System.NullReferenceException

Category: Linux

18. May 2011

Systemd in GNOME, PackageKit and what GNOME as an OS really means

Is the sky is falling? Is GNOME going Linux only?

A recent proposal be PulseAudio and systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering to add systemd raised concerns that GNOME might drop support for non-Linux platforms.

Rest assure this is not the aim. Lennart in follow ups to his proposal explains that systemd could be separated into a core set of interfaces which could take replacement backends that support e.g. FreeBSD so long as it implements the interfaces systemd cares about or as it was their init system. What Lennart doesn’t want is a lot of additional code in systemd as it is today to support these platforms as one of the main advantages is the simplicity and elegance obtained by relying on the functionality presented by Linux.

Why should we care about what systemd cares about?

Because systemd gives us a powerful set of tools to improve the user experience along the improvements promised and shown in performance and standardization (read Lennarts excellent series explaining systemd on his blog). With systemd we can replace some core functionality such as ConsoleKit which would allow for a smoother multi user experience.

Solving simple problems such as setting the pretty host name that gives your machine identity. Systemd strives to allow this now by standardizing on such things as where this data is stored and it what format. Fundamental assumptions about the system that will benefit the user experience.

Systemd goes beyond that, it’s interfaces provides us a set of information and functionality which we can use to make GNOME more user friendly. E.g. systemd lets us provide a smooth experience via it’s control group tracking of all processes. This allows balancing of CPU (and likely also IO) resources between applications making a system slow down more graceful and the overall experience smoother. This tracking also allows GNOME precise knowledge of these processes. data which might be used for improvements in how gnome-shell displays information to the user.

Shouldn’t we wait depending on systemd till other platforms are supported somehow?

In honesty, resources are scarce and the truth is that the vast majority of developers and users of GNOME are on Linux. We have a reference implementation now on that most used platform and replying on it’s interfaces would allow us to provide a superior user experience both short term and long term. Depending on ystemd only means depending on its interfaces and competing kernels can init systems could very well provide these interfaces as well. That effort is though on their shoulders but with apparent willingness to cooperate.

How this is analog to PackageKit longterm

Many people misunderstand PackageKit, mostly I suspect because they have had poor experiences with the default PackageKit user experience. PackageKit is not about these tools, PackageKit is about defining a common interface to talk to the package manager. This allows e.g. integration so that the system is requested to install support for missing formats if it is available. Common examples of these situations would be missing compression formats like .rar, missing codec support such as .mp3.

It is not about .deb vs. rpm, nor yum vs. apt-get!

PackageKit like systemd exist precisely to avoid those fights. The existing tools and package repos are excellent, what we care about is not replacing them but working with them in a consistent fashion. In PackageKit every package manager implements a backend which supports a common interface. In the same way that depending on systemd allows the assumption of a common set interfaces which can be used to enhance the user experience. There should be nothing technically baring an analog solution for systemd as what PackageKit has for separated backends.

But the PackageKit user interfaces are still ugly David!

That is true and it is widely agreed that the Ubuntu Software Center is a superb experience. It currently works not using apt-get directly but using an incompatible PackageKit fork aptdeamon. Porting this to PackageKit is being undertaken by Alex Eftimie under Google’s Summer of Code 2011 so fear not you shall have the same experience as always, and it will be available on any GNOME platform. Naturally depending on completeness of PackageKit backend and existence, though most major distributions are covered to some degree.

Ubuntu’s other tools such as the update experience are also aptdeamon tools and could be ported. My personal feeling would be that the better investment of resources would not be specifying GNOME3 stories for upgrades and updates in additions to the stories already told by PackageKit.

PackageKit and systemd are slow!

And I postulate to all that slow is a bug. In the case of systemd one of benefits should be performance an Lennart is already matching an Ubuntu Upstart powered 10 second boot. As I understand with patches to a standard Fedora 15 install and no LVM as I understand. PackageKit might have hard problems to solve to match what aptdeamon gives Ubuntu in terms of performance and certain features but Richard Hughes has shamed concerns before with actual hacking. I would trust him to solve this problem long term and reap the benefits of being allowed the assumptions PackageKit gives GNOME now.

GNOME as an OS is (partly) about interfaces, not defining a Linux only desktop that runs only on Thursdays if the window is open

Interfaces like PackageKit and systemd allow GNOME to solve problems and provide real improvements to the experience. The sad side effect of leveraging what the vast majority of GNOME users already have in Linux is short term that GNOME will be Linux only. Long term it is up to the competition to provide the same interfaces. This is no different than depending on Tracker or GTK+, these needed tools which provide the interfaces we need might not run on a given platform. Given resource constraints it must sadly fall upon these platforms to contribute in providing those required interfaces.

Leave a comment
25. July 2010

An adventure in Open Source contribution

I’m now officially a contributor to Banshee.

While I have done a lot of advocacy work and packaging, this is my first ever proper code contribution to Open Source. Coding as such never really excited me and as a result it has been some 5 or 6 years since I last sat down to understand and work on significant code. Even then I never really got deep into programming as specification and design always was more fun to me than implementation.

