I have a test computer with several hard drives in it, each with a different operating system. When I need to test a new software program or hardware peripheral, I can quickly assess its compatibility across several platforms with this computer. The hard drives are a mix between Western Digital Raptor 36GB and Seagate Barracuda SATA-V 160GB models — fairly new, fairly fast, and presumably spacious enough for my test OSes. It did not occur to me that I might ever run out of space on the 36GB drives because there is very little “real life” data on it — just a few megabytes worth of documents, pictures, and other test data. Since switching to Linux and BSD, I have come to think of personal data as being the big storage sink, with the operating system and desktop software being the minimal part of the hard drive’s space. Well, that doesn’t hold true in Windows Vista. I made the mistake of putting 64-bit Vista on one of the Raptor drives, and after a little over a month of sporadic, short-term use, I’m out of free space. This, to me, is astonishing. How is all that space being used?
First of all, a drive labeled as 36GB is certainly going to be less than that due to addressing, partitioning, and bad sector elimination. When it’s all said and done with Windows Vista’s NTFS, I end up with 33GB. So there’s 3GB out the window right then and there. Vista’s Disk Properties dialogue indicated that more than 31GB of that space was occupied in some way.
There is almost no data to speak of on the Vista drive — a few browser bookmarks, a few small graphic files that I used for testing in Photoshop and Fireworks, and a half dozen screen shots from other programs I’ve tested recently. Far, far less than 1GB — probably less than 10MB altogether. So the first thing I did to see what was taking up so much space was look at the Programs and Features section of the Control Panel, which shows how much space each installed program is occupying.
Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium doesn’t say how much space it takes up, but if the size of its directory in C:\Program Files\Adobe is any indication, it’s about 3GB. That’s about what I’d expect it to be, considering the number of programs included in the suite. Microsoft Office Professional 2007, by contrast, is a mere 500MB. Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 Suite takes up a surprising 590MB, but it’s even more hefty when you fold in the ancillary Roxio programs and packages that are installed separately from the suite. Add up all of Roxio’s applications and you have about 735MB. The separate content package for Easy Media Creator is by itself more than 800MB. World of Warcraft is about 5.5GB. Then there are about a half dozen other programs like the Flash Player and the Firefox Web browser and other little extras that add up to less than 1GB.
So there was no “smoking gun” in terms of huge programs taking up a lot of space. Even added together, they don’t amount to an unreasonable portion of the 33GB drive. What about Windows Vista components? Surely there’s something like IIS or MSSQL installed that I do not need. But when I clicked on “Turn Windows features on or off” I found that I only had the bare minimum installed in Windows Vista Ultimate. No indexing service, ActiveX installer, extra network services, or anything else that I could reasonably do without. In terms of checkboxes in the list, I had 7 of 23 selected, and two more partially selected.
The next step was to take a look at the file system and see if I could get a better picture of where all the space was going. The Windows directory itself was 11.5GB, which to me is unbelievably large for an OS, not including the applications. Compare that to FreeBSD, which is an entire operating system with lots of extras and has no trouble fitting on a single CD; or Ubuntu Linux, which fits an entire graphical operating environment with desktop applications onto a single 700MB CD.
C:\Program Files, including both the 32- and 64-bit directories, weighed in at 12GB. So MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Roxio Easy Media Creator, World of Warcraft, and a handful of other desktop programs take up roughly the same amount of space as the platform they run on. Again, I’m shocked at the sheer size of Windows Vista, which I must remind you is merely an environment for running the aforementioned desktop applications.
So I had less than 2GB of free space, but something didn’t quite add up — literally. If I turned on the option to show hidden files and folders, then selected everything in the C:\ directory, then looked at the group’s properties, I only came up with 25GB. So if Explorer said I was using more than 31GB, but I only had enough files for 25GB, where is the missing ~6GB? Is it possible that Vista actually has a 6GB swap file someplace hidden beyond what Explorer can see? That would be ridiculous, but so is an operating system that occupies almost 12GB by itself.
Putting aside the missing 6GB for a moment, I decided to run the built-in Disk Cleanup function to see if there were any unnecessary files I was unaware of. I know that I have personally deleted installation files that I’ve downloaded, that the Recycle Bin is perpetually empty, and that I hadn’t done enough Web browsing on this operating system to accrue a significant number of Web cache files. Incredibly, though, there were 3.59GB worth of files to clean out of Windows Vista — files I never had any control over or purpose for. 8MB of thumbnail images, 1.27GB “temporary files” (whatever those are), 292MB under various categories related to something called “Windows Error Reporting and Solution Checking,” and 2GB wasted on something known as “Hibernation File Cleaner.” I have no idea what these things are — I mean, I have some good guesses, but how would I find out for sure? — and I was not aware that I was doing anything that would cause all of this cruft to build up over the scant few hours (over the course of several weeks) this operating system has actually been used since I installed it.
After Disk Cleanup was over, I re-checked the difference between what all of the files and folders reported and what Disk Properties showed in terms of occupied drive space. This time it was 24.6GB in the file view, and 29GB in the Properties dialogue. So my 6GB deficit was reduced to 4.4GB, which is still an unacceptable amount of “missing” space as far as I’m concerned.
Hopping over to my Mandriva 2007 Spring AMD64 workstation, df -h shows that all of my installed software (a lot!)plus the operating system adds up to 19GB, and personal data (including a few VMware images, World of Warcraft, and tons of pictures, project files, Web site code, and some unedited home videos that I haven’t gotten around to editing and compressing) is around 53GB. The size of the data will remain consistent across platforms, though — it’s the same on Linux as it is on BSD or Windows. One way or the other, there is no way all of this would fit on a 36GB drive. But if I needed to do software testing with very little data and a lot of programs, with Linux, BSD, or Windows 2000 or XP (my entire gigantic WinXP stack, including a significant amount of test data, is around 47GB) I could easily fit everything on the Raptor drive.
So the questions are: How big is your desktop software stack? Do you know how all of the space is being used? Even if I were to research the topic further and gain an understanding of what the Disk Cleanup cruft was, how would I manage to prevent it from accruing in the future? If I had chosen a larger hard drive and used Windows Vista more frequently over a longer period of time, would the entire drive eventually fill up with unnecessary garbage? I’ll leave you with one last question: What does this say about the long-term stability of Windows Vista?
A badly researched Yahoo News piece recently characterized open source developers’ reluctance to adopt the new GNU General Public License version 3 as creating “a rift in the open source community between idealists who believe all software should be free of charge and free to use, and pragmatists who want to see open source software make further inroads into commercial use.” There are so many things wrong in that statement that I hardly know where to begin. Is it really so difficult to understand this stuff? Yes, there is a rift in the community — if there is a single, cohesive, unanimous community at all — but it’s not for the reasons listed in this Yahoo story.
I guess I should start with the difference between open source and free software. One is a software design philosophy officially defined and maintained by a licensing cabal; the other is a set of moral values imposed through software licenses defined and maintained by a social/political movement. There has been a natural division between the two since the inception of the Open Source Initiative in 1998. The OSI has little or nothing to do with “seeing open source software make further inroads into commercial use,” per the Yahoo author’s article. The very first sentence on the OSI Web site is: “Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.” Where does it say there that corporate adoption is a goal? Not that getting more open source software into enterprise-grade businesses wouldn’t benefit the OSI or open source software in general, but since when has this been one of the OSI’s primary goals?
The Free Software Foundation has vociferously expressed in every possible way over the past 20+ years that the “free” in “free software” has absolutely nothing to do with price. Again: Free software has absolutely nothing to do with price; it is instead a set of moral obligations to provide certain allowances to users and programmers. It takes less than 30 seconds worth of reading on the fsf.org Web site to discover this fact. You’d have to be some kind of moron to make a mistake like this in a professional publication.
Despite the Yahoo author’s mistakes, there really is a rift forming over the GPLv3. Indeed the gap between free software-ists and open source-ists is widening with the GPLv3, mainly because of the restrictions it includes. FSF supporters say that the restrictions protect freedom; open source pragmatists say that the restrictions harm the very same freedom, though the OSI has approved GPLv3 as officially “open source.” The OSI isn’t really a leader in the open source community, despite its name — all it really does is allow people to use the OSI trademark if their software license conforms to the open source requirements. The real leaders are the people approving patches, writing code, and performing code audits — they’re the ones who truly determine what open source software is and is not.
Anyway, fundamental dichotomies aside, since the June release of GPLv3 I have seen some of the free software moderates defecting to the open source camp, too. With events like Eben Moglen’s bizarre tirade against Tim O’Reilly, the FSF leadership (even though Moglen is no longer officially a leader, he still acts as a spokesperson) is appearing more like a group of religious extremists, and less like programmers intent on creating free replacements for proprietary programs. The FSF’s focus is increasingly to protest, boycott, censure, and exclude all things it does not find morally agreeable. By contrast, it is the open source community that is doing all the real work — the coding, the documentation requesting, and the reverse-engineering. The rift is forming primarily between the people who do the talking, and the people who do the actual software development. This has come to mean a rift between free software, which for all its bluster and bombast has failed miserably to produce a complete GNU operating system; and open source, which has produced many financially and/or technologically successful operating systems over virtually the same period of time.
