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It’s been five years now that I switched from Debian to Ubuntu, primarily for the updated software and radical changes in the user interface, and there are quite a few things that were constant all this time. When on Debian, I always used the unstable branch. It was the obvious choice for a non-mission-critical desktop environment I always needed. But even being unstable, it lacked a bit of risk-taking that made me some times having to compile (or download binary) applications by myself, working around the packaging management system.

With Ubuntu, it’s the exact opposite. The ongoing lack of support for nVidia and ATI boards, PulseAudio and the new Plymouth splash are good examples of major failures on deploying a technology that is yet too young to be in a distribution, especially a Long-Term-Support one. Recent rumours on changing Firefox to Chrome is a more critical change, since the whole community around Firefox (add-ons, plug-ins, bookmarklets, etc) cannot easily be migrated to Chrome or any other major browser. But this is all about the Ubuntu Way.

Identity

Ubuntu, like many other Linux distributions (especially Debian), has built its identity around the OS that most users share. It’s organic, and grows with time and feedback from the users, joined with the directions the “board” is taking in what goes in and what goes out. The original Linux community (back in mid-90′s) was a bit homogeneous in that respect, with most distributions being yet-another-collections-of-packages, be it RPM, DEB, Tar balls or anything else. With time, strong feelings were separating some distributions apart, and specializing others. Debian, for instance, became over preoccupied with license issues (no other than open source was allowed), while RedHat became more enterprise focused, flooded with third-party libraries, commercial products and a licensing scheme that was more like Microsoft than anything else.

Still, within the Debian community, some people (like me) thought that the release schedule was too wide and the licensing issues were too narrow to produce a really helpful desktop replacement for other commercial systems, like MacOS. Indeed, after a few releases, Ubuntu has shown that it can replace them for most uses to most users. I, as a Linux user for so many years, welcomed the ease of use of a MacOS without the lock-downs and lame packaging systems.

But they went further, and decided to be very (very) much the same as Apple. Initially, the Linux way was to offer everything there was available for everything. There were dozens of instant messengers, browsers, picture viewers, consoles, etc, all installed by default (or to pick from a selection of thousands of packages in the installation process), which was a major pain. Recently, Ubuntu has provided an installation process easier than Windows and MacOS, and for every application type, there was only one default option. That is, what has become, the Ubuntu Identity.

Taking Risks

To keep that identity, and still progress as fast as they (and me) would like, one has to take risks. I have to say that, for the most part, they were right on the spot. Some failures (as mentioned) are expected to happen and you are left with the consequences and decision of those risks. For a company with such a tight budget (and such high expectancy), there is little they can do differently. If they had bigger budgets, they could spend more time adapting the proprietary graphic drivers and the update system (that never works on fine-tuned machines), but they don’t. And based on how updates work on Windows and MacOS (ie. they don’t), I’m not surprised with Canonical’s failures.

I like Firefox, ALSA and Pidgin, but if the overall experience is more stable (and complete) with Empathy, Chrome and PulseAudio, so be it. We’re passt the time to complain about personal preferences in favour of a wider viewpoint. I’m too old to rant about how pity is the new splash screen when using ATI proprietary drivers for the time being, I just want to install and run. As long as my VIM is working and there is a browser and an IM to use, I’m happy. I don’t care Gimp is not included by default, I do dislike that GCC is not, but I understand the reasons and always install it first thing when I get a new system.

That’s the Ubuntu identity and the risks Canonical takes to move the desktop experience forward. As unstable Debian people used to say, that’s the risk of being on the edge…

Upgrades never work

So, I stated that upgrades never work for fine-tuned machines, and that has been my experiences until today. In the beginning, I thought it was that Ubuntu was still immature, but today I had to roll-back my Lucid installation I did yesterday for major incompatibility issues, mainly with the ATI proprietary graphic driver (splash and return from sleep).

So far, the only way I can upgrade Ubuntu is by installing a complete new copy of it every time, and apply the backed-up changes in configuration files manually after all is done. It may seem a lot of work, but every time I try to upgrade and every time I end up installing from scratch and applying the few manual tuning later. Now that I know exactly what I have to change and where (after years of doing), it takes me roughly 15 minutes to customize it.

