Monthly Archives: September 2011

Dude, Where’s My Blackboard Contract?

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[UPDATE: 9-23-2011 9:54EDT] The original links to vendor searches on Open Book seem to be working again. I guess that means that the issue was a poorly-timed technical outage. In light of this, I take back my tentative speculations about Open Book actively suppressing results – I was wrong. Leaving this blog post up for historical reasons.

[UPDATE: 9-21-2011 1:46EDT] It looks like all vendor information is missing from Open Book at the moment. The contracts are still available by contract number (example). This may point toward an Open Book technical problem. Until a bit more is known, I think it’s reasonable to assume it’s an innocent accident. The general points still remain.

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about how CUNY and Blackboard have, in various ways, inspired my work in free software. In that post, I linked to a page that showed search results for CUNY and Blackboard from Open Book New York, a service provided by the NYS Comptroller’s office that lets citizens see how public institutions are spending tax money (a great idea, right?).

The blog post got many thousands of hits, and many hundreds of those users clicked on the link in question, which showed the amounts of CUNY’s current hosting contracts with Blackboard. This morning, one of my commenters, Brian, let me know that the link no longer worked. In fact, when you search Open Book for Blackboard, no contracts at all are shown for the entire state, while just a few days ago, a similar search turned up lots of results.

My decision to hotlink to the contract details in the original post, instead of spelling the dollar amounts in the text, was completely intentional. While I think that the high cost of Blackboard’s service is indeed an important symptom of a larger problem, I think that the dollar amounts have the potential to overshadow other considerations. So I linked, knowing that few readers would click through.

But now, because I don’t want that aspect of the original post to be lost, I’m going to bring to the foreground what I’d intended to leave in the background.

– The original link to the search
– Google’s cached copy
– Screenshot, 9-21-2011

If removing the results was intentional, ie if Open Book removed the results at the request of Blackboard or of CUNY (I consider the former more likely, given the evidence), it is obviously quite disappointing, and lends a certain irony to the “Open Book” moniker.

It’s here – BuddyPress 1.5!!

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It’s finally here! After many, many months of bug squashing, refactoring, and general bloodsweatntears, BuddyPress 1.5 has been released!

This long development cycle has been frustrating in some ways and extremely rewarding in others. On balance, I’m quite proud of the work that’s been done, and quite pleased to have worked so closely and so well with John, Paul, and all the other contributors to BuddyPress. My sincere thanks to all the users and developers who have been supportive during this dev cycle.

Most importantly, BuddyPress 1.5 itself kicks ass. The bp-default theme has seen some serious improvements, some much-needed features have been added, and the codebase has been overhauled in terms of additional internal APIs, documentation, style, and so on. If you’ve done development with BuddyPress in the past, do yourself a favor and check out BP 1.5 – you are in for an extremely pleasant surprise.

Here’s to 1.6 and beyond!

I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard

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For two reasons, Blackboard is the key to why I develop free software.

The first reason is historical. I first got into free software development because of my work with the CUNY Academic Commons project. As spearheaded by Matt Gold, George Otte and others, the Commons is intended to create a space, using free software like WordPress and MediaWiki for members of the huge community of the City University of New York to discover each other and work together. The project is not pitched as a Blackboard alternative, for a number of reasons (primary among which is that the Commons’s Terms of Service prohibit undergraduate courses from being held on the site). Still, the Commons was conceived, at least in part, out of frustration about the near lack of collaborative tools and spaces in CUNY. And more than anything else, Blackboard (by which I mean Blackboard Learn, the proprietary learning management software that has been CUNY’s official courseware for quite a few years) is the embodiment of what can be so frustrating about academic technology at CUNY: central management, inflexibility, clunkiness, anti-openness. In this way, Blackboard begat the CUNY Academic Commons, and the CUNY Academic Commons begat Boone the developer.

There is another reason why Blackboard is integral to my free software development. It is ideological.

Short version: I love CUNY and I love public education. Blackboard is a parasite on both. Writing free software is the best way I know to disrupt the awful relationship between companies like Blackboard and vulnerable populations like CUNY undergraduates.

Here’s the longer version. I’ve been affiliated with CUNY in a number of capacities over the last decade: PhD student, adjunct lecturer, graduate fellow, full-time instructional technologist, external contractor. I’ve seen many parts of CUNY from many different points of view. Like so many others who have philandered their way through CUNY’s incestuous HR departments, my experience has rendered a decidedly love/hate attitude toward the institution. You can get a taste of the what CUNY hate looks like by glancing at something like @CUNYfail. The love runs deeper. Those fortunate enough to have “gotten around” at CUNY can attest to the richness of its varied campus cultures. In every office and every department on every campus, you’ll meet people who are innovating and striving to get their work done, in spite of a bureaucracy that sometimes feels designed to thwart.

