[124000550010] |<title>#10: Pervasive presence</title>
[124000550020] |This is one post in a series, describing <a>challenges we need to overcome</a> to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop.
[124000550030] |We’re increasingly living in an always-connected world, with multiple ways to speak with one another at any given time.
[124000550040] |I might SMS or call a friend, reach them on IRC or SIP-phone, send them email or –once in a blue moon –a handwritten note.
[124000550050] |Knowing how best to talk with someone at any given time is the challenge –if you’re like me you try the fast-and-light stuff first –a ping on IRC or Jabber –then bring out the heavy guns like email.
[124000550060] |“Presence” is all about turning that haphazard process into a systematic framework –making sure that you (well, more accurately your laptop and your cell phone) know how you should reach out and touch the person you want to communicate with.
[124000550070] |It’s about an integrated addressbook –no more distinctions between IM and email –and a constant interaction at the system level to keep others aware of your status.
[124000550080] |On the reverse side, of course, none of us wants to be SO accessible that our stream of consciousness is perpetually turbulent.
[124000550090] |Just as spam has come to be a hostile attack on my inbox, I fully expect to have to defend against hostile attacks on my concentration on IRC, SMS and other comms channels.
[124000550100] |So I imagine we’ll have a nice little arms race in the “presence” department, as the good guys work to make it easier for us to talk to one another at any given instant, and the bad guys try and offer us body modification pills.
[124000550110] |This is an opportunity for the free software desktop to outshine the proprietary guys, because it’s going to be an area of enormous innovation.
[124000550120] |The core pieces are falling into place –look at Galago and Telepathy –what’s needed is innovation in the ways we use that framework.
[124000550130] |I believe that free software communities can innovate faster than proprietary companies.
[124000550140] |This is a good place to prove our mettle.
[124000560010] |<title>#9: Pervasive support</title>
[124000560020] |This is one post in a series, describing <a>challenges we need to overcome</a> to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop.
[124000560030] |I have this weird relationship with the words “it’s not supported”.
[124000560040] |Whenever I’m talking to an audience of typical computer users about Linux I’ll hear those words.
[124000560050] |I also often hear them when I’m meeting with organisations that could well benefit hugely from free software infrastructure or desktops.
[124000560060] |“I’ve heard about Linux, it sounds great but <strong>it’s not supported</strong>.”
[124000560070] |This is an interesting comment, when Canonical along with many other companies offer 24×7 support for Linux.
[124000560080] |Red Hat offers support.
[124000560090] |Novell offer support.
[124000560100] |HP and IBM and others all offer support.
[124000560110] |You can get it on commercial terms pretty much anywhere, anytime.
[124000560120] |So why do people say “Linux is not supported”?
[124000560130] |Because the guy behind the counter at their corner PC-cafe doesn’t support it.
[124000560140] |Because the guys they deal with every day, who are more than likely a relatively small outfit, don’t support it.
[124000560150] |And even if they DO support it, they don’t have a big sticker on the front door next to the Windows logo and the Apple logo, saying “Linux”.
[124000560160] |There are huge amounts of skill in Linux in many economies out there that are effectively invisible, because they are not specifically advertised.
[124000560170] |This is why I encourage governments to announce that some portion of their infrastructure will run on Linux –it catalyses the whole ecosystem to make their existing capacity public.
[124000560180] |It gives IT services companies a reason to put Linux on the door.
[124000560190] |It gives project managers a reason to learn about Linux deployments and how best to manage them.
[124000560200] |There will come a day when Linux shifts from being something behind the scenes to front and center stage.
[124000560210] |Then, although the actual number of Linux-skilled people won’t have changed, people won’t say “it’s not supported”.
[124000580010] |<title>An invitation, not a conspiracy</title>
[124000580020] |A number of people have commented on my invitation to OpenSuSE developers to join Ubuntu Open Week, some have expressed dismay that I would risk creating discord in the free software universe by inviting developers to leave one project and join another.
[124000580030] |There have also been plenty of reasonable comments and suggestions, and I hope the net effect is to leave both communities better informed about the efforts of the other.
[124000580040] |I think it may be worth having public “town hall meeting” in the usual Ubuntu style to discuss the invitation and make sure everyone has a fair chance to air their views.
[124000580050] |Feel free to continue to comment on this blog –I do the spam-moderation thing about once a week usually, will try to get to it more this week.
[124000580060] |Till then, let me say the following:
[124000580070] |<li>No offense was intended to SuSE –it’s a great distribution.
[124000580080] |<strong>This is about Novell’s extraordinary decision to legitimise Microsoft’s IP claims over Linux in general.</strong>
[124000580090] |I have serious concerns about the Novell-Microsoft deal –and so do other people who make huge contributions to the body of free software.
[124000580100] |Novell and SuSE are of course deeply linked, and so the actions of one do have consequences for the other.
[124000580110] |I would expect the same sort of consequences in Ubuntu if Canonical made poor decision.
[124000580120] |In the past two weeks I’ve fielded many mails from SuSE developers in regard to this, so I believe it was reasonable to point out the timely Ubuntu Open Week.
[124000580130] |I very much hope all of this helps to bring home to Novell executives the folly of their course, and results in the termination of the patent-related aspects of the deal.</li>
[124000580140] |<li><strong>Collaboration between SuSE and Ubuntu is welcome</strong>, and I would support efforts to make that collaboration happen in practice.
[124000580150] |Most free software developers want to see the whole free universe succeed, not just one or other distribution, and collaboration is a good step towards that goal.</li>
[124000580160] |<li><strong>Ubuntu is not free of controversy</strong>, and neither is Debian.
[124000580170] |I was not suggesting that Ubuntu or Debian are somehow perfect –only that we would have nothing to do with Ballmer’s offer and are deeply conscious of the impact of this sort of deal on the long term future of free software.</li> 
[124000580180] |Apologies to anybody who was offended by my extension of the invitation to OpenSuSE developers, it was certainly not my intent to upset you.
[124000580190] |Thanks to cool heads on both sides who have kept the discussion focused on our shared goals of improving the quality of free software and ensuring that it continues to be widely and freely available.
[124000590010] |<title>Fresher’s Day</title>
[124000590020] |As part of <a>Ubuntu Open Week</a>, we’ll be hosting a Fresher’s Day on Friday December 1st where any and all questions from new contributors will be welcome.
[124000590030] |It will happen primarily in #ubuntu-freshers on irc.freenode.net and I expect there will be analogous conversations in the Forums and other community, erm, forums.
[124000590040] |So for folks who are interested in the dynamics of the community but not sure where to start, come along on Friday!
[124000600010] |<title>Binary-only codecs, nyet</title>
[124000600020] |Corey, the distinctions between software that enables the hardware to function fully, and software that delivers a specific feature, are manifest.
[124000600030] |Ubuntu has included firmware, and used proprietary drivers since its inception.
[124000600040] |That’s always been a slightly uncomfortable proposition, as Mako observed, but it’s been true since the Warty Warthog.
[124000600050] |Even Debian goes some way along that road with its inclusion of firmware and other non-free bits, suspending belief in the DFSG in this particular case.
[124000600060] |We discussed this at length in one of our earliest summits and settled on the hardware enablement vs apps boundary.
[124000600070] |It’s worth pointing out that all of the applications that will be enabled by the AcceleratedX decision are free software applications –Compiz/Beryl and related work are all about showing what is possible at the cutting edge of free software.
[124000600080] |The hardware to run this is part of the very basic standard PC offering today, but the drivers to enable that functionality are tied deeply to hardware that is not publicly documented.
[124000600090] |The vendors concerned each have their own strategy –some open, such as Intel, and some closed, such as ATI and Nvidia.
[124000600100] |We lobby the companies concerned to open up their drivers, and to a certain extent we can apply market pressure, directing users to hardware which DOES have free drivers which I believe is a much more effective approach than “preaching from a distance”.
[124000600110] |It’s always better to engage and work with someone than to sanction them and isolate oneself.
[124000600120] |I’m certain that this strategy moves the free software agenda forward more effectively than any other.
[124000600130] |Our strategy has already put us in a position to influence significant open source strategy with major companies, and we have used that leverage to accelerate their embracing of free licenses.
[124000600140] |It’s not always possible to claim public credit when that happens, but I’m sufficiently convinced of the merits of the approach that I feel very good about the impact we are having in the world.
[124000600150] |I think Ubuntu will have a bigger chance of helping to convince Nvidia and ATI to take an open approach if we build a good relationship, apply market pressure, and get them to see the benefits to them of the open source road.
[124000600160] |We will, I think, get them there, but not by pouting and yelling insults from our high horse.
[124000600170] |Remember how little power we really have in that discussion, and remember that free software progress has always been made by playing to our strengths.
[124000600180] |For a very long part of the history of free software it was ONLY possible to run GNU tools on a proprietary OS.
[124000600190] |We can’t assume fancy graphics functionality will be on every machine Ubuntu is installed on, we can however allow X and free software apps to take full advantage of it when the hardware is present.
[124000600200] |I’m very happy that it is possible (and straightforward!) to remove the non-free drivers from Ubuntu, and I don’t believe that the AcceleratedX specification will change that.
[124000600210] |In fact, I worked quite hard to get Gnubuntu (an ISO of Ubuntu without any restricted elements) off the ground –it has effectively now emerged as gNewSense and I would encourage you to use that if this is a touchstone issue for you.
[124000600220] |I hear you when you say “users want proprietary codecs”.
[124000600230] |That’s why we make sure these items ARE available, at the user’s option, as packages on the network repositories.
[124000600240] |That allows users who need that functionality, or who choose that functionality over free alternatives, to exercise that choice freely.
[124000600250] |We don’t make that choice for them, though of course there is huge demand from real users for that.
[124000600260] |And we will stay firm in that regard.
[124000600270] |Ubuntu does not, and will never, include proprietary applications.
[124000600280] |Why NOT include those items?
[124000600290] |Because they exist in free forms, for a start.
[124000600300] |There are free implementations of MP3 and MPEG and other proprietary codes, and in some jurisdictions its perfectly legal to use them.
[124000600310] |In time, it will be legal to use them everywhere.
[124000600320] |That’s not true of drivers for your graphics card.
[124000600330] |Refusing to include the proprietary codecs, and Flash, and until recently, Java, is part of what defines Ubuntu’s core set of values.
[124000600340] |So is making damn sure the OS enables the hardware you run it on.
[124000600350] |In the case of modern graphics hardware, which is the particular item that you are talking about, we are getting to the point where the majority of the transistors in your computer are devoted to pixel and vertex shading, and dead unless you enable them properly.
[124000600360] |So it’s silly to say that this is “unimportant hardware functionality”.
[124000610010] |<title>#8: Govoritye po Russki?</title>
[124000610020] |This is one post in a series, describing <a>challenges we need to overcome</a> to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop.
[124000610030] |There are 347 languages with more than a million speakers.
[124000610040] |But even Ubuntu, which has amazing infrastructure for translation and a great community that actually does the work, is nowhere close to being fully translated in more than 10 or 15 languages.
[124000610050] |You can see a great chart of this in the <a>Edgy Translation Status</a> page.
[124000610060] |Translation is one of the key opportunities we have to create something radically better than what the Windows hegemony has yet been able to deliver.
[124000610070] |Something that will give millions –tens or hundreds of millions –of new computer users a reason to stick with free software.
[124000610080] |If you want to make a difference, and you are not a native English speaker but nonetheless have good English and are a regular users of Ubuntu or the free software stack, please help!
[124000610090] |It’s <a>dead easy to contribute with Rosetta in Launchpad</a>, and you can translate many upstreams or add translations for your home language straight to Ubuntu –we ship out a new language pack at least once a month.
[124000610100] |Our goal is straightforward –build a huge, well managed community to translate free software into hundreds of languages with a high level of accuracy, then make those translations instantly and freely available.
[124000610110] |It’s like wikipedia for your desktop.
[124000620010] |<title>New developer processes</title>
[124000620020] |Daniel Holbach and others have done sterling work on <a>defining better structure</a> for new Ubuntu developers.
[124000620030] |Our “Masters of the Universe” dev-team makes a huge contribution to each release, and is the proving ground from which new core developers are selected, so I’m really happy to see a more formal process being defined for new devs who are interested in working on Ubuntu.
[124000620040] |Well done Daniel!
[124000630010] |<title>#007: Great gadgets!</title>
[124000630020] |This is one post in a series, describing <a>challenges we need to overcome</a> to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop.
[124000630030] |This world is increasingly defined not so much by the PC, as by the things we use when we are nowhere near a PC.
[124000630040] |The music player.
[124000630050] |The smart phone.
[124000630060] |The digital camera.
[124000630070] |GPS devices.
[124000630080] |And many, perhaps most, of these new devices can and do run Linux.
[124000630090] |Free software in the embedded market is becoming a commodity, in the same way that MS-DOS and then Windows made the PC a standardised software environment.
[124000630100] |Except that Linux in the gadget sector is still very much a black art, a highly fragmented story where devices are all use vaguely similar but ultimately different free software –at every level, from the kernel on up to the GUI.
[124000630110] |There have been many attempts to “make a platform” for the mobile and embedded markets that can rival what Microsoft has achieved on the PC.
[124000630120] |Microsoft themselves, of course, are pushing hard to extend the Windows franchise into the mobile and gadget space, with some success if I look at the quality of their latest releases of Windows Mobile.
[124000630130] |Symbian was an interesting attempt to create some commonality without creating a hegemony, but ultimately I think that effort foundered on the rocky shores of a trust-less industry.
