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% HIDDENKEYWORDS: Greenhalgh, Eleanor|Williams, Claire|Ulziikhuu, Urantsetseg|Clar, Christina|Colenbrander, John|Haag, Christoph|Murtaugh, Michael 

% EG = Eleanor Greenhalgh
% CW = Claire Williams
% UU = Urantsetseg Ulziikhuu
% CC = Christina Clar
% JC = John Colenbrander
% CH = Christoph Haag
% MM = Michael Murtaugh

% TITLE: Etat des Lieux

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The following statements were recorded by Urantsetseg Ulziikhuu (Urana) in **2014**.
She studied communication in Istanbul and Leuven and joined Constant for a few months
to document the various working practices at Constant Variable. Between 2011 and 2014,
Variable housed studios for A rtists, D esigner s ,  T echno I nventors, D ata A ctivists, C yber F eminists,
I nteractive G eeks, T extile H ackers, V ideo M akers, S ound L overs, B eat M akers and other
% digital creators who were interested in using Free, Libre and Open Source Software for their creative experiments.
digital creators who were interested in using F/LOS software for their creative experiments.

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% NOWSPEAKING: UU
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Why do you think people should use and or practice Open Source software? What is in it for you?


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The knitting machine that I am using normally has a computer from the eightie s. Some have these scanners that are really old and usually  do not work anymore. They became obsolete. If it wasn’t for O pen S ource , we couldn’t use these technologies anymore. Open Source developers decided that they should do something about these machines and found that it was not that complicated to connect  these knitting machines directly to computers. I think it is a really good example how O pen S ource is important, because these machines are no  longer produced and industry is no longer interested in producing  them   again, and they would have died without further use.

The idea that Open Source is about sharing is also important . If you  try  to do  everything from zero, you just never advance. Now with O pen S ource,  if somebody does something and you have access to what t he y   do, and you can take it further and take it in to a different direction.


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% NOWSPEAKING: MM
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I haven't  always used O pen S ource software. It started at the Piet Zwart I nstitute where th ere was a decision made by Matthew Fuller and Femke Snelting who designed the program . They brought a bunch of people together that asked question s about how our tools  influence practice, how they are used. And so, part of my process is  then teaching in that program , and starting to use F ree S oftware more and more. I should say, I had already been using one particular piece of  F ree S oftware which is FFmpeg , a program that lets you work with video. So there again there was a kind of connection . I t was just by the virtue of the fact that it was one of the only tools available that could take a video, pull out  frames, work with lots of  different formats, just an amazing  tool. So it started with conv e nience. But the more that I learned about the whole kind of approach of Open Source, the more Open Source I started to use . I first switch ed from Mac OSX to maybe Dual Booting and now indeed I am pretty much only using O pen S ource. Not exclusiv e ly O pen S ource, because I occasionally use platforms online that are not free, and some applications.

I am absolutely convinced that when you use these tools,  you are learning much more about inner workings of things, about the  design decisions that go into a piece of software so that you are   actually  understanding at a very deep level, and t his then lets you move  between different tools. When t ools change, or new t hings  are offered, I think it is really a deep learning that helps  you  for  the future. Whereas if you just focus on the specific   particularities  of one platform or piece of software, that is a bit fragile and will  inevitably be obsolete when a software stops being developed  or some kind of  new kind of way of working comes about.

% NOWSPEAKING: EG
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I use O pen S ource software every day, as I have Debian on my laptop. I came to it through anarchism - - I don ’ t have a tech background - - so it ’ s a  political thing mainly. Not that F / LOS S represents a U topian model of  production b y any means! As an artist it fits in with my interest in collaborative  production.  I  think the tools we use should be malleable by the people  who use  them.  Unfortunately, IT education needs to improve quite a  lot before  that  ideal becomes reality.

Politically, I believe in building a culture which is democratic and malleable by its inhabitants, and F / LOS S makes this possible in the realm of   software.  The benefits as a user are not so great unless you are   tech-savvy  enough to really make use of that freedom. The software  does  tend to be  more secure and so on, though I think we're on shaky  ground  if we try to  defend F / LOSS in terms of its benefits to the end  user.   Using F / LOS S has  a learning curve, challenges which I put up  with  because I believe  in it socially. This would probably be a  different  answer from say, a sysadmin , someone who could see really  concrete benefits of  using F / LOSS.

