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So, the day has ended and we’ve seen many protests around the world. Did it help? Well, a bit, but don’t hold your breath right now.

European citizens are still being sued by the American government and being extradited to the US because their sites had links to copyrighted material. So, in a way, what SOPA and PIPA stands for is already reality, but it takes the US government a lot of effort and money to do so. With SOPA and PIPA, enyone in the world could end up in Guantanamo Bay, as easy as any American.

While I welcome the protest, and feel that Americans did a good job converting 30 more senators to their cause (it was 5, now it’s 35), it’s far from enough. I think people still haven’t realised that this is not an American issue. Just like American copyright laws have bankrupted creativity around the world (think Mickey Mouse effect) and the American patent system has destroyed technological advancement (patent trolls, et al), SOPA and PIPA will spread throughout the world and be the icing on their cake.

The people that are so desperate to preserve their profits by breaking the rest of the world are the people that already have more than anyone. Last year, Viacom’s CEO had a 50mi raise in his salary. Not a bonus, mind you, a raise. To protect those people’s profits, we’re letting them destroy the entire world, stop technological advancements (that don’t give profits to them) and kill all the artists in the process.

If you, like me, are outside of the US, please make sure your government stops short of bending to the US government, as they always do. Europe, and particularly UK and France, has been America’s puppet for far too long. The US is not the only country in the world, and nowadays, it’s not even the most important one. We need to change the world to multi-polar and promote countries like China, Russia, Brazil, India. Not that I like any of them, but we must not put all our coins into one crazy country, we need more crazy countries to re-balance the world.

Now, for some of the protests

Apart from the obvious Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, there were some others I’ve seen that are worth mentioning.

• FightForTheFuture had a very interesting video explaining the whole thing.
• Ars Technica published only SOPA/PIPA articles, and very good ones at that.
• Bruce Schneier, security legend, also joined the protests.
• Avaaz, always alert, started a petition and already got more than 1.5mi signatures.
• People that live on content (in theory, the ones affected by piracy) also had their say: XKCD, Abstruse Goose, Basic Instruction.
• Last, but not least, The Daily WTF has a very interesting piece about how bad it already is, and supporting PIPA so we can go back to the BBS era that was much more comfortable!

It was not just that, some people actually went on to the streets (NY and SF) and it seems most senators’ phones and websites went dead for the traffic. It’s working, but this is not the end, nor this is just about copyright. This is about freedom of thought, freedom to share, freedom to be a human being. Stopping SOPA/PIPA is just the first step, we need to undo most of what the media/war/oil/tobacco industry has done for the past 80 years, unless you like dictatorships, of course.

To protest against absurd piracy counter-measures in US, the Wikimedia foundation (and others) will be shutting down this Wednesday.

We’ll be supporting the act by shutting down our blog, too. Not that our blog makes any difference, it’s more for the protest than anything else.

UPDATE: More sites, including Google and WordPress, are joining the strike.

Today is the annual Day Against DRM, please remember to check your shopping list for possible DRM-ed products, and consider doing some of the ideas on the site… I can give you a few examples why this is bad.

First, I own an iPad and cannot use it. It won’t be recognized by my Linux machine, I can’t copy music or books to it, I can’t browse my music collection on my server to play random songs, I have to sync it with iTunes (and only iTunes) that I have to run on a Windows virtual machine inside my Linux machine. It’s dead slow, it won’t sync up things from my iPad unless I find the magical option pull changes from iPad instead of the ubiquitous sync option, etc.

Secondly, the Play Station is a wonderful machine and many people wanted (and could) run Linux on it. Years ago there were clusters of Play Stations, since its GPU was powerful enough to do scientific computation (better than many computers at the time), but now, you can’t even touch it without going to jail.

Finally, in the age of the internet, companies are still attached to material values such as possession and ownership, whereas the internet transforms everything into a service. Amazon, although they still use DRM on Kindle, they understood it quite well and have created the most important cloud service on the planet.

Why those companies are not using the same model for everything? Well, generally reality doesn’t get transformed that quickly, so it was a great shock. But now society is demanding new rules for a new reality and the fact that many people are going to jail for preserving their own rights is alarming and a crucial sign that the old rules don’t apply any more.

This day is to remind you that you are not alone in thinking that this is all wrong, that you should be able to listen to any music, on any device, anywhere, since the technology allows you to. If the business model does not account for it, change the business model!

May the 4th be with you…

I got an iPad for Christmas. Didn’t buy it, got as a gift, and I have to say that it didn’t change my point of view on Apple a single bit.

A few years ago, while getting an iBook for my sister, I had to configure it to speak French for her and still English for me, which was a pain. I wanted to run OpenOffice, only to learn that there wasn’t one. I couldn’t find the configuration files or anything that would resemble running a Unix system. Some people say I just didn’t find it in the right place, that I could have used such and such software to make it the way I like it, but that kinda killed completely Apple’s spirit of “just work”.

All in all, I was happy to go back to my old faithful Linux and eventually bought a Dell Studio, now running a vanilla Ubuntu 10.10. I used to be the hard core Linux user, compiling the kernel, changing modules and fiddling with the configuration a lot, but there’s something I’ve learned in all these years is that a desktop (or a laptop) has to just work. And having used a iBook and an iPad, the créme de la créme of usability and user experience, I have to say that, unfortunately, there is no miracle.

