software, both proprietary and open source. As an undergraduate student I had access to UNIX servers such as phoenix and ernie. The systems would have been largely useless to me without the GNU software that had been installed. In the department of my major, Computer Science, the GNU system was the de facto standard, and was installed unquestionably on every system, whether an HP workstation, an Intel lab computer, or a high-end SGI workstation. All technical departments that I know of, from Physics to Cognitive Science, practiced similar IT strategies. These departments did not nitpick on whether a system was proprietary or open source. They just installed the best products, and students, staff, and professors were grateful for it. Your article also glosses over the fact that most businesses installing proprietary ERP or CRM system also license the source code for that system. This is a fundamental piece of business strategy, and a prudent measure for businesses installing software that may be in use for decades after the original software vendor goes out of business. Thus the facts of the matter are that businesses feel having access to source code is very important. So important that they are willing to negotiate complicated source code licenses and pay millions of dollars for the privilege, over and above the cost of binary software and services. My first year at Princeton, 1993, was one of the first years of DormNet, a cutting edge program to wire student dorms with ethernet. With excitment I plugged into the network, only to find that my operating system, Windows 3.1, had terrible support for TCP/IP and hardly any internet software. Thus began my experience with the GNU/Linux operating system. At that time, GNU/Linux was the only system available to a student that would provide adequate internet services. This GNU software system greatly improved my access to education, and many of my classmates felt the same way. The GNU system has blossomed in the past decade to create entirely different genres of Open Source Software. To see you conflate the terms is a disgrace to your title. A "manager of technology strategy," at Princeton University no less, must understand that the word "free" does not occur in the word "Open Source Software." Open Source refers to the ability to have access to source code, and has nothing to do with money. A person in your position should also know that the "free" in Free Software is to be understood as in the context of the French word "libre." Which is to say Free Software is about the freedom to see and manipulate software source code, says nothing about whether the software in question costs money or not. That is to say that Free Software is an idea concerning the software text, the ability for developers to see and possibly change software at the source code level, should they choose to do so. In terms of procurment of IT services, indeed there is no difference between free software and proprietary systems. You contract out for a service and it is provided by a vendor. Surely a univserity, or any organization for that matter, cares mostly about the quality of a service rendered, and not on an implementation. But Princeton University is not just any organization. Princeton University is a non-profit organization, whose motto is "In the nation's service, and the service of all nations." If Princeton University is to live up to this motto, it must judge the social value of it's technology strategy and the implications of it's software and hardware procurement. Your article implies that I would have somehow received a better education if I had stuck with Windows 3.1 and not used any GNU softare on phoenix. How could this be possible? And now, as a software engineer that is plenty old enough to work at Microsoft, I find no problem making a living working with open source systems. The worst part of your piece, Mr. Strauss, is it's blatent hypocrisy. As an undergraduate Computer Science major at Princeton, Open Source was the cornerstone of my education. As far as I know, usage of Open Source Software at Princeton has increased since the time of my studies, not decreased. If these are you own personal views, you should say so clearly. They obviously are not representative of Princeton University IT policy. However, even if they are your own views, I recommend you do some more research into actual IT practice. Understanding the implications Open Source Software may be slightly confusing to the general public, but should present no intellectual barriers to IT executives at Princeton University. Sincerely, [...] (a computer science major) 

The Morning News has a great interview behind the scenes on the Dean presidential campaign. In general, I think The Morning News may be giving The Onion a run for its money.

Strategist #1: Yeah… it could be a mixture, a couple of things that are conservative, like vanilla, and a couple of things that are a little more radical, like, I dont know, broccoli. You know, something for everyone.

(apparently it’s true that Howard Dean’s middle name is Brush).

Ordinarily, I’m not much of a capitalist. In fact, Red Hat is the only stock I own, primarily for ideological reasons.

You would think the SCO lawsuit could potentially hurt Red Hat’s stock value. But I’m wondering if it actually had the opposite effect of drawing people’s attention to these issues. Red Hat’s countersuit probably doesn’t hurt either.

