I just wrote this to a friend in facebook and thought I’d post it here. He wanted to know what I didn’t like most about the healthcare bill:

It is so hard to say what I don’t like most because it is a big bill but also because I am upset about the process. This bill was rammed through the Congress. The only bipartisanship was with the opposition. A Republican in the liberal state of Mass won Ted Kennedy’s seat and yet still they kept pushing this through in spite of this and other the messages from the electorate. This bill has been a part of the debate for a year, and yet it has been firmly rejected by the American people.

It was sold on a pile of lies.

Barack Obama said as a Senator that the 60-vote requirement is the biggest reason for having the two separate legislative bodies. The Senate is where legislation like a hot tea, goes to cool down. It was always understand that bad government laws can very easily make any situation worse. Yet as prez, he doesn’t care the Senate anymore and has endorsed the 51-vote reconciliation process. “Nobody cares about the process”, he tell us. “people without insurance are dying every day.” As if he’s going to stop death. He’s supposed to be a constitutional law processor.

We are told this bill will decrease the deficit — as if a program like this can ever do that. This was negotiated between special interests in secret, as if they have all the answers. As the process went on, the legislation got worse. If a worker showed up to your house, and every day he worked he made it worse, you’d surely fire him.

We are told we can keep our doctor and insurance, but the bill says that insurance now needs to be approved by DC. My catastrophic insurance will be outlawed — they want everyone on full-service plans. This bill also doesn’t fix the tax equalization issue that your employer gets a tax deduction for healthcare, but you don’t. This has caused people to tie healthcare to employment, which is very bad.

So it is as much what is not in the bill as what is in it.

But anyway, as to what it contains. The US already has programs to help the poor and the elderly. This bill doesn’t even attempt to shore them up or reform or improve them. It actually makes those programs in even more fiscal trouble. Every American is putting money into these programs. We can talk about giving people things, but if the money isn’t there, it is just a promise. These entitlements always end up costing more than the estimates. By now they should know better!

The biggest issue is that it doesn’t push towards healthcare as more of a free market. Why can everyone afford cellphones today? Not because the government stepped in. The problem with healthcare is the “third-party payee” system. If you want going to the doctor to be like visting Apple, removing all the regulations. That, plus tort reform, buying insurance across state lines, and a few other things would totally change things.

Price and cost controls and regulations stifle progress in the free market. That is the old economic thinking in that they don’t consider the unintended consequences of their stuff. If the US government got into the software business as a way to alleviate the problem with Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, would you think that was a good remedy?

It also took a very long time to make this bill happen because it was so terrible that many Democrats didn’t like it and so they had weeks of back room deals. Obama should have scrapped the bill in January. We could have passed something smaller and better by now. They are arrogant.

The good news is that Obama is the best community organizer the Republicans have ever had. They now know what they stand for — basically the opposite of what Obama is doing. Even McCain understands how tax cuts can decrease unemployment. Obama believes the ends justify the means, and is clueless. This is a terrible combination. He was educated by white liberals in Columbia and Harvard so his skin color plays zero part in my analysis. Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes were white people, but so were Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan. I believe that half of America would be a better president — polls show that a majority would not have pushed through this healthcare bill.

William Buckley wrote this in 1963: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty.” If the Republican party had nominated a constitutional law professor, and a resume that would fit on the back of his driver’s license, he would have gotten hammered.

This is a funny video about the h/c law.

Behind the scenes, the people who created this new law have in mind the idea that in the long-term the best way to save money on healthcare is to push the “scarce” resources towards the young people. It is like them looking at the high price of cellphones 20 years ago and deciding that the best thing the government should do is to step in and redistribute them to the “productive” people.

And in their anger, they lash out at their critics. Sarah Palin gets criticized for months for bringing up death panels, when we all know that every healthcare system has limits today, and this legislation has it.

Every alleged misbehavior by someone angry at DC today gets amplified in the media. Congressmen who wanted to vote “no” on healthcare reform get harassed, but the only stories we ever hear about are of the angry electorate calling up those who voted “yes”. This follows their “tea-partiers are evil” storyline. The establishment doesn’t care about any threats to those who are not following along with their agenda. They want those who don’t follow along to have it difficult.

A wheelchair-stricken black man gets beaten up by big SEIU men, but we only ever hear about the racist tea-baggers — that sliver of Americans that oppose Obama’s policies and constitutes half of the electorate.

Many Democrats cheer Obama’s “achievement”. They have absolutely no idea what they are cheering for.

Version 1.03

Dear Mark,

Thank you for your feedback on my book excerpt about Ubuntu / Debian, and I appreciate your time.

