ideas to build content stores on

In my last blog entry I wrote about building communities on ideas that tie the individual actors together, and letting those communities of individual actors interact freely, guided and driven by those ideas. I'd like to share with you one of two ways we're trying to bring that spirit to a practical result with the Make·Play·Live Add-Ons system.

First, though, a little update on the app itself in a screencast I hastily threw together for this blog entry to show some of the improvements made to the application since the last screencast. You can grab the original ogg recording here, or watch it via youtube below:

A couple years back, I spent a lot of time thinking about "app stores" and this led rather organically to the broader topic of add-ons of any type: books, graphic art, music, applications, widgets, services ... what principles should it embody, and for whom?

Free(dom) Software

Societies that rely on technologies for processes impacting basic human rights must be open for all to use, to review and to modify for their specific needs. To forgo any of those things means trading rights that should not be negotiable in exchange for tools. This is a very poor exchange and would very likely eliminate the possibility of free societies with strong guarantees for human rights.

The add-ons system respects this in a number of different ways. Firstly, the implementation itself is Free software. The implications go way beyond being able to make client apps that integrate well with a given system, as the above Add-ons App does with Plasma Active. It means that other entities can also host their own content and other add-ons in their own database. This result of freeing the server side code will mean there is no single point where censorship or decisions made against you can be erected. It also means that those whose needs we can not take care of, say the needs of a specific educational environment or a specific community's needs, will be able to build those services.

However, there is another way we can support Free software: by promoting it in the catalogs. We show the licensing of applications directly, will be allowing you to filter based on Free-ness and will promote Free software applications to the device owners who are using the Add-ons App.

Keep in mind that Free software can be sold, and on devices such as these getting software that is tested and well packaged is a service much like bottling water. Yes, water can be had at no cost, but the convenience and safety of bottled water makes it something you can sell. So while we are shipping a ton of great Free software applications by default as part of Plasma Active (and therefore the Vivaldi tablet) so that it is useful out of the box, we are also going to be encouraging developers of Free software to think about putting a small price tag on their applications in the catalog.

The idea of voluntary payments, or "pay what you feel", has also come up and is something we've discussed. It isn't in the first version of the software, but I rather expect it to show up eventually. It will be interesting to see how well that works.

Free(dom) Culture

Freedom doesn't begin and end with software, though. We are big fans of Free culture in general. There are a few reasons for this. First, we like sharing stuff with people and really enjoy experiencing the creative efforts of others. It's thrilling and enjoyable and highlights how "Make" and "Play" fit together so well.

That would be enough on its own, but there are other reasons to support Free culture. By sharing openly and broadly, society as a whole is enriched and entirely new and powerful works can be derived from this commons. Shakespeare didn't invent many (any?) storylines, but he took old themes and made them amazing, immortal. Disney as well tapped the large body of existing children's fiction that was in the commons to create animated films that many consider masterpieces. A society with Free culture is a society that invents more, creates more and is richer as a result.

This does not "just happen" on its own, though. Free culture needs to be supported. So we have put a focus on making Free culture works available, even if they may not draw a single penny for us. It makes the experience better for those of us using it and helps invest in our culture.

We've started with Project Gutenberg, but that will only be the beginning. Which brings up another interesting topic: federation of data.

Open Participation

Central storage of all the data is OK, but then we would once again have another silo, albeit one that was rooting for freedom. A rather more enticing concept is being able to have data that is worked on and exists outside our little silo available through the add-ons system. This allows greater opportunities for people to participate in their own way, in specialized communities, while bringing our audience to their doorstep.

With Project Gutenberg, they are doing a wonderful job of digitizing books left and right. There is no need for us to get in the way of that. So we mirror their content and make their catalog available to our audience. I contacted them about this and they were wonderfully supportive of the idea. And why not?

The system can already handle installing software from third party repositories, which will bring software communities using OBS into the same sort of relationship. Imagine: hundreds or even thousands of different communities working whatever it is they do, and able to be syndicated into a seamless whole by hundreds or even thousands of add-ons stores around the world in hundreds or even thousands of different constellations? Wow!

