Christian Schaller

One thing I ranted about multiple times in my blog over the years is how Linux distributions have failed to provide their content in Ogg format. Especially when the content is targeted at Linux users it suprise me that they do not make sure to have the video available in the format that basically all linux users have support for out of the box. That said both Red Hat and Novell has actually taken this feedback to heart and more often than not they do provide Ogg videos these days (in addition to various other formats).

It saddens me then when I checked out the link in Jono Bacons latest blog entry. Where the Ubuntu MOTU videos seems only to be available in the proprietary Flash format. For a distribution which likes to drape itself so loudly in the colours of community and freedom this is a huge letdown. And while you can view these videos with things like swfdec you still need to have the patent encumbered codecs available through gst-ffmpeg to actually view the videos. Would it be so hard to also offer those videos as a Ogg Theora torrents for instance?

Update: Talked to Jono. Turns out they do plan on making Ogg’s available, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. While I kicked Ubuntu here, it wasn’t really about them specifically, but the fact that even though the tools have gotten quite good and widespread over the last few years in terms of creating Ogg’s the open source or free software community is still rather lackluster in its willingness to try to help push the free formats. Its kinda how I used PNG images on my website even before there was widespread PNG support, cause if my page got just one person (hi mom) to use a PNG supporting browser it was a step forward.

Slashdot linked this weekend to a Nokia position paper on the use of Ogg in the HTML5 proposal for the media elements. For those of us who have followed the HTML5 discussion for some time there is little new in the position paper, he is simply regurgitating the same arguments that Apple Safari people came up with.

Let me start by saying that I know that Nokia is a big organisation and that the opinions expressed by Stephan Wenger in the linked position paper do not reflect the opinion of everyone at Nokia. So unlike the Slashdot crowd I am not putting this position paper at the feet of everyone at Nokia. I would point out that Stephan Wenger’s job at Nokia seems to consist of traveling the world attending MPEG meetings eating canap’es, so there is probably a lot of self interest in that position paper also

That said I do feel it correct to address some of the concerns/claims made in that document and by some Slashdot commenters.

To start with the Slashdot headline, the definition of proprietary in this context I guess could be open to debate, I have myself referred to technologies as proprietary if they are mostly a one group/company effort myself, even if the code is available. If that description would fit Ogg, Vorbis and Theora is another matter, but I will for the sake of argument allow that the what makes something proprietary in the context of software is open to some discussion.

What I felt was the biggest red herring in the paper was actually the musing about DRM. There is nothing stopping you from DRM protecting Ogg,Vorbis and Theora content and thus his arguments about the need for DRM support seemed rather misplaced. Sure you can not play back a DRM protected file on a system only supporting the normal playback but that is true for any format. You can not play back a Windows Media DRM’ed file on a non-DRM supporting Windows Media stack either. Same for playing back a Fairplay protected AAC file on a system with no Fairplay support. And unless he wanted to also standardize on a specific DRM system in HTML5 it doesn’t matter what format you use cause if people use different DRM systems you don’t get better interoperability anyway. An OMA DRM protected AAC file do not work with a Fairplay enabled AAC playback system and vica versa.

He also spent a some time nagging about what are the currently popular formats on the net and what terms they are commonly available under. The cutest argument however was how he managed to try to say that if the W3C accepted a royalty bearing set of codecs for this specification it could at the same time try to push for more royalty free stuff through MPEG and ITU-T…..yes….sounds brilliant……no better way to convince organizations creating royalty bearing standards that they need to do royalty free standards than to start paying money to use their standards…..errrrr NOT.

His section on Alternative ways forward is also quite hilarious. Proposal 1. Leave it up to the market forces. Dude, standardizing on Vorbis/Theora is part of creating market forces. And for the claim that the market had quickly chosen something at earlier points in other non-related markets was also quite hilarious. If he instead had looked at the Web of today there is a big mix of stuff being used like Windows Media, Quicktime, Flash Video, DivX, Real Media and more. And its been like that for a long time. The only way the HTML5 media tags have any hope of causing consolidation is of course to propose specific codecs for HTML5. If not there will be zero motivation for anyone to move away from their current Windows Media or Quicktime or Flash or whatever solution.

