Freestyle - FLOSS In Design - Transcription 1
Freestyle FLOSS in Design seminar
Transcription, part one
Rotterdam, May 19th 2004.
Calum Selkirk
Steve Kovats: Good morning everybody and if we can just get the sound down in the (...)thanks, Yes first of all welcome everybody to V2, the institute for the unstable media here in Rotterdam, my name is Stephen Kovats I guess your agent from V2 for the day I am working here to organize events like this - in this case a collaboration that we started some time ago together with Matthew Fuller from the Piet Zwart Institute. In this case also together with the Hogeshool Van Amsterdam together with Geert Lovink who you'll meet later on today or in a few minutes this morning, our session today Freestyle, using FLOSS in design and art will be introduced by Calum Selkirk here to my right.
Calum is the systems operator at the Piet Zwart Institute and he will tell you a little bit about the Piet Zwart Institute and about the topic today. I basically just wanted to say a couple of words from the side of V2_ and why we do this kind of event. As an institute which deals with not just the support and not just, let's say the broadcasting of electronic media arts we are also strongly involved in developing systems, we develop software, we develop hardware applications and we try at least as is fundamentally possible to develop work within an open source environment. But even this is, is something which is constantly being subjugated by, let's say, 'default mentality', I mean you probably see here...ok in this case not but of course we'd usually be using browsers which are Internet Explorer, stuff like that. So we have a real problem actually in dealing with the space in between proprietary software, open source systems and all the kind of strange things that are going on in between. And today's session is I think really important in the sense that is probably one of the first times that we have really tried to examine really what is this difficult space in between, and how to deal with it. And I hope that with our guests we'll get a good insight into it and be able to, actually, initiate some of the work which is shown here into our own practice as an institution. Its quite an important thing I think to note.
Just a quick note here, the screen on my right hand side this is the IRC chat, there is also a channel open. All day for people who want to participate from outside. I'll be running the moderation for the chat so when people have questions coming up from the outside, I'll throw them onto the panel, they will be able to see and hear from the stream, as long as they are getting the stream and you can follow their commentary as well, (so hopefully they'll keep to the topic). Anyhow I don't want to pull the introduction into the afternoon sessions so I'd just like to pass the mic onto Calum Selkirk for the introduction to Free Style, FLOSS and design.
Calum Selkirk:Ok, thanks Steve, hello and welcome, as Steve said my name is Calum Selkirk. I'm the Systems Administrator for the Piet Zwart Institute. This seminar is organized as part of Media Design Research at PZI, a programme which aims to developed critical thinking and activity in Media Design through a series of Research fellowships, publications and seminars.
Not wanting to spend any more than was necessary on speakers, or rather, spend what was available on booze for the speakers hospitality suite, I was asked to give an introduction of sorts. It's not that I mind so much but the kind of bad trip that was laid on me would have driven a saner man to hunker up in a corner in a fit of paranoia and self doubt. 'Just speak about .. umm .. all the .. umm .. stuff you umm .. and ah .. try to make it .. umm .. accessible to umm .. and none of your off the cuff rants Selkirk .. or your name is dirt'. These are dark and dangerous times for Systems Administrators, I can tell you .. and so without much further ado ...
This beautiful beast (picture of the RSTA-MEP http://www.linuxjournal.com/modules/NS-lj-issues/issue114/6634f1.png/) is the Raytheon Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition Mission Equipment Package (RSTA-MEP) ... quite a mouthful ... in layman's terms one might call it a 'mobile command centre', an item that should be somewhat familiar to anyone who attended any of the demonstrations opposing the WTO in Seattle, Genoa, Evian etc.
It's 'sensors and software provide for Wide Area Search (WAS) imaging, automatic target detection (ATD) and aided target recognition (AiTR) capabilities'. This quote is not, as you might expect, from Soldier of Fortune, but from the October 2003 issue of the Linux Journal. The Raytheon RSTA-MEP is, at least in terms of it's key technological components, software, a product of Free and Open Source development.
The authors of the RSTA-MEP article outlined no cost benefit analysis of the use of 'Open Source' in this specific project, but it's a fairly safe bet to place economics as a high concern in it's adoption. The following quote from an article titled 'Toward an Open-Source Government' in the same October 2003 Linux Journal is perhaps more illustrative: 'Many people in the Open Source community have long believed that open source and government are a good match. As any state level politician can verify, US state governments are faced with the worst budget conditions in at last 50 years. In addition to having to gut and cut programs and services possibly needed by more people than ever, many schools and state funded universities are expected to provide more technology for more students with the same or less money. In light of these conditions, some proponents of open source believe now is the perfect opportunity for states to save money by moving legacy systems to, and creating new systems that run on, open-source software'.
I begin with the RSTA-MEP not specifically to make any kind of political statement on the status of the Free/Libre & Open Source movements, what people do in the privacy of their own police state is entirely their own concern. It's too grossly simplistic to not place each one of us, as taxable subjects, within the confines of the arms factory. In this sense the notion of a 'pure' politic is of course non-sense. My intention, if somewhat circuitously, is to get out from under the two generalized methods of talking about Free & Open Source software, that is, in terms of 'freedom', which is essentially a political position, and one represented in this debacle by the Free Software Foundation, and the more pragmatic position, one which is predominantly expressed in terms of economics, and one represented by the Open Software Initiative.
It's not, however, without some sense of irony to that I begun with the RSTA-MEP and other 'opportunities for states to save money', when current US defense spending is running at 1.2 Billion USD per day. And what, by extension, it might mean to talk about about freedom, as presented by the Free Software movement, devoid of thoughts of political and economic power. Here Raytheon's claim that 'We own the kill chain' is quite accurate, and reminiscent of Albert Einstein's statement that 'technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal'.
Of course there are other minor, or less emphasized, themes woven between 'free' and 'open' arguments, those of standards, participation, disclosure, access. However design is possibly the least discussed, if it enters the discussion at all, or if entering the discussion, placed entirely subservient to the imperatives of 'freedom' and 'economics'.
In a interview back in 1999 Richard Stallman was asked, '.. if Free Software produced inferior software, you would chose it?', to which Stallmans reply was 'Yes. Because I won't give up my freedom for a little convenience'. Not that I would necessarily infer that Free Software WILL produce inferior software, but it does beg the question of what kinds of software the Free Software & Open Source movements are heading toward? What designs other than, by definition, those meeting the criterion 'free' or 'open'. Will the market choose? The programmers? Some kind of darwinian evolutionary process? (don't laugh, some open source advocates actually view the Open Source development model in these terms), or will the unquantifiable thousands of code monkeys plugged into the internet reach equilibrium before the forces of entropy drag us back into pre-civilized sludge?
On top of these questions we can ask those of a more generalized nature. Is software parity with the propriety world desirable? What kind of culture do these softwares engender? What technological savvy is necessary to leverage the tools themselves? What constitutes 'user interface'? Where does the end user, non-programmer, and in the context of the seminar, the designer, fit into the equation? What kinds of antagonisms and areas of contestation do these softwares open up?
The Answers to these questions, if there are any definitive answers, would certainly take more than my fifteen minutes introduction allows, but we can hope, from the scope of the speakers here, that some of these questions can be touched on. Or, better still, give some framework to generate your own set of questions.
When sitting down to write this piece I seriously wondered if I'm at all qualified to talk about design, even software design, having been a free software user and developer since '96. I'm still using the same mail client I used twelve years ago and my interface to computers is almost entirely done via the hermetic vocabulary of the command line interface. My aesthetics are almost paleolithic in terms of the fast pace evolution of the internet and attendant technologies. The best I could say about the design, would come, more often than not, after a bout of wrestling with some piece of crap software, and most of what would be said would be completely incoherent, if not simply abusive. It's very much a gut reaction, and one that is probably born of many years of internalizing, rather than externalizing, design.
One idea I've often tried to explain, and not necessarily as a advocate of either side, is the difference, and by that I mean the very tactile difference, of command line interface and graphical user interface. There is some zone of incomprehension you enter when talking to someone who's frame of reference, in terms of user interface, is entirely graphical. They can only view you, a command line interface user, as either someone who has super human skills in the memory department or is some kind of sick masochist, and once established it's a tough image to kick. Part of problem, I think, is that there is a misconception re command line interfaces, that they are somehow historical throwbacks, remnants of early software development, rather than one particular design model for computer-human interaction. The graphical user interface was NOT an evolution, but a co-existent design model.
This perhaps is the rubic cube for how we might think about todays seminar. On one plane presenting what's currently available in terms of Free and Open Source software, the 'tool's for design' themselves, and on another tangential plane, the design of software, it's interface, theoretical underpinnings, the kind of culture generated from it's development and use.
And I'd just like to give a quick plug to those graduating from the Piet Zwart Institute's media design master course. Their final show would be held the 18th of June at Overblaak 85, beginning at 5 p.m.
And so now I think I need to introduce Geert Lovink. I have no idea what he is gonna be talking about...
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh
Geert Lovink:
Thanks everyone for coming here, is a pleasure for me to introduce you to Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. He is well known for his essay he wrote in the late 90's about the cooking pot markets, that's how I got to know him. At that time he was still based in Delhi and around 2000 he moved to Mastricht to the Netherlands, where he took up a research job at the school of informatics, all together with Luc Souter.
Rishab has been doing quite a number of large scale researches ever since, the first one also is quite well known it looks into the demographics of software, open source free software developers, who they are, where they are located and sort of looks into the economics of the movement itself. He then moved onto a few different topics. He got involved also in politics, dutch politics and European politics in the struggle against European patent law. And his latest research is about more global nature, and looks into the distribution of open source developers in particular in non-western regions. It's a big honor for us that he could make it here and Rishab is going to give you and introduction about code culture and economics because thats what the context is about here. Thank you.
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh: Thank you. I am very happy to be here and I'm going to talk about first some results from the free software survey. A survey about free software developers, especially aspects related to motivation, why developers do this apparently for free. Then I'll go on to some of the aspects of well, what we call intellectual property ( for more than anything else ) that allow the economics of distributed collaborative production to work in a way that is feasible to do this for free and try to relate that to design and art and various cultural production as (it were). And finally I'll describe some aspects related to pricing issues in developing countries when we started the first FLOSS survey .
