[Mon Feb 28 20:38:33 CST 2005]

Well, precisely going through Nat Friedman's blog I came across a few great demos of Beagle, the latest Mono app everybody is talking about. Move over, KDE, the GNOME guys are truly innovating. {link to this story}

[Mon Feb 28 20:24:00 CST 2005]

Nat Friedman's blog is always worth to check on a regular basis, since together with a few comments about his own personal life he always tends to mention this or that technology that he finds interesting. Well, for the most part they turn out to be quite fascinating projects. Take, for example, Hula, the new project to build an open source mail and calendar server started by the guys at Novell as a spinoff of NetMail, or his rants about amonth ago about Xgl, a new X server based on OpenGL/Glitz. According to Nate's description:

Because Xgl is built on GL primitives it naturally gets the benefit of hardware acceleration. For example, window contents get rendered directly into textures (actually they get copied once in video memory for now), and so you get the benefit of the 3d hardware doing the compositing when you move semi-opaque windows or regions around.

{link to this story}

[Mon Feb 28 20:15:26 CST 2005]

Mandrakesoft has agreed to acquire Conectiva in what amounts to a merger of second-tier Linux distributions. While Mandrakesoft has experienced deep financial troubles until very recently and remains somehow popular in its own country, France, Conectiva is considered by many one of the leading distributors in Brazil. It is difficult to see this move as a major threat to either Red Hat or Novell but it was without any doubt necessary for both Mandrakesoft and Conectiva to survive and remain relevant in the near future. At the very least, it spells more competition which always tends to be a good thing. {link to this story}

[Wed Feb 23 14:46:36 CST 2005]

Ben Mourer writes in his blog about The Memory Problem affecting desktop applications, and it makes for some interesting read. According to him, the biggest problems are:

• Over hungry caches: Anybody who uses their Linux box alot knows this command killall firefox-bin. The issue with Firefox and some other applications (Evolution, possibly others), is that they implement a cache. Wait, you say, a cache is good right!? Not really. A cache that never frees data is no cache, it is a leak. The "cache" in Firefox seems to be a giant leak.
• Some X Server Black Magic (TM): Owen reports that each process uses 400 kb for some sort of Black Magic communication with X. Ask him, not me :-)
• Bloated Panel Applets: It is extremely silly that I get memory back by killing my clock applet. The clock should be free.
• Toolkit level optimizations: There is tons of stuff to be done at the toolkit level. For a Hello World, 450 kb of ram gets malloc'd. This does not include the wastage from malloc due to book keeping (4 bytes per object), alignment (everything is 8 byte aligned), and the minimum size (allocations less than 12 b are made to be 12 b). There are a few major offenders here. For example, fontconfig allocates about 100 kb of data that could be mmap'd readonly. Also, there are a few easy 10-20 kb gains in gtk+. Remember that a typical user may have 20 copies of this basic bootstrap data. Saving a few kb here and there really adds up over the desktop.

{link to this story}

[Tue Feb 22 12:41:03 CST 2005]

At the risk of being accused of dangerous leftism, I must say I fully agree with Robert Faletra's piece on Computer Reseller News regarding the issue of CEOs and buyout compensation. As they sell their companies, the CEOs make millions and millions in the form of buyout compensations. Yes, the shareholders may make some money off the sale too, but as Faletra explains it is not as if the CEOs in question had to work too much to "turn the company around" or anything like it.

One deal that may be in the works and bears watching is the sale of MCI to Qwest Communications or possibly Verizon in the next few months. This one involves a CEO who has yet to run a successful company but just may be closing on his second sellout payday.

If MCI —formerly WorldCom, which was renamed when Michael Capellas was brought in to turn it around— is sold, you can bet there will be a very handsome payout for him.

And it goes on and on and... In this era of financial speculation and virtual worlds, CEOs do not appear to manage businesses as much as just profit from them. The key does not seem to be to design a sound strategy and implement it, but rather to "maximize returns on investment" to the shareholders. Now, whether that is accomplished with real improvements to the bottom line or by means of speculative operations to sell out is a different issue, and it does not seem to bother anyone. As a result, we end up with a business world that is increasingly more and more "soft" and "virtual". {link to this story}

[Thu Feb 17 16:08:11 CST 2005]

I just came across Hula, an interesting calendar and mail server project put together by the Novell guys, at least according to the place where I read about it. Apparently, the intention is to build a collaboration server that could compete against the likes of Exchange and Notes. In any case, it is something to keep in mind. {link to this story}

[Wed Feb 16 13:03:38 CST 2005]

