Last week of WLM

Now is the last week of the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 photo competition and while the global competition already surpassed the last year numbers (it happened during the last week), on the national level we are still a bit behind in Romania, with still around 800 more pictures needed to match the last year. I have myself a batch of newly taken photos to upload, but we can do it only with the help of the larger community (the number of Romanian photographers participating is about half compared with a year ago), so is time for a last push. Below are the banners and posters we used in the campaign so far, feel free to share and re-use:

Web is down. Who cares?

Earlier today I prepared a set with a few pictures to upload to Commons forWiki Loves Monuments when I noticed the Romanian language upload wizard is not working, it is the default we use and promote. The bad part: nobody complained, even if it was not functional for almost a day. And we were wondering why the contributions slowed down!

Once the problem was found and reported, it was fixed and now everything works again (it affected other languages too, at least French and Polish (languages with plural forms for words), which also took important upload hits yesterday.

The conclusion I draw from there: we are too used with websites not working, we say "I'll try later" and go on with our lives. Nobody bothered to write a few words in the contact page, even "you suck, upload is borked" would have been very useful.

Heroes

For a community project (and not only) you need a solid base: a good infrastructure, good processes and clear goals. With this base built, people are enabled to come and make it shine, acting themselves like heroes. But people come and go, a solid base will make heroes appear continuously, a healthy project will have both.

The incontestable hero this year on Wiki Loves Monuments is Pere López, a long-time wikipedian who uploaded by himself over 5700 pictures so far and continues to do it. He is returning to the contest, after he was a top contributor in the previous year too. And his close "competitor" (they help each other) is another Catalan contributor, Enfo, now at over 3800 pictures.

In the Romanian contest, we have our own hero too, Andrei Kokelburg is the top contributor, closing to 1100 pictures so far, and he will continue uploading too. Currently, Andrei is ranked the 6-th in the global uploaders (5-th if we don't count a robot doing automatic flickr imports). He is passionate about this (as a museum painting restorer in his "real life") and will continue contributing historical monuments photos even after the contest ends.

And they are not the only ones, in Romania we have over 120 people participating so far, 5 of them with over 100 pictures each. The total number of peoples in the contest? 5612 and we still have a couple of days until the half of its duration (more stats on the dedicated page, which keeps into account only activity on Commons, there are other sources too).

There is time for more heroes to step up and I am looking at YOU :D

picture by Andrei Kokelburg contributed under a CC-BY-SA license to Wikimedia Commons.

One week of Wiki Loves Monuments

Almost one week passed from the start of the Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest (there are still a few hours until the end of the day) and people are submitting photos with historical monuments from their countries to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia and more. So far it looks good.

On the world level, the stats are good, the uploads as I write are over 47,000 images (my guesstimate: they will close to 50.000 by the end of the day/first week), poised to reach a total of the month that will set the contest as the world's biggest (passing the last year numbers, which made Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 the biggest photography contest so far). Of course, is not all roses: unfortunately a few countries backed-down at the last minute, so WLM happens in *only* 32 countries (still not bad).

On a national level Romania is not doing bad either, we reached 1000 pictures in less than one week and joined this select club (there are countries that reached this milestone after the first weekend, hats off to them!), a performance which took almost two weeks next year. The number of people contributing is 65, which is also not bad, unfortunately most of them are still at under 5 images. They may grow.

On a personal level, even if as an organizer I won't qualify for any prize, I still want to add my photos. My strategy was different this year: I uploaded my bulk of images, standing in the queue for a while, from the first days, to kickstart the contributions. And there were quite a few of them, at 365 images giving my "15 minutes of glory", for a short while I was one of the top dozen contributors worldwide. Also at the moment my pictures are one third of the Romanian uploads, but my uploads slowed-down (if I want to post more pics, I have to shoot them first), other people will have to step up. I am confident this will happen.

Wiki Loves Monuments in 3, 2, 1...

We are just one day away from the start of what will be the biggest photo competition ever: Wiki Loves Monuments will open on September 1st and will stay open until September 30, during this whole month you are invited to take photos of historical monuments from your country and upload them to Wikimedia Commons (technically, the upload has to happen this month, the photos can be taken before). And it is no joke, while the 2011 edition is a steps away from being declared the largest competition ever (stay tuned) with about 168,000 pictures from 18 countries, now 36 countries announced participation, most likely we will beat our own record.

There are also good incentives to participate beyond the greater good of enriching Wikipedia with data about your country's culture and history, there are prizes: first on the national level, where they vary from country to country, and then international prizes which have at the top a photo trip (and Wikimania 2013 attendance) to Hong Kong.

