open beyond licensing

Use The Source!

When I first let the world in on our "little" project to create an open tablet there were some who wondered openly about the licensing of the software. It's an important question that deserves a clarifying answer:

We are not using the OS (Android, in this case) provided by the hardware manufacturer. We are also well aware that some of the people in the hardware supply chain are violating the terms of the GPL. This was amazingly frustrating for us and caused significant delays as we went in search of GPL friendly vendors. We found that in the market of affordable device makers in China, they just don't exist. There's a cultural as well as legal hurdles that have led to this unfortunate situation, and I personally think Google has a lot to answer for when they allow such companies open access to their app store while they must be aware of the license violations that are going on. So it's an unfortunate situation, but we're problem solvers, we're bad-ass Free software developers who see a problem and bang on it until it falls over, right?

We decided to go with Mer, the community continuation of MeeGo, as our base OSS. With the amazing help of the Mer community, we have been able to bring up a non-Android, built-from-source kernel on the device and even boot into Plasma Active. There is still work left, and we still do have some binary drivers, but this progress is already one massive crowbar that's prying open the doors that have been shut on the world of ARM based devices.

We're not the only ones working towards such a brighter future: there is Luc Verhaegen's work sponsored by CodeThink  on the Mali 400/200 GPU driver being announced as FOSDEM; there is the Rhombus-Tech project that is working on a GPL kernel with Allwinner for their products such as the A10 (a chipset we'd already been looking at for (near) future devices). These are all awesome projects, and I'm happy to be a small part of this growing wave of effort. Simply put: we need open devices, and this is how we're most likely to get them. Hopefully in the future it will become "the way it is done" by all vendors out there, but it takes some early movers to take the first steps and force change.

Since we're using Mer for the user space and Plasma Active for the user experience, all the code above the kernel and most of the kernel itself is already open and available for download right now.

Full disclosure: right now we're still stuck with a few binary drivers which is not a perfect situation. With time I'm confident we'll get the binary drivers out of the picture, one by one, even if it takes time, effort and some pain. We've already managed to get source for some drivers that were not previously available so the trajectory is right. If we wait for perfection, however, we'll never get anywhere because we need to release and push the status quo level of openness further inch my inch by making releases. It'll be incremental, but we're already further than others have gotten. It's been hard but rewarding work, and I hope we can all work together to make it go faster, bigger and further!

Open Beyond Licensing

I do think it is unfortunate that when I wrote about an open and unlocked device, so many people jumped straight to the topic of source code licensing. Free software is not about licensing. Let me pause while the shock of that idea sinks in for a moment. ;)

Free software is about freedoms. Licensing is an important part of the toolbox to ensure those freedoms are available, but they are only tools not the actual product being aimed for.

This is important to keep in mind because openness and freedom goes a lot deeper in Spark than just using GPL and BSD licensed code. For instance, the boot loader isn't locked so you can boot your own OS if you wish. You can install your own apps, you can even provide your own app delivery system. You can use the Open Build Service to deliver software on top of the Mer core. That is not a property of the open licensing, but of our desire to deliver devices that you not only purchase but wish you own.

The content store is also going to be interesting. On release, the client will be Free software and the APIs openly documented so others can write front-ends. Most interestingly, however, is the server side. It has been designed in such a way that other people with other devices or concepts can use that same back end to make their own stores. It supports the idea of a single, large set of content which can then be curated into any number of different stores with different focuses and delivery targets.

Think about the possibilities: a school district or educational board could decide to set up a "store" with learning materials and content with access granted to their students. They could offer both "free" and "pay for each download" content, even if only for bookkeeping purposes. Much like the wildly successful video game markets for gaming consoles, the Make Play Live content store uses a points system for transactions, so in such a scenario points could be handed out to students, schools and/or entire districts.

On release, we will be providing a guarantee that if the project dies or we all fall over, the back-end code for the store will be made immediately available for download under a Free software license. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, of course. Once we are happy with the implementation and scalability of it, we will be making the back-end open as well. We have chosen to delay that release as we don't want others setting up their own hosted stores before we are confident in the internal design ourselves.

Even Activities themselves, the core interaction concept in Plasma Active, embody the philosophies of freedom and openness. This is your device and it should become your personal thing reflecting you. You are not treated as a mere consumer for an app store, but given a tool to help you live your life in some small way.

I really urge people to think about openness and freedom, two amazingly important concepts, beyond the boundaries of simple software licensing. Licensing is important, and we take it pretty damn seriously .. but we ought to look at bigger picture and really think about how to make our digital tools open and free in all sorts of ways.

Tomorrow I Answer Questions

There were tons of really good questions asked on my blog, on tech news sites that carried it as well as by private messages. Tomorrow I will do my best to go through answer as many of them as I can with short, to-the-point answers. I will be covering information ranging from release time lines to pre-orders to more hardware details to .. well .. visit tomorrow to find out!

