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Talk legalese with us – Red Hat booth Saturday at SCALE 8x

17-Feb-10

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.

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Blowing open the doors to contributions

16-Feb-10

A few key pieces just fell in place and now we can easily open The Open Source Way for contributions.

  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:

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Five fast minutes on The Open Source Way – Ignite at CLSWest

15-Feb-10

In January 2010 I participated in an Ignite session at the Community Leadership Summit West.  CLS West is a subset of the annual CLS, to be held this year again near OSCON in Portland, OR on 17 and 18 July 2010.

This talk is in O’Reilly’s Ignite format, which is 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds.  The math says, 5 minutes and you have to keep on a very tight schedule.  As both a curse and a gift, I talk quickly, and I think I came out relatively intelligible.  Sort-of.

Filed in Community, Fedora, Presentations, Red Hat | Tagged , , | Comments (1) »

Man fix dryer, ugh

13-Feb-10

When something breaks at my house, everyone turns to look at me.

Not to accuse me of breaking it, although often enough … but in expectation that I’ll fix it.  Computer to clothes dryer, apparently, I have the tools and skills.

Of course, I really don’t.  What I have in the family is the most experience in diving in to difficult waters and finding my back out again.  When I do this for the family, I wonder if I’m just enabling them to not learn that skill?

Of course, my wife turns a huge load of brush and straw in to a garden bed in an afternoon, when I’d barely scratch out a square foot of clear space.  She turns daunting in to done while I’m still shading my eyes in fear.  Between us, we’re a good fit for getting most things done, mostly well, most of the time.

Of course, the girls are just kids.  At 12, I find Malakai to actually have a great attitude about diving in to things.  I think this is one of those ages-and-stages things, they are no worse and maybe better than I was at that age.  A few months ago, when Mal’s music player ran through the washing machine, she and I took it apart to dry.  A couple of days later, she put the whole thing back together again when I was out.  It worked, except the battery was dead.  Clearly, the learning to swim in difficult waters is sinking in to her, too.  Also, the joy of a job well done.

It’s just funny-but-not-ha-ha that I get the role that includes belly crawling under the house, sticking my hand in to my elbow to unclog things, and really just about anything that is gross.  I’m also the carpenter, remolder/renovator, bicycle and car mechanic, and head chef/kitchen manager.

My friend Rahul once said to me long ago, “Why would you cook?”  Where he lives, I reckon, food is easier and cheaper from a restaurant or a food stand.  I know that I love the act of cooking, the transforming and delighted mouths, and I love even more when we grow something from scratch that feeds family and friends.  At last weekend’s pie party, we served plum, apple, apricot, and rhubarb pies where the fruit all came from our garden.  It was pretty amazing to realize how much of the ingredients were from our own hands, from the sun and soil in our garden.

In the end, I guess I choose to do-it-myself because there is a feeling that it is the right way to live.  If I didn’t listen to these feelings and intuitions, I don’t know where I’d be now.

http://mether.wordpress.com/

Filed in Community, Fedora, Responsibility, Urban Farm | Tagged , | Comments (3) »

Licensing my blog content as CC BY SA 3.0 Unported

05-Feb-10

I am licensing all of my blog content past, present, and ongoing under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (CC BY SA) free content license.  This includes my content published by the excellent WordPress engine at iquaid.org, and my content at iquaid.livejournal.com (deprecated).

This has been on my mind for a while, and in a discussion with Mel after she did the same thing, I realized it was time to fish or cut bait.

The bottom line is, I don’t know what value my content can bring beyond what it’s done for me already, and I’ll never know unless I assign the rights so that others can reuse or build on my work.  I am specifically not using the no-commercial use (NC) variant of the CC license; most of my reasoning is inline with this article from freedomdefined.org.

If there any bad actors who would use the free content license in away against my interests or preferences, I have to figure that i) they would do it anyway and regardless of my licensing, and ii) who am I so paranoid of?

Seriously, when you have a choice to spread peace, love, and understanding or fear, hatred, and doubt … choose love.

Filed in Fedora, Free Culture, Writing | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) »

Config tweaks on TheOpenSourceWay.org

05-Feb-10

Thanks to folks for finding and pointing out the configuration problems on TheOpenSourceWay.org.  I’ve still got a BIND configuration to work out, I’ll be haunting #rhel this weekend looking for help. 🙂

To get permissions to edit the wiki, I have put a human in the way (currently just me).  I’m working on getting up content on the user creation pages that explains how to request access.  I don’t like adding this barrier in an otherwise self-service process, but … default wiki configurations invite spambots, and we don’t have the resources to watch the wiki that way.  For the time being, we’ll have humans create accounts for other humans.

