October 15, 2009

Asay and Tiemann, mano a mano.

Filed under: fedora, freesoftware, green, proprietary — Alex @ 8:24 pm

Matt Asay has written another entertaining blog piece on his particular theories of open source economics, and Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann and he have engaged in what is superficially a bit of “Is not!” “Is too!“. Looking a bit deeper, though, it’s not really the pragmatics vs. the Stallmanites, even though that’s how Asay frames it.

Fundamentally, Tiemann is right on the money: a simplistic “supply and demand” view of how prices are set in a market place completely ignores the value that Red Hat offers to its customers. “Subscription” versus “box price” is not simply a semantic difference – indeed, that’s essentially labelling their customers as brand tarts unwilling to risk CentOS / Scientific Linux, and reduces the business decision to a simple money figure. That’s not how business works; the difference between “cheapest” and “best value” is huge.

Asay also bizarrely labels Red Hat a “distant second to Canonical” in the purity stakes. This is Canonical with the proprietary server management, proprietary file sharing, proprietary application store, etc.? I don’t even vaguely understand the argument here: either Matt is badly misinformed, or is just being very selective – the only thing I can think that Red Hat withholds is permission for others to use its trade marks. Which Canonical also does.

Then comes the claim that “The bulk of the best, most widely used open source is funded by proprietary dollars.” – followed by a call of thanks for the likes of IBM, HP, Intel. No doubt those companies do contribute a reasonable amount, but to credit them with the bulk of the best: that’s really stretching it. If you look at the actual factual information of who contributes what to projects like Linux, corporate interest is large, but “funded by proprietary dollars” – haha. What Asay is basically implying is “proprietary sales are underwriting the development of open source” – presumably some kind of mass corporate hallucination that has turned these businesses into charities, and pragmatism be damned.

Of course, the reality is these businesses would never underwrite development of software which wouldn’t make the money back, and indeed IBM’s vaunted “$1 billion investment” was apparently recouped in a single year. According to Matt, we should be thanking IBM for doing this: to my mind, IBM should be thanking the community for the contribution that has enabled it to recoup its investment so quickly (since 2002 presumably it has been making good money, too).

What Matt doesn’t seem to get is that this split-personality marketing of “we do all this open stuff, except for this scarce bit we’re charging you for!” is a prize example of a house divided unto itself. You can’t sensibly talk about the benefits of open source without contradicting yourself completely when it comes to the paywall behind which your proprietary software sits: basically you have to fess up that the open source bits are the bait.

What Michael’s post illustrates nicely is not just a clarity of purpose, but a 100% commitment to what they tell their customers: no ifs, no buts, but a single compelling story. Customers understand the value they offer, and that’s why they make money.

[Edit 20:24: just for clarity, my comparison of Canonical to Red Hat is not to denigrate Canonical: merely to illustrate that claiming Red Hat are a 'distant second' to Canonical in the purity stakes is utter nonsense. Also, my reference in the comments to "proprietary application store" should be parsed as "a store that hosts proprietary applications", not "an application store that is proprietary"]

October 14, 2009

WikiReader – “Project B”

Filed under: bongo, fedora, freesoftware — Tags: , , — Alex @ 10:02 am

Let me start this by saying that I really, really want OpenMoko Inc. to be a raging success. With Android, Palm Pre and other “Linux phones” showing pretty how not to do things (jury’s out on N900 for me still), the properly free smartphone is an idea whose time is very definitely here. Sadly, with the freeping creaturism of the phone market and the need to develop both a hardware and software stack simultaneously, that didn’t seem to work out so well, so OM are now going to their backup plan: “WikiReader“.

Now, I’m a huge fan of Simple. I don’t particularly like the look of this device, but I respect the design: the reduced form factor, the insane battery life, the readable screen. Not sure on the wedge shape (presumably necessitated by the choice of AAA power supply), not sure on the buttons (surely it could have just been one touch screen?), but those are design choices. It has obviously been designed, and that’s excellent.

However, although it has been designed, who has it been designed for? The wedge shape makes it less pocketable, and most adults I know already have phones which beat this device into a cocked hat. So I’m pretty sure it’s not really designed for me. Because it’s essentially an offline device, presumably the people it is designed for are mostly/entirely offline: however, if they’re offline because they can’t afford it, it’s difficult to see how/why they would pay $100 for one of these things. I’m also deeply sceptical of any project which attempts to address the “IT needs of the developing world” in a fashion which involves shipping basic devices that no-one in London or New York or (other “not developing world” place) would actually use.