To summarize my experience with the iPad in a sentence: the hardware is good, the software is average, the philosophy is disgusting.

The hardware

The hardware is good, not great. First, it’s got a good CPU+GPU combo and memory enough to run some cool games without glitches. I was actually surprised with the quality of some games, and the screen resolution and the quality of the capacitive touch-scree is really something.

But the (stereo) speakers I have in my Nokia N95 are far better than the (mono) speaker in the iPad, even in quality (despite its smaller size). There is no camera, and no easy way to interconnect it to the world, unless this “world” is made of Apples. You can only print to an AirPrinter (or whatever that’s called), you can only connect Bluetooth with other iPads, maybe iPhones but it didn’t even recognize my Nokia.

Despite its lack of hardware, the case is pretty heavy, almost a kilogram. I normally think that heavy is good, but in this case, to hold the iPad while you play is quite tiring after a few minutes. I bought the Need for Speed (quite good game) and I ended up using cushions to rest my elbows after a while and a few minutes later I stopped playing because my arms were hurting.

All in all, the responsiveness and screen quality are really amazing, the rest is just not what I’d expect from Apple. However, I hear that since 2005 Apple has slowly and constantly reducing the quality of the parts not to increase the price of the gadgets. It’s a clever move for a while, works even better with a fan base (instead of customers) but that’s bound to fail one day.

Finally, a minor thing. There is a side button for the volume, and one to mute. Problem is, it doesn’t work with everything (even some things made by Apple). It’s mute and you can still hear the sounds. Even the volume works while in mute, only for those applications that ignore the mute button. The others, you need to un-mute it to hear. I expected more from Apple…

The software

The second expectation I had from Apple was that the software would be amazing. I’m not talking about third-party AppStore software, but bundled Apple software. How naive.

My experience developing software for 20 years tells me that every piece of software is crap, people just don’t realise because software engineers can hide the crap really well. Microsoft hides it behind zillions of useless features, Oracle hides it behind zillions of useless configuration steps, Google hides it in a secret box that only his advertisers can read, open source don’t hide it at all and Apple hides it by giving poisoned apples to their fan base.

Because I’m not a fan boy, I’m unfortunately exposed to the naked truth: it sucks.

First, there is no Flash. I don’t care if HTML 5 is better than Flash, the web has zillions of Flash applications, web pages, videos and animations in Flash and it’s not going to change just because Apple doesn’t like it. Youtube has moved to HTML5 (probably because of Apple), but I can’t follow links of any other pages that have flash. That sucks.

Second, Safari sucks. Try to use eBay on safari. Try to sell something on eBay using Safari… I dare you. In many other pages it broke, as in falling back to the welcome-screen. Yesterday it locked the iPad completely. I was using the Twitter application that redirected me to an youtube page, when I opened in Safari it locked. When I closed Safari, the welcome-screen was locked. I couldn’t click (tap?) on anything. Nothing worked, and you can’t turn it off (the way to go for non-unix OSs), just make it sleep. After a few desperate taps on applications, I managed to tap on the Youtube application (that wasn’t running, so far) and when I hit on another random video on it and it played, I closed the youtube app and the rest started working again.

It breaks so many times and in so unpredictable ways, that now I only use it for Gmail and Google reader, because I know those pages were hand-crafted for the iPad. As a web experience, that sucks big time.

Another big fight I had, until I got in terms with the iPad, was iTunes. In the PC, iTunes does it all: play and download songs, books and videos, buys apps, browse the university programme (excellent, by the way). When I got some songs, videos and a few apps, I went to the iPad and where was all my stuff?

Well, I found out that you must use the iPod software to listen for songs, the Video app to view videos, the iBook to read books, the AppStore to buy apps, the… wait, every time I have an argument about Linux vs. Mac, I’m constantly reminded that normal users want less applications, less complication and with Apple you (supposedly) have the same interface all over the platforms. Well, I just learnt that, with the iPad, this is exactly the opposite. I’ve seen systems better integrated than that…

Another big problem is the bloody spell checker. If you don’t speak English, you’re screwed. First, you can’t disable the spell checker and whatever you type WILL be checked and the version that stays is the spell checker version. You can disable on a word-per-word basis, by clicking on the little X button, every time you type a word. The problem is, if you’re writing in a burst, that kills your speed. Also, in some screens you can’t cancel the spell checker. It shows up with the little X but you can’t click it. Does it make sense? To show the balloon with the X that you can’t click? I expected more from Apple.

App Store

For me, it doesn’t make sense to have a computer and not be able to run programs you want in it. Ever since I wrote my first program when I was 5 years old, I learnt that that’s what a computer is. Even Apple computers at that time were like this, I had some, and I could write programs to them and run. The fact that I have to download it from an App Store is out of my comprehension. (I understand the immediate business model, but I still think that it kills in the long term, lets wait and see).

The same friends again had the excuse of it being a quality control, that Apple can control what’s going in and make sure it won’t break the user experience. Well, if you have used the iPhone or the iPad you know very well that that’s far from the truth. Most applications suck, break, explode, or are just badly coded. And let’s be honest, do you really think that Apple spend time reviewing every single application?