In the coming weeks we will also be unveiling the developer program. There will be no up-front cost to participate, and aside from illegal content we won't be telling you what you can and can not be sharing with others. You can upload what you make.

Of course, the audience needs to be taken care of and it would not be fair to them (which also includes us ;) if there was just an unfiltered firehose of whateverness sprayed through the Add-ons App. We designed the system so that catalog owners have tags which they can put on any content they want in their catalog.

This balances the participation of those making content available with the participation of those delivering the content. The result? One body of globally federated content that can be presented in an infinite number of catalogs that meet the needs of different audiences.

If a catalog owner doesn't like fart apps, they can filter those out. If a catalog owner wants only to show HTML5 apps, they can filter only those in. But nobody tells you what kind of app you can write, what sort of book you can author, etc.

tl;dr

None of this is ground breaking philosophically. It is simply the re-application of well known principles from and attributes of Free societies to an add-ons system. But that required us to identify that those attributes ought to be in an add-ons system, and to develop that system from those principles as the first principles of the system.

It is also not enough to only be content with the application, in this case the add-ons app, itself being free enough. It is critical to consider the network effects and social interactions that are implied by the design. We live in a networked world and we are building the tools of togetherness, the tools of culture. It is therefore a requirement that we start designing with respect for the responsibilities that comes with.

We also believe that when you do that ... the results can only be more compelling.

p.s. 

I forgot to add some links that I had meant to .. so here they are:

Creating systems of support for Free culture is a trending topic. Just yesterday I came across Bryan Lunduke's project to move to a completely Free software approach for his work. This is a big gamble for him, but he's betting on an ethical route and I have mad respect for that. It shouldn't be a gamble, however, and we can change that dynamic by building systems of support that can free people of the temptation to hold their their own work hostage. I'd rather see people able to participate easily in  free culture without making unreasonable financial sacrifices. This relates to our thinking on supporting Free software and Free culture in the add-ons system.

If you are interested in getting involved with the Big Picture ideas around the add-ons system and how it impacts mobile device usage, please join us over at OpenTablets to discuss it with us in the forums!

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you can't control the most powerful things

Note: This is a follow up to my earlier blog entries "founding philosophers" and "the age of pragmatists". If you have not read that one yet, please do so before continuing here.
 
The most powerful things in the world can not be controlled. At best they can be influenced.

This can be written another, less catchy, way: a) there is a limit to the number of things that can be effectively managed simultaneously by a unit of management effort; b) management is a finite resource that demonstrates diminishing returns when scaled up in a purely vertical fashion; c) and there is a relationship between the power of a system and the size of the system. In that interplay there exists a threshold where the system loses the attribute of "controllable" as it increases in influence, and vice versa. This can be seen by analogy in natural systems like hurricanes and more literally in the complex interplay within biological ecosystems. It's simply an attribute of large dynamic systems.

Social movements attempt to shift the expectations and behaviors of people in large human systems, and they face the control/power challenge quite directly:  they can't be tightly controlled if they are powerful, at best they can be influenced.

Through processes of social evolution, humans stumble upon culture and custom as a pretty decent way to manage this issue. Shared values, common expectations and communal goals allow individual actors within a large society to move in a generally coordinated fashion without requiring each to be directly managed.

Culture becomes a way to define, refine, transmit, reinforce and reassure each other of the precepts of the system. Art and ritual, governance and tradition .. they allow us to influence ourselves at uncontrollable scales. This allows hugely influential social structures to emerge that also have some measure of stability to them. On the down side, it's a slow process that is not overly efficient and can seem to work against pragmatic goals at times.