So, my conclusion is that this device has been designed for children, and probably children in families who have a pretty high income. But, here’s the thing: if I was designing it for children, I would not make a device that was black and white, had no pictures / illustrations / animations, had no music / sound, etc. I mean, this thing is boring. And is adult wikipedia actually suitable for children? I don’t know what the reading age of the site actually is, but I’d imagine you’d have to be into your teens to understand most of it (particularly without diagrams and stuff).

I hope I’m the one who’s dead wrong about this device. I’m thinking of excuses, right now, I can use to buy one. But, it doesn’t have any kind of connectivity: I couldn’t hack it to store contacts or calendar appointments, and putting stuff like a wifi card into the micro-sd slot (assuming that would even be possible – does it have in-built flash? think not..) would effectively kill the battery life. I have this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that this is a brilliantly designed device implementing a wonderful idea that no-one actually will want. And that would be very, very sad.

“Free hardware” seems like an obviously winning idea. Has anyone actually successfully executed it yet though?

October 7, 2009

Boycott “Boycott Novell”: a huge own goal?

Filed under: fedora, freesoftware — Alex @ 5:50 pm

It’s difficult to tell apart the different factions of the people of Judea these days. On one hand, you have the Boycott Novellers, who post large amounts of “news” heavily rewritten to support their point of view, often with personal attacks on individuals and accompanied by Perez Hilton-style silly drawings. Sad, then, to see the new entrant – Boycott Boycott Novell – apparently chase after their namesakes with a personal attack on a free software developer and, of course, accompanying silly Hiltonesque.

Somewhat hilariously, both sides mistakenly re-interpret RMS’ view on Mono to remove the subtlety of his argument, and in doing so end up making precisely the same error: his warning against the use of Mono is not based on it being “non-free”. Both sites would have you believe that he believes that, and argue their various biases from that  viewpoint. What Richard is actually saying, of course, is that in his opinion Mono represents a risky bet – one that he is not willing to take and one he advises others not to. Which is his prerogative. But he’s careful to say that it is free software, and correctly identifies possible benefits in moving Windows developers onto free platforms. It’s a delicate argument, one easily lost on others.

I expect more from the people involved in both sites, but particularly Boycott Boycott Novell, who seem to have taken the “don’t tell us what to do!” argument to the almost ridiculous extreme of “don’t give us your opinion ever!” (for certain people’s opinions, anyway). There are extremely serious points to be made about the so-called journalism of well-known activists who purport to support a community they spend most of their time attacking in one way or another, but it seems too easy to fall into the trap of my enemy’s friend is my enemy (even when the friendship is unlikely to be mutual).

Boycott Novell fails on various levels, but mainly because it spends most of its time not offering constructive criticism but delivering polemic after polemic against Microsoft and then seeking to tie parts of the community in with that, deserved or not, often with scant regard for the actual facts. But simply because they use RMS as a totem in their witch-hunt does not put the responsibility for what they write at his door, nor does it mean his views are allied with theirs even when they claim they are. The issue with Mono is many times more sophisticated than the arguments they put forward, and there will be plenty of people who weigh the balance very differently based on their perception of the risk.

If I could wish for anything for Christmas, it would be that people who see themselves as members of the free software community stop attacking others in that same community. And yes, that would go for anyone in the community. I wouldn’t bet on it, though.

September 11, 2009

Derren ‘witch’ Brown

Filed under: Uncategorized — Alex @ 6:00 pm

Apologies, but I couldn’t help but comment on this.

  1. I don’t believe it’s broadcast delay. There is a delay there, but it’s of the order of seconds. His waffle at the end is about the same length. I don’t see what difference it would make – it could make the switch happen earlier (e.g., at 1:40 on the video above) but I don’t see any gain. With people analysing the video, it doesn’t really matter where it happens.
  2. I don’t believe it’s split video. That’s horribly difficult to get right, I’m not sure anyone proposing it has actually tried it – particularly since they also broadcast this thing in HD. It’s also not very Derren Brown.
  3. I don’t believe it’s a 55k take split. There’s no visible edit split – and there would have to be one, somewhere – and he knew he got all six at the end. The stuff Derren was saying about “sorry if I only get five right” – eh. This idea is plain nonsense.
  4. I don’t believe it’s eInk etc. Not very Derren Brown. It’s certainly not projection or quickly stuck on numbers, either.
  5. I don’t believe there is a hidden wall. The balls cast a shadow on Derren; if it’s a wall it’s exceptional.
  6. I don’t believe there is anything dodgy about the stand. Looks like perspex to me, and the ball’s labels are pointed up and out.
  7. I don’t believe the “last ball moved a bit” stuff. The last number out was the 2; which is actually the ball on the far right when they’re turned. If the balls had been replaced, the 2 would be the last in / labelled, so the ball on the far left as it’s turned around should be the one raised…
  8. I don’t believe he predicted anything, or used statistics, or that the balls in the lottery were influenced.
  9. I don’t believe he palmed the balls. Not enough time, not physically possible.
  10. I don’t believe he’s holding anything in front of the balls. The labels are on the surface of the balls.
  11. Finally, I don’t believe he’s actually going to give us any insight into how this trick was performed. The fact that people are hanging on the little ball moving or the video thing – clutching at straws. This was a good trick