From my part, I am again a member of the organizing team in Romania. I have no specific goals in this endeavour, I want it just to be fun and fair and also get some quality pictures in Wikipedia, the jury focus will be more on usefulness of the images, more than the art side. As numbers, the only one I have in mind is my personal contribution: I want to upload myself at least 200 pictures to the campaign (being an organizer and jury member, they won't run for any prize). I would also be thrilled to see some of my photographer friends from the community getting involved in this contest yes, it will happen also in India, in North America, in South America... almost everywhere).

Let the fun begin!

IRC session on CC licenses and sharing

Kushal invited me to give an IRC talk to the Linux Users' Group of Durgapur (don't be thrown back about their website, is recovering after an "incident") on Creative Commons licenses, sharing, free culture and free art. It happened yesterday evening on #dgplug, taking until late in the night - I suspect some of the audience felt asleep, they were not as interactive as I hoped. They had only very brief knowledge about software licensing (considering it was a LUG) and even briefer on cultural licenses, so I had to start with the basics. For the curious, the full session log is available at my website (it should appear also on dgplug's website - update: here).

Mountain wallpapers

As I said yesterday I was a little back with posting wallpaper stuff, today I get up do date, so won't stress people with them again at least for a few days (still, don't promise it will take longer than a week, things may happen)

As a couple of the pics above featured cows, is probably an interesting idea with something more abstract, even if not mountains-related, a detail from a spherical water fountain.

Summer wallpapers

I was busy lately with some photography projects (including a couple of photo exibitions and a new edition for Wiki Loves Monuments) so I am late with one of the tasks I try to follow: publishing some Free wallpapers from sceneries I encountered:

Fedora radars

Last weekend the Baneasa Bucharest airport (BBU) hosted the yearly edition of the big air show of Bucharest. Aircraft and helicopters offered a spectacle in the air and thousands of people admired them. In addition to that, a nearby hangar was organized for an exhibition with booths and early in the morning, before the show in the sky to start, I gave a tour of the exhibition floor when a complex device in a middle of the Linux boot process caught my attention:

I quickly reached my camera to capture an image of the standard init, when the guy at the booth (for the air traffic systems, radars and such) told me to wait a bit for the system to start and get a better picture. I replied I was interested to see it booting Linux and we chatted a bit, apparently in the last year they migrated all the infrastructure to Linux, coming from Unix. In the meantime it reached the desktop and I saw for a fraction of a second it was Fedora Core 6 (complete with the DNA wallpaper) and when wondered why a 5 years old system is used, I was explained such an old system has all the bugs fixed.
When talking, a second display showed its desktop for a few seconds and it had the Fedora 15 stripes. I wondered about the combination of an old and a newer system and was advised to wait more and talk with an engineer. Couldn't wait, the things outside started to warm-up, but in the working radar system picture the legend is: on the left a Fedora Core 6 system, on the center and top Windows 7 systems and on the right a Fedora 15 system. I am not a specialist, so can't say what every of them is doing.

Sunflower wallpapers

It's been a while since my last post with wallpapers, is about the time for a new one and since last week-end I got into a sunflower field, today's theme is free sunflower wallpapers. Enjoy :)

But for this post not to be all photo fluff, here's a screen capture of my Fedora desktop struggling to edit the photos above, all while having open a few more apps (email, instant messenger and web browser: the borwser and photo editor fight for bringing the PC to a crawl).

#FREEBASSEL

Have you ever used the Open Clip Art Library or the Open Font Library? Both of those sites are powered by the Aiki framework, which was used with openclipart.org as its primary target. The main developer behind Aiki is Bassel Khartabil and he is in need of our help, being detained in Syria.

Bassel by Joi Ito, on Flickr

His friends launched #FREEBASSEL, a global effort to gather information and leverage that will help lead to his release, here's a quote from the campaign website:

On March 15, 2012, Bassel Khartabil was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus. Since then, his family has received no official explanation for his detention or information regarding his whereabouts. However, his family has recently learned from previous detainees at the security branch of Kafer Sousa, Damascus, that Bassel is being held at this location.

Myself, I have little faith (none at all in fact) in dictatorships like the Syrian one but I signed the petition, think is a worthy cause and invite you to join. Solidarity is the best thing we can have in such situations.

I didn't knew Bassel directly, we exchanged mails on the OCAL mailing list, but I used his work, both as an contributor and used of both OCAL and OFL. But even if I didn't knew him, for crying out loud, he was detained 4 months ago and nobody, not even his family, have any info. That's not acceptable.

