Cutting Free

The last question I asked Simon Martin in his interview got me thinking. I asked him whether the choice of Google as a search engine provider compromised the aim of promoting Free Software.

I’ve always tried to pick web sites that run Free Software, such as phpBB forums and preferring ibiblio.org/webster or Wiktionary, but it’s not really been as part of a conscious decision. I’ve never sat down and thought that I’m only going to use web sites that run Free Software, but recently I’ve started to realise this issue’s importance.

That was one of the reasons I moved this blog from Blogger to Blogsome. You can see some of my thoughts at the time in my "Blog Move" post. It was also behind my recent decision to move my web mail from GMail to ippimail.

I’ve been guilty of using the convenient web services, such as Google, but I want to start putting that right.

For that reason, I’ve decided to write this series of posts, called “Free your web”, which will look at what Free Software web services are out there. I’ll also go into some depth about web search and some ideas about what can be done to make a competitive Free Software search engine.

This issue has also been discussed on the gNewSense mailing list. Try starting here.

Changes

Thinking about web software in the same way as desktop software, there is no doubt in my mind that it should be just as Free. For that reason, I’m giving this blog a freedom audit and some things are going to change.

You know that I want this site to generate some income so that I can spend time developing Free Software; well, I’m going to have to find some different methods.

I use AdSense contextual advertising, and links to products on Amazon. Neither of the corresponding sites are running on Free Software. Until I find suitable replacements, advertising on this site is suspended.

I use Google Analytics to handle the statistics for the site, so I can see which posts are popular, but that will have to go.

I provide a link with each post to enable readers to ‘digg’ it; but digg isn’t Free Software so that too will go. That one’s more of a shame because I’m grateful for those who have ‘dugg’ posts in the past, and it has generated traffic. However, I shall talk about alternatives to digg (and del.icio.us) quite early in this series, so I hope you’ll try them out.

The series

As mentioned above, a good part of this series will talk about web search and some ideas of how a competitive search engine could be made, but these are some of the issues the earlier posts will cover:

• Why should we care?
• Is Google the enemy?
• Business models for Free Software sites.
• Alternatives to digg and del.icio.us.

And we shall finish the series with an interview with LinuxQuestions.org founder, Jeremy. LinuxQuestions.org runs Linux Bookmarks, a successful alternative to del.icio.us.

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I hope you’ll stick with this. I think it could be one of the most important issues facing Free Software at the moment.

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I think it’s worth being quite specific about what is meant by "Free Software".

The "Free", in this term, refers to freedom ("Free as in Freedom"). That is, when translated to French, it is "libre" (liberty), not "gratis" (price). In fact, it has been proposed that the term "libre software" be used to avoid the confusion. This hasn’t been adopted en masse, but is used by some. I capitalise the initials of "Free Software" to emphasise it as a proper noun with a definition and set it apart from software that is only available gratis.

Four Freedoms

The best source of a definition is the originators of the term - Richard Stallman, and the "Free Software Foundation".

Their definition can be found at the FSF web site (worth reading), and is often called "The Four Freedoms":

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

[EDIT] Took out the ramble about Firefox and IceWeasel, and wrote the following.

The essence of this is that you must be able to see the source code. And you must be able to change it in whatever way you wish, and let others reap the benefits of your improvements or crash because of your bugs. There should be no restrictions on your freedom to do these things, other than to ensure you cannot prevent others from having these freedoms.

These freedoms are embodied in the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is quite thorough about protecting these freedoms for those using derived works.

I believe the GPL says that a work derived from the original must be clearly marked as such, and not misrepresented as being the original. This should help companies who want to preserve their reputation, without restricting people based on trademarks.

The GPL does not say that you cannot charge for distributing an application, whether it be yours or anyone else’s. Many companies have been successful in distributing Linux CDs for a fee. Nor does it say that fee should be nominal. However, anyone who pays a fee to receive the programmes may distribute them for free, or for a fee of their choosing.

In order to protect your freedom to access the source code, the GPL does stipulate that source code must be available at no cost. This does, of course mean that you can download the code for free, and compile it yourself.

This leads to a more service-based industry. Many companies make a good sum, by providing technical support, or further development of Free Software. In fact, have made their success in providing these services for proprietary software. Rather than limiting the industry, it shifts the focus, and even levels the playing-field.

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I hope this has been a reasonably clear explanation. If anyone would like clarification on any issue, or has any corrections, please leave a comment.

Links:

• Free Software Foundation
• The Four Freedoms
• Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG)
• stallman.org

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After some fiddling, I’ve managed to work out how to put a "Digg This" button on this Blogsome blog.

You will see the button at the bottom of this post. There are some WordPress plugins to accomplish this, in quite a sophisticated way, but these aren’t available for Blogsome blogs.

The Digg Tools page has instructions on how to ‘integrate digg in your site’ (I also got the button graphic from here), but they are very general. After some experimentation, I found that if I use the following hyperlink, based on their instructions, it seems to work:

http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url={permalink_link}&title={the_title}&bodytext={the_title}&topic=linux_unix

There are some minor things I still need to work out. I use the title for the "bodytext"; what I really want to do is use the "Excerpt" that appears on the RSS feed. I’ve also hard-coded it to use the "linux_unix" topic, which won’t be quite suitable for all my posts. I think I may be able to get round this by using "Custom Field" feature when making a Blogsome post.