Maybe I can tweak the wiki permission structure so any normal user can create other user accounts?  That plus a detailed how-to page could go a way toward lowering the barrier a bit.  My goal isn’t to approve/disapprove people; anyone who asks and agrees to license under the CC BY SA 3.0 is welcome to participate.

It’s an ongoing situation, and that’s the difficult part of release early, release often.  If I waited until all these things were perfect before releasing, it would take even more months.  As it is, the content itself hasn’t been updated since September 2009.  That was because we got it to the point of being good enough to start working on externally, and it has taken the interim time to arrange and create the upstream hosting.  It’s rough around the edges, but improving every day, in part thanks to all of you finding and reporting problems. 🙂

The next goal is to move beyond the “file bugs and help test things” stage as quickly as possible.

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Cranking up to SCALE 8x

02-Feb-10

This is going to be one wickedly fantastic Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 8x.

Our Fedora presence is growing, both in depth of roots in the area and the scope of what we are trying to do.  A local Fedora Ambassador is organizing the Fedora Project expo presence.  There are a few stalwart Fedora community members flying in from afar, and Larry, the kids, and I are making the full pilgrimage via wifi-and-XO-laptop-sporting minivan.

In addition to contributing to the Fedora effort, I’m going to be representing Red Hat in talking about “Being a catalyst in communities – the scientific facts about the open source way“.  I’m really excited because the SCALE organizers have asked me to present that as the Saturday morning keynote.  Yeah, you heard that right – first keynote for little ol’ me.  Instead of flying in a rock star from remote, a local boy is going to represent.

Where last SCALE 7x was the first time we ran the revamped Fedora Activity Day (FAD) program, the FAD model has been richly tested and proven over the last year.  A FAD is a focused work effort by Fedora contributors, usually around one or two topics.  This year we are going to run our second SCALE-based FAD on Friday.  We’re still looking for a topic, so if you are thinking of coming there is still time to influence the planning and preparation.

On the Friday before the expo weekend are a host of other SCALE mini-events, including the Women in Open Source (WiOS) summit.  Our daughters, who did a lot of hard work as self-described Fedora Mascots last year, are presenting “Ultimate Randomness – Girl voices in open source” at WiOS at 10 am.  They are going to talk about how they use and contribute to open source, then take questions from/have a discussion with the audience.

I also see other talks from the ecosystem around Fedora and Red Hat, including Richard Fontana on “Improving the Open Source Legal System”.

See you there, especially Saturday morning right after registration. 🙂

The four Fedora Mascots and jds2001.

Fedora Mascots make the booth look even cooler.

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Community handbook – The Open Source Way

02-Feb-10

Introducing a community book written by a community.

http://www.TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki (read and participate)

http://www.TheOpenSourceWay.org/book (HTML, HTML single page, PDF)

This is a handbook for creating and nurturing communities of contributors.  It was originally thought of as a cookbook to provide recipes for enacting community the open source way.  It is released under the Creative Commons BY SA 3.0 Unported free/libre/open content license.

We originally wrote this handbook for internal-to-Red Hat use.  Our community team tells many of the same stories and makes the same points to different audiences, and we thought a handbook or cookbook would be a handy way to practice our own methods.

No surprise, it was immediately clear to us that this type of content is better if it draws from and benefits a wider community.  In this case, the community of practice of people interested in contributor communities.  That community writes this kind of documentation for itself.

As a source for repeatable and successful recipes, the book follows a simple format:

  • First is a principle, explained in a paragraph.
  • Second are implementation details, in one or two paragraphs.
  • Third is an example demonstrating the principle in an implementation, in or two paragraphs.

If you want to use the book, you can start referring to the wiki pages immediately.

It has a nice PDF version, which currently prints to 30 pages (double-sided.)  This one is Red Hat branded, but you can take the DocBook XML sources and build it using whatever look you want.

It is also incomplete, specifically in the area of examples.  I don’t want this to be full of only technology examples.  That’s one place you can come in.  Give up some examples of the principles in action, from the real world, and ideally in realms outside of technology.

