Weblog

screwed by non-free software

October 10th, 2006

Triton’s demise is just a perfect example on how relying on non-free software can be disastrous for you, even if the vendor doesn’t actually act maliciously.

 Check this heise.de article for details.
 

European Commision launches DebateEurope website

March 27th, 2006

As seen on heise.de, the European Commission has launched the DebateEurope website. According to the website, it is seen as an "invitation (…) to discuss (…)  ideas, hopes and worries for Europe’s future."

The European Commission wants to "make contact with you and listen to what you think and propose."

I think this is an excellent opportunity to advocate Free Software and other important political issues like Human Rights, Data Privacy, Software Patents etc.

If the site keeps it promises, it can offer a very direct way to communicate with highly-involved EU politicians, an opportunity noone should not fail to take.

I am sure you are all busy with your working life, just as I am. But if you can just spare a couple of minutes every now and then, this could make the difference. The more supporters the better, that’s how democracy works, after all.

Teh r0x0r today

February 13th, 2006

Steinar H. Gunderson. Thanks to evms-bootdebug, moving my storage server’s root partition onto the RAID-5 array went like t3h br335e. And the system is booting like a breeze now, as well *ggg*

Comment – Mandriva CEO disses Ubuntu

February 13th, 2006

François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva, recently did an interview for the Mandriva Club. During that interview, he did some serious Ubuntu bashing. Some of his arguments amounted to straight lies and FUD.

Here some examples:

"One possible worse case scenario is that Ubuntu’s plan is to use money to put all other community-based distros out of business and then start monetizing the installed base."

1.) Ubuntu pledges on it’s website that it will never do what Mandrake/Mandriva has done, offering a so-called "Premium" version for money. They might break this promise but how likely is that, really? Therefore, this is a dodgy argument, others would simply call it FUD. Aha, A CEO of a so-called Open Source company taking refuge to FUD then, isn’t he? Well, we all know who the usual culprits are, what does that tell us about Mandriva and Francois?

2.)  The second part of this argument is that Francois seems to regard Mandriva as a community based project. Francois, Debian is a community-based project, so are Arch Linux, Gentoo and many others. I won’t deny that Mandriva has a healthy community, but the only interpretation of Mandriva being "community-based" is that they survive on getting money from them. These people are paying that money for the privilige of getting the software earlier than others. On exchange, they get their GNU/Linux tainted with non-free software. Wow, what a deal that is. Ubuntu doesn’t do that either byraway. You get all the non-free software as early as all others do, and you don’t have to pay money for the tainting service, either. In essence, Mandriva IS NOT a community-based distro, it is run by a company, which Distros like Debian, Gentoo and Arch Linux are not. Even Ubuntu has set up a foundation to keep it running in case Canonical decides to quit. Additionally, my perception is that Ubuntu’s interaction with the Free Software Community is much more intense than Mandriva’s, just look at how many Debian Developers work for Canonical or are otherwise involved with the Ubuntu project.

3.) The third mistake in Francois’ argument is that Ubuntu might put other community-based distro’s out of business. Francois reflecting his business-centric mindset onto non-profit projects doesn’t fit the reality, though. Well, they might put companies out of business, but I cannot imagine Ubuntu finishing off projects like Debian, Gentoo, Arch Linux and all the others, can you? Sporting such an argument is, again, nothing more than FUD.

Another nice piece of FUD is this sentence:
"one person, with a quasi infinite check book is behind the operation.

Well, Francois. I hope all the Ubuntu Members, MOTU’s, LaptopTesters et al won’t read this sentence. They might get seriously angry at you, you know. In case you haven’t noticed, it takes a wee bit more than a single person to get a good GNU/Linux distro running. By reducing Ubuntu to Mark Shuttleworth you do severe injustice to all the others involved and disregard essential factors on how to create a popular GNU/Linux distro. Perhaps that’s why Mandriva hasn’t taken over the GNU/Linux world yet.

The last sentence I’d like to comment on is this one:
"By doing so, we are building a strong and healthy company based on a proven business model."

Aye, so what? Again, there’s enough successful GNU/Linux and thousands of Free Software Projects out there that do not rely on that "business model" of Mandriva’s.Why should we care about shareholder happiness? We are happy if we can use Free Software and convince others doing so. Not everyone sees GNU/Linux as a "product" like Francois does, but he doesn’t seem to realise that.

All in all, Francois doesn’t do himself very good voicing his opinions regarding Ubuntu. I don’t have a problem with Mandriva advertising their products, but spreading FUD about a project like Ubuntu does seem to be a wee bit improper, doesn’t it?
There are couple of good reasons one might use Ubuntu and there are a couple of good reasons one might use Mandriva. Francois dissing Ubuntu in this interview doesn’t really want me to use Mandriva, though.

