Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

A quote from a blog I'm reading a lot more regularly now, Baldur Bjarnason's:

It's almost as if open source has become a system for transforming people's leisure time into free labour for corporationsâ€”eating up people's lives while driving them on with promises of future employment. (E.g. "GitHub is your resume".)

15 years ago, I had a long conversation with Bob Hughes (of Dust or Magic fame) about Free Software and open source. I was gushing about it

I talked about how it was going to change the world for the better, make software more egalitarian & democratic -- I was a bit of an idealist[.]

He then explained to me what was going to happen, how corporations and capitalism in general would twist the system to their benefit.

And then a follow-up here:

Instead of empowering the people and regular computer users, we've empowered VCs and tech billionaires.

OSS is still there for the rest of us to take advantage of, if we have the will and the skill, but it isn't doing much for your regular computer user.

I suppose that was Stallman's point about OSS versus Free Software in the first place.

I'm not sure what the angle Bjarnason's ascribing to RMS, but I bet I'll repeat it here accidentally.

Look, here's the problem with OSS... Well, here's the problem with indie-garage software coders (the toymakers) in general: As RMS says, software [sic] wants to be free. That's in large part why the App Store prices raced to the smallest possible (imagine if Apple had let you set any price! How many 12Â¢ apps would there be?). The marginal cost of distributing software, once written, quickly approaches nil.

What's neat is what you can do with software. If you make software that enables people in real time to do something interesting, you can sell that service. Software naturally enables. If your hours of github wrangling is worth 98Â¢ in actual cashola, but enables you (and others) to perform thousands of dollars of services, well, yes, github is your resume.

That is, if you chose to write server-side code, you've already boxed yourself into a use that'll never be customer facing. The flip side is -- your faceless, nearly designless software is barely worth anything on its own. There are so many replacements for what you've done. If you charge so much as 99Â¢, folks will go elsewhere. It stinks, but it's the hard truth. Sellable software requires design, serious design. Otherwise you'll never hit that group of end-users willing to give you real cash (the "market").

So it's better to give your services-focused software (your jQuery plugins and SQL profilers) away for free. At least then the barrier to entry of licensing and price is gone, and you have what's at worst an even playing field with your like-minded competitors. You probably still won't build the next Bootstrap, but now you at least have a shot. Hard truth time? Even those folks that try to eek a living out of customer-facing apps, and who are good at it, have a really hard time making ends meet.

And there's nothing wrong with writing code for a job. Server-side programming pays well. You will love your salary for doing brainteasers.

But you're not overtly using open source to be political in this case. You're following the market's natural direction. That is, these "resume" projects you're making are likely the easiest worthless projects (insert a smilie and remember that my assertion is that all software wants to be free and is, eventually, essentially worthless) you could make. And, again, good for you. Most people never share excellent worthless work. ;^)

Free Software's alternative

If Bjarnason's point is that non-GPL licenses are too lenient, I've agreed for years. You have to use a protective license if you want to create a privileged space that competes with capitalism. You must use capitalism to create this Free haven. The most brilliant, Deluezo-Guattarian move GNU ever made was to copyleft software. Use copyright to fight copyright. Use capitalism to fight capitalism. Inhabit, reassemble, and redirect. Don't fight head-on.

And it's the lack of inhabitation that's killing the dream of OSS (and GNU) idealists. Where are OSS' best wins on the client? LibreOffice, which is still a big win. Firefox, less important now that there's mobile, as Bjarnason points out. Even The Gimp or Audacity were good apps.

But none of these are best in class designs. Where is the better mail client, the better word processor, the better personal finance software? Where is the better desktop OS? Where is my hoverboard?

Cutting closer to the bone, how much Free software do you use "at home"? How about that phone in your pocket? Is it Free software? Look man, it's not. You're happy to use OSS at work, but you're not using it at home. How do you expect work software to make your home life better? How is Free software going to improve your life if you don't use it?

Better yet, WHY AREN'T MORE OF YOU CONTRIBUTING TO REPLICANT, the truly Free Android fork? In other words...

Why aren't we putting our time into game-changing software?

If you want to create that idealistic society that Free software enables, you have to work on projects that society cares about. As long as Free software remains derivative, it's going to be playing catch-up. And if Free clients are only as good as paid clients from ten years ago, platform-jumping (like the one from PC to mobile) will keep catching it by surprise.

Until we concentrate on the client -- that is, servicing the needs of people, dammit -- Free software will continue to gain a foothold only in those spaces where the software experience is completely fungible, like we see on servers today. It's not OSS' fault (I realize I'm conflating OSS and Free software too much) that we haven't created the ideal. It's ours.

(This is where, if I allowed myself more time, I'd start into suggestions about how to make this happen. Use Free software "at home" (and in your pocket). Learn the apps' foibles. Learn the languages used to create them, or figure out how best to recreate them. Find the pain points its users would have, and make the apps truly citizen-usable. And help folks figure out how to make Replicant work. There's like one dude plying away at the most important Free software project going, and that's simply not enough.)

Labels: app store, business, F/free, indie, OSS, rms

Finally started seriously scratching a new itch. I really disliked how difficult I'd found it to get a database engine working crossplatform for my C# "hobby" projects with MonoDevelop and, now, Xamarin Studio.

I'd considered using JSON or DataSet's WriteXML method to serialize data, but up until now, I'd been just writing stuff to text files to get hobby projects running more quickly. After using home-grown text file formats for years, though, it seemed dumb not to leverage SQL syntax. Yet every time I tried to find a good, crossplatform solution, I would waste hours not quite finding a great answer.

As I write in the new project's readme...

MVED# was written largely because of setup hurdles encountered attempting to deploy other obvious embedded database solutions for C# crossplatform. SQL Server Express is not crossplatform. SQLite must be installed on Windows and has a few nontrivial setup requirements on OS X, both of which create a clear barrier to entry out of proportion for applications with modest data serialization needs. C#-SQLite is an interesting alternative, but still had issues when I tried it out in May of 2012.

