MIT CourseWareThatIsMerelyAjar

Yesterday I started looking into MIT OpenCourseWare and got very excited.  The range of courses for which there is open material available is enormous.  With these curricula at my fingertips, the way was open for me to educate myself, on my own time, without significant expense.

Then I dug a little deeper, into the available content for their introductory course on Nonlinear Dynamics I: Chaos.  To my dismay, I learned that their assignments involved code snippets written for MATLAB, proprietary mathematics software for which you need to purchase a license.

MATLAB is an excellent product and a standard software package used in universities, so it makes sense that courses transitioning to openness would initially depend on it.  However, it presents a serious obstacle to the open distribution and use of the course content.

Fortunately, Ryan Morlock has listed several open source alternatives to MATLAB, and some use languages that are “mostly” compatible with it.  It looks like the most of the assignments wouldn’t be difficult to port over to something like Octave.  It’s just a little shocking that nobody has done it yet.

FOSS4G Erratum

Thanks to Jody Garnett and Archeogeek for their correcting my misrepresentation of OSGeo in my first post from FOSS4G.  As they point out, OSGeo does not, as an organization, have it in for ESRI.  Rather, their mission is a purely positive one: “support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data.”  Indeed, I had no right to speak for the organization at all, having been exposed to it directly really only for a few days at that point.

Apologies for being caught up in the irrational exuberance of the moment, projecting my own opinions on the rest of the community, and generally overstepping.

Free software and capitalism

As the global capitalist economy tanks, and as I attend a free software conference, my mind alights on the subject of the role of free software in global capitalism.

My verdict: it is a radical departure.

Capitalism is an economic system whose foundation is the private ownership of the means of production.  Software is, among other things, a means of production.  Free software is not privately owned.*  So each successful free software project shifts the foundation of the economy towards…something else.

But what?

As Arnulf Christl has exhorted throughout the conference, the opposite of free software is proprietary software, not commercial software.  The proliferation of open source software has brought with it an open source industry that operates in the market just like other industries.

I’m certainly not the first to say this, but it seems high time for an economic theory that takes intellectual goods, and their tendency towards freedom, as fundamental instead of grafting them onto theories about trade in “normal,” material commodities.

* pace, licensing quibblers.

Computers are for computing

One of my favorite talks from FOSS4G this year was Josh Livni’s talk on Walk Score, a web service that calculates the “walkability” of an area based on publicly available data.  Walkability is calculated efficiently right against the database according to an algorithm that takes into account how easy it is to get around–and get to points of interest–by walking.  Then it displays the results using Google Maps.

It took me a while to realize what I liked about Walk Score so much.  It isn’t a fully open source stack, and though “walkability” is important to me, I don’t really have a use for this service beyond checking out the walk score of my home town.  And yet it appeals to me and has been a generally popular site.

Then I realized: this project appeals to me because it computes something interesting.

A frustrating aspect of the world of open source web GIS is that most projects appear to be hung up on the problems of making data available over the internet–in various formats, in certain combinations, with certain metadata, but otherwise essentially untouched.  Where modifying data is supported (say through WFS-T), it has to be done painstakingly by hand.

I don’t want to minimize the challenges of building the foundations that have taken so much effort so far.  But I think that what gets missed in the process is the fact that the most compelling applications compute something useful.  What people really want and need is software that thinks for them.  Or, maybe, discovers something for them.

What Walk Score does, which few applications I’ve seen this week do, is calculate something interesting for people.  Livni had the creativity to turn a human interest into a quantitative, algorithmicly calculable metric, and found a way to report that metric back to people in a way they could understand.  It provides people with something two steps ahead of them, just beyond the horizon of what they can imagine.  That’s true progress.  I hope to see more of it in FOSS/Web/GIS applications in the coming year.

Get Real

Internet is expensive in South Africa, since all uploaded data has to travel via satellite.  So I will try to keep myself terse.

On the first day of FOSS4G2008, Sindile Bidha delivered a “lighting talk” on “GIS in schools programme and Quantum GIS.”  Quantum GIS, or QGIS, is open source desktop GIS software. Bindha spoke about how in Eastern Cape, one of the poorest provinces of South Africa, they were trying to introduce QGIS into the high school curriculum.  The challenges?  Among others: no trained teachers, no documentation, and no computers.

The next lightning talk was delivered by Arnulf Christl, president of OSGeo.  He rexcitedly read passages from the book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and interspersed his own commentary:

This is a revolution.  No, it’s an evolution.  The whole world can connect instantly, everywhere!

There was a talk given today on the subject of “Mapping the Sanitary Sewers of a South African City – First Experiences with FOSS GIS.”  Somebody is apparently making tentative steps to use open source geospatial software to make sure shit is disposed of properly.  First steps.

I didn’t go to that talk.

Instead, I went to a talk entitled “Participatory Free and Open Source GIS in the Web 2.0.”  A Brazilian masters student studying in Osaka told us that  the Web 2.0 was exciting because…well, I forget the specifics, but the reasons were displayed on a slide in the form of a tag cloud.  She told us that her thesis was on the future of the web and GIS.

“Studying the future is very popular in Japan; when I went there for the first time, I thought it looked like the future!”

Because crowds are wiser than individuals, she needed to talk to several people–maybe 30 total–about their predictions of the future, for her thesis.  She breathily asked the audience of nerds “who are so passionate about their work”–on the word passionate she turned to a slide displaying a red heart on a white background that was reminiscent of the Japanese flag–if they would agree to be interviewed by her.  To tell her what they thought.  About the future.

Q&A begins.  The first question from the audience, loud and clear: “How do I sign up for an interview?”

Another talk I missed today was about the “Development of a Malaria Decision Support System based on Open Source Technologies.”  Each talk–about malaria, about sewers, about the Web 2.0–was twenty minutes long.  About every three seconds, a child dies of malaria.

One issue that has come up frequently at FOSS4G is the importance of having free (as in “freedom”) data to be used with all the FOSS geospatial software that the conference is about.  The software is useless without data.  We are reminded of this most stridently by the OpenStreetMap community, which holds “parties” where they collect data by walking through streets with GPS in their hands.  They held one of these parties to map Hout Bay, a suburb outside of Cape Town, last Sunday just before the conference.  They put their data on the web under a CC-by-sa license (though, admittedly and regretably, the license cannot legally apply to the data because data does not fall under copyright law).

Late in the afternoon, I attended a workshop about GIS education.  It was attended primarily by people from South Africa’s GIS community; they were trying to figure out how the hell they could teach people how do work with GIS software.  At some point, somebody asks about how schools can get data for GIS students to work with in the classroom.  Ideally, it’s data that is local and relevant to the students’ lives.  Some guy from the South African government piped up:

“Oh, we have lots of data–on roads, lakes, vegetation, everything–and we want to make it free.  We just don’t have the bandwidth to host it!”

The government doesn’t have the fucking bandwidth.

Internet is expensive in South Africa.