My configuration is in such a state that it takes me zero maintenance and little backup disk space, as well as easy installation process. The magic is simple.

Preparation

This is one thing I recommend to any system, Linux, Windows and MacOS: Split into, at least, two partitions. One, around 50-80 GB, for your system, preferably the first one (primary partition). The other(s), taking up the rest of the hard-drive, for your data/home directories. If using Linux, of course, reserve (at the end), a space for your swap (4GB is more than enough, even if you have that, or more, of RAM). Swap is a safety measure and not to be used under any normal circumstance.

Daily Usage

Backup your home directory often, including personal configuration files, IM history, panel short-cuts, everything. Apart from your data, the rest might give rise to some complications when upgrading the user environment (Gnome, KDE) but that’s minor and can be overcame easily. That will help you in case things go awry in your update/replace process. A cron job or manual invocation to a script is recommended for that.

Also, remember to back up (manually, by copying) every system configuration you change. Because most configuration on Linux is a text file, that part is very easy. It has to be done manually because, as it’s very simple and easy (you shouldn’t change that many configuration files), you can do a detailed comparison between what’s in there and what you want to replace or add. This will be important for your post-update process.

Additionally, any non-essential data can be moved to a shared disk (with appropriated backup), accessible over the network. This way, you not only don’t have to backup all your data (photos, videos, documents) every install (could take days), but they will also be available from other computers while you upgrade your machine, so you can continue working on them as soon as your machine is ready.

Upgrade

Upgrades never work, especially if you have changed the configuration. Some systems evolve and can’t read old configurations properly, new systems won’t read other systems configurations and migration scripts never work properly on modified files. What’s worse, as Ubuntu has its own identity, the new systems will work better (or only work) with other new systems. So the integration between the new systems and your old, changed, systems will most likely fail silently. PulseAudio is the best example of that conflict.

To update, simply re-install the new version from CD (USB, or whatever) into the OS partition. So far, they have managed to make the upgrade to new systems pretty easy, if you discard your old ones. Empathy imports pidgin accounts (and history), all basic systems are properly configured if you do a fresh install. As wireless network passwords, panels, personal short-cuts, and other configurations are stored in your home directory, you just have to log in to see your old desktop, just the way it was.

The few things that aren’t installed (like GCC, VIM, gstreamer plugins) can be easily installed if you have a list of things you always install in a file (in your home dir), like build-essentials, ubuntu-restricted-extras bundles. Printer VPN, printer and share configurations can be easily copied over from your backup as soon as you installed and an apt-get upgrade can be done to get the new stuff since the CD was released.

Roll back

What’s best in this strategy is that roll backs are extremely easy. You can’t roll back a dist-upgrade using apt, but you can safely re-install the previous CD in case it breaks up things so badly it becomes unusable. Like the new Ubuntu, it’s still bad with proprietary graphic drivers and the open source ones are not nearly as good. So I just rolled back and will wait until it stabilises.

Instabilities occur most often in Long-Term-Support releases (like the current). It might seem weird, but it’s pretty simple: they commit to three to five years of support, so they must get new software that will last that time. The lifetime of open source projects is not great (still, longer than many commercial products), but a five year commitment on a software that is already five years old is a big risk. Ext3 and Ext4 filesystems are a good example of this case.

So, instead of providing the stable components, they change radically the interface and sub-systems and wait for them to stabilise, hoping that the production state of the release will remind developers to speed up the fixes. While not optimal to the users, it’s more or less the only way they can go without breaking the promise of support when the application goes dead. This is why enterprise Linux is so expensive, because companies require stability as well as support, and ultimately, the distribution companies will have to maintain some of the dead application for years, if not decades.

Not only roll back is easy, but changing distribution entirely. As your data is distribution agnostic (Linux centric, not package-system centric), you can re-install virtually any other Linux distribution, as many times as you want, and keep the same look and feel.

Conclusion

In summary, it might look more complicated to use and maintain, but it’s not. Once your setup is done (partitions, backup scripts), the rest is pretty easy and quick. So far, I have stubbornly upgraded every release (since 7.04) to make sure it’s still harder than re-installing and it has been the case for every release.

