Patents on …..gas pedals and software; posting from Google Docs

OK, this is the first time I try to publish directly from Google Docs.

This is interesting, because it seems that most of my online work is being moved to Google. Which is both good and scares me a little.

Good is being that me, as a sorta advanced user, moving to Google means that they have pretty good products. Search, mail (and especially spam filtering), Blogger (beta), RSS reader, analytics and now docs are all Google products which I now seem to use more. I do think they are good products for the type of usage I use them for, and they are good in more generic sense.

But what scares me in all this, is the thing that all my actions on the net, or at least many of them, go through one same central place, which is being Google, which in reality gives them all the info about my habits online, and also a lot of information about me as person. That, in fact, scares the hell out of me – if Google becomes evil one day, they could hurt many people as me. And what if they require a payment for all these? I don’t believe this will happen, but it might.

Now, to the matters. I’ve found interesting article, about some obscure patent, given for ….”gas pedals, the kind that make trucks go when drivers step on them…”.
Apparently, the outcome of the trial may serve as a precedent for other patent issues, so many companies, including Microsoft and Johnson&Johnson, tried to override the courts’ decision.

But, what’s to gas pedals and software licenses?

Quote: “Alliteration aside, we’ll defer that question to somebody with a law degree or at least a working knowledge of patent law. But, it’ll be worth following how the Supreme Court treats this case given that Microsoft is playing both sides of the fence here — dangling the patent sword above the head of Linux while at the same time politely asking the Supreme Court to make it harder for patent squatters to hit tech companies.”

Link to full article is here .

Feedback is appreciated.

Novell vs. Microsoft, Gnome 1.x removal, cokehabit and stuff, 14-21 Nov 2006

Well, the day for weekly stuff.

There are few things are going on. Some of them Gentoo, some are not, so lets get started:

1. I would start with Novell-Microsoft deal. Albeit not news anymore, this one caused a lot of stirring in FOSS community. If you have missed the deal, then in a nutshell: Novell will pay ~40M $ to Microsoft, and Microsoft will pay something to Novell. What is it for we do not know, but it will allow Novell to claim idemnification for its clients from MS, and also MS already started telling that Novell pays for Microsofts’ intellectual property used in Novell Linux products.

While intriguing where will this thing go, I really don’t think its a good idea for any linux distro to pay for “intellectual property” which is possibly used in Linux based OS. And I agree on this with Red Hat’s people, saying to Steve Ballmer, “show us the violating code, and it will be removed”.
That’s why, by the way, Jonathan Schwartz said all those things about OS importance. He just reacted to this deal….

2. Gnome 1.x removal caused more hateful fan-mails than even xmms procedure. Which is strange, especially because of xmms removal issue. I noticed plans to remove Gnome 1.x and friends couple of weeks before, and all that despite the fact that I occasionally visit forums. I mean, that somehow information did came to me, so I don’t understand how people pissed by xmms removal do not pay attention to what is happening, and then complain again about Gnome. Thats childish and unfair, BUT I do understand their behavior.
   Besides giving notification, or in addition, some other kind of warning/notification system may need to be developed to announce such things. But people should also cool their spirits and try and understand both sides – understand developers why do they decide to retire packages (trust me, its not to screw you for fun), and understand users that do not enjoy dealing with removal problems.
3. Finally!! User representatives meeting had place last weekend, and it was very cool to catch up will all of them missing in action (yes, there was some timeout as it seemed). Loki99 suggested to have a long meeting in 3-days span, which came out really great. Some of the things that were discussed were CMS system for gentoo-userreps.org (which is not very operational at the moment), and also my ideas about userdays and video docs.
   I really like hanging around those guys, they are very cool. And I have an opportunity to learn a lot there.
4. cokehabit was demoted as userrep. I can’t (and won’t) get into the details why did it happened, enough emotions get around this one as it is. I hope that userrep project will still do great and that users and developers will benefit from it.

Thats all for now, more will be here as it comes 🙂

Feedback is always appreciated

Gentoo week and other stuff

Man, it have been a boring week. Besides a Bugday which took place last Saturday (and still have to check out the results of that), there’s almost nothing.

The only thing thing that I’ve noticed on forums is kinda twofold: one user considered moving from Gentoo to Ubuntu, and wanted convincing to stay, and other wanted to try Gentoo while he’s using Ubuntu and wanted points to help him out.

This actually caused me thinking. The question here, of course, is more general, and I would say it like this:

• How does one picks the most appropriate distro for himself/herself and what can we do to make that Gentoo?

Now, this issue is not so simple. While I could understand ones’ choice of Linux over Windows or MacOS (and don’t start with me on GNU, its semantics for me). But how would one choose a distribution?