FLOSS stands for Free Libre Open Source Software, it's now become a fairly widely used term especially in Latin America and Asia and Southern Europe where the problem between free software and open source never existed. Free software is what the movement was always called but in English free means freedom or free as in 0 price, and free as in 0 price puts off people in business. But that was not meant by free software in the first place, the emphasis was always on freedom. so open source was created as a sort of marketing term. But in countries with latin languages it's always been called some variant of libre software, in French its always been logiciel libre in Spanish, software libre, software libero in Italian. In Europe, libre software is another term and we created this term to unite all three.
Our original goal was not to look at software in itself but as software as one of the most easy to measure and easy to quantify forms of collaborative production that occur on the internet. So there are lots of different forms of what i call non-monetary economic activities that occur thanks to the connective power of the internet and they include outputs in user groups and lately Wiki and so on . But software is the easiest to measure and is the easiest to quantify because you can also compare it to proprietary software and the commercial software industry and then forget some idea of the degree of production that is going on and what people are not explicitly paying for.
So, what we found and what we believe is that software development when money is not involved, when money is involved also, but then when money is not involved you have to focus in this other aspects is a social process and is based on many things as fun, pride, and a community spirit, but of course so is investment banking and thats one of the things that i've been arguing from the beginning - that you can't look at free software as a non-economic activity, anymore than you can look at investment banking as a non-economical activity.
You can study the sociology of an investment bankers and indeed anthropologist go in look at you know,look at team management in investment banking and it's very interesting that if all they would care about was money and how they move from one bank to another you wouldn't have this strange phenomena that his or her team moves with him. Because they work in groups and there are lots of social dynamics there and similarly in software when people are not paying for it you might think that you should only look at all the fun and joyful reasons because people do it but there is an economics there as much and, the economics is what we want to look at . Similarly, management theory draws on psycho-sociological explanations. But seeing it as economics helps us to examine the sustainability of free software social links between people. And seeing it as economics help us in seeing it as a system of creating and producing things of value and possibly also its applicability towards other domains such as art.
What we, what I argue is that free software is not really a new economics, its not a new anything because it doesn't have any new values or beliefs that have not occurred in some other aspect of society over time wether its from various communal sharing social systems or academic science, the scientific community for instance. It's the economics of collaboration that on the other hand does something new because, the economics of collaborative production on the internet, thanks to the technology of the internet and thanks to the fact that the problems of creating software can be broken down into smaller problems that can be solved by individuals contributing small amounts and working towards creating a unified whole is what makes this work as a functioning system.
One of the most interesting things from my survey was this (shows slide). So: the 'reasons to start and continue free software developmen'. We asked this question in a number of different ways, including 'what you think the free software community is?', but this is a response to 2 questions, 'what was your reason to continue?', 'what was your reason to start participation in the free software community?'. That's the blue lines and 'what was the reasons to continue with the free software community?', that's the orange lines. And we divided it somehow arbitrarily into 'social', 'political', 'product-related' signaling and 'monetary'.
What was most interesting here for us is that learning and developing new skills and some other of the social, combined with signaling effects, were very important whereas the traditional explanations that people are doing it just for fun or that are doing it because they don't like Microsoft were not so important for people when they joined. But the process of working in the free software community is a politicizing process and therefore you see that people did not think, did not join the free software community because they thought that software should not be proprietary or they don't like their companies but having participated in the free software community they get politicized. Similarly people did not join the free software community in order to make money. That's just 5 percent that give that as a reason. But 12% gave that as a reason to continue, presumably because they discover that you can actually make money with free software. We created this based on the groups of social, political, etcetera.
We found 4 groups of developers mainly, those whose main reason is social or community, those whose main reason is career or monetary and those whose main reason is political and also product-related. This is a measure that we came up with based on people's answers to the question, 'on the whole do you think that you give more to the community than you take from it?' What we found - and surprisingly - was that people actually feel they take more than they give. So they feel that there is a benefit, so you can therefore explain it a lot in selfish terms.
The reason we ask these questions is that when there isn't a price transaction it is hard to prove why people are doing this, because they benefit from it rather than doing it out of charity or a general sense of good will towards everyone or something. The numbers here represent, well, 1 would be if everyone said that they take more from the community than they give and 0 would be if everyone... or -1 would be if everyone said that they give more than they take so as you can see everyone here thinks that they are selfish, they give more than they take about approximately 70 %. So the difference between those who think that give more and take, those who think that they take more are: 70 % think that take more.
Well, there is a slightly different but similar measure which I called the 'Hobbes measure', which is the answer to the question, same question applied to others, 'do you think others give more than they take? Or do you think that others take more from the community than they give or is it more balanced?'. Partly because people are not that sure about what other people's motives are and partly because everyone assumes others must be a bit less selfish than they themselves - because you see so much stuff out there that you find valuable - this is not as strongly selfish.
But people still think others take more from the community than they give. You can see that this sentiment is highest in the career and monetary group but is fairly high in the social and politically motivated groups as well. So it's an interesting situation when people think that we benefit and we profit from it or I profit from it so I'm selfish but everyone else is profiting from it so they are also selfish which is pretty similar to... it's certainly something that you can look at as an economical system of production. We also looked at what people found as their rewards based on their motives to see whether those who give social reasons as their main reasons for production and for participation are getting societary rewards, so this is one of the rewards which we could call social. It's the number of projects that you participate in which also refers to the number of other people you are interacting with, and what you can see is that on an average everyone has participated in several projects. There were 2800 respondents to the survey. There was a follow-up survey carried out by Stanford which had another 1500 respondents and a further follow-up made this year by Mitsubishi Research in Japan which had 700 respondents so we have a data set of approximately over 4000, over 5000 respondents worldwide and so on average people have contributed to 6 projects. And there isn't a significant benefit or significant advantage for those who say that they are doing it for social or community reasons. The only advantage you can see here, or difference you can see here, is that those who are doing it for career or monetary reasons are participating in more projects and you also find that they are making more links with other people.
Now these are a couple of slides that I presented in Bhutan, which as some of you may know has, since 1970, followed the development policy of maximizing net gross national product by gross national happiness. I thought that I should sell them on free software by saying them that free software is more related to happiness than proprietary software. But, it produces also some of the data that we got from our survey. These are not responses to the question 'why do you participate in free software?' but to other questions, similar questions that we ask in order to try and get people to clarify what they think about their participation. So, 'what do you expect others to do in the community?'. 'Share their knowledge' is the most important answer. 'Respect my contribution' and 'write beautiful and aesthetic programs'.
So there is a very strong degree of learning, skills development , teaching. Everyone else is supposed to share their knowledge and there is also a strong degree of reputation build-up. You do participate in order to build your reputation. You want others to respect your contribution. But there is this artistic aspect, if you will, that you want people, everyone else and this is what you expect others should do , others should write beautiful code.
And then 'why they participate in the FLOSS community?' This is basically from the slide that you saw. 'Learn new skills 70%', 'share knowledge and skills', then 'improve the products of others'. So you are obliged, or you are expected to, improve other's products and that is also a reason people give for their own participation. And improved job opportunities - that's quite important. Those slide down here, but about half of free software developers earn income from their free software participation.
That might not seem like a hell of a lot, but given that the other half are approximately, the other half are under 25 years old, or often students, they are not necessarily earning any income from anything. So there is no reason to expect them to earn income from free software. About a third of free software developers get paid directly from their free software participation either administrating or providing services or something similar. A fifth got their job because of their free software experience. So you worked in free software and that got you a job in a proprietary software company because the fact that you've contributed to, say the Linux kernel shows that you must be a very good programmer - so the reputation effects don't remain within this free software community but they spill outside that community.
Here again is another interesting question that we asked. We asked these two questions comparing peoples attitudes to free software and proprietary software development. We are only asking free software developers what they think so, 'people in free software are more concerned about money than those in proprietary software development'. So as you can see everyone thinks that this is not true. 'People in free software are less concerned about money, and people in closed software are more concerned about money than free software'. So about a fifth say that this is not true and about 40 % say that this is true and that it's bad. So, 'people in proprietary software are more concerned about money and they should not be', but a third think that people in the proprietary software are concerned about money and they should be - that's why they are doing proprietary software and not free software. There is a strong implication that money should not be the priority or the main motivation to do this sort of work but that does not mean you don't get money by doing this sort of work.
Well, that's what I was saying - that 31% get a direct income and 21% get an indirect income. And these are fitting pretty closely to demographics. We also asked people for instance wether they are married and have children and a surprisingly large fraction of our respondents are married I mean, over 17% are married and over 45% have partners. So these are not 'lone hackers', though they are mostly male. And the reason we asked that was we wanted to see wether that leads to differences in income. And thus predictably enough those who are married or have children or who are older tend to want considerably more, because if they were not able to make a living out of free software then they would have found a real job by then. So those who remain in the free software community work 40 hours in the free software community and they earn quite well.
I want to go on into the aspects of intellectual property that make this form of functioning possible. Its quite cliché now that software or intellectual property is not like a physical good. It's not like something you can drop on your toe. If i take your car from you, you don't have it but if I take your software you have it still. But that has a lot of impact on whether these models of free collaborative production can work or not. So although the paper that I wrote first describing this, as Geert was saying, in 1998, used a tribal cooking pot into which everyone from the community puts in all their stuff as an analogy, that would never work with actual food and actual things. What you have to do after sharing all this is you still have to divide the resulting combined output, you have to divide it out and the resources and the output are limited because they are physical goods whereas with software, with intellectual property, once you combined your input with other's people inputs you all get to share the benefits, you don't have to share the benefits. You get to duplicate the benefits.
