The Freeconomy Malaise

At the beginning of this month, I mentioned some of the open-source leeching going on, along with mentioning Wired’s article, “Free.”  Well, “Free” is back in the news again, and not so much in the way that it probably wants to be.

Gawker.com is all over recent reports that Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, contains a number of straight lifts right out of Wikipedia.  Putting aside for the moment the propriety of using Wikipedia as definitive proof of anything, the problems with doing so I’ve mentioned before, it’s of course ironic that there’s a lot of hullabaloo surrounding using free content in a book about the economics of free.  It probably bears mentioning, that Wikipedia, like many organizations, such as Gawker media, publishes under the CCL which means that contributors allow their work to be freely used, so long as the use is attributed and that the derivative work is then allowed to be freely used:  “To grow the commons of free knowledge and free culture, all users contributing to Wikimedia projects are required to grant broad permissions to the general public to re-distribute and re-use their contributions freely, as long as the use is attributed and the same freedom to re-use and re-distribute applies to any derivative works.”  (Source)  For Mr. Anderson, the issue appears to be whether there was proper attribution of the material allegedly lifted, and as a logical extension, whether he would then allow the use of the material he used in a free manner.  It’s a fascinating dilemma in many ways.  To me, anyway.

Perhaps the biggest reason why I find myself so fascinated by the whole thing is that I recently read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, published in 1992 (yeah, I know Amazon is saying 2000, but that’s just for the edition to which I linked), and it was incredibly prescient in almost all respects (okay, so we don’t have rat-things …. yet, or burbclaves …. yet) except for one area.  In Snow Crash, people pay–sometimes, a lot–for information.  I also recently listened to the book-on-CD of Douglas Adams’ quasi-posthumous work, The Salmon of Doubt.  One of Mr. Adams’ suppositions as he was writing at the end of the 90s was that individuals would be willing to make micropayments for content.  That is clearly not the case today. Somebody pays for the information, but it seems rarely to be the end-user.  At least in the dead-tree media days, subscribers would defray some of the cost of publication, but these days the cost is almost exclusively placed on advertisers and content-generators willing to receive little to no compensation for their work, all in the name of trying to get noticed in some form or fashion.  Gawker, to its credit I think, has pointed out the way this can be problematic.  (This is not to say that Gawker Media, as shown by Gizmodo’s call-for-intern, is paying its interns splendiferous salaries.)

As we move along in this terrible economy, it really does make me wonder what the end game will be.

Oh, and to satisfy the FTC, links to Snow Crash and The Salmon of Doubt, are not made as part of Amazon’s affiliate program.  And if you don’t like Amazon, here are links to B&N.com’s site for the respective works:  Snow Crash; The Salmon of Doubt (MP3 download).  I am not part of an affiliate program with B&N, either.

More Adventures in Linux

After playing with 64-bit Fedora 9, I began to feel a little like the pop idols on Iron Chef, with the horrible dubbing: “Um, tee-hee, I don’t think I’m hardcore enough for this distro!”  There wasn’t anything really wrong with it, I suppose, other than sludgy response, Flash 10 not working, the scroll wheel being excrutiatingly slow, always having to drop to the terminal to do things…  That’s not really a knock on Fedora 9.  It’s a beautiful program, but probably my 2+ year old lappy isn’t suited to playing around with that particular flavor of Linux; not when it’s essential that I use my external monitor.  (Not to mention the fact that I am not a seasoned pro at this…) I generally liked the Gnome environment better than KDE, especially the way the desktop effects worked–it’s truly slick.  (And I have since learned that Fedora probably did the best job of recognizing and dealing with the meager video card that I have.  I’ve also learned that the stunningly slow internet browsing I was experiencing was due to IPv6.  I found some code that would disable it, but someone else pointed out that all you really need to do is type “about:config” in Firefox’s address bar, search for IPv6, and toggle the selection: Presto!  (That’s one thing I truly love about the Linux community: whatever problem you’re having, someone’s had it, too, and the fix is findable.))

Anyway, since I had a lot of issues that mitigated against having a pleasurable experience with Fedora, it was time to write it off and try something new.  Why not try Ubuntu, I thought?  Cool, I said, that will be fun; but let’s not play with Ubuntu, let’s play with Kubuntu, because everyone seems to like KDE better than Gnome, and besides, there are widgets right out of the “box”!  So, I downloaded Kubuntu 8.10, ran it as a Live CD, and generally found it to be quite nifty.  Hella faster, that was for sure, even off the Live CD.  So, I clicked “Install,” and hesitated at the partition screen.  I didn’t want to let it just use the entire hard drive, because, for now, I need to keep my XP system; having something reliable is essential.  And not fully understanding, at the time what all the partitions were doing, and not understanding why it kept telling me to make the existing Linux partitions into something that I didn’t have an option to do, I hit the web and searched for what most people thought was the easiest distro for dual-booting with XP.  Ubuntu and Kubuntu came up a lot, but so did OpenSUSE 11.

