S2M-1921 Patrick Harvie: Open Source and Free Software

That the Parliament welcomes the findings of the Office of Government Commerce’s report following proof-of-concept trials of Open Source software; notes that the report concludes that Open Source software is a viable and credible alternative to proprietary software and that its use can generate significant savings in hardware and software costs and reduce licensing costs and hardware refresh requirements; notes the significant financial and environmental benefit that could arise from a policy of adopting Open Source software, including the GNU/Linux operating system; notes the long-term dangers for organisations in becoming locked into proprietary systems; further believes that the principles of free software and concepts such as Copyleft can help to protect important rights and freedoms for people in an increasingly digital age, and urges the Scottish Executive to develop a strategy for promoting the adoption of free software and Open Source wherever workable throughout the public sector and to ensure that all software developed with public funds is copylefted.

Supported by: Shiona Baird, Eleanor Scott, Mark Ballard, Chris Ballance, Mr Bruce McFee, Robin Harper, Stewart Stevenson, Mike Pringle, Donald Gorrie

Great stuff. Patrick is also seeking comments, suggestions and improvements on the motion - I’ll be dropping him a line about Creative Commons - and asks that folk who support it contact their MSP, which you can do via this page.

Thanks to Simon for the heads-up.

Your Machines is a series of hands-on workshops and discussion events introducing Free Open Source Software (FOSS) as a tool for creative practice and exploring the wider issues related to it. They have been organised by Simon Yuill, and are hosted and co-ordinated by Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow.

I’m definitely attending the workshop on Audio Visual production with FOSS tools and the talk by Derek Holzer, FOSS Tools For Artists, but there’s a wealth of other stuff worth checking out.

Jim - quite reasonably, since my closing aside on open source software wasn’t as clear as it could’ve been - takes a pop at my mention of the warm glow I get from using free software:

How can knowing you contribute essentially nothing (not even good intentions!) to the very people who make your computing experience a simple and pleasurable one (except for Apple) make you feel good?

I continue to register shareware programs that I use, and continue to feel good doing so. Funny that he mentions donationware as something different than shareware. ;-)

To take the last point first, my distinction between donationware and shareware was not meant to suggest that I favour the former because it allows me to get the software without paying. I’m an absolute stickler when it comes to both - all my shareware is licensed and I always pay the suggested donation. Like Jim, I like supporting small software firms and independent developers - if they’ve made something I find useful, they certainly deserve payment. When it comes to commercial software, my point was that I felt bad in the past for stealing stuff like Word or Photoshop because I couldn’t justify spending large sums of money on applications I rarely use, so another part of my feeling good about using open source software comes from finding an alternative to ripping off commercial developers.

The first point is more interesting, I think, and raises questions about the role of the user in the open source community.

For me, the principal attraction of open source software is political. It never ceases to amaze me that people are willing to devote so much time and effort to provide software that anyone and everyone can use, for no financial reward, and I’m very grateful that they do. Not because it means I can use that software for free, but because the whole process of its development and distribution dovetails neatly with my rather naive, essentially Socialist, ideas about the way the world should work. In short: I’m an idealist, not a cheapskate!

But, as Jim points out in his post, I am not a coder, and so don’t contribute directly to open source projects. Casting aside the implication that only coding contributors to open source projects should be able to use them - which is plain silly - this gave me pause for thought.

True, we don’t pay cash money for the open source software we use, but I believe users have a role in the open source community; not equal to the programmers who put in the hard work, but a significant one nonetheless. First, as a non-coder, I can and do contribute directly to open source projects in a number of ways, be it beta testing, writing documentation or submitting bug reports.

Beyond that, the user’s role in open source is harder to define, since ‘payments’ are made by expressing support, spreading the word, simply using the software. (Sci-fi author and weblogger Cory Doctorow has coined a term for one aspect of this interaction between creators and consumers: whuffie.)

Perhaps I can better explain the role of the user by responding to Jim’s next point. He says:

When I find Jack’s art journalism work I’ll remember to use it thoroughly but not support it in any material way. Obviously Jack will understand completely and feel good about it.

Please do! Strip the sarcarsm from those two sentences, and you’re left with the truth. I do indeed feel good - bloody great, actually - about people using things I’ve written without offering any material support. An interview I did with the designer Helen Storey has been used by Primary School children in a project about science and the body. The thank-you email from three of the kids is worth a hell of a lot more than the twenty-five quid I got for writing the piece. The Q & A interviews with Jim Lambie and Martin Boyce on this site have both been cited by undergraduates in three art history dissertations that I know of and, again, that’s a lot more satisfying than the money earned from publication of the finished articles. This certainly isn’t selfless altruism on my part; I’m getting paid in full, just not in an easily quantifiable currency.

And this is what, I assume, drives the open source movement: the developers’ knowledge that there are users out there benefitting from their efforts, and that those users are grateful.

