was security, now mutating into a discourse on social relations

[Kurt Cockrum]

[bringing this onto the scn list at Barb's request]
Barb (bb140) said:
>I tend to agree with your thoughts on work/scn, including that Joel should
                    [ ^..mine --kurt ]
>be writing job descriptions.  But, do you agree we need more trained
>volunteers?  Who will train them if you and others don't regard that as
>part of your job at scn?

Yeah, I think we in hardware would all agree that training is part of
our job.  And it extends all the way from apprentice-level to root-level.
No argument there.  But RTFM takes care of 99% of that :)

>I am curious about this:
> 
>> > Then let's keep it simple.  The proper thing to say is "it's time for
>> you to move on".  The "have-not" has become a "have".  We have a
>> success story, but we seem to be regarding it as something destructive
>> or inimical to the interests of SCN.

Don't misinterpret me here.  I'm not suggesting that people go away
after they become net-literate.  I'm saying they know more than they
used to, and now the relationship between teacher and student has
changed, so that they are more like peers.  But not customers (perish
the concept!).

>This seems to imply to me that you regard SCN's mission as taking care of
>have-nots, until such time as they are successful, and then they must move
>on to be....somewhere with the other "haves"?  

Well, in a country where nobody can read, and somebody learns to read,
it counts as a success, whether they go on to use their reading skills
for their own benefit, or they decide to join the community of readers
that shows people how to read.  The literacy program in Cuba is one
example; people who learned to read often passed that skill on to others,
but not everybody did.  But the country as a whole gained enormously.
The more people know, the less ignorant they are about the things
they are dependent on, and the better off everybody is, IMO.

But take note here that the mission is to teach people, not to make
them happy or to provide conveniences to them, nor to treat them
as customers.  I think the analogy applies strongly to SCN.
Of course, this is, as usual, my opinion.

>I think this needs discussion and hope you will post this back on
>scn at scn.org.

Done.  Send flames to barb :)

>To wit:
>--is scn's mission to only take care of poor folks/organizations, they
>can't be part once they are successful?

Or if they become rich, they have to go away :) ?
Not before bequeathing us all their money :)

Seriously, I think that's the priority.  Empty bellies should get filled
before the hors d'oeuvres are passed out :)  But if you can score some
hors d'oeuvres out of the dumpster, well, pass `em around! :)  I'm not
fussy :)

As far as "take care of", I strongly disagree with the concept.
Our job is to teach people how to fish, not to bring them fish every
day.  Biiiiig difference, IMO.  I'm not the least bit interested in
fish delivery, frankly.

>Other issues relating to this:
>--is scn's mission to always do it the cheapest way possible, (shareware
>mentality) even when software is out of date?

Not by any means.  Various factors should be, and are considered.  But
whereever we have a choice between open-source and commercial, we
should IMO be biased toward the free software, for the simple reason
that we can inspect it ourselves and not have to take an outsider's
word for it the way we do with commercial software.  If we judge it
lacking, then that's the time to consider commercial alternatives.  But
I'm very strongly against commercial sw being considered first, just as
I'm against putting mission-critical stuff on a Windoze/NT machine.

Philosophically, I think there's a *nice* fit between free software,
produced by people with altruistic motives, being *used* by other
people doing other things for altruistic motives.  That feels so right
to me that I wonder that I have to explain it.  Ah, well.  I suppose
that religious folk feel the same way about their religion, although I
hate to taint myself with the religious label.

>                                               Who determines what areas
>of scn will be state of the art, and cash paid for it, and when it will
>boggle along in shareware?

That is what gets hammered out at meetings and mailing lists like this
one.  It's a community effort, and what you are doing (reading this
post) is part of the process.  And "boggling along"? see my above
paragraph.  The boggling I mostly see isn't "shareware boggling", it's
"commercial boggling".

"Shareware" isn't the same as open-source or free, BTW.  One doesn't
often see "shareware" in the unix world.  In the windows world
"shareware" is the term used for low-priced binary executables, often
of reduced functionality, chiefly designed to introduce the
fully-functional commercial application.  It's often called
"cripple-ware" because, like with tryout copies of Adobe Photoshop
which are "free", you can't do major functions like "saving".
Otherwise it's as opaque as a commercial application.  It's *only*
benefit is that it doesn't cost much $$, but you are still dependent on
the whims of the author, who is the only one who can see the innards of
the sw, and who controls the distribution.

Also, the term "free" refers to the freedom to copy the software, not
the price paid.  You can charge as much as you want for copies of the
software you wrote or acquired;  under licenses like the GNU Public
License (a typical open-software licensing arrangement), you are
essentially prohibited from imposing *restrictions* on copying.  So you
could charge $2,000,000 a copy for the sources, and if it's neato-keeno
enough, somebody will buy it (or write their own).  And it's unlikely
they'll be passing out *cheap* copies, unless you've offended them :)

Shareware doesn't have many of the nice properties of open-source sw.
Let's not confuse one with the other.

