[CREATE] [LGF-LGA] Ok, let's start with a website

[Yuval Levy]

buon pomeriggio Ale

You will forgive me for being so direct and venturing into risky territory 
here.  No intention to offend you nor anybody else.


On August 14, 2010 02:19:07 am a.l.e wrote:
> how our software works.

Which is inherently different from how the software of the dictator of the 
forbidden fruit works.  which again is inherently different from how the 
software from those other West Coast proprietary houses works.  And even 
amongst "us", there are very different cultures with different written 
(example GPL and BSD) and unwritten rules.  Software must always be viewed 
within its human context.


> it's one of the most valuable opinions on this list.

Don't pump my ego, please, three weeks from now I might need it (I am 
currently anxiously waiting for a career-defining response), but now it is not 
the time. 

 
> but this time i think you confused my ego with a try to show the pride
> of our community?

OK, here I venture on thin ice.  In mid August.  Your ego tells you that is 
good to share.  So good that it also tells you that you have to convince 
others as well.  Deep inside you, you're an evangelist and Open Source needs 
people like you, with your drive, motivation and skill.

 
> since i've been doing the libre graphics booths at openexpo i've
> noticed a double need:
> 
> - being able to show our projects in a organic way (i've created a
>   leaflet for it... but it would be much better to have website i could
>   point the people to).
> 
> - being part of a bigger organisation  (i've been asked so many times:
>   "but what is libre graphics?" and it would have been much more
>   effective being able  to answer "an international organization).

OK, so you notice some needs in many people.  Let's say, by analogy, that you 
run a vegetarian restaurant on the main street.  You see a lot of passers by 
that are hungry... for steaks!  Can you give them what they want?

The analogy may be a bit extreme, but think of it in the essence. "organic 
way" sounds like the way of the dictator of the forbidden fruit, where 
everything must be uniform.  Resistance is futile.  There are a couple of 
other software cultures that are as uniform, but that's definitely not the 
culture of this group.  We are variety.  We are tolerance.  We use GTK, Qt, 
wxWidgets and others, not so organic and uniform interfaces - an expression of 
our variety, our tolerance, our egos.  The dictator of the forbidden fruit 
won't tolerate an application written with a different SDK in his empire.  
Egos are tamed and locked in cubicles in his world.  Except his own, of 
course.

Organization is the key.  Nature is organized chaos and it works.  It has been 
working for longer than any organization and still keeps going, despite its 
age and immutable laws.  But one has to see it to understand and admire it.  
The people who come to your booth are mostly blind because they have been 
influenced by what they saw through most of their life: the software cultures 
that are currently still dominant.  And they expect a competitor within the 
same lineage, not a paradigm shift.

 
> i've also indirectly noticed that in countries like italy (and i think
> france, too) it's very important to be certified. it's not really
> important what and how you have learned, but you have a paper saying
> that you're the gimp/scribus/inkscape/... guy.

Yes, the paper culture.  This is an expression of something that predates 
software.  You live in Zurich.  Check the history of the Sechselaeuten [0] and 
the guilds.  The certifications follow in the steps of the guilds and the 
trade unions and other more or less successful attempts, in society, to 
organize and regulate labor.  It's all over the world.  Software is just such 
a new trade that this labor organization did not have much time to develop 
yet.  Some may be thankful for that freedom.

The certifications were born to satisfy the need of the human resources 
greppers to justify their hiring choices / decisions.

I'm not saying certifications are bad.  I do see a lot of conflicting 
interests around them, especially when the same organization sets the 
standards, certifies them, teach them, and collects hefty fees all over the 
process.  It's effectively a labor tax, and unlike taxes it is not even meant 
for the public benefit.  Sorry for the digressing rant.

 
> this is what i would like to achieve with a LGA.
> (there are some other small things: but those are the main ones!)

let me summarize:
1. organic presentation
2. bigger organization
3. skills certification

correct me if I am wrong.


> i'd like you me to point to any existing project where we could attach
> those activities and i will be very happy to do it there!

