The New York LUG is having a legal-themed meeting this week, featuring James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center talking about “GPL3, The FOSS Legal Primer, and The Interaction of Licenses & Communities.” James is a great speaker and a good guy- hopefully he gets a good turnout. (I’m going to try to make it, but my time is getting increasingly more crunched as the semester wanes, unfortunately.)
If you want to go, you must RSVP.
I was hoping to do something like this in OOo this summer, and couldn’t. So I filed a bug. Looks like that paid off. (I also got this one fixed earlier in the summer.) Big thanks to Jan and Caolan- it might not seem like much, but making it easier for people to make beautiful presentations is one solid step towards making people actually like OOo.
Now, if only there were s5 export :) (I love s5 as a machine-independent presentation format, but actually writing a good-looking presentation in it requires CSS I don’t have.)
I’ve been using a fair number of CC-licensed images in blog posts lately; I’ve had a lot of fun doing it- looking through and finding the pictures is often a blast. I’ve noticed others are doing more of this lately as well.
CC, by Franz Patzig, used under the CC-BY license.
Note that in all of the pictures I use, I include the title, the creator, and the license, plus links for each of those. It is my pleasure to give credit to the generous artists who let me use their work.
But let this post serve as a quick reminder: the Creative Commons licenses also require that when using the licensed work, you must also include the URI of the license, the name or pseudonym of the author, and the title and URI of the work. These requirements are fairly loose (they need only be appropriate to the medium) but they are there, and they should be respected.
Tangentially: some CC fan should update this flickr greasemonkey script (or a similar one) to include proper licensing information. That would make this whole blogging thing so much easier :)
endlich himmelblau by extranoise, used under CC-BY license
So Red Hat is going to sell hosted servers in EC2. (see also) With my recent focus, this prompts an obvious question.
Given that EC2 is basically hosted Xen (a defacto open standard), so that you can apparently fairly trivially move a VM from your machine to EC2 to some other Xen-running server, and that you can apparently access (both upload and download) your VMs trivially via a robust API, does that make EC2 an open service?
I’m not completely sure what the answer to the question is, but I’ll at least say that this appears to be meaningfully different than most hosted services. I can get my data in and out, use the data on a Free operating system with minimal modification, and I can maintain my identity by easily ‘hiding’ EC2 usage behind my own URLs. That may not be ideal but it goes a long, long way, or so it seems to me.
Some other perhaps-relevant details:
‘Trapped Clouds’ by Chris Kovacs, used under a CC-BY license
A wise and wonderful friend emailed me to say that he was glad my posts last night did not say ‘web 2.0′, as in his wise opinion ‘web 2.0′ is a pile of hooey. On this we are in deep agreement; there is no deep substance in web 2.0 that desktop apps can’t replicate.
He said that he preferred ‘the cloud’, but that he thought it was roughly the same thing as ‘software as a service.’
I’ve spent the rest of the morning intensely bothered by the phrase ‘the cloud‘, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Now that I’ve breakfasted and am more lucid, some thoughts on why it irritates me so much:
I should note that part of why I picked google mail and not, say, yahoo mail, or some other solution, is that gmail is actually very good about letting you leave to other clouds. Despite being in ‘a cloud’, my mail was always available via POP and my addressbook in CSV, and now it adds IMAP and vcard. They have so much confidence in their software that they make it easy to leave, knowing you probably won’t. Still, this type of thing should be an expectation for services, not a pleasant surprise.
The lesson of this last post is not about gmail in particular; it is that web-based software, provided as a service, isn’t going away. If anything, it will keep expanding, because the user benefits are of a sort that traditional, user-managed software will have an extremely hard time matching.
It isn’t just that web-delivered software can be very flexible (especially once greasemonkey is involved), or as powerful as all but the most powerful rich client software, or that it can be really convenient to have access to your data at any time and any place, or that it is nice to be social and trivially share things with friends. All those things are very nice, but none of them are particularly exclusive to the software as a service, and traditional software either already does better or can catch up if it wants to. If these were the only questions, I’d put my money on locally managed software.
