soledad penadés

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When so many steps and details need to be considered before including a couple of games in a repository, how can you expect people to use free software without certain fear, uncertainty and doubts? ;-)

I just gave the finishing touches to my first public wordpress plugin: Delicatessen. Sounds yummy, doesn't it?

If you're a veeeeeeeery curious person (just like me) you'll love this plug-in. It should satisfy your innermost desires and much more. Well, not that much but at least it will allow you to find who's linking you in del.icio.us, since there's not an easy way of finding that information in del.icio.us itself.

Hope you enjoy it!

So there goes the cakephp + phpbb integration - just commited the files to Subversion and uploaded a tgz package for the lazy ones, some hours ago.

And I don't know if there's expectation about the project or maybe it's just a malfunction in the stats system, but somehow it was one of the most active projects this week. How can it be possible if it was approved two days ago? But hey, it's nice anyway…

Yesterday after work was quite funny. Following british habits, almost everybody in the office went to a near pub for some drinks. That's quite interesting since that way you can learn what everybody else in the office is doing, or what do they do outside office hours, etc.

Then somebody asked me: You must be a linux expert, no?

Me? God, I wish I was! It seems that Ubuntu it's so easy that you look like an expert, hehe, that's really funny. Then I was asked why I was using it, if I wasn't really an expert on it, instead of using windows, and I must recognize it's quite complicated to explain.

In my previous jobs I could just use windows. It wasn't really a problem until I got my powerbook. Then I started feeling windows more and more clumsy - and annoying. But I still had to stick with it, since there was no opportunity to switch to mac or linux. One day I asked about installing ubuntu in one of the computers and there were two answers:

1. linux is just for servers (and only red hat enterprise linux)
2. how can someone install a linux distribution with such an ugly name? (ubuntu)

Obviously I got discouraged and just thought: ok, but you don't know what you're losing. Some time after we replaced a pirate copy of windows XP with ubuntu at our home server, and I quite liked that new version. I thought: if it wasn't because I have MacOsX… I would install linux in my powerbook!
And somehow on the other hand I got aware of the goodness of using open source products. Now this is really hard to explain, as it may sound like a divine message or something, but the main reason is the data:

One day you don't care about open source or anything and consider the same freeware and open source. Next day (after the message came) you realise that you want to keep your data with you - and for that, you need to use programs which only use standard file formats, or open source software. So that if you change your program, your data keeps being usable.

I somehow got the final nudge when I switched from Apple's Mail.app to Thunderbird. I don't know why, I started feeling bad about using Apple's Mail. I thought: and what if I bought another computer and it's not a mac and I want to copy my email data, what am I going to do? The horror!

I discovered that although Mail.app used an standard mbox format at the beginning, they changed it so that the files could be indexed by the Spotlight. So what happened? It was not standard anymore, and I was quite lucky that some good soul had written an script for converting between Mail 2 format and the standard mbox one.
Since then I got more and more interested in this kind of software. I know it may sound a bit ridiculous if you come from the commercial background that most of us live in, but the ubuntu philosophy -providing software freely- really hit me. The idea of not being tied to any company may sound quite utopical but I believe it's good to have utopies in mind.

And then (coming back to the topic) when new computers came to the office, they had a preinstalled windows XP. I asked if I could install linux on my computer and when they told of course! I was like W-O-H-!

Since then I've been using it continuously, and can't stop being surprised every day with the good achievements and goals it has reached. I also have become aware of how many money do companies spend stupidly in things like Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows and all of that. I mean, companies could save lots of money if they could just buy bare computers with no operating system installed at all, and install only whatever they needed. Specially, computers for developers: I have a fully equipped computer for the price of 0. Just do some maths!

There are also other aspects even more complicated to explain, mainly that using free software is like making an payment to the developers. Paying with recognition, honours, and even bug reports, to be honest. I believe any decent programmer should be happy with people contributing to the software in any manner, as it means that they care about the product. So somehow there's like an spontaneous collaboration, which I personally find very interesting. (Let alone project donations, that I also have made, but that's another topic)

As you can see, the reasons for using linux are many and subjective, and most of them fall quite quickly in the personal beliefs area, being very easy to start evangelising and trying to force everybody to go linux. I do not think that it is the way, since as I said once, I got very dissapointed with linux zealots in the past. So when I have the opportunity to explain my opinions I do it happily, with the hope that it serves more people to understand this personal attitude (and maybe join it as well).

Some years ago I somehow ridiculised the radical efforts of the linux fanatics everywhere we discussed any topic, specially when they tried to introduce their love for their operating system on every single occassion - even if it was not a suitable one. It really got on my nerves, and was a kind of "Ok, just don't get near linux, you'll be scared of those freaking nerds". And it was actually true… each time you tried to get any information on linux you got a cascade of non-argued reasons, which didn't help at all; in fact they just served the opposite purpose, to make me avoid open source as much as possible, and just rely on commercial products, while increasing my general confusion about all things linux.

