Tag Archives: Open Source

libssh2, Open Source, Rockbox

My Nordic Free Software Awards 2009 nominees

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Hey, it’s really about time to nominate your favourite Free Software persons and projects from the nordic region for the 2009 awards before the time runs out.

This year, I decided to nominate the following “nordic” heroes:

Simon Josefsson

For his excellent work in GnuTLS, libssh2 and a bunch of other projects.

Henrik Nordström

For his work in the Squid project, and his efforts within IETF and its HTTP related struggles and more.

Björn Stenberg

As the primary founder of the Rockbox project. He started somehting special back in 2001 that now is a huge, thriving and succesful Free Software project.

As you might spot, I favor “doers”. I don’t believe in the concept of “nordic projects” when it comes to free or open software – the entire concept of open and free should mean that projects cross borders and regions.

In fact, it feels so out of the ordinary to think about open source people in a geographical context I find it hard to come up with a lot of names. It would be cool if ohloh had some ways to list people and projects based on where people live.

Then again, if a person from a nordic country moves somewhere else, is he or she still a nordic person? Does it depend on where the person lived during the actual act? Is Linus Torvalds a nordic person since he was born, lived many years and started his big project in Finland?

(yeah I already blogged about this subject but hey, it can’t hurt can it?)

cURL and libcurl, Development, Open Source

How much for a bug?

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no bugsWarning: blog post with no clear conclusion!

I offer support deals to companies that want to get help with Open Source programs I’ve contributed to. The deals I’ve made so far have primarily involved libcurl, c-ares or libssh2, but that’s basically because those are projects in which I participate a lot in (and maintain) so people find me easily in relation to those projects.

I wouldn’t mind accepting service and support deals for other projects or software products either, as long as they are products I know and am fairly familiar with already and I am not scared of digging in and fixing things under the hood when that is required.

In fact, I could very well consider to offer to fix bugs in any Open Source software. Like a general: if you have a bug in an open source project that you really want fixed and you can’t do it yourself I might be your man. Of course this would be limited to some certain kinds of projects and programs, but it could still include a wide range of software. A lot more than the ones I happen to be involved in at any particular point in time.

But while “a bug” is a fairly easily defined term to a user who can’t make something work in a given program it can be anything from dead simple to downright impossible for a developer to fix. The fact that users many times cannot determine if a “bug” is hard or easy, if it’s a bug or a feature not working on purpose, makes such a business deal very hard to provide.

How to pay to get a bug fixed?

Fixed price per bug? Presumably only tricky bugs would be considered for this so it would require a fairly high fixed price. But then it’ll also never be used for simple bugs either since the fixed price would scare away such use cases. I don’t think a fixed-price scheme works very well for this.One dollar bill

Then we only have a variable price approach left. A common way for a consultant like me is to charge for my time spent on a project: I set an hourly rate, I fix the issue in N hours. I charge hourly rate * N. For smallish projects, this is less attractive to customers. If we have no previous relationship, there’s a trust issue where the customer might not just blindly accept that I worked 10 hours on a task they think sounds easy so they feel overcharged. Also, there’s the risk that I estimate the job to be 2 hours but end up spending 12. My conclusion is that per-hour pricing doesn’t work for this either.

A variable price approach based on something else than number of hours it took for me to fix the problem is therefore needed.

A bug fix is of course worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. But we don’t know what they are prepared to pay. On the other end, a bug fix can get done by someone for the price he/she is willing to accept to get the job done. So where is the cross section of those two unknown graphs?

I don’t have the answer here. I’m very interested in feedback and suggestions though. If you would pay for a bug fix, how would you like to get the price set?

Linux, Open Source

kernel hacker foodfights

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The concept of flame wars and public pie throwing is not new in the open source world, and the open nature of the projects make us – the audience – get to see everything. To read every upset word and get to point back to the mails in retrospect.

I don’t think people in the open source community is any particularly more trigger-happy to start the flame wars than people are outside of the openness, but open it is and then we can see it.

