James Boston's Code Blog

I recently finished reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. If you haven't read the book, but want a flavour of it, check out his talk at TED:
Institutions versus collaboration

For those not familiar with Shirky or the book, he's what I guess you would call a new media theorist. He's not quite a Marshall McLuhan for our time, but his stuff is in the same vein. What happens when you add new communications technology to human society? The tech is of course the Internets.

The chapter "Everyone is a media outlet" is a must read for anyone left earning a living as a journalist. It will either blow your mind or make you want to blow your brains out. It all depends on how you cope with change.

However, there was one quote from that chapter that lept out at me as wrong:

Publishing used to require access to a printing press, and as a result the act of publishing something was limited to a tiny fraction of the population, and reaching a population outside a geographically limited area was even more restricted. Now, once a user connects to the internet, he has access to a platform that is at once global and free.

Free is one of those funny words. It has two meanings: free as in speech and free as in beer. I think that he is using it here in the latter sense. In a later chapter he refers explicitly to blogging as something without cost:

Another advantage of blogs over traditional media outlets is that no one can found a newspaper on a moment's notice, run it for two issues, and then fold it, while incurring no cost but leaving a permanent record.

This reminds me of the old joke, "We have freedom of the press, but only for those who own a press." What I mean is that if blogger.com is your press, Google owns it. Google may not charge you money for it, but bills are still being paid somewhere. And even if you do buy your own hosting, something that most Internet users don't do, you still don't own the press. The infrastructure between your computer and some other random Internet user is massive, complex and expensive. For this new press to be both free as in speech and free as in beer requires a great deal of government and industry investment.

I think that if we want the Internet to remain free as in speech, we shouldn't skate past the fact that it is not free as in beer.

But seriously, it's a great book. I had it in my Toronto Public Library queue for five months before I got it. That's almost as long as I've been waiting for the Button-down mind of Bob Newhart.

I attended FSOSS last week. (It was awesome!) I've got notes, but I want to post a quick word about two speakers for whom I don't have notes before I forget what they said.

I talked with Marcus Bornfreund a bit after his presentation on Creative Commons. He had talked about commercial and non-commercial usage in his talk, and I wanted to get a bit deeper into that.

"What constitutes commercial usage?" I asked. I gave him a scenario where I have a blog (I do) with ads (I don't), but I post someone else's CC licensed stuff without asking (I haven't).

"What do you think?" he replied, but not in a snarky way. He did it in the twinkly-eyed way of a lawyer having fun with something that appears cut and dry at first glance, but turns into a hopelessly ambiguous quagmire after a few minutes of the Socratic method. (The lawyer always gets to play the part of Socrates.)

The blogger who makes a living from ad revenue is largely a mythical creature, so even though it is a clear violation of the CC license, I argued that the marginal commercial value of the typical blog should factor into the equation. Most bloggers don't make enough from Adsense to cover hosting.

"So you would quantify it?" asked Bornfreund. What he meant is that you can't. Net and gross can mean anything in the hands of a good accountant.

I don't think we necessary resolved the question, but what I found interesting was that Bornfreund didn't resort to legalese in making his points. When asked whether it was okay to re-publish or perform CC licensed stuff to raise money for charity his reply was, "How would you feel about that?"

Of course, as he pointed out in his talk, you can always ask for permission to use content. It's obvious, but then again, is it?

I didn't get to see the presentation by FSOSS's other lawyer, Thomas Prowse, but I did get to talk to him at the reception.

He said that he didn't believe that we would ever see legal challenges to open source licenses taken all the way to the Supreme Court.

"Sometimes when you win you lose," he said. He didn't think either side in a dispute would risk taking it all the way, but would settle instead. There will probably never be a perfect test case for either side.

I think this is as it should be. It's possible to get so wrapped up in whether or not the GPL or CC will stand up in court that one forgets that the laws are made by people to serve people (theoretically). Copyleft advocates should be ready for a legal fight, but it would serve our long term interests better to lobby our elected officials for laws that clearly enshrine open source licenses.

I don't know if Michael Geist has ever spoken at FSOSS in the past, but he would be a great person to invite next year. He's a great advocate for that approach.

"What is open source to you?" asks David Humphrey.

I was still brooding over that question when I read an article in the Star by 'Public Editor' Kathy English:

Farewell gonzo, goodbye geeko79

It got me thinking about the business I used to be in, news reporting. Before I was a computer programmer, I used to drink before noon work at a newspaper covering sports, courts, councils and car crashes. So I know a little bit about how the culture of hacks (that's what journos call themselves... really!) and hackers differ.

