Copy of http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/04/msg00421.html. Hi folks, We have been pretty busy these past few weeks with the whole Google Summer of Code 2009 student application process.
I can say that we have this year a very good set of proposals and I d like to thank all the students and mentors for this. I am going to present to you our shortlist of projects that we would like to be funded and believe we can reasonably manage to get funded. As always, remember that the number of slots is not final yet at this point so we can t promise anything. The first preliminary slot count given today was *10* (same as last year) and we hope to get *2* more (as we did last year). This shortlist is alphabetically ordered because we don t want to reveal the current internal rankings. I am inviting you to debate what you think is cool, what is useful, what is important to Debian, maybe give us pointers to resources or people that could be helpful for the projects. We will try to alter our current rankings to reflect the zeitgeist in Debian, while taking into account the personal information that we have about each student involved. The deadline for any modification is on the 15th, so get everything in by the 14th. The final selected projects will be announced by Google April 20th, ~12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC. We ll have another announcement then. Three proposals need or may need a mentor, I indicated it. For more information about the projects or mentoring and how to talk to us directly, scroll down past the list. Debian s Shortlist : - Aptitude Package Management History Tracking
- Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling
- Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back
- Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings
- Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD
- KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager
- Large Scientific Dataset Package Management
- MIPS N32 ABI Port
- MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation
- On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration
- Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives
- Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite And the details: Aptitude Package Management History Tracking Student: Cristian Mauricio Porras Duarte, Mentor: Daniel Burrows Aptitude currently does not track actions that the user has performed beyond a single session of the program. One of the most frequent requests from users is to find out when they made a change to a package, or why a package was changed; we want to store this information and expose it in the UI in convenient locations. As a side effect, this might also provide some ability to revert past changes. Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling Student: Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Mentor: Marc Brockschmidt This proposal aims at providing debug binary packages for the packages in the Debian archive in an automatic manner, moving them away from the official Debian archive to an special one. This has the benefits of providing thousands of debug packages without any work needed from the developers, for all the architectures, without bloating
the archive. Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back Student: Diego Escalante Urrelo, Mentor: Margarita Manterola The Amancay project aims to be a new read/write web frontend to Debian s BTS; allowing DDs and contributors to easily interact with bugs via an intuitive yet powerful interface, enabling new workflows and creating new contribution opportunities like triaging while upholding reporting quality. Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings Student: Jonathan Yu, Mentor: (probably) Dominique Dumont see below This project proposes a common library for parsing and manipulating Debian Control files, including control, copyright and changelog. Main ideas include validating and parsing of these files, with both Strict and Quirks modes for the parser. The second idea is a new frontend for Debconf using Qt4 (for which Perl bindings will be written). Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD Student: Luca Favatella, Mentor: Aurelien Jarno GNU/kFreeBSD is currently using a hacked version of the FreeBSD installer combined with crosshurd as its own installer. While this works more or less correctly for standard installations (read: the exact same installation as in the documentation), it does not allow any changes in the installation process except the hard disk partitioning. This project is about porting debian-installer on GNU/kFreeBSD, and to a bigger extent, make debian-installer less Linux dependant. KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager Student: Mateusz Marek, Mentor: NEEDS MENTOR, see below. Finish Adept 3.0, a fully integrated package manager for Qt4/KDE4. Adept is currently the only viable path to a Debian native package manager on KDE that would support modern features such as tags, indexed search or good conflict resolving. With Aptitude-gtk still in development and only available for GTK+ and (K)PackageKit having fundamental problems, Debian needs this project to stay in control of its package management on KDE after much neglect in the recent years. Large Scientific Dataset Package Management Student: Roy Flemming Hvaara, Mentor: Charles Plessy Large public datasets, like databases for bioinformatics are typically too big and too volatile to fit the traditional source/binary packaging scheme of Debian. There are some programs that are distributed in Debian, like blast and emboss, that can index specialised databases, but Debian lacks a tool to install or update the datasets they need and keep their indexing in sync. MIPS N32 ABI Port Student: Sha Liu, Mentor: Anthony Fok This project first focuses on creating a new MIPS N32 ABI port for Debian. Different from O32 and N64, N32 is an address model which has most 64-bit capabilities but using 32-bit data structures to save space and process time. A second focus will be given on making such a mipsn32el arch fully optimized for the Loongson 2F CPU which gains more and more popularity in subnotebooks/netbooks in many countries. MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation Student: Per Andersson, Mentor: Wookey Many embedded devices have MTD onboard flash as persistent storage like the Kurobox Pro NAS, the Neo Freerunner, the Sheeva Plug or the OLPC. With MTD flash being so popular and with increases in capacity, support for MTD partition/installation would make Debian even more interesting to a wide range of of devices, making it one step closer to being universal. On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration Student: David Wendt Jr, Mentor: (probably) Steffen Moeller see below In many academic fields, as well as commercial industries, people use clusters to distribute tasks among multiple machines. Many times this is done by packaging a whole operating system disk image, uploading it onto the cluster, and having the cluster run it in a VM. This project intends to make it easier for Debian to distribute prepared disk images templates like they distribute CD images now, for the users to recreate or customise these templates with Debian packages and for administrators to host such clusters with Debian. Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives Student: Stephan Peijnik, Mentor: Michael Vogt The project would involve taking the distribution-(Ubuntu-)specific update-manager code, analyzing it, and creating a package with just its core functionality, decoupling the distribution-specific parts and thus making the core code extensible by distribution-specific add-ons. This in turn would remove the need of porting update-manager to Debian with every upstream release. An additional optional goal would be replacing the synaptics-backend with a python-apt based one. Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite Student: Philipp Kern, Mentor: Luk Claes Rewrite the software that currently runs the Debian autobuilding infrastructure in a way that makes it more maintainable and robust. It will use Python as its programming language and PostgreSQL for the database backend. By harmonizing buildds, many build failures can be prevented and wasteful workload on buildd volunteers can be reduced. On mentoring:

• KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager:

Petr Rockai, the original developer of Adept has offered help to anyone willing to adopt Adept. Sune Vuorela has offered help for any Qt4 and KDE related issues. *We really need a mentor here*. The student is quite competent but Google dictates that we provide a mentor to handle student management.

• Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings:

Dominique Dumont, although not DD, has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been confirmed yet. Sune Vuorela has offered to help co-mentor for the Qt4-Debconf and Qt4-Perl bindings part.

• On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration:

Steffen Moeller has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been formally confirmed yet. Charles Plessy of the Debian Med team will provide help for use cases related issues. Eric Hammond, developer of the original vmbuilder image creation tool and maintainer of a set of Debian and Ubuntu images will provide help for Amazon EC2 and image creation issues. Chris Grzegorczyk from the Eucalyptus team will provide help for Eucalyptus and Eucalyptus/Debian integration issues. Contacting us: Considering the tight schedule, most stuff happens live on IRC: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org You can also consult our wiki page for some additional information:
<http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2009> We have a mailing-list at:
<http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination> Keep this discussion on debian-devel@lists.debian.org while cc-ing soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org. This thread is for debian-devel primarily.

Date 30th March 2009 All being well the Debian Administration website now fully supports UTF-8. This change was a long time coming, considering the amount of time the site has been live. Most of the changes have been present for a while:

• Correctly setting the database to store UTF-8 internally, rather than latin1.
• Correctly setting the charset of the generated pages.

The only missing part was ensuring the at the text input by visitors/users was correctly decoded and treated as UTF-8. This was handled by updating changing the Perl CGI module to explicitly call charset appropriately. Since the code behind the site masks the database, memcached, and CGI handles behind singletons the change itself was pretty trivial:

• context diff (full file)

I made more changes this evening to tie it all together, and to ensure that my Database connection is always forced to use UTF but I think that wasn't so important. I hope this is vaguely useful the next time I have to fight with character sets & encodings. It is just all so nasty. Failing that these pages are vaguely useful:

• MySQL UTF settings
• UTF-8 samples

ObFilm: Run Lola Run

luk's status on Tuesday, 07-Apr-09 17:53:02 UTC

luk's status on Sunday, 05-Apr-09 14:45:16 UTC

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn. Huston Smith

This is perhaps one of the most enlightening books I ve ever read, and yet I feel like I ve only grasped a small bit of its meaning. It is with that warning that I attempt this review. I should add at the outset that this is one of those books where no matter what you expect it to be, after reading it, you will find that it wasn t what you expected. I heartily recommend it to everyone, from the devoutly religious to the devoutly atheistic. Science and Scientism Smith begins with a discussion of science and scientism. He is a forceful defender of science and of the work of scientists in general. But he is careful to separate science from scientism. Paraphrased, he defines scientism as the belief that science is the only (or the best) route to truth about everything. He points out that, through no explicit fault of scientists, scientism has become so ingrained in our modern psyche that even theologians have started thinking in terms of it. Yet there are some pretty glaring flaws in scientism, particularly where it comes to matters of philosophy, conscience, meaning, and religion. Smith argues that the foundation of science is the controlled experiment and logical inferences derived from it. He then proceeds to make strong case that it is not possible for humans to set up a controlled experiment to either prove or disprove the existence of something more than our material world a transcendence, a metaphysical reality, a spirit, a God. We, with our existence trapped in this finite world, cannot possibly hope to capture and control something so much more than us in every way: intelligence, versatility, and finiteness . Thus science can t even address the question. That hasn t stopped people from claiming that religion is just a helpful delusion, for instance, despite not being able to prove whether it is in fact a delusion or reality. Worldviews Smith then asks us to indulge a moment in considering two different worldviews: one the science-only worldview so common these days, and the other a more traditional religious worldview with a rightful place for science. He defers supporting evidence for each for later chapters. The science-only worldview is pretty familiar to many, and I have even heard parts of it articulated in comments left on this blog. It goes roughly like this: The universe is x billions of years old. It is, so far as we presently know, a vast expanse with mostly dead matter. Earth is the only exception, which contains some living organisms and even sentient beings, though these make up a small fraction of even the earth. This life arrived by accident through physical and biological processes, some of which are well-understood and some aren t. In the end, the universe will again become entirely dead, as our planet will be incinerated when our sun goes nova. Or, in any case, the entire universe will eventually expire in one of various ways. This worldview suggests that it is an accident that we are here and that we have consciousness, and that our actions have no ultimate meaning because the earth will eventually be incinerated anyhow. The traditional worldview holds the opposite: that instead of having our origins in the tiniest and simplest of building blocks, and eventually improving over time, we should more properly think of ourselves as being derived from something greater than ourselves. That greater something is part of our world, but something much bigger than it too. It does not rule out science, but neither is it something that science can ever explain. It suggests that our lives have a purpose, that our work has meaning, and that there are ultimate ends to seek. Smith is a scholar of world religions, and draws on his considerable experience to point out that virtually all world religions, before the Enlightenment, drew essentially the same picture of our world and the more . He reminds us though perhaps less effectively than Marcus Borg that there are other ways of knowing truth besides science, and suggests that we pay attention to what the vast majority of humanity had to say about the nature of existence before a human invention started to squelch the story. The Stories The book is filled with personal stories (Smith spent at least a decade each researching and practicing at least four different religions), quotes, and insights. I consider it the most enlightening book on religion I have yet read. Smith has more than a passing familiarity with physics, and the physicists in the crowd will probably be delighted at his discussions of quantum mechanics and the claim that nonlocality provides us with the first level platform since modern science arose on which scientists and theologians can continue their discussions. One passage reads like this:

Again I will let Henry Stapp say it: Everything we [now] know about Nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental process of Nature lies outside space-time, but generates events that can be located in space-time. Stapp does not mention matter, but his phrase space-time implies it, for physics locks the three together.

He says that quantum theory of course can t prove that there is a God, but that recent research seems to disprove the old notion that, given enough time, all questions will be answerable by science. Even if you disagree with every one of Smith s conclusions, you ll be along for a fascinating ride through physics, biology, philosophy, and innumerable religions. One of my favorite anecdotes concerns noted physicist David Bohm (who studied under Oppenheimer and worked with Einstein, among others). He gave a lecture at one point, apparently touching on his hidden variable theories to a great extent. At its conclusion, a senior physics professor asked derivisely, What does all this philosophy have to do with physics? Bohm replied, I do not make that distinction. How s that for something to ponder? The Writing The book is fun to read, and the stories make it all the moreso. However, it is not a light read. Houston Smith wrote this near the beginning, without any hint of irony:

The first of these differences is that Gass s is an aristocratic book, written for the literary elite, whereas mine is as plebeian as I can render its not always simple arguments.

