• 
  

• Presence

  Official Homepage
  Photo Stream
  News Feed
  Music Charts
  Shared Bookmarks
  

• Tags

  activism bluetooth bureaucracy camera cartoon chat community design desktop evangelism events friends fuse GNOME google history howto hunger irc jabber kde laser cannons life management marketing mobile nokia norms obex offtopic random rules science search silly support sync system troubleshooting ubuntu vim web web2.0 work

• Archives

  Select Month June 2008  (1) May 2008  (2) April 2008  (2) March 2008  (3) February 2008  (1) January 2008  (2) December 2007  (4) November 2007  (2) October 2007  (3) August 2007  (3) July 2007  (2) June 2007  (4) May 2007  (2) April 2007  (2) February 2007  (5) January 2007  (3) December 2006  (9) October 2006  (5) September 2006  (4) August 2006  (1) July 2006  (5) June 2006  (2) May 2006  (12) April 2006  (21) March 2006  (8) February 2006  (3) January 2006  (5) December 2005  (1) August 2005  (1) July 2005  (2) June 2005  (1) May 2005  (2) April 2005  (3) March 2005  (2) February 2005  (3) January 2005  (1)

• Subscribe

  
  Entries Feed
  Comments Feed
  

• Desktop Porn

  
  
  Tue Jul 8

• Propaganda

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  Protect your freedom!

  
  
  
  

• Small print in big fat letters

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

  ---

By Mad Kane:

The Constitution
Was cast aside by Congress.
Hideous corpus!

From the actual story:

The bill would create military commissions to prosecute terrorism suspects. It also would prohibit some of the worst abuses of detainees like mutilation and rape, but grant the president leeway to decide which other interrogation techniques are permissible.

Since this guy is in the Senate, I’m afraid there must be suckers in Kentucky who have actually voted for him:

"We are not conducting a law enforcement operation against a check-writing scam or trying to foil a bank heist," said Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "We are at war against extremists who want to kill our citizens."

Good luck folks.

I never post jokes on my blog (being the serious fellow I am,) but I have to make an exception for the Best Blonde Joke Ever!

Now that Freenode leader and PDPC President Rob Levin, A.K.A lilo, is gone, I’m trying hard to think if I ever thanked him for everything he has done for the Free Software community while he was with us.

I never did. I chatted with him briefly on Freenode a couple of times, idle, meaningless, fun chit-chat, that’s all. I never personally got to know him, but I did respect his work. It makes me cry, and it makes me think about how seldom we take the time to thank the people who dedicate their lives to making everybody’s life better.

Thank you lilo, have a good trip.

I have never been a big fan of terms such as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). I do understand that we use these terms in order to avoid getting into any nasty flame wars or being dragged into the schism between the socially oriented Free Software party and the pragmatist/instrumentalist Open Source advocates, but the result always felt rather unwieldy.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a lovely FLOSS (that’s right, as researchers we don’t want to stand on anyone’s toes) stream at the EASST conference in Lausanne. Soenke Zehle gave a great talk about Ubuntu marketing and “Africanization” of software. While business types and corporate users admittedly may well respond better to “open source” terminology, Soenke suggested that a large part of Ubuntu’s phenomenally quick success and great popularity can actually be attributed to “freedom” speech.

Ubuntu promises its users negative and positive freedoms: the negative freedom from the unpredictable whims of proprietary software manufacturers and vendors, and the positive freedoms of getting your software for free (both now and in the future), and the fact that Ubuntu works to provide accessible software, in your own language, and that you can make it better. Users like that. Putting Freedom back to Free Software seems to pay.

Yesterday, I went to the Linux 15th anniversary seminar here at the University of Helsinki. One of the speakers was Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, one of the great peacemakers in the FSF/OSI flamewars and perhaps the father of the FOSS term. As always, maddog’s talk was beautiful and very inspiring, but there was something that particularly caught my attention.

maddog wants to put Freedom back in his Free Software evangelism too. As the chief propagandist of Linux International, he has no doubt given a lot of thought on language, and he has changed his mind about FOSS. Free software is about Freedom, and open source code is a means to achieve the goal of liberating both users and vendors of software. He even used the loaded dichotomy of freedom vs. slavery, and spent quite a while talking about “software slaves” such as a shoe manufacturer he had met on a plane. This guy had lost half a year’s revenue while trying to upgrade his factory machines’ software from DOS-based to Windows, rewriting all his device drivers and applications, upgrading not only the machines he actually wanted to but ending up buying new hardware and software for everything. Looking at maddog’s Linux laptop on the plane, the shoemaker said, “I’ll do anything to get Microsoft out of my shop.”

I’m not surprised that an African social scientist like Soenke sees the value of freedom. I’m happy that even maddog has reconsidered his vocabulary, and decided to return to liberation speech. Why indeed do we beat around the bush so that businessmen don’t have to consider the value of freedom but instead invent another term, non-threatening, hollow of meaning? Why would we assume that they understand “Open Source” but wouldn’t understand “Freedom?” It’s not that hard to say we don’t mean “gratis stuff.”

We need to put Freedom back into Free Software.