[124000630140] |It’s hard to imagine an industry more plagued by distrust than the complex web of manufacturers and operators that makes up the modern wireless telecommunications sector.
[124000630150] |Which leaves us looking for something more.
[124000630160] |I think Linux has potential in this sector, and Trolltech does too by the looks of things.
[124000630170] |But they sell software and at Ubuntu we give it away, so I’ve yet to make the case in my head for Ubuntu to get involved despite the fact that many folks have urged us just to do it.
[124000630180] |Whether we do or don’t, I think its a great area for new free software developers to focus their attention.
[124000630190] |There is tremendous change, and change always creates opportunity.
[124000640010] |<title>#6: Sensory immersion</title>
[124000640020] |This is one post in a series, describing <a>challenges we need to overcome</a> to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop.
[124000640030] |Joi Ito is one of the folks I’ve enjoyed meeting most in recent times, though we’ve not spent much time together I’ve learned a ton every time –I hope I can return the favour some day!
[124000640040] |It was Joi who first described the World of Warcraft scene to me.
[124000640050] |I was impressed with the scale of it all.
[124000640060] |But what really intrigued me was Joi’s description of how he’s wiring up a room in his house to be a sort of portal into that other virtual world.
[124000640070] |Sound, perhaps other sensory indicators, will give anyone in that room a feeling of being immersed in WoW.
[124000640080] |Second Life of course brings a new twist to the idea of immersion, though for now it’s immersion on the virtual side of the looking glass.
[124000640090] |What interests me are the ways in which there is cross-over between the virtual world and the real world.
[124000640100] |When I’m walking around town, does my mobile phone alert me to changes in the virtual world?
[124000640110] |And when I’m working at my PC, how much can I stay focused on work, say, while my PC also keeps me abreast of what’s going on with my avatar?
[124000640120] |I think there’s going to be a need for innovation around the ways we blur the lines between real and virtual worlds, and this is again one of those places that I think the free software community could steal a lead on the proprietary world.
[124000640130] |Think of the “presence” framework being extended to know not only about the real world, who’s where doing what, but also about these virtual worlds, in which we might each be engaged in any number of different activities.
[124000640140] |Turning all of that into a nice seamless experience is the challenge.
[124000650010] |<title>Ubuntu Weekly News</title>
[124000650020] |This week’s <a>Ubuntu Weekly News</a> is, I think, the best ever.
[124000650030] |Just wanted to say “thank you” to the <a>marketing team</a> for pulling it together and making it the best bite-sized way to keep abreast of the amazing diversity of effort going on in our community.
[124000650040] |For those that haven’t tried it, there is an <a>archive</a> or you can <a>subscribe</a> to get a well-written weekly summary of what’s goin’ on.
[124000650050] |Thanks, Corey &co!
[124000670010] |<title>#4: Plan, execute, DELIVER</title>
[124000670020] |This is one post in a series, describing <a>challenges we need to overcome</a> to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop.
[124000670030] |We are a somewhat chaotic crowd, the software libre army.
[124000670040] |Thousands of projects (hundreds of thousands, if you consider Sourceforge as a reference point).
[124000670050] |Hundreds of thousands of contributing developers from virtually every country and timezone.
[124000670060] |We are a very loosely coupled bunch.
[124000670070] |To a certain extent this loose coupling is beneficial.
[124000670080] |Work goes on in one part of the free software universe entirely oblivious to work elsewhere, despite the fact that both pieces of work will ultimately land up on an Ubuntu disk.
[124000670090] |Keeping everything orthogonal is very nice –very UNIX.
[124000670100] |It means that people don’t have to keep too much in their heads.
[124000670110] |And that’s worked well.
[124000670120] |But sometimes I wish it were easier to keep track of changes and have a slightly clearer view of progress across that whole galaxy.
[124000670130] |For example, it would be nice at the beginning of an Ubuntu release cycle to have a really confident picture of which projects will produce stable releases during those few months when we can incorporate new upstream versions.
[124000670140] |It would be even better if, during the release cycle, we knew immediately if there was a *change* in what was going to be released.
[124000670150] |This predictability is one of the major reasons we picked Gnome for the first Ubuntu desktop release –we knew with some confidence when it would be possible to ship a clean, fresh “chunk”.
[124000670160] |And Gnome has been a superb partner in that.
[124000670170] |This coordination could go deeper than simply the planning of releases, and release management.
[124000670180] |One of the big advantages I’ll bet Microsoft has is that they have a single bug tracking system for developers from Office to the Kernel, with everything in between as well.
[124000670190] |That means that all their developers can have high-bandwidth conversations about any bug in the system.
[124000670200] |Compare that with the balkanised free software world, where I have to create a Bugzilla account any time I want to work directly with a new upstream.
[124000670210] |I hope <a>Launchpad’s bug collaboration features</a> will make it easier to coordinate between those bugzilla’s, at least for projects that are using Launchpad or where the bug has already been filed in Bugzilla (LP can link to other bug trackers).
[124000670220] |Bugs, feature planning, release management, translation, testing and QA… these are all areas where we need to improve the level of collaboration BETWEEN projects.
[124000670230] |I think Launchpad is a good start but there’s a long way to go before we’re in the same position that the competition is in –seamless conversations between all developers.
[124000680010] |<title>#3: The Extra Dimension</title>
[124000680020] |This is one post in a series, describing <a>challenges we need to overcome</a> to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop.
[124000680030] |Apple calls it Quartz.
[124000680040] |Microsoft calls it something else but it’s most visible in Aero Glass –the transparent theme in Vista.
[124000680050] |In the free software world we have Xgl and AIGLX (Ubuntu is going down the AIGLX road).
[124000680060] |In essence these technologies all do the same thing –they introduce a level of malleability to the once-rigid world of windowing systems.
[124000680070] |This is of course a recipe for eye-wateringly poor user interface decisions –windows that wobble being my current favourite, fun as they are.
[124000680080] |But it’s also an opportunity to rethink and improve on many areas of user interface at the system and app level which have been stagnant for a decade or more.
[124000680090] |The proprietary guys have a head start –but we have the edge of being able to try lots of interesting ideas simultaneously across the full colourful spectrum of the free software universe.
[124000680100] |We’ll be adopting a lot of these ideas in Feisty –I hope that some of them will stick and demonstrate real usability or productivity enhancements.
[124000690010] |<title>#2: Granny’s new camera</title>
[124000690020] |This is one post in a series, describing <a>challenges we need to overcome</a> to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop.
[124000690030] |Power users love Linux.
[124000690040] |It’s fast, customizable, personal, tweakable, and they can make <strong>just about anything work</strong>.
[124000690050] |Most peripherals can be made to work with Linux, it’s just that you normally need to wait a little while or know how to write the appropriate drivers or glue.
[124000690060] |Office productivity workers love Linux too if all they do is web, email and a bit of office.
[124000690070] |They love it because it doesn’t go down for maintenance, it’s not subject to the same barrage of viruses and other defects for which Windows is sadly notorious.
[124000690080] |You can configure it as a thin client system and greatly reduce the total cost of ownership in these scenarios.
[124000690090] |So the ends of the spectrum –the power users and the don’t-mess-with-my-system users, are already well serviced by Linux, and it’s getting better for them every six months.
[124000690100] |It’s the middle crowd –the guys who have a computer which they personally modify, attach new hardware to, and expect to interact with a variety of gadgets –that struggle.
[124000690110] |The problem, in a nutshell, is Granny’s new camera.
[124000690120] |You gave Granny the PC last Christmas and set it up with Ubuntu because it Just Works.
[124000690130] |Everything’s peachy, no viruses or spyware, you can administer it remotely whenever you think it needs a bit of polish, and as far as you’re concerned it’s great.
[124000690140] |But then your brother gives Granny a new digital camera… and it only has drivers for Windows.
[124000690150] |Solving this requires work at two levels –first there are possibly some drivers, and second there need to be relevant applications to manage the gadget’s content (music, photos, videos, GPS tracks, etc) and administer the gadget (firmware updates etc).
[124000690160] |As Eric Raymond has said –kid’s just want their iPod to work.
[124000690170] |My own feeling here is that it’s all about critical mass.
[124000690180] |Once 5-10% of the people who buy these gadgets are running Linux (actually, a single brand of Linux), only then will the gadget manufacturers themselves start to care about it as a consumer platform for which their stuff should work.
[124000690190] |That goes for everything from cell phones, PDA’s, and smart phones to some of the more weird and wonderful things that people like to drive from a PC, like laser cutters and 3D printing machines.
[124000690200] |It’s partly just a matter of time, but then it’s also partly a question of how we communicate the state of Linux today (just like the issues in “<a>pervasive support</a>” (challenge #9).
[124000690210] |The situation is definitely improving.
[124000690220] |To the extent that Apple continues to use free software components like CUPS, we benefit in the Linux world because printers that want to Just Work with MacOS will also Just Work with Linux.
[124000690230] |That’s a nice boost.
[124000700010] |<title>#1: Keeping it FREE</title>
[124000700020] |This is one post in a series, describing <a>challenges we need to overcome</a> to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop.
[124000700030] |We have to work together to <strong>keep free software freely available</strong>.
[124000700040] |It will be a failure if the world moves from paying for shrink-wrapped Windows to paying for shrink-wrapped Linux.
[124000700050] |As free software becomes more successful and more pervasive there will be an increasing desire on the part of companies to make it more proprietary.
[124000700060] |We’ve already seen that with Red Hat and Novell, which essentially offer free software on proprietary terms –their “really free” editions are not certified, carry no support and receive no systematic security patching.
[124000700070] |In other words –they’re beta or test versions.
[124000700080] |If you want the best that free software can deliver, a rock solid, widely certified, secure platform, from either of those companies then you have to pay, and you pay the same price whether you are Goldman Sachs or a startup in Rio de Janeiro.
[124000700090] |That’s not the vision we all share of what free software can achieve.
[124000700100] |With Ubuntu, our vision is to make the very best of free software freely available, globally.
[124000700110] |To the extent we make short-term compromises, for drivers or firmware along the way, we see those as bugs, and ones that will be closed over time.
[124000700120] |The dream for me is to be able to keep free software free of charge for the people who want it on those terms.
[124000700130] |To have people sharing the same high quality base and innovating on top of it –from Beijing to Buenos Aires –will create something that we’ve never had before, which is a completely level software playing field for every young aspiring IT practitioner, and every aspiring entrepreneur.
[124000700140] |I believe that’s how we will really change the world, and how we will deliver the full benefit of the movement started more than two decades ago by Richard Stallman.
[124000700150] |This is a personal challenge –I benefited hugely from the existence of Linux in 1996, it was what made it possible (together with SSLeay, now OpenSSL) to get into the crypto game and ultimately found Thawte.
[124000700160] |Now my goal is to make Ubuntu sustainable so that it can continue to grow while at the same time making all of that opportunity, all of those tools, freely available to the next generation of entrepreneurs.
[124000700170] |I’m glad to say our commercial support operation in Montreal is growing and that users are turning into customers, so the ball is rolling.
[124000700180] |As Ubuntu moves into the enterprise, with some of the world’s largest companies deploying it, I think we’re starting to show that it really is possible to have a platform that is both free and self-sustaining.
[124000700190] |We’ve come a long, long way from that first meeting in April 2004.
[124000700200] |If this is a dream that inspires you too then <a>get involved</a> and contribute!
[124000700210] |We’ll take whatever time and input you can give –from documentation and advocacy to local training and support.
[124000700220] |Art, energy, code… it takes all sorts to build something as complete as Ubuntu can be.
[124000710010] |<title>Secure IM in Gaim with OTR</title>
[124000710020] |I just learned about <a>off-the-record</a>, a plugin for Gaim which “Just Works”. <em>apt-get install gaim-otr</em> should do the trick on Ubuntu or Debian, then go into the plugin configuration list in Gaim and generate keys for the accounts you want to use it with.
[124000710030] |Voila!
[124000710040] |One needs to do an out-of-band (voice, typically) verification of someone’s key if you want to be sure to make life hard for the man in the middle.
[124000710050] |I suspect that we’ll soon have voice chats in Gaim too, so that will be even easier to arrange.
[124000710060] |Very classy work.
[124000710070] |Anybody care to file a main inclusion report?
[124000720010] |<title>Call for Participation for Ubuntu Live 2007</title>
[124000720020] |After six developer summits, many more sprints and countless informal meetings amongst our developers, maybe it’s time to invite our users, customers and partners to the party?
[124000720030] |Together with O’Reilly we are thrilled to be inviting the WHOLE community, individual and corporate, technical and social, from small businesses and global giants, to join us in our first annual business conference –<a>Ubuntu Live 2007</a>.
[124000720040] |Planned to mesh well with the schedule for OSCON, there’s now another powerful reason to travel to Portland for the week of July 22!
[124000720050] |If you’d like to make a presentation, there’s a <a>call for participation</a> that begs your attention.
[124000720060] |We’d like to here more about how you are using Ubuntu today and how it fits into your future plans, what’s working well and where we need to invest to smooth things out, what functionality is critical in future releases and what you think is overdone.
[124000720070] |Quoting from the announcement today:
[124000720080] |“The three-day event will aim to give participants all the knowledge they need to explore and set in motion the powerful features in Ubuntu and related applications.
[124000720090] |Program chairs are building an event that will offer expert-led tutorials, big-picture plenary gatherings, focused sessions, and a lively “hallway track” to bring participants face to face with the worldwide Ubuntu community.
[124000720100] |Ubuntu Live is happening July 22-24, 2007 in Portland, Oregon, right alongside the O’Reilly 2007 Open Source Convention (OSCON).
