Category: observations

A few days ago, I made reference to a paper released by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute at the behest of everyone’s favorite innovative software house, Microsoft.

It turns out the paper was released, retracted, revised, and re-released with no mention of the revisions.

Linux and Main – Anthony Awtrey: The Changing AdTI Documents

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) just released two versions of a white paper entitled ‘Opening the Open Source Debate’. The first was retracted for a time and the second one seemed suspiciously different in my casual reading.

To verify this, I converted each of the PDF files to text files using ‘pdftotext’ (a very handy GPL’d utility) and compared the differences using ‘diff’ (another very handy GPL’d utility). The two articles were substantially different.

The revisions were substantive and cast some light on the inroads Open Source has made in government, how the GPL is misunderstood and misrepresented, as well as demonstrating how weak the paper is, in either version.

Google Search: “unencumbered source”

The Open Source vs Free Software squabble is a distraction: it really boils down to pragmatism vs principle. This is not to claim the pragmatists are unprincipled or that the adherents to principle lack pragmatism, but instead to refer to them by their focus.

I’d like to see a new term that encompasses both, if I thought it would serve to stop the squabbling. There are more similarities than differences, after all.

OfB.biz: Open for Business – What’s Gnu: RMS on UnitedLinux, Free Software

RMS: We developed the GNU operating system, a compatible replacement for Unix, so users could be free to share and change it. Unix was not free software; it was available under restrictive licenses. It was not unusual for it to be licensed per computer, or even according to the number of users who could log in.

In 1991, the last gap in GNU was the kernel; Linus Torvalds then wrote a free kernel, Linux, and released it under the GNU General Public License. Adding Linux to GNU produced a free operating system, the GNU/Linux system. (Many users believe that the whole system is Linux, and the companies that package the system spread this mistake.)

The fact of the matter is, HURD was the kernel that RMS had in mind to fit for the GNU distribution. But it was never ready. Linux filled the gap but not by design as RMS implies: no one imagined Linux would become what it has. As for HURD, you can see the latest status: read this and tell me if you would call this a “UNIX-compatiible operating system:”

The Hurd, together with the GNU Mach microkernel, the GNU C Library and the other GNU programs, provides a rather complete and usable operating system today. It is not ready for production use, as there are still many bugs and missing features. However, it should be a good base for further development and non-critical application usage.

GNU/Hurd is completely self-contained (you can compile all parts of the Hurd system from GNU/Hurd itself). You can run several GNU/Hurd systems in parallel, and debug even critical servers in another GNU/Hurd with gdb. You can run the X window system, applications that use it, and advanced server applications like the Apache webserver.

On the negative side, the support for character devices (like sound cards) and other hardware is mostly missing. Although the POSIX interface is provided, some additional interfaces like POSIX threads, shared memories or semaphores are still under development.

This all sounds suspiciously like a desperate claim to appear to be relevant, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

If you wanted to work on a kernel, you could choose any of the BSD flavors, Linux, or Darwin (also a Mach microkernel). Any of these are more fully baked than HURD appears to be.

Over 90 degrees today: unusual, true, also hard to deal with. It’s still 80 degrees at 10 PM at Boeing Field (according to gkrellmweather).

A couple of my Wallowaters fell over: I guess they got too hot to hold their shape. When I found them and dumped the remaining water out, I was struck by how hot it was: hotter than I would use in the shower.

Supposed to be back to highs of 75 tomorrow . . . . a relief.

Jim Moy: Mac OS-X

The default installation of OS-X comes with Apache and Perl, already installed and running. Instead of turning on the internal toy web server like it used to, clicking the Start button for Web Sharing now fires up Apache. “Look, httpd.conf, wonderful!” The collective wisdom of Unix, and the happy Mac face up front, very nice.

Bought a new thermometer for outside and mounted it in the shade, on a wall of the garden shed. Right now, it reads just over 100 degrees. It’s hot (82 is the predicted high), but not quite as bad as all that.

For some reason, the geniuses who keep spam in our daily lives think sending WAV files is more useful that the old standby HTML and ASCII trash.

Fortunately, my mailer doesn’t do anything interesting with it: I just get a blank email, as blank as the mind that sent it. I probably need to create a filter for them: I’m getting a couple a day now . . . .

The Register

The AdTI [Alexis de Tocqueville Institution]’s very weak and poorly-researched paper opens no debate. It simply confirms that Microsoft paid AdTI to come up with something — anything — to stem the growing adoption of open-source (especially GPL’d) software by business and government.

Some things don’t need [my] commentary: you just need to read it. Echoes of Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nunez’s letter to MSFT.

The questions that come to mind:

Why is MSFT wasting their money on this kind of thing? By calling attention to open source vs their model, aren’t they inviting comparisons that might not otherwise occur?

And if they feel compelled to do this, why not spike something as half-baked as this? I can’t believe anyone read this and thought it was useful.

what are you looking for when you end up here?

I see a lot of search engine referrals indicating people are searching on the word “quotidian.” I’m curious about that. Am I reaping the benefits of choosing an odd word that happens to be the name of a gallery that “specializes in alternative art and new, modern genres from an experimental culture?”

Or is it the theater company with the “goal of producing plays by Anton Chekhov, Horton Foote, and other realistic or impressionistic writers, in the spare, understated style intended by the playwrights. “

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Battle brewing over deep linking

“We consider it unfair to base your business upon the works of others,” said Ebbe Dal, the group’s managing director.

There’s some new ballyhoo over the notion of “deep linking” or linking to an article that isn’t necessarily an approved mode of entry to a website. As an example, the link above would be a “deep link.”

So the newspaper publisher’s association thinks anyone who makes a living based on the works of others owes these “others” a payment. Well, what do newspapers do, other than write about the works, good, bad, or indifferent, of others? Simplistic, I’ll concede, but not altogether inaccurate.

This has a couple of very simple remedies. Any news organization that takes this attitude should be ignored by all search engines or indexing services. Once they realize how many of their visitors are coming to read their content discovered by others, perhaps they’ll wise up. If they were remotely clueful they would know that already.

It’s a trivial matter for a website operator to examine how a website visitor arrived at their site. So it would be simple to dynamically serve the content the user is actually looking for with whatever branding, advertising, whathaveyou the visitor avoids by not arriving through the site’s own entry pages.

When someone makes a request made from a webserver, the browser software passes along a lot of identifying information, like the type of browser, the last page visited, the network address, etc.

Click here for yours. The variable HTTP_REFERER is this page you’re reading now (yes, I know REFERER is misspelled: blame the boys at NCSA).

So a clueful website operator could examine these requests and serve content wrapped in whatever is appropriate for that user, depending on where they arrived through the website or from elsewhere.

The real beef is that users come to a site, read an article or two, and then leave. If they find no compelling reason to bookmark a site or otherwise remember it, it’s a lost opportunity. The online publishing game is struggling and rather than address the problem, it’s easier to make the boss think he’s losing money to search engines and indexers than because of outdated business models.