It all started when a friend buzzed me a presentation by Anders Hejlsberg titled The Future of C#. While I haven’t done much with .NET I have always been impressed by it as technology and I was eager to learn of what new tools would come in the future. Naturally the talk was also attractive to me because one of the features Anders demos (Compiler as a Service) as a coming post 4.0 release feature is in Mono today, something I always like to think about when people say that Mono forever will be “chasing the dragon”. Regardless, the talk got me excited about coding and was extremely entertaining to boot. So I wanted to try something, anything, and since I like Banshee but also see it crashing and being slow a lot as a daily stress tester and bug filer I decided to subject it to experimentation.

In comes the magic of .NET, Mono, and Ubuntu. In Ubuntu I found all the tools I needed, namely MonoDevelop, mono-tools and finally Gendarme. Gendarme is a really cool project that can inspect assemblies and executables according to a set of rules for such things as security, performance and even bad practices. So I decided to run Gendarme on then content of /usr/lib/banshee-1 expecting to see a few hits and probably a lot of false positives. However Gendarme returned more than 8800 issues even on medium settings, so I limited my focus to just the performance rules set.

Gendarmes issue reports have excellent documentation with examples of bad and good code as well as careful explanations, making it easy to pick a simple problem such as the one addressed with my patch. In this case we now determine these variables at compile time rather than at link time which is faster. It is safe to do and doesn’t break external assemblies as the fields are not shown outside. All of which was explained by Gendarme and confirmed on the Banshee IRC channel. Gendarme even explained how to fix the issue, it could not be easier. Bertrand Lorentz was kind enough to sign off the patch and commit it within minutes. As an example the Gendarme article on the issue type my fix addresses can be found here.

Regardless, that was yesterday. Today my Banshee is once again back to being a git build by hand which with the excellent Banshee daily repo hasn’t been required since I stopped contributing to Fedora. The reason is simple, I needed to compile test some more changes as I was reading the Banshee source code and learning. With friendly hints from the existing developer base also growing some basic understanding of what is going on.

Contribution is easy, zero to sixty even, with Mono and Banshee.

2 comments
2. April 2010

Paying for software and supporting Open Source

I am getting a little tired of the accusation getting levelled at me when debating with the anti-Mono crowd that I don’t support Freedom and that I am destroying Linux. I even once got accused of taking a paycheck from Microsoft and/or Novell, but to be clear neither company has ever paid me a dime for any work, in fact no technology company has ever given me a salery. I have taken gifts in return for work, e.g. Novell kindly gave me a copy of OpenSuSE 11.1 and a t-shirt for some bug reporting.

While this types of claims are entirely baseless slanter I think now is the time to come out and say that I love freedom. I love freedom so much that not only have I used Linux for more than a decade as my sole OS but I actively donate to projects and people that benefit our ecosystem.

I am a dues paying member of the EFF, I am a dues paying Friend of GNOME. I preordered the Yo! Frankie game to support open game development even though I never actually got around to playing it but it seemed like a very important missing piece in Open Source to cover high quality open gaming and show that it cam be done with full transparency.

When Richard Hughes asked for money to buy a color calibration thingy, even though I likely have no need for the work he will be doing using it I donated. Richard has donated much of his considerable talent, time and effort to projects such as gnome-power-manager and PackageKit, work for which I am grateful every day and he deserves my gratitude in the ways I can show it and my thanks for improving Linux.

Likewise I am a customer wth Fluendo, not because I feel I have to get around software patents since they are not currently legal in Denmark. However I feel as a software tester that I should test not just the solutions that are kindly available to me but those I advocate less fortunate people to examine. That being said I have actually found the Fluendo codec pack to solve issues present in the open solutions and having a working DVD player is great. I don’t especially enjoy the proprietary nature of these products but I know that much of the money I pay Fluendo will be put directly back into GStreamer development and advocacy for Open Formats.

On the open content side I make sure to buy documentaries and movies such as Sita Sings the Blues, Good Copy Bad Copy and the Piracy Documentary. I also have just signed up for a membership with Magnatune to support their fine service (about which I have have ranted previously).

Most important to me personally though is the time I put into bug reporting and following Linux every day.

All of this can of course be documented, but really it shouldn’t have to be. The accusation that I am destroying Linux is lowbrow attack which is beneath any reasonable argument. Consider this what should be a completely unneeded rebuttal to such claims.

So I ask you, what have you done for Open Source lately. Do you merely rant and leech or do you support with actions, words and wallet when you can?

Leave a comment
11. March 2010

Call of Nouveau testing reply

Christopher James Halse Rogers asked. I thought I would answer in video format (Blip.tv – Flash warning).

A full resolution Ogg Theora file is also available thanks to the awesome blip.tv here.

Also glad to see OMG UBuntu! not only picked up my first video demoing a few of Banshee 1.5.5′a features but also my discovery in the Banshee Community Extensions that UBuntu Mono maintainer and part time superhero Jo Shields is working on an Ubuntu One Music Store Extension for Banshee and in an additional lavishing of much deserved attention to the Banshee project they reported on the merging of the exciting Grid View branch.

