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phampercy · 2 years

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Reflecting on my years at Dickinson College

When I came to Dickinson College, I was not sure which major I should take as I did not know which subject I would like to study further. My uncertainty was also partly why I chose the college. I knew that with its liberal arts education, Dickinson would be a great place for me to explore my abilities. When I finally found out that Computer Science is what I want to pursue, while I was aware that Dickinson has a smaller Computer Science department with fewer technical courses compared to bigger universities, I knew that I was in good hand: my education would be more well-rounded to prepare me for any situations in my career and the class size is smaller, which means I will have more interactions with my professors.

Throughout the 100 and 200-level Computer Science courses at Dickinson College, I have learned how to think critically and solve programming problems using my newly acquired coding skill. I have also studied the basic abstraction behind a computer system. The lab assignments in those classes equipped me with collaborating skills, which would be a very necessary skill when I work as a Software Engineer in a team in the future. Slowly, I learned how to work effectively with others - how to explain your ideas to your partners, listen to their ideas, choose the best solutions, and move forward. Meanwhile, the upper 300-level classes give me a chance to apply my analytical skills more effectively and to be more creative because the knowledge and the projects are more challenging. The writing in the discipline assignments requires me to communicate better in writing, and these skills would be very essential in the future when I write documentation for the programs that I build.

In the Computer Science seminars, I learned and discussed the ethics and potentials of technology and software engineering. The discussions in class assist me in finding meaning and purpose in my future career - being a software engineer, I believe, is more than just coding and building system, as it is also about how to contribute and engage with society in a meaningful way. The goal of a software engineer should be to build tools that can help humanities move to a better future, and now, after the courses, I have learned more about the ethical framework that I can use to apply to the dilemmas in my career.

In the seminars, I have also studied the necessary skills and the processes that engineers tend to use when they develop software. This will be useful for me when I work as a software engineer in a corporation - having some knowledge about the tools and the process that my team may use beforehand will help me get onboard faster. The H/FOSS project that I worked on in the seminars, Wagtail, helped to reinforce that knowledge. Through the projects, I learned how to use Docker and Git, as well as how to document my process properly on Slack (which is very convenient, because, at my summer internship, I will use Slack too!). I also have a better understanding of how to address a bug or an issue, and what the process for my code to get approved is. While I have worked on some of those technical skills in my previous internships, my experience working with Wagtail is still very unique - I have a chance to work on a public project that many big companies use and be recognized for my work. The "team" is also much bigger, so my interactions with the community are definitely different from how I communicate with a smaller team. I also have a deeper understanding of the importance and meanings of H/FOSS projects to society, and I will definitely contribute to those projects in the future.

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phampercy · 2 years

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Is NFT a great chance for artists to make profit or a booster for art piracy?

Non-fungible token (NFT) is a type of digital asset that is stored on blockchain, the technology that’s behind many cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum – however, different from most cryptocurrencies that are fungible, each NFT has a unique ID just like how every physical object is different from each other. The popularity of NFT has exploded recently, hitting 17.6 billion USD in 2021.

While NFTs can be anything that is digital, they have become a sudden hit in the art community, because NFTs have given many artists a global market to reach out to. There is even a feature that ensures artists can still receive a percentage of profit in future trades when the value of their art increases. There are many NFT-based art projects that are launched, such as ART3.io or The Ape Project. Even global superstar The Weeknd or the prestigious New York Times are joining in the hype.

However, things can get ambiguous when it comes to NFTs copyright. While NFTs are considered a proof of ownership, buying NFTs does not guarantee that the buyers will own the copyright of the work. It is like when you buy a book, you do not buy the copyrights of the content inside that book. However, because NFT is built on the idea of decentralized marketplace, there is no function for an NFT to check itself whether it violates copyright law or not. Because of that, anyone can make a NFT based on any digital content that they want – this design creates rampant piracy as many fraudsters can easily create bots to scrap art online and then mint an NFT from that art, even without the consent of the artists. While art theft has been a problem for a long time, even with physical art, it is in a completely different scale here – the bots can “collect” the art in lighting speed. Moreover, the dynamic of NFT piracy is different compared to previous types of digital piracy – in both cases, the artists are hurt, but NFT piracy benefits people who sell art illegally much more than the people who consume the art.

OpenSea is one of the biggest NFT marketplace, yet it does little to solve this problem of outright art theft and piracy on its platform. While the company promises that it is hiring more employees and creating algorithm to detect copyright infringement on its platform, it is reasonable to question OpenSea’s motivation since the platform receives a commission for every transaction made. DeviantArt, where most of the stolen art comes from, has to create a tool to assist its creators in detecting NFTs that violate copyright. In the first 5 months of launching the new tool, DeviantArt has sent out over 50,000 alerts.

