Apart from changes in my personal life, I was also affected by a sense of purposelessness. I had no idea what I was doing in the community anymore, so I just quit. I feel that this is a general problem in the community. A successful and happy community needs something to do. It needs a responsibility, something it can focus on. For the greatest part of the five years that I have been an active part of the Ubuntu community, I felt part of a group that was working together on creating the best distribution. There was a clear goal: making the best operating system of them all.

The difference with today is that the primacy of innovation, of change, appeared to be much more in the community back then. We were all excited about the upcoming changes and the direction we were heading towards, because we all knew what those changes and directions were. For people to be excited about something, they need to know what to expect.

Ubuntu has matured enormously. Canonical has acquired so many skilled people that I do not fear for the quality of Ubuntu. It is only going to be better. However, that maturation has come with a price: as Canonical moved more and more to an Apple-style secrecy surrounding its plans, the community has been robbed from the vital basking in the glory of the upcoming changes. Because of the way the plans are announced, the community also doesn’t always feel them to be theirs.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. I believe that Canonical’s approach will probably lead to better designs. However, the atmosphere in the community needs to be improved if we want to keep everyone motivated and give the people a sense of purpose. Currently, the responsibility of the community is quite uncertain. On the one hand, Canonical makes it appear in its communications that the community has more influence than it actually has. It says that all employees are community members, whereas many are in fact not. It decides many things on its own, but then says it involves the community. But Canonical seems to steer the Ubuntu project on its own.

I do not disagree with the way Ubuntu is run. However, I do believe that it is vital that the truth is not denied, like the political ‘leaders’ of Europe currently do when talking about Greece. Saying that Ubuntu is created by the community does not make that true. Stop it. Honesty will improve a lot, because it will reduce unrealistic expectations.

With the fallacy of the community running the project removed, the community does need something to replace that. To return to the beginning of my post, what I believe is causing the leadership lethargy that was mentioned in the Community Council, is uncertainty about the responsibility of the community. It should be made clear exactly what role the community plays in creating Ubuntu. What decisions can it make? What can it contribute? What is the reach of the authority of the Community Council over the project? Once that is clear, the roles of the different leaders can be defined within that responsibility. Then they know what their purpose is. Having a purpose, having influence motivates people.

Somewhat related: maybe it would be a good idea to make in every team somewhat responsible for community and contribution management. For example, if you as a community volunteer contribute code to the desktop, who will look after you? Who will make sure that your work doesn’t go to waste? Such a change would also take of stress from the shoulders of the community team, which should not be used for such wide purposes.

The number of bugs reported every day is huge. It’s a continuous flow of problem reports, Apport crash reports, wrongly placed support requests, trolling, feature requests and distress. Heroically fighting to stem the flood is Ubuntu Bug Squad. Together with specialised bug triage teams for certain packages, like the kernel, they try to process as many useful bug reports as they can. However, there are too little triagers for too many bugs.

The current situation is not good for the people who work so hard to process all the reports; many leave the team soon after joining. It also causes relevant bugs to be lost in a sea of unprocessed or half-processed bogus bugs that clog up the system. It has been proposed before, but maybe we should once again seriously consider discouraging non-technical users from reporting bugs.

If we’d decide to do so, regular users would be kept away from the bug tracker. Only for automatically generated crash reports from Apport should be allowed, because the process is such that bogus reports rarely happen and many triage steps for this particular kind of bug can be automated. We would remove the ‘Help->Report a bug’ everywhere, including alpha releases. Links to reporting a bug should be removed from the documentation and the official sites. Launchpad could be adapted to make the ‘Report a bug’ button less obvious.

All this should lead to less bug reports and a higher average quality of the reports. If we focus only on the technically capable and interested users, then we’d have less clueless reports. It would save the time, energy and motivation of the bug triagers, which could then focus on making sure every bug that would be reported, would be processed quickly.

However, we should not forget that one of the things Ubuntu often is credited for is the large amount of bugs forwarded to upstream. Furthermore, an even more important argument in favour of bug reporting for the masses, is the fact that technical users use their computer different than non-technical users. They might miss bugs that non-technical users do encounter or see no problem in a feature of the system that is terribly confusing for non-technical users.

Limiting bug reporting would deprive us of this and that seems sufficiently bad to me to doubt whether we should limit bug reporting at all. I really don’t know what’d be the best. Making it harder to report bugs would make managing the bugs easier, but wouldn’t that also make the bugs we manage worth less? What do you, oh dear reader, think?

The large success of Ubuntu we’ve seen in the recent years has come mostly due to the fact that Canonical is very good at adding polish to the functionality that was already there. It made the great tools of the free desktop software usable by everyone. They still do this wonderfully and I have full confidence that the Canonical Design Team will continue to make Ubuntu suit its users even better.

However, while reading OMG! Ubuntu!’s post about the music and document file browsers mock-ups something struck me. Something that started to bug me while trying out GNOME Shell now became clear. Canonical may be very good on polishing, it may be very good at innovating user interfaces, it cannot do without GNOME. It lacks content.

Now, I don’t mean this in a demeaning way. I have great respect for the vision that speaks from Unity. However, I would like to emphasise that working within GNOME would be much better for Ubuntu on the long-term, no matter how hard it will be in the short-term.

When comparing Unity and GNOME Shell, I noticed right away how clearly a philosophy speaks from GNOME Shell. When using GNOME 3, you can really notice how its developers have purposely worked together to create a coherent experience. It feels nicer than Unity. Plus: it uses GNOME technologies and that improves its integration in the rest of the desktop tremendously.

But after a while you start noticing a few things. GNOME Shell is less stable than Unity and it feels less solid and responsive. Moreover, whereas Unity’s rough edges are at its rough edges, GNOME Shell has rough edges spread equally all over. GNOME 3 looks less slick and sharp than Unity, GNOME 3′s default theme is less crisp than Ubuntu’s Ambiance.

It is a terrible shame that the huge effort Canonical made to get Unity to the high level it currently is, was not spent on making GNOME Shell even better. Canonical may be stubborn, but the company has great ideas and it could have done so much to make GNOME Shell really slick.

Canonical is not a very huge company. It does not have enough employees to create and maintain a whole desktop. This is already showing in the stalled innovation of Notify OSD and friends; I am absolutely jealous of GNOME Shell’s notification area. While GNOME is working on expanding and improving its GNOME 3 desktop, Canonical is still very busy with its own shell. The consequence of this is that the shell does not integrate as much in the rest of the applications as you’d hope. There is a lot to improve in the GNOME project, but when you improve it, you are sure that it fits with the rest of the desktop and that it will look and behave the same.

The Documents and Media file browsers I mentioned earlier can be great ways to give users access to their files. However, every time you implement a way to access stuff like this, you make a paradigm choice. If you want to satisfy the user, it should be consistent. Unity also gives the user access to files, but it does so in a different way. This causes a collision of paradigms. If Canonical wants to do it right, it should ensure consistency across all applications. This is a lot of work and will probably require the development of its own file manager, etc, in the long term.

Canonical does not have the workforce to fully maintain its own desktop. By creating its own shell, it may improve things in the short term, but it will only make things worse in the long run. While GNOME progresses along a different path, the two desktops will diverge even further. In the end, if we ever want to beat Mac OS X, Ubuntu will have to to get rid ofGNOME and Canonical will have to have grown substantially.

GNOME needs Canonical as well. There is no other company in the Linux distribution world that focusses on regular consumers and regular consumers are the target group that shape the OSes of today. I’m not sure how much longer Novell’s remains will stay around, Nokia seems to be on a suicide mission and Red Hat is a business oriented company. GNOME 3′s magnificent user interface philosophy is in need for a good set of clothes and proper manners and of all companies that are in existence today, Canonical is the best candidate to look after that.

