The first decision I made was to build the site with Django. It has been my web framework of choice for many months now. I used it to build the new frontrowcrew.com, and I’m very satisfied. The thing is, Django wasn’t always usable.

Some months ago Django 1.0 was not released yet. Yet, when you went to the Django web site and community, it seemed as if nobody was using 0.96, the stable version. When you go to the Django documentation online, it defaults to showing you the documentation for the version currently in development, rather than the latest stable version.

If at that point in time you wanted to start a new project with Django, you had a tough decision to make. Do you start with 0.96 and stick with it? Do you start with 0.96 and go through the hassle of porting over to 1.0 later? Do you deal with the hassle of building on the development version and build your way up to the actual release? Do you just not start your project and wait for the release? This is a difficult decision to make, and there’s an easy answer I left out. Maybe you just shouldn’t use Django, and go find something else that isn’t in a state of flux?

Happily, Django 1.0 has been released now, and this is no longer a problem. Well, at least it isn’t a problem for Django itself, but it is a problem for many things built around Django. Take Pinax for example. Pinax is a project that builds on top of Django. They implemented a lot of solutions to things that are common to all web sites, such as registration, password management, blogging, friend, and tagging. My new site idea will need some of those things, and I want to reinvent as few wheels as possible, so Pinax was very appealing to me.

The problem is that Pinax is currently in the state of flux that Django used to be in. There are sites out there which are built using Pinax, so it can be done. However, the current stable version seems to have been largely abandoned by the community. In my limited experience, the development version appears to be far superior, but it’s still in development. Worse, as a newcomer to the Pinax project, their documentation is very unreliable. I find myself asking those same questions all over again. Maybe it’s easier to reinvent those wheels than it is to deal with the hassle of closely tracking someone else’s project?

Let’s say I just want to add tagging to my Django application. Why should I bother with Pinax, I can juse use django-tagging. It has a stable version 0.2 that came out, over a year ago? The site says that version 0.3 is targeting Django 1.0. In other words, it’s completely useless. I’m not going to use Django 0.96 just so that I can use the stable version of django-tagging. I’m also not going to go through the hassle of using an unstable version of django-tagging 0.3 from their SVN trunk. Since their project was dependent on Django, it was their job to follow Django’s SVN trunk and have django-tagging compatible with Django 1.0 the day that Django 1.0 was released, or very soon after. Their failure to do so has made their project useless.

Just for kicks, let me talk about Laconica. Laconica is an open micro-blogging platform. Think of it as a Twitter clone, but with a different, and better, system architecture. I’ve been running an installation of it for our podcast community, and it’s very nice for the users.

The problem with Laconica is that it’s a nightmare on the back-end. The project has noble goals. They want it to be as easy to install, upgrade, and administer as WordPress. And while they have the first verison of a web installer, the underlying architecture is frighteningly bad. You have to run a set of daemons to handle the queueing of in and outbound messages. That kind of design is going in the exact opposite direction of making things easy. What’s worse is that in the latest version they added even more daemons, and two of them decided to eat up all my CPU. Because it’s under constant development, there are frequent updates with awesome and significant improvements. That’s very good, but the upgrading process is nightmarishly difficult. I want to keep the Laconica server running for the users who enjoy it. It’s just that the administration is far more work than it’s worth.

Here’s the one piece of advice I can give to open source project managers out there. Make sure to maintain a degree of separation between your development community and your user community. A very small percentage of the people who want to use your project actually want to get involved in working on the project itself.

My web site is going to use Linux, Ubuntu, Apache, Python, Django, numerous Python modules, CouchDB, Postgres, memcached, and many other open source projects. If I’m working to build the site, I need all those things to “just work.” I don’t have time to get heavily involved in the communities for any of them. Any effort I have to spend tracking development versions, or dealing with bugs in someone elses code, brings me closer to the point where I would have been better of building it myself.

Actually, let me offer one more piece of advice. Lots of small easy upgrades are better than a few big ones. The difference between Pinax’s stable and development versions is enormous. What if instead of having that huge gap, they had instead made many small upgrades to the stable version over time? The gap between stable and development would be much smaller. Using the stable version wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all, and upgrading to newer stable versions wouldn’t be as big  a deal.

I’m a programmer trying to do a project on my own. I’m smart and full of enthusiasm for the latest and greatest open source goodness. I want to do everything the right way. I want to utilize as much open source code as possible, so that I only have to write the code specific to my project. Sadly, I am unable to do that if the open source projects are in a state of flux, or can’t be relied upon. When reusing code requires just as much effort as rewriting code, you know something is wrong.