[124000720110] |Proposals are due by February 14, 2007.”
[124000720120] |Yup, Valentines Day.
[124000720130] |The initial list of areas of interest include:
[124000720140] |<li>High performance computing</li>
[124000720150] |<li>Ubuntu in small and medium businesses</li>
[124000720160] |<li>Thin client deployments with Ubuntu</li>
[124000720170] |<li>Building Ubuntu derivatives</li>
[124000720180] |<li>Ubuntu in education</li>
[124000720190] |<li>Building Ubuntu-based appliances/products</li>
[124000720200] |<li>Point of sale, mobile, scientific research, banking, and other verticals</li>
[124000720210] |<li>Performance optimization in large enterprise</li>
[124000720220] |<li>Community contributions</li>
[124000720230] |<li>Ubuntu in the NGO/non-profit sector</li> 
[124000720240] |Looking forward to seeing you there!
[124000730010] |<title>Closing days of the MOTU Council voting</title>
[124000730020] |Calling all Ubuntu developers!
[124000730030] |There are 5 very good nominees for the MOTU council up for confirmation, please do take the time to vote.
[124000730040] |<a>https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-dev/+polls</a>
[124000730050] |The UI on those pages is a mess so please check carefully that you’ve voted in all 5 ballots, it takes just a few minutes.
[124000730060] |I opened up each of the ballots in a separate tab rather than trying to navigate between them.
[124000730070] |In each case you need to indicate that you approve or disapprove of the nomination.
[124000730080] |Voting is open to all ubuntu-dev and ubuntu-core-dev members.
[124000730090] |Two of the nominations are for a one-year term, the others are for two year terms, so we can start getting some rotation of the council in a year’s time.
[124000730100] |If there are other worthy candidates please send your nominations to the tech board.
[124000730110] |Cheers!
[124000740010] |<title>Accessibility building momentum</title>
[124000740020] |I was really pleased to read about an <a>accessibility review of ORCA</a> in a KDE blog post.
[124000740030] |It’s a pointer to a bit of study on the integration of <a>ORCA</a> in Gnome (you can jump straight to the report <a>here</a>) and the good news is, it’s really very positive.
[124000740040] |Thanks to super work on AT-SPI, a11y is starting to shape up on the Linux desktop, and the source of the blog post suggests that BOTH the desktop heavyweights care about it.
[124000740050] |Even better was the news that the German federal government is funding <a>several full-time developers</a> to work on <a>accessibility in Orca and Ubuntu</a> and by extension other free software distributions too.
[124000740060] |There seems to be a growing consensus that the needs of key constituencies, such as those with special accessibility needs, or those who need independent access to public sector documents and data, are best served through collaboration around content and code that is licensed in a truly open fashion.
[124000740070] |At the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, in Mountain View in November ’06, we had a first mini-summit of <a>a11y-focused</a> developers.
[124000740080] |It would be great to gather together the relevant researchers and app developers in Seville in May to continue that work?
[124000740090] |Michael Zacherle sets a nice clear goal in a recent email:
[124000740100] |“At the end we want to have at least the ICDL Core Modules accessible, together with instructions and documentation.”
[124000740110] |For those who haven’t encountered it, the ICDL (“International Computer Drivers Licence”) is a basic course which covers everything you need to know to be office-capable with a computer.
[124000740120] |In other words, the basics you need to call yourself computer literate, and in many cases, one of the key requirements for a job.
[124000740130] |Recently, I’ve seen encouraging signs that the ICDL will be fully supportive of people who want to be “computer literate” with free software.
[124000740140] |Wouldn’t it be something if that privilege were extended to EVERY user, regardless of financial circumstance, language, or disability?
[124000750010] |<title>Snowboard heaven &hell</title>
[124000750020] |I’m working out of Verbier, Switzerland, during February and March this year.
[124000750030] |No sympathy expected.
[124000750040] |Hopefully, the miracle of broadband will make it possible for me to work a full day and enjoy the slopes too!
[124000750050] |Last week was my first here, and a bit of a holiday –I had 12 boisterous guys sharing the chalet and things got a little rowdy.
[124000750060] |Photos are, alas, NSFW.
[124000750070] |Not safe for pretty much anything, actually, other than sending us all tumbling from our respective slender grasps on respectability.
[124000750080] |‘Nuff said.
[124000750090] |Anyhow, the week finished with the most amazing day snowboarding I’ve ever been lucky enough to enjoy.
[124000750100] |Four of us and a guide went exploring off the back of Mont Fort, which is the highest peak you can get to without hiking, and did some back country touring.
[124000750110] |I’ve never experienced anything like it.
[124000750120] |Fields of virgin powder, steep climbs up snow staircases that seem to spell instant terminal velocity for anyone who places a foot wrong, nerve-wracking traverses.
[124000750130] |We survived, it was glorious, and of course the more we retold the stories to the rest of the group, the better it all seemed.
[124000750140] |There’s a sign in one of the pubs here that says, very wisely, “The older I get the better I was”.
[124000750150] |Today of course all of that cock-sure confidence went out the window after a huge overnight dump and wind that concentrated the snow into nice deep drifts.
[124000750160] |I couldn’t tell my arse from my elbow, could barely keep the nose of the board on top of the powder, crashed into walls of snow that were totally not there a second before (they jumped out at me, I swear) and ended up falling into a tree-well and landing on a series of strategically placed rocks.
[124000750170] |I’m sure the rocks are not regretting the encounter, but I am this evening!
[124000750180] |Anyhow, tomorrow morning am lined up for another lesson and am hoping that a little more caution, along with my trusty old ass-guards (“does this make my bum look fat?”) will make for a better day.
[124000750190] |More to come.
[124000760010] |<title>Clarification on Feisty’s proprietary drivers</title>
[124000760020] |<a>Jonathan</a>, I’m afraid you’ve misread the <a>announcement that proprietary video drivers will not be switched on by default in Feisty</a>.
[124000760030] |This was the result of a long telephone call including the entire TB and CC.
[124000760040] |During the discussion, <strong>we re-affirmed the Ubuntu policy of including proprietary drivers where these are required to enable essential hardware functionality</strong>.
[124000760050] |We define “essential hardware” as <strong>functionality which exists widely and for which there are free software applications that are broadly useful, that we wish to include in Ubuntu’s default install, and which require full use of that hardware</strong>.
[124000760060] |The canonical example has always been wifi drivers, some of which only come in proprietary blobs, but which of course enable huge parts of the free software stack to Just Work.
[124000760070] |We have always shipped those, and intend to continue to do so.
[124000760080] |The big discussion has been about whether or not 3D video functionality would be considered essential for Feisty.
[124000760090] |I and others do believe that <strong>3D is an essential part of the modern desktop experience</strong>.
[124000760100] |It is difficult to buy a PC or laptop that does not include such hardware, and in terms of transistor count it’s almost as much as your CPU these days.
[124000760110] |However, when we reviewed the status of the free software applications that depend on that hardware functionality we found that they were not ready for inclusion by default in Feisty.
[124000760120] |Neither Compiz nor Beryl have the requisite stability and compatibility to be a default option in Feisty.
[124000760130] |It was this which blocked the decision to enable proprietary video drivers by default, not an aversion to their inclusion.
[124000760140] |For better or worse, we already crossed that line right at the beginning of the Ubuntu project, and reaffirmed that policy during this debate.
[124000760150] |It is <strong>highly likely that Feisty+1 will see the inclusion of Compiz or Beryl by default</strong>, looking at their maturity and ongoing community involvement, and that will catalyse the decision to enable this hardware functionality by default too, even if that means using these proprietary drivers.
[124000760160] |Now, the discussion did highlight a couple of key issues and result in a number of additional decisions:
[124000760170] |<li>We have not been forceful enough about our policy on software patents and other, similar threats to software freedom.
[124000760180] |As a result, we have joined FFII and other organisations that are fighting software patents (I am personally co-funding an EFF representative in Brussels to focus on this and other work related to software and content freedom).
[124000760190] |We will also shortly announce participation in another patent-related initiative aimed at preventing a hostile take-over of the free software space by those with entrenched software IP positions.</li>
[124000760200] |<li>We will actively support Nouveau and other efforts to develop free software drivers that enable the requisite functionality.
[124000760210] |I am happy for folks working on these efforts to contact me directly or to follow the community channels in Ubuntu.
[124000760220] |Either way, we will provide financial and development support for those groups and will integrate their work as soon as it does the necessary hardware magic.
[124000760230] |Proprietary drivers are not the preferred solution and will be eliminated once the community delivers a free alternative.</li>
[124000760240] |<li>We will work closely with the hardware vendors concerned, and part of that will be to continue to make the strong case in favour of free drivers.</li> 
[124000760250] |In addition to all of this, we have restarted the effort to produce a flavour of Ubuntu that includes no proprietary drivers or firmware at all.
[124000760260] |In fact, this flavour will take an ultra-conservative approach to all forms of content on the .iso, whether that be artistic or code.
[124000760270] |More on that initiative later.
[124000760280] |So, I’m sorry if this is not the resounding rejection of the drivers that you were looking for, but I hope that the discussion has proven open, comprehensive and ultimately reasonable.
[124000770010] |<title>Calibrating equipment for altitude</title>
[124000770020] |One of the experiments I was a guinea-pig for on the space station was a study into the correlation of heart rate and metabolism (energy expenditure) in space.
[124000770030] |I didn’t have to do much –drink some amazingly expensive water (isotopically distinctive so it would make a good marker) and keep track of everything I ate.
[124000770040] |And wear a heart monitor, which recorded every beat for much of the flight.
[124000770050] |Apart from the irritation associated with the wiring of the heart monitor it was straightforward, all the hard work was done on the ground at the <a>Sports Science Institute of South Africa</a>, at UCT.
[124000770060] |This was an extension of research they had been doing into the correlation of heart rate and metabolic activity in athletes, and they wanted to see if the same rules apply to astronauts in flight.
[124000770070] |Conclusions:
[124000770080] |<li>Yes, they do.</li>
[124000770090] |<li>Astronauts don’t burn a lot of energy in space.
[124000770100] |Floating around is the ultimate couch potato profession, except for interesting events like EVA’s and decompression scenarios where every movement is against the pressurization of your suit.</li> 
[124000770110] |I was reminded of all of this yesterday when I took a look at the readings of my heart rate monitor –just a low-end Polar heart strap and watch that I’ve been wearing out on the slopes for interest’s sake.
[124000770120] |The dear thing thinks I’ve been doing AMAZING amounts of exercise while snowboarding.
[124000770130] |In one day, apparently, I burned off 6,000 kcal, which is hardly likely given my very relaxed (“Sunday tripper”) approach to exercise in general.
[124000770140] |I think the issue is that my heart rate is generally elevated when at altitude.
[124000770150] |The watch doesn’t know anything about altitude, though, so it thinks that I’m tearing up some imaginary track when really I’m enjoying a cup of vin chaud <sup>*</sup> at 3,000m.
[124000770160] |So, does anybody know how to recalibrate one of these things, for a more realistic result?
[124000770170] |I’m guessing somebody has a data set which would allow one to normalize heart rate for altitude and body mass, and get better results.
[124000770180] |Or is there a monitor out there which senses altitude and takes it into account automatically?
[124000770190] |<sup>*</sup> thanks to Pierre for pointing out that I’m not, in fact, drinking “lime wine”.
[124000770200] |What a limey I am.
[124000790010] |<title>A very good start</title>
[124000790020] |I’m very impressed with the results of the early work being done at the new <a>Linux Foundation</a>, which is OSDL+FSG with a leaner focus on getting things done.
[124000790030] |Working in civil society, quango’s, non-profits or consortia is extremely difficult –money is always tight, it’s not as clear what the metrics of success should be, and it’s often hard to get consensus from a critical mass of players on what needs to be done.
[124000790040] |So I think it’s a credit to the folks who setup the new entity that they have been able to narrow the focus substantially and get buy-in from all the major players on the goals for 2007.
[124000790050] |I’ve been nominated for and elected to, and have accepted, a seat on the board of the Linux Foundation, not in my capacity as founder of Ubuntu or via Canonical, but as an independent representative of the free software and Linux community.
[124000790060] |I’ll endeavor to wear that hat as effectively as possible in the role!
[124000790070] |I’m not a great fan of consortia –they are always at risk of being divided by their own membership, but I agreed to take on this role because I think the management have a mandate from the funders to deliver something that’s really important for free software –an open process of standardisation that delivers results in competitive time frames.
[124000790080] |I’ll do my best to help them achieve that.
[124000800010] |<title>Pre-installing Linux</title>
[124000800020] |There’s been a tremendous level of interest in the fact that pre-installed Linux (in the form of Ubuntu | Fedora | OpenSuSE) is the #1 rated suggestion on <a>Dell’s IdeaStorm</a>.
[124000800030] |On the face of it, there is little question that Linux pre-installation is popular with customers.
[124000800040] |Why, then, is it so difficult to buy a PC in the US or Europe that has Linux (and ideally Linux alone) on the hard drive?
[124000800050] |The devil, as always, lies in the details.
[124000800060] |First, <strong>margins on PC’s are razor-thin</strong>.
[124000800070] |This has two significant consequences.
[124000800080] |Most importantly, it means that Microsoft co-marketing funds are a substantial portion of the profit margins for many large PC retailers.
[124000800090] |Tweaking the nose of the giant might be fun but it’s risky.
[124000800100] |If Microsoft reduces the per-PC marketing contribution it makes for a particular reseller, that puts them at a huge financial disadvantage relative to their competitors.
