This is a description of intent, with some rationale. Maybe some of this will be useful for you. If nothing else, some advice would also be appreciated. So. What is is this about? I have decided to make some changes in my electronic life. I will not make all the changes immediately, and I don’t have any complete plans yet – this is the outlines for a long term plan.

My current situation

I have used a MacBook as my main computer for the last 7 years. I do a lot of development in different environments, and when I switched, MacOS X coupled with the hardware allowed me to get more things done without dealing with stuff I didn’t want to deal with. But MacOS X also afforded me the possibility of tweaking and changing many of the parts of the OS when I needed to do that.

I have several email accounts, most of them are GMail in one variety or another. I also use several other pieces of the Google ecosystem.

ITunes is my main music player. I have lots of music and other things that I regularly sync with my IPad and IPhone – both of whom I depend a lot on in my day-to-day life.

This blog and a few other services are hosted on Rackspace.

In addition to an IPhone, I also have a Galaxy Note 2. I use both phones and the IPad extensively.

I currently store most of my life inside of 1Password.

I use Dropbox for sharing files and information between different people and devices.

Why I want to change

Fundamentally I am a believer in free software. I believe that open ecosystems are better than closed ones, and I believe that monocultures are extremely bad in the long run. I am not a huge fan of centralization, and I don’t like the anglocentric focus of our industry. I am not a huge fan of having all my electronic life hosted under the auspices of US legislation, especially not in light of recent events. I am also getting more and more uncomfortable with closed services and software that I can’t inspect.

But looking at the various things that define my electronic life, it’s clear that my day-to-day actions speak a very different message from my beliefs. So I am going to change that. Of course I realize that this might be painful. There are many things that a monocolture does quite well. It’s a local optima for certain problems. But as part of this effort I will have to take a hit in productivity to stand for what I believe in.

What I will change to

I have not completely decided all the particulars of the direction I’m going to take. Since it will be a long term effort, I can take it step by step. The first and probably biggest step is that I will migrate from an Apple laptop as my main programming device. I will instead run a System76 Gazelle with Debian 7.

Of course, switching back to Linux will mean that several things will be easier to switch to – I won’t be able to keep using some of my usual tools.

Open questions

There are a whole slew of open questions in this quest. The biggest one is probably what to do about mobile phones. None of the smartphones out there are particularly open while being strong enough for daily use. Maybe the Ubuntu Edge will be that phone at some point, but for now I’m not sure.

A password manager is also a requirement. I really like 1Password, but since it is closed source I am uncomfortable keeping my credentials there much longer. The only viable alternative seems to be KeePassX. I haven’t tried it yet, but since it hasn’t seen updates for several years, that doesn’t strike me as very confidence inspiring.

I want to get out of GMail, but I have no idea where I will go. I might host for myself, but that comes with a significant burden.

I currently run my servers on Rackspace. I need to change that to something that is hosted in a better legal framework, but there are not that many good cloud providers out there.

Any recommendations and thoughts are welcome!

13 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: reap | tags: apple, foss, free software, linux, mac, Open Source, switching. | #

Sometimes, when discussing my interest and work with JRuby and other Open Source projects, people get all upset. It’s really hard to justify for a non-programmer the benefits of Open Source, but sometimes it can be as hard to explain to corporate programmers. “What? You give away code for free, for anyone to use?”. Not only that, I also do it mostly in my spare time.

I’m not planning for this blog entry to be some kind of manifesto. I’ll just detail the (very logical) reasons why I do what I do.

At work
I work at Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Sweden. KI is a University, and like all Universities in Sweden, we are part of the government. That means that most of our funding is tax-based. We use lot of Open Source in our work, providing services to the campus. We run mostly on Linux servers, we use Open Source frameworks when building internal systems. Needless to say, we have saved uncountable millions with this strategy. And the Swedish government did a review a few years ago that recommended that all tax-funded organizations should use Open Source software is possible. From this perspective, it is very rational to try to give something back. We mostly do this by trying to release everything we develop internally that can be repackaged for distribution easily. We also allocate some time for all our developers to work on Open Source projects of their choice. Needless to say, I mostly use this time to work on JRuby.

In my spare time
Rationalizing Open Source from a corporate perspective is quite easy. It’s harder to answer why I also do it in my spare time. I spend on average about two-three hours a day on Open Source, with about 80%-85% of that on JRuby. So why?

First of all, I recognize that Open Source is important in itself. I firmly believe that the current market model for software will soon disappear. It is obvious that the classical, shrink-wrapped model doesn’t really work. I want to make that happen faster. Contributing to Open Source projects make that happen.

Secondly, JRuby is important. Ruby is great, but it has it’s short comings. I believe that JRuby will be the necessary bridge between the two camps that Java and Ruby seems to move towards. JRuby will bridge the gap and give crucial capabilities to both platforms, and that can’t happen soon enough.

Third, I believe it’s important to hone my skills. Doing software development means always have to become better and better in your areas, and new areas. This is hard to do in the confines of regular corporate culture. Open Source is practice for me. It makes me better and I learn crucial new tools and techniques. Reading other peoples code is an excellent way to learn, and that’s easy with Open Source.

Fourth. And most importantly; I’m a coder. This is my passion. Code is art and coding is what I really like doing. I have code in my head always, 24 hours. I dream about code. I design software more or less irrespectively of what my front lobes are engaging in. I’m getting more and more that my subconscious uses programming languages to get around Sapir-Whorf, helping me think from other angles.

Charles wrote about this a few months ago, here. He describes mostly what I feel about coding.

Of course I have other interests. I’m very musical, creating and listening to music constantly. I’m very fond of Go. I read incredibly much (too much if you ask some). But coding is what I like doing best, and when you get down to it, that’s why I do Open Source.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: jruby, karolinska institutet, Open Source. | #