Alex Hudson

Mike McGrath asks a pertinent question: why didn’t you vote? Although I did actually take the time to vote, I can totally understand why someone wouldn’t.

For one thing, as others have said, a lot of the candidates were quite similar: they said many similar things, and I don’t doubt any of them could do the job competently.

Personally, I tried to vote on issues where possible. I voted for people who had a clear view of what “Fedora” means to them, and sided with those who had a specific vision (that is to say, not those who take a pluralistic all-things-to-all-men approach). I tried to vote for bettter communication (though most candidates were pro- that), and for those who had a track record of commitment: these various “posts” don’t really have much in terms of power, so I mostly am interested in a. what the person would bring in terms of time and resources, and b. the attitude of the person.

Read More

I did promise Lance that I would blog more on Bongo, and I’m going to try to stick to a post a week at least – however, this first one will only tangentially be about Bongo.

Since the project was initially released, the autotools build system was what you needed to create Bongo. There are a variety of benefits to using autotools, and it’s an extremely well-tested and mature system. However, it’s also relatively difficult to understand and not particularly quick. Over time we accreted more and more things into our build which no-one understood fully and that would occasionally blow up in our face.

Read More

apComms is an all-party group interested in various technological issues, and they’ve just announced that they’re starting an enquiry effectively into ‘net neutrality. I would link to something useful if I could, but surprisingly(?) their website is well out of date. Paraphrasing the specific questions they’re asking, though:

1. When should ISPs be filtering/blocking traffic?
2. Should Govt. intervene over Phorm-like services?
3. Do we need new initiatives to protect privacy online?
4. Is the global approach to kiddie porn working?
5. Who should pay for traffic, and should Net Neutrality be enshrined in law?

If you want to respond, you need to write not more than four pages and submit it via email to the admin user at the domain apcomms.org.uk – you have until the 22nd May 2009. I’d be interested in people blogging on this topic, particularly their responses.

Read More

So, the news is out that Sun are being bought by Oracle. Personally, I didn’t see that coming – didn’t see Oracle wanting to get into the hardware business, but maybe they will literally just chop those bits out and sell them off. Or maybe they do want to get into hardware.

This has some interesting implications for free software projects, though:

1. Java. Clearly Oracle are huge fans of Java and will want to continue the development. Will it stay entirely free software? I would imagine so – I don’t see what there is to gain by closing it up again. They pretty much have control of the development process thanks to Sun’s nature, and it’s not really like anyone is going to be forking it at this point. Probably not much danger here.
2. Solaris. Oracle’s DB software runs best on this platform, so again it’s likely to be continued – at least, in the short term. Longer term, I don’t see Oracle wanting to commit development resources to both Solaris and Linux, and this could be the key time to start to merge the two. Not necessarily great news for Solaris fans.
3. OpenOffice.org. Erk. Traditionally, Oracle have never been slow to stick it to Microsoft, so at first glance you could see this going great guns under Oracle as Larry tries to sink another Bill battleship. However, it doesn’t really look to me like this would fit terribly well into the Oracle product line-up, and Oracle have traditionally been a bit luke-warm about OOo – for example, their stuff doesn’t really integrate with it at all, whereas it does with Office, understandably. Indeed, search their blogs for talk of OOo and you find basically nothing – and Oracle aren’t even involved in the OASIS technical committee for ODF, which seems to me to betray a complete lack of interest in this area. OOo is potentially in trouble with this news.
4. VirtualBox. Not sure much will happen with this; I imagine it would continue but I don’t see Oracle being particularly interested in driving it hard. Probably it would merge with Oracle VM, although the latter is Xen-based. Both could continue with the idea of aligning them in the future, which would probably happen naturally.
5. MySQL. Erk again. Oracle already own the developers of InnoDB, and in fact the BDB developers too, but don’t expect to see MySQL being in a position to compete with Oracle’s database any time soon now. However, much of the interesting MySQL development now appears to be taking place in the community, so maybe this doesn’t make much difference.

Compared to IBM, on the face of it Oracle doesn’t offer a substantively different story with regards free software. They contribute when and where it makes sense for them, and not in ways which could possibly compete with their software. However, their software is also essentially all extremely high-end enterprise process stuff, which is generally relatively bespoke and requires armies of trained monkeys consultants to install. In that scenario, free software offers a much lower threat and doesn’t even come close to touching many of their markets – so it can perhaps feel a little more relaxed about its contributions. The Oracle OSS page is relatively happy reading,

Read More

So, probably as I was posting my little blog piece yesterday on IBM taking over Sun, it seems that the IBM and Sun deal was falling apart – seemingly a quabble over the pricing, but I suspect a little more must have been to it than that.

Again, I’m reminded somewhat of Microsoft – when Yahoo! refused their take-over offer, which at $31 represented an extremely generous premium over their then ticker-price of about 62%, with a total deal worth $44.6 billions. Such a rich deal that even Microsoft would have been forced into debt (though doubtless they’re thanking themselves for walking away now – the timing would have been awful). When we look today, it’s around $13 and has been as low as $9. Shareholders were rightly steaming.

Read More

If we’re to believe what we’re told in the press, sometime tomorrow – or perhaps later in the week – IBM and Sun will announce some kind of merger. I’m not sure anyone is under any illusion that this would effectively mean the end of Sun in time, being absorbed into IBM, although there is a lot of speculation over what would happen to various projects. Some, like NetBeans, seem pretty certainly done for, and the amount of life left in the SPARC architecture post-merger seems limited.

Read More

When Fedora 10 was released, one of the first things I did was enable nouveau as my graphics driver – nv was horribly slow on my Dell, and I didn’t want the pain of the proprietary drivers. Needless to say, it didn’t immediately work: it didn’t want to play with my 1920×1050 panel and I got big black bars on either side of the screen. It took someone on #nouveau all of about five minutes to give me a patch to fix the problem, and a hop-skip-jump later I’d recompiled the driver and the display was great.

Read More

This weekend saw the arrival of a new computer – woo! – a long-needed desktop upgrade which brought me the usual technological wtfs (“since when did CPUs come without pins?!” etc.). As part of this, I’ve been trying to upgrade my Fedora 11 Alpha to a more current rawhide.

Clearly I missed something, because even after a number of attempts in different ways I failed. rpm complaining about md5 mismatches or something, for example, which I kind of knew might be an issue from following devel but didn’t really anticipate. The worst of my attempts ended badly with rpm attempting to upgrade glibc, the pre-script failing (I think with some python error) and rpm bailing, leaving me with a completely horked system.

Read More

When the new “MailCo” (as it was at the time) was announced, the first thing they did was poll people on what changes they should be looking to make to Thunderbird as kick-ass as possible – you can see from the initial launch blog post that integrated calendaring was item #1 on a list of new features.

Now, only one year on, the word is that calendaring won’t be integrated or bundled at all – in fact, it gets worse, because the calendar developers have also announced that a number of full-time developers have been lost. Doesn’t say why, but I’m assuming you can blame the Global Downturn™.

Read More

Over the past couple of days I got added to the packagers group in FAS and uploaded my first approved RPM – it has been a very interesting process, particularly going through the various policy pages on the wiki (which, while informative, are pretty badly laid out in my opinion – but that’s something I can help fix). Trying cvs again for the first time in years has been an odd experience.

Read More