Let me start with the easiest one: #3.  Schools!  At any level.  This is where 
the indoctrination by the proprietary cults starts, with trojan horses coming 
in the form of deeply discounted software and other corrupting presents, 
financed with the money from the drug^H^H^H^Hproprietary licenses trade.  I 
still can't get over the experience I had about four years ago at a university 
in Quebec.  A professor for business ethics has some needs.  We discuss them 
and it basically boils down to some IT infrastructure for her 
courses/students.  MediaWiki would have been perfect for them.  The show 
stopper?  Their servers were paid for by a certain proprietary software giant 
and came with the string attached that no open source software can be 
installed on them!  Business ethics!!!

The recession is a time of opportunities.  School budgets are shrinking.  Open 
Source has the competitive edge on this, even if the evil empires use their 
war chests to sugar-coat the deals with the devil that many institutions are 
still signing.  But even now, advocates from within universities have a steep 
slope to overcome.  Maybe we should help them, rather than appeal to a general 
public that visits expo booths under the effect of the proprietary drugs?

#2 organizations.  The Titanic sunk hundred years ago.  Sure there are trades 
in which economies of scale prevail, size matters, and bigger is better.  
Think automotive manufacturing where them marginal unit produced cost nearly 
nothing.  Size matters also the other way around.  Scale in software is in 
distribution/duplication, not in concept/implementation.  And we here know 
that duplication value-added tends to zero.  The world does not know it yet.  
It pays hundreds of dollars for copies that cost near to nothing to produce.  

The large organization has been tried on software.  And it has largely failed, 
or is failing.

A "Linux distribution" is what come closest to a large organization in our 
ecosystem.  Like every organization, it faces the basic "make or buy" 
decision.  And when the cost of buying are close to zero because upstream 
input is also Free, it isn't unsurprising that more than 90% of the inputs to 
such an organization are sourced.  This enables them to be small and lean.  
Not large and bloated.

So you will forgive me if I don't agree with your statement that we need a 
bigger organization.  I do see a need for coordination, that can be tweaked / 
improved.  And I do see areas in which we are still weak:  contributors to the 
Linux kernel, the Apache webserver, the FreeBSD system, and other successful 
Free software are on the payroll of corporations.  They are paid to contribute 
to Open Source, and that's not charity: those corporations do get good returns 
back from their investment.  In this area, Libre Graphics is still weak.  Will 
a larger Libre Graphics organization improve this?  I doubt it.  What may help 
changing this is studying how corporations like BMW [1] approached Open 
Source.  How where their decision-maker influenced?  Then apply the learned 
principles to industries that use graphics software.  Easier said than done, I 
am afraid, at least for me.  I have not been trying to do this in the graphics 
area; and in the general administration area the results of my efforts have 
been... mitigated.


#1 presentation.  Sure, it is important how you present yourself.  The 
dictator of the forbidden fruit masters the art.  It requires tight upstream 
control, which he manages pretty well because upstream is on the leash.  Free 
software is unleashed, and I argue it is impossible to force it into a 
uniform, organic presentation in the same way that it is impossible to enforce 
the adoption of a single GUI-Toolkit across all projects.  Each project 
present itself the way it is, and it is a good thing (expression of the ego).  
Because each project shows openness to coordinate with others for F/free - 
something that the other guys have to pay hard cash and sometimes hard clash 
for.  They have attrition, we don't.  They buy and discontinue FreeHand [2] to 
make more profits on Illustrator - we encourage InkScape, sK1, and others to 
coexist and thrive.  Just this can fill a single website [3].  How come are we 
not there?  "the experience reminds us that we hang on the edge - maybe next 
time it won't work."  What better wakeup call?

For "uniformity", I would go the other way around:  encourage the projets to 
show a CREATE badge on their homepage.  To state that they are part of the 
CREATE initiative, not the other way around.

You will still need something to present the whole.  Something to present the 
evangelists and advocates and the ideas they bring to the table.  I believe 
you will have the support of most people and projects.  It has been shown in 
the past, with those projects and people putting out calls for donations on 
their websites and blogs.

Describe the unplanned, ad hoc development of nature; not the quinquennial 
plan of failed dictatorships.  Express yourself, who you are, why you got 
here.  You will be credible enough, without trying to mimic the other guys.


