Stuart Jarvis

Jos has been getting very philosophical lately. One post that got me thinking about how odd KDE is (in a good way) was his one about working together.

KDE is quite unlike anywhere else I have worked, for fun or profit. Probably the closest analog is my involvement at university with the student newspaper, the Warwick Boar where I started off writing general features and ended up as Science Editor.

The Boar had a few similarities to KDE. It was staffed by volunteers, was successful (we won awards and stuff), diverse and quite large (I don’t know exactly, but well over a hundred contributors). However, unlike KDE, it was hierarchical. At the top was the Editor, who had ultimate power and responsibility. He or she made the call when someone threatened to sue for libel, or when one of the big national newspapers wanted access to one of our sources (it happened). Below the editor, each section had its own head, responsible for organising their team and making sure that their pages got done.

As a writer, you got told what to do and you did it. You could make suggestions and argue, but ultimately if your editor disagreed you could either accept it or go away. As editor, you had to get things done. If none of your writers turned up one week then you had to put the section together yourself and meet the weekly deadline.

Such an approach, with a named person responsible for every aspect of the project and sanctions (like getting sacked) for getting it wrong, meant that the newspaper always arrived on time and was generally of decent quality.

KDE is quite different. We don’t really have a hierarchy. Sure, there are people in each group that are almost defacto leaders – people listen to them and they push things to get them done, but there tends not to be one person whose approval you need to get to do something. There’s also no one to make you do things and no one who will have to sort things out if you screw up. This can be a good or a bad thing.

Costs and benefits of being KDE

Benefits of a hierarchy:

• If a named person is responsible for doing something, generally they do it
• Power lies with experienced people who are less likely to screw up
• People outside the organisation know who they should contact (even if they don’t know a name, they ask for ‘the Science editor’)

Costs of a hierarchy:

• If you are going to be held responsible for finishing something you get involved in, you may be discouraged from getting involved in the first place
• Power lies with experienced people who are less likely to take chances, try new things and make things better
• People outside the organisation are only aware of the leaders and they tend to get the credit (or blame) for the successes and failures of the organisation as a whole – so the people actually doing the work can feel that success or failure will have little impact on them personally

Herding Cats

Going back to my experience with the Boar and contrasting it with being an editor on the Dot: on the Dot we work by consensus and a few rules that we set. That sometimes means we’re a little slow to get things done because there’s no one person who has to do it. If everyone is busy then it doesn’t get done. However, it also means there are more checks and balances in place – I made a couple of major screw ups while working as an editor on the Boar because I didn’t have to consult other people, but on the Dot we rarely make really big mistakes that don’t get spotted before publication.

There’s also the question of time as a volunteer. If being involved in the Dot meant committing to getting things published within set deadlines and taking sole responsibility for that then I would have to resign tomorrow. We all have real jobs and other things to do and simply cannot make those kinds of commitments.

Conclusions

For me, KDE is in some ways flawed by its freedom – the fact that we can all, in theory, wander round doing whatever we want. Looking at it that way, it’s amazing we ever get anything worthwhile done. But in practice, the bonds withing teams and the consensus that we build mean that generally we do things pretty well. A more rigid structure would kill a lot of that and I think we would have a lot less people involved because it would be less fun and would require commitments that people simply cannot make.

Some more experienced gearheads sum up getting things done in KDE with the simple phrase of “herding cats“. Well to all our cat herders out there: thanks. You do a great job.

Tags: busy, community, Dot, Free Culture, herding cats

This started as a comment on Ade’s blog post about Hugin, but I don’t think comments should be bigger than the original blog post, so I’ve moved it here instead

Ade makes some interesting points about the GPL, particularly the opportunity to exclude certain jurisdictions where the use of the software would infringe a patent. He also raises the question of whether distribution of source code – as opposed to binaries – can be counted as infringement and reflects on the trend to explicitly claim for a medium containing code that would cause the invention to be ‘realised’ on a computer.

Background

If you’d like an elegant and (generally) very well argued primer and history of what can be patented in UK law see this judgement (from 2006, things have changed a bit since then). The judge in that case, Peter Prescott, was actually only standing in and therefore wasn’t really expected to take a fresh look at it as he did and go against patent office practice that had been making software patents a bit easier to obtain in the UK up until that point.

He’s something of a personal hero of mine

Why I’m writing about this

I guess the first thing to say is that I’m no patent lawyer, this is not legal advice and my knowledge is limited to UK and (a little) to EU patent law. The knowledge I have was gained through working as a patent examiner (one of the people who decides whether or not a patent is granted on an idea) from 2004-2007 at the UK Intellectual Property Office. During the last year of my time there I was in the department working on ‘unpatentable’ inventions: software patents, business methods and the like.

This area of patent law moves quite fast in varied, contradictory and nonsensical directions and I really have not been paying attention to it since I left almost three years ago.