So, well, information is the, essentially the only sort of property that absolutely needs state-imposed enforcement, state imposed monopolies. You have the system of patents for example where, unlike in a free market, if the government did not come up with this state-imposed monopoly - that over a specific idea, that you registered this idea with the state and then you have a monopoly over that idea - people would be able to copy it. Because you wouldn't be able to stop them. Because if you express an idea, even if someone else does not come up with it themselves, they can think of that idea as well. But the only way to protect the idea is by having the state to protect and enforce a monopoly. So information is what economist call an extremely non-rivalrous good because several different people can have access to this same piece of information at the same time whereas several different people would have to compete to have access to the same chair and only one can have access to it at a given time.
Put all together with the fact that the cost of duplication is zero, and that a new copy doesn't cost anything, it means that instances of information or individual copies are infinitely reproduceable. So my original software, let's stick with software , my original program may be worth a lot, and I might have spent a lot of effort and that might have cost a lot to create but every additional copy costs nothing to create. Therefore the value of every additional copy is basically zero. So there is not economic incentive for a recipient to pay for a zero value good which is why you have software piracy: people don't feel that they should have to pay for something which they can actually copy for free. That's why nobody feels that downloading an mp3 is the same as walking out of a store with a CD, because it actually cost something to copy a cd because - you have to buy a blank cd - but it doesn't cost anything to download something from the internet. It doesn't cost anything to make a copy of an mp3 file no matter what the recording industry association say or what sort of propaganda they use. They want to make people feel that it is morally wrong to download an mp3 or it is as wrong as to walk out of a store with a CD.
The problem with intellectual property laws or intellectual property rights is that they ignore this basic problem with the economics of information and work against what is essentially the natural behaviour of a free market which is if something costs nothing to copy it has no value. And what then you have is that duplicated instances of information have zero value, the individual copies have zero value. The original acts of creation, they have a lot of value or maybe not very much value, depending on how creative you are but it could have had a lot of value and this has nothing to do with the degree of profit margin. It's simply got to do with where you price and where the costs are.
So if you look at Microsoft Windows for example and the hundred billion dollars or more that Microsoft generated from Windows 2000, the point is not wether it is fair for Microsoft to generate a 100 billion dollars when it cost them maybe 2 or 3 billion dollars to create or whatever. The point is where they make that money from. So if they decided that it cost a billion dollars to create and we want a thousand percent profit margin and therefore we should get 10 billion dollars out of this that would be fine if they were able to figure out a way of getting a lump sum of 10 billion dollars land in their laps at the time they created the software. The cost is incurred at the time of creation and creating the original work.
But since there is no practical way of doing that, what has happened in software or in music or in lots of other forms of art that are reproduced digitally is that prices are being charged at the stage of making copies when no cost is being incurred at the stage of making copies in order to compensate for the fact that a large cost is being incurred at the stage of creating the work.
You want to be able to charge everyone for creating the work, so selling copies is an attempt to offset 100% loss at the point of creation. When you create something but you are not paying for having created that with 100% percent profit - because when you duplicate something which doesn't cost anything to duplicate - and you are charging money for it, it's a 100% profit. So you are trying to offset 100% loss at the time of creation with a 100% profit at the time of duplication and this does not work. Or it works only with the support of laws and enforcement and more and more restrictive regulation. But essentially if it was really a free market this wouldn't work. The expected result is that well, while you may say that respecting claims toward ownership of land is the norm, respecting IPR claims isn't. Most people think that if I steal your house or I steal your car that's wrong. But most people in the world don't think that if I steal your intellectual property there is anything wrong about that.
Which is why you have ridiculous situations where for instance the World Intellectual Property Organization produces comic books for children to educate them on the importance of copyright or patents. You have 10 year olds that are being told in comic books that you have ideas and you must patent them and that's how you became rich or if you want to be a musician well copyright is the essentially important thing and everything should be copyrighted. And the bad evil pirates they are depicted as you know thugs with striped t-shirts and bandanas who are unshaven and going around trying to rob you. Or the Department of Trade and Industry, I think is in Australia has produced tracts for 8 year olds which includes a cartoon character called IP as an intellectual property action. And IP tells children that when they make drawings or they make little cartoons in class they should put in a little copyright symbol because it belongs to them and they must not share because it belongs to them. If someone else wants to use some of their paintings then they have a right to ask for something because this belongs to them. Without this sort of propaganda or without this sort of thing the economics of information would make this unsustainable and lead to some other sort of economics.
So the solution, and this is what I call the problem of infinity the fact that copying, you can copy infinitely and there is no cost involved there whereas the original cost of creation is high. The solution the free software community and other collaborative information creation systems have found as a solution is that at the point of profit or non, wether it's monetary or non-monetary as we've seen, most people think that they can explain themselves by selfish reasons. They think they are getting more from the community than they are giving which means that they are making some sort of a profit even if its not monetary. But the point of profit is not at the point of copying or making one copy, so there is not the point of profit. So, where is the point of profit?
The point of profit seems to be related to the point of creation or the act of participating in a community where you are creating rather than the number of copies you make. So at the point of one time creation to which your profits are linked, when you write the Linux kernel then the profits that you gain from the Linux kernel, whether it is your reputation or whether it is your job as an administrator for implementing Linux or whether it's your job as a consultant costumizing linux for a client, these are things that you are getting for the original act of creating Linux. These are not things that you are getting for every single instance of copying but for the original act of creation which is where the value was created in the first place, so you are being rewarded for that point of creation. And this is very similar to many forms of remuneration that have been used in the cultural domain, patronage for instance, is always been related to creation and performance and not copying.
Perhaps you are a court musician, Bach was not paid on the basis of the number of people that came to listen to his performances or to the number of different churches which actually played his music. He was paid simply for creating it, so that was related to the value involved in the creation and not to the value involved in copying. Similar is the subscription model for publishing novels in the 19th century, when Charles Dickens and others wrote novels in installments which were distributed to subscribers. The reason that this model was used was that enforcement of intellectual property was not very secure and as one's novel installment was published it would immediately be duplicated and the author would not get anything out of it even if he was able to find out that this was happening as there was a lot of piracy.
But the way to get money from such a situation was to have subscribers who were paying for the privilege of being the first to read and if they did not pay, the author would not write the next installment. You were only able to get the next installment if you paid for the previous one in which case the next installment was written. Those who felt it was worth having access to this new work were paying the costs. Of course there were lots of people free-loading and lots of people who were able to read without paying anything, but in essence, certainly this way of working was sustained. This is similar to what is called the Street Performer Protocol, which is a protocol that has been made on this basis in order to create a system which is technically possible to implement. The street performer protocol, well, it's looking at the difference between how a performer on a street earns and how someone in front of an audience in a theater earns. If you perform in front of an audience in a theater you are charging in a per copy basis, charging for every individual listener even though it actually doesn't cost you any more to sing in front of an audience of a hundred than it does to sing in front of an audience of fifty, perhaps there are costs involved for those who are providing the space but it does not actually cost you more to sing for more people than for less people, whereas the way a street performer earns an income is by singing and getting paid for singing and getting paid by some people that pass by. If the amount that he gets in a day or whatever is sufficient he will continue to do it. If it's not sufficient then he won't and the level of sufficiency is unrelated to profit margin. So, there might be someone who thinks that he needs to make a hundred euro a day in order to continue singing on the streets and there might be someone who thinks that he is only going to sing on the streets if he makes a thousand euros a day, if he doesn't make a thousand euros a day maybe he won't but then he won't sing - so that's a market valuation of his singing but it has nothing to do with the number of people who is passing by.
The street performer protocol is a protocol that involves an escrow system where you promise to the escrow agent that if a certain amount of money is released you will release this creative work to the public and to everyone. And the people who donate into this escrow system, donate into this account and they give the money and they are sure that the money won't reach the artist except under this condition. So you might say that, well for a 100 thousand dollars I'm gonna create this wonderful novel or painting or whatever and people will put money in there and if a hundred thousand dollars is reached then I'm obliged to create that and release that to the public and if I don't then everyone gets their money back so the money doesn't come to me directly. So that's one of the systems.
So free software has adopted an economical alignment of profits and creativity typical in the past of cultural activity but there is a very different pricing model that is used and that leads us to a lot of significant differences that there are between code and culture, cultural activity. The first thing is that very little of the lessons that we have learned form free software would apply to forms of art that deal with physical objects. So if you paint and there is any additional value to the painting on canvas as opposed to the copy made on a file then this model won't work at all. It will only work for purely digital creations where this problem of infinity exists and therefore you can have a system of reproducing any number of copies then everyone having access to the combined work. So that draws out a lot of cultural activity of course, but there are still a lot left. But there are many other issues which, and this is something that for the past five years whenever I've given talks on free software people have asked me "why doesn't this work with culture?" and "what can we learn from it in design, in art and so on?".
I think that might be more for ideological or political reasons rather than for practical reasons because there are some practical reasons why code works in this model and those are that for people, there is much less of the so called moral right of the author when you talk of code. Code contributers are not particularly concerned about the integrity of their contribution or the fact that their contribution remain as they wanted it to be. In fact most open source licenses explicitly eliminate that possibility. So when you create code you are giving everyone the right to change it and to change it in anyway they like which means change it in ways that might distort your original intentions or whatever. And secondly, code is very functional, people might want beautiful or aesthetic code but finally if it doesn't work it doesn't work and is useless and if it does work well then it doesn't really matter whether it looks nice or it's well programmed.
So for instance the same people who like beautiful and aesthetic code also flock to the, there's been a contest that has been run for over 20 years the Obfuscated C code contest (http://www.ioccc.org/) and more recently there's been the Obfuscated Perl code contest which is all about writing a program to do a fairly simple thing, to just print 'hello world', but the program should be as impossible to understand as you can make it. So there have been, for instance, a four-line perl program that decrypts DVDs. There is a program written by a friend of mine which is a decryption algorithm in a shape like a dolphin, because it is formatted in a certain way and uses all mysterious symbols and is almost impossible to figure out how it works even for an extremely, you know, an extremely skilled Perl programmer, but it looks like a dolphin and it works very fast so that's cool.
But it's that it works and that is something that really is much more important than the fact that it is well written, whereas most design is more about, wel,l design works also of course, but does it work for you as much as it works for me? It's much more subjective than code. And the third aspect is, so that it goes to the question of improvement or vandalism when someone changes your work, are they improving it? In code someone is always improving it. Even if they make it worse they are adapting it to their needs so, it is an improvement as far as everyone is concerned whereas in art it is often something that you don't want.