I can think of a few simpler ways to express that thought. In any case, it isn t light reading, but it is accessible even if you, like me, have little formal training in philosophy, theology, or quantum physics. Conclusion I would do such a poor job trying to paraphrase Smith s main points that I haven t even really attempted to do so here. Get the book you ll be in for a treat. Incidentally, I had been thinking of buying the book for awhile. What finally made me do so was an NPR story about how he helped preserve the sound of the Gyuto Monks Tantric Choir back in 1964, when he (of course) was sleeping in a monastery in the Himalayas and awoke to investigate something transcendent the holiest sound I have ever heard. I pressed the Buy button for the Kindle edition a few minutes later.

Last month, Codethink turned 2 years old, to coincide we had a company-wide hackfest in Brussels straight after FOSDEM. It really brought home how much it d grown. Just a year ago there was just me and Mark. Now we are 8! So i m gonna take a moment to shout out to the great job these guys are doing. In order of appearence . Mark Doffman
Mark has been consistently working on transforming AT-SPI (the GNOME Accessibility and UI automation technology) into a D-Bus based cross-desktop project. From nothing a year ago, working with Mike Gorse from Novell, he s now got something that more or less works and it s getting a lot of focus and testing as we plan for GNOME 3.0. I m looking forward to a brave new future for cross toolkit accessibility on the Linux desktop. John Carr
John came to us from working on Conduit, and he s continued on his dream of making all the devices and web services of the world talk seamlessly to each other. John s been in charge of pushing the Wizbit project along and now the core of this is pretty stable, he is going to be turning his eye to working on using Wizbit for synchronisation. J rg Billeter
A stunning hacker who needs no introduction! J rg s been continuing to hack on Vala and it s getting more and more mature each week. His main work, however has been on the stunning tracker-vstore, a branch of tracker that brings full RDF capabilities, which Philip van Hoof has been blogging about. I ll be writing a biggish blog post on this soon and what RDF could really mean for the desktop experience. Karl Lattimer
Karl came to us from working on UI at Nokia. At Codethink he s continued to focus on graphics technology and user experience, bringing his keen eye to Wizbit, amongst other things. One of the most impressive things I ve seen for a while was Karl s kinetic scrolling widget for the Wizbit timeline view. I m hoping we can turn this into something more general in the future. Ryan Lortie
Another hacker who needs no introduction, Ryan s our low-level infrastructure guy. He s been working on GNIO, a library to do network operations using GIO stream abstractions and continuing to hack on DConf, which is gradually coming together. He s also been helping J rg out with Vala. Mukund Sivaraman
I knew Muks from his GIMP work, and his work on Herb is really impressive. Muks is mostly working on top secret stuff that we can t talk about, unfortunately! Peter Charlton
Our documentation guy. This guy knows how to write and knows how to take something vague and unintelligable and turn it into crystal clarity. Invaluable! Of course, through all this I ve been here, dancing about architecture and generally doing the best I can to hold the whole shebang together. I ve been mostly working on some top secret stuff which hopefully will be getting opened up soon. I ll dance about that then

Philippe blogs about how one can import a GPG key into apt's GPG keyring so that it will stop complaining about unknown keys. While his method will work, it has a major flaw: Importing random keys without checking them first makes secure apt totally useless, since it allows an attacker to replace an apt repository with another one that he signed with his own key and you won't even notice because you blindly import keys anyway. So what's the right way? Depends:

• If you have a GPG key yourself, and you have built a local web of trust (with gpg's --update-trustdb command beware, this is an interactive process that can take a long time if you have a lot of keys in your local gpg keystore), you can verify that the key really is what it claims to be:

  wouter@celtic:~$ gpg --edit-key 6070D3A1
  gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.9; Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
  pub  1024D/6070D3A1  created: 2006-11-20  expires: 2009-07-01  usage: SC  
                       trust: never         validity: full
  [  full  ] (1). Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) <ftpmaster@debian.org>
  Command> quit
  

