Expanding on last month’s very rough Kindle screensaver experiments, I’ve now put together a real set of ten nice looking close-ups of subway maps from cities around the world and packaged them for use on the Kindle. In order to install any kind of custom screensaver, you’ll need to perform the (very simple) Kindle “jailbreak” hack. Once that’s done, you should just be able to drop the image files into the directory created by the jailbreak.
There are ten cities included in this version, and they’re all systems I’ve ridden and maps I’m familiar with. If you’d like to see another map done in the same style included in a future release, please just send me the place and, if possible, a high res version of the map to work with.
Earlier this week I read a new essay by Benjamin Mako Hill called “When Free Software Isn’t Better.” Although I found it incredibly insightful, the reaction to this essay hasn’t been universally positive. The criticism has focused on a perceived attack on the Open Source Initiative. I want to address why I think Mako has taken a stance here that’s not aligned with the OSI, and why I also think it doesn’t constitute an attack.
In fact, what he’s done is articulated how important the goals of the OSI are, and why we need to work towards those goals as a conclusion instead of just assuming them as a starting point.
There are three major benefits most often touted by free and open source software boosters:
the “four freedoms” to run, study, distribute, and improve software;
the exciting collaborative elements of participating in a free and open source project; and
the superior software that comes as a result of that collaboration and many eyes making all bugs shallow.
Mako’s premise is that the collaborative development of the kind described by open source boosters around free or open source software projects is actually very rare, and that the superiority of free software projects is not guaranteed, and he provides evidence to back up those claims. But these are not reasons to abandon freely licensed software. Rather, he takes the opportunity to stress the importance of pursuing freedom, which is ensured even where the other benefits aren’t.
Of course he agrees, and he goes out of his way to clarify, collaborative development and community projects are incredible, popular, and real. The Linux kernel, Ubuntu and Debian distributions—and in the free culture world, projects like Wikipedia—all demonstrate not just freedom but also superiority through community participation. That can and should be an end towards which groups like the Open Source Initiative strive. Mako’s consideration, then, is just that nobody take those qualities for granted.
When active community involvement and better software are taken for granted, their absence is seen as a particular shortcoming of that project. And that situation sells the developers short: the individuals that are doing great work without a lot of community behind them, and the many projects in earlier stages that are functional and useful but lack the polish of proprietary versions deserve support and users, too.
That idea resonates deeply with me as a user of free software. I grappled with a tension between a commitment to free software being better and my hands-on experience with lots of it which, to put it bluntly, isn’t. It was after seeing Mako speak about “antifeatures” at Free Culture X last year, a talk which held the seeds of this essay in it, that I realized the reason I stick with free software when it isn’t better is because it’s free.
There was a time, certainly around the 1998 founding of the Open Source Initiative and especially in the “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” world of enterprise IT, when free software was not an option even when it was better than the proprietary alternative. Now, due in large part to the efforts of the FSF and the OSI, that’s not the case any more.
Today, it’s easy to use free software when it’s better. But there are important and non-obvious reasons to do so even when it’s not.
I came across a very interesting map by redditor JPalmz that showed the countries of the world, re-arranged to match population with land area. I thought it was very cool, so I decided to do the same thing with US states. You can see the results below, but you may need to click through to see it full size in order to read the names of the states clearly.
Some interesting results: only Texas stays in the same place, Delaware and Vermont swap, and Rhode Island becomes a real island.
UPDATE: I’ve done a lot of work on these and put together a much more polished version, which is now available in a later post.
I’ve put together a set of screensaver images for Kindle models with 800×600 displays. (That’s all of them except the DX, as far as I know.) The collection is all segments of transit maps from around the world. For this first version, I’ve limited it to a handful of systems I’ve ridden, so this one includes ten maps from the US and Europe.
This is an early version, and doesn’t yet include a “Slide and release the power button to unlock” notice or anything. I’ll probably add that and improve the contrast on some of the images, which came out a bit gray. I’m happy to take other feedback, or suggestions for maps to include in later versions.
I’m heading out to the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona tomorrow through Friday. I hope to meet lots of interesting people there, talk about lots of interesting things, and hopefully write something up for these pages. Say hi if you see me there!