What does this have to do with Free software? It started with people defining common expectations and communal goals.  To take one example: the GPL is a formulation of this in the form of a legal text. Participants communicated these social artifacts to each other, and this gave rise to a large, successful, somewhat uncontrollable movement that showed itself to have great effectivity and strength. Some pragmatic membership of some Free software communities, looking more at the costs of such an approach than the benefits, have over time steered towards mechanisms that are ultimately more manageable and controllable but far less powerful.

A common pragmatic approach is one that focuses on balance sheets alone. I was told by one well-known Free software company founder and self-appointed community leader that they invested significant amounts of money in a particular Free software project per year and then asked rhetorically "What do we have to show for it?" They were referring to a combination of community control and corporate profitability, two things they were still searching for. What they had actually gotten from it was more and better Free software and membership in the society that creates it, but that escaped them.

This kind of thinking is the result of optimizations done for the perceived benefits of the individual actors. The culture, is not being measured as part of the success or failure, and so suffers as a result. As this is a prime mechanism of ensuring stability and forward movement of large systems, this is concerning. It is also self-defeating, as without stability it is hard to build successful structures.

An interesting manifestation of this approach has been the rise of a new job position: the community manager. Managing a community is a polite way to say "We're trying to exert influence over this system of people and bring some control to it." The community manager positions currently around Free software are not community developers, community coordinators or even community "engineers" (whatever that might mean) .. they are "managers", and they are beholden not to the community but to the employer.

As such, it is not uncommon to witness a community manager repeat dubious ideas that are slanted towards and which attempt to justify their employer's interests; to see divisions created as much as unity; for the installment of systems based on loyalty-based conviction (fanaticism) that encourage highly partisanship approaches.

This is not an indictment of the individuals who hold these positions. Community managers are not somehow "bad people". I know a number of of them personally and will attest that their hearts and minds are in the "right" place. It's a systems issue: no matter who was placed in that position the result would be the same. The measurements and incentives that come with these positions create the often unfortunate results we see, all in the name of hoping to construct and manage a group of people in support of the company's interests. And everyone's heart is in the right place the whole time.

The pragmatic nature that has overtaken Free software has increasingly left behind the idea of influence by idea and replaced it with the management of economics (monetary and otherwise). If the goal is to create a new economic model for technology, we've become focused on the right things. However, if it is to create a new model for technology in society, to ensure that technology aids humanity rather than erodes it, it probably isn't, because that requires systems so powerful they can only be influence and not controlled.


Building community on ideas that tie individual actors together, and letting those communities of individual actors interact freely, guided and driven by those ideas is critical. Free software needs to find a way back to the "age of philosophers" in some fashion without losing the power of the pragmatists.  We need both, with each influencing from its strengths.

I believe it is unrealistic to  ask others to do that which we are not willing to do ourselves. It can also be helpful to adjust the rules of the game slightly so that the desired behavior is rewarded more strongly. Which brings me to the useful conclusion of this blog entry series.

I've written about a bunch of history and a little philosophy in these three related blog entries, the next one will wrap it all up and be about the pragmatic results that this train of thinking has led to. In particular, I will introduce two key components of Make·Play·Live that were directly influenced by this train of thought: the add-ons content system and the partner network that was recently announced.

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and, nor or

Just read another "forget desktop Linux" piece by a writer trying to cover Free software on a sight ostensibly doing the same. This is exactly the sort of thing I wrote about in a recent blog entry, and it's sad to see it continue.

First off, "world domination" is not the only metric, nor the most useful one in every case. We have tens of millions of users around the world and I'm sure they'd appreciate it if we didn't forget them. I am one of them, and I know I certainly feel that way. You may be as well.

There's another aspect to that article: it suggests concentrating on mobile. Now .. where have I heard that before? Oh, right: everyone saying the desktop is dead, long live the web, we should focus all our efforts there.

Wake up call #1: hundreds of millions of laptop and desktop systems are sold each year. It's a market that isn't going away. Nothing is "killing" it. It is being displaced to some extent, but it isn't going away. It's less interesting because it isn't growing, and the corporate drive for ever increasing profits thus stamps it as "mature, boring." This is different from "dead."

