“When a Microsoft veteran turns into a Linux enthusiast."
"It taught me more about open source software and Linux than I ever knew before. It was riveting."
“A case that free software can help pave the way for a 21st century renaissance."
-- John Markoff, New York Times
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Obama has been prez for 19 months and he passed his financial package within weeks of taking office and it was not even phased in like Reagan’s tax cuts were. This is the Obama economy.
Obama has no new policies to improve the unemployment rate. He only sells his current agenda (like Cap and Trade of CO2) as being helpful towards “Green jobs”.
Obama is out there claiming his stimulus bill is working, and so is implicitly rejecting further ideas to get the economy going. If what you’ve done is a success, why improve? Obama changing would require admitting his 860B stimulus failed in its stated intentions of keeping the unemployment below 8%.
So he will knowingly let America continue to suffer rather than confront his failings. There are many things he could do to get the economy going again. But they are everything he was taught is a bad idea, like tax cuts. (Here is a video by Kennedy on why he proposed tax cuts to stimulate the economy.) And spending cuts don’t make sense if your goal is “social justice”.
He’s also a moral relativist. Obama said the surge wouldn’t work and then he said it didn’t work. He said all that because it was a way to increase his popularity with the liberal Democrat base so he could get himself nominated. Later he said: “of course putting in more troops would have helped and I said so at the time.”
To a moral relativist, words only mean what he wants them to mean at that time. Moral relativism is an intellectual pillar of modern liberalism.
The only way Obama’s presidency can be saved is if the Republicans take control of Congress. The problem is that Obama would instinctively fight them — he has been a fighter his whole political life.
This is some article about how Beijing is spending $740 on green energy.
This is a big headfake, or stupid on China’s fault. E=mc^2 says that energy is basically infinite. So why shouldn’t it cost almost nothing by now? We need cheap energy to have a manufacturing sector. We can’t be a country full of lawyers an…d MBAs.
We’ve been talking about battery-powered cars for 100 years. The problem has always been the batteries. Fuel is a dense form of energy. We can do biofuels, not this ethanol boondoggle, or maybe these expensive, toxic, exotic batters.
Windmills is another stupid idea. It would take windmills over the entirety of the UK to provide for all of its electricity. The wind power is up high. If we are going to do wind, we should be doing kites. When the government gets involved, it screws it all up.
All these programs do is distract the free markets and make them invest in the wrong technologies. The government is terrible about choosing winners. That is why R&D tax credits are a good idea.
As for electric, there is no point building bad batteries today and hoping that teaches you how to build better ones. No, the problem is the chemistry and that should be solved first. The Chevy Volt will not succeed as it is using conventional batteries, not anything next gen. The government is just investing tons of money in the current crappy stuff.
Boondoggles.
Bedlam coffee open mic night: I’m bringing some dnb http://bit.ly/aCHkpA
Screwed up the text in the last version…
Useful discussion about dangers of hubris. Also points out connections between Obama and JFK.
Boehner was on the defensive for his nuking an ant statement.
He should have said something like this:
I’m sorry for mispeaking. My teleprompter was broken that day, and so I was speaking with my mind and heart as my guide. And I ended up using a metaphor that only half-conveyed the idea I was trying express. Which is that this reform is a spreader bar on our financial sector when our economy is already bound and shackled and gagged. As esteemed Richard Posner has written,
“The most sensible legislative response to the financial collapse of September 2008 would have been to do nothing until the causes of the collapse were fully understood.
There is no urgency about legislating financial regulatory reform. The existing regulatory agencies have virtually total authority over the financial industry. And because they were asleep at the switch when disaster struck, they are now hyper- alert to prevent a repetition of it. Indeed, bank examiners have become so fearful of condoning risky practices that they are making it difficult for banks to lend to small businesses and consumers and thus are retarding the economic recovery.”
