Originally this article was supposed to be a book review of the upcoming O’Reilly title Subject to Change, but I was so appalled by its content that I felt compelled to shift focus to the more important issue of ethics in publishing. This book reflects a sinister trend in the tech book publishing industry that favors vapid, tedious material that serves to advise readers without revealing the big secrets. The purpose is for the authors (usually a group of writers, and most of them high-level managers) to promote their company and its services by giving readers just enough information. If they want the advanced material, they need to buy the rest at a premium price by going straight to the company for its professional services. Meanwhile, the publisher bathes in a sea of money while the authors relentlessly promote the book on their blogs and in their conference keynotes and panel discussions. Tech books have increasingly become corporate marketing vehicles, sacrificing the exciting A-list technical material that regular tech book buyers and enthusiasts have come to expect from companies like O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education. This isn’t the first book I’ve seen that gives readers a 20,000-word marketing pitch — that honor belongs to Enterprise Ajax (and it’s about three times longer). I’m bothered — sickened — to see that not only is this trend continuing unabated, but it’s actually become a habit.

Subject to Change is written by four people who hold high positions at a company named Adaptive Path. You’ve probably heard of that company because its CEO, Jesse James Garrett, is credited with coining the term Ajax in an essay he wrote a while ago. Other than that, there isn’t anything particularly remarkable about Adaptive Path, other than the fact that it seems to be a successful consulting firm. But from reading this book, you’d think that Adaptive Path was the second coming. Its logo is splattered across every cover surface, larger and more prominent even than O’Reilly’s. The authors speak in the first-person (usually plural, sometimes singular) and turn nearly every subject into a plug for their company.

The book’s primary content reads like a marketing pitch for Adaptive Path services. It’s packed with enthusiasm but entirely devoid of substance. There are whole paragraphs that meander around non-specific subjects, one leading into another until you’re pretty sure you’ve got the gist of what the authors are trying to say, but you have no idea how to apply it to your business. Each chapter and section contains, in no specific order: Lots of inspirational hand-waving and encouragement, vague and wide-ranging advice on what to avoid in terms of policy, quotes from CEOs and news articles, examples from the industry — both good and bad — that are over-generalized and removed from all necessary context, and the brilliant solutions that Adaptive Path has provided its clients to solve these nebulously stated, over-worded, general business problems. Here’s an example of the latter from page 118:

At Adaptive Path, we look to the other competencies within an organization and combine design with those to generate more effective solutions.

If that isn’t a (badly phrased) line destined for a television commercial or print ad with a beautiful actor leaning toward a desk to point instructively at a computer screen to show guidance to another, seated, less attractive or lower status actor, then I don’t know what is. It’s the sort of rubbish meant to inspire cigar-chomping pointy-haired CEOs to pick up the phone and yell, “Johnson! Get in my office! I just saw a great TV commercial and I want these ‘Adopt-A-Bath’ people working for us, pronto!”

And as an example of its empty, overlong, non-promotional content, from the intro to chapter 4:

Creating engaging user experiences requires a solid understanding of the people you want to serve, which inevitably means doing research. Research is a reliable way to gain insight and deal with uncertainty, but to incorporate the ideas from chapter 3 you may need to reconsider how you think about research. In our experience, a lot of research does nothing but keep research staff busy; however, well-executed research can transform your organization’s understanding of its customers, and help your team create compelling experiences.

I feel like I just walked in a big circle. I see a lot of words (most of them are one word — research), but they’re all inside of diluted phrases that individually offer a tiny kernel of useful information. This literary hand-waving pervades the entire book to the point that if it were properly condensed into concise, actionable information without any self-promotion, this book’s text could fit comfortably on a CD jewel case booklet. There were so many editing 101 mistakes — so many basic, elementary book management issues with this title that I am astonished that the usually sharp minds at O’Reilly let it pass with their approval.

People want to read tech books because they’re excited at the prospect of expanding their technical understanding through an impassioned expert’s narrative. Had Subject to Change been about Adaptive Path’s company history and its business methods and corporate culture as a successful Web 2.0 company on the cutting edge of technology, that might be an interesting read. Similarly, a book that clearly taught all of Adaptive Path’s A-list material — the processes, philosophies, and practices that make it a leader in its industry — would be successful as a niche book for those interested in industry trends and best practices. But this is neither. It pretends to be a book that teaches readers how to reshape their methods to be more innovation-friendly and client-oriented — a compelling but not revolutionary concept — but it offers absolutely no new thinking on the subject. The entire volume of useful information in Subject to Change can be summed up thusly: “Think outside the box, and pay attention to customer needs. And if you can’t do that, hire us!” Take that to heart and save yourself the time and money wasted on this book.

Perhaps I should not be so surprised and offended at this book. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it happen. Subject to Change is representative of a growing genre of corporate promotion books that are all wind and no sail. The people who write them are D-list Internet celebrities with successful blogs; they are people who speak at conferences and participate in panel discussions. As a result of their public speaking and presentation careers, these people make excellent book promoters and thus, excellent book authors as far as publishers are concerned. It doesn’t matter if the book sucks, because it’s going to be promoted as though it were the tech industry’s Valley of the Dolls. It will sell regardless of the quality of its content. Having these pseudo-famous people write books is good business for publishers — at least in the short term, while there is brand equity to burn.

From the author’s point of view, such book deals are a once in a lifetime opportunity to promote his business. He doesn’t care if he makes any money from book sales. It would take some kind of miracle book to eclipse his salary and stock options. Sure, royalty money is always nice, but the real money will roll in when tens of thousands of potential customers masquerading as readers flood his sales department with impassioned inquiries.

So on the one hand there are publishers that want to produce books that will sell, and having authors who can promote their own books is an added bonus. On the other hand there are potential authors who see an unprecedented opportunity to get more clients and improve their status in the industry. Mix the two together and you have a money-making machine that transfers the publisher’s brand equity to the author’s company. Eventually it may be that the majority of new, non-reprint technical books are corporate promotion deals — that is, until readers wise up to this scam and start demanding quality. Maybe what we need is Tim O’Reilly 2.0 to come along and save us from this corporate promotional crap and deliver books that offer fascinating technical facts and details that inspire readers.

It makes my stomach turn to see that one of my heroes and idols — Tim O’Reilly — personally approved of Subject to Change and called it a “terrific book” on the inside cover, though most of his endorsement addresses the book’s topic and not its actual implementation. His opinion is ill-conceived; he does not understand that commercial influences, be they internal (“We can’t say that about our own product!”) or external (“We can’t say that about an advertiser’s product!”) are equally destructive to the integrity of good technical writing. They also apply in the opposite direction — “We MUST say that about our product!” — and that’s what we have with Subject to Change.

There will never be a good book on innovative business thinking; no one qualified to write it would take any amount of money to give away his secrets. And so we have this spammy self-worshipping tripe in the form of books like Subject to Change.

As for me, I haven’t decided if I should be more selective in the books I agree to write about, or if I should continue to call it like it is, naming-and-shaming the literary turds in the technology book pool. That is, if O’Reilly and Pearson aren’t too offended at this article to continue sending me review copies. Frankly, it wouldn’t break my heart if that happened — reading bad books makes me miserable.

Brian Proffitt over at LinuxToday posted a rebuke of an InfoWorld troll experiment in which a writer purposefully tried to incite an entity known as the “Linux community” to attack him. Such actions are unbelievably stupid by any measure of sanity, and the Web does not need further proof that cyberspace is filled with highly destructive, undercooked man-children who make real-life threats over everything from books about Java to who has the better rogue talent spec in World of Warcraft. There are so many bad assumptions in the InfoWorld writer’s thesis — for instance, the illusion of a single, cohesive “Linux community” — that I hardly know where to start. But Brian Proffitt isn’t entirely in the correct frame of reference either. Yes, there are a lot of violent Linux people, and they are the dominant public face of Linux for many technology news readers, but there is another side to this story on the publishing end of things. Brian’s right in that he should be more discriminating with his news picks, but I have the feeling his job is going to get tougher as the rise of Linux blogs and advocacy sites make it more difficult to find reliable and authoritative Linux-oriented stories.

In his criticism of the InfoWorld tripe, Proffitt compares the InfoWorld blogger to someone walking into a Boston bar and insulting the Red Sox, or hitting a beehive with a stick. What he seems to have overlooked is that with these analogies, he’s admitted that Linux advocates can be violent, angry brutes who enjoy participating in online harassment and abuse. You know that bees have stingers, and that sports fans in bars could potentially be violent if incited, but I did not know until now that I was expected to think that Linux advocates were equally dangerous. I mean I did think that, but I didn’t realize that this was supposed to be as obvious as the notion that bees have stingers. Proffitt in essence concedes that there is a large contingent of dangerous Linux people who will come out and sting if there is a perceived attack on the hive, and that purposefully stirring up trouble will draw the reaction the effort deserves.

This really is true; there really are some unbelievably horrid people in the free software and open source worlds. First, though, let’s establish the fact that there is no “Linux community.” This is a term used when someone wants to either credit or blame Linux as an operating system, free software as a techno-religion, or open source as a development model. There is no central community structure; Linux as a community is, in the most optimistic light, a large number of individual software development projects that are designed to work with one another in some way, supported loosely by a group of partisan distro fiefdoms and financially enabled by a handful of corporations who make money on services and hardware products peripheral to Linux. People only invoke the “Linux community” when they want to marvel at or place blame upon something associated with Linux. In this case, it’s online violence.

Proffitt goes on to cite a frequently regurgitated accusation among Linux activists — that InfoWorld posted the tedious, sickeningly sanctimonious 5-part troll post to get more Web traffic (and therefore ad dollars). Perhaps this is true, and there are a small minority of media productions that really do make money primarily off of this philosophy, but InfoWorld does not seem to be one of them. The only consistent effort I have seen — reading between 50 and 100 tech news stories per day — to bash Linux beehives to make money is Dan Lyons at Forbes. He is part of a psychotically-fashioned sect of the news media that makes money off of other people’s anger. Howard Stern, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Ted Nugent, and Al Franken are all in this same category. They are making money off of readers, listeners, and viewers who have a masochistic urge to be infuriated. On the one hand you have writers and pundits who enjoy upsetting people, and on the other you have people who enjoy being upset.

InfoWorld does not fit this pattern, nor does the befuddled author of the five articles that bash Ubuntu, so I think Brian Proffitt’s accusation is unjustified (unless he knows something I don’t about InfoWorld and its parent company, IDG, which produces the various LinuxWorld Conference & Expo events). More than likely, the InfoWorld blogger was trying to teach us all a lesson about… something. What specifically, I don’t really know, but I’m sure he had some good and sound reasons when he started the 5-part anti-Ubuntu series, even if they did not translate into print correctly.

Speaking of Dan Lyons, look at him now, with his famous (and terribly written) Steve Jobs blog and his hugely profitable book deal. Linux advocates have been shouting for years about what a monster he is, but who really is to blame? The monster writing things that upset people, or the people who are easily upset and feed that monster with their online clicks? Lyons at least admitted he was wrong about the SCO Group and hinted that there was some measure of personal antagonism in it for him, referring to Linux advocates as “nerds” on Forbes.com and “freetards” on his terrible blog. Rob Enderle said that he took up the anti-Linux, pro-SCO cause in his writing primarily because of the rabid Linux activists who viciously attacked him. Enderle did not, to use Brian Proffitt’s metaphor, swat the hive — the hive came and attacked him, and he took it upon himself to get revenge for it. Keep in mind that both Lyons and Enderle were working with a company history and inside information at SCO that made its court case against IBM (with regard to SCO code illegally included in the Linux kernel) look lopsided in SCO’s favor. From their frame of reference, the Linux people were the aggressors.

I think it goes a little deeper than the people who like being upset. There is a growing mass of Linux advocates who have a strong need to act out against people like Lyons. When Bill O’Reilly rants and raves on television, people yell back at their television sets and complain about it over beers at taverns and at the weekly poker game. But there are some Linux people who, given the greater power and freedom of the Web, have taken it upon themselves to exact revenge against writers who speak out against Linux and/or free software.

Revenge is a messy business; innocent people will get hurt, perfectly reciprocal harm is almost never possible, vengeance does not return reality to its previous unharmed state, and righteous anger never ends with a feeling of justice. History is replete with examples of these facts. Just like Enderle and Lyons wanted revenge against the Linux people who attacked them, the Linux advocates needed revenge against them for what they perceived as ad hominem attacks.

There is something far worse than overreacting Forbes editors and IT analysts, though, and that’s where we come back to the InfoWorld blogger. He is like many writers in the technology world — he is an activist first, a journalist second. I did this too, for the middle portion of my writing career, while under the toxic influence of the pathetically underqualified and overhyped SourceForge Inc. editorial staff, but I’ve since reformed. The trouble is that when you write about technology and you learn so much about it, you start to think of yourself as a supreme expert. Once you reach that self-assessment, you begin to think that your opinions and preferences are better than other people’s because they don’t know as much as you do. You assume that you know better — you make an emotional connection to what you think is right — and once that happens, you start to justify spreading misinformation or omitting important details that don’t jive with your beliefs so that your readers will form the “right” opinions. You begin to adopt the attitude that it’s okay to lie if you know you are right.

And so we have Linux journalist-activists, who know that they are right — people like Pamela Jones of Groklaw; Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of eWeek, Linux Watch, and DesktopLinux.com; Joe Barr of Linux.com; Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet Blogs, and this whole site, which is dedicated to free software advocacy-journalism, among a few others. They print pro-Linux, pro-GPL, pro-GNU, pro-FSF, pro-Stallman, anti-Microsoft, anti-SCO, and sometimes even anti-BSD articles and news stories. They have created this gang of angry Linux activists, and feed them with both glowing propaganda and blistering invective. If these clowns were standing on stage in front of a group of people and incited them with misinformation, omitted information, advocacy, and harsh rebukes of genuine criticism, and that group went out to threaten people’s lives and destroy private property, they would be charged with a crime. But when they do it on the Web, and the result is death threats, DDoS attacks, crapflooding of comment sections and forums, and racial slurs and other hate speech — even while outwardly feigning disgust at such actions — they ignore the damage, or make half-hearted pleas for the attacks to stop so that the entire “community” is not tarnished. It is these activist-journalists that do the tarnishing, not the people they incite and influence. Even if they don’t directly incite online violence, they actively attempt to build an atmosphere in which it is agreeable to take revenge against dissent.

Pamela Jones created Daniel Lyons with her snarky, irreverent commentaries on Linux as our sacrament, Richard Stallman as our computational lord and savior, and SCO as the unreasonably evil anti-Christ. Over the past few years, Lyons and Jones have acted as shadow brothers, variously attacking each other in direct and indirect ways on Forbes.com and Groklaw.net, trying to show how much of a moron the other was for staunchly defending his or her tightly-held beliefs. It’s not over, though. It continues to this day, with fact-free paranoid investigations into how many ex-Microsoft employees work for what investment group or tech patent firm, or what big evil corporation could be funding which anti-Linux journalists. We will have more Dan Lyonses with the rise of advocacy blogs and the willingness of sites like Linux Today to link to them as though they were reliable news and information sources. As long as these literary turds are floating in the pool of the Web, spreading their attack-vocacy and inciting online violence against people who disagree — even if the dissenters are despicable — we will all, as Linux users and technology news readers, suffer.

So yes, Brian, as an LT reader I want you to cut out the trolls, but I want you to do it on both sides. Cast off the InfoWorld bloggers and the Pamela Joneses with equal enthusiasm — that will be the greatest service to your readers, even if they end up attacking you for it.

There’s more to say on this subject, but this isn’t the right time to print it.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.

Ed. note: This is our final political article, capping a weekend of Presidency IV coverage. We hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as we enjoyed producing it. Back in high school, some politically-minded classmates first instructed me on the difference between the political left and right. On the most basic level, conservatives want less government, and liberals want more government. This applies to laws, corporate regulations, central government planning and management, and personal restrictions and rules for citizens. Since I have always struggled with the concept of “following the rules” — just remembering what they are is a challenge for me — conservatism has generally appealed to me. After this past weekend’s GOP debate, I’m totally confused. Republicans, who have been traditional conservatives, now want a larger and stronger federal government; and Democrats, who have been traditional liberals, seem to want to eliminate a lot of the oppressive regulations and policies set forth by the current Republican administration. Have the sides switched?

The American founders were conservatives by 20th century standards. Coming from an oppressive British imperial government, they feared a strong American federal government and established the U.S. constitution to ensure that the kind of oppressive political atmosphere that created the United States could never happen there again. These are facts and are not in dispute. However, in modern times we struggle with the notion that our country has evolved beyond the founders’ vision, and that we must adjust, ignore, or reinterpret the constitution in order to deal with global and domestic problems that the founders never envisioned. And this is precisely where America’s 21st century political quagmire remains.

All throughout this weekend, I was inundated with references to Ronald Reagan as the pillar of modern conservatism, and Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln as its archetypes. But what have these leaders really shown us? What did they represent in their time in the White House? Lincoln advocated a large and powerful federal government — so much so that he took the entire nation to war against itself. More Americans were killed in the civil war than in all other American-involved wars combined, all to establish the fact that the federal government has ultimate power, and states have limited rights. This is not a conservative stance; it advocates big government, and is not what the founders intended.