Wake up call #2: there is no reason we can't do desktop and mobile and web. Yes, "and", not "or". Free software projects could create very compelling horizontal integration between these sectors as long as we treat them as not being mutually exclusive choices. This is part of the strategy of both Apple and Microsoft (and others), and the market would berate either for saying that they were abandoning some of these tech segments to focus exclusively on one. In KDE, our focus on the desktop has been extended to devices and the web in the last few years, and that's a good thing, something that should be supported. Which brings me to:

Wake up call #3: If people engaged in supporting Free software can't manage to keep long term focus, not freak out and continue to support the efforts that are ongoing ... we're screwed. We are, and will be, our own best friends or our own worst enemies. It starts by not telling others to stop supporting the efforts of thousands of volunteers and companies from around the world. That is, simply put, a betrayal.

A sophisticated view would be an examination of how we can draw together the efforts and successes of mobile for the desktop to give it a boost; to analyze how Free software desktop products and Free software mobile and web products can integrate and work well together.

There are projects and teams out there doing exactly that right now. Several teams in KDE are doing exactly that, and we mean business. It would be nice to not have to keep pulling knives out of our backs from journalists as we continue pushing forward. Long live Free software on the desktop, mobile, web and server!

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partner network, 8gb storage, applications

Today is a day in which I find myself passing through many doorway as all sorts of milestones for our little project are coming up at once.

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, we'll be shipping the Vivaldi tablet computer with 1GB of RAM .. and today I can tell you even more good news: we've doubled the internal storage to 8GB as well. We'll be settling on the USA pricing shortly as well, and I think people will be pleasantly surprised with where that lands.


Purchase orders for the first production runs of devices have gone in. This is truly a "point of no return" for the project, and that is very, very satisfying to have reached. We have some of the typical right-to-the-wire engineering work to do on the software side, but then we'll be pulling all the triggers and emails will pour forth and sales will open.



We've been signing letters of understanding with various companies as part of an effort to build a partner network around Make·Play·Live. This will allow us to provide services and support around Vivaldi, the Add-Ons App and future efforts that would be impossible to do otherwise. I've got  a whole separate blog entry brewing about it which I'll release after the official announcement next week.

Speaking of sales, yesterday the first Make·Play·Live accounts were created using the Add-ons App. It was also the day that the credit card processing system went live, making addons.makeplaylive.com a fully operational battle station. In step with this, today is the last day of development for version 1.0 of the Add-Ons app. We'll start loading content on the server soon and move it over to an SSL secured home on port 80. A development installation will remain up on port 3000, and we intend to keep that open to the public as well.

Aaaand, I have another long blog entry in the "philosopher/pragmatist" series already written and waiting for one more round of editing before pushing "publish" on it.

Somewhere in all this, I also managed to catch up with mailing lists and push a fix to libplasmagenericshell in kde-workspace that fixes a crash when loading themes without window shadows. I have to say "thanks" to Marius Cirsta from Frugalware for doing the detective work that tracked down the source of the problem and made my job simple. :)

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the age of pragmatists

Note: This is a follow up to my blog entry earlier in the week titled "founding philosophers". If you have not read that one yet, please do so before continuing here.

Pondering the "big questions" is all well and good, but it matters little if words are the only results. To have an effect, the ideas need to be translated into action and Free software did that in a big way. While GNU Hurd may not have gotten very far, the Linux kernel certainly did as did thousands of other Free software projects big and small.

These efforts were by and large led by pragmatic individuals who were drawn to the idea(ls) of Free software but who had a focus on producing working technology. Thanks to their committed efforts, Free software has become a global force both in terms of technology and the size of the industry based around these efforts. Whether we look at Apple's successful rejuvenation by taking Free software and crafting OS X from it, Google with both its search empire and Android mobile OS, IBM's backing of Linux or Red Hat's successful climb to 1 billion in annual revenue, it is undeniable that Free software's ideals have translated quite clearly into tangible results.