Who can infringe? (Why claim the software medium?)

Within UK law, at least, there is the idea of primary and secondary infringement. The primary infringer is someone who does something directly reading on to the claims of a patent. So if the patent claims only the method of doing something and your software performs that method when run then the primary infringement would occur only when the method is actually performed (i.e. when the program is run). In that scenario, if you were selling the software then only your customer would be a primary infringer when they used the software. However, as a supplier of the means to infringe, you could be open to a claim of secondary infringement. The original logic of this was – I believe – to allow the owner of a patent to sue, say, the British importer of an infringing device rather than having to pursue a foreign manufacturer abroad.

However, pursuing a case for primary infringement is easier and so, as Ade noted, many patent applications will also include a claim along the lines of:

A storage medium containing code that, when run on a computer, performs the method of claim x

This would allow them to go after anyone supplying the program on a disc as a primary infringer.

There was, briefly (I think it got overturned) a court judgement in the UK that ruled that any claim to a program on some kind of medium was a software patent as such (well, obviously…) and not permissible under UK law. I had great fun in my last few months as a patent examiner rejecting loads of applications simply by saying:

Claim x is a claim to a computer program on a storage medium. The invention is therefore clearly a computer program as such and cannot be patented.

Applicants and their patent attorneys didn’t much like that.

So does source code infringe?

I doubt it. There may be an argument for secondary infringement, but that gets in to all kinds of difficulties as there are various defences such as the research defence (pure academic research and the publication of methods arising from it are immune from patent infringement) or freedom of speech (anyone remember the haikus containing the deCSS code?).

Also few people make money from distributing source code, so where’s the point in suing them? It’s easier to sue the end user who directly infringes (and doable if they’re a big company: SCO tried it with Daimler, albeit in a copyright rather than patent case) or someone distributing the binaries on a commercial basis (if the patent owner remembered to claim for software discs too).

Disclaimer: as far as I’m aware, the above has never been tested and a lot of it might not apply outside the UK anyway.

Why does this matter to KDE?

Most of the software patents that came to me originated in the US and were fairly easy to dismiss under UK law. However, there was a patent application that came to me before I worked in the unpatentable section that could have had a direct impact on Amarok.

I don’t remember the details of the patent in question (and probably couldn’t reveal them anyway as I don’t want to mess with the Official Secrets Act). However, it was for a hardware audio player and one of the features it claimed had, I knew, been in Amarok for a little under a year, but before the filing date of the patent. It was my opinion that Amarok would have infringed had the patent application been granted. It took me a couple of days to find the disclosure of the feature in the Amarok infrastructure (trawling wiki page histories and forum posts), twice as long as the target time allotted for processing that particular patent – and I had to hit that target to get promoted.

The point is that the Amarok wiki and forums are not somewhere we routinely searched for prior art and had that patent application been passed to someone else who didn’t know (or care) that the feature was already in Amarok then the prior art probably would not have been found. I would not have been criticised for not finding it and it was against my interests (other than as a user of Amarok) to spend the time doing so.

The problem is more than software patents

As illustrated by the Amarok case, it’s not only software patents that can be dangerous. The ‘invention’ there was obvious – to you or me – but it probably wouldn’t have been patently obvious, by which I mean the the level of invention required for getting a patent is low.

There is also a problem not only with a lack of time to do things properly, but also a lack of technical knowledge. I examined applications concerning JIT compilation, despite having no knowledge of programming. I examined applications for magnetic hard drive read heads without having the faintest idea of what would be obvious to someone in the industry, or really even really which features were important.

I always had the impression, since we saw the results of prior art searches from other offices, that the European Patent Office were far more thorough than we were. They certainly had more time per patent application and found things in places we would never have looked. We tried not to look at what the US Patent Office was up to.

I’ll finish off by quoting Peter Prescott in that judgment I linked to at the start:

Despite the prohibition on granting patents for computer programs … it is said that the EPO [European Patent Office] has granted more than 40,000 of them… From the point of view of the applicants … if there is any chance of getting such a patent it may be said to be a rational business choice to try it. If not, their competitors might … patents that are wrongly granted can be very expensive to challenge, and perhaps beyond the means or inclination of small and medium enterprises. An accumulation of patents of that sort … may be a serious barrier to entry.

The only safeguard against that wrong – and it is a wrong – is the vigilance of the Patent Office. When I was a Patent Office examiner … we sometimes granted patents that we shouldn’t, but did it anyway because we thought the Patents Appeal Tribunal would not support us.