Freedom

Software freedom is a luxury. I often talk here about software freedom, I advocate it, I fight for it, but let me tell you again: software freedom is a luxury, in order to enjoy it there are other things needed, like a democratic society, law, justice or freedom of speech, if there was a Maslow pyramid of freedoms, software freedom would be somewhere to the top, with those basic things as its base. You know, the things you take as granted in a country member of the European Union and for which people died in December 1989.

"wake-up Romania, your democracy is dying!" says a protester in Bucharest

Those things are now at risk in my country, Romania, where in the last few days the democracy imploded. The American embassy expressed concern, the German one did the same, the French government did the same, the EU Justice commissioner did the same, there are talks about suspension from the European council. If it sounds like hell, it is because is hell.
"Prime Minister Ponta, in 2 months you destroyed the democracy built in 20 years"

The problem is, even if the current government isn't, we, in some parts of the country, are a modern European society, we don't have guns to take them in the streets to defend democracy. We have families and jobs to keep, the best we can do is to go out in the streets and protest. Then document everything online, since the traditional media is owned and controlled (more on that later). The moment was "well" chosen: the country practically melts at near 40°C, students go home for the summer break, parents are worried with their children in the middle of high-school graduation exams, people are planning summer vacancies away from the city - you know, what a normal society is supposed to to. Unfortunately, a corrupt government takes us from normality and make us go out in the streets. Even the computer geeks (especially the computer geeks, who are part of the progressist class of the country).
FOSS hackers and and IT&C students left their basements to defend the Consitution

So what happened? Let me get back in time for a few months: the year started with a heavy winter, with even below -22°C and a center-right government based on a weak parliamentary majority being hard on economy trying to keep the country economy stable and avoid repeating the Greek situation. Of course the austerity measures (they were in power since 2008, for all the global crisis) made them unpopular. Add some corruption, which seems to be a constant to all Romanian governments, some mistakes and a very good propaganda machine in the hands of the opposition, they were going for a big loss in the upcoming general elections, scheduled for this autumn. But then something happened: opportunists changed parties, seeking for a warm place and the parliamentary majority changed. The government changed, a coalition formed around the ex-communists got into power.
"Why do you lie to us?"

So far this is democratic play, it was all legal even if apparently dumb: the former government was unpopular and still losing popularity, more austerity had to come. The communist had nothing to do than just wait half a year and they were approaching a slam dunk, winning election with no effort. Yes, getting into power earlier gave them some advantage (a few years ago their leader, the current Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta declared after losing an election "we lost because their vote stealing machine was better than our stealing machine"), but also had disadvantages: in those months, despite their promise to raise salaries and pensions, they would have been forced o keep austerity, otherwise the country economy goes into chaos and they have their hands tied by the European Union and International Monetary Fund anyway. So why hurry?
protesters

The ex-communist party had the government from 2000 to 2004, when they lost election facing a wave of people angered by their corruption and anti-democratic actions, like free press suppression or using the justice to destroy political enemies. Then came as a hero the current president Traian Basescu, which they tried to impeach back in 2007 but failed, he was re-confirmed with a huge majority and was re-elected in 2009. The main promise of president Basescu was freedom of justice and this started to bring its fruits, after many years of delays the courts approached verdicts in some major cases, one of them being Adrian Nastase, former Prime Minister. They HAD TO stop justice. As icing on the cake, the current PM, Victor Ponta was revealed by the British magazine Nature as a plagiator in his PhD thesis, situation in which other politicians of the world had to resign their seats. That HAD TO be stopped too.
"Down with Ponta" and "Ponta is a plagiator"

The hard moves started last week, when the public television management was changed to be comprised only of government representatives (traditionally, it also had proportional representatives from all the parliamentary groups). In rural Romania internet access is limited, people get most of the information from television, so they assured to take control of the public television. They also had control of the biggest private media trust in the country, which is owned by Dan Voiculescu, a known collaborator of the secret police from the communist dictature and they have control over other smaller media companies. A second move was to move Monitorul Official, the paper where the laws are published before they are able to function, from the Parliament in the direct control of the Government, this way it can be used to their own purposes - the first use was to escape the above-mentioned media-mogul from an imminent judicial sentence. The second use was to dissolve the universitary ethical commission who would have recommended retiring the Prime Minister's PhD.
"We want a country like outside. Down with Ponta"

This week the things accelerated. First, the People's Advocate was replaced: over the summer the Parliament goes to a break, the government will pass "urgency orders" which are to be approved as laws after the parliamentary break in the autumn, but until then they have the power of laws and the People's Advocate is the only authority able to challenge them in the meantime at the Constitutional Court. Then the presidents of the both parliament chambers were changed, with government representatives - this is again against the law, since they were supposed to be replaced only with another members of their party. Then the government passed an urgency order which limits the Constitutional Court to oppose the impeachment of the president. Yesterday the impeachment procedures were started and tomorrow a law (or urgency order?) will be passed to simplify the procedures of dismissing an impeached president.
"Victor, when you will call the miners?"