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the reveal

The Reveal

As I noted earlier in the week, my recent blog posts have been slowly leading up to something, and here's what that something is:

The first tablet computer that comes with Plasma Active pre-installed.

It's name is "Spark", in recognition of it being the start to an even bigger flame.

It sports an open Linux stack on unlocked hardware and comes with an open content and services market. The user experience is, of course, Plasma Active and it will be available to the general public.

The hardware is modest but compelling: 1GHz AMLogic ARM processor, Mali-400 GPU, 512 MB RAM, 4GB internal storage plus SD card slot, a 7" capacitive multi-touch screen and wifi connectivity.

I'm sure some of you are already wondering what the retail price will be. The answer: a mere €200. 

A Bit of the Bigger Picture

This is more than just another piece of hardware on the market, though. This is a unique opportunity for Free software. Finally we have a device coming to market on our terms. It has been designed by and is usable by us on our terms. We are not waiting for some big company to give us what we desire, we're going out there and making it happen together. Just as important: the proceeds will be helping fuel the efforts that make this all possible.

It's also more meaningful than "just" Free software: The people who get to use these tablets will have in their hands a device that is more than an application bucket that sees them as a consumer. They will have a device that places value on who they are and what they are doing. This lies at the heart of Activities in Plasma Active and the open software stack will drive that trend further. Perhaps best of all: there's no walled garden to get locked into or which can be taken away.

This also will provide opportunities to the wider Free software ecosystem. Partnerships are being forged to provide things as diverse as OwnCloud hosting services, Kolab and Kontact Touch deployment support and exciting Qt/QML add-on apps for download.

The content store will offer great Free Culture artifacts such as digital books from Project Gutenberg as well as contents and apps for purchase. It will provide a conduit to users for those who love writing great software, Free and otherwise, using the typical Linux tools.

In case it wasn't painfully clear already: this epitomizes what I've been writing about for the last few days. It is a product made with and out of a commitment to the philosophy of making, playing and living. In fact, that's the brand under which this tablet, and those that follow it, is being brought to market under: Make·Play·Live.

.. but that's not all! ;)


I'll be sharing more information as to when the tablet will be available to be shipped directly to you (soon!), how you can place orders for them as well as more details on the hardware and software provided.

This will have to wait until Tuesday, however, as I'm off on a business excursion for a couple of days. Leave your questions in the comments and I'll do my best to cover them all in the coming blog posts.

Some Credit :)

Before I go, though, I want to offer some credit where credit is due. I've been involved in bringing this to fruition, but I most certainly have not been alone. The entire Plasma Active community, with their commitment and efforts, have been critical and inspiring. The efforts and commitment of both individuals (such familiar names as Marco, Sebas and Martin) as well as companies such as Basyskom and OpenSLX have been critical to making this even possible.

We've also had the support of projects such as Mer, the community continuation of MeeGo. One shining star there for us has been Martin "vgrade" Brook. He's a contract software developer contributing Mer hardware adaptations and Plasma Active bring-ups on ARM devices such as this one as well as various Tegra2 Tablets, Ti Tablets, Nokia devices and the Raspberry Pi.

Countless others have worked in so many ways I could never even begin to cover them all. This tablet is only possible thanks to the KDE community, to Qt, to the Linux ecosystem and to the pioneers of Free software.

... and finally a bit about my own future

In a few months I will no longer be sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks to work full time on KDE. I have been looking at various possible paths that lie in front of me, and as I've been going through this process I jotted down a few things that I would like to share with all of you:

First, I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to engage so deeply with a community as great as KDE thanks to the support of a company as great as Trolltech and right through its evolution into the Qt Development Frameworks we know today.

Second, I won't be leaving KDE or Plasma, let alone Free software. My heart lives here and I can't imagine not being involved.

Third, this is an exciting doorway through which I am stepping. I can not see with perfect clarity what lies on the other side, but it looks bright. :)

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live

We Seek Quality

Quality of life is a topic often discussed. There are so many different methods used
to try and measure this rather intangible aspect of our experience. We all have some sort of intuitive grasp of what it means, however: fulfillment and engagement, contentment and industry.

We want to neither go without nor to have everything simply handed to us. We desire peaceful lives sprinkled generously with happy events while also being spared from overly repetitious dullness. We crave companionship and simultaneously seek out competition. We hope that taken together these characteristics will lead to a wonderful tapestry woven of our experiences, relationships and memories which can whisper to us the meaning of our lives.

So quality of life does not seem to be an overly esoteric concept, yet it can be devilishly hard to get a hold of. Certainly life is not perfect and many things can and do go awry over the course of a lifetime; but even with those unavoidable bumps, we ought to find patterns of life quality in our choices and experiences.

