Sadly, most people never read the channel topic upon /joining, which is very sad and leads to a lot of confusion. Then again, some people are so devoted that they even check the topic on #ubuntu-offtopic. Go figure! Naturally, those who are not familiar with the channel culture and do read the topic, will be very confused. For the past few months (since April at least), the #ubuntu-offtopic topic has contained the greeting, “Welcome to the new, more optimized #ubuntu-offtopic!” which has caused some nervous giggles and a lot of questions. Since #ubuntu-offtopic regulars never answer a question (at least seriously), I decided to try and take a stab at this mystery.

(Disclaimer: please do not take this as a promise of public parsing of any other parts of the topic at this or any future article. I can try for my standard, very high, consultation fee, but the gratis public service only covers this one freebie.)

Some people speculate that the “optimization” of #ubuntu-offtopic is a friendly jab at the famously efficient build process of Gentoo binaries. Others claim that it refers to the quality of conversation on the channel, very thoroughly stripped of sanity, detached of any real phenomena, and lack of requirements to coherent language. Some say it’s just a random thought added to the topic by an unstable operator on a Monday. All of these are very plausible and educated guesses.

However, my extensive empirical studies have lead me to conclude that the optimized nature of #ubuntu-offtopic refers to this ambitious vision developed by rww and mc44:

Sadly, we have not really seen this optimization effort bear fruit. Channel regulars keep blabbering pretty much as inefficiently as before, and new users almost never take the time to investigate the optimization algorithm. Instead, they are content with just having a short laugh at the topic and join the discussion about LOLcats, comparative flashlight brightness, popular music and the evils of proprietary software.

The failure of a majority of users to adopt this very efficient mode of conversation might be due to reluctance to search for suitable XKCD strips to express their point of view, and the extra work required on the receiving side of communication for checking the corresponding strip. Granted, this presents a fairly steep learning curve in the beginning, but anyone can see how highly effective our offtopic chatter would be after all the comics are memorized. Think about the reduced workload and bandwidth savings on freenode’s servers if idle chatter is conducted using the rww/mc44/xkcd protocol! These savings could be redirected for the benefit of support and development channels, and everybody wins. As a side effect, one of the greatest winners would be Randall and the XKCD web site. Think about the increase in page views!

I say, laziness is no excuse for inefficiency!

topyli’s law:
When a user asks for help on a problem (s)he is having with $PROGRAM, another user will immediately suggest they switch to $ANOTHER_PROGRAM and use that instead.

topyli’s second law:
When you add an “Advanced” button or tab in the configuration dialog for your $USER_INTERFACE, all your users immediately become advanced.

The second law is actually a special case of mahen23′s law, which I learned on #ubuntu-offtopic. Here it is:
If you create a button, people will press it.

I just upgraded this site to 3.0 and nothing seemed to break. My part of the major transition included one step: clicking the “upgrade now” button. (Yes I did backups first, but that’s daily routine, right? :)

Big thanks again to the awesome WordPress hackers who made it happen!

If you see something broken, please let me know.

I’ve had my new HTC Desire for about two weeks. It’s a very nice Android phone, looks awesome, and for the most part it’s a delight to use. I have, however, been cursing the difficulty of text input. I’ve been using Nokia smartphones and communicators for ages, with solid and usable physical keyboards or numpads, and getting used to the touchscreen is not very easy. What made things worse is that the virtual keyboard on the Desire was not localized, and typing characters such as Ä and Ö was not very fast. (English speakers would call them ‘accented characters’ and bury them behind tricky UI maneuvers, but they are in fact very common vowels in the beautiful Finnish language.)

I had no idea what to do except try and learn to type even just a little bit, and accept the idea that this is not a very good device for text input. Oh well, I can always use the netbook if I need to write a long email or notes. It never even dawned on me to complain to fellow Android users about this, or ask for survival tips and tricks. They were probably just trying to cope and enjoying YouTube and the marvelous Web browser.