What's next? The president will be impeached, a referendum will follow in about 3 months. In the meantime, his place will be held by one of the government coalition leaders, which got into this position (Senate President) just a couple of days before, he will have almost all President powers, including to pardon and put into liberty condemned criminals (hint, hint!). The last standing democratic institution is the Justice, which have leadership changed scheduled in September anyway, with the new leadership to be put in function by the government, parliament and the (temporary by then) president. And then this government will "organize" the presidential referendum and new parliament elections. In a country which will be no more a democracy.
Protester

What we do in the meantime? Protest. Today Bucharest is expected to held a big rally of democracy supporters, I will follow this matter on my photography blog. To end in a different, less gloomy tone, this is the sign I liked the most at yesterday protests in front of the government building:
"Hello political parties. The Higgs Boson exists. Let Romania alone."

"Pirates": SpringerImages

Lately we hear a lot about cases where corporations or greedy individuals misuse freely licensed software or content, such a case is related in a special report in Signpost, Wikipedia's community-written and community-edited newspaper: Springer's misappropriation of Wikimedia content "the tip of the iceberg".

SpringerImages, a website providing scientific images and part of the Springer global publishing company was caught by a professor publishing and selling Creative Commons licensed materials with no proper attribution. After being contacted and some talks with the professor, the publishing company admits there may be some flaws but call the accusations "blatantly false" and "reputation damaging".

After the Signpost's article, Springer published another response, this time they acknowledge "defects" and take measures like "we have manually stopped display of *all* images with MediaWiki or Wikipedia in the caption. These images will not be displayed again until we can reliably differentiate among those that have non-commercial restrictions."

The article notes how damaging for Free culture such abusers are, one notable example being the German Federal Archives, which donated 100.000 pictures to Wikipedia in 2008 and then stopped contributions after seeing mass-scale abuse of their donated content (like images with watermarks cropped and then sold on eBay as original)

In as interesting piece, read it all at Signpost.

Trends

Yesterday I passingly mentioned on a post that stats show the Fedora user base is shrinking (looking back, I probably should have said "seems to be shrinking"), which made for a later conversation with someone genuinely asking for the numbers, someone else challenging my conclusion and someone else not taking a solid stance either way.

First, I want to make it even clearer, I was not talking about contributors or project health, which can be measured with completely different metrics, but just about the users base, which was relevant in the context of my post (users will have to inflict UEFI with Secure Boot).

Second, there is no absolute way to count the user base for a Linux distro, you can't do it the Windows way by counting sold licenses or pre-installed computers (well, neither that is accurate, not counting the unlicensed installs), nor you can use web usage statistics (not every computer is online, Linux desktop market share is too small and easily affected by rounding errors), so the best way our community was able to come with was counting package updated via yum (the wiki statistics page has explanations about the methodology and its flaws).

Based on the plain, raw, data in the page I made a simple chart and then added a few annotations on top, to have a little context, is easier to read this way

Some observations:

• There was an absolute peak with Fedora 8, which is possibly attributed by the statistics page to a massive Amazon EC2 presence with images provided by various entities/companies. Community-wise, the distro was then at a Maximum, with everything opening left and right, people being enthusiastic. Is the time you will see past and present contributors remembering as "good old times".
• Another, much smaller, peak happened with Fedora 14, which can also be attributed to the Amazon EC2 presence.
• The chart shows a big dive with Fedora 15, the numbers where still have time to increase but not much, it will be EOL-ed in a few weeks.
• Fedora 16 is mid-life, until December when it will reach End Of Life, more installs will happen, is too early to tell if it will surpass F15 or not, we'll talk about that in half a year.
• Of course Fedora 17 is near the bottom, is a fresh release with statistics for after only one week, so far it shows, according with the statistics page, more yum connections and less direct downloads compared with the previous release.

Any more disclaimers needed?

Thresholds

A big flame does not end suddenly, it continues with echoes and as echoes go further away, the more ridiculous they get. You can learn, for example, why do Fedora needs signed binaries for UEFI with Secure Boot: because is too hard for users to enter BIOS and change a setting there.

I encountered myself Linux users who didn't entered BIOS before but they need it for the install to change boot order. In such cases I google myself a nice tutorial and point to that. If they are not able or not willing to follow such simple instructions, then I recommend them to continue using Windows, pay for a specialist to solve their problems or take a computing course. And I don't think I am wrong in doing that, by definition, Fedora user base is defined by voluntary Linux consumers who are computer-friendly and likely collaborators. If they are unable of doing such a little work or unwilling to learn such a simple thing, they will be more pain than useful contributors.

