We just made another release of GNU MediaGoblin: 0.3.0, "Rise of the RoboGoblins"! We've had "release artwork" for a while, ever since Jef van Schendel made the banner for our 0.0.3, "Talking in Rainbows" release, but recently I've been doing the artwork. The last few releases have come out with release artwork that is both more complex than my usual work, but also with results that I'm extremely proud of. In a certain sense, it's silly to spend so much time on release artwork. Sure, people seem to like it. But on the other hand, I probably could be coding. But my life has also been both at work and in hobby space more and more of "hacker management" work (as in, both doing programming as a hacker and managing projects that hackers work on) and it's nice to get some time in to do artwork for fun.

Anyway, several people have commented that they really like the artwork for this release, I've been meaning to write up a blogpost showing how I do artwork, and there are a couple of interesting aspects to the artwork in this release, so now seems like an opportune time to give a brief overview of the process.

First of all, materials. Excepting a minor bit of Blender assistance, I did everything in the GIMP for this release. I have an Intuos 2 wacom tablet that I use on my desktop, and I've used that as my primary art tool for almost a decade(!) now, but earlier this year I got a Thinkpad X220 laptop/tablet hybrid (with gorilla glass screen for scratch resistance while drawing; definitely recommended if you do much artwork on the go) and I do almost all my artwork on there these days. In fact, most of the artwork for this release was done from the car (Morgan was driving, of course).

I knew I wanted to go with the name "Rise of the RoboGoblins" for this release, both because I thought it fit in a very silly and abstract way, and because I knew I had some ideas for artwork that could go with it. I didn't have extremely specific ideas for the artwork, just that I wanted a group of robot goblins bravely standing around. So first step, figure out what those robots look like.

This is typically what my canvas looks like when I'm sketching out ideas. When I sketch for ideas I usually do a bunch of small drawings on a moderate/smallish canvas resolution. Fast and loose sketches, see what sticks. In this case, as I came up with robot designed I liked I moved them over to the side. I usually don't bother to clean up files like this very much. I use the pen tool for this, as I do for pretty much all my sketching and outlining.

Now that I knew what the characters looked like, I wanted to figure out where to place them. I had a pretty good idea of the character sizes based off of thinking bout the character sketches above, so I did a quick and rough sketch of things in an 800x600 canvas.

This looked pretty good to me, and I had a pretty decent sense of the composition and perspective. Yes, on its own, the above sketch looks like crap. But it isn't meant to be evaluated on its own; it's just a guide for me and me alone.

There's only one problem: I'm terrible at perspective. Or, that is, I can do perspective when it's just one object, but the moment I start to put a bunch of objects in a scene I start overworrying about the structure of perspective and tend to overcompensate. Luckily, I had a trick up my sleeve that I used in our previous release, 0.2.1, "Gearing Up":

Basically, taking a cue from the wonderful Blend & Paint training DVD, I made a minimal scene in Blender to figure out the perspective, then used that as a background layer to guide me in the shapes and perspective of my artwork. (Thanks to my good friend Lunpa for suggesting this technique probably would work with my artwork as well.) As you can see, the shapes are super, super basic in the blender scene. I don't need anything complex, I just need to know where things are. So, by that same principle, all I really needed was to line up some cubes on a plane with some simple three point lighting. So I did just that:

Now that we have that, it's just a simple matter of rendering that, scaling up our canvas on the perspective sketch image to three times what our end result will be (2400x1800 for an 800x600 scene), and adding the blender render as a layer for "guidance". I duplicate the "perspective sketch" layer, move things into place, and refine the sketches a bit so when I do the next draw-over it'll be a bit clearer where things go.

So now we have that, but the outlines are nowhere near what we want here; this is just guidance stuff still. I create a new layer to create another sketch with more details. At this point my desktop looks a bit like this:

At this point the details are shaping up pretty nicely. However, the middle-left character still looks a bit rough comparatively. So I do three things: make a new layer to draw final outlines over the sketchy but mostly correctly shaped outline ones, make a layer to block in color, and make a layer to go under that which I just paint white so we don't have accidental transparency in spots (I use a pressure sensitive pen and like a bit of the painterliness that comes from using an opacity-varying brush).

Once that's done, it's time to start shading things in (at this point we have colors, but they're pretty flat). Only one thing: I'd like to be able to have reasonably accurate ideas of where the shading could be. Luckily we already have a Blender scene set up for this, so I swap out the cubes for Suzanne (the Blender pseudo-mascot monkey) heads:

At this point, we're set to shade things in. Really, my method of shading is pretty lazy... I use a circle brush with the burn/dodge tool in the GIMP and "paint in" shadows and highlights with some cleanups and minor detail with the paintbrush and airbrush. The rest of the work is making the background (I used the plane from the blender scene with a conical gradient to give a bit more shadow moving toward the focal point) and some slight color adjustments with the curve tool. I sketch in the shadows at their feet using the pen tool and the cube scene for guidance, add the text, and I'm done!

So that's pretty much it! If you want to follow around or play with it, feel free to download the source XCF file. (To avoid ambiguity, it's CC BY-SA 3.0.) Not all my artwork is as intensive as this one is, but I'm very pleased with how it came out, anyway. Not bad for someone who doesn't have formal training, amirite?

And now, a minor tangent. One of the biggest joys of MediaGoblin development is really working with the incredible, incredible community of contributors and users we have. I've started a thing called contributor drawings to give thanks to people who have done a lot for the project. Sadly, I'm pretty slow at getting them done. But I was pretty pleased with the way this artwork came out... indeed, I tend to think it's some of the best artwork I've ever done. So now I want to take the opportunity to dedicate this piece to a particular community member... Jef van Schendel is our lead graphic designer and is responsible for MediaGoblin's primary look and feel. I felt it was appropriate to dedicate the piece I thought was the best of my artwork to the person responsible for MediaGoblin's design (and also the person who started the MediaGoblin release art tradition!) and I'm happy to say that Jef accepted this as his contributor drawing. Thanks for everything you've done, Jef! MediaGoblin wouldn't look nearly as awesome without you.

