Open Source to Go!

"iPhone SpyPhone?"—The Music Video!

2011-04-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

I constructed a somewhat modified version of Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker tool, and used it to produce this video. I've visualized ten months' worth of location data from my iPhone 4's consolidated.db, as it was added to the database in this, and while it could be said to be "tracking me" in a very general way (like at a city level), it's far from "tracking my every move", in either time or space.

(Sigh. The iframe for the embedded YouTube video doesn't appear on Planet GNOME, at least not for me in Chromium. Here is a direct link to the video on YouTube.)

What do you think?

I've got more information on how I produced this on my main blog, including links to

a pre-built version of the modified iPhoneTracker I used
the source code changes I made
a higher-resolution version of the video which you can download (Quicktime format)
and, as a bonus, a downloadable archive of The Wired CD, Creative Commons-licensed music from artists like David Byrne (whose "My Fair Lady" was used as the soundtrack for this).

Enjoy!

(If you liked this, consider voting it up as a submission on Slashdot, please!)

iPhones and Location-Gathering: NO CALL FOR PANIC.

2011-04-21T08:56:00.001-07:00

You've undoubtedly been reading a lot of histrionics about the fact that there's a file on your iPhone (if you have one) which contains a database of time-stamped longitude and latitude coordinates, with attendant speculation that the iPhone is "tracking your every move". It's not.

See my posting on my main blog to get all the details on what it is doing.

What Does a Dead Parrot Have to Do With Software Development?

2011-04-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

Read my new article, "What Monty Python Taught Me About the Software Industry", on Software Quality Connection to find out...

What Are Your "Technological Holy Grails"?

2011-04-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

Harry McCracken posted an interesting article on his "Four Technological Holy Grails". I came up with some of my own. What are yours?

Removing/Configuring Facebook Apps: Do You Know How?

2011-04-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

I know a number of folks in the community are Facebook users—despite the dire warnings of some about "CIA plots" and the like—but with the dramatic increases in "rogue" apps there and "like-jackings" and such, I'm not sure everyone knows how to remove an application you don't want, or to configure one to limit the information it can access (when it's possible to do so).

Facebook seems to want to make this as difficult as possible, by hiding the settings in not-easy-to-locate places, by moving things around, etc. Accordingly, I wrote up a quick guide, with screen shots, over on my other blog, for those who are interested...

Good News for Facebook-Haters!

2011-04-10T10:11:00.001-07:00

The growth of like-jacking, spamware and malware links, and the like on Fa(r)cebook continues unabated. Before long it'll be like this:

For more on this, and what to do about it if you've gotten unfortunately caught by something like this—and it's getting harder and harder to tell, in some cases—see here...

This Is Not An Energy Converter

2011-01-21T09:29:00.000-08:00

This makes hot, crispy bread. (Image, courtesy of Zalgon.)

Lurking on the Gnome marketing list, and seeing some of the silliness going on, I'm reminded of one of the things which people regularly seem to misapprehend about what they're doing. Maybe they're unclear on their goals.

I'd thought marketing was about "getting new people to at least try out what you're offering", but a lot of what I see still seems to be more about "getting the people already using what you're offering to feel validated about the choice they've made" ("Made of inspiration, made of easy"? Really?)

That, and the rant I witnessed this morning, about how the "i" in everything made by Apple stood for "idiot"—under completely mistaken circumstances, as it happened—encouraged me to write a posting about what Apple is really selling, and why they sell a bunch of it.

Got a "To Do" List? Actually Get Anything Done?

2011-01-20T18:13:00.000-08:00

It's not unusual to spend a lot of time putting together a "To Do" list, and then going on to ignore it until it gets stale. Turns out that making a "To Do" list, in an of itself, doesn't actually help you in getting anything done, for several reasons.

I've put together the first of a series of articles on why the problem with getting your "To Do" list cleared may be your "To Do" list. See more here.

Lunatic Stalker Update

2011-01-14T07:37:00.000-08:00

The lunatic stalker who's been harassing me for several years is still at it, now impersonating various people on Facebook. He started out impersonating me, but having had that ID removed, he's now—as of this morning—impersonating Richard Stallman. The ID of the profile—which is blocked from me, so I can neither view nor report it—is

I can't view it, but I believe this is "Richard Stallman's" profile:

http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001954412755

This is Perplexing

2010-11-04T21:50:00.000-07:00

I've gotten some interesting commentary on my last posting with regard to the LVC situation. Much of it has devolved into excruciatingly minute examinations of under exactly which circumstances one should be willing to compromise one's Steadfast Principles and precisely how much, purely in order to get more free software into more people's hands.

The perplexing part is that I don't really recall any thin-end-of-the-wedge hand-wringing over the lost-standing and only recently-resolved Sun RPC situation, where people found no day-to-day problem in a GPL violation which affected pretty much every Linux-based system on the planet for years.

I frankly don't get it. (As of a moment ago, VLC is still up on the iTune App Store...)

Gun. Foot. Bang.

2010-11-02T14:06:00.001-07:00

Once again, the Free Software Foundation trots out its most strained and sketchiest reasoning to justify painting Apple as a villain and trying to keep GPL-licensed software out of the App Store and off iOS devices.

This time, it's taking a much bigger risk: in doing so, it's placing the VLC project into the middle of the conflict, and taking sides—apparently—with one developer against many others.

More here.

Better Living Through Stoicism!

2010-10-31T08:44:00.000-07:00

My cat went missing yesterday! What does this have to do with ancient Greek philosophy? I've written this blog posting to explain.

RIP LimeWire. Should We Care?

2010-10-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

In stark contrast to the inability of some folks to conduct an actual discussion, I've always gotten along well with Tim (aka "Goblin"), who blogs on free software and related matters over on OpenBytes.

He recently posted on the LimeWire shutdown, and the attempt to punish the RIAA for it by conducting a DDoS attack against their site, something we agree is hugely counterproductive behavior.

My response to one of Tim's comments there turned into a blog posting in its own right, on what the issues are here and how the community should be viewing this.

This Week's "Linux on the Desktop" Debate

2010-10-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

(image courtesy Sarah Caulfield)

The subject of whether there's any future (or present, for that matter) in the notion of "Linux on the desktop" as something that "regular end-users" might want to take up has been discussed in a variety of places this past week. I put my two cents in over on my other blog (and this is "GNOME-related", so I don't want any whining).

The situation, as I see it, is that, even if Linux isn't "dead on the desktop", if it were, it would scarcely make a ripple on the awareness of most users of personal computers.

The reasons why things got to this point, and why we can expect the same in the mobile space—more Android and webOS and the like on phones and tablets and such, but scarcely any user-visible "community developed-and-maintained" open source—in the foreseeable future are really pretty basic as I see it.

Most of this is not appreciably different to things I've said at "GNOME Mobile" meetings and on the gnome-marketing list. If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you always got.

Why Would Someone Try to Bribe Me to Bury This Story?

2010-10-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

I've never had anyone attempt to buy me off before, that's a first. Evidently, I turned over a rock related to some tax fraud scandal on freenode which has been covered up for about five years.

Anyone know any details regarding this? Feel free to contact me privately if you prefer.

No, Apple Is Not Trying to Patent LLVM. That's a Lie.

2010-10-09T11:32:00.000-07:00

There's been some nonsense being floated around on identi.ca (as well as less savory locales) the past week, to the effect that "Apple has patented LLVM". It turns out to be based, as near as I can tell, on someone's having done a simple string search through Apple's patents for the string LLVM, finding two instances, assuming the worst, and pouring out their darkest, most ignorant, most ill-informed fears onto the "End Software Patents" site, which Ciaran Riordan runs, without ever actually having read the patents (actually one patent, one application) that had gotten them so upset.

This was more or less the state in which I found the Apple page, a couple of days ago, over there. Ciaran and I have been discussing the matter for the past couple of days, pretty constructively for the most part, while I corrected the page in various ways. It's in a state at this point where we can both tolerate it, at least.

If anyone tries to tell you that "Apple has patented LLVM", it's a load of FUD and nonsense. All the details are over here. I've summarized the five biggest arguments the opponents of this situation—which turns out to involve a single patent application which actually has nothing to do with LLVM per se—have brought forward as to why this particular patent application is so problematical in their view here.

I Can't Tell Whether I'm "Good" or "Evil" Any More.

2010-10-07T15:38:00.000-07:00

My filters picked up this story (in multiple instances) today: Microsoft has agreed to license a portfolio of some 70-odd smart phone-related patents held mutually by my ex-employer ACCESS and Acacia.

I actually worked as ACCESS' patent portfolio strategist on this last year, helping to assemble, organize and relate the patents in question (out of possible hundreds), reporting to the then-General Counsel (who's now indulging himself making fine Belgian chocolate, something he tells me he's enjoying a lot more than lawyering).

So, I guess that makes me an official "patent troll". However, I'm a patent troll that got money out of Microsoft. I suppose Boycott Boy and his pals are liable to burn out a few circuits trying to get their (pin)heads around that!

Are You Using the Facebook App on Your Smart Phone?

2010-10-06T20:25:00.000-07:00

If so, you really need to take a look at the article I've posted on my other blog. Like now.

Survey Update

2010-06-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

So far, I've gotten responses from 35 GNOME members, out of 192 respondents, total.

Of those GNOME members

6 (17.6%) are members of the FSF
21 (60%) of these respondents say that they routinely use the term "Linux" when referring to "an operating system based on a Linux kernel, etc."; 8 (22.9%) use "GNU/Linux", and 6 (17.1%) use some other term (including the interesting alternative of "Leftux"in one instance—I guess this respondent will be easy to spot should he-or-she be attending GUADEC)
When limited to the two alternatives, 25 (71.4%) chose "Linux" and 10 (28.6%) chose "GNU/Linux".

When given four potential focuses to prioritize for the Board, GNOME members ranked the alternatives as follows:

Focus	Most Important	More Important	Less Important	Least Important	Average Score
Overseeing the GNOME 3 road map	10 (30.3%)	13 (39.4%)	8 (24.2%)	2 (8.1%)	2.94
Building better bridges to corporate users of GNOME technologies	8 (25.8%)	12 (38.7%)	7 (22.6%)	4 (12.9%)	2.77
Providing technical oversight and direction	7 (24.1%)	7 (24.1%)	10 (34.5%)	5 (17.2%)	2.55
Educating users about the FSF's views on software freedom	6 (17.6%)	3 (8.8%)	7 (20.6%)	18 (52.9%)	1.91

Obviously, the more Foundation members who participate, the more authoritative the survey will be: the current number of respondents represents perhaps 1 in 10 Foundation members. If you haven't participated yet, please take a moment to do so.

Since I'm mainly interested in this issue as it affects the foundation-list and Board activities, I'm not reporting the overall totals at this point, but will do so once I've gotten what seem to be a large enough number of responses to be indicative of something.

Let's please remember that this was raised as an specific issue to prospective Board candidates by Mr. Stallman, a Foundation member, prior to the election. Head-shaking and moans of "Not again!" seem entirely inappropriate, unless our method of dealing with divisive issues is pretending that they simply don't exist....

The "Issue" That Would Not Die: Flog a Dead Horse for Richard

2010-06-18T21:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's back. On the foundation-list, in spite of a direct request from the moderator that it be dropped. You know it! You love it! It's "GNU"/Linux! (And no, I didn't start it.)

However, this seems like an excellent opportunity to gauge the feelings of the GNOME community around this, and I've accordingly constructed a (in my belief) quite non-leading survey in order to see what people thought.

If anyone feels I'm engaging in "push-polling" here, please let me know, and I'll be happy to make any reasonable changes. I'd like to see this so-called "issue" settled once and for all, if only so that it doesn't get made into a hobbyhorse in future Board elections.

ALERT: "Like-jacking" Exploits on Facebook

2010-06-06T13:51:00.000-07:00

I wanted to alert folks that, if you are on Facebook, there's currently a potential issue where "like" can be "clickjacked". It's a browser-based exploit using an "invisible iFrame", I've posted a couple of things about it on my other blog if you want more details.

Long story short: be very careful what you "like" on Facebook right now.

Some Odd Ideas About How GPL Licensing Works

2010-06-03T15:06:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of discussion of the FSF enforcement action here, on Twitter and identi.ca and elsewhere. It's been suggested to me that, since the "GPL is a 'distribution license'" and since Apple "distributed" copies of GNUgo, Apple must therefore "comply" with the GPL. I'm afraid this is sheer fantasy. Here's my reasoning:

1. Yes, the GPL is, indeed, a "distribution" license, i.e. certain obligations in the license are "triggered" by the act of "distributing" a "binary".

2. Distributing a binary and failing to meet those obligations, indeed, constitutes an infringement of the author's copyright on the code: the copyright grant in the GPL is contingent on meeting the GPL's obligations.

3. A "distributor" of a GPL-licensed binary thus has two options: meet the obligations, or be in infringement. "Meeting the obligations" and "complying with the GPL" are non-contractual choices that this "distributor" gets to make, of his own free will. He can, alternatively, choose to infringe, again of his own free will.

4. Apple cannot be held to be in infringement, thanks to the "safe harbor" provided by the DMCA, so long as they meet the obligations of that act, as indeed they have done in the past, and presumably continue to do.

5. Ergo, whether the FSF imagines that Apple is a "distributor" of GPL-licensed "binaries" means nothing whatsoever: the DMCA says they can't be held liable for infringement as long as they observe the requirements of the Act. The most that the FSF can legitimately say is that Robota Softwarehouse evidently placed what seems to be an infringing copy of the GNUgo program in Apple's store.

6. The remedy for such an infringement would have been for the FSF to provide Apple with a DMCA infringement notification, to which Applewould have responded by removing the application, presuming that Robota Softwarehouse didn't provide a DMCA counter-notification stating that they believe the FSF is mistaken and that they're willing to settle the matter in court.

7. If Robota did file a counter-notification, the FSF would have no recourse but to sue Robota Softwarehouse if they wished to get the situation redressed. They couldn't sue Apple, even though the program was still up on the App Store, still getting "distributed", still merrily infringing the GPL: the DMCA says they couldn't. And they couldn 't even force Apple to take it down, not without a court order coming out of their winning their case against Robota.

At no point in any of this does the GPL license on the code actually matter in the slightest to Apple.

That's my understanding of things. Does that gibe with other people's?

Further Issues With the GPL and "App Stores": An In-the-Wild Example

2010-06-02T11:56:00.000-07:00

Even though the issue of the provision of source code isn't (apparently) an actual issue in the specifics of the FSF's enforcement action against Apple, there are some interesting points which it does raise, and I've been able to find a concrete example of what I'm talking about here.

The "FileHippo" site hosts a variety of "freeware" for download. (I haven't used this site, and can't speak to the safety of their downloads, but it gives a useful example.) I can, for example, download the (GPL-licensed) Handbrake program for Windows from here.

Now, while it includes a copy of the GPL in the COPYING file, etc., the installer does not contain sources for Handbrake. I can get those sources from the developer at handbrake.fr, but that's irrelevant: the FSF's interpretation of "distribution", as we've seen, includes anyone through whose hands a binary passes.

Now, if I go to FileHippo, who "distributed" the copy of Handbrake to me and demand the sources, as is my right, they can't help me: they don't have them, and they don't especially want to have them, I'd think. From their point of view, it's the developer's responsibility to make them available, if that's what the developer chooses, or is obligated, to do.

By simply having had a copy of Handbrake uploaded, and making it available to the general public, it would seem that the site is in (completely inadvertent, and probably unbeknownst-to-them) technical violation of the GPL. In fact, one could put such a site (or someone's web site, if they had an ftp client which allowed uploading) in technical violation, it seems, by placing a GPL-licensed binary there but not the corresponding sources and waiting for someone to download it.

Sites like download.cnet.com circumvent this issue by not hosting the downloads themselves, but by directing the user to the developer's site.

Here's an interesting question to ask: the Apple iTunes App Store and the Android Market don't really require or support the uploading of source code as part of placing a program for sale in their respective stores. They don't support the downloading of source associated with an application which someone purchases.

So, if someone demands sources from them for a GPL-licensed program, having received a binary through the store, what are they to do? They can't provide what they don't have, and I'm sure they're not looking to become a repository for GNU code on the FSF's behalf because some third-party decided to use the GNU code in their own app.

Again, whether the source code is or isn't available from the developer makes no difference. In the FSF's view, since the store is where you got the binary from, the store is where you must be able to get the corresponding sources from.

It seems the app stores are left with two choices: change their procedures entirely around to support a very small number of (probably unprofitable) applications in the way the FSF insists, or simply disallow GPL-licensed applications from the stores entirely.

I predict they'll do the latter.

An Open Letter to Brett Smith

2010-06-01T19:23:00.001-07:00

I've sent the following email to Brett Smith, the FSF's Licensing Compliance Engineer, with some questions I have about the recent FSF enforcement action against the Apple iTunes App Store

Dear Brett:

I've been analyzing the recent enforcement action by the FSF against the Apple iTunes Store, and wondering about the implications for other "app stores" which I seem to be finding in the reasoning you describe in your blog postings.

1) You specifically call out point (i) of Apple's App Store Usage Rules, which specify that you must accept the prevailing third-party license (in the case of GNUgo, the GPL) as well as the App Store's own Terms of Use.

Is it simply the requirement to accept terms above and beyond those in the GPL which, in and of itself, constitutes a violation? Would the required pre-acceptance of _any_ terms or conditions constitute a violation?

2) In examining the Terms of Service for Google's Android Market, I find some interesting issues in there. §2.4 specifies that

"From time to time, Google may discover a Product on the Market that violates the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or other legal agreements, laws, regulations or policies. You agree that in such an instance Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your Device at its sole discretion."

As we have seen today, Google removed some dozen or more trademark-infringing "Tetris" applications from their Android Market, and also from the phones of the users who purchased such applications. This is completely in accordance with the terms of service one is obligated to accept as a pre-condition of obtaining application from the Android Market.

I believe that—in spite of the language in §4.2, which specifies that, in the case of a "conflict" with a third-party license, the third-party license terms would take precedence—Google would be obliged to forcibly and unilaterally remove even GPL-licensed applications under a variety of circumstances.

A hypothetical example:

I write an Android application which is an MP3 and MP4 player. For whatever reason, rather than using the codecs built into Android, I use "free" (unlicensed) MP3 and MP4 codecs, which happen to be GPL-licensed. I place the app in the Android store, under a GPL license.

You are a US citizen, and get a copy from the Android store. The legitimate holders of the MP3 and MP4 patents sue me, and advise Google that they're doing so, as the app clearly infringes their patents.

I do not believe that §4.2 of the Google Android Market agreement is possibly going to trump §2.4, in a case like this.

In other words, the fact that the program is licensed under the GPL would not, I believe, keep Google from yanking it off your Android phone, and the phone of anyone else who had obtained a copy. I doubt Google is going to be willing to foot the damages associated with being a party to a clear case of willful patent infringement to maintain the freedom of the General Public License. This would constitute a pretty clear insistence that users abrogate their right to "Freedom Zero", and it's difficult for me to understand how such a situation would not constitute a violation of the GPL.

Do you agree with this analysis, and with the conclusion that the Android Market is equally in violation to the extent that it hosts GPL-licensed applications?

3) Very similar problematical language to that found in Apple's and Google's various Terms of Service can also be found in the terms and conditions associated with the Microsoft "Windows Marketplace for Mobile". On the assumption that my general reasoning here is correct, is it reasonable to expect that the FSF will next be conducting enforcement actions against Google and Microsoft?

4) Why did the FSF not apparently undertake a similar enforcement action against the developer of GNUgo, Robota Softwarehouse, who marketed the program for some time, evidently, while having only a comment on their site claiming that source would be available "next week"?

Thanks very much for any help you can provide in answering these questions.

Sincerely,

David "Lefty"Schlesinger

UPDATE: I had gotten a report that Tetris apps were removed from Android phones as well as from the market before I wrote this, and have since received a conflicting report in the comments. In any case, I stand by my reasoning around the hypothetical example: that case would certainly be one in which Google would find itself obliged to unilaterally remove a GPL-licensed app from a third-party user's phone.