  Why --edit-key? Because --list-keys, --list-sigs, or even --check-sigs does not show you the validity information. The --list-sigs --with-colons output does, but that is meant for computer consumption, and isn't very useful for human beings. But --edit-key contains the information too, so that works. What you need to look at is the information that immediately follows 'validity:'. In my case, it says 'validity: full', meaning, "enough" people who I have indicated (using --update-trustdb) to trust that they can sign keys the proper way have signed this particular key. "Enough" is configurable, but for now, let's ignore that (there's plenty of data about that on the web if you want it). If your output says 'validity: full', then go ahead and add it to apt's trusted keyring:

  gpg --export 6070D3A1   apt-key add -
  

  Note: go ahead and ignore the 'trust: never' data in the output. This represents the fact that I told gpg not to trust the key when doing gpg --update-trustdb. This doesn't mean I won't trust data that's signed with this particular key; however, it does mean I won't trust key signatures signed with this particular key. Since this is not a personal key, but a key only used to sign data with, this is the right thing to do for this particular key.
• Alternatively, if you don't have a keyring, don't want to maintain your local web of trust, don't understand what I just said, or any combination of the preceding, just check what the maintainers of the particular repository to which this key corresponds tell you. If they're good maintainers, they should've given you a fingerprint right beside the information that contained the apt repository. Copy-and-paste that information on two command lines:

  gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key <fingerprint>
  gpg --export <fingerprint>   apt-key add -
  

  If they didn't give you that information, then send a giant cluebat mail to them. They really should've done that.
• Finally, if you don't care about all this gpg stuff and don't think anyone would be interested to break into your system, you'd be wrong scriptkiddies don't look at who's using a particular system, they just like to be stupid. If you insist, however, you should note that you can actually disable secure apt, by adding the following to a file under /etc/apt/apt.conf.d:

  APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated "yes";
  

  Not that I'd recommend it, but if you insist...

I have just been informed that syfy is the new SMS abbreviation for syphilis .

As funny as these stories are for reading, any hard data is absolutely lacking. Are there similar stories which actually cite sources? OTOH the fact that even cheap main stream devices like USB sticks and WLAN routers routinely have compatible with Linux , often even giving a kernel version, printed on the package tells me that the stories are not that far off. Even so, I'd be curious who these Icelandic Microsoft Certified Partners switching to Linux / Free Software are (first link, the quote below also originates there).

Microsoft Access, the only database software on the planet that s better at printing mail-merged stickers than it is at storing data.

Certain amount of hyperbole, but still a great perspective on software-as-a-service vs service-as-a-service in Iceland. Microsoft Skull-fucks Iceland s Economy, Contracts Syphilis Entertaining too :)