In the end, I found some pretty cool apps, but nothing that I wouldn’t have found if there was no App Store.

So, in a nutshell, the software side of the iPad is mediocre, at best.

The philosophy

And here’s where we get the nasty bits. I could go on and on about all the little details, but I’ve said enough already about Apple, DRM and everything. As I read in another blog reviewing the iPhone vs. Android: “Apple, I’m not your bitch”. I don’t like someone else deciding what applications I can use, what books I can read, what songs (and where) I can hear, etc, etc.

For me, this is the crucial point and to have used a iBook before and to have an iPad now, I can categorically say: I don’t like Apple products, I’m not their bitch.

Tablets

To be fair to Apple, they do get one thing right: what people want. Before the iPhone, everyone wanted something like an iPhone, but Nokia was too busy fixing Symbian to realise that (and when they finally realised, they copied Motorola). I always wanted a tablet, really, since I saw it in Star Trek, 23 years ago and I bet every one want one, too. When the first tablets arrived in the 90′s, they were absurdly expensive and only ran a few programs that actually used the tablet, in other words, the touch-screen was merely a substitute for the mouse.

What Apple did was to consolidate the interface into a simple and easy to use touch-screen, which children and animals alike can use as if it was their third hand. What is really disappointing is that they know so well what people want and give so little effort to actually make it complete. They create a very good interface and fail to consolidate the tools, they create a quality control mechanism and fail to control the quality, they give freedom to people, that otherwise wouldn’t be able to use computers, and take it away with so many restrictions, they simplify the use of so many things, and take away the basic assumptions people have about things, like being able to play songs anywhere or to borrow a book from a friend.

It’s amazing that a high tech company such as Apple haven’t yet realised that technology changes the way people live, communicate and do business. There’s no point is give half the freedom technology allows you to, just because you can’t monetise the other half. I’m sure Apple has lots of good people inside that could share some ideas on how to progress without handcuffs, if they would just listen to them…

In the end, tablets are really as great as I thought they would be, and I’m loving it. Pity it’s an Apple tablet… However, that gave me reassurance that I must buy an Android tablet next year or so, when they become as good as I hope them to be.

Final Veredict

• Idea: 0, at least 23 years old and has been done before many times.
• Time-to-market: 10, as usual, first to make it right.
• Hardware: 7, a camera and good speakers would do nice.
• Software: 5, Flash, Safari don’t work well, bad AppStore quality.
• Integration: 3, only interconnects with Apple, DRM, iTunes on iPad.
• Usability: 7, the interface is good and simple and always ready to work.
• Philosophy: 0, DRM, dev. license only works on Macs.
• Average: 4.6, don’t buy, wait for the Android tablets to arrive in full.

Defective by design came with a new story on Apple’s DRM. While I don’t generally re-post from other blogs (LWN already does that), this one is special, but not for the apparent reasons.

I agree that DRM is bad, not just for you but for business, innovation, science and the evolution of mankind. But that’s not the point. What Apple is doing with the App store is not just locking other applications from running on their hardware, but locking their hardware out of the real world.

In the late 80′s – early 90′s, all hardware platforms were like that, and Apple was no exception. Amiga, Commodore, MSX and dozens of others, each was a completely separate machine, with a unique chipset, architecture and software layers. But that never stopped people writing code for it, putting on a floppy disk and installing on any compatible computer they could find. Computer viruses spread out that way, too, given the ease it was to share software in those days.

Ten years later, there was only a handful of architectures. Intel for PCs, PowerPC for Mac and a few others for servers (Alpha, Sparc, etc). The consolidation of the hardware was happening at the same time as the explosion of the internet, so not only more people had the same type of computer, but they also shared software more easily, increasing the quantity of software available (and viruses) by orders of magnitude.

Linux was riding this wave since its beginning, and probably that was the most important factor why such an underground movement got so much momentum. It was considered subversive, anti-capitalist to use free software and those people (including me) were hunt down like communists, and ridiculed as idiots with no common-sense. Today we know how ridicule it is to use Linux, most companies and governments do and would be unthinkable today not to use it for what it’s good. But it’s not for every one, not for everything.

Apple’s niche

Apple always had a niche, and they were really smart not to get out of it. Companies like Intel and ARM are trying to get out of their niche and attack new markets, to maybe savage a section of economy they don’t have control over. Intel is going small, ARM is going big and both will get hurt. Who get’s more hurt doesn’t matter, what matter is that Apple never went to attack other markets directly.

Ever since the beginning, Apple’s ads were in the lines of “be smart, be cool, use Apple”. They never said their office suite was better than Microsoft’s (as MS does with Open Office), or that their hardware support was better (like MS does with Linux). Once you compare directly your products with someone else’s, you’re bound to trouble. When Microsoft started comparing their OS with Linux (late 90′s), the community fought back showing all the areas in which they were very poor, and businesses and governments started doing the same, and that was a big hit on Windows. Apple never did that directly.

By being always on the sidelines, Apple was the different. In their own niche, there was no competitor. Windows or Linux never entered that space, not even today. When Apple entered the mobile phone market, they didn’t took market from anyone else, they made a new market for themselves. Who bought iPhones didn’t want to buy anything else, they just did because there was no iPhone at the time.