I took a look at what OpenSUSE had to offer, and I liked what I saw.  Yeah, it’s a Novell product, and Novell plays with Microsoft, and that sorta diminishes the whole ethos, but at the same time, playing with Microsoft suggested (and was sorta confirmed by reviews online) that dual-booting would be quite easy.  And besides, the KDE screens looked really nice.  (‘Course, they all do, pretty much, don’t they?)  So I grabbed it, burned the Live KDE distro, and went to work.  It loaded up quite quickly, about as fast as Kubuntu.  And it seemed great.  Now, at that point, I was more than used to my screen’s resolution not being recognized; for whatever reason, using an external monitor with a laptop really confuses the hell out of these distros.  However, I wasn’t expecting OpenSUSE to not give me any option higher than 1280×1024.  I don’t have ANY monitor that has that resolution; my laptop is 1280×800 and my external is 1680×1050.  So, whatever, it looked terrible.  But, given that there must be a way to fix this after the install, I went forward with it.  And installing truly was simple.  When it gets to the partitioning point, OpenSUSE said, in effect, “I recommend you keep your Windows partition, and let me write over that Fedora install you have there, and use the partition you created when you first started tilting at these windmills.”  And since that was precisely what I wanted to have happen, I was more than happy to say “By all means, my good distro.”  Installation was painless, and it loaded very quickly.  Resolution, of course, was terrible, and the standard method of changing resolution, using the System Configurations tool, still limited me to 1280×1024. So I went searching for help on the ‘net (disabling IPv6 first, of course).  Someone recommended to someone else to try using Sax2, and indeed, it gave me lots more resolution options.  But damed if they worked.  Simply put, everything got fouled up, and OpenSUSE became entirely unusable.  So, onto a different distro.

Since I already had Kubuntu 8.10 on Live CD, I installed it.  Everything worked great until I went to change my monitor’s resolution.  And the damn thing just locked up completely.  Couldn’t get anything to work.  Rebooting just rebooted into a locked screen.  Trying failsafe mode did nothing, because of some such error or something.  Whatever.  My patience was wearing thin.  But I’m also determined to see if a law firm can really make use of Linux and open source software.  So I did another search on distros that people seem to like, and Mandriva is tops on the lists.  I chose the Gnome option for 2009.0, because people have been complaining about KDE 4, and I tend to agree with the general tone.  Also, I discovered that the environment doesn’t feel quite as cohesive as Gnome.  Yes, there are really cool translucent effects on things, but then there are old-school classic-Windows looking touches.  Just made me feel like I might as well go with Gnome which makes me think of OS9.  Not that I like OS9, but at least the environment feels unified.  Also, if you don’t choose the Free option, you’ve got built-in Flash and supposedly better support for video drivers.  I can attest to the former, but the latter was terrible.  Install was fine, but, again, trying to make the resolution make sense was a lesson in anger management.  And to top it off, while the hardware configuration tool recognized exactly what video card I had, the driver it wanted to install turned out not to be a driver that was appropriate, which I discovered too late.  So, the result was a desktop that looked nice, but missing menus, and when I did just happen to glance upon one, the text was about 700x bigger that it was supposed to be, and there was no way to see what was going on; things were so screwed up that–when I thought that maybe I’d just reinstall from the Live disc–the Live environment acted precisely the same way.  Not fun.

So, fine, Ubuntu.  Everyone says it’s the most newbie-friendly distro.  And I had this partitioning thing down pat at this point.  And I hadn’t tried Gnome via Ubuntu, so…. maybe?  Yup.  Installed like a charm, allowed me to have 1680×1050 on external, notified me of updates, and they installed smoothly, hasn’t crashed yet, Flash installed nicely, and I’m currently using Firefox on Ubuntu 8.10 to do this blog post.  Now, it’s not like I have dual monitors; lappy’s screen doesn’t look right, but the main concern is the external monitor and that’s working at least.  I think the color leaves a lot to be desired, but that’s fixable.  I also need to reboot, so I’m not sure if all this will have to be retracted in ten minutes.  Also, it won’t let me run any nifty desktop effects, but maybe that’s for the better.  Clearly my computer’s not up to it.

I’m a little annoyed at the constant asking me for my password any time I want to install something or change a setting.  Isn’t that something that Microsoft and Apple get made fun of all the time for?  But I understand there’s a good reason for it.  Anyway, though, Ubuntu is working, and stands a very good chance of existing on my system in the morning.  And I think that for my needs, 64-bit truly isn’t the way to go right now.  But it truly feels like something a law firm could actually use for its computing, and that was the main goal of this exercise, anyway.  We’ll see.  It’s only been up and running for a couple of hours…

Is it 100% Perfect?

No.  But, after spending all day trying to get Fedora installed on my laptop, I’m happy to report that it’s 95% awesome.  And it’s hella faster than running off a live CD.  Right now, I’m running Fedora 9, installed on my laptop, in its own partition, and it’s FAST.  I chose the 64-bit install, which I’ve read perhaps doesn’t really do that much for me.  But I bought this laptop a couple of years ago because it had a 64-bit processor, and dammit, I’m going to do something with it! Anyway, likely due to the fact that there’s hardly anything installed, from power on to login, it’s probably, what, 90 seconds or so?  Maybe less?  That’s a far sight better than my bloated XP installed.  Even after I uninstalled all the bloat I could.  Anyway, what a nice experience.

Are there problems?  Yes.  Screen resolution continues to be an issue.  I get 1600×1050 on my external monitor, but I also get the same thing on my 1280×800 laptop screen, which obviously isn’t cool.  If I try to turn off my lappy’s monitor, the external monitor actually shuts off.  Also, Fedora thinks my external is only 19″, when it’s 20″, and it’s not like size matters, but… And I haven’t tried to deal with my external devices, like my printer, my external HD, my external DVD burner, or my webcam…

Cool things tonight, though: sound’s there; wireless mouse and keyboard work flawlessly (haven’t tried multimedia capability yet) (even scroll wheel works pretty well); bootup is super fast; GUI is already way slicker than XP; Firefox works no problem; satisfaction of knowing that I am doing something on a non-MS rig is waaaaayyyy high.  But, as I’ve spent pretty much the entire day doing this, and it’s almost midnight, I’m calling it quits for the night, and will continue to play with it tomorrow.  I’m looking forward to seeing if I can get OpenOffice 3.0 installed and then duplicate my table of authorities “hack” using Linux, and moving one step closer to being an open source office.