I was very pleased to wake up this morning to the news that National has delayed the introduction of S92A via an order-in-council. It s a nice short-term victory, but I ll save the champagne until the law is fundamentally rewritten. The most pleasing aspect of the decision is simply that it was made at all. Within two weeks, a small band of protesters were able to harness the power of the Internet to direct international attention and place enough pressure on a Government, whose Prime Minister admitted to not having read the bill prior, that he then took the time to understand the issues and personally announce the delay in implementation of the law. We owe much thanks to the Creative Freedom Foundation for all the effort they put into co-ordinating the protest and ensuring that a single coherent message was presented. Just a little bit of my cynicism and belief that politicians never listen to public opinion outside of election campaigns was chipped away today. The reason I m not breaking out the champagne yet is that we ve only achieved a temporary reprieve in the commencement of the law. While those present at the press conference seem somewhat confident that John Key didn t like what he found in the law and would have repealed it if given the chance, all that has actually been done is delay it in the hopes of an agreement between the TCF and the rights holders (aka big media companies) on how to implement the still fundamentally broken law. The Government has given until late March for that to occur. To put this into a more global context. My happiness as I took the bus to work after reading about the decision to delay the law was short lived as the front page of the local paper declared that Eircom (Ireland s equivalent of Telecom) has voluntarily agreed to block sites such as The Pirate Bay upon request by the media companies (this comes a week after they also announced an agreement to, again voluntarily , implement a 3-strikes S92A style policy). Now, with the biggest ISP in their pocket (so to speak), the media companies have sent threatening letters to the remaining ISPs in the country demanding they implement the same procedure. To me, this illustrates one of the fundamental problems with S92. The concept that an ISP is liable for the conduct of its users, or for policing where on the Internet users should and shouldn t be able to connect to does not belong in our laws. Most ISPs already have provision to disconnect customers for illegal activity in their terms and conditions. If an end-user is doing something illegal, that is an issue between the rights holder and the end-user to take up in the courts just like every other sector of society must do when wronged, at which point the existing ISP terms and conditions can be invoked and access terminated. The big media companies, having decided that it is too expensive/hard/inconvenient to follow standard legal procedures to resolve their grievances are launching multi-pronged attacks to shift the playing field in their favour. In countries like New Zealand, where our politicians yearn for a Free Trade Agreement with America, they use their lobbyists to ensure that S92 style laws are part of the conditions. In other jurisdictions, like Ireland, they use strong-arm, divide and conquer style bully tactics outside of the political and legal process. I don t support copyright infringement. I rely on copyright to protect much of the work I place on the Internet, I want strong laws that protect me when my rights have been infringed. I don t believe that such laws should come at the expense of due process, our legal tradition and the basic principle of fairness! I don t believe that copyright infringement is such a heinous crime that it demands punishments stronger than those we deliver to paedophiles, stalkers or any other class of criminal who uses the Internet to enable their crimes. To me, today s (yesterday s - depending on your timezone) decision is only the first step in clawing New Zealand back from the dangerous path that the big media companies have been leading our law makers down. From here we need to press on and demonstrate to the Government over the next month that even if the TCF and rights holders are able to come up with some sort of workable code of practice, the law is still fundamentally flawed. It is based on premise that we are guilty by accusation. Even if guilt were to be proved by a competent legal body (eg. court or copyright tribunal) we don t need laws placing further liabilites onto ISPs (and remember the definition of ISP under this amendment act includes businesses who provide Internet access to staff, libraries, schools and hospitals) when their existing terms and conditions already prohibit illegal activity. Finally, and most importantly of all, we need to remember that laws exist to serve all sectors of society. Yes, copyright infringement is against the law and rights holders are reasonable in expecting the law to protect their content and allow them to make a fair profit. On the other side of the fence, average New Zealanders are not being unreasonable in their desire to have media available electronically, on demand and non-inhibited by DRM following a legal purchase. The failure of the media businesses to adequately cater to this change in market demand and usage of technology is obviously a contributing factor to the widespread copyright problems that they are facing today. Obviously, I m not condoning copyright infringement simply because the media companies are failing to address demand. Even stupid laws must be obeyed (and the concept of copyright is far from stupid). What I want to see is the Government acknowledging that the problem is not solely with consumers infringing copyright for malicious purposes, and therefore that the solutions do not lie solely in increasing the enforcement and punishments available. Copyright has always been a balancing act between the rights of content producers and consumers. S92 and the act it is contained within are taking us far too far down the road of catering to big business and their outdated business models with far too little concern for the rights of the individual consumer. Despite the many submissions made on this act last year when it was first passing through parliament, there was no comprehensive debate on what copyright means and how it should balance the rights of content producers and consumers in our digital century where copying is a zero-cost, zero-thought activity. Without such a debate we re doomed to continue wasting time arguing over the symptoms of the problem, like S92. So, I m saving my champagne for the day when we as a country address these issues and come up with a fair and workable interpretation of what copyright means today.

The Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation are probably the two authorities on what is free and open source software that are better respected than the debian project. It s fairly easy to see that the famous licences (GNU GPL) appear on both lists, but how similar are their approvals? There was a comparison at Asheeshworld Notes you will like: OSI vs FSF in 2007, but I ve noticed more and more duplicates in that listing and the source code didn t work for me. I ve captured the current differences between their actual approvals in a pseudo-diff. The generating code and intermediate steps are splattered around the same folder. Many of the differences look like a result of process differences, but I m not sure because OSI doesn t make any comments and their licence review process archive seems awkward to search. As I understand it, a lawyer advocates a licence in the OSI process, so it requires the licensor to contribute (and many licensors couldn t care less about OSI); but FSF does an independent review, so FSF has to decide it s worth reviewing. In case it s not obvious, I think FSF s independent foundation-led review is much the better of those two. There are two licences that OSI approved but FSF lists as non-free: NASA Open Source Agreement and the Reciprocal Public License. Both of these are send-back-ware where changes have to be sent back or made available to the upstream developer. Many debian developers agree such payments-in-kind are non-free (OSI s OSDefinition is based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines), but I think an early OSI advisor thought they were a good idea, so those approvals look like an OSI bug to me. It s not obvious if there are licences that FSF approves but OSI rejects. OSI doesn t seem to list licences to avoid. Is it helpful to see the differences? Would a comparison with the debian archive be useful? Are there other curiousities captured in the differences? Are people interested in reconciling the differences?

The title of this book makes me realize how much a good and catchy title matters for a book. This one really caught my attention as I am fond of both irony and technics. Never thought of putting them together but someone surely has and it sounds like he has written a pretty nifty philosophical book on technology.

The title of this book makes me realize how much a good and catchy title matters for a book. This one really caught my attention as I am fond of both irony and technics. Never thought of putting them together but someone surely has and it sounds like he has written a pretty nifty philosophical book on technology.

Lenny got released yesterday and after having to push another update to Etch through volatile to fix an annoying warning when Lenny is in the sources.list, my work is now almost done too. (Yes, the autobuilding infrastructure is still offline, but we will get that reactivated shortly.) Anyway: if you live in or around Karlsruhe and did not get a mail by nomeata and me and if you would enjoy meeting tomorrow (Monday) evening, please speak up by mailing us. Let us celebrate the latest and greatest release. ;-) The plan is to meet up at the Vogelbr u at 19:30.

Debian so needs a Debian Tartan theme. For reference, my .Xresources file contains these xtartan configuration items:

XTartan.colorCode.EB: rgb:09FF/21FF/48FF
XTartan.colorCode.DR: rgb:57FF/0000/0AFF
XTartan.colorCode.DY: rgb:E4FF/A8FF/48FF
XTartan.Mine.nextTartan: Debian
XTartan.Debian.sett: %a EB16 DY2 EB16 DR16 BK2 DR16 W6 BK2 W2 BK2 W2 DR6 W2 DR6 W6 BK2 W2 BK2 W2 BK2 W2 DR6 W2 BK2 W2 DR6 W2 BK2 W6 DR6 W6 BK2 W2 DR16 BK2 DR16

Which (when calling xtartan -r -t Debian) provides for a nice Tartan background; but it's not a theme. I'd do it myself, but I'm not a graphical guy; but I would so love such a theme. Someone with graphical skills please make it!

Dear all, I am currently assembling a talk that discusses if and how the principles of free software can be applied to topics beyond operating systems and software. The first things that come to mind are surely the Creative Commons, free music, free films, free books etc. but I am sure that there is more, also even beyond the digital world. I already know a couple projects but I am looking for many many more! So, what examples do you know for applications of the free software philosophy that go beyond the usual software/OS area? I'd be happy for any hints, urls, projects, authors, bands, names etc. that come to your mind! To contact me, simply drop me an e-mail or prod me on irc (alphascorpii on OFTC and freenode).