Android mobile phones are widespread, growing faster than anything else, taking Symbian phones out of the market, destroying RIM’s homogeneity, but rarely touching the iPhone market. Apple fan-boys will always buy Apple products, no matter the cost or the lower quality in software and hardware. Being cool is more important than any of that.

Fool me once again, please

Being an Apple fan-boy is hard work. Whenever a new iPhone is out, the old ones disappear from the market and you’re outdated. Whenever the new MacBook arrives, the older ones look so out-dated that all your (fan-boy) friends will know you’re not keeping up. If by creating a niche to capture the naiveness of people and profit from it is fooling, than Apple is fooling those same people for decades and they won’t stop now. That has made them the second biggest company in the world (loosing only for an oil company), nobody can argue with that fact.

iPhones have a lesser hardware than most of the new Android phones, less functionality, less compatibility with the rest of the world. The new MacBook air has an Intel chip several years old, lacks connectivity options and in a short time won’t run Flash, Java or anything Steve Jobs dislike when he wakes up from a bad dream. But that doesn’t affect a bit the fan-boys. See, back in the days when Microsoft had fan-boys too, they were completely oblivious to the horrendous problems the platform had (viruses, bugs, reboots, memory hog etc) and they would still mock you for not being on their group.

That’s the same with Apple fan-boys and always have been. I had an Apple ][, and I liked it a lot. But when I saw an Amiga I was baffled. I immediately recognized the clear superiority of the architecture. The sound was amazing, the graphics was impressive and the games were awesome (all that mattered to me at that time, tbh). There was no comparison between an Amiga game and an Apple game at that time and everybody knew it. But Apple fan-boys were all the same, and there were fights in BBSs and meetings: Apple fan-boys one side, Amiga fan-boys on the other and the pizza would be over long before the discussion would cool down.

Nice little town, invaded

But today, reality is a bit harder to swallow. There is no PowerPC, or Alpha or even Sparc now. With Oracle owning Sparc’s roadmap, and following what they are doing to Java and OpenOffice, I wouldn’t be surprised if Larry Ellison one day woke up and decided to burn everything down. Now, there are only two major players in the small to huge markets: Intel and ARM. With ARM only being at the small and smaller, it leaves Intel with all the rest.

MacOS is no longer an OS per se. Its underlying sub-system is based on (or ripped off from) FreeBSD (a robust open source unix-like operating system). As it goes, FreeBSD is so similar to Linux that it’s not hard to re-compile Linux application to run on it. So, why should it be hard to run Linux application on MacOS? Well, it’s not, actually. With the same platform and a very similar sub-system, re-compiling Linux application to Mac is a matter of finding the right tools and libraries, everything else follows the natural course.

Now, this is dangerous! Windows has the protection of being completely different, even on the same platform (Intel), but MacOS doesn’t and there’s no way to keep the penguin’s invasion at bay. For the first time in history, Apple has opened its niche to other players. In Apple terms, this is the same as to kill itself.

See, capitalism is all about keeping control of the market. It’s not about competition or innovation, and it’s clearly not about re-distribution of capital, as the French suggested in their revolution. Albeit Apple never fought Microsoft or Linux directly, they had their market well in control and that was the key to their success. With very clever advertising and average quality hardware, they managed to build an entire universe of their own and attract a huge crowd that, once in, would never look back. But now, that bubble has been invaded by the penguin commies, and there’s no way for them to protect that market as they’ve done before.

One solution to rule them all

On a very good analysis of the Linux “dream”, this article suggests that it is dead. If you look to Linux as if it was a company (following the success of Canonical, I’m not surprised), he has a point. But Linux is not Canonical, nor a dream and it’s definitely not dead.

In the same line, you could argue that Windows is dead. It hasn’t grown up for a while, Vista destroyed the confidence and moved more people to Macs and Linux than ever before. The same way, more than 10 years ago, a common misconception for Microsoft’s fan-boys was that the Mac was dead. Its niche was too little, the hardware too expensive and incompatible with everything else. Windows is in the same position today, but it’s far from dead.

But Linux is not a company, it doesn’t fit the normal capitalist market analysis. Remember that Linux hackers are commies, right? It’s an organic community, it doesn’t behave like a company or anything capitalism would like to model. This is why it has been so many times wrongly predicted (Linux is dead, this is the year of Linux, Linux will kill Windows, Mac is destroying Linux and so on). All of this is pure bollocks. Linux growth is organic, not exponential, not bombastic. It won’t kill other platforms. Never had, never will. It will, as it has done so far, assimilate and enhance, like the Borg.

If we had Linux in the French revolution, the people would have a better chance of getting something out of it, rather than letting all the glory (and profit) to the newly founded bourgeoisie class. Not because Linux is magic, but because it embraces changes, expand the frontiers and expose the flaw in the current systems. That alone is enough to keep the existing software in constant check, that is vital to software engineering and that will never end. Linux is, in a nutshell, what’s driving innovation in all other software fronts.

Saying that Linux is dead is the same as saying that generic medication is dead because it doesn’t make profit or hasn’t taken over the big pharma’s markets. It simply is not the point and only shows that people are still with the same mindset that put Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, IBM and now Apple where they are today, all afraid of the big bad wolf, that is not big, nor bad and has nothing to do with a wolf.

