The Quick European Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog
Breaking with the blogging tradition of incredibly obvious (and search engine indexable) article titles, I think it's fitting to have a subtle, more European perhaps, heading for this post. To cut to the chase, it deals with the great transatlantic dog fight between possibly the world's biggest monopoly and the Eurocrats - that is Microsoft vs European Competition Commission.
This has caused great entertainment for those browsing the net as, for some, this has broken down into a full scale Europe vs America battle. The ruling is Microsoft's first court loss of significance that stands to have genuine legal ramifications as most other similar cases have been settled out of court by deep pockets and hamstrung prosecutions. Although it's always hard to pick the legal meat off the bones in a lot of software related court cases, other articles have mentioned that the ruling means limited scope for MS to appeal, possible requirement of protocols disclosure and of course the small matter of hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Small change to a big fish perhaps but no one likes to throw away money.
Those who support the decision are proudly strutting the streets with their vin rouge in one hand and their petit pain in the other singing "Vive la Revolution" as they go. Some have changed to spelling color with a 'u' and prefer to organise their day than organize it. Those against, see the fleeting head of communism attacking capitalism's finest hour. Cries of "Red! Reds! Under the beds" can be heard from those who shun the European Courts ruling. Particularly entertaining is the comments at the end of the article Microsoft's Stunning Court Defeat. I don't normally mange to keep chugging through the comments but I did find this little flame quite amusing.
So what does the future legal direction of this case hold? Well that's anyone's guess, but the interesting thing that FFII correctly pointed out in one of their recent press releases is that patents are where the battle is at. Whatever respect Europe can garner by being the first one to call a spade a spade - or an illegal monopoly an illegal monopoly - will be soon squandered if software patents are allowed in the back door. How anyone could be stupid enough to repeatedly bring software patents to the brink of legality in Europe is amazing. But that is what's happened time and time again. Software lifecycles are measured in months (not decades like in big pharma) and innovation has always occurred by building on the ideas of others. But yet there are those who are scared that taking a stance against software patents means being anti-intellectual property - when the reverse is the case. Let's hope that the next time software patents are on the European menu, that there will be enough intelligent people in the room to call the spade again.
Kissed a QT and now I’ve caught Mono
The Irish Penguin branches out to a new platform this week as Mono, the Linux-y version .NET of is tackled. What wonders await...
Well, thus far, we're not actually sure, although early signs are promising. We pulled down the MonoDevelop codebase as well as it's dependancies via Subversion and most things built without major problems (on Ubuntu Fiesty) and a little help from the fabulous monodevelop-list AT lists.ximian.com (just replace AT with @) #. Although the holy grail of having a happily built MonoDevelop environment is proving just a little elusive - a conflict between Cario from v1.0 mono libraries and Cairo from v2.0 libraries is a spanner in the works. This should be a straightforward one to iron out.
It will be interesting to compare the Form's/Widget designer to the fabulous QT Designer and see if MonoDevelop provides a stable and first rate environment for doing GUIs. But of course, even more interesting will be the politics...
Momentumless Linux and the Death of Open Source – A Developer’s Response
A couple of blog and news posts on the Internet this week seemed to make the headlines with death knells for Linux and Open Source for a multitude of reasons, both chronic (less anti-Microsoft sentiment about) and recent (GPL 3). But on reading, I couldn't help but feel that both posts sounded wrong, utterly utterly wrong in fact. No disrespect intended to the authors of course.
The first post Open Source Is Dead, Long Live Open Patents? by David DeJean, which took a commonly cited angle on GPL3 hurting Open Source by fragmenting the community. But that is to not understand the community. Bare in mind one important fact about community-oriented Open Source developers, of which I am one - we write the software because we love to. For the vast majority of SMD's (Small-to-Medium size project Developers, for want of a better term) we don't really care whether our project is GPL2 or GPL3 - why? Because they are both effective Open Source licences and they will both serve our personal purposes fine as either licence would suit our pet projects. Of course, we'll all still get our goat up as to whether Linux or the GNU Compiler Tools should be GPL 2 or 3 - but that's a separate issue - it's won't stop us writing the software we love. It is naive for commentators to think that because a new licence comes out that it will hurt the amount of FOSS produced. As for businesses, if it made sense to switch to Linux before GPL 3, it will still make sense after GPL3 - irrespective of what or who adopts GPL 3. It technically affects Tivo (although they will be able to stick with Linux 2.4 kernel) - so what? Such cases only make up a small part of the econosphere. Plenty of business providers seem to be happy. Even embedded solution providers are saying that GPL 3 won't turn customers off, with Jason Wacha of MontaVista saying "Our customers are used to working with licenses that are much more restrictive than the GPL. In my opinion, typical proprietary licenses are much more restrictive in pretty much all instances than the GPL."