My ego is not so large that I believe this blog post can change Canonical’s company policy—which naturally wasn’t thought out in one hour—but I do wish to add my voice to the chorus that say: Ubuntu should return to GNOME 3!

Let us first take a look at the defined purpose of the ‘local community teams’. The ‘About Local Community Teams‘ page at the Loco Directory has the following to say about it:

With the incredible success of Ubuntu around the world, the LoCo project is here to help groups of Ubuntu fans and enthusiasts work together in regional teams to help advocate, promote, translate, develop and otherwise improve Ubuntu.

Local community teams are supposed to cater a definite geographic area. In the United States and the Russian Federation they ought to cover a state, in the rest of the world a complete country. This geographic constraint is important to notice, since we will see later that it doesn’t always fit well in the case of ‘local communities’.

Within their geographic area, local community teams are expected to advocate Ubuntu, organise local activities and informal meetings. This is all ‘in real life’, the internet presence is often very limited. Teams that behave according to this description, are what I would like to call ‘local teams’. Basically all local community teams from the English-speaking countries are of this type.

Since the international Ubuntu community is English-speaking and provides excellent support via the Ubuntu Forums, Ask Ubuntu and the #ubuntu IRC channel, the internet communities of the English-speaking local community teams don’t have to have a broad own community online. They are limited to small forums that are mostly used to discuss the activities that take place ‘in real life’ and to complement social contact. For the most part they are integrated into the international community.

Virtually all other local community teams, however, can be classified as ‘local communities’. Because many, if not most, of its members do not speak English, they cannot use the online support from the international community. The main focus of these ‘local communities’ is not so much activities ‘in real life’, but instead the management of a language-specific Ubuntu community. Running a community is not easy, so it takes a lot of resources.

The local teams have much more time and energy to spend on organising local activities and meetings, because there already is an online community for them, the international one. You can call the local teams a team because they often consist of equals, working together to spread Ubuntu and enjoying each others presence.

A local community, in contrast with a local team, does not consist of equals working together on the same things. There are many more different functions within a community: there is support to be given, documentation to be translated and written, interface text to translate and all of this needs to be organised. Furthermore, those who come to ask for support are a fundamentally different kind of community member than new computer enthusiasts who joins a local team to help out. Many of the people who come to ask for support are regular users who don’t have the desire to become an active contributor, they only want help. The spirit of a local community is therefore very different from that of a local team.

What makes this even more complicated is that language boundaries and geographical boundaries often don’t match. For example, Spanish is spoken in a lot of different countries by many people across the whole world. Therefore, having one Spanish support channel and forum makes sense. Add to that the Spanish translators of Ubuntu’s interface and documentation and what you get is a very large community, separate from the international one, transcending geographic borders. The difference between this conglomeration of several ‘local community teams’ and, say, the local team of the US state Massachusetts, is one of day and night. Countries like Belgium, where they speak Dutch, French and German, are even more complicated, because you have multiple language communities within the same borders.

Local communities and local teams both do very valuable work. I think it is a shame that many local communities are not locally as active as local teams often are. But this does have a reason: founding, building and running an full-blown online community puts a hefty toll on your volunteers. If you are small, like Ubuntu Nederland, you don’t have a lot of spare persons left to organise social activities ‘in real life’.

Duplicating the international Ubuntu community in your own language is hard, it requires skill to do it successfully. Good documentation can help with that. Unfortunately, most of the documentation—written in the English-speaking international community—focuses on local teams instead of local communities. Also, the requirements of the LoCo Council put a lot of emphasis on local activities, whereas it can be a tremendous achievement already to ‘only’ have a solid online presence.

I should add some nuance to this. Of course there are local community teams that under my classification would be local communities, but which do have a strong local presence; there are probably also local teams that have a large own online community. I acknowledge this and think that the definition of a local team and a local community should be stretched enough to suit this. However, the general observation still applies.

What to do with this analysis? Firstly, I think that the international community should be more conscious of the fact that non-English local community teams are distinctively different from English-speaking local community teams, because of the boundary created by language. We should be aware that there are several parallel Ubuntu communities in other languages that over time may have grown own identities. They may see themselves not as a localised annexe of the international Ubuntu community, but instead as the equivalent for their own language of what is often perceived to be the English Ubuntu community, but is in fact the international one.

Secondly, there also is a task for the leaders of the local communities, who could make their people more aware of the way things work in the Ubuntu project and explain what more there is to do if you learn English. They can help to bridge the gap between the different language communities.

Thirdly and finally, the LoCo Council should take into account when judging the performance of local community teams that not all of them have the extra burden of having to build a complete new community from the ground up.

One could argue that Americans—no, I’m not going to write USanians—derive a large advantage from the fact that the default locale is their English variant. All software is understandable for them right from the beginning. They never have to wait for translations. However, in this piece I would like to argue that actually it is a disadvantage.

The Disadvantage

Why would it be a disadvantage to Americans that all software automatically suits their customs and follows their local quirks? Well, for that I would like to do a game of compare and contrast. Mostly contrast. You see, the US English strings are the only texts written by the developers themselves.

Development attracts people who like to develop, not people who like to write. They do not necessarily come from the United States, often are not native English speakers and many of them can’t see the use of arguing about -ize vs -ise, or have own opinions about it. The consequence is that the US English strings are written by people whose primary interest is writing code, not human language. This is detrimental to the quality of the texts, the suitability of the chosen phrases and spelling and grammar in general.

Translation teams, however, attract people who are interested in language. In the world of perfect localisation, all typography nuts, grammar enthusiasts and spelling bees will join together to form a team with Super Language Powers. This means that the people who will write the text you see every day on your computer are fond of language, know how to use it and have experience to say it, if you speak any language or dialect other than US English.

The Consequences

All languages—except US English—have a corrective filter between the developer’s work and the end-user. There is one community that oversees all use of language in the product. Translation teams often work with word lists, style guides and selection of contributors based on their quality. This allows them to guarantee quality, make sure that all text on the system follows the same conventions and warrant consistency across the desktop. You can correct for overuse or underuse of capitalisation, distinct between the computer and user in events by using different verb conjugations and so on.

Consistency is an important issue. For example, a computer can have a screen, a display and a view. These words are near synonyms, but the X server uses them to distinguish between three different things. It is hard enough for a user to understand what the system is talking about already, it becomes even harder when words can have different meanings in different applications. When there is no central organisation of the terminology, this does happen. Translators could correct for this by adapting the translations to the context, but Americans are out of luck.

There are no people looking after the typography, grammar, capital use and readability of US English. But there is more to localisation: translation teams also make sure that the system is using the correct date format, currency, decimal delimiter and so on. Each country has its own conventions here. No one has the job of nitpicking about the American conventions, so they’re missing a watchful eye here as well.

The result is that the US English desktop can often be inconsistent in style, word choice and spelling. This makes our product less appealing to Americans and to other people using the US English version. If we want to pursue perfection, we should not miss this out.

It has also consequences for the translations. The translations are translations of the original English texts. Although I did say earlier that translators can correct for inconsistency and bad wording, they don’t always do. It is a lot of work to manually check the context of each and every string, many translators just stick to translating every word with the same phrase. Badly used capitals and dots will often find their way into translations as well. Vague US English results in vague translations.

Solutions?

Improving the quality of US English will mean large improvements for all languages if it is done properly, by sending patches with corrections to the developers. I am convinced that we need an American ‘localisation team’, consisting of all American typography nuts, grammar enthusiasts and spelling bees who want to contribute to Ubuntu and FOSS in general. They could work together with other projects to establish conventions and methodically go through all applications to check whether they comply with these conventions.