There is another side effect of this that isn’t immediately obvious. Existing open source applications that are licensed under the GPL, and other similar licenses, can not be legally ported to the iPhone. If you make modifications to a program under the GPL, you must open source your derivative code. The Apple agreement prevents you from doing this. Therefore, you can’t port emacs to the iPhone without violating either the GPL or the agreement with Apple.

In the wake of the recent court ruling upholding the Artistic License, we are more sure than ever that open source licenses are enforceable. Thus, the only chance we have of seeing many open source apps ported to the iPhone is if Apple makes a change, because the GPL isn’t going anywhere.

Luckily many open source projects are licensed under the BSD, MIT, or other similar licenses. Projects under these licenses can be ported to the iPhone because the derivative code does not need to be open sourced. This is why we are seeing iPhone applications that contain code from PuTTY, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, etc.

Don’t think it stops there. Recently I have been doing a better job of keeping my ear to the ground in the open source world. I have become enamored with many new frameworks. I’m discovering new features in software I have used for years. Ubuntu and Firefox, the two applications I use more than any others, are going to receive major updates in the very near future. I’m also combining old programs in new ways to great effect. Software has never been this good, and it’s only getting better.

With developing software being easier and more fun than ever, why is it that I haven’t actually been very productive? What was the last software project I actually finished? I don’t even remember. My problem is that I often end up just playing with the tools and not actually getting real work done. I read documentation and fool around enough to learn how to use the tools. Then when the time comes for real work, the novelty has already worn off. I hammered nails for no reason. Then I take a pass at real carpentry because the hammer no longer interests me.

I’m presently working hard to overcome this problem. You may see the fruits of this labor sometime in the future. Despite that, I just can’t help myself from wondering. How many other developers are just playing instead of developing anything useful? Is there something about the design of the software that encourages this behavior? What is the psychology and neurology behind these feelings? Can we make actual productivity more fun than useless play?

One thing seems to be pretty clear from where I’m standing. The people making the tools are getting a lot more work done than the people using them.

The first thing I noticed is a subtle change to the menu when you boot from an Ubuntu CD. Before there used to be an option called “Start or Install Ubuntu”. Now there are two separate options “Try Ubuntu Without Changing Your Computer” and “Install Ubuntu”. That’s a very smart change that is going to make a big difference for new users. Also, they have supposedly made changes to how the Live CD works when you put it into a computer that has Windows presently booted. Handing out CDs is going to be a much more effective way of spreading the love.

Also, there were a bunch of features included in the Feisty Fawn, and also the Gutsy Gibbon, that weren’t 100% perfect. This includes some of the audio and graphics support. All those things have been polished a great deal. I think that is because Hardy is an LTS release. That’s actually a big deal because Dapper has reached the point where it is too old to be still useful. I’m actually thinking that I might use Hardy full on until the next LTS release. Though, I don’t know if I’ll be able to hold myself back from upgrading for so long. Maybe I can do it on my computer at work.

I don’t really have that much else to say other than that I tried the Xubuntu Hardy Heron to see what was up. I used Xfce way back in the day on Gentoo machines, and I was a fan. I really like the idea and style of Xfce, but since I switched to Ubuntu and Gnome, I can’t deal with Xfce. Basically, when I use Gnome, I only use a fraction of the features it offers. Most of the other stuff is cruft. Xfce is sort of like Gnome light, even though Xfce people will probably yell at you if you say that. I like that it has most of the Gnome features I want, and takes out pretty much all the ones I don’t want. The thing that keeps me away is that there are always a handful of things I really need that Xfce leaves out. It’s getting better, but I don’t see myself using it anytime soon.

Everyone, I mean everyone, with a PC, should at least try the Hardy Heron. Even if you’ve tried Linuxes or Ubuntus in the past, that doesn’t matter. Try this one. This is the real deal.

I am a big-time Linux user. I’m going on 7 years of heavy Linux desktop and server use. However, I do not have the hangup that everything has to be free. I use Linux because it is a better operating system. I use Firefox because it is a better browser. I use it because it is an environment in which I can be more productive in my computing. I use it because it allows me to use my computer the way I want to. It is only a vocal minority of the open source community who disagree.

If you ask Linux desktop users, the people who will use Firefox on Debian, most of them want the original icon back, and they will go to great lengths to get it back. There is an extremely popular thread on the Ubuntu forums for a script that simply re-adds the original Firefox logo. People actually care about the icon. They even care about a dialog box they will never look at. They don’t care about two silly patches they will never notice, and they don’t care about using only 100% free software. Only a few crazy idealists like RMS care, and they’re ruining it for the rest of us.

