This is a great idea. Adobe should leverage the power of the Free Software community to make Flash perform better on Linux, these improvements will surely be able to make Flash overall a better netizen plus an overall better performer – even on non-Free platforms like the iPhone, er iOS, thingy. I think Adobe would be wise to brag about this site a little bit and market their openness a bit more, it binds them more tightly to the community and positions them as an alternative to closed, proprietary pseudo standards like Silverlight.

Yay!

Now that American Industry has seen that other nations can catch up, many companies are trying to change the rules to keep their advantage. One way they do this is through trying to force the US Trade Representative to ban trade with other countries because they have no use for crappy software from Microsoft. Now, they don’t mind if the country doesn’t pay for the software as long as they use it because they know at some point these foreign governments and companies will get caught out and be forced to pay Microsoft for some license or other. What these trade organizations, like the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), do not want to see is a choice in the marketplace. Choosing something other than a product from one of these organizations threatens the high paid lawyers and ex-CEOs who can’t find work from earning a handsome living making fools of themselves in the press.

Recently the IIPA, whose members include the BSA, RIAA, and MPAA, (litigious hobgoblins all), issued a report trying to strong arm the USTR into banning countries that use “Open Source” software. The report is conveniently available in pdf (a proprietary format of course) on their web site. A quick gander at that didactic screed brings us some useful nuggets, also highlighted by the Gaurdian. Of course the Guardian, like any good news organization, got it’s news from a blogger, who deserves the real credit.

I point out the Guardian article because they have a useful quote from the report so you don’t have to go through the whole thing:

“The Indonesian government’s policy… simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market.

Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.

As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions.

There is a distinct and glaring lack in these paragraphs from the report. In fact I would say there is a complete absence of truth. Let’s help the author(s) with some corrections shall we?

The first paragraph goes off the rails early with the claim that recommending open source software weakens the software industry. Far from it – it strengthens the software industry, particularly the software industry in Indonesia. Because you are allowed to study and modify Free Software, you can learn about programming and become a better programmer. You can create innovative products and sell them. Perhaps even to the United States? It follows that the long-term competitiveness of the industry would be furthered by the use of Free Software in Indonesia, at least the Indonesian software industry. And call me crazy but I believe sovereign nations have a right to their own software industry.

What the heck is an artificial preference they refer to in the first paragraph? Is that the opposite of the “natural preference” of Microsoft software? Somebody better run and tell the busiest web sites in the world, along with two-thirds of the rest of the web, to stop using the apache web server – it just ain’t natural. They follow that odd statement up with claiming legitimate companies will lose access to the government market. Here is where the arrogance that borders on pathological rears its pointy head. Closing a market by allowing only proprietary software denies access and competition – in short free trade – not the other way around. Their statement is transparent falsehood so contrived you’d have to be dense as a lead cupcake not to see through it.

Now in the second paragraph we begin to see the real incompetence that American jurisprudence has so sweetly bestowed upon the world. Rather than say, research their topic, they inform us of what it isn’t, setting up a straw man cum sock puppet. Fortunately this straw puppet is highly flammable – let’s set it alight; Free Software is built upon copyright.

Boy that was easy. Easy because it is so damn simple. Free Software relies on copyright law for its existence. You assign a copyright when you write software, often that copyright goes to a company if you are working for them, but sometimes it goes to individuals and organizations. They can license their software as they see fit if they possess the copyright. Many companies see a strategic advantage in using Free Software licenses like the GPL because it allows them to re-use high-quality software from other large companies, like Intel, IBM, Red Hat, Sun, Oracle, (stop me if this is boring you) Novell, Nokia, Microsoft, oh yes – even Microsoft has released Free Software. Presumably because it allows them to make money. But I’m just guessing here.

Clearly the IIPA lawyers either do not understand the law or they lie to protect their business. Free Software is directly built upon copyright law and to say “it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights” is to babble illogically. How can copyrighted works undermine copyright? How can you claim that following law does not respect the law? You can’t of course, these are logical impossibilities. You would think it would also be a bit illogical to rail against “open source” software and then go ahead and run your web site on that self-same open source, but this is precisely what the IIPA does; their ranting nonsense web site is hosted on a Solaris machine. Did I mention they were incompetent?

Free Software is a material product which lends itself to capital markets. It is an efficient use of capital and brings with it huge return on investment. Companies large and small use Free Software daily to help them grow and prosper, that is a fact that IIPA fails to mention and one cannot help but wonder why.

Why would Intel and Nokia bundle up some of their most crucial “intelectual property” and give it away to the Linux Foundation? Why else would they let in fierce competitors? Why else would they let in applications and frameworks and not keep complete control? The reason is that these companies feel they can compete with their competitors on a level playing field and win. They may in fact be right.

There are some losers in the whole switch from Moblin and Maemo, specifically those who have a lot at stake with keeping things as they are. As someone who’s worked with Maemo technology, the move from a debian environment to a rpm environment is a big move. I’ve worked with rpm previously however and have been working with the Moblin toolchain for a couple months now so I don’t feel like the rug has been pulled out from under me. Community and governance issues will be big though – there is an established Maemo community that just does not exist in Moblin. Moblin is software mostly, designed to run on Intel’s Atom chipset, there are not many devices that have inspired a loyal following like the Maemo devices have. It remains to be seen if Intel, the Linux Foundation, and Nokia can handle this community transition. I suspect they are not so interested in the community per se, as long as they can attract developers who in turn attract hardware buyers.