So I didn’t mean to suggest that the ongoing financial crises he is presiding over are small. Far from it. He never does talk to me, but if he had called, I would have been happy to explain in any amount of detail my concerns.
So instead, he loaded onto his teleprompter a political attack that is based on a mischaracterization of my position. I just want to know at one point Obama realized this mistake. Or whether he knew it was a mistake when he said it.
Of course, this demonstrates that Obama isn’t the post-partisan unifier he claimed to be in his campaign commercials. Who is the real Obama? The one who claims to believe in the free market, or the one who pretends his stimulus bill is a success?
Now for something completely different, here is a progressive breaks mix I made.
I post much more frequently to Twitter or Facebook. I recommend we meet up there!
There are 12 Cuban programmers each translating a chunk of my book into Spanish. Here is my latest mail to them:
Hi;
An idea for an interesting project occurred to me, and you are the perfect candidate country to build it!
I have come to understand that rolling releases are what Linux should become. I have installed Ubuntu on friends computers, and years later, they are running the exact same software. Free software improves every day, and it is a shame that people are not always running the latest.
Therefore, you should put rolling-releases software on every desktop machine in Cuba. You should put something on that automatically upgrades to the latest version without any intervention by a local user.
Now, this can create a problem. If you put out a fix and every machine crashes and won’t boot, you are screwed.
Before I get to the solution, there are many ways to mitigate this problem. For example, you can mirror Debian-Testing, but create a different schedule for how the software deploys. Some machines will grab the latest builds. Some machines will grab Debian Testing + another 20 days. If you can categorize machines, and setup different dates for how long things sit in -Testing, you can catch problems early.
There is no software that does this yet and I you guys should build it. It allows people to connect up to Debian-Testing, but not be on the front lines. I’m not sure how to implement it. But it is a big enough project that it would require a bunch of you.
You also need to work on what to do when things go bad. For example, if a machine crashes, it should reboot into a special state to see if there are any new packages. It could be that a fix is waiting for it.
Furthermore, if the machine is still hosed, then you could have it decide to do a reinstall. You should setup every machine to have a separate user and home partition. This gives you the possibility to wipe machines.
Every machine that is running this Linux is connected to a very powerful force. Once it is installed, it can all be run remotely. Year after year, the software in every school and such will automatically get better. And hey, even if it breaks, well that’s just a reason to hire some Debian experts in every school.
And it would be useful to many other people. It could be one of the biggest reasons to move people back to Debian. In fact, you could end up unifying a lot of the other forks by Debian implements a better Debian-Testing. The early people who joined Ubuntu came from Debian and used it mostly because it shipped more frequently.
So you need to figure out how to implement it, and how to handle bad situations. The key is to have multiple types of correction mechanisms. One thing you can do is look at past Debian-Testing breaks and see if your solution handles them.
What do you think?
-Keith
v1.06
I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the inefficiencies of the separate Ubuntu and Debian organization. I’ve also talked to enough Debian developers to be convinced that they generally agree with me. I feel quite confident that building “The Universal OS” is doable in the Debian team. They might need better software and more people, but those things are also doable.
In fact, there is an argument that Ubuntu would be farther along in certain ways if it had done its work within Debian. Ubuntu’s marketshare was doubling every 8 months, but it has slowed a lot down now as it has grown from 8 million to 12 million in 3 years. It is harder to grow when you are big than when you are small, but I think part of the problem is that the new users aren’t turning into developers who can attack the bug and feature list that are preventing even more users from using Linux. Linux has a lot of work ahead of it to get to its Wikipedia-scale potential, and grooming new developers is key to this process.
Ubuntu wasn’t created with the primary focus of adding developers. Ubuntu’s success growing the user base is critically important, and because users brings developers, but Ubuntu didn’t have the mentors that turn out quality and committed new contributors. I’m not saying the Debian process couldn’t get much faster, only that the team is large and quality, and possibly a little bitter that lots of new people aren’t showing up to help them out. Debian has the people and the technology waiting but no great enthusiasm in the developer community.