Today I heard about a family member being bullied and discriminated against for being an atheist. And at the moment, I am incredibly angry, incredibly furious. I don't think I was prepared to be so angry about this. I don't even think my life gave me an expectation or even much thought that this could happen to someone I loved. And so I am feeling a lot of anger that I don't know how to deal with, so I guess I will just write it out.

Let me step back for a moment. I am an atheist who was raised as a Christian. I came out as an atheist in early adulthood. I won't say my family was very happy about it, but I never faced any serious disrespect, and I haven't faced any discrimination about being an atheist in my lifetime. To be honest, after coming out, I never gave it too much thought. I mean, my father is even a religious teacher, and he was understanding about it. Granted, he is about the most liberal, tolerance-minded religion teacher possible; when I told him I was an atheist, and explained my thoughts behind things, he said something like "Well, that makes sense to me. I think you're approaching a belief system and ethics in your own way." Maybe that is why I unsusbcribed from the atheist subreddit; it seemed full of so many people who were just so angry at religious folks for their intolerance against atheists or for their simplemindedness or whatever. But I always thought of my father, a religious person who was willing to and even interested in talking about my beliefs and non-beliefs. My mother seemed a bit more disappointed, but she never changed her attitude to me, and she has always supported me and what I believe in. So that kind of bitterness that these other people held atainst non-atheists never resonated with me. It seemed absurd and reactionary.

And then today happened.

I don't use Facebook anymore, but Morgan occasionally tells me about things she sees on there. Today I heard about my cousin-in-law's son getting bullied and physically assulted for being an atheist. Worse yet, it seems he's been bullied and physically assulted for being an atheists by students at his public school and it seems at this point unlikely that anyone is going to get in trouble for it.

The short version of it goes like this. The kid goes on a camping trip for the fifth grade school outing. There's a campfire at night, and a group of boys sit around and tell ghost stories. One kid declares that there really are ghosts, but it's okay because if everyone around the campfire believes in Jesus, he will protect them from the ghosts, and that if anyone didn't believe in Jesus, they should leave the campfire so that they don't endanger the safety of the circle. So my cousin's kid gets up to leave the circle. The other boys notice. They chase after him. They begin calling him names, and shoving him around. (Apparently, they were forceful, but they didn't leave any marks. Regardless, that's physical assult. And as you can imagine, being a kid and shoved around and harassed by a group of other kids outdoors in the middle of the night has got to be a pretty scary experience.)

The school doesn't call up my cousin(-in-law) and tell her. I'm not sure if they didn't know, or if they didn't think it was important Anyway, my cousin doesn't know until her kid gets home from school. And of course he's scared.

They live in a very small, predominantly Christian town. She tells us that normally she tells her children that it is best to just not talk about their beliefs, and normally they do not. But of course, in this case the issue was forced: he was forced to either hold to his beliefs or lie about them. So he got up, and he walked away, as were the instructions of the other children. And then he was assulted and bullied.

We called Morgan's cousin on the phone. She tells us that of course, she is angry. But she also wonders if she should blame herself for "doing this to her children". But what has she done that any other parent does not do? She has passed on her beliefs from herself and her children. And in fact she has taught her children that even if they do not believe in other religions, they should understand them. Her children are not naive, and in fact they have read up on a lot of religions. But these beliefs, even these non-beliefs, are their beliefs. And that's their right. It isn't the first time her children have been bullied about such things either, but it is the first time the bullying has turned violent.

What can she do? She lives in a very small and predominantly Christian town. If she raises a fuss (which she might) the chance of the school doing anything is fairly small. And even if they do, she does that at risk of alienating her family from the rest of the community. And so what is she to do?

In a moment like this, it is easy to see why so many atheists seem angry much of the time. If the reverse had been true, with atheists beating up a Christian for believing in Jesus-the-savior, of course there would be recourse. There would be a mob. And thus, in retaliation of this hypocrisy, it is tempting in this moment to join the tribes of the angry atheists.

On the other hand, I think of my father, who I imagine would read this and be just as angry and upset as I am. And so it is not true that all Christians, in all communities, are this way. And if this happened in someplace larger and more diverse and more liberal... if this happened in Chicago, this would probably not be tolerated. And of course, this would be bad, just as bad, if it were discrimination in any other situation: whether the child were a Jew, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim. Any such discrimination is not okay. And certainly, many of the groups listed above probably face similar fears. It is likely that our cousin would also tell her children to not tell their schoolmates about their beliefs if their were Muslim. And so, part of the problem is simply something that is already generally known to be true: it can be a frightening thing to be a minority, any minority, in a small, tight-knit, and discriminatory community.

I do feel though that this action is likely to not be viewed with the same seriousness (or as the same act as) "religious discrimination" because by definition the religious belief expressed here is non-religious. And so I will not join the crowd of atheists who feel bitterly against all religious people. But today at least I have gained an understanding of how someone can come to develop those feelings. And I am certainly angry, and I feel very justified in being so.

Licensing is a big deal in the software and cultural freedom movements; there are a lot of licenses available in both domains (probably too many), and people have strong opinions about what licenses and license components are better or worse. But in the truly libre category of licenses, maybe the most controversial aspect of licensing is that of copyleft, a powerful copyright hack that uses copyright itself in a sort of judo move to force those to make derivatives to give their contributions back to the commons.

There are two primary copyleft licenses, the GNU GPL for software (and some other categories of functional) works (and the related AGPL and LGPL) and CC BY-SA for non-software (generally cultural) works. But I don't intend to go into details on copyleft or the licenses themselves, there's plenty of resources about that already on the internet.

What I'm more interested in exploring here is the perspectives on copyleft. Is copyleft good? Is it bad? A lot of people have extremely strong opinions about it. Actually that's an understatement; if digital ink were made manifest, the amount spilled over copyleft could fill at least one olympic sized swimming pool. But despite all the heated debates about copyleft, I've never really found a good breakdown about what those arguments are. I actually think it's not too hard to separate the arguments categorically, so here's my attempt to do so.

Even though I'm on the overall-in-support side of things (I am actually conditionally in strategic support of copyleft and think the decision about whether to use copyleft or not should be weighed on a case by case basis; more about that at the end) I'm going to start by discussing the objections before I move to the support side. Generally I think the objection side of things is a bit trickier (and intellectually, maybe a bit more interesting to analyze) than the support side, so I'll go to that first before I explain why one might actually find copyleft to be a valuable tool. (A slight amount more caveat: I'm not claiming to not have bias here; I do. But again, I'm not completely on one side or the other, and I think the decision about whether to apply copyleft to your project is best made by understanding both the pros and the cons.)

