Posts Tagged ‘community’

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A new "community centred" distribution

Monday, May 1st, 2006

So apparently Linspire have decided to increase their commitment to Open Source/Free Software by creating a community-driven distribution, FreeSpire.

Arse.

This is nothing but a thinly disguised attempt to get some positive press for their company and commercial product in order to increase their very small market share. In the past Linspire have taken much from the community and given nothing back – in fact they’ve done everything in their power to contribute as little as possible. Specifically:

  • They take Free Software and make it available through their Click’n'Run warehouse – which Linspire customers have to pay extra to access.
  • Even when they do release something as Free/open source (because they’re required to do so because they’ve used GPL‘d code) they make it unacceptably difficult for people to use the source they make available – e.g. sources which don’t compile, silly dependencies on things in Linspire so you can’t use it on other distros, etc. etc.
  • When they modify a piece of software they don’t send their changes to the original developer for inclusion like other distros do, they just chuck the source somewhere and forget about it.
  • Not only do they support and sell proprietary software with their distribution, but they develop and sell their own proprietary software!
  • They did release the source for their Click’n'Run warehouse client, but only because they know nobody else will want to use it.

So after all these years of exploiting the community for profit, they make a "community-driven distribution" and all is forgiven… No doubt they’ll appreciate any help they get from the community with FreeSpire – since it’ll be increasing the value of their commercial distribution – but I would hope that the community will do to Lin/FreeSpire what they’ve been doing to the community since the company was founded: ignore it.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with companies making money from Free Software (ala Novell, Red Hat, Sun, etc.) but when all they do is exploit it then pretend they’re community-driven, it annoys me. See also this article at Groklaw: Freespire: A Linux Distro For When You Couldn’t Care Less About Freedom. It’s also rather distrurbing to see people who should know better getting dragged into it…

So please, if you want a real community-driven distribution from a someone who is giving back to the community as much as they take (more in most cases) look at Debian, OpenSuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and any other distribution without a "spire" in the name.

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Posted in linux | No Comments »

Why I love Free Software

Sunday, June 5th, 2005

Those who read my blog regularly will remember that I recently acquired a Sun Ultra Enterprise 450 server. Now I was going to run Solaris 10 on it because of Linux’s lack of support for the machine’s environmental monitoring (envctrl) hardware which means that all the fans run all the time which is a real noise.

I decided that I couldn’t live with Solaris. As a Debian user, I was used to having a nice easy package management system which makes installing new software and upgrading as easy as a single command. Solaris sort-of has this, but there is a lack of packages which means it isn’t really adequate. I really, really don’t want to get into a state where I’m compiling and managing packages manually (I’ve done it before, I ain’t doing it again). There were some things I liked about Solaris – I was especially impressed with the ease of configuring software RAID using Solaris’ administration tool (I forget what it’s called), but at the end of the day I needed something I could manage easily and Solaris wasn’t it.

So now I had a dilemma. I couldn’t run Linux and I couldn’t run Solaris. Yes there are other Free operating systems which would run on the machine, but they don’t support the environmental monitoring features either. In desperation I sent a message to the sparclinux and debian-sparc lists asking if anyone would care to code the support into the 2.6 kernel in exchange for $100. After some discussion it became apparent that the problem was not a lack of motivation for someone to write the driver: a developer simply needed access to a machine or someone who would test patches. So I’m currently working with Eric Brower and testing the patches he is sending me at least once a day. He’s been working on it for the past week and at the moment we’re debugging the temperature readings. At the rate things are going I expect we’ll have fan control by the end of next week. There’s also someone donating a machine to be hosted by the Aurora Linux guys which Eric will hopefully be able to use for testing at some point.

That’s why I love Free Software. All I had to do was ask and someone has taken on the job of writing a not-unsubstantial driver for the Linux kernel.

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The maggot in the apple?

Monday, May 9th, 2005

OK, here’s where I have my annual rant. If you really intend to read it, find a comfortable chair and a cup of coffee.

I was reading through the LUGRadio forum today (this isn’t about this specific forum, I’m talking in general, I’m just using it as a typical example of a community forum), I read through a few of the threads at which point I developed a headache and stopped reading. So what caused my headache? The amount of brainless zealotry. Quite a few of the threads on there seem to be very similar: 1st person: “I like X”, 2nd person: “I like Y, anyone who likes X must be a moron”. And so on and so on. Of course there have always been debates in the community about which software is best (vi vs emacs for example) but its always been good-natured in the past, just a little friendly jibing. But more and more there are people who do little more than rant and rave about their views, completely dismissing (and often insulting) anyone who doesn’t agree with them. People create threads purely to start flamewars and anyone who tries to debate things rationally just gets insulted and flamed.

As an example, the LUGRadio guys talked about such people on their show (specifically about how certain members of the community have been making personal attacks against someone whose views didn’t agree with theirs). There was a thread created on the forum to discuss the topic and pretty soon there were people there who thought such behaviour was acceptable in the community and as a result the thread digressed into brainless insults, with anyone trying to make a reasonable comment simply being ignored or insulted.

The actual discussion on LUGRadio was about a woman called Laura DiDio who was involved in publishing a paper which slagged off Linux. OK, fine. My response to that would be to simply respond to the points she made in a constructive manner and prove through reasonable discussion that she’s wrong. However some people thought it was appropriate to make abusive phone calls and send abusive e-mails, not to the company she was working for who commissioned the paper, but to this woman specifically. How anyone can consider it appropriate to make such personal attacks, I cannot imagine. Such people do not belong in this community.

My very real concern in that one day someone will go too far. All it takes is for a free software zealot/extremist who also happens to be a gun nut to get annoyed with someone and there could be gravely serious consequences… not to mention the complete destruction of the community and the reputation of free and open source software that would result.

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The distribution that dares not speak its name

Monday, February 14th, 2005

It’s been in the IT news today that Red Hat have been enforcing their trademark policy, which basically translates to “You can only say ‘Red Hat’ when talking about official Red Hat products or the company”. This means that any distributions which are based upon Red Hat are not allowed to say so. Specifically, they are currently pestering Centos and demanding that they remove all references to Red Hat from their website.

Of course this is nothing new, which is why third-party CD distributions of Red Hat have always been known as ‘White Hat’ or something similar, but now Red Hat are just going over the top.

This policy is absolutely ridiculous and an excellent way for Red Hat to isolate themselves from the Free Software/Open Source community. Not to mention the fact that it almost certainly wouldn’t be enforcable in court, as it’s undeniably fair use of the trademark – but who’s going to go to the expense of finding out?

As a result I’ve had to go through a 60,000 word series of articles I’m writing to remove any references to Red Hat when talking about Red Hat-based distros, to ensure that the magazine and myself are protected from any silly litigation which could result (now where have we seen silly litigation before?).

Crazy.

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Posted in Law, linux | No Comments »

The community

Thursday, January 20th, 2005

I’ve been thinking recently about the community. That’s the Free and Open Source software community, of course.

Its really quite amazing when you step back and look in upon it. Our community is one containing people from every country of the world, including men and women of all ages, races, religions, etc. etc. Where else in society can you see an example of such a wide and diverse group of people all sharing the same beliefs and working together towards common goals?

I know people who have been amazed by the sense of community behind the free software movement and this has been their main reason for switching to free software. I really think LUGs and other Linux/FLOSS advocacy groups should push the community message as a reason for using free software, in addition to the usual technical & “Microsoft are evil” arguments.

This community is something amazing like the world has not seen before and I am proud to be an (albeit small) part of it.

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