Ed. note: In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, today’s editorial was contributed by a character that both the proprietary software industry and the free software movement fear and loathe: A software pirate. According to the high-handed moral arbiters of the world, a person of such questionable character and loose (as in the opposite of tight, despite what you may have seen elsewhere on the Web) morals is a danger to our very thoughts and consciences. So if you are someone who is easily offended, or if your beliefs are so flimsy that you are afraid they will be shaken by some pirate talk, you may want to skip this one. On the other hand, if you’re one of those people who secretly loves to be infuriated, and you’re a proud member of the Church of Stallman or a Microsoft shareholder, read on. This editorial is dedicated to every person who has ever copied software and given it out to friends; doubly so if you also gave them the activation crack.
A pirate’s life for you
I be Robert Wales, notoriously known as Bob The Burner, privateer in mine own good service, Captain of the famous galleon Asus Core II, proud member of the brotherhood o’ pirates. This official document’ll be servin’ as your confession. Confess and ye shall be spared — by my troth — but if ye continue to deny your true nature, you’ll take the long walk, and I cannot vouch for ye among the sharks. Join the brotherhood of pirates, or swim with the sharp-toothed fishes.
Thou’rt a pirate. Sack up, ye cowards, and admit thy crimes! Ye did lend thy copy of Microsoft Office to cousins and family to copy and use freely, knowin’ that the sharin’ o’ one’s resources with the same is the very portrait o’ charity. Tis a capital idea! Never mindin’ the fact that ye didn’t pay for it neither — ye got it from me hometown o’ Pirate Bay, a place near ‘n’ dear to the hearts o’ many a casual privateer such as meself. The hearth spot o’ every rascal, scoundrel, villain, ‘n’ knave that e’er dared put laser to dye in the name o’ friendly-minded software redistribution.
Bore me not with talk of software freedom, for ye well know that all software is free to redistribute at your own bleedin’ discretion. That’s why ye gave that already five-fingered Office 2007 Professional disc to your mother’s other son — the fat one — complete with a freshly generated product key and the activation crack executable. So much for anti-piracy measures, when a cupshot, half-witted candlewaster such as ye can circumvent the devious pre-plottin’ of one of the world’s largest corporations. Such tactics don’t make ye a member of the very first house until ye can ‘fess up and join the brotherhood. Skulkin’ around in secret, handin’ out discs for a lover’s fee don’t make ye right with either side.
If ye should think that such activities be deboshed and dern, and force ye to carry coals to the personal satisfaction of Pope Stallman and High Inquisitor Jones, take heart: Piss them away with the e’entide’s ale. I tell ye truly: Do not play the maid’s part for such as these — do as ye will, and follow thy heart to satisfaction. Thy duty, as ye well know, be to family and friend, not to ideal and artificial virtue. As if thou shouldst strain thyself to the compass of thy wits to figure out how source code be any kind o’ personal benefit to a dorbel such as ye, and how a guarantee o’ freedoms that ye already possess without the intervention o’ others is any more than a big steamin’ pile o’ prevarication. To thee and to me, all software be free.
The best kind o’ loot’s the kind ye don’t pay for
Admiral Holleyman of the Bull Shit Association dares claim that our craft makes his skainsmates lose (that’s the opposite o’ win, for all ye spelling-retarded coppocias) $11 billion US dollars every year. Hoy-day! A flight of fancy I’ve ne’er seen before such bardleture came before me! Such presumptuous posy overflows my yellow bile. As if every man of the brotherhood would actually buy the programs he pirates! Bah! Next, I wager he’ll be so bloody daft to presume that blokes should actually read a license agreement, the likes o’ which have never been, and may yet never be enforced in full.
Forsooth, me brother, we two know that Microsoft Office isn’t worth its weight in fool’s gold to us or the false-villains we share with. If ye got more gold than sense, $500 is the price to pay for thyself, and an additional $500 for each man ye care to distribute it to. Waste not thy coin; should ye decide to be a recognized part of the brotherhood, the price is $500 less, per man.
Bore me not with words and obligations of licenses. This program o’er here has a license that grants me the boon o’ sharin’; and this program o’er there forbids the same. The grand assumption bein’ that I’d trade six ounces of whale dung for the words or the differences between them — a program’s a bloody program! Words be bloody words, all of which are fatally ignorable to the intended licensees, who want not but to use programs in peace.