This sort of thinking naturally causes me to end up looking backwards and not looking forwards. It is unfair that the pioneers, and Mark Shuttleworth is one of them with Ubuntu, always get arrows in their back. I have written a book and gotten nice and nasty emails and know that it is tough to put yourself out there.
That is all true. But I feel that pointing out the general inefficiencies of two separate teams is enough for an outsider like me. There are many ways to better maximize the effectiveness of organizations. As an outsider, I’m not even really sure what they are when it comes to Debian and Ubuntu. I’ve now decided that I’ve written everything that I can say though I update my book section periodically; while it isn’t a perfect case because I ignore certain aspects in the interest of brevity, it generally makes the points.
I will end on a forward-looking idea. If someone sees a problem, it is incumbent upon the person to make at least one proposal for how to fix a problem. My general proposal was: “find ways to work more efficiently” but that is not actionable. It seems that the structural deficiencies are not being addressed in an official way. Since Ubuntu was created, I can point to no policy change made with regards to its relationship to Debian that demonstrates a recognition of the potential efficiency problem.
So I’ve come up with a specific proposal: cancel MOTU and have all of those people join Debian. This is not the only useful proposal I can come up with, but I believe it is specific, the most potential for improving the situation, and which demonstrates Ubuntu understands the importance of Debian. (Some have mentioned the idea that all code changes should be done in “Debian first”. That is actually a better policy.)
Where does this end? Who knows? Let’s take one step, and then see if it greatly improves the situation. Having one of the Ubuntu conferences meet simultaneously with a Debian conference is another good thing because it gets all the experts together to talk. Simply a message that the mass of new developers should go join Debian and that the underlying codebase as Ubuntu should stay focused on strategic scenarios would do a lot. It is to Ubuntu’s benefit to keep the diff with Debian as small as possible. If Ubuntu focuses on growing the user base, and Debian focuses on growing the developer base, that makes an excellent split.
The worker bees of Debian are the developers, and so getting more of them would be helpful to it tackling all the bugs that the new users are finding. A rising tide should float all boats and Debian could easily be adding at least 100 new developers a year given the tremendous growth in Linux usage. And as all work flows down automatically from Debian, Ubuntu loses nothing. In fact, it will help Ubuntu to have those changes go through the Debian process. This is not my idea: at the Debconf in 2007, a Debian Developer explained that his biggest concern was MOTU.
Here is the list of packages in Ubuntu but not Debian. Here is the list of packages with newer version in Ubuntu. I presume this proposal would change the situation so that these lists were very small. Though there should be other benefits, this provides a way to measure the success of this proposal. Can anyone make the case that this would be bad for Ubuntu to cancel MOTU? Can anyone think of a better small but specific proposal?
My goal in these writings is not to create conflict. It is to remind others that the current situation is very inefficient, and Ubuntu is also suffering because of the separation. The buglist is just the most noticeable manifestation. And this proposal would cause a very small disruption to the existing community and yet should improve the situation. You can’t fix a problem until you admit it exists and social structures are whatever we make them to be. MOTU need not exist if we decide that it doesn’t make sense. Having separate repositories is not that big a deal, but by pushing most work to Debian first simplifies things.
We can look for other big and low-hanging fruit but a number of inefficiencies do not matter. For example, it is better if someone does a code change twice than one person do it in Ubuntu and then some months later another person do it in Debian. This is why this MOTU change could be the biggest low-hanging fruit now.
Here is a tutorial (not the easiest thing to read) of her views.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/65720
Does anything in it stand out as possibly scary?
- Focusing on government motives. She argues that campaign finance laws as bad because she divines that their motives were bad. They were just trying to stem the “excess” flow of money into politics! The problem was the unintended consequences. But as long as she thinks she finds people with good motives, even total idiots, what they are doing is fine.
