Mark Shuttleworth | here be dragons

Joi ito has had a few stern looks from the US INS regarding visa waiver forms.

I can relate.

I have a UK passport by virtue of the fact that my father was born in the UK (mostly by accident – another fun story). So I also know about the visa waiver program – it used to cover me too. Until one day I flew into the US briefly, on my own plane, to visit friends in DC as part of a long trip. When we arrived at Dulles, the immigration officer said there was a small problem. The operator of my plane had never signed the visa-waiver treaty, and so despite the fact that I had entered the US 27 times previously on that same passport, without a visa, they would now have to decline me entry.

But before doing that they would:

• take me in for questioning
• search me (I objected to the strip search, they relented)
• fingerprint me and send those fingerprints off around the world (no, Mossad is not looking for me, yet)
• examine for obvious tattoos and other distinguishing features
• ask me to sign a statement of wrongdoing (I declined)
• terminate my visa waiver access – from then on I need a visa

A complication was that, because they did not have records of all the times I left the USA, they believed I had previously stayed for longer than the 90 days. Fortunately I was able to get copies of all my inbound and outbound tickets faxed to them, so I think they eventually came to believe that I had not actually overstayed the visa program ever.
Then they let me back on the plane, we flew to Ottawa, the US embassy kindly gave me a visa, and we returned to the USA.

Now, flying into the USA I am ALWAYS sent off for extra questions and paperwork. And on applying for a new visa, I have to fill out the form for “people with a criminal record” (cross out the criminal record part, write in “visa waiver declined”, I kid you not). It’s a joyless process.

Hello, land of the free, knock knock.

I fell in love with the USA once. It was built on beautiful principles. Alas, it appears to have forsaken those in the name of security and expediency. As a result, I think the world is looking for a new source of inspiration – a new country where the most interesting people of the world can arrive, feel welcome, and feel free. Joi, best you be sure to hand that little green form back, every time.

There was a bit of grumbling about Red Hat at Debconf this year (along with plenty of grumbling about Ubuntu too). While I agree that the Red Hat Network legalese effectively makes RHEL a proprietary product, I think it’s important to give credit to Red Hat for the role they have played and continue to play in bringing Linux, GNU and the free software stack to the wider world.

Red Hat was, and remains, essential to the free software and linux ecosystem.

Most of the world’s computer users have never seen or touched a Linux environment directly. Yes, of course we all use it in the form of Google or Akamai or a WiFi base station that we installed ourselves last weekend… but in terms of actually staring at the keyboard and typing into a Linux console or X-Term, adoption is still very much in the low-single-digits. Which means that less than 1-in-20 people who consider themselves IT people have hands-on experience with free software. For most of those people, Red Hat “speaks their language”. Which means that they are far more likely to get their first taste of free software via Red Hat than they are, say, compiling their personal kernels from scratch.

And we all win, when Red Hat has a win.

Every Red Hat server installed at UBS is a win for Free Software.

Every Fedora Core 5 installation at a school is a win for Linus Torvalds, for me, for Ubuntu, for Debian and even for Richard Stallman.

Every time Red Hat gets a mention on CNBC or that stupid Cramer show that really should have died with the dot com bomb, it’s a win for Free Software.

Why?

Because people learn by taking single steps. They learn by tasting new ideas little by little and not getting burned. They learn that “Linux” works, is reliable, is predictable, and that not running Microsoft Office is potentially a feature because it also means that it does not run all those pesky macro viruses.

And they learn that “normal”, which they used to define as “Windows”, is just part of the full universe of options they have at their disposal.

That of course inevitably touches their curiousity bone… and who knows where they might actually end up – in Gentoo, in Ubuntu, in Debian, perhaps even in OpenSolaris-land. It doesn’t matter – it’s all GNU goodness. Even if they stick with Red Hat.
In the free software community, we are as likely to turn viciously on one another as we are to stand united. And that’s a big weakness for us, as a community. It’s too easy to get free software advocates, who agree on 99% of things, to shred one another over the remaining 1%. That just makes us a confusing place for new users – and a disturbing place for more corporate adopters. It makes it easy for proprietary software companies to divide and conquer the free software world. We divide spontaneously.

Instead, we should strongly affirm the things in which we all agree.