I'm marking this as objection 0 because it's not actually an objection itself (some even argue it's a feature, and at the very least it's mostly necessary, unless you're using file or package-based copyleft like the MPL or LGPL). That is to say, on its own people aren't upset about it, but combined with the other objections some people find it particularly irritating: if you combine a copyleft work with a non-copyleft permissively licensed work (again, unless the copyleft license is the LGPL or MPL or similar), effectively the combined work is under copyleft. (This doesn't mean that you can't continue to develop the non-copyleft permissively licensed work separately without copyleft applying though.)

It should be noted though that the same thing is true with combining a non-copyleft permissively licensed work with a proprietary work: effectively the entire work is proprietized. (Indeed, that's exactly what copyleft licenses like the GPL are trying to prevent.)

Anyway, that wouldn't bother you if the terms of copyleft itself didn't bother you, so let's move on to the reasons people find copyleft itself objectionable.

The first objection is maybe the most classic objection to copyleft: copyleft itself is non-free. There are a few variations to this argument but it generally goes like this: restrictions in licenses are bad; possibly copyright as a system of restrictions is itself bad. Since copyleft relies on copyright and restrictions to preserve the commons, that means that it's also bad. The most free license then is one that provides as few restrictions as possible.

Sound confusing? Let's put this another way and go back to the copyleft as a "judo move" perspective. If copyright were violence (and a number of people in this camp believe that it really is), then copyleft defends against proprietization with a violence-in-retaliation move. It might be defensive, it might even just be returning the violent force of the oppressor against the oppressor itself, but to this particular category of anti-copyleft objection, that doesn't matter. Any violence itself (or any copyright restriction) is objectionable, even defensively, and the fact that a copyleft license makes use of such force is offensive.

The trouble with this position is, if you're really arguing it, you'd better be consistent about it and also object to the violence of proprietization (which is surely worse than copyleft in its reduction of freedoms through restrictions). If you really are concerned with user freedom, your whole ecosystem had better be free with completely permissively licensed non-copyleft works to bring that dream alive. If someone wants to proprietize your world, and legally they can, you can't stop them directly. Your only routes to bringing this completely ultra-restriction-free world to life are to keep building freely licensed works and tools (and encourage others to do so) and to try and reduce the scope of or eliminate copyright on a legislative level (a worthwhile pursuit, but certainly not an easy one, and one we seem to be losing rather than gaining ground on at the moment).

In the software world you used to hear this argument a lot more, particularly along operating system lines: back in the day it especially used to be [Free/Open]BSD users arguing with GNU/Linux users. If you're completely running permissively licensed free software and objecting to both copyleft and proprietary software (like Theo de Raadt), you have the moxie to back this position up by sticking to your principles. (And notably, even though I don't agree with this position entirely, it's one I have a strong amount of respect for.)

However, I think this position is on the decline, and instead we see a different argument on the rise...

The other argument (which I think we've been hearing more and more of) is that copyleft is strategically a poor choice in comparison to permissive licenses for free and open source software.

There are a few reasons you might make this argument; permissive licenses are generally more interoperable with other licenses, but the main reason given is that you'll get more developers and more users on-board this way. Some businesses are uncomfortable with the obligations of copyleft; avoiding copyleft means that you'll get a larger marketshare, and greater popularity means that it's more likely that you'll have more people giving back to your project. Maybe you aren't even worried about contributions; maybe you're making a library and you want as many users as possible even if you're the only active contributor.

You might also not feel strongly about the freedom side of things at all; you might write a library that you're totally okay with being used by only-proprietary-programs; you just want developers to be able to share code and give back to each other or think that you'll end up with better software by following such a methodology, principles be damned. (However, many people who do take this side do feel strongly about free and open source software, they just think this is an easier strategy to iterate toward that goal.)

What I do think is true is that in the software world (but I don't think quite as much in the culture world) we're seeing this attitude on the rise: these days you often hear and see people take the route of "release the code to the projects that aren't your core business, but keep the core bits of your business proprietary if that's what makes sense to you." The move to this trend has been growing simultaneously with the rise of interpreted languages like Python and Ruby, the move to distributed revision control systems, and maybe most importantly, the move to software as a service web applications. This post by GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, "Open Source (almost) Everything", captures that mindset pretty well.

To say nothing of the culture side of things, the good news here is that for a certain scope on the software side (libraries and infrastructure specifically) this seems to be doing more than well enough. For libraries and certain parts of infrastructure, people do seem interested and willing to contribute back even without copyleft. And we're seeing an abundance of code crop up these days because of it. I think that's great, though I don't think it's actually enough... but more on that below.

In short, arguments to not use copyleft for strategic reasons are fairly common, probably even increasingly common, among many developers. And at least in certain situations, there seems to be reason to back up such a choice.

There's another sort of objection that's actually a combination of the previous two, but in a way that's deceptive and potentially even dishonest. What I'm talking about is when anti-copyleft individuals are arguing for not using copyleft for strategic reasons but mask the argument to sound like a principled, freedom-oriented reason. This comic might help best explain what I mean (based on a true story):

COPYLEFT COMIC
by Chris Lemmer-Webber
+-----------------------------+
|  Don't use that copyleft    |
|  license!  It's non-free!   |
|  It destroys your freedoms! |
|     /                       |
|   , ,               , .     |
|   O o               o O     |
|  \ C /               ~      |
|   '|'               /|\     |
|                 /           |
|   Oh no!  I like free!      |
|     Why isn't it free?      |
|                             |
+-----------------------------+
+-----------------------------+
|  I can't use it in this     |
|  proprietary program        |
|  with my proprietary        |
|  license!                   |
|     /                       |
|   \ /               , .     |
|   O o               o O     |
|  \ C /             __c      |
|   '|'                |\     |
|                 /           |
|  But your license is even   |
|  more restrictive point for |
|  point, and forbids even    |
|  basic distribution and     |
|  modification!              |
|                             |
+-----------------------------+
+-----------------------------+
|  What are you, some kind of |
|  software freedom zealot?   |
|     /                       |
|                             |
|   \ /               - _     |
|   O o               o O     |
|   c                  ~      |
|  <'|'>              /|\     |
|                             |
+-----------------------------+