So back in February 24th of this year, I started hacking a database engine. And 121 commits to Bitbucket later, I finally have enough to put up on GitHub. (The GitHub/Bitbucket dynamic is also very interesting...) I can CREATE TABLE, INSERT, DELETE, SELECT, even INNER JOIN. I'm an UPDATE away from 80% of what I use "real" databases to accomplish. Well, if you ignore speed.

It's fun to look back over my commits, as always. There are almost zero commits in June and July, when work took a real turn for the busier. Seems like tons of late night commits. Also some interesting comments about where I was while I was coding...

Admittedly, there are tons of *cough* idiosyncratic behaviors in the engine, but much of this was an enjoyable alternative to the horribly defensive coding you have to do for customer-facing code. If I don't want to support ORs in WHERE clauses yet, well, I don't have to. If I want to support only INNER JOINs at first, that's my "right". Case sensitivity? Whitespace rules? All my decision. Bizarre! Want FLOATs to be stored as conventional DECIMALs for now? No problem (and more accurate too)! Unicode? Not yet! Why not? Because I chose [not] to! I'm drunk with power.

It was a heck of a lot of fun dealing with how to serialize each of the datatypes I'm supporting now. I did take a few old school-ish routes with storage while writing. Every column's length is absolutely fixed (VARCHARs really aren't VAR at all), largely to make the file's format really easy for users to eyeball, probably a leftover from having played around with 6507 assembler too much years ago. I even slap lines of 0x11s between columns to make it super-easy to view. Having easier-to-read files is probably not the best motivation for creating formats, but I'm happy with how it turned out.

Here's a crappy example of a raw "Moore's DataBase File (mdbf)" in the quick file viewer I wrote for the engine (click to see in any real detail).

Figuring out ways to serialize strings and decimal values was, honestly, fun. Doing this without much heavy "cheating" (more accurate would be "researching") was also a refreshing break from "serious" work, as this project is intended to be almost completely for [my] relaxation. Getting close to finished in about a tenth of the lines of C#-SQLite is, well, interesting. There's a lot that's not here. Parsing commands, even when you do get to choose what's syntactically legal, quickly gets, well, ugly. JOINs tend to bust what would otherwise be a pretty simple paradigm for parsing SELECTs -- heck, even SQLite currently doesn't support RIGHT OUTER JOIN. (Actually, reading that page, I feel a little of Hipp's pain (though let's make clear, since I'm talking about both in the same paragraph, that C#-SQLite is a port of SQLite by Noah Hart). GRANT and REVOKE don't mean so much when you're just hitting the file system, do they?)

Ultimately, writing MVED# reminded me a great deal of the shareware app I wrote years back. Eventually, even when you have nobody to answer to, code reaches the point where it's difficult to keep things idealistically organized. (Insert tangent about why it's so much more important to see a candidate's solution to a real-world problem than to simply interview, say, a new graduate about patterns when you're hiring.)

This project was also my first "real-world" use of the GNG Manfiesto. Even though MVED# could have easily gone under LGPL, I think there are going to be times where it's easier to use with the project's files compiled into a single app with new, closed files, so I opted for MPL 2.0 for now. Either way, it's open, demands changes by others to be shared, but allows others to use it as they'd like without compromising their own original, unrelated contributions, just as GNG demands.

Anyhow, to advert a little more plainly, the Minimally Viable Embeddable Datastore in C# (MVED#) or, as I called it as I developed it (since I wasn't worried a whit about performance), Moore's Database, can be found here:

https://github.com/ruffin--/mved/

It's not feature complete yet -- I'd like to sneak an UPDATE command handler in there before I do too much clean-up of existing code, which will be an easy refactor and then edit of the SELECT code -- but it's surprisingly close for what I think I'd like to use it for. A quick class for testing should follow UPDATE.

The code is hilariously simple. Optimizations are almost non-existent. Yet, at the same time, I think it's a horribly accessible codebase. We'll see. I'm going to use it. It works just as well on OS X as Windows, and that's a great start for my apps that need an embedded database solution. I can only assume Xamarin's going to make it pretty easy to use MVED# on Andriod and iOS too.

But okay, fine. I hear what you're thinking. If I have 121 commits and each one is, say, 30-45 minutes (let's go on the high side of that range and say 45 min, though admittedly I wonder how good of an estimate that is), that's 90 hours I didn't spend writing The Next Great Piece of Software with an existing engine. And it's not like I'm done yet. To me, that sort of cuts both ways. I'm surprised I'll be able to get a first functioning database engine in well less than three full-time weeks' of work, and I wonder if I'd waste that much time trying to get existing DBMSes working crossplatform. But then if I'd kept development to a primary platform and used the obvious DBMS engine for it, that's ~90 hours of work and months of free time I'd be ahead of where I am now to release an app for someone.

Regardless, it's been, and hopefully will continue to be, a fun project. Happy hacking.

