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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.

Spam is good for you, at least better than you may think. Spam accounts for three quarters of all emails sent worldwide and some even attached carbon footprint to it (and here one of the reasons why it’s nonsense). But it’s good for you in ways that does not meet the eye very easily and very few people would even consider it as good in the first place.

Not only emails, think on how much regular mail you receive is really worthy and how much is spam, it’ll probably account for three quarters as well. How much of that is really mean, how that really hurts you so bad that you’d put the sender in jail for it?

Sure spam is a nuisance, sure it gets in the way of the real work, but at what cost are we, the society, willing to pay to eradicate such problem? Well, lets take a look on how spam really started…

Local business

You’re a window cleaner and recently moved to Shlobershire in a very quite little village. How would you let people know about your business? You can go on, talking to each one of the local residents but that’s a nuisance, so you print some pamphlets and post through the door of everyone.

Some will read and call you, some will be pissed off but most will just ignore you. You’ll figure out pretty quickly about those that got pissed off (if you live in a small village you know that already), but then you buy them a pint and everything is settled.

What’s the final cost? A few pamphlets, a couple pints and you got two great things: one or two windows to clean and the whole village knowing who you are. This is, by far, the cheapest marketing ever. The rest of us that can’t afford a real marketing campaign have to find ways to promote our business.

With all the fuss about global warming, organic farming and fair competition in business (if there is such thing), we want to promote and use more of local business than big brands. We’re loosing creativity, diversity and quality if we don’t.

ROI

Just like the local business, some people can’t afford big marketing campaigns. Either because they’re poor or because their business is not so legal in every country.

So, why people still send those stupid ill edited loosely formatted emails, even when it’s obvious what they want? Who wants pills, fake degrees or enlarge their penises? Well, apparently some do and the do reply and may well get what they want!

The return of investment is much, much better than most marketing campaigns. Take Microsoft’s campaign with Jerry Seinfield or the “I’m a PC” thing? It was the most expensive piece of crap ever done. Seriously, I prefer spam than that!

The return rate is very low, one reply in millions of email, but if they send billions of emails, go figure.

But that’s clearly bad, isn’t it?

Well, illegal activities are bad, of course. Either on-line of off-line, drug dealing is bad, banking scams are bad, but not all spam is a scam or a drug selling point.

First, people receive so much spam from normal companies (even those that they have explicitly opted-out) including broadband providers, software, telephone and TV etc and etc.

The smaller companies are still sending physical spam and it’s probably working much better than the electronic spam, but that’s the deal: it works and it’s cheap.

Second, what’s really illegal? Downloading a music you haven’t paid for is illegal? What if you will pay later? What if the author allowed you to? Ripping your CDs to MP3 to listen in your car is illegal? You have paid for it already!

Google has become target of many accusations of illegal behaviour because they host a number of websites, videos, personal profiles on social networks. If people started to massively upload child pornography to YouTube, would the Google guys be in jail? I bet my little finger they wouldn’t.

RIAA kills a kitten every time you download (or rip) a CD while governments detain people for years on maximum security prisons without a single charge, what’s really legal?

Pirate Bay scam

I still don’t believe it happened, even though it was on all major journals for a week, but the Pirate Bay guy actually got a jail sentence for owning a website that allowed people to share files. They’re not criminals, they’re not killing people or (more importantly) getting in the way of the course of business (after all, money is more important than peoples lives nowadays). They just set up a list of things.

File sharing is one of the biggest revolutions of the recent internet and more and more people are asking the industry to finally adopt the technique rather than fight it. Whether they like it or not, it will prevail.

What is worse, a few old ladies downloading very old music (unavailable from any shop in the world) or the fear that the recording industry poses on most governments today that allowed such a scam to ever being turn into reality?

One mistake does not justify the other, but many (sane) people are already saying: Stop fighting reality, come back to it, be part of it.

You can’t fight them, help them!

I can’t imagine a world where we wait people to deliver a pamphlet to hand-cuff them, or where someone is jailed for listening music in his player’s speakers. Unfortunately, we’re not that far from it.

Why spam works? Because there isn’t any other way for those people. Yellow pages? Who reads them? Journal advertisement? Banners? People got used to them and can ad-block automatically. Our brains are trained to ignore them, it’s just not effective any more.

Some companies say they can provide a much better ad experience for the users by spying their lives closer than their lovers. I would object that approach…

There are many (free) systems for local business, but none of them seem to cut it. Maybe because people are always trying to get money in return (weird world, isn’t it?) and end up putting paid ads bigger, colourful and in the front page, and let the real local business somewhere between marriages and obituary.

