Dear Canonical

29. January 2010 at 21:56 (Community, Linux, Ubuntu)
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Dear Canonical,

Let me start out by saying this, I am in no way opposed to you turning a profit. However I believe your recent actions, including but not limited to the Canonical-Yahoo! revenue sharing agreement (henceforth: YahooGate), are hurting Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community.

We can both I hope agree that Ubuntu is marketed as a community project and that was it not for the community Canonical today wouldn’t be where it was. Likewise without Canonical there would be no Ubuntu, you are valued community members and valued sponsors. However I feel that YahooGate shows that you are now willing to go around the community and enforce changes without debating or even proposing these changes to the community ahead of time. We were not asked if there was an interest in entering into such deals, and if so how such changes should be rolled out, let alone limited. You acted like bad community members and that cannot be allowed to happen.

As community members, it is our duty to hold you accountable, to keep you honest. Likewise I would see it as Canonicals duty to hold the community accountable to it’s actions. In that spirit I will quote the part of your own governance charter which I feel was infringed upon as a result of your dealings in YahooGate.

2. ensure that decisions regarding the Ubuntu distribution and community are taken in a fair and transparent fashion,

As you will agree I hope, you announced this change unilaterally without first discussing it in any way or form. As a result here of you cannot claim that the governance charter item 3 can be considered in effect.

3. ensure that necessary decisions are actually taken, even when there is no clear consensus amongst the community.

If we are not consulted we do not know there to be a situation we might need to take a stance on, we cannot make a fully informed decision and we cannot uphold our duty to keep Ubuntu on the path to creating the best possible experience for users.

I ask you to consider that one of the many things users might flee from in the Windows world is preinstalled trialware and other sponsored changes to the defaults, a problem so great that chains like Best Buy have started offering dubious additional fees to “optimize” machines prior to delivery, a service that effectively is comprised of removing all of these additional programs (programs the OEM, like you, make money installing) and resetting defaults. We should avoid at all costs to end up in this situation, this is why I feel that only technically grounded arguments should be valid in determining the defaults in Ubuntu. The aim should be to create a truly pleasant and enjoyable experience, that in itself I believe will prove to be a larger generator of income than any such deal might.

You have entirely failed to present a case for how this change benefits the Ubuntu user experience and in the process have also set a dangerous presidence. What defaults in Ubuntu are for sale and at what price, clearly as long as the user remains with the choice to replace any such default you can put a suitable price on any default. If not where would you define the limit? Going past any technical argument, any argument for the general benefit of the user. E.g. could I offer to pay you a one time fee to make Banshee the default mediaplayer e.g. and in that case, where would that price lie. Not that I intend to pay you but I would be interested in just how big my wallet has to be to have a voice in Ubuntu because clearly being a long time contributor isn’t enough to even get asked about the general guidelines in such cases despite the governance charter.

Then there is the problem of how this is being intended rolled out to users. I gather from the information you have released that you do not see a problem with your plan to also apply this change to upgrades not just new installs. There also has been no mention so far of any user notification at all, I would at least present the user with the information as to why this change was made and a guided way to change the default back. Here I would suggest looking at what Google does with Chrome and Chromium on the first launch. This would be sufficient I think to let the user be able to make an informed decision.

Finally there is the problem of transparency, you say that the income generated from this deal would go towards paying for open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform. Given this premise would you be wiling to open your books and let the users see that you uphold your word and put the income you generate from this into Ubuntu?

I am not entirely opposed to this kind of deal however I believe the community and Canonical need to agree upon a set of general guidelines for areas where this would be acceptable and where it wouldn’t be. There would be a need for full transparency in this cases and the user would have to be presented with the option of making an informed decision whenever Canonical has made a change to fiancially benefit themselves to support it or not. This transparency would need to extend to the accounting, if we cannot see that the promised benefit of these deals reaches the Ubuntu user we will be forced to assume that you are hiding something.

If you expect something from us, you have to give us something in return, in this case a voice. I think the community has earned that much. Till you do so and apologize for your handling of YahooGate I will personally pledge to cease doing support, filing and working on bugs as well as promoting Ubuntu. I wish you good luck in the future.

On a personal note, I hope you will do the honorable thing and politely break off the deal with Yahoo! before sitting down with your community of contributors and working on this details. I hope you will alay the fears that this might continue to be a distraction from creating the best possible desktop experience available to mankind. I hope you will show that you despite your actions respect your contributors, that you will affirm that community is more to you than a word, that this relationship we have in order for us both to flurish needs to be a cooperative symbiotic in nature. Right now your actions speak for themselves.

I would also like to extend my apologies to Yahoo!, I have no bad feelings towards your search engine, I do however currently find it technically an inferior choice for my needs as well as those users I have the honor of working with or helping. I do not believe it to be in the best interest of Ubuntu to default to your service currently. I hope you can work on that and propose the change on pure technical grounds one day, at which point I will be happy to support your move without any need to buy your way into Ubuntu. I bear no ill will towards you but I also know that certain members of the community has been calling you names and accusing you of having impure motives to entering in this deal. I see no evidence that this is the case and in the interest of goodwill and honesty I distance myself from such reprehensible behavior. I wish you good luck in the future and hope to be able to find common ground to work with you on in the future that will benefit us both.

