RMS Where to start

 So, for the record, I welcome Richard M. Stallman back to the board (or is that bored) of directors of the FSF.   Cancel Culture Witch hunts are simply bad policy, and it is absurd to try to get the entire board to resign because you don't like the leader.  

This doesn't mean in anyway that I support most of the (non free-software related, or even sometimes free software related) opinions of RMS, think he has the best manners(lol), or think he hasn't done plenty of annoying things to offend people.

He can be abrasive personally, and I understand people not wanting to hang around a rant face, even if he does spend a lot of time on the free software movement.  On the other hand, he stands out in peoples minds, and you will find him quite memorable, a good quality for activism. 

There has been a lot of concern over canceling leaders in the open source and free software movements.  Linus Torvolds had to clean up his act on the Linux Kernel (and then someone said more DRM was added.) Eric Raymond got kicked out of OSI (that is now a defunct corporate shell of its former self.  In light of all this, the attacks on Richard Stallman and the board of the FSF is not an isolated incident.  

I figure if I write a post on this current hot button issue, my project and blog and everything will just get a whole lot more attention because RMS and the FSF (and the resulting drama) seems to be the main issue people care about these days.  Its sad that actual news about freedom respecting software often gets ignored in favor of celebrity gossip, but it is like that everywhere, and RMS has certainly put in his time to get media attention, deserved or not.

Free Culture Novels, where to post them?

So, I wrote a novel and "published" it.  Well, maybe publish isn't quite the right word.  I wrote it and distributed it on the internet.  I wrote it, without thinking about who my audience would be and where I would find them.  That was probably the biggest mistake, thinking of the marketing afterwards, and not before I ever even wrote it. 

So, actually, I wrote it years ago, it was 2010, I think, and I was trying to get over an obsession. Anyway, its the only Nano write novel so far I actually finished, not as in 50,000 words finished. I do that every year, I mean as in completed the story and act.

So basically, here is the plot of the novel.  A young woman has a falling out with her family and joins a cult, little does she know the horrors that await for her the organization. Its basically an adult horror novel, but more of a thriller style, as opposed to a blatant gore fest. 

It is licensed Cc-by-sa.  I never could figure out what to do with it for years, and then one day, I decided that I had enough of sitting on it.  I thought of the horror of dying and no one actually getting to read it, and then I made a drop box account, stuck it up there, and posted it to a few facebook groups - of people who mostly weren't interested. I don't tend to hang out in writers groups.  I'm not desperate to make money from my book or collect royalties on it.  (If that was the case I would have never published it this way in the first place.)

The book is kind of an afterthought, something I just did, and then didn't know what to do with after I wrote it.
I also wrote a script based on it, that I haven't released it yet.  Perhaps some day someone will want to make a movie or play of the book. I thought about putting it on a place like github, but I felt that was too technical for people who just want to read it and don't really want to contribute to it in any way.  So, here is the link to the drop box of the book.  https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9ij5792zlbdrhg/TheCultofDionysus1.0.pdf?dl=0

 So, here is the thing.  We already have a vast free software movement, but not so much for culture.  We do have quite a few books in the public domain, and I can think of things like wikibooks for text books.  I have seen other free culture webcartoons and plenty of music.  I've even seen a few movies. But novels, I just can't think of that many that meet the free culture definition https://freedomdefined.org/Definition, besides works already in the public domain.  More importantly, even if I did stumble across one, say a friend wrote it and blogged about it, I wouldn't know where I could find others of similar quality.  Maybe part of the problem with novels is they don't really have anything to do with gaming, visual mediums or factual information. So, if you have any idea about novels please mention it in the comments.

Fork Games!

Today I want to talk about a controversial word in the free software community, Fork!

Most software projects don't really need forks.  How many word processors, web browsers, cd burners etc do you need?  Probably one or two is more than enough.  But when it comes to games, gamers tend to collect hundreds to thousands of games given enough time.  They at least try them out to see how they play.  I tend to play one or two things for a long time and get all I can out of it, but over time I have played quite a few different games starting back when I was a kid. 

Proprietary game companies frequently come out with a game, and make more and more sequels of this great game.  Gamers like this because they know if they liked the first one, the next one will be similar so they will be more likely to buy then next one.  Thus you have popular series such as Ultima, Final Fantasy, Heroes of Might and Magic, Super Mario etc. 