A poster on Slashdot makes an interesting suggestion about how to conveniently distribute documents when you don’t want anyone to be able to eliminate distribution by taking down a server; and you want to automate distribution of new releases of the document. apt-get. This would be particularly useful for distribution of the internal memos from Diebold Voting Systems that the company is trying to shut down:

Yes, the power of apt-get could be used to form a type of ad-hoc distributed network for the distribution of the Diebold memo, without fear of a single server being shutdown making the document disappear. What we did for the Fed was to create a set of apt.sources files which contained the addresses of a bunch of mirror servers which contained the documents of interest. When a user needed to find a document, they would simply issue an apt-get instyall Document command at their workstation, and apt-get would do the rest.

Thanks to the fine folks on the Omnibook Mailing List (a list for GNU/Linux users of the HP OmniBook line of laptops), my laptop is back in working order. (Interestingly, the top three results in google on a search for “omnibook” are all Linux-related at the moment, and the entire first page of results of “hp omnibook” are all Linux-related as well). Within a couple of hours of posting my report that my hard drive was making clicking sounds and spontaneously spinning down and crashing the system, I had received numerous helpful suggestions for fixing this common problem.

So I took the whole thing apart, added some Darice “Foamies” (“No Messy Glue”) in between the hard drive controller cable and the case, put it back together (probably not putting the right screws in the right places), and voila, all better.

I’ve chronicled the repair with my digital camera, and will be posting instructions and photos soon for future OmniBook owners who will inevitably travel down this path.

One poster to the list made the following interesting suggestion, which I find quite appealing:

Perhaps we need free hardware, besides free software?
I mean, someone who produces for the sake of having something working for a reasonable amount of time and in a way that most of us can fix it if it breaks.

The ability to fix it yourself (or the freedom to tinker) is a core part of the free software movement. There’s no reason why the principles shouldn’t extend to hardware as well, despite the trend today towards planned obsolence in devices, rather than repairability.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld the FCC requirement (CNN story) that all tuners receive digital TV signals by July 2007.

I fail to understand why the digital TV transition warrants a government mandate of this sort. While I’m generally not inclined towards knee-jerk anti-regulatory opinions, this seems to be a perfect case to let the market do its work. I invite anyone to make a convincing argument for market failure here. If people aren’t purchasing digital televisions, it’s because (1) they’re too expensive or (2) they’re not interested (1 and 2 are really the same thing). There’s no evidence of a particularly high barrier to entry to the DTV market, so there’s nothing stopping any particular manufacturer from marketing cheaper or more appealing DTV tuners, and there’s no need for the entire industry to be forced to make this transition.

Sure, you might purchase a non-digital tuner today and be screwed in four or five years if this transition really does occur, but that’s a risk you should be able to take, and the price should (and does) reflect that risk. I’m happy to buy somewhat obsolete technology for 80% off, even if I can only use it for a couple years, and then buy something new at that point, when hopefully I’ll have a source of income.

Can someone make a convincing argument why the state needs to force manufacturers to make what people aren’t demanding?

NewScientist.com has an interesting interview with Patrick Ball, deputy director of the Science and Human Rights Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The interviewer asked Ball about the importance of free and open-source software to his work.

I assumed that free/open-source software is useful to human rights groups in the same way that it’s useful to any nonprofit—or really anyone—high quality software that doesn’t have to cost money. But Ball points out a particular benefit to human rights work that I hadn’t considered:

The other part of the copyright problem is piracy – or, more appropriately, unauthorised copying. The beauty of this argument, from the point of view of, say, the government of Burma, is that they can say to the World Trade Organization, OK, we’re going to crack down on piracy – and then they go arrest a bunch of human rights groups. If we use free software, that all goes away. Also, living in miserable poverty is not a human rights violation, but it’s clearly not in the spirit of human rights law. I don’t think any intelligent person thinks that better standards of living are coming to any place without computing. And one of the impediments is paying a huge tax on every computer sold in the world to a rich company in the state of Washington. The way out is a fundamentally different approach to software, but freedom comes at a price. As a human rights guy I accept lower salary, longer hours, more difficult travel schedule and using free software. These are all costs I pay in order to live according to a set of principles.

ZUG (“the world’s only comedy site” (?)) has an excellent guide about how to avoid tolls on the Massachusetts Turnpike. I highly recommend it, at least to Massachusetts natives. I’m not sure this method will work in other jurisdictions.