random neuron misfires

sneakums, I know what the GPL stands for, but I was curious why he generalized it in such a fashion, nothing more.

“our business” is in giving users a choice. I’ve had to correct dozens of people who view GNU/Linux as a competitor to Microsoft. We are fundamentally nothing more than an alternative, albeit a better one. Competing on a business or financial level is secondary to providing a more functional, robust solution for the users that use GNU/Linux.

Microsoft has a financially-driven business model, and clearly view the GPL and what it stands for as a threat to maintaining that revenue stream. (notice he did not use the term “Free Software” in his speech anywhere. It’s clear they want to keep pushing the “GPL == open == linux == that hacker that stole your password” mentality in the general user populous). The Free Sofware community is a socially-driven business model. It turns the whole monopolistic practices of a company like Microsoft on their head.

Education should be our next task. Educate the users, and not by slandering Microsoft, but with good, concise, down-to-earth examples of where GNU/Linux and Free Software is really benefiting the advance of technology, business, and the spread of information.

We’ve demonstrated that we can stand together to develop software to benefit the community, rallying together to advance the development of GNU/Linux. Now we must stand together as a non-technical community and begin our task of re-education where it really matters most.

“…What it comes down to is that all this whining by Microsoft about “intellectual property” and “innovation” is merely an expression of their fear:

Microsoft has been reaping enormous profits with a faulty product, developed based on the inventions of others. In part, those were disequilibrium wages–artificially high, temporary profits. In part, they have been able to maintain them through questionable business practices.

Microsoft is afraid of competing in the real world, where margins are razor thin. Just like IBM, Ford, and other formerly grand companies, Microsoft needs to come back to reality sooner or later…”

Did anyone notice that Mundie calls the GPL the ‘General Public License’ here:

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2761605,00.html (grep for ‘general’)

I wonder if this was intentional, or if his ego prohibits him from really admitting the truth about our business.

New Toy

I picked up a new Palm m505 handheld the other day at the local CompUSA for a nice cheap price of $449.00 USD.

I can only say I am totally unimpressed.

The screen is the dimmest screen I have ever seen. Yes, it’s transflective, but there’s no white, and it’s incredibly hard to see unless you’re in a dark closet with the backlight on. It is dimmer than my girlfriend’s Palm IIIc with the brightness setting all the way down.

It looks incredible in direct sunlight though.

Why the heck did they feel the need to decrease the diameter of the left side stylus rail hole (leaving the right side stylus rail hole intact)?

Contrary to popular (Palm) belief, there are still some left-handed people remaining in the free world. Even some right-handed people like myself prefer left-handed orientation on their PDA. Not only can you not put a stylus in there now, you can no longer use their included “leatherette” cover in the right side rail slot because the diameter of the rail which holds it in place is only about 1mm wide. Renders every single clip-on case enclosure for the Vx useless now. Great thinking.

Speaking of incompatibility, why did Palm feel it was necessary to turn a completely functional clip-on slot in the back of the device into two separate holes now?

Great, now my PalmVx GPS’ (2 of them) and my Minstrel clip-on wireless modem are useless as well, as is my regular modem. Every third-party clip-on and hardware add-on now needs to have a new version built to support this new device.

And what’s the deal with making the stylus itself being 2mm shorter in the m505?

Now I can’t go to the store and buy a pack of replacement stylii without getting a set for my Vx, and another set for my m505. They are identical stylii, except the m505 is 2mm shorter, and the Vx one will not fit in the m505 slot now. Wonderful.

Yes, the connector is different now as well. They needed to go to USB, and I can understand that, but what the hell is with those little hooks on the cradle, and the little “eyelet holes” in the back of the Palm? Who thought of that? Those things will probably fatigue into slots instead of holes in 1,000 cradlings of the Palm, rendering the hooks in the cradle itself useless.

Lastly, why is a device with a higher bit depth (16bpp) by an order of magnitude still being shipped with the same amount of memory as the 2bpp devices (8MB)?

Color applications which will work on this device will be larger for no other reason than they have color support, even if no new features are added to the app. Yes, the added colors look beautiful, and are appreciated, but please give us a platform that we can use to take advantage of them.

sigh

I don’t have the energy to continue to rant on and on here, but I believe this is the beginning of their demise. They’ve planned this road map, but it leads right into a wall.

They’re pissing a lot of people off, from hardware manufacturers to developers to commercial partners to third-party conduit developers and maintainers like myself. They may want to take two steps back and look at who supported whom here.

Palm, please remember that your product would be dead if it wasn’t for third party support, both in applications and in software/hardware/user support. That is a statistically-proven fact. I hope your numbers this quarter reflect these decisions of yours.

I can’t continue to be the voice box for those who can’t or won’t speak up about these things.

