Category Archives: Open Source

Open Source, Free Software, and similar

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.

cURL and libcurl, Rockbox

Google Summer of Code for cURL?

Google Summer of Code 2007 front print

As I was involved in gsoc 2007 within the Rockbox project, I ventilated the idea on the libcurl mailing list just yesterday that perhaps this is a good year for the cURL project to apply to become a mentoring organization to be able to host students doing gsoc work?

If so, this is no point unless we can at least present a bunch of interesting projects to lure students to us to have them work to improve (lib)curl and do stuff we otherwise might have a hard time to get done.

What things would you like to see that you consider would be a good project for a student to work on during the summer 2008?

New protocols? Fixing the last remaining blocking calls within libcurl? Fixing up/replacing language bindings? It’s not strictly a requirement that we come up with the best ideas since students apply with their own suggestion anyway, but we can provide good suggestions and ideas that will make students attracted to us and make them select to work for our project – should we be selected as a mentor organization.

cURL

Rockbox

Rockbox on gsoc 2008?

GoogleRockbox tinyThere is reason to suspect that there’s an upcoming announcement from Google about their Summer of Code 2008, so for the Rockbox project it might be just about time to start thinking about what particular projects we’d like to see done this time!

Of course it is also time to look back on how we performed last year and to consider what we should improve to make sure we do it better this time (should we be accepted again). After all, we got 4 projects assigned, two are now in SVN, one was a complete failure and one was half-done.

Linux

Audacious it is!

Yeps,

Based on suggestions from friends I did ‘apt-get install audacious‘ and gave it a go. It certainly looks very similar to xmms and it also provides the same simple features I like and use when it comes to music playback on my computer.

Audacious logo

While I’m really not bothering much about looks of software and my computer desktop in general, the default skin in Audacious really is quite awful. But really, mosts skins for winamp and xmms that (rather nicely) work for this player are just graphics-crammed overworked stuff so finding a “bare” and “simple” skin that looks nice isn’t that easy.

I just settled with one that looks a bit better than the default.