Criminal Harassment by "Freedom Lovers"

2010-02-09T12:04:00.000-08:00

It's one thing for the denizens of "freedom" to harass me by attempting to intimidate my by interfering with my employment, but we're over the line into new territory now. Having failed to achieve their ends by attacking me directly, Michael Rudra Nath (aka Jason Christopher Hughes) and Brandon Lozza are now fostering the cause of "freedom" by harassing and attempting to interfere with the employment of completely uninvolved members of my family.

This has become a matter of criminal harassment, and is now being handled by the appropriate authorities here in California.

[Links were broken, are fixed...]

Are You?

2010-01-22T11:03:00.001-08:00

Browser Discipline

2010-01-16T11:59:00.000-08:00

I love tabbed browsing, but I found that I usually wound up, after a number of hours, with a bazillion tabs, lots of duplicates, and I'd occasionally "lose" a tab I was trying to do something with after having opened up another tab to go hunt down some piece of information that I needed to do whatever in the first tab.

Firefox and Chrome can both get weird when you open up too many tabs in too many windows, occasionally disastrously so. I commented on this, on someone suggested that it "sounded like a workflow problem", and on consideration, I decided that was probably so.

I finally solved the problem by instituting a browser discipline: I have six browser windows, no more, no less, except perhaps for a few minutes at a time:

Personal Stuff: my Gmail, the sites I use to study Japanese, etc.
Work Stuff: like it says
Programming, Web design and site admin: I throw this stuff all in one place. It ranges from control and admin panels for various sites to my web analytics stuff
Blogs and blogging: Blogs I write and ones I read
Social media: Twitter, identi.ca, YouTube, Facebook (which used to be on my "Personal Stuff" page, there's a reason for that which may become clearer in time), and articles and postings related to social media...
Interesting Stuff: any miscellaneous things I turn up and want to remember to look at, but can't easily categorize otherwise. Google News, TechMeme, and some other similar sites are usually on here, as is miscellaneous reference stuff...

The number of tabs I have in these windows varies, from a minimum of six, usually, to twenty or more, depending on what's going on.

This has made life a lot easier, and saved a bunch of wasted time and frustration. I don't know whether anyone else rins into stuff like this, but if you do, give it a shot, and let me know how it works out for you...

Shane Fagan Corrects Misapprehensions About GNOME 3

2010-01-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

Shane Fagan has a good post on "debunking GNOME 3 myths", which unfortunately is syndicated to Planet Ubuntu, but not Planet GNOME. You should read it if you have an interest in the plans for GNOME 3.

A New Survey!

2010-01-13T08:02:00.001-08:00

I'm conducting a new survey, this time on attitudes around FLOSS and proprietary software. I expect people who felt the previous survey to be less than entirely even-handed will find this one somewhat more to their liking. Please pass around the link to the survey below as widely as you can: we got over 1500 respondents to the last survey, which was terrific!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/F8DG25Q

Thanks!

Free as in "Free of any factual value whatsoever"

2010-01-11T14:52:00.000-08:00

Once again, my management has received a lovely letter from a "freedom-lover", making a variety of exciting claims, such as the following:

Your employee David N. Schlesinger has in public admitted to publishing stolen pornographic photographs. This behavior of his looks very bad indeed for both ACCESS, Inc. and the Gnome Advisory Board which ACCESS pays $10,000 per year to keep Schlesinger sitting on.

Fun stuff. I've also had fraudulent DMCA claims and ICANN notifications from the very same "freedom-lover" to deal with this morning. It's terrific the way that folks who like to tell you how they're are all about "freedom" find means to justify their apparent ends.

In more immediately relevant news, the suggestions that using the VirtualServer directives in Apache's httpd.conf was a better way to go turned out to be true. It also turns out that avahi won't do DNS on a subdomain without heroic measures.

Also, the "First ELSE" phone, which is based on the ACCESS Linux Platform, and incorporates an extremely cool UI based on clutter and other GNOME goodness, is getting a lot of positive notice based on its appearance at CES. Congratulations to the Moblin team for a good showing at CES as well!

(Also, Blogger is a idiot. If you add an "<" in WYSIWYG mode, it thinks you're entering a tag. And then is adds a "/VirtualServer" closing "tag". If you type "<" in HTML mode, it does the same! You have to type "<" in WYSIWYG mode for it to work. Grumble, grumble.)

mod_rewrite Problem Apparently Solved!

2010-01-10T13:34:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a pointer from Niko Sams, I seem to have gotten my configuration issues with Apache and mod_rewrite sorted out. What finally worked in the .htaccess file was the following:

RewriteCond %{http_host} ^(.*)\.karasu\.local
RewriteCond %{request_uri} !^/+(karasu\.local)/?
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://karasu.local/%1/$1 [L]

Thanks So, now "http://karasu.local" serves me /var/www/index.html and "http://live.karasu.local" serves me /var/www/live/index.html. Cool.

Okay, off to try to debug storytlr's Twitter notifications!

Any .htaccess/mod_rewrite Pros Out There?

2010-01-09T07:59:00.000-08:00

I'm playing around with setting up a storytlr test server (Linux Mint "Helena", effectively Jaunty, with the usual LAMP stuff and avahi for ZEROCONF mDNS service) for debugging purposes here—posting notifications to Twitter is broken, broken, broken—and I wanted to put the installation in a sub-domain mapped to a sub-directory, e.g. http://live.karasu.local --> /var/www/live/. I'm running into issues trying to get mod_rewrite to do its magic.

You'd think there would be good examples of the right combination of RewriteCond's and RewriteRule's to accomplish this, and there may well be, but I'm mostly turning up more evidence that I'm not the only one who's had a lot of trouble with this, as well as a few things that seem, at first glance, plausible, but which fail disastrously in practice.

Anyone got a good canned solution for this? storytlr gets very unhappy if it doesn't believe it's in a top-level directory, and I'll just install it there if I don't come up with a better solution, but it's aggravating me that an (apparently) simple problem is so difficult to solve.

Oh, the following is for He-Knows-Who, He-Knows-Why:

Here's a Nice Christmas Present...

2010-01-05T12:02:00.000-08:00

eschnou and alrdw in Belgium, the folks at storytlr.com, which was "not a startup, just a fun project" who had been offering their interesting social media aggregator as a service, decided to fold up their tents at the end of 2009, and as a sort of parting gift, released their codebase under the Apache license, as they had planned to from the outset.

storytlr, written in Javascript and PHP, was inspired by Loïc Lemeur's call for a "centralized me", and allows the aggregation and streaming of content from Delicious, Digg, Disqus, Flickr, Google Reader, Identi.ca/Laconi.ca, Last.fm, Picasa, Qik, Joe Random RSS Feed, Seesmic, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, TwitPic, Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube favorites.

Entries can be "mashed up" into stories, as well, and it seems easily customizable in a variety of directions.

Installation is pretty straightforward, although it does not seem at all to want to live anywhere other than a root directory: I need to fiddle around with the rewrite rules to get it to live in a synthetic subdomain. You'll need PHP5, plus mcrypt and curl. Handy tip: set "debug" to 1 in the config.ini file when you start it up, or you'll likely be looking at a blank page and scratching your head for a little while.

The initial drop of the sources is at http://storytlr.googlecode.com/, and it's well worth taking a look at if you're interested in this sort of thing...

Rules for Planet GNOME?

2009-12-13T11:48:00.000-08:00

Recently, Richard Stallman has suggested on the foundation-list that Planet GNOME is not effectively representing the free software movement, and that rules should be developed to bar "favorable mention" of proprietary software.

I've put together a small survey on SurveyMonkey in which I hope to get as many people to participate as possible. Mr. Stallman has raised "supporting free software" as being a critical obligation of the Planet, since GNOME is part of the GNU Project; Philip van Hoof, among others, has suggested that perhaps we need to re-examine that relationship.

The thread on the foundation-list can be found archived here., in the thread, "Code of Conduct and Foundation membership". Mr. Stallman's contributions begin here.

The survey can be found here.

The Communication-Driven Economy

2009-10-18T11:58:00.001-07:00

(This posting originally appeared on the LiMo Foundation blog...)

I recently read an extremely interesting special section in The Economist, concerned in particular with how mobile communications, and "mobile finance", was positively affecting emerging economies. One figure that stuck with me was that adding ten cell phones into a population of 100 people had the net effect of raising the country's GDP by 0.8%; that's a simply staggering figure relative to the investment involved. Particularly in countries that have been historically lacking in infrastructure, mobile communications can be paradigm-changing: it allows instant communication with places and people that might have been days off, or otherwise inaccessible. By providing a flow of information of all kinds, where none existed before—especially over long distances, mobile communications make new markets and new products possible in ways that would have been out of reach otherwise.

Today, more people access the Internet, globally, from cell phones than from traditional computers. Many people have never accessed the Internet any other way. This is a continuation of the major "paradigm shift" which began in 1995, when "the Worldwide Web" moved from being a province belonging solely to the technically adept to something which was accessible and usable by anyone at all—with the right equipment, anyway. The "right equipment" was, of course, hideously expensive in global terms: a computer costs at least a couple of thousand dollars.

Today, we see cell phones that are, in terms of power and performance, the full equivalent of "desktops" or "laptops" of only a few years ago, at a fraction of the cost. And the cost only keeps getting pushed down. A phone that is capable of accessing the Internet, and hence the world, is within the reach of more and more people in the world. And, as The Economist points out, having that phone enriches and improves people's lives in tangible and quantifiable ways.

But cell phones and mobile devices don’t only drive economic change: they can drive political change as well. Five years ago, cell phones and text messaging played a crucial role in Moldova’s “Orange Revolution”; today, it’s at least as likely to be Twitter that is used for mass communications. Communications of this sort cannot be censored, and we can expect to be seeing such facilities playing an increasing role in all kinds of political discourse.

The device-manufacturing members of the LiMo Foundation ship on the order of a quarter of a billion phones worldwide annually. The economics of the electronics industry keep driving the cost of a device with a given feature set ever-downward; efforts both in the open source world and in organizations like LiMo do the same with software. Virtually every phone on the market comes with a web browser of some sort—ACCESS alone ships scores of millions of new installations of our browser product a year on phones at all price points.

Change on a global scale is rarely sudden. It’s a series of small changes - incremental ones. In the past twenty years, cell phones have gone from being a luxury available only to the wealthy to something that’s within the reach of the majority of people on the planet. At the same time, the power and functionality of the devices themselves has only increased. With that increased availability and functionality has come better flow of information and news, improved economic prospects, better education, and the ability to stay in contact with those who are physically distant, for people around the world. We’re only beginning to see the changes that will come out of a transition like this.

The "One Laptop Per Child" effort set out to produce a general-purpose, portable computer suitable for children's education at a cost of $100. It didn't quite achieve all of its goals, but it led to a number of interesting and useful experiments and results. It may be that the modern and increasingly functional cell phone turns out to be, to a large extent, the real "hundred dollar laptop" and not just for children.

[Lefty will be presenting at eComm, the Emerging Communications Conference, in Amsterdam, on behalf of the LiMo Foundation, on Oct. 28. For more details on the conference, please see http://europe.ecomm.ec/2009/]

A Quick Note...

2009-10-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

I got an email from Bruce Byfield yesterday, from which I learned that one of my stealth projects had been "outed" by my pals Miguel and jdub. This is actually a good thing, since I'd gotten distracted for the last month or so on paying work. In any case, the site was actually pulled together enough that it was good to get the kick in the ass and get it out there.

So, I actually did what I was threatening to do at GCDS, and put up boycott-boycottnovell.com. Enjoy! I'm happy to have outside contributions if anyone wants to provide some. Traffic's going up nicely, and it's getting a lot of mentions on Twitter and elsewhere.

Love,

Your friendly, neighborhood "troll-like enemy of the free software movement" (still no word on whether this represents the official position of the FSF...)

T-Shirt Designs for the FSF

2009-09-29T05:19:00.000-07:00

or perhaps

Some might prefer this one, I suppose.

Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est La Même Damned Chose...

2009-09-27T08:09:00.000-07:00

I didn't attend LinuxCon this year for a variety of reasons—chief among them being that I'd have had to go straight to Portland from Amsterdam rather than get to visit my home—so I missed out on the talk by Mark Shuttleworth. I did read about it on the geekfeminism blog, however.

Sorry, Mark: explaining this stuff to anyone is hard, not just to "girls". Here we go again, falling into the bad and distancing habit of using women as the archetype of technical non-adeptitude. I do it myself: I've worked hard to break myself of the habit of using my mom or my daughter as someone who something is "easy enough for", with incomplete success. Moshiwake gozaimasen. Ganbarimasu.

Look, it's awfully easy to say bone-headed things: I've done it (and still do it, occasionally) and so have you. What's a lot harder is being able to step back from the knee-jerk need to defend oneself and look at the situation from the point of view of the person who's complaining about it.

(Let me also note that, in fact, not every single complaint of offense may have merit: I do not, personally, feel obligated to apologize to platypus fanciers for saying that platypi are funny-looking, or to creationists who are upset that I'm somehow abridging their freedom of religion by looking askance at mythology being taught as "scientific theory". However, my bar for having offended others is pretty low, "reasonable doubt" that the person's offense might be out-of-line, rather than my own perception of "preponderance of the evidence"...)

The appropriate response at that point is not to counsel the other person that they're wrong to feel offense, but to acknowledge their feelings (which doesn't mean agreeing with them) and to apologize. Not "I'm sorry that you're feeling offended", but "I'm sorry for having offended you", ideally with some actual sincerity. At that point, one is well-advised to rethink the behavior that caused the offense, and to find some more useful substitute behavior for future use.

I've met Mark several times, and I think he's an essentially reasonable guy. I hope, and expect, that he'll respond to Skud in a reasonable way. We'll see.

On a somewhat related note, I was interested to read the minutes of the FSF's "mini-summit" on increasing the participation of women in free software, with a stated mission "to increase women's participation in the free software movement and work to make sexism in person or online unacceptable within our community". Sadly, there's no suggestion among the various "Initiatives" along the lines of "Discourage FSF leaders and representatives from telling jokes in keynotes which portray women as in need of technical assistance of an intrusive and nonconsensual sort, from the sound of things". I'm a little surprised they missed that one, frankly.

I'm likewise fascinated at the performance of Bruce Perens on LWN in the discussion on the "mini-summit" there. Bruce is pretty sure that there's no problem at all, or at least no problem for us to address. Additionally, Bruce's experience as a white-water rafting guide apparently allows him to assure us that the sort of behavior that people are finding upsetting is caused by Asperger's Syndrome, and therefore cannot possibly be fixed, and it's wrong of us to draw attention to it. Interestingly, Bruce has also only encountered one single solitary woman in all his years who knew how to use EMACS. Says Bruce, "What I meant was that there are more women who hold technical jobs than there are women who so love the technology that they will work on it whether they get paid or not. That seems to be an especially male thing." You can't make this stuff up.

I was likewise not at the Boston "Software Freedom Day", but I read on the GeekFeminism wiki that a question regarding the Gran Canaria keynote was put to Mr. Stallman there, and he responded that "The person who brought that up seems to be a troll-like enemy of the free software movement." This was, by the way, the same event at which Mr. Stallman felt it necessary to label Miguel de Icaza "a traitor to the free software movement". (Was there a loyalty oath? I missed that...)

At least I'm in decent company. Maybe Miguel and I can get t-shirts made up or something.

The 2009 Open Source in Mobile Pub Quiz!

2009-09-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

I was at the Open Source in Mobile conference in Amsterdam last week, both to present on "Strategies for Enabling Innovation with Open Source" and to act as quizmaster for this year's 2nd Annual Pub Quiz (and having done it two years running, I think it's an official "tradition" now...)

People expressed some interest in seeing the questions and answers, and I promised to post them here. Adam Shaw of Informa, the conference's producers, worked up the first four categories this year; the last four were mine. So, without further ado:

[Well, much further ado, anyway. Sorry for the remarkably idiotic markup problems, fixed now. The quiz started its life as a MS Word document from Adam Shaw to me, and stayed that way. The amount of nonsensical horsecrap that Word throws in with a simple paste is amazing, and the editor that Blogger provides you with doesn't help...]

Round 1- Sport

Q-Due to superstition, what did Bjorn Borg not do during the Wimbledon fortnight?
1. have sex
2. wash his hair
3. shave
4. wear underpants
A- Shave

Q- Nigel Mansell won the World Drivers’ Championship for which Formula 1 team?
A- Williams

Q- Who was the first unseeded man to win the Wimbledon Singles title?
A- Boris Becker

Q- Which sports playing area is 2.7 metres by 1.5 metres?
A- Table Tennis

Q- In which country will the 2014 Football World Cup be held?
A- Brazil

Q- In 1988 who became the first boxer to have won world championships in five different weight categories?
A- Sugar Ray Leonard

Q- Which piece of sporting equipment is 3 inches in diameter and weighs 6 ounces?
A- An ice hockey puck

Q- At which sport did Scotland become world champions in 2005?
A- Elephant Polo

Round 2- Geography

Q- What is the home country of Van Morrison?
A- Northern Ireland [NB: I want to acknowledge that this answer is disputed by Mr. David Neary, who informs me that Northern Ireland is a "province", not a country, and that Mr. Morrison was, in fact, born in ~~the country of Great Britain~~ the United Kingdom.]
[NB: I want to further acknowledge that I know something between "jack-shit" and "fuck-all" about the geographical vagaries of the United Kingdom. Sorry for the Inconvenience.]

Q- In which country was OPEC founded?
A- Iraq

Q- Which country is the world’s largest coffee exporter?
A- Brazil

Q-If you flew due east from New York City, what would be the first country you would reach?
A-Portugal

Q- Bollywood is the nickname for the Indian film industry. The film industry of which country is known as Lollywood?
1. Pakistan
2. Laos
3. Portugal
4. Luxembourg
A- Pakistan (Lahore)

Q- Paris attracts the most visitors in France each year. Which French town attracts 5 million visitors a year and has more hotels than any other French city except Paris?
A- Lourdes

Q- At 29,029 ft Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth. The tallest mountain in our solar system is Olympus Mons on Mars. Plus or minus 10,000ft, how tall is Olympus Mons?
A- 88,600ft, it stands 27kms above the surface level

Q- What Mexican cactus is tequila made from?
A- Agave

Round 3- Wordplay

Q- What kind of mixed drink takes its name from the Hindi or Sanskrit word for five?
A- Punch, from the Hindi word Panch as punch initially had 5 ingredients, spirit, sugar, lemon, water, tea

Q- If you were awarded 10 points in the UK for using it but only 1 point in Poland, what would you be doing?
A-Playing Scrabble with the letter Z

Q- Which animal does a Hippophobe fear?
A- Horses

Q- Who wrote over and over again: ‘I will not yell she’s dead during roll call’
A- Bart Simpson

Q- The Toyota MR2 had to change its name in which European country?
A- France- MR2 sounds like Merde

Q- Which five letter word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it?
A- Short

Q- What is the Romanian Word for ‘Son of the Devil’ or ‘Son of the Dragon’?
A- Dracula

Q- There exists only one word in the English language that when it is capitalised has a completely different meaning. What is that word?
A- Polish, polish

Round 4- Entertainment

Q- Which TV Shows spawned the following spin offs? (1 point per correct answer)

Frasier
Mork and Mindy

Q- Which singer appeared on stage at both Wembley and Philadelphia during the Live Aid concert?
A- Phil Collins

Q- How is singer Paul Hewson better known?
A- Bono

Q- If you allow for inflation what is the highest grossing movie of all time?
A- Gone With the Wind

Q- How is Annie Mae Bullock better known?
A- Tina Turner

Q- What was the name of Anthony Edwards character in Top Gun?
A- Goose

Q- Who was the boxer portrayed by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull?
A- Jake LaMotta

Q- Which three presidents does Forrest Gump meet in the film Forrest Gump? (all three needed for a point)
A- Nixon, Kennedy, LBJ

Round 5- Open Source Trivia

Q- How many children does Linus Torvalds have?
A- Two.

