Attracting women to Free Software communities

There was recently a discussion on the coreboot mailing list about coreboot being more welcoming to female developers. What follows started out as a short reply and blossomed into something that was just begging to become a blog post.

I think that our discussion raises a very important question: Why should coreboot (or any Free Software project) specifically state their support for women to participate?

Semantically, saying that everyone is welcome to contribute does indeed include women as well as three-toed sloths, children, and any sentient beings we don’t know about yet. But I think it can be very welcoming for the coreboot community to mention, even if only briefly, that we are supportive of female developers.

Why software patents are slowing us down

In the beginning there were a bunch of old guys with wigs, and they wrote The Constitution and The Patent Act of 1790. These weren’t your run-of-the-mill guys with wigs that you’d see on the street today, these guys wore powdered wigs with ribbons in them. Having just recently broken up with their domineering but sometimes loveable companion England, these men thought that it would be a good idea to

“…promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”

Not bad, founding fathers, not bad.

But if we fast forward a couple hundred years to today, we find that we, the United States, currently have some issues with these limited grants of exclusivity. Despite our parents’ best efforts, we seem to be having severe problems both in comprehending the idea of “limited” and in seriously discussing how best we can promote Science and the Arts. If the Founders were alive today I’d half expect our current congresscritters to roll their eyes, stick their fingers in their ears, and say “lalalalala, I can’t hear you” whenever the Founders stopped by for a chat. I must say that it seems like a lot of common sense was lost when men stopped wearing wigs.

One of the most egregious problems of today is the granting of software patents. There are several reasons why software patents should not be granted and should not exist, but I’m going to focus on just one aspect in this post: Interoperability in a world of digital distribution. In order for software developers and software users to be able to innovate and create and distribute and interoperate with others (and yes, those two groups include just about everyone out there), we must get rid of software patents as they are like millstones tied ’round our necks.

Free Geek t-shirt doodles

Free Geek, a nifty community computer recycler and technology enabler that’s like a cross between Habitat for Humanity and that place in your high school basement where they piled up old computers and oscilloscopes, is designing a new T-shirt and asked for help from the community. Being far away from PDX and faced with the distinct possibility that I’d have to do real work on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I figured that the only way out was to make some sketches. If it’s useful, does it still count as procrastination?

I was relived to hear that “Designs don’t have to be polished, as long as the idea is clear.” I mean, I’ve designed a t-shirt before, but doing the inking of the design took near about as long as drawing the darn thing in the first place!

Travelocity’s watersports ad: Good humor or poor taste?

Travelocity recently ran an ad in The Advocate (an LGBT magazine) that included the following text:

Travel Wish #18:
Try a new water sport.

Most of the advertisements in The Advocate are from big-name companies like Cadillac, Prudential, Avis, HSBC, and Subaru. The ads are similar to what you’d see in other print media, often with a bit more of an environmental vibe like the new Cadillac Hybrid or the Subaru “Love. It’s what makes a Subaru, a Subaru.”. The models in ad pictures are often paired as same-sex couples, which makes sense considering the target audience. Some advertisers include colors or, as in the case with Avis, a rainbow-themed button at the bottom of the ad with the text “We try harder.”

The Travelocity ad includes a picture of three guys and the Travelocity gnome playing “Chicken” in a resort pool. As much as I enjoy humor in advertisements, I was curious to see a big name like Travelocity make a joke that could be interpreted poorly depending upon the audience and setting. I could definitely imagine people interpreting their words as a suggestion that most gay men like to indulge in urolagnia, something which I believe is not the case. Given the flavor of other ads in The Advocate, Travelocity’s text seemed a bit more racy than most.

Compostable dishes!

As a quick follow-up to my previous post about recycling and composting at Dartmouth and DHMC, I wanted to link to a site that sells compostable cups and compostable to-go containers. The cups are made out of NatureWorks PLA and the to-go containers are made out of sugarcane fiber. I don’t believe that this is the supplier that Dartmouth and DHMC use, but the products look roughly similar to what is currently being used at the cafeterias and dining halls.

I’d love to have some charts comparing these products when made out of clear plastic, styrofoam, and compostable materials. Interesting data would include initial cost, cost of disposal, environmental impact (production/disposal energy needed and byproducts produced), and utility. Perhaps one of the suppliers like ECO Products would be willing to do this analysis.

Recycling: Let’s kick it up a notch

Hey you! Do you buy stuff? Do you buy stuff in packaging? Well of course you do!

Okay, now do you recycle some of that packaging? Do you know where your recycling goes? If you have municipal composting, do you know where the compost goes once it has finished decomposing?