Labels: coding, F/free, github, gng, mved, open, SqlDbSharp

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Why Free software is losing: It's not the software. It's us A quote from a blog I'm reading a lot more regularly now, Baldur Bjarnason's: It's almost as if open source has become a system for transforming people's leisure time into free labour for corporationsâ€”eating up people's lives while driving them on with promises of future employment. (E.g. "GitHub is your resume".) 15 years ago, I had a long conversation with Bob Hughes (of Dust or Magic fame) about Free Software and open source. I was gushing about it I talked about how it was going to change the world for the better, make software more egalitarian & democratic -- I was a bit of an idealist[.] He then explained to me what was going to happen, how corporations and capitalism in general would twist the system to their benefit. And then a follow-up here: Instead of empowering the people and regular computer users, we've empowered VCs and tech billionaires. OSS is still there for the rest of us to take advantage of, if we have the will and the skill, but it isn't doing much for your regular computer user. I suppose that was Stallman's point about OSS versus Free Software in the first place. I'm not sure what the angle Bjarnason's ascribing to RMS, but I bet I'll repeat it here accidentally. Look, here's the problem with OSS... Well, here's the problem with indie-garage software coders (the toymakers) in general: As RMS says, software [sic] wants to be free. That's in large part why the App Store prices raced to the smallest possible (imagine if Apple had let you set any price! How many 12Â¢ apps would there be?). The marginal cost of distributing software, once written, quickly approaches nil. What's neat is what you can do with software. If you make software that enables people in real time to do something interesting, you can sell that service. Software naturally enables. If your hours of github wrangling is worth 98Â¢ in actual cashola, but enables you (and others) to perform thousands of dollars of services, well, yes, github is your resume. That is, if you chose to write server-side code, you've already boxed yourself into a use that'll never be customer facing. The flip side is -- your faceless, nearly designless software is barely worth anything on its own. There are so many replacements for what you've done. If you charge so much as 99Â¢, folks will go elsewhere. It stinks, but it's the hard truth. Sellable software requires design, serious design. Otherwise you'll never hit that group of end-users willing to give you real cash (the "market"). So it's better to give your services-focused software (your jQuery plugins and SQL profilers) away for free. At least then the barrier to entry of licensing and price is gone, and you have what's at worst an even playing field with your like-minded competitors. You probably still won't build the next Bootstrap, but now you at least have a shot. Hard truth time? Even those folks that try to eek a living out of customer-facing apps, and who are good at it, have a really hard time making ends meet. And there's nothing wrong with writing code for a job. Server-side programming pays well. You will love your salary for doing brainteasers. But you're not overtly using open source to be political in this case. You're following the market's natural direction. That is, these "resume" projects you're making are likely the easiest worthless projects (insert a smilie and remember that my assertion is that all software wants to be free and is, eventually, essentially worthless) you could make. And, again, good for you. Most people never share excellent worthless work. ;^) Free Software's alternative If Bjarnason's point is that non-GPL licenses are too lenient, I've agreed for years. You have to use a protective license if you want to create a privileged space that competes with capitalism. You must use capitalism to create this Free haven. The most brilliant, Deluezo-Guattarian move GNU ever made was to copyleft software. Use copyright to fight copyright. Use capitalism to fight capitalism. Inhabit, reassemble, and redirect. Don't fight head-on. And it's the lack of inhabitation that's killing the dream of OSS (and GNU) idealists. Where are OSS' best wins on the client? LibreOffice, which is still a big win. Firefox, less important now that there's mobile, as Bjarnason points out. Even The Gimp or Audacity were good apps. *But none of these are best in class designs.* Where is the better mail client, the better word processor, the better personal finance software? Where is the better desktop OS? Where is my hoverboard? Cutting closer to the bone, how much Free software do you use "at home"? How about that phone in your pocket? Is it Free software? Look man, it's not. You're happy to use OSS at work, but you're not using it at home. How do you expect work software to make your home life better? How is Free software going to improve your life if you don't use it? Better yet, WHY AREN'T MORE OF YOU CONTRIBUTING TO REPLICANT, the truly Free Android fork? In other words... Why aren't we putting our time into game-changing software? If you want to create that idealistic society that Free software enables, you have to work on projects that society cares about. As long as Free software remains derivative, it's going to be playing catch-up. And if Free clients are only as good as paid clients from ten years ago, platform-jumping (like the one from PC to mobile) will keep catching it by surprise. Until we concentrate on the client -- that is, servicing the needs of people, dammit -- Free software will continue to gain a foothold only in those spaces where the software experience is completely fungible, like we see on servers today. It's not OSS' fault (I realize I'm conflating OSS and Free software too much) that we haven't created the ideal. It's ours. (This is where, if I allowed myself more time, I'd start into suggestions about how to make this happen. Use Free software "at home" (and in your pocket). Learn the apps' foibles. Learn the languages used to create them, or figure out how best to recreate them. Find the pain points its users would have, and make the apps truly citizen-usable. And help folks figure out how to make Replicant work. There's like one dude plying away at the most important Free software project going, and that's simply not enough.) Labels: app store, business, F/free, indie, OSS, rms posted by ruffin at 8/25/2015 10:06:00 AM