We cannot ask from all the localisers to understand programming language and patching systems. However, with the current state of technology, I am afraid that writing patches directly for the code is the only option. In the long term, something like a POT editor and a reverse POT generator could improve things.

It would also require infrastructure. Many languages have project-agnostic communities for translation in FOSS that provide various language-related services; examples are the French Traduc and the Dutch OpenTaal. These relations are often not formalised, but they are really helpful in making sure everyone is somewhat following similar rules. As part of FreeDesktop an American initiative could be started, which could keep a list of the standard meanings and uses of words.

The solutions above are just ideas for ways to deal with a problem that we should give much more attention than we have done so far. Admittedly, it is easy for me to talk from the sideline, knowing that I—being a native speaker of the Dutch language, not of US English—will never be doing much of the work I propose. But I do hope that some people will be inspired by this piece and do something with it.

Those poor Americans deserve localisation too!

You see, I wrote that blog post in a very short time, directly after the idea came up in my head. Without doing any fact-checking, without even proofreading, I had written a piece on a sensitive issue and published it without making sure I wasn’t talking complete crap. Not smart.

First of all, I should have realised when writing that blog post—and previous pieces on the Canonical-Banshee issue—that I am a mere external commentator who has only circumstantial experience with the events surrounding the issue.

I should have also known that you should never say something you cannot prove. I stand corrected on my assumption, which became an allegation when I published it, that GNOME is a USA-dominated project. I confused company/project culture with human culture, as one commenter on the flawed post pointed out correctly. There are in fact many, many Europeans at key positions in the GNOME community, just as much as there are Americans fulfilling pivotal roles for the Ubuntu project. I could have learned that only by going to GNOME’s Wikipedia page.

I learned my lesson and I would like to sincerely apology to my readers for breaking their trust by publishing such a badly founded piece. I assume that no one was insulted by incorrectly being called American or European.

GNOME was founded by two Mexicans and currently seems to be predominantly dominated by people from the United States, with the foundation itself being based in the States. The most important companies behind it, RedHat and Novell, are both from the United States too.

Ubuntu was started and Canonical was founded by a South African based in London, where the company has its headquarters. Although there is again a very high American presence within the community and company, the leadership is much more eclectic than GNOME’s. Furthermore, the Canonical Design Team seems to be predominantly British.

Why would this matter? Our differences aren’t very large after all, the open source community is dominated (unfortunately) by white, Caucasian males and they have a lot in common. I think it may play a more important role than we have thought so far. Communication is very culture-bound and it seems that it is communication that has been causing most of the problems.

If we look at the rejection of ‘libappindicator’ as an external dependency, we may be able to see this more clearly. Canonical, say some people in the GNOME project, failed to push its inclusion thoroughly enough. They may have done what was formally required, but didn’t show the initiative that could have resolved the issues that were raised. They say that you need to find the right people to talk to, not expect a machinery to process your request once you’ve delivered an appropriately tagged package.

Canonical reiterates that it did what was required to propose a module as an external dependency. They say that they want to have someone to talk to, to have someone in charge who makes the decisions and can be phoned up if necessary.

Both parties expected different things from the other. This may be what caused the unease. Each party feels that it did enough and the other too little, so no one is to blame.

Strikingly, it seems that the cooperation concerning the application indicators/status notifiers with KDE—founded in Germany, its foundation still being based there—was very productive. Was this because of the persons involved, or because of the cultures? The communication ways I described above do seem to reflect the stereotypes of the two continents.

What should be said that the above is a gross generalisation. Generalisations can usually only be used, with great care, when you talk about large groups. In this case it might be better to talk about individuals instead.

I don’t think that what I said above is the whole explanation. I do think, though, that it is something we should keep in our minds. It may not only have played a role in worsening the unease and misunderstanding here, but it affects all communities that are truly diverse. Traditionally, FOSS seems to have been dominated predominantly by people from the US. Now that is changing, more people learn English—as an example, my father’s generation learned German, not English, as the most important foreign language at Dutch secondary school, for me it is English—and ‘developing’ countries are catching up.

Cultural differences will be more visible in communities, we need to be aware of the different ways different cultures communicate if we want to make sure no contributions go to waste.

However, what if that philosophy of yours is hindering you while achieving your goals? What if your morally better culture is closed and looks down upon people who behave differently, scaring them away? What if your right is the wrong in someone else’s eyes and there is no way to prove that wrong objectively?

Doesn’t your moral perfection, your superiority to all those inferior hypocrites make it harder to enjoy what you like to do, to reach the people you want to reach, to have success where you want to succeed? Doesn’t that make your moral perfection useless? Doesn’t it mean that those people with their flawed human nature might be achieving more with their sensible, flexible, pragmatic approach?

The case

Banshee’s Amazon MP3 store plugin was developed by Banshee star-developer Aaron Bockover, who announced on his blog last August that all revenue of the plugin would go to the GNOME Foundation. The plugin consists of two separate extensions, one for integrating music importing from Amazon’s MP3 store into Banshee, the other for embedding the store’s website. Both are open source, and available from Banshee’s GIT branch.

After discussions between Canonical and the Banshee developers, Jono Bacon announced on his blog that the final settlement was that Canonical would receive 75% of the revenue of both music stores, and direct 25% to the GNOME Foundation. Some people were outraged by Canonical taking such a large share of the revenue, arguing that the company was simply profiting from the work of others.

When are you allowed to sell?

I want to investigate this issue by going from the bottom up. Let us first establish why we pay money. We can’t do everything ourselves, because we don’t have infinite time and skills. Therefore we use the services of others, and pay them in exchange for what they produce. That money allows them to buy the products of others, so they can focus fully on their job. Money is thus awarded for a service.

In open source, most of the time you will not have to pay for the software. However, the GPL license does not prohibit selling your software. The Free Software Foundation defines free software not as ‘gratis’ software, but says software is free when a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes. (Read its piece on selling (free) software if you want to know more.)

When are you entitled to sell?

You pay money in exchange for a service. In the case of the Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin, Amazon gives a share of the revenue to Banshee, as a reward for bringing users to its store. Banshee subsequently chooses to give the revenue to the GNOME Foundation. Note that it is not the end-user who is the customer here, but Amazon!

Under the current plans, the Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin on Ubuntu will give Canonical 75% of the money paid by Amazon and the revenue of the Ubuntu One Music Store. The GNOME Foundation, via Banshee, will get 25% of both. I shall focus on the Amazon MP3 plugin. There are two ways to look at this. The first way is to consider Banshee an involuntary customer of Canonical, buying the service ‘broader access to customers’. The win for them is more income. The second way is to consider Amazon a customer of both Banshee and Canonical, who jointly provide the service Amazon pays for.

How does this happen? The Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin, developed by the Banshee project, is the direct means used to make the Amazon MP3 Store available. Other important factors are the attractiveness of Banshee—courtesy of its developers—and distribution via Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution on the desktop.

We have seen that both Canonical and the Banshee project deliver a part of the service that Amazon pays for. Canonical is the final distributor, bringing the product to the customers’ doorsteps, Banshee can be compared to a more specialised producer, providing a specific product to the distributor. If we look at the real world, we can see that it is often the distributor at the end of the chain that determines the prices. Farmers, for example, earn often very little for their crops. Most of the revenue on produce goes to the supermarkets that distribute the goods to the customers. Supermarkets may not be the sole method of reaching customers, but they are by far the most important channel; the farmer depends on the supermarkets. This simple fact allows the stores to dictate the prices. It is an economic law that says that when a good—in this case access to the customer—is scarce, the costs will go up. Here it means the costs for the farmer will go up in the way of lower revenues.

