The Fine Manual

This month is national novel writing month. For all of those people wondering what that has to do with free culture or free software, it gives you a chance to write up your novel and then you can put it under a free license when you are done, as a few people have done in the past. Hopefully some of them will turn out good and not sound like something a computer randomly generated.

For those interested in writing novels, the url is www.nanowrimo.org

If you don't program, you may end up wondering why you should use free-software. Why not just buy Mac OSX and Microsoft word? Well, let us look at the potential negative consequences for choosing proprietary software. If you have used proprietary software at all, you have probably run into one or more of these problems that free software eliminates for you. When you use a computer, you want to do a specific job. Maybe you want to type up a document, send an email, or look up information on the web. Maybe you want to play a game. You wonder why you should use free software instead of the proprietary alternatives, especially when proprietary software is the way you are used to doing things.

Unfortunately, you will, sooner or later run into one of the many drawbacks of using proprietary software. First of all, buying propriety software is expensive. Microsoft office and Windows cost quite a lot. Your Macintosh is also quite expensive. You like to save money so you can buy more useful things.

Secondly, you care what happens to your data. If you are using proprietary software, it could eat your data. If bugs cause it to eat data, you cannot have them fixed. You can not ask another programmer outside the company who made the software to look at the code for you to see if it eats data or not. Unfortunately, I had this experiences with windows XP. This is one of the reason I have chosen to support free-software.

Product activation on things such as windows XP is not convenient for you, the user, what if you need new hardware and have to reinstall it? Many proprietary games come with things like starforce, that adds drivers to your operating system to try and prevent you from making any copies of the software, even if it just for back up usage.

Proprietary media often has things like digital restrictions management in them to prevent you from doing what you would like with your software such as installing it on another computer, or make a backup copy. What if your friend likes the software you have, but it is no longer sold and you cannot find a copy? Can you give them a copy. Digital restrictions make it difficult for you to do so.

What if your old hardware dies, but you want to continue running your favorite programs? What if the parts to recreate the hardware no longer exist? The binaries are complied to only run on certain kinds of hardware, so if you had the source code, you could recompile the program to run on your new system. You could hire a programmer to make whatever modifications are needed to have it run on your new system. With free software, having the source code means freedom to continue running whatever program it is that you like regardless of the availability of the old hardware.

Sometimes it seems that the free software movement is programmer centric. They assume that because they like to program, that everyone likes to program. This does not seem to be the case. Programmers want to get money for their time so that they have to spend less time doing things they do not like to do. If you do not like to program, then you can pay programmers to program for you. If programs already do what you want, then you may not have to do even that. But when you are choosing software, it makes sense to choose software that won't end up causing you more grief in the future and that will be difficult if not impossible to find someone to fix it. Free-software gives you much better options.

Demand free software. If you are having a programmer program something for you, make sure that you receive the source code to the application. That way, if something happens to the programmer, or you ever want to have any changes made to it, you still can have the changes you want made. It is about keeping your options open. Don't pay for people to try and make themselves indispensable by keeping the source code to your system secret. If you cannot receive the source code, don't pay the programmer.

You are the customer, and there is a saying, the customer is king. Many programmers would love to write you free-software and give you the source code to it. You do not have to put up with bad programmers who do not give you the source code. You do not need to buy software if a program already exists that does what you want it to do. You do not need to deal with such customer unfriendly schemes such as product activation, digital restrictions management, and artificial programming service provider monopolies.

Is Eric Raymond and the RTFM jerk crowd driving away good contributers and users from free software? That is what I am beginning to wonder. I think that a lot of people don't want to get involved because the community comes across as a bastion of unrepentant meanness. One of the things the RTFM jerk says is “Go back to windows newbie.” as well as comments such as. “If Linux is too hard for you, why don't you just go back to windows.” after some newbie complains about the hard time she is having getting her system to work properly. More comments like “if you cant' make it work, then just go back to what ever worked before.” This is not the way to increase freedom for users.

These users are often already disgusted with their prior proprietary operating system, and have already demonstrated that they are willing to put some time into learning something new. Sometimes they get frustrated because things don't work as they should. unfortunately, things that might seem blatantly obvious to people who have worked with similar problems for a long time, are incredibly frustrating to the newbie. I wish the RTFM jerk crowd would just stick to hard distributions and operating systems like BSD, Gentoo and Slackware, and not waste time with abusing newbies trying to get things like Fedora and Ubuntu to work. They should quit telling people to RTFM and posting links to Eric Raymond's “how to ask questions” http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html and “how to be a hacker” http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html documents.