Free software projects on the hand, are afraid of the Fork! If there is game one in the successful free software games, one of two things will happen.  The original team will keep trying to improve it, not just mantain it so it continues to run on newer computers (like when libraries get out of date) So eventually with all the new features it will play like a different game.  (example, crossfire, battle for wesnoth) Or even if it doesn't play different, it will look significantly different and have features and game balance changes the original did not have.

On the other hand, they often just abandon it, so it get forks, multiple forks, many of these forks don't even work on the platform the game originally worked on, and then there is the question of what is the real fork if people didn't change the project name. (IVAN, also known as iter vehehims. ad neccam)

The other problem with free software games is the dead projects that don't compile and run and never did.  Well, maybe they compiled on one person's system at some point, but no one else can get it to work, and the original developer cannot be contacted.  You can find a lot of this type of project on any popular free and open source software hosting site.  While this is not a problem in and of itself, you keep wondering if perhaps the original developer should have forked a project that already worked properly and changed a few things, if they might not have a better game that people would actually care about and play.


In my next post, I will propose an alternate universe where free software game development thrives and surpasses proprietary  game development using the fork.

The Importance of Ego

I was thinking today about the importance of the ego. Without the ego, you would not exist. I do not think too highly of any religious of spiritual system that tries to eliminate this vital component of life in any kind of perminate way. Without ego, we would not be able to make choices that benifet us as individuals. We would keep going around thinking we are other people or that our decisions do not matter.
One day a few months ago, I saw some graffiti where I lived. It had these heads with open mouths, and underneath was written the word, ego. I still do not completely get it. I also saw a gray lightning shaped streak in the sky after I drew it out on paper.

Anyway, my husband gets to hear about his ego all the time. People try to put him down at work and school and be hard on him. That is bad for his ego. It is important to tell people how great they are all the time as well. Sometimes that is not an easy thing to be doing, because people want to tell each other what they don't like about the other person instead of what they do like about them.

Hackers and the Ordinary Computer Users

Computer Users and Hackers, a match made in heaven, right? Wrong. See, there aren't first of all, enough free software hackers to go around. They always want to work on the next version of Ubuntu, or Fedora with its six month release window (get real, most computer users would rather just use the same os the computer came with until the hardware is too slow, like what five or six years) Instead of working on the new distro every six months, they should just have upgrade (patches)

Instead the hackers should spend time writing applications that users actually want. What kind of things do users want? No, its not another emacs plug in to read text based emails or broken game development libraries, no, its actual complete working games, you know like the evil proprietary titles that people are buying off steam with DRM attached. It should be easy to create similar games to those released in the 80's and early 90's. But do we make them, no, we just play text based net hack with bad game play that no user would actually like, then we go and package up last years version of Pysnake for ubuntu or some other equally out of date and mediocre rehash of Tetris

The real people we need to talk to are the game-developers in training. The people who have decided they want to write games, and are willing to spend time and money to do it. We understand that they have fallen in with the Microsoft crowd and the proprietary software ideology because it seems like a way to make money from game design. But the fact of the mater is having the game in the first place is more important than getting paid. Even if no one ever got paid for making games again, why could they not be made. People play games because they are fun, not because it makes money.

The other side of this is the free content movement. Content is important, just as important as the software code. If we don't convince people who write stories and people who do artwork that free-culture is important, than it does not seem like some programmer should have more power than someone who can put together a coherent story. People have already admitted there are too many programmer designers, and not enough game design comes from people who are primarily interested in things other than programming. The programmers tend to dismiss them out of hand.

For the longest time, I did not care about free software, I only hated Microsoft and only installed GNU/Linux because unlike Mac-OS it would install and run on my old computer. But then I thought to myself, after reading the free software philosophy, what would my life be like if all games were free software. What kind of games would exist that do not exist now. I could see them in my dreams and I was completely frustrated by the fact that so many games do not come with source code.

Perhaps we need a multi-pronged approach to this effort. Instead of simply focusing on the easy targets, Grandpa Joe who uses his computer for email and web surfing, we should focus more on the hard targets, people who dream of making a living designing games. For instance, instead of writing a flash player, we should be thinking about software freedom for the people who make the flash movies and games. They are the people who drive people to download flash players in the first place. We need to think about the trend setters, not just the general populace or people who are behind on the trends.

Compelling content will get people to throw out what ever philosophies people have, because it bypasses all the logic, and simply appeals on an emotional level. You can't ignore the kind of marketing like a cute Free-licensed (as in what a Debian hacker would call a free license, not some artist) anime series that promotes free software. I know hackers think of marketing as an evil word, but we are trying to appeal to an audience, that in our eyes, could qualify as evil. They operate purely on selfish emotional drives, never caring about other people, instead living on a selfish level of getting what you want no matter what.