They talked about having to "URL encode" the permalink and title. I didn’t do anything to do that, but it just seems to work. 

Hope you find this useful. You could always "Digg this story" if you do  

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NOTE: This covers the move to Blogsome, and will be the last post that also appears on Blogger.

After raving, yesterday, about Beta Blogger, I’ve decided that I can’t resolve the fact that this blog is about Free Software, but is run on the proprietary Blogger software.

For that reason, I have moved over to Blogsome (cuttingfree.blogsome.com). This gives me a free (as in price) host, that runs the Free (as in freedom) Wordpress software. This looks to be very powerful (moreso than Blogger), but lacks the drag-and-drop template editing. So far, I much prefer the Wordpress WYSIWIG editor, and the software definitely seems more suited to a power-user.

Wordpress is very actively developed and is constantly updated. Perhaps I shall blog on what aspects, if any, may be called cutting-edge.

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NOTE: This post was made before I moved to Blogsome. I’ve kept it because it may be useful to some.

When I started this blog, the Blogger.com site informed me that they (in typical Google style) had a beta version of Blogger (beta.blogger.com), and gave me the opportunity to use that service. Given that this blog is about the cutting edge, I, of course, took the plunge.

Categories

One of the reasons I was happy to move is that the Beta Blogger allows for post categories. Actually, they call them "labels" (like in GMail). In fact, they are what are more generally known as "tags" (as in del.icio.us). I call them "Categories", over on your right, but I might change it to "Tags".

The lack of "Categories" was a major shortcoming in Blogger for a long time. I am glad to see Google applying their usual ingenuity to this service. In fact, that missing feature very nearly stopped me from using Blogger (I hadn’t heard about Beta Blogger at that point).

Templates

The templates have also been completely overhauled.

If you choose one of the new Beta templates (many are updated versions of the old ones), the new interface enables you to drag-and-drop components around. This is in quite a restricted manner, but it’s still an excellent feature. You are also able to add components (including HTML snippets) to the template, using point-and-click, and there is probably no reason to edit the HTML directly.

JavaScript

The new interface relies heavily on JavaScript, and that doesn’t always seem to work in Firefox. However, that situation seems to have improved, even since last week. The problem seems to be aggravated by the NoScript extension. Even though I have Google and Blogger whitelisted, it still seems to stop working every so often. I’m not sure if they’re using a different domain for some scripts, but I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of it. Of course, the fault could lie with NoScript, rather than Beta Blogger.

Posting

Not having posted with the standard Blogger, I don’t know what the posting interface was like. However, the Beta posting interface is very nice. You can write your post with a rich-text interface, which has a good in-line preview. It also features a spell checker.

I would like to see the rich-text editor include headings. It allows you to change the font, the text size, and make things bold, but I like to use the standard "h" tags. To make my headings, I have to revert to the HTML editor, and type in my own "h3" tags.

Account

Beta Blogger can be used with your normal Google Account. You no longer need to create a Blogger one. A nice feature that would be more useful if they told you before you signed up.

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The new Beta Blogger is very slick, and holds the potential to live up to Google’s reputation. The new features are well worth signing up for. I have experienced no problems apart from the JavaScript issues with Firefox and NoScript.

If you use third-party tools to post to your Blogger blog, they probably won’t work with Beta, but I expect support will be implemented in most soon.

As you can see, my blog posts are now made available under the GNU Free Documentation License. I’m not sure how screenshots fit in with this, but if they’re OK, I’ll post some of Beta Blogger soon.

Links:

• Beta Blogger
• Review of Beta Blogger on bloghacker (a little out of date)
• Known issues with Beta Blogger

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This is the obligatory introduction to the blog.

The main focus of "Cutting Free" will be Free Software at the cutting edge. By "Free Software", I mean "Free as in freedom". People generally understand this to be "Open Source", and the terms are usually considered to be interchangeable, but "Open Source" has a wider scope.

Free Software often leads the field in technological development and innovation. I shall focus on such projects, but probably also mention software that really should be brought up to speed.

Software that pushes the boundaries is what excites me, and being able to dabble in the code and get to see the workings doubly so. Free software has the unique position of enabling individuals around the world to play with an idea just because they want to, without having to worry about commercial viability. Microsoft spent a lot of time and resources on developing WinFS (a filesystem which uses a database to take care of the storage), but they dumped the project. It’s actually quite a good idea (although it would have reduced interoperability), but GNOME have explored the same idea through their GNOME Storage project, and that work continues.

There are, of course, examples where the volume of company money has enabled proprietary software to succeed where Free Software cannot. However, the unrestricted way in which Free Software can be developed, and the remarkable results that can come from that, that makes for a fascinating topic itself.

If there are any projects you would like me to feature, then please leave a comment.

I hope that I shall be able to make this subject as interesting for you as it is for me.

Michael

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