Tags: amarok, background, Free Culture, offtopic, patents, suckage

If you’re reading this via Google Buzz then this post was brought to you by WordPress, Identi.ca, Twitter and Google. That’s either impressive or horrifying…

Social Media confusion, by Damien Basile under CC-by-sa

Social Media tools suck

On the one hand, it’s kind of nice that interoperation is possible at all, but on the other it’s a silly chain with many unnecessary points of fail. I can use WordPress to blog and that plays quite nicely with Identi.ca – I can syndicate the posts to Identi.ca and likewise list my dents here – things talk to each other. I can also syndicate from Identi.ca to Twitter, but Identi.ca (and therefore I) know nothing about replies at Twitter. From Twitter posts get passed to Google Buzz, but I know nothing about what happens there unless I happen to log in to the GMail web interface. Chances are that there are some people on Twitter wondering why I’ve @replied to them about something they never posted – markey on Twitter != markey on Identi.ca for example.

Identi.ca is made usable and useful by the KDE microblog widget – I simply wouldn’t use it if I had to actually visit the website and log in – that takes longer than the dent. Web interfaces suck. Similarly, I can interact with GMail via KMail (or I could, actually I prefer to have Google forward my mail to another server, a throwback from the days when GMail either didn’t support IMAP or it was a bit funky). GMail’s web interface, while better than other webmails, sucks. Twitter and Buzz, without convenient desktop interfaces that I use already, simply do not get visited by me on even a weekly basis.

In terms of Social Networking, I have Facebook (which I got bullied in to years ago and kinda use, infrequently), LinkedIn (dunno if I’m going to do much with that, another sucky web interface) and Flickr (only for KDE promo). Facebook and Flickr are made more bearable by the excellent digiKam image export tools

Infrastructure for KDE Promo sucks

Similarly, the KDE community wiki sucks – as a collaboration tool (it’s fine for storing info and userbase and techbase are both awesome). I need to discuss things by mail, then open a browser, log in (which requires a round trip to my openid provider if I want the same account on all the wikis). Then I need to remember how to use wiki markup. That’s my excuse for the various things I should have done on the promo wiki and haven’t done. There are things we can do better with the wiki, but the basic problems remain.

Collaborative writing tools suck too. Email is rubbish for actually keeping track of stuff. Google docs is amazing in its way, but it’s another web interface, doesn’t work in Konqueror (or does it nowadays?), is not free and is slow compared to a desktop app. Kobby (and Gobby) also don’t meet our needs – yet…

Really, I want a single “KDE Promo” app that deals with all the above. I’d like a pony too, please You can call it Kommunicator or Kollaborator if you like. The app, not the pony. He’s called Shergar.

There is hope…

Sorry if all that sounds a bit gloomy. There are some good points too The KDE microblog widget rocks. Kopete sorts out my soup of instant messaging accounts, making MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, and Facebook Chat not suck to the extent that I don’t need to care or even know what network I’m chatting to someone on. Kontact makes my email, calendars and contacts portable thanks to the magic of Kolab PIM data structures.

Ok, the point I’m trying to get to is that all these amazing new social tools we have are limited because they don’t interoperate by open standards, only allow some limited syndication. I want to operate my Identi.ca and Twitter and Buzz accounts as one. I don’t want to have to point Google Buzz at Twitter because they didn’t implement the Identi.ca API yet. I want my Facebook stuff and my Linked in stuff in a single view in Kontact or a Plasma Widget, not in some web browser or web browser widget.

Frank Karlitschek covered some similar ground a bit more coherently in his Camp KDE talk – be sure to check out the other talks too. Together with grappling with the Promo pages on the community wiki and discovering Google Buzz, that’s what has really prompted this post. The new services we’re seeing are exciting and can be useful and Google are helping to remove some of the suck from browser-based apps, but you have to wonder why they fix the browser rather than just using the desktop. ownCloud may have some of the answers, complemented by KDE software (reimplementable by anyone else by using open standards too). Perhaps we can even succeed in, as it were, “freeing the web from the browser”. Only time will tell.

Tags: Camp KDE, community, Free Culture, promotion, rant, suckage, web technology

I really need to start believing the the power of free communities. I remember hearing about Wikipedia shortly after it started (the English version was at the few thousand articles mark) and thinking that it was a nice idea but would never really take off and compete with traditional encyclopaedias. Yeah, so I was wrong on that one, but at the time I knew nothing of the things (KDE for example) that communities of volunteers can build.

But a few years later, when I first heard about OpenStreetMap, I really shouldn’t have fallen in to the same trap again. But I did, I never thought it would become comprehensive enough to be usable. Now it’s my site of choice when I want a map, not only because the other alternatives either cool, but non-free, belong to the competition or are just plain horrible to use but because in many cases the OSM map data is actually superior (with better marking of local footpaths etc) and – of course – you know you can use it freely.

A really nice illustration of the coolness of OSM, showing edits from 2008, can be found at Vimeo or possibly viewed below if you’re viewing this somewhere that allows embedding. Either will unfortunately require you to have some kind of Flashy stuff installed.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

(This animation was produced by ITO World. It is licensed CC-BY-SA. The music is ‘Open Electro’ by Vincent Girès and is also CC-BY-SA).

Tags: Free Culture, web technology