To the extent possible under law, Chris Lemmer-Webber
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
Copyleft Comic via CC0.  Paste, alter wherever/however you like.
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Let me describe this perspective in another (non-comic) way: the argument is that I'm reducing someone's freedom by using a copyleft license that will infringe on their ability to integrate said program with their proprietary application, that by choosing a copyleft license one is reducing their "freedom to choose what license they want to use". Sorry, but as I said earlier, the reason why it's hard to maintain the freedom-oriented anti-copyleft position is that you also have to object to proprietary software without a mechanism to protect your work from being proprietized (and this particular breed of truly-freedom-oriented-anti-copyleft Theo de Raadt style perspective seems to be on the decline, maybe because it is hard... though as said, I do admire people who truly take this perspective). But if you're straight up looking to proprietize software (or any other works) then it really isn't freedom you're concerned with at all, it's strategy. I actually think that many people aren't maliciously trying to deceive people, they probably don't realize they're doing this. But a lot of people are, you hear this perspective all the time, and the hypocrisy of it is really annoying.

(And, by the way, if you're waving your finger at me over the edge of your macbook about copyleft being nonfree while committing to your GitHub account in-between working on your software as a service web application and the game you're working for the iOS app store, sorry, but I'm not going to take you seriously.)

Please don't deceptively use arguments about user freedoms when user freedom isn't your primary concern, it diminishes those who are actually concerned with principles and diminishes your own argument when you had a perfectly good one already, one of strategy.

On the support side, I think things are generally simpler to analyze. Actually, there's one perspective on supporting copyleft that I think is in decline but has traditionally played enough of a role that it's worth observing: the financial incentive of proprietary relicensing. The basic idea here is that the copyleft allows anyone to release free work that integrates with or extend your own copylefted work, but if they want to release something proprietary that integrates/expands with your work, they need to relicense with you.

Over the last decade this strategy was very popular, but seems to be rapidly on the decline for I suspect a couple of reasons: 1) it's not generally as lucrative as organizations might like and 2) if you get outside contributions and don't just throw code over the wall, you generally need some sort of copyright assignment or contributor agreement. People seem less and less willing to sign such things these days and furthermore they delay integrating contributions (today's distributed collaboration systems have gotten people used to being able to get their contributions integrated very quickly into a codebase).

From my perspective, the decrease in this trend is probably not much to be sad about, but it does probably help point to the perceived decrease in copylefted works.

Now for the main reason for supporting copyleft: as a strategy (or even as regulation) for preserving user freedom. I think I'm fairly right in pinpointing this as strategy, I'm not sure I know of anyone who seriously thinks that copyleft is a matter of principles (the FSF directly says "Which license is best for a given library is a matter of strategy, and it depends on the details of the situation" in the article Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library) and it's certainly not a requirement for a work to be considered either free software or free culture. The question really is then, if we have preserving user freedoms in mind, is it a good idea?

Copyleft supporters tend to think yes, it is: going back to the judo move metaphor, there's simply too much risk right now of being beaten up otherwise, so some sort of form of self defense is necessary or at least very useful. By adding a requirement that others share alike, we've helped to make sure that the commons is not commandeered by interests that might not otherwise personally care about user freedom.

So what do I think? Actually, I already stated it: I'm in the conditionally-consider-whether-or-not-copyleft-is-good camp. I am in the concerned-with-user-freedom camp, and I don't feel bad about having a license condition that you're only violating if you're proprietizing things. So a more important question to me is: is copyleft the most strategically beneficial licensing option? And, as I keep semi-saying, it depends.

I think it's worth recognizing that libraries are doing just fine without copyleft. In fact, it's now the case that almost everyone who releases libraries does so under a permissive free and open source software license. And people do seem to be contributing back to those libraries, as much or more than they would be if they were under copyleft (mainly because the scope of people using them is higher and because people seem to realize that you're lowering maintenance costs by trying to give back your contributions into an actual codebase, plus it feels great to have your code merged into a library you love). So as for libraries, I think maybe copyleft isn't so necessary these days as it used to be.

But a world where only libraries are free is also a world where developers are free and users are not. As someone who believes in user freedom, that's not acceptable to me. So if not libraries, where does copyleft hold value? And the answer is obvious: applications. Applications have traditionally been the areas that have had the strongest copyleft. They're also the area that's receiving the least amount of attention from a free and open source software perspective in emerging areas right now (web applications and mobile applications). Particularly I'm interested in the web world, where we're winning on the library side and losing on the application side. What we do see is that free and open source web applications still have a high proportion of copyleft licensing (think Wordpress under the GPL and StatusNet under the AGPL). I suspect copyleft has a huge role to play here yet.

An addendum: I wrote this blogpost a while ago, but continued to procrastinate on publishing it for some reason. On that note, I've just come back from PyCon, which is an amazing conference, but one generally that has a strong amount of the "release your libraries under a permissive license, and snark on people who use copyleft" type attitude (pretty much exactly in the manner of the Open Source (almost) Everything article). Surprisingly, despite having a big logo of AGPL in our poster session on MediaGoblin, we only got one person who snarked at us for the license choice (a pretty lame snarking at that, which was "I think people who use copyleft are insecure", which sounded like hyper-masculine chest thumping in licensing wars form). What I wanted to say in response to that person, but which I failed to do, was to say: I think permissively licensed tools are still great, but I use copyleft in the space that you probably would have proprietized it. I don't want to just "open source almost everything"... I want the whole stack to be released as free software. It's not just developer freedom I'm concerned about, it's user freedom. And I think that's probably the difference.

Another addendum: It's been pointed out to me that maybe my position on "libraries are doing just fine without copyleft" misses that, for example, the state of Android device lockdown might be less abysmal if that ecosystem were copylefted. That's a fair point, though I'm really honestly mostly a web developer and speaking from a web developer space. In the web world, I feel like the type of people who are traditionally copyleft advocates completely fell asleep at the wheel for a while, and the generation of (erk) "rails community" type people took over. And where they've driven us to is a place where the whole ecosystem is so close to being free, but people stop right before finishing the job. And if I wrote copylefted libraries in this space, for the most part, people will just not use it. So why not just be allies with those people, and in the space that they normally lock things down, I can release things as copylefted free software web applications?