Sincerely,
David Nielsen, a disappointed Ubuntu contributor.

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YouTube revamp

14. January 2010 at 07:11 (Personal)
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Apparently Google are planning a rather vast revamping of the YouTube service. Naturally a lot of the rather vocal members of the Free Software minority have managed to push several versions of their HTML5 + Ogg Theora suggestion to the top. However is this a good thing?

Firstly it combines two goals, one Google are invested in and one it argued against. They will be able to dismiss such a goal as having reached 50% by already having invested heavily in HTML5 and using it for other services, YouTube is sure to follow. However they also issued comments against Ogg Theora based on concerns about the quality. Clearly this is where the debate needs to be had and making it as simple for Google as possible increases the chances of success. I would instead support ideas that aim to ensure that YouTube is accessable to everyone as encompassing goal, Open Standards are a natural outcome hereof. Then I would give specific well argued examples, Google are concerned about the quality and performance of Ogg Theora so start with the Xiph rebuttal and fill in the gaps, fix the problems and then what would stop Google from supporting Openness?

Secondly while the use of format and such is important to a large number of users this is a technical decision and likely not what Google are looking for input on. There are a large number of things that do not work on YouTube today, in the user experience and performance of the site that are far more important. There is rampant DMCA abuse and the reaction from YouTube is often wide banning and removal of users without sufficient investigation. You have problems with vote and rating bots. The comment section is in dire need of a serious redesign that will encourage debate and replies both in text and video form. There seriously needs some action taken to eliminate the spam problem. All in all YouTube is becoming less and less a compelling place to participate, occasionally a place that will wrongfully get you into legal trouble, the slip towards more commercial offerings seem to have taken all development interest from the community that made YouTube a success. This all leads to slowly strangling what made YouTube great and instead turning it into a Hulu-like service where nobody but your partners can upload and videos will remain locked by criteria such as region. Google will likely make more money this way but they will cause the creation of fierce competitors and they will very publicly betrayal the orignal voxhall idea that gave birth to YouTube which cannot be good for PR.

Open Standards and formats isn’t all that is required to ensure access for all, e.g. it would be nice if the community was leveraged in creating subtitles for important videos. Lots of people depend on subtitles to access information, this need stretches all the way from being an enhancement (e.g. people learning languages), a requirement (e.g. elderly people, people with reduced hearing capacity, etc.) to a downright legal requirement (e.g. deaf people). It should be noted here that to the best of my knowledge no provision for providing subtitles support currently exists in HTML5 and this definitely needs to be addressed.

It would also be nice if they took the chance to work with the Creative Commons to have them do explanatory video posts as to their licensing and licensing in general (what to watch out for such ensuring that music used can with distributed and where to get such media) followed by defaulting every contribution to a channel setting (default to something reasonable such as the share-alike license). Doing this encourages conversation, it means you open yourself to crticism and it grows the public pool of work which can be used amongst other places in the classroom which combined with subtitles and what other material can prove to be valuable tools in learning. One example of this is Potholer54’s Made Easy series which gives a quick but scientifically valid look at how the universe came to be and offers explanations of evolutionary concepts, the information is freely available and offers an excellent supplement to the traditional classroom experience.

I also think that YouTube needs to make it insanely easy to not just view but contribute to YouTube from outside the YouTube website, there is a growing number of appealing devices such as the (gadget lustworthy) Boxee Box that enable enjoying the multitude of media experiences that your own collection and the Internet offers. It is vital for YouTube to be well positioned for consumption in such an environment. This is another place where Open Standards argue for themselves, new device makers wouldn’t have to pay any kind of licensing to support your product, it would be entirely free and thus lead it being one of the first things to be implemented for such devices.

I believe we should argue for open standards and open formats that are free for all to use, however I think this argument will be the natural outcome of looking at where YouTube, the rest of the Google services and the Internet as a whole must go. From looking at the current problems and the best long term solutions to that. I believe that by flooding the suggestion box we risk drowning serious user issues and misleading YouTube into addressing their problems in the wrong order and in doing so lead them to further endanger YouTube.

We also need to remember that to have YouTube be a good showcase for open standards it first needs to be a good experience, one that users will flock to. It can be ever so free and open, but if it isn’t good people won’t use it and then any effort in opening up the experience is utterly wasted. A poor but open YouTube doesn’t serve you, Google or the Internet as a whole. Keep that in mind.

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Does this droid owner have buyer’s remorse?

8. January 2010 at 16:34 (Android, Community, HTC Hero, Hardware, Personal)
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This is an reply to the InternetNews.com story: Will Droid Owners Get Buyer’s Remorse?

I recently bought an HTC Hero and while it is a nice phone I have found it to be slow in use and not really fulfill the promise of being much more than a phone.