This wolf is, mind you, not Linux. Linux and the rest of the open source community are just the only players (and Google, I give them that) that are not afraid of that wolf, but, according to business analysts, they should to be able to play nice with the rest of the market. The big bad wolf is free content.

Free, open content

Free as in freedom is dangerous. Everybody knows what happens when you post on Facebook about your boss being an ass: you get fired. The same would happen if you said it out loud in a company’s lunch, wouldn’t it? Running random software in your machine is dangerous, everybody knows what can happen when virus invade your computer, or rogue software start stealing your bank passwords and personal data.

But all systems now are very similar, and the companies of today are still banging their heads against the same wall as 20 years ago: lock down the platform. 20 years ago that was quite simple, and actually, only the reflection of the construction process of any computer. Today, it has to be actively done.

It’s very easy to rip a DVD and send it to a friend. Today’s broadband speeds allow you to do that quite fast, indeed. But your friend haven’t paid for that, and the media companies felt threatened. They created DRM. Intel has just acquired McAfee to put security measures inside the chip itself. This is the same as DRM, but on a much lower level. Instead of dealing with the problem, those companies are actually delaying the solution and only making the problem worse.

DRM is easily crackable. It has been shown over and over that any DRM (software or hardware) so far has not resisted the will of people. There are far more ingenious people outside companies that do DRM than inside, therefore, it’s impossible to come up with a solution that will fool all outsiders, unless they hire them all (which will never happen) or kill them all (which could happen, if things keep the same pace).

Unless those companies start looking at the problem as the new reality, and create solutions to work in this new reality, they won’t make any money out of it. DRM is not just bad, but it’s very costly and hampers progress and innovation. It kills what capitalism loves most: profit. Take all the money spent on DRM that were cracked a day later, all the money RIAA spent on lawsuits, all the trouble to create software solutions to lock all users and the drop-out rate which happens when some better solution appears (see Google vs. Yahoo) and you get the picture.

Locked down society

Apple’s first popular advertisement was the one mocking Orwell’s 1984 and how Apple would break the rules by bringing something completely different that would free people of the locked down world they lived in. Funny though, how things turned out…

Steve Jobs say that Android is a segmented market, that Apple is better because it has only one solution to every problem. They said the same thing about Windows and Linux, that the segmentation is what’s driving their demise, that everybody should listen to Steve Jobs and use his own creations (one for each problem) and that the rest was just too noisy, too complicated for really cool people to use.

I don’t know you, but for me that sounds exactly like Big Brother’s speech.

With DRM and control of the ApStore, Apple has total freedom to put in, or take out, whatever they want, whenever they want. It has happened and will continue to happen. They never put Flash in iPhones, not because of any technical reason, but just because Steve Jobs doesn’t like it. They’re now taking Java out of the Mac “experience”, again, just for kicks. Microsoft at least put .NET and Silverlight in place, but Apple simply takes out, no replacements.

Oh, how Apple fan-boys like it. They applaud, they defend with their lives, even having no knowledge of why nor even if there is any reason for it. They just watch Steve Jobs speech and repeat, word by word. There is no reason, and those people are sounding every day more dumb than anything else, but who am I to say so? I’m the one out of the group, I’m the one who has no voice.

When that happened to Microsoft in the 90′s, it was hard to take it. The numbers were more like 95% of them and 1% of us, so there was absolutely no argument that would make them understand the utter garbage they were talking about. But today, Apple market is still not big enough, so the Apple fan-boys are indeed making Apple the second biggest company in the world, but they still look like idiots to the rest of the +50% of the world.

Yahoo!’s steps

Yahoo has shown us that locking users down, stuffing them with ads and ignoring completely the upgrade of their architecture for years is not a good patho. But Apple (as did Yahoo) thinks they are invulnerable. When Google exploded with their awesome search (I was at Yahoo’s search team at the time), we had a shock. It was not just better than Yahoo’s search, it really worked! Yahoo was afraid of being the copy-cat, so they started walking down other paths and in the end, it never really worked.

Yahoo, that started as a search company, now runs Microsoft’s lame search engine. This is, for me, the utmost proof that they failed miserably. The second biggest thing Yahoo had was email and Google has it better. Portals? Who need portals when you have the whole web at your finger tips with Google search? In the end, Google killed every single Yahoo business, one by one. Apple is following the same path, locking themselves out of the world, just waiting for someone to come with a better and simpler solution that will actually work. And they won’t listen, not even when it’s too late.

Before Yahoo! was IBM. After Apple there will be more. Those that don’t accept reality as it is, that stuck with their old ideas just because it worked so far, are bound to fail. Of course, Steve Jobs made all the money he could, and he’s not worried. As aren’t David Filo or Jerry Young, Bill Gates or Larry Ellison. And this is the crucial part.

Companies fade because great leaders fade. Communities fade when they’re no longer relevant. the Linux community is still very much relevant and won’t fade too soon. And, by its metamorphic nature, it’s very likely that the free, open source community will never die.

Companies better get used to it, and find ways to profit from it. Free, open content is here to stay, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop that. Being dictators is not helping for the US patent and copyright system, not helping for Microsoft or Intel and definitely won’t help Apple. If they want to stay relevant, they better change soon.