But these relatively shallow software features aren’t the only issues. The problem here for any provider of locally-managed software, be it the Free Software Foundation or Microsoft, is that software as a service is a different architecture; an architecture which provides features which go outside of pure software. Most importantly, this architecture abstracts away the most hated and unreliable parts of the self-managed software ecosystem- hardware, support, security, and maintenance. Those are someone else’s problems- all you have to do is log in and use the software. In Jesse’s words, ‘I no longer have to worry.’
In the locally-managed software world, those issues can be truly resolved only with redundant hardware in redundant locations, reliable bandwidth, complex mirroring setups, and the application of lots of manpower, both to set things up and to minister to them when they go wrong. You can improve every part of the system, but the need for time, maintenance, and redundancy will never be completely eliminated. Hardware and software will always require maintenance, and time and skill will be needed to resolve the inevitable failures. The million dollar question is whose responsibility these things are. Hosted software promises to make that responsibility go away, so that you can focus on other things and sleep easily at night.
In an age where everyone has gigabytes of data to back up, hundreds of pieces of software to keep up to date, and so on, this ability to sleep easily at night – to not worry – to put the responsibility on someone else’s shoulders – is not to be undervalued. People will make many compromises, in functionality and in other freedoms, in order to reduce that worry and get that security. Of course, the security provided by some (all?) of the hosted service providers is to some extent illusory. Hosted service providers can be subpoenaed, or fail, or decide to hold your data for ransom. But people strongly believe (with some reason) that software and hardware are even more likely to fail, and at high cost given the centrality of our data to our lives. So until that expectation changes (either because service providers get worse, or because self-managed software gets radically better) software as a service will only become more common.
The implications of this for personal freedom will be the subject of an upcoming post; suffice it to say right now that we need to start thinking about principled services now so that we can design and implement them.
In class Thursday, during a discussion of privacy and security, Prof. Moglen asked me how I do email; I told him gmail. I was going to write a long post explaining why (which will probably form part of an essay in the near future) but Jesse nails a fair number of them in one sentence:
Now, I no longer have to think about keeping spam stuff up to date, no longer have to worry about that next security vuln …, no longer have to worry about having a decent interface for getting mail from mobile devices, etc…
I’d add no longer have to worry about storage space (at least not for future emails); not have to worry about data backup; not have to worry about hardware failure and reliability; not have to worry that I can’t leave (since I mostly ‘hide’ @gmail behind @tieguy.org).
Jesse and I are not alone in this- gmail is the most popular user-agent at gmane.org, and an lkml admin tells me that over half of current lkml subscribers are @gmail.com. (This bleg was unsuccessful in getting Debian data, but I imagine their numbers are similar.)
Prof. Moglen is right to worry about privacy and security, but for the vast, vast majority of us those are very irregular problems. If they have non-trivial impact, that impact is once or twice in a lifetime. The problems I’ve listed here are all daily problems with self-hosted email. (You can take steps to reduce some of the worry, but you still have to use your precious time to recover when things go wrong, and you have to do it on the hardware or network’s schedule, not yours.) Solving daily problems at the expense of once-in-a-lifetime problems is a tradeoff most people will happily make. So gmail and the like are winning, and will win for the foreseeable future, even amongst those like Jesse who are skilled in the fine arts of software maintenance.
This is principled software’s biggest challenge- not how to stay relevant in the face of google’s vast server farms (which are important but not insurmountable for many classes of service), but how to stay relevant in the face of how convenient centrally-hosted web software is for both users and developers.
[It doesn't hurt that gmail is very nice software. The keyboard nav is very good, search is powerful, conversation view is the first real innovation in email in ages, archiving of IMs as emails is so blindingly obvious that I'm still shocked no other mail/IM pairs that I know of do it, and the intense scriptability (which is now officially supported) means I have more plugins for this than I used to have for evo. None of these were the things that pulled me away from evo, though- it was all about not having to have the responsibility of running my own server.]
I’ve upgraded to Fedora 8 and created the appropriate F8 X41 tablet thinkwiki page. It keeps getting shorter; hopefully this time I’ll actually file bugs for everything that doesn’t Just Work so that the F9 page is ‘oh, it just works.’
Yow. (Just mentioned here at this panel.) And see also the (potentially) open side of this.
Notes from the panel on Advertising, Brands and Public Relations below the fold. Continue reading →