I’ve learned from it that I would like something that runs a UI experience that is closer to stock Android since the porting of a large change such as the HTC Sense UI takes a long time to complete as the Android base progresses and improves. Time when the user is deprived of updates to improve the experience and instead of slow incremental changes they get rare large code dumps that likely also changes behavior. This causes issues for users learning the basically new phone all over.

I’ve also learned that I would like a hardware keyboard since I am not cut out for on screen typing. Furthermore I would like to see some of the more logic extensions be made to the platform such as letting known friends addresses appear in the map application.

Skype on Android is utterly crippled, there is some kind of restriction being enforced to disallow the application from using the data connection. That sours the experience quite a bit.

All in all while I bought the phone because I needed one and thus had to pick what I thought was the best phone at the moment. I really wish the Droid had been available to me subsidized as I am not ready to pay for an unlocked phone with the mobile contracts as they are currently since it doesn’t save me money.

The HTC Hero isn’t a bad phone but the realistic competetor available to me at the same price was a new iPhone 3GS 32GB and it is certainly an inferior phone to that on many counts.

If you are thinking of going with the Hero to support Open Source then you should also know that HTC adds a proprietary UI and know that it comes with costs though it provides a very compelling UI.

The perfect Android phone might be closer to the Droid or the Nexus One depending on your preference and use cases. They are still slower on things like loading and rendering webpages than the 3GS but the hardware is solid and should support the platform as it expands. You should expect this expansion to be directly and naturally deployed for these phones an thus be improved with updates regularly considering that they are a very standard Android deployment. You could consider it an investment of trust in the platform, it doesn’t quite provide an experience that really beats the the iPhone solidly yet but it has considerable promise and past performance as an indicator will reach it soon. Bet on it coming to these products soon.

I elected to go for openness regardless, I know I have an inferior phone for it. It’s still a good phone but it’s not more than a phone in any really revolutionary way. It’s for people like me hoping to reduce the amount of gadgets I carry by removing my mp3 player, the Hero doesn’t replace a good camera though. Likewise the experience isn’t bad but isn’t really followed through to it’s natural conclusion to the extend competitors have done. Openness outweighted that, even with the encumberance of the Sense UI, for me. It isn’t likely to be the case for a lot of people.

I don’t have remorse for buying an Android phone but I acknowledge that the competition is overall a superior choice for most people right now.

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Why “helping MySQL” reflects poorly on us all

3. January 2010 at 11:23 (Community, Linux, Personal)
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As of late Monty with the support of leading FSF figures has started campaigning to “help MySQL” since Oracle surely will mean it harm. Here is why signing such a petition in my personal opinion is a bad idea.

1) The grassroot movement is basically turning into spammers, going to every forum and other venue they can come up with an posting the same copy and pasted message without providing a reasoned argument for their case in such posts. Signing the petition is rewarding this behavior.

2) This is largely about commericalization of MySQL. Namely the right to monitize from relicensing for commercial clients who do not wish their codebase to be infected by the GPL license for one reason or another. This has nothing to do with the software’s freedom status and given the FSF’s behavior as well as argumentation throughout recent years, the entirety of the inherent freedoms remain intact even when forking the existing codebase, meaning that this is entirely about the right to make money from proprietary use cases of the code. Thus the FSF once again shows that they do not have the moral high ground given their abusive and divisive behavior towards more pragmatic community members arguing for such use cases historically (e.g.: the Miguel de Icaza traitor incident).

3) Outside of the right to monitization for proprietary use cases the only thing lost is the right to use the name MySQL. While there is a significant brand behind MySQL this is not a technical argument against the letting Oracle do with their obtained property as they please. MySQL was sold long ago along with the rights to the name and the copyright and such objections should have addressed then instead of assuming that MySQL would always remain in the hands of those we consider friendly. This is more an argument against copyright assignment than anything, if you do not agree with what is happening to MySQL right now, do not agree to contribute to projects that require copyright assignment. Now is not the time to attack a company for utilizing the rights that come with obtaining copyright assigned code and the people to do such campaigning most certainly shouldn’t be the FSF who themselves require copyright assignment.

4) The superior technical solution will eventually unseat MySQL and we already have several forks in progress including Monty’s own MariaDB and Drizzle, their respective developers will have to rewrite the code to clear the copyright ownership and learn from this incident or simply find other ways to pay the bills than selling rights to use the code under a different license than the GPL. Meaning the GPL isn’t a suitable license for such projects especially when combined with copyright assignment. In the grandest of traditions in Open Source this will spur competition and open the market to a compatible but commercially more paletable solution, unseating MySQL from new code (or existing “non-encumbered” code such as PostgresSQL) rather than a fork of MySQL. Futher underlining that this is an argument from people with a vested interest in reverting their own mistakes of the past.

5) While this is not the sole reason for the EU and similar governmental agencies holding back agreeing to Oracle finalizing their purchase of SUN it certainly isn’t helping. While this deal is in limbo, SUN is bleeding money and laying off many fine employees, in the progress directly hurting the Open Source community by removing valued contributors. Consequences for which the FSF nor Monty or any other party involved in this campaign has expressed the slightest remorse or concern. If they want to claim the moral high ground they should at least address this, apologize and amply justify their actions to the people who are left without jobs in an already hard pressed market and economy. I do not believe they are in a position to do so as they themselves are to blame for creating the situation.

