Category Archives: Open Source

Open Source, Free Software, and similar

Rockbox

Rockbox on Meizu M6

Meizu M6In the eternal chase for new targets to port Rockbox to, the turn seems to have come to the tiny Meizu M6 player.

This 55 gram thing is slightly smaller than a credit card (width and height at least) and it boasts a 2.4″ LCD, 4GB flash and is powered by a Samsung SA58700 (ARM940T core and a CalmRISC16 DSP thing). It has an FM tuner and built-in mic for recording as well.

There’s of course the standard Rockbox forum thread,and an HW info page in the Rockbox wiki.

Other targets with the exact same SoC include the irivers E10, clix and S10. But none of those have a Rockbox port yet.

cURL and libcurl

curl feature freeze March 20 2008

It is yet again time to pause the add-new-features-craze in order to settle down and fix a few more remaining bugs before we go ship another curl and libcurl release in the beginning of April.

cURL

So at March 20 we hold back and only fix bugs for about 2 weeks until we release curl and libcurl 7.18.1.

The only currently mentioned flaw in TODO-RELEASE to fix before this release is the claimed race condition in win32 gethostbyname_thread but since the reporter doesn’t respond anymore and we can’t repeat the problem it is deemed to just be buried and forgotten.

Other problems currently mentioned on the mailing list is a POST problem with digest and read callbacks and a mysterious bad progress callbacks for uploads, but none of them seem very serious and thus terribly important to get fixed in case they should turn out hard-to-fix.

Yes, I picked the date on purpose as that is the magic date in this project. Especially this year.

Open Source

Flaky kudo ranks on ohloh

While most people I’ve talked to agree with my that the ohloh.net‘s kudo rankings seem more or less random, I didn’t post about this on their site until today when I found such a blatant example of weirdness that I couldn’t resist. One user with 173 commits in a single project and with only a “mere” level-1 kudo received outranks another user with 6800+ commits in 10+ projects who has received 23 kudos (including 3 from level-10 people)…

If this rakning is not due to a bug in the algo, I would say that the algo is bad since this just doesn’t look right.

Of course the whole idea of “kudo-ranking” people is somewhat of a tricky idea to start with, but now that it’s here I think it is worth to make it as good as possible. And by good in this context, I mean that (average) human beings that compare two people should end up placing them individually in the same order as the algorithm does – taken all things into account.

My post in the ohloh forum: Something is wrong in kudo ranking land

IT Politics, Linux

RHEL is never right

Okay it has been known for a while, but I just recently found out so I figure I should help put the light on a recent hilarious article published in the Red Hat Magazine: It is never correct to abbreviate Red Hat Enterprise Linux as RHEL. (That’s actually not the correct title of the article, but the correct title is so ridiculously long I won’t paste it here since it’d take everyone’s breaths away.)

According to this article, RHEL is “never correct” as an abbreviation for Redhat Enterprise Linux – even though Google finds almost 2 million pages mentioning it, and the top search result it shows links to www.redhat.com/rhel/. Limiting the search to within redhat.com gives more than 52,000 hits.

Some people complicate matters more than others…

IT Politics, Open Source, Rockbox

Open Source Accessibility

SRF (synskadades riksförbund – the Swedish Association of the Visually Impaired) is a Swedish organization that recently expressed concerns about open source (in Swedish), since as they say “open source in itself is no guarantee for accessibility to disabled persons” (my translation).blind person symbol

The argument came up because Mats Odell, a minister in the Swedish government, expressed a positive attitude towards open source within governments (link in Swedish).

I find it disturbing that these visually impaired guys immediately bounce back and seem to imply and think that open source automatically somehow is less useful, less quality, less fitting or less accessible. But sure, open source is not a guarantee for better accessibility, but then nobody claimed it either and I don’t see how any software can be guaranteed to be better. A very weird statement it was I must say.

One perfect example showing how open source adds accessibility is how Rockbox works. By providing innovative functionality, it makes devices suddenly a whole lot more usable to blind or visually impaired persons. There’s simply no commercial alternatives coming close.

Other fine example on how open source makes software more accessible than any closed-source competitor, is in how translations can be done even to very small languages spoken by economically not so wealthy population groups. Like how closed-source programs fail to deliver software translated to the 11 official languages of South Africa and a lot of other ones.

To round off, the orca project makes openoffice, Firefox, gnome apps and Java-based apps accessible. I’m not saying I know all about being visually impaired and how they use open source, but I do know that open source is accessible to a far extent at some places and at others there’s room left for improvement. But open source gives everyone the ability to join in and make it happen.

Rockbox

Rockbox on Olympus m:robe 100!

Olympus M:Robe 100For some reason I haven’t previously properly pushed this fact here:

The Rockbox port for the Olympus M:Robe 100 is soon about to enter the fine room of all the other existing Rockbox ports. It seems most stuff is working in this port now, and with bootloader and daily zips on the download mirrors there’s only a few minor things left before it’ll go in among the other zips on the build page!

The mrobe100 is a mi4-using PortalPlayer-based (PP5020) target with a monochrome LCD. Here’s the proper forum thread.

Most of the magic stuff done on this port seems to have been pulled off by Mark Arigo with Robert Kukla doing a fair share as well. Thanks guys!

cURL and libcurl, Rockbox

Summer of code ideas and mentors!

To get good results from Google’s Summer of Code, we need a fair amount of volunteering mentors and we need a good set of interesting projects to make students get attracted.

Rockbox tinyIf your interest is in the Rockbox project, add your project ideas or add yourself as mentor on this wiki page.

curl tinyIf your interest is in the cURL project, read this page about the existing ideas and provide new ones or submit yourself as mentor on the mailing list!

Organizations can apply for becoming part of this starting tomorrow, March 3 2008.

cURL and libcurl, Licensing

AOL UK uses curl in disguise

2 Comments

Information to this was mailed to me from a friend but is easily verified as I’ll describe below.curl tiny

America Online in the UK (AOL UK) is using our cURL application (without including the license anywhere) as part of their automated broadband router configuration CD for their AOL UK customer base. The CD is provided to all AOL UK customers and the automated router configuration component using cURL has been included with it for a couple of years.

The software includes the cURL application renamed to “AOL_Broadband_Installer.EXE“. There is no license included or mention of the license anywhere on the CD or installer, contrary to what’s required at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/copyright.html.

The md5sum for AOL_Broadband_Installer.EXE matches the win32 binary in the curl-7.15.3-win32-nossl.zip release package I personally built and offer for download…!

If you want to check it out yourself, the direct link I figured out to the installer is here and I found it on this page (download the “easy installer” for Netgear DG834G).

Update: see my reply below.

Blogging, Open Source

Open Force on idg

So the big fancy (and often ridiculously stupid) Swedish IT news site idg.se opened up a “blogging” portal, and in there we find an at least semi-interesting open source blog named Open Force. Contrary to linuxworld.idg.se, it doesn’t look exactly like they just suck out all the news from slashdot, linux.com and linux today and translate them to Swedish.

But of course the author (Niklas Andersson) is but a journalist and not an open source contributor, why I fear it may very well keep up with the rest of idg.se anyway.

I’ll try to keep an eye on it and give it the benefit of the doubt for a while.

Update: it should possibly be noted that “Open Force” – despite the name – is written entirely in Swedish.