'Til All Are One

I’ve recently been pon­der­ing the ques­tion, what truly con­sti­tutes wis­dom? Can it be determ­ined by age, your intel­li­gence quo­tient or how many people read your web­log? It is a ques­tion that shall prob­ably forever elude me.

What promp­ted me to philo­soph­ise over this is my phys­ical state of health. I have spent at least half of 2006 par­tially debil­it­ated with some sort of ill­ness. Is this a sign of age, and is age a determ­in­istic factor of wis­dom? Just yes­ter­day, I dis­covered my first fully-​​white strand of hair on my scalp. Not half-​​white, not grey, just plain white. A couple of days prior, I was told by doc­tors that I have a her­nia. This is a follow-​​on from two bouts of bron­chitis (there was a notice­able gap in between), which had me cough­ing my lungs out over a period of sev­eral months, pla­cing stress on my abdom­inal muscles. That in turn stemmed from an infec­tion that left me with laryngitis. I can’t even remem­ber what might have caused that. There was some con­cern that I might develop pneu­mo­nia (which incid­ent­ally is what felled James Brown yes­ter­day). That’s all on top of my usual issues with hay­fever and eczema.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my body is col­lapsing (apart from my cho­les­terol, I’m quite healthy over­all), but is this a har­binger of some­thing more? Are these signs of age, and if so, am I any wiser? Can I join the (in)famous grey­beard clique in the com­munity? Is there a form that I can sign, and do I need to remem­ber a secret hand­shake? Is there a sign that states “You must be this grey to enter”?

Far out… And this is only on the threshold of my 25^th birthday…

I wrote this back in Octo­ber, and for some silly reason I for­got to post it. Bet­ter late than never, I say.

It seems that every couple of weeks I’m at some kind of FLOSS-​​related event. You just can’t keep me away from them! They may require a lot of work, but it cer­tainly feels reward­ing to get the word out. This is espe­cially so in regards to the edu­ca­tional sec­tor. Chil­dren are our future, and they are gen­er­ally more will­ing than your aver­age adult to learn new and dif­fer­ent things. It is an educator’s job to impart know­ledge, and it is the duty of any respect­able edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion to facil­it­ate a free and open flow of know­ledge. What bet­ter way to achieve this than with free software?

This concept was not lost on the eduact­ors, par­ents and stu­dents at the Sydney Edu­ca­tion Expo in June, and I’m proud to say that we man­aged to rep­lic­ate that suc­cess at the Sydney Moodle Con­fer­ence on Octo­ber 14–15 (Sat­urday and Sunday). Once again, I manned the Linux Australia/​SLUG stand, join­ing Pia Waugh, Lind­say Holm­wood and Andreas Fisc­her. The SLUG Com­mit­tee stopped by for a while, too.

Whereas most people at the Edu­ca­tion Expo were unfa­mil­iar with FLOSS, many of the attendees of the Moodle Con­fer­ence had some idea about it. Moodle itself is avail­able under the terms of the GPL, and many com­pan­ies and schools have become part of its user/​development/​support com­munity. All we had to do was to remind them that we rep­res­ent the under­ly­ing FLOSS con­cepts that have made Moodle so great, and that Moodle func­tions in con­cert with other FLOSS pro­jects such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

The response was over­whelm­ing. We were pre­pared to hand out a truck­load of Ubuntu CDs, only to dis­cover that most attendees had already been sup­plied with one as part of their offi­cial con­fer­ence kit. That didn’t stop us from dis­trib­ut­ing many more, though. We had one fel­low so excited about FLOSS on Sat­urday that he brought along his laptop the next day for an impromptu Ubuntu install­fest. We demon­strated a range of tech­no­lo­gies, includ­ing Compiz and Ink­s­cape. Vis­it­ors were impressed with the ease of the Ubuntu LiveCD installer, and with how Moodle can be installed (com­plete with depend­en­cies) in only a few clicks via Synaptic.

Most inter­est­ing for me was the Live Online Event, which was a panel dis­cus­sion on-​​stage in front of about 150 people. Pia was slated to rep­res­ent the LA/​OSIA point of view, but was forced to bow out due to other com­mit­ments. Much to my sur­prise, she asked me to fill in for her. So there I was, on-​​stage, in front of well over 100 people, field­ing ques­tions while being recor­ded and streamed live over the Inter­net. I had never done any­thing like that before, but I think I went reas­on­ably well. Pub­lic speak­ing and gen­eral spoken com­mu­nic­a­tion are cer­tainly skills that I would like to fur­ther exer­cise in the future. Thanks for your sup­port, Pia!

The topic which dom­in­ated the panel dis­cus­sion, and one which I had been pre­vi­ously unaware of, con­cerned how far soft­ware pat­ents had intruded into the realm of edu­ca­tional soft­ware. Moodle-​​competitor Black­board has been issued an appalling pat­ent “for tech­no­logy used for internet-​​based edu­ca­tion sup­port sys­tems and meth­ods.” I was some­what relieved to see that Mar­tin Dou­gia­mas, Moodle’s founder and pro­ject leader, was not con­cerned at all by this event, at least as far as Moodle was con­cerned. Nev­er­the­less, the spectre of soft­ware pat­ents has been loom­ing over FLOSS for some time now, and it is still very unclear if/​how the situ­ation will ever be resolved.