In spite of the dot-com bust, the Internet has indeed introduced a revolution in our lives. Today, I read in Wired about the German radtio station MotorFM, whose business model is based on MP3s downloadable to mobile phones. As in the case of so many other dot-com businesses, this may or may not work but there is little doubt in my mind that we are moving towards a world where people can select between multiple customized streams of music and radio programs instead of having to settle for good old broadcast. Personalization is king in the society that is coming. We can think about its positive and negative consequences, and perhaps even do something about it, but we will not be able to stop it. That is for sure. {link to this story}

[Mon Feb 14 10:25:47 CST 2005]

OSDir publishes that Red Hat's lawyers contacted the folks at CentOS regarding the alleged misuse of their trademarks. To be honest, reading the letter sent by the lawyers my first impression is that they are right. If the CentOS website contained any reference whatsoever to Red Hat and/or their products (chiefly, RHEL), they need to be removed in order to comply with the law regarding these issues. The GPL gives anyone the right to redistribute Red Hat's code (well, at least the one released under that license) without any problem, but definitely not to use the company's name to promote a product, and I would dare to say that CentOS has become well known thanks to its relation to Red Hat's product. Therefore, it should not surprise anyone at all if they are trying to defend their interests. After all, this is a public company with a lot to lose if look-alikes start spreading like the weed. Yet, as some people argue, the problem is not so much the letter of the document but the spirit in which it is written. Let us not forget that in the past there were many distributions (SuSE, Mandrake...) that spawned off Red Hat Linux and announced themselves to the world as "Red Hat compatible" or "Red Hat derivatives", but nevertheless the company was not nearly as aggressive pursuing its legal rights. So, what changed? The business environment has changed. Today, Linux means money, lots of money. In this sense, the Red Hat managers are quite disingenuous and are using at least some level of good old double-speak. Still, whoever happens to know another Linux company that contributes so much to the community as Red Hat does, and plays by the book, please raise your hand. I just do not think there is one. We have to concede that much.

As for CentOS, I have discussed the topic with my friends a few times and still find no reason to change my mind: if I were the sysadmin for a company, I would not bet my company's future on CentOS or any other similar Red Hat look-alike; rather, I would pony up for RHEL licenses or switch to something else altogether (SuSE if I like their prices better, Debian if I want to continue running Linux for free). It is simply too easy for Red Hat (or anyone else) to make life difficult for these projects, even playing by the GPL book. Just think about it. If Red Hat decided now to limit the distribution of its source RPMs only to its customer base it would still be complying with the GPL. Even better, if they made their customers sign a contract promising that they will not release such source RPMs to the wider public under the threat of being fined, they would still be complying with the GPL. Finally, they do not even need to release source RPMs at all. As long as they release the source code to their users (which could be done in a simple tarball with or without the patches applied, which can be made available separately on their FTP servers) they are complying with the GPL. Can you imagine how much that would hurt projects such as CentOS? What if instead of simply rebuilding an RPM from a neat source RPM with SPEC files and all they had to build the whole thing from scratch now? Yes, all this could mean war between Red Hat and the open source community. So? Notice that I do not even have to assume any form of ill will on behalf of Red Hat's current managers. Who knows what will happen in just a couple of years? Who is to tell me that a closed source company is not to buy them and start doing precisely what I am laying out here? {link to this story}

[Sun Feb 13 10:16:47 CST 2005]

It riles me up to see so much FUD spread about the GPL license. Software Development News tells us how Pervasive Software has unveiled Pervasive Postgres, a product based on the open source PostgreSQL database. The company plans to make money from support and service contracts, as it is common in the open source world. In any case, the company's director of products, Lance Obermayer, praises PostgreSQL's BSD license calling it "the most business-friendly license" while criticizing MySQL's GPL license:

... which he said often compels corporate developers to buy a commercial license when deploying databases with a proprietary or closed-source program.

No, no, and no. Anybody who knows anything at all about the GPL also knows that it does not force any company whatsoever to release its own changes to the code if they are to be deployed internally. It only forces them to do so if they plan to redistribute the code and commercialize it outside their company. This is an issue that has been discussed thousands of times, and Mr. Obermeyer should know better than to spread this misconception. As it is, I am afraid this is just one more instance of Dilbert's pointy-haired school of management, where Mr. Obermeyer met a legal advisor who had a total of about 5 minutes to explain how the GPL license works in some flashy and entertaining slides while the manager digested approximately 20% of what he had to say on the topic. {link to this story}

[Sun Feb 13 09:57:17 CST 2005]

Anyone who follows the technology industry knows that Microsoft executives love to scare people with stories about open source supposedly destroying the software ecosystem with its disruptive licenses by forcing companies to give away their products. What they do not like to talk about so much, of course, is how Microsoft itself has already been destroying that very same software ecosystem by swallowing up pretty much any competitor from Netscape to any company that wrote email clients, collaboration tools, web server software or virtualization software. Today, I read a story in Software Development Times about Citrix's troubled future once Microsoft introduces terminal emulation features in Longhorn. If anybody has any doubts that Microsoft is guilty of monopolistic practices, please read the following description:

Late last year, Citrix and Microsoft signed an agreement that extends their longstanding partnership for five more years. It stipulates that Citrix's MetaFrame will support Longhorn, the forthcoming version of Windows Server expected nexr year.