This month is going to be pretty intense... maybe I should even say "pretty insane". I'm going to be at three different conferences. Maybe I'll see you at one?

• PyCon -- I've been attending PyCon every year since 2008. As with most years, I'll be on the video crew. Last year I gave a talk on Blender's Python API (video here). This year I missed the deadline to give a talk, but I will be giving a poster session with Deb Nicholson on MediaGoblin. (Deb handles most of our press related stuff, including writing up most of our blogposts. She does a really great job!) PyCon is always a fantastic conference, and apparently news of that has gotten around. This year both the hotel and admission to PyCon sold out a month in advance. Yow!
• LibrePlanet -- This year I'll be presenting with Mike Linksvayer about Creative Commons. I suspect it'll be a fairly wide ranging talk, going from the 4.0 license process to bridging Creative Commons and free software. Unfortunately, I'm attending a wedding on Saturday, so I'll only be around for Sunday. However I'll be in the Boston area for a few days afterwards, crashing at Deb Nicholson's place. If you want to meet up, let me know.
  Not sure if somehow MediaGoblin will tie into this whole thing, but in a sense it's very pertinent to LP2012 since it started right after LibrePlanet 2011 (which I didn't attend), is a GNU project, and I started planning it immediately after LibrePlanet 2010 when I finished up my work with the FSF on Patent Absurdity (debuted at LP2010; I did the animations for the film as mentioned previously.
• Flourish -- I'll be speaking at Flourish this year on (surprise, surprise) MediaGoblin. Flourish is a good conference, in Chicago, and really cheap. In fact, it costs nothing, and if you register in advance you can even get a free (as in t-shirts) shirt. It's a good "tech and culture of free software" type conference.

Wow, that's a lot of conferences! And a wedding! Yesterday my friend Will commented to Deb (whose life is pretty much nonstop conferences) "I don't know how you do it. I do a conference and then I have to hug myself in a dark room for a month to rejuvenate." Too true. I think after this month is over I'm going to have to reconstruct myself in a bucket for a day or so.

I got interviewed about MediaGoblin on the excellent Frostcast of FrostbiteMedia. This happened over a month ago, but life has been intense, and better late than never in blogging it. Anyway, I talked to Jonathan Nadeau who runs the podcast, and even though FrostbiteMedia doesn't specifically say so, this episode is released under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported. (mirrored here)

(Your browser doesn't appear to support HTML5 audio, but I mirrored the file here.

Anyway, I've given it a few listens, and I'm super pleased with how it came out. We talk about the motivations behind MediaGoblin, the underlying architectural decisions, and even a bit of my own free software personal history. It went by really fast... hard to believe the show comes out to about an hour. (It was also my first time being interviewed on a podcast or anything of the like before, and I had some dumb self-inflicted technical difficulties. Luckily, Jonathan was very patient.)

By the way, I have a lot of respect for Jonathan Nadeau. Jonathan is not only a free software activist, but also a blind user of free software. He's also starting a nonprofit called the Accessible Computing Foundation which aims to make the life of computer users with various disabilities better by improving the state of accessibility in free software. Very cool and noble goal. There's a good interview with him on this Linux Outlaws episode. Best of luck to you, Jonathan!

There's been plenty of discussion on the blogosphere already about Gnome 3 already, and I'm not sure this post will add much to it, but whatever. A lot of people hate it. A lot of people love it. A few people love it, but hate certain things about it, but are optimistic that things are bound to get better in the future, in which case they will completely love it. I'm in that latter camp.

Let me put it this way: I recently got a new laptop, a Thinkpad X220 tablet with a gorilla glass screen (yes I am trying to make you jealous, because this is probably the best computing purchase I have ever made in my life) and before I wiped windows and installed Debian testing on it, I decided to try out a Fedora 15 live USB key to see how nicely gnome 3 felt. I instantly began to crave that this could become my regular desktop environment. Especially in tablet mode, damn, it's really great... but even in not-tablet mode, it's still really great. But I installed Debian anyway because I'm pretty used to it, and pined for the day when Gnome 3 would become available in testing.

Sometime last month, that became available. I upgraded and never looked back.

...well, kinda.

Gnome 3 has been really great on my laptop, great enough that I eventually lost patience with my desktop (on which I was running StumpWM, which I mostly enjoyed except when I wanted to use the GIMP, which is often, but that's another post of its own that I'll never write) and upgraded that from Debian stable->testing too. For the first few minutes, I was in heaven. Then the pain points began to set in.

The main issue is that it keeps crashing on my dual monitor + nvidia setup. I did file a bug for this, but a pretty miserable one. There's no -dbg package in Debian, and I haven't had the time to compile gnome-shell from scratch to test it, so I just haven't been able to submit a decent report with a backtrace. Lame, I know. But when it crashes on my dual monitor setup (which happens once every hour or two), it usually fails to recover and makes me log out, and then I lose all my work. And then I'm sad. It turns out this isn't just the proprietary nvidia drivers either... stunningly enough I got the nouveau drivers to work on my desktop and they work pretty damned well. (Okay, the overview doesn't seem to work for me, but that still seems to be pretty good progress. Did I mention that Blender runs well with nouveau too? Pretty exciting.) That's the main reason I switched away on my desktop though... and bugs happen, I'm not meaning this post to blame developers for that, just including this for context's sake.

But another thing, the Gnome developers currently seem to be unconvinced that persistent notifications are a needed feature because they clash with the primary design philosophy of Gnome 3, which is that the shell shouldn't interrupt you from whatever you're working on. I can understand this theory, but the fact is that it's simply wrong. I need to treat my IMs like a queue... if I miss a message from a coworker, I need to respond to it. And to respond to it, I need to know it's there. The fact is, sometimes when I am hyperfocused on my task (when the goal of gnome shell is succeeding), I will miss the subtle hints of messages, and I need to come back to them at some point. Anyway, there's an extension for that, but it requires gnome-shell 3.2, and Debian testing only has 3.0 in testing at the time of writing. Which means I'm back to pining for a gnome-shell Debian release. I think this is a bigger deal than the developers are acknowledging, and it's something that should be provided by default; 3 of my coworkers switched to gnome shell then switched away to XFCE largely because of this issue. That's a pretty big deal, and I think it's something that should be addressed part of Gnome core, as not everyone will learn how to install extensions (not everyone will in Firefox either).