I am impressed to see a lot of the Maemo community joining in MeeGo immediately, they have sort of swamped the MeeGo infrastructure, but what role the Maemo council and the Maemo paid staff, such as myself, will play is going to be interesting to see. I think our role will be greatly diminished because I think the focus of the MeeGo project is going to be much more technical. I think sites like talk.maemo.org will live on but separate from the more developer-centric MeeGo.

MADDE is designed to make cross compiling and generally building applications easier, and it appears to be doing just that. Installation went smoothly and the documentation is concise and clear. MADDE even provides a debian directory, which is my particular interest at the moment, so let’s take a closer look there to see how MADDE can help you build debs.

The first thing you notice when using MADDE is that when you create a project with it, it creates not just project files, but debian files for you as well. In that debian directory you’ll see a bunch of example files – things you can use if you are going to create a debian README file, man pages and the like. For Maemo, we don’t use man pages, so you can simply remove any file that ends in .ex that you don’t want or need.

There are of course a variety of details of packaging you can go into, but what is very interesting with MADDE is that the package building is included. This means that you can call ‘mad dpkg-buildpackage’ and MADDE knows what to do and goes ahead and does it. You don’t need to fiddle with your environment, unless of course you want to, MADDE saves you a great deal of time by including all the needed tools for packaging.

I will discuss the implications of MADDE and packaging further, and I also hope to dive into some of the source code. (Dear Nokia, please consider releasing your perl modules to CPAN.) But my first impression of MADDE is that it is a huge time saver, and a great maemo development environment – try it out!

The first: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Python is from the Ubuntu wiki which is a really good source for all things Ubuntu. The wiki entries tend to be clearly written and easy to read which is a blessing. This particular wiki entry takes one through packaging a python app from beginning to end in a straight forward manner – nothing really complex here. It should cover about 90% of the packaging requirements of python Maemo apps.

The second: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/336 is from the site Debian Administration which is a great site. The site has an active community and some experienced admins post there so you’ll definitely find advanced topics like chroots, MTA configuration, etc. The article I pointed out is a fairly thorough discussion on packaging with some theory at the beginning.

The downside of the first article is that it describes using CDBS which requires more editing of files and is not as widely used as debhelper. The second article is a little older and doesn’t take advantage of the changes to debhelper that have come along in later versions. But between them I am sure you’ll find something useful and they are a great way to get started.

The repo is not yet public. It is currently set up on the new hardware that Nokia has generously provided us. I am looking for brave testers and for packages that might be suitable to put in our community repo. The discussion that was held at the Maemo summit in Amsterdam spoke only about SSU updates and that is all I think is really appropriate at this time, regular packages should of course end up in the usual place: extras. This does not mean that we should limit ourselves to just SSUs, but let’s start there and see what else needs to be added.

I thought I would set up a thread on Talk -> Development where we can co-ordinate our work.

Hope to see you there!

This is a short article / post on installing Web::Simple on Debian’s testing version codenamed Squeeze.

Sometimes you may not need all the powerful tools that are bundled into Catalyst, the perl web framework. But you may want to use a module or two from the CPAN that you can be reasonably sure is tested and follows some best practices. Web::Simple might be that. It is written by notorious perl gadfly Matt Trout, and whatever one says about his profane grandeloquence, one must admit he writes valuable modules for perl. So let’s take it for a spin while noting that it is new so we oughtn’t complain too loudly if things break.

The first thing we need to do is to install Web::Simple and we’ll need to go to CPAN to get it since it is not packaged for debian. I just used cpan to install;

cpan -i Web::Simple

Now, lets test it out using the synopsis! One of the great advantages of perl is that there is often working code in the synopsis of a perl module on CPAN, I am just going to take the synopsis and put it into a file, chmod the file to 755, and run it. If I run it from the command line first, like this;

./web-simple

I get this message:

“No path passed – use ./web-simple / for root at
/usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1/Web/Simple/Application.pm line 249.”

So I re-run my program (web-simple) the way they recommend, with a “/” and viola, a 200 status message!

./web-simple /
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:41:57 GMT
Content-Length: 12
Content-Type: text/plain
Status: 200

Hello world!


Now this might not be useful enough to write a shopping cart, but it certainly is a handy module to sketch out ideas and make some prototypes without having to set up an entire Catalyst installation. Good stuff, thanks Matt!

Go directly to the post by Manoj to read more about this. He is going to continue work on the graphs but in the state they are in now they are pretty useful to describe what happens.

There is some data to go on, though a lot is anecdotal. Firstly, I think we have seen increased traffic on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net #maemo) with lots of new users of various backgrounds. That is an easy thing to do, to show up on IRC and ask some questions, but there are other signs of increased developer interest. Firstly, we are seeing lots of new apps come into garage, Maemo’s development platform. That is a positive thing. Not only new applications, but applications that have been around for a while are returning as well. People are fixing bugs, uploading new packages, and generally getting their software ready to put on the devices.

Another significant measure is the traffic on the developer’s list. Already through the first two weeks of September, there has been more email to the list than any other month this year except for May. In May we had 430 emails to the developer list for the entire month; sin September we have had 381 emails to the list and the month is only half over.

So taking these little data points into account, I am willing to predict the platform is going to be a big success, maybe bigger than we imagined.