Theodore Roosevelt abandoned the Republican party and started the Progressive party, which caused the Republicans to lose the 1912 presidential election. He was the Ross Perot of his time, except he had more popular support and actually defeated his Republican opponent. How on earth can modern Republican conservatives look up to Theodore Roosevelt as an icon and an idol when they incessantly proclaim the paramount importance of a Republican candidate being elected to the White House? Roosevelt was the world’s first Republican presidential election spoiler.

Ronald Reagan increased the size of government, spent billions of dollars of American citizens’ money on weapons that were never used in order to out-scare the Soviets, and established a political legacy of heavy spending and heavy inflation. A hundred years from now, when political analysts are commenting on why America fell, the huge amount of wasteful government spending funded by the gratuitous printing of money to pay government debts will be listed as a significant contributing factor. And Ronald Reagan did this — he stood for bigger government with big (military) spending. Isn’t that what conservatives are supposed to be against — aren’t we supposed to be for lower taxes, less spending, and less government interference? Just a few years after Reagan was out of office, one of the most iconic Democrats of all time — Bill Clinton — reduced government spending and eliminated the federal budget deficit. Have we formally entered Bizarro World?

Speaking of Clinton, his main presidential idol was Thomas Jefferson, who was the original cheerleader for limited federal control and regulation. Jefferson was heavily in favor of states’ rights. That hardly sounds like Bill Clinton.

I think this past weekend’s Reagan worship is little more than a bad case of “pain is temporary, glory is forever.” We’ve forgotten (or perhaps not yet realized) that Reagan’s policies have destroyed or will destroy us, and that his charisma and charm — like Bill Clinton’s — is all we remember in pictures and video clips now that the pain of the domestic economic rot of the 80s, when America’s middle class began to die, is over.

I attribute the corruption and fall of conservatism in the late 20th century to an increasing connection between outdated and irrelevant Christian moral codes with the Republican party. The liberal Democrats want to avoid making rules to prevent abortion and gay marriage — they want less government in this respect — and the so-called conservatives want to create federal regulations to ban these things — more governmental control. A true conservative would insist that it is not the federal government’s responsibility to regulate these things, yet here we are with the regulation of these issues at the forefront of Republican political debate.

Do these neo-conservatives think that homosexuality and abortion did not exist in the 1700s, that the founders were not aware of these practices? Do the neocons think that the founders did not wisely choose to leave abortion and homosexual issues out of the constitution and other statements of federal policy? Abortion predates America, the protestant religious sect, and the English language. Homosexuality has been around — and heavily documented — since before Romulus murdered Remus. To think that the American founders were ignorant of these acts (and indeed that at least one of them did not at some time participate in one of them), or that these practices were suddenly introduced in the 1970s in America, is nothing more than pure arrogance. But activists on both sides of the political spectrum have no respect for the ideals on which this country was built. It’s about arguing and being “right” instead of being “correct.” The ability to shout loudly and argue successfully has superseded the need to rely on facts, accurate information, and intelligent observation. It’s a lot like the majority of technology journalism.

If anything, religious Republicans should be in favor of more Bible-like governmental control and regulation, of a “nanny state” that forces an outdated and unnatural sense of morality on an unwilling populace. The atheists and liberals should want less government, less regulation, and more distance from the kind of despotic dictatorship that the god of the Old Testament exemplified. The simplified definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” have lost their meaning for me — I no longer know which group I can safely throw my lot in with because they’ve both come to represent the same kind of socio-political disease.

Secretly, the neo-conservatives really do want bigger government, even if they publicly say otherwise. Unfortunately, so do the liberals. The only difference is that neocons think that they are morally obligated to support an oppressive nanny state (exactly like the Taliban did in Afghanistan), and liberals simply think that they’ve got the perfect plan for costly, widespread regulation (which works well on a small western-European-nation-sized scale, but cannot possibly work on an America-sized scale). The neocons think the founders were unaware of homosexuality and abortion and did not anticipate modern, Christian-judged immorality; and the liberals think that the founders didn’t appropriately consider the future needs of a large and needy American nation with 50 states plus protectorates. They’re both on the same level of wrong. I’m not convinced that there is any way out of this, that there is a “good” side to pick, but as a disenfranchised conservative I’m tired of the neo-conservative worship of spendthrift policies, bloodlust and warmongering, empire-building, and pro-big-government historical figures while paying lip service to freedom through limited government. These are not conservative ideals.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.

The questions a company will not answer are always interesting. Recently I asked TransGaming if its seeming abandonment of its users who rely on Cedega to play World of Warcraft was merely an oversight, or if the company is too busy concentrating on its Mac projects to bother with Linux users. Almost two weeks ago, Blizzard Entertainment pushed through a required World of Warcraft patch that made the game unplayable for many Linux users, reducing frame rates to unacceptable levels, causing distorted sound, and making the OpenGL graphics engine more difficult to switch to. Considering TransGaming’s history of rapidly addressing WoW patch issues, this is unusual behavior. Couple that with total silence from the company and you have a genuine mystery on your hands. What’s going on at TransGaming?

Cedega subscribers pay U.S. $5.50 per month to get the latest updates to the game engine that allows many popular Windows games to run nicely in Linux (review here). If you stop paying, you can forever use the newest version you downloaded. However, with Cedega-breaking World of Warcraft patches coming out almost once per month, a Cedega subscription is practically a requirement for Linux WoW players. Traditionally, TransGaming has responded quickly to WoW patch issues and not only communicated its efforts via its Web site and user forum, but issued a game engine update that fixes the problem within a matter of days. This time around, though, TransGaming representatives have ignored the 2.2.0 patch problems and refused to respond to bug reports and forum posts related to these issues. When I sent TransGaming a press request email asking what was going on, I was not given the benefit of a reply.

It’s possible that the WoW 2.2.0 patch has introduced huge problems that TransGaming programmers are having trouble fixing, and they are so busy working on the problem that they don’t have time to let their rapidly diminishing subscriber base know that a solution is forthcoming. That would be a fairly unusual situation though, especially in the face of several forum posters (myself included) vowing to cancel Cedega subscriptions if there is no immediate communication from the company. How many subscribers can TransGaming lose before it takes the issue seriously?

Perhaps TransGaming is no longer concerned with Linux subscribers, and doesn’t mind losing them. Some have speculated that TransGaming is overextended in trying to meet its Apple obligations, which are the Cedega-like Cider gaming engine and a contract with Electronic Arts to port several existing games to OS X, not to mention the contract with CCP to bring EVE to Cedega and Cider. Could this be a case of too many irons in the fire?

Maybe TransGaming execs have come to the realization that fruitheads will pay any amount of money for anything Apple-related, and Linux users are reluctant to pay for anything, ever. Apple is, comically, the low-hanging fruit for TransGaming. You don’t have to look very far to see how committed the company is to the OS X platform — in his latest message, the TransGaming founder gushes over the gaming industry response to his company’s attention toward Macs, and the Cider product page says: “Why should developers and publishers consider the Mac market? In the last quarter alone, Apple shipped over 1.5 million Macs, generating the most profitable quarter in Apple’s history. Apple’s financial results represent growth of 36%, more than three times the industry growth rate with analysts forecasting an installed base in excess of 12 million Intel Macs by the end of 2007. A poll of Mac purchasers conducted by Apple shows that nearly 50% of buyers are new to Mac which implies that more and more Windows users are switching to Mac. With only a small collection of games available historically, the Mac gaming market today has been a void that Cider is now filling.” That may well be a nice way of saying “Screw you $5.50 per month Linux chumps — Apple’s where the money is.”

On behalf of all jilted Cedega subscribers, I’d like to sarcastically thank Steve Jobs for providing an artistic-poseur metrosexual identity and personality cult for all of the world’s richest morons. Without crApple, TransGaming would still be trying hard to maintain a good Linux product. So how long will it be until TransGaming dumps Cedega altogether?

The only good news is, the latest Wine release solves all of the problems that Cedega has with WoW patch 2.2.0, so you don’t need to go running back to Windows just yet, but you do need to install and configure Wine. Hope you’re not missing out on any raids in the meantime.

Update: Shortly after this article published, TransGaming woke up and started replying to week-old problem reports and forum posts. Unfortunately, the responses offer only superficial advice that doesn’t fix subscriber problems. It’s a start, but the real issue is not whether TransGaming will fix these problems eventually — the issue is that the lightning speed of Cedega updates post-WoW patches is entirely gone. Cedega burns while TransGaming fiddles with Apple ports.

Discuss this article now on our forum.

Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.

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!

Discuss this article now on our forum.

Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.

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.

Discuss this article now on our forum.

Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.

In the majority of the software world, companies and open source projects alike compete with one another in terms of quality, cost, documentation, ease of use, and necessary program features. A small, unethical portion of the market sees things a different way; companies in this minority category want to find a way to force people to buy their products. Today I present you with two examples of such underhanded business tactics: Microsoft and SafeMedia Corp, both of which are petitioning governmental entities to legislate them into hyper-profitability at everyone else’s expense.

In Microsoft’s case, it’s pushing to have its proprietary MS Office file format become the standard for government documents and communications both in states in the US and entire countries in other parts of the world. Obviously if Office’s file format is made the standard, that will impel governments to buy large numbers of Microsoft Office licenses, and Microsoft will make a lot of money. One could argue that if Microsoft made a superior office suite with competitive features at a reasonable price, such dirty tricks would not be necessary.

The other company is one you likely have not heard of — SafeMedia Corp. It’s a small, Florida-based corporation that produces a P2P network traffic block technology. Though it is implemented in a dedicated appliance (the Clouseau), SafeMedia’s long-term goal is to get its filters into cable modems. The filtering technology does not just involve ports — it seems to actually filter out certain kinds of protocols that indicate BitTorrent and other distributed file sharing technologies ala programs like FrostWire and KaZaa. Unfortunately, according to my testing, it also weeds out a large number of false positives in the form of legitimate BitTorrent traffic. Integrating SafeMedia’s technology into cable modems would be a disaster for ISPs, broadband Internet customers, BitTorrent Inc., and anyone who uses distributed filesharing technologies to distribute their products or services. But SafeMedia would make a lot of money, and that is why its CEO, Safwat Fahmy, provided written testimony to both the US House of Representatives and the Senate that shamelessly plugged his products as the perfect solution to unwanted filesharing. Quoted in part from an email press release sent to me this morning by SafeMedia’s PR firm:

SafeMedia Corporation CEO and Founder, Safwat Fahmy outlined the dangers and risks of contaminated P2P networks today (Tuesday, July 24, 2007) in his written testimony before the U.S. House Of Representatives Committee On Oversight and Government Reform, at the “Inadvertent Filesharing Over Peer-To-Peer Networks” hearing. The SafeMedia Chairman focused how P2P networks operate, the features and characteristics of “contaminated” P2P networks. Fahmy also explained in his written testimony how SafeMedia’s technology was developed to address illegal sharing of copyrighted materials on contaminated P2P networks and how it will help to protect consumers, students ,businesses and our national security from the serious privacy, identity theft and security risks.

And:

Historically, Fahmy told the Senate hearing, “P2P networks were developed to overcome limitations on bandwidth and processing/storage so arguably there were some benefits to using P2P networking as opposed to the client-server model. But frankly, the historic reasons for developing P2P networks do not exist in today’s world: limitations on bandwidth and processing/storage are easily remedied by clustering many low cost servers and the deployment of wideband fiber to deliver even more powerful performance than P2P networks.”

So BitTorrent is made obsolete by clusters and fiberoptic Internet services? I can’t trust Mr. Fahmy’s expertise when he makes statements like that; clearly he does not understand the fact that BitTorrent is used by companies who cannot afford hugely expensive hardware and bandwidth resources. It is not a luxury — it’s a necessity to many software and media businesses. But how can I trust him anyway? Fahmy is directly involved with a business that sells products that would benefit from this testimony’s acceptance, so in effect the testimony is one big sales pitch. His words are biased in favor of profits, and tainted with misinformation that unnecessarily polarizes the issue, and therefore meaningless before the congressional committees — or at least we must all hope that our elected representatives are smart enough to understand this. Presumably they have been in politics long enough to know when they’re being wooed by greedy CEOs or their lobbyists.

Just as disturbing are Microsoft’s dirty tricks in getting its OOXML file format adopted as a standard in the state of Massachusetts and the country of Portugal (among several others in Europe and South America). But Microsoft is under greater scrutiny and faces opposition from both the open source software community and corporate competitors Sun Microsystems and IBM, both of which have an interest in seeing the competing OpenDocument format gain wider adoption. In contrast to Microsoft’s proprietary OOXML, OpenDocument is an open standard that is free to implement in any software, so it is not platform-dependent like OOXML, which is currently only implemented in Microsft Office 2007. Consumers will not suffer any consequences of OpenDocument becoming a state or national standard because they can download and use the open source OpenOffice.org suite to view and edit them. If Microsoft wins the format battle, you may be forced to buy (or “pirate”) MS Office 2007.

What concerns me more than Microsoft and its Office format is SafeMedia’s congressional manipulation. The issue has made it into an amended Senate bill which will control education funding. If the corporations that will benefit from this — SafeMedia, the MPAA and the RIAA — succeed, they will make money and we regular citizens will suffer by losing federal funding for 25 colleges and universities as they struggle to prevent P2P file transfers. Such prevention is an exercise in futility; even the SafeMedia technology does not filter out direct file transfers via email, FTP, HTTP, or SSH. To filter out all “bad” traffic, you also have to filter out some or all of the legitimate traffic as well, crippling the network’s usefulness and limiting the ability of those 25 institutions to teach and conduct research.

If only Microsoft and SafeMedia made products that sold themselves without legislative help. If only their sales pitches focused on competitive quality, features, and pricing, there would be no need to try to force people to become their customers. Perhaps the awful truth is that people do not want to spend a lot of money on Microsoft Office 2007 (and by extension, Windows Vista), or they make good use of P2P filesharing and don’t want it filtered out. This practice of lobbying our governments to force us to use substandard or unwanted products is nothing short of predatory capitalism, and I think it stinks.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.

The GNU General Public License version 3 is unleashed to the world today, ready and willing to conquer perceived problems with the legal system in the U.S. and other countries. It’s been carefully considered, debated, and examined by very smart people with a lot of experience with software license law and advocacy. Programmers, lawyers, and businesspeople have looked it over and petitioned changes until most parties were reasonably satisfied with the result. So today is, ostensibly, GPLv3 release day, but I think in the future that it will be remembered in a sad sort of way. We will look back on this and say that June 29, 2007 was the day when the Free Software Foundation jumped the shark, creating an impassable chasm where there was already an uncomfortable rift between the Free Software Foundation and GNU Project, and the larger free software and open source worlds. The GPLv3 adds restrictions galore for developers and users alike, none of which are designed to be understood by the people who matter most — programmers and users. The FSF tells us that the new restrictions in the GPLv3, on patents, patent licensing, and hardware capabilities, are there to make us more free. That’s right — more restrictions are being forced on us so that we can be “more free.” If that sounds like a big steaming pile of nonsense to you, then I’m with you, brother.

Free as in “do as I say”

The GNU General Public License version 3 introduces a level of restriction that is unprecedented in Free Software Foundation-approved software licenses. Though the language is exceedingly difficult to understand (more on that later), the license seems to require all people who modify GPLv3 software to grant all users of that software a “non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license” for all of the patents you might have. So if you create some GPLv3-licensed software to use in, say, a game console, you may have to give all users of that game console a copy of the source code (no surprise there — the GPLv2 requires that, too) and a license to all patents on game console components and technologies that you invented — and maybe all of your other patents on other devices as well. So if a competitor goes to the store and buys your game console, then finds a cheaper way to make the same thing using the same software you created, they could make a case that you have no patent claims against them for copying your designs.

Furthermore, the GPLv3 stipulates that you must waive the ability to include anti-circumvention technologies, and also include “installation information,” which means you have to provide any files or data that unlocks or controls hardware. Well the DVD and DRM people aren’t going to allow you to give away their decryption keys, so forget about your game console playing DVD movies or DRM-encumbered audio files. And if you want to put checks into the hardware to make sure that the software it runs will not harm the device? That could be against the GPLv3 as well, if it prevents running modified versions of the software.

Forget about the concept of GPLv3-licensed computer games, too — if you can’t prevent people from running unmodified versions of the software, you can’t prevent cheating.

Legalese

Restrictions aside, the aspect of the GPL version 3 that bothers me most is that it is totally impossible for a layman to understand. I read every license for every program I review. None of them are particularly easy to understand (except the BSD license, and a few other minimally restrictive open source licenses), but if you concentrate on what you are reading, you can usually understand what your limitations and enablements are. Microsoft’s license agreements are, for example, relatively easy to understand: You can’t sell, copy, give away, publish benchmarks based on, or install this software on more than one computer. That may be a disadvantageous agreement for the user, but at least the terms are clear. The GPLv3, by contrast, is ancient Greek. Here’s an example:

A contributor’s “essential patent claims” are all patent claims owned or controlled by the contributor, whether already acquired or hereafter acquired, that would be infringed by some manner, permitted by this License, of making, using, or selling its contributor version, but do not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of the contributor version. For purposes of this definition, “control” includes the right to grant patent sublicenses in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License.