In the process of achieving world domination, the philosophizing was largely factored out of the community. I mentioned a few individuals in the "founding philosophers" entry, and I think it is interesting to examine what happened with them.

Admittedly, it is extremely difficult to remain relevant in a growing and shifting community for an extended period of time. There are means, however, such as refreshing one's image and message over time. In contrast to Madonna's ability to remake herself to remain relevant, Richard Stallman continued his largely monotone quest for software freedom. He spent much time and energy on trying to get "GNU" tacked on to "Linux" or insisting people say "free" rather than "open source". The increasingly pragmatic Free software world grew increasingly less interested in these sorts of discussions and as a result the influence of the FSF waned in many areas. Richard is still widely admired, often quoted and certainly relevant, but he isn't breaking new ground in quite the same fashion he did in the 20th century. During this same period of time, the rather more pragmatic and action focused FSFE has risen in importance and respect.

As for Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens, they both fell to the same arrows: a lack of new ideas combined with increasing partisanship. The latter issue is particularly interesting because it highlights a significantly negative shift that the pragmatism may have inadvertently brought with it.

For instance, in 2004 Eric proclaimed on a popular (at the time) Free software podcast that KDE would be dead as a project by the same time the next year. I also  recall the day that Bruce sent an email saying that not only would his new brain child User Linux not include KDE or PostgreSQL by default but that he would not abide anyone else working on support for them on top of User Linux. The message was  clear: not all Free software efforts were welcome.

Personally, this ran completely counter to my expectations, namely: we're all doing this for the betterment of each other (globally) as well as to have fun, build wonderful communities (which is a very human desire) and make great technology. To that end, no Free software is bad or should be called out for extermination, even in the case that we personally don't see much value in them. There is a fine difference between "I'm not interested in..." and "I think it should die"; between "I want this to succeed..." and "Success means the failure of alternatives..". This change in attitude grew alongside the wonderful achievements of the Free software pragmatists. Were the two processes related?

During this period, another interesting attribute began to develop: Free software communities started measuring success based on traditional market metrics: total cost of ownership, market share, etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with such metrics and they can make for great goals to reach for, particularly as they influence the adoption of Free software. However, are they really the measure of success?

By way of example: If we follow the mainstream tech media, desktop Linux's small global market share does indeed mean it has "failed". Some who do or have in the past worked on Free software desktop components have bought into this thinking. Stepping back for a moment, though, I have to ask myself: "Is a dominant share of the global desktop market the only or primary reason I'm doing this? Or would that simply be a great result, a goal to strive for?" It all seems a bit like telling a self-made millionaire who got there by doing what they love that they have failed because they aren't a billionaire. These are perhaps more philosophical that pragmatic ponderings, however, and Free software has increasingly become less philosophical.


The advances of Free software under the hands of the pragmatists have been fantastic and in many cases gone beyond all possible expectations of greatness. However, the partisanship that paralleled this has resulted in Free software competing against itself in various, and I would suggest unhealthy, ways. It even undermined the founding philosophers who lost themselves to naming struggles ("It's GNU/Linux..") or rooting against Free software efforts they personally didn't like. It also distorted our own sense of success and failure where only being #1 globally was good enough. Of course we must ask ourselves: does it matter that these shifts have taken place?

As Free software has evolved, several "big questions" have arisen as can be seen from the various outbursts of contention around contributor agreements ("CLA"s). Many such issues remain precariously open and could use with some critical thinking, popular essay writing and public discourse. At the same time, we are left without many philosophers amongst the "A-list" Free software personalities. Today, they are much more likely to be cut of the pragmatist cloth, and this is a polar shift from where we left off in "founding philosophers".

(.. and no, I'm not yet done with this blog entry series. You probably now understand why I've broken it up into a series. ;)

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HTML5, WAC and Plasma

Sebastian blogged about HTML5 WAC application support in Plasma, complete with a screencast, and it is looking really promising. Tizen, the combined effort of Intel and Samsung, is focusing on WAC which itself is nicely documented here. Plasma's flexibility in this area makes this a nice way to add to the number and variety of add-ons available for Plasma enabled devices.