And the final thing is the modularity so the reason, the main reason free software is successful is that any free software problem can be broken down into smaller free software problems which means that the commitment of people, of individuals , individual contributors does not have to be very high. Most free software developers work by contributing between 2 or 4 hours a week. So that sort of makes all this discussion about motives irrelevant in the sense that it doesn't take very much motivation to contribute 2 hours a week. And if something can be a sustainable system of production, with a hundred thousand people contributing two hours a week, then that's great and you don't even need to know why they are doing it because you can have any number of reasons for doing something for two hours a week. So its not very critical and if you don't do it for two hours a week that means that it's very easy to replace you with someone else who is willing to do it for two hours a week. And that works because software development is extremely modular, there are people who have contributed just one line of code or just made a little change here, and that change matters.
Most of free software, most of the code is written by a very small fraction of the people, so approximately 20% of free software developers develop or write 80% of the code. And if you include more things that are just discussions or mailing lists or working on the windows and the design and the documentation it really doesn't change it very much. Then you include all those other people and it is still approximately 20 to 30% of the people whom are doing 80% of the work. But the fact is that the remaining amount, the tail end of the community is critical in order to make it work. Because if you only have this 20% they would have 80% of unfinished work, that wouldn't, it wouldn't work because they are only able to do the 80%. But you need the last bit to be fixed. That's what the remaining thousands of people who contribute 2 hours a week who fix one line here and one line there do. And that's something that I don't know how it would work in most forms of cultural production or even in design where typically you also want more, a holistic or there is an idea, a coherent idea to it, which in code you don't have. In code the coherent idea is that it runs. The fact of writing code nicely is about whether it is easy to understand by other people, whether it is easy to change, whether it has been written in a structured way, and if it has been written in a structured way then it saves time, but typically you find that that is something that proprietary software programmers spend much more time thinking about than free software developers do because proprietary software companies design things from the top down. They make the code look good because it actually costs them money if the code is bad and is more difficult for other people to change it whereas free software communities try to do that but often not very successfully and finally the bottom line is, "does it run or not?" and, "are people willing to make changes or not?". And I don't know if that's something that can be applied to culture.
I don't think I have time to go into the developing countries thing and it's not really the most important thing here. But I'll just leave you with this slide which calculates the cost of Windows XP in different developing countries comparing the cost with GDP per capita. So the average income in India is 460 dollars and Windows XP and Windows 2000 costs 560 dollars, which means they 15 months of income and if an American earning 35000 dollars on average were to spend 15 months of income on Windows they would spend 42000 dollars. So this is basically a random list of countries and I've got a table of 176 countries which shows how expensive software really is in developing countries terms. A lot of this work is available on the FLOSS project web site, including the original FLOSS report with the detailed studies of motivation and our continued work. Thank you.
Geert Lovink: Thanks a lot. Let's see, we still have time for some questions...Is there anyone here who has a question for Rishab. It's been an enormous amount of statistics and...
Josephine Bosma: I missed something in the lecture which is just a very simple statistical thing. These respondents, where do they come from, what kind of people were them, apart from that they were married, most of them.
Rishab: They were from all over the world. We didn't design the survey in order to be demographically representative because in order to do that you need to know how many respondents there are all over the world so that you can get a representative sample. But, well it was basically a random survey, it was publisised in various web sites, we also drew our sample from looking at the actual source code of well, basically all, about 3000 free software projects. We looked at who is writing them because people leave their names in the source code, and it was publisised on sites with millions of hits, such as Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/) and it was basically a random survey. What we found in our original survey was that there were far more Europeans than there should have been and that was because it was publicised as a survey funded by the European Union, so maybe more European respondents came that way. When Stanford did their survey they called it FLOSS US and there were initially more Americans who responded to that survey but finally the numbers came fairly close to what ours were. So if you want a very rough breakup its approximately 30% of developers in North America and about 45 to 50% in EU countries and the rest from the rest of the world. And there is certainly an under representation of Asia, especially East Asia where developer communities in China and Japan do not read the English language mailing list at all. Whilst our survey questions were only in English, the announcements were translated into many languages. So FLOSS Japan made a survey in Japanese and Chinese and in some of the other countries in Asia, so they had another sample.
Linda Wallace: The people who, the developers who were making a living out of Open Source Software, were they mainly in academic institutions, like departments of computer science areas, or were they working for companies, or what?
Rishab: No, they were mainly not academics. So those who were students, students represented 20% and those whom were students were of course at universities. But most of the ones whom were earning an income were either self-employed or employed in public sector organizations or in companies. So they were mostly working for others or they, a lot of them, were consultants. Originally, about 3 or 4 years ago, most of the software developers were freelance consultants but now there are a lot of big companies who are employing free software programmers directly.
Leslie Robbins: I'm curious because you talked about a 100% creation is equal to nothing, so nothing? I'm just kind of like thinking out of the top of my head so, nothing is then... the value is sharing. So if the value is sharing how does that fit into this monetary world that we live in, where do you see that... do you understand what I'm saying? You are talking in your lecture that creation is nothing, 100% creation has a value of nothing, therefore you can duplicate anything for free and so I'm asking how does that fit into in your view, creation is then sharing that's the motivation because money is the motivation for a lot of people. So how does this sharing fit into the rest of the society that we live in?
Rishab: That's at least two questions. I didn't say that 100% of the creation is nothing I said that there is creation and then there is duplication. The creation may involve a lot of effort and there is a lot of value on that, the duplication does not involve any effort and there is zero value on that. Most pricing systems today work by not rewarding the act of creation but rewarding each instance of duplication. That's simply because it's difficult when you want to sell a product on a shelf to charge money for the act of creation which happens once, rather than charge for copies. But systems such as patronage or other protocols allow you charge, to be paid for creation rather than pay for duplication. So it's not that people do not create for money... I mean, the examples that I used from art from the past, whether it's composers or whatever, they were being paid to create: they were not paid for individual copies but they were being paid for the act of creation. And as to how this fits into the rest of the economy, well, people create for all sorts of reasons just as people work in banks for all sorts of reasons so, money is one of the reasons people do things but is not the only reason and money is not necessarily a prerequisite for economics.
Economics is the study of the production and allocation of resources, so if it's being done without money then it is still something that can be studied, it's still economics. It might be more difficult to measure because you don't... money is useful because it is a number. So it's more difficult to measure if there isn't money but it doesn't mean its not economics.
Geert Lovink: Maybe we can go to the chat now, because there was a question here by John Hopkins and I'll read it here:
"Talking about code is talking in a fully enclosed symbolic system of representation. What is the relationship between the real," he says, "physical world and the world of intellectual activity and ideas. Where does the interface occur?", he asks...
Rishab: Well, I don't know that the symbols that are in code are any less real than a chair. I mean, I don't see that it's necessarily less real I mean if it's something that someone is willing to value, then people value all sorts of things in the real world that I would not value. So its simply got to do with what people are willing to value something for. But in terms of where it interfaces, well you could have, you could live your life within a closed group of transactions in these so called unreal things, if all you want, if all your needs are met by software if you only need software and you only produce software so it doesn't really matter how it interfaces to the rest of the world. And if you are only in an agricultural economy, then it does not matter wether you interface to industry. So, if you are able to work in only barter that's just fine. It's when you need to interface to different types of economies, whether it's from agriculture to industry or it's from one country to another that you need some exchange system. In the free software community they've found that the exchange system is often reputation, or that used to be the only one, it's your reputation in free software that would get you money which would get you a car for example. But now it's often much more direct, the software that you are creating in free software or the services that you are working around it are being paid for which gets you the car, so...
Roger Teeuwen
Geert Lovink: I'd like to point the fact that all speakers, all three speakers will be here after this next session, so we may as well move on to the next speaker. So far, as we've seen here in Rishab's presentation, there is always an implicit idea that free software only has producers and no users. It is a world in which all users are presumed also producers of code. But because we are here in this context of arts and culture we may as well, also start to put the user on the agenda, the user who is not a producer of code. And to raise the issue of the user of software in our context here which is design and art we've asked Roger Teeuwen who is a graphic designer here from Rotterdam who is , I believe an Apple Mac user to install Free Libre Open Source Software and use it for a while as a user in his own profession. And in the next lecture he will report about his findings.
Roger Teeuwen: Thank you. Does this work?. Ok, it'll do. I'll first talk very briefly about my work as a graphic designer so you get an impression of who I am or what I do. I'll just scroll down...
(see also http://www.rogerteeuwen.nl/) During my 6 year freelance graphic design practice and 4 years study I gradually became aware of working methods in the general sense. In every aspect of my practice working structures develop, some are critically looked at, some are educated and some seemed to be accepted as they seemed to be literally connected with my work. One of these, immediately accepted, is software because of their seemingly specific qualities used for each design-solution. But did during these 10 years my work become more dependent on the possibilities as presented through the programs?
I was asked by Matthew Fuller to design the leaflet for this seminar using only open source software. As I didn't have any experience with open source software and I needed to use a Linux computer at the Piet Zwart Institute I made, before I started, two decisions: - the maximum amount of time I could spend on the design was 24 hours - I would keep two diaries, a formal and an emotional one - I would only use the Linux computer at the Piet Zwart Institute and Calum for technical support. Here is my diary.
DIARY ON 24H OPEN SOURCE Actors: Roger Teeuwen, graphic designer; first experience with open source software Matthew Fuller, course director Piet Zwart Institute Femke Snelting, curriculum and research development Piet Zwart Institute Calum Selkrik (Cal), systems administrator Piet Zwart Institute Michael Murtaugh, Mentor Piet Zwart Institute Todd Matsumoto, student, Piet Zwart Institute.
31 march 2004
11.00hrs Formal Calum set me up, made a user account on a Linux computer Starting with three software packages: The Gimp (alternative to Adobe Photoshop), Scribus (alternative to QuarkXpress), Sodipodi (alternative to Adobe Illustrator)
11.00hrsEmotional Immediately a number of questions appear: Why do these programs look as if they are designed 10 years ago? Do the functions change when developing them alternatively? What does 'copy modify redistribute understand' mean on a sticker on my monitor? Need to do some 'program enhancement'!