I’ve always disliked the harsh attitude and language that seems to have become popular in some circles, and I believe Linus Torvalds himself is part of that movement as he’s often rude, bad-mouthed and very aggressive in his (leadership) style. I think that easily grows into a hostile and unfriendly atmosphere where little room is left for fun, for jest and for helping out among friends.

So even if that is not the reason for the recent developments, here’s two episodes from August 2009:

A short while ago we got to see well-known kernel hacker Alan Cox step down as tty maintainer after an emotional argument on the lkml. The argument there was basically Linus telling Alan he should’ve admitted his error and acted on it earlier than he did.

Nearby, on the mailing list linux-arm-kernel a long-going argument about the management of the actual mailing list itself again sparkled up a fire. The argument in this case have been a long going discussion whether the mailing list Russell King (the main ARM Linux maintainer) runs should be open to allow non-subscribers to post without them needing moderation or not. It ended today with Russell shutting down his lists.

Right now, it seems the linux-arm-kernel list is being transferred over to infradead.org by David Woodhouse to continue its life there, but I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this yet so things may settle differently. There’s also this patch pending which suggests using the linux-arm list on vger.kernel.org.

(Readers should note that I myself don’t take side in any of these arguments.)

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

libcurl in package management

A few days ago I noticed that the “urlgrabber” project now has switched to using pycurl (the python libcurl binding) in their bleeding edge development. It means that projects using that, such well-known apps like yum and anaconda then use libcurl. Already since ages the Suse installer named YaST is using libcurl and a few months ago I learned that the opensolaris package management (pkg) is also switching to become pycurl based.

According to the lead man on the urlgrabber project, Seth Vidal, there are several reasons to switch from Python’s native urllib for (mostly) HTTP transport and he was friendly enough to mention a few to me. Clearly the two primary reasons are FIPS certification and urllib’s lacking HTTP proxy support. The FIPS certification is something the Fedora project has been pushing for a lot during recent time and thus they’ve worked hard on making libcurl support NSS for SSL/TLS, and the lack of HTTP proxy support is supposedly hard to push into urllib itself due to its stagnant development etc.

In Debian-esque worlds, libcurl and curl are already used by the package system in forms of apt-transport-https and apt-file.

It seems that when you run an open source operating system tomorrow, chances are that libcurl is in the back-end of the package system.

Development, libssh2, Open Source

libssh2 vs libssh

There are only two open source libraries for SSH that I am aware of. At least that are at the fundamental layer, written in C.

I researched the SSH library market years ago when I stuck with libssh2 as the one I thought was most promising, and since then I and others have taken it much further. The lib that I didn’t go with at that time, confusingly enough named libssh, recently came out with a new release.

Since there is now clearly two active open source SSH libraries it feels like we should help our users and potential newcomers by explaining how our projects and libraries differ. As a little teaser: one of the libraries turned out more than twice as fast as the other in my test…

While I admit to not having actually used libssh for real, I’ve read the docs and I’ve tried it a little bit. My take at a comparison is now online at:

http://www.libssh2.org/libssh2-vs-libssh.html

I will highly appreciate your feedback and additional things that differ between the two! The list isn’t really much to boast about as it currently looks!

Linux, Open Source

Open Source Sweden?

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I’m fascinated by this Swedish organization who call themselves Open Source Sweden (“Leverantörer av Öppen Programvara i Sverige” in Swedish which means “Suppliers of Open Source Software”)

They claim to be some kind of business organization for companies that work with and within open source in Sweden, and they want to promote open source and help companies work with open source etc. All pretty fine ideas methinks.

So, let’s hypothetically say I am employed and associated with several companies and I basically work exclusively with Open Source software on my job and I work in many open source projects. Why would I make my companies join this organization? Their web page(s) give very few answers to that, and yet they have many members and some of them quite well known in our community.