And the students. CUNY is the City University of New York, the City University. It belongs to New York, and its history is tied up with the ideals of free education for New York’s residents. While the last few decades have seen the institution (as a whole, as well as a collection of campuses) evolve away from these ideals in various official and unofficial ways, it’s impossible to step into a CUNY classroom without getting a sense that CUNY still serves as a steward for New York’s future. CUNY is too huge and its population too varied to make general statements about the student body, but I’ll say anecdotally that, of all the universities I’ve been associated with, none even approach the level of racial, economic, and academic diversity that you find on a single campus, to say nothing of the system as a whole. CUNY is (to use a lame but apt cliché) a cross-section of New York: her first-generation Americans, her first-generation college students, her rich and her poor, her advantaged and her vulnerable. (See also Jim Groom’s I Bleed CUNY, which makes a similar point with a lot less abandon.)

Public education is a public trust, maybe the most important equalizer a state can provide for its citizens. CUNY, with the population of New York City as its public, could demonstrate the full potential of public education in a more complete and visible way than perhaps any other public university. It’s for this reason that it breaks my heart and boils my blood to see CUNY money – which is to say, student tuition and fees – poured into a piece of software like Blackboard.

In virtue of their age, undergraduates are inherently a vulnerable population, and CUNY undergraduates – reflecting as they do the full demographic spectrum of New York City itself – are doubly vulnerable. Many CUNY undergraduates go to CUNY because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t go to college at all. This imposes certain moral strictures on those responsible for managing and spending the money paid by CUNY students in tuition and fees. Wasting CUNY money is a far worse crime than wasting, say, shareholder money in a private company. Shareholders have freedom; if they don’t like your management, they vote with their feet/wallets/brokers. CUNY students, by and large, do not have the same freedom; it’s safe to say that, for most CUNY students most students, big-ticket NYU and Ivy Columbia are not reasonable alternatives. CUNY students are, in this sense, captive, which means that their hard-earned tuition money is captive as well. Thus it is a very bad thing to spend that money on things that aren’t worth it.

And Blackboard is not worth it. Vats of digital ink have been spilled expounding Blackboard’s turdiness, and this is no place to rehash all the arguments in depth. A short list, off the top of my head:

  • The software is expensive [EDIT 9-21-2011: See this post for more details on cost]
  • It’s extremely unpleasant to use.
  • It forces, and reinforces, an entirely teacher-centric pedagogical model.
  • It attempts to do the work of dozens of applications, and as a result does all of them poorly.
  • Blackboard data is stored in proprietary formats, with no easy export features built in, which creates a sort of Hotel California of educational materials
  • The very concept of a “learning management system” may itself be wrongheaded.
  • As recently reported, the software may be insecure, a fact that the company may have willingly ignored.
  • Blackboard’s business practices are monopolistic, litigious, and borgish

In short, Blackboard sucks. Blackboard supporters might claim that some, or even most, of the criticisms leveled above are false, or that they apply equally to other web software. Maybe. And I certainly don’t mean to downplay the difficulty of creating or assembling a suite of software that does well what Blackboard does poorly. But the argument against spending student money on something like Blackboard goes beyond a simple tally of weaknesses and strengths. As Jim Groom and others have argued for years, shelling out for Blackboard means sending money to a big company with no vested interest in the purposes of the institution, which in the case of CUNY is nothing less than the stewardship of New York City’s future, while the alternative is to divert money away from software licenses and into people who will actually support an environment of learning on our campuses. Frankly, even if Blackboard were a perfect piece of software, and even if its licensing and hosting fees were half of what it costs to hire full-time instructional technologists, programmers, and the like to support local instances of free software; even if these things were true, Blackboard would still be the wrong choice, because it perverts the goals of the university by putting tools and corporations before people. The fact that Blackboard is so expensive and so shitty just makes the case against it that much stronger.

As long as our IT departments are dominated by Microsoft-trained technicians and corporate-owned CIOs, perhaps the best way to advance the cause – the cause of justice in the way that student money is spent – is to create viable alternatives to Blackboard and its ilk, alternatives that are free (as in speech) and cheap (as in beer). This, more than anything else, is why I develop free software, the idea that I might play a role in creating the viable alternatives. In the end, it’s not just about Blackboard, of course. The case of Blackboard and CUNY is a particularly problematic example of a broader phenomenon, where vulnerable populations are controlled through proprietary software. Examples abound: Facebook, Apple, Google. (See also my Project Reclaim.) The case of Blackboard and its contracts with public institutions like CUNY is just one instance of these exploitative relationships, but it’s the instance that hits home the most for me, because CUNY is such a part of me, and because the exploitation is, in this case, so severe and so terrible.

