sustainablog: Building an Open-Source Community for Appropriate Technology

The "Open Source" meme is making widespread change in the computer industry. Nobody can doubt that, and the change is moving step-by-step through the whole of the computer industry. It means a change from the former normal business practice of having proprietary advantage over your competitors, and using secrecy to preserve that advantage. But I think society as a whole loses from the secrecy, because what's allowed science and technology to flourish is for each succeeding generation to stand on the shoulders of science. But in the computer industry the secrecy actively prevented succeeding generations to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Building an Open-Source Community for Appropriate Technology: is an article discussing the possibility of using the open source model in the development of "appropriate technology". Open Source concepts are obviously new to Jeff.

"Appropriate technology" generally, as I understand it, is in opposition in many ways to business-as-usual. Business-as-usual depends on consumption, the more the better, as high levels of consumption mean higher sales which mean higher revenues.

Since appropriate technology generally doesn't fit normal business practices, it's probably a good fit for open source development models.

My take on open source models, from having used open source software over the last 25 years, is that the owner of a product is the one who gets to determine the licensing under which it's distributed. By licensing, I mean the ability to take the product design and make your own. For example only the Ford Motor Company is able to make a Ford car, because it is Ford that owns the design and doesn't tell anybody else the design except under license agreements in the cases where they outsource parts construction.

It is the goals of the owner/developer of a product which determines the sort of license they use.

In the open source software world, the people generally have a goal of sharing and openness. In contrast the closed source software companies have a goal of control, and making the most money they can.

Jeff mentions some difficulty with learning to use open source software. This is an interesting byproduct of the OSS process. The quality of an OSS application depends on the contributions by the community that builds around that application.

In some cases the community cares a lot about usability and documentation. But often the community around a project is made of software developers, and software developers are notorious for not quite grokking real usability issues. For example, an error message that makes sense to a developer is often completely foreign to the typical end user.

I think this partly stems from the "we're building this ourselves" nature of the open source process.

This may be a resulting attribute of any appropriate technology developed under an open source model. In fact I came across an example the other day.

Maria 'Mark' Alovert and others are developing designs and documentation for producing biodiesel. The web sites are biodieselcommunity.org and localb100.com. There's a lot of great information there, but it's a little haphazardly organized, and certainly not a finished and polished product you can just buy and begin using. Instead they have a bunch of pieces, parts, documentation, etc, and expect the end user to do a lot of learning and assembly.

What would tend to happen is some people are willing to roll up their sleeves and dig into the problem. It's those people who are most motivated by the problem set, and it really does, I think, contribute to the overall increase in knowledge among society as a whole.

For example I can offer an analogy from operating system design. If the only computer operating systems one could get were closed source, then almost nobody would understand the fine art of operating system design. But because of Linux, FreeBSD, Darwin, and other operating system projects, there are a large number of people who have spent a lot of time studying, analyzing, modifying, tweaking and improving operating system design. The result is, I think, very good in demystifying and opening up computer system design.

Green Car Congress: US Petroleum Consumption Hits Record Highs in 2005

We're screwed if this keeps going like this. US Petroleum Consumption Hits Record Highs in 2005 What this means is the demand for oil is continuing to grow unabated. And this year saw record oil prices in the U.S. as well, yet it didn't slow the growth in demand.

Green Car Congress: US Petroleum Consumption Hits Record Highs in 2005

We're screwed if this keeps going like this. US Petroleum Consumption Hits Record Highs in 2005 What this means is the demand for oil is continuing to grow unabated. And this year saw record oil prices in the U.S. as well, yet it didn't slow the growth in demand.

Green Car Congress: Russia Turns the Natural Gas Screws on Ukraine, Europe Feels Effect

Green Car Congress has a report about a crisis in natural gas supply between Russia, Ukraine and the rest of Europe. Apparently Russia has jacked up Ukraine's prices, and the resulting dispute has interrupted natural gas supply to Ukraine. Russia Turns the Natural Gas Screws on Ukraine, Europe Feels Effect (Green Car Congress, 2 January 2006)

One of the comments on GCC is "Ukraine has to pay market price, so US can't object to capitalism. This is direct result of Ukraine's orange revolution." to which I say... your nuts. It isn't capitalism to jack up prices just because of a change in government. That's manipulation. Russia was on the losing side of the Orange Revolution event, and I suppose now they want to use the cold of winter to create a heating crisis and maybe anger the people of Ukraine enough to topple the government. That is not capitalism at work.

Some interesting factoids in the article -- Russia has the largest Natural Gas reserves in the world, followed by Iran. The three major fields, Urengoy, Yamburg, and Medvezh’ye, are in Siberia and the Russian Gas company, Gazprom, admits these fields are in decline and there will be "steep" declines in output between 2008-2020.