[124000800110] |This means that one of the biggest issues a computer manufacturer or reseller faces in considering Linux pre-installations is the impact it will have on the Microsoft relationship, and hence bottom line.
[124000800120] |Also, thin margins mean that any customer interaction or support call can blow away the profit not just on that sale, but on many others as well.
[124000800130] |The worst-case scenario is a customer who buys a computer at the lowest price off your website, assuming it’s a Windows machine, and then calls, infuriated, because it “won’t work with the game they are trying to install”.
[124000800140] |One customer who accidentally gets Linux without knowing what that means is an expensive proposition for a company that makes relatively little on the low-end product range.
[124000800150] |For this reason, I don’t think it makes any sense for Walmart to sell low-cost Linux PC’s, and we’ve never pushed US / European retailers to try pre-installing Ubuntu unless we think they can segment out the market which genuinely WANTS Linux from those that are just looking for a great deal on “a [windows] computer”.
[124000800160] |Second, <strong>we free software fans are a fussy crowd</strong>, and very hard to please.
[124000800170] |You know what you are like –you sit and configure that Dell system down to the finest detail, you want a specific model of HP laptop, you want the one that has the Intel graphics chipset not the other chipset because you prefer the free driver approach from Intel… you are in short an expert, demanding customer.
[124000800180] |This means, that in order to reach us with Linux, a reseller has to offer Linux EVERYWHERE, not just on a few select models.
[124000800190] |Worse, we are not “Linux” users, we are users who want version 6.06.1 of Ubuntu, or 10.2 of SuSE, or Fedora 6.
[124000800200] |We want a specific distro, and in many cases also a specific VERSION of that distro.
[124000800210] |In order to please us, the vendor has to offer an enormous matrix of possibilities –machine and distro/version.
[124000800220] |This is an expensive proposition.
[124000800230] |So, what can we do to help address the need?
[124000800240] |First, we can <strong>help the vendors get more detailed insight</strong> into the real nature of demand.
[124000800250] |For example, here’s a survey being run by Dell that will I’m sure help inform their decisions about how they help you get Linux on Dell:
[124000800260] |<a>http://www.dell.com/linuxsurvey/</a>
[124000800270] |It would be great, of course, if those sorts of surveys were less vendor-specific, so that we could express our opinions once and have that counted across the whole industry, but there you have it.
[124000800280] |(It would also be great if Dell would consider Ubuntu to be both community- and commercially-supported, but that’s a different story <img/>).
[124000800290] |Second, we can start looking at <strong>ways to change the model</strong> so that there’s a better fit between customer expectations and the economics of the industry.
[124000800300] |For example, if you’re one of the people who voted for Linux pre-installation on Dell IdeaStorm, would you be happy to receive a Dell box with no OS and with an Ubuntu disk in the box, which you yourself installed, with no support from Dell?
[124000800310] |What if it came with an assurance that the set of components you had configured *should* work, but no guarantee?
[124000800320] |Can we tweak the parameters to get to the point where you would be satisfied, and Dell could make a reasonable profit with only reasonable risk?
[124000800330] |Solve that, and I think we could all get one step closer to fixing <a>Bug #1</a>.
[124000800340] |<strong>Addendum:</strong>
[124000800350] |Of course, some resellers specialise in Linux pre-installations.
[124000800360] |My favourite of them is <a>System76</a>, who do a great range of laptops and desktops with, amongst others, Ubuntu preinstalled.
[124000800370] |Kudos to them for spotting the market and making the most of it.
[124000810010] |<title>Linux and Solaris –common ground ahead?</title>
[124000810020] |SUN’s free software credentials took a big step forward today with <a>Ian Murdock’s decision to join the company</a>.
[124000810030] |Congratulations all round.
[124000810040] |Now we have to find a new CTO at the Linux Foundation, and one with big shoes to fill.
[124000810050] |Hopefully, Ian’s experience will lead to something ISV’s very dearly want –commonality and standardisation across their non-Windows target platforms.
[124000810060] |Here’s to an interesting year!
[124000820010] |<title>Beryl 0.2.1 in Universe</title>
[124000820020] |I was thrilled to see a slew of new Beryl packages land in Ubuntu yesterday.
[124000820030] |There’s been a furious amount of activity from the MOTU and Beryl upstreams to get these packages ready for Feisty inclusion –cleaning up copyright issues as well as getting the packages themselves into first class order.
[124000820040] |Now the rest of us can test Beryl simply by:
[124000820050] |- enabling universe in /etc/apt/sources.list (or, in Ubuntu, just use System->Administration->Software sources)
[124000820060] |- installing Beryl (“sudo apt-get install beryl”)
[124000820070] |After I’d done this, I could get Beryl up pretty much immediately by just running “beryl-manager” at the command prompt.
[124000820080] |A huge thank you to the folks who worked so hard to get this done in time for Feisty –lupine_85, racarr, imbrandon, pricechild, and others!
[124000820090] |The MOTU team’s response to this challenge was <strong>awesome</strong>.
[124000840010] |<title>Bazaar 0.15 –the “much much faster” release</title>
[124000840020] |Well done to the guys working on <a>Bazaar, the distributed version control system</a>, for their work on the latest release.
[124000840030] |This one includes a new working tree format that radically cut the time of “bzr status” for larger trees.
[124000840040] |After installing the release I was prompted to type “bzr upgrade” whenever I used a tree in the old format, and the upgrade was smooth (glad for the backup it makes, but I’ve started deleting those since it all seems rock solid).
[124000840050] |There’s a page which shows the <a>relative performance of different releases of Bazaar</a> since 0.8, and I’m impressed that they have cut the time of “bzr status” by 2/3rds since 0.8 which I think was about a year ago.
[124000840060] |We picked Bazaar for <a>Launchpad</a> because of it’s excellent cross-platform support and robust handling of renames (even in extreme cases –renaming files inside directories that other people renamed and merging frequently between branches of people who are radically restructuring a big tree).
[124000840070] |It’s never lost data for me, or blown up in a surprising way, and we use it heavily in a team of about 20 developers.
[124000840080] |For the past year I’ve been urging the team to focus on performance and these numbers suggest good results.
[124000840090] |Robert Collins tells me there’s about another 40% of low hanging fruit on “bzr status”, but for 0.16 Martin Pool says the focus is almost entirely on the smart server so that network operations (push to a remote repo, or merge from a remote branch, or commit to a remote branch) are much more efficient, especially for people on high-latency links.
[124000840100] |Looking forward to it!
[124000860010] |<title>Congrats!</title>
[124000860020] |…to Debian on the release of Etch!
[124000870010] |<title>Surfin’ the web</title>
[124000870020] |Isn’t StumbleUpon <a>wonderful</a>?
[124000880010] |<title>Taking freedom further</title>
[124000880020] |I’ve long believed there’s a general phenomenon that underlies the free software movement.
[124000880030] |It’s “volunteer-driven, internet-powered collaboration”.
[124000880040] |I think it will ultimately touch every industry that has any digital workflow.
[124000880050] |Lets face it, that’s pretty much every industry.
[124000880060] |The phenomenon has three key elements:
[124000880070] |<li><strong>Freedom-driven licensing.</strong>
[124000880080] |If you want the magic, you have to set it free, because it’s the possibility of doing things for themselves that motivates people to build on your work.
[124000880090] |Just exposing the “source” (whether that’s code or other content) isn’t as interesting.
[124000880100] |Microsoft will show you the source to Windows these days, but they won’t give you the freedom to remix it.</li>
[124000880110] |<li><strong>Community.</strong>
[124000880120] |The net allows us to build a community of eyeballs and fingers based on personal interest rather than personal geography.
[124000880130] |It used to be that companies always had to do the best they could with local talent –or fly people in and deal with visa issues (that’s why Microsoft is a big proponent of greater H1-B visa allocations).
[124000880140] |Today we can find the best talent wherever it is, talent that is really personally interested in the underlying issue.
[124000880150] |And we call that talent pool “community”.</li>
[124000880160] |<li><strong>Revision control.</strong>
[124000880170] |I’m much happier to give you read AND write access to my stuff, if I can know who changed what, when, and easily revert it.
[124000880180] |And if that revision control allows cheap branching, then there can be multiple, parallel efforts to solve a particular problem.</li> 
[124000880190] |Consider wikipedia in this light: it clearly meets all three criteria.
[124000880200] |Its content has a license that gives you genuine freedom.
[124000880210] |There is a big community that takes a personal interest in that content (actually, multiple communities, one which I call “the librarians” wants to make sure the institution itself is healthy, the others are communities that form around specific content, given the nature of wikipedia as a repository of knowledge).
[124000880220] |And of course every change is logged with some level of identity associated with it.
[124000880230] |The linux kernel is the same, as are most of the components we associate with a GNU OS.
[124000880240] |But why stop at just code and knowledge?
[124000880250] |I’m a big fan of the work of the Creative Commons, because they have taken to heart the idea of generalizing the licensing problem.
[124000880260] |And conferences like the <a>Digital Freedom Expo in South Africa</a> this week, which TSF has agreed to sponsor, are forums for discussing the ways in which these principles can apply to other domains.
[124000880270] |I would love to be part of the exploration of this phenomenon at all levels but Ubuntu is plenty of work for one lifetime.
[124000880280] |Nevertheless I think there are real opportunities, both social and commercial, in this idea.
[124000880290] |Incidentally, one of the reasons I picked the <a>Bazaar revision control project</a> for use in our infrastructure, and why I sponsor it, is because I think it will be great to have a revision control system which can be adapted to manage LOTS of different kinds of content, not just code.
[124000880300] |And the Bazaar guys abstract things to an appropriate level to be able to do just this.
[124000880310] |I’d like to be able to see a house I like, and “bzr branch” the plans to that house, then share my modifications together with my experiences of living in that house so that others can merge the ideas they think worked best.
[124000880320] |All we need is bzr embedded in an architectural drawing application <img/>
[124000880330] |A number of folks have asked about the new “radical freedom” flavour of Ubuntu that I hinted at in the <a>announcement of work on Gutsy Gibbon</a>.
[124000880340] |Part of that initiative is focused on code freedom –going further than anybody else, though, beyond the CPU down to the level of the code running in firmware on your peripherals.
[124000880350] |We want to highlight the good work of hardware vendors who have completely embraced that idea.
[124000880360] |Of course –if you REALLY want freedom then you need to run that flavour on a SUN SPARC chip in an FPGA, in which case you would have freedom to modify even the CPU itself, and everything running on it.
[124000880370] |Raising the profile of genuinely free hardware is one way I hope we can reach the point where we no longer choose to include any binary drivers in vanilla Ubuntu.
[124000880380] |But a broader part of this “radical freedom” thrust is to explore freedom in other domains.
[124000880390] |If we ship a PDF, do we ship the source document?
[124000880400] |If we ship a JPG, do we ship the source artwork?
[124000880410] |If we ship a nicely edited video, do we ship the original, unedited recording so you can really remix it?
[124000880420] |If we ship music, do we ship the samples and the separated tracks?
[124000880430] |Potent medicine indeed.
[124000880440] |I’m looking forward to seeing how far we can push the concept, just inside the Ubuntu project.
[124000890010] |<title>Ubuntu Live open for registration (Portland, OR, July 22-24)</title>
[124000890020] |<img/>The doors are finally open to <a>register</a> for <a>Ubuntu Live</a>, our first global Ubuntu user conference.
[124000890030] |It is being hosted by O’Reilly Conferences in the prelude to OSCon in the same venue, and exists “to provide a meeting place for Ubuntu users, contributors, and partners–and the Ubuntu-curious”.
[124000890040] |The list of <a>sessions</a> is already impressive (we had a phenomenal set of papers and presentation proposed, but had to whittle it down to this initial list).
[124000890050] |I’m sure there will be some additional sessions too.
[124000890060] |But the thing I’m most excited about is the list of <a>speakers</a>, so you will find me in the front row for every keynote on those dates.
[124000890070] |Let’s meet up in Portland!
[124000900010] |<title>Community council nominations</title>
[124000900020] |Ubuntu members, it’s time to expand the Community Council!
[124000900030] |After much discussion, we have five candidates for the CC-2007.
[124000900040] |In my capacity as project BDFL I’m nominating each of them for a 2 year term, and need your approval to get them onto the council.
[124000900050] |There are 5 separate polls, one for each nomination, and all Ubuntu Members (developers, advocates, artists, forums contributors, whatever their contribution) get an equal say.
[124000900060] |I very much hope all of these candidates meet your approval!
[124000900070] |We will be able to cover more time zones and respond more quickly to community issues with this expanded governance board.
[124000900080] |That said, the CC is the most important body and you should feel empowered to vote accordingly if you feel a candidate is not suitable.
[124000900090] |It’s a secret ballot.
[124000910010] |<title>Trademarks redux</title>
[124000910020] |One of the very interesting issues-du-jour is the interaction between the three “legs” of “intellectual property”.
[124000910030] |Traditionally, those three are copyrights, patents and trademarks, and they have quite different laws and contractual precedents that are associated with them.
[124000910040] |Recently, however, I’ve observed an increase in the cross-talk between them.
[124000910050] |Classically, “software freedom” was about the copyright license associated with the code.
[124000910060] |But patents and trademarks are now being brought into the mix.
[124000910070] |For example, the discussion around Mozilla’s trademark policy was directly linking the concept of “freedom” to trademark policy as much as code copyright license.
[124000910080] |And much of the very hard debate in the GPLv3 process is about linkages between copyright license and relevant patents.
