Randa begins and Lernstick

The sun has risen this morning to reveal the beautiful valley which a some 20 or so KDE community members have gathered to work on 3 main topics (multimedia, accessibility and Plasma). People were awake and hacking here in Randa until the early hours of the morning of our first day here. In the Plasma room we spent the day catching up with each other and what we're working on as well as starting in on libplasma2, the next version of the underlying Plasma library, with the goal of having it in top shape for inclusion in the first release of Frameworks 5.

We also have some people who have joined us that haven't been involved in upstream KDE very much but who are involved in Free software and use KDE technologies in various ways. One example of this is the Lernstick initiative which brings Free software (and KDE! :) to students around Switzerland in the form of a handy, self-contained USB stick. They are now working on making this available on tablets as well, and one of the people behind the project was kind enough to give us a quick demo of the live login feature:

Today we continue on, with most of the people staying for the whole week to work on improving KDE and Free software for the masses. This meeting was made possible by Mario Fux and his wonderfully supportive family here in Randa who take amazing care of us (and make some very tasty food :) as well as the over 10,000 Euros in financial support provided by the KDE community. Our thanks to everyone who makes these meetings possible so that we can in turn make more, and better, Free software.

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a small update on Vivaldi

What a crazy year it's been for our little Vivaldi tablet project. Lots of ups with Plasma Active developing by leaps and bounds, with version 3 coming out this month and many of our efforts starting to improve our other form factors such as Desktop, and so much learning with regards to the state of the hardware world in Asia.

With our chosen hardware, we dealt with the completely typical (for the industry segment) GPL violating company which we negotiated with to change that ... only to have them simultaneously renig at the last minute and, while introducing a new revision of the board not only break our prior work but noticeably decrease in build quality. This was a massive, massive set back for us.

We didn't give up immediately, but kept banging our collective head against that particular wall until we exhausted all rational options. We began looking at various other options in the meantime for hardware production. It's been a grueling few months, which at one point was one contributor to my health generally failing forcing me to take a number of weeks away. (I'm feeling very good and all in one piece again, in case anyone is wondering. :)

Armed with the things we've learned from our first go-around, we began exploring  the Asian manufacturing world again. I've noticed a few differences this time: first, I'm able to ask the necessary questions a lot more effectively, and as a result get rather better answers. I'm also able to read between the lines a bit more effectively as I learn the business lingo of this sector's culture, which really also helps.

But recently a really eye-opening thing happened. One person I'd been working with previously contacted me, said they had recently moved to another company that also produces the sorts of electronics we need and started with "... and we have source code."

This was the first time I'd had a company at this level in the game approach me with that line. Are we, collectively, getting through to them? Maybe. One person, one company, one effort at a time.

I'm not going to say anything about the hardware we are looking at using. Last time that didn't turn out perfectly, so this time we'll wait a bit longer before sharing that information ... though I expect that when we start sending devices around to people for demos and engineering work that it will still come out. :P Anyways ... what a ride, but we aren't done yet.

In fact, that is a question I've had to stare down a few times: Is this worth doing still? In times when things look completely bleak and you've just had your most recent negative answer handed to you, that question pretty much finds you without you going looking for it. I've found my answer to it has shifted over the last few months. For a brief period of time it was, I'll be honest, "No, it is not worth doing." I hated that answer, though .. it felt unnecessarily wrong. So I dug more and the combination of seeing that the tablet space is still very much open (with all sorts of speculation about Android's position in it, Apple's ability to keep a death grip on the space, the rise of Amazons and others, etc..) and the reaffirmation that if we don't make open devices who will, I feel it is more important than ever to keep going.

After all ... someone came back to me and started their sales pitch with ".. and here's our source code." Halle-fucking-lujah.

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supporting Randa 2012

Others have blogged about this already, but I don't think enough can be said about it. A quiet tradition has arisen in the KDE community: a yearly developer meeting in Randa with dozens of people in attendance. This tradition goes back three years now, with the fourth installment of the Randa meeting happening later this month.

The Randa meetings have hosted discussions on KDE's libraries, Plasma, multimedia, messaging and more.
These discussions resulted in significant decisions being made that were unlikely to be achieved with the quality and quickness experienced at such a meeting. Those decisions translated into improvements in our software ... a lot of improvements. This time around the topics in focus are education, accessibility, multimedia and the Plasma Workspaces. Each of these four topics has a group of committed developers and contributors coming to Randa to work on them. Yes, it's four developer sprints in one!


What's also makes Randa special is that it is amazingly well coordinated (which significantly contributes to the quality of the results), it is in an awe-inspiring location in the Swiss mountains which not only puts everyone in a great frame of creative mind but also limits distractions  ... and it does all of this in a rather affordable package given the number of people who attend.

