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Shortly after the recent announcements from Miguel regarding Novells partnership with Microsoft to develop moonlight, Simon Phipps responded in hos blog criticising the agreement.

Not long after, Miguel and others counter attacked. Now I’m not going to comment here about whether I think the Novell / MS agreement is a good or bad; I haven’t even looked at it closely yet. What I will say though is that one of the main responses from the Novell supporters has been to call Simon a hypocrite because of how Sun have or do license some of their products.

This misses the point. That nobody has answered all of Simon’s criticisms on their own merit is a bit worrying. I don’t really care about what Sun has or hasn’t done now or in the past. Let’s take each thing on it’s own and debate it. Can someone tell me why Simon Phipps is actually wrong in his criticisms? He may be completely wrong, but saying “Novell isn’t bad here because Sun is just as bad” doesn’t cut it.

If someone wants to start another debate about Sun’s licensing then fine; go for it.

Filed by Administrator at 5:59 pm under Linux and free software
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I did a talk last week for the Nottingham LUG. It was a basic intro into approaches to version control, followed by a few examples.

People have asked for a copy of the presentation, so I have put that and some other LUG talk material of mine (including work in progress) into a bazaar repository. You can get it with:

bzr branch http://foo.stupids.org/~martin/lugtalks

Filed by Administrator at 11:22 am under NLUG, Linux and free software
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For those who don’t know, Schrödinger is a library implementing the quality Dirac video codec. It is triple licensed using MPL ,GNU LGPL and MIT. It is important because although we already have Theora, another free video codec, Schrödinger is much more advanced and is comparable in quality to current popular non-free codecs.

I’ve been loosely following the development of Schrödinger for a while now and it has been usable for quite some time. The main barrier to its use however has been the lack of bitstream compliance. In other words, if video is encoded with one version, it might not be possible to decoded it with a future version, and vice versa.

In the latest 0.6.0 release though, full bitstream compliance has been achieved. This means that as long as there are no bitstream bugs, video encoded with this version will work on all future versions.

In the past, video downloads have often been offered as a choice between theora and e.g., xvid, giving the user a choice between freedom and high quality. I now look forward to these both being replaced with Schrödinger which provides both.

Filed by Administrator at 1:06 pm under Linux and free software
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Finally the OpenJDK sources are available. Still quite a lot of people, especially a subset of Linux folks, don’t seem to care about java. Personally I think we will look back on this in a few years as a crucially important point in the open source and free software world.

This opens the way for a lot more free and open source software to be shipped with Linux distros which is not only convenient in itself, but will help position that software as the default choice for many users over the proprietary alternatives.

Filed by Administrator at 9:33 am under Linux and free software
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Feedback about the BBC on demand service is being sought.

There is one question about whether Windows only services are acceptable.

Find the survey here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/consult/open-consultations/ondemand_services.html

Filed by Administrator at 7:31 pm under Linux and free software
1 Comment

I’m never quite sure how much difference petitions make, but we seem to have tried just about everything else and there are still some people who genuinely believe software patents do more good than harm.

Please join us and oppose software patents

Filed by Administrator at 3:04 pm under Linux and free software
2 Comments

I decided some time ago to move all my services from my home ADSL connected server to a hosted machine. Well, now I’ve finally got around to it. Services are being moved over one by one. Hopefully I’ve not messed it all up and you should actually be able to read this.

Anyway, I’m pleased so far with the virtual debian server black cat networks have supplied me. Anyone looking for a low-end server with full root access should take a look.

Filed by Administrator at 1:15 pm under NLUG
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Amazing. Not that this exploit has been discovered. That’s no surprise at all. What’s amazing to me is that people will still continue to load large blocks of unknown, unauditable code into their kernel or as an xorg driver.

Guys, you are already potentially handing over control of your machine to someone who isn’t even willing to let you look at what they are doing with it. Now it turns out that what they are doing is writing poor code so that you are in fact handing over control to any sufficiently skilled attacker, and there is nothing you can do to fix it.

Actually, why am I bothering?

“Yes, but what about shiny games?” I imagine will be the response. I understand that for many this is a simple matter of priorities, but I just wish people would realise that when they hand over hard earned cash to a company, they are not just doing what is most convenient for themselves, but they are supporting that companys ideals and further empowering them. And that indirectly affects everyone.

Filed by Administrator at 11:45 am under Linux and free software
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Well, it looks like libata PATA support is finally making it into the kernel. This is good news. Woo.

Filed by Administrator at 2:22 pm under Linux and free software
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I’ve got back from Lugradio Live 2006. I was an impressive event. Lots of talks, lots of people and a fair amount of drinking at the party.
On the “cool new software” side of things I found Mirco Müller’s Lowfat talk and demo intriguing. There is some good fun but also seriously important stuff going on there I think. Michael Dominik’s Diva talk useful. It looks very promising so far, although it did leave me wondering about why there is not more collaboration between diva and pitivi. I’m not suggesting they should merge or anything drastic like that; they clearly have different goals. I just think that they could share infrastructure like gnonlin. gdv really seems to fill the same role. Anyway, I will continue keeping a close eye on both projects.

Definitely the most impressive part of the whole weekend for me though was Simon Phipps, both in his “The zen of free” talk on Saturday, which was excellent and taught me a way of looking at open source that I didn’t even realise I was missing, and in his contribution to the “Mass debate” earlier in the day. Brilliant.

I’m sure many of the ones I missed were equally good. It’s just a shame we can’t see everything.

Filed by Administrator at 8:18 pm under NLUG, Linux and free software
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