Actually Finding It Is Another Thing


Living well is something that is learned. At least, I know that I'm still learning more about what it means to do so every day.

One thing I've noticed is that we tend to construct unfortunate narratives which get us to focus on things that do not really contribute to quality of life at all. It's perhaps easier to identify these narratives by imagining the autobiography of a live driven by them:

"On that fateful day 25 years ago, I finally managed to find a store in the mall that had the phone I had been looking for. I activated it and downloaded Angry Birds. The very next day I went to work with people I can't really remember anymore working on something I only recall as being rather boring; at least I don't think I learned anything from it, though it certainly allowed me to pay for all the network I was using with my new phone."

Really? It isn't like we all need to be riding rockets to the moon or painting the next Mona Lisa, but certainly we can live in a way that adds to something worth reflecting on in years to come.

Yet collectively, we are investing so much in things with far too little meaning, typified by punch-the-clock jobs used to make us into engines of consumption. Yes, we need to work. Yes, new toys and gadgets are awesome. Yes, Angry Birds is indeed a little addictive. These should be fillers, though, not the content of our existence.

So I Asked Myself: What Can I Do?

If I wish to live in a world where people are living lives worth living, then I need to try and help create an environment that supports that.

I wish to engage in ways that contribute to the mindset of living meaningfully. I want the things I make to contribute to and support the unfolding of meaning in the lives of others.

Getting there means stepping aside from some of the dominant models in society today such as "the person as consumer" and "the person as work unit". It means finding models of value that emphasize lives lived with quality. It means creating things that reflect that value.

In short, I can't rightfully expect to find lives of quality if my own efforts work in the opposite direction. I know I will not always achieve such high aspirations, but I can certainly try and, hopefully, succeed often enough to make a difference of some size.


Epilogue

This set of make, play and live blog entries may read like so much philosophy, but these are things I truly care about and which I want to find at the heart of my efforts. They are the metrics by which I wish to measure myself by, and which I hope to inspire others to consider as well. If I can manage that, what better life could there be? :)

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play

There's a well-known saying which first appeared in a book by James Howell published in 1659: "All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy." The message is that life should not only be about the seriousness of work and that enjoyable, recreational activities are an important part of life. It is as true now as it was three and a half centuries ago.

Humans aren't the only ones who engage in play, of course. Many animals also play extensively, mostly while growing up though some continue to do so well into adulthood. It's one of the reasons I love having cats around the house: they are given to running around, chasing things (and each other) with obvious joy and frivolity. In addition to the enjoyment they get from it, this play has a pretty serious component: it's a way to put their skills into practice and improve them. It can also be a way to build social bonds with others of their social group.

Similarly for us humans, play can be more than just enjoyment and relaxation. It can be applied to creative processes to draw out truly great results from both individuals and teams. It can let us explore ideas, social interactions and generally open doors to new experiences and modes of being. It's a safe and enjoyable way to experiment, all while helping relieve stresses and pressures that may be trickling in from the more serious efforts in our life.

Sometimes I get the sense that technology has been getting more and more unplayful and that saddens me. The industries built around computing are massive. Billions of dollars swirl around them every day, and that sort of scale certainly requires a good amount of applied rigor and seriousness to keep things moving. The sheer amount of money that can be made coupled with the increasing complexity of technology and the ever rising expectations from people who use it can lead to an overly serious, unplayful environment that produces overly serious, unplayful results.

I've noticed that even many of the most popular games available for devices like phones and tablets these days are built around obsessive, repetitive behavior wherein you collect synthetically scarce imaginary resources and vie for the approval of imaginary beings. While rewarding to certain aspects of human psychology, these games are less playful than work-like. They don't even give you much opportunity to expand a set of skills. Even our most serious of traditional games, such as  chess or go, are opportunities to exercise and grow strategic thinking while bonding with other humans. If even our games are less playful, one need not apply much imagination to how opportunities for playfulness are elsewhere.

In short: without play, life becomes dull and we risk become an increasingly boring group of people. That's not the sort of experience I wish to have, nor the sort of experience I wish others to have when using the things I help make.

The activities of play, when added to the other ingredients of life, can help create a fantastic and dynamic experience. That's why there's a certain seriousness to being playful; there is even such a thing as "serious play" which is being increasingly explored by those focused on innovation and communities. There's also, of course, the completely freeing and frivolous sort of play that rounds out this picture.

Make and play. Play and make. They go together, and I'd like to not only experience this myself but help support others in finding their own moments of exuberance.