In the go-go-go society in America today, most people don’t ask questions about where their sneakers or lettuce comes from, let alone asking where their curbside recycling goes or taking the time to figure out what happens to their old computer after they’re done with it. While the problem of what to do with waste affects people across the world, the matter of improper electronics disposal is resulting in e-waste being dumped in 3rd world countries where reclaimers with little to no training or safety gear release toxic materials into the air, soil, and waterways.

But this post isn’t about e-waste (perhaps I’ll write such a post soon). I’m currently interested in what’s happening with recycling and composting at Dartmouth College as I work at the Dartmouth College Interactive Media Lab. Dartmouth has a long tradition of sustainability and commitment to recycling and composting. The Dartmouth Outing Club has had an Environmental Studies club since the 1960s, and Dartmouth now has a new sustainablity website and a Sustainability Initiative to reduce the environmental footprint of Dartmouth.

EUPLv1.1 vs. GPLv3: What kind of freedom would you like?

Ernest Park recently wrote a comparison on Linux.com between two software licenses, the European Union Public License v1.1 (EUPLv1.1), authored by the European Union and the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3) authored by the Free Software Foundation. Although his comparison is quite extensive, I cannot agree with his conclusions, most of which may be summed up by his insinuation that “The EUPL is unique in its encouragement of interoperability, freedom, and lack of license lock-in upon redistribution.” Instead of creating a new FOSS license, I suggest that the EU throw their weight behind an existing license such as the GPLv3 or Apache License v2.

Official Palm Pre FOSS site coming soon

After a spirited discussion on slashdot and some emails, I’ve finally found a lead on where to get the linux kernel sources for the Palm Pre. Here’s what they have to say:

From: Opensourcequestions [at] Palm

Hello,

Many thanks for the email.

We are in the process of preparing the packages and our modifications
to upload them to our open source web site – http://opensource.palm.com.

The specific page where the packages will be posted is:
http://opensource.palm.com/packages.html. For now, the page says
“Coming soon” but we expect to have the packages ready and uploaded
in about 2 weeks.

All the best,
Palm Open Source Team

I know, I know… waiting means you’ll be idle and idle hands do the devil’s work. But you’ll just have to sit on those idle hands for a few days and dream of a Pre running a Free-Software-only stack.

UPDATE (2009-06-21):

Palm’s open source website now shows a list of packages available for download. It looks like they’re distributing upstream tarballs alongside tarballs of their patches.

On supporting FLOSS charities…

Bradley Kuhn has a nice post on his blog telling us to Support Your Friendly Neighborhood FLOSS Charities. He writes:

“I believe that if each person who has benefited seriously from FLOSS gave $200/year, we’d make a substantial change and a wonderful positive impact on the non-profit organizations that shepherd and keep these FLOSS projects alive.”

$200/year works out to about $0.55/day. As I suggest in Free Software starts in your pocket, if you pay for things using cash, make about 7-8 purchases each week, and save the change, you’ll end up with $200+ at the end of the year. Just empty the coin jar whenever it gets full, give the hard coin to a local charity, and give an equivalent amount to a Free Software non-profit.

We all have crappy days, unsure if we’ve actually gotten anything done, so when you give money to a Free Software non-profit remember that you’ve given someone else the opportunity to get something useful done. Sometimes it’s difficult to go home after a long day of work, sit down, and make substantial useful contributions to a Free Software project. Your brain is fried, so flex your economic muscle instead.

It’s so simple that you can do it right now. In fact, don’t just think about the idea, go ahead and do it right now! Pull out the change in your pocket and put it in a cup on your desk. There you go — Free Software just got $0.34 more in funding.

Money isn’t everything, but a certain amount of it is vital to keeping our Free Software ecosystem not only alive, but growing. Start right now.

El GPL, Two and a smidgen more

Google raised eyebrows recently when it talked about its use of FFmpeg in Chromium for H.264 playback. The code in FFmpeg that Google is using is available under the LGPL 2.1 license. Apparently Google says it has a patent license (which we’ll probably never get to see) that covers H.264 playback in Chromium. Now there are lots of pundits out there on Slashdot who hast spoke their piece, several of whom question whether Google’s distribution of Chromium + LGPLed FFmpeg + undisclosed H.264 patent license is legal.

I can’t tell you if what Google is doing is legal — legal advice is the department of the SFLC guys — but I do have an interesting take on the situation and wonder if Google hasn’t gotten itself into a very sticky situation. Let’s first set the stage: