Tag Archives: Open Source

IT Politics, Open Source

My projects will never be GNU

I’m maintaining a bunch of projects and at times I think about joining some kind of umbrella organization to find a foster family for the project. An organization that’s bigger than just that single project that possibly could be helpful in a lot of ways.

A gnu head!

One large and famous such umbrella project for free and open software is GNU, Gnu’s Not Unix. To submit your software to GNU, they have a set of rules you need to obey. and here’s my reasons why the projects I maintain most likely will not ever become GNU projects:

  • GNU programs should come with documentation in Texinfo format – Oh man, so we need to provide an inferior documentation format of the docs for our software just to be GNU? It doesn’t make sense. And of course, info also sucks.
  • A GNU program should use the latest version of the license that the GNU Project recommends ”not just any free software license. For most packages, this means using the GNU GPL” – for many existing projects the selected license was carefully chosen and if the project has existed for a while changing license is not an easy task. I would also consider it out of the question for many projects. A true stopping requirement for most of my projects.
  • the documentation files and comments in the program should speak of GNU/Linux systems, rather than calling the whole system Linux, and should use the term free software rather than open source – blah. I often speak of “open source” and I like the term “Linux” because of its simplicity and it being easier to pronounce than GNU/Linux.

In all, this just proves that I don’t share the religious and strong philosophical views on life and everything that the GNU people posses.

I’m quite simply not a GNU person. I sympathize with their general goals and I know and support a lot of GNU hackers and projects. I just can’t make my projects join the project.

Linux, Open Source, Rockbox

Linuxträff 2010

I’ll be brief:

On the Software Freedom Day 2010 (September 18th), the guys in “The Swedish Linux Association” (Svenska Linuxföreningen) are organizing a day with talks and presentations about Linux and foss related subjects, which they call Linuxträff 2010. It takes place in Stockholm city, Sweden.

At that event, in the 11:00 – 12:00 time slot, you will be able to see and hear me do a little talk about Rockbox and reverse engineering to get free software on consumer electronics.

See you there!

selinux-pingvin-gnu-demon

c-ares, cURL and libcurl, Network

C-ares, now and ahead!

3 Comments

The project c-ares started many years ago (March 2004) when I decided to fork the existing ares project to get the changes done that I deemed necessary – and the original project owner didn’t want them.

I did my original work on c-ares back then primarily to get a good asynchronous name resolver for libcurl so that we would get around the limitation of having to do the name resolves totally synchronously as the libc interfaces mandate. Of course, c-ares was and is more than just name resolving and not too surprisingly, there have popped up other projects that are now using c-ares.

I’m maintaining a bunch of open source projects, and c-ares was never one that I felt a lot of love for, it was mostly a project that I needed to get done and when things worked the way I wanted them I found myself having ended up as maintainer for yet another project. I’ve repeatedly mentioned on the c-ares mailing list that I don’t really have time to maintain it and that I’d rather step down and let someone else “take over”.

After having said this for over 4 years, I’ve come to accept that even though c-ares has many users out there, and even seems to be appreciated by companies and open source projects, there just isn’t any particular big desire to help out in our project. I find it very hard to just “give up” a functional project, so I linger and do my best to give it the efforts and love it needs. I very much need and want help to maintain and develop c-ares. I’m not doing a very good job with it right now.

Threaded name resolves competes

I once thought we would be able to make c-ares capable of becoming a true drop-in replacement for the native system name resolver functions, but over the years with c-ares I’ve learned that the dusty corners of name resolving in unix and Linux have so many features and fancy stuff that c-ares is still a long way from that. It has also made me turn around somewhat and I’ve reconsidered that perhaps using a threaded native resolver is the better way for libcurl to do asynchronous name resolves. That way we don’t need any half-baked implementations of the resolver. Of course it comes at the price of a new thread for each name resolve, which turns really nasty of you grow the number of connections just a tad bit, but still most libcurl-using applications today hardly use more than just a few (say less than a hundred) simultaneous transfers.

Future!

I don’t think the future has any radical changes or drastically new stuff in the pipe for c-ares. I think we should keep polishing off bugs and add the small functions and features that we’re missing. I believe we’re not yet parsing all records we could do, to a convenient format.

As usual, a project is not about how much we can add but about how much we can avoid adding and how much we can remain true to our core objectives. I wish the growing popularity will make more people join the project and then not only to through a single patch at us, but to also hand around a while and help us somewhat more.

Hopefully we will one day be able to use c-ares instead of a typical libc-based name resolver and yet resolve the same names.

Join us and help us give c-ares a better future!

c-ares

Open Source

Foss-sthlm on Internetdagarna

Yes, I’m very happy to say that our good friends at .SE (who run and admin the .se TLD and more) like FOSS a lot and they are organizing Swedish perhaps biggest conference on internet-related stuff annually in October: Internetdagarna. This year, they’ve reached out to cooperate with us – the foss-sthlm foss network – to arrange and hold a meeting of our own during the conference.

The foss-sthlm meeting will not be within the actual conference, but will be held just next door. We intend to hold the meeting admission-free just as before – the way we like! I hope and think that we will be able to arrange another kick-ass meeting then and with .SE’s help we will get the arrangements done in style. I just very well may end up doing a talk myself at that meeting. (We call that meeting #4 for now, but it’s by no means decided that it actually will end up being the forth one this year.)

Let me again just mention that foss-sthlm is no formal organization and it has no leaders and no actual members. We’re all just individuals. However, I work to get things to happen within the network and I thus sometimes appear to “speak for” us, although in the end I of course only speak for myself and I help out to arrange things that I hope others will appreciate as well.

Open Source

foss-sthlm second meetup

Within the network of people we call foss-sthlm, the time is closing in towards our second meetup. Or “Möte #2” as we so imaginatively call it (translates to “meeting #2”), to be held in the same great place as the first one, on May 19th 2010.

Our first gettogether was an astounding success and I don’t expect us to be able to repeat that massive attention and number of attendees this time. Things still look good and the number of attendees just reached 80 with exactly three weeks to go, so there’s still good time for more people to decide.

This time we’ve lined up 5 speakers and we’ve made an deliberate effort to not re-use any of the speakers from the first metting to make sure more people get the chance. Unfortunately, that means I won’t do any talk! 😉 Topics this time (for those lazy enough to not visit the link or if you for any reason think Swedish is hard to digest) include:

Smalltalk, FOSS legalities in Sweden, Cross platform Qt, Women in Open Source and FFmpeg.

I’m glad that we once again have sponsors that will let us use the room for free, provide sandwiches and coffee for the break without charge so that we can do this thing admission free once again. We learned from the first meeting that we need a little break in the middle.

If you’re in the area and still haven’t signed up, please go ahead. We’ll get a full afternoon with hardcore FOSS talks, followed by the rest of the evening at a pub talking FOSS with Stockholm’s FOSS hackers that matter.

Logotype Competition

We’re also throwing out different logo alternatives on the mailing list as a kind of competition and I guess we’ll just vote for a winning contribution at some point. My personal favorite so far is probably this version created by Tommy Nevtelen:

Tommy-Nevtelen-FOSS_STHLM

libssh2, Open Source

two competitors or one united

1 Comment

In a discussion on the libssh2 mailing list, the founder and maintainer of the libssh project got involved. The actual discussion is not what I want to talk about here, but something he touched on in one of his mails:

“I think a bit of competition in open source is fair and leads to innovation”

Recall that there are only two existing SSH libraries written in C that are free and open. These two libs have roughly the same features, the same goals and a lot of other similarities.

So, does it help open source projects to have an identified and known competitor to compete against and to try to steal users from and to try to outperform in other ways? Is there any research done that proves this theory?

Or is it just so that we have a number of developers with a certain amount of time, and if we divide those in two or more groups we therefore make sure that neither is advancing as fast as they could if all those persons would participate in the same project? Open Source projects are so often driven and developed by volunteers, and within a given area (say people interested in a SSH library) there is only a given amount of people and to make the best use of that limited set, wouldn’t it be better if they all would work together in a single project?

Would OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD  have been better off by not having split up? Would KDE and GNOME have reached further today if they had been a united project?

I don’t know the answers here, and most probably the answer isn’t very clear or binary applying to all cases anyway as I bet all situations are slightly different and thus should be considered separately.

In the history of FOSS, many forked projects end up getting merged again but we don’t often see two independently created projects merge. I guess the Compiz and Beryl fusion is an exception. I think the sense of “my pet project” is often too strong, not to mention that different licenses and different development cultures make mergers hard to take place.

Look, I’m not really advocating that libssh2 and libssh should merge at this point. I’m just playing with the idea and trying to see the issue from different angles.

There are of course several things that would speak against projects to merge: different views on what licenses that are suitable, religious things such as how to indent source code or what build system to use. Quite possibly also other social aspects: development and team “culture” and behavior and why not just the “Not Invented Here” syndrome – it isn’t always that easy to give up what you made yourself or to appreciate someone else’s work.

cURL and libcurl, Open Source, Rockbox

140 foss hackers

3 Comments

At last, the first meeting with our recently started foss-sthlm effort took place. The amount of attention and attendance we achieved by far surpassed our wildest assumptions, and around 130-140 persons interested in open source showed up (we don’t know the exact number). The facilities in Kista where we held the event, were graciously let to our use by Stockholm’s University (DSV) and they were very good. MSC and Nohup were our two sponsors who donated great sub sandwiches and drinks to all of us. Thank you!

I’m glad we manage to offer this event completely free of charge to the attendees, and hey we had quality talkers speaking up on really interesting subject that I think the audience appreciated on the subjects of PostgreSQL, Upstart, Open Source Sweden, Rockbox and Debian packaging.

I did a 20 minute talk about curl – in Swedish. The slides are available (they are thus in Swedish too), see below, and hopefully there will soon be video available online with my presentation.

I also hope that we will gather all the slides at one single point to offer on the foss-sthlm web site, so check that out later on if you want the lot!

Foss Sthlm #1 – curl

View more presentations from bagder.

And here are Björn‘s slides:

Presentation av Rockbox

View more presentations from bjornhaxx.
Open Source, Rockbox

My Fosdem 2010

4 Comments

Friday

Björn and I left work on the Friday afternoon and took a flight down to Brussels, Belgium. After having checked in to our hotel, we met up with Frank from the Rockbox project and we headed to the Fosdem beer event that took place on a pub quite nearby to the hotel.

The Beer event was crowded. I mean really really crowded. But we still managed to get seated and we got fine Belgium beers and we had a good time. We met a few other Swedes that turned out to be the first in a long series of Swedes that were there. Petur from Rockbox joined up there as well and together we went over a fair share of their beer selection…Atomium

Saturday

For us tech guys, the Saturday morning had no really exciting subjects and weirdly enough the morning had only one track and the massive amount of parallel tracks didn’t start until after lunch. This gave us an opportunity to go sight-seeing, and we visited the city square and the Atomium before we headed into the FOSDEM premises and squeezed our way in to a presentation.

Peter Stuge from the Coreboot project explained to us that we were by far too many people crammed into that little room so if one of the responsible guys would come around a fair lot of us would get thrown out of there. With that heads up given, he started his talk and gave us insights in what coreboot is, what it does and so on. I’ve heard Peter talk about this topic before, but he’s still a good talker and the topic still is techy and interesting enough to listen to.

Embedded software development best practices by Adrien Ampelas turned out to be a bit boring. Basically we got the feeling that Adrien re-used a company slide show or something and told the audience a lot of things I bet the majority of people already knew. Yes we know we must use version control. Yes we know we should send patches upstream. No we don’t Fosdem Entryagree with you that there never exist any reason not to use git.

Sascha Hauer from the Barebox project (the project that was previously known as U-Boot v2) told us about this U-Boot project and what they’re trying to accomplish. It seems like an interesting approach to fix some of the worst mistakes of U-Boot but still leverage on all the things U-Boot did right. It’ll be fun to see if it gets adoption from board makers and companies in general. I guess there’s a lot of investment in U-Boot so lots of things will probably stick with that for a long time ahead…

Flash enable BIOS reverse engineering by Luc Verhaegen gave us an insight in the x86 based reverse engineering they do in the Coreboot project to figure out how to enable flashes and to make them possible to write to when you want to upgrade them to use Coreboot. It was only a quick run-through, but my general feeling was still that compared to Rockbox-style reverse engineering, their tasks actually seem a lot easier! Still interesting, as Luc is a good speaker.

Sunday

Sunday morning started earlier than yesterday. Interesting talks started right away, and we actually were too slow at breakfast so we missed the first part of the interesting Introduction to RTEMS talk by Thomas Doerfler. RTEMS is a fully open source RTOS that’s been around for ages and that has some very good realtime skills and can get shrunk to a rather small size. A slight downside with it is its slightly odd license, as it is a GPLv2+ license with a rather big exception that is made to allow proprietary applications link with it. It makes it incompatible with regular GPLv2 code.

The RepRap project was presented by Adrian Bowyer and I must admit that these 3D-printers are mighty cool and even more fun to see and witness in the real world than they are to see on tiny pictures on web sites.

Back in the embedded room, Roberto Jacinto told us about apt-get for android – with GUI which pretty much described the Aptoide project. It has nothing in common with apt: it doesn’t do dependencies and it doesn’t use its file formats. It has some pretty significant bugs still, and it generally seemed like a rather immature project that I’m not even sure I agree is on the right track. I’d rather actually see the real apt-get for android, with or without GUI.

The Cross build systems: Present & Future workshop could’ve become interesting. A lot of projects (PTXdist, Buildroot, Crosstool-NG, Openembedded, Emdebian etc) spoke about what they are, what they hope to do and how they’d like to collaborate. Unfortunately it took a bit too long time so by the time all had presented their projects the time was pretty much up. The most controversial and slightly off-topic of them all was Andy Green (formerly involved in Openmoko) who talked about how we all should stop cross-compiling and build directly on the target instead(!) and how booting Linux shouldn’t need a boot-loader and that designing PCBs with NAND is stupid(! again). I didn’t hear anyone agreeing with his ideas.

Next up was my talk on Rockbox. I did it in about 40 minutes and I think I covered a bit of what Rockbox is and how we work when we work with new potential targets. It later struck that I should perhaps have had a slide about what the future holds etc, but hey I think it went pretty smooth anyway! Peter recorded my talk on his n900 so hopefully it’ll soon be available online somewhere. After my talk we met a lot of guys wanting to talk Rockbox, ask about particular players and so on and it was mighty fun and interesting.

Greg Kroah-Hartman did the final talk and he is a very good and engaging speaker that really can catch the big audience in Fosdem’s biggest room. Write and Submit your first Linux kernel patch is his “standard talk” but he’s doing it so good and with such elegance that it is a pleasure to watch and learn from. And I’ll admit I wasn’t aware of the get_maintainers.pl script in the kernel tree. A very useful little thing!

Reflections

Some conclusions and general thoughts about the event:

Lack of gaps – there’s a problem when all talks in all rooms are made gapless. It makes people get up and leave 5-10 minutes before the end of each talk so that they will get in time to the next talk that will start on the full hour in another room. It causes pretty much all question-sessions towards the end to fail since the questions (and answers) can’t be heard.

Hard to find people – it is such a huge event and lots of people I have no idea what they look like, so trying to meet friends and people I’ve only emailed with or chatted with on IRC is very hard. Name tags would be really cool. I did have some benefitsHaxx from using my shirt with a big Haxx logo on the back since a fair amount of people recognized it and approached me!

Audio systems – the quality of the different rooms varied a lot (not only sound-wise but the sound was what bothered me). Unfortunately for me, the embedded room was one of the worst ones when it came to audio. It was a big room sure, but the biggest room had an excellent audio system and thus proved size is not what matters. In this case, I think a lot was to blame on the actual microphone we had there.

Phone apps – having phone apps with the entire schedule and a little map for each room etc was a great service. The app also reminded us when a talk you had marked as “favorite” was about to start. It was a bit strange though how the android and n900 versions of the app differed. The n900 version was buggy and slow, but it did offer the schedule in a time-based view while the android version only allowed us to view the schedule based on rooms.

Next year – yes. I think it was great fun and I will really try to attend next year again. Hopefully other friends will too, since meeting friends at the place really doubles the fun! Thank you all for a nice event!

cURL and libcurl, Open Source, Rockbox

curl talk at foss-sthlm

I’m now scheduled to do a short talk on curl and the project on the foss-sthlm meeting in Stockholm on February 24th! As you can see on the site, there’s also a set of other fun subjects around Free and Open Source Software.

The material on the site is all in Swedish and all talks are expected to be mostly in Swedish.

Our merry foss-sthlm effort has really taken off in a great way and more than 50 persons have already signed up to show up at the meeting and we have 5 other speakers apart from myself lined up. The program isn’t really fixed yet, but it certainly looks like it’ll end up at least mostly the way it currently looks.

If you are in the area and have an interest in FOSS, consider showing up!

Oh, and my brother Björn is scheduled to talk about Rockbox at the same event.

Open Source

My open source TV

6 Comments

For Christmas this year I decided to surprise my wife with a new TV. To sum it up: hiding a 42″ TV in the closet was hard.LCD TV

Oh well, the model I got for her is a Philips 42PFL7404H. It’s really nothing magical about it, it’s a rather standard LCD TV.

What did make me smile however, was the little paper I found next to the manual (which is done in 30 languages!) and the quick-start guide, a two-sided legal-sized paper that lists all the open source products they’ve used in the TV as well as the GPL and LGPL licenses spelled out in their entirety. Anyway, the products this TV claims to use are:

Linux kernel, Flash Eraseall, Nandwrite, Helper Application, Libc, Librt, Libm, Libpthread, libgcc, libstd++, Diet libc, libgphoto2, vsnprintf, GIF reading routines, base64.

I find it noticeable that there’s no shell or busybox in that list, which in my book is a rather unusual embedded Linux setup.