random neuron misfires

I see lilo is up to his “banging-the-tin-cup” again in his latest antics on OPN. Let’s review some history of when I caught him doing this well over a year ago:

**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Sun Apr 15 16:02:17 2001
16:04:30 <lilo> listen, I am not paid to talk to perennially angry 
   people
16:04:39 <lilo> such I judge you to be at present 
16:04:55 <setuid> Are you saying you draw a salary based on 
   donations from the community?
[...]

dopey…and let’s not forget that OPN is a private network, not a public one.

**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Sun Apr 15 16:02:17 2001
16:07:10 <lilo> please see paragraph 2 of the motd 
16:07:19 <setuid> I've seen it, which you are legally violating.
16:07:23 <setuid> Which has also been noted. 
16:07:28 <setuid> Next? 
16:07:28 <lilo> this is a private network
16:07:37 <lilo> your access may be revoked at any time
16:07:40 <lilo> that part
16:07:44 <setuid> That's fine with me.
[...]
16:08:33 -lilo- lilo is ignoring you

What’s funny about this particular interchange (one of dozens lilo and I have had) is that I was g-lined from OPN for putting lilo on /ignore awhile ago, but he sees fit to put me on ignore.

Sorry, OPN is not “open”, nor friendly, nor does it in any way contribute to the furthering of any community spirit. When it ceased to be Linpeople, it become another entity entirely. Looking at all the suspicious things going on behind the scenes at OPN, I’m definitely directing people away from it. There are dozens of other freely available irc networks that cater to specific tastes, including my own server, that don’t force this level of “management” down on it’s userbase.

lilo, really. I’ve personally been out of work for over six months, and I’m not begging for money from anyone. I could always break down and work at McDonalds or as a school janitor, or mowing lawns. Drop the ego, and do what you must to support your family. This is getting ridiculous.

You don’t “deserve” a salary for setting up OPN, just as I don’t “deserve” one for all the unselfish giving I do for the community, in mailing lists, CVS hosting, gratis web development, IRC servers, and so on. I do it because it needs to get done, and it benefits the community as a whole. You also don’t have to personally micro-manage the network. An irc network, properly configured, runs itself. Delegate out the responsibilities, if you must. Let it be what it needs to be.

Enough already.

GPL violators have tripled..

Bluefish, MercuryGuide, TechXNY

It also appears that MercuryGuide is now also using our application (Plucker) in “their” version (MovieMobile) without providing source, and they neglected to change our CreatorID, so installing their application clobbers ours. Deleting it deletes ours. It also validates the previous assertion that MercuryGuide was
delivered the parser components by Bluefish, and that they have the source code.

TechXNY is the third one. They are also redistributing a “modified” Plucker application, stamped with Bluefish’s name, without providing source, without retaining the original copyright that we provided in the package.

This is going to get ugly. Is there a Slashdot editor in the house? Please contact me directly. I may need a favor from you.

For those following the saga: [1] [2] [3] [4]

The Bluefish Wireless vs. the GPL (and Lanham Act) Violation Case is proceeding very nicely.

Our FSF-appointed attorney sent the initial letter to Bluefish Wireless today for their GPL violation of Plucker. She also is going to be pursuing them on violation(s) of the Lanham Act.

This is good news. The letter was emailed to James Fisher, CEO of Bluefish Wireless and sent via Federal Express

They have ten (10) days to respond.

So much going on lately. Need to find work, doing tons of code, more cross-country server relocations, fraudulent moving companies, and much more.

Update: Microsoft Security

raph, I share the exact opposite view that you do, and I think that this could definately be a bad thing. I posted a quick comment on it a few days ago under that same Slashdot story you referenced in your recent diary entry.

Open Directory Project

softkid, your Open Directory Project seems mighty similar to the DMOZ Open Directory Project. Why not just join them as an editor. They have quite a big jump on you already. I have one of my own for Palm-related content (ala AvantGo), but the code driving it is not complete yet.