Canonical can be compared to the ‘Superunie’, the joint procurement organisation of the major Dutch supermarkets. Like supermarkets, it doesn’t actually make everything it offers itself. Instead, it is responsible for the selection, integration and fine-tuning of the components, and maybe for baking the fresh baguettes. Its large market share in the Linux desktop world gives it a lot of power. Some people are principally opposed to it and say it abuses its power.

Access to many potential customers makes Canonical’s contribution to the ‘service’ provided to Amazon much, much more important. It is very likely that 25% of the Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin’s revenue when enabled by default will be higher, than 100% of the same plugin disabled by default. The service of enabling the plugin by default is therefore a valuable ‘product’, which is sold to the Banshee project at a not unsubstantial price.

This high price can be justified by the fact that Canonical is selling a scarce good to the Banshee project. However, Banshee has little choice than to accept whatever benevolent offer Canonical deigns to make. Because they’ve chosen for a free license, there is no real transaction to be made. If Canonical doesn’t like what Banshee demands, then it can just replace the affiliate code and keep everything for itself. Banshee is powerless. That is the difference with the farmer-supermarket analogy, in which the farmer can decide to reject and offer and not give his or her produce.

So, what  amount can you ask for this substantial additional value? It is impossible to determine the true economic price of it when only one side can make demands. The 75:25 ratio is therefore not a representation of the true values of what both sides have to offer, but instead the representation of what the only party with any power over the matter considers the values to be. It is a subjective determination.

Whether or not you agree with the chosen ratio depends what value you attribute to the services provided by Canonical and by the Banshee project to Amazon. It is not possible to do this fully objective, and in any case you need extra data to say something definitive.

To me the demands from Canonical don’t seem very unreasonable at all. The value of the huge user share Ubuntu has to offer seems to be worth the 75% slice at first glance. However, we’ll first have to see the statistics from the Amazon MP3 plugin in action on Ubuntu to verify this assumption. If it turns out that Ubuntu brings in a lot of revenue, then the 75% fee is justified. If it turns out that the revenue is relatively low, or average, then Canonical’s share should be lowered to compensate for the proven lower value of the ‘service’ offered by the company. I would propose to do this check not too long after the launch of Ubuntu 11.04, make the results public and swiftly announce change when change is justified.

What do you think? Do you agree with my conclusion? Did you spot any mistake? Please leave a comment!

When people talk about Ubuntu, they usually have two ways of referring to it. Most frequently people use ‘Ubuntu’, but at some places you’ll find ‘Ubuntu Linux’ very consistently. This may be a relic of the past, after all the Ubuntu 4.10 Warty Warthog release announcement has links to www.ubuntulinux.org rather than www.ubuntu.com. In this blog post I want to argue here to stop calling Ubuntu ‘Ubuntu Linux’. There are several reasons to do so.

The first, and the most important argument considering we’re trying to market a product here, is that using simply ‘Ubuntu’ makes the brand name a lot more attractive and easier on the mind. Because of the Linux in ‘Ubuntu Linux’, people will associate it with the legacy of past Linux distributions, and I think that ‘Ubuntu’ is a more attractive name on its own.

The second argument is about being sensible about attribution. Several people have said that Ubuntu should very purposely be marketed as ‘Ubuntu Linux’ to give credit to the Linux developers. Other people, who feel that GNU contributed a lot of code to the base of most operating systems using the Linux kernel, even say that we should try to promote Ubuntu using the impossible name ‘Ubuntu GNU/Linux’. However, why would we attribute GNU and Linux, but not GNOME, FreeDesktop, Mozilla, The Document Foundation, Novell, Red Hat or any of the other projects and companies that all contribute to what is ultimately integrated into one Ubuntu? Does GNU really deserve more to be in the name than GNOME? Isn’t the browser the most important tool of the desktop nowadays?

Putting either Linux or GNU and Linux in the name is not fair at all. There is no reason why those vital projects should be attributed, whereas other projects that are just as vital are not.

The third argument is practicality. Your headlines will be a lot shorter when writing ‘Ubuntu’ instead of ‘Ubuntu Linux’.

The fourth argument is conformity. If we want to bring a consistent message, we all should follow the same naming scheme. This is very important. When someone is talking about ‘Ubuntu’, and another person is discussing ‘Ubuntu Linux’, then you create confusion. “Is Ubuntu the same as Ubuntu Linux, or is it something different?” a person might wonder. Ubuntu Linux could very well be a derivative of Ubuntu! We should pull our act together and make sure we deliver a consistent message. Canonical and most people are using ‘Ubuntu’, therefore it makes sense to stick to ‘Ubuntu’.

Why write this blog post about to propagate a convention that is already dominant? The reason for this can be found in the fourth argument: ensuring consistency. Use ‘Ubuntu’, not ‘Ubuntu Linux’! When you see ‘Ubuntu Linux’ being used somewhere in a description, on a wiki page or elsewhere, fix it! Make sure the public knows we’re all talking about the same product!

As we’re welcoming these new people to the Ubuntu community and introducing them to the various tasks there are, we can see a set of problems arise. There is the problem of increasing scale—community manager Jono Bacon has written about handling this on his blog several times—and the issues introduced by the increasing diversity of the community. I’ve written before about the effects of language differences, but there is something else we should realise, which shows itself more and more now the composition community diversifies.

Not everyone is equally intelligent. When considering other people, it is very hard not to assume they think like us, and judge from that viewpoint. Especially when you are intelligent it may be very hard to realise there are also a lot of people who have more trouble thinking. Life is not like Sims, where everyone has an equal amount of character points, only distributed across different character traits. With the knowledge of the human we have nowadays we can only conclude that ‘life’ is not fair, because not everyone gets the same amount of character points. Some people are smart and beautiful and nice and happy, and other people are stupid, ugly, unpleasant, depressed. Both situations are rare, but both can occur.

This is an important thing to consider in a community that seems to assume intelligence. Every contributor is welcome, which is a good thing, because we don’t want to shut someone out. Every contribution helps us. We can see this in the mentor programmes too. If you create a page at the Ubuntu Wiki and sign the Code of Conduct, you’ll be assigned a mentor. You do not have to sit an exam. At the Ubuntu Developer Summit we are discussing the future of Ubuntu almost as equals, and there are a lot of people that have something interesting to say.

However, what we are doing is not easy work. Building an operating system, writing applications to run on it, running a community, these are all tasks that require skills. Skills that not everyone has. We do, apparently. That makes us more intelligent than the average person, because that is how hard it is to do what we do.

Not all prospective bug triagers, MOTU applicants or passionate artists have got what it takes to build something like Ubuntu. A bad bug triager only causes more work, an unskilled MOTU ruins our credibility, ugly artwork scares users away. Even when the triager, packager, artist is a very kind person, we should say that.

I do not doubt that the community members are honest enough to tell people when they are not delivering good work. But that isn’t the only side to this. Say you are telling someone (s)he’s triaging bugs badly, you’ll first have to have seen badly triaged bugs. That means someone will have to correct those bugs, if the reporter hasn’t already stopped responding. It could also mean that someone has spent some time trying to mentor the bad triager. Valuable time of a volunteer has gone to waste. That is also bad for the motivation of the volunteer.

We should not make intelligence a requirement for joining the community, we should not look down on people because they happen to be less intelligent, we should not become an elitist club. We should, though, make sure we watch out that we do get the right people at the right place. We should realise that not everyone has something to say that is worth listening to, though you cannot make that judgement until you’ve heard what the person said. We should prevent frustration for volunteers and prospective volunteers by being clear about what it takes to join the community.

We should not assume intelligence.