I suppose I’ve failed miserably to pin down how the user fits in to the open source community here (perhaps any developers reading could enlighten me) but it seems to me that these intangibles - gratitude, support and the like - play a role in the movement, and an important one at that.

For those who haven’t been bitten by the Launchbar bug, the utility allows you to launch applications, open files and display contact information from your Address Book, all with a couple of keystrokes. It even learns as you use it, quickly working out what application you want when you type a couple of letters, with an efficiency that is almost creepy.

Now, there’s competition in the form of Quicksilver, a free application that works in the same way as Launchbar, but with greater flexibility, more features and a choice of display options.

At first glance, this makes Quicksilver seem unwieldy in comparison to the elegant simplicity of Launchbar, which you can use out of the box, intuitively. After a few days use, and a bit of tweaking, I think I’ll be pimping the new kid on the block from now on.

Here, in no particular order, are a few reasons why:

• iTunes integration

  This is just amazing. Whack the command key combination you have set to invoke Quicksilver, type browse or itunes and up pops a listing of all your iTunes playlists. You can then browse them by typing initial letters, and hit return when you find a playlist you want to play, or move down a level to look for a particular song. That sounds a little complicated written out, but in practice, it means you can be playing a song within a split second. (The same applies to iPhoto Libraries too, if you use that to manage your photographs.)

• Window, Menu and Bezel views

  You can choose from three display modes for Quicksilver. The Window option is default, but makes the app feel more of a standalone thing, lacking the tightly integrated feel of the other options. For now, I’ve been switching between Menu, which layers the Quicksilver interface over your Menu Bar - a nice, neat option for those of us lacking screen space - and Bezel view. I’m leaning towards the latter, which is not unlike the centered pop-ups you see when changing volume or brightness settings, or Liteswitch X’s interface for tabbing through open applications. (Although the fact that many icons end up looking ugly and pixellated is putting me off a little)

• Clipboard Viewer, the Shelf, and Finder replacement

  Hit your Quicksilver command key combination, then Command-L and you get a view of the last ten items you copied to the Clipboard. I don’t need to explain how handy this can be. The Shelf is a feature I haven’t used much, because the slickness of the basic features almost render it unnecessary, but with Quicksilver running, tap Option-Command-S and you get a little place to keep stuff: just drag whatever you like there - files, folders, apps, contacts - for easy retrieval. Lastly, I hate using the Trackpad on my laptop, and there’s no room on my messy desk for a mouse, so I like to do everything from the keyboard. Quicksilver makes browsing the Finder as quick as navigating from the command line, but with all the advantages of graphical cues. You can, say, type a forward slash to start browsing from the top level, and find what you’re after by typing initial letters, or using the arrow keys, very quickly indeed.

• Launching URLs

  I can’t quite put my finger on this, but I quickly disabled URL launching in Launchbar, finding that the thousands of bookmarks available cluttered up results. With Quicksilver, and its little window displaying lists of choices, finding what you’re after is an easier proposition, and it seems to learn more quickly than Launchbar, figuring out immediately that when I type s I want to launch Safari, and when I type sr, it’s this website I’m after. A subtle difference, maybe, but one of several deft touches that are persuading me to switch.

• It’s cute!

  When I invoke Quicksilver, and type the first couple of letters of a friend’s name, up pops their photograph from Address Book. With a click or two of the right arrow key, I can launch their homepage, send them an email, or display their ‘phone numbers. It’s not more functional than Launchbar, but it’s a nice little touch, and shows the attention to detail the developers have put into maintaining the familiar look and feel of OS X.

So - and it almost pains me to say this - Quicksilver is the new essential OS X launching utility, and Launchbar is unlikely to keep its place among my Startup Items. I should say at this point that comparing the two is, perhaps, unfair: Launchbar is still the better simple launcher, but the extra features of Quicksilver just about make up for the fact that the learning curve is a couple of degrees steeper. And, where Launchbar is as stable as can be, there are still a few bugs in the Quicksilver beta, not least the annoying window layering quirks when using the Clipboard Viewer or Shelf.

The fact that it’s free and soon-to-be open source is not a clincher for me, as it might be for some. But, that said, having replaced Photoshop with the Gimp and installed OpenOffice in place of Word some time ago, if I now ditch Launchbar I’m fairly sure my computer will be completely free of commercial software and shareware, either stolen or paid for; exclusively running bundled Apple applications, freeware, donationware and open source software instead.

Even for someone who isn’t a raving open source evangelist, this feels pretty good. The open source underpinnings of OS X aren’t just a boon in terms of making for a vastly improved operating system. They allow those of us too fond of shiny, pretty things to move completely to an open source platform - however much we know it is, politically, the right thing to do - a chance to claw back all the cash those capitalist pig-dogs at Apple grub out of their users for hardware and software upgrades. Which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, A Good Thing.

Update: In a timely fashion, Quicksilver now has preliminary documentation, which reveals that it’s even more sophisticated than I thought, including features allowing you to move files around, manipulate them, even compress them. Wow.