4 comments
11. March 2010

A first meeting review of the Nokia N900

The packaging itself is stunning and practical, everything is neatly packaged and the device itself is wel protected to ensure a flawless first experience.

The problem that meets the owner starts before even booting the device for the first time. To insert the battery, SIM card and any additional SD storage on top of the devices ample builtin 32GB storage, one has to enter into a power struggle with the rear hatch. Getting this to pop off requires a lot of force and the hatch feels brittle. Something you definitely don’t want to be the first feeling upon starting the device as the experience will have to be that more stunning. I don’t think this will lend itself to repeated interaction and since that is where the SD cards go it might become for some. Nokia needs to revise this to be polished.

The device itself is fatter than a comparable smartphone such as the HTC Hero I have experience with. It is heavier but comes with a high quality Carl Zeiss optic and a hardware keyboard with that device doesn’t have. It is a trade off I am happy to make but it leaves room to improve with technological advances with future models making the investment and long term commitment to the platform more attractive.

The look and feel of this black giant is good, though slight plastic with a sad touch of cheapness with touch. Not the experience you pay for nor the experience such devices are capable delivering. It is practical and pretty but not stunning.

The hardware keyboard though a bit small is comfortable in use provided none of the cables are attached as they current placement interfere with normal use.

The interface is slightly boring, the icons feel generic and not in touch with the device. It is themable, perhaps something inspired by the monochrome icons in Moblin and Ubuntu Lucid would do well here. The vanishing animation when you dismiss a window is just the right amount of bling to be useful and pretty. Very decent animations when you bring up application menu and it is tailored to not get cluttered at the cost occasionally to depth or lack thereof. Visually these are the only standouts and the interface otherwise feels functional yet a bit dull.

The Skype integration is great and skype to skype call are clear even on a 3G connection. It fixes my main problem with Skype on Android and iPhone devices by being capable and allowed access to the network through 3G making it useful on the go. The interface on Skypes part needs a bit of work especially since the skype-to-skype call option isn’t well placed.

The headset that comes with the N900 is the best I have had when it comes to sound quality, even the mic is of an acceptable quality. Though I wish the sleek style of just having a button to accept calls could be merged with the ease of the HTC Heros headset which allows interaction with the music application in addition to accepting calls.

Maemo as an OS has good features but the boot time of the device isn’t highlighting performance. Given my use of it as an nearly always on device thanks to it’s intelligent profiles.

The profiles are really what makes Maemo elegant and what Android sorely lacks. With an device that is always on capable it’s always you want to be entirely on, e.g. if you are at sleep being on instant messaging and away or busy sometimes isn’t enough but you stll might want Skype on but set to invisible. Maemo allows that. The only thing the profiles really need is a system to manage and categorize alerts. They already intgrated Tracker so they are probably going to increase the semantic component and just needs to be able to filter alerts.

The N900 is a key device in the newly announced MeeGo merger of Maemo and Moblin. Moblin takes performance very seriously and that is likely going to influence the platform. They also care about creating compelling visual interfaces. Maemo might be functional especially on hardware like the N900 but it’s icons and visual presentation needs a bit of a lift to really bring it to wow.

Contact interaction is really Androids strong point, with identity held by Google every contact can basically have every thing hooked in and they do. It is great in use. This part I miss from Maemo, the interface part of their People framework is weak and hard to use effectively. This really needs to be fixed.

The media player is a near master peice, it is powered by Tracker and the end result is stunning. An easy to use, comfortable, elegant interface that is quick. I put in the SD card from my hero which had media on it already and it just appear correctly indexed and available in the mediaplayer without any work, beautiful. My only complaint is that it doesn’t have an equally elegant solutions to audiobooks and podcasts.

The updater works well, when I first got the device I use it to check for updates and one was ready for installation. Downloading and applying the update was all done over the air and with a simple reboot into automatic flashing. Took a few minutes and was entirely painfree. A much better experience than on the Android powered HTC Hero, which forces official updates through a Windows only application. It looks like N900 users are in for a stream of useful bug fixes and experience enhancements unlike the big code drops Android pushes. I would consider this a plus and trust MeeGo to handle this with care in the future.

I’ve played with the camera a bit, it is responsive and takes quality images. Unlike the slow camera in the HTC Hero it is actually something I would consider using frequently. I have never carried a camera with me at all times before, now with the N900 I will, of sorts at least. I am excited about what that might add to life.

The screen feels a bit rough to move around with the finger, requiring force than on the HTC Heros display. This often leads to more force being applied and taken as a pressing action. This really sours the otherwise smooth interaction since you have to be very careful and attentive all the time. Which is normally not what you want e.g. while scrolling long lists of artists.

The lists of applications available to you is extremely small, unlike the firehose of the Apple App store or Androids marked. But those that are there are useful, if they are more ports of existing applications and not something that pushes the frontier like some of the Android and Apple apps. If MeeGo will be able to attract developers I think is helped by it’s openness and use of familiar Linux Desktop components with strong maintainers and good track records with the existing Linux ecosystem.

