Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Please use open standards

Today marks the release of Kubuntu 7.10, and almost the beginning of a new era with KDE 4.0 running as beta. If that doesn't mean anything to you, then I think you need to be brought up to speed with what open source is and how you fit into the picture. Because you do.

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend a week with James and Evan of Graffiti Research Lab. These two, along with Cory Archangel are the superstars of the open source art movement. However, unlike Cory, they have bridged over into the internet fame community because the videos of their work have reached internet meme status. But the reason for their fame is because of the simplicity of their work, the way it adds to the community and due to availibility of the information to replicate and expand on their work. This is a key element to their process: in order to make good work, they make work that can be hacked by others and modified for specific interests.

America's economy needs capitalistic exchanges to function. However, as a society, we have cultivated a culture of downloading and consumption which does nothing except feed off other societies like a parasite. Open source standards and creative common licenses allow us to change this parasitic trend and give more than we take. Brasil's minister of culture has been working with communities throughout the country to set up internet cultures focused on content creation, long before habits of "download culture" begin.^[1] The minister of culture wishes to create hotspots with resources to create information and upload information before they learn to download; it isn't about being a consumer but being a provider first. He recently said that the biggest weapon Brasil has, as the underdog, to the future is to make something free/open source. In America, we have a natural tendency toward consumption: that is what makes a capitalistic economy healthy. However, there are alternative models.

What does it mean to take without giving: the parasitic nature of Americans

Pirated software and media is rampant across the world. When my college level design class was asked how many people use open source software, only two people raised their hands. However, when asked who currently was using pirated software (especially versions of Adobe suite programs), the entire class raised their hands.

Last week, the RIAA won their first major case against a woman who puportedly was sharing 24 music files over a lame duck peer to peer file sharing software called Kazaa. When asked what was considered stealing, Sony's head lawyer stated that even ripping your own CD to your personal computer is considered a breach of license agreement and therefore, violation of the law.^[2] This case sets a precedent that the content is no longer what you purchase, but the licensed format/medium of the content is what was purchased.

Yet Americans, and people all around the world, continue to fight these laws in a desire to get something for nothing. For some reason, we have romanticized this idea deep into our culture's memes. We want to know that we can get true free speech without the cost that comes with it, that there is something for free which we can get without a cost. Free does not exist, but is apart of the mythos created from a culture that wishes to consume without producing. We are theives because we steal information we use open and free resources but we do nothing in return to propagate open source material. We, the elite, are parasites because we don't use the information at our fingers to model for free information.

Why is open source important for the world? Why is it important to identify it as being separate from economy?

There are ways to use and support open source software without having to digress from a purchase economy. Everyday we use tools which are free, from companies which have learned to make money off free, without recognizing it or, more importantly, contributing to open source. Google.com, for example, is the business world's poster child for producing free goods while making a large profit from free. Mozilla has a software suite which is truly open source and offers the consumer the capability to contribute to their creative commons license. I believe the meme applied to true open source foundations, such as linux and Mozilla, are "socially responsible practices." These are businesses and communities which provide content and the license availability for the consumer to produce and share beyond what the product is.

Since chatting with James and Evan of GRL, I have thought about what it means to volunteer for something without any prerequisite of "social duties." Take a moment and think about the last time you vounteered in a responsible social manner. Most of the people reading this blog probably did so with good intent, without fulfilling any requirement from an outside group. However, many volunteers are "scab" activists, pulled from outside by organizations such as justice systems, school or church systems which fill the volunteer positions because they aim to instill a sense of community in their partitioners. This forced vounteerism does not build community, but exposes the participant to a false sense of production.

The chumby is a device I am very enthusiastic about, because of the company's directive to produce a true open source device, available for hacking and modification from the end user but also enforcing a social network model which requires the user to create content and share it with the larger community in order to use it for themselves. The device is simply an always-on web monitor which runs Flash Lite 3. But open source standards are of no use without contributing to them. In my Art As System class, we have been teaching the students to evaluate why objects/systems are assembled when they are built. Most were made for machine logic by automated robot production with the added benefit of restricting the end-user's access to the device. In order to curb cost efficiency and control medium license, devices are made to prevent someone from opening it and changing how it works. The question on my mind is will the chumby pull off open source hacking because it asks to be taken apart and modified?

An open letter to corporate/private authors

I want to use kubuntu linux. The OS is the perfect open source operating system which can be accessed by everyone. I have run linux on our home desktop in the past and been very pleased at the ease of functionability of Kubuntu. Any functionality you wish has already been coded into the software suite available, except one: video games. I like to play good video games, so I don't use linux because of my video games. There are ways to port windows software onto a linux kernal OS, but these are outside my basic experience and therefore not possible to the common user of linux. I had hoped that with the development of Qt4 in KDE 4 that this kind of cross platform software port would become possible for the common man, but I was led astray.^[3]

While discussing this option for linux with a friend, he noted that what needs to happen isn't to create content for other OS and then port to linux, thus continuing the pirating/download trend, but creating content for open source standards which rivals that of the mainstream operating systems. Were EA games to create their content for linux, the dynamics of open source would change from being the background noise to the flood of downloads and parasitic clicks, to the opening of the barriers blocking the common man from creating his own content.

In the meantime, there is no excuse not to port open source software to your own operating system. There are many outlets to discover open source software suites, such as Open Office and Miro media center. These tools will allow you to create content of your own, using open source standards, which you can then upload and be a socially responsible user in our global culture. By using linux or other open source software, the obligation is different than the agreement made with the corporate model standards: to use something for free, you need to participate in the improvement of that thing.