In short, my opinion is that supporting this campaign makes the Open Source community look like offended children who would rather take the ball they already gave away and go home than live with their decision. It is our own failing that caused this situation and instead of attacking Oracle over it while people are losing their jobs and the Open Source community loses valued contributors we should review the road that led here and consider adding a freedom from copyright assignment clause to the list of inherent freedoms that needs protecting. Futhermore we should encourage a wide sweeping review of our existing projects and see which are in danger of ending up in the same situation as MySQL. Any action taken to deal with these situations should be above all be calm, polite and non-confrontational. if any projects show as currently being in danger and action might be needed should rational evidence based argumentation fail to work with these projects or they ask us to not argue against their policies, competition should be assumed as the natural outcome.

In the interest of intellectual honesty, the other side of the argument is available here.

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Dear HTC

2. January 2010 at 05:05 (Android, Community, HTC Hero, Hardware, Linux)
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Considering that snowstorms made going outside unsafe during the last days I could return my Hero we are now stuck with each other so what do you say we attempt to make it a kickass experience instead?

Firstly, drop the Sense UI, I know you invested heavily in it and rely on it to sell phones with a superior UII experience and with Android versions prior to 2.1 that is likely to also have been the case. However you too must realise that it is a burden to have to port it to every new Android release to ensure that your users have the lastest version. You might not think it matters to be on the most recent release but it does, e.g. for reasons of security, unlike an old non-smartphone, my HTC Hero contains a lot of personal data such as contacts, my music, mail, Facebook login information – all information I would like to know is as protected as it can be. Ensuring that you keep up with upstream Android means that any security fixes are obtained at the cost of testing the release against the hardware and ensuring that your users are notified of the update (optimally you could offer to perform the upgrade automatically over the air – it shouldn’t be technically impossible).

Additionally you should get translations for free, when I got my Hero it only had English interface and only after going through a painful upgrading experience did I get Danish support. Being localized for free increases your potential pool of customers vastly, e.g. my mother would never use a phone that was in English, she would use one in Danish though. Working upstream is no big enlightenment for us Open Source people but I realise that it might hard to get right for you, we will be happy to help you. It is true that short term you may suffer a bit due to losing the ability to sell your phones on the preceived superior UI experience but long term you will be able to save money on maintance and development of devices. It would force you to compete on the superiority of your phones design and hardware but I am confident that you can do this as the HTC Hero I have in my hand is a solid design and very pleasing on the eyes even if it could stand to be a lot faster and smoother. People will happily pay for a good phone and with subsidized plans it’s not even going to cost an arm and a leg.

Make it easy to write text in another language without the autocorrecting spell checker doing stupid things such as replacing you with joo (which doesn’t even make sense in Danish). It’s is some what a big deal, the current generation of smartphone users are likely to both need their local language for text messaging friends but email could very easily be in English (or in my case, messages to my fiancée are in English as are 99% of my mails but text messages to my friends are otherwise in Danish). Given my usage pattern typing messages takes forever since I have to carefully correct nearly every word.

Let my contacts appear on the map if an address is known and allow me to define known locations (and let me tie those to contacts). This is pretty much a no-brainer that would enhance the usefulness and user experience of the maps application.

Include a Google Reader application, there are a few news applications in the store but none included in the bundle you get with the phone, however there are applications for monitoring stock prices. I have an overwhelming feeling that more people will benefit from a news reader so please hurry and include one.

Include a todo list program, it is really missing from the standard bundle and no good placefiller exists in the store that integrates well especially with my online experience. I can buy an app to interact with Remember the Milk but for such a simple and fundamental task I really don’t want to pay 15$, especially since Google has a similar todo list I could easily use. Bonus points would be given if it handles situations such as “Remember to buy milk” then being location aware and having access to a list of nearby stores it could beep and remind me that I need to do this if I ask it to.

Increase cooperation between applications, e.g. the other day I was having a text message conversation with an old friend and we arranged to meet up. However there exists no way to simply click the conversation and convert it to a calendar entry (it would also be interesting to be able to convert to a todo list entry since todo list entry basically are calendar entries without a date attached). Bonus points would be given if you can manage to take hints from the conversation for dates and date references such as the day after tomorrow (in multiple languages naturally) to suggest the correct date when creating the calendar entry.

Release specifications so that someone might implement a flashing tool for your devices that works under Linux. It would be nearly entirely free for you to do so and considering the popularity of Android with Linux users (as Android is a Linux platform) it would likely aid a lot of your paying customers. Given a release of specification rather than the release of a proprietary tool such as what you have for Windows would very likely also give you support for the Mac platform for free as well. Such a move would also buy your company a lot of goodwill with the Open Source community and show us that you are want to work with us, such trust is a good investment and can be the thing that tips the scale for buying an HTC device for a number of users. We’d rather own devices from companies that work with us than not and will warn each other of companies that directly work against our interests. Looking at how closed off the iPhone is and how much trouble Linux users have using their devices to their fullest, it would be very likely that distribution wikis would include a recommendation for Android devices and provided that HTC makes it easy for us to include full support a specific recommendation of your products wouldn’t be unthinkable – we are good to those who are good to us.

My stubby finger tips have a hard time hitting those on screen keys, perhaps we could find a solution for this. Hardware keyboards are good but tend to be a problem for localization and slow you down getting to market in a lot of countries. Clearly the on screen keyboard is a good idea but the keys are simply to small. Given the size of the screen it is hard to correct but ideas such as swype show promise to improve the experience. I would suggest spending some research dollars here.

As a general improvement to Android, I would really like an Audible application. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and I would love some means of buying the directly from my phone, download them and add them to my media library. Naturally the DRMed nature of Audibles products is a problem as is their complete lack of support for Open Source and Linux specifically but is a fight we’ll have to take with Audible not Android or HTC.

Finally you should provide a means for advanced users to provide bug reports, several things in your own released ROMs have flaws, given that it is related to your own fork I don’t feel comfortable going to Androids bug tracker and the only means you seem to provide is going through customer service which isn’t an interaction with the development team. This would naturally go away if you moved to providing a vanilla Android experience and you’d get help from the entire Android community to fix your bugs.

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What’s in a name?

26. December 2009 at 19:52 (Personal)

For a while now I’ve happily used the name GNOME commentary, because as a GNOME user and a person who follows development I wanted to provide an outlet for news and exciting looks at what the future holds. However looking back upon the last years postings I haven’t actually done much to fulfill that intend.

I do tend to post on things that interest me, commentary on legal and social matters, distribution specific updates and issues of technology in general including my surprisingly popular article on the Acer Aspire Revo r3610 which have drawn more traffic lately than all the other articles put together. It was also one of the most fun articles to write as for me it was a time of making the most out of what few resources I had and being pleasantly surprised at just how far it could take me. I am glad you all seemed to find it useful.

So here is the question, is it time to change the name of the blog, if so to what and does it even matter? Most people likely come here from aggregators which just displays my name rather than The GNOME Commentary.

The reason I ask is that for 2010 I have set the goal of returning to more active blogging, I won’t set a specific goal of posting once a day since I always felt more comfortable writing when I have something passionately urging to get out and I would rather continue to produce such articles than fulfilling a daily goal by issuing vapid non-sense. Writing an article often takes me a couple of hours, longer if I have to track down links and other resources for people to use as resources for the article and to dig out further data. I realize that personal disappointments in the past year including my decision to leave Fedora has left me without the desire to blog and without such work also arises a feel that there somehow is less material to work with. This will change, I feel energized and have several ideas I want to explore, hopefully I can turn 2010 into a productive and fun year of blogging.

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Is there an acceptable level of DRM?

26. December 2009 at 05:19 (Hardware, Linux, Music, Personal)
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I have been giving DRM some consideration lately, specifically with deals such as the Zune Marketplace free pass to millions of songs at 14.95$ a month with 10 free keepers a month would there exist and implementation of DRM I would accept as a requirement for access. While I generally hate DRM and think it punishes paying customers, could one envision an implementation that would be fair?

E.g could one envision a business build on free streaming of DRMed files and DRM free files for purchase so that they allow reasonable access to listen and learn new music but if you want to access the files and do with them what you wish – say use them offline, use excerpts of for a review or a composite video (adding a touch of music to a video project, like a review YouTube show or as a music interlude in a podcast). Would it work and what problems would there be with such a model?

Well first up the technological problems inherent to DRM won’t go away, if the DRM server is down or is removed as has been the case with a number of services already. Then your content stops working, however this would only affect the streaming service as songs you bought and own would be DRM free. Free services disappear all the time for many reasons so I don’t see this as specifically a DRM problem but a consumer support problem, if we don’t back the model then the service will go away. Magnatune runs a streaming service for all their music and the only price you pay for this wonderful access is listening to a little blurb at the end of each song, this works well for independent artists. However I don’t see e.g. Parlophone being ready as a corporation to grant the same level of access to their catalog with the only protection from being ripped off being “trust the customers not to abuse the service and save streams, remove ads and building a full copy without giving us a dime”. That is just not the way they have grown use to doing working and expecting them to attain enlightenment overnight is more than dangerously naive.

I think Magnatune deserves a lot of credit for taking that risk and I am hopefully that it is paying off for them. I think a lot of such a success can be traced back to their stated mission of not being evil, I think customers respect that and having it be highly visible and transparent, such as can be seen in their simple profit sharing that your money actually goes to the artists. As such Magnatune’s “pay what you want” system often is above the minimum of 5$, in other words people aren’t cheap when they feel they are being treated fairly. I have to admit that while there are no limits on the files and I get them in the format I desire even lossless I am still amazed when they encourage me to share my new music with 3 friends. They could have politely asked me not to do that to protect their business as well as their artists and I would respect it because of the beyond fair treatment they give me otherwise and instead send friends to their streaming service to sample my amazing new finds.