More GPL Violations

A company based in San Francisco called Bluefish, has taken Plucker source code in full, and used it to create a product they sell (quite expensively). This isn’t bad, but “their” application states clearly in the About box, that it is “Free Software” and covered under the GPL (as does the About box found in Plucker).

They have removed all attributions and references to the original authors of the source code they are using, and replaced them with their own, which is very misleading. They have also taken custom artwork without permission, and used it on their application.

Here’s a quick screenshot comparison Bluefish versus Plucker:

• [main screen] from Bluefish’s application (note the graphics on the toolbar)
• [main screen] from Plucker, note the graphics again
• [preferences screen] from Bluefish’s application
• [preferences screen] from Plucker
• [About screen] from Bluefish’s application
• [About screen] from Plucker

I called the CEO, James Fisher at the San Francisco office and politely made a verbal request for the source code to the application they provide in binary-only format on the Mercury
News website.

He politely told me no.

I then said asked if he was aware that the application that they based their product on was covered under the GPL, and by not providing sources which created that binary that was already made available for download, he was in violation of the GPL, as detailed in Section 6, 7, and 10 (along with others) of the GNU General Public License, a license which Plucker is clearly covered under.

The GPL FAQ also has two related questions on it:

(one) “I want to distribute an extended version of a GPL-covered program in binary form. Is it enough to distribute the source for the original version?”

(two) “I want to distribute binaries, but distributing complete source is inconvenient. How about if I give users the diffs from the current FSF version along with the binaries, and suggest they get the base source from the FSF?”

He then said that he was not in violation, and suggested that I should “..go re-read the GPL, because we are not violating it..“.

I asked for his email address, so I could quote him the relevant sections of the GPL he was violating. I also mentioned that I was going to put a call into the FSF to get their clarification on the issue.

Then he begins to tell me that he “might” release the sources, but that they were busy “debugging” them right now, and might release them when they was done. (The key word used there was “might”, not “will”)

Sorry, no. If you release a binary which was based on GPL sources, you are required to release the full sourcecode, scripts, and other tools which created that binary (which were covered under the GPL), at the same time, not months or years later. Section 3 of the GPL is very clear on this.

His assertion that they were “debugging” the application is invalid, as “debugged” sources will produce a different binary (whose source must also be made available upon request).

If you can put the binary up for download, you can put the source code up for download as well (though this is not required, it can be mailed or linked elsewhere). The stipulation though is that you can not impose more restrictions on the code, obtaining it, or its use, than you received when you agreed to the license by using it (Section 6. of the GPL).

I have written a draft letter (currently un-sent at the time of this diary entry) which I will be sending to James Fisher as well as copying in the relevant FSF parties. I have taken pains to make sure that this letter appears non-threatening, and that the proper “legal” language was used throughout. I welcome any comments on it before I send it (and after sending it, it might disappear from that URL)

Update:

Someone recently brought up that they also have a name and logo which is suspisciously similar to the Bluefish HTML Editor. I took a quick comparison screenshot to show the similarities. Flip one fish horizontally and they are nearly identical. Who has the trademark first on this one?

I’m only concerned about the clear violation of the GPL stated above though, but this graphical logo similarity is interesting.

Is it just me, or is this happening more and more lately. Companies seem to treat Open Source and Free Software as some sort of “bake sale” of free code thew can just take and use however they wish, without abiding by the license, giving proper credit and attribution, or adhering to the terms of the code they’ve been using.

“Oh this code we downloaded to make our commercial product had some sort of GPL thing at the top of every file. We don’t use that GPL thing, so we just removed that stuff and the names of those guys who wrote it. It’s our code now.”

pilot-link Needs Testers!

We’re about to release the first preview release of pilot-link which includes some very neat new features — USB support and a very detailed DEBUG and logging facility (thanks to jpr). I’ve also cleaned up the sources in general, making them more readable, compressing the cruft, and converted it all over to Automake and fully using getopt().