But here are a few counterpoints to that: extensions do exist, and they seem to be capable of doing a hell of a lot (even including providing a tiling window manager if you're willing to run a modified mutter). And people who are doing the most complaining like "Gnome ruined everything! We had a perfect desktop! It's all dead because the Gnome developers killed the free software desktop!" I wonder how many of these people were around for Gnome 2.0, which was also not a perfect desktop either. In fact, around Gnome 2.0 I also switched away from Gnome in frustration, experimented with a bunch of different window managers, and eventually came back somewhere around 2006 and was surprised to find that everything was just so damned... pleasant. I think the same thing is going to happen to Gnome 3 also. In fact it already is. And I think this guy put it right: thanks to extensions, and given some time, plenty of users can be frog-boiled into loving the change in desktop paradigm. That is, assuming that the developers and designers can come to be convinced that walls users are running into are real walls. And they probably will.

One last thing, and this might be rude. I've had a number of friends who have been involved more closely in GNOME than I am complain that there's a large amount of cliquishness in the GNOME world, and even between separate parts of the contributor teams (developers and designers not really talking and working directly together?). I don't really know if that's true for sure, I don't work directly on GNOME, but I trust the friends who have said it, and I've certainly seen plenty of other projects do this at least. I've felt pretty strongly that avoiding this kind of cliquishness in MediaGoblin has been a big win for us. I hope it isn't true for GNOME, and if it is, that they can work on trying to avoid that. But maybe I'm just talking out of my ass on this one. I would prefer that I was. But if not, hopefully people can realize that in-crowds in projects are not the way to go.

Anyway, a sure sign that Gnome 3 is the future for me at least is that when I am using XFCE on my desktop, I do keep moving my mouse to the upper left corner and being sad when nothing happens. I keep using my laptop more because Gnome 3 is working there. And I keep refreshing the status of Gnome 3.2 in Debian page. Given enough time, and assuming the developers can take the needs of their users seriously, I do think Gnome 3 is the free software desktop that most people will come to love.

Or, at least, ten years in the future when contributors kick off Gnome 4, I think Gnome 3 will be the desktop that everyone will be upset at being taken away and replaced with something else.

Today I went in for an exploratory surgery... a very minor outpatient procedure. Actually, I've never undergone surgery before. As the anesthesiologist put me into sedation, I handed the book I had been reading over to Morgan (one of if not the first programming books I had ever picked up, which was on C, and which I decided was time to seriously revisit). Morgan said to me, "Basically, you'll go to sleep before you know it, and then you'll wake up, they'll tell you it's over, and you'll be like 'What, already?'"

As I sat in the surgical room and started to space out, I was still thinking about coding, and my thoughts about coding must have started to shift over to MediaGoblin and its community. Suddenly I was at my computer. I started writing a blogpost, full of all the things I've been thinking about and have learned by working on the project over the last many months; my thoughts on community, releases, communication, everything. I ran it through ispell-buffer. I was super pleased with it. I was ready to commit it and push it over to my site.

Then I woke up to a nurse telling me, "That's it, we're done, you can wake up now!"

"Damnit," I mumbled. "Now I have to write that whole damned thing all over again."

Today I received a call from my friend Miles telling me that one of our mutual close friends, Matt DeSpears, passed away by taking his own life. It's hard to pick the appropriate words to describe how I feel upon hearing this news. "Shattered" and "devastated" are words that come to mind, and yet even though I feel like I am both of those things I don't feel that I have fully processed it yet. How do you describe losing one of those people who you just take for granted as a constant in your life?

I don't really feel like I am thinking completely clearly, but I feel compelled to write. And I feel like Matt deserves a proper tribute. And maybe the most appropriate time to give that tribute is right now, when I am most overwhelmed with emotion.

Matt, like many of the people I know and love, was a misfit. I don't mean this in a negative way: the people I love most in life are misfits (and I consider myself one of the biggest misfits of all). Being misfit means your character is likely to develop into something unusual, and the most unusual people are often the most beautifully interesting. Matt was even more misfit than most, and I loved him dearly for his unique character. There will never be another Matt. But being a misfit also means that it's harder to fit into the rest of the world, and that was especially true for Matt.

I met Matt at an alternative school called Kradwell, which I transferred to in my junior year of high school (as I was nearly failing out of school due to my social issues and trouble coping with my attention deficit disorder). I quickly came to love Kradwell. At Kradwell, my social problems vanished. I used to joke with people: nobody makes fun of you for being a freak at Kradwell because at Kradwell, everyone is a freak. Instead of resenting how weird I was, I came to embrace it. I met many friends there, all strange in their own wonderful ways. One of the friends I met was Matt.

Photo of Matt DeSpears from the Kradwell yearbook

It took a while for Matt and I to become friends. Matt had a certain amount of awkwardness that was high even by Kradwell standards. But eventually I did come to know him, and one time I invited him over to a get-together at my house. I don't really remember the details, but I remember that day becoming a day when he became more integrated into the group of friends I was meeting at Kradwell. It was also around the time that my group of friends at Kradwell became integrated with my older group of friends from childhood. Without any realization, we formed a close knit group of friends that had continued to be strong even until this day, which my wife and I now call the Milwaukee Crew. I came to love this group of people, not just individually, but as a group: bonded through a mutuality of friendship and antagonism. It had that kind of dynamic to it that you can't force into being, that just develops, and you come to enjoy. Whenever I've come into Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Crew would assemble... or whoever of us were around. Morgan would sometimes remark about how resilient our group of friends were, still meeting together and making the same old jokes, expecting the same quirks... I thought it would last forever...

As I said, Matt was more awkward than most, but underneath that shell of awkwardness was a true warmness. Matt had a very fuzzy and puppy-dog like personality to him when you knew how to reach it. The truth of the matter was, Matt just wanted to be loved. I guess that's true for everyone, but even more so than for most people, that's how I think of Matt.

