Christopher J. Buckley

Today the Farnborough Airshow kicked off here in Hampshire. Last week we were treated to the A380 circling - it is almost quiet - i hope we get to see it again this week. I’ll be uploading my pictures here throughout the week.
 

Mediaportal is an XBMC-esque media centre for use on Windows. Recently, i have been suffering stability and ergonomic problems with it, due to the MS Media Centre Remote Control not working correctly with RC1. If you are having similar issues, they are all fixed by installing this replacement driver.

I recently took the Red Hat RH436 Enterprise Clustering and Storage course. This was an excellent course; well presented and documented. I would recommend it to anyone looking to further their knowledge regarding storage (LVM, Fibre, iSCSI) and clustered filesytems (Global File System) and how Red Hat’s virtualisation solutions allow for a ready HA environment.

I am pleased to report I passed this course.

This Friday I took my RHCE. Whilst I cannot talk about the exam (an NDA forbids this), it lasted a whole day and was a very interesting experience. At the end of the day, my results were e-mailed through to me - PASS! Overall, both the exam and the means to which it was carried out is extremely impressive.

My certificate can be validated on Red Hat’s training section. Now, to attempt the courses that make up the RHCA.. !

Just a brief post, I’ve uploaded new pictures to flickr of Virginia Water - I had no idea this place existed, it is right opposite Wentworth Gold Course, as well as a sunny-day trip to the beautiful Sandbanks, Poole and Corfe Castle.
 

Here you can view the very beautiful Virginia Water. One day, I may find the energy to walk around the whole lake!
 

To commemorate the 10 year anniversary of the Open Source Definition, its author Bruce Perens (former Debian Project Leader and noted Free-Software developer) has written a very worthwhile essay explaining the current state of Open Source and outlining the next decade for the Open Source movement.

Notable pieces from Bruce’s essay are outlined herein:

And that brings me to our first mistake: for a time, there was a conflict between Open Source and Free Software evangelism. My intent has always been for Open Source to simply be another way of talking about Free Software, tailored to the ears of business people, and that it would eventually lead them to a greater appreciation of Richard Stallman’s arguments. This has come to pass, and I hope you’ll continue to make it so. One only had to witness the attendance of the GPL 3 committees to see that the importance of FSF’s work was appreciated by the largest of corporations.

For me, this is the single most important message to make people aware of: Open Source is a ‘business-friendly’ term to spread the philosophy and principles of Free-Software. The GNU foundation does tremendous work in enabling, and preserving, software freedom’s for users. It is of great sadness to me that people I talk to are at times completely unaware of the term ‘Free-Software’, instead thinking that this software is ‘Free as in no-cost’, rather than ‘Free as in Freedom’. Richard Stallman is owed an extremely large debt for his vision in creating the FSF and ensuring software freedom’s for all.

In contrast, we have not yet achieved the penetration that we might have desired on user desktop systems, at least if you don’t count the fact that Free Software provides a large part of Apple’s MacOS today, and critical elements of Microsoft Windows as well. Both companies have been forced to develop strategies to live with us, some of them less comfortable than others. Today we are seeing much of the value of software move from the desktop to the network, an area in which we are already entrenched. This can only lead to the expansion of Open Source on the systems in individual user’s hands.

This is a very realistic point: GNU+Linux penetration on the desktop is growing daily; users are realising that proprietary software and vendor lock-in is something that they no longer have to be part of - they can possess software freedom with GNU+Linux - primarily first on Server, but now on Desktop. The next decade will be pivotal in ensuring GNU+Linux on the Desktop penetrates to the masses.

One recent phenomenon has been the appearance of government officials openly on the stage at conferences concerning Free Software. Of late, it’s my turn to speak when the minister has finished his greeting, and they are always announcing some national government initiative concerning Open Source. OK, I speak outside of the U.S. a lot, but even in the U.S. we are seeing Linux (and presumably the GNU system)

Free-Software is here to stay: it is used both by Enterprises and Governments. Ignore the FUD from Proprietary vendors who tell you that Free and Open Source Software bears a heavier risk than using proprietary software.
Remember also, when you are using a ‘Linux’ machine, you are more than likely using the GNU System, be your distribution from Red Hat, Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo, Slackware et al. Go and tell people about the GNU System!

Microsoft remains a problem, as the bastion of the old way of thinking about software, and as the epitome of the old school of dirty corporate fighting. Their current strategy seems to be to poison us with money, most recently by making patent agreements with a number of Linux distributions. These agreements go against the spirit of the software licenses used by our developers, and were perhaps intended to dissuade developers from contributing their work. To this end, Microsoft poured more money into Novell last year than Novell’s annual profit - indeed Novell would have had no annual profit without Microsoft.

A very articulate observation from Perens.

Perens closes by stating that:

So, you can see that the future will present its challenges for Open Source. We could never have forecast how big we would become during Decade Zero of Open Source. But we’ve built tremendous strength, to the point that we can consider much larger tasks. Join us now, as we enter Decade One.

Please do take time to read the original article located at Perens’ personal website.

This is a fantastic piece of filming - talk about being in the right place at the right time! You can find the complete footage here. The pilot and ground control were the epitome of calm and professional.

NB: Notice Concorde in the background 2 minutes in!

Yesterday, a discussion came up regarding which software license is more or less restrictive. We were agreed upon ‘public domain’ and ‘proprietary’ licenses, however, the issue of BSD vs GPL came up. I turned to my friend, software license expert, and GNU member David Crossland for help on this issue.

David has written an excellent article, which I hope people can take time to read and digest.

First we have to resolve which BSD and GPL licenses you refer to.
The original BSD license is an all permissive (non-copyleft protected) license that is incompatible with all versions of the GPL. The revised (1999 onwards) BSD license is an all permissive license that is compatible with all versions of the GPL.

Therefore the FSF recommends calling simple all-permissive licenses compatible with the GPL “X11” licenses instead of “BSD” ones. (OSI says “MIT” licenses, but MIT has released under lots of licenses so its not ideal.)

Which is more free, X11 or GPL? They are equally free. X11 style licenses are free software licenses. The GPL licenses are free software licenses. Being a free software license is a binary value. At the important level, it is nonsense to say one is more or less restrictive than any other.

In the details, there are differences though.

Revised BSD is “more free” than original BSD because it is GPL compatible; you are free to distribute combined versions of such with all the GPL software out there, and that is very useful. Its a very secondary kind of freedom though, compared to the kind of freedom that defines free software.

The GPL has clauses to ensure the software remains free for all users of the software. Copyleft is the main example of this as it was in GPLv1; GPLv3 has other clauses like those about Tivoisation. To me these are protections, but proprietary software developers call these clauses “restrictions” because they restrict them from restricting everyone.

There is tonnes of bullshit around the web that says stuff like “From the perspective of the user, the BSD license is actually more “free” than the GPL: you can do whatever you want with the code, including wrap it up and make it proprietary.” But by “more” they mean “less,” by “users” they mean “developers” and by “including” they mean “especially.”

It is less freedom from the perspective of users because X11 licenses allow middlemen developers to make proprietary versions, so not all users will have freedom. With GPL, all users will have freedom. What you can do is freedom; when what you do effects others, it is not really freedom by power. The GPL restricts the amount of power you have over other people, it does not restrict your freedom. [0] So if you are making your software free, the GPL does not restrict you at all.

Since GPL software cannot become proprietary, the GPL makes for more freedom, overall.

However, there are exceptions to that. For example:

• The Xiph media formats are non-copyleft, to promote wide adoption of the format.
• A non-copyleft TCP/IP implementation was neccessary to build the Internet. [1]
• Font software is different to regular programs, and so the Open Font License is more suitable than the GPL for most fonts.

The FSF publishes the LGPL, a weak copyleft. A weak copyleft means that someone can link their proprietary software to your free software, but must keep your parts free. Sometimes - rarely, today - it can be strategic to release software that permits this, but it is not generally recommend. So it could be said that all-permissive non-copyleft free software licenses are more restrictive than the GPL, from the perspective of users, because some versions of the software will be proprietary.

However, I think its better to reformulate the question: Which license will result in the most freedom for all users? Usually this is the GPL, but it depends on the situation.

[0] Bradley Kuhn - CTO of softwarefreedom.org and previously Executive Director of FSF and a very cool guy who I met last time I was in New York - wrote about this in “Freedom or Power?”

[1] Programming languages are typically non-copyleft, although I think thats a shame - Perl was originally GPL, and if it remained GPL, all perl software would be GPL. I don’t know the exact circumstances why it switched, although I’d like to.