Also, if you have nVidia or ATI graphic boards, never upgrade in less than a month after the release is out. I recommend you upgrade at least two or three months later (mid-releases), as most of the vendors will have updated to match the new Ubuntu Way.

Lastly, as I normally fine-tune my computer, I haven’t had a successful migration of any operating system until today. I always try to upgrade, if available, and end up re-installing everything. That was true with DOS, Linux and Windows, since 1990 and I doubt it’ll change any time soon. It’ll be necessary an intelligent installation process (which our computers are not able to run, yet), to do that.

In the far future, it lies, then.

Minix seems to be inspiring more operating systems nowadays. Microsoft Research is investing on a micro-kernel (they call it multi-kernel, as there are slight differences) called Barrelfish.

Despite being Microsoft, it’s BSD licensed. The mailing list looks pretty empty, the last snapshot is half a year ago and I couldn’t find an svn repository, but still more than I would expect from Microsoft anyway.

Multi-kernel

The basic concept is actually very interesting. The idea is to be able to have multi-core hybrid machines to the extreme, and still be able to run a single OS on it. Pretty much the same way some cluster solutions do (OpenMPI, for instance), but on a single machine. The idea is far from revolutionary. It’s a natural evolution of the multi-core trend with the current cluster solutions (available for years) and a fancy OS design (micro-kernel) that everyone learns in CS degrees.

What’s the difference, then? For one thing, the idea is to abstract everything away. CPUs will be just another piece of hardware, like the network or graphic cards. The OS will have the freedom to ask the GPU to do MP floating-point calculations, for instance, if it feels it’s going to benefit the total execution time. It’ll also be able to accept different CPUs in the same machine, Intel and ARM for instance (like the Dell Latitude z600), or have different GPUs, nVidia and ATI, and still use all the hardware.

With Windows, Linux and Mac today, you either use the nVidia driver or the ATI one. You also normally don’t have hybrid-core machines and absolutely can’t recover if one of the cores fail. This is not the same with cluster solutions, and Barrelfish’s idea is to simulate precisely that. In theory, you could do energy control (enabling and disabling cores), crash-recovery when one of the cores fail but not the other, or plug and play graphic or network cards and even different CPUs.

Imagine you have an ARM netbook that is great for browsing, but you want to play a game on it. You get your nVidia and a coreOcta 10Ghz USB4 and plug in. The OS recognizes the new hardware, loads the drivers and let you play your game. Battery life goes down, so once you’re back from the game, you just unplug the cards and continue browsing.

Scalability

So, how is it possible that Barrelfish can be that malleable? The key is communication. Shared memory is great for single-processed threaded code and acceptable for multi-processed OSs with little number of concurrent process accessing the same region in memory. Most modern OSs can handle many concurrent processes, but they rarely access the same data at the same time.

Normally, processes are single threaded or have a very small number of threads (dozens) running. More than that is so difficult to control that people usually fall back to other means, such as client/server or they just go out and buy more hardware. In clusters, there is no way to use shared memory. For one, accessing memory in another computer via network is just plain stupid, but even if you use shared memory in each node and client/server among different nodes, you’re bound to have trouble. This is why MPI solutions are so popular.

In Barrelfish there’s no shared memory at all. Every process communicate with each other via messages and duplicate content (rather than share). There is an obvious associated cost (memory and bus), but the lock-free semantics is worth it. It also gives Barrelfish another freedom: to choose the communication protocol generic enough so that each piece of hardware is completely independent of all others, and plug’n'play become seamless.

Challenges

It all seem fantastic, but there’s a long road ahead. First, message passing scales much better than shared memory, but nowadays there isn’t enough cores in most machines to make it worth it. Message passing also introduces some other problems that are not easily solvable: bus traffic and storage requirements increase considerably, and messages are not that generic in nature.

Some companies are famous for not adhering to standards (Apple comes to mind), and a standard hardware IPC framework would be quite hard to achieve. Also, even if using pure software IPC APIs, different companies will still use slightly modified APIs to suit their specific needs and complexity will rise, exponentially.

Another problem is where the hypervisor will live. Having a distributed control centre is cool and scales amazingly well, but its complexity also scales. In a hybrid-core machine, you have to run different instructions, in different orders, with different optimizations and communication. Choosing one core to deal with the scheduling and administration of the system is much easier, but leaves the single-point-of-failure.