This is a license written by and for lawyers, not programmers or users. I’ll reiterate the fact that I have read through dozens of complex software licenses. I have seen many unusual clauses (particularly in Sun licenses), but nothing so convoluted as the GPLv3. The above quote is only a single example of an overlong and tedious license that no end user or software developer — the people who most need to understand what their entitlements and limitations are — can ever hope to fully understand. This puts all users and programmers in a powerless position in which we must trust the interpreters to accurately convey what we can and cannot do with this program. When you are powerless, you are not free. In a sense, the GPLv3 authors have robbed us of the freedom to understand the terms by which we use, modify, and distribute GPLv3-licensed software. They have made free software into something that cannot be reasonably understood, nor explained to a newcomer.

Software patents do not exist

The GPLv3 refers repeatedly to “software patents.” If you only hear RMS or other free software advocates talk about this subject, then you are likely also against “software patents.” I was too, at one point. There is a huge problem with this attitude, however — software patents do not exist in the context in which the term is generally presented. There are no special rules, laws, or provisions for patenting software. A patent on software is legally and structurally identical to a patent on a skateboard. In fact there can’t be any special patent provisions — the World Trade Organization, through the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property rightS (TRIPS) treaty forbids participating countries from passing laws that favor one kind of technology over another. So if there were special rules for United States patents on software, the US would be in violation of the TRIPS treaty. The patent laws could be uniformly changed to better accommodate the software industry, but that still might violate TRIPS, and could harm other industries more than it would benefit software developers and distributors.

So if you can’t make special rules for patents on software, then why not make software unpatentable? That seems like a good idea from a PC-centric frame of reference, but it doesn’t hold outside of that part of the technology world. We as computer users only see patent abuse in the news, like the the Amazon one-click patent and Steve Ballmer blathering about theoretical patent violations and other silly things that anger and annoy everyone except the people making money from them. But what if you were an engineer working in some other industry? What if you discovered a way to improve efficiency or performance in an invention by moving solid state logic to a software program that runs on the device? For instance, instead of a transistor or integrated circuit with static logic that can never be changed, you design a software program that resides in rewritable memory and can easily be modified and updated or expanded beyond the original design. Many cars on the market today, for instance, can self-tune to adjust for a variety of conditions. This is something that is much more difficult to do with static logic if there is no method of storing the self-tuned parameters. If software were unpatentable, you would have to avoid moving the logic from hardware to software because though it may give you a temporary competitive advantage, all of the time and money you or your company spent developing that solution could be wasted by a copycat competitor.

Abstracting firmware has its own problems, especially when companies forbid redistribution of firmware files, so this is not always a good thing. There cannot be a law or provision that favors any one technology over another, though, under the current system.

There may be problems with the patent system, but they will not be fixed by a software license.

A big, freedom-loving middle finger to BSD

Linux distributions are not the only operating systems affected by GPLv3. More threatened than anyone are free software projects that abhor licensing restrictions imposed by the GPL, such as the BSD variants.

According to FSF representative Brett Smith, there are about 150 software projects in the GNU Project that have copyrights attributed to the Free Software Foundation. Of those, at least 15 are committed to switching over to the GPL version 3 today. “The complete list probably won’t be final until the day is over. But highlights should include fundamental GNU/Linux system utilities like sed and tar, a suite of Internet software — such as FTP and telnet servers and clients — called inetutils, and the Texinfo documentation system.”

He didn’t mention GCC or the GNU debugger (GDB), which are arguably the two most important GNU Project programs to outside operating system projects. So I wrote to representatives of the three main BSD projects and asked them what they planned to do about the GPLv3.

Martin Husemann of the NetBSD Foundation told me that it was already possible to weed out software according to license, both in the base system and in pkgsrc:

We don’t think that the switch of GNU programs from GPL v2 to GPLv3 will affect NetBSD or its users much, since we are not in violation of the additional provisions that GPL v3 stipulates. It is a long term goal of NetBSD to become GPL free, but the potential change in license will not affect the scheduling of that goal. Furthermore, the GPL programs in NetBSD are clearly separated from the rest of the source so one can easily distribute a GPL-free NetBSD system (with missing functionality specially in the toolchain parts).

Since pkgsrc does not redistribute third party packages, it is also not affected. For users of pkgsrc, and creators of binary pkg sets or CDs/DVDs, it has versatile provisions to express licensing restrictions implied by the created packages (like LICENSE=, ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES, NO_BIN_ON_FTP, NO_BIN_ON_CDROM).

As of this writing, the OpenBSD Project had not made a decision regarding GPLv3-licensed software in the OpenBSD base system. Like the other BSDs, OpenBSD has very few GPL programs, and has gone to great lengths to replace some existing tools with BSD-licensed alternatives. Most of the GPL programs in OpenBSD are older and heavily patched, so there is little or no dependence on the GNU Project’s latest packages.

The FreeBSD core team had this to say on the issue:

Thank you for your interest in the FreeBSD Project. As you know, the FreeBSD Project has a long history of producing open source under the liberal BSD open source license. This license allows unlimited open and closed-source reuse of our software. We do rely on some GPL components– most critically the gcc development tool suite–but it is a core goal of our work that FreeBSD be complete operating system with BSD-licensed kernel, system libraries, services, and command line tools. Because GPLv3 has not yet been finalized, it would be premature to draw conclusions about how it will affect our project; obviously, we will follow events closely as they unfold.

Civil war?

I have always used free software over proprietary alternatives when there was a choice to be made. Sometimes there is no choice, and you have to click through some ridiculous license agreement that you don’t agree to and don’t care about. The GPLv3 has become another such license that I have to click through and don’t care about, so whenever possible, I’m going to be using something that’s a little less restrictive. Perhaps this will be the great homecoming to FreeBSD for me — I’ve always considered myself a BSD user in exile, anyway.

The operating systems I’m using now are still under the GPLv2, but I may have to stop updating parts of them if GPLv3 crap is going to leak into them. I can’t be alone in this rejection of the new restrictive GPL, so I expect there to be a reckoning in the free software community. A lot of projects and distributors aren’t going to include GPLv3 software, either forking the old GPLv2 editions or using BSD-licensed alternatives instead. It’ll be interesting to see where this leads, but I think this will be the end of “GNU/Linux” and the beginning of just plain “Linux” — not the kernel alone, but the kernel plus a body of free software userland utilities and programs unencumbered by convoluted restrictions. In the BSD world there are already free software replacements for many of the GNU Project programs. It takes little effort to do drop-in replacements for them in existing Linux distributions.

The end

There is an important moment in the history of psychology (please Tom Cruise, don’t jump on my couch) that applies well to this situation. Though Carl Jung had defended Sigmund Freud on many occasions, the latter said something to Jung that forced them to part ways: “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. This is the most essential thing of all. You see we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark against the black tide of mud of occultism.” At that point, Jung understood that it was more about Freud’s ego (ha!) than it was about figuring out how the human mind works — it was about being “right” over being “correct.” I frequently think of this whenever I find myself defending a principle based on old assumptions. Here we have RMS telling us that restrictions mean freedom, and I can’t help but think that this is more about ego and “being right” than it is about being free to use, modify, and distribute software.

I’ve no doubt that this is the beginning of the end for GNU, and it will prove the strength of the larger free software world. The Free Software Foundation has dumped a load of restrictions on us with GPLv3 and told us that restrictions lead to freedom and that it is good for us. That’s a little too Bush administration-like for me. In fact I fully expect someone, somewhere, to claim that I “hate freedom” for speaking out about this abysmal license — that would make the irony complete. That a license as restrictive as the GPLv3 should be mostly written by and wholeheartedly supported by someone who speaks out against the Patriot Act puts it a step beyond irony, and into hypocrisy. Further mimicking Bush political rhetoric, Stallman even claimed recently that restrictive software licenses are evil. So does that make him an “evil doer” for promoting a license that attempts to restrict hardware, software, software licensing, and patent licensing choices that should remain in the hands of software developers, or does that make people who are against it “evil doers” and “freedom haters” for not supporting it? If we aren’t with you, Richard, are we against you?

One way or the other, count me against. GNU, this is as far as we go. I’m breaking up with you. I think we should see other groups of userland operating system tools (or users, as the case may be). I’d prefer it if you took my number out of your cell phone and pretended we never went out.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.

This editorial is an experiment. It was originally written by Radu-Cristian Fotescu for his blog, but he offered us the chance to publish it here on The Jem Report as well. It is extremely long, and divided up into separate pages, which is something I don’t usually do with articles. So the format in which this is published is the first experiment. The second experiment is a matter of this article’s content. I don’t agree with everything Radu-Cristian says in his article, but I very much agree with what he is doing, which is to take a brutally honest look at the failures of the open source community and demand that we begin to recognize them instead of continuing to ignore the parts that aren’t working correctly. This is the first step in fixing some of the problems that frustrate us all as GNU/Linux and *BSD users. Maybe it’s time for a great re-examination of our processes and attitudes, and think about what needs to be done to create great software instead of continuing to perpetuate old mistakes on the basis that tradition, politics, rhetoric, and dogma are more important than critical thinking.

Foreword

I have been using open source software since the beginning of 1995. It was about Linux (starting with Slackware, after an initial apprenticeship with SLS), then some FreeBSD and NetBSD, to continue with several Linux distributions. What a choice! The future was bright, as the Linux kernel experienced a lot of improvements, the number of the distributions climbed up to the sky, advanced desktop environments appeared, and the StarOffice suite metamorphosed into OpenOffice.org, a very decent alternative to Microsoft Office.

In those times, the possible adoption of Linux or of FreeBSD wasn’t hindered by any patent issues: the SCO Group was still living from software, not from lawsuits, nobody was questioning the possible inclusion of Microsoft software patents into the Linux kernel, the restricted multimedia codecs weren’t an issue either (what codecs?!), as the desktop was not that multimedia, after all. And Linus Torvalds was living in Helsinki.

We’re now more than a decade later than the moment when I judged the open source to have gained a decisive momentum — 1996-1997, when Slackware was the reference, Red Hat was "the other choice", KDE and GNOME were just emerging, Walnut Creek was selling CD-ROMs, and SunSITE mirrors were the home of most of the relevant software. The worst thing that happened was that Yggdrasil Linux died. But the Earth kept spinning…

Ten years ago, Perl was the cherished jewel; now, the gourmets are enjoying Python, the teens are into the PHP-mania, and the most trendy are going Mono. The question is not anymore Emacs or vi?, but SUSE or Ubuntu?

Actually, Linux is now at 15, and Debian Etch was just released. Novell made a deal with Microsoft and no Armageddon followed, so why do I believe that the open source is in a sorry state?

As with many other things in life, gradual changes are never properly noticed, then it comes a day when something like 9/11 or something like Katrina happens, and we’re all bewildered: how could this happen? Were we that blind?

We usually are. We’re just humans.

{mospagebreak title=1. The kernel and friends, take one}

1. The kernel and friends, take one

I remember how much I loved the Linux kernel 1.2.13, and how surprised I was of the stability of the "unstable" 1.3.18. In times when being conservative in software was still a good thing, I was wondering why `ls‘ was not having `–color‘ by default in FreeBSD. I wanted a greater speed of the changes.

Now I wouldn’t feel the same. The first shock was to see the buggy Linux kernel 2.0.0.0, and the weird dance of the fixes: 2.0.0.7 was better, but wait, it then got worse, so 2.0.034 was really the one to use. Or maybe not. Still, due to the improvements in the kernel, and of the inertia of the mind, I thought it was a progress anyway.

I have the strange feeling that the GPL vs. BSD flame wars were milder in those times. Or maybe I was just younger.

The 2.6 kernel stated that the dichotomy between "stable" and "unstable" should be history. In a world of an increased complexity, the kernel team was declared as being able to only issue "stable releases" How humble of them. A fourth version number was however added, to allow for severe fixes to be marked.

Three years after 2.6 was released, a few people are still considering it too buggy for production use, although 2.6.9 was a very solid one, as users of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 4 and of its clones can witness. Patrick Volkerding eventually decided that the next post-11.0 Slackware will only feature a 2.6 kernel, as slackware-current dropped the 2.4 line. A tremendous change for some of us.

Unhappy people with the 2.6 kernels objected that not having a stable API is harmful for a sustainable development of drivers. Nota bene: it’s only about a stable Application Programming Interface, not about an Application Binary Interface (ABI). No matter. Greg Kroah-Hartman expressed the kernel team belief that a stable API would be a nonsense. I couldn’t tell whether this decision was made to prevent binary-only kernel modules, or it was just another irresponsible decision, but in good faith.

As one of the main complaints and alleged reason for not using Linux on the desktop was the lack of the hardware support for some new devices, we have to notice that, while not being able to influence hardware vendors, a tremendous effort was made to add more and more supported devices to the Linux kernel, and Greg K-H was one of the people responsible with that, especially on the USB side.

Every once in a while, "progress" rhymes with "breakage", and every now and then either the end-user, or the makers of a distribution have had to fix some udev rules. As a proof that it isn’t just me, Pat has provided some udev-alternate-versions with Slackware. You can’t sat Pat is not knowing what he’s doing, can you?

Progress comes at a cost, and unexpected breakage is one of them. Is this acceptable in a world when OSS adoption relies on the "It Just Works" metaphor? Am I trying to say there is something wrong with changes in the kernel? No, I am not. Except that I suppose you remember Andrew Morton saying the "2.6 kernel is slowly getting buggier" (at LinuxTag 2006). To some extent, Linus seemed to agree.

{mospagebreak title=2. The bugs, out in the open}

2. The bugs, in the open

Except for the added freedom (not without some strings in the case of the GPL), the open source software is supposed to provide you with some welcomed advantages over closes-source software.

Say, once the code is in the open, bugs can be easily noticed, and the necessary fixes and cleanup come at ease. Well, at least in theory, as nowadays’ code is complex.

Security fixes are indeed benefiting for having the code in the open, but this also has a price: security advisories are issued more often than ever, as everyone can dig for weaknesses. Hackers don’t have to try blind attacks anymore. Therefore, once a security patch is issued, the system administrator should really, really apply it ASAP. We’re living in a highly networked world, never forecasted by the Sci-Fi writers of the ’60s and ’70s.

Surprisingly enough, this never prevented some stunning security holes to pop up because of hilariously simple coding errors: 13 years after a rlogin -froot remote authentication bypass vulnerability, the mostly unused Telnet daemon had a terrible bug in Solaris 10/11, just a couple of months ago.

The affected Telnet daemon is derived from BSD source code, and while Solaris was traditionally a proprietary OS, starting with version 10, you can get its source code from OpenSolaris.org.

Another proof that the OSS mantra is not always having the expected outcome is OpenOffice.org. I am using it almost every day, and it is indeed a good office suite. Yet the fact that its Bugzilla is public does not only allow me to file bugs with them (you could never do such a thing with Microsoft Office!), but also to notice how many old bugs are still unfixed.

Let’s admit that a public bug tracking system leads to a better feedback, and to a better project management from the QA standpoint, with the side effect of having zillions of bugs reported, many of them duplicates or NOTABUG Is this a good reason enough for not fixing some everlasting Oo2 bugs such as not being able to have an easy way to change the default paper from Letter to A4 in all the Oo.org and to have it stick this way (Bug #39733), or sticking with the design flaw that limits your paragraph to 65,534 characters, as if it were under Windows 3.1 (Bug #17171)?

I don’t think this is a good excuse. Notice that no matter Oo.org is open source, nobody is going to fork it just to fix such annoying bugs. Once a product goes mainstream, it’s almost like it becomes proprietary: at least for the sake of the compatibility, everybody is going with the flow.

So long about the myths of freedom in an open source world.

{mospagebreak title=3. Our friends, the software patents}

3. Our friends, the software patents

While some people believe that the diminishing factors in the mass adoption of Linux and of other open-source operating systems are the lack of the drivers for some of the devices used with Windows, or the lack of enough games under Linux, or even the apparent difficulty in setting it up on some platforms, all I can see as a major hindrance is this one: software patents.

While the United Kingdom’s PM had a prompt response to a petition, just to confirm that «the Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software», and that «although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK», the major Linux actors are U.S.-based (Red Hat, Novell), and even the FreeBSD foundation is an American subject (a notable exception: OpenBSD is a proud product of Calgary, AB, Canada).

Therefore, the mainstream Linux distributions cannot afford to include patent-encumbered code, no matter what third-party extra packages might you add, as a non-American end-user.

This wasn’t such a big problem a decade ago, but it is now. Except for patent-free multimedia formats such as OGG/Theora, the vast majority of the most popular audio and video formats are either covered by one or more patents, or they’re not open-source at all: MP3, MPEG, WMA, WMV, AVI. Almost 100% of the websites will only provide media in formats like WMV or MP3, which is something delicate for the enterprise Linux user, especially when in the United States.

But wait! Aren’t the patents a Capitalist system meant to protect innovation and to provide with the necessary incentive to keep it happening?

It was indeed supposed for a patent to protect the creator and to reward the creativity. The US Constitution states in Article 1: «Clause 8: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.» Abraham Lincoln, himself a patentee, said: "The patent system added the fuel of interest to the spark of genius."

That was once, over 200 years ago, when software was not born. It’s the fault of the American mentality, tributary to the idea "What was said by the Founding Fathers of the Nation should not be questioned, the same way we don’t question the existence of God." Indeed, the U.S. Constitution (with its Amendments) is like a second Bible to Americans. Contrary to the very basic principles of the democracy, there is this religious feeling that the Constitution should never change.