The Myth of Meritocracy

Some people like to work on open source projects. They seem to think it is a meritocracy and they will get to work for people who are much more skilled, nicer, and less full of themselves then their bosses at their corporate job. However, these issues are not going to go away in the open source world, or anywhere else for that matter. Perhaps a simple explanation is an order, so people can quit having unrealistic expectations for how things are supposed to work.

First of all, people have to understand why successful projects are started and what kind of person tries to start a project. Doesn't it seem easier to work on something that is already being started? If you actually have some skill, then yes, because people want you to volunteer to work on their project. Most open source coders are very happy to have bugs fixed. If however, you are incompetent, and your code looks like something a junior high school student would write, spaghetti code with memory leaks, then you will not be able to get on an open source project that is already highly successful. The better coders will tell you to read the fine manual or other less friendly terms.

As a result of this, the incompetent coder does not get his or her stuff in the project that is already successful. Where they go from there, however is another matter. Many just decide “hey I suck” and go work for Microsoft, play proprietary games, or “volunteer” for proprietary projects, such as being a windows beta tester or volunteering to write a manual for a proprietary game manual and giving the copyrights to the company.

A small minority of the people who end up being told that their code (or artwork or music) sucks, decides that they are right, and everyone else is wrong. They then proceed to ignore or fork the project, and start a totally new and “better” project knowing that eventually, everyone will see how great they are. Most of the time, they suck too much to pull this off. Either they lose interest, or they are just too stupid to learn. The dead project sits around sourceforge taking up space, and no one uses it because it is in pre-alpha, the code doesn't work, and the developer hasn't updated it in years.

Occasionally, however, the monkey pounding at the keyboard produces the open-source equivalent of hamlet. Whether this is from sheer ego and stubbornness, or actually having enough skill to make software that is actually usable I am uncertain. Perhaps due to the stubbornness, they eventually create something worthwhile. The successful projects sooner or later attract other developers, who come to the egotistical keyboard monkey and say “Hey, I can do this better than you.” Now the monkey has a choice, either the monkey can keep an empire of one (or two, or however many idiots the project started out with) or have a better project. The successful projects chose the later route.

The next developers that join the project tend not to be very good, although they have to, by definition, be better than the original monkeys that started the project. They too have big ego and lack skill, but fortunately for us not as much as the original founders. These people, in turn, attract new developers who say “I can do better than these slightly talented monkeys. Now the second layer of monkeys have a decision to make. Either they can let these new, better developers on the project, or they can shoo them away. Now, this is a harder decision, the new monkeys will never let someone who they think is worse then them on the project. The simple reason is this, the original boss monkeys left them in charge of part of the project, it has to get better, not worse, so they only have people working under them who are better than this second later set of monkeys.

This continues down the layers of management depending on how large a project gets, it could stop here, or it could potentially go down hundreds, even thousands of layers. And this explains essentially why it is always mean, egotistical incompetent people who lead these open source projects. It wont' change, because it is hardwired in the fundamental human nature.

C Programmers Reality or Fiction

Today I want to talk about a common urban legend that is widely believed. That is the existence of people who write code in C for fun. I don't believe in it myself since I have never met someone who knows C programing, beyond the hello world and memory leaks anyway. Sure there are a lot of C programs already out there, but simply having a program doesn't mean that a programmer exists or even ever existed. In fact, atheists have used this argument to prove the non-existence of god quite frequently, and since they say they are smart people and always right, I have to agree with them, because I don't want to be stupid.

Besides C programs, I can't really think of any other argument for the existence of C programmers. Most people these days tell newbies to learn a language like python, and not C, because, as newbies soon find out, C produces lots of memory leaks. The thing is, a lot of the good games, such as turn based strategy games such as Battle for Wesnoth (although that is written in C++) and Crossfire are written in C. Supposedly this was done several years ago when there were more C programmers, but I don't know anyone who writes C programs for fun, let alone for work.

Some people claim that C programmers must exist because of the programs, and think they hide in caves or in their basements and write code for fun. I don't believe it. I don't believe in supernatural nonsense like trolls either, because, if I did, I would be stupid, insane, or both. But that doesn't mater the point is a made up story about where C programmers are hiding out does not prove the existence of C programmers. Sure it doesn't refute it either, but that is meaningless without proof, a C programmer.