Another problem with any technology designed to limit your use of content is that what you will accept now isn’t always what you will accept in the future. E.g. a user might go an buy an iPhone today and not think twice about the limits Apple ensure using lawyers and technology to lock out 3rd parties, if that user some time later elects to move to Linux or just move away from iTunes the consequences of that acceptance hits. Nor did I when the DVD player came out give much thought to the protection schemes built in and how they affected me and I started building what has now become a huge collection of movies and TV shows on DVDs. Not for a second did I consider that the region coding meant that taking my DVDs with me out of Europe would render them unplayable. After all I thought I would live in Denmark all my life and it didn’t limit me then outside of buying DVDs from the US that weren’t available in Denmark and here all players are basically region code free so it was a non-problem. As my situation now might call for a move to Brazil or where ever my fiancée finds the perfect Ph.D. project this might come back to bite me in the nether regions.

Another problem relating to the DVDs is that the CSS protection, is being heavily protected by lawyers, limits my OS of choice from shipping support, I can’t view the content I paid for on my desktop out of the box. While the laws in Denmark would seemingly allow me to break the protection, making such code available could land one in serious trouble of the lose your house flavor. This also means that while he rest of the software stack in Linux is very advanced, DVD support is lacking since no company will risk helping out as it would make them a target, no distro can ship the code leading to the feature being under maintained and under tested. I might legally be able to install such support but frankly it’s in a poor state and close to uselessly broken in some cases for no good technical reason, all of which makes me a sad panda.

Why is this a problem? Well I would like to do to my DVDs what I did to my CDs. Keep the originals safe in a box and access my content the way I please on the devices I please. I would love a way to easily and quickly put my movies on a NAS and let them be transcoded for use on my portable devices, viewable on the TV and other such things. I might even want to use little snippets easily in other projects, like this blog. When I started building my collection a DVD was probably so large that the idea of fitting hundreds of movies onto a harddrive seemed a bit far fetched, not today though. The hardware is cheap and available anywhere, now it’s a good time to do something like this and I can’t easily.

The point is you will agree to some limitation now that might come back to haunt you years from now, if it is enforced by DRM then your only choice is to violate the law to access and enjoy the content you bought the way you want. There are risks involved with this and you cannot be sure that software to do such alternation will be available as companies like to sue those who enable you to do these things.

I honestly though don’t think I can find a single major thing to object about with a scheme which sole purpose is to prevent saving a stream, there will always be people for whom this isn’t enough or people who will be break the protection to keep the content they get free access to. I have no problem going after these people, I really don’t, they have the option of using the entirely free access (perhaps with ads, lower resolution than would be available to buy DRM free), I see no moral argument one could present for doing such a thing. Well there is one, provided the access isn’t equal, then they would deprive users of say Linux from using the free option thus forcing them to buy without trying.

Even an truly dogmatic FSF supporter wouldn’t really be able to argue this is directly evil, while the specific component that unlocks the DRM is very likely to be proprietary (giving you the content, the means to unlock it and the key – that is free access which is unlikely to happen) you would still have the option of playing the content using nothing by ideologically blessed software, provided you buy the content.

Assuming the blob is well written as well as supported on any platfrom and some entity such as the Linux Foundation has access to the code under NDA so we can get an opinion as whether or not unlocking the DRM is all it does. I wouldn’t feel bad about installing such a thing by default on users desktops (again, if you don’t like it, remove it and live with buying your content). We could even restrict the binary with things such as AppArmor or SELinux to ensure it’s not given all out access to reduce the security concerns.

Lots of maybes and assumptions but I think such a scheme would work and hopefully as time progresses, with the support of customers it could be shown that customers can be trusted to not abuse such restriction-less privileges. As for the realism inherent to such an idea, I doubt you’ll get record companies and movie studios to agree to this but on the other hand what Spotify is doing today if I understand it correctly (sadly there is no Spotify in Denmark yet) in the countries where they have gotten the licenses isn’t that dissimilar to the streaming part of the idea, adding a DRM free store wouldn’t be a far stretch.

I think when it comes to DRM free content customers also need to realize that they are asking companies to run a risk of losing revenue, something that is very scary to them, it’s a big shift in the way they have grown used to working and they need to be convinced by the bottom line. They give you an awful lot of power which can be abused and we need to show that the limits they put on content is harmful to paying customers, it holds back creativity and new business models but in return we have to reward them for trusting us by not abusing that trust once they put it in us. Even if we are justifiably angry over past transgressions, the way to settle that anger is not to rip them off when they change for the better.

DRM Free, to paraphrase that cliché from Spider-Man, comes with great responsibility.

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A little Acer Aspire Revo r3610 update

23. December 2009 at 16:39 (Acer Aspire Revo r3610, Hardware, Linux)
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In my previous post on my beloved r3610 I mentioned that I was unable to make the bundled wireless keyboard work. I assumed wrongly that the dongle was built into the machine, however after cleaning up my things I found the manual and discovered that the required dongle can be found inside the mouse’s battery bay. Once you can dug it out of it’s holding place, unplug your existing keyboard and insert the dongle in an empty USB port on the Revo then hold the connect button on the keyboard for a few seconds and voila your machine now has a working wireless keyboard.