This makes the U.S. Patent and Trading Office practically an institution appointed by the Constitution. And nobody would ever manage to make it refuse to register software patents!

Maybe sticking to the tradition is a good thing. What makes a software patent so different?

The first possible answer is a rational one: some people consider software as a collection of mathematical algorithms and data structures, and none of them are patentable under the current law. The USPTO is however part of the Department of the Commerce, and it seems they can’t understand mathematics, nor programming. As the number of the patents granted in the last years increased exponentially, they were obviously poorly processed, so that they granted both patents closed to the perpetuum mobile, and software patents about linked lists (PN/7028023, PN/5263160, PN/5446889, PN/5671406, PN/5950191, PN/6301646, PN/6581063, PN/6687699, PN/6760726). Notice how the undertrained patent examiners are easily fooled by the magic wording "method and apparatus".

The second answer would be an experiential: software patents are bad because we can see how detrimental they are to the advance of the IT!

A recent situation involved some of the mainstream distros (openSUSE, Fedora) disabling a ClearType-like pixel sub-hinting method in the open-source FreeType2 library: openSUSE Hobbled by Microsoft Patents. While the details of the issue are beyond the scope of this discussion, this reminded me of a third possible argument: why should the end-user bother with patents included in the software he’s using?

Since the most absurd lawsuits of the latest two millenniums, the SCO vs. IBM, SCO vs. Novell, SCO vs. Daimler-Chrysler, and SCO vs. AutoZone, proved that common sense and the U.S. law system have not met yet, some vendors of open source software and services became aware that corporate customers might feel unsafe to use open-source software, because as long as the code is widely available, possible patent-infringing code snippets could be identified at any moment.

This is only one of the reasons the last year’s Novell-Microsoft interoperability agreement and patent covenant was signed: Novell wanted to give to the customers of its commercial Linux solutions the feeling of safety: no, they will never be sued by Microsoft for any alleged patent that Linux might infringe!

Given the number of the lines of code in Linux, nobody can tell how many algorithms might be covered by a U.S. patent belonging to a Fortune 500 company. As a matter of fact, Steve Ballmer explicitly stated that Linux infringes Microsoft patents.

And here we go back to the previous question? Why should the end-user be liable for a possible patent infringed by the software he is using, being it free or commercial software, as long as it was bought and used in bona fides?

Common sense and the logic of the judicial system don’t mix that often They might say: because the software is open source, so you have had the means to become aware it’s infringing some patents! Along with the vendor (if any), you are liable.

This quick reasoning might work for situations when you’re buying a pack of cocaine labeled "Soap", and you claim innocence because what you bought is soap! Of course nobody would buy it, because it’s trivial to notice you have not bought soap, but cocaine, thus possessing it is a clear violation of the law.

But is the end-user of a software product responsible for examining it against possible patent violations? Just how far can we go with the absurdity?

Following the same rationale that says Linux users should be liable for patents infringed by Linux, consider the following case: you’re buying a car manufactured by Ford, and it happens that the car includes some special screw that is patented by Toyota, and illegally used by Ford. Should you, the end user, go to jail for the patent infringed by a screw present in the car bought by you?

Don’t let an American attorney of law read this: he might answer "yes".

{mospagebreak title=4. Devils advocate: what if…}

4. Devil’s advocate: what if…

Let’s play the devil’s advocate for a change. Let’s forget how important is open-source software to us, and how annoying is to have it restricted by software patents. What if software patents are necessary?

You might have read Jem Matzan’s interview with the patent attorney Jack Haken. Should you have done so, here’s a catch phrase you can’t miss: «The TRIPS treaty properly requires that countries cannot use their patent laws to discriminate in favor of one field of technology over other technologies. Thus, the same patent protection needs to be available for a technologic device, for example an anti-skid brake actuator in an automobile, even after a competitor ports an original hardware logic implementation into firmware.»

Quite valid as argument. The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is a treaty that sets down minimum standards for intellectual property (IP) regulations. As it’s administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO), your country must be applying it, so face it: it is the law.

The actual requirement is stated as follows at Art. 27(1): «patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application.»

Would then software be a "technology" apart from all the others, and would the lack of patentability of software be a discrimination that infringes the TRIPS?

Are algorithms "inventions"? Or are they rather "non-technical", thus not in a "field of technology" and outside the scope of TRIPS?

Judging by the number of software patents issued in the United States, it seems that we could take "software is technology" for an answer.

Judging by the previously mentioned position of Downing Street, software is unlikely to be a technology, as long as it is not patentable.

The European Patent Convention (EPC) defines what inventions are not patentable in Article 52, paragraph 2: «(a) discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods; (b) aesthetic creations; (c) schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers; (d) presentations of information.»

To me, it’s even redundant, as "programs for computers" (i.e. software) contains both mathematical methods and "scheme, rules and methods for performing mental acts", it’s just you don’t do them mentally, you’re using a computer for that. To the extent of this definition, the mental acts involves using your brain as a finite state automaton, hence the use of hardware is only an equivalent.

The UK Patent Office is subject to the Patents Act 1977, which incorporates EPC’s Article 52 accurately.

Why is the United States interpreting the TRIPS differently? Why are you more likely to accept a software patent as an American?

Wikipedia is quoting Howard T. Markey (chief judge of the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals and later of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) for having listed the four primary incentives embodied in the patent system: (1) the incentive to invent in the first place, (2) the incentive to disclose the invention once made, (3) the incentive to invest the sums necessary to experiment, to produce, and finally get the invention on the market, (4) the incentive to design around and improve upon earlier patents.

Let’s prove that software patents are actually deterring the innovation, instead of the intended stimulation of them!

Following the rationale as for the technology patents, open source software should be patented, otherwise what is the incentive to (2) "disclose the invention once made", and to (3) "invest the sums necessary to produce, and get the invention on the market"?

Decades of unpatented open source software are the best proof that the patent incentive in not necessary for software.

Decades of closed-source software are also proving that for some companies, the patent incentive is not enough.

Software is really different.

Given the exponential increase of the patents granted every year, the current patent system might be a hindrance for industrial inventions altogether. Instead of providing the incentive to invest in R&D, the huge number of valid patents increases the costs significantly. Before trying to design and manufacture a simple item such as a toothpaste recipient, you must pay attention to the registered patents and patent applications under examination: you might need dozens of engineers and patent attorney just for that!

Simply put: you might be able to design a simple item like a recipient in 10 minutes, you might be ready for production the next day. All you want is to pack some toothpaste and to sell it, you’re not going to patent anything. We’re not anymore in the Stone Age, creations that would qualify for inventions could even be done by kids!

But no, you have to pay tribute to the patent system. As the USPTO grants patents just about everything, the cost for developing the simplest items gets higher and higher: patent attorneys are expensive.

Two thousand years ago, Tacitus wrote: «The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.» Should he have lived today, I bet he would say: «The more corrupt the Establishment, the more numerous the patents.»

Patent systems that were designed in the pre-IT era are definitely obsolete. We can see they’re unpractical even for the industry, what to say then about software patents? Is there anyone who can examine the millions of lines of code in a project and to identify the applicable patents?

«Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.» — Aldous Huxley, in Do What You Will (1929).

The consistency of the the U.S. patent system might lead to the death of open source. Reforming it is only for the best. After all, we’re talking about a country "by the People, for the People". Or is it a "corrupt state"?

I wonder whether someone has patented the idea of using a plastic washbowl to cover your head when it rains and you don’t have an umbrella. I guess I have to pay a patent attorney.

{mospagebreak title=5. Detrimental to Linux at large}

5. Detrimental to Linux at large

Let’s put aside all the heated revolted reactions of the open source community on the "betrayal" committed by Novell when they signed the patent covenant with Microsoft. I am on the side of the believers that it was a betrayal indeed, but this is not the point.

The point is that the patent cooperation agreement could be seen by some as beneficial for Linux, because "hey! Microsoft has just acknowledged that Linux is a real competitor!". As long as Microsoft agreed not to sue the customers of Novell for the «use of specific copies of a Covered Product as distributed by Novell or its Subsidiaries (collectively "Novell") for which Novell has received Revenue (directly or indirectly)», more and more users would have the confidence to buy Novell’s Linux solutions, hence Linux will benefit!

Flawed argument. And a very poor one.

Indeed, the Linux solutions you would buy from Novell will make you immune to patent claims. But the use of the free counterpart, that is openSUSE, is not giving you immunity! (To make things even weirder, the individual contributors to openSUSE are still protected, whereas Novell as a company can still be sued by Microsoft, and vice-versa.)

The worse of all: this creates a unilateral, competitive advantage of Novell in the Linux world. Like in any other monopolistic practices (let’s say oligopolistic, by also counting Microsoft), this is only beneficial to Novell Linux (SLED, SLES) and Novell Linux alone! Once again, only the commercial solutions qualify.

This is sabotaging the advancement of Linux as an open-source project, because open-source is about choice, and the Novell-Microsoft agreement is about suppressing the competition — being it Red Hat or the 100% free Linux distributions.

Even worse, should it be still possible: this undermines the very spirit of the open and FREE software, as long as Linux distributions you won’t pay for are excluded from any protection. By signing this covenant, Novel acquiesced that Linux users can be sued (otherwise, why protecting them?), and this is going to create panic and recession in the Linux world.

Thank you, Novell. You are really a community leader. When you lost Jeremy Allison and Guenther Deschner from the Samba team, it was certainly because people adore to see how patents are used as competitive tools in the free software world.

{mospagebreak title=6. The lost battle of the GPLv3}

6. The lost battle of the GPLv3

I am one of the believers in the idea that the BSD licenses and the closely related MIT/X11 license are the true promoters of freedom in software, and not the Gnu Public License (GPL). Some may argue that the status of the Linux today, as compared to *BSD, is the best proof that copyleft licenses in general, and GPL in particular, are the only licenses that generate progress in the FOSS world.

I will not waste my time with endless arguments leading nowhere, but I will notice that in GPL, Freedom Three is an Obligation! As stated by Richard M. Stallman, «Freedom Three is the freedom to help build your community by publishing an improved version so others can get the benefit of your work.» All the freedoms that define the GPL are offered by the BSD-style licenses too, but GPL makes an obligation out of it. You must give away the modified code, should you want to redistribute the built binaries.

This is not the best definition of freedom by my book. What resembles the most with the GPL is the way the Communist governments in Eastern Europe started the social reform after 1945, inspired by the Bolshevik ideology: only the poor should have access to the available resources, the rich shouldn’t have anything and they should go to jail and to detainee camps!

The way the GPL denies any proprietary usage of the licensed code looks really Bolshevik. The BSD license doesn’t make any discrimination.

But what is the most useless part of the whole process of creating a GPL version 3 is the futile attempt to prohibit "TiVoization", DRM, Novell-MS-like agreements, binary-only drivers and whatever else would make RMS happier.

A few optimists like Bruce Perens happen to believe that GPLv3 will force Microsoft to give away the right for all GPL software to use any of their patents that are presently in GPL software distributed with SUSE. I wouldn’t be that optimistic, but I am not a lawyer. Novell is not that pessimistic about GPLv3, which makes me stand to my beliefs.

Instead of spending so much energy on the contradictory GPLv3 (which is unlikely to be adopted by the Linux kernel, as it is under "GPLv2", not "GPLv2 or later", and the majority of the kernel team is against going with GPLv3), the Free Software Foundation should have focused to better ways to fight the real enemy: software patents.

Speaking about open source and the FSF: does anyone have any news of the legendary and illusory GNU Hurd operating system? I guess not. What a triumph of the FSF…

{mospagebreak title=7. The business model}

7. The business model

I would not try to analyze the business model behind open-source software like the web browser Mozilla Firefox (which receives a tiny amount each time a search on Google is made using its search box), nor of OpenOffice.org.

The open source operating systems are our main interest. Except for the *BSD family, whose members are either backed by 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations like The FreeBSD Foundation or the NetBSD Project, or the task of individuals like Theo de Raadt for OpenBSD and Matt Dillon for DragonFly BSD (by the way, your donations to either of them are appreciated), the 500+ Linux distributions fall roughly into two main categories: the vast majority of the distributions are made by the enthusiasts, for the enthusiasts, and a given number of them are mainstream distros, supposed to be trustworthy and polished enough to satisfy both the corporate-minded user and the home user.

As perceived by Christopher Negus in The Linux Bible 2007, the mainstream Linux distros are the following: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core, Debian, SUSE (SLED, SLES, openSUSE), KNOPPIX, Yellow Dog Linux, Gentoo, Slackware, Linspire and Freespire, Mandriva, Ubuntu (and Kubuntu, Edubuntu).

Out of them, having or trying to have a business model are: the Red Hat family, Novell’s SUSE, Linspire, Mandriva, and Ubuntu.

From this short list, Ubuntu has the most controversial business model. Supported by the South-African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth and his company Canonical (headquartered in the Isle of Man, a fiscal heaven), Ubuntu is based on Debian (it has even taken some of the Debian’s developers) and has gained an unexpected momentum especially because of the ShipIt program: free CDs were shipped free of charge to anyone wishing to receive them, worldwide.

As this was contested by some as creating an unfair competitive advantage for Ubuntu (as no other distro can afford such an enterprise), the overall outcome is positive for the mass penetration of Linux as a whole.

Nevertheless, despite its relatively recent offering of commercial support, and of the release of a Long-Term Supported version last year, there are no proofs of Canonical having a positive balance. Ubuntu is still relying on the wealth of a billionaire, which is hardly a business model.

Novell, Linspire and Mandriva had disappointing yearly and quarterly results lately, to the extent of my knowledge. As Mandriva’s CEO François Bancilhon briefly explained before presenting Mandriva’s business model, «Further to my knowledge, the only company making money is Red Hat.»

It is indeed very difficult to be profitable by selling support services associated with free, open-source software. The individual customer is unlikely to be willing to pay, and the corporate penetration of Linux is mediocre, especially in North America, where Red Hat would be the only Linux trusted for large-scale deployments, with a second choice being Novell.

Mandriva is left as the only purely European Linux vendor, struggling for profitability while the recent releases 2007 and 2007.1 Spring seem to be less buggy than usual.

{mospagebreak title=8. The package management}

8. The package management

Along with the response time in providing with security fixes and the supported lifetime, this is often a factor neglected by the "distros for the enthusiasts". As Linux is generally insensitive to the worms and viruses that threaten the Windows systems, most home users only care about a newer version of a package if it’s about an application of interest to him. Errata and patches are not his concern. This also allows him to switch distros just because a given release of a certain distro has a better hardware support.

Responsible use of a Linux system should consider that (again, along with the errata response time), the reliability of the package management system is of the utmost importance, as the integrity and the availability of the system depends on it. The quality of the provided packages is also important, otherwise automated system updates might break the system (this happens more than once in a while with Ubuntu, which questions its suitability for the enterprise).

The good news is that most of the system use either the Debian APT system (apt-get & friends, Synaptic, aptitude), or RPM-based utilities like yum, Yumex, YaST. The over-hyped SMART package manager is able to deal with sevral types of packages and repositories, yet I have difficulties to understand the high level of praise it gets. Because, let’s face it: the alleged "RPM hell" is a myth. There is also a "DEB hell" (I was in there myself), and the real problem with the unsolved dependencies is the lack of quality of the repositories. This "repository confusion" is even easier to attain by users who follow the friendly advices from the countless Ubuntu-related forums and blogs and add dozens and dozens of unreliable third-party repositories.

The bad news is that some distributions seem to have a masochistic pleasure in regularly break the package management tools.

This happened in the most unpleasant manner with openSUSE: defocusing from the traditional YaST-based package management, Novell brought the alternate libzypp-based generation of Zen tools. When first released with openSUSE 10.1, they achieved the rare performance to have both package management systems rather broken than functional. Things were mostly fixed later, but some disappointed customers leaved SUSE (that was before the Novell-Microsoft agreement), as it’s hard to provide a worse message than "we don’t know what package manager we want to offer you, and we don’t know how to make them work either". The simplicity was also affected by the increasing number of package management tools: rug, zypper, zen-updater, zen-remover, zen-installer…

Fedora Core started the new generation of GUI tools Pup (updater) and Pirut with FC5. They were both very buggy, and while things have improved in the meantime, their design is horrendous. To me, Pirut is more like a joke than like a package manager. The GUI for yum that I liked, namely the version of Yumex that came with CentOS4 (yumex-1.0.2), was replaced in newer Red Hat distros by either the much slower yumex-1.2.2, or by the unfinished, buggy yumex-1.9.5. Definitely, some steps backwards.

Mandriva has the misfortune to ship its 2007 release with a broken RPMdrake The command-line interface tools worked fine, but RPMdrake 2007 was systematically breaking the list of the available, not installed packages. RPMdrake was fixed for several times, and broken for about the same number of times. The last time I checked it, it was working fine though.

Apparently, the APT tools are still one of the best choices. Newbies can enjoy the extremely friendly Synaptic, while more advanced users can use the CLI. Well, it’s known that the intelligence of Synaptic is limited: no matter how pleasant its interface might be (with a lot of information for the advanced users too!), the only tool that can fix all the problems is the ncurses-based aptitude. Which is horrendous from the usability POW.

And you guessed right: instead of extending Synaptic with the intelligence bits from aptitude, the Debian guys have decided to declare aptitude as the default package manager. Isn’t this a charming decision?

Some will declare the Smart Package Manager as the savior. I don’t think so: it is marginal, and the study cases that claim to prove its superiority are unconvincing.

Hopefully, Linux Standard Base will eventually be of some help. As Ian Murdoch recently said in an interview, «In terms of packaging, yes, there is clearly need for a packaging standard. Because you just go look at a downloads page of any Linux application – MySQL is a good example – and they’ve got 15 different packages. Here’s the RHEL 4 version, the RHEL 5 version, the Debian version, the whatever version, and in part the LSB is designed to solve the problem.»

{mospagebreak title=9. What does it mean to be stable}

9. What does it mean to be stable

Being stable might just mean to run without crashes, but it can also refer to a lifetime model involving a STABLE branch, and one or more testing, unstable, -current evolving branches.

Usually, small distros can’t be trusted for having enterprise-grade stability, mainly because of the scarcity of the resources, as manpower. There is also another rule of the thumb that usually works: the "original" distro is less buggy than the derivatives.

This works better with Slackware, which is practically bug-free (not counting the -current branch). The derived distros (SLAX, Wolvix, Vector, Zenwalk, etc.) provide some extra polish, customizations, extra packages, and… bugs.

Even Debian’s "testing" branch is usually more stable than Ubuntu’s releases.

What is rather strange is that some distributions have chosen to be "unstable by choice": Sidux, recently Arch… In a world where the increasing complexity of the software makes the bug management more and more difficult, choosing to be unstable just for the sake of being "on the bleeding edge" is not my cup of coffee.

This kind of instability doesn’t mean the distribution should not behave as expected. The open source has brought the ability to always have the last version of an open-source software package, either by installing a binary package provided by the distro makers, or by building it yourself from sources. Having an entire distro always kept up-to-date is desired by many individual users, and it’s also a distinct possibility: free of any charge for most. Does this mean it is a desirable approach from a corporate point of view?

It’s rather the other way around. In a business environment where stability and system availability are of the utmost importance (some people really think of "business continuity", not of spinning cubes), the primary choices are something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian stable, SLED and SLES, Mandriva Corporate Server and Desktop. What do all of them have in common?

An assumed approach of stability, that is. For instance, when RHEL4 was released, only OpenOffice.org 1.1 was available. Throughout the supported lifetime of 7 years, RHEL4 will never get OpenOffice.org 2.x, regardless of the improvements it could bring. Only security patches and bug fixes will be applied. When deemed necessary, selected new features are backported to older releases, but the general rule is: make as much as possible to prevent the breakage of what is already working. This might be annoying to be unable to use the new ODT document format, but at least consistency is ensured within a multinational company that uses a given release of an enterprise distro. On occasions, some applications can get upgraded to the next major number: this happened with Firefox 1.0.x going Firefox 1.5.x with Update 3 of RHEL4.

Stability doesn’t mean obsolescence. With RHEL (but also with other enterprise distros), relevant improvements are backported to the existing base system when it is essential for customers. During the lifetime of RHEL4, the included kernel 2.6.9 (a very stable one, BTW) will not get a version upgrade. When Dell included in its Precision 390 workstations the BCM5754-based Broadcom Ethernet Controller, which only started to be supported with lernel 2.6.17, Red Hat has backported the corresponding changes to the existing 26.9 kernel, thus making possible to be certified for the Dell products that use BCM5754. You don’t have to worry when buying a new Dell computer: it will work with your software.

This business definition is despised by the regular Linux user, and this might explain why the Arch Linux aficionados were so vocal to defend their "rolling-release never to reach 1.0" development model.

From a corporate standpoint (and corporate adoption is essential for the survival of Linux!), using Linux does not mean doesn’t only mean browsing the Internet, listening MP3s and watching DVDs, and writing CDs/DVDs.

{mospagebreak title=10. Eye-candy: competing with Vista?}

10. Eye-candy: competing with Vista?

This is something I never thought I would experience from something like Linux: deliberately going with the shallowness, the eye-candy, the superficial.

As a "semi-veteran" in computing, I was expecting from Linux to try to prevail through quality and performance, if not from simplicity too (K.I.S.S. is one of the principles of UNIX). This used to happen 10 years ago, why isn’t it possible anymore?

Maybe the first sign was when FreeBSD tried to mimic Linux and to be "more user-friendly". It was rather wrong, and I can only hope they realized the mistake. The gradual recovery of the once legendary FreeBSD stability can be seen with 6.1 and 6.2. Hopefully the trend will not be reversed again.

The point of no return was generated by Ubuntu. More and more IT-illiterate users, some of them not being able to find their way in Windows if an icon is moved from its initial place, were now "into the Linux thing" Ubuntu was already a polished, user-oriented Debian, now demands were to make it even more user-friendly.

What’s almost tragic for the accuracy-minded people is that in various Ubuntu forum threads I could read in the past 2 years plenty of plainly wrong explanations and speculations regarding the cause of some annoyments, and about "how Linux works". The democratization of the access to UNIX-like systems engendered a lot of garbage from people not knowing anything, yet believing they have found the Holy Grail. You shouldn’t take a Ubuntu forum for Wikipedia.

When polls on popular Linux sites ask: "What is the most newbie-friendly distro", you know you are in the 21st century when people need nice GUIs, no matter what bugs are hidden therein.

Improving the user experience is not a bad choice per se, exaggeratedly focusing on eye-candy is however wrong. No common sense can explain how so many people believe they actually need those dozens of Superkaramba widgets that make their desktop look like an Airbus cockpit. No common sense can explain why so many people claim they need unstable 3D desktops like Beryl/Compiz, for they believe that having the applications windows on the faces of a spinning cube, or having "wobbly" windows does actually help them.

I have seen some rational voices too, who confirmed that most of the 3D innovations are actually distracting them, thus decreasing the productivity. But, you know, you can’t fight with the masses of teenagers that can’t make the difference between the games they play and a productivity desktop.

Some of those youngsters happen to be Linux developers. Can you trust such childish developers for creating quality software?!

Sometimes you can.

Don’t misunderstand me. I have had rather pleasant experiences with both Compiz and Beryl: they worked. AIGLX doesn’t always work better than XGL, but at least it doesn’t break 3D rendering for games and for anything that needs to do 3D rendering: OpenGL screen savers, animation and CAD/CAE programs, that sort of thing. Functionality has been sacrificed for cosmetics, and totally unnecessary cosmetics at that. I am happy I don’t have to use them, but I am unhappy to see that RHEL5 comes with Compiz and AIGLX.

A third 3D desktop approach is the French Metisse, which seems to be less interested in wobbly windows and spinning cubes. It includes some productivity-oriented features, but unlike XGL and AIGLX, Metisse failed to work with my Radeon.

The cherry on the top of the cake is the bizarre idea that Linux has to compete with Vista. As if Vista wasn’t an aberrant OS anyway, the American way of thinking saw everything through a comparison. Linux is not supposed to gain momentum "because it is good", but because "Vista has the GUI feature X, and Linux does it better".

And what is Vista, if not eye-candy, GUI, and useless resource consumption? If this is where Linux is heading…

While many minimalist window managers still exist, the very small group of users who believe in the power of the simplicity is a decreasing quantity…

{mospagebreak title=11. The security model}

11. The security model

If "everything is a file in UNIX" is common knowledge, there is also common knowledge that the security model in Linux and BSD follows the UNIX model, not the old Windows approach. Constantly using the system as the privileged user is not an option.

A first attempt to make the users life easier was made by Freespire. Most readers should know that the root account is disabled in Ubuntu, the user needing to gain temporary superuser privileges through the sudo command. Well, as allowed by the architecture of sudo, Freespire is configured to accept sudo without requiring the user to enter any password! (Yes, there is an infamous NOPASSWD somewhere in /etc/sudoers).

Given that by enabling the "Admin Approval Mode", a similar operation mode is available in Vista too (you could just press ENTER or click a button to accept administrative tasks), I would refrain myself from declaring Freespire’s defaults as inspired by Windows 95. They can be easily changed anyway.

A much more severe breach of the traditional UNIX security model was brought by the (otherwise very promising) Pardus Linux.

Part of their set of innovative features, a new concept was created around the new configuration manager COMAR: the first user (the one who installed the system) is granted some special administrative privileges never seen before. It is practically half-root, because he can perform a wide range of administrative tasks (adding/removing packages, starting/stopping services or the firewall, etc.) without being ever asked for a password!

Pardus developers explained that this feature could be offered as an option only with the next release, however this doesn’t change anything at all: the evil was done. For the sake of the user’s convenience, basic Linux principles were broken. Should people get used with this, they will ask from other distributions to provide them with such a feature.

Sadly, whereas even Microsoft tried to improve the security in Vista and to educate the home user not to use an administrative account, there is a Linux project trying to do exactly the opposite.

Requiring either the user password or the root password before performing administrative tasks was already possible through sudo (also kdesu, gksudo) or an appropriate PAM-based authentication (consolehelper). Granting a user the right to "sudo" without a password was already possible, although hardly a good choice. A possibly good feature would be to configure sudo to accept more trivial tasks such as changing the system time (not critical for home use) without a password, but not more (no, setuid is not an option, it’s actually much worse).

Irresponsible approaches made from the highly praised (even by me) Pardus a black sheep from a security standpoint. At times, open source rhymes with thoughtless design and severe flaws.

Just forget about the name of the distro I just mentioned, although it is going to be a trend-setter. In a few years, on public request, half of the 500+ Linux distros will have the security features perverted.

{mospagebreak title=12. Hype vs. real needs}

12. Hype vs. real needs

Once a business, always a business: Linux is subject to the inflation of the buzzwords and the false "needs" you encounter with anything that’s marketable. As Miguel de Icaza was telling two years ago to Linux Format, «Linux used to be hip, but it’s lost its hipness. The new thing is Mono – Mono is hip!» So Mono is the new kid in town.

Have you noticed how the IT industry doesn’t seem to know whither to go, where to head to? The enterprise stack includes J2EE, but it also includes .NET. Expensive Oracle deployments and endless SAP implementations are still selling, but the quality of the software is not better than in times of COBOL. The more complex a software infrastructure is, the more painful it will be, but the ROI is hardly a certitude. Dozens and dozens of CRM and ERP solutions do exist, but I have never met a satisfied customer so far.

This is when buzzwords sell more. Because not everyone was happy with Java, and because the .NET technology that relies on a Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) pioneered by Microsoft is now an ECMA standard (ECMA-335, ISO/IEC 23271), someone thought that an open-source clone of .NET, namely Mono, would make the best choice for running .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix at large (Mono is a project sponsored by Novell).

Are we really depending on a Microsoft concept to save the enterprise services in Linux? Some people don’t seem to be bothered by that.

Sadly enough, Mono is nowhere close to replace the enterprise Java. Nowhere close to that. After all these years of fuss and increasing enthusiasm, Mono has not replaced ASP.NET in the companies that are using .NET on Windows platforms. The most prominent use of Mono in Linux is the use of C# for standalone GUI projects, namely through Gtk#.

As a matter of fact, the most important result was that GNOME got contaminated with Mono. Initially emerged because of license worries with regards to KDE (so it was about freedom!), GNOME is now tributary to a Microsoft-inspired technology! Unbelievable, yet true.

So Mono has not fulfilled the initial expectations. On the contrary, it has made a lot of Linux users to be dependent of Gtk# (through Beagle, Tomboy, etc.), whereas excellent solutions for desktop tools already existed, e.g. PyGTK or PyQt.

While Mono is available under Red Hat’s community distribution Fedora, the company’s flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 does not include Mono! Is it because Red Hat does not venture into a "Novell business", is it for they can’t go for a "Microsoft-designed business", or is it that I am not the only paranoid in town?

Another buzzword very cherished nowadays is about virtualization. This is what I call "Xen-mania".

The IT press is full of reports on how Xen performs under SUSE or with Red Hat. Everybody is "just trying it", yet very few people really need it. Red Hat was initially reluctant to Xen, as it was dubbed "not ready for production use" (or maybe this was because Novell was the first to offer it), but now they just gave to the market what the market wanted.

When you will find about a decent number of companies really using Xen, drop me a note. Xen is still a buzzword meant to boost the sales, and this works very well in North America, where ingenuous CEOs and CTOs buy Red Hat because "it’s corporate Linux" the same way they buy Oracle’s broken Linux clone "because it’s oh, Oracle", yet they don’t make use of them. They were buying IBM with Microsoft in the past, so they’re buying now what’s trendy. While this can be seen as a commercial success, it is not what Linux needs.

What is really used in the real word, and it’s not new technology: chroot jails in Linux, BSD jails, Solaris Zones. They just work, and they’re cheaper in resources.

On the other hand, while Novell is supporting the Mono project, they have dropped the support for Hula, their own open source mail and calendar project. Novell was unable to manage such a simple project, while smaller companies had the skills to provide with excellent groupware solutions like Zimbra and Scalix that can successfully replace Exchange (I liked Zimbra, and I was short to install Scalix).

The crappy management at Novell can also be seen by looking at the most advanced mail client, Evolution. Advanced or not, Evolution lacks an elementary feature present for ages in all the Windows e-mail clients: a tooltip notification when new mail arrives, possibly providing you with details on the received messages.

I was suggested to use third-party programs to be notified of new mail, but this is not the point. When a MUA collects the mail, it is supposed to notify me synchronously ("hey! I have new mail for you!"). The third-party solutions are asynchronously checking for new mail, which means the moment they will notify me has nothing to do with the moment when Evolution has collected my mail.

The lack of focus on basic user needs is deplorable. We can have spinning cubes in Linux, yet Evolution is unable to provide with visual notification when new mail arrives. Even Microsoft is better at that.

The IT press features a stunning mimicry: a recent article describing how the Kubuntu-derived Pioneer Linux Basic Release 2 fails to differentiate enough to have a raison d’étre finds the "supreme argument": Automatix2 (a questionable concept in itself) doesn’t misses a few packages, especially the virtualization product VirtualBox. I am positively sure that Al Bundy (part of the target group of Pioneer Linux Basic) can’t live without virtualization.

Some other times, the needs might be real, but the solutions will deceive an uneducated user: I am thinking of the new Desktop Search metaphor.

The latest years have brought to the public Beagle, Strigi, Tracker, Pinot, Recoll, Doodle, and a few more Linux equivalents of the Windows counterparts Copernic Desktop Search, Blinkx, or Google Desktop. These are engines that make use of a daemon to periodically index the documents on your hard disk, so that a later search will provide with faster results than a more classic inquiry using find, grep, locate, or the desktop own "Search in Files" GUI tool.

What’s wrong with the new desktop search tools?

The first wrong move was to have the corresponding daemons started by default in some distros. This would generate a "mysterious" and intensive extra disk activity in idle periods. For the worse, SUSE 10.0 has replaced GNOME’s own gnome-search-tool with a Beagle search in Nautilus, thus breaking the common usage pattern.

Any user that will expect for accurate results will be deceived. The file you have just created or modified a few minutes ago, the new mail and whatever else has not been reindexed will be missing or showing the wrong contents in Beagle’s result list. This is because, contrary to the "good ol’ grep" that searches every possible matching file, Beagle only looks in the database with the indexed files (usually your home, plus your Evolution mails). When they get indexed!

Personally, I just cannot rely on results which depend on a database of (not yet) indexed data instead of a real search. These "approximate" searches have the advantage of the speed and they can take into account meta-data from several types of files. The "meta-search" capabilities come with a price though: the price of ruining the image of Linux as an accurately working UNIX system.

The last time when I used Beagle I couldn’t persuade it to reindex a file that was modified for two weeks already, so that the search results showed a preview with non-existent contents.

All the wrong solutions to the unnecessary needs seem to come from a Windows-like approach of the computing.

{mospagebreak title=13. Our friends are our foes}

13. Our friends are our foes

Sun Microsystems is a friend of the open source community, and a friend of you. After all, aren’t they the originators of OpenOffice.org? They have also decided to open-source Java under GPLv2, they have open-sourced Solaris, and now Ian Murdoch (the creator of Debian) is with Sun, to help them understand what the general public is expecting from an operating system.

Well, maybe. I have not used OpenSolaris as embodied by GNU/Nexenta, and BeleniX was not very convincing, although it was fully functional. I have read however the Entitlement for Solaris Express, Developer Edition. They say it’s an "OpenSolaris-based distribution", however it’s still partially proprietary. Fine so far, but have you noticed how outrageously threatening and absurd are some provisions of this EULA?

E.g. : «(iv) You will indemnify and defend Sun and its licensors from any claims, including attorneys’ fees, which arise from or relate to distribution or use of Developed Programs to the extent these claims arise from or relate to the development performed by You. This Section 2.0 does not apply to the Sun Java etc.» Me, John Doe, defending and indemnifying Sun?! In a future life, maybe.

More threats: «11.2 It is understood and agreed that, notwithstanding any other provision of this Agreement, any breach of this Agreement may cause Sun irreparable damage for which recovery of money damages would be inadequate…» If money is not enough, maybe they want my life, right?

Or, something that not even Microsoft has not thought of: «14.0 During the term of the SLA and Entitlement, and for a period of three (3) years thereafter, You agree to keep proper records and documentation of Your compliance with the SLA and Entitlement.» Wow. Three years after the 6 licensed months, the FBI, the Interpol, the United Nations and the Martians will come to my door and arrest me for not having kept proper records to prove I am not guilty of any infringement of this EULA! The fine blend of freedom. Orwellian freedom, that is.

