03.21.12
IRC Proceedings: March 21st, 2012
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Links 21/3/2012: Torvalds Secrets, Radeon HD 7000 Driver Now Free/Libre
Contents
GNU/Linux
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Open-Source (free) MultiMachine Project Aims to Spark Manufacturing Revolution in Developing World
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Kernel Space
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Steve Jobs tried to hire Linux founder a decade ago
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Linux Kernel Performance: Flame Graphs
To get the most out of your systems, you want detailed insight into what the operating system kernel is doing. A typical approach is to sample stack traces; however, the data collected can be time consuming to read or navigate. Flame Graphs are a new way to visualize sampled stack traces, and can be applied to the Linux kernel for some useful (and stunning!) visualizations.
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Long term kernels 2.6.27.62 and 2.6.32.59
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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TEA: A Smooth Text Editor That Hits the Sweet Spot
The TEA Text Editor is a very handy writing tool that delivers a much different user interface. For most computer users cranking out words or program code for digital consumption, text editors are often preferable to feature-bloated word processors. TEA pours on features yet keeps from getting too steamy.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Dear Esther: A Source Engine Game On Linux
You may have heard a few days ago that Dear Esther, a game built upon Valve’s Source Engine, would be ported to Linux and released in the coming months. Well, here’s more details about that Source-based game is getting to Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME 2 vs. GNOME 3
Users who choose between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 are rarely making that decision on a purely rational basis. In my experience, users of GNOME 2 are often choosing what they know, while users of GNOME 3 are technophiles who enjoy anything that is new.
Neither is likely to go over the two generations of GNOME feature by feature. In many cases, the choice seems made before login.
But what happens when the two desktop environments are compared in general features? I’m a fan of neither GNOME 2 nor GNOME 3, but I decided to find out.
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Distributions
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New Releases
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Ankur has launched Shishir 2012
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Legacy OS 4 Mini is Here!
Today sees the release of Legacy OS 4 Mini an Update / Replacement for TEENpup 2010 Mini Beta. Those updating from TEENpup 2010 Mini Beta will need to save any important documents, music etc to an external Hard Drive, USB stick etc as a full reinstall is required to update to this new version, sorry!
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Debian Family
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Debian Stable — set it and forget it — spoils me for fresh Linux Mint 12 on some very nice ZaReason hardware
Spending a couple of days intensely running Linux Mint 12 on a very nice desktop PC sent to me for review by ZaReason (much more about that later), I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the annoying bugs in Mint that made me a lot less productive than I am in the Debian Squeeze system I’ve been running on my laptop since late 2010.
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Devices/Embedded
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Free Software/Open Source
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A Peek Behind the Curtain at Puppet Labs
In this interview, Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs, explains why the Puppet configuration management tool is a huge hit with sys admins, and tells us what to expect next from the popular open source project.
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Open source moving in mobile
We got another reminder of how disruptive open source software is to mobile computing this week, when Linux and Android merged back together. This appears to be good news for a number of parties, but Android and Linux developers and users seem particularly likely to benefit. The inclusion of Android code in the Linux kernel and the ability for Linux developers to more easily work on the Android environment and applications also ties into some of the key topics we’ll be covering in a Webcast March 21 titled ‘Open Source, A Tale of Two Cities in the Mobile Enterprise,’ presented by 451 Research and Black Duck Software.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Chromium OS Desktop Shell Eschews Google’s Cloud-Only Mantra
Ever since Google started working on its Chrome OS operating system, it has had a pronounced focus on allowing users to only work with cloud-based data and applications. This has drawn criticism from many users, and some from us here at OStatic, as seen in this post. With Chrome OS, Google placed a heavy bet on the idea that consumers and business users would have no problem storing data and using applications in the cloud, without working on the locally stored data/applications model that they’re used to.
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CMS
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Licensing
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Understanding Open Source Licenses and Obligations
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How important is software compliance?
Are developers actually chasing down license violations?
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Openness/Sharing
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How to do open research: 5 basic principles
There are some pretty basic things that a researcher can do to make their work into an open content project. Here are a few.
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Programming
Leftovers
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Finance
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Censorship
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America: Iran Can’t Control The Internet, Only We Can
The Obama administration has condemned Iran for trying to take control of the Internet. In addition, The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued guidance and licensing information to further support the free flow of information to citizens of Iran – a freedom the Iranian regime has consistently denied to its people.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Take Action: ISPs Selling Out Customers, Pushing Backdoor SOPA
They’re selling us out. Just weeks after Internet users from across the globe came together to to beat SOPA, the major ISPs are cutting a deal with Big Content to restrict web access for users who are accused of piracy.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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De Gucht goes rogue again
Concerned of the ACTA dossier many citizens contacted the press staffers of his colleague Commissioner Neelie Kroes. Commissioner Michel Barnier is right when he emphasized the need for better communications. Karel De Gucht had the opportunity to embrace the public attention to ACTA, and strengthen the institutional cohesion with the European public, help the transformation of the EU towards an “Europe of the citizens”. He didn’t exercise this opportunity, and it appears to me the reason is a fundamental disrespect to democratic principles, he doesn’t take the public seriously.
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EMC to Promote Microsoft APIs
Summary: Likewise is swallowed by EMC
A COMPANY called Likewise has helped promote Microsoft APIs and control by Microsoft. EMC has just become its parent, just like VMware:
EMC’s Isilon business unit has splashed out and bought a fast-growing startup, Likewise, whose software both EMC and other OEMs and enterprises use to NAS-enable Unix- and Linux-based storage devices.