There is this illusionary dream in the Fedora community to gain massive market share (the stats show we are shrinking) by attracting an audience of "girl scouts" type of users, for which we removed usability, lose features day by day and may reduce the freedom in the near future.

From the beginning, being a Free software user required a balance between freedom and convenience, and every of the people involved has his own threshold, but Fedora as a project has a stated mission "to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community" and "freedom over convenience" was part of our marketing message since the four foundations were defined and even before that.

Back to anecdotes and personal experience, time teaches me is not worthy to invest in people who are not willing or not able to learn: you teach them at first, some will learn and grow into valuable contributors, some will refuse and suffocate you with babysitting requests. Filter ones from the others and your life and work will improve.

Luana wallpapers

When everything looks doom and gloom in the Free Software world is time to remember there is life beyond it, like the last week-end when I had the chance to explore a magic land full of stories and legend, but also beautiful sceneries. I returned from there with a lot of pictures to send later for Wiki Loves Monuments (I am busy these days making the contest work, with sponsors, trademarks and such), but also with beautiful images to share as Free wallpapers. Enjoy.

Less freedom is no freedom

I wanted to write about the Linux boot and UEFI from a while now, but I figured out is better to learn first more about the issue and take a deep breath before taking a position. In the meantime, many faces of the debate were talked in various places, so I think I have a better grasp.

From the beginning, when people started talking about Secure Boot some warned about the treat to Free Software, but they were pretty much dismissed by many as a bunch of hippies following the smelly RMS, we'll surely find a way around when will get to it. Now, after mjg wrote a long technical pieces about the struggles of making Fedora boot on UEFI with Secure Boot enabled, we can the alarmists were right and Microsoft managed to give a fatal blow to Free Software on the desktop with the help of many hardware manufacturers.

The problem is Free Software won't be able to co-exist with Windows and keep its freedom, people will have to make the choice: break-up totally with Windows (really hard in the computing landscape of today) or give away one of the fundamental freedoms granted by GPL (modify and distribute the software). Sure, this is not a problem in the server world, where you can safely turn Secure Boot off and live happily (boot malware does not affect Linux) as this is not a problem in the enterprise desktop in the places where the game is Linux-only. It is a problem in the hobbyist space, where people play with different stuff all the time and is a problem with adoption, when new potential users will have their computers locked to Windows. It is also not a Linux problem, is a Free Software problem, if you give away freedoms, you can still run Linux.

I can see how people wanting to run Linux and Windows 8 (let aside me not understanding why anyone would want to use Windows 8, it's a turd, from the same category with GNOME Shell, a tabled interface shoehorned into a desktop) will enter BIOS(UEFI) at every boot and change the Secure Boot flag according with the OS they are going to start (time wasting and annoying). And you will have to turn it off, don't expect things like drivers or kernel modules from RPM fusion or similar sources to receive certificates, after all they distribute software with legal restrictions in the US, the home of the certification authority.

So short term disable Secure Boot, keep Windows 7 if you have to dual boot, put your own keys inside BIOS(UEFI), pay, there seem to be some solutions. How about long term? I expect "pirates" will crack Windows 8 anyway and make it boot without Secure Boot. Then, in one or two releases Microsoft will change the logo specifications, Secure Boot will be mandatory with no BIOS option to turn it off - we must defend ourselves from evil pirates and malware writers and over 90% of the computers, "designed for Windows", will be unable to run a Free Software operating system (Linux desktop is busy chasing windmills with user interface experiments, so it won't gain significant market share).

My prevision is even more grim: by that time Windows will move to allowing installs only from the "app store" and Free Software applications will be out (remember, apps like Firefox, LibreOffice or even GIMP have the bulk of the users on Windows). By that time Free Software will be dead and buried, wanting a Microsoft alternative we will have the choice of Google Chrome with everything in the "cloud".

Quite negative so far, right? There should be a solution I see... yes, I think the Free Software world should refuse Microsoft's proposal for Secure Boot. Some FOSS developers argue having a secure boot process can be a good thing, while they may be right, here is not the case, Microsoft proposal is broken by design, we should not endorse it, join the opposition and get the anti-trust regulators to make something, all while teaching people how to change BIOS settings and generate and install own keys. I don't see any important player endorsing the FSF petition: Fedora is not there, Red Hat is not there, Debian is not there, Canonical is not there, Ubuntu is not there, Mint is not there... not any distro is there. And this is a bad thing.