There’s still some lingering issues with Win32 and OS/2 support, and requests for testers and porters have been made, but there has been no response yet.

Moving Eastward

The move back east is going slowly, much slower than I want. I do not want to have to pay another $2,000/USD for rent in February, especially while unemployed. I have Palmsource in San Jose to attend in a few weeks ($1,200/USD registration fee), and the cross-country relocation. Ick.

So much to do…

slef: Don’t feel so bad. I nurtured that network long before it was usurped by lilo. Back when it was still called “Linpeople” (faces of the original crew) many years ago. I moved #palmchat from Dalnet to OPN (and lilo decided to bend under the whining pressure of the founder of the Dalnet channel and removed my founder status and gave it to the other person).

I moved #ipaq and #handhelds.org over to OPN from gimp.org (well, it was a collective decision, I jumped and founded them to secure the channels, and then handed the foundership over to a7r and nikos).

What did I get for my troubles? lilo decided to g-line me from the entire network (there was also a situation where I was banned from #linpeople there, because I was in a heated discussion involving Windows vs. Linux with another person there. It was “decided” to ban me, because out of the two arguing parties, one of them had lilo on /ignore (me), so I was banned).

Too bad I’ve been there long enough I have enough ways in and out without having to make myself visible. Some day I’ll post the logs of his little private conversations with me that led up to the g-line. Maybe some day that network will grow up, but right now, it’s all posturing and positioning with ignorant non-community people in control.

As you said, there are dozens of other networks to participate in, and they’ve been around longer, are more stable, and much more friendly. I’m doing what I can to nurture those networks now. I’ve outgrown the small, constrictive box called OpenProjects. Other networks are benefiting from my skills and input now, there’s no need to go back to kindergarten.

VICTORY!

I have now tamed the 8-headed hydra of a beast which calls itself cross-gcc. After beating my head against the wall tracking down bugs deep into the guts and bowels of gcc and glibc, I figured it all out.

In the spirit of open source (“Release Early, Release Often”), I’ve whipped up a single-pass-build-script to make this all incredibly easy for anyone else to take advantage of.

Seems that every VA box I’m aware of (and many Andover boxes also) is/are down, except SourceForge. I would have personally preferred the opposite, but hey, that’s just my opinion (these include themes.org, linux.com, slashdot.org, newsforge.net, linuxgram.com, andover.net, OSDN.com and others).
Some people believe it has to do with VA’s recent financial troubles.

Personally, I don’t get into the politics of any of this, but here’s the official Quit Slashdot.org Today page for those who want a laugh.

I just tried to do a whois on each of these servers and noticed some interesting things:

# date
Sun Jun 24 05:41:54 EDT 2001

# whois slashdot.org
[whois.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.3
SLASHDOT.ORG.SUCKS.COMPARED.TO.JIMPHILLIPS.ORG
SLASHDOT.ORG

# whois linux.com
[whois.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.3
LINUX.COM.NEEDS.TO.RUN.FREEBSD.LIKE.HCCTRC.COM
LINUX.COM.IS.KINDA.COOL.BUT.RUN.FREEBSD.LIKE.JIMPHILLIPS.ORG
LINUX.COM.ALONETRIO.WAS.HERE.WITH.ALTAVISTWAP.COM
LINUX.COM

My current bet’s on more hacking going on. Nobody asked me to investigate this one though.

I ordered DSL finally, and will end up paying way too much for it. $99.00/month for 144k/144k of IDSL, not even real DSL. It’s all there is here, but that beats the 14.4k dialup performance I’ve been getting lately.

URGENT

1. 1. I need to find someone in the Bay Area with a decent solid network connection to allow me to colocate a box on their segment for a few weeks until I can find another colocation provider out here. Mine just folded and is giving me until the second week of July to get my box out and all DNS records routed off (about 20 domains). Does anyone want to earn an extra $100/month or so to let a box sit under a table on

1. 1. their LAN segment for a few weeks? The box supports open source project development and some other domains, nothing heavy-hit at all, nothing illegal, just web, mysql, cvs, ssh.