Matt also loved to antagonize people. We all did, but there was this certain flavor of antagonism in Matt that's really hard to describe. I remember Jay driving Matt and saying "Which way should we turn, Matt?" and Matt said, "Pope." "No seriously, which way do we turn, Matt?" "Pope." "No seriously, we're about to pass the light, which way do we turn?" "Pope." Maniacal laughter ensues, as Jay drives through the intersection yelling with frustration. (Edit: Apparently it was a highway off-ramp, the next intersection wasn't for miles, and I wasn't even in the car. But the memory has been strong enough in our group that I've remembered it as if I was.)

It might be hard to understand how that could be lovable, or even entertaining, but maybe you just weren't there. For years, we've groaned about this story, but behind the groan was a fondness for the memory, for the dynamic that unrolled between our friends.

There are other things, too, that I remember fondly, that seem like they will never be able to happen in the same way again. All night LAN parties playing CounterStrike, with Jay and Matt getting angry at each other over some tidbit. Playing a prank on Matt so we made it so that every action on his computer elicited the noise "whoop-da-doop-da-doop!" and watching him getting angry as he couldn't turn the noise off. Later (after it was disabled), he became obsessed and in love with that noise, as we all did. It's just one of those inside jokes that all of us became obsessed with that nobody else could understand the meaning behind.

I also remember that Matt became obsessed, as a few of us were, with an MMORPG that existed before that term existed called Graal, which was basically Legend of Zelda in 2d online. Believe it or not, this proprietary game partly led me to become obsessed with the idea of free software as it was completely scriptable, and for a time, anyone could run their own server which meant that anyone could build their own universe. Then they took the ability to run your own server away and I became angry and... hm, that's a topic for another blogpost. The real point is, after a good number of us stopped playing, Matt continued playing the game, caught up in that online social world. We used to antagonize him about it, and then he asserted that he stopped playing the game altogether. Later, Miles and Jay would sneak across the side of his house and take a photo of him playing the game. He was furious. But eventually he came to laugh about it, as we all did. Filed into another memory of fondness in the Milwaukee crew. And there was something about that game that seemed to reflect something interesting about Matt, maybe about all of us. The promise that you could build your own universe, and the ability to escape into another one that wasn't as painful as your own. Matt became an administrator on the server. One day Matt had shown me that he had built an entire trading card minigame inside the game itself that had a bit of a following, even a fansite. He had never programmed anything else in his life. He just did it. I don't remember Matt ever doing anything else like that before.

This is either Miles or me chasing Jay in a cardboard robot suit. I think it's Miles. Regardless, it captures the spirit of the times and the crew.

I could go on into infinity listing off fond memories, and I'm a bit tempted to, but I think maybe I shouldn't. But here are a few of the ones I remember the most fondly:

• Creating cardboard robot suits and beating each other with plastic bats to the confusion of our neighbors.
• Hanging out at The Node, a coffee shop for nerds we all loved (until sadly they shut it down) and playing Risk. One day after a particularly serious defeat, I "whoop-de-doop-de-doop"'ed Matt while doing a dance. Nobody else in the coffee shop knew what I was doing or why I was making a fool of myself. But we all understood.
• Driving around and talking about our relationships, or sometimes lack thereof. Cheering each other up as friends, dropping by to say hello.
• Jay and Miles stopping by to order the most complex sandwich they could order at the sandwich shop Matt was working at.
• Matt's wonderfully strange vocal intonation somehow becoming a manner of speaking that everyone in the crew adopted.
• Various shenanigans at Kradwell.
• Matt's bizarre obsession with the Pope, Battle Pope, and BatPope.
• After I had moved away out to Barat College, Matt, Miles and Jay driving all the way down to my dorm completely unannounced, picking me up and making me come along with them on some adventure. At the time, I acted like it was an inconvenience even though I truly appreciated it. And of course I really appreciate the memory now.
• Hanging out on our private web forum which was entirely full of inside jokes and shenanigans. "Nice" and "Shut up Wesley" being inside jokes that were tossed everywhere on there.
• As members of the group began to disperse, doing various get-togethers in Milwaukee or Appleton nonetheless. Beating each other senseless with styrofoam pool noodles even though that doesn't make any sense because we're supposed to be adults here.
• My bachelor party, which was also a LAN party. We were hoping it wouldn't be one of the last time we ever got to do one of these types of things again, but knew that it probably was.
• Matt being one of the ushers at my wedding, with Jay as my man of honor, Miles as one of the groomsmen (the others were siblings). Several other members of the Milwaukee crew (Claire, Dani, Fatch (Jon), Corinna, Jeni... and I am probably missing a couple others) weren't in the wedding party but were in the audience.

Matt, Miles, myself, and Jay (in order) at my wedding

I think, more than anything, I am sad that in all of our get togethers there just won't be a Matt anymore to recollect with. There will just be an empty seat and a memory of Matt. It seemed like it would last forever, be a constant in my life, and yet now it will never be the same.

A couple weeks ago I was going stir crazy from living in DeKalb. Those of you who know me personally know that DeKalb is not exactly my favorite place to be, but we're here because of Morgan's grad school program which I am supportive of (and we can do because I have the good fortune of working remotely as a programmer). I decided to go to Milwaukee to visit friends and family for Thanksgiving and even take a few days off to work on some of my own projects. Right before I left the car broke down... but we decided that it was important enough to blow the money on a rental car so I could get out of town.

While I was there, I tried to assemble the crew, but it didn't happen as it usually did. I had the chance to meet most people individually, at least. Matt and I had scheduled to go out and meet one night, but for reasons I won't go into I did something I never did: I got so frustrated over some detail that I canceled. Thankfully, we agreed to go out and get breakfast at George Webbs the next morning.

