neuro.me.uk

As someone said on IRC this morning: “the FSF appear to have come up with the perfect plan for how to look like a bunch of annoying, smart-arse tossers“. Has the Free Software Foundation gone nuts?

Update 13:30: I don’t seem to be alone on this: popey, mgdm, ZDNet, Slashdot.

I’ve been saying for a while that the more zealous methods used by proponents of Free software have been somewhat over-the-top, and do more to detract from the FOSS public image than to build upon it in a constructive way. Now they’ve taken a sip from the poisoned Kool-Aid. The FSF, via it’s Defective by Design campaign, is advocating that people block-book sessions at an Apple Store’s Genius Bar, a sort of drop-in and bookable repair and support centre. “Having lots of slots booked will get Apple’s attention and ensure that the Geniuses have done their homework”, says the ‘Apple Challenge’ page, posted by FSF employee Matt Lee. The rationale apparently is that Apple is now the enemy, since Vista is doing more damage to itself than anyone else can from outside Microsoft, and the first target are the Apple Store’s Genius Bars.

Update 13:35: Just noticed this on IRC …
[13:33]<mgdm> popey: you mean mattl actually uses a Mac?
[13:33] <popey> he does
[13:33] <mgdm> IRONY OVERLOAD *head asplodes*

My employer purchased both AppleCare and ProCare for my MBP, which has come in extremely handy when the ‘O’ key snapped off (keyboard replaced overnight), my battery failed to hold a charge (replaced immediately upon attending pre-booked Genius Bar session) and my motherboard GPU failed (motherboard replaced in 90 minutes). Now imagine any of the following scenarios: you’re unsure how to use your newly purchased Macbook; you’re trying to connect a camera to your Mac to transfer photos to iPhoto and print them to send to relatives in a frame; your machine has failed in some way and urgently needs repaired, as you use it for your business. You try to book a session at the Genius Bar to resolve any of these issues, and … it’s fully booked. For days. Wow, they must be busy.

Well, no, it’s actually a bunch of uber-asshole Free software zealots thinking they’re “special”, attempting to monopolise a consumer resource in an attempt to “educate” or “catch out” Apple Store employees, some of whom may have used Macs for years, others may have had a crash course in Apple products so that they know as much as they can about the stuff they sell, but little else. Why harass these people? It’s like having a constant stream of people going up to the counter at McDonald’s and espousing the benefits of a low-carb, high-fibre diet to the person who can do the least about it. Genius Bar employees may know all about FOSS, but critically it’s not their job to promote it. It’s not a “product” to be “sold”, but a philosophy to be shared.

A plea to the FSF: stop harassing Apple staff, and stop alienating the very people you’re trying to “save”. There are better, more ethical, more agreeable methods to promote FOSS. What you’re doing is none of those things. In the meantime, you’ve virtually guaranteed I will never promote, condone, contribute or donate to any FSF body, project or campaign. I’ve had a “Warning, DRM” defectivebydesign.org sticker on my Macbook Pro for a while now, mainly for comedic value. It’s gone now. I no longer want to be seen to be promoting these idiots in any way. As much as I love the thought of Free and Open Source Software being used everywhere and anywhere, this is just not the way to be going about it.

Yes, I’m in Rant mode again; just sent this to PC Pro magazine:

To: letters@pcpro.co.uk
From: neuro@well.com
Subject: Wishlist

Hi PC Pro Letters,

I was pretty disgusted to note the completely haphazard manner in which David Fearon researched and documented Ubuntu Linux’s “downsides” in your “Who’s Killing Windows?” feature (p122, issue 156). He references the relatively complex Synaptic package manager application to add and remove software, when for over a year a simple and usable “Add/Remove Applications” applet has been sitting at the bottom of the Applications menu in every standard install of Ubuntu. The rest of the article was littered with errors, and this has led me to a wishlist, a la Jon Honeyball’s (p128-129, issue 156).

1. PC Pro should endeavour to contract writers who are knowledgeable on their chosen topic. If they can’t write authoritatively about the subject they are submitting articles on, they shouldn’t write them at all. The Real World section is terrible for being full of inaccuracies while purporting to be written by experts.
2. More editorials from high profile figures from outside the IT industry, and real critical pieces from regular contributors such as Dick Pountain’s diatribe on cover discs.
3. No more rambling back page rants from Jon Honeyball, please.
4. More space for readers’ letters; surely you receive more than 10 usable missives a month? This is the age of Web 2.0, interactivity!
5. Less screengrabs of websites in Real World and elsewhere, cf Steve Cassidy’s MS and IBM grabs (p175-176, issue 156). I understand writers sometimes struggle to find appropriate art, and that pictures speak thousands of words, but it’s akin to BBC News Online posting a shoddy screengrab of google.com to talk about Google. If you have to screengrab, at least get an app or relevant shot.

This is the first I’ve been compelled to write to PC Pro to complain in years of reading, and the magazine is otherwise consistently excellent. Hopefully this will be taken as constructive criticism and not just a random slating! Keep up the good work.

After Microsoft and Novell’s announcement that they are to start collaboration on tighter integration between Windows and (admittedly SuSE) Linux, there has been a lot of bollocks kicking around from people squealing “this will be bad“, “this will be really bad“, “oh no, it’s the end of the world as we know it“, and so on. $deity forbid two old-school rivals want to bury the hatchet and do something that’s in the best interests of both their customers.

It is good for Microsoft, as it gives them an “in” into both the FOSS community and corporate arenas, and it’s good for Novell, as it helps them solidify their role in the enterprise Linux market. An associated patent agreement, where Novell pay licensing fees Microsoft for specific patents, and Microsoft agree not to litigate on those patents, is just a cherry on the cake, although cynics may suggest that the patent part is the meat of the deal. I’m unconvinced. The patent deal is to keep shareholders happy; the collaboration deal is to keep customers happy. And isn’t that what FOSS operating in a corporate environment is all about?

Two sides to the same story: Linspire are releasing a freely-available, freely-distributable, community-led, Debian-based Linux distribution (sound familiar?) to be called Freespire. Linspire’s edge is that they will distribute non-free drivers, such as for nVidia or ATi graphics cards, as part of the core distribution, and not from optional repositories a la Ubuntu.

Jono Bacon, who is on the Leadership Board of Freespire, is genuinely excited about Open Source and distro diversity, and I’d trust his opinion to be as unbiased as possible. Meanwhile, Pamela Jones over at Groklaw is characterising Freespire as Satan’s Distro. Yes, binary non-free, non-open drivers are Bad. But think about the first thing a new user of Ubuntu does — and when I say user, I don’t mean an average Linux geek, I mean a Joe Bloggs user, a wants to read e-mail and buy stuff off Amazon user — is to look for ways to play their MP3 collection, or watch a DVD, or go to a website with Flash, or listen to BBC Real streams, or … You see my point? The Ubuntu forums are littered with requests to just Make Stuff Work™. This is undoubtedly the market Linspire is targetting, and it is a market.

Is Jono wrong to be associated with this distro? Is Pamela right to vilify it? I’ve no doubt that while Freespire is a noble effort by a company well steeped in commercialism, it’ll survive with a niche of its own; not a huge niche, but a cult following nonetheless. Ubuntu is a steamroller of a distro with a strong ethical community. Freespire just won’t have the momentum to keep up. I really don’t know what Pamela is worried about.

Note that this isn’t SquiggleOS, the original attempt to create a free version of Linspire which began under the same name. SquiggleOS has now been abandoned in favour of Freespire development. Also note that SquiggleOS lead Andrew Betts is a Leadership Board member too.

At last, someone at Google has realised something that I and others have known about for ages: it takes ages to install applications on Windows because everything is disparate and has its own installer.

On Ubuntu, I can fire up a simple Add Applications applet which allows me to browse a selection of apps of varying kinds, such as development tools, Internet utilities and browsers, games, and so on. On Windows, once the core operating system and freebie MS applets are installed, I have to seek out the stuff I want from many different places.

Google Pack will change that. It provides a simple install/uninstall one-window interface to Google and select third-party applications on the Windows platform. They are:

• Google Earth, Desktop, Toolbar, Picasa, Talk, and the new Video Player and Pack Screensaver;
• Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar, Norton AntiVirus 2005 Special Edition, Ad-aware SE, Trillian, Gallery Player HD, RealPlayer, and Adobe Reader.

That reads like an excellent line-up of useful apps to be installed on a brand-new machine. It’ll also auto-detect previously installed apps, so if you’ve already got the latest releases of Google Earth and Adobe Reader installed, it’ll mark them as up-to-date and leave them alone.

Genius, just genius. You have to ask why Microsoft didn’t do this years ago.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, so I haven’t tapped out some of the stuff I’ve been up to. One of those things was to sit two (cheap) Linux Professional Institute exams in the middle of last month. Net Resources through in Edinburgh were getting themselves organised to be the first LPI certification exam provider in Scotland, and in doing so were offering cheap exams — £15 as opposed to ~£100. LPI did something similar at the LUDEx last month.

The exams, LPI 101 and 102, were paper-based — I was told of a four-to-six week wait for my results, which was a shock after sitting the computer-based exams for my Microsoft certification where you are told the result as soon as you click ‘Finish’ — and they both took me about half an hour to rattle through. Quite a few ScotLUG types had a bash too, but when we met up later that night at the Paisley Beer Festival and compared notes, we found out how evil some of the questions were

A few weeks trundle by, and all of a sudden I got my results through by email from LPI — I passed both 101 and 102 without much room to spare, but it was two passes nonetheless. That earns me an LPIC1 Junior Level Administration certification — it sounds a bit of a letdown considering I’ve been doing sysadmin duties on Linux boxen for almost 10 years now!

OK, 201 and 202 to go now!

According to a Russian security site [babelfish translation], SCO are behind a new worm (Mydoom) which is designed to target www.sco.com with a DDoS attack this Sunday, while propogating itself in the usual win32 email fashion … seemingly the FBI has raided SCO, detained employees and seized equipment. Truth? Who knows — the whole SCO vs. the open world IBM thing gets weirder by the day.

“Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and the world’s wealthiest man, is to receive an honorary knighthood for “services to global enterprise”.” Yeah, I know, I had to do a double-take on that one too.

The Telegraph article also states that “commercial success has led to hatred of him among his competitors.” This in the same week that Microsoft sucked it up and gave massively deep discounts to Newham Council to prevent them moving into a final rollout of an open source desktop system in association with IBM. This about a company who have attempted to paint open source as “un-American” and anti-Constitutional. Or was that Darl McBride? Ugh.

Hat tip to Martin for this post’s title.

For those who think Debian is “hard” to install, let the Chicken Install method dispel a few myths I personally have always found Debian fast and easy to install, the new installer should help that become even simpler. The tendency these days is more towards eye candy than actual ease of process. If it’s not anaconda-ised or Windows-like, it’s “bad”. Shame that, because some of the best usability work is being done in these text-based installers. Handy for those who are blind, as technologies such as Speakup can be used to shunt console output to speech synths from the boot prompt onwards. Advancements such as these are why I love open source