Saturday, November 02, 2013
MVED# (Minimally Viable Embeddable Database in C#) on GitHub. Finally started seriously scratching a new itch. I really disliked how difficult I'd found it to get a database engine working crossplatform for my C# "hobby" projects with MonoDevelop and, now, Xamarin Studio. I'd considered using JSON or DataSet's WriteXML method to serialize data, but up until now, I'd been just writing stuff to text files to get hobby projects running more quickly. After using home-grown text file formats for years, though, it seemed dumb not to leverage SQL syntax. Yet every time I tried to find a good, crossplatform solution, I would waste hours not quite finding a great answer. As I write in the new project's readme... MVED# was written largely because of setup hurdles encountered attempting to deploy other obvious embedded database solutions for C# crossplatform. SQL Server Express is not crossplatform. SQLite must be installed on Windows and has a few nontrivial setup requirements on OS X, both of which create a clear barrier to entry out of proportion for applications with modest data serialization needs. C#-SQLite is an interesting alternative, but still had issues when I tried it out in May of 2012. So back in February 24th of this year, I started hacking a database engine. And 121 commits to Bitbucket later, I finally have enough to put up on GitHub. (The GitHub/Bitbucket dynamic is also very interesting...) I can CREATE TABLE, INSERT, DELETE, SELECT, even INNER JOIN. I'm an UPDATE away from 80% of what I use "real" databases to accomplish. Well, if you ignore speed. It's fun to look back over my commits, as always. There are almost zero commits in June and July, when work took a real turn for the busier. Seems like tons of late night commits. Also some interesting comments about where I was while I was coding... Admittedly, there are tons of *cough* idiosyncratic behaviors in the engine, but much of this was an enjoyable alternative to the horribly defensive coding you have to do for customer-facing code. If I don't want to support ORs in WHERE clauses yet, well, I don't have to. If I want to support only INNER JOINs at first, that's my "right". Case sensitivity? Whitespace rules? All my decision. Bizarre! Want FLOATs to be stored as conventional DECIMALs for now? No problem (and more accurate too)! Unicode? Not yet! Why not? Because I chose [not] to! I'm drunk with power. It was a heck of a lot of fun dealing with how to serialize each of the datatypes I'm supporting now. I did take a few old school-ish routes with storage while writing. Every column's length is absolutely fixed (VARCHARs really aren't VAR at all), largely to make the file's format really easy for users to eyeball, probably a leftover from having played around with 6507 assembler too much years ago. I even slap lines of 0x11s between columns to make it super-easy to view. Having easier-to-read files is probably not the best motivation for creating formats, but I'm happy with how it turned out. Here's a crappy example of a raw "Moore's DataBase File (mdbf)" in the quick file viewer I wrote for the engine (click to see in any real detail). Figuring out ways to serialize strings and decimal values was, honestly, fun. Doing this without much heavy "cheating" (more accurate would be "researching") was also a refreshing break from "serious" work, as this project is intended to be almost completely for [my] relaxation. Getting close to finished in about a tenth of the lines of C#-SQLite is, well, interesting. There's a lot that's not here. Parsing commands, even when you do get to choose what's syntactically legal, quickly gets, well, ugly. JOINs tend to bust what would otherwise be a pretty simple paradigm for parsing SELECTs -- heck, even SQLite currently doesn't support RIGHT OUTER JOIN. (Actually, reading that page, I feel a little of Hipp's pain (though let's make clear, since I'm talking about both in the same paragraph, that C#-SQLite is a port of SQLite by Noah Hart). GRANT and REVOKE don't mean so much when you're just hitting the file system, do they?) Ultimately, writing MVED# reminded me a great deal of the shareware app I wrote years back. Eventually, even when you have nobody to answer to, code reaches the point where it's difficult to keep things idealistically organized. (Insert tangent about why it's so much more important to see a candidate's solution to a real-world problem than to simply interview, say, a new graduate about patterns when you're hiring.) This project was also my first "real-world" use of the GNG Manfiesto. Even though MVED# could have easily gone under LGPL, I think there are going to be times where it's easier to use with the project's files compiled into a single app with new, closed files, so I opted for MPL 2.0 for now. Either way, it's open, demands changes by others to be shared, but allows others to use it as they'd like without compromising their own original, unrelated contributions, just as GNG demands. Anyhow, to advert a little more plainly, the Minimally Viable Embeddable Datastore in C# (MVED#) or, as I called it as I developed it (since I wasn't worried a whit about performance), Moore's Database, can be found here: https://github.com/ruffin--/mved/ It's not feature complete yet -- I'd like to sneak an UPDATE command handler in there before I do too much clean-up of existing code, which will be an easy refactor and then edit of the SELECT code -- but it's surprisingly close for what I think I'd like to use it for. A quick class for testing should follow UPDATE. The code is hilariously simple. Optimizations are almost non-existent. Yet, at the same time, I think it's a horribly accessible codebase. We'll see. I'm going to use it. It works just as well on OS X as Windows, and that's a great start for my apps that need an embedded database solution. I can only assume Xamarin's going to make it pretty easy to use MVED# on Andriod and iOS too. But okay, fine. I hear what you're thinking. If I have 121 commits and each one is, say, 30-45 minutes (let's go on the high side of that range and say 45 min, though admittedly I wonder how good of an estimate that is), that's 90 hours I didn't spend writing The Next Great Piece of Software with an existing engine. And it's not like I'm done yet. To me, that sort of cuts both ways. I'm surprised I'll be able to get a first functioning database engine in well less than three full-time weeks' of work, and I wonder if I'd waste that much time trying to get existing DBMSes working crossplatform. But then if I'd kept development to a primary platform and used the obvious DBMS engine for it, that's ~90 hours of work and months of free time I'd be ahead of where I am now to release an app for someone. Regardless, it's been, and hopefully will continue to be, a fun project. Happy hacking. Labels: coding, F/free, github, gng, mved, open, SqlDbSharp posted by ruffin at 11/02/2013 10:56:00 PM

Tuesday, October 01, 2013
The "ASP Loophole" TV is SOCIAL, again: The Honest Public License: What motivated this new license now? We have a general availability version of Funambol coming out in September. I already know there are commercial companies that are live with our code and do not return anything. More than two years ago, we did something similar, switching Sync4j from BSD to GPL. There were companies taking our code and running away with it, without returning anything. One even managed to get public with software based on our code, and our community never saw a line of their modifications. Now is no different. I've seen this argument for using GPLv2 libraries with edits on commercial web servers before, and from some large companies and government organizations. Most interesting to me in that post was seeing someone with good, FSF values outside of FSF. But I'm also reminded of my "GNG Manifeso" post years ago (over 11. What traction!). You can't really get mad at someone for "getting public" if you release under BSD. From me: This is also why I dislike the X11, BSD, and MIT licenses. These licenses don't do enough to protect the contributions of the people that made the code -- they essentially enable legalized plagiarism. It's certainly one's right to make code that's this unregulated, but these licenses are nearly overly altruistic motivations. And, as we see here, the mistaken use of the BSD didn't match the intent either. But does that require GPL? I don't think so. I'd like to think you can strike a balance between making a company release everything and making a company release any improvements to the logic you helped create in your OSS lib. Labels: F/free, licensing posted by ruffin at 10/01/2013 10:59:00 AM

Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Why isn't Linux making a push for schools? Remember grammar school? If you're of an age, where "an age" means approximately mine, you got used to using the Apple IIe with Logo and The Oregon Trail and even, for many of us, BASIC. Ah, 10 PRINT <Control-G> 20 GOTO 10. Even in AP Pascal a decade later, I'm using an LC in our class to hack up my code. Apple's aggressive marketing to schools was a brilliant move. Is this positive experience why I have Macs now? Um, duh. Yes. If it's not a direct correlation, the indirect quotient is so small as to be nearly negligible. Heck, I still like using OS 9 every so often on my StarMax clone, so it's not even the recent Apple cache that's sucked me back in. I was brainwashed. Why aren't we doing that with Linux and grammar schools today? Why are kids learning how to present with Powerpoint instead of OpenOffice? Do I even need to argue the merits of going with "free as in beer" software that's function complete? A local school is using Powerpoint 2007, so many kids can't even edit their Powerpoints at home if they wanted to, even if they did shell out for Office 2003 or 2004. You get the picture. Labels: F/free, linux, microsoft, powerpoint, schools posted by ruffin at 5/18/2011 10:56:00 AM

Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Google's Animated Doodle: Technology Overkill? Dynamic Google doodle draws dancers, complaints \| Deep Tech - CNET News: Today's Google doodle honors choreographer Martha Graham's birthday--and with animated dancers revealing it, the doodle also showcases the company's push to build a more dynamic Web. The only problem: some people find it's slowing their machines. That's hardly the outcome that Google--obsessed over every millisecond of delay in delivering search results--could have wanted. The interesting thing here is that the animation is apparently all done with dhtml instead of, say, an animated gif, which would have done just as well. The code is a mess. And using the javascript engine to power your animation as well as your keystroke sensing is a little cannibalistic. It's like ethanol -- there's no inherent reason that corn prices should be directly and immediately influenced by gasoline price until we started feeding our mouths and tanks with the same stuff. It's a ill-fated confluence of convenience. Google's "everything's a nail" attitude also reminds me of what the Free Software Foundation is trying to call "The Javascript Trap. Because Gmail's interface online is full of proprietary code, the FSF has decided they'd like to tell their mail list subscribers to stop using that fully-featured web app. You may not be aware of the dangers of JavaScript -- a problem we've deemed The JavaScript Trap -- proprietary software running on your computer, inside your web browser. ... When you visit a website such as Gmail, your browser will download and run several thousand lines of JavaScript code. This JavaScript code is no different to other programming languages -- applications written in those languages running on our computers should be free software, so we can run, modify and share them if we wish. It's an interesting line, but a flawed one (my first reaction was a solid "Oh noes!"), I think. The Javascript is still out there for you to review and edit. It's heavily obfuscated, even moreso than decompiling many Java or .NET apps, I'd argue, but it's still out there. The FSF should be more worried about the proprietary software on the Gmail servers. They suggest IMAP and Thunderbird is the way to go, which is nice, but they obviously haven't used Thunderbird recently. (I kidded hyperbolically) I wonder if Javascript on your browser isn't in some sense a use of a little-"o" open source medium that is more in tune with FSF than, say, Outlook. Sure you've still got the assembler/machine code of Outlook -- any app is just a bunch of zeroes and ones -- so you could argue it's open too, but Gmail is several steps closer. I did email Mr. Lee, who sent out an email to me (and everyone else) saying that I should stop using Gmail's online interface. Here's a bit of my replies. Though I expect Google's Javascript is copyrighted, it would seem that studying the Javascript is still possible, isn't it? I'll admit I haven't checked the code, but each include file, etc, is downloaded to your browser, so we're a few cURLs away from the source, aren't we? What's different here? ... [he's nice enough to reply, and I send another]... There's nothing illegal about having your browser interpret Javascript differently, is there? We can turn off window.open, eg, having our browsers censor or rewrite code. There's an implicit openness to and ability to modify the interpretation of [little "o"] open Javascript already. Extend Tor and interpret away, (c) or no. Like Java, the code's all there by virtue of the system, you know? Your Gmail protest is really arguing that Free also implies "written for humans", which is a point I really appreciate. It'd be great to see that slant foregrounded more in FSF posts and projects. Open source is, ultimately, all about the human readability, isn't it? The "Javascript trap" really means that you can't stop at open. If I obfuscate my Java as part of the compilation process and release the obfuscated code, it's not really Open is it? Still, Google's mastery and overuse of Javascript is an excellent point. What are they doing with our browsers? Why are they willing to compromised their own functionality to recreate the animated gif or SVG? And even though their interface seems very simplistic to the point of minimalism, which platforms are part of the Google web and which aren't? Labels: F/free, FSF, gmail, Google, javascript, online distribution, open posted by ruffin at 5/11/2011 11:02:00 AM

Thursday, March 31, 2011
Open source as an opening strategy From AppleInsider \| Google clamps down on handset makers to stem Android fragmentation: Though it has long heralded Android as 'open,' Google has recently taken other steps to gain control of its mobile platform. Just last week, it was revealed that the company had closed availability of the source code of Android 3.0 Honeycomb, a tablet-specific version of its platform. There's a new-ish mode of engagement with open source that's open source once we're done with it. This allows people thinking about adopting the packages to vet everything fairly well and to mitigate the dangers of being unsupported in the future if, here, Google's support for Android died. But what it allows the provider to do is to retain rights to every bit of code, and fork into a proprietary branch their future development. That is to say, if you release a package you've written completely by yourself under the GPL and never accepted patches, you could then release version 2 based on the same code as a copyrighted, proprietary, closed source piece of software. That's what Google's doing with Android. You initially get more adoption than a closed platform because the source is out there for anyone to maintain if they need to so that they can keep selling hardware, but once enough folk use it (initially for that but later for other reasons, like broad adoption), BAM, close up shop. You've gotten the adoption benefits of open source with the later benefits of proprietary lock-in thanks to planned obsolescence driven by consumer capitalism. It's sort of the issue with BSD for me. BSD really isn't Free Software, precisely because it's too freely (little "f") exploited. OS X is here thanks to FreeBSD's overly unrestrictive license. We'll never see tons of the changes Apple made to the codebase, and are lucky to have gotten anything from Apple via Darwin. Similar with KHTML and Safari, though there Apple has been great about giving back with WebKit. Up until now, at least. Because the software's not properly protected (and here I include LGPL v2), Apple owes us nothing. What good is it if your work only creates a standard for Square One? You want to ensure the future versions enabled by your continues to be an open standard and a force for cough good. Neither of these modes of producing open software, BSD or open after we're done with it, are really "open" in spirit. Both are waiting for conventional modes of production to exploit their resources right back into a closed situation. Bless their hearts. Labels: android, ethics, F/free, Google, hats of money, open posted by ruffin at 3/31/2011 11:12:00 PM

