politics – Fading Memories

Two novels

I’ve often said I started working on Krita just because I needed a Linux application to draw maps for the novels… But I have never shared the novels themselves. I don’t think I’ll get them published, so maybe here they are?

They were written in the nineties, and are… sexy, in places? And inappropiate? And the third one, which was more inappropriate got lost through a change of laptops. Damn, I miss that text, it was cool.

You might also think that there’s a lot of cultural appropriation here, especially in “Droi”, where a whole class of evil magic has been derived from Buddhism. On the other hand, I could, back then, read Sanskrit, Pali, Classical Chinese, Classical Tibetan and so on. I think the scenes where the heroine fights against how debased her belief system has become are the best.

Oh, I also think the sex scenes are good!

There’s also plenty of conlanging, and while I have lexicons and grammars for the languages in question, I won’t be sharing those :P.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s the juvenile

Murxao (sweet juvenile romance with added cats)

And Droi, (protag’s thought process) imma gonna fix this world to avenge my dead wife.

This is all in Andal, a world that’s different, and which I started creating when I was eleven or so. My original thought back then was “there should be someone home when the kids come home from school, but you need two adults working to earn enough, so, any marriage should be between three people, one of them staying home for the kids.”

Yes, I was pretty innocent when I was eleven.

Should we stop flying to our free software conferences?

Whelp, the latest IPCC report doesn’t beat about the bush. It whacks right into it. And, yes, while governments and companies need to take responsibility and finally start to DO something, we all still have a personal responsibility.

As KDE we’re working on the energy consumption of our applications (which already has shown something we, the Krita developers, can do right away), I changed to buying the electricity I use for building Krita (and everything else) from the local windmill coop… I don’t drive, never have, and that pile of wood next to the stove dates back to 2018, and we’re not going to burn it any more. (Why would we — it’s too warm in winter, when we came to live here in 2007, we needed that stove because it was too cold otherwise!)

All of that is peanuts.

But there is one place where we, as a free software community, have to take responsibility (that word again) and stop doing something we absolutely love to do, and for which we’ve been pining.

In-person conferences with a world-wide attendance.

I’m hating having to say this, and I’m hating that I have to say that it is inevitable, and I hate that many of my Krita collaborators won’t actually be meeting me, the improved second release, but… We, as a free software community need to have this discussion, and until now, all I’ve seen has been silence.

Flying always scared me irrationally, but that’s not the reason I think we should stop it. Cheap air travel is only possible because it’s subsidized, untaxed and airlines are being kept alive only as a matter of national pride. And that’s the only reason we can actually afford to fly people from all around the world to conferences, sprints, Akademies and the like.

Our conference model is built upon something we wouldn’t be able to afford if air travel was priced in accordance with its real cost.

And, we’re probably not going to miss the presentations, much? Most presentations at free software conferences are, honestly, a bit meh. A conference with presentations is something we’ve copied from Academia. What we’re really missing is the meetings, the chats, the sitting together at a table and making notes, the occasional pair programming, the making new acquaintances, the gossip.

And the remote conference format pretty much only provides the presentations, with a bit of chat, which we already have next to it. And I really cannot handle remote conferences myself. For meetings and BoF sessions, I get a headache in a minute or ten. For presentations, especially when pre-recorded, I get bored in under a minute. That sucks.

Maybe we can find a better on-line get-together activity. Max Miller from Tasting History has a virtual cocktail party with his patreons. Maybe the next virtual conference could start with planning and facilitating the socializing, and only add in a program as an afterthought?

But whatever, we still should not go back to burning enormous amounts of kerosene for our get-togethers. Would it be too much to say that that would be criminal?

Why we shouldn’t blame ourselves for the Linux desktop’s microscopic marketshare

Well, that was three interesting articles on the same topic on the same day, namely, billionaires. And read in turn they explain exactly why the Linux Desktop is still at such a marginal market share, and why that’s not because we, who work hard on it, are failures who have been doing the wrong thing all the time. It is in the first place policies, bought with money, that allowed people to build monopolies, taxing individuals and so becoming even more rich and powerful.

(Similarly, it’s not individuals through their choices who are destroying the planet, it is policies bought by the very rich who somehow believe that their Florida resorts won’t sink, that they won’t be affected by burning up the planet so they can get richer. But that’s a digression.)

So, the the first article, by Arwa Mahdawi, discussed the first part of this problem: with enough money, all policies are yours. It’s just a squib, not the strongest article.

Then, Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor enumerates the ways people can become so exceedingly rich, and none of that is because they are so hard-working and so successful:

Exploit a monopoly: this is illegal under the laws of the United States.
Exploit insider information. This is also illegal.
Buy a tax cut. This seemed uniquely USA’ian until the Dutch prime minister Rutte promised abolition of the dividend tax to Unilever. This would seem to be illegal as well, but IANAL.
Extort people who already have a lot of money. Extortion is illegal.
Inherit the money. This is the only legal way to become a billionaire.