Finally, going the multi-hybrid-independent style is way too complex. Even for a several-year’s project with lots of fund (M$) and clever people working on it. After all, if micro-kernel was really that useful, Tanembaum would have won the discussion with Linus. But, the future holds what the future holds, and reality (as well as hardware and some selfish vendors) can change. Multi-kernel might be possible and even easier to implement in the future.

This seems to be what the Barrelfish’s team is betting on, and I’m with them on that bet. Even if it fails miserably (as did Minix), some concepts could still be used in real-world operating systems (like Minix), whatever that’ll mean in 10 years. Being serious about parallelism is the only way forward, sticking with 40 years old concepts is definitely not.

I’m still aspiring for non-deterministic computing, though, but that’s an even longer shot…

Ever since 1995 I hear the same phrase, and ever since 2000 I stopped listening. It was already the year of Linux in 95 for me, so why bother?

But this year is different, and Linux is not the only revolution in town… By the end of last year, the first tera-electronvolt collisions were recorded in the LHC, getting closer to see (or not) the infamous Higgs boson. Now, the NIF reports a massive 700 kilojoules in a 10 billionth of a second laser, that, if it continues on schedule, could lead us to cold fusion!!

The human race is about to finally put the full stop on the standard model and achieve cold fusion by the end of this year, who cares about Linux?!

Well, for one thing, Linux is running all the clusters being used to compute and maintain all those facilities. So, if it were for Microsoft, we’d still be in the stone age…

UPDATE: More news on cold fusion…

Normally the Linux Magazine has great articles. Impartial, informative and highly technical. Unfortunately, not always. In a recent article, some perfectionist zealot stated that Ubuntu makes Linux looks bad. I couldn’t disagree more.

Ubuntu is a fast-paced, fast-adapted Linux. I was one of the early adopters and I have to say that most of the problems I had with the previous release were fixed. Some bugs went through, of course, but they were reported and quickly fixed. Moreover, Ubuntu has the support from hardware manufacturers, such as Dell, and that makes a big difference.

Linux is everything

Linux is excellent for embedded systems, great for network appliances, wonderful for desktops, irreplaceable as a development platform, marvellous on servers and the only choice for real clusters. It also sucks when you have to find the configuration manually, it’s horrible to newbies, it breaks whenever a new release is out, it takes longer to get new software (such as Firefox) but also helps a lot with package dependencies. Something that neiter Mac nor Windows managed to do properly over the past decades.

Linux is great as any piece of software could be but horrible as every operating system that was release since the beginning of times. Some Linux distributions are stable, others not so. Debian takes 10 years to release and when it does, the software it contains is already 10 years old. Ubuntu tries to be a bit faster but that obviously breaks a few things. If you’re fast enough fixing, the early adopters will be pleased that they helped the community.

“Unfortunately what most often comes is a system full of bugs, pain, anguish, wailing and gnashing of teeth – as many “early” adopters of Karmic Koala have discovered.”

As any piece of software, open or closed, free or paid, free or non-free. It takes time to mature. A real software engineer should know better, that a system is only fully tested when it reaches the community, the user base. Google uses their own users (your granny too!) as beta testers for years and everyone seem to understand it.

Debian zealots hate Red Hat zealots and both hate Ubuntu zealots that probably hate other zealots anywhere else. It’s funny to see how opinions vary greatly from a zealot clan to the other about what Linux really is. All of them have a great knowledge on what Linux is comprised of, but few seems to understand what Linux really is. Linux, or better, GNU/Linux is a big bunch of software tied together with so many different points of view that it’s impossible to state in less than a thousand words what it really is.

“Linux is meant to be stable, secure, reliable.”

NO, IT’S NOT! Linux is meant to be whatever you make of it, that’s the real beauty. If Canonical thought it was ready to launch is because they thought that, whatever bug pased the safety net was safe enough for the users to grab and report, which we did! If you’re not an expert, wait for the system to cool down. A non-expert will not be an “early adopter” anyway, that’s for sure.