Saturday, February 05, 2011
iTunes and HD movies: A confusing set of choices I've been meaning to watch the social network, and saw it teased on iTunes today. I clicked on the very off-chance that it was a cheap rental. No luck. But what was strange was the grayed out HD choices. I hadn't seen that, nor its "The HD version of this movie is available on Mac or Windows 7 computers with HDCP components." I'm using Vista right now. No dice, I guess. Nor is my monitor HDCP. I didn't think that always happened though, and somewhat randomly picked out the most under-appreciated Bond movie, The Living Daylights, to check. Sure enough, I'm good enough to rent that in HD. Luckily I already own it. On VHS, I think. This was pretty reminiscent of a complaint against the MacBook from Free Software Foundation's "Defective by Design" campaign, whose banner I've got at the top of this page. The MacBook apparently won't let you play every movie through non-HDCP out. Here's a quote, if you follow a link to ars technica in the FSF complaint. When my friend John, a high school teacher, attempted to play Hellboy 2 on his classroom's projector with a new aluminum MacBook over lunch, he was denied by the error you see above. John's using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room's Promethean system. Strangely, only some iTunes Store movies appear to be HDCP-aware, as other purchased media like Stargate: Continuum and Heroes season 2 play through the projector just fine. Attempts to play Hellboy 2 or other HDCPed films through the projector via QuickTime also get denied. Other movies that don't work include newer films like Iron Man, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Love Guru, but older films like Shawshank Redemption are restricted as well. So I've included Hellboy 2's entry from the iTunes store in this entry's screenshot as well. Yet another option: Here I can only grab SD versions unless I have an iPad or Apple TV. "Also Available in HD on iPad and Apple TV." That's strange, huh? I'm not sure if it's the SD version in the ars technica story. I suppose iTunes might even restrict SD playback. But it, regardless, is a third choice in HD content. 1.) Can't buy without the right OS. 2.) Can buy, no questions asked. 3.) Can't buy without the right snazzy Apple hardware. It's a strange new world of copyright. I like lending books. So much more intuitive. That said, I'm buying more and more from Kindle. Saves me gas, I can put the text on my iPod, and I've often got a free, if poorly read, audiobook to boot. Nothing better than listening to six hours of Foucault via computerized narrator. Labels: copyright, DRM, F/free, HDCP, iPad, iTunes, macbook posted by ruffin at 2/05/2011 10:48:00 PM

Thursday, May 13, 2010
Hey, look, Steam for Mac! And Portal's free! Yay!!! Less yay. Labels: F/free, FUN, steam posted by ruffin at 5/13/2010 07:36:00 PM

Doctorow's For the Win free for download The hardback's only $13, but I've been reading more books on my iPod touch recently than hardback, so I thought I'd see if I could find a good eBook version. No luck at Amazon or BN.com, but a quick Google got me this... For The Win � Download for Free: Below you'll find lnks to downloadable editions of the text of For the Win. These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. Some people don't understand why I do this -- so check out this post if you want my topline explanation for why I do this crazy thing. Wow. Very nice. It's nice to see someone be quite this dedicated to ideals. Is it worth $13 to have a printed copy in my hands? Probably not. The last two books I've read (and am reading) as codices -- Deon Meyer's Dead Before Dying and Brian Herbert's horribly written but exceptionally interesting Dreamer of Dune are both old library hardbacks via Amazon's used marketplace. $6-7 is about my max these days. I don't know that many starving artists are going to go this route, nor would their publisher probably go for it either, as this is a move that would kill fledgling sales. Still, I'm nearly always impressed when people treat information as something Free, and this is one of those times I'm happily impressed. The whole world's a library! EDIT: It looks like the easiest way to read this on an iPhone or iPod is to get the Stanza app. Once you've got it, hit "Get Books", Catalo, scroll down to "Free Books", select Feedbooks - Free Content, Public Domain Books, Authors, etc etc. Labels: ebooks, F/free posted by ruffin at 5/13/2010 02:17:00 PM

Thursday, March 18, 2010
Finally forked over for VIm After using VIm for years as my primary professional text editor for web development and programming, I finally made a donation to ICCF Holland for ole Bram. The next day, I received a very nice email thank you in reply. Even if (and I assume so) it's a computer generated email, the note was appreciated. The only application I've paid for in my current at-home development suite (and I've paid for it twice! OS 9 and now X) is Transmit, a rock solid ftp client for OS X that does an excellent job syncing edits in VIm to web servers. It's been well worth the $30 I spent, and is a much better solution than Filezilla or whatever that Duck app is that I've tried on OS X several times. (Can't say I care a whit for Coda, though. Perhaps if they integrated VIm in the same way...) In the past, I've shelled out for Ultra-Edit, Visual SourceSafe, and the VB 6 IDE, though the last two at greatly reduced prices during (legitimate) promotions. I suppose you could include OSes, but that's pushing it. Pretty sure I would have bought those either way. ;^) Soon, I'll shell out for Versions, an OS X svn client that was nearly as intuitive as Visual SourceSafe, something I can't say for any other svn client I've tried. Version control is a key tool in any developer's bag of tricks, and in the long run the $53 I'll spend there will unfortunately pay for itself a few times -- unfortunate because if you're benefitting from version control it's because you would've lost edits without it. /me guilty Otherwise, when doing PHP/MySQL work, all I need is MAMP, which is being supported once again and kicks the doors off of XAMMP, at least on OS X. That's free. For Java, I'm still using Eclipse. Free. And for VB.NET the Express version plus sharpDevelop are just enough to get me by. Both free. So after pulling down as much as I have coding, it was about time to pay up for VIm. If Bram M. wants to send that cash on to Uganda, more power to him. I'm nearly embarrassed to admit I read through much of their literature before donating. I sure didn't ask Panic (the Transmit people) where they were putting their cash before I sent it. I hope the VIm money is headed to Kibaale, but seriously, that's up to Bram. It's a great app, and I'm happy he's helped keep the app up. Labels: ethics, F/free, hats of money, shareware, vim posted by ruffin at 3/18/2010 03:57:00 PM

