On this meeting, that was about to last for 1 week not only theoretical topics should be discussed, such as the prinicals of GNU General Public License (resp. its comming amplification for web-based applications, e.g. production sysems of Indymedia) or discussions about what is copyright or proprietary software compared to free or "open source" software, but also practical things: workshops ("How do I install Linux?" [1]), video screenings round the topics netactivism, hacking and development, network-security and GPG/PGP encryption with a following keysigning party.

The parties of developers and useres are not clearly separated. Everybody is part of the pool of ideas and gives information and experiences to the other participants, instead of only being present as a consumer in lectures of alleged "experts". "Each of us is an expert, each of us has something to offer/present and nobody should be excluded" organisers point out again and again.

The various workshops in which you could offer know-how or in which you could learn something were accordingly casual and balanced.

First concepts were treated:

What is "FREE"? "FREE" means, if you can do the following with a thing:

1. use it
2. understand and adapt it
3. copy, distribute and sell it
4. publish changes and share it with others

To clear the antithesis between "free" (free of charge) and the right to sell a product it has to be pointed out that the word "free" in english is not definite. Beneath its meaning as "free of charge", "free" also means "free" in liberal terms ("Think free speech, not free beer"). Therefore alternatives in foreign languages are used: "libre", "libero", "livre", or: "Open Source".

"PROPRIETARY": at the users expense, closed code, "intellectual property", controlled and not accessable in terms of the items mentioned above.

"COMMERCIAL": can be free (in terms of free speech), but it doesn't have to; at the users expense and a product which is business-oriented.

"PUBLIC DOMAIN": the public has access; there is no expression of "intellectual property", but it depends in which country you are and if regional regulations allows the not-using of "intellectual property" anyway. Adjudication normally protects the rights of the copyright owner, "public domain" however is an expression which is widely not legally defined. (read more here: www.creativecommons.org).

"COMMONS"/"COLLABORATIVE PROPERTY": an old expression of property and economy as a collective says - shared resources and non-proprietary common goods. Today you can compare it with free/open source software, music (in view of social consensus), national parks and the copyleft-movement. A danger of the "commons" which is not really relevant anymore in the electronic era was the mis- or overcultivation: "too many cows = too little grass".

After that there was the first introduction game with provocative questions on which others had to anwer at random. Topics were, if you thought that each form of information should be freely accessible. While to the whole spectrum there were different basic opinions to the polarising questions, the consensus moved towards the attitude to make scientific and political information generally non-restrictively public and to protect private data. With equated arguments it was discussed if and to what extent proprietary software should be applied in your organisation. The supporters of open software brought forward arguments that it was not good to rely on shorthand practicability but to bear in mind longterm advantages of independence of huge corporate groups from the IT-industry.

On Sunday, August 31st there were discussions in three groups. The topic was “Intra/Inter- Developer Collaboration”. It was about communication within the developers-community. Democratic processes were distinguished as well as the making of sufficient documentation and the importance of teaching users how to participate in technological developing to make themselves independent of less swamped developers. Further encouragement and examples out of the circle of participats were: documantation in the form of FAQ, because those are easy to understand, but above all they are easier to write for the developers than complex, structured guidances, create and provide documentations for appliance for the assimilation of new features within a programm, as well as examples and optical illustration of the utility of software projects (screenshots!). According to the participants in this discussions the mantra of free/open source software development “Release early, release often” stays, because: software is not the actual product, but the “service” of a consecutively attended project with its community of developers and users.

In the opinion of the discussion groups it was important to encourage the cowork between different projects to foster social relations ("Think pivo on the beach"), to cultivate mutual (data-/protocol-) standards and therefore a catchphrase (“.doc-phonomenon”).

On the Summer Source Camp in Vis there were more than 80 participants from approx. 35 countries. Among them people from Azerbaidschan, Tajikistan, Ukraine and of the Baltic states, Croatia/Kosovo/Serbia, Taiwan, Mongolia, Africa, from various countries of Europe and North America. Most of them come from the sectors development aid, advanced training of IT in threshold countries, development of applications to support local organisations in regions which are difficult to access (like Amazon) and the further education of emancipatory initiatives on location abandoning economic dependence on western industry to the greatest possible extent.

Moderators of the „Inter-/Intra-Developer Collaboration“ workshop you can hear in the audios are David Turner ("Gnu GPL Guru" Free Software Foundation), Jason Diceman Commons Group and Mako Hill (board member of "Software in the Public Interest" and Hardware-Manager/accountant of Debian GNU/Linux projects).

Finally something personal:

I’ve done my kitchen work, there are not many mosquitos and they are pretty gentle, sun is shining more or less non-stop, it’s not too hot, water is blue and pleasantly cooling. Now Vis has Indymedia-stickers.

Contact:

irc.freenode.net, channel #vis (not really busy).
summersource-l@tacticaltech.org (camp-mailinglist)

Links:

http://www.tacticaltech.org/summersource
http://www.mi2.hr/

[1] Short comparison between the different Linux distributions, which were introduced and explained during the camp:

RED HAT is the most widespread, commercial distribution with its extensive support-system, which is sold especially to bigger firms. Next to SuSE people start working with it, to make their first steps in OSS.

DEBIAN, had its 10th anniversary lately. At present it is organised by approx. 1500 freelancers. With about 13.000 programm packages on eleven different platforms (among them Sun and Macintosh) it is the biggest distribution worldwide, which offers good usability. Documentation is available in about 25 languages. In addition the Debian project has adopted a social contract, which should save the basic ideal of free software. The whole distribution includes no proprietary software at all.

A smaller, customised version of the debian distribution called „Debian NP“ (‚non profit’) for NGO-organisations and their spezial economic needs are being composed at the moment.

Compared to other distributions SLACKWARE is developed by only a handful in solo attempt. The advantage of Slackware is the good support of old hardware, e.g. 386 platforms, which would be waste under normal circumstances. But with Slackware they proper for e-mail, text-based websurfing and simple communication.

DYNE:BOLIC: Similar to Knoppix a distribution bootable by CD with the focus on multimedia and audiostreeming. Probably in the future it will be the standard toolkit of many media-activists. (www.dyne.org)

Comment: Relating to a Dyne:bolic workshop Jaromil (maintainer of Dyne: bolic) and a croatian hacker played a joke to create a version of a Linux distribution which is bootable live under Windows, which begins with an autorun skript first to eliminate the Microsoft operating system as soon as the CD is put into the drive and boots Linux afterwards. And even if you can estimate that this skript won’t find its way to regular releases of the Dyne:bolic distribution it was an impressive demonstration of primitive flaws of the “most popular operating systems in the world” and why a change to other operation systems is worth it.

• Pictures of the camp and original article on Imc Germany
  
• Imc Translations