Happy Birthday GNU

Nearly a week after its release, I suspect most of my audience has seen the FSF's Freedom Fry video of Stephen Fry wishing the GNU project and the free software movement a happy birthday. While I'm not usually one for birthdays, I thought I'd at least reflect on it briefly. Certainly, it's a wonderful video -- for which Matt Lee at others at the FSF should be proud. But it's fact that the GNU project is now twenty-five years old that is truly noteworthy.

Wikipedia says that a generation (i.e., the average interval between the birth of parents and of their offspring) is somewhere between 25-30 years in most of the Western world. Twenty-five years isn't just a big number divisible by five, it marks a generational shift.

Certainly, GNU has matured and accomplished wonderful things in last quarter-century. More importantly perhaps, it's produced wonderful progeny. It has spawned hundreds of thousands of free software projects, thousands of free or nearly-free operating systems, and an unbelievably vibrant global free and open source software community. Beyond the software realm, the free culture movement, most free licensing projects, and much of the access to knowledge movement can trace a connection back to GNU. We are living, and building, a new generation of the free software movement.

It's not been an entirely smooth ride, feelings have been hurt, and it's hard for GNU's proponents -- myself included -- to not wince at some of what has been done in GNU's name and because of its example. But even cynics must admit: the world is an undeniably better place because of GNU and the efforts and ideas that it has motivated.

I turn 28 in December and have spent my entire computing life in world where free software was a viable option and an active form of resistance. Here's to another generation! May we be half as productive and positive as the last!

Syndicated 2008-09-07 00:46:49 from Benjamin Mako Hill

Feminism in Practice

When my friends Karen and Annina were confronted with an offensive sticker on the laptop of someone working at our lab, they organized a very constructive and effective intervention.

I was so impressed that I made a short illustrated write-up of the story on my wiki.

Syndicated 2008-08-27 18:14:56 from Benjamin Mako Hill

Free Software Project Management HOWTO

I took a little time today to make a new release of the Free Software Project Management HOWTO. Nearly eight years after I wrote it, much of the document is out of date or has been replaced with better, more comprehensive write-ups. In particular, I think Karl Fogel's book, Producing Open Source Software says everything insightful I say in the HOWTO, a whole lot clearly -- plus adds a lot I missed.

That said, my HOWTO is short and is apparently still useful to folks. I updated it to include links to a new German translation courtesy to Robert F. Schmitt, to fix a bunch of links that time broke, and to address a few obvious mistakes that readers have pointed out.

Thinking about the documents' future, I'm happy to release it under Creative Commons BY-SA in addition to GFDL and would love to help out on a wiki book project to merge a few of related efforts into a comprehensive wiki reference work.

Syndicated 2008-08-22 22:37:49 from Benjamin Mako Hill

Story of Josephville

After a late-night IRC conversation about egg corns, shaggy dog stories and feghoots the idea for a short story came to me in the bathtub this morning.

I give you, The Story of Josephville. Apologies in advance.

Syndicated 2008-08-21 16:06:40 from Benjamin Mako Hill

Charles Kane and Jim Gettys

I watched Citizen Kane several weeks ago and was shocked to learn that the major villian in the film is a political boss named Jim Gettys. Of course, a real Jim Gettys is a well known X Window System contributor who is currently working at an OLPC manager.

Last night someone reminded me that OLPC's new President and COO -- who I'd always just thought of as Chuck -- is named Charles Kane!

Here's a short clip from a video of the fictional Charles Kane giving a rather long speech decrying the fictional Jim Gettys! (Also in Ogg.)

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I haven't been this amused since I learned that the head villian in the cartoon Jem was named Eric Raymond!

Syndicated 2008-08-18 18:20:46 from Benjamin Mako Hill