I’m extremely happy to let everyone know that I am now a Debian Developer. I’d like to thank my AM - Martin Michlmayr, Drew Parsons for advocating me and sponsoring uploads, and Roger Leigh for also sponsoring uploads. I’d also like to thanks the FD and DAM teams (looks like they have been busy during this last week). The entire process took 13 months to complete, with that time roughly split between waiting for an AM and then covering P&P and T&S. My wait in the FD and DAM queues was quite short. Of course the first thing I did once I found out, like any email freak was to update my .sig file. Thanks once again to all of those people that helped during my time in the NM queue.

Mozilla/Firefox in a lot of ways was/is the poster child of free software… I mean do you know how many times I was talking to a certain non-technologically-inclined-person who claimed to not know a thing about open source, and then after I asked what browser they were using and when they said Mozilla, I would let them in on the dirty little secret that they were, in fact, in its very bosom, cradled in and by the rhythm of freedom. And they would gleefully respond with some excited variation of “I had NO idea and I love it… those tabs, those plug ins, that speed….blah blah.” I just loved inducing that reaction. But for me my love affair with Firefox is officially over. For many years it was a happy, fulfilling relationship but lately, the little red fox has let me down, acting way too erratic, crashing during those inopportune moments, like when opening a pdf, which would cause the whole apparatus to come crashing down, and all those lovely open tabs, with all that information, would be gone in an instant. For the last 4 months, every time this disdainful event occurred, I would just bemoan and bitch a lot, especially on IRC. Part of me was a loyalist but a bigger part of me was just very very very lazy. With all my bookmarks, with my tool bar, with all my passwords configured JUST RIGHT, I felt enduring the crashes and loss of data was worth it. But no more (admittedly my IRC compatriots were sick of hearing me complain and pretty much demanded that I change). So now I am going to “rediscover the web” but with Galeon. It is up and running and I have transfered a good chunk of my settings over and over the course of the next few weeks I will make the transition. So far so good though there is work to be done, to be sure, to make Galeon into my new love(ly), web browser.

Dear Benjamin Seidenberg!
Your account ‘benjamin’ has just been created in the central LDAP
database of the Debian project.  Please note that it needs a bit of time
until this information is synced with all developer-accessible machines.
You should be able to login or upload packages after about 30-60 minutes.
The password for this account can be found appended to this message,
encrypted with your GPG key.
Email sent to benjamin@debian.org will be forwarded to astronut@dlgeek.net,
to change this visit http://db.debian.org/forward.html.

This has definately made my day. I would like to thank my sponsor and advocate, Anibal Monsalve Salazar, the Debian Cyrus Team (especially Sven and Henrique) and especially my AM, Cl ment Stenac (Zorglub). I couldn’t have asked for a better AM; he answered every mail within a day as far as I remember, was extremely supportive and helpful. I remember when I sent him the last T&S response he appologized on IRC that he couldn’t write the recommendation until that evening, whereas some AMs have taken months to do it.
For those interested in the NM queue’s proccessing time, here is an approximate summery of my progress through NM:
Waiting for advocate: 2.5 weeks (This should have been shorter, I had my advocate lined up, but then there was a question about me signing the key of the guy who signed mine, but I hadn t checked his ID).
Waiting for AM: 6 months
Going through the checks: 2.5 months. (This would have been shorter had it not been right around the end of my senior year of high school, with the mad rush to cram everything in before exams)
Waiting for FD: 1.5 Months
Waiting for DAM: 1.5 Months
Waiting for account creation after DAM approval: 2 months.