Also from out friends at Sun, there is a fine document: Solaris is a better Linux than Linux. I wouldn’t mind if Solaris were a better Linux than Linux. Maybe it is, actually. What I do mind is the way they’re trying to promote their OS: through lies. There is no way to have OS Support Fees of $10/mo for Solaris versus $106.67/mo for Linux! They have simply took the most expensive RHEL option, as if there wouldn’t be any other choice!

With Linux, costs start at $0/mo, pass through $50/yr (SLED) or $80/yr (RHEL Desktop), and would only go to $2,499/yr as the most advanced available service option ever.

They manage to forget about the 10:1 cost ratio in other place on their web site, which says: «Solaris 10 Subscriptions up to 50% less than equivalent offerings from Red Hat.» Now, that’s a different story.

So long for affinities in business. Or ethics, as the bare minimum. It’s only business, dude.

{mospagebreak title=14. You can leave your hat on}

14. You can leave your hat on

Believe it or not, some Linux actors can’t always be totally in good faith. For a fistful of money…

As IT professionals should know, when a certain OS platform is certified for a given database, this happens for a particular version of the OS, and for a particular version of the database server. This should be obvious anyway.

When Ubuntu 6.06 LTS was released in June 2006, Canonical has immediately issued a press release where, amongst the praised features (a 15-minute away LAMP solution with Ubuntu Server Edition, support for up to 5 years), they said: «The Ubuntu server platform has been certified for IBM’s DB2 and MySQL.»

At that time, the IBM Recommended and Validated Environments for DB2 9 did not mention any Ubuntu release, and the only relevant certification was with Recommended and Validated Environments for DB2 V8.2. That is, DB2 v8.2 was "Validated" on Ubuntu 5.04 ("Recommended" means IBM actually builds, tests and deploys on them; "Validated" means IBM certifies the full compatibility and gives official support).

And here comes the truth: "Ubuntu server" first appeared with version 5.10, so the claims about "the Ubuntu server platform being certified for IBM’s DB2" can’t refer to the 5.04 certification. Furthermore, there was no official record of IBM supporting DB2 on any newer Ubuntu release, so basically Canonical was lying and neither Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS, nor Ubuntu Server 5.10 were certified for DB2!

In the meantime, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS was validated for DB2 9, but this happened several months later. The lie was standing unnoticed by anybody (or nobody cared about the deceiving advertisement). Mr. Shuttleworth simply ignored my questions on the matter. What would happen with all the mainstream Linux distro would simply lie to increase their market share?

It’s only a coincidence that while I am writing this, Canonical announced a tighter integration with DB2: the latest IBM database will now download and deploy easily from the Ubuntu desktop. This time in full truth, we hope.

Also blamable from Canonical is the use of the (partially) closed-source Launchpad for managing the bugs in Ubuntu. As if Bugzilla, Trac the other open-source bug tracking systems were not good enough, or as if open-source can’t be trusted enough. All this, coming from the distro ranked #1 on Distrowatch! Far from being the right message to pass to the community…

Another unexpected surprise is coming from Novell, the open source company. While the EU Europass site features downloads as both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice 1.1 documents, the Novell Buying Programs page has all the price lists as XLS files! None of them is duplicated as either ODT or SXW. This tells volumes on their "integration" with Microsoft. In times of NLD9, they had that objective of having all Novell employees on Linux and OpenOffice by Q1 2005. Or maybe not.

A last glitch is coming from the real #1, Red Hat itself. Part of their Patent Policy, there is a Patent Promise. It’s not difficult to notice that the BSD and MIT licenses are missing from the list of the Approved Licenses: «GNU General Public License v2.0; IBM Public License v1.0; Common Public License v0.5; Q Public License v1.0; Open Software License v1.1.»

Once again, a wrong message.

{mospagebreak title=15. Documentation, at large}

15. Documentation, at large

Summer 2005, Alan Cox admitted in an interview that we have reasons indeed to be dismayed by the poor state of documentation of most of open source software. What is worse, this is unlikely to change: «I don’t think anyone’s going to do a grand initiative.»

As predicted, things have not changed since then. Currently, the best documentation on open-source software is The FreeBSD Handbook, and second-best is The OpenBSD FAQ.

Quality end-user Linux documentation is issued by Red Hat and by Novell, but this is often far from the quality of the old-style UNIX printed manuals. KDE and GNOME always ship with incomplete and obsolete help files (and pretty useless: thank you, I know how to read a text label, maybe I wanted for more), and Linux has gradually lost the classical respect for man pages, a long-time UNIX tradition.

For quality man pages, you need to go to the *BSD land.

Let’s switch now from the end-user or the system administrator to the guy that should decide what Linux distro will your company buy and use. Is enough first-hand information available? You know, a few clicks away, as we are in a global Web world.

To our surprise, the major actors are deceiving in this department. Should you want to buy SLED, you can’t find out what exactly comes with it! In other words: what are you paying for? Is it more than a plain desktop? I dare you to find an easy link to that. You have to go to the package list page to notice that the Samba server is included. Unfortunately, things are not any better with RHEL.

A conspiratorial theory would say that the lack of a proper documentation is made on purpose.

When you purposefully design software that is difficult to use, lacks documentation, and/or is nearly impossible to install and configure, you are doing so for creating the opportunities to sell support contracts and consulting services. When the beauty of the GUI is only skin-deep, here comes the big, fat support contract.

Leaving the conspiracy land, I bet both Novell and Red Hat suffer from the Microsoft-like arrogance: we are the #1, come and buy from us, you don’t really need all those details. Our solution is what you want anyway, let’s drop the technicalities. Or you can have one of our commercials call you.

Is it that hard to put a page with all the relevant info, in easy access? Or are the buyers deemed so stupid?

The pleasant surprise comes from the French Mandriva. Their Corporate Server 4 has a very practical specifications page, and the accompanying Product Sheet is the best product presentation I have seen in my whole life! All the relevant info you need to take a decision is there, in a good presentation, just the way you’d expect it to be. (Incidentally, it’s a good server indeed.)

Fortunately, there is life outside North America too, contrary to the common belief.

{mospagebreak title=16. Fixing bugs by not fixing them at all}

16. Fixing bugs by not fixing them at all

With the current complexity of the software, having lots of unfixed bugs shouldn’t be a major concern. All the publicly-available Bugzillas are not there to show you how weak is the open-source software; on the contrary, they allow you for a better interaction with the developers. The fact that Microsoft and Oracle don’t have any bug tracking system open to the public does not mean their products have fewer bugs.

There are however some questionable reactions to some particular bugs.

Let’s take a popular media player for KDE: Kaffeine. For a long while, it was the default media player in many distributions, including Mandriva. Then it stopped being the default in Mandriva. The reason? An old bug that allowed Kaffeine to crash Konqueror under certain circumstances.

Thread-safe or not, a good design of Konqueror should not allow it to crash when a child process is going stray. Any crash of Kaffeine should be tolerated by Konqueror, otherwise that means it follows the Windows approach: when Explorer crashes, everything goes wild.

Things can be even worse. At some point, I managed to make Kaffeine crash the whole X server with a beta version of Kubuntu, which is definitely something that should never have happened with Linux (it’s more like Windows Millenium Edition to me). The phenomenon stopped happening with a later update of the system, but nobody has a clue of what happened and how was it possible.

The "embedded Kaffeine crash" bug was fixed mid-February, but only in theory. The fix released with Kaffeine 0.8.4 involves the use of a modified xine that requires xcb, so the actual bug (either improper design, or improper error handling) was not fixed. Obviously, the Kaffeine you might be using proudly carries the eternal bug, and you’ll have to wait until 0.8.4 will get mainstream.

Is this a good reason enough to change the default media player to KMPlayer? (Mandriva Corporate Desktop 3.0 had Totem as the media player in KDE, and I was expecting to change it to Kaffeine, but it seems KMPlayer is “more official”.)

Another questionable decision was to remove Klipper from the list of the applets automatically launched with KDE, also in the latest Mandriva. Once again, it has been said that Klipper (a clipboard manager) presents a severe bug in relation with Konqueror. To avoid some unpleasant crash, it is not started by default.

Klipper is one of the small tools that make the difference when comes to KDE vs. GNOME debates. Each and every KDE user will want it started, and will most likely manually start it on systems where it’s missing. The vanilla KDE starts it by default. The default KDE installations of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Fedora Core 6 have Klipper started by default. Why is then Mandriva irritating the users, while trying to avoid some rare crashes to happen?

Sweeping the dust and hiding it under the carpet is one way. Another innocent way to avoid fixing a bug is to concoct an ugly workaround, as with a printing hack in KPDF 3.5.7. Not bad from a practical point of view, but it doesn’t address any bug. Nobody will ever try to fix the bug if an ugly hack is available, will they?

{mospagebreak title=17. The Debian kindergarten}

17. The Debian kindergarten

If Richard M. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation are known for having unmitigated views on what is "freedom as in free speech", not "freedom as in free beer", the Debian Free Software Guidelines are also known to have some extremist views with regards to what is free and what is not free.

I used to call this license-Nazism. For instance, no matter the GNU Free Documentation License is a FSF creation, Debian is more Catholic than the Pope, and only considers it conditionally free!

The famous democratically-organized, legally-aware, freedom-committed Debian Project has serious problems with the idea of trademark licensing and protection. It seems to be problems with the understanding of their own license.

Last year, Linux New Media AG from Munich (the publishers of Linux Magazin, Easy Linux and Linux User) has issued at CeBIT 2006 an extended version of Debian Sarge, compiled by German members of the Debian Project to include packages or versions of them not present in the official Debian Sarge: X.org, SpamAssassin, Firefox 1.5 and more (Sarge has Firefox 1.0.x and it uses XFree86, not X.org).

This edition was still labeled "Debian Sarge". And they had no problem with that!

To force a simile, it’s like you’re a customer of Mercedes Benz, and you notice that a modified car is still labeled "Mercedes" (and not "SsangYong, powered by Mercedes", but simply "Mercedes"). And Mercedes is doing nothing about that issue. To them, it’s even OK to have the fake car labeled "Mercedes", as long as it’s not labeled "Genuine Mercedes". Wouldn’t you be offended that Mercedes doesn’t care about that? Would you keep buying from Mercedes, as long as they don’t care to protect their trademark? Probably not. How would you tell which Mercedes is genuine and which is not?

Debian fails to understand that even the user of a free product is still a customer. Red Hat understands that, and it would react in defense if a modified Fedora Core 6 would still be labeled "Fedora Core 6 Zod" instead of something like BLAG, for instance.

It should come then at no surprise that Debian failed to accept Mozilla’s Trademark Policy. While everybody else had no problems with it, the Debian people found it in violation of DFSG #8, so they had to come up with a whole different Zoo to "fix" the bug: you don’t have anymore Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey in Debian, but Iceweasel, Icedove and Iceape.

Would you rather have a web browser with 15% of the market, or 15 privately branded Firefox-based browsers each with 1 percent? Except for finding more about the Earth’s fauna, I can see why many people got angry about the change of the names in the Mozilla products shipped with Debian.

Going to the kindergarten now. Dunc-Tank was an experiment to see how targeted fund raising can improve Debian, and whether Debian 4.0 etch could be released on schedule on the 4th of December, 2006 (which of course did not happen).

It wasn’t all about money though. As the then DPL Anthony Towns revealed, «Steve Langasek, who is one of the release managers, was basically working 18 hours a day on his day job to do PHP coding, and he wasn’t having enough time after that to look into some of the release critical issues that we were having.» Just how bad can a project management be, when you appoint as a Release Manager someone who is already busy for 18 hours a day with something else?!

It can be understood that the majority of Debian developers were not happy with the decision to have someone be paid for a work the rest of them are doing for free and for fun. There is nevertheless a long way from disgruntling to the kindergarten-like mutiny that was the Dunc-Bank, «an experiment to see how aggressive bug reporting can delay the release of Debian Etch. We hope that by finding more and more RC bugs in Debian we can delay Etch.»

If this is not deliberate sabotage by your books, we’re definitely playing different games.

The Dunc-Bank sabotage was initiated by Sam Hocevar, a well-known Debian developer. Then, Sam Hocevar was elected as the new DPL for 2007! It’s useless to ask "how many voted for Sam", because the Debian elections are using an advanced Condorcet voting system with Schwartz Sequential Dropping, to guarantee that the winner is the candidate that is the less hated, if I am allowed to put it this way. That means Sam was the best choice for Debian, as expressed by the voice of the Debian developers. In my opinion, Sam is the worst thing that could happen to Debian, and a clear sign that Debian is going nowhere.

This is suicide for Debian. Mere suicide. As Sam was elected by the Debian developers, Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

Debian will continue to be largely unaffected by this decision, but electing the main saboteur as your leader is ruining the last attempt to trust the Debian Project.

You will trust Debian even less once you will find that, while their repositories include plenty of obsolete or orphaned packages, the Debian New Maintainer page is currently listing 102 Applicants in Process, and you can also see that an applicant can wait up to 814 days to pass all the procedures!

I would close by borrowing the words of Ladislav Bodnar (LXF91, April 2007, p. 38): «Debian developers … re-read point 4 of the Debian Social Contract: "We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities." If you still conclude that what you have to say is in the best interest of your users…» To me, it looks more like vanity.

{mospagebreak title=18. Freedom and myths}

18. Freedom and myths

Our friends, the software patents, are imposing known restrictions to what a Linux distro can ship with. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is having its own contribution, so that the only legal solution (especially in the United States) to play proprietary media formats or zone-coded DVDs is to use commercial software on top of your free of charge Linux distro.

GNU/Linux (the way Richard Stallman likes to call it) is primarily about freedom, so that a Linux user should ideally refrain from playing MP3, MPEG, AVI, WMV or WMA files or streams. He or she should also not be using closed-source software such as Acrobat Reader, Flash, RealPlayer, or maybe Opera too.

I fully agree that everyone should be encoding in OGG instead of MP3, but what to do when this is not the case? Is everybody having such a "high conscience" to only accept the utmost expression of the freedom, and to simply refuse to watch the Web clips on sites like CNN? (Swfdec started to be able to play YouTube videos recently.)

There are not so many heroes in the real life. Probably 90% of the individual users are using what should be called "illegal codecs" (some small distros that are not backed by any company can even provide them out of the box), and some corporate users (and some of the individuals too!) have chosen to pay for the commercially-licensed players offered by Mandriva, Turbolinux, and Linspire.

Freedom is too a matter of choice. Practical choice, not revolutionary programs. This makes the "purified" gNewSense distro sponsored by FSF a political product, and nothing more. Fortunately, the future Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon will feature a new flavour of uncompromising freedom that renders gNewSense pointless, for it «takes an ultra-orthodox view of licensing: no firmware, drivers, imagery, sounds, applications, or other content which do not include full source materials and come with full rights of modification, remixing and redistribution».

At the opposite end of the rainbow, another myth appeared. Click’N'Run, the service provided by Linspire, is supposed to offer soon a universal repository, starting with Debian, Fedora Core, Freespire, Linspire, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. Both free and commercial packages will be offered.

While providing packages for the whole Universe is not a trivial task at all, and one may wonder whether Linspire has the required manpower to ensure a proper QA so that updating from CNR doesn’t break the system, there are some high expectations that will not be met.

A good deal of the users who currently use third-party repositories like the Penguin Liberation Front are cherishing the unexplained belief that CNR will allow them to get rid of all the annoyances they were having, by providing them with packages not in the original distro of their choice.

Sure thing, this may happen, but for a price! What is currently patent-encumbered will fall under the commercial offerings umbrella: the "harmless" packages will be free, but the others might cost you fees like $49.95. Many users are not conscious of that.

As the MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3) patent status is the most fuzzy of all, it is also the audio format that offers you more than a single choice. There are even two free ways to play MP3 legally.

The first one comes from Mandriva: all their distros are MP3-aware out of the box, even the Free download editions. As part of a commercial deal, they can offer you legally-licensed MP3 decodecs for free.

The second choice is from Fluendo, whose Web Shop not only offers paying decodecs for Dolby AC3, MPEG4 Part 2 Video, MPEG2 Video, Windows Media Video and Windows Media Audio (the complete set of playback plugins for Gstreamer is priced EUR 28), but the MP3 plugin is free of charge!

I bet everyone is willing to pay royalties for a mathematical method or for a file format. Feel free to do it.

There is one more thing that might make the defenders of freedom feel uneasy. Fedora had the intention to provide Totem with a <;;a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureCodecBuddy">CodecBuddy feature that would inform the users that restricted formats can not be played, and to direct them to the legal choices provided by Fluendo. As Red Hat and the Fedora project are American subjects. they can not afford to be accused of contributory infringement of any kind. See a possible screenshot here.

And still, the MP3 playback plugin can be downloaded for free from Fluendo.

What is defective with this approach? What would be extremely annoying to me (should CodecBuddy behave as described) is to see how Fedora, traditionally a freedom-oriented, neutral distro, is going to become nothing more than a Fluendo Webshop front-end! I can predict how some FSF-enrolled people will stop using Fedora the next day.