Idiosyncrasies

Each Linux has its own idiosyncrasies, that’s what makes it powerful, and painful. The way Ubuntu updates/upgrades itself is particular to Ubuntu. Debian, Red Hat, Suse, all of them do it differently, and that’s life. Get over it.

“As usual, some things which were broken in the previous release are now fixed, but things which were working are now broken.”

One pleonasm after another. There is no new software without new bugs. There is no software without bugs. What was broken was known, what is new is unknown. How can someone fix something they don’t know? When eventually the user tested it, found it broken, reported, they fixed! Isn’t it simple?

“There’s gotta be a better way to do this.”

No, there isn’t. Ubuntu is like any other Linux: Like it? Use it. Don’t like it? Get another one. If you don’t like the way Ubuntu works, get over it, use another Linux and stop ranting.

Red Hat charges money, Debian has ubber-stable-decade-old releases, Gentoo is for those that have a lot of time in their hands, etc. Each has its own particularities, each is good for a different set of people.

Why Ubuntu?

I use Ubuntu because it’s easy to install, use and update. The rate of bugs is lower than on most other distros I’ve used and the rate of updates is much faster and stable than some other distros. It’s a good balance for me. Is it perfect? Of course not! There are lots of things I don’t like about Ubuntu, but that won’t make me use Windows 7, that’s for sure!

I have friends that use Suse, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and they’re all as happy as I am, not too much, but not too few. Each has problems and solutions, you just have to choose the ones that are best for you.

Gtk, the graphical interface behind Gnome, is very simple to use. It doesn’t have an all-in-one IDE such as KDevelop, which is very powerful and complete, but it features a simple and functional interface designer called Glade. Once you have the widgets and signals done, filling the blanks is easy.

As an example, I wrote a simple dice throwing application, which took me about an hour from install Glade to publish it on the website. Basically, my route was to apt-get install glade, open it and create a few widgets, assign some callbacks (signals) and generate the C source code.

After that, the file src/callbacks.c contain all the signal handlers to which you have to implement. Adding just a bit of code and browsing this tutorial to get the function names was enough to get it running.

Glade generates all autoconf/automake files, so it was extremely easy to compile and run the mock window right at the beginning. The rest of the code I’ve added was even less code than I would add if doing a console based application to do just the same. Also, because of the code generation, I was afraid it’d replace my already changed callbacks.c when I changed the layout. Luckily, I was really pleased to see that Glade was smart enough not to mess up with my changes.

My example is not particularly good looking (I’m terrible with design), but that wasn’t the intention anyway. It’s been 7 years since the last time I’ve built graphical interfaces myself and I’ve never did anything with Gtk before, so it shows how easy it is to use the library.

Just bear in mind a few concepts of GUI design and you’ll have very little problems:

1. Widget arrangement is not normally fixed by default (to allow window resize). So workout how tables, frames, boxes and panes work (which is a pain) or use fixed position and disallow window resize (as I did),
2. Widgets don’t do anything by themselves, you need to assign them callbacks. Most signals have meaningful names (resize, toggle, set focus, etc), so it’s not difficult to find them and create callbacks for them,
3. Side effects (numbers appearing at the press of a button, for instance) are not easily done without global variables, so don’t be picky on that from start. Work your way towards a global context later on when the interface is stable and working (I didn’t even bother)

If you’re looking for a much better dice rolling program for Linux, consider using rolldice, probably available via your package manager.

My pet compiler is now sufficiently stable for me to advertise it as a product. It should deal well with the most common cases if you follow the syntax, as there are some tests to assure minimum functionality.

The language is very simple, called “State Language“. This language has only global variables and static states. The first state is executed first, all the rest only if you call goto state;. If you exit a state without branching, the program quits. This behaviour is consistent with the State Pattern and that’s why implemented this way. You can solve any computer problem using state machines, therefore this new language should be able to tackle them all.

The expressions are very simple, only binary operations, no precedence. Grouping is done with brackets and only the four basic arithmetic operations can be used. This is intentional, as I don’t want the expression evaluator to be so complex that the code will be difficult to understand.

As every code I write on my spare time, this one has an educational purpose. I learn by writing and hopefully teach by providing the source, comments and posts, and by letting it available on the internet so people can find it through search engines.