During the past years, I have usually kept outside of heated arguments, but since I slipped on debian-private today anyway, I might as well go all the way and write a proper opinion, disguised as an outside view to simulate objectivity. Intellectual Icebergs Episode 10 talks about "Scales of Superiority". Simplified, we have a set of fields that we consider important to us, and where we will go to great lengths (and be irrational about it) to achieve a state where we can feel superior to others. To a large extent, that is what drives us on. If you think ballroom dancing is fun, you pick it up as a hobby, but if you place your "scale of superiority" in this field, you will go beyond that, and train every day, until you finally win the competition. Obviously, this is highly irrational to someone who is just not that "into it", but as they are generally not offended by you secretly sneering at their inferior dancing skillz (because they could hardly care less), this is not a problem. Now, inside Debian, we also have our scales by which we measure our success. For some of us, it is suitability for a particular field or work, for others it is rating by others. Debian has been suitable for a lot of tasks (since it is the universal operating system, after all), and has been held in high esteem for quality, so both camps were happy. So, what has changed? I believe that the biggest change was the advent of Ubuntu, and specifically, the community's reaction to it. A lot of people we considered our peers jumped ship, claiming that Ubuntu was "better". If you only cared about whether Debian was suitable for your needs, then your reaction was probably "good riddance". If you cared about peer rating, you were in hell now, as someone else was getting all the attention (and, since that is what your brain cares about really, all the MOTAS). In short, Debian's status as the superior distribution, your "herd" as the supreme rulers of the land of stability, your entire self-worth as defined by your "scale of superiority" was challenged. This is the situation we're in. Half of us feel threatened by Ubuntu, half of us do not, and to each group the behaviour of the other is completely irrational. Most of the behaviour we have seen in the past years is a direct result from this. The discussion about Ubuntu "not giving back patches" in the proper way was seen as an attempt at building a competitive advantage over Debian. That Ubuntu ships non-free drivers for hardware that is unsupported otherwise is a direct threat, because it allows them superiority in the field of hardware support. Now, with "LTS", they have even challenged our status as the distribution with the longest (heh) security support, while Debian shows severe stamina problems. That my girlfriend runs Ubuntu on her laptop is a direct threat to my masculinity, because I am unable to "perform" a network install on her laptop via wireless LAN. "I am sorry, dear, I have no idea why this device is unsupported, I never had any problems with that before." So we are looking for ways to regain our confidence. Some of us seek superiority by shifting their scales, claiming that while we're not as sexy as Ubuntu, we at least do not tie our users to our desktop, where they have to do kinky stuff to get to a harddisk, with us it is straight fsck, mount, umount. Some of us are trying to recreate Ubuntu's success by copying their methods (mandatory team maintenance, paying core developers) in the hope of eventually surpassing them. I can see that Debian also shares the goal of being a strong "contender" on the desktop, because "universal" simply includes everything, so I can understand that some developers are feeling threatened here. But I think I should ask you to get a broader view here. We are not measured by the number of one-user-only desktop installs we have. While it gives some short term satisfaction, it is not the same thing as a long-lasting installation on an university cluster and watching the users grow from nano to vi users. Debian is behaving as if it had a massive midlife crisis. I think we should try to remain calm here. Because Debian with a wig will not look young, it will look ridiculous, and in the long run, Ubuntu will either grow up, try to become another Debian (which makes them redundant), or they will stay in their niche and score the desktop users, which need not bother us at all, because they are bad in the sack anyway. I'm now going to turn myself in to Dr. Freud, and you go and get laid.

So this afternoon while I was wading through some old email, I kept hearing rocks land in my kitchen. Twice I picked up rocks that magically appears. They could have come through the window, but that would be a difficult throw.

I've discovered that wandering over to Golden Gate Park is almost always a good idea. Yesterday was the Tour de Fat where I got rather sunburnt. This evening there was a drumming circle going on. I'll have to get a diggery-doo for next week's drumming circle.

The Massachusetts race for governor has turned very ugly. Even setting my personal partisanship (and professional bias) aside, I’m certain that the blame is not equally shared on both sides. Massachusetts Lawyer’s Weekly says it better than I could, and I reproduce the entire editorial here:

Deval Patrick for governor During the 34-year history of Lawyers Weekly, the paper has never endorsed a candidate for elected office. This practice was borne out of the notion that the political, or societal, issues that dominate races typically outweigh issues that are of distinct interest to lawyers. But the race for governor in Massachusetts in 2006 is suddenly very much about what it means to be a lawyer. On the one hand, we have Democratic nominee Deval Patrick, whose stated policies on judicial independence and appointment of judges (among other issues) reflect a genuine understanding of the legal system. Conversely, Republican nominee Kerry Healey has launched a chilling assault on the practice of law. Healey is running a television ad that takes Patrick to task for his 1985 representation of a defendant accused of murdering a police officer — an ad that borders on the bizarre in its reasoning. “While lawyers have a right to defend admitted cop killers, do we really want one as our governor?” the ad asks. Last week Healey added an ad that references Patrick’s one-time support of convicted rapist Benjamin LaGuer. “What kind of person defends a brutal rapist?” the ad asks. With those misguided questions, Healey has insulted an entire profession. Here’s hoping she does not get away with it. What is Healey’s message? That criminal-defense attorneys somehow should be associated with, or blamed for, the actions of their clients? That protecting important constitutional rights is somehow a seedy business? Healey has resorted to the worst form of pandering, openly inviting voters to think of Patrick as someone who associates with criminals. Her finger-pointing has a flavor of McCarthyism, suggesting that anyone who has spent time in the criminal-defense arena should be identified, called out and avoided. The lieutenant governor proclaims herself a criminal-justice candidate who is tough on crime. Yet nearly everyone associated with the criminal-justice system, be they defense attorneys, prosecutors, police officers or otherwise, understand that the Constitution guarantees the right-to-counsel, and the right to a zealous advocate. Healey no doubt understands this as well, but conveniently ignores it as she paints Patrick a villain. Gov. Mitt Romney knows that diminishing the work of attorneys often makes for good politics. He rarely hesitates to criticize lawyers — or judges — if it suits his agenda. But even Romney has never sunk this low, to this crass sort of demagoguery. Healey has become the bully in the schoolyard, poking fun at the overweight children. Look, he’s a lawyer. He must be a second-class citizen. Deval Patrick, meanwhile, has quietly made it known that he appreciates the key components of the legal system. He favors giving judicial administrators more control over their budgets and pay increases for lawyers who do work for the state, including prosecutors. Patrick says he would devote much attention to selecting judges, returning power to the Judicial Nominating Commission. And the former civil-rights attorney has suggested that he will be careful before criticizing a judge’s decision. “Judges don’t go looking for hard decisions,” he has said. As to the LaGuer matter, Patrick missed an opportunity with a clumsy, disjointed explanation of the matter. Patrick could have simply stated that any efforts he made in helping LaGuer obtain a DNA test were in the pursuit of truth. As former Suffolk County District Attorney Ralph Martin so eloquently put it in an Oct. 8 Boston Globe op-ed article, “I never thought that serving the ideals of the Constitution made you soft or tough on crime. … Respecting the Constitution doesn’t make you soft or tough — it only makes you just and fair.” One need not be defined by one’s profession, of course, and lawyers will have other important matters (i.e., education, taxes) on their minds when they go to the polls on Nov. 7. But attorneys can rest assured that a vote for Deval Patrick guarantees an appreciation for many of the ideals that lawyers deem important — while a vote against Kerry Healey sends a message that lawyers won’t tolerate her unforgivable cheap shots. Do we really want someone who defends accused criminals as our governor? President John Adams, author of the Constitution that Healey swore to uphold as lieutenant governor, defended the accused killers in the Boston Massacre trial. Do you think Adams would have been qualified to be our governor?

After asking the lazyweb on how to seek on gzip streams I got a very useful and comprehensive reply by Paul Sladen. As my previous searches on this topic didn't turn up to much useful things I'd like to publish Pauls reply (with his approval) here to help other people having the same problem as well: In a later mail Paul also added the following: Thanks Paul!

There have been quite some comments on the Iceweasel case all over the planets, and I saw several assertions, especially from the Mozilla camp, that I, as the Firefox co-maintainer, the xulrunner maintainer, and (soon) Seamonkey iceape co-maintainer, have to rectify. They broke the –enable-official-branding flag
Half-true. We just replaced Bon Echo/Deer Park with Firefox at the appropriate places in the build tree so that we could have Firefox with the “unbranded” logo instead of the official logo, as Gervase Markham gave us authorization for. You’re still free to enable the official branding, except that since the logos and stuff are non-free, we removed the other-licenses/branding/ directory from the original tarball, thus yes, the flag is half broken. Firefox logos being subject to trademarks, Debian thinks they are not free.
Trademark and copyright are different things. Mozilla has unnecessarily given a non-free license to “clarify” the trademark situation, but that is not required. To make it clear: Debian thinks the logos are not free because they are not free. Period. Debian isn t properly collaborating with Mozilla , sending unusable 100000-lines patches for validation just before releases (as seen on Lucas Nussbaum’s blog)
Let me take the firefox_2.0~rc1+dfsg-1.diff.gz file, strip the debian directory from it (it only contains maintainer scripts, our set of icons and some debian specific searchplugins), and strip the configure diff that is generated by autoconf due to some changes in configure.in… that’s exactly 2654 lines of diff. Very far from the 100000-lines patches they are claiming. The Mozilla people talked about Debian-specific changes that changed frozen APIs, breaking extensions (from Lucas’s blog again).
So, let’s dig into our firefox_2.0~rc1+dfsg-1.diff.gz:

• Changes to disable application upgrade (we want that to happen through apt-get) and change some other default preferences,
• Changes to fix “make distclean” so that it really cleans the build directory,
• Change not to build the “mangle” utility,
• Change not to call netstat to generate entropy, which is useless on linux,
• Changes to make Firefox build and work on architectures such as hppa, mips, mips64, m68k, ia64, sparc64, alpha, and arm, which the Mozilla guys don’t seem to care much for,
• Change to add a preference directory so that users can put their set of customized preferences in /etc/firefox/pref,
• Change to allow to build flat chrome without the zip utility,
• Change to allow to use system library for myspell, instead of statically linking the bundled one,
• Changes to allow to build s390 binaries on s390x host with s390 toolchain (same applies with x86 binaries on amd64 host with x86 toolchain),
• Changes to work around bugs with the hidden visibility pragma on gcc,
• Changes to make the pango backend actually build correctly,
• Changes to avoid some error messages while trying to create Makefiles from inexistant Makefile.in’s,
• Change to install in /usr/lib/firefox instead of /usr/lib/firefox-x.y,
• Change not to build useless chromelist.txt files,
• Changes to make helper applications with parameters work,
• Changes to allow builds against GTK 2.8,
• Changes to work around an Xrender bug,
• Changes to make the Gecko/yymmdddd string taken from preferences instead of being half-hard-coded (you could change it with preferences, but it would still be set to the hard-coded value at start time ; and you could change it again with preferences…),
• Change to allow mice extra buttons to act as something else than a left button,
• Change to allow to build with -Wl,–as-needed to avoid linking against a whole lot of useless libraries, without losing the link on libxpcom.so which is required by some extensions’ components,
• Changes not to shlibsign the NSS modules at build time, since we’re stripping the binaries afterwards, thus breaking the signature. We do build the signatures later, within the maintainer scripts.

That’s not that many changes, and most of them were taken from either some Mozilla CVS trunk or the Mozilla Bugzilla . And most of those that were not taken from there have been sent, except those that really don’t make much sense outside Debian. So, where are these frozen API changes ? And we’re not properly collaborating, huh ? The Mozilla project started by coming to a (admittedly uneasy) agreement with Debian for use of the name, but the Debian version diverged even further from the official version, so the permission was revoked. (from comments on Matthew Garrett’s blog) That one is really interesting, because between the time we got this understanding with Gervase and now, we are actually less diverging from the official version than by then. The main difference by that time was the extensions manager, which, in Debian, needed a lot of changes to actually act as it should, especially with globally installed extensions. I’m not saying the Debian one was perfect, it also had its own problems, but that was a whole lot less than the blatant crap that was the official one, obviously written for Windows without any thoughts for unix, and especially linux distributions. The only main difference now, between the official Firefox and ours, is that our build has the pango backend enabled, which we chose over the Xft backend for several reasons I won’t explain here. The others differences are that we use system libraries where possible, instead of the bundled libpng, libjpeg, libtiff, libmyspell and libcairo. We also build a flat chrome, instead of having everything in .jar files. Now, a little bit about differences the Mozilla guys don’t seem to care about while they really should: distributions build the Mozilla products with gcc 4.x, while the official binaries are built with gcc 3.4, as well as the extensions distributed on addons.mozilla.org. Fortunately, not a lot of extensions make use of binary components, and not a lot are linked against the standard C++ library, but when that happens (like with colorzilla), you get a component linked against libstdc++5 to load on a Firefox that is linked against libstdc++6. You are lucky if that setup doesn’t crash. Little extra from comments in Lucas’s blog:
Is it possible for the Debian Firefox maintainers to create an installer package for contrib which will install the vanilla FireFox from Mozilla s site.
How great would it be to have a package for one architecture instead of 12, and with a dependency on libstdc++5, that almost no other package uses any more. Update:
Debian is going to replace Firefox with a GNU fork called Iceweasel
Half-true. For the etch release, Iceweasel will only be Firefox with a different branding. We are taking the Iceweasel name because it was already know as a possible alternative name for Firefox when the trademark concerns have been raised more than 2 years ago (thanks Nathanael Nerode for this nice name, by the way). It appears that the GNU guys decided to start a fork with this name… that’s quite unfortunate, actually. Anyways, the plan is to get in touch with them to see what we can do together, but with the etch release approaching, we can’t and won’t do more than a rename for the moment. Update 2:
We (Mozilla ) presently have working relationships with most of the major Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu (As seen in several posts from people of the Mozilla Corporation or Foundation)
Very interesting. Ubuntu uses the same set of patches as Debian, with some more of their own, and even releases beta software in their official releases. But when it’s Ubuntu, it’s fine. Sorry, I forgot Debian is lame, and DDs are frustrated fanatic integrists, on top of being bloody fanatic assholes. Update 3: Added some precisions about other differences with the official binaries, and a small patch I somehow forgot.