In sooth we have unfathomable value, but convincing the brotherhood to pay up will do naught but chase us more fervently into the realm of open source, where our value shall remain undiminished. We will still produce, though briefly inconvenienced by the frustrations ‘o switchin’ platforms. The Admiral would do well to understand that in terms o’ software, nothing’s truly stolen… just creatively redistributed, and such is the motto of the brotherhood. Learn it and live it, brother.
Copyin’s natural
Commodore Garfield means to cross swords with us, brother. Claims he: Ye can invite thy friend to thine abode to view a film, and ye can lend him your DVD, but ye cannot give him a copy for his own self. What cozenry be this? Tis the same, materially — a movie be watched, and that’s all any do care about. The manner in which it be accomplished is related to matters of convenience and personal finance, not the profit of unknowns and the benefit of false morality. The true morality be in one’s duty to his brothers, not in how regularly he pays the cartels and consortiums o’ the world, or how ardently he adheres to the principles of Pope Stallman. May the wind be at your back, Commodore, but I warrant I shall have the piss of your gravestone on the matter.
Thus we come upon yet another: Tis well to pay to see a movie, and tis well and good to tell one’s mates about the movie, but ye be forbidden to record it or to perform it on thine own. Ye can record a film from the television, but ye cannot give it out to anyone. Where be the line to demark this issue? Do me mates have to stop doing abhorrent Johnny Depp impressions and repeatin’ lines from films for fear they should violate the secret and invisible financial rights o’ others? Who owns the blasted copyright on mine own memory, and can a man buy it back!?
In parting
Such are the issues we face, and may they be remembered for the benefits the powers o’ law seek to remove from ordinary citizens.
I accept your admission of piracy, and welcome you to the brotherhood. At last! You admit that you’ve copied or distributed a program or two without regard for the text that impotently governs it. You skulk in secret no more; bask in the liberation of the moment, and bite thy thumb at the priggish wastrels who refuse to participate. Yo ho!
Wall Street Journal Columnist Walt Mossberg says that Ubuntu isn’t for mainstream computer users. He may be right, but I would like to know what his basis for comparison is. Though I can see based on his photo that Walt is decades older than I am and has had more access to more operating systems over the course of his career, I have to question his experience in installing, configuring, and using desktop operating systems. The issues he lists are genuine, but not unsolvable, and aren’t materially different than the same initial configuration trouble that any user could have with any operating system on any modern computer.
Recently I have been looking into moving to Europe — just for fun, really, because realistically this is not something I could financially afford to do. I was reading up on some advice for Americans moving to Switzerland when I came across this brilliant piece of advice: “If you find yourself getting angry, accusing the Swiss of what may appear as odd behavior to you, this is a good chance to analyse exactly what behavior sets this off and skillfully try to find new ways of communicating to establish good and lasting relationships. Keep in mind that you didn’t really like everybody ‘back home’ either.”
The same applies when you are a Windows or OS X user in Linux Land. Keep in mind that your traditional operating system did not always work as intended, and if you had to install or reinstall it from scratch, you know how difficult it was to find the most current drivers, apply hours worth of patches, readjust the ridiculous default settings to your preference, and reinstall all the software you pirated, er, legally purchased. This is no different on Linux, and in fact, I would say that it’s much easier to switch to Linux than it is to switch to Windows or OS X after you’re used to Linux. Treat this not as a reason to say that Linux sucks, but as an opportunity to learn how to properly configure and control your new operating environment.
Mossberg’s conclusion does make a lot of sense, though. If Dell is supplying the operating system, it should work perfectly from the factory. After all, when Dell gives you a Windows machine, it guarantees that it works properly in its initial condition. Why should this be any different with Ubuntu Linux? I’m suspicious of this behavior; it looks to me like sabotage, like Dell is purposefully half-assing its Linux effort so that it can “prove” that Linux isn’t a viable desktop OS, and the issue can be safely put to rest. More likely, though, it’s a lack of funding and internal commitment to making Linux desktop systems succeed.
The thing is, Linux — and certainly BSD — users don’t really want Linux preinstalled. What they want is a fully Linux- and/or BSD-compatible computer that they can install their preferred OS on. They want the equivalent of a sticker on the machine that says “FreeBSD 6.1 certified” or “Designed for Ubuntu 7.10.” We already have Windows logos that say things like this. Why can’t Dell give its customers the same benefit of knowing which of its systems works perfectly with FreeBSD and Ubuntu Linux? Based on that information, the rest of the BSD and Linux users can figure out if their preferred OS will work with it.