Does this mean will Vivaldi have WAC support? the answer is "Yes, when the WAC script engine is ready". As it is self-contained in its own git repository and being added to the growing list of OBS packages available to those making Plasma Active images this will be trivial to ship as a post-launch update when it is ready.

In addition to getting WAC apps loading (something Marco did initial work on), Sebastian has also been implementing API access permissions and the Device Status API. The API permissions UI is important as we will almost certainly end up using this for native Plasma add-ons written in QML. There is a lot of other WAC API that needs implementing. If you're interested in hacking on this, check out the git repo with `git clone git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/sebas/plasma-scriptengine-wac`, or if you have set up git URL rewriting (which you should if you use KDE git repos as it saves on hassle) `git clone kde:scratch/sebas/plasma-scriptengine-wac`.

On a sidenote, I also fixed a bug that is visible in Sebastian's screencast where tooltips do not hide as they should when dragging a widget from the new QML based Add Widgets UI. Thinking of Sebastian's screencast, I wondered if anyone would have found it helpful had I recorded the process of fixing such a bug. It's an every day sort of thing to me, but would aspiring KDE hackers find it useful to see how those of us working on Plasma today accomplish such tasks? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

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founding philosophers

A quick preface: I know sometimes I write overly long blog entries (and emails, and.. ;) but some things simply do not boil down well into short missives. This is one of those things, so instead of lobotomizing it or risking tl;dr I'm going to break it up into a few different entries. The history covered in this entry is probably familiar to many of you, but it provides the necessary starting point from where we will eventually end up. Please bear with me. :)

When I got involved with Free software, there were a few people who stood out as luminary thinkers on the topic of freedom in technology and technology in freedom. These intelligent and well educated spirits spent considerable time pondering the issues, discussing them, distilling them into writing and sharing the results with anyone who would listen. They challenged each other, they supported each other and the Free software community rewarded them all by paying attention.

I remember listening to a Red Hat founder describing the principles the company was founded upon. The idea of a company whose mission was to do more than only make money resonated deeply; why not have a for-profit group that embodied a specific set of ideals? The world did not have to be divided starkly between, for the sake of caricature, idealists creating NGOs and those setting up corporations. We could take all that interested us and create successful, coherent systems from it.

The concepts embodied by this breed of idealistic pragmatist were inspired by the writing, public speaking and thinking of the Free software philosophers. Richard Stallman and his organization, the FSF, was a center of gravity due to their central role in turning Free software into a serious movement. The idea of technology being a lynchpin to freedom was at once fascinating and obvious to me once I stumbled upon Stallman's ideas (a flavour many great ideas tend to share), and there were countless thousands of others similarly touched.

Of course, Stallman was not the only one thinking or writing about these topics. I read Eric Raymond's papers with great interest as did many others. The Cathedral and the Bazaar was something you could count on "everyone" having read in Free software circles at the time. Bruce Perens, John Hall and others were similarly extolling and spreading ideas about Free software and how it could interface with society and economics.

It was the age of philosophers in Free software: they were "the" names and they held great influence. They were speaking with national governments as well as at small Free software events; they were paving new thoroughfares for freedom right through the middle of international corporations as well as hanging out on IRC. Documentaries were made, books were written and the concepts were maturing. They had become the founding philosophers of Free software.

Linus Torvalds stood out among this crowd as he was certainly a thinker but more of a pragmatist than a philosopher. He was perhaps unique in this way among the "A-list" stars of Free software at the time and as such increasingly became the poster boy for the tangible benefits of the movement.

He was not the only pragmatist involved with Free software, of course: there were increasingly large numbers of amazing minds writing all sorts of great code, founding companies and ensuring the general spread of "open source". These efforts would end up re-shaping the global technology landscape. It would also fundamentally shift the Free software landscape.

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