I feel like NFT has its own potential to be a tool that help struggling artists to achieve their breakthrough. However, just like cryptocurrency, because NFT is a new innovation, there are not many regulations for the technology. If NFT wants to grow larger, it has to find ways to protect the artists and the consumers by all means – with updated law, new algorithm design, or better platform moderation.

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phampercy · 2 years

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How can we design an ethical social media?

Social media has become an increasingly essential part of our lives, and their creators can’t stop bragging about their supposed benefits. However, the truth is that social media is not without flaws. Social media use has been linked to risk of depression and anxiety, and social media algorithm have been accused of propagating biases, radicalizing their users, manipulating public discourse for monetary gains. These problems raise a question of where we can create a good social media without these harms? This blog post will propose some ideas for how we can design a more “ethical social media”.

1. Reduce users’ screen time: Social media addiction is a serious problem. Many companies have designed tools that assist users to manage their using time. Other potential solutions are making scrolling harder and slower after a certain amount of use time or reducing the number of notifications to limit the fear of missing out. Yet, these designs go against the firms’ interests, as it would want you to spend more time on the platform, so that it can show more advertisements to you – which bring us to the second point.

2. Shift away from ad-based revenue system: It’s time that we realize that corporations won’t act in our interests – there’s a famous saying that essentially means: If you are not paying, then you are the product. Only by paying for social media can we change this dynamic. Social media should be treated as a public utility, just like multiple communication platforms that come before it (television, telephone, radio…) – governments can fund those platforms (with independent editorial policy, like BBC), subscription tiers can be created with special features (like Twitter Blue), or a donation portal can be opened (like NPR or Wikipedia). Those solutions assure that social media will still be free of charge for most users, and companies will have a decent stream of revenue without relying too much on advertising.

3. Increase transparency: It’s alarming how much companies love collecting our data. Implementing the 2nd suggestion may decrease companies’ needs to collect data for advertising purposes, after all, companies still require some data to improve users’ experiences. Therefore, it is critical to be transparent about what data that companies are tracking or to obtain users’ consents – Apple’s App Tracking Transparency tool, which allows user to opt-out of those invasive tracking, is a great design. Another idea would be making (part of) the code open-source – users will know if the app is designed to be addictive or invasive, and they can also contribute to the code, making social media more community-based.

4. User-tailored newsfeed and less controversial content: While I acknowledge that these suggestions may limit diversity of speech and keep users in an echo-chamber, I would argue that the benefits are much greater – we will have more control of one aspects of our lives and will be less angry (better for our health!) Engaging to more ideas are not as important as engaging to ideas in a more thoughtful, respectful ways (which are hard to do if you’re angry) – Twitter have launched tools to nudge users to rethink abusive tweets or read an article before sharing it. This solution can help limit radicalization and misinformation too, which is a plague of many platforms.

There are many other interesting ideas that cannot be discussed here, but it is important to highlight that those suggestions above are not far-fetched – some are already implemented by big platforms, and a decentralized, ad-free, open-source social media have existed in the name of Mastodon. An ethical social media platform is undoubtedly conceivable if we have an ethical framework to guide us.

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phampercy · 2 years

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Licensing - what to know before making the choice

Licensing is particularly crucial to a H/FOSS project because it determines not only how free and open your project is, but also how the project's community is developed and interacts with one another. These are some considerations I believe developers should make before making their choice:

Developers can choose from a variety of pre-defined, common licenses, the majority of which can be classified as either copyleft or permissive licenses. Permissive licenses let you to change, run, and redistribute the project with little limitations, but most copyleft licenses demand that any derivative work be released under the same license.

Permissive licenses (76% of FOSS projects) are currently far more popular than copyleft licenses (24% of FOSS projects). There are good reasons for this: first, developers need to be paid and permissive license allow them to profit from derivative works, and in a capitalistic world like ours, it wouldn't be practical for all software to use copyleft licenses and be free commercially; second, the project can reach a wider community because proprietary products can use permissive-licensed projects, and a larger community means more contributors.

I understand that developers may be concerned that cooperatives will use permissive-licensed projects to enrich themselves, but then fail to contribute back to the project and community – a 2009 study found that copylefted projects were more popular and active at the time, which could be because developers identified with the philosophical tenet of copyleft licenses and didn't like their free work being used for commercial purposes. However, the same study also found that developers stayed in copylefted projects for a shorter period of time, which can be explained by the fact that developers can only gain from contributing to those projects for a limited time. Also, things have changed: more and more firms are seeing the benefits of FOSS and investing extensively in it, such as Google's Android, Adobe's Apache Cordova, and Microsoft's Visual Studio Code.