- Inciting others to commit harm is not allowed, but legislation banning flag-burning is legal because she is sure it will never incite others to commit harm.
- If there is an overabundance of an idea, “action disfavoring that idea [would] un-skew public discourse.” As there are too many right wingers on Talk Radio, so we should “un-skew” the number of them.
- Restrictions should focus on whether the person’s ideas are causing “public harm”. Harm is surely very narrowly defined.
- Government should treat all people creating public harm equally. If we are going to round up one-right winger, we should be fair and round up them all.
Using this sample of her writings, are you convinced yet that she is worthy of being on the Supreme Court?
There have been reports on the Linux newswires recently of dissatisfied Ubuntu users leaving for one reason or another. I’m not going to jump on that bandwagon here, but instead just point out that in any community, especially an immature one, this is bound to happen. My message is to those who are leaving — you should put Debian at the top of your list of distros to try.
I have nothing against Gentoo or Arch or any of the other distros. In fact, part of me is happy to have a wide variety of distros for the experiments and innovation that they create. Free software is about choice. But the other part of me understands that the power of the free software community is maximized when cooperation is maximized, and that it takes big teams to defeat the remaining proprietary software companies.
American social philosopher Eric Hoffer, who studied political movements, wrote: “In order to succeed, a mass movement must develop at the earliest moment a compact corporate organization and a capacity to integrate all comers.” The vast scope of Wikipedia demonstrates what large teams can (quickly) do. In joining a big team, you can get more help, and any work that you contribute can be used by more people. It also creates the Metcalfe’s law virtuous cycle that more users bring more users. Every problem Debian has can be solved with more resources. That is one of the lessons of Ubuntu.
Debian should be the natural next distribution for any unsatisfied Ubuntu users, but it isn’t for various reasons. Part of this is because people assume that if Ubuntu isn’t good for them, then Debian can’t be either, because Debian is generally considered a “worse” version of Ubuntu. Secondly, because Debian has been somewhat stagnant and mostly ignored since Ubuntu’s creation it doesn’t seem like an exciting place to work anymore.
In my book I wrote that Debian has been terminally damaged by the split. You could even say that Ubuntu is screwing Debian twice: once by stealing people away from what should be their natural home, and again by making them dis-satisfied and causing them to leave this combined community. Mark Shuttleworth could hardly have conceived of a better way to kill Debian than what he came up with. I don’t believe he yet understands that posting patches is not an appropriate way to “give back” to Debian. In our email discussions he insists that Ubuntu is not a fork because all patches are posted to a website. By that standard nothing is a fork. As I wrote in an open letter to Mark:
The main concern I have about the current situation is this: when an Ubuntu person does some coding work and posts the diff to a website, it is now a workitem for someone else in Debian to dig into and understand. Of course, having that fix is helpful, but the time to do something is mostly the time to learn how to do it.
If you pick up a violin, it will be clumsy to you unless you know how to play one. It is the same with a patch if you haven’t seen it before. So therefore, whenever someone learns something, they should make sure that they do their work in both Debian and Ubuntu to save someone else time.
Neither you nor anyone else has ever acknowledged this problem or attempted to explain how this won’t happen all the time in the current situation.
I believe if this point was understood, Ubuntu as we think of it now would not have been created. Even if Debian does not have a fatal prognosis, it is quite on life support now. But I am starting to understand that this can change because a movement is filled with sentient beings. And that even the slough of those leaving Ubuntu is enough to stimulate significant new life and energy into Debian so it can get back up on its feet again — if they realize that they should go to Debian next. Work done in Debian also helps Ubuntu, and all of the other distributions that derive from Debian, so work is even more leveraged than contributing to Ubuntu.
Another benefit is that the larger the Debian team, the more this encourages Ubuntu to work more closely with Debian. For example, if the yearly Debian conference (the next one is August 1-7 in New York City) has 1,000 people attending, then it would be more natural for Ubuntu to hold one of its twice-yearly summits at the same time because there would be more chances for discussions and cross-group collaboration.