Open source people often promote the fact that OSS is all about choice. Users are given choices. However, most users aren’t smart enough to make those choices. I know how to build Linux from scratch, but my mom doesn’t. She runs Ubuntu though, so whatever Ubuntu decides is what she gets. When IceWeasel appears, she is going to be confused. When we have less than 1% of the users imposing their ideology on the rest of us, that is not choice. It is not freedom. If you demand in ideological 100% freedom, you actually end up losing the freedom to use something that is not 100% free. In trying to fight for more freedom they have somehow achieved less freedom.

Imagine a Linux distribution just like Ubuntu. Now imagine this Linux distribution comes with ndiswrapper all set out of the box. It comes with NTFS read/write support out of the box. It comes with NVidia and Ati drivers. It comes with Xgl/Compiz/latest 3d shiny stuff out of the box. It comes with demos of some of the few proprietary games that run on Linux, perhaps from Introversion. It comes with wine already setup and working. It comes with real Sun java and real Adobe/Macromedia Flash already working. It has codecs and players for every multimedia format that exist right out of the box. This would rapidly become the dominant Linux distribution on the desktop.

That distribution would have questionable legality, but, if it existed, it would make every other Linux distribution insignificant on the desktop. Nobody would continue to use distros like Debian on the desktop except for the scant few crazies who support things like IceWeasel. There would be no reason to. I help people convert to Ubuntu very often, and such a distribution would eliminate 90% of the things I have to tell people. How many of those people give up on Linux forever because ndiswrapper is hard to set up? Why deny these people? Why hurt Linux for the sake of useless ideology? Have we forsaken the practicality that makes the Linux platform so great in the first place? I haven’t.yeah

Most people just want their computer to work and accomplish certain tasks. They don’t care if it’s 100% free. They care that their wireless card works. They care that they can visit websites with Flash. And yes, they actually care about a Firefox icon. Linux can do all these things! It just can’t do them easily, because zealots are holding us back. We could have awesome Linux on the desktop right now. Look how good Ubuntu is. It is so close to perfection, it’s not even funny. The only problems we have left are in places where proprietary software has fulfilled a function that open source can not. The only thing stopping us is the unwillingness of a few people to use the proprietary software or to make deals with proprietary software companies.

There is a point at which you can try to promote something with such zeal that you end up hurting it. We have reached this point. Stop it.

Of course, there are differences between code and music. Having people collectively modify a song as if it were a wiki is not the greatest idea. Not everyone has musical skills, talents and knowledge. You would probably just end up with a jumbled mess of sound if you operated in this fashion.

But just because music can’t be open in the same way that software is open doesn’t mean it can’t be open in some other fashion. Not only can music be more open, but it needs to be. How many times have you heard an awesome song only to find out that the other songs by the band are not as good or even in the same genre? How many times have you heard a song that has a good part, but the rest of the song is boring or even painful? Those are only problems because music is a one way street.

Here’s one way I propose for opening up music. Artists write songs and just record yourself trying to write the song. In fact, record everything every time you use your instrument. Who says the only thing people want to hear are finished studio recordings? Then your fans can listen and give you some advice. Like “hey, that bit is really good but that other one sounds a little off”. Artists absorb the user input and go back to the drawing board. Eventually there will be a finished product created by combining the musical skills and talents of the artist and the input of the listeners.

Death to authoritarianship (is that even a word?). Music, movies and everything else can be authored via collaboration rather than by a single author. If you have musical skills you should create music which more people will enjoy. If having the listener participate in the authoring process will help achieve this goal, then you should do it.

The last thing I want to mention is how this will change music listener habits. In the current environment people are spending their time trying to find new artists and new songs that they enjoy. In a more open environment listeners will do this less and instead spend that time influencing artists they know to get them to create better music. I’m not a musician and maybe I’m wrong. But I know that if I create anything it always helps to have more eyes and ears review it before I put the final seal on it. Why is music not that way?

Lastly, from a financial point of view this is a much better model than the one we are headed for. With the advent of people buying single tracks for a meager price musicians will not be able to sustain long term financial success unless many of their songs are wildly popular. Most bands I’ve found trying the new model are one hit wonders or zeros. Under the current model only the greatest musicians will quit their other jobs and the rest will be poor. With the model I suggest a few of the one hit wonders will be able to survive on their music thanks to the loyalty generated by the interactive fanbase.

Music is all about creating good feelings in those who hear it. We all know the ways in which music can make us feel good. But let’s add one more way in which music can make us feel good. Imagine going to a concert and hearing a song played that you helped to create. Then you hear a part in the song that you suggested. That “I did that” feeling is great, the same feeling you get when a big podcaster says your name or you see yourself on TV.