Do I want to say something is wrong with the Ubuntu community? No. I do not think that there are things we need to change to fix the issue I just described. Yet. We should be watchful, considerate and aware that not everyone is equal. The sentence “Every man was created equal.” is wrong, because men where not created, just like women, and they are not equal as well. Everyone is unique, in a positive or negative sense.

Generalising, from a consumer perspective the theory works like this: there are two parties, consumers with money, and vendors with products. Both parties want to have much of what the other party has. The vendor tries to tempt the consumer to buy the product, by making the product more attractive to the consumer. This could mean that the product becomes technologically better, or that it becomes superficially better, which still makes the consumer happier. Because of competition for the attention of the consumer between the vendors, they have an extra motivation to keep improving.

The vendors are trying to please the consumers as much as possible, because the consumers are the people who decide where the money will go. With every purchase, you vote for a specific product. You reward or punish decisions made by the vendors. If a certain decision is bad for the consumer, the vendor will sell less of the product. This is a motivation to do the consumer no harm.

The rise of the internet has made it possible to transmit information for a price that approximates zero, in case of high volumes. It is very easy to reach a very large audience for a very low price. This has made it alluring for vendors to start off giving their product away for free, out of idealism, or because the vendor just likes making the product. The positive reaction of consumers to this has led to the rise of the economy of free. More and more services are available for free.

However, even hosting a very small website is not free. You have to pay for it to stay up. It becomes more expensive when your audience grows. Further costs are added when you want to deliver high quality content, or content that is in popular demand. YouTube is free for us to use, but Google does pay license fees for the music hosted on the video site.

This money has to come from somewhere. In the economy of free it is not the user who pays for the product. Usually the advertisers fund the vendor, but often also investors. YouTube and Google earn a lot of money with advertisements, and so does Facebook. Another example is Ubuntu, also given away for free to regular users. Canonical earns money from delivering various services to companies, and gets it from its investor and founder.

In our little free market model the properties and the quality of the product where determined by the consumer. The consumer pays, so the consumer chooses which products stay, and which go. However, in the economy of free we have a different payer: the companies and persons buying ad space and investing money.

We are just as much the customers of Facebook, as cows are the customers of milk farmers. A farmer has interest in the happiness of his cows, but in the end they are not who they have to please. The people who buy the produce of the cows, the milk, are the real customers. At Facebook we are the milk cows. Facebook’s product is its user population, and the information put online. You might say that we pay with our personal information, but personal information alone is not enough to pay rent and wages, you need cash for that.

Ubuntu’s product is the happiness it provides its founder, and the services provided by Canonical to companies. Its regular users are by no means comparable to milk cows, but they are more a tool than the actual consumers. I don’t mean tool in a negative way, I mean to say that the regular, non-paying Ubuntu users are needed for the cultural, emotional aspects of Ubuntu, for its important community. But in the end, this also does not pay the bills.

So the people we think of as the consumer are in the economy of free no longer the consumer. This changes their influence on the products they use. No longer are they voting directly for a certain product. You can go to another Facebook, but if all advertisers have a certain basic requirement of their product, and all social networks need advertisements to run break-even, then you will never be in control like you are in the super market.

Our role is different, in the economy of free. We are the product. Especially when social pressure is high, we lose part of the say this simplifying model to attributes to us, and ultimately we lose it to the vendors.

Disclaimer: this is not an attack on either Facebook or Canonical, it is just an observation I would like to share with you.

In addition to my post earlier today, The importance of an accessible community (Dutch), I would like to share the following with you. Maybe I exaggerate or simplify sometimes somewhere, but in those cases that it mostly to illustrate my point.

When a community is not focussed on contributing to the project around which it resolves, but on the talking about it, you get a completely different community than when the community is focussed on contributing to the project around which it resolves.

When a community is mostly preoccupied with talking about something and the asking and answering of questions about something you get a much more passive community, in which the talking (on the forums) gets the most attention, that’s around which everything resolves. People who want to become a part of the community spend their time hanging around at the forums and chat there.

We all know it is harder to just by text bring over exactly what you want to say. It is harder to understand the nuance and irony of someone without seeing their face or hearing their voice. When people, who might be a bit bored and are looking for something to do, hang around at the forums the whole day chances are that somewhere a misunderstanding occurs, resulting in an argument. That is bad for the atmosphere.

There will always be people who complain, no matter how perfect you do something. Consequently there also will be people on the forums who will complain; about Ubuntu, about Ubuntu NL, about the forums, about me, about you, about the colour of the grass, etc, etc, etc. Everyone always knows it better, the best steersman are indeed always on shore and never on the bridge. [And that, ladies and gentleman, is a Dutch proverb.] People who don’t agree [with the criticism] will rise up and react. Then you easily have an argument.

The two issues mentioned above naturally don’t have to occur everywhere a lot. However, when your community mostly seems to be a talk group [literally 'support group', but that would take away the focus on the talking] you quickly get people starting to look for things to talk about — because joining the discussion [about Ubuntu and Ubuntu NL] isn’t possible — en then those issues become a lot more visible and of frequent occurrence.

This is all because there isn’t much to talk about. People are bored and don’t have anything different to talk about or discuss.

When a community is mostly preoccupied with contributing to a project — in our case Ubuntu and Ubuntu NL itself — you get a much more active community, in which working on contributions gets the most attention, that’s around which everything resolves. People who want to become a part of the community spend their time contributing to Ubuntu and Ubuntu NL and that’s what’s being talked about on the discussion places.

You’ll always have people who complain, whine or are searching for something to do and start windbagging for a lack of something better to do. But if it’s mostly about contributing to a project in a community the talking will be mostly about that.

The passive whining of the first part of this piece gives a community in which negativity pervails. This isn’t pleasant, discourages people and scares them away.

The positive focus on contribution in the second part of this peice gives community in which it is about sharing and cooperating. This causes a much more pleasant atmosphere and attracts people, to the contrary. The focus on contributing encourages people to do something themselves, because only then you’re really a part [of the community].

Instead of the biggest whiners being the most important people of the community, the people who contribute the most are the most important. And that is much nicer.

Wanneer een gemeenschap niet gericht is op het bijdragen aan het project waarom het draait, maar op het praten erover, dan krijg je een heel andere gemeenschap dan wanneer de gemeenschap gericht is op het bijdragen aan het project waarom het draait.

Als een gemeenschap zich vooral bezig houdt met het praten over iets en en stellen en beantwoorden van vragen over iets krijg je een veel passievere gemeenschap, waarin het praten (op het forum) de meeste aandacht krijgt, daar draait het om. Mensen die bij die gemeenschap willen horen besteden hun tijd aan het rondhangen op het forum en het praten daar.

We weten allemaal dat het lastiger is om via enkel tekst over te brengen wat je precies wilt zeggen. Het is lastiger om de nuance en ironie van iemand te begrijpen zonder zijn of haar gezicht te zien en zonder zijn of haar stem te horen. Als mensen, die zich misschien een beetje vervelen en iets zoeken om te doen, de hele dag rondhangen op een forum wordt de kans groter dat er ergens een keer een misverstand ontstaat en daaruit een aanvaring volgt. Dat is slecht voor de sfeer.

Er zullen altijd mensen zijn die klagen, hoe perfect je iets doet. Er zullen dus ook mensen zijn op een forum die gaan klagen; over Ubuntu, over Ubuntu NL, over het forum, over mij, over jou, over de kleur van het gras, etc, etc, etc. Iedereen weet het zelf altijd het beste, de beste stuurlui staan immers aan wal en staan nooit op de brug. Mensen die het er niet mee eens zijn zullen opspringen en reageren. Dan kun je al snel een twist krijgen.