12.00hrs Formal Talked with Michael Murtaugh about the history and meaning of open source. He mentioned 'LayTex' as an alternative he worked briefly with during study, as an example of trying to develop a more definition based software. We also talked about the way software development evolves, it's becoming more and more Microsoft vs. open source (including IBM). When I mentioned Java, Michael told me Java is partially open source, Java itself keeps the overview. But you can contribute as a programmer. Their idea of light clients (stripped computer connected to a server/terminal) has dissapeared or shifted because of economical demands.
12.15hrs Formal Downloaded 'Processing', java software which makes the connection between code and interface/visual.
'Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It was created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as an electronic sketch book.' (from http://www.processing.org/)
12.45hrs Formal Talked with Femke Snelting about the difference between open source and proprietary (copyright), that new functions and opening the program language are the most potentially interesting areas. For example going beyond Dreamweaver's connection of visuals and code.
13.11hrs Emotional So language and definition are essential in program development. But why base the program you are developing on existing software rather than think about ways to redefine work space or software all together? If the code is visible during the time you are using software the possibility to change and experiment appears. The connection between language, code and form becomes more explicit and therefor the user is and more aware of the possibilities and more aware of the way his or her actions are defined within software. 13.15hrs Emotional Scribus is really illogical when you are used to working with Xpress. There is a disconnection between text input and the text field, but only when creating a text field, after doing this it's defined and you can change and activate the field. A pdf writer seems to be incorporated, so publishing should be possible. This is one of my biggest concerns!
13.24hrs Formal Found (on the net) a mail which seems to be the start of the development of 'The Gimp'.
"From: petm@soda.csua.berkeley.edu (Peter Mattis) Subject: Image Manipulation Program Features Date: 1995/07/29 Message-ID: #1/1 organization: UC Berkeley newsgroups: comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.apps,comp.os.linux.x,comp.os.linux. development.apps
Suppose someone decided to write a graphical image manipulation program (akin to photoshop). Out of curiosity (and maybe something else), I have a few (2) questions: What kind of features should it have? (tools, selections, filters, etc.) What file formats should it support? (jpeg, gif, tiff, etc.) Thanks in advance, Peter Mattis"
and:
"Date: 1996/02/15 During Christmas break we encountered Photoshop 3.0 and discovered the 'joy of layers'. This functionality was deemed absolutely necessary and will part of the next release of the GIMP. This will involve major changes to many parts of the GIMP and is not expected to be ready for several months. The other major item being changed is a reworking of the interface (and perhaps the dropping of Motif!). Please do not bug us about when these changes will be ready. It only distracts us and slows us down. (Suffice it to say, we think the changes will be worth the wait)."
Maybe thinking about the definitions and ideas which are presented to the user through the programmer is the main goal of open source software, the second goal is developing a way to contribute to the software. But could become complex when the software becomes common sense, so maybe the goal is to be able as a user to develop your own case specific software.
13.42hrs Formal In the Gimp there is an option to write scripts and to incorporate them in the program, and share it!
13.42hrs Emotional Computer literacy demands a new way of reading, the language is sometimes so specific and needs so much knowledge it's hard to find an answer for the question you formulated!
13.53hrs Emotional I need the open source user manual!
13.58hrs Formal During some kerning activities in Scribus the program crashed.
13.58hrs Emotional Open source rules! Open force jules! Oen force les! Of course I didn't save my document before Scribus crashed! My thanks goes out to...
14.03hrs Emotional Selecting a text in Scribus really takes a while, and it feels unstable! I've got the feeling the program can crash any given second!
14.04hrs FormalScribus seems to have an option to add java scripts.
14.45hrs Emotional Lunch with the Kate Rich (research fellow) in her 'cube'.
15.35hrs Emotional Imported my first picture in Scribus, also feels unstable!
15.38hrs Formal Switching to Sodipodi, really looks like a stripped version of Adobe Illustrator and the functions and interface resemble it a lot.
15.44hrs Emotional What does 404 mean, it's an error code but which one?
15.49hrs Emotional I'm actually considering to use paper again to write ideas down! This work-environment feels so new and so inefficient!
15.59hrs Emotional What is software? A collection of definitions and functions which control your behavior and actions? Or a way of structuring and capturing ideas? What should software be?
16.11hrs Formal Switching to The Gimp.
16.11hrs Emotional Layers are really much more complex than photoshop, whats the gain?
16.30hrs Formal Made my first collage, an open source collected image.
16.30hrs Emotional Why are all functions unlogically redefined without a (at least not to me) gain?
F 16.45hrs Formal Thinking about the way software is presented when purchasing. Could there be some sort of a schedule which explains why open source is a viable option?
16.58hrs Formal Needed Calum's help to print a document from Scribus. Printed at 17.21, turn out you need to make a pdf from the document and than run GGV PostScript Viewer and print from this application.
16.58hrs Emotional Needed Calum's help to print a document from Scribus. My god so much trouble to print a document. Interesting though that Calum thought the document (which was only a test) had a meaning and was a design! If you need to put a lot of effort in making a print you need a reward!
17.31hrs Formal The Gimp crashed, the program name has (unstable) behind the name, this is correct!
17.31hrs Emotional The Gimp crashed! Shit... lost an interesting schematic on the way open src could be visualized!
17.45hrs Formal Remade the image
17.45hrs EmotionalRemade the lost image, this is a way of learning a program! (not an appealing one though)
17.45hrs Formal Back to Sodipodi and Scribus to remake the Gimp pattern/structure. It seems patterns and structures aren't as easy to create as in illustrator or even xpress!
17.45hrs Emotional Back to Sodipodi and Scribus to remake the Gimp pattern/structure, this isn't easy. A lot of features which I use a lot are or really hidden or not present. It really feels as if I'm back to square one!
17.54hrs Formal Sodipodi crashed when attempting to step and repeat.
17.54hrs Emotional So easy and so complicated!
18.06hrs Emotional I start to feel a connection with The Gimp, maybe because I get tired or maybe because it's the only application so far in which I'm successful in my attempt to create a message... I do get constantly confronted with the different way of functionality. Got the feeling I could be more efficient in Text editor (Macintosh) than in all open source software combined! At least in terms of speed and meaning! Could I actually write the definitions of my existing work-environment? 14 april 2004
12.18am FormalCalum helped me getting started
12.18hrs Emotional It's been a while due to illness that I wasn't here until now. The pressure is on because of the tight deadline...
12.19hrs Emotional Decided I'd focus on Srcibus to design the leaflet because it's closed source rival Quarkxpress is the program I use the most often.
12.34hrs FormalStarted, talked to Michael about spring-alpha
12.38hrs Formal Can't find scribus, need Cal.
12.38hrs Emotional lunch
13.06hrs FormalUsing terminal to start Scribus (instructions cal).
13.06hrs Emotional Let's start!
13.45hrs FormalTalked with Matthew about the time schedule, he suggested I'd finish the design today. I'll start with the information side first and concentrate on the typography!
13.54hrs Formal Installed Bitstream Vera, one of the only open source typefaces.
14.12hrs FormalCan't seem to find 'a&u' in Scribus, seems no typographic subtleties are possible, strange because it's a DTP program?
14.12hrs Emotional Why the same typographic options as in word? Unbelievable that the alternative isn't precise in the key element of a dtp program!
14.15hrs FormalInteresting, I can make buttons in Scribus which allow me to import or use other actions when activating. Could be an interesting automatization for correction!
14.45hrs Formal Trying to link two text boxes, very complicated idea and interface behind this function!
14.45hrs Emotional Absolutely too complicated to link text boxes! Can't figure out how this works!!! How complicated can this be? I figured out the difference between active and passive text boxes but the actual linking doesn't work (annotation properties)!
14.55hrs Emotional I actually think a program like Scribus is much closer to a writer (programmer, etc.) than a designer, much more literally a text-editor. It looks it's more the other way around, thinking through content about the format. This could actually very well be 'myself' as a designer (through education and context) than designer in general.
15.03hrs EmotionalBecause of the last statement I suddenly feel I understand the software more, and I'm more and more looking for functions which I use a lot in Xpress in Scribus and I'm more successful is my search than before.
15.16hrs Emotional Are there connections or explanations possible which emphesise the 'cross-influence' and targets in the same time?
16.13hrs Formal Matthew suggests I should also think about the programmer/user relation (reacting on program and profession/crossover relations).
16.20hrs Formal Cal explains the notation of programs and the meaning the numbers have: 1.3 unstable 1.4 stable 1.6.5 stable
16.48hrs Formal Trying to print the document, no luck need Cal. Also found out that when exporting to pdf there is a font problem.
16.48hrs Emotional Why is there always a problem with printing, I can't believe this!!!!!!!
17.07Formal Pdf works.
E 17.07hrs Emotional Pdf works, printing is impossible. It's not possible to print a different paper size than A4!
17.10hrs FormalTalked with Cal about program-definition-combinations, using his specific knowledge and freshmeat.net
E 17.10hrs Emotional Brain stormed with Cal on open and closed source programs, really interesting to experience so much specific knowledge!
18.15hrs FormalTalked with Femke about the combinations and concluded combinations between writer, programmer, artist, designer should be more self-explanatory.
In the evening I tried to make combinations with 4 definitions, 12 combinations are possible and if the order isn't an issue 6. I ended with 12 program-combinations and 12 definition-combinations.
15 April 2004
9.29hrs FormalStarting up.
9.29hrs Emotional Needed to get the concierge to open the work space, everyone else except Femke were missing.
9.42hrs Formal Started working on definition-combinations.
9.42pm Emotional I've got two sets of definitions, programs and users. How can I combine these and make sure it's readable and on the other hand stress the difference in meaning and the similarity in combinations?
9.46hrs Emotional I've got two sets of 12 combinations, trick is now how to make the difference between programs and user definitions
10.10hrs Emotional Talked with Todd about the concept of the flyer and tested if the combinations were readable, and they were! The programs were much easier than the users but I think they are the bridge between the two.