However.. what I would say…

  1. I’m interested to know why the TV got turned off. It was moving out of shot, and presumably they could have had set runner turn it off / down off camera. That makes me think they really couldn’t stick on the show longer than the ball announcement.
  2. There is a gap between the numbers being announced and turning around the balls. This gap must be necessary; the writing down of the numbers and stuff didn’t have to happen.
  3. The ball holder has sloped-back sides. The front and back of the box are shallow and don’t raise high, but the sides raise up – there’s no need for that; he only needs a box. The slopes match roughly where the labels on the balls are located. Was something attached to the front of them somehow? Looking in between the balls, it could be a line of tape going across the front (particularly between 35 and 39 at about 2:25) – equally though, it could be compression bleed. Not convinced it would give the 3D effect required either.
  4. Are they even balls? We know that looking at the inside of a sphere and the outside is very similar – indeed, everyone’s seen those masks at the fair which seem to follow you around. I suspect they probably are balls, though.

Personally, I’m going for tape over the balls, palmed over it somehow. The sides of the holder and the apparent grey between the balls. I doubt we’ll know for sure tho.

September 2, 2009

Patent infringement to be criminalised?

Filed under: freesoftware, misc — Alex @ 9:22 am

That’s apparently what a group of UK inventors are asking for. On the face of it, their arguments are pretty hard to dismiss: if you have a patent, it is extremely costly to “enforce” it and essentially means it’s only open to the big boys.

Sadly, the article doesn’t really talk much about patent quality or the goals of the patent system, and although it brings up the problem of accidental infringement / independent invention, it doesn’t really explore any possible solutions. Certainly, we do seem to have a system which requires a severe overhaul at the moment, though.

August 6, 2009

A couple of words on Clutter…

Filed under: bongo, fedora, freesoftware — Tags: , — Alex @ 8:28 am

For various reasons, I’ve been playing with Clutter over the past week. Rather than the 1.0 release that was announced a little while ago, I’m still on 0.8 – for a number of reasons, but mainly because 1.0 isn’t really available in any distro yet, and because the various language bindings are not yet up to date. LWN has a pretty decent write-up of the 1.0 release (subscriber only for the next week).

Let me talk about the negative things about Clutter first. Here are my main problems with it:

  • documentation for the bindings isn’t great. I haven’t looked at the C++ stuff, which I have a suspicion might be good, but information for pyclutter and Clutter# is extremely hard to find. For the project I’m doing, I’ve ended up writing it in C – I would have much preferred to use C#, Python or Perl in preference. Ho hum.
  • it’s not great on non-accelerated hardware. No, scratch that – it’s terrible. My machine has a decent Radeon, but because I’m using the free software driver I don’t get 3D. Clutter therefore sucks big-time. For the project I’m working on, this showed up quite early on: I couldn’t get animations to work. I would run the animation, but nothing would happen. Turned out that because I had something else going on, it wasn’t getting enough screen update time and was basically just freezing rather than dropping frame rate. I’ve changed things around to deal with this, but you absolutely need 3D acceleration for Clutter.

However, all that said, I’m extremely impressed by Clutter. The API is pretty simple: I haven’t coded using it before, and I think I learned it in about four hours. Obviously, you need to have some kind of understanding of what a scene graph is, and some of Clutter’s terminology is confusing – for me, Alpha was the worst as every time I saw it crop up I assumed it was something to do with opacity. A better name would have been ValueTimeRelationship or something – it’s just a function which computes a value between 0 and 1 given a time parameter t.

What I really like is ClutterScript – again, awful name, because it’s not a script in the programmatic sense – the ability to define parts of the user interface in an external JSON file, bring it in and play with it. It’s quite basic (there are lots of things that I’d like to do that you just can’t do, although some of it is hackable) but a big timesaver, especially in C.

