Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog

Mar 22, 2013 GMT

For several weeks, I've resisted writing this blog entry. I don't want people accusing  me of mansplaining  -- of lecturing women about what they already know better than I do -- as an easy way of discrediting me. Nor do I care to hear my resignation from The Ada Initiative in November 2011 dredged up to as evidence of my personal animosity. But, being the mouthy type that I am, I'm going to plunge in anyway, simply because nobody else has.

Writing as a pro-feminist, I would like to make the case, as respectfully as possible, that... more »

Mar 14, 2013 GMT

Over the years, I've written and talked several times about how free software projects should approach journalists. At times, I've been able to single out publicists who do an especially professional job, including Jennifer Cloer of The Linux Foundation and Sally Khudairi of The Apache Foundation. However, mostly, I've spoken in the abstract. I never had a detailed example to offer -- until last week, when Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE's community manager, contacted me about the new 12.3 release.

What makes the efforts of Poortvliet' and the rest of the openSUSE... more »

Mar 08, 2013 GMT

Normally, I evaluate free software projects in terms of the functionality they provide. However, with many projects experimenting with crowdfunding, increasingly I find myself looking at them the way I would a non-profit to which I am considering donating. I want to know, for example, how much of the money a project collects goes towards administration, and how much goes to project activities -- in other words, if the money it receives is being well-spent.

This is the perspective from which I approached KDE e.V's financial statement for 2012 -- I wanted to do a spot-check on how... more »

Feb 28, 2013 GMT

I'm not sure when I started. But in the last six months or so, I've been making a distinction in my mind between consumer and productivity computing as a means of clarifying my thoughts about desktop interfaces.

This is a distinction that hardly needed to be made in the first twenty years of the personal computer. Each workstation was released with the largest hard drive, the fastest video card, and the largest amount of RAM available, and was used for every task that users had. For years, laptops were less powerful, but that had to do with convention and the limits... more »

Feb 23, 2013 GMT

Studies of hacker culture are rare. Serious studies untainted by hype are rarer still. For both these reasons, E. Gabriella Coleman's Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking is a welcome contribution to the subject. The result of over a decade of participant observation, Coding Freedom may not always be a precise survey of the free and open source software (FOSS) communities, but at least the resulting map bears some resemblance to the territory it is supposed to represent. 

For that reason alone, it has met a friendly reception... more »

Feb 14, 2013 GMT

When a non-developer criticizes free software, sooner or later a developer will respond with, "I'm looking forward to seeing your code," or something similar. It's a reflex response, but one with increasingly less validity today.

Fifteen years ago, such a response made sense. Non-programmers were a minority in free and open source software (FOSS), so expecting someone to reinforce their criticism with code seemed reasonable. The chances were that the person making the criticism could reply to the challenge. They might not get their code accepted if they... more »

Feb 08, 2013 GMT

I've spent much of the last week exploring the recent releases of Calligra Suite and LibreOffice, and listening to the unlikely rumors of a Linux version of Microsoft Office. I haven't concentrated on office suites so intensely for years, and, as I examined Calligra Suite's and LibreOffice's very different layouts and approaches to productivity, I found myself thinking: What should a modern office suite consist of?

That isn't a question you hear any more. The great days of innovation in the office suite were the early 1990s. Since then, ideas about office suites have... more »