On one of the forum threads, someone said “when you choose a distribution, you are choosing the way of thinking, the philosophy and an approach”. This is the most accurate characterization I heard about “what I get if I choose {your favorite distro here}?”.

So, in a nutshell, one chooses a distro by a most suitable way of doing things on a computer, not according to applications list. I don’t care for how long my computer boot, because I have uptime of months, and I reboot it once in a long while. So will it take 20 seconds or a minute, doesn’t matter to me.

But if I create a Media Center, I would like it to turn on instantly, and I do turn it off all the time. See, the purpose is an important thing, but the way of doing it is much more important.

Does my mom care what OS her TV runs (or if at all)? Does my dad care for his cell phone OS? Of course not. They want a predefined set of tasks, but these tasks should perform flawlessly.

If I want distribution, with predefined set of tasks, I want them be performed flawlessly. In the end, in screenshots you’ll see a standard X with standard window manager with custom theme and icons. How does this provide a mindset of a distro? How would I know whether we’re good for each other?

I see many users complain that Gentoo is not Fedora, Ubuntu or Suse. I suppose that after a move to these distros they complain how Fedora, Ubuntu or Suse is not Gentoo. We like to complain.

My friend started his second grad year, started using Red Hat in uni, because thats what they have. According his main complains, its like he’s complaining that Linux is not Windows (he doesn’t say that directly, he says something like “why don’t I have {…} in Linux as I did in Windows. It was so simple!!”).

So, why would a person leave Gentoo for other distro or other distro for Gentoo? 2 reasons:

• He/she did something (or, although more rarely, something internal happened in distro structure) which broke his system and he/she either couldn’t recover it or it took a lot of effort; and
• The perceived mindset of other distro (or Gentoo) seems to be more suitable to this users’ mindset at the moment, so user believes that other distro is “better” because it would allow to do things the way he/she can’t at the moment with the distro he/she uses.

So can we do anything withing Gentoo to help that? Meaning, keeping more existing users and luring more of a new ones?

I believe so. There are many things that can be done, but the main thing I believe would be creating an easy ways around Gentoo. These would include, some but not limited to:

• Easier processes for installing and maintaining. (we’re close but it’s not perfect)
• Better documentation (either more fun, interactive and comprehensive)
• Better change notification
• Better feedback and support.
• Better accessibility of developers to users and better interaction within community.

I can’t say how exactly to do these, I’m trying to figure things each at a time. But as a part of user-user community relations, and part of users-developers relations, all ideas that are out there should be checked (and that’s partially what userreps are there for), and in the end I believe we would have the best distro.

The best for out mindset that is.

Feel free to throw more ideas for making it better.

My week with Gentoo and other stuff

Well, it’s kinda a day for my weekly stuff.

In fact, I haven’t see much of going on with Gentoo, this week was pretty calm. So few things then:

Non gentoo:

1. I’m twice an uncle now. My sis gave birth to another baby boy last friday, exactly one year after a previous one. So its kinda funny thing in a family now, we still laughing. But it is weird though.
2. Yet another “Is Linux ready for the desktop” type of article. I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of those. To the date, I think linux is just another OS, which gives you the choice. Because of the kind of a user I am, I do think Linux is better than anything else, because almost everything I do with computers, is either multiplatform (Java-Mono-.Net-Flash, and please don’t flame on this – they all the same to me), webbased (gmail) or Linux/Unix oriented (shells, cli’s of sorts, etc). Linux is great platform for that.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that Windows is bad, but for the god’s sake, why would maximizing Outlook from system tray to a full or opening a “new mail” window takes 15-20 seconds on pretty idle system?

3. I’ve read an article about OLPC project efforts, and man, I want to work for something like that.

Isn’t it great project? I’d quit my current job in an instant if job like that would come up. It’s not the money thing, its pure interest and excitement drive – I like challenges and, more important, seeing the result almost immediately of what you did. I already have ideas for what can be done with this kind of laptops, and it doesn’t even exist yet!! That alone should show how bored I am at my current job.