Now the article entitled What Is a Billionaire, by Matt Stoller was posted to the Linux reddit today. Not surprisingly, many people completely didn’t get the point, and thought it was irrelevant for a Linux discussion forum, or was about capitalism vs socialism, or outdated Microsoft bashing.

However, what it is about, is the question: why is Bill Gates not in jail for life with all his wealth stripped off? He’s a criminal, and his crime has directly harmed us, the people working on free software, on the Linux Desktop.

So, to make things painfully clear: Bill Gates made it so that his company would tax every computer sold no matter whether it ran Windows or not. If a manufacturer wanted to sell computers running Windows, all the computers it sold were taxed by Microsoft. He would get paid for the work a Linux distribution was doing, and the Linux distribution would not get that money.

That means there’s a gap twice the amount of this illegal tax between Microsoft and the Linux distribution. If a Linux distribution would want to earn what Microsoft earned on a PC sale, it would have to pay the Microsoft tax, and ask for its own fee.

This cannot be done.

And I know, this has been said often before, and discussed often before, and yeah, I guess, poor Bill Gates, if he hadn’t been bothered so badly with the hugely unfair antitrust investigation, he would also have been able to monopolize mobile phones, and the world would have been so much sweeter. For him, for certain.

I guess we didn’t do all that badly with the Linux Desktop market share being what it is. This is a fight that cannot be won.

Monopolies must be broken up. It’s the law, after all.

One worry less

This year, we’ve got elections in the Netherlands. Which means, I have to choose where my vote goes. And that can be a trifle difficult.

After fifteen years in the free software world, I’m a certified leftie. I’m certainly not going to vote for the conservative party (CDA, formally Christian, been moving into Tea Party territory for a couple of years now), I’m not going to vote for the Liberal Party (VVD) — that’s only the right party for someone who has got more than half a million in the bank. Let’s not even begin to talk about the Dutch Fascist Movement (PVV). The left-liberals (D66) are a bit too much anti-religion, and, shockingly, being a sub-deacon in the local Orthodox Church, I don’t feel at home there. That leaves, more or less, the Socialist Party, the Labour Party and the United Christian party. The Socialist Party has never impressed me with their policies. That leaves two…

Yeah, you know, I’m a Christian. If someone’s got a problem with that, that’s their problem. I’m also a socialist. If someone’s got a problem with that, that’s their problem. If someone thinks I’m an ignorant idiot because of either, their problem.

But today, the Labour Party minister for international cooperation, Lilianne Ploumen, has announced an effort to create a fund to counter Trump’s so-called “global gag rule”. That means that any United States-funded organization which so much as cooperates with any organization involved in so-called “family planning” will lose its funding. She is working to restore the funding.

News headlines make this all about abortion… Which is in any case not something anyone with testicles should concern themselves with. But it isn’t that, and just talking about abortion makes it narrow and easy to attack. As did our local United Christians party, which will never again receive my vote. It’s also about education, it’s also about contraceptives, it’s about helping those Nepali teenage girls who are locked in a cow shed because they’re menstruating. It’s about helping those girls who get raped by their family get back to school.

It’s about making the world a better and safer and healthier place for the girls and women who cannot defend themselves.

And I don’t have to worry about my vote anymore. That’s settled.

Coincidence? Unlikely

The Stichting Brein — the Dutch equivalent of the RIAA, or so it seems — has lost a court case a few days ago. Seems that internet providers are not obliged to provide information about supposedly copyright infringing customers. At least, not under all circumstances.

So, today’s news is that the Dutch police and secret service are going to create and maintain a database for matching IP addresses to persons. Of course, this is for the loftiest of goals: we’re combating child pornography and terrorism here!

But my bet is that this just means that next time Brein wants to sue a Kazaa user, they can skip the providers and go to the secret service. And that this will happen a lot more often than that the database will be used to catch terrorists. And that catching so-called “pirates” (you’re not a pirate unless you kill, maim and rob, I feel) was the actual reason for creating this database.

For a non-governmental organization, Brein (and the BSA) do have an awful lot of powers. And for a free country, we’re under an awful lot of surveillance.

Were the British WWI Generals Stupid or Extremely Stupid?

The answer is, of course, extremely stupid. And that’s not a left-wing extremist position, as a certain “Michael Gove” claims, according to a BBC article I just read.

And to say:

“Tony Robinson is wrong. Michael wasn’t attacking teachers, he was attacking the myths perpetuated in Blackadder and elsewhere,” said the spokesman.

“Michael thinks it is important not to denigrate the patriotism, honour and courage demonstrated by ordinary British soldiers in the First World War.”

is a filthy bit of twisted rhethoric indeed. Nobody attacked the soldiers did they? But the officers.

The image of clean-shaven, cowardly officers in nice chateaus doing their utmost to not get near the front-line that Gowe attacks is not a myth. It’s the truth. Blackadder was pretty accurate there, especially for a comedy series.