The standout is the lack of a good todo list, especially as a widget for the home screens. You also lack the easy of integrating mail and calendaring from Android. Androids centralized calendar in my pocket that syncs with the cloud is the first time I ever felt calendars were really useful. Maemo can do this but it doesn’t have the same feel of ease and there is a lot of configuration. The mail application is a disaster, on a device that can play 720p movies and have more processing power than NASA used to send mankind to the Moon.. why have you implemented a mail solution that doesn’t support threading for performance reasons. And then gone and made the interface uncomfortable and old fashioned, this isn’t the 90′s. You have tracker, present the information in useful manner look at the media player and learn. I miss the GMail client from Android and I am so sure the N900 is more than capable of delivering an experience that tops it.. then it present me this relic.

From day one my HTC Hero worked really well with my Ubuntu desktop. Media handled correctly by Banshee and nearly correctly by f-spot. The N900 offers no such joy, however this is not because Banshee isn’t capable, I suspect an OS bug is preventing this from working. The device is correctly detected but it doesn’t work even in USB mass storage mode. I am hoping this gets fixed soon.

I have been enjoying this device for a while and I am very happy with it. Some of that is hopes for MeeGo but the N900 is a great device and I am so far very happy with it. The hardware is sound, they have interesting technology such as Telepathy and Tracker to help them improve the poor elements of the Maemo experience. With MeeGo also comes Moblin and hopefully their work to integrate social elements into the experience. I am eager for the future, don’t disappoint me MeeGo.

Leave a comment
29. January 2010

Dear Canonical

Dear Canonical,

Let me start out by saying this, I am in no way opposed to you turning a profit. However I believe your recent actions, including but not limited to the Canonical-Yahoo! revenue sharing agreement (henceforth: YahooGate), are hurting Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community.

We can both I hope agree that Ubuntu is marketed as a community project and that was it not for the community Canonical today wouldn’t be where it was. Likewise without Canonical there would be no Ubuntu, you are valued community members and valued sponsors. However I feel that YahooGate shows that you are now willing to go around the community and enforce changes without debating or even proposing these changes to the community ahead of time. We were not asked if there was an interest in entering into such deals, and if so how such changes should be rolled out, let alone limited. You acted like bad community members and that cannot be allowed to happen.

As community members, it is our duty to hold you accountable, to keep you honest. Likewise I would see it as Canonicals duty to hold the community accountable to it’s actions. In that spirit I will quote the part of your own governance charter which I feel was infringed upon as a result of your dealings in YahooGate.

2. ensure that decisions regarding the Ubuntu distribution and community are taken in a fair and transparent fashion,

As you will agree I hope, you announced this change unilaterally without first discussing it in any way or form. As a result here of you cannot claim that the governance charter item 3 can be considered in effect.

3. ensure that necessary decisions are actually taken, even when there is no clear consensus amongst the community.

If we are not consulted we do not know there to be a situation we might need to take a stance on, we cannot make a fully informed decision and we cannot uphold our duty to keep Ubuntu on the path to creating the best possible experience for users.

I ask you to consider that one of the many things users might flee from in the Windows world is preinstalled trialware and other sponsored changes to the defaults, a problem so great that chains like Best Buy have started offering dubious additional fees to “optimize” machines prior to delivery, a service that effectively is comprised of removing all of these additional programs (programs the OEM, like you, make money installing) and resetting defaults. We should avoid at all costs to end up in this situation, this is why I feel that only technically grounded arguments should be valid in determining the defaults in Ubuntu. The aim should be to create a truly pleasant and enjoyable experience, that in itself I believe will prove to be a larger generator of income than any such deal might.

You have entirely failed to present a case for how this change benefits the Ubuntu user experience and in the process have also set a dangerous presidence. What defaults in Ubuntu are for sale and at what price, clearly as long as the user remains with the choice to replace any such default you can put a suitable price on any default. If not where would you define the limit? Going past any technical argument, any argument for the general benefit of the user. E.g. could I offer to pay you a one time fee to make Banshee the default mediaplayer e.g. and in that case, where would that price lie. Not that I intend to pay you but I would be interested in just how big my wallet has to be to have a voice in Ubuntu because clearly being a long time contributor isn’t enough to even get asked about the general guidelines in such cases despite the governance charter.

Then there is the problem of how this is being intended rolled out to users. I gather from the information you have released that you do not see a problem with your plan to also apply this change to upgrades not just new installs. There also has been no mention so far of any user notification at all, I would at least present the user with the information as to why this change was made and a guided way to change the default back. Here I would suggest looking at what Google does with Chrome and Chromium on the first launch. This would be sufficient I think to let the user be able to make an informed decision.

Finally there is the problem of transparency, you say that the income generated from this deal would go towards paying for open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform. Given this premise would you be wiling to open your books and let the users see that you uphold your word and put the income you generate from this into Ubuntu?