For this very non-compelling reason to join, they charge ~600USD/year for membership if your company has less than 6 employees “with open source capacity” up to 3100USD/year if you happen to have more than 25 open source capable persons.

The only thing I’ve ever seen from this gang is that they get the honors to speak up on open source subjects in the media and they did issue a press release almost a year ago…

Their site lists 31 member companies (and a bunch of them are clearly in the >25 section). That’s a lot of membership fees every year.

So if anyone reads this. Why would I talk my companies into becoming a member? What can possibly be worth all that money?

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

Getting support to curl

The other day I read this blog post by Stormy Peters, talking about getting people to sponsor or support Open Source projects and she continued to describe the Gnome approach and a bunch of projects that accept donations etc etc.

It made me (not too surprising) think about the situation for our little project cURL. We’re independent of any umbrella organization (GNU, ASF, etc) and we don’t have any vendor or company backing that pays for daily development or maintenance. We don’t have any legal entity or formal organization behind the project. We’re all just a bunch of people on some mailing lists.

We do have occasional companies and vendors who step up and pay individual developers to add features or provide various kinds of support, but they’re all basically single-shot occurrences and nothing that’s done on an ongoing basis.

Or products are used in all Linux distros, by hundreds of companies and so on. We’re a fairly active team, continuously working on bug fixes, tweaks and adding new features.

What can we do to make us more attractive for more support or active sponsoring by some vendor(s)?

Would joining an “umbrella” organization or forming a legal entity make it any more likely to happen?

Isn’t it so, that if the project is mature and good enough already, there’s actually very very little incentive for any company to take it under their wings and rather the market economy makes it a lot more profitable to simply use it as it is and if – at worst – in the end something really hits the fan, you can pay someone at that crisis point to fix up the immediate problem. And then continue like before.

And to be honest, I think we are proving to everyone that it works this way by continuing to deliver rock solid quality software. For no price. Completely open source. Year after year. Darnit, it’s just too fun to stop!

cURL

Open Source

Top Free Software persoject 2009?!

As two years before this, FSCONS is again looking for nominees for The Nordic Free Software Award 2009.

If you know any fine persons or projects you think are fitting and are from “the Nordic countries“, head over to that web page and submit!

And btw, this year’s FSCONS is set for November 13-15 although their site is still pitch black. I hope to be able to go there this year. Perhaps even do a talk about something!

Update: the word ‘persoject’ is not a mistake, even though it looks weird and wasn’t explained in this post. It was just a word I made up last year when I blogged about this award, and I re-used it now without thinking much about it… I won’t do it again. I promise! 😉

IT Politics, Open Source

Mine is More than Yours

So Redhat created and made this very interesting Open Source Activity Map available. It rates 75 countries’ open sourceness based on “Government, Industry, and Community” and how good the countries are at open source. Sort of. The numbers are based on research done by Georgia Institute of Technology.

What does it give?

I’m a Swede who lives in Sweden and I can see that we’re not generally that much into open source, but we’re also a very small population compared to lots of other countries. But no, I cannot see how Finland or Norway are any further than we. What also puzzles me is how they even rate China before Sweden. The numbers that are provided don’t appear to take population into account, or even participation level in open source projects.

Of course I realize I have but one view and my view is deeply skewed by the projects I work in and by the people I meet and I have never even tried to compare different countries’ governments against each other in regards of open source so I figure I can’t make a good comment on these results. What is weird is that there’s simply almost no participants in open source projects from China (and several other Asian countries) and I’ve always thought that’s primarily due to language barriers. Is this map then suggesting that those missing people make up for it in projects within their own language regions?

Or isn’t it so that this map is more a map of comparing legislations and governments against each other, and no so much what actual people from these countries do in various projects? I would otherwise assume that us people in the western world have a small benefit from being close to the English language. Not to mention how those speaking native English can easily jump into most projects without thinking twice about language problems.

I think however that this is a very good idea. It brings issues to the open. What makes a country good for open source? What’s needed to make my country better?

oss activity map