It’s a pretty well-known fact that it wasn’t the ordinary British soldiers who were mind-bogglingly stupid. It was the officer corps. The generals. The generals who never, ever even visited the front-line, who stayed in their comfortable chateaus poring over increasingly irrelevant maps.

Not that Gove or Murrison or Paxman will do it, of course, but they should read On The Psychology Of Military Incompetence (Pimlico) by Norman Dixon. The author definitely is not left-wing (unlike me) and did serve in the British Army. And he explains in a very clear and very to the point how the British generals in WWI were stupid, and why — and also how the army rewards exactly that kind of stupidity. And also that the British army wasn’t the only place where stupidity of this kind reigned — it was rife everywhere.

This is not an image that needs to be “balanced”. It needs to emphasisized and amplified and remembered. Because the system that rewards these monumentally moronic and mentally defectives with the power to lead armies are still in place, and time and again, from Singapore to Sebrenica, they have managed to get hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands killed. Every officer ought to read Dixon. And every politician.

Software Freedom Day 2009

Yesterday, Irina, Jos van den Oever and I went to the Software Freedom Day in Amsterdam. I think there were about fifty to sixty attendees, and a nicely balanced schedule of talks in two tracks. Very interesting was the presentation about Soleus: community driven virtual private servers.

We did enjoy ourselves a lot, but since it has been ages since Irina and I have been in Amsterdam without the kids, we left around four o’clock to go on a book buying spree the like of which we haven’t committed for over four years. And then we rounded off with an excellent Indonesian dinner for two.

And our kids are wonderful: when we came home they had done all the dishwashing for us:-)

Just a few days

And then I’ll be able go into a restaurant again and enjoy my meal. Or go to the pub for a beer, without first flying out to hospitable Montreal, where I for the first time discovered how much fun a smoke-free pub could be. Dutch restaurants and cafes will be smoke-free from July 1st. Of course, restaurant and cafe owners are complaining that they “used to be hospitable, but now they have to tell guests they cannot do something”. I‘ve never found them hospitable.

Every time I had to eat out the past few years — for work, for instance, or at a KOffice hack sprint I had to leave early or go home really sick. Whenever we had something to celebrate with the family, we’d go as early as possible to a restaurant, so we could have finished our dinner before the smoking customers started arriving. Sometimes that wouldn’t work out, and I’d be sick again.

Bubble Thoughts

Through Mark Rosenfelder’s Zompist website, which I’ve been reading since my conlang days, I came across Eric Janszen’s article The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash. Well worth a read — and now I am pretty certain that, no, there won’t be a stop to burning food as fuel, no matter how many scarce food becomes. No way anyone can fight the might
of $20.000.000.000.000…

Which reminds me of another article I’ve read but lost the URL of that explained how the corn lobby in the USA was ultimately responsible for the Volstead act (because corn was too bulky to move, it was converted into something smaller and more valuable, namely Bourbon, which caused massive alcoholism, which caused the anti-alcohol campaigns because factories needed sober people to work the machines, etc.), and later the corn-syrup-in-everything phenomenon. I really should have saved that URL.

Of course, if the corn that used to be converted into corn syrup now gets converted into fuel, maybe ubiquitous obesity will be a thing of the past very soon… But so many other foodstuffs get caught up in the food-for-fuel bubble, too.

On being part of a publicity machine

I doubt anyone but myself has noticed, but I’ve been blogging less and less lately. Partly because I’ve been really busy, but also because everytime I was writing an entry for Fading Memories I was thinking of whether it would help or detract from the KDE publicity machine that Planet KDE has become.

I have always maintained that since I never asked for syndication on any planet, I didn’t care whether what I wrote fit in or not. If I blog about Easter, and it gets syndicated and the Gnome games maintainer complains in the comments section about me bringing religion in the public realm, I couldn’t care less. After all, he has blogged about his religion and got his blog syndicated on Planet Gnome, too.

But on the topic of KDE, KOffice I feel the curious urge to constrain myself and exercise restraint unless I’ve got another gosh-wow-bang-zip innovation to report.

And that may well be counter-productive: when I started working on Krita in 2003 nothing worked and the project was nearly dead. A powerful stimulant. Bart Coppens recently said on IRC how the fact that even the line tool was broken gave him the courage to try and hack on Krita. Adrian Page got sucked into hacking on Krita because I was too dim-witted to make free-hand painting work.

Admitting that there are problems, that things are broken and need fixing can be a powerful inducement for people to start helping out. When Bart Coppens told the audience at Fosdem that it seems likely that only a tiny fraction of the KOffice applications might make it for 2.0 release of KOffice, we noticed quite a few people dropping by on irc and asking us what they could do to help.

So: people, there is plenty left to fix in KOffice. There are plenty of interesting but not too hard things that you can pick up. There are quite a few quite patient people around on the mailing lists and on irc who are prepared to spend an evening helping you get started. And — we’re still committed to making something that’s fun to work on, fun to with and that will really boost your capabilities as a coder.