It does seem to me that Clutter and Gtk need to get it together somehow. I suppose if they continue to work together relatively well it’s not too much of an issue, but I think the Clutter bits really ought to be built into the toolkit, or the other way around: there are still substantial gaps between the tool (like accessibility, as mentioned in the LWN article). But it has intrigued me about GNOME 3. I’ve seen gnome-shell and bits of Mutter, but I can see how this could be extremely compelling.

I just wonder how it’s going to work with my video card.

July 20, 2009

Compiling Bongo

Filed under: bongo — Tags: , — Alex @ 1:19 pm

Recently, we changed the build system of Bongo – we’ve moved away from autotools. This isn’t to say that autotools is necessarily that deficient, but the new CMake system we’re using is a lot more suitable for our kind of project. This has brought some immediate benefits – much simpler build system, much quicker compiles and installations (’make install’ in particular is now much faster), and a slightly simpler source tree. We can also now build binaries out-of-source, which is a huge boon.

However, we haven’t yet really documented properly all the different build options and how it works. So here it is – your primer to the new Bongo build system.

Once you’ve checked out Bongo, you’ll see a source tree which looks something like this:

$ ls
ABOUT-NLS  cmake           COPYING  import   INSTALL  po      TODO
AUTHORS    CMakeLists.txt  doxygen  include  man      README  zoneinfo
ChangeLog  config.h.cmake  HACKING  init     NEWS     src

The first thing we should do is create a new directory to do our build in: this stops all our build files from littering the source tree.

$ mkdir build
$ cd build/

Now we need to configure the build. There are two ways of doing this, and I use both! One way is good to start off, the other way is good for tweaking. You’ll see what I mean, but let’s start with the initial configuration. This is how I usually start:

$ cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/tmp/build -DBONGO_USER=alex -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DDEBUG=On

The first argument points to the Bongo source directory. Because I made a ‘build’ directory in the source tree and went into it, we’re just pointing at our parent directory. Then come some other options. Every option is prefixed with “-D”, and some of them are CMake options and others are Bongo options. In full:

  • CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX: where we want to install to. I use /tmp/build for testing, and /usr/local/bongo when I want to run it in production.
  • BONGO_USER: which user you want Bongo to run as. I use my user account for testing, “bongo” for production. You can also run as “root” if brave (not recommended!)
  • CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE: set this to Debug to generate information for gdb, otherwise leave this option out.
  • DEBUG: enable code paths which generate debugging messages. Both this option and the previous are for either advanced users or developers, really.

There are other options to the Bongo build, but these are the main ones. However, once you’ve configured Bongo, you may want to tweak something: perhaps turn on debugging, or change one of the file paths, or something different. The easiest way to do that is simply:

$ ccmake ./

Note that it’s “ccmake”, not “cmake”. This starts an interactive application where you can change each configuration item. You point it at the build directory, not the source, and it gives you all the various tweakable options. You’ll see that they are the same options that we pass to cmake – and indeed, you can pass them to cmake! There’s even an advanced mode with even more knobs (press ‘t’). When you’re done, press ‘c’ to configure the build and then ‘q’ to quit.

Once you have configured the build, you have access to the usual make commands:

$ make
$ make install
$ make clean

The first builds Bongo, the second installs it to your prefix, the last removes the built files.

July 15, 2009

Boycotts as consumer judo

Filed under: freesoftware — Alex @ 10:55 am

MJ Ray has some interesting thoughts on the recent discussion of BoycottNovell’s lash out at people criticising RMS’ GCDS keynote. For the sake of being open, my reaction to RMS’ speech (which I didn’t see) was that it sounded pretty distasteful: I don’t think there was any sexist intent, but the choice of words was pretty poor.

I think a key problem with BoycottNovell is that it left the lands of “corporate judo” a long time ago: motivating people to spend (or not) their money is one thing (to be applauded – it’s a basic tenet of capitalism, after all), and telling people why they shouldn’t buy a certain company’s products empowers them to make better choices. Rallying against individuals rather than the corporation, though, rather crosses that line.

Too much of what that site does is essentially dividing the free software world into “pro-Microsoft” and “anti-Microsoft”, and calling out the people unfortunate enough to make it into the first category as trolls, shills and/or liars: as an easy example, the guy who edits the ODF standard fell foul of not being anti-Microsoft enough, so they post speculation about his links. It seems even the person who started BN no longer wants to have anything to do with it (can’t directly link, but just search for “you guys are nuts”), having seen the latest hatchet-job on a member of the Ubuntu community.