In addition, the agreement formally grants Citrix continued access to Windows source code, calls for Citrix to collaborate with Microsoft to extend Windows Terminal Server, and provides for patent cross-licensing between the two companies...

In other words, as in the good stories about the Italian Mafia, Citrix has two choices: either it agrees to cooperate with Microsoft in developing a product that will compete against its own and perhaps even destroy the company, or it is automatically swept from the market. Let us keep this in mind: what Citrix is giving away is nothing less than the crown jewels, the bread and butter of its own business. Yet, they have little choice, for a negative to cooperate with Microsoft would only mean that the giant from Redmond would either decide to build a competitive product on its own or purchase another company that has already been working on it. Either way, Citrix gets swept away. Of course, Citrix's managers can always bank on the possibility that Bill Gates will just decide to buy their company so they (and the shareholders) can make some nice money. No matter what, the picture looks very grim for the users and their ability to choose between competitive products. {link to this story}

[Thu Feb 10 10:29:02 CST 2005]

Browsing around last night, I came across the Croquet Project, a fascinating and innovative attempt to build a revolutionary software architecture from the ground up. Actually, their statement on the homepage describes it as follows:

Croquet is a combination of computer software and network architecture that supports deep collaboration and resource sharing among large numbers of users within the context of a large-scale distributed information system. Along with its ability to deliver compelling 3D visualization and simulations, the Croquet system's components are designed with a focus on enabling massively multi-user peer-to-peer collaboration and communication.

It is distributed computing at its best, taken to its final conclusion, with irreverence and without consideration to any form of realistic views. Their website includes a series of amazing screenshots that are worth checking out. I would not expect to see a Croquet system any time soon, to be honest. As I have repeated over and over again, it is not the purported technical superiority of a product that matters but whether or not it makes business sense. Still, this project is inspiring, and we need a lot of that in our field these days. After the innovation boom of the mid-nineties, we have settled in a boring reactionary period that just repeats the same ideas day after day. It is time for a serious change. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 5 22:04:41 CST 2005]

There are times when a good cartoon manages to synthesize thoughts much better than a thousand essays. In this case, while reading old issues of eWeek I encounter a great Spencer Katt cartoon that clearly shows the stupidity of many patents claims. Yes, the cartoon itself is made up, but the way patents are being applied lately I have a feeling we will indeed see the Etch-A-Sketch lawsuit one of these days. {link to this story}

[Fri Feb 4 11:22:28 CST 2005]

NewsForge publishes today an interesting article detailing the process of becoming a Debian developer. It is no easy task, and the candidate definitely has to know what he or she is doing. As the autorh explains at the very end:

And if the process also contributes to the elitism that some people se in Debian, perhaps that is understandable. After completing such a demanding process, candidates can be forgiven for a sense of accomplishment and pride —they've earned these feelings many times over.

It makes for a good example of how to strive towards the best in a community setting that is also characterized for its openness. And, on a related note, NewsForge also published recently an article about installing Debian From Scratch that many Linux fans out there should enjoy. It does not look nearly as advanced as the Linux From Scratch project, but every bit as interesting. {link to this story}

[Thu Feb 3 12:48:28 CST 2005]

I am glad to read that the people of Guadalinex have decided to base their next release on Ubuntu. In case you do not know, Guadalinex is the Linux distribution put together by the Andalusian regional government, to be used mainly by public schools and organisms. As for Ubuntu, it is my new favorite Linux distribution. I installed it on my system at home a few months ago (back in October, I think), and absolutely love it. I do like the GNOME desktop environment, which is the default in Ubuntu, and the product is very nicely put together. Anyways, I will be writing a short piece/review over here one of these days. {link to this story}

[Thu Feb 3 12:33:33 CST 2005]

Now, this could be really powerful, provided that is not just some vaporware. HP claims that they may be about to "reinvent the computer at the molecular scale" thanks to a new technology that provides signal restoration and inversion without the need for transistors. Needless to say, this could revolutionize the computing world and result in computers that are much more powerful than the ones we run today but at a fraction of the size. Of course, they still have to prove that this is a real technology that works, and then have to figure out a way to mass-produce it at a decent price. In any case, there is little doubt in my mind that sooner or later somebody will come up with something similar that will change the world as we know it. {link to this story}