De bovengenoemde twee zaken hoeven natuurlijk niet per se overal heel vaak voor te komen. Echter, wanneer je gemeenschap vooral een praatgroep op het forum lijkt te zijn dan krijg je al snel dat mensen iets zoeken om over te praten — want meepraten heeft immers niet veel zin — en dan worden dit soort dingen veel zichtbaarder en veelvoorkomend.

Dit alles komt vooral omdat er niet veel meer te doen is. Mensen vervelen zich en mensen hebben niks anders om over te praten of discussiëren.

Als een gemeenschap zich vooral bezig houdt met het bijdragen aan een project — in ons geval Ubuntu en Ubuntu NL zelf — dan krijg je een veel actievere gemeenschap, waarin het werken aan bijdragen de meeste aandacht krijgt, daar draait het om. Mensen die bij die gemeenschap willen horen besteden hun tijd aan het bijdragen aan Ubuntu en Ubuntu NL en daar wordt over gepraat op de overlegplaatsen.

Je zult altijd mensen hebben die klagen, zeuren of iets te doen zoeken en dan maar dom gaan ouwehoeren. Maar als het in een gemeenschap voornamelijk gaat om het bijdragen aan een project zal het gepraat ook voornamelijk daarover gaan.

Het passieve gezeur van het eerste deel van dit stuk levert een gemeenschap op waarin negativiteit de boventoon voert. Dit is niet prettig, demotiveert mensen en jaag ze weg.

De positieve focus op bijdragen van het tweede deel van dit stuk levert een gemeenschap op waarin delen en samenwerken centraal staan. Dit zorgt voor een veel prettigere sfeer en trekt mensen juist aan. De focus op bijdragen moedigt mensen aan om zelf ook iets te gaan doen, want dan hoor je er pas echt bij.

In plaats van dat de grootse zeuren de belangrijkste personen van de gemeenschap zijn, zijn de mensen die het meeste bijdragen de belangrijkste personen. En dat is veel leuker.

In dit stuk wil in het hebben over het belang van een toegankelijke gemeenschap. Vergeet niet dat Ubuntu een opensourceproject is, en dat een daarbij horende gemeenschap fundamenteel verschilt van bijvoorbeeld een fanforum of een Windows-ondersteuningsgroep. Een opensourceproject hangt namelijk af van de bijdragen van zijn leden.

Ubuntu NL is ook onderdeel van het opensourceproject Ubuntu. Wij zijn de lokale tak van een internationaal project dat de hele aarde beslaat. Echter, op dit moment heb ik niet altijd het gevoel dat er in de gemeenschap ook altijd in die geest gehandeld wordt.

Want als je wilt drijven op vrijwilligers en volgens de traditie van de opensourcegemeenschap bijdragen van iedereen wilt accepteren moet je wel openstaan voor die bijdragen. Dat is een cultuur die je moet kweken, en iets waaraan sommigen eerst zullen moeten wennen, maar deze bewezen methode is wel noodzakelijk als je wilt dat de gemeenschap optimaal functioneert en door kan blijven gaan als er mensen stoppen.

Op dit moment is het zo dat veel teams nogal gesloten zijn. Voordat je ergens bij komt moet je eerst toestemming krijgen; iemand moet je uitnodigen. Veel subteams hebben een nogal scherpe scheidslijn tussen het subteam en de rest. Het is of wel, of niet bij het team.

Laat ik als voorbeeld eens het websitebeheer nemen. De discussie van die groep mensen is gesloten. Je kunt niet meehelpen of meepraten zonder dat iemand je over de scheidslijn laat. Zulke dingen maken het erg moeilijk voor iemand die mee wil helpen om mee te doen.

Opensourcegemeenschappen kunnen elke bijdragen, hoe klein ook gebruiken. Kleine bijdragen zijn een goede manier om langzaam betrokken te raken bij een (deel van een) project. Je wordt lid van een mailinglijst, reageert af en toe in een discussie en wanneer de webbeheerder een keer vraagt of iemand een klein klusje wil opklappen schrijf je dat je dat wel wilt doen. Zo raak je steeds bekender met het project en uiteindelijk kan je misschien ook wel taken overnemen van de beheerder als die het een keer wat drukken krijgt.

Deze manier heeft twee voordelen:

1. Niet iedereen hoeft natuurlijk na verloop van tijd ook, bijvoorbeeld, webbeheerder te worden. Echter hij of zij helpt wel een beetje mee, en alle kleine beetjes helpen. Al bespaart die persoon de eigenlijke webbeheerder maar tijd door vragen te beantwoorden die mensen stellen op de maillijst, dat helpt toch;
2. De opvolgers worden vanzelf klaargemaakt. Als er nu iemand uit mijn voorbeeldteam weg zou gaan dan zou er nog maar één webbeheerder over zijn, en een eventuele nieuwe beheerder zou alles nog helemaal moeten leren. Als je openstaat voor bijdragen en meedenkende mensen heb je daar niet alleen profijt van als je er nog bent, maar je garandeert ook de continuïteit van het team een stuk beter.

Alles gaat een stuk langzamer vanwege de vakantie, maar op dit moment wordt langzaam maar zeker het openstellen van de communicatie van het team voorbereid. Dit is al een stap in de goede richting, maar we moeten ervoor waken dat we ook onze cultuur meeveranderen. Dit houdt in:

• Communiceer alles openbaar, tenzij het écht niet anders kan. Geen privémailtjes om snel iets te regelen, maar gebruik een maillijst of het forum. Dan sta je anderen toe te reageren en mee te denken en kan de gemeenschap volgen wat je doet en hebt gedaan;
• Neem iedereen serieus, ook de mensen die niet al in je (sub)team zitten en luister ook echt naar nieuwkomers die iets inhoudelijks te vertellen hebben;
• Zorg dat mensen het makkelijk en leuk is voor mensen om bij te dragen, moedig ze aan;
• Laat de onderscheiding tussen Ubuntu NL team en Ubuntu NL gemeenschap zoveel mogelijk verdwijnen. Het team zou de gemeenschap moeten zijn, en anders is er iets heel erg mis, dan zijn we meer een fanforum dan een opensourcegemeenschap.

Ik heb in met deze blogpost niemand persoonlijk willen aanvallen en ik wil ook absoluut niet zeggen dat ik de bijdrages van wie dan ook maar niet waardeer. Echter, we moeten wel onder ogen kunnen en durven zien dat er een cultuurverandering nodig is als we Ubuntu NL een prettige en leefbare gemeenschap willen houden.

Het zou hypocriet zijn om een opensourceproject aan iedereen aan te raden als superieur, maar zelf de opensourcemethode niet te willen gebruiken.

Zo las ik laatst in de Volkskrant een stuk van columniste Renée Braams getiteld “Alweer een liedbijlage ‘andere landen’” Ze begint met een stukje waarin ze uitlegt dat ook zij zich bedreigd voelt, wanneer het personeel van de Albert Heijn overlegt in een taal die ze niet begrijpt. Ze citeert een stukje uit ‘A.P.Beerta-Instituut’ van J.J. Voskuil waarin een man moeite heeft met het feit dat een groep Turkse mannen in hun eigen taal spreekt.

Het hele stuk ademt een sfeer uit van angst voor het vreemde, angst voor buitenlanders. Natuurlijk moet je gevoelens niet onderdrukken of ontkennen, en het is ook wel enigszins te begrijpen dat mensen zich niet al te prettig voelen als hun omgeving verandert. Maar mensen hebben sowieso altijd al moeite met verandering, en de manier om daarmee om te gaan is door je erover heen te zetten. Allochtonen lijken misschien eng en vreemd, maar wat ons mens maakt is dat we onze onderbuikgevoelens opzij kunnen zetten.