• Software CAN be Free (using Richard’s terminology) and therefor we believe it will ALL END UP FREE. And we’re committed to reinventing everything we need until the free software stack is a genuinely complete computing universe. We’re already pretty far along.
• Free software is not just cheaper. It’s BETTER. It’s produced using a better process attracting better talent and it evolves faster, resulting in better innovation. All of that adds up to great value.

If we keep reminding ourselves that we agree on all of that, then our disagreements come into perspective. Instead of criticism for Red Hat, I think it would be more constructive to remind ourselves of the things that Red Hat does for the free software community first – and then perhaps to talk about why we prefer another system, for whatever personal reasons.

Just off the top of my head, here are a couple of things for which all of us free software advocates have Red Hat to thank:

• When the EU was voting on software patents, it was the surprising sight of Red Hat and SUN jointly appealing for clearer thinking that tipped the scales in favour of the defeat of the motion.
• Red Hat has in many ways been the public vehicle of IBM’s major Linux initiative. Without Red Hat, much of that work would have had less “punch”, because Red Hat was able to encapsulate it into a platform that could be presented to traditional IT people. We’ve all benefitted from that punch.
• Red Hat was a leading proponent of GNOME, and to date has put far more active resources into the GNOME desktop even than Ubuntu. I do intent to match that as soon as Ubuntu stands on its own two feet, but until that time, hats off (har) to Red Hat.
• The NSA and Red Hat teamed up to make SE Linux feasible. Even though that hasn’t yet become widely adopted, it still was a crucial step in getting the Fed’s to treat Linux seriously in the data center – and that’s in turn brought a rush of hardware vendors and ISV’s on board.

There’s a danger in something we love to hate. It’s that we can forget to love it.

I have to admit I was a little edgy, facing 15,000 people at the Java One event in the Moscone Center on Tuesday. Being on stage like that makes me break out in incomprehensible Swahili-nglish, every time. So I was grateful when Jonathan Schwartz gently pointed out that the licencing change we were discussing meant we could make *Java* easily available to free software desktop users, not Linux, as I said in my nervousness. Doh. Most free software desktop users already have Linux . Some day maybe it will be easier to be in the spotlight. Till then, I can only hope for hosts that gracious.

So, down to the nitty gritty.

Even though this was not the announcement we were all hoping for (a complete shift to free software Java) I was pleased to be part of the “Distro Licence for Java” announcement. As best I can tell, the new leadership at SUN clearly recognises the importance of the free software model AND the role of the community. That’s a big step forward and important to the progress of free software. If my being there could help accelerate the date when we really do have a free software licence for Java, then I was happy to take the time.

The new licence does not mean that we can include Java in Ubuntu by default. It does not yet meet our criteria for free software in order to get into “main”. But it DOES mean we can put it in the Multiverse or Commercial repositories, and people who want it can trivially get it after they have installed Ubuntu on a desktop or a server. Three clicks, and you’re done. Also, it can certainly be part of the default install of distros like MEPIS which leverage Ubuntu but add interesting and to many people useful proprietary bits.

So it’s a constructive step.

I wouldn’t expect a “big bang” conversion at SUN – it takes a long time to build consensus throughout a large organisation and it also takes time to straighten out the details of potentially thousands of other legal commitments. But the quote of the day was certainly Rich Green saying that the question is not “if” Java should be open source, but “how”. SUN wants to live in a free software world but also wants to continue to deliver on the promise of Java as a “compatible everywhere” platform. Even if there are already warts on the universal compatibility front (“write once, debug everywhere”) we’re all better off for the fact that Java is basically Java is basically Java. Developers don’t want to have to deal with “extended double remix” versions from a multitude of vendors. Especially not from vendors that specialise in “embrace, extend and extinguish” lines of attack.

So I thought I would ponder a little the strategic options and hypothesize a game plan that might do what SUN needs, while remaining firmly in the free software world. Here it is, inspired by the view of the Pacific coast as I make my way back down from San Francisco to Mexico City and Debconf.