11.11hrs FormalFinished with both sides need a print now, going to mail to Femke en try to print the pdf! (Its the other way around but hopefully this works!)
11.15hrs FormalPdf document isn't correct! Text boxes dissapear and gradients turn 180 degrees.
11.15pm Emotional When I export the document to pdf or postscript file the linked text boxes dissapear and gradients turn upside down! This is a reason not to use Scribus, really bad for you're confidence when making a 300 pages book if you know texts can dissapear and things can change!
11.17hrs FormalCal suggested that I should save the file as a postscript document and than use a viewer to check and print.
11.35hrs FormalCal updated Scribus in an attempt to solve the problem, have to wait a few minutes until its compiled and I can test it.
12.05hrs FormalSeems linked text boxes are the problem, so i'll make them by hand, separated!
12.05hrs Emotional Making the linked text boxes by hand is a strange job, compare to use typography in photoshop. I recognize this with second year students which I teach. The ones without experience also use the program they know best to express themselves.
12.13hrs Emotional Scribus isn't made for typography that's for sure, when I printed the document you immediately see a sort of 'word' identity. This is problematic if it aim is to be an alternative for dtp programs. It's much closer to a web design program/structure than a dtp program. For instance is imputing text disconnected from the form. This could be interesting if it could be disconnected more, for copy editing etc.
12.28hrs Formal Presented the flyer to Matthew. Style free as I proposed to use instead of Style Free to make a same link as with the definition-combinations has a very negative translation in english, so it will be Style free! Further do I need to place the logos, the excel-combination is double and Matthew suggested to use another open source font if I could find one.
20 April 2004
11.30hrs Formal Today is the last day of the open source leaflet project. A few things remain to do, the corrections, the logos and the final proof.
11.30hrs Emotional Last day of open sourceing for the free style leaflet. I'm actually getting more and more used to Scribus, or is this a false sense of romantic? When I enter the work space Michael is teaching programming languages. Interesting place to work on this open source leaflet! It's pretty crowded, about 10 persons, at least it feels crowded. Probably due to the space which isn't that big.
11.55hrs Formal Done the corrections and Scribus crashes!
11.55hrs Emotional Shit! Scribus crashes! At the precise moment I finished correcting!
11.56hrs Formal Start again with the corrections.
12.15hrs Formal Scribus has a really bad image preview mode.
13.05hrs Formal Trying to reach Hogeschool van Amsterdam to get their logo. Got another telephone number from the secretary. Calling, woman on other side of the phone says she will email immediately.
13.05hrs Emotional Waiting for the Hogeschool Amsterdam logo, waiting always seems endless... Decided I'd finish the leaflet tomorrow and hopefully the logo is sent to me by then!
Around 16.00hrs Formal The woman from the Hogeschool Amsterdam send me a mail to explain again what the seminar exactly was about. Finally I received the logo by 17.00am.
21 April 2004
11.45hrs Formal Final corrections and importing the last logo.
11.45hrs Emotional Jodi is presenting their work in the same space I'm working. Interesting to see their work flashing by on the background!
11.55hrs Formal Printing problem, the logo's seem to change into black squares when printing, they are visible on screen?!
11.55hrs Emotional Printing problem. Maybe the problem is in the image boxes? Printing without image boxes. No Maybe the problem is in the proportional scaling which i turned on? Printing with proportional scaling off. No Maybe the problem is in scaling in general? Printing without scaled images. No Maybe the problem is in text turn around? Printing with text turn around turned off. No Maybe the problem is in the file format? Yes, there is a problem importing tiff when using eps the problem is solved!
12.35hrs Formal Printing final flyer, doing some last minute detailing.
12.42hrs Formal Mailing the pdf to Richard (V2_) and now cross my fingers that the printer can cope with the document!
22 April 2004
14.40amFormal What I was afraid for becomes reality. When the printer test-prints the document a lot of problems appear: spaces become squares, numbers, points, comma's, dashes etc. dissapear!
The following is a transcription of the email contact between myself and the printer (Jasper).
__________________________________________________________________ From: Roger Teeuwen Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 14:47 PM To: Jasper de Koster Subject: Op verzoek van V2_
<>
Dag Jasper, Hierbij opnieuw de pdf, hopelijk gaat het nu goed. Als ik hier print gaat alles ok! Groet en succes, Roger
april 22 14:47 Hi Jasper, Attached again the pdf, hopefully it will work now! When I print in my studio everything looks ok?! Regards Roger
_________________________________________________________________ On 22-04-2004 15:25, 'Jasper de Koster' wrote:>
Hoi Roger
Nee, dit gaat niet goed. Het blijven vierkantjes, alle spaties. Via welk programma heb je dit gedistilleerd? Pagina 1 gaat wel goed, overigens. Kun je het omzetten naar lettercontouren in illustrator?
groet, jasper
april 22 15:25 Hi Roger No this doesn't work either. The spaces remain squares, all spaces. Which programm did you use to destilate this? Page number one is ok. Can you convert the document to Illustrator and use lettercontours? Regards Jasper
__________________________________________________________________
From: Roger Teeuwen Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 15:38 PM To: Jasper de Koster Subject: Re: Op verzoek van V2_
Wat ik trouwens niet begrijp is dat als ik bij mij op mijn laserprinter print alles helemaal goed gaat?! Beschadigd het document tijdens mailen? Print jij gewoon of draai je direct een film uit? Gr Roger
april 22 15:38 What I don't understand is that when I print the document on my laserprinter on 1200 dpi everything looks ok. Does the document get damaged during mail? Do you print paper or directly to film? Regards Roger
__________________________________________________________________ On 22-04-2004 16:19, 'Jasper de Koster' wrote:
Hoi Roger
Misschien print jij niet via een laserprinter of belichter? Ik heb dit probleem nog nooit eerder gehad. Zowel op film als op onze laserbelichter worden alle spaties vierkantjes. De asci code van het spatieteken in Linux is kennelijk een vierkantje in postscript level 2.
Ik probeer photoshop wel als deze pdf niet lukt.
groet, jasper
april 22 16:19 Hi Roger, Maybe you don't print using a laserprinter or a film-exposer? I've never had this problem before. In both the laser printer and the film-exposer I get the same errors. The ascii code for a space on a line is apparently a square in postscript level 2. I'll try photoshop if this pdf doesn't work. Regards Jasper
__________________________________________________________________
From: Roger Teeuwen Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 16:35 PM To: Jasper de Koster Subject: Re: Op verzoek van V2_
Hi Jasper, Toch wel, hp laserwriter 5000 op 1200 dpi geeft geen probleem hier!? Heel erg vreemd... Hoe zit het met kwaliteitsverlies als je het photoshopbestand gebruikt? Gr Roger
april 22 16:35 Hi Jasper, I use an hp laserwriter 5000 on 1200 dpi and I don't get any problems here?! Really strange.... How is the quality loss when using a photoshop rastering? Regards Roger
__________________________________________________________________ On 22-04-2004 17:59, 'Jasper de Koster' wrote:
Hi Roger
Ik ben er nu uit. Ik maak een combinatie van de beste elementen uit de opties. De logo's uit de eerstaangeleverde PDF, het kopje uit het Tiff bestand, de tekst uit een PDF bestand, dat ik heb gemaakt door het originele PDF bestand als PS te bewaren en opnieuw te distillen.
De fout ligt kennelijk in jouw distiller, want opnieuw gedistilleerd verdwijnen de vierkantjes (maar helaas ook de datum en de cijfers).
gecompliceerd, dus
Onderstaand 'monster van frankenstein' PDF komt bij mij netjes uit de printer. En ook (hoogstwaarschijnlijk) mooi op film.
groet, jasper
<>
april 22 17:59
Hi Roger,
I've got the solution. I'll make a combination between the best of both options. I'll use the logo's from the pdf, the head from the tiff, the text from a pdf file which I made trough saving the original pdf file as an ps file and than distilling it again.
I think the error is in you're distiller, because when I re-destill your file the squares dissapear (unfortunately also the numbers).
So, pretty complicated.
The 'monster of Frankenstein'-pdf on the bottom does work on my printer and probably also on film.
Regards Jasper
trycombipdfandTiff.pdf
__________________________________________________________________
From: Roger Teeuwen Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 18:21 PM To: Jasper de Koster Subject: Re: Op verzoek van V2_
Hi Jasper, Ingewikkeld! En nog een probleem, in de magenta teksten op de tweede pagina onderaan (sprekers en colophon) valt een en ander weg (leestekens en cijfers!). Vergelijk met tif. Helpt het voor een betere kwaliteit als ik je een tiff op 600 dpi stuur? Dus nog niet ok! Groet Roger
april 22 18:21am
Hi Jasper, Complicated! And another problem, in the magenta text on the second page at the bottom (speakers and colophon) information is lost (numbers and so on). Compare to the tiff. Does it help for the quality if I send you a tiff on 600 dpi? So still not ok! Regards Roger
__________________________________________________________________ On 22-04-2004 18:35, 'Jasper de Koster' wrote:
Hoi Roger
Oei, wat een klus
Ik denk dat het niet veel uitmaakt. Het blijven gerasterde letters op die manier. Ik ga wel voor 70 lijns tiff die je eerder gestuurd hebt. Of ik gebruik voor sprekers en colophon de tiff, net als bij de tekst bovenaan.
Tenzij jij nog een ander soort PDF kunt aanleveren...
groet, jasper
april 22 18:35am
Hi Roger,
My god what a project!
I don't think it will make a difference. The letters will stay rasterised! I'll use the 70 lines tiff you sent before. Or I use the tiff for the colophon and speakers, just as the text on the upper side.
Unless you can deliver me another pdf...