I’m not the one to normally do reviews or ads, but this is one well worth doing. Humble bundle is an initiative hosted by Wolfire studio, in which five other studios (2D Boy, Bit Blot, Cryptic Sea, Frictional Games and the recently joined Amanita Design) joined their award-winning indie games into a bundle with two charities (EFF and Child’s Play) that you can pay whatever you want, to be shared amongst them.

All games work on Linux and Mac (as well as Windows), are of excellent quality (I loved them) and separately would cost around 80 bucks. The average buy price for the bundle is around $8.50, but some people have paid $1000 already. Funny, though, that now they’re separating the average per platform, and Linux users pay, on average, $14 while Windows users pay $7, with Mac in between. A clear message to professional game studios out there, isn’t it?

About the games, they’re the type that are always fun to play and don’t try to be more than they should. There are no state-of-the-art 3D graphics, blood, bullets and zillions of details, but they’re solid, consistent and plain fun. I already had World of Goo (from 2D Boy) and loved it. All the rest I discovered with the bundle and I have to say that I was not expecting them to be that good. The only bad news is that you have only one more day to buy them, so hurry, get your bundle now while it’s still available.

The games

World of Goo: Maybe the most famous of all, it’s even available for Wii. It’s addictive and family friendly, has many tricks and very clever levels to play. It’s a very simple concept, balls stick to other balls and you have to reach the pipe to save them. But what they’ve done with that simple concept was a powerful and very clever combination of physical properties that give the game an extra challenge. What most impressed me was the way physics was embedded in the game. Things have weight and momentum, sticks break if the momentum is too great, some balls weight less than air and float, while others burn in contact with fire. A masterpiece.

Aquaria: I thought this would be the least interesting of all, but I was wrong. Very wrong. The graphics and music are very nice and the physics of the game is well built, but the way the game builds up is the best. It’s a mix of Ecco with Loom, where you’re a sea creature (mermaid?) and have to sing songs to get powers or to interact with the game. The more you play, the more you discover new things and the more powerful you become. Really clever and a bit more addictive than I was waiting for…

Gish: You are a tar ball (not the Unix tar, though) and have to go through tunnels with dangers to find your tar girl (?). The story is stupid, but the game is fun. You can be slippery or sticky to interact with the maze and some elements that have simple physics, which add some fun. There are also some enemies to make it more difficult. Sometimes it’s a bit annoying, when it depends more on luck (if you get the timing of many things right in a row) than actually logic or skill. The save style is also not the best, I was on the fourth level and asked for a reset (to restart the fourth level again), but it reset the whole thing and sent me to the first level, which I’m not playing again. The music is great, though.

Lugaru HD: A 3D Lara Croft bloody kung-fu bunny style. The background story is more for necessity of having one than actually relevant. The idea is to go on skirmishing, cutting jugulars, sneaking and knocking down characters in the game as you go along. The 3D graphics are not particularly impressive and the camera is not innovative, but the game has some charm for those that like a fight for the sake of fights. Funny.

Penumbra: If you like being scared, this is your game. It’s rated 16+ and you can see very little while playing. But you can hear things growling, your own heart beating and the best part is when you see something that scares the hell out of you and you despair and give away your hide out. The graphics are good, simple but well cared for. The effects (blurs, fades, night vision, fear) are very well done and in sync with the game and story. The interface is pretty simple and impressively easy, making the game much more fun than the traditional FPS I’ve played so far. The best part is, you don’t fight, you hide and run. It remembers me Thief, where fighting is the last thing you want to do, but with the difference is that in Thief, you could, in this one, you’re a puss. If you fight, you’ll most likely die.

Samorost 2: It’s a flash game, that’s all I know. Flash is not particularly stable on any platform and Linux is especially unstable, so I couldn’t make it run in the first attempt. For me, and most gamers I know, a game has to work. This is why it’s so hard to play early open source games, because you’re looking for a few minutes of fun and not actually fiddling with your system. I have spent more time writing this paragraph than trying to play Samorost and I will only try it again if I upgrade my Linux (in hoping the Flash problem will go away by itself). Pity.

Well, that’s it. Go and get your humble bundle that it’s well worth, plus you help some other people in the process. Helping indie studios is very important for me. First, it levels the play-field and help them grow. Second, they tend to be much more platform independent, and decent games for Linux are scarce. Last, they tend to have the best ideas. Most game studios license one or two game engines and create dozens of similar games with that, in hope to get more value for their money. Also, they tend to stick with the current ideas that sell, instead of innovating.

By buying the bundle you are, at the very least, helping to have better games in the future.

I have recently joined the IETF Smart Grid group to see what people were talking about it and to put away my fears on security and privacy. What I saw was a bunch of experts discussing the plethora of standards that could be applied (very important) but few people seemed too interested in the privacy issue.

If you see the IEEE page on Smart Grids, besides the smart generation / distribution / reception (very important) there is a paragraph on the interaction between the grid and the customers, being very careful not to mention invasive techniques to allow the grid to control customer’s appliances:

“Intelligent appliances capable of deciding when to consume power based on pre-set customer preferences.”