The same approach should work with the mouse but I have used a trackball for years and love it to death so I haven’t tested this.

I hope this is helpful to other people.

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Why I will be returning my HTC Hero

22. December 2009 at 11:46 (Android, Community, HTC Hero, Hardware, Linux, Personal, Windows)
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Recently I bought an HTC Hero to replace my old broken phone and to bring me into the smartphone era, something I have been looking forward to for a while. For the most part I have been fairly pleased with the phone as such but it is a device with issues.

1) HTC it ifself

Don’t be under the impression that Android phones magically keep themselves updated over the wire, you have to flash the damn thing. However HTC doesn’t support Linux (nor Mac OS X for that matter). They aren’t even shy about it when I asked tech support how to perform such updates under Linux.

Thank you for your enquiry about the HTC Hero.

Unfortunately we do not support Linux and MAC operating systems but we recommend to query local community forums in the internet dedicated to the Linux platform.

If there’s any other enquiries, please let me know by responding using the link provided and I will be happy to check for you.

So they don’t provide the tools to do the job, but I am welcome to ask the community. On one hand their support department is quick to respond, on the other hand their reply is a worthless pregenerated non-answer. The end result is that Linux and Mac users will be left out of important updates which fix issues, including one might suspect security problems. Thank you HTC for entirely missing the point and endangering your customers.

The wonderful bit of irony here is that the phone underneath is running Linux, so they basically deem that it is good enough for their hardware, but not mine.

2) Performance

I’d heard bad things about the Heros performance in reviews but when I played with the store model I didn’t see any lag. However the lag very clearly appears after a night of idleness and it makes the interface nearly unresponsive. Reviews claim that a firmware update fixes this, however do to Linux being unsupported for the flashing this opens up a whole new dimension of hurt. I finally broke down and acquired access to a Windows XP machine and spend a couple of hours hunting down issues with their flashing tool (which turned out to be rooted in a broken driver for the Android phone as a USB device). After performing this gutwrenching update, the performance issues remains present, on the plus side the interface is no available in Danish which was lacking in the device as it was sold.

3) Poor quality slightly hidden

The Hero feels good in your hand, it has the right weight and size to be comfortable to use. The headset that comes with the package is sufficient to enjoy music or conversation. However the insides aren’t beautiful at all, the GPS is off by several kilometers, the camera is slow and produces blurry pictures. The touchscreen keyboard has keys roughly 1/3 the size of any normal fingertip and the spell checking will constantly replace words like “you” with “joo” unless you specifically stop it.  It’s slow to type on, the response of the device is sluggish and overall it just feels cheap in use… for a device that is supposedly the top of the line model, and at a price that would make even Bill Gates blush I definitely didn’t expect this.

4) Strange arbitrary limits on the software

I really need Skype and I need it to be portable. However on an Android phone it seems that the software is both in beta and from on high is prevented from using your 3G/wifi connection to make calls. There is no technical reason for this to be so, in fact my old phone supported Skype directly and it integrated with my contact list. This appears to be a problem rooted in cell phone providers and Google setting up this requirement which is despicable behavior that leaves my expensive phone less capable than it would be for no good reason. Further research shows that iPhone users are in the same boat but with different limitations (I believe they can only use Skype over a wifi connection). This kind of abuse of power makes smartphones far less appealing and limits application developers creativity and user freedom.

5) There is no easy way to exit applications

As part of the design Android applications never seem to quit, this means that as a user you have to remember to check the browser, close all your additional pages and reset the page that you cannot close to something you are comfortable seeing because the next time you hit the browser icon, this is what will pop up. There is a means of killing applications but you have to dig through multiple hidden menus and enter the castle of slow that is “manage applications”. This is a design decision but given the already sluggish performance, ones impression of the device isn’t exactly enhanced by leaking applications which over time makes the road to recovery a Windows style reboot. You know that you designed a piece of crap when the way to get it back to a useful state for a few hours is to reboot it.

There are good things to say about the device, the Sense UI is beautiful and overall the device is pleasant to the eye with glittery candy being spread for your enjoyment. I’ve had it for a few days now and I have to admit that the calendar application with it’s synchronization to Google Calendar is a wonderful tool that has improved my life leaps and bounds. The screen might be small but it’s clear and very readable, I have found myself enjoying checking Google Reader from my bed and marveling at the power of the mobile webpages as well as the speed of the browser application. In fact I am so impressed by the mobile webpages that for 99% of use I go to these rather than the specially crafted applications for things such as GMail since it’s faster and provides easier access to labels.

