HELIOLITH

My latest obsession? Linux. Class I’m taking this quarter (after 2 years away from school)? Intro to Unix/Linux. Online lessons I’m following? Linux.org/lessons Ok, so I’m a latecomer to the geeky realm of one of the world’s most efficient, powerful, customizable, and innovative operating systems. Until I downloaded that first Ubuntu live Cd, I had no idea how simple, full-featured, and user-friendly this OS could be. At work, everything is still Windows-based, but at home I’ve only crossed back over to boot up Windows twice in the last 2 weeks. I don’t really miss it either. I am more and more enamored and enchanted by the core philosophy of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) that Linux is distributed under. Plus, it does “just work.”

Joe Barr wrote a nice synopsis of the brilliance of the GPL yesterday. It’s entitled, “Why I love the GPL.”

There are a lot of good reasons to like the GPL: the GNU General Public License. For one thing, it’s a David and Goliath kind of thing. It’s the little guy standing up to the corporate behemoths that run rough-shod over our daily lives by virtue of their influence, legal and otherwise, on government. For another, it’s virtuous.

The coolest part, from my perspective, is that the software is specifically licensed so that no one down the line can patent it.

Free as in free speech, not as in free beer.” The more I think about it, the more layers of meaning it develops. There is an extremely strong and growing global community that is using GNU/Linux and opensource software. Within that movement are two very attractive things to me:

1) a playfully creative, analytical and technical tinkering energy that drives people to learn more, and to give back to the opensource community. Much of what turned me away from a pursuit of the naturally mathematical/ engineering pathways in my own educational development was the apparent conformity of the field.

2) a relentless international activism around keeping free software free in the future. This is a huge subject in itself, which I hope to follow more closely in the future, but is well outside the scope of even this tangential dispatch.

I also just put together an Ubuntu-box for my classroom, and I’m excited to start drilling my students with Open-office presentation slides on their math facts, as well as exposing them to something that’s not Windows or Mac. Richard Stallman has some good ideas about why schools should only use free software. I wish I could accelerate the domestic release of the $100 PC, because we really need some better machines. Grant writing is taking a huge chunk of my after-work time. I have big visions, but so far no big sponsor!

As far as this particular distribution of Gnu/Linux I chose, I don’t think I could be happier. After doing trials with Live CDs of Suse, Mandrake, Ubuntu, and Gentoo, I was torn between Mandrake and Ubuntu. Ultimately, it was bugginess and lag in KDE/Mandrake (konqueror couldn’t stop crashing) that made me go with Ubuntu, and I’m really happy with gnome & all of Ubuntu’s newbie-friendly features.

Ubuntu’s website is very warm and open feeling. They explain that Ubuntu is an ancient african word meaning “humanity to others.” It’s important to me that the things I do somehow make a difference for others. The Buddha’s teaching on “Right Livelihood” is something that I’ve felt intuitively in my gut long before I’d read about religions. To me, it’s important that the results of my actions and choices are somehow making life better for others. Free software is revolutionary, it is viral in the very best sense of the word. It has already begun to narrow the digital divide in many countries where software licensure is a ridiculous notion.

Microsoft paints a powerful public image of helping people when you look at their ads in National Geographic, just like Shell and Chevron try to cover their immensely negative impacts on the Earth and on people. Lessig and others have often reminded us how modern media culture is built upon the taking of ideas. Modern copyright bans this taking or sharing of ideas, where Gnu/gpl is the opposite. Gnu says this will always be free and available, enriching the public domain. Ubuntu is a great distro with a rapidly growing positive community. The support from the forums and the IRC channel have been really nice.

I like this graphic from Michel’s site that sums it up quite visually. He says that, rendered in English it reads: “GNU/Linux + Debian + Gnome, divided among the people, equals Ubuntu”

There are a couple of nice wallpapers he made on his site as well.

Here’s a piece off NewsForge extolling Ubuntu, and here is another from Linux.com