I am not entirely opposed to this kind of deal however I believe the community and Canonical need to agree upon a set of general guidelines for areas where this would be acceptable and where it wouldn’t be. There would be a need for full transparency in this cases and the user would have to be presented with the option of making an informed decision whenever Canonical has made a change to fiancially benefit themselves to support it or not. This transparency would need to extend to the accounting, if we cannot see that the promised benefit of these deals reaches the Ubuntu user we will be forced to assume that you are hiding something.

If you expect something from us, you have to give us something in return, in this case a voice. I think the community has earned that much. Till you do so and apologize for your handling of YahooGate I will personally pledge to cease doing support, filing and working on bugs as well as promoting Ubuntu. I wish you good luck in the future.

On a personal note, I hope you will do the honorable thing and politely break off the deal with Yahoo! before sitting down with your community of contributors and working on this details. I hope you will alay the fears that this might continue to be a distraction from creating the best possible desktop experience available to mankind. I hope you will show that you despite your actions respect your contributors, that you will affirm that community is more to you than a word, that this relationship we have in order for us both to flurish needs to be a cooperative symbiotic in nature. Right now your actions speak for themselves.

I would also like to extend my apologies to Yahoo!, I have no bad feelings towards your search engine, I do however currently find it technically an inferior choice for my needs as well as those users I have the honor of working with or helping. I do not believe it to be in the best interest of Ubuntu to default to your service currently. I hope you can work on that and propose the change on pure technical grounds one day, at which point I will be happy to support your move without any need to buy your way into Ubuntu. I bear no ill will towards you but I also know that certain members of the community has been calling you names and accusing you of having impure motives to entering in this deal. I see no evidence that this is the case and in the interest of goodwill and honesty I distance myself from such reprehensible behavior. I wish you good luck in the future and hope to be able to find common ground to work with you on in the future that will benefit us both.

Sincerely,
David Nielsen, a disappointed Ubuntu contributor.

3 comments
8. January 2010

Does this droid owner have buyer’s remorse?

This is an reply to the InternetNews.com story: Will Droid Owners Get Buyer’s Remorse?

I recently bought an HTC Hero and while it is a nice phone I have found it to be slow in use and not really fulfill the promise of being much more than a phone.

I’ve learned from it that I would like something that runs a UI experience that is closer to stock Android since the porting of a large change such as the HTC Sense UI takes a long time to complete as the Android base progresses and improves. Time when the user is deprived of updates to improve the experience and instead of slow incremental changes they get rare large code dumps that likely also changes behavior. This causes issues for users learning the basically new phone all over.

I’ve also learned that I would like a hardware keyboard since I am not cut out for on screen typing. Furthermore I would like to see some of the more logic extensions be made to the platform such as letting known friends addresses appear in the map application.

Skype on Android is utterly crippled, there is some kind of restriction being enforced to disallow the application from using the data connection. That sours the experience quite a bit.

All in all while I bought the phone because I needed one and thus had to pick what I thought was the best phone at the moment. I really wish the Droid had been available to me subsidized as I am not ready to pay for an unlocked phone with the mobile contracts as they are currently since it doesn’t save me money.

The HTC Hero isn’t a bad phone but the realistic competetor available to me at the same price was a new iPhone 3GS 32GB and it is certainly an inferior phone to that on many counts.

If you are thinking of going with the Hero to support Open Source then you should also know that HTC adds a proprietary UI and know that it comes with costs though it provides a very compelling UI.

The perfect Android phone might be closer to the Droid or the Nexus One depending on your preference and use cases. They are still slower on things like loading and rendering webpages than the 3GS but the hardware is solid and should support the platform as it expands. You should expect this expansion to be directly and naturally deployed for these phones an thus be improved with updates regularly considering that they are a very standard Android deployment. You could consider it an investment of trust in the platform, it doesn’t quite provide an experience that really beats the the iPhone solidly yet but it has considerable promise and past performance as an indicator will reach it soon. Bet on it coming to these products soon.

I elected to go for openness regardless, I know I have an inferior phone for it. It’s still a good phone but it’s not more than a phone in any really revolutionary way. It’s for people like me hoping to reduce the amount of gadgets I carry by removing my mp3 player, the Hero doesn’t replace a good camera though. Likewise the experience isn’t bad but isn’t really followed through to it’s natural conclusion to the extend competitors have done. Openness outweighted that, even with the encumberance of the Sense UI, for me. It isn’t likely to be the case for a lot of people.

I don’t have remorse for buying an Android phone but I acknowledge that the competition is overall a superior choice for most people right now.

Leave a comment
3. January 2010

Why “helping MySQL” reflects poorly on us all

As of late Monty with the support of leading FSF figures has started campaigning to “help MySQL” since Oracle surely will mean it harm. Here is why signing such a petition in my personal opinion is a bad idea.

1) The grassroot movement is basically turning into spammers, going to every forum and other venue they can come up with an posting the same copy and pasted message without providing a reasoned argument for their case in such posts. Signing the petition is rewarding this behavior.