I’m exhausted.

gstein, as one who uses ViewCVS very heavily on my cvs server (and shared a few emails with you personally), I’ve got a few quick suggestions:

• It seems that setting mime_types_file has no affect on the rendering of the page. If there are PDF files, or Postscript, or images in my repository, and I want to view them, the browser renders them as ‘content-type=text’, no matter what I tell it to use.
• some sort of code2html output, so I can link to not only a file with syntax highlighting, but link to a place in that file, by line (the equivalent of running ‘code2html -lc -t8 -N’ on a source file, for
  example)
• While in the syntax-highlighted view of the file, a drop-down for each version in branches where that file appears would be nice on that page. If I’m currently looking at version 1.13, and want to see 1.12 and 1.10, a dropdown at the top (or bottom) to allow me to pick another branch where this file appears, and view its contents, would be nice.

But what am I doing, this isn’t ViewCVS’ bug reporting system, this is advogato =)

Great work gstein, keep it up!

Now I just need to find a better patch management solution and bug-reporting solution for my cvs, and I’m pretty much done (for this week anyway).

Anyone have any recommendations for a good bug reporting system I can use?

Reading

Thanks to dave0, I now have a better place to purchase books

Here’s the books (fictional) I’ve managed to polish off in the past three weeks:

From the Corner of His Eye
by Dean R. Koontz

Seize the Night
by Dean R. Koontz

Night Moves (Tom Clancy’s Net Force, 3)
by Tom Clancy and Steve R. Pieczenik

A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Trilogy)
by Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruth Robbins

I used to have so many books at my last place. I had to leave 14 boxes of books behind. Saddens me. This is all I could find around the apartment, or at the local store, or that Erika bought for me (thanks!)

It’s good to not be so focused on work though, but there’s this other pile sitting here next to my computer, growing and begging to be cut into (most technical, some not). I plan on cutting through them soon:

GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool
by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey, Ian Lance Taylor

Official Guide to Programming With Cgi.Pm
by Lincoln Stein

Dynamics of Software Development
by Jim McCarthy, Denis Gilbert

Mastering Regular Expressions: Powerful Techniques for Perl and Other Tools (O’Reilly Nutshell)
by Jeffrey E. Friedl and Andy Oram

Sams Teach Yourself C++ for Linux in 21 Days
by Jesse Liberty, David B. Horvath

Graphical Applications with Tcl & TK
by Eric Foster-Johnson

XML Bible
by Elliotte Rusty Harold and Elliote Rusty
Harold

Beginning PHP4
by Chris Lea, Wankyu Choi, Allan Kent, Ganesh Prasad and Chris Ullman

MySQL
by Paul DuBois, Michael Widenius

The Leadership Challenge: How to Keep Getting Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations
by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner and Tom Peters

Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader
by Joan Goldsmith and Warren G. Bennis

Multilunguality

I’m also trying to teach myself German and Italian. I think I may put them into active use some day soon.

I bought these two multimedia courses at CompUSA here in San Bruno:

Instant Immersion German

Instant Immersion Italian

Japanese is next.

I’m just so exhausted with learning, fighting, defending, coding, fixing, and dealing with an insurmountable amount of uncertainty looming over me every day with ${COMPANY}.

Such a productive weekend.

I wish the liars and deceitful people pounding my back would learn to see the light of truth.

Could I be tasting life again?

Handera 330 POSE sources posted

one down and one to go…

Great work guys, special thanks to Mike W. at Handera

hub, no worries. You definitely did the right thing, and it was timely. Right at the point where Mundie had some of his own comments to say.

Go with your gut. It’s always going to be right.

..but you could cert me

The Saga Continues…

After the debacle with Sony and the GPL, I’ve been barraged with emails and many queries from reporters and other people who are apparently questioning Sony’s actions in other areas. I won’t reveal any names here, but it’s clear POSE is not the only place where this is happening. Apparently a commercial product developer on their PS2 Linux team (separate very well-known IDE development company) has patches he’s made to the gdb and gcc sources and was not allowed to put them back into their respective trees, back to the community from whence they came.

Let’s be clear though. I am not attacking Sony or their partners. I’ve already tried to clear that up over here.

I decided to seek out another hardware vendor to support the JogDial functionality and memory expansion slots. I find Handera and of course, Handspring.

So I’ve been trying to find the sources for the Handera modifications to POSE, as well as those from Handspring, and come up with some interesting results. I managed to find the Handera Windows binary of the emulator over here, and upon extraction, I see a ‘Handera Readme.txt’ (spaces in filenames, gar!) that states:

“..This is based on the Palm OS Emulator 3.1 sources and is also compatible with all ROMS the 3.1 Emulator from Palm is compatible with. The changes will be sent to Palm to be merged into their sources in a week or two…”

The original announcement of this Handera POSE release is here (May 2, 2001).

I asked for the sources over here (follow the thread from there, May 8, 2001).