Er lijkt de laatste tijd een verandering te zijn in het publieke debat. Niet alleen de eerder genoemde column, maar het publieke debat in het algemeen lijkt steeds meer het accepteren van onderbuikgevoelens normaal te vinden. Echter, wat maakt dat wij kunnen zeggen dat we in een beschaving leven, is het feit dat we onze instincten en dierlijke gevoelens kunnen sturen of onderdrukken. Als je het normaal vindt om vreemd, nieuw gedrag eng te gaan vinden en je ook eist dat in je woonomgeving deze vreemde elementen niet aanwezig zijn, ben je al intolerant geworden.

Want wanneer het normaal wordt om mensen, of hun cultuur, eng te vinden, puur op basis van gevoel, is het hek van de dam. Aan die redenatie zitten namelijk geen grenzen; gevoelens zijn niet objectief vast te stellen of te beoordelen. Het schept een klimaat waarin het voor echte racisten makkelijker wordt om hun racisme te uitten en in de praktijk te brengen. Het schept een klimaat waarin mensen die eigenlijk helemaal niet zo xenofobisch zijn, door de samenleving goedkeuring lijkt verleend te zijn om hun onderbuikgevoelens — waarvan eigenlijk ieder mens wel last heeft — te laten groeien tot xenofobie. Het normaal gaan vinden van het niet controleren van de eigen instinctieve gevoelens, zal een samenleving opleveren waaruit de beschaving voor een groot deel verdwenen zal zijn.

What I’ve read about it didn’t sound like sexism at all. Some people definitely overreacted; boycotting is way over the top, asking for an apology is misplaced as well. I’ve always been told at school and by the media that sexism is “prejudice and discrimination based on sex” — source of the English description: Merriam-Webster. What Mark Shuttleworth said may have been wrong and offending to some, but it was not sexism. It would have been if he’d said: “I think that all women are unsuitable for FOSS.” That would have been gross sexism. But this was not. He just used bad wording.

Pointing people at the use of wrong and offensive phrases is an important task. If you want to get emancipation — I’m hesitant to use the word feminism since it has got such a negative sound here these days — to succeed you need to make sure the used language doesn’t exclude anyone. However, when overreacting you scare people away as well, and it’s at least bad for your image. How gladly do you think developers would like to participate if every tiny breach of gender neutrality and equal valuation, even if by accident, will be mercilessly punished?

Please do, really do, keep alerting us whenever we make a mistake and accidentally — or willingly as well — offend women, men, youngsters, elderly, programmers and non-programmers. It is helpful. However, please be reasonably. Without reason you won’t get far.

FTD sleept Stichting Brein voor de rechter. De usenet-community wil dat Brein door de rechtbank wordt gedwongen een rectificatie te plaatsen. Daarin zou het uitspraken dat FTD’s activiteiten strafbaar zouden zijn, moeten herroepen.

via FTD sleept Brein voor de rechter | Pro | Tweakers.net Nieuws[NL].

The small piece of text above is the first part of a Dutch article that announces an interesting change in the (anti-)’piracy’ world. The Dutch Usenet user group FTD charged the Dutch RIAA-light, Stichting Brein — Foundation Brein or Brain, website at http://www.anti-piracy.nl/home/home.asp — because they finally had enough of their Director Tim Kuik — yes, the same one who said that downloading software is always illegal — constantly telling the press and the rest of the world that the group of Usenet users was doing illegal things, without providing much funding.

Earlier the FTD already gave in to pressure[NL] adapted their client to meet Stichting Brein‘s demands a bit, one of the things the removed was the NZB search engine. According to advices from a legal counsellor they were operating within the law at least afterwards. Brein continued with spreading messages saying that the FTD was doing illegal things. Moreover, they said legal action wasn’t ruled out.

FTD also has commercial interests in their client, because they sell ad space. Because of continuing, and like said before, unfounded, claims by Brein they were afraid they might lose people willing to pay them for placing their ads. Furthermore they were getting fed up with constantly being threatened.

Now, for the first time in the Netherlands, and probably also in Europe — correct me if I’m wrong — someone has charged the anti-’piracy’ organisation instead of vice-versa. What’s more, they don’t only want to get Stichting Brein to place a rectification at their website for three months, they also want the judge to tell if downloading via Usenet and providing links to Usenet downloads on forums is either legal or illegal. For that they’ve used the form of a bodemprocedure — German: Hauptsacheverfahren, Google Translate English: substantive issues.

I’m curious about the results of this very interesting trial. I’m sure other parties like Google and The Pirate Bay will also keep an eye on this to see if it’s going to have any consequences for them. I hope the judge will manage to stop Stichting Brein from spreading it’s FUD — they’re very good at it, they once spread a anti-’piracy’ tool that removed all music from your computer, regardless of its legal status.

RewriteEngine         on
RewriteCond       %{HTTP_HOST}                 ^ubuntero\.qense\.nl$
RewriteRule         ^(.*)         http://qense.nl/$1 [R=301,L]

Easy, isn’t it? Now the search engine won’t get lost and on top of that I’ve got my authority at Technorati back to 15!

Content updates and action against creationism propaganda

Next to updating the current theme Minifrom version 1.07 to 1.1 I also updated the sidebar and added a page. Now you can see my FriendFeed at http://qense.nl/social-buzz. I did that to give a clearer overview of that and also to empty the sidebar a bit.
New in the sidebar is a Text widget containing buttons of things I support. One of them is in Dutch, so I’ll explain it to you.

Recently a believer of the creationism ideology created a leaflet about his beliefs together with some other Christian organisation. It is the year of Darwin and he thought it would be at the right time to have such an action now. A little bit more than 6 million families are going to get the leaflet which propagandises outdated denials of scientific discoveries.

You can read it at the website of the man: creatie.info. After I read it I felt slightly insulted because it portrays people who acknowledge scientific proves for Darwin’s theories as heartless beings, unable to feel compassion. I’m not a heartless person! However, it also amused me since most arguments are showing childish reasoning, something seen more often at people denying Darwin’s theories. Somehow they choose to not hear the overwhelming arguments and pick emotions as arguments.

Something I hear people like the writer of the leaflet say often: “But it can’t be that such a complex thing was just a coincidence!” Well, a traffic incident can also turn out to be very complex. Furthermore reasoning with ‘it can’t be’ arguments isn’t really scientific.

The button is pointing to a website that calls for returning the leaflet to the sender in case you got it. I think it’s a good thing to let the writer know we don’t want his uncontructive work that doesn’t only insult Darwin’s ‘believers’ — were you ever asked if you ‘believed’ Newton’s theories about the gravity? –  but also the human possibility for reasoning.

If you’re Dutch, spread the news!

Of course the reports are coloured by the experiences of the author, but the reports from Israel are coloured too, they lie. For example, they were the ones to break the cease fire first, after which Hamas started to fire rockets again.

Please don’t think I’m pro-Palestine and antisemitic. It’s just that I would like to read some more balanced news.

Many people won’t like this, but the market reception of the Linux version of the Wind has not exactly been stellar, according to Tung. The return rates for the Linux version of the MSI Wind have been four times higher than that of the XP version.

MSI: Wind Doing Well, Linux Version Not So Much.

As you can read in the article quoted above, the Linux variant of MSI’s netbook named Wind isn’t doing so well. It turns out that users don’t want to learn a whole new OS, but rather stick to Windows.

The discussion about the reason of this is already heating up. Some say that it is because Linux is just worse than Windows — I definitely don’t agree with this — other say that it’s caused by the way MSI deployed the distribution or by SuSE. Some people are even blaming the news sites for being pro-Microsoft.

