Open Source

Users Get Paid While Developers Are Not

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Many (if not most – at least if we count every single project we can find) open source projects are mostly and primarily developed by volunteers on their spare time.

The volunteers may be professional developers, students, chefs or plumbers. When they work on their particular pet peeves they do that on time that would otherwise be spent with their family, with friends, sleeping, baking cakes, collecting stamps or similar.

open sourceHowever, when this team of volunteers (which usually is a very small team in most projects, in fact most projects start with just a single guy or perhaps two in the developer team) is successful in producing a project or a tool that finds a larger audience something happens.

When more and more professionals out there start using this tool, when companies start to embed and integrate this product into their projects and start to rely on it for business and day to day routines, not only do the guys in the open source project get more patches, bug reports and quite possibly more volunteers joining the project, something else can happen:

Suddenly, the developer team may notice, most of the people that ask questions, have problems, report bugs, post patches are people that are getting paid while doing it! The project has gotten so popular many companies use it and ordinary employees are set to use it as part of their day time job. They get paid to use it, to fix it, to install it and to customize it.

The developer team – however – is still consisting of volunteering spare time hacking individuals who do this without any monetary compensation…

Of course, if the projects grow wildly popular they’re likely to be bought by a company and the dev team or at least a guy or two are likely to be hired by a company to do what he/they were doing, but successful open source projects aren’t really that attractive to companies to buy since they (the companies) can instead just collaborate a bit on the side and just use the software fine without having to buy it and without having to employ anyone from there.

Please note that whatever parallels to existing projects I may or may not be part of that you can find or imagine here, I’m not whining and I’m not complaining! This is just me taking notice of what I believe is an interesting paradox happening to some open source projects.

cURL and libcurl

Crashing Firefox Goes libcurl

I guess I haven’t been paying attention lately, but I stumbled over the Breakpad project, which incidentally is gonna be used as crash reporting tool for Firefox 3, and it uses libcurl: “On Linux, libcurl is used for this function, as it is the closest thing to a standard HTTP library available on that platform.“libcurl

The wording implies that it uses something else on Mac OS X, but I’m not aware of any standard HTTP library on it. Am I missing something or are they going libcurl there too?

Also, I wonder if using different HTTP libraries on different platforms instead of a single one isn’t just begging for more problems than what it solves? As far as I know, libcurl has a few upsides compared to wininet for example. Of course, I’m not the man to tell how they should do their stuff.

Electronics

MapShare part II – not the last episode

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Tomtom ONEContinued from Tomtom MapShare.

I bought a new shiny 2GB SD card (which btw made me realize how dirt cheap these things are nowadays) and inserted it into my Tomtom ONE only to find out that backups done with the previous version of “Tomtom HOME” (their windows-only PC-based management tool) weren’t recognized, so I had to put back the old SD card again, make a backup, swap back to the new card and restore the backup.

Then I could buy a version 7 Scandinavian map from Tomtom (4o Euros) and yes, the MapShare options are now available and I also enabled the “correction” button for the main screen to allow me to tap it to make corrections as I go. Now I’ll just need to find places to go to where corrections are needed. A bit dissapointing fact is that I’ve selected options to get other people’s corrections even those that aren’t Tomtom-verified (as long as “multiple persons” did the correction), but the tool just says there are no corrections available for me!

Are there really no corrections done? I find that hard to believe, but I’ll give this the benefit of a doubt for a while. Anyone reading this who made a correction on the Tomtom-provided Scandinavian v7 map? I’m curious if the corrections are based on maps or just on positions, since I would guess that their “Western Europe” map will have the same flaws and mistakes as the “Scandinavia” map does…

Open Source, Technology

Data Sheet Leakage

Irony is part of life.

Data Sheet for a technical thingOne of the “secret” kind of manufacturers out there which refuses to provide docs to their chips unless you sign an NDA and God-knows-what, requires a user name and a password on their web site before they hand out docs. It turned out they only protect themselves using javascript so you can just read the HTML pages and the embedded javascript in them to figure out the exact URLs to use and wham, the data sheets are downloadable…

No, I won’t tell you the exact company nor site (or even exactly when this was discovered or tested) since then they might discover this and fix. I’ve tried this myself and it works fine, but I was not the one who figured it out.

Yeah, this is a moral dilemma: should we tell the manufacturer about their problem and thus close the doors for users to get this docs? Or would that risk backfiring on the guy(s) that tell them? What would you do?

Development

Food Calendar

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MatkalendernFacing the every day problem with what to eat, planning and shopping food for the family I took the familiar route: I wrote a web site (the site is in Swedish!) and service for it to ease this boring work!

Using this site, you enter the recipes of the dishes you tend to eat, you assign meals to days and then you can get the site to produce a nice and handy shopping list of all the ingredients that the planned meals require.

With multiple users, you can bookmark other users’ recipes to avoid having to enter them yourself. With top-lists and statistics you can see what meals you plan to eat the most and the least and so on. It actually works pretty neat. We have a set of user logins handed out as well, but I don’t think very many people other than me and my wife actually use it…

It still has lots of room for improvements to make it even easier to plan and to make the grocery store shopping list easier and quicker to deal with, but it scratches my itch already and I’m improving it slowly over time. I started the development of this in early 2006 and we’ve been using it in my family for well over a year now.

