Archive for February, 2006

FOSDEM 2006

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

So last weekend I went out to FOSDEM in Brussels. Unfortunately the experience was somewhat tainted by the fact that I woke up with a rather unpleasant cold on Friday, the day I flew out, which plagued me all weekend :-(
But I still managed to pick up my share of freebies and attend my share of talks, although I did miss out on much of the beer-drinking which makes FOSDEM what it is :-(

The first talk on the Saturday was Stallman’s keynote, talking about software patents. I have to admit to being in blissful ignorance of this, believing that (for now at least) they were off the agenda in Europe. However it seems that our governments are trying to bring them in through the back door. What they’re doing now is saying that the European Patent Office alone should be responsible for patents in Europe, instead of it being down to national patent offices. This seems like a sensible idea to me, and likely will to our MEPs as well, until you realise that the European Patent Office has been granting software patents for ages, against existing European law and the consensus formed by the dropping of the Patentability of Computer Implemented Inventions directive. At the moment the idea is in a consultation period, but if and when it comes before the European Parliament we should encourage our MEPs to reject it at the first reading.

He then talked about the upcoming GPL v3 (transcript). This eased most of my concerns about the new license, most of which I now realise were created by FUD spread by the uninformed. The main goals of v3 are to make the GPL more compatible with other licenses (this is done quite cleverly, by having pre-defined optional extra restrictions that can be added to the license) and ensure continued freedom. One of the requirements is that if GPL’d binaries are distributed in a signed form to work with hardware or software which will only accept binaries with a valid signature (this is a form of DRM), it doesn’t matter if you’ve got the source or not, since you can’t use your modified binaries. The license will require that in such circumstances and only in such circumstances, the private key required to sign a usable binary must be made available. This is especially important as we get more systems running embedded Linux and other GPL’d software and manufacturers who want to restrict users to using only official firmwares.
My new thoughts on the GPLv3 are that it is definitely a good thing for Free Software and I shall be licensing all my future software under it (my existing software already has the ‘and, at your option, any later version‘ clause, since I trust the FSF).

My favourite talk of the event this year was Mark Spencer’s talk on Asterisk. It’s great that we have a completely Free and feature-rich drop-in replacement for expensive PBXs. It can do voicemail, menu systems, conferencing and everything else you could possibly want. I really must get around to installing it and giving it a try, since I’ve been using VoIP for a while now. I also like the sound of Asterisk’s IAX protocol, since it can cut through NAT without any of the messing about required to make SIP work. The talk was followed by a tutorial on getting it installed and configured, which made it seem relatively straightforward to get a basic system going, which I was rather surprised by.
However talking with Mark at the airport on the way back, it seems that Asterisk only supports interface hardware manufactured by Digium, the company founded by…. Mark Spencer. As a result, OpenPBX was forked off from it. Maybe it should be OpenPBX I try then, rather than Asterisk.

I have to say that there weren’t really many talks which appealed to me on the Sunday. I did however go to the talk on Subversion. Basically the conclusions were that CVS sucks and Subversion rocks, so it’s time to convert my projects to it and begin using it to manage my website (it should stop me accidentally deleting something crucial, not that I’d ever be that stupid of course…).

There was also a talk on Beagle (the desktop search app) which confirmed what I already knew: Beagle is great. According to Jon Trowbridge ‘Search should be everywhere’, and so it should. I did play with Beagle before, but dumped it since it didn’t have a KMail backend (which it now does) and because it wasn’t available in my distro (and it has a load of dependencies). It’s now in the current version of my distro so I must give it another try.

I went to a few other things, but nothing particularly worthy of note. There were a few machines running to demonstrate Xgl. It’s all (pointless?) eye-candy: change virtual desktops and the whole screen rotates as if it was a cube with a desktop on each side; drag a window and the edges bend and curve; minimise/maximise a window and it bounces around… Pretty cool to look at, but not something I’d really benefit from having on my desktop.

I took some photos at the event which are now in my photo album. Unfortunately my camera is useless in anything less than perfect light, so many of the photos are pretty poor quality. As I wasn’t feeling great I also wasn’t very motivated to take photographs, so there aren’t very many or any from a decent angle (which would have required getting up…). I must take a decent camera next year.

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Posted in Law, Patents & Copyright, Programming, events, free software, internet, linux, politics | 1 Comment »

More on ID cards

Saturday, February 18th, 2006

I’d just like to share a few insightful quotes from my local MP, Geoffrey Cox. These are taken from his maiden speech in the Commons last year, which incidentially was short-listed for House Magazine’s Maiden Speech of the Year Award. Thanks must go to TheyWorkForYou.com for making the transcript available and easily accessible.

As I contemplated the real and genuine concerns of my constituents, I was struck by the fact that not a single letter of the between 100 and 200 letters I have received since having the honour of being elected has said that the answer to their problems lies in the introduction of identity cards.
…the state does not always behave well and we who represent our constituents’ interests should jealously guard their freedom and autonomy. It is only if a compelling case has been made for an invasion of that freedom that we should contemplate for a moment any surrender of any portion of it.
I agree with hon. Members on both sides of the House who have told us that there are practical arguments against the Bill. But even if those arguments were not so strong, I say that the arguments of principle are decisive and unanswerable.

And finally, the key question most of the people opposed to ID cards are asking, although perhaps not so elegantly:

Why should free citizens of this great country be subjected to the direction of the state merely in order to exist in our society?