VC-funded Likewise Storage Services (LSS) says it offers a consistent security model for file-based access and cross-platform, unified storage across physical, virtual and cloud environments. It has integrated identity and access management and secure access to data from Windows, Unix and Linux systems. Supported protocols include SMB/CIFS 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, NFS 3.0 and the RESTful API.
EMC has not been particularly Linux friendly [1, 2, 3, 4]; it is close to Microsoft, too. █
Threat of Software Patents Coming to Brazil
The government wants to take your marbles
Summary: Participation needed from citizens of Brazil in order to prevent software patents from entering Brazil
A day or so ago Glyn Moody saw an “important” E-mail which we too saw on the FFII’s mailing lists. The Brazilian PTO opens public consultation on patent examination that includes computer programs. This page (accessed on the 19th of March 2012) was last Updated on “Fri, March 16, 2012 11:49″ and written by CGCOM. The messenger says: “To provide greater uniformity and predictability in tests, the Brazilian PTO will hold the first public consultation on patents. The first theme will be: procedures for the examination of patent applications involving inventions implemented by computer program.
“Brazil needs to reject the PTO from up north.”“Since the publication of the public consultation in the Official Gazette on March 16, interested parties have a period of 60 days to send suggestions to the e-mail saesp@inpi.gov.br. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. By fax +55 (21) 3037-3638 or directly to one of the receptions of the PTO, through the appropriate form (in doc). To use the odt format, save the file available at this link. [...] All content has been prepared and reviewed by the Technical Board of Patents. With the suggestions, the aim is to harmonize procedures for the technical examination of patent applications relating to inventions implemented by computer program and disseminate them widely to society.
“The guideline for the examination of patent applications involving inventions implemented by computer program is one of the priority projects of the PTO for the period 2011-2015, managed by the researcher Telma Lucia Alcantara da Costa Silva, of the Board of Patent.
“In a second step, the goal is to obtain quality certification procedures for the PTO, in partnership with the General Coordination of Quality Authority.
“For more information, write to saesp@inpi.gov.br. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
This “Brazilian Software Patenting Consultation” as André Rebentisch calls it is very important. We already saw public policy in Brazil disrupted by Microsoft, so we do not wish to see software patents entering Brazil from the back door. Just watch how bad things are in the USPTO. Emoticons are a subject of litigation, not just mere dispute:
In an apparent quest to make the patent system look even more ridiculous, a firm on Thursday sued Samsung and Research in Motion for allegedly infringing a patent titled “emoticon input method and apparatus.”
“It is known that for many users, their email and instant messaging communications… often involve the use of emoticons, such as the ‘smiling face’ or the ‘sad face,’” the patent says. “However, few email or instant messaging applications offer any assistance to a user to enter and use emoticons in their communications.” The plaintiff, Varia Holdings Inc., claims it owns the concept of allowing users to choose emoticons from a menu of options rather than typing them out one character at a time.
Brazil needs to reject the PTO from up north. █
hypePad 3 is Hot
Light a candle for dead Apple tablets
Summary: Heat in excess kills overpriced tablets with a glorified logo; a remark on Apple’s resorting to patent wars
THE sarcasm aside (and parody too), while Apple denies — as usual — that its tablets are defective, customers speak out and they are not happy. As one British Web site put it:
It appears that in some cases, excited new iPad owners are being disappointed by a Temperature message after their iPad got too hot to use, according to many users on Apple’s forum.
Apple is already suffering because of Android’s momentum. That’s why it is suing using patents, in vain even (because it does not know what else to do). As a Red Hat employee puts it, we need a patent reform. Apple is exploiting a rogue system at the moment, hoping to impede fair competition using bogus claims on trivial things. Here are some suggestions:
#1: “All proceedings from infringement MUST go to the original inventor.”
#2: “Ownership of a patent is bound to the inventor named in it and this is a non-transferrable right.”
#3 “Only the original inventor as named in the patent can decide on the licensing terms and royalty rates and must state these a priori as part of the filing process.”
Whereas the original inventor MUST be a natural person.
Think about that for a second. There is a whole market of selling and reselling patents between trolls and other NPE (Non Practicing Entities) based on income from supposed infringement. To stop this madness we can either hope for a reform in the patent system that leads to superior quality (has been tried for quite some years, has not worked so far) or, and this is the beter approach IMHO, we start to change the fundamentals by making patents inalienable and thus dry up the troll market completely.
Since Apple hardly ever invents what it markets, under the above criteria it deserves almost no patents. All Apple has become is a parasite. It doesn’t respect the law, let alone ethics. █
Smoking Gun From Bill Gates
Summary: A glance at an old antitrust exhibit and what it teaches us about Microsoft’s ringleader
IT HAS BEEN years since we covered Comes vs Microsoft, but someone gets back to looking at exhibits. Here is a good pick from a couple of decades ago:
Bill Gates had no plan to compete on price/performance. It was all about monopoly and creating dependency. Fortunately FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) like GNU/Linux and Android/Linux have emerged to save us from his plan for world domination but it has taken far too long because governments did not squash M$ for breaking the laws of competition. I think 2011 was the last year M$ could dictate anything to the world. In 2012 they are largely seen as irrelevant and not a major player going forward.
Dictating to the world what to do is what the Gates Foundation is doing these days. Microsoft was never really about making good software. █
“The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.”
–Bill Gates
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