Q- How is “dead beef” used in a running operating system?
A- Freed memory is frequently overwritten with this value, which is guaranteed to generate a page fault if dereferenced (in, e.g., Solaris).

Q- How many PhDs does Dr. Richard Stallman hold? How many are honorary?
A- Six. All of them.

Q- What is the birthday of the Linux kernel?
A- August 21, 1991.

Q- What was the first software project that Apple, Inc. released under an open source license?
A- Rendezvous support for “zero-configuration” networking, later renamed “Bonjour”, under a BSD license.

Q- What was the first “live CD” Linux distribution?
A- Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X (LGX), released in December 1992.

Q- From where does the Jokosher project derive its name?
A- It’s a play on the name of the project’s creator, Jono Bacon: Jo-no-bacon == jo-kosher.

Q- The “Jargon File” has existed since 1975. What is it, and who maintains it?
A- The Jargon file is a glossary of “hacker terminology”, originally created at Stanford, but great expanded at MIT. It is maintained by Eric S. Raymond.

Round 6- Geek Movies

Q- What does an “oscillation overthruster” enable you to do?
A- Drive through mountains/enter the 8th Dimension (Buckaroo Banzai)

Q- How much power is required to energize a flux capacitor?
A- 1.21 gigawatts (Back to the Future!)

Q- What do the characters Elrond (from Lord of the Rings), V (from V for Vendetta) and Agent Smith (from The Matrix) have in common?
A- All are played by Hugo Weaving

Q- In what movie does a character save the day, exclaiming, “This is a UNIX system! I know this!”
A- Jurassic Park

Q- What 2001 movie featured Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond and a host of other open source and free software luminaries?
A- Revolution OS, directed by J.T.S. Moore

Q- What was the first appearance of a laser in a motion picture?
A- Goldfinger, 1964

Q- What is the relevance of banging a radio antenna guy-wire with a hammer to the film Star Wars?
A- Ben Burt used this sound for the blasts of the ray guns.

Q- Where would you not go to buy a “phased plasma rifle in a 60-watt range”?
A- 1984 Los Angeles (The Terminator)

Round 7- Technology Free-for-all

Q- If you were to look at “NMEA data”, what would you be looking at?
A- GPS information.

Q- The third time definitely wasn’t the charm for this well-known computer company. What is this a reference to?
A- The Apple ///, released in 1980, proved to be extremely unpopular. It’s the only computer Apple ever produced which was replaced by one with a lower model number (the Apple IIe).

Q- What does “DLNA” refer to?
A- The “Digital Living Network Alliance”, a standard used by manufacturers of consumer electronics to allow entertainment devices within the home to share their content with each other across a home network.

Q- Which of the following has not been used to access the internet: carrier pigeon, semaphore, morse code, catapult?
A- Catapult

Q- ENIAC, the US Army computer which ran continuously from 1947 to 1955, was based on vacuum tubes. How many did it contain (to the nearest thousand)?
A- 17,468

Q- Smalltalk was originally designed to be run on a specific device aimed at giving children access to digital media. What was the name of that device?
A- The “Dynabook”, designed by Alan Kay.

Q- When was the notion of “hypertext” first proposed?
A- In a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article by Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”, which described a proposed device called a “Memex”.

Q- Tim Berners-Lee is credited with the development of the world-wide web. When did Berners-Lee first propose the “WorldWide Web”?
A- In November, 1990.

Round 8- Name that Distro!

(Visual round: teams had to correctly identify the distro from its logo)

Q-
A- Xandros

Q-
A- Mepis

Q-
A- Gentoo

Q-
A- Mandriva

Q-
A- Arch

Q-
A- Knoppix

Q-
A- Kubuntu

Q-
A- Puppy Linux

The Disappearing Desktop

2009-09-18T00:17:00.000-07:00

[This posting was originally published on the LiMo Foundation blog...]

The “desktop” has been getting all the attention for the past score of years or so, and it was a big improvement from the “command line”, which is what we had to deal with prior to that. The desktop metaphor opened up all kinds of possibilities for people who had never used computers before, and unleashed a wave of new applications development the likes of which had never been previously seen.

But the desktop itself—the notion of the “computer” as a completely general-purpose device, a sort of “Swiss Army knife”, if you will—is itself an artefact of the fact that, at the time the metaphor hit the street, as it were, computers were extremely expensive devices; few people could afford to have more than one of them. However, times have changed and are still changing, in dramatic ways.

Computing power is cheaper than ever: if you compare a current cell phone (at around $400) with a desktop system of five years ago (at around $2500), they’re remarkably comparable in terms of their general specifications. In fact, the phone does more, in terms of being able to support GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi and other capabilities right out of the box; it probably has at least as much memory and, more than likely, a larger amount of mass storage. We don’t, however, tend to think of it as a “computer”.

Don Norman has observed that the more skilful we become at using a technology, the less visible the technology itself becomes, as it gets subsumed into the purpose to which it’s being put. When cars were new technology, you had to be an automobile mechanic to own one; the same was true of bicycles before that.

Open source development grew up in an environment where the desktop was the landscape in which one worked. But that’s a landscape that’s becoming increasingly less relevant. The sale of cell phones and mobile devices of increasing sophistication and capability has far outstripped the number of “desktops” being shipped each year. However, our understanding of development models and use cases hasn’t really kept pace with that.

There’s a great potential opportunity, one which we’re at the very beginning of seeing realized, for open source developers in the increasing number of Linux-based phones coming onto the market, and it’s measured in hundreds of millions of potential customers a year. Right now—and unlike the classic desktop market—there’s no entrenched “winner” in the mobile device space. There’s less likely to ever be one, since the investment people make is smaller and they’re more prone to replace a cell phone than a desktop or laptop system. People’s investment in applications for their smart phones also tends to be smaller than for their desktop systems: they tend to have fewer applications, and those applications are cheaper in cost.

Successful development for mobile devices calls for a rather higher standard of quality than we’ve typically been used to delivering in the open source world. In an environment where it was at least tacitly expected that everyone was capable of programming, the assumption developed that, if a problem wasn’t bothering me, then it wasn’t my problem; those whom it did bother could fix it if they liked. That won’t work on the mobile devices your grandfather and your teenagers use. This is an area where partnership between open source community-based efforts and the work of carriers and device manufacturers could be especially fruitful: the folks who make up the membership of organizations like the LiMo Foundation have a lot of experience here.

Another difference is the target audience and understanding the expectations of that audience. Open source development began as, in essence, a hobby: people wrote code for themselves and, eventually, for one another. But they were always writing for people who had a technical skill set and a certain level of ability with it. This made for a very different outlook than the one which is required to develop for end users and for consumers. We’ve learnt a pretty good amount about this in the community, especially over the past five years or so, but there’s still a long way to go. This is an area where collaboration with device manufacturers and carriers, who have long experience (not always good experience, admittedly) in things like usability, can really pay off.

But successful development for the mobile world requires—even more importantly—an entirely different way of thinking about how applications are used and even what applications actually are! As the various activities in our lives leave increasing online “impressions” (e.g. By our writing movie reviews, or purchasing books online, or engaging in various “social networking” activities). the ability of applications and web-based activities to interact, support and reinforce one another will enable new sorts of capabilities on the devices we use the most. I can already be notified (by a web site which tracks airplane flights) when one of my flights is delayed, and I can reschedule myself onto a different flight—all from my phone. I can take a photo of a business card, have it OCR’ed, added to my contacts, and then synchronized to a web-based server, so that it ultimately winds up on my desktop system—all from my phone. (It’s impossible for me to ever lose a contact any more: I have too much redundancy.)

This is an area that is evolving now, and evolving so rapidly, that no one has really been able to get their head around it yet. People continue to ask whether “the future” is “on the web” or “on the device”. The answer, as usual, is “yes”—and new potential applications like “augmented reality” are underscoring that—how that evolution plays out is the key area in which I expect to see organizations like LiMo working increasingly with the open source community as we discover what “computers” are going to be like as we become less and less directly aware that they are computers.

The “desktop” is increasingly going away, except for fairly specific, usually business-related uses. Outside the US, many more people are already accessing the internet from their phones rather than from a desktop system. As social networking, online shopping and content creation become even more important, the devices which will be most important to us are those which are supporting those activities, the devices we spend the most time with, the ones we carry around with us.

We used to talk about “the paperless office’, and—in some ways, anyway—it sort of happened: I don’t get a lot of paper bills and other documents as I used to anymore; now, they’re web pages of PDF files. On the other hand, my desk has vanished...

Microsoft, the GPL, and Nonsense from Folks Who Know Better

2009-07-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

The big news this week, causing much contortion and hand-wringing among the Phoney Fundamentalists, is Microsoft's submission of its Hyper-V drivers to the kernel driver tree. Those pre-disposed to view Microsoft as Satan Incarnate are sure that there's a trick, a devious plot, in there, since Microsoft is, of coure, Satan Incarnate.

What I'm finding disturbing this morning is that none other than Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center has apparently added his voice to the chorus of those claiming that "Microsoft violated the GPL!" What's disturbing is that Bradley certainly knows better.

Stephen Hemminger, the Vyatta engineer who initially turned up the issue (and no one is claiming that there was no potential compliance issue with these drivers) denies that there was a violation. Microsoft has likewise denied that there was a violation (but, of, course, Microsoft is Satan Incarnate...)

Just to remind the folks who should know better (and enlighten the folks who have not actually read the GPL), a violation will occur under the following set of circumstances:

Microsoft distributes a binary copy of a "program" (in this case, the Hyper-V drivers), which includes GPL-licensed code, to a third-party, sources not included.
The third party makes a request to Microsoft for the sources corresponding to the binary they received.
Microsoft fails to provide those sources, in a timely fashion, for no more than the cost of creating the media and shipping it to the requester.

Absent that specific chain of events, there's simply no violation. If Bradley ~~doesn't use~~ hasn't received a copy of the Hyper-V drivers, from Microsoft, through legitimate channels, he's got no standing to be requesting sources, and he can't assert a violation. However, that doesn't inhibit the untruthful propagandists from using Bradley's (unfounded) claims to support their own (inaccurate) assertions of perfidy on Microsoft's part.

The SFLC has absolutely no business making such a claim unless they're prepared to support it, and the only way they can do so is by producing the third-party mentioned above, something which has so far not happened. The SFLC should issue a clarification immediately: they've called Microsoft liars, which is about par for the course, but they've also called Stephen Hemminger a liar, which is completely unreasonable.

A FURTHER CLARIFICATION FOR THOSE WHO DON'T
READ COMMENTS BEFORE POSTING THEIR OWN

Microsoft could have failed to comply by either the sequence of events noted above, or by failing to include an appropriate notice of how to get sources. There are assertions (and I don't personally know for a fact that there isn't an appropriate offer buried in the wad of stuff one gets with a Windows Server 200 license, I don't have one) that no such offer was tendered by Microsoft.

Assuming, for the sake of the discussion, that this was indeed the case, then the copyright holder of the code being infringed (so far unidentified) could indeed have cause to complain about a violation—since the copyright holder is the only one in a position to actually do anything about it—but it would be difficult for him-or-her to start complaining after the sources had been published and submitted, and the code was brought into compliance with the license's terms.

Which seems to be exactly what Bradley's doing, albeit at second hand. Usually this sort of rhetoric gets saved for when the SFLC files an actual suit, but it's being dragged out here when such action was avoided, thanks to Microsoft's deciding in this instance to play by the rules. That the SFLC is doing this strikes me as either grandstanding or ambulance-chasing after the case has already been settled out of court. My comments about "sore winners" still stand.

AND SOME NEW INFORMATION,
CASTING FURTHER DOUBT ON THE WHOLE THING

directhex has pointed out that what Microsoft evidently did in the Hyper-V drivers is to have a GPL-licensed driver shim, which pulled in a hitherto-proprietary binary blob at boot time, no different than what Nvidia and ATI do with their drivers. About which no one is screaming "Violation! Violation!", even though neither Nvidia nor ATI appear to have corrected those situations...

Which of these things is not like the others...? This seems to be some sort of a trick question...

Linus on Extremism

2009-07-23T08:45:00.000-07:00

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.

There are ‘extremists’ in the free software world, but that’s one major reason why I don’t call what I do ‘free software’ any more. I don’t want to be associated with the people for whom it’s about exclusion and hatred.

—Linus Torvalds (as quoted in Linux Magazine)

[Über-thanks to Jeffrey Stedman and Jo Shields for turning up this quote!]

The Real FLOSS Community and the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists"

2009-07-22T12:47:00.000-07:00

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!

—Peter Finch as "Howard Beale" in Network

I've written about my adventures with Roy Schestowitz and the fun folks over at Boycott Novell, and I've been the happy recipient of much interesting mail over the last few weeks, as well as the subject of a number of blog postings and articles, some more flattering than others, and the experience has caused a bit of an epiphany.

I've come to realize that our community and the people in it, are under attack. We are being disrupted, we are being defamed, we are being lied to, and, in some instances, we are even having our lives invaded.

More importantly, I feel as though I've started to see a consistent thread running through these attacks, invasions and disruptions. This attack comes not from Microsoft, but from a parasitical pseudo-"community" that attempts to pretend it's actually our community.

What I am seeing is people making a pretense of involvement in FLOSS and in our community, people who we don't actually know, people who never join us at conferences, don't work in projects, and only participate in mailing lists to instigate flame wars. I am seeing people who seem to be making a sort of religion out of "free software" and issuing their demands to the rest of us to do things their way. These are people who will excoriate you as something less than a "true GNU/Linux user" if you should touch a Macintosh or (heaven forbid!) a Windows box. These are folks who will berate you for buying a piece of software or owning an iPod. These are people who will classify you as a "freedom hater" if you express reservations about the GPL v3.

As I've said, our community thrives on disagreement, and we (mostly) deal with it in healthy ways. We reject uniformity of opinion and we always have. In stark contrast, this pretense "community" insists that their way is the One True Way, and we should all just shut up, learn the catechism, and do their bidding.

I've come to think of these people over the past several days as the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists".

By way of a concrete example, I offer this email thread, from the ubuntu-devel list around the beginning of June.

It shows "Mark Fink" (a regular anti-Mono "advocate" who, as you will see, constantly points back to Boycott Novell and praises Roy Schestowitz, and who you may remember from that previous posting), asserting (without particular evidence) that there is "shameful censoring of mono [sic] opposition" going on, demanding that Mono (and consequently F-Stop and Tomboy) be removed from the Ubuntu default install, and further demanding that Jo Shields be removed from his involvement in Ubuntu and David Siegel be fired from Canonical, with much vituperation and insult directed at list members who attempt to help him see reason along the way.

"Mark Fink" and "Remco"--who comes in a bit later in the thread, and starts off seeming semi-reasonable, only to go progressively deeper off the deep end as things proceed--represent the "faux FLOSS fundamentalists" here.

Everybody else on the thread represents the "real FLOSS community", as do the vast majority of the hundreds, if not thousands, of subscribers to that list who didn't comment. Most of us on the thread know, or are at least aware, of one another; none of us has much of a clue who Remco and Mr. Fink are.

I appear, in increasingly testy form, a few times. The messages without line wrapping were actually posted from the countryside of Western Japan, where--as I mention--I was doing a Buddhist pilgrimage and posting from my iPhone.

Scott James Remnant asks "Remco" an intriguing question at one point, and maybe Mr. Schestowitz and Mr. Varghese would like to tackle this, too, sometime: if they're all so concerned about the presence of patents which Microsoft claims to both hold and actively enforce getting into their free software, why haven't they started a discussion about removing the Linux kernel from the default Ubuntu install?

I say enough is enough. We should put our collective feet down as far as strident demands from complete non-participants in the community go. We should say "no" to Faux FLOSS Fundamentalism, and people like Roy Schestowitz, Sam Varghese, "Penguin Pete", "Jason" of mono-nono, and the like, as well as the assortment of associated and sympathetic trolls who post endless anonymous comments to blog postings they dislike and start up flame wars on development lists.

The Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists have nothing to offer the community but their propaganda, their dogma, and their misplaced sense of entitlement. We need to reject those who demand that we all sign up for "Freedom the Way We Tell You To" and I think we need to make it clear to them that they need to either actually start participating in a meaningful way or simply stop "advocating" at us.

Plain old "freedom" is good enough for me.

AN IMPORTANT ADDENDUM THAT I SHOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO WRITE

I begin to detect a trend amongst the comments. People, let's get some clarity on one specific point.

I am not calling Richard Stallman a "faux FLOSS Fundamentalist" here. His name appears nowhere in this post, and, believe me, if I had meant it to, it would have.

Mr. Stallman has some other issues, as far as I'm concerned: poor judgment, a lack of willingness to even try to understand the point of view of others, a very peculiar inability to either acknowledge or see references to women (and I don't understand this at all, frankly) and a lack of good sense as far as how what he says will be understood, on a personal and emotional level, by the people to whom he says it.

Mr. Stallman wrote the GPL and the LGPL, and those have been valuable and important assets for the community. (The offer not good for GPL/LGPL v3, at least not yet.) No one can, or should dispute that.

Mr. Stallman has contributed a lot of excellent code in his time, and there's no way any one can dispute that.

Mr. Stallman did a lot of the seminal thinking around FLOSS (but he's not the only one who did. Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens and many others contributed their thoughts and ideas as well.)

Are we all straight on that? Mr. Stallman has unquestionably contributed, and participated, and I'm not referring to him, neither directly nor obliquely, neither implicitly nor inferentially.

So: I do not include Mr. Stallman among the ranks of the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists". His taste in humor aside, he does not make a hobby of disrupting the community to get his way.

That said, when Mr. Stallman insists that I must call not call it "Linux", but "GNU/Linux instead, I must disagree. When Mr. Stallman insists that I must not call what we work with "open source" software rather than "free" software, I must disagree. When Mr. Stallman insists that I must not own an iPod, I must disagree. In general, when Mr. Stallman insists that I must do something contrary to common practice or the dictates of my own conscience, reason or will, I must disagree. (And if I ever happen to wind up out at a group dinner with Richard Stallman--an event which seems increasingly unlikely with each passing hour, and I'm really okay with that--and he attempts to order on my behalf, trust me, I'm going to disagree.)

Because that's not freedom. That's "do what Richard Stallman says," and that's the direct converse of freedom. I do note that many of the symptoms of the faux FLOSS Fundies seem to manifest as a sort of a "free software religion", where the most extreme end of the wide spectrum of views in the free, libre and open source software community (GPL v3 only! Microsoft is our sworn enemy! The Hyper-V drivers are a plot!) is taken as the only legitimate view, as gospel.

Freedom always wins in the end because it simply can't be gotten rid of: no one can tell you how, or what, to think.

I Really Didn't Want To Be Writing About This Again

2009-07-16T07:55:00.000-07:00

mdz posted on the backlash to my blog posting (he had to close comments, inhibit the Nameless and turn on moderation as well), and dissected a lot of examples, but there's a new and (I think) rather pernicious one: the thesis is basically as follows:

"In spite of his repeated denials that he has a strong opinion one way of the other on Mono, Lefty is really a secret Mono advocate, and is leading a witch hunt against Stallman over a harmless little joke that he's told for the past decade, but it's really all about Mono."

First, let's get the harmless little joke stuff out of the way. Chani (who is a woman and who was present, so let's get that out of the way, too) posted an extremely eloquent comment on her blog:

talking about relieving women of their virginity casts women in a submissive role, with men in a dominant role, and brings up thoughts of oppression and (indirectly) rape. (yes, thinking about a roomful of guys thinking about taking womens’ virginity does eventually lead me to wondering how many of them would take it by force.) it becomes less about the non-sexual meaning of “virgin” and more about all the crazy ideas societies have had about virgin women. and thinking about that stuff would make any woman uncomfortable.