ATI Petition for Adequate Drivers

January 16th, 2006

There is a new petition available at petitiononline.com

It demands from ATI to produce adequate Linux drivers for the graphics cards and chipsets they produce.

In general, such a petition is a good idea. However, this one hasn’t been thought over properly.

First of all, the petition simply demands drivers that “work” at acceptable speeds. They claim that ATI currently released drivers are not performing to the users’ satisfaction.

With that, they mean speed, mostly. Other issues like working suspend/resume and energy saving options for laptops are not mentioned.

What is even worse, they do not demand for the drivers to be Free Software. The only demand they make is for ATI to “open source” the specs in case they do not want to produce the drivers themselves. In that case they demand complete “schematics and technical information pertaining to the video cards produced by ATI” to be made available.

Well, ATI will hardly ever do that. They might not even be allowed to do so for legal reasons. However, they could at least publish enough information to enable the FOSS community to write Free Software drivers, coudn’t they?

Besides, ATI already offers some drivers, but they are non-free.

It would have been much cleverer to demand the existing drivers to be licensed under Free Software licensing terms, in addition to demand technical documentation to enable others to write drivers, as well.

I signed the petition anyway, hoping it will put some pressure onto ATI.

Welcome to the European Democratic Republic

December 14th, 2005

Special greetings to

– East Germans

– Czechs

– Estonians

– Hungarians

– Latvians

– Lithuanians

– Poles

– Slovaks

– Slovenians

WELCOME BACK!

Finally, things start becoming the way as they were before 1990 again.

A big THANK YOU to the patriotic comrades also referred to as MEPs.

To all citiziens of member states not noted above (and the Wessis, of course): GOTCHA, SUCKERS, seems WE did win the Cold War in the end. Now Europe will be like WE ever wanted it to be.

Regards,

an East German

Mandriva and Bittorrent

November 16th, 2005

…obviously don’t go together very well. Or how else could you explain that Mandriva does not offer bittorrent downloads their latest so-called “free” edition of Mandriva 2006.

I guess that’s reserved for paying customers, and it will give you the opportunity to download iso images that are “beefed” up with non-free software.

Well, why should I bother. I stopped using Mandriva long before it got its current name. However, it is sad to see that so many people are willing to be trapped into non-free software even when they run GNU/Linux. They even pay money for getting free software earlier than others. Lucky me, I don’t have to grok that. I just keep on using Debian, Kubuntu and OpenBSD.

I’d like to know what you think about Mandriva. I’d suggest starting a discussion thread in the forum.

Nexenta’s GNU/Opensolaris and Debian

November 14th, 2005

Ok, the flamewar at debian-devel seems to be mostly finished by now. Some people posted stuff about this controversy in their blogs, thus I read about it in some posts at planet debian.

So what it is all about then?

Well the technical/legal question is: Am I allowed to link a GPL’ed application against OpenSolaris libc (which is CDDL’ed)? Actually that question is not easy to answer. But let’s get to some examples:

Sun’s Solaris 10 (non-free) ships with several pieces of Free Software, for details see here. It seems quite a bit of GPL’ed software is distributed by Sun. They also say that some of it is even integrated in their OS. More details can be found at this website. Aha, Sun directly integrates GPL’ed software into its OS.

Now comes the punchline: Sun has linked all these programs linked against their non-free libc. Sun doesn’t mention glibc anywhere on the pages mentioned above, therefore that must be the case. And I bet that they distribute binaries of these pieces of Free Software, as well.

Doesn’t that violate the GPL?

No, it doesn’t! They make all source code of the pieces of Free Software they use available for free download. That seems to be fair enough.

Aha, but Nexenta does the same, only they do even offer the source code of libc, under a Free Software license, to boot.

But somehow, that is violating the GPL.

Ok, ok. You will now say that all the libraries that are used by the included Free Software applications are licensed under the LGPL or other GPL-compatible licenses, LGPL’ed libraries might indeed be linked against non-free libraries. As long as the actual GPL’ed software doesn’t link against real non-compatibly licensed libraries, you’re probably safe.

Well, I am sure that some of the GPL’ed apps in Sun’s list do not only link against other GPL-compatibly licensed libraries, but also against Sun’s non-free libc, won’t they?

See, that’t the thing I cannot understand, please comment generously and enlighten me.

An easy way to support nosoftwarepatents.com

October 16th, 2005

I just stumbled across this article. If you oppose software patents, this is an easy way to support your ideas. Go and vote for Florian Müller, head of nosoftwarepatents.com and make him European of the Year. And yes, please spread the word.

Hi everybody

October 16th, 2005

Hi, so this is me creating my second blog ever. I’ve got one at livejournal.com already, but I realised that there’s no target audience for musing about Free Software and related politics. Therefore I have created this blog which I will fill with stuff that comes to my mind, regarding Free Software (and related politics, of course). I’m afraid the post frequency will be rather low. Enjoy, Dominik