Community Software Development (Week 13)

The two projects that are to undergo the fairly incompetent comparison of their community development aspect are the quite humble, but unprecedented TuxGuitar application and the up and coming web player, as it styles itself, Songbird. The analysis, however, is hindered not only by the relevant estrangement of the author from the real software development process, but also by a certain lack of publicly disclosed information as the scale of both projects is not as grand as, for instance, of the most well known and discussed open source enterprises.

Now, the most notable differences of the development organization derive from the relative scale of the projects - as Songbird is, essentially, a music player with numerous extensions, features and grand customization options, its general audience is far greater than that of a quite specific and niche` product that TuxGuitar as a music notation editor inherently is, therefore the number of its contributors is significantly smaller, but their commitment to the project is much more crucial than that of developers of the former one.

Songbird does have a much better organized involvement of new contributors, be that translators, testers or developers - there's numerous sections of Songbird wiki, so to speak, dedicated to explanation of various types of contributions and ways to join the team as well as contribution score boards which introduce a game element of friendly competition, which can serve as additional motivation. Tuxguitar project administrators, however, do not make it explicitly clear how developers may chip in and what tasks are there to be done (as opposed to Songbird even having its own separate Bugzilla page). The only detected mean of joining was discovered on project's SourceForge  page and is seemingly the default arrangement for all SourceForge projects. The Documentation section on TuxGuitar's site does provide some guidelines for people wishing to contribute in the translation part of the project, but involvement of new developers stops at general guidelines of importing the TuxGuitar  source project.

The Songbird sports a clearly defined roadmap, frequent releases whereas due perhaps to the scale and interest rate inherent to the TuxGuitar enterprise, it is very unclear when new version is to come out and which changes it is to bring - it is, perhaps, somewhat known to the inner cycle of developers involved in the development, but it is not up anywhere for others to see and anticipate. Even great deficiencies, such as the inability to handle the newly issued of GuitarPro format (TuxGuitar was also conceived as a free alternative to GuitarPro, which would enable editing of files in GP's native format) are not fixed for many months and no announcements are made on the progress of conversion and deciphering.

Moreover, Songbird has it's own "infrastructure" for downloads, source code hosting, various guides and API documents meant to make developers' tasks easier, better diversify them and provide sufficient explanations and manuals so as to make the involvement threshold lower, TuxGuitar, however, heavily relies on the infrastructure provided by SourceForge and is very lacking in the explicit and sophisticated guidelines department. Furthermore, TuxGuitar doesn't really have - or need, for that matter - an add-on system which is also contributing to the influx of developer power into the Songbird project.

Songbird, though indeed having known bugs that need fixing, having planned enhancements of functionality and such, is past the era where practically any brain could provide invaluable input - the added functionality is more and more complex and most apparent, highly needed add-ons have already been written and coming up - and being able to realize - with something new and desired by the public does indeed require one to be quite imaginative and inventive.TuxGuitar, on the other hand, is more challenging in its entity as being relatively unique enterprise with much fewer actual open source predecessors where inspiration, ideas and approaches could be taken from. Sadly, it being a very niche product prevents the very much needed inflow of quality developer material.

As it would seem, both projects financially survive on donations of the audience and, in a minor way in case of TuxGuitar, on providing advertising space.

The Culture of Sharing: Motivation, Business Models and Hacker Ethics (Week 12)

First and foremost, as a disclaimer of general intent and for the sake of truer interpretation, I would like to note that by no means, under no circumstance and according to no reading of a hacker definition I would consider myself pertinent to the hacker community - and the appalling fact is, after reading Eric S. Raymond's Hacker-HowTo, I would never fancy to.

As a second note, I do believe there's something quite inherently wrong with the concept of classification as ostensibly perceived by sir Raymond - as it would seem the notion of being a hacker is taken with outermost seriousness as sir Raymond goes to great lengths to set hackers apart from crackers (somewhat understandably, though being a cracker can not essentially, signify conflicts of person's features with those described as quintessential for styling oneself a hacker), posers and other types of wannabes. The aforementioned differentiation reeks of great artificiality and certain immaturity (very typical for members of musical subculture groups and the likes of them).