Yes. This.

Does anyone not get that? If so, speak up: I want to know who you are because I find you very frightening.

Now, as to the thesis detailed above. I've been clear about my opinions on Mono. If I had a serious gripe with Stallman's position, and I cared enough to do something about it, I'd post a blog entry like Dave Neary did. The fact is my feelings just aren't that strong.

By way of full disclosure, I know a lot of people on the Mono team, including Miguel de Icaza, and I like them. They are not demons, and they are not "Microsoft shills". Treating them as though they were and calling them names will not score you points in the community.

I know a lot of people working on Mono projects, and they're doing what I believe to be excellent work.

Now, I believe that anyone who's serious about "getting Mono out of the default Ubuntu install" should run for a seat on the UTB, and nominations are open until the end of the month. I guess we'll see if Roy Schestowitz puts his hat in the ring. If you want to change things, you get involved and put yourself in a position to change them.

What you don't do is defame people over the issue, or interfere with their lives. That's my gripe with Roy and his miserable excuse for a "journalistic" web site, not Mono.

Does anyone not get that?

Now, when you say "it's really got to be about Mono", you're effectively saying, "It's not actually possible that people could really get upset over something like sexism in the community. There has to be a better reason."

I came across a study which showed that, among incoming first-year college students, around half of the men favored the possibility of programming computers as a career and something like 20% of the women did. Men associated computer science with making a bunch of money, women associated it with typing and boredom. (Men were generally more interested in money, and women were generally more interested in job satisfaction.)

Assuming that half of that one out of five women, i.e. 10% actually end up studying computer science, only one out of five of them actually end up working in the FLOSS community. It seems to me that there's something wrong there. I say that a bunch of what's wrong is a climate where we tolerate (and laugh at, and dismiss concerns about, and divert discussion of) presentations like the ones given at GoGaRuCo and Flashbelt, and "harmless little jokes" like Stallman's.

Consider that.

Consider what Chani's said.

Now, tell me "It's really all about Mono."

Some other postings which relate to this.

Matthew Garrett, RMS and Virgins
Dave Neary, Gran Canaria Wrap-up Day 1
Kirrily Robert, Richard Stallman, Feminist Ally
Geek Feminism Wiki, EMACS Virgin Joke

Hm.

2009-07-14T05:32:00.000-07:00

I think mdz makes some interesting points here.

I played Kirrily Robert's "Porny Presentation Bingo" with the comments on my email exchange with Richard Stallman. I think I've won something.

In addition, I'm starting to get not only outright anonymous trolling, completely irrelevant to the issue at hand, but--at least as bad--I'm starting to get link pimps:

Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you! Increasing your web traffic and page views Add [DELETED], add your website in [DELETED] site, it's pretty awesome too!

So. No more Anonymous Cowards. Moderation is on until I decide to take it off. Sorry For The Inconvenience.

So. Have a name. Be on-topic. Don't advertise here.

Let's All Say It Together.

2009-07-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

STOP sexism by Casey West. License:

"I want the [...] open source [...] communities [I participate in] to be a dignified, respectful, inclusive, and welcoming place. … We’ve all been witnesses to off-color jokes, misogynistic back channel chatter, questionable imagery and unnecessary, trolling comments. I pledge to do better to stand up and call this behavior out when I see it in conferences, online and other public settings. I don’t expect it to go away but I’m not going to tacitly condone it any longer."

(And thanks to Luis Villa for the pointer...)

Me, Neither

2009-07-10T15:43:00.000-07:00

Emailing Richard Stallman

2009-07-08T01:47:00.000-07:00

I emailed Richard Stallman at the encouragement of a couple of friends here in order to get my concerns in front of him, and hopefully, to get a response. The entire exchange pretty much speaks for itself, I'd say, so I'll simply reproduce it in full here.

My initial email:

Dear Dr. Stallman:

I was in the audience during your keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, and I was perplexed and distressed by a few things.

The lesser of these was your tendency to shout over questioners while they were in mid-question, and to dismiss their questions as “silly”. However, this is not what I’m mainly concerned about.

The more significant problem was your comments regarding “EMAC virgins”, which you defined as being specifically “_women_ who had never used EMACS”, and for whom being “relieved” of this “virginity” was a “holy duty”. My reaction, and the reaction of a large number of members of the audience with whom I’ve spoken was one of great dismay.

Your remarks gave the distinct impression that you view women as being in particular need of technical assistance (presumably by men, since there's apparently no such thing as a _male_ "EMACS virgin"); additionally, women are quite capable of making their own decisions about who might relieve them of whatever sort of “virginity”. I (and many others) viewed these remarks as denigrating and demeaning to women, as well as completely out of place at what is, in essence, a technical conference.

As a member of the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board, I engage in regular discussions about the relatively small number of women involved in open source. I feel that it is thoughtless comments like your remarks on “EMACS virgins” which contribute, quite heavily, to this situation. Given your position with respect to the free software community, I feel you did your audience a great disservice. If those remarks were intended as a joke, the joke was, frankly, not at all a funny one. I’d strongly encourage you to refrain from such comments in the future.

I also think you may find it worth considering that there are active and important members of the free software community who consider themselves Christians—I’d cite Michael Meeks as just one example. While no one insists that you agree with or subscribe to a particular religion, people are every bit as entitled to their own beliefs as you are to your lack of them, and I thought it likewise inappropriate to take keynote time to create a situation in which you marginalize members of the community by mocking Christianity. Again, this is a technical conference.

I personally feel as though you owe your audience, and in particular the women attending the conference, an apology. The remarks came across as thoughtless, inconsiderate and sexist--again, this is not simply my own opinion, but one which I’ve heard echoed, over and over, in my discussions with others who were present at the time. I would imagine that this was not your intention, but it was indeed the reaction of many members of the audience.

I hope you will take this letter in the spirit in which it’s intended. I’ll look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

David “Lefty” Schlesinger

Dr. Stallman's reply:

The Cult of the Virgin of Emacs, like the rest of the Church of Emacs, is meant to poke fun at religion and at myself. I think that you and some others have misunderstood it.

>While no one insists that you agree with or subscribe to
> a particular religion, people are every bit as entitled to
> their own beliefs as you are to your lack of them,

Yes, they are. Are you accusing me of wishing to deny them these rights? If so, you do me wrong. I defend religious freedom as strongly as anyone.

However, freedom of religion the freedom to criticize religious views. No human views are off limits to criticism, or joking. People have a right to criticize religion directly, or to ridicule it harshly.

However, St IGNUcius does neither of those; at most it makes gentle fun of religion, tangentially. There is no reason for religious people to take offense at that. I have presented St IGNUcius with Catholic priests in the audience, and it did not offend them.

>I personally feel as though you owe your audience,
>and in particular the women attending the conference,
>an apology. The remarks came across as thoughtless,
>inconsiderate and sexist--again, this is not simply my
>own opinion, but one which I've heard echoed, over and
>over, in my discussions with others who were present at the time.

I do not believe I owe anyone an apology. I did not insult or attack them, but it is clear some people are attacking me. I think I am being criticized unjustly criticized, and I feel I have been wronged.

I am concerned about this reported hostile reaction. But I am not sure what to make of it, since it goes against nearly all the rest of my experience. I have had very few negative reactions to St IGNUcius in the past; the only one I can remember was from someone who was hostile to begin with. So this seems like an anomalous case. I don't understand why it happened.

You said that you "heard it echoed, over and over", but how many people actually had this reaction? Maybe it was a few people who started a lot of conversations.

My second email:

Dear Dr. Stallman:

I'm honestly a little surprised--amazed, really--that you managed to completely ignore the three central paragraphs which I identified as being the core of my concerns, choosing instead to focus on the side issue of the anti-religious bent of your "St. IGNUcius" routine.

Let me reiterate, without the distractions:

> The more significant problem was your comments
> regarding “EMAC virgins”, which you defined as being
> specifically “_women_ who had never used EMACS”,
> and for whom being “relieved” of this “virginity” was a “holy
> duty”. My reaction, and the reaction of a large number of
> members of the audience with whom I’ve spoken was
> one of great dismay.
>
> Your remarks gave the distinct impression that you view
> women as being in particular need of technical assistance
> (presumably by men, since there's apparently no such
> thing as a _male_ "EMACS virgin"); additionally, women
> are quite capable of making their own decisions about
> who might relieve them of whatever sort of “virginity”. I
> (and many others) viewed these remarks as denigrating
> and demeaning to women, as well as completely out
> of place at what is, in essence, a technical conference.
>
> As a member of the GNOME Foundation Advisory
> Board, I engage in regular discussions about the relatively
> small number of women involved in open source. I feel
> that it is thoughtless comments like your remarks on
> “EMACS virgins” which contribute, quite heavily, to this
> situation. Given your position with respect to the free
> software community, I feel you did your audience a great
> disservice. If those remarks were intended as a joke, the
> joke was, frankly, not at all a funny one. I’d strongly
> encourage you to refrain from such comments in the future.

Perhaps you can respond to _these_ concerns rather than the more tangential ones.

> I am concerned about this reported hostile reaction.

I would hope so.

> But I am not sure what to make of it, since it goes
> against nearly all the rest of my experience. I have
> had very few negative reactions to St IGNUcius
> in the past; the only one I can remember was from
> someone who was hostile to begin with. So this seems
> like an anomalous case. I don't understand why it
> happened.

I understand exactly why it "happened": as I said, your remarks were sexist, thoughtless, dismissive and denigrating.

> You said that you "heard it echoed, over and over",
> but how many people actually had this reaction?
> Maybe it was a few people who started a lot of
> conversations.

I would estimate that I've spoken to well in excess of a hundred people at the conference about this; most of them initiated the conversation with me, rather than the other way around. The virtually universal reaction has been exactly what I described to you: dismay, unhappiness and concern over the view of women which your idea of "gentle fun" implied.

Again, you did your audience a serious disservice with these remarks. I stand by my statement that you owe all of us an apology.

Sincerely,

David "Lefty" Schlesinger

Dr. Stallman's reply:

> I'm honestly a little surprised--amazed, really--that
> you managed to completely ignore the three central
> paragraphs which I identified as being the core of my
> concerns, choosing instead to focus on the side issue of
> the anti-religious bent of your "St. IGNUcius" routine.

I did respond to the other points, just more briefly.

>> The remarks came across as thoughtless, inconsiderate
>> and sexist--again, this is not simply my own opinion, but
>> one which I've heard echoed...
>
> I do not believe I owe anyone an apology. I did not insult or
> attack them, but it is clear some people are attacking me....

Thus, I think your criticism of my response is inaccurate. However, my response naturally reflected my own priorities.

> Your remarks gave the distinct impression that you
> view women as being in particular need of technical
> assistance (presumably by men, since there's
> apparently no such thing as a _male_ "EMACS virgin");
> additionally, women are quite capable of making their
> own decisions about who might relieve them of whatever
> sort of "virginity". I (and many others) viewed these
> remarks as denigrating and demeaning to women,

The cult of the Virgin of Emacs is simply intended as a joke about the cult of the Virgin Mary. I assure anyone who perceived derogatory meanings in it that I did not intend them.

Wow. Just wow. In anyone can find the point in his first message where he responded, "albeit more briefly", to the issue I raised, can you point it out to me? I sure don't see it.

A Good GCDS Beginning (with a significant disappointment)

2009-07-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

[UPDATE: I've had an email exchange with Richard Stallman over this. I found it...less than satisfying.]

Well, I'm in Gran Canaria for the first combined GUADEC/AKaDEmy Desktop Summit, and it's great to be here (although quite hot and humid). Last night, things got started with a very nice party sponsored by our friends at Canonical, excellent turnout! I bailed at midnight (although apparently some stayed until 3:00 am), but not before I saw a number of my friends, which was great.

Things kicked off this morning with a welcome from the local government (I'm taking part in a breakfast with them to discuss open source this coming Monday), followed by an excellent keynote, mostly on how the classical liberal arts related to free software (or "liberal software" as he called it) by Richard "r0ml" Lefowitz. Walter Bender talked about TurtleArt, and was followed by a keynote I found quite disappointing from Richard Stallman.

It got off to a bad start when the organizers had to call a break so they could locate Richard--that shows great disrespect for the audience, I'd say. This was only made worse by Richard's observation, a few minutes into his talk, that "there were a lot of people still coming in" and that he should, perhaps, start over again. (They would have already been there if you'd been there when you were supposed to be, Richard.)

The talk started out with a rehash of open source history--much of which is, I'm certain, quite well-known to the audience, and then lapsed into a fairly undirected rant about C# and how no one should be using it (with a completely incomprehensible comment that it was "good" that there were free C# implementations... huh?), before Richard donned his "Saint Ignotius" get-up. For me, things went rapidly and drastically downhill from that point.

The nadir for me was Richard's explanation of "EMACS virgins" as "women who had not been introduced to EMACS" along with the advice that "relieving them of their virginity" was some sort of sacred duty for members of "The Church of EMACS".

What the hell is that, Richard? If it was intended to be humorous, it only reached the point of being offensive. We talk about how we can work better to involve more women in a meaningful way in open source development--where they're clearly under-represented--but this sort of nonsense, stuff which would have been preposterous even ten or twenty years ago, can only work to drive women away from such involvement.

Richard certainly provided a valuable service with some of the first open source efforts, and the first free software license, but that doesn't give him, as far as I'm concerned, a free ride to regale audiences with his evidently mediæval views about women. I was very unhappy with his keynote for a number of reasons--something that was probably reflected in my questions--but the question I really wish I'd asked is the following.

Haven't we gotten past the point where we need to view women as a) technically incompetent, and in need of "us guys" to explain this stuff to them, and b) as objects to be "relieved" (presumably by "us guys") of whatever sort of virginity? If we want to encourage greater participation from women in open source efforts, do you really believe that sort of blatantly condescending, sexist, outdated nonsense is the way to go about it?

I honestly thought it was shameful.

When Zeal Becomes Zealotry: A Tawdry Tale

2009-06-13T04:05:00.000-07:00

I love zeal. Zeal is enthusiasm, it's zest, it's drive, it's initiative. Zeal builds communities. Unfortunately, in some individuals, zeal turns to zealotry, and zealotry does just the opposite. This a long posting, but it provides an excellent example of what I'm talking about, and I hope you'll take the time to read it.

I've been on sabbatical in Japan for the past two weeks, with one of them spent wandering the countryside of Shikoku, in Western Japan across the Inland Sea from Osaka and Kyoto, visiting Buddhist temples, wandering through bamboo forests, documenting things on-the-fly from my cellphone, when service was available.

Sadly, my Buddhistic mellow was harshed by my inbox filling with a lot of nonsense thanks to a moronic flamewar which broke out on the ubuntu-devel list, instigated by one Mark Fink, who has a serious hate on for Mono and anything associated with it.

We've seen Mark before, more than a year ago, similarly stirring up the GNOME desktop-devel list. At that point, he was planning to write "a replacement for Tomboy" because "because Tomboy is poisoning GNOME distributions like Red Hat and Ubuntu with it's Microsoft patented MONO dependency crap". In support of his position, he pointed to articles on Roy Schestowitz's site, boycottnovell.com. Roy seems to have a similar dislike for Mono, although I have to say he's a lot more careful in his phrasing of things.

This time, Mark took things up several notches, with a posting to ubuntu-devel titled, "shameful censoring of mono opposition"; in it, he essentially complains that the moderators of the Ubuntu Forums and the maintainers of Ubuntu are all corrupt for not simply agreeing to pull Mono out, as a few people have demanded. He went further and expressed outrage than Canaonical would hire Dave Siegel. None of which really has anything to do with the list.

It was a pretty pointless message, again referencing boycottnovell.com, and it got the expected reaction. Mark continued to escalate things even further, claiming that "the MONO camp has infiltrated canonical", and that people were "slandering roy schestowitz", Mark roundlt abused Miguel de Icaza, accusing him of "worship[ing] M$", of only starting GNOME because "because he couldn't get hired by M$" and of "splitting the Linux community", before going on to suggest that someone who expressed rational disagreement with this nonsense was a "typical M$ appologist [sic]", that "only stupid people who can't think for themselves fawn over MONO and follow it like a religion", that the forum moderators were "novell employees (or people who drink they're [sic] koolaid)", and so on.

None of this is unusual, we've all seen the September Effect, we've all seen dopey flame wars over silly points; what is a little unusual is what happened next.

As I said, I've been on sabbatical, and accordingly, I had an autorespond message up advising people that if they had a matter that required an immediate response, they should contact my manager, with his email address. After I expressed some unhappiness with Mark's attempts to stir up things, mostly in terms of having to plow through pointless emails on my phone from Japan at rather high international data roaming rates, my manager received some exceedingly odd email.

Most people have enough good sense not to resort to this sort of transparent attempt at intimidation, and my manager is smart enough not to take that sort of thing with much seriousness. I mentioned on the list that this was happening and that I thought it, while laughable, entirely out of line. There was general agreement, some of it in much stronger terms, but Mark's response was "no wonder you got reported to your boss, david. you are not very resptful [sic] of your users and customers." Some folks expressed (reasonable) outrage at this, but the reaction which really disturbed me was that a number of people began to post under pseudonyms for fear of finding themselves on the receiving end this kind of cheap attack at them and their livelihoods.

This sort of "chilling effect", in my view, can be a community killer. The open source model thrives on disagreement, and it lives on reputation. If people are afraid to disagree, and if they can't maintain reputation out of fear of off-list attacks, where are we?

But wait. It gets worse.

As I noted, Mark consistently points back to boycottnovell.com, trumpeting the cause espoused there by Roy Schestowitz, and in fact demanding at one point that Roy be made a moderator of ubuntu-devel to ensure "fairness". Mark gives every impression of being closely associated with Roy's cause and site.

I expressed some dismay over these shenanigans in comments over on boycottnovell.com. Roy was contrite, but equivocally so, I felt. He claimed he'd never heard of Mark Fink before that very day. He apologized, but refused to post a specific disclaimer about the site not being associated with Mr. Fink or his actions.

Then things got really weird. I got a private message from Mark Fink, claiming that he was scared that he'd gotten in over his head, and that Roy had in fact put him up to the whole thing. He included as evidence a digitally signed message from Roy--and I've verified the signature as being authentic--in which Roy tells Mark the following:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Hi Roy,

I'm sorry. it just makes me so mad when people are pro-MONO. also it
was not me who tried to get david fired so its unfair that they are
pinning it on me.

I liked what you do, but try to distance yourself from the site to give
it credibility. Make it look like a personal gripe while the site keeps
it polite.

- --
~~ Best of wishes

Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU/Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Freelance journalist @ http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/
Editor @ http://boycottnovell.com
GPL-licensed 3-D Othello @ http://othellomaster.com
Open Source, non-profit search engine proposal @ http://iuron.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAkoyYFgACgkQU4xAY3RXLo43nwCfdMB2txxNKF/APqkS24tSsfXf
9FIAoK0Yi83uPqJZAB72MpfBtPE8fxsT
=VXVu
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

The signature checks, this message is definitely authentically from Roy. The tone doesn't strike me as someone who's talking to someone who's done something he thinks is damaging to his cause, just the contrary. Nor does he express displeasure with Mark's actions, but outright approval, only a wish that a "credibly deniable" sort of distance be kept.

Now, I grew up in a family of lawyers, and I learned that there's no such thing as facts, only evidence. And--even though if Mark were to tell me that he had five fingers on his right hand and an ear on each side of his head, I'd want to verify it visually, in person--this seems like pretty clear evidence to me that Roy is at least supportive of, if not the driving force behind, this sort of cheap attack on someone who disagrees with him, but doesn't want to be tarred by the backlash.

This is the kind of zealotry I mentioned at the outset: the kind that places a "cause" above the real lives of real people. Zealots will try to get you fired; if they consider their "cause" important enough (i.e. more important than you are), they'll do even worse if they can. That kind of thing can only destroy community, it can't build it or sustain it.