The Linux Kernel – An Overview from IBM
Good things come in small packages packages. But great things are scabable!
One such example is the Linux kernel - it can run on anything from a toaster to a supercomputer; how does it do it? The answer to this, and other interesting questions, can be found in the very readable guide to the Linux kernel by IBM Anatomy of the Linux kernel.
Viva Le Gaelic Penguin!
Phew! After much fiddling and tweaking I finally managed to get my header image together for this site. All the while I had the song "The Irish Rover" bouncing round in my head - which probably didn't help matters!
But I think the above header was worth it. Veronica, my glamorous girlfriend and graphic design mentor, didn't like it much to start with. At least I managed to pacify her by throwing in a cute penguin pic, which I did up in the absolutely fabulous Inkscape. Inkscape has to be one of the best Free Software programs ever. It's just so easy to use and yet things just always turn out good. It's magic. And that's just the kind of thing you'll be hearing more about on this blog over the coming months along with other news and discussion from the filthy dirty world of Open Source.
Just a heads up for anyone trying to change their WordPress header image - make sure that you haven't changed the header's colours or anything previously in WordPress. If you have made changes then you should revert them - which can be done from the dashboard. Otherwise all the image uploading and CSS styling in the world won't be enough to get that flamin' header to change! Now there's an hour of my life that I won't get back! At least I had The Irish Rover playing away in the back of my head to keep me going...
Doo do doo...
GPL V3 – Its True Purpose
Recently, I read some interesting commentary on the Microsoft-Novell pact in an Linux Insider article entitled GPLv3 Could Be Risky Business which concluded with the following statement.
"Regardless of the GPLv3 outcome, it should be noted that Microsoft and Novell are two large companies with plenty of attorneys -- if they want to do business together over Linux and Microsoft products, it's not hard to imagine that they'll be able to find a way."
This statement didn't seem to ring true for me - it seemed to be wrong way to view what the Free Software Foundation is doing with GPL V3. Here's why.
Nobody wants to 'stop' Microsoft and Novell, or any other Open Source distributor, from doing business together. In fact, it would be desirable to see Microsoft produce more Open Source software - as they have with the projects such as the Web Service Software Factory - and collaborate with other players in the Open Source software field.
Rather the point of GPL V3 is to defend the rights of Free Software developers to produce software without the fear of litigation hanging over their head - by extending the patent covenant to all of the Free Software community - not just Novell customers. This fear of potential litigation has been raised more strongly than ever by recent Microsoft comments in Fortune magazine. However, it appears that by not having an expiry date on the Linux coupons that Microsoft is distributing, Microsoft itself will become a GPL V3 Linux distributor, and finally their patent covenant will extend to every corner of the Free Software communities. This will be genuinely good for software development, for the Open Source community and most of all for Microsoft - who has a lot to offer in the field of Open Source software.
They have a lot of bright developers and engineers and it is in everyone's interests to see these people contribute greatly to the I.T. sector over the coming years. But it is important that the playing field is level and that instead of 'innovative lock-ins' and restrictive file formats we see a truly great Microsoft emerge that is founded on on true innovation, engineering excellence and co-operation. The first step on this path is to build a true bridge to the Free Software community and not seemingly pretend that this intellectual property bridge is any more than an attempt to scare companies into paying a high premium for 'Microsoft-approved' Linux of Novell - using patents instead of file formats as the lock-in.