The opposition to what general audience perceives to be hackers wasn't introduced very maturely either - they say that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and many instances are known when public's interpretation of the term or what's considered to be correct has bended original terms to public's will - numerous grammatical changes were officially accepted, for instance. So remorse and indignation are quite futile, it's either gradual bending of general perception towards the desired essence (much like "geeks" social adaptation) or relinquishment of the term altogether - it's not essentially about the term anyway, it's what one does and how one behaves.

On the whole the tone of the document is alarmingly discouraging - hackers movement started out as fun, slightly anarchical, defying rules and authorities and the whole HowTo is saturated with indirect imperatives (should, has to), indications of vast responsibilities ("moral duty...") and calls for extreme loyalty ("(especially other hackers)", "it must be interesting and/or useful to other hackers") - it's hard for me personally to envision how real enthusiasm and love for freedom (which are a part of hacker "requirements") correlate with the above.

Another subjective deficiency of the document is the excess hostility (not even a condescension!) of its author towards Windows Users (the advice to format C drive) crackers (see insults in FAQ) - who ARE potential material for the hacker community, only, perhaps, are not mature enough yet (as Raymond states, many start as young as 15 or even in a more tender teenage). It's not that cracker inclinations are not be be discouraged - it's just the tone sir Raymond chooses does not give him much credit (though, perhaps, due to his past accomplishments he doesn't feel he needs more).

Furthermore, the hierarchy and climbing up that hierarchy to attain the great goal of being considered a hacker feels somewhat contrived and artificial, and, sadly, not entirely believable - it seems to rather serve the purpose of hacker community rather than helping a newcomer climb the ladder - it's hard to comprehend that mundane duties as maintenance and secondary activities, such as composing FAQs are indeed respected as highly as sir Raymond claims they are.

As for positive features, the document does, indeed inform people one what a renowned hacker perceives essential to be considered a full-fledged part of a hacker community. It does, to some degree, introduce the hackers' viewpoint on being a hacker. Another positive comment is that the document is ever changing and it's author does admit his own delusions and/or mistakes ("Java is not good for beginners") and the non-stopping evolution of the term and its environment (changing tech knowledge requirements). Sir Raymond provides good links to additional educational materials and mostly worthy explanations of their worth or of some of his statements (the right left-right brain parts involvement to justify the proposed extracurricular activities for hackers). Also, he does indeed provide quite clear guidelines to those who would either like to start their serious advancement through the world of computers or to those who'd like to fulfill Raymond's notion of hackerdom.

All in all, the document may indeed be informative in the respect of how hackers (or, at least, one of their most influential advocates), perceive themselves as opposed to the notion upheld by the media, but as for it's style and tone... it's indeed questionable whether a person, having read it, would want to associate himself with the hacker society at all.

Protection of Copyright and Intellectual Property (Week 10)

With the victorious advent of Internet the issue of Intellectual Property became as topical, as burning and frequently arising as it has never been before. And understandably so - the advancement of technological means provided ample ground for digitalization of copyrighted materials (print, audio, video materials ) and, naturally, unsanctioned sharing of these materials, which, of course, called for the backlash from copyright and stakeholders. The situation resulted in continuous modification of legislation and initialization of, essentially, an ongoing technocratic-bureaucratic war (bureaucrats recruiting some technologically savvy people for their cause and vice-versa, but general breakdown remains as stated). The fact that the strife is so protracted without, seemingly, either side having decisive advantage serves to further prove the complexity and multifaceted-ness of the matter.