That makes part of this episode looking to the future of the peak for natural gas having been reached.

The "peak oil" effect also applies to other natural resources. The model is that there is a fixed amount of each resource on the planet. And humans have a given ability to tap those resources. Between usage of the resource, the resulting depletion of the resource, and the ease/difficulty of tapping the resource, a peak will be reached in production capacity. For example the U.S. reached its peak of oil production capacity in 1970. The world is projected to reach its peak of oil production capacity, well, any day now, if not already.

Try as you might, after the peak is reached you can't increase production because the resources are heading towards depletion.

Voluntary simplicity courses

In the holiday season it's worth considering whether the holidays are supposed to be about consumerism or...? I don't see in the source of the season, namely Christs teachings, that it's about consumerism. In fact Jesus is known for living in a simple manner (though, as Ron Roth points out, there was enough money among Jesus's associates they needed a treasurer).

Voluntary simplicity is about choosing to own fewer things. There's a whole slew of benefits to voluntary simplicity from having more time in your life to having extra money that you can use to create financial security.

Both http://www.nwei.org./ and http://www.simpleliving.net/ offer training and other resources on voluntary simplicity.

The Christmas Resistance Movement

Christmas is coming, making for another round of obscene consumerism. For those of you Christians, let me ask this: Did the teachings Jesus gave have anything to do about shop til you drop?

Let me introduce the Christmas Resistance Movement

You know holiday shopping is offensive and wasteful. You know Christmas "wish lists" and "gift exchanges" degrade the concept of giving. You know Christmas marketing is a scam, benefiting manufacturers, stores, and huge corporations, while driving individuals into debt. You know this annual consumer frenzy wreaks havoc on the environment, filling landfills with useless packaging and discarded gifts.

Yet, every year, you cave in and go shopping.

The relentless onslaught of advertising exerts constant pressure. So do the unified bleatings of herds of shoppers, who call you "Scrooge" if you fail to enthusiastically join their ritual orgy of consumption. Friends and family needle you with gift requests, store windows beckon with shiny colorful packages, the same "classic" holiday jingles are piped constantly through every speaker in town.

How can you resist?

Join the Christmas Resistance Movement!

It's great fun. Two thumbs up!

Failing car companies means the car companies failed

What's good for General Motors is good for America, eh? At least that's what they used to say. But is it? This is an especially poingant question right now as the car companies are seeing slowdowns in their sales.

Another Crummy Month for American Cars (By Seth Jayson (TMF Bent), fool.com, December 2, 2005)

He points out the 3 major car companies are all seeing drastically declining sales. And at the same time Toyota was seeing a jump in sales.

According to Seth the pundit class is clamoring for the government to do something about this. In other words some sort of handout from the government to prop up the car companies.

In my view that's the last thing the car companies need. If the car companies are seeing a decline in sales, well I can point to something Seth did not. Namely, the price of oil coupled with the dependance by the car companies on SUV sales.

The price of gasoline went over $3/gallon over most of the U.S. for a period, however it's since fallen again to where it was before the jump (in California it's around $2.40/gallon). This sent shockwaves around the country, people looking to dump their SUV's, and looking to get transportation that doesn't use so much gasoline. This of course would cause a shift away from SUV's.

Seth talks about a price war fooling the public into thinking the price of cars would always be dropping. I don't know about that. What I do know is the people I interact with got alarmed over the price of gasoline.

I wish to repeat something ... long term, the price of gasoline is only going up.

The recent price hike had to do with scares over the war in Iraq and damage done by the hurricanes this summer. However at the same time the oil production system is running at full capacity, AND at the same time demand is only going up. Oil demand doesn't come just from the U.S. but both China and India are seeing a surge of their middle class, and a shift from owning two-wheelers (bicycles and motorcycles) to owning cars. As China and India do this their demand levels will go up.

Further there is the Peak Oil scenario to consider. The idea is that at some point discoveries of oil reserves will not be able to keep up with the demand. At that point there will be a peak in oil production capacity, and assuming demand continues to rise oil availability will only fall. Market forces will make sure the price goes up, and up, and up.

Now, let's get back to the major car companies. They've been riding high on a binge of SUV's for years. In a way they were just responding to customer demand, but at the same time those car companies could have done as Toyota did and looked into the future to see the oil picture. The public obviously doesn't understand the oil picture, or they wouldn't be buying gas guzzling SUV's. But the car companies have a lot of smart people in them, obviously the car companies are capable of seeing the real oil picture.

The real oil picture is that the long term trend for the price of oil is upward. And that any time the price of oil gets "high" the public panics and switches to small cars.

The car companies don't deserve any handouts ... they don't deserve sympathy ... nor pity ... they need to take their lumps and change their business. Toyota and Honda have both been pursuing the high efficiency concept for years, and they're doing wonderfully.