Interesting points from Keith over here (May 8, 2001). Most important of which is:

“..So I couldn’t say when Palm will post a version of Poser with HandEra support. But it will be in the range of several months from now…”

I then tried a different approach since we can’t wait months to begin testing these applications, by emailing Handera from their Comments form on their website:

“..Comments: I’m looking for the sources to the Handera port of the PalmOS Emulator. I did not find a link on your website to download the sources. As I don’t run Windows, I need to build this under linux. Can you please let me know where I can download this, so I can build a version under linux? Thanks a lot…”

And received:

Thu, 10 May 2001 16:18:33 -0500

“..We will be making them available to Palm for inclusion in future versions of the source tree. The modifications will be included in all versions of POSE (and source) at that time…”

To which I replied:

Thu, 10 May 2001 14:27:44 -0700 (PDT)

“..Are these sources available now? I’d like to include them in my local version of POSE, so I can begin testing applications against it. I
do not run Windows, so I cannot use the Windows version of POSE. Thanks again for your time and a rapid response…”

And received as a reply to this:

Thu, 10 May 2001 16:50:51 -0500

“..They are not available at this time. If you have any other questions please let me know…”

Ok, so they’ve taken the sources for POSE, a known GPL project (who’s owner of copyright is
still unknown) and modified them for use in their own product (the Handera 330 and the POSE Emulator to assist developers in developing applications against it), compiled a version of this for Windows using these sources and modifications, but continue to keep those modified sources “in-house”. That would be ok, if you also kept the Windows binary-only version in house, and did not distribute it, however, you can’t have one foot in both kiddie pools.

Guys, I simply want the sources so I can support your hardware in the open source projects I help develop which may some day USE this hardware. This abuse of the community effort to help you develop your projects will not continue much longer. You don’t support the linux or unix community. We do. We do this in our spare time because we love this work. We don’t get paid to do this (however you reap the revenue rewards from our hard work, you’re welcome).

So I get frustrated and decide to go to Handspring‘s site and look for their POSE modifications to support writing to the Springboard slot(s) in their new devices from pilot-link directly. Simple task. I see that they have a link to the Handspring POSE sources here on this page.

The sources are for a VC++ 6.0 build environment. Ugh. I did receive this reply from them though in my query:

Tue, 8 May 2001 09:41:19 -0700

“..We don’t build POSE under Linux internally, so the Makefile might not be part of that package. The version from Palm’s 3.1 version should do it (we only added a few source files related to the Visor Edge)…”

I’m not really sure how this translates, I mean… these ARE sources (which fits into section 3(c)p2 of the GPL), even if they’re not sources which will build on a GNU/Linux platform from which their parent project was derived from, so I can’t get completely pissed, but I don’t have or know VC++, so I’m not about to port these over (back over) to linux.

So we have a few “issues” here. I’ve also had a conversation with a Palm employee who said that “..the GPL means nothing unless it’s tested in court…”. That may be true, fundamentally, but that doesn’t mean that this type of behavior can continue (Handspring is definately on the right side of this one, kudos!)

“Encryption via Obfuscation”

I was trying to sync my newly-flashed OS4-aware Palm Vx with the latest pilot-link before I release it out the door, and I noticed that with a password set on the device, it will no longer sync. The Palm complains that the desktop software doesn’t support the password on the handheld device, and to upgrade the desktop software.

So I sent an email to the list hoping to find an answer.

The answer I got wasn’t exactly reassuring, but it gives me something to work with for now (thanks Dave Fedor, another fast response). One disconcerting thing though:

“..So if you’re on a 4.0 device with a password, you need a 4.0 desktop if you want to perform a HotSync operation…”

There are some “encryption” issues which exist in this new OS version. Just be careful and aware.

I simply want to support these devices and the users who use them. I’m not trying to cut holes in your profit streams or in your business plans. We shouldn’t HAVE TO resort to reverse-engineering protocols on the port and sniffing syncs just to write a compatible driver to support these devices under non-Windows platforms.

We’ve helped you, now how about helping us for a change.

WOW

That reply to kgb wasn’t meant to hit slashdot‘s front page. I stand by my statements, and I’ve appended a clarification to the original email, so those who want to rip me, can do so in other ways.

Addendum:

To those tearing me up for this account of my plane ride back from Linuxworld, be aware that this was not an account of a GPL violation. It was an account of my travels on a plane, which INCLUDED talking to a Sony employee, to whom I brought up their possible violation of the GPL, and he gave me his flippant attitude.

Yes, until very recently, they were not providing sources to POSE, but I just checked again today, and now they apparently are, but only to an older version of their hardware. Interesting switch on their part. This has been an open issue with them for several months now, at least since early January. They were in violation of the GPL until May 1, 2001. I stand by my statements.

(Referencing URL)
http://www.us.sonypdadev.com/program/develop_tool/palm_os.html

Slashdot, pfft.

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.