My personal evaluation of the matter is extremely biased, as I am a heavy consumer of others IP (both legally and illegally) and haven't produced anything really worth copyrighting - or, for that matter, worth illegally reproducing - yet. Therefore, I do believe the strife to ban internet piracy, for instance, to be quite futile as the means required for successful abolition of illegal distribution of copyrighted content would most probably require infringement of most basic human rights, most specifically, privacy and limiting services which are used to be consumed unlimited (internet traffic in this case), which is never taken lightly by those whose freedom is being tampered with. However, if the extremes mentioned are not to be applied, the ping-pong game of yet another restriction and its clever workaround is to continue. The investment, and thereby resourcefulness, of people fighting for retention of their "freedom", however anarchistic that may be, is greater than that of representatives of those desiring to maximize their income, hence the balance between legitimacy of claims of the latter and simultaneous prosperity of seemingly foul misdeeds. I would also like to mention that monetary loss claims of record companies, software developers and such are oftentimes absurd - only a small fraction of those who illegally obtained the copyrighted product would have actually bought the IP object had it not been available for illegal download and it is highly doubtful that this is taken into account in lawsuits and reports submitted for governmental review (so as to prompt enhancement of legislation).

Truth be told, the copyright issues are not only taxing on those consuming Intellectual Work object, but on those producing them as well. A whole group of renowned [fantasy] authors (George R.R. Martin, Robin Hobb) are apparently psyched out to severe criticism and abolition of fan fiction by an instance which had once occurred - a writer, who generally encouraged fanfiction, encountered a situation when her own ideas couldn't be realized as a fan of her work introduced similar plot lines in the fanfiction prior to original writer having finished the book and when approached by the author on that matter, demanded a percentage of author's earnings. The incident is indeed bizarre and fails to conform to common sense.

On the high note, more and more producers of intellectual property realize the overall trend of digitalization and the excess of having intermediaries feeding off of the product of their intellectual work - hence more and more artists turn to selling their art as digital download, track by track - as Steve Jobs said, people are not really all that inclined to stealing and if given an opportunity to purchase a product for a well justified price (a dollar per track, for instance) they're quite likely to do that. Moreover, the instance of Brandon Sanderson (the author entitled to finishing the Wheel of Time epic cycle by Robert Jordant) publishing close to final drafts (as a result of continuous web-publishing of the book in progress) of his novel "Warbreaker" is admirable - the web version, slightly less polished than the one that saw the print, is still available as a free download on Brandon Sanderson's website and reports show that physical book sell numbers were hardly affected by that at all. Sometimes, making the work in progress available to general public is even more beneficial - such practice helped Gluhovski land a contract with the publishing house as his book Metro 2033 quickly gained popularity over the internet. He remained true to his audience and had his second book made available to the audience via his website - that, after the initial print release, chapter a week, but still. So, perhaps, changing the marketing models to more flexible ones and relaxing the restrictions to some degree (as opposed to imposing new ones) is to have a calming effect on the overall conflict? I, personally, really do believe it to be so.

All in all, I believe the strife to protect intellectual property is blown out of proportion and common sense - not that an intellectual work does not deserve to be accordingly rewarded, no - but nowadays the whole mankind is subjected to suffering on the account of those, holding the rights to objects of intellectual property, desiring to achieve maximum gain at the expense of hampering the overall progress of civilization.

Free Software as an Important Premise (9th Week)

Long time ago, at the moment of the first introduction to computers with actual graphic interface, it didn't quite fit my perception that software was being bought - such misconception, most probably, derived from a vague understanding of what software was and, similarly, from a childish belief that only material things could be sold and bought. Then, a considerable amount of years later, the well established notion of software costing considerable sums of money - and that the only way to get to the internet was via IE, which, by some celestial mercy, came with free of charge - was shattered yet again by introduction of free software concept. Yet, it was quite vague and true revelation has taken place only in the university, when they began to methodically explain the whole notion of free software.

Since then, my appreciation for the free software gradually grew (transition IE->Firefox->Chrome), but, as it happens, I haven't grown to worship the concept (haven't adopted any Linux, GIMP ways), though, of course, having learned from my own experience how hard programming is, the respect for people who are making free software happen has become vast. As awful it may be to admit, I have no real aversion to piracy, therefore most of the software I use IS conceived to be commercial as generally one can expect a more polished interface and, quite often, a greater range of functionality (MS Office  as opposed to OpenOffice, GuitarPro 6 as opposed to TuxGuitar). Truth be told, the use of free software is quite haphazard in my case - I either use due to university demands (Eclipse, PgAdmin), to widespread best practices (Firefox, Chromium) or if the elaborate functionality is not crucial (FileZilla).