1. Pick a copyleft licence, like the GPL
   If SUN were to make Java available under a free software licence it would benefit from having it under a copyleft licence, which means that folks taking it freely would also have to contribute their work back. Following the lead of the Free Software Foundation and requiring copyright assignment would preserve SUN’s undisputed ability to defend the ownership and licence of Java while broadening the base of talent that can help make Java perform on a wider variety of platforms. For many companies, particularly those who want to embed Java in their own infrastructure, a copyleft licence will not do (it would force them to make their own applications Free) and there will thus be plenty of incentive for them to strike a reasonable agreement on commercial terms for a custom licence to the Java code. This dual-licensing approach has worked for companies like MySQL. Java is both a client and a server technology, so the reach of such a strategy is even wider than server-only platforms like MySQL.
2. Manage the trademark very, very well
   Copyright is only one leg of the intellectual property table. The trademark is the piece MOST associated with compatibility. SUN gets to say who can use that trademark even if it makes the code itself available under the GPL. Of course, use of the trademark should be conditional upon the maintainance of compatibility. Those test suites will have to get even better. If SUN is smart it can deploy the trademark as free advertising on all the platforms which are not in any event revenue-generating (like, for example, the free software desktop) while at the same time benefitting from royalties in places where it can reasonably claim a share of the revenue flow (the proprietary desktop and the embedded marketplace).
3. Keep the patent option open
   I don’t believe software patents are a good thing (they’re a no-win deal for society, we shouldn’t grant a monopoly in exchange for a disclosure of something that could never be kept a secret anyway). That said, since the US allows them, SUN has them and SUN’s competitors have them too, it’s smart to tie Java-related patent licences to good behaviour on the part of licencees. The GPLv3 touches on this – in short, SUN can leverage the popularity of Java in order to provide itself with some protection from patent suits.

All of us at some stage or another have dreamed of having a brilliant idea then resting on our laurels while the cash flowed in. Truth is, life is never that easy. While Java was and still is a brilliant idea, there is plenty of competition out there and the field is hotting up, especially amongst the free software alternatives. I’d say there are no more than two years between today, and the day that a free software widget comes along that has all the characteristics of Java and *doesn’t* come from SUN. So, much as SUN would like the world + dog to rush to licence Java, that isn’t happening and won’t happen. More to the point, when that other contender exists it will rapidly become ubiquitous, at which point SUN will have lost the opportunity to lead that platform – forever.

Today’s markets are created by tools and standards that become pervasive and ubiquitous. Apache became pervasive because it is free software, and Java could do the same. This opportunity is SUN’s to lose, but everything I’ve seen suggests that they do want to grasp it with both hands. I can only applaud that commitment.

As a small incentive, I’ll close with a thought on the value of being the platform where innovation happens.

Right now, there’s plenty of development on “Java on Linux”. Think of every major company that deploys heavyweight J2EE infrastructure on Linux today. But that sort of development is not what drives innovation. When I look at the Java code that’s out there it’s industrial, but not exciting. The really exciting stuff tends to happen at the fringes, in student dorm rooms and tiny companies. And they tend to use the tools that are most immediately accessible to them.

• If Java had been free five years ago, PHP and LAMP might never have come into existence, because it would have been possible to deliver that vision using a lightweight integration of Java, scripting and the database.
• If Java had been free software four years ago, then it might have less of the reputation as a “corporate overkill platform” that it’s at risk of being saddled with right now
• If Java had been free software three years ago, then it would have even higher penetration on cellphones and mobile platforms, and there would not be competing free osftware implementations of the mobile Java VM and API’s
• If Java had been free two years ago, then Ruby-on-Rails might have been “Java on Rails” (though truth be told I’d rather it was Python on Rails!).
• If Java was free today, more of the AJAX stuff that is popping up all over the show would be done in Java (on the server side), because every student with a Linux box would have Java installed by default

A big enterpise-focused company like SUN will always convince big enterprises like Deutsche Bank that they should buy technology and services from SUN. Fair enough. But they can’t convince a smart Comp.Sci. student to envision the world using their tools – unless they make those tools pervasively and freely available. And it’s that smart Comp.Sci. student who writes the magic that will be headline grabbing material three years from now. Innovation starts in unexpected, lightweight sorts of places. So you need to ensure that your tools can reach into those lightweight sorts of places. When Java is free software, it will flow further out into the network – and that can only be a good thing for SUN.