Now, Roy's claimed privately that he had nothing to do with any of this, and after I asked him to explain this email, he (finally) posted something disassociating Mark Fink from any connection with his site. I frankly find this hard to believe, and for one simple reason.

I'm sure Roy considers boycottnovell.com to be an "important" web site. Its traffic rank on Alexa is in the neighborhood of 55,000 over the past three months. I've got a site that isn't anywhere near the top 100,000, and I certainly track where traffic comes from pretty assiduously. It beggars my imagination to think that Roy has absolutely no idea where his traffic is coming from; Mark's messages to ubuntu-devel (and his prior messages to desktop-devel), which included regular references to boycottnovell.com, must have driven some fairly significant amount of traffic there.

So, my conclusion is that Roy is either a complete idiot or is being, shall we say, less than candid with me about not ever having heard of Mark, as the email I received also clearly suggests. The tone of Roy's email doesn't strike me as someone who's talking to someone he a) doesn't know and is b) unhappy with. It sounds like someone working behind the scenes with someone he knows rather well. As I say, no facts, only evidence, and based on the evidence, the good news for Roy is that I don't think he's a complete idiot.

If you don't like Mono, don't use it, and if you don't like the fact that a distribution includes Mono, find another distribution. But don't take the position Mark and Roy and their friends are staking out, that someone who disagrees with you is fair game for victimization: that goes against everything that community means. When you start attempting to disrupt people's lives over a disagreement regarding a piece of software, you've lost all sense of perspective, integrity and rationality. You've set yourself in opposition to actual community.

"This is Rumor Control. Here are the facts."*

2009-05-22T10:33:00.000-07:00

In response to my most recent posting, "Shivan" writes,

yadda yadda
http://www.limofoundation.org/what-is-the-platform.html
look at the middleware, between "Database" and "Multimedia Framework".
There, you got it, I'm out.

What Shivan is slyly referring to here is the box labeled "DRM Framework", and he's evidently expressing his displeasure that such a thing might be included as part of a cell phone platform. I initially began to respond in a comment, but ultimately decided that this deserved a posting all of its own.

Shivan is well within his rights to "opt out" of anything which includes DRM in it, but I'm afraid it's likely to limit his activities a little. The fact is that—to the very best of my knowledge, anyway—there isn't a mobile network operator on the planet which doesn't mandate the inclusion of at least some form of DRM in every single phone it provides. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a phone which doesn't include some form of DRM, "OMA Type 1" at the very least. And as much as I hate to be the one to tell you this, Android has DRM. Qtopia has DRM.

So Shivan is (unless he gets, perhaps, an OpenMoko phone and a long extension cord) going to have to do without a cell phone. He's likewise going to have to do without any MP3 player that supports protected AAC, WMA, and other DRM-enabled media. I'm pretty sure that excludes the bulk of the devices out there, so he's going to have to probably listen to his music (FLAC encoded? Better get a big hard disk, too...) on his laptop (and another extension cord, maybe).

(Oh, and for sure don't ever watch any DVDs!)

One nice thing about having been around as long as I have is that I'm a pragmatist. Another nice thing about it is that I understand very well that half a loaf is better than none, and ninety-nine one-hundredths of a loaf is even better than that.

It's not a perfect world, Shivan. I don't like DRM, so I don't use it—most of my music was ripped (to MP3s, sorry, even with a 160GB iPod, I've got a lot of music) from my CD collection and the rest was purchased as downloads (without DRM) from Amazon. With one exception, which I did as an experiment, I've never bought protected media from the iTunes Store, or much of anything else. So DRM never impacts me. But I'm realistic enough to understand that it's going to be there, in at least some metaphysical sense, for the foreseeable future, and I get on with life.

When the MNOs decide there's no need for DRM, cell phone platforms will stop including it. That'll be fine by me. In the meantime, I don't see that I'm improving my life by refusing to use a cell phone until they do. Your Mileage May Vary. Sorry For The Incovenience.

* Brian Glover as "Harold Andrews" in Alien³

The New Walled Gardens

2009-05-21T14:03:00.001-07:00

(This post was originally published on the LiMo Foundation blog...)

Consumers’ first exposure to the internet came via walled gardens for most people: America Online, Prodigy and Compuserve all offered a degree of access to the network, but at the cost of a variety of limitations to access and a great deal of control. In time, those walled gardens withered away, replaced by unmediated access. Similarly, mobile data services have, for years, been similar walled gardens, and in the same way, those efforts to “rope in” users are becoming untenable. Today, we see other walled gardens springing up as the old ones wither away.

The new walled gardens are different, however: they’re about the ability to write software for, and to add software to, devices that are much more capable than older cell phones (and even many of the computers we used when we were using AOL to get to the network). The walls around these gardens are defined by programming models, by application distribution (and the policies around it) and most importantly, by platforms.

Apple’s iTunes App Store, and the entire ecosystem associated with the iPhone, is an excellent example of one of these new gardens. The walls consist of an idiosyncratic programming model, one which uses non-standard languages and its own set of programming paradigms, as well as the store itself. Writing an application for the iPhone involves an investment in learning how to program for the device in Objective C—knowledge which is non-transferable to other contexts—as well as a fairly large “leap of faith” that Apple will actually accept the application and place it in the App Store for distribution.

Android, similarly, attempts to lock in developers via similar means. Applications for Android can only be written in Java, and not even standard Java, and must be created to fit within the Android application framework. Again, this involves a fairly steep learning curve, and the learning is essentially unusable anywhere other than in the context of Android.

What’s the attraction for these platform purveyors? Mostly—as with the early attempts at facilitiating internet access—it’s an attempt at a mechanism of control: control of the users, but this time at second-hand. Control is exerted via the development community associated with the device, and the expectation is that the availability of applications on a given platform (and their presumed unavailablity on others) will act as an incentive to coax users to stay with the device they have.

Experience shows that these efforts are generally failures. AOL and the like had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the point of allowing unmediated access to the net as opposed to their little Disneyland-ified portion of it. People want freedom, and people don’t like to have stumbling blocks put in their path. Developers, on the other hand, want to write programs the way that they’re used to doing, and they want their work to be as widely available as it can be. Both of these factors conspire against the success over time of the current batch of walled gardens.

We can see some of this beginning to happen in the area of MID devices: mainstream Linux is getting to be a popular choice there, and there are increasingly impressive efforts to adapt the basic Linux desktop user experience to these smaller devices. There’s a well understood programming model for these devices—it’s the same model used on the Linux desktop and on pretty much all devices based on mainstream Linux distros. This is the same programming model that will be exposed on the next wave of
“open phones” coming from LiMo Foundation members.

This is a core difference between the efforts of organizations like LiMo and others: LiMo is not reinventing a new wheel in order to “lock in” developers—and by extension users—to a particular device. The programming model, architecture and components used in a phone based on LiMo platform software is largely identical—in the open source portions, certainly—with any Linux-based desktop. Programs are developed and tested in the same ways, and programmers aren’t asked to face a learning curve that only enables them to program for a single device.

One answer, and one which will be popular in some areas, is the idea of web-based applications, using Ruby or AJAX or any of the various “Web 2.0” development models. This is attractive in that there’s a lot less risk of being locked into a single platform but again it comes at a cost: not all applications can be readily adapted to running out “in the cloud”, and not all should. But in the meantime, efforts like BONDI, etc., offer some short term relief for at least a class of developers.

In a free market, “open” generally wins over “closed” in time. Closed systems—and a walled garden is simply a somewhat larger “closed system”--ultimately frustrate both their developers and their users: the developers because they can’t do what they want, whether because they’re trammeled by programming models of by distribution models, and the users because they find they can’t get access to the programs and facilities that they want. Open will eventually win over closed in the mobile development marketplace and for the same reasons: people won’t stand for any more control exerted on them than they have to. And that goes for both developers as well as for end users.

Something for the Whiner (Actual GNOME Content!)

2009-03-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

I presented at Open Source in Mobile USA in San Francisco last week on different approaches to mobile device development--pretty successfully, I guess, from the reaction, although maybe people were applauding because they were just happy that they were finally getting to go to lunch.

At any rate, one of the more interesting things I saw at OSiM was a selection of netbooks running to 1.0.1 version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, courtesy of Canonical. On the strength of that, I ran over to the Best Buy in Capitola and picked up an HP Mini 1030NR for a little over $300. It came with "Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition for Ultra Low Cost PCs" (no kidding) pre-installed, and I booted XP exactly once before I slammed UNR into it. It works flawlessly: installation was smooth as silk, WiFi, Bluetooth, trackpad, etc., all work perfectly, no tweaking needed. It's a pretty impressive device, given the price, and--for the part of my day that consists of email and web stuff, i.e. a fair amount of it--it's just fine. I guess if I had an immediate critique it's that the "remix" seems to mainly consist of a different desktop launcher and a patch that maximizes all app windows and changes the tab structure. I'm going to give it a few weeks and a fuller review; I also plan to try the Moblin v2 alpha on it as well, and will report back on that, too.

Netbooks are an interesting kind of interim device; I suspect that they may be displaced by actual "mobile internet device"-style tablets as time goes on, but I guess we'll see. It's definitely a very handy sort of a device to have when I travel, I expect, and I may well leave the MacBook at home on my upcoming trip to London, but we'll see...

Notebook Pr0n

2009-03-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

Having spent a year or three experimenting with digitally capturing stuff that would ordinarily be handwritten (on Newtons, via Graffiti on various Garnet OS devices, on various Windows Tablet PCs, etc.), I've always come back to the conclusion that paper and writing implements have been around for millennia because they just work. Digital devices (for capture, as opposed to retention and access) still don't really have it over paper, in my book (so to speak).

I mentioned recently that I'd come across an interesting organizer system from Germany called an "X47". I managed to suffer through the web site's German-only, excruciatingly slow back-end and ordered some stuff from them, which finally arrived this last Monday. In short, it's fabulous stuff.

I got an A6-sized leather notebook, and a number of different inserts. What's unique about this system is that, rather than using a ring binding, this uses a system where the binder has three pairs of pins, one of which is spring-loaded:

The inserts, which come in a variety of styles, have a metal tube stapled into the spine, which fits into the pins:

This arrangement has several happy side-effects: the amount of available writing space is increased to the full page, since there aren't rings and holes taking up space, the width of the spine is reduced to a minimum, and you can use the page opposite your writing hand without having rings in the way. The variety of insert types encourages you to design your own organizer: I've got a one-day-per-page insert for my calendar, a "databank" insert (12 tabbed 6-page sections, good for collecting project-related "next steps"), and a lined insert (which I use for my "Autofocus" list).

Apparently, it's possible to buy this stuff retail in Amsterdam, so I'll be checking that out toward the end of next month while I'm there for a meeting sponsored by FSF-Europe. It's not cheap, but it's really well-made and the design is incredible. The same company makes a more inexpensive line, the X17, which uses rubber bands looped over the spine rather than the pin-and-tube arrangement of the X47.

The system comes in three sizes, A5 (too big), A7 (too small) and A6 (just right!) The A6 binder I got fits quite nicely in the back pocket of a pair of Levi's and has two ribbon markers as well as a number of business-card-sized pockets.

Every once in a while, you come across something that's just perfectly conceived and executed. This product gets my vote.

"It Never Ends!"

2009-03-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

I gave a presentation at eComm on "Governance for Mobile OSs" this past week, I think the audience enjoyed it, especially after the droning quality and inability to finish within the timespan allotted shown by some of the previous presentations. One of the issues I pointed out was that developers face, particularly in developing for the iPhone, huge uncertainties that they cannot resolve independently.

The biggest of these has to do with Apple's position as the unappealable gatekeeper for the store. Developers, as shown by quotes last week, are understandably concerned at "keeping their fingers crossed and hoping for the best" after having sunk considerable design and development time into their application, knowing full well that Apple can give them the "Thumbs-down" for any reason, or none at all, and that--having done so--they won't spare a second's effort to discuss it with them or even tell them what the issue is.

So (as I actually predicted some time ago), extra-curricular "iPhone App Stores" are springing up, according to a story reported initially by the Wall Street Journal. Apple's threatening to play the DMCA card to stop jailbreakers--although reports are that at least one of the non-Apple stores won't require a jailbroken iPhone to install apps--but it remains to be seen how that's likely to play out.

In a story from yesterday, iPhone developers are "tearing their hair out" over the growing delay in getting applications approved for the iPhone App store: the wait has gone from a matter of days to months, even for free applications. And, of course, Apple doesn't return calls. And, not surprisingly, "developers, who are increasingly being discouraged by a process that in many cases prevents them from getting their first real foothold in the App Store. Without clear signs that Apple is addressing the problem, companies and individuals alike are questioning whether they should continue to produce iPhone apps in the first place." (My emphasis)

Like I keep telling people, it's a big world, and "Who's winning the mobile space?" won't be decided for a good, long time. Situations like the one detailed about show the downside of Apple's store model. Developers are clearly looking for a platform that treats them better...

Just a Few News Items That Caught My Eye

2009-02-28T10:01:00.000-08:00

Proving that the world of mobile devices is indeed an extremely large and varied place, it turns out that it's evidently not possible to even give away an iPhone in Japan. (If you've ever used the iPhone's Japanese input, you might have an inkling as to why...)

(On a vaguely related note, Apple is pulling down all apps that enable "emoji" on the iPhone. If you want it, you'd better hurry on up and get it: Spell Number was a free application still available yesterday which enabled the Emoji keyboard....)

Also, Apple inexplicably trusts its iPhone developers more than Google trusts their Android developers: if you shelled out for an Android developer phone, you're not allowed to access the "paid applications" section of the Android store.

I'm going to be presenting on behalf of the LiMo Foundation at the eComm conference in Mountain View this coming week, and I plan to be attending (at least) Open Source in Mobile USA in San Francisco the week after that. If you're going to be around for either, drop a comment!

In other developments, I've come across an awesome organizer/notebook from the folks at X47, and a good resource for would-be learners of Japanese at KnowIt! Check 'em out. Fair warning: the X47 site's backend is slower than molasses and entirely in German, so if you decide to order something, you're going to need both linguistic skilz and patience...

I'm also becoming more interested in ELGG, an open source platform for Facebook-like social networking, as well as OpenPlans.org and The Open Planning Project....

The Store Story: A Follow-up

2009-02-22T21:21:00.000-08:00

I'd noted previously, that Apple's opaque and inexplicable policies (soi-disant) about which apps make it into the App Store are a direct disincentive to developer investment in the platform. That's underscored by an article in PC World which talks to developers of ten rejected iPhone applications, and gets some relevant quotes:

"We spent a lot of time and money on this product. It sucks to develop an app and get it rejected for reasons that you weren't aware of."—Patrick Alphonso, CEO, Swamiware
"Their policies and approval are shrouded in mystery. Whenever an app is submitted, it seems like playing Russian roulette."—Hardy Macia, Catamount Software
"Their reasons for banning us really didn't add up...After that, they pretty much stopped talking to us or returning e-mail and voicemail."—Sam Magdalein, Air-o-matic
"In a word, I was upset. I tried contacting Apple to see if there was any way to resolve their concerns, but they never answered my e-mail."—Josef Wankerl
"Apple's 'reasonable judgment' seems to depend largely on an individual reviewer's judgment rather than any simple-to-gauge metric."—PJ Holden
"By the time you get rejected, you've already wasted all the development time and expense, and there's no recourse to get [the application] accepted."—Alec Vance

The Store Story

2009-02-20T05:57:00.000-08:00

(This was originally posted earlier this week on the LiMo Foundation's MWC Blog...)

A lot of the news coming out of MWC this year seems to be about what isn’t there. In particular, there’s been a fair amount of commentary on the relative dearth of new Android handsets, the notable exception being the HTC Magic, coming out from Vodaphone before long. Other than the lack of a hard keyboard—the Magic is touchscreen only—it’s pretty similar to the G1.

What’s more interesting are the announcements around applications stores coming from various parties. Google has finally enabled paid applications on its Android store, a few months late, and Nokia has announced the Ovi Store for Symbian phones. In addition, Microsoft is going to have a Windows Mobile store (and reportedly brick and mortar stores as well) to push their mobile solutions. Stores, stores, stores.

Obviously, all of this has been driven by the success of Apple’s iPhone and its associated App Store. Apple, in a big comeback from their original position on development for the iPhone, has managed to do what prior mobile platform vendors, like Palm, always had a lot of trouble accomplishing: they’ve made adding software to your phone mainstream. Prior to this, while a lot of people carried “smart phones” of various kinds, relatively few ever took advantage of the capability of those devices to do things beyond the set of capabilities they shipped with. That’s a situation which is clearly changing.

Some interesting situations have already arisen, which display the difference between the various store “governance models”, if you will, as well as the security capabilities of the various platforms. Apple exerts tremendous control over its developers, to an extent pretty much never-before-seen, with the iPhone store. Essentially, developers for the iPhone have to do their work “on spec”, in the hopes that Apple will approve it for sale in the store. There have been several interesting cases where Apple’s either disallowed applications, or even removed them after initially allowing them for sale, on various grounds, as well as a number of situations around content—the author of an electronically distributed novel was obliged to remove several instances of “the F-word” in order to satisfy Apple that his content was okay for distribution.

That’s a situation that, in the long run, is calculated to provide a strong disincentive for major development projects on the iPhone: what organization is going to be willing to invest man-years of effort in developing an application that they may, ultimately, find themselves unable to effectively sell? In addition, Apple controls the effective marketing of those applications to a large degree, with its “Staff Picks”, and so on. The iPhone store is a market, but not a free one.

In contrast, the Android store is a pretty wild and wooly place, especially in the commentaries on some of the applications. Google exerts almost no control (although there are, indeed, terms and conditions associated with selling applications through the Android store, but they’re a cakewalk compared to Apple) over what gets listed there, which is fine as far as it goes. Where things get problematic is the intersection of the freedom around the store and the weaknesses of Android’s security model.

In the past few weeks, stories came out about an Android application which purported to “optimize” the memory usage of your Android phone. Sounds good, right? Of course, the app, when installed, dutifully reported the things it wanted to do, and of course, users all agreed to allow the application to do those things. The application then apparently went ahead and deleted pretty much every single bit of data on the phone, which I suppose represents an “optimization” of sorts—”There’s more now!”—but isn’t what the users of the application had in mind, certainly.

Both situations are caused by the same symptoms: lack of a policy-based security model. All Android applications are self-signed by their developers; all iPhone applications are effectively signed by Apple. However, neither of these models offer much granularity: either you install an application on your iPhone or G1 or you don’t; when you go to run it, either you agree to allow it to do whatever it does (implicitly on the iPhone, more explicitly on an Android phone), but once you’ve done that, if the application misrepresented what it does, you’re out of luck.

In contrast, policy-based models allow “levels” of signature, such that—for example—for an application to delete contacts, it would need to be signed by an authoritative source. Alternately, that specific capability would be brought out to the use for explicit approval, rather than a generic “This application wants to access your contacts”. This is one of the strengths of platforms—like the recently-announced LiMo reference platforms—which incorporate a policy-based model from day one.

Over the next few years, better security models, and broader availability of platforms which implements them, such as those being used by LiMo Foundation members, are going to be creating a real marketplace for developers, one which allows them to sell (or give away) their goods as they see fit, but also one which has some real consumer protection built in.

Greetings from Brussels!

2009-02-05T23:42:00.000-08:00

I'm in Brussels, arrived yesterday for FOSDEM this weekend. Actually, FOSDEM semi-officially begins this evening, with the traditional "beer event", being held this year at the Café Délirium, near the Grand' Place. (Tomorrow night's the GNOME Beer Event, at La Porte Noire...)

I got here around 9 in the morning yesterday, was lucky enough to be able to snag a room at the hotel that early, and crashed out for several hours. I met up with my pal Carlos, who happened to be in town, but not for FOSDEM, yesterday evening and we wandered out to get mussels and beer on Boulevard Anspach, an excellent dinner.