I would like to elaborate a little on my experience with TuxGuitar, which, after significant changes the realease of the 6th version of GuitarPro brought to the table, became my primary editor of GuitarPro tabs. TuxGuitar is, basically, a multitrack music score editor, practically mimicking GuitarPro features (to some extent) and sporting support of additional file formats. It has initially attracted me with its ability to edit PowerTab files, while bearing a GuitarPro-like interface, which was already familiar(I do not enjoy learning curves of any steepness, trying to sensibly avoid them therefore).The first thing that user is legible to notice upon TuxGuitar launch is how pleasing the interface is on the eye - even more so, than that of GuitarPro 5. Then comes the realization that, had you ever really used the GP5, you're quite ready for a full-fledged exploitation of the TuxGuitar and that strikes you as a pleasant surprise and sparks a renewed admiration for the free software developers.

GuiatrPro 5 was notoriously known for its frequent crashes, TuxGuitar, however, hadn't crashed once throughout the course of its usage for me. The way functions and options are located is, alas, semi-intuitive - wish to change the tempo of the playback crashed at my inability to locate the setting, fortunately enough, TG has a well-written user manual-documentation - even the screenshots of forms and toolbars in question are provided. Another positive side of the documentation is its attractive design - I have discovered a few useful features and options only because I was captivated enough to look through the user manual. Last, but not least, TG has quite an active and numerous user base, whom one can always address in the official forum, which I explored, wondering what could that possibly be that people still find missing from the program. 

On the downside, TuxGuitar sports a Penguin-related logo, which I definitely do not like as it does detract from the overall glam of the application.

Virtual Worlds - Second Life (8th Week)

The concept of virtual world is decisively exciting and has a potential which is hard to over-estimate, especially with the current trend of widespread adoption of virtual reality as inseparable part of everyday life. However, making the notion shine requires an outstanding execution, which is not, as it happens to be, the case with Second Life.

Having heard of Second Life for the first time I was initially quite skeptical - and, apparently, for quite a solid reason - for a remarkable project in it's supposed prime to have surfaced on such a late stage of its life cycle to someone whose social life is very closely intertwined with internet societies raises suspicions - either the person is not that well informed, or the project isn't that wonderful in the end. The introductory video has left me thoroughly unimpressed (as IMVU has been discovered and gotten tired of at that stage) and as I was running out of time to do the things that needed to be done in my First Life, I haven't even deigned the super-successful undertaking with a try.

Now, a few years later, Second Life proves itself to be as unimpressive as perceived on its heyday. Registering an account and installing the viewer is indeed effortless and intuitive. It seemed somewhat discouraging, though, that one has to pick a family name from the generated list as it does limit the overall customization which is marketed as practically boundless.

After the initial sing in the player gets taken to the introductory space which presents the bare minimum of training, which is not very encouraging as one finds him/herself wanting to do more than that and neither tips nor help menu offer the best user guidance imaginable. The overall menu was found to be counter-intuitive and finding the sections that actually allow one to modify facial and body traits, change clothes and hair was utterly frustrating. On the good side, allowing users the use of the sliders for sculpting the appearance is definitely impressive - the precision in some respect is even greater than the one provided in the most state-of-art RPG computer games - sure, facial generation is way better and smoother in Fallout 3, Dragon Age: The Origins and such, but the freedom one gets with such details as width of the hips, length of limbs and such is truly astonishing. Sadly enough, there seems to be little use of that.

On the first glance the user has a chance to assess the quality of the graphics and first impressions tend to be very true. The level of the graphics certainly failed to meet expectations, though it is somewhat understandable, but I'd rather the download file was bigger so that graphics would look more appealing and engaging - I found it hard to enjoy the experience largely due to the fact of lackluster look of the environment. It's 2010, not the dawn of the nineties - it is reasonable to expect a decent level of graphical representation.