Thursday, February 11, 2010
HTML 5 Video: Apple's Next USB AppleInsider \| Hulu to make videos available on iPad without Flash - rumor: 'The TV shows on Hulu would be perfect on the iPad. There is just one hitch: the iPad doesn’t support Flash, and all of Hulu’s videos currently run inside a Flash player,' states TechCrunch 'But that could change by the time the iPad launches in March. One rumor I’ve heard from an industry insider is that Hulu is working on an iPad-friendly version of its site that should be ready by the time the iPad hits the market,' continues TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld. If there's one thing Apple's figured out, it's how to leverage the 3-10% of folks that use Macs to push new standards over the tipping point. The iMac all but killed the PS/2-serial port mismash that came before it. USB was happening, but it wasn't until the iMac supported only USB (and at the same time merged the Apple peripheral market with WinPC) that USB became the dominant connection tech. Compare to Apple and Firewire, for which Apple collected license fees for a while. Firewire didn't go nearly so well as USB because firewire was an add-on, not a go-for-broke replacement for USB. USB 2.0 became so much more dominant that Jobs himself was eating his Firewire a few years after its introduction. Honestly, to make Firewire work, Jobs probably should have killed USB and gone 100% Bluetooth for peripherals, but Bluetooth wasn't ready for the weight then, and it's not now. Now, the iPad is killing Adobe. I'm not sure what Jobs has against Flash other than it's not something Apple controls. But he is killing it. HTML 5 video support in Firefox is a better solution, imo, than closed Flash plugins. It's, in a sense, a level less complicated. Once codec compression, speed, and resources are up, up, and down, respectively, to Flash levels, why not use HTML 5? The iPad helps make that "why not" an easier question to answer. If I'm worried about paying licensing for encoding and having end users have the proper Flash plugin installed, now I have a good excuse (aka, "business plan") to develop an alternative: a new platform that only supports the alternative that helps me hedge my bets against Flash. I can develop for HTML 5, pull an id and Quake 3 (where they released a test version of their latest game on Mac first) with the iPad to help bug test a relatively stable platform, and be ready to roll things out if Adobe doesn't give me a sweater deal. Reminds me a lot of AOL and Mozilla. At one point, AOL's licensing deal with Microsoft over using IE as the browser engine in AOL's client was coming due. AOL actually released a version of AOL based on Mozilla for the Mac, showing Microsoft that they didn't really need IE. MS no longer had AOL over a barrel, and a licensing deal was worked out. And b/c of this, in large part, we now have Firefox. AOL's bet played out perfectly for us, though perhaps not so well for them. HTML 5 video is the same move all over again. s/Microsoft/Adobe. s/AOL/[Hulu\|YouTube] Labels: aol, apple, control, F/free, hats of money, id, iPad, licensing, microsoft, mozilla posted by ruffin at 2/11/2010 10:28:00 AM

Sunday, November 22, 2009
Is there such thing as "practically free" software formats? I enjoyed thinking through Should we fight for Ogg Vorbis?, a contribution to the Linux Journal by Glyn Moody back in 2007. The most problematic statement in the piece, I think, is this one. So my doubts about this campaign have nothing to do with any weaknesses in Ogg. It's just that I wonder whether this is really something the free software world should be expending much energy on when there are other more pressing problems. Whereas DRM and software patents, for example, are manifestly and unequivocally bad for free software (and indeed for everyone), that doesn't seem to be true for the MP3 format. Is there a reason to have an open and free format when patent holders don't seem to care much about the folks who are making free software and aren't paying royalties/license fees? Rather, aren't there more pressing places where license holders are worried about enforcing patents where someone could be turning their OSS coding resources? I'm not sure how to feel about this one. I know that I'm getting to the point that I prefer PDF over any other file format for printed works. I'm so freakin' tired of dealing with the way doc, docx, rtf, etc keep fookin' slightly whenever I open them in the wrong application. I used to make do with Microsoft Word, 1998 and 2000, and as long as those apps kept working I figured I'd make do. They don't work so well any more. Now that Word 2100 or whatever it's at now can save in pdf, I'd rather just see pdf files. It's harder for me to edit a pdf than even a wacky docx at times, but there are a wealth of fairly reasonably priced apps that'll allow one to mess with pdfs. At worst, I just print them out and scrawl. Perhaps ODF is the best alternative, but PDF is the practically open format that seems to be doing best, and I don't even have to Google LAME to display it on most OSes. Does this disinclination to support ODF more directly comprise my politics? Yes, I believe it does. We need a standard that will display well outside of its contemporary platform, and display that way for the foreseeable future and beyond. That seems to be pdf to me (and yes, I realize pdf can sometimes be no more descriptive than avi; you really don't know what's in the wrapper. Again, egg + face). Still, is there "practically free" that should be good enough? I'm not sure. I don't like the mp3 reasoning any more than I did for gifs years earlier or pdfs, even after they've been declared an open standard (thanks wikipedia) in 2008. OOXML is open too, you know. Yet there's a certainly practicality to using these formats not designed to be open to humans and machines at the same time. I hate bluffing. Is GNU/hurd ready yet? Labels: control, copyright, DRM, ethics, F/free, licensing, pseudo-academic, Word posted by ruffin at 11/22/2009 01:00:00 PM