Regards Jasper
__________________________________________________________________
From: Roger Teeuwen Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 19:08 PM To: Jasper de Koster Subject: Re: Op verzoek van V2_
Nee, een ander soort pdf gaat mij niet meer lukken. Hoeveel minder van kwaliteit zijn gerasterde letters? Volgens mij moet jij beslissen of je het bestand verder gaat plakken en knippen, wat het beste resultaat is. Laat even weten waar je uiteindelijk voor gaat. Gr Roger
april 22 19:08am
No, I can't deliver you another pdf. How much does the quality decrease if the letters are rasterised? I think you have to decide if you'll use the 'collage' file or the tiff, which one the best result is. Let me know which you will use. Regards Roger
__________________________________________________________________ Van: Jasper(at)Tripiti.nl Onderwerp: RE: Op verzoek van V2_ Datum: 23 april 2004 9:13:46 GMT+02:00 Aan: rtgo(at)xs4all.nl
Ik ga dan voor de Tiff versie, omdat ik geen vertrouwen heb in de PDF. Er kunnen cijfers en interpunctie zijn weggevallen of veranderd. Dit risico wil ik niet lopen.
Je kunt wel nog films controleren als je wilt, we drukken vanmiddag.
groet, jasper
april 23 9:13pm Ok, i'll use the tiff, because I lost all my faith in the pdf. Numbers or spaces can dissapear or are changed. I don't want to risk this. You can come and check the films if you want to, we'll print this afternoon.
__________________________________________________________________ So in the end, despite the efforts of the printer, the open source program Scribus was unsuccessful in accomplishing one of it's main goals. Being an alternative for existing DTP-programs such as Quark Xpress. As a designer I need to be sure that the document I create is printable. If it isn't, I can't use it as a tool. Through using open source software I did rethink the tools I use and the environment and work structures which are created by these tools. And I think this is a very important issue which is crucial for all designers, artists etc. So I think one of the main goals of open source software development should be to make the programs formally usable, so designers, writers, artists etc. will start using them.
Geert Lovink:Well that was a hard deal, I am very sorry that we invited you to go through this. Anyway I think it's a very, very good illustration of where we are and indeed as you said, where we should go because there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. Is there anyone here who would like to respond?.
Steve Kovats: Not so much a response but just a quick question, I mean,you obviously illustrate the problem that designers generally have with this shift, and... You mentioned, at a certain moment, I think around midnight on one of those days your sentimentality but now that the project is over do you have that sense of sentimentality or now would you now an impulse to help try to improve those programs based on your experiences. Would you be interested in using a better version of it later, and avoiding paying 400 euros for Quark Xpress?
Roger Teeuwen: Oh for sure. Software in general should contribute in this development. So I am interested in keep trying and using it and contribute but as a designer...
Jaromil:
I just wanted to add something because I got to know by chance the author of Scribus. I can give you some information about him. He is Polish and he owns a hotel and he wrote Scribus to write menus for his hotel. And he is pretty happy because he has now his own program and is free software and he put it in the community. And he is happy doing his menus. I guess is quite a stable set up for himself.
Roger Teeuwen: For a hotel?
Jaromil: Yes, for the restaurant of the hotel. He is quite a gentleman it's quite an interesting person to know.
Roger Teeuwen: Yes but that's how it started right?
Jaromil: Yes how it started and now he's got some people joining the project because it's one of the most promising projects and I guess it will continue. They know the issues, they have a lot of bug reports.
Eric Dooper: Thanks, I'm going to actually demonstrate Scribus this afternoon, hopefully not with the pain that Roger went through, but I have a question. You as a designer, you run into the biggest problem when creating your product and then sending it out into the outside world where people actually had to work with it. Now, I've worked with Scribus a bit and I know there are thousands of options relating to the creation of this thing that you had to send outside. Did you feel you had to know really what was what you had to do?. Or do you feel that software should maybe guide you more in that direction?. Did you have to step maybe in the shoes of the other side who was actually receiving your thing? and make sure that he understands it?. Do you know where I'm getting at?
Roger Teeuwen: Partially
Erik Dooper: Let me rephrase it. As a designer you want to design and not worry about technicalities maybe. Did you feel you had to know too much technicalities to use this thing?
Roger Teeuwen: No, I just didn't understand what was happening. It was just pretty unclear to me. Because normally when you create a pdf it's... no problems appear. And the problems that appeared from the printer, also said, he never saw these problems and he is, I don't know how long he works in the printer, but let's assume 15 years or so?. So he never saw this, it was totally a new problem, these squares mainly.
Lawrence Liang: Coming from India, one of the problems I have in Europe is that I always look on the wrong side of the road when I am crossing, because we follow the English system of driving in the left hand side so I can completely empathize with you on the movement, but I think there is a larger structural problem here of interoperability which is precisely, you know, marked by, for example, the restrictions that (...) poses, right?. Now, ideally we should have a system where interoperability is allowed but if you have proprietary systems that don't allow for it, for example picking the code would ensure that the printer wouldn't give you a problem, how do you solve that. And in which case, you know, this is the question that I would like to pose, and this is the problem, you know, even in my own movement from Windows to Linux, similar kinds of anxieties. Do we have similar records of the amount of time and investment we had for our first journey when we learned, let's say Windows, you know, equal amounts of anxieties as where did the document go, etcetera. The kind of lock-up that Windows has created. I mean you often underestimate the kind of time you've given to learning, you know, Windows which becomes the users complaint when we try to learn a new system like Linux.
Roger Teeuwen: Yeah, for sure if I use more time to learn this program or this system, things probably...I would solve a lot of problems I think. But the assignment was 24 hours of open source, so, literally, so, that's what I used. Because normally as a designer you have this deadlines so it's the same with this project. Does this answer your question?.
Lawrence Liang: Intellectual property is a design problem. Because of the fact, you know, it's not easy to attain interoperability. You know if you have a closed source system, attempting you know, or not allowing, its code to be used for the purpose, even though it's very used in copyright law.
Femke Snelting: I want to bring up this issue of time because I think, the time for learning things, the thing that you were facing, that you are actually bringing up is, in a way design education is really aimed at. Like you learned something once and then you are on the road. And there is certainly no time to learn new things, because the time you spend on other things like, even spending 24 hours on designing a flyer, not including the time you had to spend writing e-mails to your print press person, is actually too much, you can't afford that. And yesterday I was talking to someone who is an architect and trying to explain, let's say the importance of thinking about software in a different way and he said... what he said was even worst because he said, well it took me you know 5 years to actually get into one piece of software or something he was using and then suddenly it was not supported anymore and I had to move to CAD or something, so he compared it to this. He said I can't afford to risk even learning something new a) because of time, which I don't have and b) because I don't know how to trust it and I think when something new is out of software when you need more open software when your product is outside software itself that's inmediately when you run into problem. And here it's just paper, is even simple, it's a printerand a pdf. But then if you think about a building that's even more. It's quite an issue... it's in education I think.
Rishab Ayer Gosh: Yes, I wanted to follow from what Lawrence just said about interoperability. When you use for instance, Open Office and you try to read files that are written in Microsoft Word or... you have similar problems that you have maybe 5 to 7 years ago, reading Mac files in Windows and viceversa. The Mac and Windows thing was easy because well, Microsoft runs its stuff in both platforms or Apple and Microsoft have come to commercial arrangements. But when Open Office developers are trying to make software files compatible with Windows or Microsoft software they don't get any cooperation, so they have to do reverse engineering, they have to figure out what the data format is because there is no specification. It's the same way when you are using open source software and you are trying to print to a fancy printer directly, because most device manufacturers do not provide details of the drivers to open source developers because they don't pay royalties or whatever so, developers have to figure out how to write to this devices by disassembling the code for a Windows driver or something like that.
In the case of Scribus I think this is not really that problem I mean, because Scribus is a relatively young program and there are bugs, and there might be, there might be all sorts of things with the interface that you have to specify. The Gimp I think is much better but, there is this standard thing of the user-developer intersection and the greater the user developer intersection is, the greater open source software is. So when you look at the field of publishing, book academic book publishing or academic journal publishing the standard software is (tex) which has been written in Unix and then made open source for the past 15-20-30 years actually and that is the format and all formulas and all graphics and all charts they all get printed perfectly, but that's because it's a very old stable project. But, as far as the learning curve is concerned I don't know if you ever used Pagemaker before you moved to Quark Xpress or something like that. Because I used to use Pagemaker for my classes and things and when I tried moving to Quark it was impossible so I just gave up and stuck with Pagemaker and I think a lot of that has to do with simply moving from one interface to the other and 24 hours is certainly not the amount of time you took to learn Quark Xpress so you need more time to move to another application...
Roger Teeuwen: Yes, that's for sure but I think you have to agree that going to the printer shall...I think it's not a problem of the pdf plugin or how do you describe this. But this is one of the main things of a desktop publishing program if you design a document you should be able to go to a printer, so I understand that is the beginning, the start of developing Scribus, that's why it is a experiment...
Artem Baguinski: I think I can answer to that, because this has to do do with print menus (...) The way users can help is to provide feedback to developers and maybe if you are just doing some 24 hours project that's not just what you could have done for... but mostly if you run into problems you try to communicate with developers and tell them it doesn't work! Bjorn Wijers: To continue with this issue of interoperability, there are some good news on the horizon about the Oasis standards (http://open.itworld.com/4903/031113oasis/) which tries to bring up the standard between proprietary software and open software specially in this case for web processing and in my view open source is an important issue but more important is open standards so you can choose if you want open source software or proprietary software
elpueblodechina: Do you think the use of open source software would influence your aesthetics?
Roger Teeuwen: Yes, for sure, but not so much open source software but what Rishab mentioned just now is that it was a new program to me so I think any new program would influence you in a ... a little bit but in this specific program context, there were lots of...I noticed that a lot of things weren't there so what I mentioned was the typographic refinement, which wasn't there it had a sort of Microsoft Word feel and of course the printing problem was a barrier.
Geert Lovink: Yes, I've got a question actually, we can also switch to the other speakers if you'd like. If you want to ask something to Calum or Rishab. I've got a question to Rishab because maybe he could explain us a little bit more about procedures in such a case, that we go a little bit more into details, ok, well there are these programs we would like to contribute to the development of it what steps would you take? Could we for example have a meeting, start an initiative for instance, how do you talk to developers. Would it make sense to start a user community for instance?