Running a vote usually is a bad signal. It often means someone is trying to push an issue which is doesn't have wide enough support. Ideally, we would have consensus. Anyway, the results for the votes are in, and most are pretty clear results. For example the recall vote with 48:277 - the proponents would have barely made the quorum (48 is the minimum quorum). At the Google Summer of Code, there was a talk on "Poisonous people" (blogged about by others before) - and while many big voices in this discussion clearly are top contributors, they show a couple of signs for "poisonous people" (which often are just drop-bys). So if you're now leaving the project because of the vote - so be it. The discussion is over. We'll just go on doing our Debian work as before, because we're still Debian, and Debian is still us. That hasn't changed. So if you thing we've changed radically (which I doubt we have), you're as free to leave as you've always been. If you think we're still the same, please remain with us, and help making Debian what it has always been: a volunteer effort. [Update: there was one vote 2-, which is the same as 12, but maybe he meant it to be 21 instead? Then the 'recall' people would even have missed the quorum!] [Update #2: I'd like to share this quote with you (from LWN comments):

Debian is indeed a more balanced 'organisation' than it appears to be from its mailing lists. That doesn't actually surprise me, but it's nice to have it affirmed.

Yes, many of us don't just care this much about politics, but about our users and Debian itself. Being free is a highly valued ideal; getting a release "as free as possible while still being useful" is the real goal we're after. On an somewhat related note, icedove just replaced thunderbird.]

Thjis: This is the right time to automatically search for RC bugs. So was a year ago. Although we want the RC bug count to drop, an RC bug is still an RC bug regardless of whether we know about it or not. And many RC bugs didn’t exist a year ago. Take for example #392121. A package name change in a build-dependency caused my package to FTBFS. This bug would not have existed a year ago, but needed to get fixed for etch. Incidentally, when you go through a package rename for a development package, it would be nice to check what packages build-depend on the old package. A september changelog entry for cli-common says:

- Removed transition dependency for cli-common on cli-common-dev. (7 month for a package rename transition should be more than enough)

However, at no point in that seven months did anyone email me or file a bug report to tell me that the name changed. This bug wasn’t caught until someone rebuilding the archive noticed.
Actually, this might be a good idea for an infrastructural change. Would it be possible to set up a script that notices when packages are removed and sends a notice to the maintainers of any packages build depending on them?

During the Journ es du Logiciel Libre 2006 (an excellent event, thanks to the organizers), I had long chats with people from Mozilla Europe (in a more constructive way than what others did). This is mostly second-hand information, since the well-informed guys from Mozilla Europe I talked with got their info from other Mozilla developers, so it might be slightly inaccurate, but still help to understand the issue. More details welcomed in comments. The Mozilla Foundation goal is to prevent the web from becoming a proprietary web, by ensuring that Firefox, their product, has a big-enough market-share. I find it a bit disturbing to hear free software people speak about product and market-share, but well, OK. Of course, it’s quite difficult to achieve >20% market-share only with GNU/Linux users. They put a very high emphasis on the User experience. They want Firefox to look exactly the same on all platforms, even if some features (automatic plugin installation, automatic upgrades) do not fit well on a GNU/Linux system (such features don’t work with the Debian build). They want to enforce their trademark to prevent attempts to ruin their reputation to succeed. After a question asked by Dave Neary (GNOME) to Tristan Nitot (president of Mozilla Europe), Tristan gave the example of this hacker who said he found critical security bugs in Firefox before admitting it was a joke. He also gave the example of Microsoft indirectly founding SCO. Dave Neary remarked that some people could probably be trusted (like distro maintainers). But, if I remember correctly, Tristan said that it was difficult to allow some people to use the trademark without allowing everybody to do so. Also, allowing Debian to use the trademark without allowing derivatives to do so is not possible (DFSG#8). Iceweasel is considered a good thing inside Mozilla Europe (”It’s what we have asked them to do for a long time!“). However, some people are bitter about the fact that Debian seems to have chosen to use a gnu.org-hosted fork instead of just renaming the package to iceweasel. During Tristan Nitot’s conference, I asked a question about length of security support (only 18 months for the 1.0 branch). The answer was that distros were supposed to upgrade to newer Firefox releases even on their stable releases (!) or to come and help with security support for stable releases. Also, the fact that Debian chooses to package Firefox following the FHS is considered a source of problems. Somebody claimed that Debian was the only distribution to package Firefox this way (seems strange, but I did not checked this claim). I’m not sure how this fits with other Mozilla-based browsers such as epiphany. On a more technical side, they also claimed that Debian wasn’t properly collaborating with Mozilla, sending unusable 100000-lines patches for validation just before releases (haven’t checked this claim). It’s interesting to note that the same problem exists on the other side, with Mozilla releasing “security and stability” releases instead of just providing patches for the security bugs. My personal conclusion is that Iceweasel is really a good thing, and is quite unavoidable, even if it seems that the Debian/Mozilla collaboration could maybe have been better. Let’s advertise the use of Iceweasel, Epiphany, and other Web browsers! Note : comments open for people willing to fix inaccuracies or provide references, not for a stupid childish flame-war like the one in the comment of this post. Please write your own blog entry and use a trackback if you want to provide a detailed answer! Updates:

• I forgot to mention that the Mozilla people talked about Debian-specific changes that changed frozen APIs, breaking extensions, and causing bug reports on b.m.o or misleading forum posts. (again, not verified)
• Interesting blog post about the trademark issue here
• Mike Hommey addressed most of the points I reported in this blog entry.

Dear Bubulle, I am afraid that you do not know what you are talking about. Because you aren’t the only one in this case, here’s a short explanation of what happened. The existence of the IceWeasel fork is a reality that the Mozilla people need to accept and, optionally, understand (they also need to remember what Free Software is and how it all works). Unfortunately, some of the Mozilla people at the JDLL yesterday obviously couldn’t bear a little reminder about IceWeasel, but they were the minority. We hung the two posters in the morning, and they did not even notice them for something like 45 minutes. After what, somebody came and asked, in what can be described as an angry manner, if we knew why the IceWeasel fork got started. The answer was a plain and simple “I don’t care why the fork started. We’re going to rename Firefox in Debian so you people stop annoying us with your fucking trademark.” (which was obviously as rude an answer as their original question). At which point they just went away and never came back. They proceeded to fix the Firefox poster by adding a “TM” on it and, I think, fixing the capital “F” in the middle of the “FireFox” name, then stroke the “IceWeasel” line on the other poster. At this point, photos were taken and posted to one, then two blogs. Sam, for the sake of completeness, added the missing and markings to the Firefox poster, which the Mozilla people forgot to add. The whole thing could have stopped at that point, but Daniel Glazman, the famous Daniel Glazman, thought it’d be wise to link the first two blog posts on his blog, vomitting on Debian while he was at it. This was an extremely bad idea. His blog being syndicated on Planet Mozilla, he and the other Mozilla people are just helping spread the IceWeasel name and publicising the whole Mozilla trademarks debacle. I’m just not going to comment on the behaviour of the most vocal Mozilla supporters (no, dear Daniel Glazman, I’m not going to use the term “fanatics”, I leave that up to you), it’s just not worth bothering. Josselin linked the first blog post on his blog, so the thing made it to Planet Debian, too. This is no big news for Planet Debian readers, as the IceWeasel situation has been discussed at length on various blogs already. Now, what you Christian do not know, is that we have had several discussions about the Mozilla trademarks problems at the JDLL. Many people here were not aware of this problem and asked both the Mozilla people and us about it. We explained at length, several times, what happened, what their position was, what our position was, what had been proposed by both parties, why their proposals weren’t acceptable to us. Most of the people were quite astonished to learn that Mozilla Corporation refused the “Community Edition” idea, and most of them got our point. At the end of the day, one of the Mozilla people came and apologized for the blog posts and comments (although he isn’t the author of any post or comment, I believe), telling us that it wasn’t nice from them. Thanks for that, really. Overall, all of this is very positive for the Debian Project. We are doing the Good Thing. To everybody in Debian involved in the renaming of the Mozilla products: thanks, and good luck. Mozilla Corporation now has to face the Free Software community. It’s up to them to either come up with something that is acceptable for the community or stop whining about people complying with their trademark policy. Internet Explorer still has something like 82% of the market. You aren’t done yet, and you’re not going to progress without community support. So you’d better not lose this support now. Up to you.