2) This is largely about commericalization of MySQL. Namely the right to monitize from relicensing for commercial clients who do not wish their codebase to be infected by the GPL license for one reason or another. This has nothing to do with the software’s freedom status and given the FSF’s behavior as well as argumentation throughout recent years, the entirety of the inherent freedoms remain intact even when forking the existing codebase, meaning that this is entirely about the right to make money from proprietary use cases of the code. Thus the FSF once again shows that they do not have the moral high ground given their abusive and divisive behavior towards more pragmatic community members arguing for such use cases historically (e.g.: the Miguel de Icaza traitor incident).

3) Outside of the right to monitization for proprietary use cases the only thing lost is the right to use the name MySQL. While there is a significant brand behind MySQL this is not a technical argument against the letting Oracle do with their obtained property as they please. MySQL was sold long ago along with the rights to the name and the copyright and such objections should have addressed then instead of assuming that MySQL would always remain in the hands of those we consider friendly. This is more an argument against copyright assignment than anything, if you do not agree with what is happening to MySQL right now, do not agree to contribute to projects that require copyright assignment. Now is not the time to attack a company for utilizing the rights that come with obtaining copyright assigned code and the people to do such campaigning most certainly shouldn’t be the FSF who themselves require copyright assignment.

4) The superior technical solution will eventually unseat MySQL and we already have several forks in progress including Monty’s own MariaDB and Drizzle, their respective developers will have to rewrite the code to clear the copyright ownership and learn from this incident or simply find other ways to pay the bills than selling rights to use the code under a different license than the GPL. Meaning the GPL isn’t a suitable license for such projects especially when combined with copyright assignment. In the grandest of traditions in Open Source this will spur competition and open the market to a compatible but commercially more paletable solution, unseating MySQL from new code (or existing “non-encumbered” code such as PostgresSQL) rather than a fork of MySQL. Futher underlining that this is an argument from people with a vested interest in reverting their own mistakes of the past.

5) While this is not the sole reason for the EU and similar governmental agencies holding back agreeing to Oracle finalizing their purchase of SUN it certainly isn’t helping. While this deal is in limbo, SUN is bleeding money and laying off many fine employees, in the progress directly hurting the Open Source community by removing valued contributors. Consequences for which the FSF nor Monty or any other party involved in this campaign has expressed the slightest remorse or concern. If they want to claim the moral high ground they should at least address this, apologize and amply justify their actions to the people who are left without jobs in an already hard pressed market and economy. I do not believe they are in a position to do so as they themselves are to blame for creating the situation.

In short, my opinion is that supporting this campaign makes the Open Source community look like offended children who would rather take the ball they already gave away and go home than live with their decision. It is our own failing that caused this situation and instead of attacking Oracle over it while people are losing their jobs and the Open Source community loses valued contributors we should review the road that led here and consider adding a freedom from copyright assignment clause to the list of inherent freedoms that needs protecting. Futhermore we should encourage a wide sweeping review of our existing projects and see which are in danger of ending up in the same situation as MySQL. Any action taken to deal with these situations should be above all be calm, polite and non-confrontational. if any projects show as currently being in danger and action might be needed should rational evidence based argumentation fail to work with these projects or they ask us to not argue against their policies, competition should be assumed as the natural outcome.

In the interest of intellectual honesty, the other side of the argument is available here.

1 comment
2. January 2010

Dear HTC

Considering that snowstorms made going outside unsafe during the last days I could return my Hero we are now stuck with each other so what do you say we attempt to make it a kickass experience instead?

Firstly, drop the Sense UI, I know you invested heavily in it and rely on it to sell phones with a superior UII experience and with Android versions prior to 2.1 that is likely to also have been the case. However you too must realise that it is a burden to have to port it to every new Android release to ensure that your users have the lastest version. You might not think it matters to be on the most recent release but it does, e.g. for reasons of security, unlike an old non-smartphone, my HTC Hero contains a lot of personal data such as contacts, my music, mail, Facebook login information – all information I would like to know is as protected as it can be. Ensuring that you keep up with upstream Android means that any security fixes are obtained at the cost of testing the release against the hardware and ensuring that your users are notified of the update (optimally you could offer to perform the upgrade automatically over the air – it shouldn’t be technically impossible).

Additionally you should get translations for free, when I got my Hero it only had English interface and only after going through a painful upgrading experience did I get Danish support. Being localized for free increases your potential pool of customers vastly, e.g. my mother would never use a phone that was in English, she would use one in Danish though. Working upstream is no big enlightenment for us Open Source people but I realise that it might hard to get right for you, we will be happy to help you. It is true that short term you may suffer a bit due to losing the ability to sell your phones on the preceived superior UI experience but long term you will be able to save money on maintance and development of devices. It would force you to compete on the superiority of your phones design and hardware but I am confident that you can do this as the HTC Hero I have in my hand is a solid design and very pleasing on the eyes even if it could stand to be a lot faster and smoother. People will happily pay for a good phone and with subsidized plans it’s not even going to cost an arm and a leg.

Make it easy to write text in another language without the autocorrecting spell checker doing stupid things such as replacing you with joo (which doesn’t even make sense in Danish). It’s is some what a big deal, the current generation of smartphone users are likely to both need their local language for text messaging friends but email could very easily be in English (or in my case, messages to my fiancée are in English as are 99% of my mails but text messages to my friends are otherwise in Danish). Given my usage pattern typing messages takes forever since I have to carefully correct nearly every word.