When selecting a license, you should anticipate staying with it for a long time. Relicensing might cause confusion and license incompatibility issues for users. While I recognize project contributors and sponsors' desire for more control over the products on which they have spent time and money, relicensing has the potential to undermine the community's trust in the project. As a software developer, I would avoid using a project with a continually changing license since it would be difficult to keep track of how I might use it lawfully.

Of course, if adjustments are deemed too essential, they can be made as long as the changes receive widespread support from the community and the licenses can still embody the spirit of an open-source project. An example would be when the Mozilla project opted to relicense the source code to attain GPL compatibility and make it available to more developers, but even then, relicensing can take a long time, as Mozilla took 4.5 years to complete the work. Meanwhile, making a drastic change without consulting the community might have disastrous repercussions, especially if such change is intended to make the product less "free." For example, in 2017, Facebook wanted to add a condition to the React's license that would limit the framework's availability, but the company received so much backlash that it had to backtrack.

To summarize, a license should be thoroughly examined before being adopted, and it should match the ethos of a free and open-source project.

Work cited

Mozilla Relicensing Complete, http://blog.gerv.net/2006/03/relicensing_complete/

Mozilla Relicensing FAQ, https://web.archive.org/web/20100513062601/http://www-archive.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html

Facebook’s open source React library is increasingly worrying devs, https://thenextweb.com/news/should-developers-be-afraid-of-zuckerbergs-bearing-gifts

Comparison popular open source licenses, https://www.kiuwan.com/comparison-popular-open-source-licenses/

Open Source Copyleft Licenses: All You Need to Know, https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/open-source-copyleft-licenses/

Open Source Licenses in 2021: Trends and Predictions, https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/open-source-licenses-trends-and-predictions/

Impact of License Choice on Open Source Software Development Activity (2009), https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/asi.21039

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phampercy · 3 years

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My first blog! Discussing the history and philosophy of H/FOSS

Humanitarian Free Open Source Software (H/FOSS) appears everywhere in our daily lives – as you are reading my blog, likely, the majority of the online services that you need to access Tumblr is handled by H/FOSS. The concept of H/FOSS has been developed for a long time, so to understand its importance and the philosophy, we must first discuss its history.

In the very early days of computers, manufactures were more focused on hardware and they encouraged the modification and exchange of software between customers. However, as time went on, with changing markets and more advanced technology, manufacture started selling more software, so they stopped distributing source-code freely and enforced the copyrights on it more harshly.

Unsatisfied with that reality, Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, basically launching the free software movement. Since then, the movement has evolved in the forms of different projects, numerous licenses, and unique motivations. But after all, to be considered free software, one must abide by four rules: freedom to run the software, freedom to study and modify the source code, freedom to redistribute, and freedom to distribute modified copies. We can see that the word “free” in “free software” covers much more than being commercially free – it also means the freedom to use, modify, and distribute; therefore, in 1998, the term “open source” was invented to cover all the meanings above. It is a chance for H/FOSS to reinvent themselves and be more attractive to investors and big corporations.

For me, when I talk about H/FOSS, the first thing I think about is how it embodies community values. It is built and improved by the community to benefit society and human conditions. Proprietary software can have funding advantages, but its developers do the works because of financial reasons, so the software can only survive based on how much profit it makes. Meanwhile, many of the programmers in H/FOSS do the work for free because they love the software or want to create large impacts, so H/FOSS will live on as long as it has a vibrant community. In other words, H/FOSS exists based on its quality, because only projects with good ideas and good functions can attract users, and from that, attract developers and contributors to create a lively community.

With source code released for everyone to see, the security of H/FOSS is still a debatable matter. However, I would argue that H/FOSS can be more secured as there are more developers with different perspectives to contribute – it means more eyes to detect bugs! I also have read that H/FOSS releases patches and new versions much faster, while many commercial companies still follow release cycles of 6-12 months.

Another point is that not every open-source project will have funding problems just because it is free: for example, Android, one of the largest open-source projects in the world, is commercially sponsored by Google and developed by employees from multiple corporations. Many manufactures and companies understand the benefits of making their source code available to the community, so more and more are embracing H/FOSS. According to the 2021 Open Source Jobs Report, 92% of hiring managers find it hard to find open-source talents, while 44% want developers who have contributed to H/FOSS – this means that studying H/FOSS would be a great chance to improve my career prospect after I graduate.

Work cited

Fogel, K. F. (2009). Producing open source software. Orange Grove Books. Retrieved from https://producingoss.com/en/introduction.html/.

The 2021 Open Source Jobs Report. Linux Foundation. (2021, September 20). Retrieved from https://www.linuxfoundation.org/resources/publications/open-source-jobs-report-2021/.

Why open source software is more secure than commercial software. WhiteSource. (2021, July 29). Retrieved from https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/3-reasons-why-open-source-is-safer-than-commercial-software/.

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