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.

With separate trees and buglists and such, people no longer work together simply as a matter of course of the tools they use. As a DD told me: this is social engineering. There are ways to mitigate this, but it is a problem that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the social engineering that preceded it.

Forks

In essence, I think forking is like war: it means that the discussions and diplomacy have failed. Any feature can be done in software, it is just a matter of technical and social work. So when you created Ubuntu, you were saying (before trying) that what you wanted to do couldn’t be done in Debian. This is an ironic statement given that you were starting with Debian and 10 of its best developers.

Note that forking is different from branching which happens all the time in DVCS. There are many branches of the Linux kernel out there, but the team is very unified. In the Ubuntu / Debian world you have separate documentation, incompatible packages, separate conference schedules, email lists, bug-tracking systems, and most importantly: separate teams maintaining a number of the same packages.

I know that some here might bring up a few good reasons for a fork:

1. Non-free code. That affects only a few packages, and Debian already has mechanisms to handle non-free code. Furthermore, it is possible to create two versions of a Live CD with and without the questionable stuff. So for simplicity here, let’s leave out freeness issues and assume you agree with Debian policies.
2. Having 6-month ship cycles. I have spent hours thinking about it and I concluded that this is doable with a separate tree in the Debian infrastructure. I’d rather not get into that here.
3. You state that Debian’s greater generality is something you aren’t interested in. You brought up Debian’s larger number of supported architectures as an example. I address that in footnote 8, but I’d add that Ubuntu supports more architectures in every release so it seems even this is getting smaller. Furthermore, writing portable code is not that hard, especially if you write in a garbage collected programming language. In nearly all GC languages, you use the same “binary” on all platforms.

So when I subtract out those difference, I run out of reasons for the separation.

I realize that achieving consensus on things is work, especially in the distributed nature of a volunteer movement. But this is not your responsibility, it is the responsibility of the people doing the work. You say that you don’t think you could have steered Debian in the direction that you want, but every contributor to Debian steers it. You still have to achieve a consensus within Ubuntu, and as it gets bigger, it will also get somewhat harder. And as for whether it is hard to achieve consensus in Debian, I would just point out that there are hundreds of DDs and millions of users, so they’ve managed to make it pretty far.

Money

You assert that mixing money with volunteers would have been a problem for you. Of course, we can’t know. You reference Dunc-tank; this is something I do not address in my book because I felt it was too “inside baseball”. But it seemed like there were a number of problems with it, for example, the secrecy with the way the program was developed.

The failure of Dunc-tank is not proof that you can’t mix paid folks and volunteers. And isn’t that exactly what is happening in the Ubuntu community?! We can also look to the HP example. HP pays programmers to work on Debian, and makes money supporting Debian. So this situation, and others, have not turned into a problem. Likewise, Linus gets paid to work on the Linux kernel and yet this has not caused problems.

People should contribute to free software only when they want to. If you do something because you want to, it doesn’t matter what other motivations other people have to do what ever they are doing. I would love to get paid for taking pictures, and the fact that some do doesn’t make me enjoy taking pictures less.

You can also think about the money like this: someone is working on Debian their few hours a week, and if someone else shows up and starts working 40-50 hours a week, that is great. The more people the better! I presume you’d like to hire as many of the great Debian people as you could. The world needs more full-time programmers working on free software. Many of the other Debian volunteers are in school or using it in their company so they can’t work on Debian full-time.

I realize that mixing volunteer and paid work is a tricky issue. But the solution is not just to assume that humans are flawed and so create new institutions which has the same potential problem! Note that there is also tension in what you are doing today if you hire Debian people to do work that never makes it into Debian.

Fixes

I agree that there are people looking for conspiracy and malice. Part of your challenge comes with the territory of being a suddenly very important part of a movement filled with passionate geeks. I also think that you guys were slow to adopt the GPL / AGPL for the code that you write, for example. The urge to hoard is strong and maybe some in Ubuntu don’t understand yet that it was free software, and Debian, that made this all possible. Free software and all that it implies almost requires a bit of faith.

From my perspective, the toothpaste is out of the tube. I don’t know exactly what could be done, but I also don’t consider all the possibilities because I am far away. I feel that the relationship will be uneasy as long as it continues as it is today.

You say that many people in the Ubuntu community recognize the importance of Debian now. That is good to hear. I didn’t get that sense as much in 2007. At the Debconf you suggested that people should just work in whatever codebase they wanted to, and not necessarily both.