Let my contacts appear on the map if an address is known and allow me to define known locations (and let me tie those to contacts). This is pretty much a no-brainer that would enhance the usefulness and user experience of the maps application.

Include a Google Reader application, there are a few news applications in the store but none included in the bundle you get with the phone, however there are applications for monitoring stock prices. I have an overwhelming feeling that more people will benefit from a news reader so please hurry and include one.

Include a todo list program, it is really missing from the standard bundle and no good placefiller exists in the store that integrates well especially with my online experience. I can buy an app to interact with Remember the Milk but for such a simple and fundamental task I really don’t want to pay 15$, especially since Google has a similar todo list I could easily use. Bonus points would be given if it handles situations such as “Remember to buy milk” then being location aware and having access to a list of nearby stores it could beep and remind me that I need to do this if I ask it to.

Increase cooperation between applications, e.g. the other day I was having a text message conversation with an old friend and we arranged to meet up. However there exists no way to simply click the conversation and convert it to a calendar entry (it would also be interesting to be able to convert to a todo list entry since todo list entry basically are calendar entries without a date attached). Bonus points would be given if you can manage to take hints from the conversation for dates and date references such as the day after tomorrow (in multiple languages naturally) to suggest the correct date when creating the calendar entry.

Release specifications so that someone might implement a flashing tool for your devices that works under Linux. It would be nearly entirely free for you to do so and considering the popularity of Android with Linux users (as Android is a Linux platform) it would likely aid a lot of your paying customers. Given a release of specification rather than the release of a proprietary tool such as what you have for Windows would very likely also give you support for the Mac platform for free as well. Such a move would also buy your company a lot of goodwill with the Open Source community and show us that you are want to work with us, such trust is a good investment and can be the thing that tips the scale for buying an HTC device for a number of users. We’d rather own devices from companies that work with us than not and will warn each other of companies that directly work against our interests. Looking at how closed off the iPhone is and how much trouble Linux users have using their devices to their fullest, it would be very likely that distribution wikis would include a recommendation for Android devices and provided that HTC makes it easy for us to include full support a specific recommendation of your products wouldn’t be unthinkable – we are good to those who are good to us.

My stubby finger tips have a hard time hitting those on screen keys, perhaps we could find a solution for this. Hardware keyboards are good but tend to be a problem for localization and slow you down getting to market in a lot of countries. Clearly the on screen keyboard is a good idea but the keys are simply to small. Given the size of the screen it is hard to correct but ideas such as swype show promise to improve the experience. I would suggest spending some research dollars here.

As a general improvement to Android, I would really like an Audible application. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and I would love some means of buying the directly from my phone, download them and add them to my media library. Naturally the DRMed nature of Audibles products is a problem as is their complete lack of support for Open Source and Linux specifically but is a fight we’ll have to take with Audible not Android or HTC.

Finally you should provide a means for advanced users to provide bug reports, several things in your own released ROMs have flaws, given that it is related to your own fork I don’t feel comfortable going to Androids bug tracker and the only means you seem to provide is going through customer service which isn’t an interaction with the development team. This would naturally go away if you moved to providing a vanilla Android experience and you’d get help from the entire Android community to fix your bugs.

Leave a comment
26. December 2009

Is there an acceptable level of DRM?

I have been giving DRM some consideration lately, specifically with deals such as the Zune Marketplace free pass to millions of songs at 14.95$ a month with 10 free keepers a month would there exist and implementation of DRM I would accept as a requirement for access. While I generally hate DRM and think it punishes paying customers, could one envision an implementation that would be fair?

E.g could one envision a business build on free streaming of DRMed files and DRM free files for purchase so that they allow reasonable access to listen and learn new music but if you want to access the files and do with them what you wish – say use them offline, use excerpts of for a review or a composite video (adding a touch of music to a video project, like a review YouTube show or as a music interlude in a podcast). Would it work and what problems would there be with such a model?

Well first up the technological problems inherent to DRM won’t go away, if the DRM server is down or is removed as has been the case with a number of services already. Then your content stops working, however this would only affect the streaming service as songs you bought and own would be DRM free. Free services disappear all the time for many reasons so I don’t see this as specifically a DRM problem but a consumer support problem, if we don’t back the model then the service will go away. Magnatune runs a streaming service for all their music and the only price you pay for this wonderful access is listening to a little blurb at the end of each song, this works well for independent artists. However I don’t see e.g. Parlophone being ready as a corporation to grant the same level of access to their catalog with the only protection from being ripped off being “trust the customers not to abuse the service and save streams, remove ads and building a full copy without giving us a dime”. That is just not the way they have grown use to doing working and expecting them to attain enlightenment overnight is more than dangerously naive.