You only have about a day and halves worth of battery power so use it wisely, luckily the recharge time is short and since it is done via USB you can be assured access to a source of power pretty much everywhere even without carrying a hefty recharger. The agreement to use USB charging for all modern phones really is one of those no-brainer decisions in retrospect, for years every time you switched phones you got a new brick to carry and nobodies chargers were compatible (often even within different models with the same vendor). The amount of waste and idiocy saved by this is measurable in the real world. It fills my heart with joy to think of, and as a bonus the power brick that is supplied for when a USB port is unavailable has a clever design where you can replace the plug to suit local standards. If only the rest of the device shared this clever engineering and design – verily I submit onto you, the HTC Hero would be a worthwhile investment.

Never the less, today the HTC Hero is going back to the store. I can’t stand the sluggish interface, HTC’s swamy non-support and delivering a frankly broken Skype experience really pushed me over the top. For something I spend this much money on out of pocket not to mention the costs I tied myself to for the “unlimited” data plan I really expected better.

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The importance of Open drivers and openness in general

16. December 2009 at 19:40 (Hardware, Linux, Personal)
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An interesting question was asked on the Ubuntu Forums regarding openness and why some people were reacting the way they are on the issue of proprietary software. The example given was the driver Nvidia provides for their videocards. I wrote this as a response, instead of going into ideologically definitions of freedom I feel that new users might like to see the real world measurable advantages.

Looking at the proprietary closed source nvidia driver which is currently needed for supporting 3D acceleration and many other features supported by this range of hardware. I would like to specifically point to these 4 arguments.

1) Security

It’s several megabytes of code running in your kernel with access to all kinds of things. You can’t see what it’s doing and it has been subject to at least one major security issue. We can’t fix it, if Nvidia doesn’t find the problem worth the effort then we either have to remove the driver or leave users vulnerable to attack as a distribution.

2) Portability

The nvidia driver only runs on the platforms Nvidia deems they can support. This means e.g. that right now PS3 owners who wishes to run Linux on their machines (a fully supported feature from Sony btw. though not on the Slim models) are left without such things as 3D acceleration and video codec acceleration.

3) Stability

Looking over the top kerneloopses a clear trend is that kernels with the nvidia driver (and the ati proprietary driver) are high scoring components of these and related problems. Users can (and have) experience crashes in applications, problems for which the root cause is in code in these modules. Such problems we can’t fix since we aren’t privy to the code, we are depending on the vendor providing such support in a timely fashion. As a Linux distribution you might also encounter problems with users getting a poor experience and thus losing customers – meaning Nvidia in theory could hold distributions at ransom till an open alternative appears with the same functionality or we do as they tell us.

This scenario though due to the public backlash it would cause seems absurd. What isn’t though is that Nvidia has their own development schedule and if we want to develop our software stack we occasionally have to make changes that change APIs and thus breaks the nvidia driver (this has happened). This forces us to either break this piece of the functionality for users when we import the new underlying stack or hold it back till Nvidia decides to release a compatible version. This effectively lets nvidia dictate the development pace and release process of a large part of Linux.

4) Support for outdated/unavailable for sale hardware and saving the environment

Nvidia regularly moves older devices into a subset of their driver called legacy. This driver isn’t well maintained, on purpose to lessen their support burden and naturally to sell new videocards. We thus can’t support users existing hardware, therefor we (though in reality Nvidia) force them to upgrade their machines or stay on their existing platform. Preventing distributions from gaining users and thus also potential customers. It also lessens the applicability of the age old benefit Linux always was known for, running on an old clunker and give it new life.

E.g. I participate in a project that sends old hardware to Africa to use in schools. When the time comes that the machines that come in through the door contain Nvidia chips that aren’t supported we give poor African children machines that do less than they can, are less fun, will interest them less. Making school a less exciting break in what must otherwise be a pretty bleak day.

Yes, I did just manage to invoke starving African kids while making an argument on software. Please do not see this as an emotional argument but rather a matter of making education as appealing as we can to everyone and thereby encourage more people to get engaged. The positive effects of education are hard to deny and pretty much any effort being made to increase the likelihood that people will enter into such programs should be welcomed.

Every time you are forced to upgrade perfectly working hardware to get to a supported version of Linux (even Ubuntu’s Long Term Support releases are only supported for 3½ years on the desktop) you are left with spare hardware. Often this ends up getting thrown out, replacing it thus forces upon us amongst others the following problems:

- Needlessly depleting our natural resources more

- Needlessly imposing more waste which contains toxic chemicals.

- Wasting production capacity

- Wasting money

With Open Source drivers we have the means to take these problems into our own hands.

I hope this is helpful in providing arguments for open drivers. This is a complicated area where we need to convince vendors to work with us and we need to understand that we are asking them to change their culture. They are used to sharing coming only with the exchange of large sums of money in the form of licensing agreements. We cannot expect them to change overnight but we can inform users of the arguments for openness and then together do our best to work with vendors towards greater cooperation on terms that serve the user.

It’s not just a Linux issue, even Microsoft is faced with downsides of not having access to the driver code and being able to update them at will. A study showed that 30% of Vista crashes where caused by drivers from Nvidia. Vista was notoriously poorly received for many complex reasons, it’s is just one problem area.

This is not to pick on Nvidia specifically, I use them as an example as this is a situation that is fairly well documented and many people use this driver.

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