I expect to be meeting up with a couple of other friends Monday before I fly back to the States on Tuesday. I should be getting a bunch of pictures from FOSDEM, I'll try to post the best of them here... I'm also going to be doing a little Mobile World Congress blogging on behalf of the LiMo Foundation week after next...

Who else is going to be at FOSDEM this year?

An Interesting Observation

2009-01-29T05:59:00.000-08:00

(This is something that came out of one of those "You kids don't know how good you've got it!" rants, where I was telling someone who was complaining about having to "haul around" a 120GB iPod that, when I was that age, all we had were Sony Walkmans--Walkmen...?--that ran through four AA batteries in two hours, and cassette tapes to listen to, so that you needed a backpack to carry a good assortment of music, not to mention the spare batteries....)

A 4 gigabyte SD card costs anywhere between $6 and $50 these days, depending on its transfer speed and where you buy it, and it holds, roughly, 70 hours worth of music. A "standard" cassette tape held 30 minutes on a side (because, in the days of LPs, that was about all the gouged-in spiral you could fit on a side of a platter) and cost a buck and a half, easy.

So, to store as much music as that SD card would hold would have taken seventy cassettes--a sizable stack--costing over $100. In 1972 dollars. Backpack not included.

Neat.

(Okay, there's one thing you can do with LPs that you can't do with digital media, or cassettes, for that matter, but I've only seen it done once. Monty Python's Flying Circus' Matching Tie and Handkerchief was, to the best of my knowledge, the world's only 3-sided record album. It had two spirals gouged into one side, one "inside" the other, so that depending on where you randomly dropped the needle when you started to play it--do you have the slightest idea what I'm talking about, Best Beloved...?--it would play one "side" or the other... Doesn't seem like that big a loss... And in case you've been wondering, the storage capacity of a standard filiing cabinet runs around 50 megabytes...)

This is What The Future Should Look Like!

2009-01-27T08:58:00.000-08:00

Actually, I want to mention an instance of what The Future is possibly going to look like, and shouldn't, first. I've commented in a variety of places about the problems with Android's security model, and how it essentially made any security problem the users' fault by asking them to approve what the application says it wants to do--in broad terms--on installation, without any policy component behind it at all. Lo and behold, here's the first instance I've come across of (possibly inadvertent) Android malware: a memory optimization application which (I suppose) optimizes the memory on your G1 by simply getting rid of all those space-consuming files, contact lists, etc. I suppose whoever installed it said that they were okay with it messing with that stuff. The article calls this a failure of the Android marketplace, but it's exactly what Google promised: completely open. Social engineering wins again. Caveat downloader.

Now, onto more promising and uplifting things. I use two travel tracking social networks, TripIt and Dopplr, and while I've mainly concentrated on TripIt (since it had the ability to organize my confirmations from airlines and hotels first, mostly), Dopplr blew me away last week by sending me a beee-yooo-tiful PDF report of my various travels last year (not entirely accurate, since I didn't update Dopplr with every single trip I took, but close). Check this out, I think Edward Tufte would be thrilled (you can download the PDF by clicking on the picture):

This really provides an interesting overview of things, in an immediately accessible way. One small addition I'd like would be a more explicit legend of the color-coding of destinations outside of the top ten, but that can be figured out from the map (which, again in Tufte-inspired fashion, shows both where one has been and how much time one has spent there).

I've found something very similar for my cell phone use, SkyDeck. Once you get it initialized to your phone, you get a very illuminating weekly email documenting a variety of interesting things about your cell phone usage. Not as snazzy a use of graphic design as the Dopplr report, but still interesting stuff...

I've replaced my Lenovo X61 Tablet with a 15" MacBook Pro, one of the unibody ones. I'm having some interesting experiences getting back to OS X for the first time in a couple of years after the death of my G4 Cube....

OSCON 2009 Goes Mobile (and to San Jose)!

2008-12-20T10:45:00.000-08:00

Matthew Johnson from O'Reilly has pointed out to me that next year's OSCON (taking place July 20th through 24th in San Jose, California rather than in Portland this time) is going to have, not just a Mobile Day, but a whole Mobile track dealing with "ahead-of-the-curve open telephony and mobile technologies, people, projects, and activities pushing the boundaries of what’s possible"!

The call for papers is now open, so mark your calendars and make your proposals. I'll be working with folks at the office to get ours in, for sure.

I went and saw the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still last night, didn't find it a big improvement on the original (although it does always make me vaguely happy to see Keanu Reeves getting a bullet put into him). In particular, the words "Klaatu barada nikto" never make an appearance, which was obviously a major disappointment. On the upside, the nanobot swarms were a pretty cool effect. It's still a B movie.

I still have Christmas shopping to take care of...

"I'd buy that for a dollar!"--How Not to Make Money Selling Mobile Applications

2008-12-15T08:20:00.000-08:00

As a friend from my Apple days used to say, "A funny thing happened to me today: I got paid."

On that note, there's unrest in developer-land again. Two interesting blog posts have come up illustrating the problems for subsidizing application development against expected sales on the iPhone. Craig Hockenberry started it with an open letter to Steve on the subject of "Ringtone apps", and why it's very difficult to make a case for developing non-trivial software when you can't exert much control over the marketing and distribution of that software.

The App Cubby blog follows up with a very detailed and well-thought-out post on the experiences they've had (with annotated graphs) marketing a number of popular iPhone applications. The writer says that, in spite of being fairly successful in iTunes App Store terms--featured in the "Top 50", a "Staff Pick"--he's been pulling down about five bucks an hour in salary so far.

It's not enough to create a context for developing applications, clearly. There has to be a marketplace for them, and it has to be a free and open marketplace. For it to be interesting, there has to be enough of an underlying demand to make it worth a developer's while--at least if we're talking about applications for which people expect to get paid. Both conditions are necessary, neither alone is sufficient. It's clear that Apple has the numbers, but not the marketplace: beyond any technical limitations of the iPhone SDK, Apple's heavy-handed and opaque approval process, the similar lack of transparency over how things like "Staff Picks" get made and unmade, etc., it's difficult--as both the articles substantiate--to make a solid case for doing a serious applications development effort for the platform, as attractive as it is.

This is a potential opportunity for the free and open source software community, one which I expect we'll start to see becoming a lot more "real" in 2009. We've had the first "GNOME Mobile" release, and it's a good start. We're seeing serious progress with UX/UI technologies like clutter. We're going to see phones based on this kind of software becoming increasingly available in the next twelve months, and--the economics of things being what they are--more of them will likely be "open" devices, at least in the sense of being able to add new software post-purchase.

How can the community tap into that market? There are definitely challenges to deal with, many of them having to do with the wide variety of form-factors and capabilities of these kinds of devices, as well as the variety of UI approaches that we can expect to see. If it's too difficult to adapt a program to new devices, it becomes uneconomical to do so--Apple controls this issue by owning the hardware, but Java was never able to really come to terms with it. Google attempts to manage this issue by owning the platform, effectively, but it's a very tenuous sort of ownership, mostly reinforced by there being one (maybe two) devices available which are running Android intentionally. I doubt that's a situation that can last...

By the way, I've read that the most popular Android app is PacMan.

On the Subject of Go

2008-12-04T13:41:00.000-08:00

Since Dave started it, I thought I'd post a few thoughts on the game of Go as well.

I was a pretty serious Go player in my mid- to late-20s, a member of the New York Go Association and I played in several tournaments, ranked at the 1-3 kyu level when I last played. It's been a number of years since I've played seriously or consistently, and I'd definitely welcome the opportunity.

It's been said that while chess is a game of attack and defense, Go is a game of market share, and I think there's a lot of truth in that. Like Dave, I appreciate the level of philosophy and the detail of execution behind the game, as well as the mixture of incredible simplicity and incredible complexity the game offers. You can literally learn the rules of Go in ten minutes or less, and spend the rest of several lifetimes, I suspect, dealing with the consequences.

While the chess-mastery-via-software problem has been mostly licked for several years now, to the best of my knowledge, there's no computerized approach to Go that has yielded a ranking above double-digit kyu level.

Now, that's interesting.

(And yeah, a decent Go game on my N810 would rock.)

It's Been a While!

2008-12-04T01:55:00.000-08:00

There is nothing related to open source software, mobile devices, or anything of the sort in this posting. Sorry For The Inconvenience.

久しぶりですね？I've been busy, busy, busy and off to Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo (a couple of times), London, and other places.

In particular, I've been working on taking my bonji work up a notch or two, and to that end, I spent two entire weekends in Tokyo looking for a very specific sort of brush, a 朴筆 ("bokuhitsu"). Rather than hairs, these brushes have a square, wedge-cut felt pad of sorts and are used for the sort of formal-style of bonji I prefer.

Searching for these led to various adventures, starting with a visit to Ito-ya, the biggest stationery store in Ginza, where they spent twenty minutes trying to track down these brushes for me, with no success. The most interesting adventure, though, was my discovery of the Bonji Bar, a little izakaya in Asakusa run by a fellow named Kitahana-san, who works as a tattoo artist in Harajuku during the day and runs the izakaya in the evenings. As you might expect, the decor of the Bonji Bar is all about bonji, and it was fun for me to chat with Kitahana-san about our mutual interest, and fun for him, I think, to meet an American who knew something about the subject.

I'd gone there hoping to find these brushes for sale, but no dice. Kitahana-san dragged out his set, and did the usual Japanese thing of edging around the subject of giving one to me, but I immediately said that I couldn't possibly. I did get to play with them for a good while, using that magic grey paper that you paint on with water, and which turns black until it dries again. Very neat stuff. I ended up buying a t-shirt and Kitahana-san gave me a pair of bonji-decorated chopsticks as well. I'll definitely go back there.

I learned from Kitahana-san that he had no idea where to get the brushes in Tokyo, that his were made by a little outfit out by Mount Fuji. I figured worst case, I could take the train out there and get some myself some time, if it came to that.

I drank a whole lotta sake and met a few of the bar's regular customers, who started wandering in a few hours after I did. Definitely a good place, although a little hard to find: it's waaay back of Senso-ji, in the little warren-y alleys of Asakusa...

After I came back, a very good friend of mine in Tokyo did me a couple of favors, first by ordering a set of brushes on my behalf from the Fujisan gang, and then (somehow!) discovering that these brushes could be found at Kyukyodo, also in Ginza, just down the street from Ito-ya.

So now I not only have a full set of the brushes I wanted, but I also know where to buy them without having to take a long-ish train ride. I visited Kyukyodo on my subsequent visit to Tokyo, and found the brushes. As long as I was there, I bought some sumi, a suzuri, a couple of regular shōdō brushes, and some other small things.

There are monster spiders, called jorōgumo ("harlot spiders", from an old kaidan hanashi) in Shinjuku Central Park! The trees along the side of the path to the Shinto shrine in the back of the park are festooned with Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark type webs, most of which house an extremely large (up to 20 cm., no kiddin'!) yellow, black and red Nephila clavata.

Okay, Fair Enough...

2008-10-30T01:52:00.000-07:00

When I'm (mostly) wrong, I'm (mostly) wrong. It seems that what Google has, while indeed being incompatible with OpenID 1.x is (mostly) compatible with OpenID 2.0. Thanks to those who pointed this out.

That said, if I "have an axe to grind", it's largely because I spent a good deal of the last year listening to folks like Eric Chu from Google spouting idiocies like "open source projects can't be relied on to ship according to schedule" while standing in front of a whole bunch of GNOME folks (which, of course, ships every six months like clockwork) and "current open source projects are too desktop-oriented" (which is simply nonsense) as justification for reinventing more wheels than I care to count with Android. It gets tiresome.

I'll look forward to seeing both Robert and Leslie participating in the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board; they know I'm an opinionated bastard, and they won't hold it against me...

Continuing to Not Quite Get It at Google...

2008-10-30T00:08:00.000-07:00

So, Google made a big announcement about how they're now supporting OpenID from Gmail. Except it turns out that they're really not. They're using an extra-special Googleplex fork of OpenID, incompatible with the standard. It's not OpenID, it's GopenID, or GoogleID, or Andro-ID, but whatever it is, it's not what they claim it to be.

I know the folks at Google aren't stupid, and I'm unable to understand what it is about actually working with a community--one that isn't contained within the Googleplex, anyway--that they find so scary. They did it with Android (and then spent the better part of a year publicly running down mainstream mobile open source development as "not good enough", "too desktop oriented", etc.) and now they've gone and done it again with OpenID.

Let me try to explain this to you, guys: a standard only has value when everyone uses the same one. If you decide to have your own version of a standard, it's not a standard any more, it's just pointless fragmentation.

Google's pretty good at things that simply involve writing a check, like the Summer of Code, like sponsoring GUADEC (and then not showing up), like joining the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board (and I certainly hope someone's planning on showing up for that), like Android. They're consistently terrible at actually getting out into the community and simply working with people and projects that don't happen to be Google-driven.

I don't get it. Or if I'm feeling especially cynical, maybe I do. Like we used to say at Apple, if you think you're too cynical, you're not cynical enough.

My Hopefully-No-Longer-Ongoing Vista Ultimate Upgrade Nightmare

2008-10-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

Yes, I use Vista. I'm sorry if that troubles you, but in fairness, I use pretty much every OS known to humankind at one point or another.

The reason I use Vista is that I use Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and the rest of the CS3 Web Suite for a bunch of things and—after having used them on a Mac, with an external Wacom tablet for several years—I succumbed to the allure of the generally-despised Tablet PC, especially one which used the Wacom technology. There's nothing like "painting" directly on the screen with a stylus, and a pressure-sensitive stylus is even better.

So, for a couple of years, I had a Lenovo X41 Tablet on which I ran CS2, and with which I was quite happy. I decided I needed a new system earlier this year and ended up getting another Lenovo, an X61 Tablet this time. The Lenovo's are small, (relatively) light, travel well, and generally seem to work nicely for me; in addition to the X61, I've got an X60 (non-Tablet) on which I run Ubuntu 8.04 at the moment (and on which I've been spending way too much time looking at Android sources, but that's a story for another day...)

Anyway, the X61 came with Vista Business installed, and it worked just fine. Except for one thing: Vista Business doesn't let you do Japanese input, you need Vista Ultimate for that. There isn't a single other feature in Ultimate that I think I care about, and it's worth noting that Japanese support on XP was free, the upgrade kit for Ultimate cost me $220 at Circuit City.

Okay, fine. I can really use it, and while it used to be free (and is free on Linux), I'd put down two Benjamins for good Japanese support. So, I get my official Windows Vista Ultimate disk, and get to installing.

First off, this is a process which takes a whole large number of hours, I haven't managed to stay awake through it so far, but it's got to be nine or ten hours. Having done that, I discovered that the keyboard and "Trackpoint" joystick no longer functioned. Thankfully, the stylus did, and an external mouse and keyboard did, but I ended up spending an hour or two on the phone with Microsoft Tech Support, removing devices from the registry, re-scanning, searching for new drivers, etc., before everything was finally working again.

Then, some overnight automatic update or other killed the Trackpoint again. Luckily, I knew what to do, and I got that sorted out.

So, everything was fine until I went away to Singapore and Tokyo at the beginning of the month, and took the Linux laptop with me. When I got back, the first thing the X61 did was download a whole new bunch of updates, which somehow had the net effect of persuading the system that it was no longer a Tablet. No stylus response, no input panel, when tablet-specific software was started up, it denied that there was any tablet hardware in evidence.

So, I've spent pretty much all week on the phone, alternatively, with Lenovo support and with Microsoft support. Lenovo won't send me an Ultimate recovery disk, so they say, because their policy is to only send recovery disks for the OS with which the system originally shipped. Microsoft insisted the whole thing was so vendor-specific that getting help from Lenovo was really what was needed (a position with which I basically agree).

All in all, Microsoft tried harder to be helpful, calling me back multiple times and spending several hours on the phone looking at options. Where we finally wound up is that, late yesterday afternoon, I uninstalled Norton 360 (there seems to be no way to turn it off), turned off a whole pile of startup programs and services using msconfig, and did a fresh upgrade.

And got exactly the same results as the first time: tablet functionality was back, but no keyboard, no TrackPoint. Luckily, all of the previous experience gave me a notion of what to do. I let Vista install the 24 additional upgrades it wanted to, then I ran Lenovo's updater, and installed all the updates it found. Still no keyboard or TrackPoint, but the stylus, etc., still work.

I went to the Device Manager, and saw that neither the "Tablet PC Keyboard and Button" nor the "PS/2 TrackPoint" were running. So, I searched for an updated driver for the "Tablet PC Keyboard and found one. Next, I downloaded the latest TrackPoint driver installer from Lenovo and ran that. After a reboot, everything worked.

I took a system restore point called "Everything Works Here". At least I have a fallback now, but what a pain in the ass. Now, I've got about two dozen "optional updates" from Microsoft which I'll have to go through, one by one, ready to back them out individually if the cause new trouble.

And what a circus from, in particular, Lenovo support. They were never able to give me any explanation of what someone who wanted to upgrade to Ultimate was supposed to do, and they made moronic suggestions that I'd voided my warranty with them by doing so.

And people say Linux is hard to install!

Oh, yeah.

2008-09-29T08:52:00.000-07:00

From Berlin

A geotagging update:

After a number of false starts, fruitless efforts, software installation, software removal, uploading, re-uploading, etc., I finally worked out the geotagging magic.

I've got two galleries of shots from my Berlin trip, pretty much all geotagged and mapped, on Flickr and on Picasa. I used a GisTeq PhotoTrackr, with the (horrible, confusing, designed by aliens) GisTeq software used to (finally) associate the correct time/location with the correct photo. That took several tries.

Next, it turns out that there's not one, but two checkboxes you have to click on to get location data uploaded to Flickr. First, you have to share EXIF information. Then, you have to save any location data provided. Flickr is another example (at least in configuration) of non-intuitive design...

In between the inability to get Flickr working, I pulled down IrfanView (to verify that the location data was getting correctly stuffed into the EXIF), and the latest version of Picasa (which allowed me to verify that, if I had location data, it was possible to upload it someplace and take a look at it...)

Anyway, it works. I'm going to have to look for alternatives to the GisTeq software, at least for anything other than pulling the tracking data off the device (which is likewise horrific); anyone know of any projects working on this, e.g. associating NMEA datalogs with photographs, especially graphically...?

Not Getting It at Techcrunch

2008-09-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

Dan Kimmerling, over on TechCrunch, advises would-be iPhone developers to sit down, shut up, and learn to live with Apple's rules. In doing so, he manages to completely miss the main point that people have been complaining about.

Writing software is work. Sure, people do it for fun, but people split logs for fun, too. In any case, people do this sort of thing expecting a return on their investment of time and effort. The problem that Apple has created is that developers are in the position of having to make the entirety of their investment up front--thinking up and developing an application--and only then can they submit it to the iTunes Apps Store and find out whether they're going to be allowed to sell it or not.

The problem here is the complete lack of anything like a free marketplace. Apple not only owns the grocery store here, they own your pots, pans, sink, refrigerator and kitchen stove, and you can only use the recipes they've pre-approved. If you can't sell your application on the Apps Store, you simply can't sell your application. You could try to market it to the owners of "jailbroken" phones, but those are getting fewer and farther between; Apple keeps making efforts, with every software update, to close those opportunities as well.

(One of the coders whose app was rejected by Apple "for duplication iTunes functionality" found a backdoor through a mechanism used to distribute beta versions; Apple quickly slammed that door shut, too.)

That's a lot to ask of a developer: "make your investment up front, and we'll let you know after you're done whether the last six months were a complete waste of your time." That's a very bad proposition. When you add the limitations of the SDK in terms of what you're not allowed to do, and then you add the truly draconian terms of the NDA associated with the SDK, it starts to look like something which won't really incent the development world to put in major effort.