[124000910090] |And like it or not, the GPL is widely considered the reference implementation of freedom so GPLv3′s approach will be, for many, definitive on the subject.
[124000910100] |In the Ubuntu community we’ve recently gone through a process to agree a trademark policy.
[124000910110] |This was recently approved by the Community Council, and the final draft is here:
[124000910120] |<a>http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/trademarkpolicy</a>
[124000910130] |We’ve tried to strike a balance that keeps the trademarks of Ubuntu meaningful (i.e. if it says Ubuntu, it really is Ubuntu) but also recognizes the fact that Ubuntu is a shared work, in which many different participants of our community make a personal investment, and which they should have the right to share.
[124000910140] |So we’ve made explicit the idea of a remix –a reworking of Ubuntu that addresses the needs of a specific community (could be national, could be an industry like medical or educational) but preserves the key things that people would expect from Ubuntu, like hardware support and certification.
[124000910150] |I’m sure this isn’t the last word on the subject, but I hope it’s a useful contribution to the debate, and would welcome other projects adopting similar licenses.
[124000910160] |For that reason, our trademark license is published under the Creative Commons Sharealike with Attribution license (CC-BY-SA).
[124000920010] |<title>Wretched news</title>
[124000920020] |<a>Read on</a> for something that’s either hilarious or baffling, depending on which IRC channels you’ve been hanging out in. 5 hit die Lich indeed.
[124000920030] |And that’s just the left hand.
[124000930010] |<title>A free software milestone</title>
[124000930020] |I’ve been on the road solidly for the past 10 days but itching to write about Dell’s announcement of pre-installed Linux for consumers.
[124000930030] |This is a significant milestone, not just for Ubuntu but for every flavour of Linux and the free software community as a whole.
[124000930040] |While there are already a number of <a>excellent companies like System76</a> offering Linux pre-installed, Dell represents “the industry”, and it’s very important for all of us that the industry sees a future for Linux on the desktop.
[124000930050] |Device compatibility is the top issue people raise as a blocker of broad Linux adoption.
[124000930060] |Many hardware manufacturers don’t yet provide zero-day Linux drivers for their components, because of the perceived lack of market demand for those drivers.
[124000930070] |The Dell announcement is already changing that.
[124000930080] |Those manufacturers who are Linux-aware will have a significant advantage selling their components to global PC vendors who are shipping Linux, because those PC vendors can offer the same components across both Linux and Windows PC’s.
[124000930090] |That commonality reduces cost, and cost is everything in the volume PC market.
[124000930100] |I believe that the <strong>free software approach is a better device driver development model</strong> for component and peripheral manufacturers, and that once they have learned how to work with the Linux community they will quickly ensure that their devices work with Linux as soon as, or before, they work with proprietary platforms.
[124000930110] |It will take some time to help those vendors understand the full process of working in a collaborative forum with the upstream kernel community, to ensure the widest possible benefit from their efforts.
[124000930120] |I’ve no doubt that vendors who start out thinking in proprietary terms will, over time, shift towards providing free drivers in partnership with the Linux community.
[124000930130] |I would credit companies like Intel for their leadership in that regard, it’s great to be able to show how their free drivers make it possible to reach the widest possible audience with their hardware.
[124000930140] |The most important thing for all of us is the commercial success of Dell’s offering.
[124000930150] |A sustainable business in pre-installed Linux in Western markets will give credibility to the Linux desktop as well as providing an opportunity to build relationships with the rest of the consumer PC ecosystem.
[124000930160] |We don’t have to fix <a>Bug #1</a> in order to make Linux a top-tier target for hardware vendors –we just need to show that there’s an economic incentive for them to engage with our community.
[124000940010] |<title>DRM *really* doesn’t work</title>
[124000940020] |Well, that didn’t take long.
[124000940030] |Ars Technica <a>is reporting</a> that further vulnerabilities in the HD DVD content protection system have been uncovered.
[124000940040] |As I <a>noted previously</a>, any DRM system that depends on offline key distribution will be cracked.
[124000940050] |This latest vulnerability is one step closer to the complete dismantling of the HD DVD protection system.
[124000940060] |How long before these guys ask the question: “what do our customers want”?
[124000940070] |From experience, 5-7 years.
[124000950010] |<title>Community Council expansion</title>
[124000950020] |Congratulations to all 5 nominees to the CC, and thanks to all the <a>Ubuntu members</a> who <a>voted to confirm</a> their appointment.
[124000950030] |We now have a <a>CC of 8 members</a> (one membership will expire in a day or two) that covers substantially more time zones and has experience in more parts of the community.
[124000950040] |I’m looking forward to working with this team!
[124000950050] |I’d like to thank Colin Watson for what can only be described as an extraordinary contribution of wisdom, energy and leadership during his tenure as one of our Founding CC members.
[124000950060] |Colin has accepted a nomination to the Technical Board, which we’ll act on shortly.
[124000960010] |<title>Support for Maria Corina Machado</title>
[124000960020] |I read today of the renewed efforts of the Venezuelan authorities to clamp down on Sumate and their leaders, in particular Maria Corina Machado.
[124000960030] |Most recently they <a>prevented her from attending</a> a World Economic Forum event.
[124000960040] |One of the privileges of working in the free software community is the interaction between different groups trying to bring together social and economic change.
[124000960050] |People like Maria are inspiring leaders, because they devote themselves to a cause much greater than any one person’s life, but in the process they sacrifice many of the comforts that many of us take for granted.
[124000960060] |It would be much easier to watch from the sidelines, emigrate, or simply ignore the situation.
[124000960070] |I know that the Ubuntu community is very active in Venezuela and I hope they will not also some day face repression.
[124000960080] |It seems the country is on a knife-edge, facing tough decisions that will have a major impact on the quality of life of citizens there for decades.
[124000980010] |<title>Microsoft is not the real threat</title>
[124000980020] |Much has been written about Microsoft’s allegation of patent infringements in Linux (by which I’m sure they mean GNU/Linux <img/>).
[124000980030] |I don’t think Microsoft is the real threat, and in fact, I think Microsoft and the Linux community will actually end up fighting on the same side of this issue.
[124000980040] |I’m in favour of patents in general, but not software or business method patents.
[124000980050] |I’ll blog separately some day about why that’s the case, but for the moment I’ll just state for the record my view that software patents hinder, rather than help, innovation in the software industry.
[124000980060] |And I’m pretty certain that, within a few years, <strong>Microsoft themselves will be strong advocates against software patents</strong>.
[124000980070] |Why?
[124000980080] |Because Microsoft is irrevocably committed to shipping new software every year, and software patents represent landmines in their roadmap which they are going to step on, like it or not, with increasing regularity.
[124000980090] |They can’t sit on the sidelines of the software game –they actually have to ship new products.
[124000980100] |And every time they do that, they risk stepping on a patent landmine.
[124000980110] |They are a perfect target –they have deep pockets, and they have no option but to negotiate a settlement, or go to court, when confronted with a patent suit.
[124000980120] |Microsoft already spends a huge amount of money on patent settlements (far, far more than they could hope to realise through patent licensing of their own portfolio).
[124000980130] |That number will creep upwards until it’s abundantly clear to them that they would be better off if software patents were history.
[124000980140] |In short, Microsoft will lose a patent trench war if they start one, and I’m sure that cooler heads in Redmond know that.
[124000980150] |But let’s step back from the coal-face for a second.
[124000980160] |I have high regard for Microsoft.
[124000980170] |They produce some amazing software, and they made software much cheaper than it ever was before they were around.
[124000980180] |Many people at Microsoft are motivated by a similar ideal to one we have in Ubuntu: to empower people for the digital era.
[124000980190] |Of course, we differ widely on many aspects of the implementation of that ideal, but my point is that Microsoft is actually committed to the same game that we free software people are committed to: building things which people use every day.
[124000980200] |So, Microsoft is not the real patent threat to Linux.
[124000980210] |<strong>The real threat to Linux is the same as the real threat to Microsoft</strong>, and that is a patent suit from a person or company that is NOT actually building software, but has filed patents on ideas that the GNU project and Microsoft are equally likely to be implementing.
[124000980220] |Yes, Nathan, I’m <a>looking at you</a>!
[124000980230] |As they say in Hollywood, where there’s a hit there’s a writ.
[124000980240] |And Linux is a hit.
[124000980250] |We should expect a patent lawsuit against Linux, some time in the next decade.
[124000980260] |There are three legs to IP law: copyright, trademark and patents.
[124000980270] |I expect a definitive suit associated with each of them.
[124000980280] |SCO stepped up on the copyright front, and that’s nearly dealt with now.
[124000980290] |A trademark-based suit is harder to envisage, because Linus and others did the smart thing and established clear ownership of the “Linux” trademark a while ago.
[124000980300] |The best-practice trademark framework for free software is <a>still evolving</a>, and there will probably be a suit or two, but none that could threaten the continued development of free software.
[124000980310] |And the third leg is patent law. I’m certain someone will sue somebody else about Linux on patent grounds, but it’s less likely to be Microsoft (starting a trench war) and more likely to be a litigant who only holds IP and doesn’t actually get involved in the business of software.
[124000980320] |It will be a small company, possibly just a holding company, that has a single patent or small portfolio, and goes after people selling Linux-based devices.
[124000980330] |Now,<strong> the wrong response to this problem is to label pure IP holders as “patent trolls”</strong>.
[124000980340] |While I dislike software patents, I deeply dislike the characterisation of pure IP holders as “patent trolls”.
[124000980350] |They are only following the rules laid out in law, and making the most of a bad system; they are not intrinsically bad themselves.
[124000980360] |Yes, Nathan, all is forgiven <img/>.
[124000980370] |One of the high ideals of the patent system is to provide a way for eccentric genius inventors to have brilliant insights in industries where they don’t have any market power, but where their outsider-perspective leads them to some important innovation that escaped the insiders.
[124000980380] |Ask anyone on the street if they think patents are good, and they will say, in pretty much any language, “yes, inventors should be compensated for their insights”.
[124000980390] |The so-called “trolls” are nothing more than inventors with VC funding.
[124000980400] |Good for them.
[124000980410] |The <strong>people who call them trolls are usually large, incumbent players</strong> who cross-license their patent portfolios with other incumbents to form a nice, cosy oligopoly.
[124000980420] |“Trolling” is the practice of interrupting that comfortable and predictably profitable arrangement.
[124000980430] |It’s hard to feel any sympathy for the incumbents at all when you look at it that way.
[124000980440] |So it’s not the patent-holders who are the problem, it’s the patent system.
[124000980450] |What to do about it?
[124000980460] |Well, there are lots of groups that are actively engaged in education and policy discussion around patent reform.
[124000980470] |Get involved!
[124000980480] |I recently joined the <a>FFII: Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure</a>, which is doing excellent work in Europe in this regard.
[124000980490] |<a>Canonical</a> sponsored the <a>EUPACO II conference</a>, which brought together folks from across the spectrum to discuss patent reform.
[124000980500] |And Canonical also <a>recently joined</a> the <a>Open Invention Network</a>, which establishes a Linux patent pool as a defensive measure against an attack from an incumbent player.
[124000980510] |You can find a way to become part of the conversation, too.
[124000980520] |Help to build better understanding about the real dynamics of software innovation and competition.
[124000980530] |We need to get consensus from the industry –including Microsoft, though it may be a bit soon for them –that software patents are a bad thing for society.
[124000990010] |<title>Font-ification</title>
[124000990020] |Anybody else frustrated with the state of fonts in Linux today?
[124000990030] |It seems there are two distinct issues: the availability of high quality fonts under Free licenses, and the infrastructure for installing, managing and accessing those fonts.
[124000990040] |There has been some progress on both fronts.
[124000990050] |Bitstream’s Vera, and the new <a>Liberation font</a> work (kudos to Red Hat for driving that effort) are steps to provide us with a clean, crisp set of high quality fonts with good hinting that can be installed by default.
[124000990060] |There is also good work being done by, amongst others, <a>SIL International</a> on a <a>free font license</a> framework, and fonts to go with it.
[124000990070] |I hope the community can build on these efforts to expand the font coverage to the full Unicode glyphset, preserving their essential character and metrics.
[124000990080] |The second problem, the infrastructure and API’s to manage fonts on Linux systems, is more complicated.
[124000990090] |Here’s a <a>mail to the ubuntu-devel list</a> describing the situation and calling for leadership from the community in helping to address it.
[124000990100] |We need a clean, clear way of:
[124000990110] |<li>Packaging fonts, and knowing which packages to install to get which fonts.</li>
[124000990120] |<li>Cataloguing fonts, and allowing people to manage the fonts that are immediately accessible to them or loaded by default, everywhere.</li>
[124000990130] |<li>Making all of this sane in a world where you MIGHT want to read a document in Korean using a French desktop.
[124000990140] |In other words, where there need to be a lot of fonts available, even if most of those fonts are not used all the time.</li> 
[124000990150] |Most of the long list of fonts I see in OpenOffice are lost on me, I don’t know when I would choose any of them.
[124000990160] |Sounds like a mess, but then again it also sounds like the sort of Gordian knot that the flaming sword of free software can slice straight through, given strong leadership and a forum for the work.
[124000990170] |Who will step up?
[124001000010] |<title>Fantastic science</title>
[124001000020] |<a>This sort of discovery</a>, I guess, is why I wanted to be a physicist.
[124001000030] |Alas, after two days at the amazing CERN when I was 18 I was pretty sure I wasn’t clever enough to do that, and so pursued other interests into IT and business and space.
[124001000040] |But I still get a thrill out of living vicariously in a life that involves some sort of particle accelerator.