We talked about relationships, life, work, the usual. It was a good catch up. Matt wasn't upset that I had refused to meet with him the previous night, or he didn't show any animosity. After we got breakfast we went to American Science and Surplus and walked around and looked at various things. I considered buying several things but didn't. Matt bought a keychain container for his medication. It was a nice and quiet walk through someplace that we both cherished. I was a glad we had that opportunity to get together for it. Afterwards Matt suggested I meet his father, as I had never met his parents strangely in the more than ten years I'd known him. We walked in, his father was preoccupied but said hello, Matt and I shrugged, he grabbed an iced tea from the fridge, and I drove him home. Prairie Home Companion played on the radio, which I love, and Matt had never heard. It unusually wasn't a good episode, not even the part with Guy Noir, Private Eye, and I felt bad that I didn't give Matt the opportunity to appreciate this show I really enjoyed. But he didn't mind. I dropped him off, we cheerily waved goodbye, and I drove home thinking I was glad we had that opportunity to hang out before I left.

Today I received a call from my friend Miles. He asked me to make sure I was sitting, which I was, and then told me that he had just heard from Matt's nephew. Matt had gotten into a fight with his girlfriend, swallowed a bottle of pills, and passed away.

Matt was a strange and wonderful person. Like many of us strange people, he suffered from depression and various other issues. I also in many times in my life, have suffered from depression, and have come close to attempting suicide on several occasions. I am glad I have not done so, as I probably would have become the same thing to others that Matt will be now: a dearly loved friend who is no longer there, an empty chair at a coffee table in a gathering of friends and family. I will miss Matt dearly. He was a great friend.

I want to say one more thing in this post before I close it out. Matt had a son whom he rarely got to meet in this life. If that person ever reads this, I want you to know several things about your father. First: he regretted not being able to be a better father and blamed a lot of this on himself. Family issues can become complex, as they were here, and at one point Matt thought he should finish school before he was more supportive, and then that never seemed to finish, he wished he could move down and be with you, and that never seemed to pan out. But he wanted to be there for you, he just didn't know how to get to that point. Second: your father loved you. He would show me pictures of you, he would talk about you, and he wanted nothing more than to figure out how to be there for you, and the fact that he wasn't was a great source of sadness and guilt for him. But when he spoke of you there were moments of inner pride and happiness that I never saw otherwise. And I wish that things could have worked out so you could have gotten to know your father and loved him as I did. He was a wonderful man, in his own curious way. Third: he would have wanted you to be happy, to do good things, to enjoy life. There's nothing he would have wanted more than that.

And to all others: if you know someone who is awkward or strange, be nice to them, embrace them; they need it. And if you yourself are strange or weird, don't be afraid of this, learn to love it.

Matt, I will miss your strangeness, your wonderfulness, your kindness, your friendship. Around the coffee table of my heart, there will always be a seat for you.

Edit: I tried to incorporate some text earlier into this post to make it clear that I don't think Matt's girlfriend was to blame. I honestly don't think she was. I haven't always gotten along with Matt's girlfriend in the past, but when I met with Matt for breakfast he expressed to me, "I know you guys don't like hanging out with her, but I love her, and she makes happy. I'm happier now than I have been for a long time." And I agreed... he did seem happier than he had been in a long time. This is partly added to the surprise of this news. I spoke with Matt's girlfriend and heard her side of the story. I didn't think she was to blame before, and I especially don't now. Couples' fights happen... and Matt was close to the edge for a long time. This event is going to be hard on a lot of people, but probably especially it'll be hard on Jackie. Please don't put any more grief on her shoulders than she is already going to have to bear.

It seems like it was just a few months ago that I switched my blog over to Zine. Well, actually it was a little bit over a year ago, but I've barely blogged since then. :\

Actually the fact of the matter is that I thought that by switching from my homerolled blog to Zine that I'd feel less frustrated about running my blog because it wouldn't just be some homerolled software that I was running, and I could contribute back to some larger project if I wanted to. But Zine turned out to be unmaintained basically, I wasn't really interested in spending time contributing to it, and most significantly, I didn't enjoy using it. Not because it's bad software, I just didn't enjoy blogging in it, the same way that when I blog in Wordpress for work I just don't enjoy it. But lately I've been blogging for MediaGoblin (well, a lot of the actual writing is done by Deb Nicholson). http://mediagoblin.org is actually done using PyBlosxom (a project maintained by friend and fellow MediaGoblin contributor Will Kahn-Greene) and I've come to realize I really enjoy writing in a plaintext site/blog setup I can just keep in git.

So I switched over. However, I already had the site using Jinja2 templates for Zine and Ventriloquist (something simple but semi-neat I should really write about) so I figured that why not shave a whole herd of yaks and add a Jinja2 renderer plugin to Pyblosxom. So I did, and actually... I'm fairly happy with it. I also think this plugin could maybe be a cool direction for PyBlosxom, but... more on that later maybe?

In the meanwhile, most of the site is ported over, some embarassing things are cleaned up, and a few things are now also missing. Namely, comments and tagging. Tagging should be back soon, but I'm not too sure about when comments will be back. Oh well, nobody was commenting on here anyway. (I have the old comments stashed away on my hard drive but they aren't on here yet for now either.)

Anyway, that's it for now. Now I'd better write a whole bunch more blogposts so that this blog doesn't become one of those crappy blogs where people just blog about (not) blogging. I guess it already kind of is...

I'm going to keep this brief. Or rather, the original content brief. We've launched a project called GNU MediaGoblin (yes, it's an official GNU project) which is going to save the internet from media hosting homogenization.

Well, hopefully! It all depends on how well we can organize ourselves, work hard, and organize our contributors. Anyway, read the announcement post. Sound interesting? We could use your help.

Here's some more info:

• About GNU MediaGoblin
• How to become a contributor
• Docs! (Especially the Hacking HOWTO.)

So far I've spent the last month putting down infrastructure, but we just announced the project this week and are getting a lot of interest. The founding team is a pretty solid group of people I think, and we've got a number of people interested in contributing. Again, we could use more. This weekend I'll spend a bit of time making it easier to get involved.

Lastly, here's our mascot goblin:

I think he's pretty cute. By the way, if you contribute to the project and do a copyright assignment to the FSF, I will probably make a cool unique goblin dedicated to you. Copyright assignment on this project is not mandatory, unless you want the goblin. :)

Since announcing on Monday we're already starting to get quite a bit of press. See:

• On NetworkWorld
• On LWN (points to the NetworkWorld article)
• Some German article
• Another German article?
• Another article I don't know how to read, this one in Spanish

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