But there was a new actor which was appeared in the scenario, and it was called Firebird - later renamed to Firefox. First time I heard of it, it was the usual dabbadabba from ultralinux fanatics: oh yeah there's a new browser which is open source and it's free and it's supercool because it has tabs and well, it actually is open source and based on netscape's source code…! I felt a chill in my spine. Based in netscape… URGH. I already had had to develop a couple of relatively big websites and I it was kind of a nightmare to have a decent styling on the then omnipresent Netscape 3/4. CSS? WTF? who needs css when you can have inline font declarations?

So I just kept avoiding firefox for a while, until they started their reasonable and human campaign: Take back the web. And they did it well! Why advertise things which are so surreal and ethereal such as open source, ability to access the intimacies of the browser and so on, when what people wanted was to browse any page without playing a hit-or-miss game against the pop ups?

Then it gained value for me. A browser which removed the annoyances and dangers, and could be customised at your will, and even more - which was reliable: you put some standard css and it worked. End of the story: it works. Somehow one can think it is the same idea that was used for advertising macs: they simply work.

Moral implications come later, just by the sole fact of being remotely involved with the community. Any open source software community will do, even a very small one. Using the software, getting in touch with developers, submitting bug reports, suggestions, even contributing with more code or documentation… makes you feel like you're kind of giving back something of what you have received for free (Note: I know there are also stupid coders which won't care about how many bugs you submit and won't accept any suggestion or fix anyway. Yes there are idiots everywhere - I suppose it's inherent to human nature).

It also makes you aware of the implications of closed software. What if that program which you absolutely need gets discontinued and there's a hidden bug which appears next year, and there's no one which can fix it, and you don't have a way of migrating your data to a new program? Cry.

With open source, it is different. Not in the sense that even your six year old niece could fix the funky, although buggy, Tux-goes-to-snowland game, but it means that maybe someone which is interested enough can do it. Or maybe you can pay him/her for doing it. But at least there's one way out; you're not trapped.

And that is my point: if you/we want people to move to opensource products, we have to use real reasons. Do not talk about religious like premises, they won't work. People want value, not airy sentences without any immediate effect on their pockets or timetables. Show them Firefox, Thunderbird, Ubuntu, Open Office, Gaim, Blender, Python, PHP, Apache, Ruby, Rails, MySQL, gcc, wordpress… and then they will get convinced.
Now about giving back to the community… I have been thinking about it thoroughly: there are thousands of companies making money of open source software without donating a single dollar back for it. But I came to one conclusion: if they don't give a buck for free software, they won't give it either for commercial, non-free software. They will copy it illegally as well… amoral people are not stopped by laws however.

It's quite funny how they try to protect themselves from the GPL implications. I have seen quite a lot of project managers and company directors feverishly studying the GPL to find out how can they avoid to distribute the source code of their applications based on GPL software, while not having to adhere to a commercial license (and hence having to pay).

For example, they are particularly obsessed with MySQL licensing. MySQL comes in two license flavours, one is the GPL which makes you distribute the sources of the application you build using MySQL, and the commercial one, which allows you to not to distribute anything, if you pay. So there are those avaricious and greedy executives which are going to save the value of an Oracle or MSSQL server license (which is not little amount) and don't even want to donate a ridiculous amount for allowing the coders to have some beers. They will justify that they do not distribute the application - but install it in their private servers, hence it is not distributing anything. Miserable wankers! Sometimes I really would like the judges to take more seriously the GPL and give all these people a good lesson.

Even though, I'm very optimistic about all of this open source scene. Now that we have learnt the lesson, more useful products are being developed with higher quality standards than commercial software. A simple comparison ridiculises commercial software: compare bloated internet explorer 7, after more than 5 years of what they call "development" and still can't support main CSS features which other open source browsers such as Firefox or Safari do support since more than one year ago. Want more? Compare Ubuntu with Windows, for instance.

Also, it's not only about individuals, companies seem to have changed their approach too. See macromedia/adobe with their new Flash 9 open source compilers and IDEs, for example. All of this looks very promising. Maybe it's just that open source is getting really mature and it's ready for invading every single electronic device on Earth. Maybe it's just us becoming adults and aware of what we do with computers.

But there's still quite a lot of work to do: lots of these programs need a good rework on interfacing and documentation, otherwise they are unusable and obscure. Lots more are ego-pumping projects for their developers, which didn't work as they expected and so are abandoned. Same occurs for the projects which just duplicate the functionalities of another one, but do not add anything new - for example, CMS software. Do not misunderstand me: I'm all for people writing whatever code they want, but it's stupid to start yet-another-CMS-for-LAMP when there are lots of them which are not even finished. What those projects need is a bit of collaboration between individuals so as to conquer more than one small sandhill, and reach the peak of a big mountain instead.

And we all can contribute to it! Long life open source!