I have no idea how a system would get rid of spam once and for all and it’s not my cup of tea to think about it, but I’m sure there are many people that could tackle this problem, they just need a bit of money (from the government) and time. It’s not a matter of filtering emails, it’s a matter of removing the need to send them in the first place!

If governments are really worried about spam, let them be creative and help freedom, privacy and good relationships rather than the totalitarianism we’re seeing around the world.

A new world is rising, new machines are taking life much faster than most governments would like and the digital hand-cuffs are showing that none of them understand a bit of what’s going on. All blinds, living in their caves watching the shadows on the wall. Whoever cry wolf is right for no one knows what wolf really is and where is it. Technology is like children, the more oppressed they are, the more you loose control over them.

Einstein didn’t go to the US because he liked the land of freedom, he moved because he hoped (in vain) that they would know how to use wisely the technology he knew how to build. He knew that others would be able to build it and it was just a matter of time before any bomb was actually available. Holding it back was not the answer and he knew it.

I just hope people figure it out sooner rather than later, or 1984 will seem like a pretty boring fairy tale for our children…

Would you give away your genome to research? It’s a bit tricky to define what kind of research and who will have access to it to do what…

I would kindly give mine, if it was licensed GPLv3.

Hydrogenated, unsaturated fat and cholesterol are long enemies of the public, but recently a new type of fat has been added: FAT.

Microsoft has filed a patent suit against TomTom about its FAT implementation on their Linux satnavs. This is a bit of a long story and Microsoft is not tired yet. Probably because of the recent losses with patents, they’re trying to get some profit for themselves.

Luckily, there is hope. The guys at End Software Patents can see some light at the end of the tunnel. Looks like the Bilski case can give precedence for rejecting the lawsuit of that (and many other stupid patents they’re claiming) based on the tangibility of mathematical algorithms (software) when they’re not particularly tied to any concrete implementation (hardware).

This was how it was done before in the US until the first case passed through that wasn’t attached to any particular hardware and then with the final revision in 1998 that they could patent even cake recipes.

Why not ditch it for good?

So, FAT is rubbish, 30 years old and close to zero evolution since then, why keep it? It’s true that there are many other filesystems around, much faster, safer, optimized and well designed, but FAT still has its market: on embedded devices. Because it’s simple and stupid, it’s quite easy to support it on very small machines with reduced RAM and CPU power. It’s also light-weight and fits well for small flash cards and USB storage. But the biggest reason to keep it is another: Microsoft supports it since its birth.

Would you buy an SD card that needs to install a driver to make it work? What’d be the point?

Yet again, because of the market domination (and not technical merits), Microsoft forced rubbish down everyone’s throats live for longer that it was expected. And now, they’re trying to get the profits by suing everyone that followed them for decades. What a nice way to say thank you!

Speaking of which, not only they’re happy by suing companies by using Linux (TomTom in this case and many others during the FAT fight), they’re also asking for the open-source community’s help to make Visual Studio 2010 a better product, isn’t that nice? How lovely is the American way of life, I guess the world will never be able to thank them enough.

Ars Technica has a fantastic article on software patents in US, and how the process is slowly reversing to what it should be (and was) since the beginning.

They describe all the history, important cases, different points of view and how the whole thing was going nuts in this century. The system was due to fail since the big companies started paying billions for patent trolls, but it took a bit too long to actually start reversing…

Would that be Obama’s aura? Or does both events mean that the US people finally started to think on their own? Whatever that is, it’s in the right direction, I think.

While closed source development has its niche (and a very important one), it does feel a bit weird.

I’m now working on low-level development (debuggers) at ARM, one of the things I like most but also a rare thing to find good quality open source development (with the exception of the gnu tools, of course). Of course there is a portion of your work that goes back to the community (via open standards, limited support for the open tools) but it’s not easy to find a job to write code exclusively to the gdb or gcc.

What I’m finding weirder is the fact that the documentation you need is seldom on the Internet (Google or usenet). The good side is that the guys that created the standards and tools are at your doorstep, so it’s quite easy to get hold of them in case you need something off the charts. But that’s normally true with open source as well.

The other weird thing is knowing what you can tell and what you can’t. I have no idea of what part of my current project is public so I just don’t talk about anything of it. But I think that’s just a matter of getting used to, just like I did before. Besides, albeit at EBI I could even show my (or anybody else’s) source code, I don’t think that anybody ever cared that much.