On average, I spend about half of my working week doing unpaid work for the free software community. Every once in a while, I get discouraged: by unreasonable feedback, by systematic inertia, by community dramas, by my own limitations as a developer, and so on. In those moments, I think about CUNY, and I think about Blackboard, and I feel the fire burn again. For that, I say to CUNY (which I love) and Blackboard (which I hate): Thanks for making me into a free software developer.

“Posts per page” dropdown for BuddyPress single forum topic view

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This morning I whipped up a little BuddyPress ditty for the CUNY Academic Commons that allows your members to select how many posts they’d like to see at a time when viewing a single forum topic. It’s not particularly beautiful (for one thing, it requires Javascript to work correctly, though it degrades gracefully by not showing up when no jQuery is available). For that reason, it’s probably not really appropriate for distribution in BuddyPress itself, at least not without some heavy cleanup. Anyway, here it is:

In your theme’s functions.php, place the following function:

[code language=”php”]
/**
* Echoes the markup for the “number of posts per page” dropdown on forum topics
*/
function cac_forums_show_per_page_dropdown() {
global $topic_template;

// Get the current number, so we can preselect the dropdown
$selected = in_array( $topic_template->pag_num, array( 5, 15, 30 ) ) ? $topic_template->pag_num : $topic_template->total_post_count;

// Inject the javascript
?>

jQuery(document).ready( function() {
jQuery(‘div#posts-per-page-wrapper’).show();
jQuery(‘select#posts-per-page’).change(function(){
var url = ‘?topic_page=1&num=’ + jQuery(this).val();
window.location = url;
});
});

Posts per page:

The GPL is for users

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The General Public License (aka the GPL) is for users. This observation seems so obvious that it needn’t be stated. But for those who develop software licensed under the GPL (like WordPress and most related projects), it’s a fact that should be revisited every now and again, because it has all sorts of ramifications for the work we do.

Users versus developers

What do I mean when I say that the GPL is “about users”? Who are “users”? We might draw a parallel between software and books. Books have readers (hopefully!), and they have authors. Authors read too; proofing is a kind of reading, of course, and one might argue moreover that reading is an inextricable part of writing. Yet when we talk about a book’s “readers” we generally mean to discount its author. ‘Readers’ in this sense is a gloss for ‘just readers’, that is, those readers whose relationship to the book is limited to reading. The situation with software is more complex, but roughly the same distinction can be made between users and developers. ‘Developers’ refers broadly to those people involved in the conceptualization and implementation (and also often the use) of a piece of software, while ‘users’ refers to those who just use it.

My reading of the GPL is that it’s heavily focused on users. (References to the GPL throughout are to GPL 3.0. You can find older versions of the licence, such as version 2 that is shipped with WordPress, on GNU’s website.) Take the opening line from the second paragraph of the Preamble:

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program–to make sure it remains free software for all its users.

Here as elsewhere in the text of the GPL, no real distinction is made between “you” as it refers to developers and “you” as it refers to users. Closer analysis makes it pretty clear, though. Take, for example, the freedoms that are purported to be taken away by proprietary licenses: the freedom to “share and change” software. Developers – or, to be more specific, license holders, who are generally either the developers themselves or, in the case of work for hire, the people who paid for the software to be developed – generally do not restrict their own rights to share and change the software that they create. Instead, restrictions are imposed on others, the (“just”) users.

Similar reasoning applies to the core freedoms that are outlined in the Free Software Definition, a sort of unofficial sister document of the GPL, also maintained by the Free Software Foundation. The four freedoms:

  • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
  • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

On the face of it, freedoms 1 and possibly 3 are focused on developers, in the sense of “those who are able to write code”. But, with respect to a piece of software that they did not write and whose license they do not control, coders are just regular users (in the same way that Vonnegut may have been a “reader” of Twain). All four freedoms, indeed, are user-centric. The license holder, almost by definition, doesn’t need permission to use the code (0); the developer doesn’t need to study the code to know how it works (1); owners can redistribute at will (2); owners can modify and redistribute at will (3). It’s only in the context of users – those who did not write the software – that these freedoms need protection in the form of free software licenses like the GPL.

The GPL does make a few explicit provisions for the developer/license holder:

For the developers’ and authors’ protection, the GPL clearly explains that there is no warranty for this free software. For both users’ and authors’ sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous versions.