What organization is going to commit to a 10,000-man-hour project for the iPhone when they'll have no idea whether they'll actually be able to sell the fruits of their labors? Dan is right in this: Apple is certainly entitled to run their business as they please, but I hope they're not counting too much on the notion that their position is unassailable (although, based on my experience working there, I'm pretty certain they are counting on exactly that notion). The same thing will happen to the iPhone as happened to the Macintosh in the mid-90s.

Early adopters are fickle people. As soon as there's something else they can adopt earlier that seems shinier than what they have now, they're off like a shot. That--and hubris--is what took Apple's market share from 22% down to 2% ten or fourteen years ago.

Apple's setting themselves up to see exactly the same thing happen again.

Going Less Proprietary with Multimedia...

2008-09-22T06:11:00.000-07:00

Up until now, I've kept my CDs on an iPod, and carted along a DVD drive and a case of DVDs with me when I travelled, playing them back on my laptop. I had a really interesting experience on my flight from San Francisco to New York last week, which (along with some other fortuitous timing) has encouraged me to replace the iPod.

I managed to snag a seat in business class, and discovered that United has been playing around with the Archos 7xx line: they're handing them out, preloaded with a couple of dozen movies, to folks sitting in business for the duration of the flight. Aside from some minor screen calibration problems (it was difficult to fast-forward reliably using the movie's timeline), I thought it was an excellent experience.

The Archos 7xx are pretty big units, though. Happily, Archos is just releasing the new Archos 5 line, which comes in at about the size of a 3x5 card and only half an inch thick. I ordered one from Amazon, with a 250 GB hard disk yesterday, I expect to receive it within the next month.

I also started playing around with solutions for converting DVDs to MP4, and was pleased to discover that AnyDVD from Slysoft will not only allow me to get past the flavor-of-the-week copy protection they slap on DVDs (and it's worked in every single case except one), but it also gets around the regionality of the DVD drive so I can now use non-region-1 DVDs without the driver complaining.

I'm using Nero 8 recode to do the conversion. Movies take a little less than real-time to convert, but the size (for cinema quality) is excellent: they seem to come in at around 3/4 of a gig, or less.

With the 250 GB on the Archos, that means I get get my entire CD and podcast collection, as well as a selection of as many as a hundred or so movies at any given time, onto the Archos (once I've managed to convert that many, of course.) Frequent-flying-horror-movie-enthusiast heaven!

While a 3x5 screen sounds small, holding an actual 3x5 card (well, a Moleskine notebook, which happens to have almost exactly the same form factor as the Archos) up at arms length completely covers the 32-inch monitor in my living room, and then some, so that winds up being effectively a larger screen than the one I watch at home.

And, oh yeah: the Archos runs Linux (Qtopia, to be specific). Not that it does me much good--you can hack the older Archos devices (at a cost of some loss of functionality, something Archos should help the community to correct, if they're wise), but not this one so far.

So, adios, Apple. My last G4 Cube blew up a while back (necessitating a significant amount of inconvenience in reconstructing my MP3 collection, which I had to back-synch from the iPod), and now it looks as though the iPod's days are numbered, too...

Sigh.

2008-09-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

This is terrible. It's been more than a month since I've posted anything here.

One of the reasons is that I've been busy, busy, busy. On currently in New York City for the weekend, on my way to one of the things I've been busy with, the Open Source in Mobile conference, which is taking place in Berlin next week.

I've been particularly busy coming up with fiendish questions for the ACCESS-sponsored Open Source in Mobile Pub Quiz, which is shaping up to be quite an event! We going to be having ten (!) teams, beer, and questions galore, hosted by yours truly.

I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

On a not-really-related note, I'm taking along my GiSTEQ GPS data logger to Berlin, so I should be able to do some experimenting with geotagging photos. On another, my friend John Kreuzer has a video posted of me demoing some Netfront widget stuff at Linuxworld...

I'm also reading quite a good book now, which offers some interesting explanations of why "feature checklists" are wrong and how companies fail to grapple with what their customers actual needs and experiences are: Subject to Change by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba and Todd Wilkens (O'Reilly)...

Back from Amsterdam, Usability, and Silliy iPhone Nano Rumors...

2008-08-04T06:48:00.000-07:00

I made it back from Amsterdam Saturday night, unfortunately with a bit of a cold. I'm working on shaking that now, since I need to be up in San Francisco for Linuxworld tomorrow (I'm on the "Golden Penguin Bowl" Mobile team!) and Wednesday...

Matthew Paul Thomas has expanded his six-year-old piece on the usability problems in free software, why they're there, and what we might do about them. This is a really important discussion for the community to be taking up as we move forward toward more free and open source software in mobile applications. As the iPhone has demonstrated, usability can trump features; features that are usable are, of course, even better...

Speaking of the iPhone, the blog-o-sphere is filled with stories about a supposed "iPhone Nano" that Apple's ostensibly going to be bringing out by Christmas. It's idiotic, but I hope they do it. In that form factor, battery life will be about forty minutes. The only thing I'd enjoy more would be an "iPhone Shuffle": no screen, one button, and when you press it, it dials a random contact in your address book...

If you're going to be at Linuxworld, please stop by the ACCESS booth (not hard to spot) and say "Hi!" And don't forget to come for the Golden Penguin Bowl, at 4:30 tomorrow in the Keynote room!

Gone from Portland, Arrived in Ottawa...

2008-07-24T05:17:00.000-07:00

I got delayed in Portland until two am night before last, missed my connection in Chicago, finally made it to Ottawa around two the following afternoon. Bob Murphy will be presenting on "Eye Candy for Mobile Devices" here at the Linux Symposium this afternoon at 1500 in the "Rockhopper" room.

My OSCON talk got a couple of good write-ups, at Information Week and on the "Wireless Blog". Evidently my "this is your cellphone and this is your desktop" slides were quite popular. It was really good to hang out with Neary and Pippin and Pia and Stormy and Dirk and the rest of the gang, just not long enough.

Things to do in Ottawa: get some poutine; have dinner at Sweetgrass; maybe do the Centennial Walk again... I'm also looking forward to the Whisky BoF here at the Linux Symposium; we're evidently breaking with tradition this year and having it off-site at some former government nuclear war shelter. Should be strange and interesting.

OSCON

2008-07-22T06:24:00.000-07:00

I gave my presentation at OSCON's Open Mobile Exchange here in Portland yesterday, right before lunch. A PDF of the slides can be seen/pulled down from here. I'm really pleased that the O'Reilly folks have finally realized that there's some interesting stuff going on in the open source mobile space.

Had a nice dinner at the Rockbottom Brewery on Morrison, with Dave Neary, Paul Cooper and several other folks last night, followed by several games of pool upstairs. If you're in Portland, and hungry, the food at Rockbottom is really good, as is the brewed-on-the-premises beer. The portions are enormous, so be hungry.

I'm off, later this evening, to Ottawa for the Linux Symposium. My colleague, Bob Murphy, is going to be presenting his paper on "Coding Eye Candy for Mobile Devices" Thursday at 3:00 pm in Rockhopper. This is the same paper I presented at GUADEC, but hopefully Bob's dragging along a Zylonite or something for a live demo. So, if you missed it in Istanbul, you can catch it in Ottawa...

Once Bob's presented, I'll post the PDF of the paper itself for folks to download if they like...

Bob's "Eye Candy" Presentation

2008-07-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday afternoon, I gave Bob Murphy's presentation on "Eye Candy for Linux-based Mobile Devices". The talk was well-attended and, apparently, well-received, and I thank everyone who came.

I've posted a PDF of the slides as well as the (11.4MB, be forewarned) video I presented on my web server, so feel free to pull them down if you want copies. I'll post a PDF of Bob's paper as soon as the Linux Symposium opens later next week: I think they have the right of first publication here...

On that note, now that I'm back from Istanbul, I'm heading right out again this coming Sunday on a two continent, three city two-week tour. I'll be at OSCON from Sunday morning through Tuesday, then up in Ottawa for the Linux Symposium (Bob will be presenting there) from the 23rd through the 26th, at which point I'm off to Amsterdam for a week for LiMo Foundation meetings. If you're going to be in any of those places any of those times, let me know. I've already made a reservation for dinner at my favorite restaurant in Ottawa, Sweetgrass...

Also, it seems that editing postings, at least on Blogger, moves them up again in the syndication on Planet; sorry for the inconvenience, I'll try to get it right the first time in the future...

Ob. New Pigeon Post

2008-07-15T08:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to jdub, my blog here is now getting love on Planet GNOME, hooray! Karl Lattimer suggested that I should do an intro post for those readers out there with whom I haven't yet managed to meet up, so here we go:

I'm David "Lefty" Schlesinger, and my day job is Director of Open Source Technologies for ACCESS Co., Ltd. ACCESS is a Japan-based mobile software company, probably the largest, and one of our key product offerings is the ACCESS Linux Platform, an operating system stack for cell phones and other mobile devices which is based on open source and free software, including many GNOME technologies such as GTK+, Gstreamer, BlueZ, D-Bus, SQLite and others.

I've been a member of the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board for the past three years, and am a founding member of the GNOME Mobile Initiative (about which I expect you'll be hearing much more in the coming months). ACCESS has also been a Silver sponsor of GUADEC the past two years.

I'm additionally active in the LiMo Foundation, as ACCESS' represesentative to the Architectural Council and as the chair of the Open Source Committee, which will be working in a variety of areas, internally on open source "best practices" and license compliance, and externally on community engagement and relations. I expect you'll be hearing a good deal more about this in coming months as well.

Before coming to Palm in 2001, getting spun off with Palmsource in 2003, and getting acquired by ACCESS in 2005, I was at Apple for ten years (both pre- and post-Steve), and served as the manager of the Networking Technologies team there. One of the engineers I hired while I was there was Stuart Cheshire, the architect of the Bonjour zero-configuration networking scheme, a very useful open source component (licensed under Apache v2) that's seeing increasingly wide use.

I'm a big fan of horror movies, Talking Heads, photography, and attempting to learn Japanese. I travel a lot (close to 70,000 miles so far this year), and am attempting to become the guy who knows his way around the subway system of almost any major city that has a subway system.

PS: I can has hackergotchi:

GUADEC 2008

2008-07-14T06:37:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from Istanbul, where I participated in GUADEC 2008. Terrific conference, as always, and it's so nice to see so many of my farflung friends in one place. Some interesting points:

Istanbul is a neat city, but has a bit of a tendency to take advantage of out-of-towners. Always haggle on price for anything that isn't fast food and which doesn't have a price tag on it. If it has a price tag on it, consider haggling anyway.
Traffic in Istanbul is insane. Things like traffic lights, crosswalks, lane markers, medians, speed limits, etc., are considered to be completely advisory. Istanbul has replaced Amsterdam on my list as "the European city you're most likely to get run over in".
Our Turkish hosts, and Turks in general, are beautiful people. They're helpful and generous and very proud of their history and culture. They very much appreciate it when you appreciate it. I got asked to say a few words about this at the closing of the conference by Behdad.

This conference really brought home for me just how much our community--beyond fostering the development of the technologies which we all use and love--actually bridges cultures and brings people together. As I said, we're a lot like the UN, except that we're more effective and we get along better.
Most of the parties rocked. We had some good music from the Screaming Macaques at the roof party, and some incredible Turkish music from Serdar and Volkan. Volkan is one of the best drummers I've ever had the pleasure to hear.
Best of all was the boat ride on the Bosphorus sponsored by our good friends at Collabora. It was a beautiful evening, the views were remarkable, and anything is better when you do it out on the water. We had the brilliant inspiration of making the boat ride the venue for our annual Single Malt Appreciation Society for Hackers, Engineers and Developers meeting, and a brilliant time was had by all, see below. Some fell over, but none fell over the side, yay!
On the other hand, the closing party, sponsored by Google, was very lame. The music was too loud to think, much less converse, and we were limited to three free "beers" (there was considerable discussion at the conference as to whether Efes Pilsen actually consititutes "beer"; general opinion says, "no"). Lamer still was the apparent fact that not only was the no one from Google at the party, there seemed to be no one from Google at the entire conference. The place really is a black hole. Lots of stuff goes in and nothing (other than an occasional check) seems to come out again.
Lots of useful developments, chief among them being the hiring of Stormy Peters as Executive Director of the Foundation. Stony did a great job running the Advisory Board meeting, and spent most of the week chatting up people to hear their ideas on what was going well and what needed to be improved. She's off to an excellent start and is going to bring a lot to our efforts.

Also, the Board has set a goal (thank heavens!) of getting the GNOME Mobile effort back on track. Most of us have been valiantly trying to make this happen anyway, in the face of some internal obstacles, but is seems as though those are going to be bulldozed out of the way, and hurray for that.
As mentioned, we had our regular meeting of SMASHED (the Single Malt Appreciation Society for Hackers, Engineers and Developers), and had an excellent selection of bottles again this year. Most people voted for Rob Taylor's Ardbeg as the bottle of the year, but I personally preferred the Glengoyne cask-strength which was contributed by Dave Neary. I brought a 12yo Burnfoot (also a Glengoyne), which was very good, too.
I'd list all the folks whom I was very happy to see, or equally happy to meet, but I fear I'd offend someone by leaving them out.

It was a terrific conference, I got to wander around a city I'd never been in before, and got some nice pictures as well. Thanks to Baris, and to all the volunteers for doing such a great job, and thanks to everyone who took part in it. See you in Gran Canaria next year!

Android Intended to Drive Fragmentation?

2008-04-05T05:54:00.000-07:00

According to Sanjay Jha, COO of Qualcomm's chipset division, as quoted in this article in The Register, it was Google's goal from the outset to create, not reduce, fragmentation in the mobile software space with its introduction of Android. Qualcomm is, of course, a member of the Open Handset Alliance.

"Google wants fragmentation in the industry," according to Jha.

Why? Not too hard to figure out.

Google's Robert Love presented at GUADEC in Birmingham last year on the notion of a web-based desktop, where all your data lived on servers out "in the cloud" and was accessed pretty strictly via web browsers and web-based applications. This idea raised lots of criticisms, notably on the grounds of security and privacy (an area where Google's record is less than sterling), as well as accessibility. Love had no real response to the former criticisms other than "Trust us", and suggested that Google Gears could be used to address the latter, which kind of begs the question of why one should base everything on the web in the first place.

Google's shown that an area where they can succeed is in providing cross-platform tools for their properties such as Google Maps and the like, via precisely the sorts of web-based mechanisms that Love was proposing at GUADEC.

Why does Google want fragmentation in the industry? If the easiest way to make mobile applications is by falling back to the web, then that's a win for Google: they can cover a broad swath of devices while keeping platform-based competitors isolated to their own individual islands. This approach has the cynical side effect of marginalizing the work of the real open source community (y' know, the one whose source is actually open...?) with spurious claims that it "wasn't good enough" for Google's needs.

Google's approach to the mobile space has been deeply cynical from the outset: it's an open source project whose source isn't open, it's based on standards (live the Java language) while simultaneously ignoring the communities around those standards (like JCP), and it seems as though it's explicitly intended to hamper the development of a core mainstream Linux-based mobile stack by distracting the attention of potential developers.

I dunno, seems reasonably evil to me.

Linux-Based Systems Found to Be "Hacker Proof"!

2008-03-30T09:41:00.001-07:00

At this year's CanSecWest, they mounted the second PWN to OWN challenge: given a Sony Vaio running Linux, a MacBook Air running Leopard and a Fujitsu U810 running Vista, the first hacker to exploit the system of their choice would take the device home; in addition, the first to exploit any of the devices would get a check for ten grand.

The MacBook Air went down first in a surprisingly (disturbingly, really) three minutes, thanks to an exploit in the latest version of Safari, v3.1. Disturbing, since Safari 3.1 is the version on the beta 2.0 iPhones as well. Given the lack of a real security model on the iPhone, and the fact that most things run as root, this raises some concerns about the safety of putting third-party software onto that device. No doubt this exploit will be fixed, but this and the similar speed with which the iPhone 2.0 update was jailbroken underscore the fragility of the iPhone.

The Vista device went next, taking a more impressive 55 hours, before it finally fell to a Flash exploit.

The VAIO running Ubuntu was the only device standing at the end of the third day.

Want real security on your mobile device? You want Linux.

The Shiny Report (and Nine-Inch Nails in the iTunes Coffin...?)

2008-03-03T19:07:00.000-08:00

One of the things that I seem to value in my friends is their taste and design sense. My good friend in Vancouver, Jonathan "Squink" Blake, has started up The Shiny Report, an excellent blog showcasing some equally excellent examples of form transcending function and function coming to life through form. In other words, a lot of neat, well-designed things. This blog definitely lives up to its name: it's extremely shiny.

I see an awful lot of stuff I'd like to have, or at least play with. Check it out.

Following up on the possible disintegration of the iTunes Music Store's business model over the next year or so, Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails just released the new album, Ghosts I-IV, 36 instrumental tracks in all, and is offering free downloads of the first nine tracks. Well, trying to offer:

Unfortunately, the Ghosts I-IV site is down for the next few hours for maintenance. We quietly released this album last night without any warning, and without any press. Because we know how devoted our fans are, we planned for an overwhelming response, and expected heavy traffic. To our surprise, the traffic was more than three times what we anticipated, and has only been getting heavier throughout the day. The response has been absolutely phenomenal, and we couldn't be happier, but our servers have taken a beating, causing numerous problems with the download site. Our developers, who have been working non-stop to combat the surge of traffic, feel that taking the site down for a few hours to fix some crucial issues is the best way to get things running smoothly again. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

However, they helpfully point out:

While the site is down, you can still purchase the complete Ghosts I-IV here from Amazon's MP3 store for only $5. The MP3s are high quality and DRM-free.

Five bucks, thirty-six tracks, no DRM. That's under fourteen cents a track. You can't get it from the iTunes Store, NIN fans. I expect Amazon to sell a bunch of these (one to me, certainly), and I expect to see more of this sort of thing, and more of the business in general going to Amazon, eMusic, and the like.

If you want to scope out the first quarter of the album before you buy, it's on the torrents...

2008-03-01T08:31:00.001-08:00

Technorati Profile

Steve's Phone

2008-02-29T08:23:00.000-08:00

Back in Apple's Good Old Days (and I'd always said that the corporate motto should be "Not what it used to be since 1990"), Mac OS was a pretty open development environment. Apple put a lot of work into MPW and decent tools, and--even with abortive efforts like MacApp, now resurrected in zombie-like spirit as Android--there were lots of possibilities for developers. You could pretty much write what you liked, distribute it as you could, and--largely--do what you wanted.

Those days came to an end a good while ago, and they're apparently receding further if the report from iLounge on the imminent "iPhone SDK road map" is accurate. For my part, it seems not only believable, but in character, to me.

First, the only mechanism available for the distribution of applications is going to be the iTunes music store, and the only mechanism for installation of applications is going to be the iTunes desktop. (Is this sounding at all familiar...?)

Second, Apple is going to be guarding the Pearly Gates. You'll have to submit your application to Apple for its "Officially Steve-worthy" seal of approval in order to get it onto the iTunes store. Anyone who's ever tried to get their podcast into the iTunes directory can see the flaws in this notion.

Third, no access to "accessories", which if I understand it, means pretty much no actual access to the hardware. This makes an awful lot of interesting applications pretty much impossible.

Clearly, Apple is strongly motivated to tightly control what people can get on their iPhone, to the point of (in effect) voiding your warranty for installing "unapproved" stuff on the device. The main reason for that would likely be the apparent total lack of anything like a security model on the iPhone. Pretty much everything has, so far, run as root (!), so any sort of mayhem is potentially possible. It's kind of amazing that some level of meaningful security (other than gluing the case shut) wouldn't have been designed in from the beginning on this sort of device.

This will unquestionably hamper development for the iPhone. Good news for the partisans of more open systems, bad news for the early-adopting line-standers. Good news for developers, ultimately, I think they'll be looking around for greener pastures for their efforts. Happily, greener pastures should be coming onto the market shortly.