I think Magnatune deserves a lot of credit for taking that risk and I am hopefully that it is paying off for them. I think a lot of such a success can be traced back to their stated mission of not being evil, I think customers respect that and having it be highly visible and transparent, such as can be seen in their simple profit sharing that your money actually goes to the artists. As such Magnatune’s “pay what you want” system often is above the minimum of 5$, in other words people aren’t cheap when they feel they are being treated fairly. I have to admit that while there are no limits on the files and I get them in the format I desire even lossless I am still amazed when they encourage me to share my new music with 3 friends. They could have politely asked me not to do that to protect their business as well as their artists and I would respect it because of the beyond fair treatment they give me otherwise and instead send friends to their streaming service to sample my amazing new finds.

Another problem with any technology designed to limit your use of content is that what you will accept now isn’t always what you will accept in the future. E.g. a user might go an buy an iPhone today and not think twice about the limits Apple ensure using lawyers and technology to lock out 3rd parties, if that user some time later elects to move to Linux or just move away from iTunes the consequences of that acceptance hits. Nor did I when the DVD player came out give much thought to the protection schemes built in and how they affected me and I started building what has now become a huge collection of movies and TV shows on DVDs. Not for a second did I consider that the region coding meant that taking my DVDs with me out of Europe would render them unplayable. After all I thought I would live in Denmark all my life and it didn’t limit me then outside of buying DVDs from the US that weren’t available in Denmark and here all players are basically region code free so it was a non-problem. As my situation now might call for a move to Brazil or where ever my fiancée finds the perfect Ph.D. project this might come back to bite me in the nether regions.

Another problem relating to the DVDs is that the CSS protection, is being heavily protected by lawyers, limits my OS of choice from shipping support, I can’t view the content I paid for on my desktop out of the box. While the laws in Denmark would seemingly allow me to break the protection, making such code available could land one in serious trouble of the lose your house flavor. This also means that while he rest of the software stack in Linux is very advanced, DVD support is lacking since no company will risk helping out as it would make them a target, no distro can ship the code leading to the feature being under maintained and under tested. I might legally be able to install such support but frankly it’s in a poor state and close to uselessly broken in some cases for no good technical reason, all of which makes me a sad panda.

Why is this a problem? Well I would like to do to my DVDs what I did to my CDs. Keep the originals safe in a box and access my content the way I please on the devices I please. I would love a way to easily and quickly put my movies on a NAS and let them be transcoded for use on my portable devices, viewable on the TV and other such things. I might even want to use little snippets easily in other projects, like this blog. When I started building my collection a DVD was probably so large that the idea of fitting hundreds of movies onto a harddrive seemed a bit far fetched, not today though. The hardware is cheap and available anywhere, now it’s a good time to do something like this and I can’t easily.

The point is you will agree to some limitation now that might come back to haunt you years from now, if it is enforced by DRM then your only choice is to violate the law to access and enjoy the content you bought the way you want. There are risks involved with this and you cannot be sure that software to do such alternation will be available as companies like to sue those who enable you to do these things.

I honestly though don’t think I can find a single major thing to object about with a scheme which sole purpose is to prevent saving a stream, there will always be people for whom this isn’t enough or people who will be break the protection to keep the content they get free access to. I have no problem going after these people, I really don’t, they have the option of using the entirely free access (perhaps with ads, lower resolution than would be available to buy DRM free), I see no moral argument one could present for doing such a thing. Well there is one, provided the access isn’t equal, then they would deprive users of say Linux from using the free option thus forcing them to buy without trying.

Even an truly dogmatic FSF supporter wouldn’t really be able to argue this is directly evil, while the specific component that unlocks the DRM is very likely to be proprietary (giving you the content, the means to unlock it and the key – that is free access which is unlikely to happen) you would still have the option of playing the content using nothing by ideologically blessed software, provided you buy the content.

Assuming the blob is well written as well as supported on any platfrom and some entity such as the Linux Foundation has access to the code under NDA so we can get an opinion as whether or not unlocking the DRM is all it does. I wouldn’t feel bad about installing such a thing by default on users desktops (again, if you don’t like it, remove it and live with buying your content). We could even restrict the binary with things such as AppArmor or SELinux to ensure it’s not given all out access to reduce the security concerns.

Lots of maybes and assumptions but I think such a scheme would work and hopefully as time progresses, with the support of customers it could be shown that customers can be trusted to not abuse such restriction-less privileges. As for the realism inherent to such an idea, I doubt you’ll get record companies and movie studios to agree to this but on the other hand what Spotify is doing today if I understand it correctly (sadly there is no Spotify in Denmark yet) in the countries where they have gotten the licenses isn’t that dissimilar to the streaming part of the idea, adding a DRM free store wouldn’t be a far stretch.

I think when it comes to DRM free content customers also need to realize that they are asking companies to run a risk of losing revenue, something that is very scary to them, it’s a big shift in the way they have grown used to working and they need to be convinced by the bottom line. They give you an awful lot of power which can be abused and we need to show that the limits they put on content is harmful to paying customers, it holds back creativity and new business models but in return we have to reward them for trusting us by not abusing that trust once they put it in us. Even if we are justifiably angry over past transgressions, the way to settle that anger is not to rip them off when they change for the better.

DRM Free, to paraphrase that cliché from Spider-Man, comes with great responsibility.

Leave a comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 205 other followers