The second provision is a sort of legal convenience; the first intends to ease what may otherwise be a prohibitive consequence of the core freedoms guaranteed by the rest of the GPL. Both are important and valuable. But it seems fair to say that they are secondary to the user-focused parts of the document, at the very least because they are motivated by other parts of the document, while user freedom needs independent justification.

There’s no question that the people who bear the brunt of implementing and upholding the GPL are software developers. In that sense, the GPL is very much “for” them. But, in a broader sense, that’s a bit like saying that school is “for” the teachers because the teachers play a key role in education. Schools are for children; they provide the motivation and justification for the whole enterprise. Similarly, the GPL is for users; if everyone wrote their own software, and there were no “just users”, the GPL (or any free software licenses, or any licenses at all) would be unnecessary.

Sacrifice

If I buy a pizza, I trade ownership of money for ownership of pizza. Once I have the pie, I can do pretty much whatever I want with it. I can eat the whole thing myself, I can share with a friend or two, I can throw it on the sidewalk. I can save the pizza in hopes that prices rise so that I can make a quick buck in a resale, I can retail off the individual slices, or I can give the whole thing away. I can’t use the pizza to solve world hunger (not because I’m not allowed, but because it’s not possible); I can’t use the pizza as a deadly weapon (not because it’s impossible, but because I’m not allowed). In short, ownership bestows certain rights. Not all rights – I don’t have the right to murder with the pizza, or to do impossible things with it – but many, even most of them.

The situation is more complex with intangible goods; especially those, like software, which can be reproduced without cost or loss. Copyright law in the United States (so far as I understand it; IANAL etc), in accordance with the Berne Convention, grants rights over intellectual and creative works to the authors automatically, at the time of creation. Thus, if I write a piece of software (from scratch – set aside issues of derivative work for a moment), I am granted extensive rights over the use and reuse of that piece of software, automatically, in virtue of being the author. That includes copyright – literally, the rights related to the copying and distribution of the software. In short, the default situation, for better or for worse, is for the developer – and only the developer – to possess the rights and freedoms enumerated by the Free Software Definition. By default, nothing is protected for the users.

Free software licenses exist in order to counteract this default scenario. But keep in mind what that means: When a developer releases a work under a license like the GPL, certain freedoms and rights are granted to users, which necessarily restricts the freedoms of the developer. The GPL admits as much:

To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.

“Responsibilities” is a nice way of putting what is essentially the stripping of certain rights (in the same way that, once you become a parent and thus responsible for your child’s well-being, you no longer have the right to go on a week-long bender). Once the software is released under a GPL, the original author has lost the right of exclusive distribution of the original software. Subsequent developers, those who modify and redistribute the software, are similarly restricted.

It’s a trade-off. Users get certain rights (viewing source code, copying, modifying, redistributing) because the developers have given up the default right of exclusivity. Examined in itself (without reference to subsidiary benefits for the moment), the trade-off is clearly made for the benefit of the users, and involves sacrifice on behalf of the developer, sacrifice which is usually quantified in monetary terms (Bill Gates didn’t get rich by writing open source software), but could also be associated with pride in being the sole author, etc. There are, in addition to this, secondary sacrifices involved in free software development (loss of identification with the software because of modifications or forking, less guaranteed income than in a proprietary development shop, increased support requests that come from wider use of a free-as-in-beer product [though the GPL explictly says that you can charge what you want, and that no warranty is implied]). To some extent, these secondary sacrifices can be mitigated by the realities of the market, and are anyway subject to the particulars of the scenario in which you find yourself. But the core sacrifice – giving up exclusivity over distribution – cannot be separated from free software licenses.

Software licenses are political documents

Developers have all sorts of reasons for releasing software under free software licenses like the GPL. A few, off the top of my head:

  • You want to modify and redistribute existing software that is GPLed
  • You want to distribute somewhere that requires GPL-compatibility, like the wordpress.org plugin repository
  • You believe that forkability and other GPLy goodness makes for a better product
  • You want to develop for a platform, or contribute to a project, that requires GPL compatibility

I classify these reasons as prudential, in the sense that they are focused on the material benefits (money, fame, better software) that you believe will come from developing under the GPL. All of these reasons are great and important, and many of them have motivated my own work with GPL-licensed software. Taken together or even individually, it’s easy to imagine that these (and other) benefits would outweigh the sacrifice involved in giving up exclusive distribution rights over your work.

There’s another kind of justification for releasing under the GPL: you endorse, and want to advance, the political and moral ends that motived the creation of the GPL. The GPL assumes that it’s a good thing for users to have maximal freedom over their software:

If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.