In summary, it is important to note that the purpose of the latest version of the GNU Public Licence is not on preventing co-operation between Microsoft and Novell with their pact, rather it is to defend everyone else who is threatened by the it. To this end, GPL V3 looks like it will do it's job very well - winning over many of those who doubted its necessity early on in its GPL 3 draft process. And the Software Freedom Law Centre and it's 'plenty of attorneys' has another feather in its cap as it shows an interesting hand in the poker game of software licensing. And if this hand is not enough for now, 'it's not hard to imagine that they'll be able to find a way' to continue to keep software development a free and democratic process. If you weren't sure why you needed GPL V3 yesterday, you probably know why today.
XML Document Creation in Javascript – Cross Platform
This is an absolutely super guide which basically gives you some neat code in order to work with XML documents across multiple platforms in the sadistic language of the web - Javascript.
It's a 4 page tutorial which overviews a static JS class that the author has put together which provides helper methods for creating a new XML document on the client browser by loading from disk, URL's or strings. I found it especially useful for squeezing a javascript string into a nice XML representation. Check it out on WebReference.com
Microsoft Not So Sure on Taking on World…
Under pressure arising from comments made by Microsoft's Horacio Gutierrez and Brad Smith in an Fortune magazine article earlier this week saying that Open Source software contains 235 Micrsoft patents, the company has released a statement that it does not intend to resort to litigation in an effort to halt the growth of Open Source software. So why would they highlight an issue and then when asked to state specifically which are the patents in question they respond, "We're not going to have a discussion publicly with that level of detail."
The answer is simple. If they publish them it is likely that most of them will be thrown out by the U.S. courts as invalid. This became much easier recently, when the U.S. Supreme court made it easier to legally challenge individual patents and get them invalidated. This is because most software patents have been granted without due consideration and aren't actually valid for many reasons. Patents have been grantly for things that are patently unpatenable.
Once this weeds out the likely majority of patents - Open Source developers will endevour to work around what patents, if any, remain.
So, back to the question, why would Microsoft highlight a meaningless question? Well, to bring up the issue in this manner creates a degree of uncertainty in the minds of certain business owners - however misplaced. Such people must weigh up risk every day and anything that they perceive adding risk to their business they will avoid. This will take two forms, one is to avoid Open Source software and stick with closed solutions. But this is becoming increasingly difficult as it is making more and more business sense to deploy Open Source solutions every day. The other is pay royalties to Microsoft for these (vaguely) alledged infringing patents. This is a sad situation because paying 'money for nothing' is money that you could otherwise use to grow your business.
Microsoft Vs The World
Microsoft is allegedly preparing it's army of lawyers (more than 800 strong according to one commentator) to issue an almighty patent onslaught on Open Source software. It lists 235 patents which it says are being violated by Open Source software projects. Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer says that it is in the "name of honour" that he must fight the Open Source community. The battle lines are being drawn in what could prove to be the ultimate shakeup of the U.S. software patent system. As Microsoft comes under increased pressure from Open Source software it is making lawyers, not software developers, the front-line soldiers in the fight to maintain the apparent monopoly. It looks like we're entering interesting times.
On a lighter note, here's a clip of Steve Balmer trying to rally the Redmond programmers in better days before lawyers led software development. I wonder does he exhibit the same passion today when he stands in front of his devs or does he prefer to go into the TV lounge and flick on an episode of Boston Legal...
Installing the Netgear WG511v2 (China) Wireless Card on Linux
These instructions are intended to be used to install a Netgear WG511 v2 (China) on a Linux machine that dual boots with Windows. I take no responsibility for anything bad that might happen if you follow this guide (I try to avoid responsibility at every turn).
PRE-REQUISITES
* Your machine must be a dual boot system
* You must have the wireless card installed and functioning on Windows
* The Windows partition on which you installed the wireless card already must be accessible to the Linux system (my Windows partion had the FAT32 filesystem which made this easy). If not you will first have to find a tutorial that covers this. A quick google on this topic should help. It will require you to update your /etc/fstab file. Here's an article on this file http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html but as I said googling around might find you even easier tutorials on this.
ADDITIONAL NOTES
* I performed this on an IBM T22 running Ubuntu Linux 5.10 'Breezy Badger' and also on OpenSuse 10.2. Windows 2000 was also installed as part of my dual boot system.
* As I did this on Ubuntu I used sudo instead of logging in as root. That's what the rest of this guide assumes. On OpenSuse, I used su from the command line in order to become the root user. Depending on your distro you may have to log in as root if it doesn't support sudo.