Rishab Ayer Gosh: Well, developers are responsive to feedback in general, but on the other hand they also have the, might have, the attitude that well if you have an idea - then implement it yourself. Because if they have time, they do it and if they don't have time they don't do it. So, it depends from project to project. But typically user interface related projects are doing it because they want users to be happy with the software and I know that some projects such as the Gnome project (http://www.gnome.org/) have a lot of emphasis on design and they interact a lot with designers and user interface specialists and people like that. Scribus, I don't know how the project community works but in general you contribute, you tell people what you have, problems like these bugs that you report and you try to participate in the project community. Such you have some people here who know the Scribus authors then you could try to participate in the community and provide a helpful suggestion but there is a limitation in terms of how much time developers have to do the development so, when a project is, like Scribus, something where the developer and user community might be different then fixing, or solving your own problem may not be enough so once the author has got his menus that's the extent to which he has to put in time to fix the problem and then you have to have other motives. So in the case of Open Office, for instance, developers are being sponsored by Sun, because Sun is making something out of it. In the case of Gnome, a lot of the projects, there are consultancy companies that are doing set-ups or installations of open source solutions which are helping to find Gnome developers, especially the user interface related people. So, if there were, was a company or there were an organizations that were getting some economic monetary value out of using free software for design then there would be some impetus for that...
Geert Lovink: But that leads to the question whether new media art institutions like V2_ or educational arrangements like the schools who are involved here have an interest in this or not and that I think is an open question. From my experience in the educational field I can say that the grip of Microsoft on schools and universities over the past years has only become more and the resistance or the idea that there is something else than Microsoft has all but disappeared. Maybe this has got to do with all issue of licences, really, they try to really get a firm grip on these institutions. But now is the time to cash in, Microsoft now needs the money from these institutions. So, well anyway, this is one explanation...
Jaromil: Just to add something to what you mentioned, Oasis that is kind of, I think is a company not even a foundation that is collaborating with W3C to establish those standards. And the standard is, the underlying standard is SGML just to link back to Calum's speech. SGML is a military technology and to link back to you, it's a very consistent technology because it exists since 20 years. Its an alternative, even an alternative to LayTex is. Doc Book is an implementation in SGML DTD so it's a description of an SGML target language and just to make you up an idea, SGML is the language you use to describe XML sub-domains and there is a language to describe it and is SGML. So, Doc Book is in fact an XML language to write documents and you see it very much used also in online manual documents that are easily browsable: with those links like, next, previous and index, they make table of contents and alphabetical indexing automatically. This program is used since 20 years, it's a military technology. It makes a sense to learn it, I think, because if you learn it then you have not to spend anymore time again to learn it back. I mean I learned it back I think 6 years ago Doc Book, and I never needed to learn anything else or I use emacs as an editor and I never needed to learn anything else. That is a good point for free software, and open standards like you mentioned.
Michael Murtaugh: I just have one comment. Yes, it's kind of on my mind. I wonder if this kind of DTP work is even really appropriate for this open source model. It just sort of occurs to me what Apple, or what was so fundamental on what Apple did with the Macintosh was that it was a moment that they suddenly had total control. I mean, they produced this package that was the code for the screen drawing the interface, the laser writer - I mean that was key for so many printers and also for so many designers that I know they still lament the fact that Apple didn't make printers anymore because then it was really good. And you got this tension between this kind of WYSIWYG where design is total control, that what you see on the screen becomes exactly what's on the page and something completely different, which is what I think SGML addresses and what the command line interface does too, something you know in the kind of distributed non centralised world where open source is. Because something like HTML, you know, the strength is that it isn't the same everywhere depending on what fonts you have. It just seems like an interesting tension between kind of you know WYSIWYG and a system that is very integrated from screen to printer versus maybe what open source is then yeah, more suited for something where... you know because actually it's funny because when you showed the version of the flyer that had the errors in it you know, from a designer's point of view you can be kind of like outraged like 'oh my god' but the kind of developers side is like 'oh that is interesting'...
Roger Teeuwen: What, the aesthetic of the error?
Michael Murtaugh: Yes because I think there is something interesting about that...
Roger Teeuwen: It is visual, mmm.
Calum Selkirk: I think there is actually a connection here because speaking about Apple. Apple controls the whole process, you don't have to sit around or be in an IRC channel with another 500 developers and getting some kind of consensus as to whether Nautilus (Gnome's file manager) should be an application or a directory browser. I mean, you can see this very much with Gnome progress since 1996 it's very slow and inmediately there is a lot of work such as documentation, thinking about the API and tracking bugs etcetera. It's been a large component of the development. But as far as gaining consensus goes really, designing the whole application or the application framework is a very very slow process and it's not I think because of a lack of time, effort and energy to do so you have to kind of gain the consensus of much more people to have fully implemented it while by a proprietary company can just say "This should be the system. You code-monkeys in India who are making our code will create such and such so the product comes out at the other end." See, I tend to not want to look at these applications in terms of parity: to say well, the GIMP is not like Photoshop. In a way some applications try to behave or occupy the role of these other applications. Somehow it just doesn't really work. The comparison never really works because they really have a different reason for existing essentially. Open source software doesn't exist for the same reasons that proprietary software exists...
Roger Teeuwen: But I agree it is interesting to think about Open Source software and software development, especially when you as a designer are educated on a Macintosh in this closed environment. So I think it's interesting - but the problem is, when you use this open source software in your profession as a graphic designer we need a few functionalities otherwise you can't do it. What Femke also said is that, then you should use it on a different level in your profession, as an experiment or to try to develop the programs more for a later stage so you can use them...
Calum Selkirk: I am not saying if it's right or wrong I just think it's the comparison that kind of bugs me... it's like when people compare, it's always the dichotomy of the command line versus the graphical user interface. The thing is, what I want to really use is predominantly the command line interface and having had used it over for a number of years I view the graphical user interfaces in a different way and I don't even see them as one having evolved from the other, but actually being two very different ways of designing an interface to a computer...
Graham Harwood: Because I've done design using Windows and Macintosh and I also program and there are a few things, a couple of images that might be useful in this. I think it's really important to remember that a Linux box is growing out of networked activity and that every single application I've looked at grows out of that and whereas on the Mac, especially in design, comes out of stand-alone machines that you then output to. So the culture of both systems are very different. Now one interesting thing about this is that, because I was used to the applications on the Mac but I used the open, the Free BSD side of it, there is no interface between the two. You cannot write from the command line in the Mac through the applications that you know on the Mac, a simple thing. You cannot do something like, you cannot play .mov Apple QuickTimes at the same time on the Macintosh from the command line. There are all these blocks. But I think the main thing is like that the culture even on the Mac now on OSX with the Free BSD side is so different from the graphical user interface that even within the Mac it's confused and difficult and there are no bridges and there is, you know, closure all the time.
Linda Wallace: I am just trying to process some of these ideas that are coming up and I think what you are saying Cal about you know, you can't compare the two things, the command line and the graphical user interface that's really true but you seem to be implying that designers therefore shouldn't want open source design software to have the same functionality. That there's been years and years and years investing and skilling up also you know they get from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, in my case I use After Effects video software and that's now becoming really interoperable with another 3D program called Cinema 4D and I am really interested in being able to make layers in photoshop, bringing them into After Effects and them pulling them into Cinema 4D. I really want to be able to do that. And that's if that's going to be switching over to open source I am approaching it with that mind set and I've got very little time you know, basically to re-learn a whole new world I think it's quite valid for designers to want certain functionalities, and certain kinds of mind sets to be reproduced at some level, you know in open source. I think that you can't dismiss that, it's not fair really, to dismiss that. I mean there are multiple perspectives on it and I think that it's quite a valid one.
Calum Selkirk: Well, I was more reacting to the idea of lumping them all together. It's this, you know, all software is the same. I mean, obviously my use of the computer is, or say a command line user's use of the computer is different to a graphic designer's. But new computers can serve for multiple purposes... Partly because of proprietary software everyone's expectations about computing are very similar and that's why something in my introduction was trying to explain to someone who has never, whose introduction to computing is entirely through the graphical user interface, why I possibly choose to use the command line interface. So I think I was more reacting, what I said was more a reaction to this idea that you could lump all these things together or make this kind of broad comparison between Photoshop-GIMP, Illustrator-Scribus, to me doesn't really work. and also because, Linux or free software is often very disperate it's not like this unified system that is put together by one mind with one chain of command
Linda Wallace: Scribus was set up to make menus in a restaurant, it was never set up to be Illustrator but its kind of turned into it, and you are going to talk more about that, but I mean it was never it's intention. So perhaps if there is going to be a desktop publishing program then it would be different, it would be able to render pdfs and get into the printer, etcetera.
Geert Lovink: One last remark?
Femke Snelting: It is more about... I mean if you can think about how open source software could be different from let's say Quark Xpress, it seems that's the problem we are talking about. You learn most of the times about programs when they go wrong, like when you try to open a Quark Xpress document in the wrong whatever program suddenly you start to see the code that goes into the Quark Xpress document. You start to see how it actually does its styles, typography, size, is really very similar to let's say work in html or is much closer to programming than you expect it. You also see all sorts of relations between let's say old style typography or you do system typography where you, you know tell someone in another town to please make this large, please make this italic, not that but the next line, you know, but there is a very, let's say similar programmed approach to typography or how such settings work. And I am interested in how you can develop programs that allow these different views how can you switch from one view to another, and that's why I brought up the example of Dreamweaver. I have to compare. That's how I learned HTML, just try and go wrong with the automatic options and then quickly see what it does for the code and back and forth. So you always have these kind of possibilities of doing the dumb option and doing whatever one always does with it but it allows you a way to view the backside. And I think that's an option I really, really would want to happen in whatever, whether is Photoshop, Quark Xpress or Illustrator. But it allows me to see from different sides what is actually happening so I can interfere when I need to or stay out when I don't have the time be bothered.
Geert Lovink: We are going to have a break now and after the break we will go much deeper into actual software and thanks to a patronage we have free lunch, believe it or not but there is such a thing as free lunch, so enjoy the break and I'll see you back at two o'clock.