There are plenty of documents out there criticizing at Eric Raymond and his qualifications or lack there of such as, http://esr.1accesshost.com/ and http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/dead-parrot and unfortunately, they seem to be buried deep within the community, and not on the linux.com site where a total newbie might very well end up. It is not just this site, but RTFM jerks can be found on other places on the Internet. A good example would be certain freenode chat rooms (the C and C++ programing ones come to mind) and other places they could show up. They often feel that unless they can say mean things to newbies, newbies will not get the help they need. But this is not true at all.

Why should newbies have to put up with this kind of thing? Do we really need a culture of meanness that dates back to the Unix days (at least according to one old Unix system administrator I know, who is also disgusted with this behavior.) Granted there will always be debates on the subject. Some of them are bound to get very heated. But I don't see what the point is of flaming a newbie because she asked a question. Perhaps it is the lack of a good skill based player versus player oriented massively multi-player on line role-playing game (MMORPG) written in entirely free software for free operating systems. I don't really expect anyone else to write software for me for free.

Truthfully, I think many of the people who say things like RTFM newbie do it out of a sense of inadequacy, because they really don't know the answer to the question the newbie is asking and don't want to admit it. They think that by saying this, they will look smart, especially when they refer back to Eric Raymond's document. Anytime you try to write up a document for something like how to be a hacker, people take is as a system, like how to seem smarter than you actually are. Of course people are going to want to do that because it makes them feel important when they don't have anything else worthwhile to do. Then there is just telling newbies to read the fine manual. Many times the newbies have read the fine manual, but sometimes, they don't know where to begin, it is like giving a pre-algebra student a multi variable calculus textbook. Sure they can “read” the book, but understanding it is another matter.

Many of these people want to keep GNU/Linux as something just for people who are somehow “elite” they think that by using GNU/Linux and then telling everyone else to go away they can be part of some sort of in crowd. What is the point of joining some sort of in crowd that is mean, not only to newbies, but to each other as well. Back in 2004, Eric Raymond got a taste of his own attitude http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html . He found out that help was easier said then done, especially when people did not write adequate documentation. He didn't really learn his lesson though, and continues to promote his anti-newbie propaganda. But of course it is hard to get help from an RTFM jerk. They are to busy telling newbies to RTFM to actually help them or learn some useful skill. They sometimes don't even know the answers themselves.

Sometimes I wonder if all the Open Source vs Free Software debates are not about this very thing. Free software supporters will never say things like “go back to windows newbie” because it is against the philosophy of free software. We will always encourage the use of free software, and not the use of non-free programs, even in cases where the free program is currently more difficult to use. We look at the issues the newbies are bringing to our attention and try to fix it so it works properly. Unfortunately, we seem to be vastly outnumbered by open source proponents and even worse the useless RTFM jerks.

There are many arguments on the Internet against Digital Restrictions Management. Most revolve around the fact that people want to do what ever they want with files they receive in human readable format. This includes modifying and copying. Also, hackers do not like being told that they cannot change the source code on applications they are using. Users do not like knowing that they will be unable to get modifications that they want.

However, some other people still think that Digital Restrictions Management is acceptable. I will show that there is flawed logic behind the very concept of DRM.
Either you trust the person to not misuse the information, or you should not be trusting them in the first place. There is no middle ground. Once something becomes human readable, it can be copied. Even the crude human methods such as memory, pencil and paper can be used to make copies.

DRM is fundamentally different from encryption. With encryption, you are hiding the information from untrusted third parties who may want to snoop on your communications. You are not hiding the information from the end user who has the decryption code. This is fundamentally different from DRM that unsuccessfully tries to say look, but don't copy.

• Main
• archives
• Albums
• Links

• National Novel Writing Month
• Why non-programmers should use Free Software
• Eric Raymond and the RTFM Jerks
• Digital Restrictions Managment - the flawed logic

• Free Culture [2]
• General [4]
• Free Software [3]
• Linux [1]

• RSS 0.90
• RSS 1.0
• RSS 2.0
• XML