Lars Wirzenius seems to be seconding my idea for using wikis to solve contentious issues.

My latest idea in this regard is to have several wiki pages, one for each opposing view and one for agreed facts. If an issue has multiple parties debating it then there could be multiple pages for the areas on which different sub-groups agree.

The plan is that each faction edits their own page along with email discussion with other factions and then the page of agreed facts is updated when agreement is reached on some points.

So it's autumn again, which means that the organization of FOSDEM is going to start its work again. I haven't been doing much in the central organization; however, I have been organizing the Debian presence there since 2004. This year, organizing FOSDEM will have an extra interesting edge, since they had a rather dramatic disc failure on their webserver and no backups, meaning, they'll have to build a new website. Apparently they chose to use Drupal (a project which occasionally was started by fellow Antwerp developer Dries Buytaert) rather than reinstalling their homebrewn CMS again. Anyway. A few weeks back I sent an SMS to the guy who did the Devrooms on FOSDEM side last year, asking whether I could get one for Debian this year, seen how their site was down and that they might've lost my contact information. Yesterday, I received a reply that he wanted an email instead. Fair enough, so I did that immediately. Haven't received a reply or an acknowledgement yet, though; that may not have been unexpected. In any case, I updated the website, which should be enough for now. Let's see what happens.

Jeff Waugh: “I raised concerns about overselling Portland during the first [OSDL Desktop Architects] meeting, as it could harm long-term credibility with ISVs. Such unclear language has resulted in serious miscommunication, and was not rectified in the 1.0.” (Via Stephen O’Grady.) I agree completely and have raised similar concerns—Portland helps solve an important problem, but it’s being dangerously oversold, and it’s certainly not a complete solution for ISVs by itself. The LSB has been around for a long time, and we’re just now reaching the breadth of features and distribution support that we’re comfortable positioning it as a practical solution for ISVs. Even now, we’re being extremely careful not to oversell (i.e., we consider our ISV certification program to be in the pilot phase). We (the Linux community) are only going to get one chance at this, namely the opportunity to present Linux as a unified ISV platform rather than a fragmented mess, and we can’t afford to blow our one chance with premature proclamations that the problem is finally solved.

A while ago, in my Towards a moderately paranoid Debian laptop setup article, I said things like

Disconnect your laptop from any kinds of networks. Pull all ethernet cables. Disable WLAN (via hardware killswitch). Disable Bluetooth. Disable/remove Firewire, USB, serial, whatever.

What might sound either paranoid, stupid, or funny to many people, was actually not a joke. Especially wireless technologies should be a security concern to everybody, as any flaws in the technology can be exploited... well, wireless, i.e. from remote. Recent examples of such flaws have been reported in Apple AirPort drivers, Intel Centrino wireless drivers (for Windows), and just today new problems were announced in Toshiba's BlueTooth stack for Windows (which is used in many places, e.g. Dell computers, Sony Vaio, ASUS computers). Granted, so far none of the flaws I know about affect the Linux drivers, but it's just a matter of time until such problems are found there, too. Hence, if you don't currently use any of the technologies, disable them. Only enable them on-demand, then turn them off again. Also, keep up with recent kernel/driver updates which might fix security issues...

At this school, every friday morning one member of staff holds a speech full of wisdom, insight and motiviation. While usually I find these quite transparent and full of good-sounding, not-very-helpful advices, today's speach by a history teacher was different.He talked about how africa keeps blaming the European colonialisation for it's current state, and that it should rather look ahead and "forge forward" (I didn't even know you could use "forge" as a verb implying movement, and dict.leo.org doesn't know either). He listed other countries with a devastating event in their history who were successful afterwards: Japan, after the the atomic bombing, became an industrial giant , German's economic miracly after being bombed to ashes and the Jew's will to go on after the holocaust.He assumed that if the bombs had been dropped on an African country more than half a century ago, people would still be blaming their current problems on the bombs, and demanding compensation, which some Africans do now regarding the slave trade, and which the teacher thinks also displays of lack of own initiative. Again, he compared that to Germany and Japan who did not think of expecting compensation (but then, these two have started the war that caused their bombing, so this comparision is, in my opinion, not entirely valid)Also interesting was the thesis that if these days a large slave ship would land on an African harbour, and announcements would be made that 200.000 slaves would be needed to work on American farms, people would thrash forward to go on that ship. Although it was probably a citique on the mentality of some Africans, it could also be seen as a reference to the state of affairs in Africa, where to some work as a slave might be the better choice.All in all a very interesting point of view that I wanted to share with you. It definately made more impression than my talk about Free Software, but that one went ok as well, I think.