Monday, May 19, 2008
Top 10 Freeware apps on Mac; another schmoe blogs Charles Moore recently commented on Alexis Kayhill's top 10 freeware apps on OS X. Of his, I found PTHPasteboard interesting enough to check out: How often have you copied something only to find that you need it a few minutes later but you've already copied another item over it on the Mac Clipboard? PTHPasteboard watches you while you work and keeps a copy of any items that you have copied to your Clipboard (you can specify how many entries are cached) and also saves the clipboard through restarts. I keep it configured as a default startup item. Honestly, that happens to me all the freakin' time. This is worth a look. So here are the two lists, now with my idiotic commentary. First, Kayhill's. * NeoOffice: * Flip4Mac: (Windows Media Player alternative) * TextWrangler (serious text editor) * Firefox & Thunderbird * CyberDuck (FTP and SFTP client) * Adium: (multi-service chat client) * ImageTricks (sue with OS X Tiger's Core Image filters) * MAMP (server software) * iBackup (free backup software) * Vienna (RSS and Atom reader) And a few more Moore adds, though he doesn't exactly say what to remove. * ToyViewer Image Viewer/Editor * PTHPasteboard Multiple Clipboard Utility * SpotInside Spotlight Search Enhancer * OnyX System Maintenance and Cleaning Utility * TigerLaunch Application Launcher * Seashore Cocoa Open Source Graphics Program for OS X The bottom line seems to be you can't pick a top 10 without a bit more requirements stated beforehand. That is, I tend to program a bit on the Mac, so MacVIm, Netbeans, and Eclipse are all very high on my list. I can't say much for SeaShore (a neat idea not yet ready for prime time) or Cyberduck (bad enough I re-registered Transmit). Adium's okay, Thunderbird's okay, Firefox is okay, but v3 RC 1 does awfully on my iBook. Very buggy. None of these are good enough to get rid of their commercial counterparts, including those that come with OS X, on a permanent basis. Firefox comes closest, especially b/c of its ability to navigate pages by typing. Still, occasionally in my experience it's buggy and I go back to using Safari for a week or two before trying another build. Instead of going through all I can think of, here's the freeware that currently lives on my Dock. * Eclipse * iTerm * TextWrangler * Stella (an Atari 2600 emulator) * AbiWord (a decent, smallish Word replacement that translates Word and WordPerfect fairly well) * vMac (68k MacOS emu) * MacVIm Add to that WhatSize, which was free at one point, and which I use for spring cleaning the hard drive. You might as well add GraphicConverter, which, as I've said recently, isn't smart enough to force you to register and, in fact, encourages you to treat it as free software. I'll spare you the gushing recommendations for each. Labels: browsers, F/free, graphicConverter, office, os x, vim posted by ruffin at 5/19/2008 03:23:00 PM

Wednesday, August 02, 2006
FreeBSD, give until it helps? I somehow managed to create a small ripple at apple.slashdot.com with a post a while back essentially giving my standard GNG rant "against" BSD licenses. I've been meaning to find time to blog about this adequately, but haven't yet. So here goes the important point to me... It appears that there are some that believe that FreeBSD accomplishes its work precisely by being so "free" that people appropriate it for their own commercial purposes -- but the initial work has so much momentum, its legacy contributions essentially create an interoperable conversation or standard. More simply, FreeBSD's openness meant Apple could choose it as the base of OS X, versus GNU/Linux. FreeBSD's stability, etc, meant that Apple did choose it. And now, no matter how much OpenDarwin whines (again, my characterization of one type of FreeBSD champion-er) about not getting the sort of collaboration from Apple they felt they deserved (apparently some packages from Apple wouldn't even compile, iirc), more Mac users now know how to use, say, the "ls" command than ever before. Apple users now know *NIX, where before they were simply masters of the Extension Manager. This is a very interesting point. It's a much less idealistic motivation than my reasons behind GNG, and much MUCH less idealistic than Stallman's for GNU. One must also admit that it's been at least partially [very] successful. I'm not sure of an example more powerful than OS X & Free BSD, but that's a very convincing one. Oh, don't worry. I'm not convinced, personally. Perhaps many FreeBSDers feel the way I've described, above, but many don't. Thus OpenDarwin's frustration. My post, entitled, "BSD's Fault," was only meant to speak directly towards OpenDarwin's predicament, which was the subject of the Slashdot story about which everyone was ostensibly speaking. If you don't want to end up where OpenDarwin is, failing because you expected a commercial company to return the favor they received when grabbing very open BSD'd code, then you don't use nor support BSD. I'm also one that believes GNU/Linux's (and also Tomcat's and MySQL's, etc) adoption by many businesses is a much more powerful set of success stories than those of BSD's. The GPL does a decent job of delineating where its influence ends. With GNU/Linux, etc, where the app stops, many have been able to make a living programming new code (Perl, php, etc) or creating very impressive documentation (ora.net, anyone?) about these more closed, Freely licensed techs. That these techs are more prevalent on the server side means they are relatively invisible compared to, say, OS X, but their power in dollars (as a quickly picked, stereotypical measuring stick) is much much greater. I believe Apple should feel their ethics demand they give more back to BSD, and help ensure that Darwin, OS X's FreeBSD, compiles for most serious hobbyists. Apple, not caring what these hobbyists add to apps in the future (and in some respects, I don't blame them), is treating and will continue to treat them as third class citizens. That's the fault of an idealistic interpretation of the way BSD works that GNU (or GNG) protects programmers from experiencing, and they still manage to get a whale of a lot of work done. This leaves me wondering if GNU will ever be a serious contender for the desktop. I don't know. Labels: F/free, gng, licensing posted by ruffin at 8/02/2006 01:09:00 PM

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