This year, the organizers (led as usual by Mario "unormal" Fux), are trying something of an experiment to help with fund this important event. They are going straight to us, the users and supporters of KDE and Free software, and asking if we can help support this meeting financially. We can't all be there in Randa, we can't all contribute effort directly to Free software projects, but we all benefit from these efforts and many of us do have the ability to pitch in financially to ensure that those who do the work are given the best opportunities possible to do so.

The goal is to raise 10,000 Euro ... and well over half of that has already been pledged. Please support this important event if you can. Every Euro is a direct investment in the future of the technology we all rely on. You can visit the pledge page and make a donation here.

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nobody will do it for you (and therefore they will)

There's an interesting paradox in many social cooperations that is readily observable in open, participation-driven creative projects (for which open source software is often held up as the poster child): nobody will do it for you. In F/OSS, that assumption translates to things like "nobody will write the patch for you" or "nobody will fix that bug for you". It turns out that this is the only safe assumption to hold.

But that idea flies in the face of reality: tens of thousands of bugs are fixed in Free software code bases around the world every year; huge numbers of features are added to free software code bases on a regular basis. Yet most of the people who use Free software did not perform any of the work that went into it, and those of us who do put effort into it are never responsible for more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the global result. So obviously people will and do make things for us. I have DVDs full of the stuff; I use it on all the computing devices I own every single day. You probably do as well.

This is where the paradox kicks in: the people who do the work specifically did not assume that someone else will do it for them. They assumed that they ought to do the work so that it actually, you know, gets done. For the person writing a patch in the quiet of their office, dorm room, house, local coffee shop .. (you get the picture) .. nobody did it for them. In fact, if everyone who adds to the body of Free software simply assumed someone else would do it, there wouldn't be much Free software out there at all.

Interestingly, some of the early Free software nay-sayers used to boggle at this concept of "making stuff for others" and would present it as a "logical" proof that Free software was obviously not happening because it was not realistic: "Why would anyone do it for you? Of course they won't!", they'd say, "Therefore Free software won't happen."

Indeed, in spite of the disbelief, people do realize that it is up to them to make things happen, that it is unrealistic to wait for it to magically occur at the hands of others and so they dig in and get it done, thankfully often with great joy. (Most of us working on Free software love what we do.)

By assuming that it is up to us and therefore taking on the responsibility of doing it ourselves, we prove ourselves wrong in way because we have just, indeed, done it so the majority doesn't have to. If everyone  suddenly grew complacent and decided that someone else somewhere would do it all for us and therefore we don't have to anything, then we'd be wrong all over again because nobody would do the work and nothing would get done.

What can appear as a delicious paradox is the triumph of self-motivated participation: it is people accepting that it is possible it could never happen if we all wait on each other, rejecting that as an acceptable result and so doing what needs to get done to make it happen. Put another way: stuff happens because people realize that it won't. Maybe it's just me, but I see a certain kind of heroism in these acts of self-motivation that end up benefiting others.

"Patches welcome," indeed.

Caveats

Yes, there are caveats to the above discussion, such as:

• many participants do things for "selfish" reasons, such as "scratching their own itch"; however, that does not change the fact that by making the result available as Free software, that act can (and usually does) benefit others who didn't have to do anything to receive that benefit, and that the person who did the work took it upon themselves to do it rather than wait for someone else to do so.
• some people write software out of enjoyment of the act itself: even if there are a thousand other text editors out there, there are people who will write another one just for fun. While true, in my experience most participants are not entirely free of practical motivation, so while this is an interesting phenomenon it is not enough to explain the amount of Free software (and the output from other participation-based communities).
• not everyone involved is self-motivating. This is true: some people are doing it because it's a job or require regular guidance and external motivation. I would assert that behind those people are individuals (usually large numbers of them) who are.
• there are many ways to make "code get written for me" that doesn't involve actually "writing the code"; for instance translating text, doing promotional work or providing project support services has a direct positive correlation to the rate of participation. So does hiring a developer with money. I would classify those acts as examples of "doing it because nobody else will" which are of equal import and primacy to the act of writing the code that forms the body of software itself (or whatever the end product of the project is intended to be).

I do not believe that the above caveats significantly alter the basic point, however. :)

Motivation

What made me think about this today of all days? Well, I was on IRC again for the first time in quite a while and I saw a number of people discussing patches, improvements and bugs as if someone else might suddenly appear and make it happen. That got me to thinking about the paradox outlined above .. and I love a good mind tease like this one.

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