[124001000050] |What an incredible rush for the scientists involved.
[124001000060] |Also very glad to have exited the “prime number products are hard to factor so it helps if you generated the beasties in the first place” business.
[124001010010] |<title>Renaming is the killer app of distributed version control</title>
[124001010020] |The <strong>number one thing I want from a distributed version control system is robust renaming</strong>.
[124001010030] |Why is that?
[124001010040] |Because without a rigorous approach to renaming that guarantees perfect results, I’m nervous to merge from someone I don’t know.
[124001010050] |And merging from “people you don’t know” is the real thing that distributed version control gives which you cannot get from centralized systems like CVS and Subversion.
[124001010060] |Distributed version control is all about empowering your community, and the people who might join your community.
[124001010070] |You want newcomers to get stuck in and make the changes they think make sense.
[124001010080] |It’s the difference between having blessed editors for an encyclopedia (in the source code sense we call them “committers”) and the wiki approach, which welcomes new contributors who might just have a very small fix or suggestion.
[124001010090] |And perhaps more importantly, who might be willing to spend time on cleaning up and reshaping the layout of your wiki so that it’s more accessible and understandable for other hackers.
[124001010100] |The key is to lower the barrier to entry.
[124001010110] |You don’t want to have to dump a whole lot of rules to new contributors like “never rename directories a, b and c because you will break other people and we will be upset”.
[124001010120] |You want those new contributors to have complete freedom, and then you want to be able to merge, review changes, and commit if you like them.
[124001010130] |If merging from someone might drop you into a nightmare of renaming fixups, you will be resistant to it, and your community will not be as widely empowered.
[124001010140] |So, try this in your favorite distributed VCS:
[124001010150] |<li>Make two branches of your favorite upstream.
[124001010160] |In Bzr, you can find some projects to branch in the <a>project cloud</a>.</li>
[124001010170] |<li>In one branch, pretend to be a new contributor, cleaning up the build system.
[124001010180] |Rearrange some directories to make better sense (and almost every large free software project can benefit from this, there’s a LOT of cruft that’s crept in over the years… the bigger the project, the bigger the need).</li>
[124001010190] |<li>Now, in the second branch, merge from the branch where you did that renaming.
[124001010200] |Some systems will fail, but most will actually handle this easy case cleanly.</li>
[124001010210] |<li>Go back to the first branch.
[124001010220] |Add a bunch of useful files to the repo in the directories you renamed.
[124001010230] |Or make a third branch, and the files to the directories there.</li>
[124001010240] |<li>Now, merge in from that branch.</li>
[124001010250] |<li>Keep playing with this.
[124001010260] |Sooner or later, if you are not using a system like Bzr which treats renames as a first class operation… Oops.</li> 
[124001010270] |Now, this is not a contrived example, it’s actually a perfect study of what we HOPE will happen as distributed version control is more widely adopted.
[124001010280] |If I look at the biggest free software projects, the thing they all have in common is crufty tree structures (directory layouts) and build systems.
[124001010290] |This is partly a result of never having had tools which really supported renaming, in a way which Would Not Break.
[124001010300] |And this is one of the major reasons why it takes 8 hours to build something like OpenOffice, and why so few people have the stomach to step up and contribute to a project like that.
[124001010310] |The exact details of what it takes to break the renaming support of many DVCS’s vary from implementation to implementation.
[124001010320] |But by far the most robust of them is Bzr at the moment, which is why we make such heavy use of it at Ubuntu.
[124001010330] |Many of the other systems have just waved past the renaming problem, saying it’s “not essential” and that heuristics and guesstimates are sufficient.
[124001010340] |I disagree.
[124001010350] |And I think the more projects really start to play with these tools, the more they will appreciate renaming is the critical feature that needs to Just Work.
[124001010360] |I’ll gladly accept the extra 0.3 seconds it takes Bzr to give me a tree status in my 5,100 file project, for the security of knowing I never ever have to spend long periods of time sorting out a merge by hand when stuff got renamed.
[124001010370] |It still comes back in less than a second.
[124001010380] |Which is plenty fast enough for me.
[124001010390] |Even though I know it will get faster, that extra performance is not nearly as important to me as the overall time saved by the robustness of the tool in the face of a constant barrage of improvements by new contributors.
[124001020010] |<title>Further thoughts on version control</title>
[124001020020] |I’ve had quite a lot of positive email feedback on my posting about on renaming as the killer app of distributed version control.
[124001020030] |So I thought it would be interesting to delve into this subject in more detail.
[124001020040] |I’ll blog over the next couple of months, starting tomorrow, about the things I think we need from this set of tools –whether they be Git, Darcs, Mercurial, Monotone or Bazaar.
[124001020050] |First, to clear something up, Ubuntu selected Bazaar based on our assessment of what’s needed to build a great VCS for the free software community.
[124001020060] |Because of our work with Ubuntu, we know that what is important is the full spectrum of projects, not just the kernel, or X, or OpenOffice.
[124001020070] |It’s big and large projects, Linux and Windows projects, C and Python projects, Perl and Scheme projects… the best tools for us are the ones that work well across a broad range of projects, even if those are not the ones that are optimal for a particular project (in the way that Git works brilliantly for the kernel, because its optimisations suit that use case well, it’s a single-platform single-workflow super-optimised approach).
[124001020080] |I’ve reviewed our choice of Bazaar in Ubuntu a couple of times, when projects like OpenSolaris and X made other choices, and in each case been satisfied that it’s still the best project for our needs.
[124001020090] |But we’re not tied to it, we could move to a different one.
[124001020100] |Canonical has no commercial interest in Bazaar (it’s ALL GPL software) and no cunning secret plans to launch a proprietary VCS based on it.
[124001020110] |We integrated Bazaar into Launchpad because Bazaar was our preferred VCS, but Bazaar could just as well be integrated into SourceForge and Collab since it’s free code.
[124001020120] |So, what I’m articulating here is a set of values and principles –the things we find important and the rationale for our decisions –rather than a ra-ra for a particular tool.
[124001020130] |Bazaar itself doesn’t meet all of my requirements, but right now it’s the closest tool for the full spectrum of work we do.
[124001020140] |Tomorrow, I’ll start with some commentary on why “lossless” tools are a better starting point than lossy tools, for projects that have that luxury.
[124001030010] |<title>Choose lossless VCS tools if you have that luxury</title>
[124001030020] |One of the tough choices VCS designers make is “what do we REALLY care about”.
[124001030030] |If you can eliminate some use cases, you can make the tool better for the other use cases.
[124001030040] |So, for example, the Git guys choose not to care too much about annotate.
[124001030050] |By design, annotate is slow on Git, because by letting go of that they get it to be super-fast in the use cases they care about.
[124001030060] |And that’s a very reasonable position to take.
[124001030070] |My focus today is lossiness, and <strong>I’m making the case for starting out a project using tools which are lossless</strong>, rather than tools which discard useful information in the name of achieving performance that’s only necessary for the very largest projects.
[124001030080] |It’s a bit like saying “shoot your pictures in RAW format, because you can always convert to JPEG and downscale resolution for Flickr, but you can’t always get your top-quality images back from a low-res JPEG”.
[124001030090] |When you choose a starting VCS, know that you are not making your final choice of tools.
[124001030100] |Projects who started with CVS have moved to SVN and then to Bitkeeper and then to something else.
[124001030110] |Converting is often a painful process, sometimes so painful that people opt to throw away history rather than try and convert properly.
[124001030120] |We’ll see new generations of tools over the next decade, and the capability of machines and the network will change, so of course your optimal choice of tools will change accordingly.
[124001030130] |Initially, projects do best if they choose a tool which makes it as easy to migrate to another tool, as possible.
[124001030140] |Migrating is a little bit like converting from JPEG to PNG, or PNG to GIF.
[124001030150] |Or PNG to JPEG2000.
[124001030160] |You really want to be in the situation where your current format has as much of the detail as possible, so that your conversion can be as clean and as comprehensive as possible.
[124001030170] |Of course, that comes at a price, typically in performance.
[124001030180] |If you shoot in RAW, you get fewer frames on a memory stick.
[124001030190] |So you have to ask yourself “will this bite me?”.
[124001030200] |And it turns out, that for 99% of photographers, you can get SO MANY photos on a 1GB memory stick, even in RAW mode, that the slower performance is worth trading for the higher quality.
[124001030210] |The only professional photographers I know who shoot in JPEG are the guys who shoot 3-4000 pictures in an event, and publish them instantly to the web, with no emphasis on image quality because they are not to sort of pics anyone will blow up as a poster.
[124001030220] |What’s the coding equivalent?
[124001030230] |Well, you are starting a free software project.
[124001030240] |You will have somewhere between 50 and 500 files in your project initially, it will take a while before you have more than 5,000 files.
[124001030250] |During that time, you need performance to be good enough.
[124001030260] |And you want to make sure that, if you need to migrate, you have captured as much of your history in detail so that your conversion can be as easy, and as rich and complete, as possible.
[124001030270] |I’ve watched people try to convert CVS to SVN, and it’s a nightmare, because CVS never recorded details that SVN needs, such as which file-specific changes are a consistent set.
[124001030280] |It’s all interpolation, guesswork, voodoo and ultimately painful work that results often enough in people capitulating, throwing history away and just doing a fresh start in SVN.
[124001030290] |What a shame.
[124001030300] |The Bazaar guys, I think, thought about this a lot.
[124001030310] |It’s another reason the perfect rename tracking is so important.
[124001030320] |You can convert a Bazaar tree to Git trivially, whenever you want to, if you need to scale past 10,000 files up to 100,000 files with blazing performance.
[124001030330] |In the process, you’ll lose the renaming information.
[124001030340] |But going the other way is not so simple, because Git never recorded that information in the first place.
[124001030350] |You need interpolation and an unfortunate goat under a full moon, and even then there’s no guarantee.
[124001030360] |You chose a lossy tool, you lost the renaming data as you used it, you can’t get that data back.
[124001030370] |Now, performance is important, but “good enough performance” is the threshold we should aim for in order to get as much out of other use cases as possible.
[124001030380] |If my tool is lossless, and still gives me a “status” in less than a heartbeat, which Bazaar does up to about 7,000 files, then I have perfectly adequate performance and perfectly lossless recording.
[124001030390] |If my project grows to the point where Bazaar’s performance is not good enough, I can convert to any of the other systems and lose ONLY the data that I choose to lose in my selection of new tool.
[124001030400] |And perhaps, by then, Git has gained perfect renaming support, so I can get perfect renaming AND blazing performance.
[124001030410] |But I made the smart choice by starting in RAW mode.
[124001030420] |Now, there are projects out there for which the optimisations and tradeoffs made for Git are necessary.
[124001030430] |If you want to see what those tradeoffs are, <a>watch Linus describe Git here</a>.
[124001030440] |But the projects which immediately need to make those tradeoffs are quite unusual –they are not multiplatform, they need extraordinary performance from the beginning, and they are willing to lose renaming data and have slow annotate in order to achieve that.
[124001030450] |X, OpenSolaris, the Linux kernel… those are hardly representative of the typical free software project.
[124001030460] |Those projects, though are also the folks who’ve spoken loudest about version control, because they have the scale and resources to do detailed assessments.
[124001030470] |But we should recognise that their findings are filtered through the unique lenses of their own constraints, and don’t let that perspective colour the decision for a project that does not operate under those constraints.
[124001030480] |What’s good enough performance?
[124001030490] |Well, I like to think in terms of “heartbeat time”.
[124001030500] |If the major operations which I have to do regularly (several times in an hour) take less than a heartbeat, then I don’t ever feel like I’m waiting.
[124001030510] |Things which happen 3-5 times in a day can take a bit longer, up to a minute, and those fit with regular workbreaks that I would take anyhow to clear my head for the next phase of work, or rest my aching fingers.
[124001030520] |In summary –I think new and smaller (<10,000 files) projects should care more about correctness, completeness and experience in their choice of VCS tools.
[124001030530] |Performance is important, but perfectly adequate if it takes less than a heartbeat to do the things you do regularly while working on your code.
[124001030540] |Until you really have to lose them, don’t discard the ability to work across multiple platforms (lots of free software projects have more users on Windows than on Linux), don’t discard perfect renames, don’t opt for “lossy over lossless” just because another project which might be awesomely cool but has totally different requirements from yours, did so.
[124001050010] |<title>Merging is the key to software developer collaboration</title>
[124001050020] |Continuing my discussion of version control tools, I’ll focus today on the importance of the merge capability of the tool.
[124001050030] |The “time to branch” is far less important than the “time to merge”.
[124001050040] |Why?
[124001050050] |Because <strong>merging is the act of collaboration</strong> –it’s when one developer sets down to integrate someone else’s work with their own.
[124001050060] |We must keep the cost of merging as low as possible if we want to encourage people to collaborate as much as possible.
[124001050070] |If a merge is awkward, or slow, or results in lots of conflicts, or breaks when people have renamed files and directories, then I’m likely to avoid merging early and merging often.
[124001050080] |And that just makes it even harder to merge later.
[124001050090] |The beauty of distributed version control comes in the form of spontaneous team formation, as people with a common interest in a bug or feature start to work on it, bouncing that work between them by publishing branches and merging from one another.
[124001050100] |These teams form more easily when the cost of branching and merging is lowered, and taking this to the extreme suggests that it’s very worthwhile investing in the merge experience for developers.
[124001050110] |In CVS and SVN, the “time to branch” is low, but merging itself is almost always a painful process.
[124001050120] |Worse, merging a second time from another branch is WORSE, so the incentives for developers to merge regularly are exactly the wrong way around.
