Bloomsday and opensource

Wednesday Jun 16, 2004

A sunny, breezy Dublin day marks the 100th anniversary of the day James Joyce met Nora Barnacle and immortalized in his novel Ulysses. Stepehen Daedalus in "Portrait of an artist..." reminded me of a childhood friend back in Racine, but I'm not the ulitimate Joyce fan. I didn't eat inner organs of beast and fowl for breakfast and to date I've only read Ulysses as far as lunch at Davy's pub on Duke street. Most Dublin landmarks haven't changed and knowing something about Irish culture does make the book more understandable. When Joyce writes about traffic jams, Sinn Fein and acceptance of immigrants, he could be talking about Dublin of 2004. Joyce's puzzle of walking through Dublin without passing a pub is more relevant now that pub smoking is illegal. Smokers must stand outside pubs so it can be difficult to push a pram past a pub. Bloomsday appears to be celebrated at least as enthusiastically in Champaign, Melbourne, Denver, Bradenton... Something of Ireland can be found nearly everywhere. I thought I noticed a faint Kerry accent in Native Americans of Northern Wisconsin, and I've met people from Japan, a nation with very few Irish immigrants, who regularly enjoy Ceili dancing and Irish Music in Tokyo. Denver doesn't have a large Irish population, but was quite the place to be on St. Patrick's day. Pipe bands, Floats, Irish dancers, free Kilian beer (as Irish as John Kerry.) Stagecoaches, cowboys, longhorn cattle? None of this really represented the Ireland of today but it celebrated aspects of Irish culture, music, history and language that the Celtic tiger may leave behind. I hope the world can be forgiven for celebrating and exaggerating aspects Irish culture. After all, what is more Irish than a good story?

What does this have to do with opensource?

A topic relevant to opensource came up at a Bloomsday celebration in Sandycove. In 1904 Joyce encountered great difficulty in publishing his works. A publisher purposely destroyed the manuscript for Dubliners and when Ulysses was finally published, it was banned in Britain and not generally available in Ireland until the 1960s. In 2004 Joyce's works are published in many languages and available on bookshelves throught the world. But now copyright restrictions and legal threats are preventing public Ulysses readings at many of Dublin's Bloomsday events. One of my favorite Irish expressions is "lost the plot." The expression certainly applies when an artistic or technical work is published with such severe restrictions that no one can use or promote it. I'm not a lawyer, I'm just an engineer with an individual opinion on end user license agreements (EULAs), so here it is:

1. Simplify Simplify Simplify (Simplify ^3)
2. Users generally don't have a lawyer at their side when they click the O.K. box on the "This software is not to be used to sell rashers..." EULA.
3. Users seldom have a translator at their side when they click O.K.
4. Consider locale specific EULAs, most nations do not have the legal complexity of the U.S., these locales may not require 20 page EULAs.
5. Most users are not criminals, be gentle, don't drive them away.
6. If you can opensource something, explore the benefits and risks, then just do it.

One last word, don't let anyone tell you that Sun isn't involved in the opensource movement. Sun has contributed hundreds of thousands of lines of code to OpenOffice.org, JXTA, GNOME, Mozilla and quite a few other projects.