According to the Q2 2007 Jon Peddie Workstation Report, AMD is still struggling with a minority market share, Dell is still on top, and Hewlett-Packard is still the number two workstation manufacturer. Buried in the details, though, is something more interesting: Dell is also the number one Linux workstation manufacturer.
According to Jon Peddie senior analyst Alex Herrerra, it’s difficult to track workstation operating system use because the OS installed by the client doesn’t always match what was shipped by the manufacturer. “But our data is pretty solid, showing that Linux has grown to about 15% over time and in the past 2 years pretty much held there,” he said.
So about 15% of the workstation market is comprised of Linux machines — far more than the barely traceable number of Linux desktop computers. Oddly, all workstation manufacturers seem to have grown in chorus. “No one workstation vendor seems to have benefited dramatically more or less with the growth of Linux, though (anecdotally) white boxes would presumably have a much higher penetration of Linux. Among Tier 1 vendors, the share of Linux doesn’t vary much from vendor to vendor, though interestingly, Dell appears to sell more workstations with Linux than other vendors (more like 20% Linux).”
After I posted yesterday’s call for stories from or about people who claim to have had comment posts deleted from Groklaw, I received an email from Pamela Jones asking me why I was “doing this.” Since such a question presumes a certain level of conspiracy, I replied that the call for stories is self-explanatory — if what people have said is true, this is a significantly interesting story for my readers, many of whom (perhaps wrongly) consider Groklaw an impartial source. The next email I got on the subject was from Ziff Davis Enterprise editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, accusing me of attacking Jones in a public forum (The Jem Report) via my call for stories, and advising me that this is not tolerable on his Internet Press Guild mailing list, of which I have been an active member for a few months. He then kicked me off the IPG list. It seems you aren’t allowed to write about Steven J Vaughan-Nichols’ friends, or question the operational practices of Web sites friendly to free software ideals, and remain an IPG member. This is a sad day for me, not because I am now an outcast — on the contrary, that’s the best part! — but because a writer I’d held a great deal of professional respect for sacked me because — I know this is bizarre — I was being too much of a journalist. I am sad because I thought SJVN was a pillar of professional journalism, the sort of guy who would encourage a hard charger like me to chase important stories like this one. That Vaughan-Nichols would kick me from an unofficial online journalism group to pressure me into killing a story and to show support for his friend Pamela Jones is, to me, shocking and heartbreaking. Unfortunately, among journalists who are also members of the free software social/political movement, there are questions you are not allowed to ask, people you are not allowed to write about, and personal politics and cronyism trump professional obligation. So let’s clear a few things up and air some dirty laundry, shall we?
Ethics are not determined by personal feelings
Writing critically is not a friendly endeavor. If you are friends with the people you write about, it is difficult to write objectively about them. It’s not impossible, but it is difficult, and the longer you write about your friends, the harder it is to determine whether or not you are treating the subject fairly. There are many people I deal with professionally whom I am on friendly terms with, but that doesn’t mean I owe them a positive article, news story, or review. A few of them have said angry things to me after an unfavorable review, but for the most part, they’ve gotten over it. I continually remind myself that I am not doing this to make anyone — myself included — look good.
Vaughan-Nichols’ problem is that he’s been doing this for too long, he’s too friendly with too many insiders, and is now more interested in protecting his friends than in protecting a good story. The very point of journalism is to investigate the hidden mysteries of the world; to report on the successes and failures within the internals of social power structures, and to give readers information that they do not have the time or resources to discover on their own. People do not need journalists to report things that can easily be learned; we write reviews to help people make informed buying decisions, we write articles to help readers understand complex concepts, and we write news stories to inform those who were not there to observe firsthand. One thing we do not ever do is influence a story to protect a friend, whether it be writing a story in favor of, or attempting to kill a story in opposition to.
Sacred GNUs
Had I attacked Pamela Jones or Groklaw ad hominem, that would have been unprofessional and I’d have been deserving of a rebuke by an elder like SJVN. However, a Google search for groklaw and deleted shows that there is ample evidence to suggest that Groklaw is censoring comments, many of which appear to be honest attempts to correct errors, and well-reasoned dissent to tightly-held opinions. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if Groklaw didn’t pretend to be an objective information source that relies on community contributions for accuracy. Investigating and writing about this practice is not an attack — Stevie Wonder driving by fast could see that. But I understand why SJVN sacked me — writing anything but praise for Groklaw is taboo among journalists who are also free software supporters. This is what I call the free software journalism club — the small cabal of online writers who try to mix free software fundamentalism with journalism.