[124001050130] |For merge to be a smooth experience, the tools need to keep track of what has been merged before, so that you never end up redoing work that you’ve already solved.
[124001050140] |Bzr and Git both handle this pretty well, remembering which revisions in someone else’s branch you have already integrated into yours, and making sure that you don’t need to bother to do it again.
[124001050150] |When we encourage people to “do their own thing” with version control, we must also match that independence with tools to facilitate collaboration.
[124001050160] |Now, what makes for a great merge experience?
[124001050170] |Here are a couple of points:
[124001050180] |<li>Speed of the merge, or time it will take to figure out what’s changed, and do a sane job of applying those changes to your working tree.
[124001050190] |Git is the undisputed champion of merge speed.
[124001050200] |Anything less than a minute is fine.</li>
[124001050210] |<li>Handling of renames, especially renamed directories.
[124001050220] |If you merge from someone who has modified a file, and you have renamed (and possibly modified) the same file, then you want their change to be applied to the file in your working tree under the name YOU have given it.
[124001050230] |It is particularly important, I think, to handle directory renames as a first class operation, because this gives you complete freedom to reshape the tree without worrying about messing up other people’s merges.
[124001050240] |Bzr does this perfectly –even if you have subsequently created a file with the same name that the modified file USED to have, it will correctly apply the change to the file you moved to the new name.</li>
[124001050250] |<li>Quality of merge algorithm.
[124001050260] |This is the hardest thing to “benchmark” because it can be hugely subjective.
[124001050270] |Some merge algorithms take advantage of annotation data, for example, to minimise the number of conflicts generated during a merge.
[124001050280] |This is a highly subjective thing but in my experience Bzr is fantastic in merge quality, with very few cases of “stupid” conflicts even when branches are being bounced around between ad-hoc squads of developers.
[124001050290] |I don’t have enough experience of merging with tools like Darcs which have unusual characteristics and potentially higher-quality merges (albeit with lots of opportunity for unexpected outcomes).</li> 
[124001050300] |I like the fact that the Bazaar developers made merging a first-class operation from the start, rather than saying “we have a few shell scripts that will help you with that” they focused on techniques to reduce the time that developers spend fixing up merges.
[124001050310] |A clean merge that takes 10 seconds longer to do saves me a huge amount of time compared to a dirty (conflict-ridden, or rename-busted) merge that happened a few seconds faster.
[124001050320] |Linus is also a very strong advocate of merge quality.
[124001050330] |For projects which really want as much participation as possible, merge quality is a key part of the developer experience.
[124001050340] |You want ANYBODY to feel empowered to publish their contribution, and you want ANYBODY to be willing to pull those changes into their branches with confidence that (a) nothing will break and (b) they can revert the merge quickly, with a single command.
[124001060010] |<title>FLOSS community in Second Life</title>
[124001060020] |Catharina Bethlehem wrote to tell me about her work on the Ubuntu community in Second Life.
[124001060030] |As you might expect, the free and open source meme is very much alive and well in SL.
[124001060040] |There is now a group looking to setup an <a>island devoted to FLOSS</a> that brings together members of the whole free software community –multiple distributions and upstreams –for virtual socialisation and collaboration.
[124001060050] |Sounds like cool stuff indeed!
[124001060060] |Speaking of which, is anybody actively working on Ubuntu packages for the Second Life client?
[124001060070] |It would be great to see “sudo apt-get install second-life” DTRT.
[124001080010] |<title>Willing to buy a high-end, free-software-only laptop?</title>
[124001080020] |With projects like Gobuntu and gNewSense aiming to provide a platform that is zealous about free software, the obvious question is “where can I run it?”.
[124001080030] |And right now, as far as laptops go, there are no good answers.
[124001080040] |Pretty much any laptop you can buy today needs some sort of non-free bits to make the most of its hardware, putting you in the tricky position of having to choose between hardware usefulness and software freedom.
[124001080050] |And boy, do we know about that choice in Ubuntu!
[124001080060] |There have been several threads about this, in comments on this blog and also on comments to <a>Bug #1</a>.
[124001080070] |Most of them have focused on free drivers but we should also be thinking about OpenBIOS (the new name for the LinuxBIOS project).
[124001080080] |An ideal solution would also use firmware that has a free software licence as well, but I personally would see OpenBIOS and free drivers as a good start.
[124001080090] |Right now, software freedom isn’t a huge priority for most of the companies that make up components for the PC and laptop industry.
[124001080100] |If we want to get onto their radar screen, we need to show that its worth their while to think about it.
[124001080110] |To that end I’d like to build up a list of people who are interested in this idea, and would potentially buy a high-powered laptop if it were guaranteed to work completely with free software drivers and OpenBIOS.
[124001080120] |So I’ve setup a mailing list over here:
[124001080130] |<a>https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/free-software-laptop</a>
[124001080140] |Please go ahead and join that list if you think you would seriously consider buying a laptop that was powerful and designed specifically to be free-software friendly.
[124001080150] |This is a totally moderated list –I’ll only allow messages through that specifically let people know about the possibility of acquiring a laptop that can pass the free software test.
[124001080160] |So it’s news-only, and ultra-low traffic.
[124001080170] |If we can get sufficient numbers of people to express interest in such a laptop then I will start hunting for an OEM to offer a solution for pre-order.
[124001080180] |I’ve also started to sketch out the components and specifications for a laptop that would meet these requirements here:
[124001080190] |<a>https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FreeSoftwareLaptop</a>
[124001080200] |It will take a lot of committed buyers to move from concept to execution but if we can pull it off it will have an excellent ripple effect in the PC hardware industry.
[124001080210] |Make yourself heard!
[124001100010] |<title>DVD playback now standard for Dell Ubuntu customers</title>
[124001100020] |The good folks at Dell have added DVD playback capability to the image that they preinstall for folks who <a>buy Dell computers with Ubuntu</a>.
[124001100030] |Multimedia and DVD are often cited as the biggest things missing from the typical consumer’s expectations of a “fully working system”.
[124001100040] |Ideally, we could deliver a great multimedia experience in a free software stack but the US patent landscape makes that impossible, so for the moment this requires proprietary software.
[124001100050] |My hope is that the content industry will realise that DRM and playback restrictions are harmful to their own interests, and that EMI’s decision to sell MP3′s leads to a broader movement away from restrictive technologies.
[124001100060] |So, thanks and congrats to Dell for taking care of this for their customers, there’s one more reason to give someone close to you a virus-resistant, spyware-resistant Ubuntu-based Dell for 2008 <img/>
[124001110010] |<title>A community approach to commercial training materials</title>
[124001110020] |Is it possible to have training materials that are developed in partnership with the community, available under a CC license, AND make those same materials available through formal training providers?
[124001110030] |We’re trying to find out at Canonical with our Ubuntu Desktop Course.
[124001110040] |Billy Cina @Canonical has been making steady progress towards the goal of having a <a>full portfolio of training options available for commercial users</a> of Ubuntu.
[124001110050] |Companies that want to ensure that their staff are rigorously trained, and individuals who want to present their Ubuntu credentials in a formal setting, need to have a certified and trusted framework for skills assurance.
[124001110060] |Most of the work we are doing in this line is following the traditional model, where content is funded as a private investment, and the content is then licensed to authorized training providers who sell courses to their local markets.
[124001110070] |These courses are usually sold to companies that have adopted a platform or tool and want to ensure a consistent level of skills across the organization.
[124001110080] |Many companies are moving to Ubuntu for both desktop and server, so demand is hotting up for this capability.
[124001110090] |We have a system builder course, and a system administrator course are now available from authorized training providers.
[124001110100] |But we wanted also to try a different approach, that might be more accessible to the Ubuntu community and might also result in even higher quality materials.
[124001110110] |We think the key ingredients are:
[124001110120] |<li>Use of an open format (Docbook)</li>
[124001110130] |<li>Content source available in a public Bazaar repository (<a>here</a>)</li>
[124001110140] |<li>Licensing under open terms (CC-BY-NC-SA)</li>
[124001110150] |<li>Working with the Ubuntu doc-team, who have a wealth of experience</li> 
[124001110160] |The license is copyleft and non-commercial, so that it is usable by any person for their own education and edification with the requirement that commercial use will involve some contribution back to the core project.
[124001110170] |It’s already a 400 page book which gives a great overview of the Ubuntu desktop experience, a very valuable resource for folks who are new to Linux and Ubuntu.
[124001110180] |We are getting to the point where we can publish a “daily PDF” which will have the very latest version (“trunk”) compiled overnight.
[124001110190] |So anyone has free access to the very latest version, and of course anyone can bzr branch the content to make changes that suit them.
[124001110200] |If you want to have a look at the latest content, try this:
[124001110210] |<li>install Bluefish (useful as a docbook editor)</li>
[124001110220] |<li>make sure you have <a>bzr 1.0</a></li>
[124001110230] |<li>make sure Launchpad has <a>an SSH key for you</a></li> 
[124001110240] |Type:
[124001110250] |<code>bzr launchpad-login <your-lp-username</code> <code>bzr branch lp:ubuntu-desktop-course</code>
[124001110260] |The source is huge (712MB, lots of images in a large book), so grab a cup of tea, and when you get back you will have the latest version of the content, hot and well-brewed <img/>This is a great set of materials if you are offering informal training.
[124001110270] |Corrections and additions would be most welcome, just push your branch up to Launchpad and request a merge of your changes.
[124001120010] |<title>A fantastic result for Inkscape with Launchpad</title>
[124001120020] |I’m absolutely thrilled to see this chart of untriaged bugs in Inkscape since the project moved to Launchpad:
[124001120030] |As you can see, the Inkscape community has been busy triaging and closing bugs, radically reducing the “new and unknown” bug count and giving the developers a tighter, more focused idea of where the important issues are that need to be addressed.
[124001120040] |A lot of my personal interest in free software is motivated by the idea that we can be more efficient if we collaborate better.
[124001120050] |If we want free software to be the norm for personal computing software, then we have to show, among other things, that the open, free software approach taps into the global talent pool in a healthier, more dynamic way than the old proprietary approach to building software does.
[124001120060] |We don’t have money on our side, but we do have the power of collaboration.
[124001120070] |I put a lot of personal effort into Launchpad because I love the idea that it can help lead the way to better collaboration across the whole ecosystem of free software development.
[124001120080] |I look for the practices which the best-run projects follow, and encourage the Launchpad guys to make it easy for everyone to do those things.
[124001120090] |These improvements and efficiencies will help each project individually, but it also helps every Linux distribution as well.
[124001120100] |This sort of picture gives me a sense of real accomplishment in that regard.
[124001120110] |Bryce Harrington, who happens to work for Canonical and is a member of the Inkscape team, told me about this and <a>blogged the experience</a>.
[124001120120] |I’ve asked a few other Inkscape folks, and they seem genuinely thrilled at the result.
[124001120130] |I’m delighted.
[124001120140] |Thank you!
[124001130010] |<title>Good architectural layering, and Bzr 1.1</title>
[124001130020] |I completely failed to blog the release of Bzr 1.0 last year, but it was an excellent milestone and by all accounts, very well received.
[124001130030] |Congratulations to the Bazaar community on their momentum!
[124001130040] |I believe that the freeze for 1.1 is in place now so it’s great to see that they are going to continue to deliver regular releases.
[124001130050] |I’ve observed a surge in the number of contributors to Bazaar recently, which has resulted in a lot of small but useful branches with bugfixes for various corner cases, operating systems and integrations with other tools.
[124001130060] |One of the most interesting projects that’s getting more attention is <a>BzrEclipse</a>, integrating Bzr into the Eclipse IDE in a natural fashion.
[124001130070] |I think open source projects go through an initial phase where they work best with a tight group of core contributors who get the basics laid out to the point where the tool or application is usable by a wider audience.
[124001130080] |Then, they need to make the transition from being “closely held” to being open to drive-by contributions from folks who just want to fix a small bug or add a small feature.
[124001130090] |That’s quite a difficult transition, because the social skills required to run the project are quite different in those two modes.
[124001130100] |It’s not only about having good social skills, but also about having good processes that support the flow of new, small contributions from new, unproven contributors into the code-base.
[124001130110] |It seems that one of the key “best practices” that has emerged is the idea of plug-in architectures, that allow new developers to contribute an extension, plug-in or add-on to the codebase without having to learn too much about the guts of the project, or participate in too many heavyweight processes.
[124001130120] |I would generalize that and say that good design, with clearly though-through and pragmatic layers, allow new contributors to make useful contributions to the code-base quickly because they present useful abstractions early on.
[124001130130] |Firefox really benefited from their decision to support cross-platform add-ons.
[124001130140] |I’m delighted to hear that OpenOffice is headed in the same direction.
[124001130150] |Bazaar is very nicely architected.
[124001130160] |Not only is there a well-defined plug-in system, but there’s also a very useful and pragmatic layered architecture which keeps the various bits of complexity contained for those who really need to know.
[124001130170] |I’ve observed how different teams of contributors, or individuals, have introduced whole new on-disk formats with new performance characteristics, completely orthogonally to the rest of the code.
[124001130180] |So if you are interested in the performance of status and diff, you can delve into working tree state code without having to worry about long-term revision storage or branch history mappings.
[124001130190] |Layering can also cause problems, when the layers are designed too early and don’t reflect the pragmatic reality of the code.
[124001130200] |For example, witness the “exchange of views” between the ZFS folks and the Linux filesystem community, who have very different opinions on the importance and benefits of layering.