Another source of frustration was the lag and eventual crash of the Second Life viewer - all three sessions ended this way and presumably PC and connection configurations are not to blame - for the graphics such as SL sports it is decisively unacceptable. Furthermore, the supposed immersion was further hindered by getting stuck in objects and buggy execution of using object's special features (which weren't that special after all). The level of interaction between the avatar and the world also leaves a lot to be desired. Had it been realized on the scale it's done in Fallout 3, it would have added much more to the virtual life emulation.

Furthermore, SL simply doesn't deliver in terms of the atmosphere - the design isn't thorough and artful enough to make one really experience the emotions it is supposed to evoke - Haloweenish corn field was not anywhere near scary and intimidating, Japanese romantic island nowhere near believably oriental and enchanted garden hasn't really created the Alice's Wonderland enticing feel it was aiming at.

From what has been seen, SL seems to be overly commercialized - arriving at a new location and seeing an impressive pretty building one could suspect socializing was going on at, you most definitely spotted a deserted store and with SL it looked like offer seriously exceeded the demand.

As far as interaction with other people goes, nothing out of the ordinary has been encountered, though nothing was deliberately sought, true enough. From the glimpses of other people's conversations that were caught, particularly intelligent communication is not a frequent occurrence in SL, if it is not, of course, an organized meeting, or a location that assumes to be attractive to specific audience. One surreal experience, though, was hearing the actual conversation of a group of USA natives - it struck as some background voice overs, while, in fact, that was a real-time over microphone chat.

It may, indeed, be true that using SL for educational purposes is fun and enriches the over-internet learning experience, but as with democracy - it's good for we have no better option known to us.

Folksonomy - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (7th Week)

First and foremost, I would like to emphasize that I personally have great faith in tagging as folksonomy has proven itself useful and efficient on numerous occasions. It's become such an intrinsic facet of the web architecture in recent years that imagining having to go without it is maddening as the amount of knowledge and time it would have taken an expert to built even the small fraction of the relations and collations is indeed unfathomable. Luckily enough, drawing significant amount of people to the task, while finding a sensible way to restrict the anarchy and ambiguity, can be extremely fruitful.

Elaborated on below are the cases when folksonomy either works extremely well, its efficiency is arguable or  ambiguity reaches disastrous levels, which is in direct correlation with folksonomy's quality.

The Good

One outstanding example of folksonomy's success is definitely Last.fm artist page tag clouds. The beauty of tag clouds is that they allow visual representation of characteristic's weight which is far more true to life than one-level labeling. It also appears that search results are sorted by the quantity of people who'd deemed the tag appropriate for an artist as well as by weight of the tag in aritist's personal tag cloud. It must be noted that expertise of the masses does work extremely well in this case - for instance, one wouldn't be able to discover splendid, but yet obscure performers hadn't it been for tags (or similar artists - but that's a whole other story). Some tags ARE quite unspecific or irrelevant ("seen live", for once), but thanks to visual weight representation they do not seem to be distracting.

The Bad

The opinion to follow is perhaps slightly biased, but apparently and quite naturally amazon.com tagging in music department doesn't seem to match the eloquence and scale of Last.fm. This, ostensibly, derives from amazon.com dealing in multitude of wares and subject types, being continent or/and country specific and, essentially, very commercial - it's main objective is to Sell, whereas Last.fm's, if to put it the noble way, to educate, to broaden one's awareness - at least that's how it's marketed and that what it genuinely is doing (as many do not really have aversion to piracy and don't go and buy discovered artist's records). Therefore, the number of people who condescend to tagging on amazon.com isn't really enough to secure viable folksonomy, because in folksonomy quantity does indeed tend to turn into quality.