But it’s more than time to have this content out in the open.  Release early, release often.

After all, the open source way can be practiced in many more parts of life than just technology.

One final note.  What we refer to as the open source way is a rebranding of what are really techniques utilized in creating freed software a.k.a. free/libre software.  The brand of open source has a lot of recognition and traction with people entirely new to the discussion, looking how to apply these concepts in their communities.  When practiced properly, open source software is good enough as free software.  That’s how we do it in the Fedora Project.  As an effort to spread information about how to use free and open community techniques, we are relying upon the current strong Open Source brand in helping to amplify the message.

One section I hope to add to The Open Source Way soon is a version of the article by Richard Fontana, “The free software way“, published on opensource.com.  My goal is to provide a new, canonical location that explains the right way for free and open to interact.

(Update – first both links to HTML book fixed.)

http://theopensourceway.org/book
Filed in Community, Documentation, Fedora, FLOSS, Free Culture, Open Source | Tagged , | Comments (7) »

Understanding opensource.com

28-Jan-10

This week saw opensource.com kicked out of the nest and told to fly.  I’ve been watching some of the discussion around it and have some comments about a bit of confusion some folks are having.   Please pass this along.

What I see here is a new type of discussion …

… one where our experiences in free/libre and open source software technology and collaboration informs the greater topics …

… one where the greater topics are how to apply the principles of collaboration and community (the open source way) to wider and important issues – education, government, health care, and so forth …

… one where the greater community of readers can participate and help direct the topics …

… one that builds on the brand “Open Source” that already has meaning outside of technology circles, to spread a valuable methodology (the way) to new audiences/communities.

But not …

… not one where a few pundits pontificate while other voices are lost in the comments …

… and not one where a controlling organization is hiding behind faux authenticity.

The degree to which we continue to do that is the amount of attention and help we get from all the other real people out there. The more we enable each other to spread these principles, this open source way, the better free content we all make for each other. Easier our jobs become. More enjoyment we get out of life. Nirvana.

I have high hopes, clearly.

Full disclosure: I am a long-time employee of Red Hat, which is  a major force behind opensource.com and the ones who originated the plan.  I did not work on the design and deployment teams, but I did participate in an internal pilot to help iterate on the site before it launched.  As a proponent of the open source way, I’ll continue to support the site partially by leaning on everyone to improve, iterate, and improve.

Filed in Community, Fedora, FLOSS, Free Culture, Open Source, Red Hat | | Comments (4) »

Contributor CV and recommendations

28-Jan-10

Listening to a call about the cool stuff our Community Architecture team is doing with education (such as POSSE and opensource.com/education), I had an idea.  Is it a simple idea?  Yes.  An elegant idea?  So far.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Contributor_CVs

It’s an opt-in system to track an individual’s contributions and recommendations from others within the Fedora Project community.  (Naturally, FLOSS for code and content, use it for your own project, etc.)

For recommendations, we can get started today with a simple process.  You leave a comment in a user’s talk page on the wiki, using the ~~~~ signature format plus the page’s history to verify the recommender.

These recommendations can later be pulled in to a semiautomagic system, which would also provide a nicer interface for making a quality recommendation than a wiki page.  (Or not, if the wiki system proves itself.)

That system can pull in all sorts of data of a contributor across the Fedora Project world.  I imagine it as a module of the Fedora account system (FAS).  Count of wiki edits, numbers of contributions to mailing list discussions, code and content touched in SCMs, count of blog posts on planet with tag cloud, IRC help statistics (somehow) … any ways we can pull in and massage data to give a meaningful result.

Run that in to a cool code/tag/collaboration swarm animation alongside a set of personal recommendations from other project members.  This page is something that can help you get in to school programs, get new jobs or promotions, and who knows what other ways that might have meaning in your life.

All of this to add value to contributors, giving them more reason to enjoy what they do around these parts.  It’s also cool to show your non-project friends and family how and why you spend the time you spend on your FLOSS and community pursuits.

Of course, the data is all exportable; you aren’t trapped carrying this CV at a fedoraproject.org domain, nor are you required to use the project’s service.  There are a ton of privacy concerns involved, solving those has to be a first priority.  People will get competitive or try to game the system, to varying degrees. *shrug*

Um, so … anyone want to help build this?

Filed in Art of Living, Community, Education, Fedora, FLOSS, Free Culture, Online life | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off