You can do similar things by looking up their views on virtually any prominent GNOME developer, or people employed by Novell, too. Everything gets categorised, along with people outside the community like journalists, and the whole thing has a whiff of McCartyite witch-hunt about it. If it was calm, considered and reasoned, I doubt people would have a problem with it – but in practice it’s the literal mud-against-the-wall experiment. The “pasting logos/words/phrases on top of photos of people” has a real Perez Hilton-quality about it, and I don’t think that’s a compliment.

Realistically, BN is now such a large body of articles that most of the harmful ones are mired in the dross of repetitive repost, and do little direct damage themselves. However, I doubt that much consumer judo can be laid at their door, and I would bet a fair proportion of people who are in a position to purchase large amounts from Novell are never going to bother wading through that site. Whether or not you agree with their intentions, from the point of view of being effective it’s pretty clear they’ve lost.

July 10, 2009

Come on, Facebook – re-instate Tom Brake MP

Filed under: green, misc, proprietary — Alex @ 1:09 pm

Now, I’m not a huge one for using web applications as a means civic communication – I tend to believe that communicating with your representatives is much better done in a public space rather than a private one like Facebook. However, this story (on the face of it) is quite disturbing.

Transport for London recently announced the removal of the N213 night bus service between Croydon and Sutton. For many people, particularly young people going out of a night in Croydon, although this service wasn’t overcrowded it was important. A number of people on Facebook started a group to protest this, and took to the streets of Wallington last night.

Our local MP, Tom Brake, has been a Facebook user for years now and has tended to be pretty good about using it intelligently: joining good local causes, using it as another way of letting people know what he’s up to, and that kind of thing. So, he also joined the “Save the N213″ group and posted various letters that he’d sent to the Mayor / TFL.

Now, however, Facebook has suspended his account: it’s like he doesn’t exist on the site any more. No comments, no profile, unceremoniously de-listed from the various groups.

Fine upstanding local residents

Fine upstanding local residents

Why has this happened? Well, according to LibDem Voice, “his account was automatically suspended when their system detected an unusually large amount of traffic to and from his account“. That is to say, the protest against the N213 – which Tom was participating in, not really organising – was too successful, and Facebook assumed something bad was happening.

MPs need to be easily accessible by their constituents. On issues like public transport, children and young adults are particularly important because they don’t have the option driving. Representing them effectively means, realistically, being able to contact the local community via Facebook (and services like it) because that’s what these people use in the same way older generations write letters to the local newspaper.

It’s difficult to know what to do about this. It’s difficult to see how a kind of public service obligation could be imposed on something like Facebook; equally, setting up something genuinely public and civic-minded is unlikely to attract the demographic we’re talking about.

July 8, 2009

Google Chrome OS

Filed under: bongo, fedora, freesoftware — Alex @ 5:34 pm

As I drove to a business planning session (a.k.a. entrepreneur funday) this morning, I heard on the radio that Google had announced their intention to release a consumer operating system. This was interesting news, albeit too brief, and being at this event I wasn’t able to check the news until I got back this evening.

Pretty much the first thing I read was Andrew Savory’s take on this. Wow, how disappointing.

Not technologically, though. A browser on top of a Linux core – ok, that makes sense. It will obviously need a few other bits and pieces too, but intrinsically we’re not a million miles away from where Pyro was going (as Alex Graveley noted). However, the community side of it is deeply, deeply disappointing. But, considering Android, not entirely surprising.

Although the announcement ends “we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision” I somehow doubt that: this is another example of FLYOSS – Fly-tipped Open Source Software. All the vision I’m seeing here is the old joke about Messers. Bodjit & Scarper dancing in my head.

There is a lot of talk about the security architecture about this, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the hardest problem to solve when you’ve junked virtually every app bar the browser, and there is a lot of talk about how great this will be for developers. But will the apps be as compelling as those created using Mozilla Prism or Adobe Air? Or will Google re-invent that wheel too, with their own desktop toolkit? Will Chrome OS need a Google account to work?

I think Google are about three years late with this already, anyway – the Netbook revolution has pretty much come and gone, and people are just installing Windows on them. It’s ridiculous, but people don’t much care about the size/speed of them, and they’re getting them basically for free with broadband contracts. By Q3 2010 that boat will have not only sailed but be half-way around the globe on its world cruise.

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