Electronics, Linux

More Phone Hacking Fun

With Google’s just announced Open Handset Alliance, I figure the chances of getting a phone that’s possible to hack and improve just suddenly increased a lot!Open Handset Alliance

Android is a project by the alliance, claimed to be an open source, Linux-based, platform for core and applications for mobile phones – “a complete mobile phone software stack”. They promise an “early look” of the SDK on November 12, so I figure that can be interesting. The SDK is supposed to be a free download and will contain all the docs. It could potentially mean some fun coming up soon!

It is cool to see both Samsung and Motorola from the handset world joining the band wagon, and also interesting and not the least surprising to see that Sony Ericsson and Nokia aren’t there…

Rockbox

Rockbox Downloads Oct 2007

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Rockbox!

I did a count back in August, and it seems the downloads counter is growing. During October 2007, Rockbox was downloaded 102127 times from build.rockbox.org, split up on 26 different zip files. This is a 43% increase since my last count! (New since last count is the SanDisk Sansa C200 package)

Here’s the list, with the August results on the right side of the slash (position, count, share of total).

  1. ipodvideo 20721 (20.3%) / #1 17829 (25.1%)
  2. sansae200 18788 (18.4%) / #2 9909 (13.9%)
  3. ipodnano 13228 (13.0%) / #3 9110 (12.8%)
  4. ipodvideo64mb 12780 (12.5%) / #4 7649 (10.7%)
  5. h300 3614 (3.5%) / #5 3153 (4.4%)
  6. gigabeatf 3522 (3.4%) / #6 3113 (4.4%)
  7. iaudiox5 3340 (3.3%) / #8 2712 (3.8%)
  8. ipodcolor 3287 (3.2%) / #9 2400 (3.4%)
  9. ipodmini2g 3083 (3.0%) / #10 2286 (3.2%)
  10. h120 2924 (2.9%) / #7 2720 (3.8%)
  11. ipod4gray 2896 (2.8%) / #11 2098 (2.9%)
  12. sansac200 2841 (2.8%) / NEW!
  13. ipodmini1g 1647 (1.6%) / #14 1191 (1.7%)
  14. ipod3g 1624 (1.6%) / #15 984 (1.4%)
  15. h10 1624 (1.6%) / #13 1322 (1.9%)
  16. h10_5gb 1524 (1.5%) / #12 1380 (1.9%)
  17. ipod1g2g 1384 (1.4%) / #17 606 (0.9%)
  18. player 834 (0.8%) / #18 551 (0.8%)
  19. recorder 692 (0.7%) / #16 615 (0.9%)
  20. iaudiom5 422 (0.4%) / #19 341 (0.5%)
  21. recorder8mb 354 (0.3%) / #21 256 (0.4%)
  22. h100 345 (0.3%) / #20 299 (0.4%)
  23. recorderv2 222 (0.2%) / #22 227 (0.3%)
  24. fmrecorder 222 (0.2%) / #23 207 (0.3%)
  25. ondiofm 113 (0.1%) / #24 105 (0.1%)
  26. ondiosp 96 (0.1%) / #25 101 (0.1%)

As you can see, the recorderv2 and ondiosp packages are the only ones downloaded less than before. Sansa e200 has taken a big bite of the share since last, and the newcomer c200 gets almost 3% at once. The h120 build dropped 3 steps.

The top-4 targets are portalplayer based. The top-8 targets have color displays.

The downloads split on main architecture is interesting (the previous count to the right of the slashes):

  1. portalplayer 85427 downloads (83.6%) / 56764 (79.7%)
  2. coldfire 10645 downloads (10.4%) / 9225 (12.9%)
  3. samsung 3522 downloads (3.4%) / 3113 (4.3%)
  4. sh1 2533 downloads (2.5%) / 2062 (2.8%)

So while all gained downloads by number, the portalplayer targets increased their share…

Another split on properties is to separate the targets on solid state (flash) memory and hard drives:

  1. HDD 67061 downloads 65.7%
  2. flash 35066 downloads 34.5%

Like last time, this doesn’t include custom builds, builds from download.rockbox.org nor release builds from www.rockbox.org. Take all this as indications, not absolute facts.

Rockbox

Sansa View is PP+mi4 based

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Sansa View I was just told about it by zivan56, and my mi4 page was just updated: the SanDisk Sansa View uses the mi4 file format and it is clearly PortalPlayer based. mi4code can find the crypto key, so decrypting it for disassembly is easy.

In fact, the zip contains two mi4 files and the second one is called “mediaproc.mi4” seems to be for a separate processor or similar, and it makes sense since the PP can’t do the movie playback etc with the specs that they boast for this player.

That media processor might very well be a “nv6110“, referred to many times in the firmware image.

Go crazy in the Rockbox forum thread about it!

cURL and libcurl

libcurl DNS resolve problems on Leopard

libcurlI found this article by Jungle Dave titled Leopard DNS Issues (and work-around), which explains how libcurl built with IPv6 support may cause trouble on MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard).

According to him, that’s because getaddrinfo() causes a SRV lookup to be made and that may be either slow or get discarded completely and thus cause trouble.

This just adds another problem to getaddrinfo() resolves then, since we already have the problem with it when resolving round-robin DNSes since more or less every machine has a bad /etc/gai.conf setup that makes getaddrinfo() return a sorted list instead of the “random” one DNS admins in the wild would prefer the users to use…

tech, open source and networking