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Posted in digital rights, politics | No Comments »

Democracy in action

Tuesday, February 14th, 2006

I was going to post about the smoking ban and ID card stuff going through parliament this week, but now I don’t have to. During my daily blog-reading I came across a post which describes my thoughts on these two things perfectly. So I figured "Why spend the time and effort writing my own entry, which I can just steal someone elses?". So here it is: my thoughts on the smoking ban and ID cards.

Two parliamentary votes in the last 24 hours: one good, one bad, I think.

Today, there was a vote in favour of effectively a total ban on smoking in all public places, like pubs, restaurants, offices etc. This is good. Smoking is evil as far as I’m concerned and pretty-much nothing anyone else can say will make me change my mind on that one. Being able to go out to a restaurant or a pub and come home not smelling of smoke will be very welcome.

Now, the ‘bad’. The saga over ID cards continues. MPs have voted to make the cards “not compulsory”. However, after $SOME_DATE, if you want a passport, you’ll need an ID card too, no opt-out. That’s obviously a rather warped definition of “not compulsory”.

For what it’s worth, as I’m sure many readers of this site are aware, it’s not the cards as such that is the problem. It’s the ID register (”the database”) that holds information related to the cards. Specifically, what’s going to be stored in it? And who will have access to see it? To modify it?

Furthermore, the government are partly trying to ’sell’ the idea of ID cards to the public based on the assurance that they will stop terrorism (unlikely, especially for anyone contemplating being a suicide bomber – all the 7 July 2005 bombers were UK citizens and, had ID cards been in use then, would all have had legitimate ID) and stop fraud. Stopping fraud: not sure about that: having a single card which is presented as the “gold standard” for personal identification strikes me as being more of a risk of identity theft than anything else.

Mutter, mutter….

This post is © sungate.co.uk 2006 and is licensed under the CC-by-nc-nd-2.0 license.

So there it is. Now I can get back to work…

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Posted in Law, Life, digital rights, politics | No Comments »

UltraSPARC T1 to be GPL’d?

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

It seems that Sun are looking at using the GPL for their soon-to-be-open-sourced UltraSPARC T1 processor. I figured I should write something more about the processor, since they added me to the blogroll on opensparc.net.

They’ve also started a public consultation on which license they should use. This is great, because I suspected that they’d just release it under the CDDL and leave the users to like it or lump it, like they did with OpenSolaris.

Sun summarise the reason for open sourcing the processor as the following:

The goal in simplest terms, given the fact that Niagara is a breakthrough technology, is to offer it to everyone (as it is a compelling invitation for people to adopt) so that it becomes the industry standard for 64-bit CMT.
New designs/chips/SOCs for new uses that can be brought quicker to market by leveraging something that works.

In English, that translates into:

We want everyone to be able to use it, in both free and proprietary systems. We want to beat Intel/AMD, but we know that SPARC as an architecture is declining (I’m guessing here, but it’s probably true) so we need another way to do it.

If they want it to be usable as part of non-free systems, they should be using the LGPL rather than the GPL. I think the LGPL is the right license because it: -

  • allows free, unrestricted distribution of the code
  • ensures modifications are made available (if the modified code is distributed)
  • allows use as part of non-free systems without requiring the rest of the system to be under the same license

The GPL would require the rest of any system the code is incorporated into to also be released under the GPL. This would either: increase the amount of free hardware out there OR stop people from using the processor, thus reducing the community around it and slowing down the development of it.

While I’m somewhat extremist when it comes to Free Software (insofar as I believe that the GPL is always the right license for software), hardware is a different matter. There are a number of important differences between hardware and software, the key ones being: -

  • Hardware modules are not dependent on each other – each module is essentially independent and doesn’t require anything external to do it’s job (accept inputs, do some form of processing, set outputs). Software is modular too, but most software modules are built to work with other modules.
  • Most hardware systems developed as code are developed in proprietary development environments (when I say proprietary in this case, I don’t just mean non-free – I mean you have to sign an NDA just to use them). This could cause all sorts of legal issues relating to the publication of the finished system (under any license).
  • Most hardware is distributed on custom ICs – if your hardware has a bug, you can’t just get the source, recompile and off you go. You need the right software and hardware to be able to do anything. This doesn’t necessarily mean that access to source code isn’t as important for hardware as it is for software, but it’s worth considering.
  • In Europe, software can’t be patented (in theory at least), but hardware can.

Given these differences, perhaps no existing license is right for hardware – maybe we need the GNU Hardware Public License to address the unique issues associated with it.

For example, does having multiple modules on the same chip mean that they’re a single work even if they’re completely unrelated and don’t talk to each other? If two modules on a chip do talk to each other, are they classed as a single work or as two seperate works? What constitutes source code – the original source in the hardware description language, the compiled form ready to be burnt to a chip or a diagram of the individual gates on the chip? As far as existing licenses are concerned, all could be classed as source code yet they’re very different things. Let’s not forget patent issues as well – in Europe software is not patentable, so the original source code for hardware cannot be covered by patents. However there is nothing to stop you from patenting hardware – what happens if there’s a patent which only applies to the finished hardware? For example, by using and distributing source code you don’t violate the patent, but as soon as you burn it to a chip, you do (e.g. the patent is for ‘A piece of hardware which does X’). These issues mean that should existing licenses be used for hardware source code, the freedoms we though the license was guaranteeing are no longer guaranteed.

To summarise, I believe that of the existing licenses, source code for hardware should be licensed under the LGPL. But what we really need is a GPL-like license specifically for hardware, because it is my belief that existing software licenses are not sufficient. I don’t have all (or even many) of the answers, but what I do know is that open hardware, like open software, is the future and we should be working to encourage its development and use.

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Posted in Programming, Technology, free software | No Comments »