Sigh. I'm not part of the FOSDEM organisation team, and this is by choice. I know that I wouldn't find the time to help organize a conference of the scale of FOSDEM, since I'm rather liable to forget to do important things at times. Having said that, I happen to run a company together with Philip Paeps, who is now one of the main FOSDEM organizers; apart from that, I've also managed the Debian presence there for the past few years (lost count how many exactly), and arranged the key signing party for a few years with Joost Van Baal taking over for me starting this year. As such, I'd like to believe that although I'm not exactly in to all their secrets, I do have a front-row seat when it comes to how things are going there. FOSDEM is the "Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting". It has been that since 2001, and will always remain so. Yes, originally it was called "OSDEM", because frankly, the organisation of the original OSDEM was done by a group of people who like Open Source, without necessarily subscribing to the Free Software ideals. The core group of the organisation is a rather diverse group; for instance, Philip has been known to be rather... negative... about Ubuntu, while Mark (one of the press contacts) has done some activism and translation work for Ubuntu. The change of name from OSDEM to FOSDEM was done not because the organisation's ideas about software were changed overnight by a mail from Richard Stallman or anyone else from the FSF; but rather, because they were open-minded enough to understand that having a name which only says 'Open Source' would be excluding a considerable part of the community that encompasses both Free and Open Source people. This is why the name wasn't changed in FSDEM; it is FOSDEM. I'm quite sure that the fact that FOSDEM is so open-minded about many of the controversial issues that have separated our community over the years not just Open Source vs Free Software, but so many other things as well is one of the main reasons why FOSDEM is so popular today: because everyone, and I truly mean everyone, will find something that he or she likes. That is why I'm so saddened that some people seem to find it necessary to not only whine, but also boycott a conference, because they believe that FOSDEM should not take money from a big Free Software/Open Source contributor, just because they also happen to be a company, and as such make business deals with Microsoft. Note that I'm not either defending or condemning Novell's attitude here; but it is a fact that not everyone in the larger Free and Open Source community feels the same way about the whole Novell/Microsoft deal (else there wouldn't be an openSUSE anymore), and as such they still deserve a place on FOSDEM. Over the history of the organisation of FOSDEM, it's always been a place where everyone could get their opinion out; whether it be the opinion that "Free Software Must Rule The World", or that "It's All About The Way You Do Things"; as long as your opinion is shared by a large enough number of people in the larger FLOSS community, it is welcome. I feel that blocking one organization from sponsoring the event, just because they have made some deals which a significant group of people, one which nevertheless does not encompass the whole of the FLOSS community, disapprove of, would set a dangerous precendent that might jeopardize the very core of what makes FOSDEM so great: its impartiality. Thank god that didn't happen.

FOSDEM is a place where free and open source software really means open source software and the F in FOSDEM is a token gesture to the free software movement if you believe FOSDEM organiser Philip Paeps. If that s so, I m amazed they can claim to promote the awareness of free software with a straight face. I m not going to FOSDEM again because there are better value-for-money events around now, but I do understand the motives of the various anti-Novell campaigners. The Boycott Novell site linked to my explanation of Boycotts a few years back. I really don t agree that A conference just is not complete without corporate schwag and presence. Presence? I don t really enjoy being jumped by salesmen. Schwag? There was one long-term useful item in my last conference pack, that was from an association and I would probably have bought a slightly better one if I hadn t been given it. So, I really don t understsand why FOSDEM are annoying people in part because they like branded cheap junk. I suspect most of it ends up in the bins before long. I mean, who needs a non-obvious bottle-opener? I have one on the waiters friend, another with a nice handle, one on my penknife, one on my wife s penknife and even one on the can opener s handle. There are probably a few more in my home and bottles aren t even so hard to open without a special tool anyway! Anyway, if you re going, I hope you have a safe journey. Maybe you could mention Glyn Moody s summary of the FOSDEM controversy to some people there. Call me when you re organising a trip to something like a drupalcon, wordcamp or LUGRadio Live.

Poking around the web site for Law in Contemporary Society, a class taught this semester by Eben Moglen, (who is counsel for the Free Software Foundation and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center), i found Felix Cohen's Trancendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach, which (according to wikipedia) is one of "the most-cited law review articles ever written". I haven't read the whole thing yet (and i'm neither a lawyer nor a philosopher) but it's fascinating reading. And from what i've read so far, it's a strong push toward directly addressing the values that lie hidden beneath our technical or mechanical decisions, and to avoid mistaking technical success or skill with a worthwhile outcome and clear goals at a societal level. This is something we software developers and system administrators struggle with as well (or at least i think we should). It's neat to get my head around these concepts from a different intellectual sphere, and a different era (74 years ago!) when the technical and mechanical tools i work with didn't exist in anything like their present form. This kind of reading makes me wonder what works from Computer Science or Systems Engineering or Information Technology will have this kind of exhortative power and social relevance so far into the future. Do you have a favorite (or abhorred?) text from your field that offers the kind of moral and technical challenges that Cohen's work does?Tags: law, moglen, philosophy