I am personally convinced that if investments done by Ubuntu had been done directly in Debian, things would be much farther along! But no matter any of that, I feel that all Ubuntu users, even the happy ones, who ever decide to contribute back should just directly join the Debian team. If Ubuntu gets all the users and Debian gets all the developers, that is an excellent compromise. Ubuntu might not realize it, but it is best for everyone if all work is done in Debian first. There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest is that it is maximally efficient and guarantees that a Debian person will never have to re-do the work done by Ubuntu. Another is that Debian’s more experienced team will ensure that the work done is to Debian’s high standards. Another is that more people in Debian will make the organization happier and healthier. If Debian got 100 new devs a year from Ubuntu, that would greatly decrease the tension between the two orgs.
What distro users use is not one-millionth the importance of what one contributors choose. For those who want to run the latest code, there is Debian-Testing. That should even be more reliable than the unreleased versions of Ubuntu because code sits in -Unstable for some time before deploying to -Testing.
Of course those employed by Canonical will not do their work in Debian first, but everyone else can. And as all contributions from Debian automatically flow down to Ubuntu, there is zero reason for anyone to complain. Teams who do their work directly in Debian can use Launchpad or the Debian tools as this issue is not so important. What is important is that Debian get some new faces, stay the center of gravity, and retain all the institutional knowledge required to build “The Universal OS”. Eventually we need to get to a point where organizations like Dell and Amazon consider it important to support Debian, but that is still a ways out. (Note: the smaller distros like Damn Small Linux and Mint are not a problem because they are small teams focused on strategic scenarios like size and out of box ease of use. They are not a threat to Debian’s relevance.)
Update: I’ll end with an interesting chart that I just found from a thesis.
Update 2: Roy Schestowitz wonders why I’m trying to stir up trouble. This is a comically ironic statement coming from him. My interest is to document ways to maximize the efficiency of the community so we can resolve Ubuntu’s Bug #1. An army of millions is losing to an army of thousands! Furthermore, I’m not the only person who makes this point. He is paranoid because I used to work at Microsoft. Also, he doesn’t WP:AGF.
Update 3: Here is the list of packages in Ubuntu but not Debian. Here is the list of packages with newer version in Ubuntu. If the people in MOTU and such groups all joined Debian, these lists would be a lot smaller or basically empty.
Here we are 5+ years in, and these basic problems still exist.
The problem is Mark doesn’t see the point of doing work in Debian, because if he did, then why should he have created Ubuntu? Mark thinks contributing to Debian makes as much sense as contributing to Red Hat: nice in some ideal world, but not worth investing in. Do you think he talked to Dell or the Amazon cloud folks about supporting Ubuntu and Debian?
Either:
Work doesn’t go into Debian, which is bad for Debian,
Or work is done in Debian in which case Ubuntu has little reason to exist.
Update: It looks like the Ubuntu people are going to put their stuff into Debian. That is good to hear. So we’re going from the first scenario to the second — which is an improvement.
Hello,
Ubuntu is developing more and more software of its own and often Debian
reintegrates the software but later on. I wonder why you are not
integrating new software immediately in Debian:
- you would benefit from the feedback of the debian community sooner
and avoid some packaging churn later on [1]
- even when you have constraint of integration with other software in
debian and that you’re blocked, you can have a ubuntu-specific packaging
thanks to the dpkg-vendor framework and still share the source package
between both distributions
- you would have some explicit responsibility in maintaining the software
that you create
[1] I’m referring to http://bugs.debian.org/571929 for desktopcouch, the
initial packaging is sub-optimal and the upstream developers (all
@canonical.com) have been asked for their feedback and insight on the
reasons of some dependencies but they have never responded… this
sucks hard. It would be nice if this small fingerpointing would lead
to someone reacting…
Cheers,
–
Raphaël Hertzog
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