> (just a warning: i won't ever create it under the url
> http://create.freedesktop.org/libregraphics/ i don't think i have to
> explain my reasons for it)

ROTFL!  Yes, completely agree with you that the domain name is something that 
can be tweaked / improved, and I am confident that Jon will agree to a better 
name once you'll propose it.

Speaking of names, LG ... well, it's a commercial entity.  I have a few goods 
from them (it's a LG Philips, a joint venture, that produces the S-IPS panels 
that are so great at color reproduction) and a few bad experiences that lead 
me to associate LG with *L*esser *G*oods.  Also "Libre" has a political 
connotation that many users don't care about and some can even perceive 
negatively.  Ideas welcome.

 
> (btw. is it worth to make our software more professional if are not
> able to show it? and yes, on a parallel track i'm also working in making
> one of our programs more usable in a professional environment.)

What is your definition of professional?  In photography I found a significant 
difference between "commercial" and "professional".  The clerk at Wal*Mart 
that takes passport pictures will say (following their marketing) that he's a 
professional.  But he has no formal training nor passion.  Can't explain the 
aperture and shutter speed dial on his tool of the trade.  Yet they dare call 
him a professional.

 
> btw2, for my ego, it's much more practical to invite any of my friends
> with their kids (3 to 5 years is the best age...): it's so easy to be a
> god for them!

That's not ego, it's self-esteem.  Ego is who you are deep down inside.  Self-
esteem is how you see yourself.


> i don't think i will ever try to strengthen my ego by discussing any
> topic in a mailing list... it's so painful!

You express your ego unconsciously in everything you do, my friend.  You 
mostly apply to the world the principles that you apply to yourself - unless 
you are extremely lucid and aware of your ego.  Your ego was strengthen in 
your formative years.  Not much you can do about it now other than accept it, 
express it, and be aware of when you're applying its principles to the rest of 
the world.

 
> personally, i'm convinced that we need a LGA and that it needs some
> services offered over a website.

go ahead and do it.  If it's good, others will follow.

 
> and -- if we stick to the website -- it should give the visitor a good
> feeling about our software when she lands on it.

I think this is the individual project's responsibility.  You can, of course, 
try [4] - an existing project/organization into which many of your ideas might 
fit.


> one of its main tasks will have to give her an overview of what LG is,
> what software is around and what it can do (eventually also what it
> can't.

I guess you want to go at it from a user perspective rather than from a 
software perspective.  Which is good.  So rather than giving an overview of 
what LG is, why not giving an overview of what the user wants to accomplish 
and how it can be accomplished with Free tools?  i.e. rather than recycle the 
tool's own descriptions, describe the users.  And of course, if you see a 
tool/project that does not describe itself particularly well, you are always 
welcome to complement / contribute them.

Question: why ImageMagick is not here?
 
 
> i admit that i did not watch camille's presentation (for the same
> reasons you didn't like it)

I did not say I didn't like it.  I said I could not watch it.  On top of it, I 
am the kind of guy who gets easily bored by videos and other time-controlled 
presentation because my time-flow is different than average.  I like things 
like slideshare where I can flip through the slides at my own pace.  I also 
like to read in fixed-width font because it's faster (the brain uses the 
invisible grid to speed up the process of words-detection).


> i must say that may ideas are really not compatible .

that's OK too.  Agreeing to disagree is also a civil way to move forward.  The 
left and the right of the political spectrum have sometimes diametrically 
opposed ideas, but they work together in a democratic system of alternating 
leadership.
 
 
> i will step out from this discussion now.

I apologize if I've been too intense or even offending.  Not my intention.  
And me too, I've spent more time on this than I should.


> the idea of a LGA and now i want to work on it.

Please do.  Do work on what you deem valuable for you.  Work on what makes you 
feel good.  The rest will fall into place by itself.


> have a wonderful day

anche a te, buon fine settimana!
Yuv

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sechsel%C3%A4uten
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10073798-16.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_FreeHand
[3] http://www.freefreehand.org/
[4] http://ubuntustudio.org/