HELP!

“..there’s still more left to this weekend, isn’t there?…”

kgb, that new Sony would be nice and all, if they weren’t in violation of the GPL..

That device, and others like it from them, will NOT be supported under Linux, not by me (in pilot-link, plucker, or any other application I happen to code or help in the development of) not by my colleagues, not by anyone in the open source community who is aware of what they’re doing with their “Go ahead, try to sue us..” attitude.

I dearly regret spending the $499.00/USD on my Clie.

My full account with one of their employees is here

FWIW.

Hey look! I was in USA Today! Note to self: Never talk to anyone at PalmSource. He never presented himself as a reporter when he was at the booth talking small-talk to me.

dhd: I feel your pain wrt telecommunications companies. I can make long-distance calls, but not local calls, because my “local long distance” charges exceeded 75% of some threshold I was never told about. Even to this day, they can’t tell me what that threshold is.

ianmacd: I think something “odd” has happened to my access at the Palm Pavilion. I now no longer have access to anything with my login that I can’t get publicly through the normal seeding pages. It would appear as though I now have less access than before. johnm Did I piss someone off?

jpr: I saw your abstract. If I can finagle it from work, I’ll try to make it to OLS to catch your talk. I promise I won’t heckle like I did over there. I have way too much on my plate right now, so I don’t think I’ll be submitting any papers this year for that.

New Years

Boring.

I coded my butt off.

The results of the new Plucker Portal will be live soon. The Perl major hurdles are done. I might start playing with Text::Template soon too. Looks promising. I hope they’re not just shrouding eval in a module though.

Some of my slurped ViewCVS redirection:

  my $redirect = substr $path, 5; # drop "/cvs/";
  my $cvs_info;
  my $loop = 5; # nuke the redirect loop

do {
 local $ENV{SCRIPT_NAME} = "$script/cvs"; 
 local $ENV{PATH_INFO} = $redirect || '/';
 $cvs_info = $CVS_PATH 2>/dev/null;
 ($redirect) = $cvs_info =~ m{  
    ^Status:s+301s+Moved

    Location:s+Q$ENV{SCRIPT_NAME}E/(.*)
    }x;
 } while (defined $redirect and $loop--);

  for ($cvs_info) {
 if (m#^Content-Type: text/plain#) {
    $_ = (split / /, $_, 2)[1];
    s/&/&/g;
    s/</</g;
    s/>/>/g;


 $_ = "<pre>$_</pre>";
 } else {
    s#.*<body[^>]*>##is;
    s#</body>.*##is;
    s#"$script/cvs/~checkout~/#"$CVS_URL/~checkout~/#g;
 } 
 }
 print $cvs_info;

Airlines

Looks like these are my plans for January:

• 1-13-2001 to 1-22-2001: Fly from SF to Colorado for vacation with Erika
• 1-22-2001 to 1-29-2001: Fly from Colorado back to SF for training at Linuxcare SF facility
• 1-29-2001 to 2-3-2001: Fly from SF to New York for Linuxworld Expo

“How Do You Eat An Elephant?”

Somewhere in here, I have to find time to get the BBC cvs up and working for public development, prepare my slides for LWE, release pilot-link 0.9.5, get my Sony Clie kernel module finished, complete two lingering HOWTOs (perhaps I can do these on the airplanes?), shim in JogDial and MemoryStick support into Plucker, and lots more.

And that work thing. Lots of projects there too. Have to get the final report out for $PROJECT[1], the $PROJECT[2] serial alarm daemon, and $PROJECT[3] for the Wine stuff. Can’t say any more at this point.

Dysfunctional Family Life

I managed to find my dad on the net.

That’s oddly surreal. He left me when I was 3 years old. I wonder if he even knows I exist. Or does he even care. I was talking to a guy in #perl on irc, and he said my last name seemed familiar, and that his stepfather’s last name was the same as mine. After some digging, I realized that this guy’s stepfather was my father’s brother. Weeeeeird.