One of the big debates we are having at the moment in the Foundation is all about how to design a curriculum to stimulate the development of analytical skills. The thing I care most about is that we focus not on the specific set of tools, but on the ability to “learn and apply a current tool set”.

The truth is that we constantly acquire and discard sets of tools. So we should not be fixated on one specific set of tools for all of life. Society, technology and the times change so fast that any fact, process or algorithm we learn at school is by definition not going to be useful for any length of time. The real skills that serve us are the ability to adapt, learn, apply the products of that learning, and participate in the discussions and challenges of the day. Tht doesn’t mean that facts are useless, nor that specific tools don’t matter. Unless you can demonstrate an ability to absorb and apply both, fast, you haven’t actually gained the knack of becoming effective in a given environment.
I was thinking about the toolsets I’ve had to acquire over the past fifteen years since I left school.

In university you are solving the problem-du-jour as set by lecturers and tutors. Each year you learn a new set of theorems, axioms, rules, laws, analytical techniques, best practices, algorithms, formulae etc. And you have to learn how to make them dance for you so that you can do well in that year. Then, by and large, you file those away never to be used again, and learn new tools for the next year of study. Sometimes, the tools and laws and rules are additive, you build new knowledge on the old stuff. Sometimes, however, you just learn the tools because you need them to get through the year, and that strikes me as being makework. See my rant on the study of economics below.
In work, you’ll have to learn the tools of the trade or the company and how to get things done. If you’re a nutcase like me, you change your toolset entirely every few years – I spent two years consulting and training (late university and early Thawte), two years writing database-driven web applications for crypto and PKI services (later Thawte), a year studying ballistics and space vehicle operations (Star City and the ISS), two years learning cooking, dancing, and the intricate details of playboyhood, and now two years learning about how to build a distribution (Ubuntu), and how to build *big* web applications (Launchpad.net). In each of those phases the tools have been different. Its hard to know what kind of schooling could have made a meaningful impression on my ability to be a better cosmonaut – or a better programmer – or a better man of leisure.

And I’ve no idea what set of tools I’ll have to learn next.

My experience might be extreme, but for ALL of us life consists of a constant process of reinvention, learning and discovery. You are not doing the same job today that you were five years ago – the world is changing around you. the most successful people learn how to spot the best tools and trends and to take advantage of them. They also learn to LET THEM GO when the time is right. Rather than being convinced your tools are the One True Way, recognise that they are rocking good tools right now and will also certainly be obsolete within five years. That gives you an incentive to keep an eye out for the things you need to learn next.

Not everything that gets offered to you is likely to be of use. I hated economics at university because it epitomised the disposability of old knowledge. The problem was that first-year economics was basically a history lesson disguised as a science lesson. We learned one classical set of ways of looking at the world, and how to apply them to assess an economy. This was a bit like learning science circa 1252 and being told that you need to be able to draw up an alchemical recipe for lead-to-gold conversions that could pass for authentic in that era.

Then in second year they said “luckily, the world has since decided that those ideas are utter crap, you can’t really manage an economy using them, but here’s a new set of ideas about economics”. So we set about learning economics circa 1910, and being expected to reproduce the thinking of the Alan Greenspan’s of that era. The same people who orchestrated 1929-1935 and all the economic joy that brought the world. We knew when we were studying it that the knowledge was obsolete. And of course, when I looked into the things we were supposed to study in third year, fourth year and masters economics programs the pattern repeated itself.
There is some value in disposable knowledge. I like to hire guys who set out to learn a new programming language every year, as long as they are smart enough to stick to core tools for large scale productive work, and not to try and rewrite their worlds in the new language every year. The exercise of learning new API’s, new syntactical approaches, new styles is like jogging, it keeps you fit and energised. It’s useful even if aren’t a marathon runner by profession. But it should be kept in balance with everything else you have to do.

So, back to the topic of curriculum.

We want to create a curriculum that can:

• be self taught, peer mentored, and effectively evaluated without expert supervision
• provide tools for analysis that will be general useful across the range of disciplines being taught at any given age
• be an exercise machine for analysis, process and synthesis

The idea is not that kids learn tools they use for the rest of their lives. That’s not realistic. I don’t use any specific theorems or other mathematics constructs from school today. They should learn tools which they use AT SCHOOL to develop a general ability to learn tools. That general ability – to break a complex problem into pieces, identify familiar patterns in the pieces, solve them using existing tools, and synthesise the results into a view or answer… that’s the skill of analysis, and that’s what we need to ensure kids graduate with.