% NOWSPEAKING: CH
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Actually I came from O pen C ontent and alternative licensing to the  technical side of using GNU/Linux. My main motivation right now is t he possibility to develop a deeper relationship with my tools . For me it is interesting to create my own tools for my work , r ather than to use something predefined . S omething everyone else uses. With F ree S oftware this is easier -- t o invent  tools. Another important point is that with F ree S oftware and open standards it's more likely that you will be able to keep track of your work. With proprietary software and  formats, you are pretty much dependent on decisions of  a software company. If the company decides that it will not continue an application or format , there is not much you can do about it . This happened to users of Free H and.   W hen Adobe acquired their competitor Macromedia they decided to discontinue the development of Free H and in favour of their own product Illustrator. You can sign a petition, but if there is no commercial interest, most probably nothing will happen. Let's see what happens to Flash.

% NOWSPEAKING: CC
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I studied sculpture, which is a very solitary way of working. Already through my studies, this idea of an artist sitting around in a studio somewhere, being by himself, just doing his  work by himself, didn't make sense to me. It is maybe true for certain people, but it is definitely not true to me today, the person I am. I always integrated other people into my work, or do collaborative work. I don't really care about this ' it is my work ' or 'it is your work ' , if  you do something together, at some point the work exists by itself. For me, that i s the greatest moment, it is just independent. It actually rejoins the authorship question, because I don't think you can own ideas. You can kind of put them out there and share them. It is organic, like things that can grow and that they will  become  bigger and bigger, become something else that you couldn't have  ever  thought. It makes the horizon much bigger. It is a different way  of  working I guess.

The o bvious reason is that it is free , but the sharing philosophy is really at the core of it. I have always  thought that when you share things, you do not get back things instantly, but you do get so much things in another way, not in  the way you expect. But if you put in a idea out, use tools that  are open and change them, put them out again. So  there  is lot of back and forth of communication. I think that is super important. It is the idea of evolv ing   together,  not just by ourselves. I really do believe that we do evolve  much  quicker if we are together than everybody trying to do things by  his or  herselves. I think it is very European idea to get into this   individualism, this thinking of idea of doing things by myself, my thing. But I think we can learn a lot from Asia, just ways of doing, because there community is much more important.

% NOWSPEAKING: JC
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I don’t necessarily develop like software or codes, because I am not a software developer. But I would say, I am involved in analog way. I do use O pen S ource software, although I have to say I do not much with computers. Most of my work is analog. But I do my researches on the website. I am a user.

I started to develop an antipathy against large corporat ions , operating system s or softwares, and started to look for alternatives. Then you  come to the Linux system and Ubuntu which has a very user-friendly  interface. I like the fact that behind the software that I am using , there is a whole community, who are until now without major financial  interests and who develop tools for people like me. So now I am totally into O pen S ource software, and I try to use as much as I can. So my motivation would be I want to get off the track of big  corporates who will always kind of lead you into consuming more of  their  products. 





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What does Free Culture mean to you? Are you taking part in a 'Free Culture Movement'?

% NOWSPEAKING: MM
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I'd like to think so, but I realised of that it is quite  hard. Only now, I am seriously trying to really contribute  back  to  projects and I wouldn't even say that I am an  active    contributer  to Free S oftware projects. I am much more of a user and  part of the  system. I am using it in my teaching and my  work, but now I try to maybe release software myself in some way or I try  to create  projects  that people could actually use. I think it is  another  kind of  dimension of  engagement. I haven't really fully  realised it , so yes for that question if  I am contributing to F ree C ulture. Yes, but I could go lot deeper.



% NOWSPEAKING: JC
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I am a big support er of the idea of Free Culture. I think information should be available for people, e specially for those who have little access to   information. I mean we live in the W est and we have access to information   more or less with physical libraries and institutions where we can go. Specially in Asia, South America, Africa this is very important. There is a big gap between those who have access to knowledge and those don’t  have access to knowledge.

That’s a big field to explore to be able to  open up information to people  who  have very poor access to information.  Maybe they are not even able  to  write or read. That’s already is a big  handicap. So I think it is a  big  mission in that sense.