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make

Make

There was a time when most everyone I knew had some sort hobby or past-time in which they made things, often simply for the sake of making. From this they derived enjoyment and personal meaning. The meaning was not kept to themselves, either: I remember being invited to watch a cactus that flowers most spectacularly but only once per year bloom as evening set in at the house of a hobbyist horticulturist. I spent evenings with good friends in old barns or in the comfort of their living room making music, listening to others play instruments alone or together, sharing stories they had written. I watched a friend sail out on a boat he built with his own hands in his own back yard, taking other friends out on day excursions on the waves. I've also watched that kind of involved life fade out from being the norm to being the exception.

Over the course of 2011, I had a strikingly consistent conversation with various individuals on this topic of making. In particular, the discussion would end up pondering why so few people in industrialized societies engage in the process of making. We would usually end up mulling over the role of modern patterns of consumption in this trend, what we have perhaps lost and how we might bring making back into the mainstream.

Sometimes the conversation would bloom out of a discussion of consumer centric social structures; sometimes we got onto the topic by way of possible economic alternatives to "we must find everyone a wage based job"; and other times I simply brought up the topic on its own. From those interactions, I took away three primary points of personal interest.

First, whether one self-identifies as conservative or liberal (economically, socially, politically or some combination thereof), people are generally aware that we make less and consume more, that the ratio between those behaviors has changed significantly towards the latter and that this is somehow not a great turn for our societies.

For many consumption has become the primary mechanism of involvement. There is nothing wrong with consumption itself (if we do not consume air, water and food, we will in short order cease to be), but it also probably isn't enough on its own. A working balance between participation by making and involvement by consumption has been lost.

Second, there is a distinct sense that many societies have begun to forget what it means to make. I had to remind one fellow, an academic that has found a very cool niche in the NGO world, that he did actually make something in the course of his daily work, even if it is not a physical good. He caught himself in surprise at the realization that, yes, he did make something ... and often.

Others expressed concern that fewer and fewer people knew how to really make much of anything. Instead, the skills being commonly acquired seem to be more  geared towards acts of consumption, or for practices that don't really create anything.

Third, regardless of the trends towards consumption and away from making, there remains a high degree of value placed on the act of making and on those who do so. Aside from the obvious observation that we hold those who are great makers (which may be different from people who make great things) aloft in our societies, there is a definite inner connection to the act of making alive in people. We have not (yet?) gotten to the point where we have forgotten there is great value in the act of making things.

Despite all that general agreement, no one I talked to had any really solid  ideas on how to bring making back into the core of our collective experience.


At the same time ... The Maker Faires are beacons of hope; the open source world continues to be a hive of activity; Wikipedia and OpenStreeMap bloom; kids still love lego; and I still bump into people doing crazy and wonderful things "just because". However, it seems evident that prioritizing behaviors, activities and objects that encourage and support making over simple consumption is still very much needed.

This avenue of thought has caused me to reflect quite a bit on what it is I am doing, what I am making and how I am encouraging and enabling others to engage with life creatively as well.  Few things are as inspiring to me as watching something being made; few things fill me with more hope than someone with a warm heart and busy hands.

Yet if I truly believe that a world of people who engage in making is a better place to be, how am I contributing towards the realization of that reality? Eventually the obvious truth filtered slowly through my mind and hit me over the head with its simple truth:

I want the things which I help make to become opportunities for others in their turn to participate with their own voice, their own movement and their own passion.

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fine tuning the trajectory

It's difficult to come back to the blog after an absence without explaining what I was up to, what kept me from writing. I always feel I owe some sort of explanation for an unannounced silence.

In this case, it was pretty simple: changes are coming in my life and I needed some time to consider them. I find that when I'm sharing my thoughts with others on a more-or-less constant basis that my ability to work through deeper issues is lessened. This is why, every so often, I take some time to myself to just ... ponder. Often I don't realize I need to do this until I'm doing it, which is often why it comes without much warning.

I don't want to overstate it, however. I wasn't engaged in intense 24x7 meditations. I did take some time for family, enjoying mid-winter play with family and friends. Sledding, water sliding, geeking out at science museums with my son; building igloos in the mountains and watching fireworks on New Years with my wife. That sort of thing.

Most of the time, however, I was re-centering myself, finding where my energy is (and isn't) and working out what I wish the next few years to look like. I'm comfortable with the conclusions I have come to, and thankful for the support I've received during this process, particularly from family.

The path these decisions will have me embark on is not entirely easy nor comfortable. It embodies the good kind of the "scary": the tension that comes from doing something really exciting, really out there on the edge of your abilities; something that you can not guarantee a positive outcome for 100%, but which you really, really want to do with all your being and you know is within your abilities if you strive hard enough.

One of the most significant results of all the pondering in relative silence is this: My role within KDE and my relationship to the F/OSS community is going to be changing this year in fairly significant ways.

I will be writing more on this over the course of the week, culminating in an announcement on Friday that I hope you will find as exciting as I do. :)

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