I’m in Beijing, China, for the first time.

What an interesting experience. The city is modern – spacious, well organised, clean. The people are gracious, relaxed and open. Yet this is clearly a tightly managed state. This hotel broadband connection links me to about half the internet – the rest is conveniently firewalled off. Surfing the net for news is painful, many sites and stories just time out. Others are blazingly fast. The firewall rules decide who can see what.

There are closed circuit video cameras all over the show, and they obviously and actively track the pretty girls. Because they’re obviously a clear and present threat to national security. I’d take that line too, if it was my job to monitor the damn things.

This is a country that will certainly take its turn as the dominant global superpower. Again. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes, and the pattern of the ages is that major cultures each take their turn at the top. Of course, China has been there before in days gone by, and if modern history had been written by the Chinese we might all be more aware of their great early discoveries, exploration and civilisations. But that’s history now, the important thing is the future. And the future here is bright. China is moving fast.

The story of recent Chinese “management policy” is interesting. Many concepts, such as the one-child policy, are outrageous or offensive to Western sensibilities, but they are widely supported and well regarded here. And frankly, they make a certain amount of sense. Keeping the population growth rate down has made the economic growth rate contribute more directly to personal well-being. Having come directly from India, the contrast on that front is immediately obvious. There may be a billion Chinese here, but they each seem to have a reasonable amount of space, and less pressure on resources means fewer reasons for domestic tension.

In practical terms, the West will likely end up adopting similar policies. While we all have the right to do what we like with our lives, there are likely to be increasing consequences for behaviour that has a social cost to it. Most Western countries are banning smoking in public places, because your right to smoke doesn’t give you the right to harm the health of others. And I think it’s likely to go further (sensibly so) to reflect the fact that self-induced harm should not be the problem of the state. Countries are going to say to obese people: you lose your rights to free health care unless you take care of yourself. Same goes for smokers. Here in China, the one-child policy is similar. You can technically do what you like, but if you don’t help the state manage itself, then the state won’t help you. Fair enough.

What I find more difficult to understand, though, is the restriction on speech and access to knowledge. A free country has nothing to fear from the truth. That’s something we need to remind ourselves of today. In the USA, there are awkward signs of the truth being surpressed when its politically inconvenient. NASA’s climate scientists are getting told to keep the facts of global warming to themselves – by a 24 year old who lied on his resume about actually having a degree, but who proved his political loyalty during the Bush campaign. Journalists who probe allegations of White House impropriety face censure and are ostracised. Their employers come under pressure to silence them or fire them, or face economic sanction in subtle but meaningful ways. As much as the White House would love some things to be true, the facts don’t always cooperate. A mature leadership recognises that and adapts its plans to reality. An immature leadership tries to manipulate the presentation of reality to fit its ideas. So it’s not just in China that we see the systematic suppression of the truth.

But in China, the filtering of information reaches a new height. And I wonder how the transition to an open society will be made. Because sooner or later that transition must come. In cities, people have ever increasing wealth. They find it easier to live with things like the one-child policy, because their modern lifestyles make fewer, smarter and better educated children a sensible strategy. They share increasingly Western values – and sooner or later they are going to expect Western-style freedoms. Their rural peers, however, are on a different track. So much as there is a widening economic divide, there is a widening divide in values, needs, and expectations. The people of the cities may well want to get a real say in what happens long before the rural communities are comfortable with that idea. Or before the state is comfortable with the rural community vote. And that will make for an interesting transition.

It must be an extremely difficult responsibility, that of the future of a nation of one billion people. And we should be impressed with the results that this management team has delivered in recent decades. An economic transition from central planning to rampand capitalism is under way, and it’s been much better handled than the same transition in Russia was. Well done. I wonder if the information transition will be as well handled. And I wonder what the country has to fear from the truth. None of us has a monopoly on the truth, but it’s only in letting each of us speak our individual truth that society creates its consensus view.