The assumption here is that “greatest possible use to the public”, and by the extension the good of the public, is something to be actively pursued – a moral claim par excellence.

And, among free software licenses, the GPL is perhaps the most explicit about the ways in which user freedoms (and thus the greatest good of the public) should be guaranteed and propagated. The “viral” nature of the GPL constitutes a kind of normative statement about the value of user rights over developer rights, which goes beyond other free software licenses that do not share its viral nature. The difference might be summed up like this. Alice and Bob are coders, and Carol is a potential user of the software. If Alice writes a piece of software and licenses it under a free software license like those in the BSD tradition, Bob can fork the software, make a few changes, and sell it to Carol under any terms he’d like – he can compile a binary executable for distribution, without making the source code available, converting his fork into closed-source, proprietary software. If Alice licenses the software under the GPL, on the other hand, Bob can still modify and sell to Carol, but he may not change the terms of the original license – in particular, the source code must be made available for further modification and distribution.

The normative aspect of the difference is in the value that each license scheme ascribes to the rights and freedoms of various individuals involved. BSD is more permissive with respect to Bob; GPL limits his ability to license the derivitive work as he pleases. GPL is more focused on Carol, and protecting her – and other “just users” like her – at the cost of some of Bob’s freedoms. (The GPL is for users.) One might express the difference in political terms thus: the GPL is more liberal, and less libertarian, than the BSD. Users, who are on the weak end of the power spectrum when it comes to software, are protected under the GPL, in the same way that society’s underprivileged and weak are often the focus of political liberalism. On this picture, licenses, like laws more generally, are designed in part to create the restrictions necessary to protect the positive freedoms of a vulnerable population.

For developers who agree independently with the normative principles underlying the GPL, its moral benefits can outweigh the sacrifices it entails. Such a justification is the starting point for Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (see, for example, the FSF’s about page). You may, of course, foreground other aspects of free/open-source software when justifying your licensing. I’ve listed some justifications above, and entire movements have sprouted to focus on prudential, rather than moral, justifications for open source development.

But – and here’s the rub – licensing your work under the GPL constitutes an endorsement of its moral justifications, even if it’s not (from a cognitive point of view) what motivated you personally to apply the license. If you choose a free software license for prudential reasons, you are not justified in complaining when your project is forked. If you choose the GPL for prudential reasons, you can’t altogether disavow the inherently altruistic underpinnings reflected in the license’s preamble. Put another way: Among other things, software licenses are political documents, and it’s incumbent upon developers to understand them before adopting them.

It’s important for developers to think carefully about this before diving into a license. My own take is that the original motivation for free software – that user control over the software they use is fundamental to their autonomy – becomes truer every day, as more and more of our agency is mediated through software. For that reason, licenses like the GPL are ethically important, at least if your worldview depends (as mine does) on respecting the agency of other human beings.

This post was prompted by a recent post by Ipstenu. Much of my thinking on the matter is clarified and inspired by the first few chapters of Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software, a book about free software written by philosophers/computer scientists Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter. You can (and should) buy the book here.

Musings on Git and Github

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About a year and a half ago, I started moving all my personal and professional software development to Git and Github. Here are a few thoughts on what it’s meant for me as a developer.

Originally, the primary impetus for the change was that, as version control software, Git is so much better than Subversion. But in the last few months, the value of Github (the site, as opposed to Git the software) has become increasingly evident and important. As developers (in the WordPress world, especially) have taken more and more to Git, and as folks in general have become more familiar with Github, the value of Github’s social model to my work has increased by a huge amount. Between private and public repositories, client work and open source projects, I collaborate with dozens more people today than I did at this time last year. Some of this collaboration is planned ahead of time, and so maybe isn’t so notable. But increasingly, it’s unexpected and unsolicited – forked repos, pull requests, bug reports and patches.

Probably many of these changes are incidental, and are unrelated to version control at all. But I like to think that the mechanisms of Git – cheap branching, sophisticated merging – and the design of Github – activity streams, easy forking – have played a role. Using Github has changed, and continues to change, my development practices, by making me think more about audience and reuse (notions that are familiar to teachers of writing), encouraging the “release early and often” mantra (since all my stuff is public anyway more or less as soon as I write it), and orienting me toward collaboration by default, rather than solo coding. All these changes are highly laudable, leading to better product, and making my work more fun.

If you are an open-source developer, working in locked-up or practically invisible repositories (or, heaven forbid, not under version control at all), do yourself a favor and get acquainted with Git and Github. The benefits are potentially transformative to the way you approach your work.