Took some time at lunch today to look at more places. auzure_skies and I came home, and I got an email saying that I've been accepted into the M.Sci IS program. Then we called the real estate agent and asked her to come over so we could make an offer.

And yesterday the first book in the CIM course showed up.

The nice part is that much of the CIM should be finished by the time the baby's born. The move will be done and out of the way, and the Master's program doesn't come until several months after. So it only *feels* like I'm insane. Really!

I've read quite a few blog posts about someone leaving Debian and whether they should remain on Debian planet. An official policy on these matters has now been posted which stated what I expected, if you feel that you belong and meet technical criteria then you are welcome.

Not that this solves much, the next debate will be about what content is suitable for Debian-planet with the expected answer being "anything which meets technical criteria and doesn't offend many people or break any laws". I've already had some comments on my blog from people who want me to change topics. I don't know if other people get this or whether doing an average of one post per day gets me more attention from the loons.

I started blogging after leaving Red Hat. I considered asking for my blog to be added to the Fedora Planet, but wasn't sure whether I would be posting much about it. I just checked and it seems that my old Advogato blog is aggregared on the Fedora Planet and there is no mailto URL on that site to allow me to get it changed. I've just put a final blog entry on Advogato to inform everyone of the change.

I'm not sure if it's worth adding my blog to the Fedora syndication. I have just decided to change my main desktop machine from Rawhide to Debian/unstable. The reason is that Fedora is mostly a Gratis distribution and Debian is more Libre. For most computer users there is no real difference as they don't have the skills to use the liberty that Debian offers. But for people who can code (note that we are in a small minority of computer users) the difference is significant.

The final issue that forced me to this decision is this bugzilla entry about Xen. In Debian there are kernels for Xen on i686, Xen on AMD K7, and Xen on i686 with vserver (doesn't Xen make vserver redundant?). In Fedora there will be one Xen kernel which won't boot on the machine that is most important to me and which ironically is the machine that was issued to me by Red Hat (and sold to me when I left).

This issue of a lack of choice is quite understandable from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side of things. It's OK to say to a customer who wants to pay for a RHEL-AS license that they need a machine less than 3 years old if they want to use all the features. Adding new kernels adds support costs and I think that most RHEL customers want to have a smaller set of supported options with a higher level of support. I often recommend RHEL to clients and I will recommend that clients use Xen on RHEL-5 - and that they purchase recent hardware to do so.

But for home and hobby use it's a different matter. I provide all the support I need, I can compile my own kernels without much effort - but it saves time to have someone else do it. Fedora simply lacks choice here by design. I still support a bunch of Fedora and RHEL machines and will still develop RPMs for them. I will put everything I develop under http://www.coker.com.au/rpms/ for anyone who wants it.

Given that if the Fedora Planet people want to syndicate my blog I am more than happy to have them do so. I don't dislike Fedora, in fact I still recommend that people use it. It's just that Debian suits my personal needs better than Fedora does. I expect that I'll have more Debian content than Fedora content on my blog, but there will also be a lot of Linux content that's not distribution specific.

It will be interesting to see what the Fedora Planet people do.

Eric: My comments weren’t directed at you. That would be shooting the messenger—after all, a quick read of the comments to my post the other day shows that you’re just going along with the community consensus. My dismay is based on two basic things. First, while the web guys (you know, the ones we used to make fun of as not “real programmers”) are off inventing the future, the Debian community (or some significant subset anyway) sees this as the critical issue, and that makes me wonder how relevant free software is going to be in a few more years. It may be a matter of principle to some, but it paints everyone with the same lunatic fringe brush. More than anything, though, it’s the, uh, inconsistency that really burns me. As I said in the aforementioned comments, I ll be the first to agree that Mozilla is being overzealous, just like I thought Debian was being overzealous in its reaction to the Debian Common Core last year. As I said then:

I can say with 100% certainty that a trademark policy more restrictive than the one adopted by Linus Torvalds for Linux isn’t what the founder of this project had in mind.

Yet, now that the shoe is on the other foot, Debian is up in arms because another organization wants to enforce its trademark? Come on. You can’t have it both ways.