If someone were to show that Groklaw is not an impartial source, that it does not consider any community input that does not fall in line with Free Software Foundation dogma, then that diminishes the viability of the free software journalism club (of which Groklaw is perhaps the founding member) as a whole. It airs a mile-long clothesline of dirty laundry. It shows that advocacy and fanaticism have taken over where impartiality and objectivity should be paramount. We already know that Vaughan-Nichols and Jones are part of this unspoken cabal. Perhaps before I am finished researching the Groklaw story, I will have a few more names to add to the list. Discovering them is not difficult; all I have to do is see who reacts when I publicly sacrifice some of the sacred GNUs in the free software community:
An article or review that suggests a free software program is not as good as a proprietary competitor.
Admitting that most people illegally copy and distribute proprietary software openly.
Any kind of investigative story on Groklaw or Pamela Jones.
Anything remotely in favor of anything Microsoft-related.
Questioning the operational stability of a free software operating system.
Any criticism of the GNU General Public License.
Any criticism of the Free Software Foundation as a moral authority.
Write about these things and expect retaliation and rebuke from the free software journalism club. Email and blog posts from free software supporters are one thing, but I truly fear this disease has spread to the one place that should have natural immunity to it — journalism. It is a sign that something is deeply wrong in both the free software community and the fourth estate in general when journalists rebuke one another for encroachment not of industry-recognized ethical standards, but of free software taboos.
There is much reasonable debate to be had over the above-listed taboo topics. Disagreement does not have to be in the form of a “troll,” and contrary evidence is not always “FUD,” though the fundamentalists insist otherwise. Anyone who disagrees with free software philosophy is a troll, their reasoning is FUD, and if they write professionally, they must be being paid off by Microsoft and/or SCO. Such is the free software community attitude toward dissent, fostered primarily by the free software journalism club. Reality and history say that if an idea stands up to time and criticism, it doesn’t need your voice to validate it… and if your theories and beliefs cannot hold up to well-reasoned critique, then they are probably ill-conceived. Therefore those who violently oppose dissent have something to fear — they are afraid that you might show them something convincing that will shake their beliefs. Journalists are supposed to provide or at least enable those well-reasoned critiques, not participate in one faction’s defense. You cannot be on the stage and in the crowd at the same time.
That which you deny, you give power to
Those of you reading this in the free software community need to understand that silencing a dissenting opinion does not make it go away, nor does it sway popular opinion, and it certainly does nothing to change reality. Casting out the parts of reality that you deny makes them stronger, not weaker. The bulk of popular storytelling over the past 150 years has revolved around this core theme, yet so many people refuse to accept its lessons.
I vow to continue to show the hidden parts of the reality of the technology world for as long as I maintain my technology Web sites. Those of you in the free software journalism club need to take a hard look at what you are doing, and either learn to separate your beliefs, prejudices, and emotions from your professional obligations, or get the hell out of this industry. You cannot be a free software advocate and an objective journalist; neither can you remain so by forming tight friendships with insiders and defend them by rebuking curious colleagues. You know you’re in the wrong group when asking questions gets you expelled.
As readers, the best thing you can do to reject the free software journalism club’s altered reality is to stop clicking on, linking to, or otherwise supporting its work. That means articles by Pamela Jones and Steven J Vaughan-Nichols, and their associated Web sites.
As Linux and BSD users, if you are ashamed to be in the same group with the free software fundamentalists, then start associating yourself with the adults — that means open source instead of free software, Linux instead of GNU/Linux, and rational thinking over blind advocacy.
As publishers, we all need to start taking a hard look at the stories we link to on other sites. There needs to be a better distinction between opinion and journalism. (This very piece, you might notice, is clearly marked as an editorial). Among the journalistic pieces there needs to be better quality control, which means not linking to sites that consistently publish unreliable content (cough, Forbes, cough, ZDNet Blogs, cough). Find better stories to link to; don’t support the free software journalism club.
From Kyle Bennett over at HardOCP, I’ve learned today that I’m not the only one who has problems with some tech PR firms. This time it’s a PR guy who made ridiculous claims about a computer’s performance, then refused to back them up with facts or figures. Before you continue reading, I should mention that most PR people are professional, pleasant to deal with, and admit their limitations when it comes to technical subjects. Updated
The PR guy Bennett dealt with was David Tractenberg, who is listed as the president of Traction PR. Among Traction’s list of gaming industry clients, I see only two names I recognize — New Line and Konami. New Line being the film production company (and as we all know, movie-based games are always horrible — no exceptions), and Konami being most recognized for its Nintendo smash hit from an era before a significant portion of today’s gamers were born, Contra (“Congratulations. You have defeated the vile Red Falcon and saved the universe. Consider yourself a hero.”). Not really what I’d call “heavy hitters” in the computer and console game worlds.