I have a brother and a mother somewhere too. I wonder where they are.

Pilot Goo

If anyone has any ideas for conduits for pilot-link or gnome-pilot, let me know. I’ve posted my wish list here. Consider it an ad-hoc TODO list.

3:23 am, PST (or “Sleep is for Mortals”)

• I had this book awhile back called Wide Awake At 3 AM” by Richard Coleman, and it was about using a revolving wake period (add an hour each day, go to sleep an hour later) to increase the amount of time you stay awake. Supposed to be a behavior mod to enhance productivity. Most people aren’t wealthy enough to be able to do that, and maintain a job.

  But what if you don’t sleep AT ALL? I hate what that car accident in 1992 has done to me, and at the same time, it’s the best thing it could have ever done to me.

  Since I only put in less than 5 full hours of rest per week (I’m completely unable to achieve REM at all, lilo believes this is the result of my TBI in 1992, and resulted in what he believes is an undiagnosed overactive reticulum), as long as I stay away from boredom, and keep myself fed, I’m doing good. Very particular splits of mental and physical rest are all I need.

  Found some interesting information here on this whole sleep disorder thing related to TBI.

  “Boredom is the hardest task to concentrate on”

Internet 6.0

• I was working on a new site design today, which actually came out REALLY well. I’m pretty impressed with the result. More on this later, but I found a neat tool while asking the guys in #perl too many convoluted perl questions. In the middle of this madness, I found Bluefish, vi, GyrosCoPe (yes, it’s really spelled that way), and an assortment of browsers, and you can pretty much do anything. Table wizards are a great help.

  “AOL now ships the Internet on CDROM. It’s called Internet version 6.0”

In the Palm® of my…

• pilot-link.0.9.5 errata went out on Sunday. I hope to get enough feedback to get this rolled out within the next week or two. I would have loved to have cut a release by Christmas, but that wasn’t in the cards.

Christmas Passed

• Another Christmas has come and gone. I hope everyone that celebrated some sort of holiday this season got what they wanted. Joy or toys. I should hit the mall one of these days and go shopping for some new toys to outfit myself with.

  I spent the long weekend coding. And coding. And coding. And… ah, enough of that.

8am-8pm

• Work is going to be fun these next two months. Whee. Much to do with the BBC, some non-public internal projects, OLS, Linuxworld in New York, and lots more writing and coding.

RSI

• schoen, I think I can sympathize with you now. My arms have been cramping up a lot lately. No pain associated, but my fingers seem to hit the wrong keys now as I type. It’s that same feeling you get when you’ve been out in the snow without gloves for too long. Stiff. I hope I don’t go into some sort of RSI injury session. Without use of these hands, I am pretty much rendered useless.

Thinner

• I’m done with this severe diet modification. I looked in the mirror the other day, and saw a skeleton looking back. I must have lost 20lbs, and I’m only 175lbs. on a good day.

  On the plus side, I’ve never been mentally sharper, or looked as healthy. I look 10 years younger (and I probably weigh as much as I did 10 years ago). Time to do some real in-depth nutrient research and approach this much more methodically. As hectic as this was, I am convinced.

  I wonder if Erika can help me along this path of self-discovery. Her background is perfect in this area.

  I had a huge bowl of my “Nuclear Spaghetti” today (Dave’s Insanity in the boiling water, 1/2 tbsp of mayonnaise (for a cremier
  sauce), chunky sauce of choice, some other ingredients, boil, eat, burn).

  I definitely miss the taste of good food.

Christmas was productive, work is going to be speedily accelerating, things are looking up with Erika, I’m cutting away at my growing list of projects and overdue tasks… things are looking good. Now I’ll have to get in an accident or get pulled over, or my truck will blow up or something. It’ll balance all this chewy wholesome goodness with some catastrophic act in my life.

Karma is never on my side.