Here, they focus on letting the appliances decide what will be done to save power, not the grid or the provider. Later on, on the same paragraph:

“Early tests with smart grids have shown that consumers can save up to 25% on their energy usage by simply providing them with information on that usage and the tools to manage it.”

Again, enforcing that the providers will only “provide [the customer] with information”. In other words, the grid is smart up to the smart meter (that is controlled by the provider), where inside people’s houses, it’s the appliances that have to be smart. One pertinent comment from Hector Santos in the IETF group:

“Security (most privacy) issues, I believe, has been sedated over the years with the change in consumer mindset. Tomorrow (and to a large extent today) generation of consumers will not even give it a second thought. They will not even realize that it was once considered a social engineering taboo to conflict with user privacy issues.”

I hate to be pessimist, but there is a very important truth in this. Not only people are allowing systems to store their data for completely different reasons, but they don’t care if the owner of the system will distribute their information or not. I, myself, always paranoid, have signed contracts with providers knowing that they would use and sell my data to third parties. The British Telecom is one good example. He continues:

“Just look how social networking and the drive to share more, not less has changed the consumer mindset. Tomorrow engineers will be part of all this new mindset.”

There is no social engineering any more like it used to be. Who needs to steal your information when it’s already there, on your Facebook? People are sharing willingly, and a lot of them know what problems it may cause, but the benefit, for them, is greater. Moreover, millions bought music, games and films with DRM, allowing a company control what you do, see or listen. How many Kindles were bought? How many iPhones? People don’t care what’s going on if they have what they want.

That is the true meaning of sedated privacy concerns. It’s a very distorted way of selfishness, where you don’t care about yourself, as long as you are happy. If it makes no sense to you, don’t worry, it makes no sense to me too.

Recently, the Future of Privacy Forum published an excellent analysis (via Ars) on the smart grid privacy. Several concepts that are easy to understand how dangerous they can be, became commonplace to not think about it or even consider it a silly worry, given that no one cares anyway.

An evil use of a similar technology is the “Selectable Output Control“. Just like a Kindle, the media companies want to make sure you only watch what you pay for. It may seem fair, and even cheaper, as they allow “smart pricing”, like some smart-grid technologies.

But we all have seen what Amazon did to kindle users, of Apple did to its AppStore, taking down contents without warn, removing things you paid for from your device, allowing or disallowing you to run applications or contents on your device as if you hadn’t pay enough money to own the device and its contents.

In the end, “smart pricing” is like tax cut, they reduce tax A, but introduce taxes B, C and D, which double the amount of taxes you pay. Of course, you only knew about tax A and went happy about your life. All in all, nobody cares who or how much they pay, as long as they can get the newest fart app…

While EA seems to have understood how to play the game, the Swedish court (and the European legal system) not only fails to get it, but also came with a lame excuse to reject the pirate bay retrial.

On one side, one of the judges was a member of several copyright protection groups and forgot to mention that before the case. This fact itself should be enough for a reconsideration of the decision, as his interests were too tied up with the case to have a fair opinion. But what bugs me most is the reason (or rather, the excuse) of why they are still determined to make them pay for their “crimes”.

The court found them guilty because, it said, they continued to operate the service even when they knew users were being pointed to pirated material.

So, they’re not keeping any copyrighted material themselves, and they have a clause that takes away their responsibility of whatever material is shared across their networks, but that’s not enough, they should have done something.

Let’s say they did have to do something, now we should apply the same rule to others as well right? What about the weapons industry? They know it’ll be used to kill other people, but they still make it and sell it (much worse than only provide the means). What about the tobacco industry? They know it’s not healthy, they know people will get lung cancer, but they still do it (and quite a lot of it).

What about the recording industry? Yes, the same one that is accusing pirate bay of “harming the artists”, forces artists to sign diabolical contracts where they get all the money and the artists get all the work. Who’s harming the artists in the end?

I completely agree with the court decision, as long as they apply the same rule to everyone. No more firearms (for civilians, at least), no more cigarettes, 50/50 for contracts. Fair is fair.

Since the early days (millions of years ago), the human race is being watched. Not by any sort of god or alien race, but by itself.

During the cave age, human-apes lived in groups. Either on trees or proper caves, they were all together. It was, then, pretty impossible to do something and not being noticed. If you want to enjoy the sunset while all others are working hard on protecting the cave, you’ll be spotted. If you get someone’s else wife for a ride, people would know.

Empires came and went and the only thing they brought as a relief for that was the number of unknown people around you. People would know you on your neighbourhood, but you could go away a few blocks and you’d be a total stranger. Moving cities was even better, but that was nothing that you couldn’t do during the cave age.

Even with the ability of changing homes, during your stay in a particular place, you are being watched. Not all vigilance is bad, though. Some might learn that you like football and invite you for the local team. Others could notice you left your door open and warn you, and even babysit your children.

Whenever you interact with the people, you invariable leave a trace. If a policeman asks your neighbour where have you been, he’ll probably have a good hunch and that will probably help the police to find you. The only thing that matters, really, is if you’re lost (and needs finding) or running away.

The Internet is a much bigger place than any city or country, it’s far easier to go on without being noticed. But, as with real life, people are watching. Sometimes for good, other times for bad, and that doesn’t make the Internet any different than the real world.