{mospagebreak title=19. The kernel 2.6.20}

19. The kernel 2.6.20

Somewhere on the road from 2.6.19 and 2.6.20, a major change happened: «First, the big change is the migration away from the crusty old parallel ATA drivers to shiny new ones that use the same libata infrastructure as the SATA drivers. A side effect of this is that /dev/hda becomes /dev/sda. This isn’t a problem if you’re using ‘mount by label’ (which has been the default in Fedora since forever). If you aren’t, well, it’s going to be fun.»

Manually compiling a 2.6.20 kernel took by surprise some people, when «the harddrive had switched dev file from hda to sda and the DVD drive had taken the place of hda.»

As a matter of fact, I have experienced some moody behaviors with Ubuntu Feisty (Beta):

• kernel 2.6.20-12: IDE (PATA) /dev/hda goes /dev/sda
• kernel 2.6.20-13: IDE (PATA) is seen again as /dev/hda
• kernel 2.6.20-14: IDE (PATA) /dev/hda goes again /dev/sda

The /dev/hdb IDE CD-ROM is seen as /dev/scd0 by the unified driver.

My first reaction believe that starting with 2.6.20, the Linux kernel shoud have had a new tagline: «How Do You Want Your Devices To Be Called Today?»

And indeed, forcefully treating a device as a different device, and changing its identification in the process is revolting: an IDE PATA hard-disk and an IDE CD-ROM will never have assigned SCSI-like device names in BSD-based operating systems such as FreeBSD or Solaris!

At least, device names have a meaning in BSD-land.

I agree that using a SATA driver with a PATA disk works, but why forcing it? I thought the philosophy of forcing the users was a Microsoft one, not an open source concept. Even so, when Microsoft did the same thing in Windows NT, replacing the "scsidisk" driver with "disk", it was the other way around: a more generic name was used, which made the value of truth unchanged. Any SCSI disk is indeed a "disk", but not all the disks are SCSI disks!

Chuck Ebbert from Red Hat told me that dropping the old PATA driver was justified, as there are horrible IDE bugs with hot-pluggable drives. However, there is a problem: «The real problem is that SCSI only supports 15 partitions per disk while the old IDE driver supports more (31?) Nobody has an answer for that one…»

To me, this is just another proof that the decision to treat everything through the SCSI driver was a hasty one. Automated updates of a production system that go into hdX becoming sdX will break things like automated backup, mounts, exported NFS, and even RAID.

Mounting by label is supposed to be immune to device name changes. And Red Hat distros are using it by default. There are however two CONs to that answer.

First, some other distros (Ubuntu) are using udev-provided UUIDs in GRUB instead of LABELs when with the SATA driver (root=UUID=c18758e8-a5c2-4921-816a-f235542574a2). One size does not fit all.

Secondly, there is a lot of software that will still break, for it’s using the more intuitive device name. Some examples include raidtools (raidtab) and mdadm (mdadm.conf): they both use /dev names and will need manual fixes.

The irresponsible changes in the Linux kernel contrast with the conservative approach of the *BSD family of operating systems, whose wisdom says that something that worked yesterday is not supposed to break tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the kernel team does its job and takes the decisions without a previous poll with all the mainstream distro makers, albeit some of them (Red Hat, Novell) are employing kernel developers. This is decentralized software development.

Coming after a 2.6.19 kernel that was breaking all distros older than ten months, I wonder whether you’re supposed to be expecting for less every day when running Linux. I for one am expecting for more.

Therefore, 2.6.20 might be the sign that you should switch to *BSD.

{mospagebreak title=20. 2.6.16 and 2.4.35: does anyone care?}

20. 2.6.16 and 2.4.35: does anyone care?

For the stability-minded people (remember, the Linux kernel does not have a stable API), it was established that 2.6.16 will be the stable kernel for 2 or 3 years. Still, no stable API/ABI for external modules!

The 2.4 kernel has a stable version in 2.4.34, maintained by Willy Tarreau. More than three years ago, Marcelo Tosatti (the 2.4 maintainer at the time) said that after 2.4.24 is released, the 2.4 kernel will go into maintenance mode, but changes continued to appear. Ironically, the 2.4 kernel is still used by the recently released Debian Etch, and Slackware 11.0 is the last Slackware release to have it by default (the next release will completely drop the support for 2.4).

Some people seem to still care about 2.4. Is anyone caring of the long-term supported 2.6.16? I am afraid not: RHEL5 shipped with 2.6.18 (and will stick to it for 7 years), Debian Etch has chosen 2.6.18 too.

How expressive for the good coordination between the major distributions and the kernel team!

{mospagebreak title=21. KDE vs. GNOME}

21. KDE vs. GNOME

Go to any Linux forum or mailing list and you will be able to start a "KDE vs. GNOME" flamewar without the slightest effort.

When KDE was founded in 1996, the cross-platform Qt toolkit was chosen for its richness of features. Qt is still believed today to be the best toolkit available, although it’s worth mentioning that GIMP, the open-source rival of Adobe Photoshop, is using the GTK+ toolkit, which constitutes the foundation for "the other major desktop environment", GNOME.

Due to some concerns expressed by the Free Software Foundation with regards to the then non-free Qt license, GNOME was launched in 1997 by the GNU project, to provide with a really free desktop environment. In the meantime, Qt has changed its licensing model, and starting with 4.0, a GPL edition is available for Windows too, yet "a friendly competition" is still opposing KDE and GNOME.

GNOME was born for "uncompromising freedom" for the code, as opposed to the queer initial Qt license. The funny contradiction is that this does not apply to the trademarks, but only to the code. The current GNOME Foundation Trademark Usage Guidelines is a long and complex legal babble, which includes the obnoxious: «Do not use GNOME logos unless you have explicit written permission to do so.» In contrast, the KDE Logo Trademark Licence is a short notice that merely states: «The KDE logo can be used freely as long as it is not used to refer to products other than KDE itself. There is no formal procedure to use it.» What better example could have been chosen to illustrate the differences between the American and the European mentalities?

Miguel de Icaza, the initial GNOME project leader and the creator of the popular Midnight Commander clone of Norton Commander, is now more interested in the development of Mono, which explains in part the contamination of GNOME with Mono.

While KDE has decided to only provide the stable 3.5 branch (currently, 3.56) with minor bug-fixes and improvements, as the upcoming KDE4 will be a major breakthrough, GNOME makes slow but steady advancements. Nobody knows what an illusory GNOME 3.0 might bring (there are no plans for 3.0), but the traditionally under-featured GNOME seems to have reversed the trend: at least for the time being, it shows visible changes from a stable version to the next one.

Red Hat was originally "GNOME and proud to be so", whereas the European distros focused on KDE. It has been said that GNOME is business-oriented, and KDE is aimed at cutting-edge technology, but things have gradually changed in the last 2-3 years.

As a consequence, two traditionally KDE-centric Linux distributions that used to consider GNOME as "just an attachment" have decided to grant it a higher role, almost unbalancing themselves.

SUSE was the first to change its focus to GNOME, after having been acquired by Novell (GNOME is more popular in the United States, whereas KDE is the most popular in Europe). At some point, panicked users thought that Novell decided to support only GNOME as its official desktop. It was later clarified that both desktops are important to Novell, but in the meantime Hubert Mantel, co-founder of SuSE, had already left the company. He returned to Novell after the controversial Novell-Microsoft deal.

As a buyer of Ximian, the added know-how allowed Novell to have an active role in the development of GNOME too. Evolution, now the default personal information manager and workgroup information management tool in GNOME, is an important asset of Novell too.

Mandriva was also tempted by GNOME, and they have managed to provide a well-polished GNOME desktop, at pair with the KDE one.

The less positive part of the never ending competition between KDE and GNOME is that it is not like the competition between other window managers or desktop environments (XFCE includes enough tools to be considered a desktop environment, and its latest file manager Thunar is excellent; yet, it is unable to draw transparent icon labels on the desktop, which is surprisingly anachronistic nowadays). You will never see passionate quarrels on whether Fluxbox or WindowMaker "rulz", but almost every KDE-GNOME dispute gets flaming and political.

It’s even easier now that GNOME has Mono.

As I have personally switched from FVWM and WindowMaker to GNOME, then to KDE two years later, I can tell it’s not that easy to make the switch.

Basic differences include the reversed order of the OK and Cancel buttons, or the immediate effectiveness of the changes in GNOME, versus the need to Apply them in KDE, all idiosyncrasies inherited from the widgets or from the philosophy of the respective desktop. As for the look and feel…

The default graphical theme in KDE looks more frivolous than in GNOME, and this is one of the reasons I rejected it for a long time. On the other hand, GNOME only started to matter since version 2.0, because the previous GTK+ 1.2 had some of the ugliest possible widgets.

An annoying issue that appears when in a desktop environment you’re running an application that uses the widget library of the other desktop is the lack of consistence: if you run KDE and use Evolution, it can look very plain, and won’t theme with the rest of the OS. Telling KDE to theme GTK+ applications to mimic the style used in KDE is however giving better results than configuring Qt to have an acceptable look under GNOME.

Seven years ago, Richard Stallman declared on Qt, the GPL, KDE, and GNOME: «GNOME and KDE will remain two rival desktops, unless some day they can be merged in some way.» FreeDesktop.org was then formed to encourage the cooperation among open source desktops for the X Window System. So far, feasible projects such as XDG menu or D-BUS were practically adopted by the mainstream, whereas the illusory Portland initiative has failed to set "common interfaces for GNOME and KDE" other than menus, MIME types and other small items. Important, but unimpressive from a distance.

Another salutary initiative, the Tango Desktop Project, was more successful in unifying the look of the individual icon sets as a first step to create a common look and feel.

A unified desktop might be a factor of influence for a better mass adoption of Linux, and it would also cut the rivalry that exists between the fans of each of the two desktops. Once KDE 4.0 is released, I am afraid the "KDE vs. GNOME" flamewars will get revived nevertheless.

{mospagebreak title=22. Alice in BSD-land}

22. Alice in BSD-land

The BSD family of operating systems comes in fewer flavors than Linux. The major derivatives of 386BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite are, in chronological order, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, with a honorable mention to DragonFly BSD. Desktop-oriented FreeBSD spin-offs like DesktopBSD and PC-BSD are still struggling to acquire a production-ready status, yet they provide a very pleasant desktop experience. Needless to say, BSD operating systems can run Linux 2.4 binaries natively.

My first encounter with FreeBSD was after I was introduced to Linux. I guess it was in the times of FreeBSD 2.0.5 and 2.1.5. The BSD-like init system of Slackware helped me to find my way in FreeBSD. I don’t remember very much of it, but I know I liked it. Maybe this was because it was really STABLE.

Even before that, I had the joy to discover NetBSD 1.0. It was small, it was interesting, and it looked promising.

At some point I was distracted by Red Hat 3.0.3 and 4.0, and I lost the focus on *BSD.

Created to provide software that may be used for any purpose and without strings attached, the FreeBSD Project had a clear license, no matter it’s about the 4-clause or the 3-clause one. Simply put, I love the BSD license for you can summarize it to everybody in a simple way: "Do not claim that you wrote this, and do not sue us if it breaks."

15 years after my first contact with the GNU General Public License, I still have problems in finding the coherence in it. The never ending debates on how does the Novell-Microsoft deal put up with either GPLv2 or GPLv3 (draft), as well as the confusion that reigns over the legality of the binary kernel modules (OK, if they’re illegal, why doesn’t anybody enforce the GPL?) prove that GPL is a confusing license. The best digest of it would be: "the sources better be available somehow", but the arbitrary of the interpretation of concepts like the "written offer" and the ambiguity on what is a "derived work" consumed so much energy, that a supernova could have been born.

Unlike the governance model used for the Linux kernel, that of a benevolent dictator for life, in which Linus Torvalds approves the modifications he likes, FreeBSD has a democratic model that uses a core team of 9 members, and several other carefully sized teams. The governance model does matter because the FreeBSD project is responsible for the whole operating system, not only for the kernel, as it’s the case with Linux. So no, FreeBSD has not a closed development model, but only a mature one.

Why are FreeBSD & friends less used than Linux? The discrepancy is even more visible at the level of the general public, and the desktop usage of FreeBSD is surprisingly low, regardless of the fact that popular cross-platforms desktop environments are working in *BSD just like they do in Linux.

The detractors of the BSD license blame it for the alleged slowdown of *BSD compared to Linux. When there is no guarantee to have the modified versions of your code returned to the community, less people are motivated to contribute. I have to confess that I fail to understand what is all about: after all, you should write proprietary, closed-source code if having someone else using it is a problem to you. Yes, commercial usage should be allowed too, otherwise what’s the meaning of the "open" part in "open source"?! Or maybe, as Clinton said once, «it depends of what the meaning of "is" is.»

It’s rather that FreeBSD long time resisted to the temptation of making things "easier" in order to entice the Windows users. It’s not elitism, as nobody said "we only need smart users", it’s responsibility.

Unfortunately, starting with 5.0, the quality and stability of FreeBSD have deteriorated, or maybe it was my hardware that was less supported. Compromises have been made to match the popularity of Linux, and the price to pay was rather high.

Starting with 6.1 and 6.2, I felt like FreeBSD started to recover, and I hope the future will prove it as a stable, rosk solid operating system.

The second-best is not second-best no more. As, Charles Hannum, one of the NetBSD founders,
wrote last year, «The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance. It has gotten to the point that being associated with the project is often more of a liability than an asset.»

I can’t make any judgments on that one, but I noticed that NetBSD 3.1 is a step back in terms of project management than 3.0. With 3.0, a second CD image was available, to offer extra binary packages. This ISO file is not available anymore in 3.1, and the FTP tree is messy and inconsistent. The i386 architecture seems quite neglected nowadays, with i386 binary packages stopping at 3.0, as 3.1 seems to be focusing on the PowerPC platform.

Fortunately, there is OpenBSD too. It is a hard nut, and a "take it or leave it" issue. Theo de Raadt, the founder and leader of OpenBSD and OpenSSH, is known to have a strong personality, and a real repugnance of the closed-source code. Unlike FSF’s Richard Stallman, Theo is credible in his approach, and doesn’t like any kind of attached strings, GPL included.

Et pour cause! The viral character of the GPL makes that everything that mixes with GPL be only able to be licensed as GPL. As it was once said: the BSD license protects the freedom of the users, whereas the GPL protects the freedom of the code.

The traditionally cold relations between Theo de Raadt and the Linux community experienced a burst of bold reciprocal accusations when an OpenBSD developer was accused of GPL infringement and code stealing by the developer of a Broadcom bcm43xx driver licensed under the GPL (the full thread).

To make a long story short, the controversial driver code in OpenBSD was not meant to be put in the main code tree — although it was indeed publicly available, it was just to look at and modify it in-place, so that a working driver could be created in the end. No "stealing" was ever intended, and getting your inspiration from GPL’ed code with regards to data structures, finite state machine models, and whatever else was not documented by Broadcom is not theft.

The dispute got uglier than necessary, however simple conclusions like «The lesson is simple. Communicate and observe the licenses. There is no other way to put it.» are way too simple. The actual dispute generated by the incompatibility of GPL with BSD looked more like a dispute over software patents, with GPL bearing the coats of the patentee. There was a definite lack of common sense and humanity on the Linux/GPL side.

While the most secure operating system (in the default installation), OpenBSD might not be the best choice for everybody. It releases twice a year, with a mathematical precision (unlike Fedora or Ubuntu), but this also means you should upgrade the system: older releases are not supported for long. The FAQ says that «old releases are typically supported up to two releases back.» This does not guarantee 12 months, and the elusive phrasing makes people believe that OpenBSD is only supported for 6 months.

While you don’t "have to" upgrade every 6 months, it is certainly to your benefit to do so. There is great wisdom in this approach, because although upgrading is always a stress, OpenBSD advances in small, non-volatile steps that take the hassle out of upgrading. Each release is a large collection of small changes. Also, where other projects are consistently down to the wire with the release date, too frequently pushing an RC out the door as golden master simply because they have delayed things too long and need to start selling, OpenBSD usually has a release finished and ready to go almost a month before the release date.

OpenBSD is not a one-man project: there are some 170 contributors around Theo de Raadt. The engineering team is usually busy with creating drivers and reverse-engineering undocumented chips. Also, any external code passes severe quality checks before it can enter OpenBSD.

This is the team who brought to the whole world the open-source implementation of SSH: OpenSSH. And this is the team who created the OS with the most Spartan installer currently in use.

Unfortunately for the BSD-land, when the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) merged with the Free Standards Groups to form The Linux Foundation, it was only to assert that *BSD is not supposed to have anything to say in the Open Source and Free Standards areas. It’s all in the name of Linux…

{mospagebreak title=23. Shooting yourself in the foot}

23. Shooting yourself in the foot

Shooting yourself in the foot is not unsual in the OSS world. If it’s not the future Debian Project Leader trying to delay the next stable release as a sign of rebellion, it’s Ubuntu breaking after a system upgrade. Or it’s Eric S. Raymond leaving Fedora after 13 years, for that he cannot stand the alleged "incompetent repository maintenance" that «will condemn Fedora to a shrinking niche in the future.» This only makes sense when you find that ESR joined the Freespire leadership board, so that joining the Ubuntu camp was only logical. And shameful.

The first major fork that bewildered me was the incredible story of X.org being born out of XFree86, for a change in the license of XFree86 4.4.0 that was considered incompatible with the GPL.