More interestingly, Traction PR lists its “alumni clients” on the same page, and those are some pretty significant names — Sony and HP, for instance. But I can’t help but wonder why these are ex-clients. Perhaps it was David Tractenberg’s special brand of charm in saying such things to journalists as (according to the HardOCP article authored by Kyle Bennett), “Really, were you being serious? Just need to know if want a real answer on this one…” in response to a question asking what makes the company he’s representing a market leader. Or maybe it was the creepy phone message Tractenberg reportedly left Bennett. I’ve had one or two of those in my career. If I were on Tractenberg’s client list after seeing how he behaves in email and phone conversations with the very people he is trying to reach, I would find the quickest way to become an “alumni client” myself.
I have to wonder if some of the smaller PR agencies are just press release factories that megaspam journalists in the hope that a few of them will just repost the release without question, cringing when any degree of scrutiny is applied to their marketingspeak. By contrast, some smaller operations like Pat Meier Associates and Modena Barasch Communications are consistently top-notch in their approach — innovative, attentive, and creative in all of my dealings with them. I don’t know why, but I had this unrealistic notion that public relations is a field that is able to weed out the losers early on. I guess maybe it’s like any other industry or profession, where there are people who enjoy doing good work, and people who are just doing a job.
Addendum
I got a call from David Tractenberg this evening, asking if I could modify or remove the above post. I won’t do that unless there is a factual error or inaccuracy, but I did offer to print a response or an interview with him if he’d like. Tractenberg turned those offers down, saying that he didn’t want to make this any worse than it already was. I’m not convinced that a real news story or interview on the matter would do harm, but that’s not my decision to make.
Anyway, David’s not quite as bad as the situation suggests, for the simple reason that if he were, he wouldn’t have called. I’m sure everyone has their bad days, etc., but when you talk to the public or to someone who will report to the public, you have to be so very careful with what you say. I’m sure that there is another side to the story, and that both people are “right” from their own frame of reference. So the heart of the matter — that a situation happened and that things were said and emailed that should not have been said or emailed — remains true. As to whether this speaks badly of Traction PR, I don’t really know. Despite my reluctance to remove this post, Tractenberg still offered to send us a Commodore gaming system to review, which I will gladly do if/when a system becomes available. That puts him on a level above Apple, Mayo Communications, and the other miserable PR reps that I’ve dealt with in the past who were, to their detriment, totally unrepentant for their lapses and were not able to salvage a bad situation.
As to whether the Commodore system really does perform 30% better than some or all of its competitors, that remains to be seen, assuming I do eventually get one in to review.
For quite a while I have heard, read, and been personally told stories about messages that have been deleted from Groklaw’s comment section. Specifically these are posts that do not agree with Pamela Jones’ opinions and conclusions, or seek to debate or clarify issues that are not clear-cut or obvious. I’m curious about the voices that have been silenced by Groklaw’s censor, and might like to write a story about it if I can collect enough information about the people and posts that PJ would like us not to read. So if you have posted a message on Groklaw and subsequently found that it was removed or edited, or if your Groklaw user account has been terminated without your consent, tell me about it — email me at jem at thejemreport.com.
A few days ago I wrote about how reality trumps idealism in software licensing, the point being that there is a wide gap between what free software supporters wish the software world were like, and what the software world actually is. There is a similar disconnect between a program or machine’s actual utility and the image projected by its producers, marketers, and supporters. Nothing — but nothing — in the information technology realm is perfectly intuitive for everyone, nor does it always work correctly or lack a certain percentage of production flaws. But for fans of specific (usually underdog) technologies, there is an obsession with the image that the object of their affection “just works.”
Maybe the real issue is the blind ignorance that comes packaged with the slightly unhealthy sentiment of love. How many parents have you known who think that their astonishingly average son is the smartest kid in the world, or their plain-looking daughter is a beautiful princess? How frequently have you heard people gush about how their 6-month old baby is performing at a 10-month old level, with all the fervor of someone who wholeheartedly believes that such trivia is impressive and interesting to anyone who does not share the child’s genes? Somewhere inside, these people know that they’re hawking absurdities, and masking worries about the obvious with hope for change.