If you come to my house, I’ll remember. When you visit websites, your IP and page you visited is logged on their servers. We eventually forget your visit, if you were not that important, or clear old logs from the server, but for a while, you are there.

Being logged in a server is no different than being remembered, and that’s hardly a bad thing. What is bad is what you do with that piece of information. And for that, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the net or at my house, it’s a violation of your freedom for me to use that information solely to my profit. Hiding behind proxies is not the way to go, because that is only pushing your freedom even further away.

So, what is neutrality?

Net neutrality is to give the freedom to people do whatever they want, whenever they want and not cap their ability for profit or legal reasons. This may seem dangerous, if someone is trying to do any harm, the chance they’ll succeed is big, but that is also the case with real life. Suicide bombers,, for instance, always manage to explode themselves and no one can do anything about it.

Well, they can, and that leads us to a much worse scenario: Guantanamo Bay. Caping everyone’s connections and inspecting everyone’s packets because some will abuse is against human rights. The same with locking people in far away prisons without any charge just because there was a hunch that he/she would do something wrong whenever they would.

Society is complex and evil. Freedom comes with a high price: harm. If you start guessing who’ll do the wrong thing and punishing them before they do, you can surely save a lot of harm being done, but also you’ll harm lots of innocent people to a no return point. Your society will be as bad as the quality of your guess.

So, judging people for the crimes they have commited won’t change the harm they have done, but will save the lives of people that didn’t commit any crime. Crime is part of the nature. Not human nature, but life itself. It’s not possible to stop it once and for all, it’s not possible to accurately predict when it’s going to happen and the outcome of trying is far worse than not, so don’t even start.

Not only that, but these guess-works give permission to certain people (or groups) to deviate the logic for their own profit. That’s the case of recording companies and the fight against copying and borrowing. That’s the case of idea patents and the inherent inability to think. That’s the case of all major wars since the second world war (and probably many more before that).

Guessing on people’s freedom is evil, not even hideous crimes are that evil.

The long dispute with Cisco has finally come to an agreement. For me, that means two things: first, they’re not trolls sucking money from the big corps for stupid patent infringement, as some might fear. Second, they’re very patient, understanding and sometimes a bit too naive.

Why the fear?

When building embedded systems or when you’re too close to the hardware (such as Cisco) you may take a wise decision to use open source software, as it’s quite likely to be stable and taken care by a good bunch of good people. Even though there are several ways of doing it independently, so your software is not virally infected by the GPL, it’s not always possible and you may have to re-invent the wheel because of that.

It’s not only GPL, patents can also cause a whole lot of damage, and it seems that TomTom has decided to go head first with the Linux community.

So, although the fear is understandable, it’s more of a hysteria than based on actual facts. The FSF hasn’t had much to show on court, and that adds up to the uncertainty of the lawyers, but it’s in cases like the Cisco that they show a much higher maturity that most companies have shown recently, even mature companies like Microsoft.

Richard Stallman

The FSF is not only Stallman. Even though he’s the boss, the organization is a large list of people, sponsors, advisers (and now interns). One thing is to fear what RMS will do when he finds you using GPL in your kitchen scale, but a completely different matter is what the FSF (as an organization) does.

The Cisco case has been going for several years. They offered help, they’ve asked politely, they’ve warned about the potential dangers and so on. A lot has been made before they have actually filled the suit, and they’ve settled it nicely. This shows that they’re not just waiting the next infringement to get you down, they actually care about their (and your) freedom.

The day the FSF starts acting stupid is the day people will drive away. It’s not like Microsoft that you have no option, there’s plenty of options out there, software, licences, partners, advisers, programmers, etc. GNU/Linux is not the decent open source operating system, the BSDs are as good, sometimes better, especially in the embedded case.

The year of Linux

Every year since 1995 is the year of Linux. For me it always was, but I can’t say the same for the rest of the world. Recently, Linux (and other open source software) has played an important role in defining the future of mankind and more and more the Linux community feels that it’s their sweat and blood.

There is a great chance it’ll become the platform of all things in a very short time-frame. Cars, mobile phones, PDAs, netbooks, laptops, desktops, servers, clusters, spaceships. One platform to rule them all and in the darkness bind them, but if they play dumb, their glory might never see daylight.

Lots of people disagree with the new revisions of the GPL license, they feel it bites the hand that feeds it. Many companies feed back open source regularly and that kinda broke the synergy. I personally think that it’s excellent for some cases, but not for all. For instance, development tools should not be restricted, especially when it comes to platforms they can’t reach. Opening the platform is an obvious way around it, but not everything can be exposed and they can’t figure out every implementation detail.

Drivers might also have trouble with GPLv3 for the same reason. Again, there are ways around it, the FSF recently opened a backdoor to develop proprietary plug-ins if they’re blessed, but that might not be suitable for every case.

Solution?

Sorry, not today. Stick to FreeBSD if you can’t cope with GPLv3, find a way to co-exist with the GCC exception and provide the source code of what you have to. If it’s not your core business, you could donate your code to the community and make it GPL too and treat your program as enabling technology, of course, providing your code doesn’t expose any patent or trade secret.

So, well, yeah. Each case is a different case, that’s the problem of being in the long tail.

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