[124001130210] |Anyhow, kudos to the Bazaar guys for the imminent 1.1, and for adopting an architecture that makes it easier for contributors to get going.
[124001140010] |<title>Ubuntu Live –Call for Papers</title>
[124001140020] |<a><img/></a>O’Reilly, the organisers of Ubuntu Live, have just <a>issued the call for papers</a> for Ubuntu Live 2008.
[124001140030] |The theme of the event is <strong>“Taking it Further”</strong>, which I think is perfect for Ubuntu this year!
[124001140040] |The subtitle to the conference should probably be “Going into production at scale”, because it seems everywhere I look these days people are taking Ubuntu into production.
[124001140050] |Perhaps it’s the preparation for the April LTS release, perhaps its that more and more of their apps and solutions are certified on Ubuntu, or perhaps its just that confidence in Ubuntu for large-scale deployments on the server and the desktop has reached a tipping point, but either way I’m delighted with the ramping up of heavy-duty adoption of the platform that our community delivers with such metronomic precision.
[124001140060] |So Ubuntu Live 2008 promises to be informative, as we start to reap the benefits of that experience.
[124001140070] |If you have interesting deployments or projects that you would like to share, UL2008 would be the right platform to do it!
[124001140080] |I’d be particularly interested in talks that describe:
[124001140090] |<li>large-scale government deployments of Ubuntu on the desktop (there have now been several)</li>
[124001140100] |<li>specialist deployments, for example high-performance computing clusters, or vertical market solutions</li>
[124001140110] |<li>virtualisation-based deployments where Ubuntu is the host or the guest platform</li>
[124001140120] |<li>large-scale server farms for hosting or web edge-of-the-network deployments</li>
[124001140130] |<li>appliances based on Ubuntu</li> 
[124001140140] |You can <a>submit a proposal directly</a> or read more <a>about the conference</a>.
[124001140150] |Hope to see you there!
[124001150010] |<title>Economic oversteering</title>
[124001150020] |Yesterday, we saw the most extraordinary failure of economic leadership in recent years, when the US Federal Reserve pressed the “emergency morphine” button and cut Federal Reserve rates by 0.75%.
[124001150030] |It will not help.
[124001150040] |These are extremely testing times, and thus far, the US Fed under Bernanke has been found wanting.
[124001150050] |Historians may well lay the real blame for current distress at the door of Alan Greenspan, who pioneered the use of morphine to dull economic pain, but they will probably also credit him with a certain level of discretion in its prescription.
[124001150060] |During Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed, economic leaders became convinced that the solution to market distress was to ensure that the financial system had access to easy money.
[124001150070] |This proved effective in the short term.
[124001150080] |When LTCM looked set to explode (private investments, leveraged up dramatically, managed by Nobel prize-winning financial theorists, placed a bet on a sure thing which didn’t pan out quite as expected) Greenspan engineered an orderly unwinding of its affairs.
[124001150090] |When the dot com bubble burst, Greenspan kept the financial system energised by lowering rates so far that they were, for a substantial period, at negative levels.
[124001150100] |A negative real interest rate means we are effectively paid to take out loans.
[124001150110] |That might sound good, but how would you feel if I used the words “paid to take a few more hits of crack cocaine”?
[124001150120] |The underlying problem was that people had become accustomed to high rates of return and did not want to accept that real rates of return in the US were moving down.
[124001150130] |They had become accustomed to easy money, and Greenspan’s policy ensured that money remained accessible at a time when people had demonstrated a low ability to invest that easy money well.
[124001150140] |Low rates give people an incentive to invest in stocks, even if those stocks are not earning very much.
[124001150150] |This meant stock prices recovered quickly, and the effect was amplified by the fact that low rates increased corporate earnings.
[124001150160] |This was a so-called “soft landing” –disaster averted.
[124001150170] |He must have known the risks, but the one big warning sign that would likely have convinced Greenspan to return to normal rates was missing: inflation.
[124001150180] |Low rates, and especially negative rates, have historically always resulted in inflation.
[124001150190] |Greenspan kept rates low because there were no signs of inflation.
[124001150200] |It seemed as if the US had entered a new era where the correlation of rates and inflation no long held true.
[124001150210] |People explained it by saying that the US was increasing its productivity dramatically (productivity increases are like anti-inflation medicine).
[124001150220] |Now, with hindsight, it appears that the real reason for the absence of inflation was that the Chinese were increasing <strong>their</strong> productivity dramatically, and that US consumers were spending so much on Chinese goods that Chinese productivity growth, not US productivity growth, was keeping US prices low.
[124001150230] |When tech came off the boil and people should have been using the pause to clean up their affairs, Greenspan made it easy for people to get themselves into a worse position.
[124001150240] |Easy money made stock market prices artificially high, so stock market investors felt rich.
[124001150250] |Worse, easy money made house prices artificially high (by about 45%), so <strong>everybody</strong> felt wealthier than they had planned or expected to.
[124001150260] |To make matters worse, a series of financial innovations created a whole industry designed to help people go back into debt on their houses.
[124001150270] |I remember trying to watch TV in the US and being amazed at the number of advertisements for “home equity withdrawals”.
[124001150280] |They made it sound like turning your major personal financial asset –your paid-off house –into an ATM machine was a good thing.
[124001150290] |In fact, it was a means to spend all of your primary store of wealth.
[124001150300] |And with inflated house prices, it was a way to spend money that you did not really have.
[124001150310] |A convenient way to get into a deep, dark hole of family debt.
[124001150320] |The result?
[124001150330] |The average American owns less of her home today than she did 30 years ago –55% as opposed to 68%.
[124001150340] |Easy money makes people poorer.The company with the most irritating ads, Ditech (and I feel ashamed to be contributing to their website search ranking with the mention, perhaps it will help instead to link to their <a>customer feedback</a>), has a tagline “People are smart” and a business model built on the idea that “People are dumb”.
[124001150350] |Their “most popular” product strikes me as being tailor-made to make it easy to turn home equity –an asset –into new debt.
[124001150360] |Why did Greenspan do it?
[124001150370] |I think he genuinely believed that there was something different about the modern world that had altered the laws of economic gravity.
[124001150380] |I suspect he no longer feels that way.
[124001150390] |But Greenspan is no longer Chairman of the Fed.
[124001150400] |Ben Bernanke blinked, yesterday, and in that blink we have the measure of the man.
[124001150410] |Greenspan acted carefully, logically, and basically prudently.
[124001150420] |Several years of anomalous economic data are a reasonable basis to think that the rules have evolved.
[124001150430] |You would have to have a Swiss (700 years of stability) or Chinese (“we think it’s too early to tell if the French Revolution was a good idea”) approach to stick with economic theories that are at odds with the facts for very long.
[124001150440] |Greenspan made a mistake, and it will have huge consequences for the US for a generation, but he had reasons for that mistake.
[124001150450] |Bernanke just blinked, he panicked, despite knowing better.
[124001150460] |We now have rigorous economic explanations for all that is happening.
[124001150470] |We have come to understand, quite clearly, what is going on in the world.
[124001150480] |The deflationary Eastern wind has been identified.
[124001150490] |We know there is no productivity miracle in the US, no change in the laws of physics or economics.
[124001150500] |So we know that the US patient is addicted to easy money morphine, medicine that was prescribed with good intentions by Dr Greenspan, medicine that has in the last 7 years made the patient more ill and not less.
[124001150510] |More morphine today constitutes malpractice, not economic innovation.
[124001150520] |We know the consequences of more morphine –stock prices will rise artificially (4% yesterday, on the news of the shot), house prices will stumble along, companies will take longer to default on their loans.
[124001150530] |Bernanke might be hoping to do what Greenspan did –retire before the addiction becomes entirely obvious.
[124001150540] |Too late.
[124001150550] |While the Fed is clearly not willing to admit it, the markets have just as clearly taken their own view, that the prognosis is not good.
[124001150560] |They are smart enough to see that all Bernanke has done is cover up the symptoms of malaise, and many are using the temporary pain relief to head for safer territory.
[124001150570] |I expect that any relief will be brief, market recoveries will fade, the rout has been deferred but not averted.
[124001150580] |I started out by describing the Fed’s actions as a failure of economic leadership.
[124001150590] |Some folks are lucky enough to lead from the bottom of the cycle, up –they take over when things are miserable and can only really get better.
[124001150600] |They look like heroes even if their voodoo has no mojo, so to speak.
[124001150610] |Others are less lucky, they get handed custodianship of an asset that is at the peak.
[124001150620] |As for Bernanke, he’s in that latter category.
[124001150630] |He needs to be able to speak clearly and frankly about the hard work that lies ahead in the US.
[124001150640] |He needs to appeal to the very best of American industriousness –a traditional willingness to work hard, be smart, and accept the consequences of refusing to do so.
[124001150650] |He needs to lead under the most difficult circumstances.
[124001150660] |But that’s what leadership is about.
[124001150670] |Fortunately for Bernanke, central bank independence is widely believed to be the only credible approach to economic governance.
[124001150680] |That independence gives Bernanke the right to stand at odds with political leaders if needed.
[124001150690] |Given the recent White House announcements –more morphine, further indebtedness for the worlds most indebted country –there’s no stomache for a real program of rehabilitation in the Bush Administration.
[124001150700] |Bernanke will have to lead without political support, a very difficult task indeed.
[124001150710] |Our greatest and most memorable leaders are those who lead through difficult times.
[124001150720] |The same is true of failures of leadership.
[124001150730] |Appeasement, or rehabilitation.
[124001150740] |Chamberlain, or Churchill.
[124001150750] |Thus far, Chamberlain.
[124001160010] |<title>There is no victor of a flawed election</title>
[124001160020] |The tragedy unfolding in Kenya is a reminder of the fact that a flawed election leaves the “winner” worse off than he would be losing a fair contest.
[124001160030] |Whoever is President at the conclusion of this increasingly nasty standoff inherits an economy that is wounded, a parliament that is angry and divided, and a populace that know their will has been disregarded.
[124001160040] |And he will face a much increased risk of personal harm at the hands of those who see assassination as no worse a crime than electoral fraud.
[124001160050] |That is at best a Pyrrhic victory.
[124001160060] |It will be extremely difficult to get anything done under those circumstances.
[124001160070] |There is, however, some cause for optimism amidst all the gloom.
[124001160080] |It seems that many Kenyan MP’s who were fingered for corruption during their previous terms were summarily dismissed by their constituencies, despite tribal affiliations.
[124001160090] |In other words, if your constituents think you’re a crook, they will vote you out even if you share their ethnicity.
[124001160100] |That shows the beginnings of independent-minded political accountability –it shows that voting citizens in Kenya want leaders who are not tainted with corruption, even if that means giving someone from a different tribe their vote.
[124001160110] |And that is the key shift that is needed in African countries, to give democracy teeth.
[124001160120] |Ousted MP’s and former presidents are subject to investigation and trial, and no amount of ill-gotten loot in the bank is worth the indignity of a stint in jail at the hands of your successor.
[124001160130] |As <a>Frederick Chiluba</a> has learned, there’s no such thing as an easy retirement from a corrupt administration.
[124001160140] |Of course, that makes it likely that those with skeletons in their closets will try even harder to cling to power, for fear of the consequences if they lose their grip on it.
[124001160150] |Robert Mugabe is no doubt of the opinion that a bitter time in power is preferable to a bitter time after power.
[124001160160] |But increasingly, voters in Africa are learning that they really can vote for change.
[124001160170] |And neighboring countries are learning that it hurts their own investment and economic profiles to certify elections as free and fair when they are far from it.
[124001160180] |It would be much harder for Robert Mugabe to stay in power illegally if he didn’t have *nearly* enough votes to stay there legally.
[124001160190] |You can fudge an election a little, but it’s very difficult to fudge it when the whole electorate abandons you, and when nobody will lend your their credibility.
[124001160200] |The best hope a current president has of a happy retirement is to ensure that the institutions which will pass judgement on him (or her) in future are independent and competent, to ensure that they will stay that way, and to keep their hands clean.
[124001160210] |It will take time, but I think we are on track to see healthy changes in governance becoming the norm and not the exception in Africa.
[124001170010] |<title>Hammering on the Heron</title>
[124001170020] |Reports of beta testing for 8.04 LTS seem very positive all round, to the great credit of the desktop and server teams who have been working so hard to make Hardy Heron rock.
[124001170030] |I have been running Hardy on my laptop through most of the cycle, but took the plunge on my home firewall and desktop (Kubuntu) machine this weekend.
[124001170040] |The coolest part of the firewall upgrade is the fact that Michael has made the release upgrade tool independent of the GUI, so you can use it for server upgrades too.
[124001170050] |So, now would be a great time to test the upgrade!
[124001170060] |File bugs if you run into any issues with your particular configuration.
[124001170070] |Apparently, this is upported on both Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) and Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), so feedback on either upgrade path would be most welcome.
[124001170080] |That should make sure you have the release upgrade tool installed.
[124001170090] |Now you can trigger the upgrade process to the current beta:
[124001170100] |This should fetch the latest version of the update tool, which knows about various transitions in library versions etc so that it can attempt to update your machine smoothly without leaving large amounts of dangling packages.
[124001170110] |You can say “no” if you don’t like the proposed package install and removal plan (in which case, your feedback would be very valuable!).
[124001170120] |For fresh installs, 8.04 LTS should be good to go on any high-volume server platform available in the market today –let the server team know if you run into any problems at all.
[124001170130] |They are hoping to meet the desktop team’s “Just Works” standard, so the bar is set pretty high.
[124001170140] |From my perspective, the upgrade was smooth –full marks and my thanks to everyone involved.