I think the same is true beyond parents and children. It’s certainly true in sports and politics, where it’s widely believed that if you yell loud enough and argue strongly enough, that the facts and probabilities will be irrevocably swayed and reality will be changed. It never is, but that hasn’t ever stopped anyone from insisting that “Our team’s gonna win!” when the odds or the facts suggest otherwise. Sadly, aficionados wrongly assume that if their sports team or political party loses, it is because they and their fellow fans did not wish hard enough.
In the technology world we have Apple fans who silently ignore the reality of myriad hardware defects and unethical business practices, Apple’s refusal to replace known defective products, and the recent incident where Apple iPhone customers got screwed out of $200, not to mention Apple’s life-long habit of abandoning platforms with no advance warning. Apple is arguably worse than Microsoft in many (if not all) ways, but something about its overpriced, unreliable fashion accessories appeals to a solid 3% of the computing market. And that 3% are cut from the same mold as the gushing parents, screaming fans, and arguing politicos.
The same applies to many (if not most) Linux and BSD fans — blind advocacy frequently overcomes the reality of the software. Too frequently that means distorting or ignoring the facts in order to puff up the object of the fans’ affection. The point of all of this blustering is partly just raw emotional expression, but a larger portion of it is evangelism. When you’re a real fan, you want to be among other fans, and you want as many of them as possible. Each conflict your team engages becomes a war between idealistically opposite factions, a struggle between good and evil, and David vs. Goliath revisited — all in one.
With computers, fans like to claim that something “just works,” meaning no manual-reading or configuration is necessary, and you’ll never have a reasonable problem with the product. That is never true, though. Everything needs maintenance, and all things degrade over time. Apple computers have all of the same problems that other computers do, and the operating system is no less bug- and problem-prone than most others. A MacBook Pro with OS X does not make you more creative than a cheap eMachines with Windows ME. Your Linux desktop computer will crash and need to be restarted sometimes. You will run into frequent permissions problems on a desktop Linux system, and you won’t always know that they’re permissions problems. Windows doesn’t work all that well with all Windows games. OpenBSD performs poorly under a lot of circumstances. FreeBSD is labor-intensive to maintain over a long period of time. There is no technology utopia; anyone who says differently is just showing you more pictures of their “beautiful” ugly kids.
A preliminary report on LWN.net indicates that AMD will soon release the hardware specifications for its graphics chips, starting with the R500 onward. If this is both true and accurate, this is the best news the open source world has had in a long time. Open source drivers can be mostly or totally useless, but open hardware specifications — those that are made available by the manufacturer and do not require a non-disclosure agreement — enable the entire open source operating system world to write good drivers.
Last year I wrote a lengthy piece about OpenBSD’s quest for hardware specifications. I link to it frequently because it shows the real front line in the open source operating system world, and explains why and how the effort to write new hardware drivers is getting much more difficult. One of the things I learned that really surprised me while doing interviews for that article and the one on the OLPC proprietary hardware fiasco (both articles came from the same set of interviews and the same body of research) was that open, complete, and accurate specifications for hardware are far more important than an open source driver for the same. You can have all of the source code to a driver, but if you don’t have the hardware specs, it is very difficult to figure out what the code does. It’s like trying to do component-level modifications to a motherboard without a schematic — you could probably do it, given experience, time, and enough resources to fail dozens of times, but why would you want to?
Secondly, open driver source code may not be any good, or directly usable by anything other than the platform it was intended for. It’s possible that the driver is horribly written, in which case you might be better off writing it from scratch anyway. While it certainly helps to be able to look at someone else’s driver code to figure out how to safely, securely, and efficiently interact with the hardware, the code for a FreeBSD driver will be almost entirely unusable in the Linux kernel, and even other BSD projects. The various abilities of each operating system kernel conform to different design philosophies, most notably in memory allocation, process scheduling, security, and threading models. That’s not to mention the free software and open source licensing issues surrounding copied driver code, which has caused much trouble lately. Aside from technical and licensing barriers, many operating system developers would simply prefer to write their own code rather than use someone else’s.
When you have open and complete hardware specs, nobody is left out. Linux is the biggest player in the open source world and is most likely to get it an open source driver before any other Unix-like operating system. Sun could probably manage to arrange something for Solaris as well, but Sun’s history says that they’d more likely pay to develop a proprietary driver instead. FreeBSD is always on the cusp — it has proprietary Nvidia drivers, for instance, but they’ve never worked as well as they do on Linux. OpenBSD doesn’t want anyone’s binary drivers, not that there are any available for it anyway, so it’s totally left out of the video driver game. Open specifications give every operating system the same, standard resources to work with — and nobody gets left out.