It should work on any platform you can compile to (currently only Linux and Mac binaries provided), but the binary is still huge (several megabytes) because they contain all LLVM libraries statically linked to it.

I’m still working on it and will update the status here at every .0 release. I hope to have binary operations for if statements, print string and all PHI calculated for the next release.

Unix is turning 40 and BBC folks wrote a small article about it. What a joy to remember when I started using Unix (AIX on an IBM machine) around 1994 and was overwhelmed by it.

By that time, the only Unix that ran well on a PC was SCO and that was a fortune, but there were some others, not as mature, that would have the same concepts. FreeBSD and Linux were the two that came into my sight, but I have chosen Linux for it was a bit more popular (therefore could get more help).

The first versions I’ve installed didn’t even had a X server and I have to say that I was happier than using Windows. Partially because of all the open-source-free-software-good-for-mankind thing, but mostly because Unix has a power that is utterly ignored by other operating systems. It’s so, that Microsoft used good bits from FreeBSD (that allows it via their license) and Apple re-wrote its graphical environment to FreeBSD and made the OS X. The GNU folks certainly helped my mood, as I could find all power tools on Linux that I had on AIX, most of the time even more powerful.

The graphical interface was lame, I have to say. But in a way it was good, it reminded me of the same interface I used on the Irix (SGI’s Unix) and that was ok. With time, it got better and better and in 1999 I was working with and using it at home full time.

The funny thing is that now, I can’t use other operating systems for too long, as I start missing some functionalities and will eventually get locked, or at least, extremely limited. The Mac OS is said to be nice and tidy, and with a full FreeBSD inside, but I still lacked agility on it, mainly due to search and installation of packages and configuration of the system.

I suppose each OS is for a different type of person… Unix is for the ones that like to fine-tune their machines or those that need the power of it (servers as well) and Mac OS is for those that need something simple, with the biggest change as the background colour. As for the rest, I fail to see a point, really.

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.

Almost 10 years ago, MySQL became a great open source database, part of the LAMP platform (Perl, not PHP) and had everything to compete with the big players in the next few years.

It was then that they have done major releases, with a huge set of new features each, almost once a year. The community was happy using, developing and integrating with other products. But it was around 2005 that the things started going bad…

Back in 2005, when I was still in the loop, I have to say that I wasn’t impressed with the progress that the database had. I wasn’t also impressed with the new view the board gave to big companies (such as Yahoo!) on what was a good bet and what wasn’t.

After release 5.0 (still the production release, irrespective of what Sun says) there wasn’t a major development until Sun acquired MySQL and only then they’ve released 5.1 which they better shouldn’t.

In the old days, MySQL became famous by not implementing foreign keys and transactions, something that every other database had, because of speed issues. That decision became the core of the company and allowed other storage engines (such as InnoDB and BerkeleyDB which had those features) to be integrated, making it very easy to plan your database, using only the features you needed where you needed.

Who’s to blame?

I’m not sure it has something to do with Oracle buying InnoDB and Sleepycat (and now buying Sun, which owns MySQL). Even with all the politics of Oracle slowly buying MySQL in pieces, I don’t believe it’s the whole story. I see much more of an internal conflict and a lack of vision (probably for the lack of guts to keep taking weird decisions and succeeding) than anything else.

Now, MySQL is going down the same drain InnoDB and Sleepycat went, but with a twist: the source code is still GPL. Sun screwed up MySQL in a way I thought it wasn’t possible, Oracle will do it much more efficiently, even if they still play as good guys, it is definitely the end.

Don’t take my word only, my good friend and MySQL guru Jeremy Cole is taking himself out of the loop to avoid the useless politics. Steven (Computerworld) also cannot see how any of the involved companies will get anything in return of this deal.

Is there a light at the end?

Could Monty’s fork become a new MySQL without all the fuss? Could he, the odd guy with odd ideas, put MySQL on the map again? I do hope so, but that will cost MySQL the hall of fame. They’ll need to start over again and eventually fail once they’re there again and restart…

It’ll be fun to watch, at least MySQL had a GPL license which always ease forks and future development. Long live the open source revolution!

UPDATE:

Two excellent articles about the same issue from The Register and Ars Technica.

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.

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