I think that a merge is not the big task it sounds because the entire Debian and Ubuntu would join in. But even today, I think there more things than can be done. Here is a thought experiment. Suppose you decided that Bzr is duplicate code and therefore the Launchpad repositories should be converted to Mercurial. This thought experiment doesn’t get Ubuntu much closer to Debian, but it is the kind of “out of the box” thinking one could consider. Maybe there is a way to fast-track Ubuntu people into the Debian team? What about cancelling MOTU and having them all join the Debian team? How can Debian’s debbugs and Alioth work better with Launchpad? What about having UDS at the next Debconf? What about sharing documentation and wikis?  I feel like one could come up with a long list of things big and small that would squeak greater efficiency and improve the situation.

You state that you don’t think Ubuntu can ever be loved by Debian developers. I hope you and your org don’t quit trying. No situation need ever be stagnant and the OS is such a critical piece of the free software movement.

One of Linux’s top challenges

I wrote this book for two reasons: explaining why free software is superior and what things can be done for faster world domination. (You can find a short version of the to-do list here.) It will not be easy to beat Microsoft.

Many, even in our movement, believe that free software will never achieve world domination on the desktop, and so I focused on that. One of the reasons why Unix never was much competition for Windows was because there were separate teams re-implementing each other’s features. This Ubuntu / Debian inefficiency is one of the big things I came up with. I think what you have done has been amazing for Linux, but Ubuntu is buggier and moving more slowly than it could be.

I presented a version of these ideas in Debconf 2007 to you and others, and listened carefully to all the feedback, but I didn’t feel that my main point — about the violin — was understood. So I’ve left it in for now. In fact, I met a number of people at that Debconf who agreed with me and gave me evidence of other inefficiencies. One DD was surprised that I understood the Debian and Ubuntu situation so well even though I am not really a part of either! And my Microsoft friends I’ve talked this over are easily convinced that it is an example of the FOSS community shooting itself in the foot.

This is not an issue I push much anymore, so I consider it mostly as food for thought as a case study on forks, and because if Ubuntu’s developers understand the importance of joining the Debian community, then the inefficiency can be minimized. It is cheaper for one person to do work twice than for two people to do the same thing.

Respectfully,

-Keith

Interesting picture from:

http://www.neatorama.com/2010/03/17/nano-trek/

There are a lot of people worried about “open data”, like Matt Asay and Tim O’Reilly.

Of course, they call free software “open source” and they think the lack of open data it is a big deal with companies like Google threatening to control what links we click on and companies like Facebook using free software but not letting you easily migrate your data to Myspace, etc.

But I disagree. The biggest problem with Google is their lack of support for free software. They’ve only started releasing stuff in the last few years, and a lot of it is the plumbing code, not cool the stuff that AI researchers of all kinds would be digging over. Perhaps it is because people have been talking about “open data” instead of free software. Even if you could export data from Google’s search servers, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to make sense of it if you didn’t have the accompanying software.

The free software battle is much more important than the open data battle. It is not really that hard to get your data out of Facebook or out of Amazon EC2. It is your data and you put it in there. And this can anyway be solved by a few standards or even some free import / export code.

The open data movement should be a (small) part of the free software movement.

Get your popcorn!

Microsoft is reviving itself right now. It has the money and the expertise. Windows 7 is a major improvement over Vista, even though it demonstrated the holes in Microsoft’s aging technology stack.

Windows 7’s additional 3 years of debugging, plus a new Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, Windows Azure, IE 9, Bing, Natal, Office 2010, etc. show how Microsoft is shoring up its weaknesses and taking the initiative. That is great as it makes the battle fun to watch.

But the seeds of Microsoft demise have already been sown. Microsoft will lose because it doesn’t understand that it is an “encyclopedia” of free software for every task that you can imagine that is the true power of the computer. Wikipedia is just one thing you can build using free software, and it is the million-man free software army that is working on this problem and gaining critical mass.

Hardware First

The first thing the free software community needs to do is convince every hardware company to fully support Linux: feature-complete GPL drivers in the Linux tree before the device ships. This should be done for all components, not just the ones inside PCs that ship with Linux today.

Hardware companies already know that it is in their self-interest to support free software, but they just aren’t executing. But as governments and companies and users continue to request Linux, things will improve. Note, it doesn’t matter that Windows 7 is much better than Vista because large organizations are now making the switch, and pushing PC vendors to better support Linux over time.

The Long Tail of Software

Perfect hardware support is something that Microsoft already promises, so this by itself will not be what convinces people to switch to Linux — it just makes this possible. What we need is to keep improving the various software programs for every task you can imagine in art and science. We also need to push people to write it in Python rather than C/C++. We have enough programmers today, but too many big and old codebases that need a coat of polish.