The Ugly

Just a few months ago it would have been extremely easy to name an internet instance where tagging was awfully incompetent and insufficient, but, apparently, things have improved for 500px.com since then. But even now, it's quite possible to find photos by very general tags, like "tiger", "rain", whereas more complex concepts, such as "withering", "matador", "burlesque" leave much to be desired. This might partially be caused by people not anticipating others wanting to search such specific entities and to some extent by a the user/picture ratio, which leads to the situation when there's a lot fewer users willing to contribute to folksonomy than photos to be classified. It also must be noted that due to result's display limit and deficient tagging prominent photos depicting flowers may not be found by searching for "flowers".

Now, the last and the least, comes the google image labeler folksonomy game - The Labeler Game- even though diversity and exactness is encouraged (by prohibiting proposition of words used to describe the picture very often, by granting more points for complex concepts), oftentimes the matching pair is indeed far to general to be of any real usefulness. Surprisingly enough, google image search does nevertheless prove to be quite efficient - probably mostly due to the fact that it doesn't heavily rely on the results of the aforementioned game-camouflaged folksonomy.

WikiWorld (6th Week)

It would be most fitting to note that, truth be told, Wikipedia IS marvelous as it is... for what it is, or, at the very least, can be quite fairly defined as democracy was referred to by Winston Churchill “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” True enough, such statement of the matter leaves a seemingly vast space for improvement, but ostensibly, it will take not thorough analysis and planning, but serendipity to get there. So, naturally, no revolutionary suggestions are to follow - just a few tweaks here and there, which could possibly make Wikipedia even more user-friendly and helpful.

Interface

The claim, being as superficial as it is, really is the most desired enhancement I could name. Even though the recent redesign did significantly improve the overall look, there still remains ground to be covered until the eye can truly rest on Wikipedia pages - it doesn't have to be overly complex, of course, as it would detract from the main idea of the page, but Apple's website can be drawn as a good example of providing minimalistic, yet vastly enjoyable design. Wikipedia can still go even sleeker, more modern, more gradient and even less angular.

More Links to Relevant Web Resources
One of the things Wikipedia's helpfulness could benefit from is encouragement of providing more links to relevant and trustworthy resources on the web on the subject matter that could provide more detailed, more frequently updated and more diverse information and richer means of interaction - for example, various fan community websites under a wiki article which implies having a fan society. Wikipedia policy strife to maintain the neutral and unbiased tone can often lead to such links being omitted or edited out.

Pop-up Links as Citations
As a matter of fact, should a wish occur to view citation's details or even follow the link to cited material one by all means has to navigate away from the read text, which can be potentially frustrating in case of long articles. One possible solution to that would be the introduction of a smooth smart pop-up with information on citation and a navigable link, which would open in the new tab and would leave the position of the current reading intact. The usefullness of such a feature may seem debatable, but, after all, the benefits of tabbed browsing wasn't apparent for a very, very, very long time.

Better Visualization of Contributors

Wikipedia now has a fairly serviceable change tracking view, though it's still not as self-evident as it presumably would benefit from being. As of now, it's virtually impossible to have a real overview of authorship - which author exactly is responsible for which section of text, whereas this could possibly be quite beneficial if combined with next suggestion. That would allow for better-founded skepticism and possibility heightened credibility of information encountered on Wikipedia. This could be realized either as another integrated smart pop-up section solution or as a separate view, similar to Edit and History tabs.

Assessment of Contributors and/or Diversified Accounts
Wikipedia, remaining open, could provide ground for establishment of more trustworthy accounts of varying "weight" - for example, simple verified accounts, where a person , though registered under some alias or pseudonym, does provide his/hers real data to the administration, through, perhaps, those smart identification cards which are getting widespread use and acclaim. A more persuasive level of such account would be a specialist status - providing proof of degree and/or other academic acclaims in certain field the user would be considered an expert at. However, this sounds like a troublesome procedure, but, as it would be optional, it seems that such an option could be explored. Another solution to diversifying validity of specified article data is rating the author - hence information entered by a submitter could be assessed by readers in regard to its trustworthiness on the account of submitters rating. It is worth noting that rating articles won't do as they are ever-changing and evolving.