Until recently, the Toronto Star has been publishing anonymous comments from its web pages in its print edition. But that's all over now:

The Star's brief experiment in what's been called "reverse-publishing" has been halted – ending the publication of pseudonymous online comments in the newspaper in a "Web Forum" feature that took up nearly a quarter of the space long allotted to signed, verified letters to the editor.

The way English describes the decision to stop publishing the commments, I can't quite figure out if she has irony impairement or is a brilliant dead pan satirist:

Early this month, Star Editor-in-Chief Fred Kuntz, who had initially defended the Web Forum as a means of creating synergy between the newspaper and its website, said he decided to end the feature after "hearing out both sides of the debate, and agreeing with those against."

Really? Synergy? Seriously? Okay. I imagine a meeting in which the publisher demands that the paper be 20% more rad but only 3% more eXTReMe after seeing declining readership numbers among the 'web generation'. I can only assume that English secretly hates Fred Kuntz and wants to make a fool out of him without getting fired.

The whole tone of the article is one of contempt for the Internet where ZOMG! people can say what they want:

Long before the Internet empowered anyone and everyone to muse anonymously with their opinions on anything and everything, newspapers were inviting readers to have their say on the Letters page. But the Letters pages of serious newspapers have always held themselves to a high standard of discourse. The Star verifies the identities of its letter writers and edits letters for accuracy, taste, length, grammar and spelling.

I'm sorry your attempt to combine 4chan with a family newspaper didn't work out. Nobody saw that coming.

But I'm getting a bit off topic. My purpose is not to rant about the totally genius and sure-footed aplomb with which newspaper publishers have met the digital age, but to rant about the hacks who actually do the work.

One last quote from the article, the most interesting I think:

In a letter to the editor published Sept. 29, Toronto reader Robert Fripp wrote this: "Why has the Star cut the Letters page in favour of Web Forum, where correspondents lack the courage to attach their own names? This double standard debases the whole page."

That letter provoked a newsroom petition signed by more than 100 journalists who agreed with the letter writer...."

English would have us believe that the 100 journos are concerned about integrity, moral fiber, standards, what-not, but after reading that quote, I can almost smell the sweat and panic. There is a genuine terror among news scribes because of all this unpaid writing going on across the Internet.

Don't believe me? Here's something one journo wrote and posted to the Canadian Association of Journalists listserv:

....frankly, I doubt the distributed reporting model advocated by the likes of Jay Rosen (NYU school of journalism, Press Think blog, Assignment Zero). About three years ago during one of those re-imagining excercises newspapers go through from time to time, our staff was asked to imagine what a 'newspaper' fifteen years in the future would look like. I suggested it would be something much closer to the movie business: a virtual company with staff that came together on a freelance basis to produce each and every issue. It would be an aggregager of hyper-local reporting with freelancers pitching stories ideas - and bidding on others - in a fluid marketplace managed by the "paper"'s few full-time employees.
I fear that nightmare may yet come true.
And I'm not sure the CAJ should be creating awards to hasten its arrival.

An aggregator of freelancers in a fluid market? I'm not going to bring up digg or reddit. It's like kicking puppies at this point.

The very existence of the CAJ listserv brings me back to the original point that I keep straying from: I can join their journos only listserv because I have credentials but you can't because you're not a journalist so suck it. The whole attitude of journos to the freelancer and the hobbyist is antithetical to hacker culture. Attempts at 'citizen journalism' and other forms of transparency have not exactly swept the industry. All of the vaguely journalistic analogs to a Mozilla or a Linux haven't come from the hacks, but from the hackers. (I guess I am bringing up reddit again.) There is a real fear of what will happen if anyone is allowed to do journalism. Journalists desperately want to retain their role as gatekeepers. But it's that very distrust of openness that is killing journalism and lowering the public opinion of journalists.

Sure, hackers like to rib IRC newbies (who doesn't?) but ultimately they can be found on IRC because there's a real desire to share the love of coding. It's that idea that anyone can play and everyone should play. Hackers don't say, you can't do what I can do. They say, you can't do what I can do but I can help you get there (if you're not an idiot willing to learn).

When I was a reporter, the only mail I got was big foot sightings and people telling me I suck. Nobody ever wrote in to say that something I wrote helped them.

In my brief career as a programmer, I have got emails from people I've helped and who want to help me. People have been downloading, modifying and using my Process Manager code. When I finish the new nsIProcess API I hope it will get an even bigger response from the community. I get a satisfaction from this that I never found in journalism.

If you've worked both inside and outside of open source, you will appreciate how revolutionary the invitation to participate is.