Only today, after two weeks of usage, I learned something that blew me away. Browsing the web, I stumbled upon a Finnish Android forum discussion about the relative merits of different options for Finnish typists on Android. Turns out there’s an app called ‘Scandinavian Keyboard‘, and it’s Free Software and all.

I launched the Android Market on my phone, and downloaded this new keyboard.

I downloaded a keyboard.

I also downloaded a Finnish dictionary for it, so that predictive text works both in Finnish and English (unlike before).

So then it dawned on me. The Nokia Way that I have learned since getting my first Communicator, working through all my life with Nokia devices, is the paradigm of shipping a very powerful ESeries smartphone to you that does everything out of the box that most people ever need. You only download a few special apps that geeks need like PuTTY.

The iPhone Way (and the Android way) is all about shipping a nice, lean system (and don’t forget to make it pretty!) and making everything available as apps.

And when I say “everything available as apps,” i mean everything! When I got my Desire it certainly looked good, and it paid due attention to importing my Facebook friends, but I had no SIP calling. I had no password manager. I had no system task manager (worth mentioning). The RSS reader sucked. I didn’t even have a damn task list to go with the calendar! And worst of all, no Finnish keyboard layout or dictionary.

But there sure was an app for all that.

P.S. I have no idea which way is better. I always enjoyed a new Nokia device, because it was so powerful right from day one. But the way of the Android might be a good idea as well: just try and ship a nice, lean base system and let users add their own bloat.

P.P.S. In case you’re wondering, I fixed SIP with Sipdroid, passwords with KeePassDroid (yay!), processes with Advaced Task Killer, RSS with … nothing! the iPhone version of Google Reader rocks. For a Task list I use Astrid, which has very nice Remember The Milk sync and a friendly and funny nagging feature. Feel free to suggest better/more!

Marx

Remember the good old Marxist dialectics of commodities? When a good becomes a commodity, an exchange value is added to the pure use value that the good was originally created to be, and all hell breaks loose. Capital is accumulated. Labor and materials are exploited, and the good is alienated from its original purpose as it is exploited in the market. In many ways this is a good thing, and Marx never forgot the “civilizing qualities” of capitalism over any other mode of production. But the contradiction between use value and exchange value still remains unresolved. The best we can do is deal with it, and in many areas we are successfully doing so. I’m afraid that in the most crucial area in the information age, software, we are struggling.

Even as we can celebrate the liberation of our software as free software users, we must nevertheless take a critical look at the use values we are creating, and how we can do better. I think the solution is to commercialize free software more, not less.

Marx was and still is right, and software is very much a commodity that has tremendous value in modern information capitalism. The contradiction between use value and exchange value is correspondingly huge.

Use value before software

I’m not going to postulate a “state of nature” like Locke or Hobbes did, but i do know for a fact that software was not always a commodity. When UNIVAC and Digital and IBM built their enormously expensive mainframes in the 1950s that only a few companies and research facilities were able to acquire, software was the actual outcome that users wanted. The activity that the computer was purchased for was programming. What an airline or a government wanted was the machine. No talk about software. The IBM customer bought the raw machinery and wrote the software that would do the single task that they needed it to do, like complex calculations or keeping customer databases. The use value was in the hardware, the software was the result of the user’s work. Software as an independent entity did not exist.

Emergence of software as a commodity

Hardware became cheaper and smaller, and more users were able to purchase computers. All universities and every moderately sized business had one. No longer would users be happy with UNIVACs or IBM model so-and-so’s, but we suddenly had portable, general purpose systems like Unix that ran on a wide variety of machines. Operating systems and applications became different entities. Unix was relatively free because of AT&T’s ban on entering the software business, and we soon had two modes of software production: proprietary Unix and free university Unix. Proprietary software was born.

Use value was no longer in the hardware: it was cheap and replaceable. Use value was in the software: this was what actually enabled to do the stuff you wanted to do.