Gentoo-related:

1. Userreps are little slow lately because they are busy, but don’t let it stop you. If you have anything interesting or important to say, suggest or ask, do it on User Representatives Subforum or drop by #gentoo-userreps channel on FreeNode irc network.
2. Last council meeting logs were published. One thing I noticed, is that Bryan (kloeri) will review Devrel etiquette guide, because the current one has some ambiguities. I did suggest few things for that and it would make me really happy if some of my suggestions would find a way in final document. That would be great.
3. XMMS voes (part 4) – “it ain’t over until I say its over”? This subject seem to affect so many people, that many cannot leave it in peace. So, in an effort to help all of those, User Representative kopp (and developers nattfodd, amne, metalgod, nixnut, and if I forgot someone – correct me) has prepared an explanatory article about an issue. Use it to solve your problems and I hope it will be the end of it.
4. “Automatic Tools” department (if I’m starting to resemble John. C. Dvorak here – sorry) – this time its about automatic deletion of an old packages (or rather, their distfiles).
   My stake on this, is that yes, there are unneeded files on you system that take considerable amount of space, and I understand that some people never heard of eclean. But this cannot be the reason to create automatic tools to do so either. As some haven’t heard of eclean, what makes one think that people will know about settings in /etc/make.conf for distcleaning? Isn’t this the same concept? Besides, you obviously can’t delete the files automatically, so you’d default to option in /etc/make.conf, which will not even be set in that file, but in some else, probably in profile/ somewhere. How is that different from eclean? It just means integrating eclean into Portage, not as stand alone package.And if eclean is not good enough, maybe it should be enhanced.

I just don’t understand why every time the existing tool doesn’t do exactly what one needs, the suggestion for “automatic tools” appear. IMHO, its not always the best way.

Well, thats it for this week. Feedbacks are appreciated (I am usually having them for lunch) and if I missed something (or forgot to mention someone I should’ve) just let me know and this unfortunate mistake will (supposedly) be corrected.

Just a short note about GWN

OK, so now as we all just love going over and over recent retirements, something else I’ve noticed:

Only 3 people were mentioned as retired developers on the latest GWN issue.

If there’s a policy to “clean” a workpool from nonactive developers, why keep it secret? Is there an official community resourse announcing retired developers other than GWN?

On the other hand, I noticed how successful (IMHO of course) Planet Larry became. Maybe its time to add to GWN another section, such as “Seen on Planet Larry” (as addition to “seen in the community”)?

Wouldn’t you agree?

Policy update suggestion

OK, after writing an apparently controversial essay yesterday, I got some responses. For some unknown reason, most of them were regarding Patrick‘s retirement.

Although he was given as example, for some reasons this draws too much attention. I don’t think it should.

So I had some thinking, and decided that much of the discussion is about performing as developer. Being “inactive” is some kind of definition, which is set in peoples’ minds, and which is hard to argue with.

As I’m trying to be helpful (I hope), I would suggest a policy update, so future cases would be much easier for developers and Dev Rel project to deal with.

An existing policy for the matter is here:

1. Developers Handbook, Part I, Ch. 3: What you get
2. Developers Handbook, Part III : Policies
3. Developer Relations Policy guide

All these are nice and good, but I can’t find anywhere anything regarding developers tasks. What a developer should do?

So I’d propose the following policy update:

Issue a “Being a Gentoo developer” statement/policy/contract/document, you name it.

Have it structured for example, in following form:

Part I.
As a developer, you are expected to :

1. Make ebuilds and commit them to a tree….
2. Fix bugs…
3. Be a part of one of the following projects and act according their policy:……..
4. ……..

Part II.
In order to perform tasks defined by part I, you will be granted:

1. With Gentoo email account
2. With IRC cloak as a developer and some admin (op) privileges
3. With Forums cloak as a developer
4. Bugzilla high-level access
5. CVS commit privileges
6. Maillists
7. Shell access
8. …….

Part III
Being a developer means representing Gentoo. As such, you’re expected to behave according to the following rules:

{ This is greatly explained in etiquette policy }

Part IV
We support developers having a life besides Gentoo. So, in cases when life becomes more important, and you cannot fulfill your tasks as a developer, following actions should be taken:

{ this is greatly described in “leaves of absense” policy }

Part V
If you do not perform you tasks, abuse resources given to you or not behave as described in etiquette policy, this contract will be considered “breached”, and the following procedure will follow:

1. You will be notified about you suspected being in a “breach” of this contract, and asked either to sease incorrect behavior or perform your tasks as required.
2. You will be provided with “probation” time to see whether a change happens after notification.
3. If after this period a situation is still the same, a board of chosen developers will vote for you retirement as developer.
4. Some or all granted resources will be taken from you as a result of retirement.
5. You will not represent Gentoo officially from that point on.
6. Your return to Gentoo in any way will be a subject to a decision by a board of chosen developers.

I think that such a policy statement will define much better what being developer for Gentoo actually means and will make it easier to solve possible conflicts when something is not going right (purely subjective of course).

I don’t want to say that this will solve all problems, but I hope it can help to resolve some and prevent others in the furture.

I would be glad for a feedback on this.