At last, licences. It’s so easy when you develop GPL or LGPL (or similar). Just write whatever you want, use whatever library you need and put a GPL3 tag on your code. That’s it. Simple as that. Now I have to think what would be the impact of that library on the license of what I write, and that’s something I didn’t want to care…

Also, if a document is GPL-ed, you have to GPL it too. If it’s version 3, everything you write (including company’s previous ideas) become GPLv3 as well. That’s a big nuisance. I do understand GPLv3 for code, even apply that to my own source code, but it does annoy a lot when applied to documents.

Although weird for some reasons, it’s not bad at all. I have many more reasons to love my new job. Excellent team, great environment and an impressive code quality, which for me, is a must.

BBC link, It almost made me cry. At least, now, bands and writers can start making money out of their work…

Well, with Vista finally worthless and DRM abandoned for good, I can focus my attentions on things I like best: promoting open source software, low-level development and helping Camfed.

According to BBC, the new European strategy against cybercrime encourages the police to hack the hacker.

I just wonder if the European Union has any idea of what the word ‘hack’ really means or how gray is the area between white hats and black hats and, more importantly, that both types live on both sides of the fence! Ask a hacker to define hacking and you’ll need a comfy sofa and someone else to actually hear the whole story.

The only problem with that is that it’s recursive. Once the police (and the private sector) hacks me, they become a hacker themselves, allowing me to hack them, on the interest of security based on the same law. Right?

It still hasn’t gone to meet it’s maker, but it was also not as bad as it could’ve been.

After Windows Vista was launched with more PR and DRM than any other, Microsoft hoped to continue its domination of the market. Maybe afraid of the steep Linux increase in desktops (Ubuntu has a great role in that) and other market pressures, they’ve rushed out Vista with so many bugs and security flaws, so slow and with such a big memory and CPU footprint that not many companies really wanted to change their whole infrastructure to see it drawn a little later.

China government ditched it for XP because it was not stable enough to run the Olympics, only to find out that the alternative didn’t help at all.

All that crap helped a lot Linux (especially Ubuntu) jump on the desktop world. Big companies shipping Linux on lots of desktops and laptops, all netbooks with Linux as primary option, lay people now using Linux as they would use any other desktop OS. So, is it just because Vista is so bad? No. Not at all. Linux got really user friendly over the last five to ten years and it’s now as easy as any other.

Vista is so bad that Microsoft had to keep supporting Windows XP, they’re rushing again with Windows 7 and probably (hopefully) they’ll make the same mistakes again. It’s got so bad that the Free Software Foundation’s BadVista campaign is officially is closing down for good. For good as in: Victory!

Yes, victory because in one year they could show the world how bad Vista really is and how good the other opportunities are. Of course, they were talking about Linux and all the free software around, including the new gNewSense platform they’re building, but the victory is greater than that. The biggest message is that Windows is not the only solution to desktops, and most of the time, it’s the worst.

In conjunction with the DefectiveByDesign guys, they also showed how Vista (together with Sony, Apple, Warner et al) can completely destroy your freedom, privacy and entertainment. They were so successful in their quest that they’re closing doors to spend time (and donors’ money) in more important (and pressing) issues.

Now, they’re closing down but that doesn’t mean that the problem is over. The idea is to stabilise the market. Converting all Windows and Mac users to Linux wouldn’t be right, after all, each person is different. But the big challenge is to have users that need (or want) a Mac, to use a Mac. Who needs Windows and can afford to pay all extra software to protect your computer (but not your privacy), can use it. For developers the real environment is Unix, they should be able to get a good desktop and good development tools as well. It’s, at least, fair.

But for the majority of users, what they really want is a computer to browse the web, print some documents, send emails and for that, any of the three is good enough. All three are easy to install (or come pre-installed), all three have all the software you need and most operations and configurations are easy or automatic. It’s becoming more a choice of style and design than anything else.

Now that Apple got rid of all DRM crap, Spore was a fiasco so EA is selling games without DRM, the word is getting out. It’s a matter of time it’ll be a minor problem, too. Would DefectiveByDesign retire too? I truly hope so.

As an exercise to the reader, go to Google home page and search for the terms: “windows vista“. You’ll see the BadVista website in the first page. If you search for “DRM” you’ll also see the DefectiveByDesign web page as well. This is big, it means that lots and lots of websites are pointing to those websites when they’re talking about those subjects!

If you care enough and you have a Google user and is using the personalised Google search, you could search for those terms and press the up arrow symbol on those sites to make them go even higher in the rank. Can we make both be the first? I did my part already.

Please, if you are in UK, sign this petition to investigate the legality and fairness of DRM techniques, especially root-kits such as SecuROM.

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