The XFree86 Project license 1.1 added the requirement that a proper acknowledgment ("This product includes software developed by The XFree86 Project, Inc (http://www.xfree86.org/) and its contributors") either in the documentation, or in the binary itself, "in the same place and form as other third-party acknowledgments". This was considered by the Free Software Foundation as a the BSD-like advertising clause that makes the license incompatible with the GPL.

The claimed license incompatibility was just the final straw in a strange history of stagnation, restricted access of the developers to the CVS (only a core team of 15 had commit rights), culminating with a vote on the self-disbanding of the Core Team, effective immediately!

A few distros have forked XFree86 from an older version (Debian Sarge is using it), but we are practically using X.org now.

Another example of a severe self-shoot is the forking of cdrkit out of cdrtools, which was a result of Debian Bug #377109.

The root cause was the decision of Joerg Schiller to change the license for cdrtools’ build system under the CDDL instead of GPL. Sun’s CDDL is an OSI-approved free license, but (as we all know) GPL doesn’t mix with anything else.

By following the long thread of comments on the Debian Bug #377109, we can notice that Joerg Schiller has some excellent points every once in a while. For instance, he is showing that Debian’s own Social Contract says at section 9 that a license (here, the GPL) should not force the contamination (here, of the CDDL-licensed build system with the GPL license). If Debian would follow the strict GPL interpretation, then Debian would need to call the GPL clearly non-free because it then would violate the DFSG Section 9.

I don’t know of any impartial attorney of law to have examined the compatibility of the GPL with Debian’s Free Software Guidelines, as they seem to contradict each other in such cases.

Furthermore, Joerg has raised one more legal objection, after «a 1.5 hour phone conference with the lawyer who created the CDDL and the Solaris chief engineer»: a European Author has the right to create more legal combinations than a US Author has. This is a result of the archaic US Copyright law. As per the German Copyright Law (which applies to Joerg’s licensed work), «the GPL cannot go beyond the boundaries of copyright law. If, according to copyright law two works are independent, then the GPL has nothing to say about it. … Schilling is claiming his Makefile, because it is a full program, is an independent work. That means the GPL is irrelevant until you prove it is not an independent work.»

The joys of having GPL as the most used open-source license, instead of BSD, MIT, CDDL…

And now, a very practical shooting: very recently, Olivier Blin from Mandriva has witnessed how Apache 2.0 managed to self-indict a DoS! While a bug in the respective build of the 2.6.17 kernel is not excluded, isn’t that nice to know that Apache 2.0 is able under certain circumstances to shoot itself with a Denial-of-Service? (Slackware comes with Apache 1.3.37, and OpenBSD comes with Apache 1.3.29).

Not to mention the latest quiz: Are GPLv3 and Apache 2 incompatible?

{mospagebreak title=24. The awakening}

24. The Awakening

Under Linux, BSD and everything UNIX, the high uptime was always one of the most valued assets, especially for servers. Windows users were traditionally enjoying the BSOD at random moments.

But they were also enjoying another features before Linux ever had them: hibernation (officially known as "suspend to disk"), and standby (officially known as "suspend to RAM"). Since a desktop user doesn’t need to have the computer running 24/7, yet he would like to be able to "freeze" it and recover to the saved state quickly, these were great features. Laptop users will enjoy them even more, as the power is a scarce resource when you’re on the way.

I remember how surprised I was to see that both hibernation and wake-up were practically instantaneous starting with Windows 2000, compared to the slow BIOS-based procedure used by Windows 98 on an old HP laptop. After almost a decade of "hibernation and awakening", the availability and reliability of these features in Linux is one of the first things I look after a new installation on any of my home systems.

Alas, the current status of the suspend features in the Linux kernel is best described by the word broken: Barely Reliable Overlooked Kernel Erratic Nap.

I always have problems when I change a distro, or even when I upgrade to the next version. With FC5 I had a reliable hibernation on the laptop. Ubuntu 5.04 managed to hibernate my desktop, but I lost this with 5.10. SuSE 9.3 hibernated my PC with kernel 2.6.11, but SuSE 10.0 broke it completely: kernel 2.6.13. FC6 restored the sleeping capabilities, but Pardus broke them again, while still being able to suspend to RAM on my laptop. On its side, Mandriva 2007 brought back the suspend to disk for my PC, and RHEL5 and Kubuntu 7.04 can cope with my laptop almost perfectly. In this entirely foolish saraband, I was never able to make anything go to sleep with neither of CentOS4, Debian Sarge, Slackware.

Yes, I know: the BIOS might be "defective" with regards to the DSDT, no matter the kernel says it can cope with it: «ACPI (supports S0 S1 S3 S4 S5)». Patches are available, but is this really a task for the end-user? An ACPI DSDT patch in initrd is a distinct possibility, howevr none of the distros I tried had it.

While the old power management interface APM was superseded by ACPI, the power management features that work with your computer and a given version of an open-source operating system can never be foretold.

There is more than a single possibility to make your computer suspend: the swsusp support in the kernel, the suspend2 patch, and the userspace µswsusp. No one can tell you what should work with your computer.

At the desktop environment’s level, there is also some duplication in the front-end helper applets that allow you to suspend: we can count KLaptop (dead but walking in some distros), KPowersave, gnome-power-manager, the new kde-guidance-powermanager, and possibly some others.

Unless the efforts to make Linux have a better power management for a broader range of hardware will be better focused, it will still be regarded as a difficult operating system, built using a chaotic development model.

But why is that we want to put our computers to sleep (err… not for good), instead of just shutting them down, then powering them up again? It might be about the booting speed.

I am personally satisfied with the speed my computers are booting. I don’t care that much if they take 30 or 60 seconds to get from death into X. Some other people do care.

The classical init system (sysvinit/sysv-rc) has been doing a good job in starting, supervising and stopping all the processes on Linux systems for 15 years now, not to mention that it used to do its job on Unix System V since 1983. When comes to the speed of booting a modern Linux system, various approaches — usually involving parallel execution — have been tried in order to improve it: initng (Init Next Generation), runit (somehow similar to BSD’s RC), pinit, and of course Ubuntu’s sexy upstart.

While progress is generally a positive idea, having several distros starting their own init system is crazy: this is going to make the respective distros incompatible with other distros, and this will also render your previous knowledge of sysvinit useless. In the process, all the systems unsing the new and experimental init systems will definitely not be production-ready, as the risk of not booting correctly is significantly increased compared to those using the verified System V init.

When something is broken (power management), they don’t fix it, but when something works (sysvinit), they’re trying to break it. I am afraid this is the way Linux works nowadays. Maybe they need a different way of awakening to discover what is really important: through meditation (zazen).

{mospagebreak title=25. Whereto?}

25. Whereto?

I can already feel the trollers anxious to throw with accusations of FUD. Not facing the truth and not accepting critiques would be prejudicial to FLOSS at large.

Narrow-minded readers might assert that’s impossible for the writer of such a critical document to have a genuine interest in the development of the open-source software. The same happened to Bernard-Henri Lévy when he published the book «American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville». Some reviewers declared BHL must have some twisted logic, otherwise there wouldn’t be that «insurmountable paradox: on the one hand, a declaration of love for America every few pages; on the other, the content of the book, which is in sharp contrast with this declaration. Alas (or Dieu merci?), Lévvy cannot escape his Frenchness.» Ah bon.

Criticizing the sorry state of the open source today does not mean closed source is better. Also, the current status of the open-source projects is not bad per se, but only if we put side by side the expectations we had a decade ago with the reality we are facing now. Things could (and should!) have been much better.

What are my hopes coming from?

As Linux is still the most prominent alternative to closed source and proprietary, I will start with some Linux opportunities.

Dell’s recent decision to ship desktops preloaded with Linux might be boost the progress of Linux into the business desktop. As a European, I would like to see some Mandriva-powered systems that are easy to find worldwide, however previous attempts with HP and Dell were huge failures in the end.

The remaining RHEL clones, CentOS and Scientific Linux, should increase their cooperation and even merge if deemed useful to create a solid, free of charge enterprise offering.

I started however to doubt a little about the future of RHEL after the wrong message given to the public by Matthew J. Szulik with the Red Hat Challenge. The competition is only open to «full-time, part-time, or executive student attending graduate business school or a graduate design school in pursuit of a Masters in Business Administration or similar degree», so that it sounds like having a good Linux business plan is unrelated to technology, which is hard to swallow by a techie. In addition, the challenge is only open to certain countries, giving you the message that Red Hat is too lazy to deal with the contest and gambling rules of Québec, of half of the Europe and of half of South America; however, the Microsoft Canada Holiday Greeting Card Contest 2004 was won in Québec, the winner of the Microsoft Future Pro Photographer Contest 2006 was from Romania, and the software design category of Microsoft Imagine Cup won in Italy, all of these countries missing from RHAT’s list of qualifying places. It’s time for Red Hat to realize that not the MBA-ers are the missing resource, but some more common sense.

I hope that Mandriva will find its way towards a positive financial balance, and that the Corporate Desktop and the Corporate Server will gain momentum. There is no way I could agree with Linux.org in their view on raising and falling distributions.

I also hope that the unjustified aura around Linux will not hide *BSD anymore, and that FreeBSD will improve its market share with time. With the backing of iXsystems, PC-BSD should continue to strive to provide a more comfortable FreeBSD power as a viable desktop alternative to Linux.

There are little chances that OpenBSD will ever change their installer, whose main asset seems to be its ability to fit on a single floppy; its claimed perfection through simplicity is diminished by a known issue mentioned by Jem Matzan in his OpenBSD 4.0 Crash Course, where it notes at page 13: «the installer will crash if you try to use DHCP with more than one network interface; you can change this manually later if necessary.»

DragonFly BSD has also an interesting potential, I wish them luck and more resources.

We might encounter improvements even from OpenSolaris, but this will be a long and winding road. Sun is still working to complete the open-sourcing of Java, and they might need a full mental rework to be able to provide with less threatening SLA and Entitlements for their commercial offerings (maybe they should fire some lawyers in the first place). Solaris Express Developer Edition is not that express, as it has has for the minimum system requirements 768 MB of RAM and 14 GB of disk space (80 GB is the recommended size). Sounds like Vista to me.

And Slackware will always matter, as long as craftsmanship, commitment, and quality make a difference.

To contradict myself, I have written parts of this report on a Pardus system, and some final edits were done under Kubuntu 7.04, both distributions I said I will not use (and I had a few KWin crashes with both of them). Like I said in the opening, we’re all humans after all.

But I will never understand why IBM has not agreed to open-source OS/2.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2007 Radu-Cristian Fotescu and JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints nor reposts without written permission from both copyright holders.

Most of us are used to proprietary license agreements for software products — especially those made by Microsoft — and perhaps to a limited extent, for some types of hardware as well. In requesting a review package for the Microsoft Zune digital audio player, I was recently presented with something I had never seen before: a license agreement for the actual review materials. The document a public relations representative asked me to sign dictated the terms by which I could use and write about the Zune. Consequently, I declined the opportunity to write about the product because I don’t want the manufacturer to put restrictions on what I write about their products. Below is an explanation of what this bizarre agreement entails.

Review agreements

Actually, I have seen restrictive product review agreements in the past. IBM and Lenovo have sent me review packages with documents that tell me what I can and can’t do with their products, but didn’t require my signature in order to participate. Harmonic Inversion Technology sent me a less complex agreement that asked for my credit card information in case I decided to keep the (relatively inexpensive) product they loaned for review. Of course I did not provide that information — who in their right mind would?

A Microsoft spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous told me that Microsoft requires this same agreement of all of the reviewers it works with, and has for quite some time. I personally know this to be false, as I have reviewed more than a dozen Microsoft products over the past five years, ranging from Windows XP and Office XP to its line of computer peripheral hardware products, and have never been asked to sign anything.

Oddly, manufacturers that send more expensive products to review don’t require any more than my word that I’ll send it back, and don’t seem concerned that I will otherwise behave unprofessionally. It’s only the sub-$300 devices that manufacturers seem worried about. Even then, what’s the point of sending a toothless “agreement” that I will in fact not agree with? That’s what worried me about the Zune agreement — it required my signature. Let’s take a look at the things I would have signed my acquiescence to.

The Zune reviewer’s license agreement terms

The two-page document begins with empty fields for the reviewer’s information — name, address, phone number, email address, publication, and columns for two signatures. Apparently email messages and phone conversations that reveal these details are not enough.

The introductory text explains what this license governs, which is the contents of the review kit:

• Welcome letter
• Reviewer’s Guide
• Zune device with pre-loaded content
• Zune software CD
• 14-day or 3-month trial card for the Zune Marketplace
• Pre-paid return packaging

The agreement goes on to assert that the Zune itself must be returned to Microsoft within 14 days, “or earlier upon Microsoft’s request.” Under what conditions would that happen, I wonder? Could Microsoft suddenly declare you an enemy of the company and terminate your license with extreme prejudice? And what about the other components of the kit — why aren’t they to be returned as well if they are so important as to be labeled “confidential” by the agreement?

Part 2 of the document begins by saying that the above materials are licensed to you only, and that you can only use them on your “premises,” which I presume to mean your office or home. So reviewing the Zune while on a bus, in an airport, at a friend’s house, or at a coffee shop is strictly forbidden. It also means that other people — friends, co-workers, spouses, or indeed freelancers or other writers whom you might assign the review to or ask to help test — are not allowed to use anything in the review kit. They are not allowed to use the Zune; they are not even allowed to read the welcome letter.

Next, you’re told that you are only allowed to study the contents of the Zune review kit to write a review or article on the Zune. You can’t, for instance, write a review of an album or song that you hear while using the Zune, nor could you use the Zune to write a review of headphones or earbuds.

When referring to such in the review, you are only permitted to refer to these names:

• Zune
• Zune device
• Zune Marketplace
• Zune software
• www.zune.net

The agreement specifically demands that you not refer to the Zune reviewer kit. You also could not refer to the Zune as the “Microsoft Zune,” and if you really followed the agreement to the letter, you couldn’t even use pronouns.

You may only use “unmodified” screen shots of the Zune in the review. That means you are not allowed to watermark, crop, or otherwise edit your Zune photos. Theoretically you couldn’t even compress them.

With regard to the operation and use of the Zune, you must follow all instructions that Microsoft gives you. You’re also compelled to keep the device in good condition. This last part is not a surprise; it’s the first part that I find bizarre. If Microsoft says I can’t reset the device’s ROM or try out alternative firmware on it, then I’m limited in what I can write about.

If you receive an updated reviewer’s kit in the 14 (or less) days that you have the original one, you have to return both kits.

You are not allowed to open or in any way disassemble the Zune. You also can’t copy, reproduce, distribute, reverse-engineer, attempt to derive source code from, modify, or make a derivative work of any part of the Zune review package.

Both you and Microsoft can choose to terminate the agreement at any time, but the notice of termination must be in writing. Even if you terminate the agreement, what follows below will survive it. In other words, there are parts of the agreement that are apparently supposed to be in effect forever.

Lastly, if you suffer damages because of the Zune or the review kit, Microsoft claims that it is not liable, even if Microsoft is aware that the Zune will cause damage. You are, of course, responsible for keeping the Zune in pristine condition, even if the Zune is damaged due to overcharging, which Microsoft has acknowledged as a possibility according to this Amazon.com reviewer. If you live in a state where it is not possible to eliminate liability, Microsoft says that the most it will be liable for is U.S. $100 or the value of the Zune review kit, whichever is greater.

Or what?

The rest of the agreement is the usual all-caps WARRANTY and LIMITATION OF LIABILITY tedium found at the tail end of every proprietary license. What the agreement does not state clearly is what the penalty of violating it is. What can Microsoft do to you if you sign this ridiculous agreement and then refuse to abide by its terms?

Well, first of all you’ll be bound by the laws of the state of Washington. If that is inconvenient for you, too bad — Microsoft invokes the forum non conveniens clause. If you want to try to claim that the court Microsoft sues you in has no jurisdiction over you, too bad — Microsoft declares that this is not possible. If you sue Microsoft or vice-versa, the prevailing party must pay the other’s legal fees.

The very last paragraph in the license says that if you use the review kit in an unauthorized way or if you even threaten to do so, that Microsoft will be harmed immediately and irreparably and “for which there is no adequate remedy at law.” Under such conditions, Microsoft entitles itself to “appropriate injunctive relief, without the necessity of posting bond or other security.” I take that to mean that you’ll be sued, though I’m no lawyer and don’t understand all of the possible meanings of this purposefully ambiguous and certainly threatening language.

You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand that this license is meant to scare a reviewer into abiding by the terms that Microsoft thinks are favorable to it. If you don’t do what Microsoft says — like if you use the Zune on the bus, or show the welcome letter to your girlfriend — you face the possibility of consequences implied by “appropriate injunctive relief.” The likelihood of this outcome is not a measure of its authority, nor of its gravity. To me this seems like economic terrorism — scaring people into thinking that they’ll be sued if they don’t write positive reviews. It’s dirty pool. It’s what many in the computer technology world have come to expect from a software company that has consistently used goon tactics to force competitors like Corel, Lotus, Novell, Caldera, Be, and Sun Microsystems into submission. I will not submit; I will not support it. This editorial article appears in lieu of a Zune review.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.