A low-budget operation like ours should not be devoting our precious
energy to fundraising to just to pass that money right along to vendors
who can then turn around and sell commercial software back to us to
help manage the fundraising and the licenses for the fundraising
software.  I don't know how I can convey any better the deep sense of
"what's wrong with this picture?" that I feel with such scenarios.

If you think carefully about it, you will see that a lot of this stuff
is really just variations on the old scam of "send $2 for money-saving
booklet," only jumped up to $10.  It's like an appointment with a
Day-Timer salesman, or responding to a spam for spamming software.  Can
you say "Internet Business"?  In other words, it ain't real.

>I admit that there is a new impetus going on, to open source some of the
>best software.  (ebase for donors is a good example of this new trend--he
>raised funds to develop software for small non-profits would couldn't
>afford donor databases systems, and his software is now state of the art
>because it has email merge on it).
>[...]

Well, I don't know about ebase or what constitutes "state of the art".
I certainly don't think the idea of adding "email merge" to a piece of
software qualifies as an "innovation" deserving intellectual property
protection (it fails the obviousness test, for one thing).  It might
be extremely useful, but that's something way different than innovation.

But for crucial stuff, somebody needs to look at the code, not just
take somebody's word for it.  Preferably a bunch of people should look
at the code, and try to gain consensus.  For a lot of free software,
that's already been done, like for Linux, or sendmail, or emacs, or...

Anybody who wants to can learn what's necessary to understand free code
(which may be a lot, more than what 1 person can do, such as the Linux
OS), and start browsing away.  That's not a perfect solution, because
it's almost impossible for one person to look at say, a million lines
of code, but it's a quantum jump from proprietary code that you can't
examine.  This is important, because in certain senses, this software
will evolve to form fundamental infrastructure for the societies of the
future.  This must *not* be magic, IMO.  I think there are anti-social
forces in society that would just love it if it were :(

One thing to remember is that the reason this sw is used is that it's
already been around for a long time, and there are very few bugs or
surprises (relatively speaking) compared to software that has a
relatively short life-cycle, or has a less dynamic way of evolving.
This is because 1000's of people have hammered on that code for years,
something no company can reasonably afford.  And most free software
contains licensing provisions which prevents companies from
appropriating modified versions to market without making the sources
available.

But bear in mind that this says nothing about the quality of the code,
which in either the commercial case or the free case, may be good or
bad.  What I'm saying is that the code, good or bad, goes thru
processes in the free model that are absent or greatly attenuated in
the commercial model.

The quality comes from zillions of people poring over the code.  The
individual activity of one person might not be all that productive, but
what emerges from protracted concurrent activity by lots of people is
something different entirely.  This is very close to the kinds of
order that can emerge from "chaotic" processes [ also very close to
metaphysics :) ].

In a certain sense, open-source software is self-repairing and
self-evolving, because it gets used to form the infrastructure for the
next generation of development, in sort of a "bootstrapping" process
(which, after all, is just what "life" does).

I think advocates of commercial transaction processing on SCN are
obligated to get out there and get informed on the subject, which might
mean coughing up the $$ and getting
	Garfinkel, Simson & Spafford, Gene
	Web Security & Commerce
	ISBN 1-56592-269-7 [$32.95, O'Reilly]
and *reading* it all the way thru.  Then discussions on the topic would
be more useful.

Another thing worth checking is
	Aalberts, Robert J. & Townsend, Anthony M. & Whitman, Michael E.
	The Threat of Long-Arm Jurisdiction to Electronic Commerce
	Communications of the ACM 41(Dec. 98)12:15-20
which ought to make any commerce advocate sit up and take notice.

Electronic commerce is an arena where one should not venture unarmed
and unready for combat, so to speak.  SCN can't afford to keep
high-priced junkyard dog lawyers on retainer, the way a full-fledged
commercial player can.

AFAIK if we are geared up in any way for any kind of potential legal
battles, they would be in the area of civil rights and
freedom-of-speech, modulo the pacifist sensibilities of the legal
help.  Legal action in that domain can have genuine worth, compared to
legal action in the electronic commerce domain, which is more like
Lebanon in the mid-80's, a great way to dissipate energy and do maximum
damage via isometric struggle.

Of course, if the powers-that-be in SCN, and the electronic commerce
advocates have taken this into account, and can get prepared to cope
with the problems and difficulties I've mentioned, and the ones in the
2 references above, why, then, go for it!  That isn't giving any kind
of blessing, that's throwing up my hands in resignation.
--kurt
  John has left the building.
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