As for you iPhone owners, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Did you think that was your phone? Not at all: it's Steve's phone, he just lets you use it. And pay for the privilege.

Steve is good. Steve is wise. Drink your Kool-Aid.

ResourceSpace: An Excellent Open Source Digital Asset Management Package

2008-02-23T11:30:00.000-08:00

I keep saying to people that the problem with a lot of open source software is that it's 80% as good as the last guy who worked on it needed it to be. Every once in a while, though, you stumble across an open source project that's just incredibly awesome.

I do a lot of presentations, so I deal with a lot of stock photos, graphs, templates and so forth. Managing these, especially across a globally-distributed organization is no small feat, and things have gotten to the point where we clear need a real digital asset management package. We'd been looking at Canto's Cumulus--proprietary, and in my opinion, the web interface is quite unattractive and inconvenient to use--and then I stumbled across ResourceSpace.

ResourceSpace is written in PHP and requires a single MySQL database. It was originally developed by OXFAM International to manage their own digital assets, and it's available under a BSD license for free use.

It allows users to upload resources of any number of custom-defined types individually via direct http or batched using ftp; image assets are automatically resized to a variety of form factors, and can be distributed either by direct download or via email. There's also a decent facility for defining collections of assets, public, private or shared, as well as "themes" (groups of public collections).

Types of resources, with both global and specific attributes, can be defined, and access can be controlled with high granularity. Users can be freely classified and the access controls are similarly pretty fine-grained.

Tagging and keywords are supported, and the standard keywords and fields can be easily customized, without knowledge of PHP, from the administrative interface. Search capabilities are very good, and, while I haven't loaded my test installation down with pictures, it seems as though it's capable--thanks to reliance on MySQL--with managing extremely large libraries of assets efficiently.

The user interface is clean, easy to use and modern-looking, quite a bit nicer than some of the competing proprietary products. It's also--since the full source code is, of course, provided--completely customizable. Strings can be customized and localized from the administrative interface (which is cleanly integrated into the rest of the site), and the overall look can be modified from the css files.

The biggest missing feature I'd like to see in here is version control, but that's a bit of a side issue to the one I wanted to solve: ensuring that we didn't buy the same stock photos over and over because we didn't know we'd already licensed them and making it possible for our users to access those stock images through a web-based interface, without having to deal with the vagaries of multiple VPNs, etc. For the security-minded, the site requires log-in by default to access resources, has a full supporting facility and can be easily configured to run over https on sites with a usable certificate. Documentation is a little on the sketchy side, but bring-up was dead easy and required a minimum of PHP and MySQL savvy.

If you're looking for a DAM package, I'd definitely check out ResourceSpace before you went out and spent money on anything.

In Which I'm Not Actually in Brussels This Weekend

2008-02-22T04:24:00.001-08:00

Things got busy for me here—if you look at the last week's press announcements coming out of MWC, you may be able to deduce why—but the long and short of it is that I'm not going to be in Brussels for FOSDEM as I'd planned.

I'm bereft, if that's any consolation. Looks like I'll be in Rome next month, though. Photos to follow, no doubt.

LugRadio Live USA 2008! Don't Miss It!

2008-02-21T10:02:00.000-08:00

I just got the word from my friends Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge that I'll be speaking at the upcoming LugRadio Live USA 2008 event, this coming April 12 and 13, in San Francisco. It's going to be a terrific event! If you haven't been listening to LugRadio Live, you owe it to yourself to check that out, too.

Registration for LugRadio Live USA 2008 is now open at http://lugradio.org/live/USA2008/register, and tickets for the two-day spectacular cost only $10 for the full weekend, including full access to all talks, the exhibition, evening events, and a free bag o' swag for visitors. Pre-registrations also enjoy additional benefits at the show and the first 50 registrations will receive a free copy of Postal 2: Share The Pain (subject to age verification), thanks to Running With Scissors. All pre-registrations will also be entered into a raffle to win prizes by a variety of vendors.

LugRadio Live USA 2008, the 'rock-conference' from the team behind the popular LugRadio podcast, brings the successful and unique formula of the UK LugRadio Live events to The Metreon in San Francisco on the 12th and 13th April 2008. The event is supported extensively by Google and also supported by Dice.

LugRadio Live USA 2008 brings together over 30 speakers across three stages, 30+ exhibitors, a range of BOF sessions, debate panels, lightbulb talk sessions, demos and much more, all wrapped up in the unique event that the UK incarnation has become known for, combining an incredibly loose, social, inclusive, and amusing atmosphere - if you are new to LugRadio Live, it is nothing you will have seen before.

Confirmed speakers for the event include:

Miguel de Icaza (Mono / Novell / Co-Founder Of GNOME)
Ian Murdoch (OpenSolaris / Founder Of Debian)
Robert Love (GNOME / Google)
Aza Raskin (Mozilla / Humanized)
Benjamin Mako Hill (Ubuntu / Debian / FSF)
John Buckman (Magnatune)
Val Henson (Kernel / VAH consulting)
Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla / GNOME)
Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons)
David Schleef (GStreamer)
Matthew Garrett (Power Management / Kernel)
Danese Cooper (Intel / OSI)
Aaron Bockover (Banshee / Novell)
Liana Holmberg (Second Life / Linden Lab)
Emma Jane Hogbin (Hick Tech)
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier (OpenSuSE / Novell)
Kristen Accardi (Kernel)
David "Lefty" Schlesinger (ACCESS / GNOME Mobile)
Joe Born (Neuros)
Selena Deckelmann (PostgreSQL)
Stewart Smith (MySQL)
Dan Kegal (Wine)
Ben Collins (Ubuntu / Kernel)
Jason Kridner (Texas Instruments)
Jeremy Allison (Samba / Google)
Christian Hammond (VMWare)
Ian McKeller (Songbird)
Alison Randall (Parrot / Perl / OSCON)
David Huffman (LVM)
Brian Will (Pigeon)
Belinda Lopez (Ubuntu)
Ilan Rabanovich (SoCal Linux Expo)
Eddy Mulyono (Packaging)
Matthew Walster (Demo Scene)

The show will also see a large number of exhibitors, which will be announced in the coming weeks, with plenty to see and do. In addition to this, the LugRadio team will be recording a live performance of their cult-hit podcast, which has over 20,000 listeners, in front of the LugRadio Live USA 2008 audience - like the UK event, this is always quite a spectacle, and excellent fun for all involved.

The iPod Tripod: The Writing on the iTunes Music Store's Wall...

2008-02-18T08:41:00.000-08:00

I like weird music. Music that not a ton of people listen to, music that's hard to find. I particularly like a British composer named Jocelyn Pook, who's probably best known for her work on the soundtrack of Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut. I've got every album that she's made, or thought I did. I was trolling around last night, and it turns out that Pook has an album I don't have: she did the soundtrack to some film version of Heidi (which I've never seen). So, I decided this morning to buy the album. More particularly, since all I do with CDs is rip the tracks off them and then store them away, I decided to just buy the mp3 files.

So, I checked on the iTunes store, to see if this album was available as a DRM-free "iTunes Plus" download, and indeed it was, for $9.99 (Apple had this and one other Pook album available); I then went and checked the Amazon mp3 Downloads to see if they had it there: they did, at $8.99, and three other Pook albums as well.

So, of course, I bought it from Amazon.

Here's where the business model that got the iPod 70% of the MP3-player market starts to come off the tracks.

What made the iPod such a success? Availability of easily-obtainable music for it. I've run my entire (large) CD collection through my Mac, a disk at a time, correcting tags, consolidating genres (do I really need "Rhythm and Blues", "Rhythm & Blues", "R & B", "R&B", etc...?), correcting artist names (I like the group Mediæval Bæbes, too, which, everytime I add another album seems to spawn a hundred mutations: "Mediaeval Baebes", "Mediaeval Bæbes", "Medieval Bæbes", and so on), but most folks don't have the patience for that, they get them the easiest way: they pulled them down from where they were available, and the only place they were available was iTunes.

Once you'd gotten your music, what were you going to play it on? Again, you had a single choice, at least if you wanted pocketability: an iPod. Those AAC-encoded, DRM-protect tracks couldn't be played on anything else. So, the sales of iPods isn't a mystery: it was, for all practical purposes, the only game in town for the vast majority of consumers of such devices.

You could buy a Creative Zen (and I did) and you'd get better sound quality than you would with an iPod, but getting that music on there was a lot more inconvenient. Creative, and other makers of music players, suffered as a result.

But things have changed: Steve came out against DRM, having seen the writing on that wall, and started offering the "iTunes Plus" DRM-free versions (of some stuff, at a roughly 10% premium). But then, having let the cat out of the bag, the music producers, beginning with EMI and culminating with Sony BMG, declared that they didn't think much of this DRM stuff, either.

Turns out they didn't think much of the exclusive deal that Apple (and at the time it was the iPod driving the music suppliers to the iTunes Store, the mirror image of the iTunes Store driving consumers to the iPod) had given them for access to all those iPod owners, either. So, they've started offering their tracks through Amazon and other places, as well as selling them directly themselves in some instances.

Now, none of those tracks are locking you into either iTunes or the iPod any more: it was Apple's "FairPlay" DRM that did that, and that's increasingly a historical footnote. If you can play your tunes on something other than an iPod with equivalent ease (and downloading music from Amazon, at least, is trivially easy), all of a sudden the iPod is going to have to actually compete with other MP3 players. I'm sure the folks at Creative, not to mention Microsoft's Zune gang, are not entirely unaware of this.

Apple is increasingly going to have to compete on its technical merits (and the iPod has some issues here: the Creative folks asked me once to find the iPod's total harmonic distortion on Apple's web site--you can't) and on cost. Given Apple's deep love of 50% margins, competing on cost is going to be problematical for them. Here's the disadvantage of doing all your own hardware and software: you've got to get really good margins (like 50%) on the hardware to pay for all those software folks.

Apple succeeded in the music business because of the "iPod Tripod": the three legs were the iPod itself (which was the only thing which could play music from the iTunes Music Store), the iTunes Music Store (which was the only place you could get the music to play on your iPod), and the iTunes desktop (which was the only thing that could connect the two). It looks as though every leg has become a lot shakier in recent months.

And this is happening at a time when--coincidence or conspiracy?--iPod sales seem to be slowing, or perhaps dropping. Apple's reportedly cut its parts orders for iPods and iPhones or all sorts pretty dramatically, first by 50%, then by 60%. The iPhone is reportedly sitting on the shelves at AT&T and not doing so well in Europe, either. It seems to be popular in China, though, which can't make AT&T any happier...

Does the iPhone Have a Future?

2008-02-16T14:18:00.000-08:00

I recently pointed out to someone (who will remain nameless to protect the guilty) that for all the media hoopla, Apple's nowhere near achieving, say, Nokia's success in the mobile phone market. He scratched his head for a while and advised me,

Nokia sells crap.

I wasn't entirely certain how to respond (or "retort" as Samuel L. Jackson might say) to this incisive and in-depth analysis. Fact is, Nokia's got 40% of the worldwide market and has for a good while, whatever they're selling, and Apple's not even a blip on the radar in terms of sales impact: for every iPhone sold, Nokia sells a hundred phones. He went on to advise me, with slightly better sense,

And the iPhone woke them up to the fact they sell crap.

The iPhone certainly raised a certain sort of user experience in Nokia's priorities, as it did for all handset vendors—they've been talking about work on haptics, and they demonstrated a prototype touch-based Series 60 implementation at MWC. So, they're certainly not standing still.

This is one of the reasons that the iPhone is going to have problems, long term. Apple's always been based on the notion that they could (and many times did) come out with a product that could command the kinds of margins they needed: 30 to 60%. Companies like Nokia, and—even more so—companies like Samsung and LG are quite comfortable living on much thinner margins, margins Apple can't possibly survive on.

Apple was once the largest manufacturer of personal computers in the world, between one out of every four and one out of every five computers sold had an Apple logo on it. What happened? Windows 3.1 came out, and there was now something that was 80% as good for 60% of the price. And the Mac's share dwindled down to the single digits it's historically enjoyed since. (And don't tell me about their recently improved share, because it supports my point: you can run Windows on your Mac now.)

Apple's set themselves up to make exactly the same mistakes with the iPod and the iPhone: they can't make 'em cheap enough to compete well with something that's going to be almost as good, in its own way, and quite possibly better in some, given the shortcomings of the iPhone's hardware and software.

Now that DRM's gone down the drain, Amazon and others are starting to eat the iTunes Music Store's lunch. If you're not locked by Apple's DRM into your iTunes desktop/iTunes Music Store/iPod tripod any longer, Apple's business model is starting to look a little shakier overall. It's going to be an interesting couple of years, but Apple has as many challenges as anyone else, and they're the kind of challenges that they haven't handled especially well in the past.

It's called "hubris". And they've got a real bad case again.

The Battle for the Best Buggy Whip

2008-02-10T08:08:00.001-08:00

Google and Microsoft are in the news right now, Redmond having dropped $40B in market cap in response to their bid to buy up the Yahooligans for another $45B in order to produce a "credible number two" to Google's far-and-away number one in the online advertising space.

They're all fighting to be the best buggywhip manufacturer in town, particularly when it comes to the mobile space.

Horizontal search, which Google unquestionably excels at, has its uses, but those uses become more and more limited as information (much of it useless) becomes increasingly "available" (i.e. findable). Simply finding a chunk of information that matches your inevitably incomplete attempts at what you think it might look like isn't usually enough, not when the matching process is driven by how many randomly-chosen others point at this chunk, without regard to who's looking for it.

A couple of concrete examples: if you just know me by first and last name, you'll have one hell of a time finding anything that's actually about me with Google−there's a guy who's worked for Reuters for years with exactly the same name, who gets pointed at a lot more than I do (I'm working on this, I assure you). Most of what you'll turn up is about him, unless you know more about me than that.

I live in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, California. When I try to find out something about Santa Cruz,I frequently find myself wading through a stuff about Santa Cruz County, Arizona, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, Santa Cruz Island (aka Indefatigable Island) in the Galapagos archipelago, and so on. These are all places, which−while I'm sure they're quite interesting, kinda−are not locales that I'm likely to be looking for information about. Because I'm me, but Google doesn't really know that (although they have enough information to know it better than they do).

I travel a lot. Type "plane flight to Brussels" into Google, and you'll certainly turn up pointers to places that could get you one. Quite a few of them, in fact, both of the "sponsored" (i.e. AdWords ads) as well as of the "organic" (i.e. directly generated by the search) variety. Now, your work really starts. Out of the, oh, three-quarters of a million responses there, which one gets you the cheapest ticket on the nicest airline leaving (or arriving) at the time you want, and so on...?

Thus, the limitations of the horizontal approach to both search and advertising. Luckily, in this particular instance, there are vertical search engines, like Kayak and SideStep, effectively meta-search engines, which go out and troll every travel and airline site they're aware of (and they're aware of quite a few more than I am) and collect the results, allowing me to sort and filter them in a pile of ways. Then, there's a whole other site which can tell me where the best and worst seats are on a given model of aircraft, and ones that can give me suggestions (and reviews) of hotels in Brussels (and let me book reservations), and ones that can provide some ideas of things to do, or places to eat while I'm in Brussels...

But we're back to horizontal again. Tons of stuff to wade through. Because it's not about me.

What if, my putting an entry into my calendar that indicated I was going to be in Brussels for a week made certain information about me available: when I'm going, my history (and ratings) of my past hotel stays in other places, my various travel affiliations (frequent flier clubs, etc.), the kinds of food I like or the kinds of things I like to do (based on an "interests" list, or restaurant reviews), and so on...? What if that information enabled the right kind of vendors to come looking for me? I'd need to have some way of matching potential responses against the information I'd provided−but if a response came in from, say, a restaurant that had overall poor (or no) ratings, or one that didn't match well with my history, it'd be "ranked" lower than responses which were a good match, or which had many positive ratings.

Since responses would come in after my "expression" of a concrete need, there'd be a good incentive for prospective vendors to "cut me a deal". Knowing (from my history) that I like Japanese food, if there were a good sushi bar in Brussels, they'd probably be interested in offering me a free bottle of sake to come in, and−if their reviews were good−the odds are that I'd take them up on the offer. Moreover, there'd be an incentive for them to offer me something in exchange for reviewing them on an independent site, information which could feed into other people's future "findability".

Because the new model isn't going to be about searching: it's going to be about allowing yourself (or aspects of yourself, more properly) to be "found" by prospective vendors and to allow them the chance of being "found" by you. Advertising is going to be a lot more targeted, much more so than even AdWords can manage, since its responses suffer from all the limitations of horizontal search in general, and then some.

Simple search-generated ads are like billboards: they appear in front of your eye by relative happenstance, and if they happen to actually be of interest to you, it's pretty much by chance. While there's a certain probability that I'll be driving past a billboard for a McDonald's at a moment when I'd both be interested in a Big Mac and have the time to stop for one, it's not all that large. And when I get a thousand ads for plane tickets to Brussels, the odds of any given one being the one I pick are looking like the blllboard's chances of getting my market share.

This won't apply only to travel, eating out, and so on: it can be extended to things like music, movies, and almost anything that can be sold, whether a good or service. By looking at my buying history (what I'm willing to share of it, via reviews or otherwise), my interests (again, what I make available, and there's already a lot on FaceBook, Plaxo, etc.), and by comparing that information to similar information from others, you can identify potential "outliers" in my constellation of interests. Amazon already does this with their "Recommendations", and not too horribly−they're frequently recommending CDs or horror movies to me that I actually already own−but it can be a lot better. They could know (from the information I share about my music collection) what I already own. You see some interesting progress in the direction of music from sites like last.fm, the Music Genome Project, iLike, and others.

As I said at the outset, this approach (some aspects of which Doc Searls has referred to as "vendor relationship management") will be increasingly important as our access to information becomes increasingly mobile. Because of factors like small screen size, there's not going to be a lot of room on mobile and converged devices for ads. Nor, because of the I-need-to-get-it-done-now, task-oriented nature of the use model of such devices, is there going to be a lot of patience for advertising that isn't very specifically targeted at what I'm likely to be interested in right now. What would be nice would be something akin to an email or SMS notification on my phone, at lunchtime on a day when I had some free time, for places (in a specific radius of where I am right now, as provided from my GPS information, say) which wanted to show me just how good their miso ramen is, with a tag on each showing the number and distribution of reviews the places had gotten.

So, good luck to Microsoft and Google. While they're duking it out over the billboard rights on the Information Highway, I suspect someone else is going to be sneaking in with a better idea.

My Boss on PodTech

2007-08-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

My manager, Didier Diaz, ACCESS' senior VP of Product Strategy Development, got interviewed by Tom Foremski from PodTech... I'm expecting my interview with Martin McKeay to be up there as well in a week or two...

Off-Topic, But...

2007-08-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

...I just got back from spending the weekend in Orange County, and I wanted to mention my cousin's coffee shop, Bogart's, right across from the Municipal Wharf in Seal Beach. A great place, and I think I might have talked her into stocking my favorite coffee maker, the AeroPress...

To paraphrase Ben Franklin, "Coffee is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

LinuxWorld 2007 Recap

2007-08-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

We just finished up with LinuxWorld SF yesterday, and I'd say it was a great success. In addition to hosting our Developer Day, which was well-attended, and throwing a terrific party at Mezzanine Tuesday evening, we demonstrated the ACCESS Linux Platform on a variety of devices, including Marvel PXA3xx development devices and Texas Instruments' OMAP 2430 and 3430 development boards. We announced that we have an evaluation software kit for the Marvell devices, which will allow evaluation of the platform on a fully-featured piece of form-factor telephony hardware.

We also announced the availability of the latest g++ toolchain from our friends at CodeSourcery as part of our SDK, eight new members in the ACCESS Connect Ecosystem program, including my good friends from OpenedHand, Movial and Fluendo, and last but certainly not least, the ACCESS Linux Platform minisite, your portal for information about the ACCESS Linux Platform.

Not bad for three days.