There was an article in the San Jose Mercury News about my daughters and their friend. My eldest’s reactions to the article included specifying that it was her friend who self-identified as a geek and was OK with that ID. My daughter doesn’t self-identify that way, and her reaction got me thinking.
As with other negative terms that are taken on by a subculture, the word geek is a noun that originally had a negative connotation. However, some of the subcultures that it was used as an insult against took on the term as a positive self-identifier. Currently, geek is a noun, adjective, and verb that refers to a state of being and acting where you think something is so great that you lose your cool over it. You stop focusing on how the world thinks of you and you totally immerse yourself in the thing. Subcultures where that occurs sometimes take on the term geek for themselves.
Back in the 1980s, people passionate about computers were called computer nerds. We used the word geek in its larger context but applied to other interests. I remember, and still know many, theater geeks from high school. Back then, I was a game geek – I liked role-playing, strategic board games, strategic role-playing, and dressing in camo and shooting at each other in the woods with BB guns (before there were paintball guns and that geek past-time became commonplace.) I have now realized which of my friends (and wife and daughters) are fashion geeks. When a geekness achieves a certain cachet, it becomes cool in itself.
For me, the triumph of the girls’ talk at SCALE 8x Women in Open Source summit, article, and follow-on interest is in the idea that girls are finding it more interesting to be passionate about something than to be cool and aloof. There is a safety in a cool composure, in not exposing yourself. It is easier to hide your true feelings behind a historic guise of acting ladylike. Even in our culture of girl soccer and vollyball champs (sports geeks), and so forth, there is a lot more cultural pressure for girls to stop being girlish and start acting like ladies. By comparison, being a gentleman is easy.
On the Friday of SCALE 8x we had a Fedora Activity Day (FAD) focused on getting ready for Google Summer of Code 2010. As usual, we had people drop by to see what was going on, since “activity day” is an unclear bit of clubspeak. (By clubspeak, I mean the language we use as insiders or as people well studied in a community.)
We kept a log (HTML log and HTML + plain text summary), had a plan, and completed the important bits.
Early the following week I did a crossdump for Mel Chua. We are doing some work-swapping for a few weeks. I’m helping get Fedora Insight to the next level (staging, ready for production), and Mel is working on the next stages of work the Summer Coding SIG needs.
Within the next week you should start to hear about what students, mentors, sub-projects, and upstreams need to be doing. If you are involved in Fedora or the JBoss.org projects, help pass on the word.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Pay attention if you want to know more about Zikula, want to work with it, and can spend some time helping Fedora Infrastructure. Especially if you can do design and know (enough) CSS.
Today I sat with my project manager glasses participating in an IRC work session on Fedora Insight. The session, much of which was logged and summarized using the awesome zodbot and the meetbot module (plain text logs and summary.) The logs were started a bit late, but include a summary followed by work on the internals of Zikula, it’s templating system, and making things that much better for the Fedora Insight move to production.
We are meeting tomorrow (Sunday 28 February at 13:00 UTC and going for another eight to ten hours) in #fedora-meeting-1 to continue working on the final bits. This includes documenting and teaching the process of moving from publictest instance to staging. We have a Zikula team member, Simon Birtwistle, who is making that magic happen. We want to make sure we capture that as knowledge in to the Infrastructure SOP system.
In addition, we’ll be following some Infrastructure procedures to dump the database from testing and load it in staging.
This has been a long journey with a lot of hands helping along the way. It’s the double-edged sword of fighting with free/libre and open source software on your side. You can’t brute force your way through some of the parts because time isn’t the most important value in the equation. Both the Fedora systems and the upstream Zikula team have benefited from the work, we are now literally 99% there. Smacking good!
There continues to be some balance with the existing Zikula package. The current one in Fedora is in the version range of 1.1.x, while upstream has a 1.2.x series that we need to run instead. By comparison to 1.1.x, 1.2.x contains fixes and removes hacks in favor of better solutions, some of which are related directly to working with the Fedora Project. There is a ticket requesting that a 1.2.x version be hosted by Fedora Infrastructure until an appropriate solution can be made for the Fedora main version, which may be waiting for 1.3 to release.
That’s my wrap for the day. Pascal will publish something to the logistics list archives later, I reckon.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
From the big drive down, the FAD on Friday, through my keynote on Saturday, and the flurry of the event following that, I’m finishing off SCALE 8x with Richard Fontana’s talk on improving FOSS licensing. (Addendum, I was when I wrote that, but now it’s the next morning, epic drive home complete.)
“I like the richness of all the hundreds or maybe thousands of different FLOSS licenses. It’s fun.” Not an exact quote, but an accurate paraphrase of what Richard said.
I have a bit to write about for this SCALE, I’ll get right on that for ya.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
In English we have a well-known confusion with the word/term “free”. It can refer either to something having no cost/price, or as a reference to essential matters of liberty.
Words such as “freedom” might work, but are a bit much to say each team, and to me have the effect of hyperbole — big words chosen to prove how important the topic is. Overblown.
Not that I consider matters of freedom to be trivial, but I don’t want to be using alarming language in every discussion unless it’s necessary.
Recently I found myself beginning to use a slightly new term that I think resolves the English ambiguities: freed software.
What I like is the not unsubtle reference to any situation where a person, place, or thing was once owned as chattal and is now freed of ownership. Being freed means having the freedoms of one who is free. My writer/culture ear thinks that “freed” is the word that takes us out of the tautology of “free-as-in-freedom”.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
As of this week’s plan, Richard Fontana and I are going to be at the Red Hat booth from 2 to 4 pm on Saturday 20 February at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 8x.
Being careful not to give legal advice, I think we’ll be there to have freeform discussions around:
- How and why we do licensing in the Fedora Project;
- The relationship between free and open source software;
- General landscape around intellectual property (IP) rights and content;
- The culture and methods of free culture/content;
- Where to find more of this discussion at opensource.com/law;
- … and so forth.
You know Richard originally from his work as a co-author of the GNU GPL, version 3, while at the Software Freedom Law Center. Today, Richard is Red Hat’s open source licensing counsel, and people like me interact with him on a range of topics from licensing around content and code to education about free/open source software legal culture. In addition, Richard works on promoting open standards and intellectual property law reform. He is a writer for the new law channel at opensource.com.
Richard Fontana will be talking about Improving the Open Source Legal System at SCALE on Sunday.