The title my main source of IT news, the Dutch Tweakers.net, has chosen a more generalizing title for their article, Netbooks with Linux are 4 times more often returned, since it’s just about MSI’s netbook. However, their article does provide some more information about what MSI wants to do against this.

They’re not very content with SuSE and consider changing the distribution. One suggestion from inside the company is to use Ubuntu with the look and feel of Mac OS X.

I think that this all is caused by people not knowing what they’re buying. Most people go for the cheapest one when the specifications are generally the same and find out after they’ve opened the box that it has a completely different OS, if they even know what an OS is. Explaining the differences between the both versions could help, but when the buyers don’t know much about the system that can be hard to do.

What should be done? Advising the Windows system to computer illiterates because that’s what is mostly used or advise the cheaper and according to my opinion better Linux equivalent, making Linux bigger, which is good for all distributions?

I think that at least the difference between the two OSes should be made more clear on a understandable way in the description, even though not everyone would understand it completely. Next to that the salesmen should also highlight this difference and explain it. However, in my eyes MSI has the largest responsibillity. They have to deliver a good and easy-to-understand system with support that’s easily available. MSI can do this by picking the right software and help a bit if needed. But if there is nothing good to chose from, they’ve got a problem. This is the responsibility of the Linux community. We need to provide something that is suitable for this.

Canonical already made a good start with creating an Ubuntu netbook remix, which looked good in my eyes. I don’t know how the SuSE version at the Wind look like, because I couldn’t find any screenshots and browsing MSI’s website gives the idea a Linux version of the Wind doesn’t exist at all. The “MSI recommends Windows® for everyday computing” sentence everywhere at the website doesn’t give you a better feeling too.

It seems that Linux isn’t really important here, which is a pitty because I think that the area where Linux can show it’s qualities is the netbook class. I hope this will improve in the future, who knows what will happen in the future? The announcement of Microsoft that Windows XP is going to be available for a longer time gives at least some hope, because it proves that Windows Vista isn’t suitable (yet?) for a lot of people who rather want to use legacy software than the newest member of the Windows family.

In een woord: walgelijk.

Hoe kan iemand zo kortzichtig zijn? Zo blind, zo dom? Alsof de Islam de enige godsdienst is die totale werelddominatie zou hebben nagestreefd/nastreven. Ook in de Bijbel staan honderden levensregeltjes. En wat te zeggen van de expansiedrang van het christendom en dan voornamelijk het katholieke geloof? Bijna direct na de stichting van de Kerk door keizer Constantijn was een van de belangrijkste doelen van de nieuwe christen het bekeren van heidenen, al dan niet met geweld. Denk maar aan de heilige Bonifatius die ook geen lievertje was. Of de kruistochten.
Waarom dhr. Wilders de politicus van het jaar geworden is mij nog steeds een raadsel. Het enige waar hij werkelijk goed in is, is het bespelen van de media. De enige media die hem echt durfde aan te pakken was HARDTalk, de andere media zijn te bang Geert Wilders kwijt te raken. In het interview met HARDTalk wordt echt duidelijk dat Geert Wilders echt racistisch is. Hij wil het eerste artikel van de grondwet, die discriminatie verbiedt, vervangen door een die vastlegt dat de Leitkultur(waar kennen we dat begrip ook al weer van?) in Nederland een joods-christelijke is en is er erg op tegen dat Rotterdam en Amsterdam voor de meerderheid zwart worden. Hij ziet dat als een probleem. Waarom? Wat is er erg aan? En alhoewel hij verscheidene keren zegt dat hij niet alle immigranten slecht vindt, generaliseert hij toch vlak daarna weer.  Maar hij moet gewoon accepteren dat culturen soms veranderen. Vroeger waren we Germaans, toen is het christendom ons opgedrongen, al dan niet met geweld. En nu krijgen we misschien met islamistische aspecten te maken. Maar wat is daar zo erg aan? Het Chinees-Indisch restaurant is ook heel populair, maar zeker niet Nederlands of joods-christelijk. Volgens verschillende mensen die verstand hebben van de islam zijn het vooral de fundamentalische islamieten die de Koran niet goed lezen. De islam zou een godsdienst van vrede zijn en is bovendien gebaseerd op het oude testament, wat ook in de Bijbel gebruikt wordt. Als de Koran verboden wordt moet ook een deel van de Bijbel verboden worden.
Alle godsdiensten moeten gelijk behandeld worden. Waarom is het oproepen tot het doden van een vrouw die overspel heeft gepleegd wel erg als het in de Koran staat, maar niet als het in de Bijbel staat? Er zijn inderdaad een boel fundamentalisten in deze wereld. Maar dat wil niet zeggen dat je de islamieten moet behandelen op een manier die erg doet denken aan de manier waarop een zekere godsdienst werd behandeld in de jaren 40-42.

Ik roep iedereen op: doe wat tegen Geert Wilders/de PVV of we worden wakker na een regeerperiode van dhr. Wilders als een vredesmacht van de NATO de randstad bezet houdt om onrusten te voorkomen en foto’s van kampen als bij Schiphol  de hele wereld overgaan om aan te tonen hoe die de westerse beschaving kan zinken.

De overheid heeft een tijd terug aangekondigd strenger te gaan controleren of scholen wel aanbieden wat de overheid verplicht stelt. Doen ze dat niet dan moet er een boete betaalt worden. Want, zo zegt de overheid, wij hebben de scholen geld gegeven om les te geven. Wij hebben ze geld gegeven voor een vooraf bepaald aantal uren. Zijn die niet gegeven dan hebben ze dat geld ook niet verdiend, het is bedoeld voor de lessen waar de leerlingen recht op hebben.
Dit neemt echter absurde vormen aan, zoals te zien is bij het Piter Jelles, die 244.000 euro moeten terug moeten betalen aan de overheid. Maar, dan vraag ik mij af, waar moet die school in hemelsnaam dat geld vandaan halen? Ouderbijdrage verhogen? Bezuinigen op materiaal, gebouwen of leraren? Een van de oorzaken van een tekort aan les is een tekort aan leraren. Dat vererger je alleen maar door een boete te eisen. Met welk geld moet de school dan extra leraren aannemen die uitgevallen collega’s vervangen?

Ook andere problemen dienen zich aan. Zo is dit een van de belangrijkste reden waarom leraren amper of niet naar bijscholing kunnen, waardoor de kwaliteit van het onderwijs achteruit gaat. Een school zette 65plussers in om in te vallen voor absente docenten. Ze kunnen niet zo snel aan vervangende docenten komen, wat komt door een gebrek aan geld en leraren, een beroep wat niet zo populair meer is.

Het kan best wel met niet ‘genoeg’ uren zoals een aantal scholen laten zien. Dat is ook het punt van LAKS. Ze willen af van het verplichte aantal uren dat scholen per jaar moeten maken. Het gaat om nu veel te veel om kwantiteit, terwijl kwaliteit veel en veel belangrijker is. Wat heb je eraan om in een lokaal te zitten in het bijzijn van iemand met een bevoegdheid, maar die zelf ook niet weet wat je het beste kunt doen? Geef het geld voor die uren en administratie van onderwijstijd en boetes uit aan wat nuttigers! Want zeg nou zelf, betere, nieuwe methodes, betere begeleiding voor mensen die moeilijk en juist erg makkelijk kunnen leren, materiaal en leraren zijn toch veel beter dan een klas kauwgom laten schrapen in het bijzijn van een onderwijsassistent.
Dus, teken de petities op stop1024.nl en de website van de onderwijsbond!  Laat je school aansluiten bij het Bewust Kiezen voor Kwaliteit platform! Want op deze manier maak je scholing niet beter, je helpt alleen scholen nog meer naar beneden.