% NOWSPEAKING: UU
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Could Free Culture be seen as an opposition to commercialism?

% NOWSPEAKING: MM
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It is a tricky question. I think no matter what, if you go down the stack, in terms of software and hardware, if you get down to the deepest level of a computer then there is little free CPU design. So I think it is really important to be able to work in this kind of  hybrid  spaces and to  be aware of then how free F ree is, and always look for altern a tives when they are available. But to a  certain degree, I  think  it is really hard to go for a total  absolute. Or it is a decision, you can go absolute but that may mean  that you are really  isolated from other communities. So that's always a bit of  balancing act , how independent can you be, how  independent you want  to be, how  big does your audience need to be, or you community needs  to be. So  that's a lot of different decisions.  Certainly, when I am  working in the  context of an art school  wi t h design  practitioners, you know it  is not always possible to  really go  completely independent and there are lots of implications in  terms of  how you work and whom you can work with ,  and the printers you can  work with.  So it is always a little bit of  trade-off, but it is important to understand what the decisions are.

% NOWSPEAKING: EG
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I think the idea of a Fr ee C ulture movement is very exciting and   important. It has always gone on, but stating it in copyright-aware  terms issues an important challenge to  the 'all rights reserved'  status-quo. At the same time I think it has  limitations, at least in  its current form. I'm not sure that rich white  kids playing with their   laptops is necessarily a radical act.  The idea  and the intention are  very powerful though, because it does have the  potential to challenge  the way that power - - in the form of 'intellectual  property' - - is distributed.

% NOWSPEAKING: CH
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Copyright has become much more enforced over the last years than it was ever before. In a way, culture is being absorbed by companies trying to make money out of it. And Free Culture developed as a counter movement against  this. 
When  it comes to mainstream culture, you are most often reduced to a consumer of culture. Free Culture then is a obvious reaction. The idea of culture where you have the possibility to engage again, to become active and create your version, not  just to consume content. 


% NOWSPEAKING: UU
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How could Open Source software be economically sustainable, in a way that is  beneficial for both developers/creators and users?

% NOWSPEAKING: EG
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That's  a good question!  A very hard one. I'm not involved enough in  that   community to really comment on its  economic future. But it  does, to  me,  highlight what is missing from the  analysis in F ree C ulture  discourse, the economic reality. It  depends on where they  (developers) work. A lot of them are  employed  by  companies so they  get a salary. Others do it for a hobby.  I'd be interested to get  accurate data on what percentage of F / LOS S developers are getting paid, etc. In the absence of that data, I t h ink  it's fair to  say it i s an unsolved problem. If we think that developers ' should ' be compensated for their work, then we need to talk about capitalism. Or   at  least, about statutory funding models.

% NOWSPEAKING: MM
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It is interesting that you used both 'sustainability'  and 'economic viability'. And I think those are two things very often  in opposition.  I  am doing a project now about publishing workflows and  future  electronic publishing forums. And that was the one thing  we  looked at. There were several solutions on the market. One was a   platform called  ' Editorial ' which was a very nice website that you could use to   mark down texts collaboratively and  and then it could produce ePub format books. After  about six months of running,  it closed down as many platforms do. Interestingly, in their sign - off message it said: _Y ou have a month to get your stuff out of the website, and sorry we have decided not to O pen S ource the project . As much as we loved making it, it was just  too  much work for us to keep  this running _ . I n terms of real sustainability, O pen S ource of course would have allow ed them to work with anybody, even if it is just a hobby .

% NOWSPEAKING: CW
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It is very related to passion of doing these things.     
E mbroidering machines have copyrighted softwares installed. The software itself is very expensive, around 1000 € , and the  software  for professionals is 6000 € to buy. Embroidering machines  are very expensive themselves too. These softwares are very tight and  closed,  you  even have to have special USB key for  patterns. And there are th e s e two guys who are software developers, they  are trying to  come up with a format which all embroidering machines  could read. They take their time to do this and I think in the end if  the project works   out, they will probably get attention and p r obably get paid also. Because instead of giving 1000 € to  copyrighted software, maybe you  would be happy to give 50 € to these people.