Enter the IBM PC and IBM’s failure to do anything with it. It became a standard and a myriad of clones emerged, producing “IBM compatible” PC machines from off-the-shelf components. None of those companies were powerful enough to maintain a vertical system of hardware, operating system and applications, like IBM and the biggies used to. It was economically much more feasible to get the software from third parties, specialized software companies such as Microsoft and the Unix vendors. Behold the software commodity as an independent entity.

Free software was around all this time of course. I’m not sure why we did not use it all along. Maybe we were unable to make it run on cheap PC’s, maybe we were too proud to acknowledge them. I don’t know.

The commodity reached its perfection. Use value was in the hands of companies producing proprietary software. They would, under terms of a license that they dictate, allow you to reach your goals in limited ways, and express yourself in ways that they deemed appropriate. Their End User License Agreements would allow you to write stuff, make calculations, draw and edit images, and such things, in all the ways that they (not you) could imagine you might want to do for the fee that you pay. You could do more if you paid more, sometimes, if there were many others that wanted to the same thing and it became economically interesting to the company to provide you with the possibility.

The creator of the software owned you.

The free software movement

Not everyone was happy with that, and we got rebels such as the heroes of the Free Software Foundation. I’m not going to preach to the choir and repeat the rise and success of free software, but I’m going to say that the rebellion was all about a world-class hacker such as Richard Stallman being unable to fix the driver software for his brand new Xerox printer because it was proprietary. The use value was greatly diminished.

Free software is all about making software useful again. Software is only useful when you can do what your needs are, not someone else’s. No software vendor is ingenious enough to predict what you might want to do. Free software communities are: they just do what you tell them to do. We’re talking usefulness, use values again.

So now that we have philosophically and economically fixed everything with the free software ideology and open source development models, and we have wonderful systems like Linux-based GNU systems and all the awesome apps that run on them, we’re home free, right? I’m not sure.

Why business is good

Let us see how we have needed companies that exploit our free software commons. Let us see how they have actually added not only capital for themselves, but actual use value for all of us.

In the late 1980s, before the Internet or the Linux project existed, a few guys realized that the GNU C compiler, the GDB debugger and Emacs made a pretty damn good set of developer tools, and decided to sell them to developers and support them. They listened to customers and fixed bugs, added features, and customized the tools for individual companies and users. The GNU project was not interested in doing any of this, so the users were better off paying Cygnus to do it for them. Cygnus was adding real use value to the GNU tools. Soon the company noticed that the GNU project was really slow in integrating their improvements to the official compiler tree, so they were left with no choice other than forking it. Eventually, the FSF realized that Cygnus’ version was far superior to them, and adopted it as official. Cygnus pretty much became the maintainers of the GNU C compiler.

The GNOME project was created in 1997 to create a free desktop for GNU-based systems. It succeeded because Red Hat hired developers to work on it. Red Hat got a nice desktop for themselves, and the GNU project got a free desktop. Red Hat made sure the potential use value was created.

In 2010, we are complaining when Canonical, Red Hat and Novell are leading the evolution of desktop systems, and IBM, Oracle, and others are in charge of the kernel. Why do we complain? What we are witnessing is the reconciliation of use value and exchange value. Everybody wins when commercial free software succeeds.

A couple of questions where conclusions should be

Smart companies will have to adopt free software and standardize. They will then have to compete in some genuine way that makes them special. Offering a stable operating system is not a very good business plan anymore: anyone can take GNU/Linux and offer that. Offering an awesome desktop experience is not going to work for much longer: companies like Red Hat, Novell and Canonical are working to make that point pretty much moot as well.

Looking into the future, we must consider end-users and the use values they are after even more carefully. Think about ultralight computers and mobile devices. Why do we complain if Nokia controls a device such as the N900? I have no idea. Maybe the hardware in the device is important again, and we, the free software movement, have made the software stack pretty much worthless in terms of exchange value? If so, we have more time to concentrate on more important things and place all this in to the basic category of “infrastructure” along with electricity and railroads.

I would like to think so.