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.

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.

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.

Also another milestone tonight, I broke open the new mailing list and sent some random messages.  I have a lot trapped in my head, and getting it down and able to be organized in to tasks  is an important project goal.

Topics on this list, and the kind of things I’m going to begin writing about, include:

• The future direction for content;
• Specific discussions about the business chapter;
• How we produce the book, from wiki to XML to git;
• What needs to be done on the collaboration/contribution side, e.g. fedorahosted.org/tosw;
• Sysadmin fun;
• Project goals, direction, tactics, and strategy;
• Meet on IRC?

Image copyright (c) 2010 Debora Wade, released under CC BY SA 3.0 Unported

Overall, the keynote went great.  No real glitches and I survived the big laughs when the “security updates available” alert went off on my laptop when I was talking about security. I meant to be both ahead of the length of time involved and to talk more slowly.  Not sure how except to cut words while conveying more.  (Certainly the parts about SELinux could have been about 3 min. shorter, for example.)

I was very proud to have my family there in the audience, too.  Now they know I’m not totally nuts.

There is a break in the middle between the two parts where a few minutes of video was lost. Mainly I was talking about stuff you can read here:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_(operating_system)#History
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Relationship_to_free_or_community_distributions
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux#Implementations

My wife requested more visuals in the presentation.  I realize this stripped down style works for me, but not for people who want to make a visual connection with the spoken word.  For example, when I’m talking about Prince St. in Boston, having a nice shot of Prince St. on the screen would help convey the story better.   This all requires me to have more practice in giving the talk so I don’t mix up the order of stories.

Regardless,  I am going to do some improvement to this presentation because I’d like to give it again, and I think some others would as well.  The OpenOffice.org source and a PDF with notes are both available, all of it is under the CC BY SA 3.0 except the image of the resonant pendulum from exploratorium.edu (Red Hat got permission to use that image; I’m looking for a free content replacement or I’ll have to make a special trip to shoot my own.)

Preparing for the talk and during giving it, I found myself being newly aware of diversity and inclusivity issues.  I heard in comments from multiple directions that people appreciated my recognition of the value of people who participate quietly, and that their silence isn’t only shyness.  Often there are very legitimate reasons someone does not feel enabled to speak up, and due to the nature of the situation, some of us may not be able to even know or understand that.  There were still a few parts where I saw my language lacking, e.g. usage of the ubiquitous and excluding “you guys”, but overall I was much happier with my talk than many, many others I have sadly witnessed.

Being charming and funny is all good, but not at the expense of 66% of your current and future audience.  Meaning, when you offend a large group (e.g. women) and their supporters (e.g. sensible men), you approach 66% of the audience who are or should be turned-off by you.  (There will always be some of the offended group who don’t see the privileged behavior as bad, and many in the non-offending group who also see no problem.)

Since the success of free and open projects is related to the quantity and quality of contributors, and since contributors arise from participants who arise from the 80%+ who are just consumers … well, we need about 100+ new people to generate three to five contributors.  It doesn’t make sense to continue excluding huge swathes of humanity, especially for the sake of vanity and way old school thinking.

I hadn’t thought about it before, I’m used to thinking in terms of locality for law.  This is the law that generally touches us every day – from traffic to local statutes.  I’m sure we’re regularly affected by international commercial law, for example, but I just don’t spend much time thinking about it.

It hadn’t occurred to me that we could support FLOSS licensing in this way.  Richard laid out some areas that need attention for the idea to actually work.

• Stewards of widely used licenses need to provide public guidance on interpretation and usage, such as how the FSF does for the GPL family.
• Projects should document their interpretations of the licenses they use, such as how they intend them to interoperate.  Fedora is a great example here.
• They can also help by documenting policies on inbound contributions, such as what Richard and I did for The Open Source Way.
• Distribution projects can help police licensing and explain their own rationale, such as how Debian and Fedora have done it.
• Consider community dispute resolution institutions to resolve intracommunity FOSS licensing conflicts and questions.  The SFLC has assisted in this before, but that is not a very scalable solution.
• … plus others I didn’t capture in my notes; we’ll have to get Richard to write an article about it.

After listening to this and some follow-up questions from the audience, I stood up and suggested that there seemed to be an existing community of practice around FLOSS licensing.  Maybe we should formally recognize it, invite wider participation, maybe setup some infrastructure.

Such a community of practice could define and provide guidance as a stand-alone, neutral party that all interested people can participate in.  Individuals in upstream projects, downstream distros, or stand alone developers can join and bring questions for discussion.

This is a classic example of a situation where a community of practice can be highly successful.  I’m not sure how it fits in, but I’d like to see opensource.com/law be a central place to hear from the community around international FLOSS licensing.

I walked away with one last thought, after listening to Richard share his thought processes as he has pondered this domain.  More than nearly every other lawyer on the planet, Richard has been exposed to many aspects of FLOSS licensing in an international arena.  His musing left me thinking how the law is a completely human constructed mindscape, meaning the ability to do thought experiments is greatly expanded.  Imagine if you could work on physics problems in a mental universe where the laws of physics were your own construction.  Not wildly speculated science fiction, but well thought out and explored mental maps.

Non-lawyers tend to think of the law as immutable.  Perhaps in some ways it is, when you take a snapshot of it in the moment, with current thinking and case law.  But new thinking, it seems, can cross with case law, and possibly give out something new that didn’t exist before.  There are current international legal constructs that didn’t exist a hundred years ago.  It seems like a time to make another one for FLOSS licensing.

From the inky shadows on the right, Richard Fontana reviews the FLOSS legal landscape.

“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.

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”.

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.

1. All the legal bits passed muster, and the new contribution policy explains the rules.  It’s simple enough – by contributing, you agree to put your contributions under the CC BY SA 3.0 Unported.  Read the policy for full understanding.
2. If you have a user account on the wiki, you are enabled to create new user accounts.  That is how we are going to allow in new contributors while keeping out spambots.  You are entrusted to make sure new people you add understand the contribution policy.

I’ve also started a big task list on the wiki, and am waiting for the new mailing list tosw@lists.fedorahosted.org to be created.  All part of following the directions:

• Set up a mailing list first
• Use lightweight, open collaboration tools – wikis, mailing lists, IRC, version control, bug trackers – and give out access
• Tasks, tasks, tasks or ‘Project management matters’