His second option was to adopt some ancient standards which where sure to be out of patent. One would have hoped a position paper from a world leading organisation like Nokia would be held at a higher professional standard than being based on a random authors ‘author’s personal experience‘ to quote the article. That said Theora as it is could be better and it is in the process of getting a lot better due to Monty’s ongoing work.

His last proposal is of course the oldest most true and tested way of trying to derail an effort: propose to set up a committee to investigate the issue…

Hopefully the next time Nokia want to write a position paper on something they will choose someone to write it who wants to be part of the solution and not the problem.

Read Miguel’s post about the patent suit between Sun and NetApp. I guess both parties are carefully avoiding stating something which is outright lies so instead they tiptoe around the issue a bit.

Here is my guess of how things went down:

Step 1: NetApps first approached StorageTek behind the cover of a third party intermediary seeking to purchase STK patents. This is what Jonathan mentions in his blog and nothing in the blog entry of the NetApp CEO contradicts this, it just omits it.
Step 2: Sun when being asked about the patent purchase turns around and says ’sorry not for sale, but you can license.’ Sun having talked to the third party mentioned they make this offer directly to NetApp. So As the NetApp’s CEO says, Sun contacted them with a list of patent (the same list NetApp had asked to purchase) and said they where available for licensing.
Step 3: NetApp realize that their patent purchase request has backfired a bit and starts looking for a way out. Their first solution is to look through their own patent portfolio probably hoping to find something to cross license with Sun. (Or if they got stupid with greed, they tried to both get Sun to agree that they where not infringing on Sun’s patents and at the same time demand patent fee payment for their own).
Step 4: Licensing lawyers/people at Sun are faced with what is more than a ’standard’ patent licensing agreement and for some reason tries to just drop it instead of dealing with it. (A scarily common event in many big companies).
Step 5: NetApp either due to worry about future legal action from Sun or due to greed decide that a request for a summary judgement about the validity of the Sun patents (which they originally wanted to buy) and a countersuit would be the best way forward.
Step 6: NetApp CEO presents his view in blog post in the hope to not get to much bad reactions from the open source/free software community.

Step 7: Sun CEO replies in his own blog.

All the above is just guesswork by me of course for what happened, but these set of events would not contradict either of the two versions of what happened.

My guess is that NetApp just got greedy in this process and starting behaving stupidly. Probably in the end they make the same fatal mistake that SCO did, they assumed the cost of a lawsuit is what you pay your lawyers. Instead the real cost of a lawsuit will often be the collateral damage it will inflict on your business. NetApp might end up experiencing the same thing that SCO did (although on a smaller scale), that suddenly their customer base wants to avoid doing business with them as they are seen as a patent troll and a enemy of open source software.

Been briefly taking part in and watching a discussion about wether Launchpad should be released. The debate made me think about wether all code releasing is truly important or even a good thing.

Once upon a time I was writing articles for a now defunct news site called linuxpower.org. For this site a special publishing system had been written. I know Jeremy considered releasing the code we used for the site a couple of times, but in the end I remember him concluding that the code wasn’t really in a release worthy state and that he didn’t have the time or the interest to clean it up in order to add yet another half-done publishing system the world.

While we all where strong supporters of free software none of us had any problems with this decission. Part of the reason for that is that releasing the code of something doesn’t automatically make it useful for people. In fact it may only be a distraction as you get more useless crap showing up on google when you are trying to find something.

For the release of sourcecode to be truly useful the code needs to be in a state where its been prepared for consumption by anyone else than the original creator. Getting hold of a source package that do not compile or run cause you don’t have access to the 7 post-it notes with manual instructions, the 19 steps only stored in the memory of the creator and is using some database tables you don’t have an sql script to create tend to be of abysmally little value.

A lot of source code is written by one or two persons for their own private or professional use. Code written like that is often using a lot of shortcuts to achieve its tasks, like hardcoding values, no code comments, no documentation, no real build system, relying on a database structure thats been created manually and incrementally over a period of time and so on. Thus sending that code out there doesn’t make it instantly useful. So unless your application is truly special nobody will probably ever bothering spending the weeks or months it would take to make it useful to themselves or the even longer period it would take to make it useful to the world at large.

That said there are of course cases where even such code could be useful, for instance if the code documents a certain piece of hardware or fileformat. But once again it would require the code to actually correctly document the hardware or fileformat in question, sending out a file called nvidia-driver.tar.gz which contains a driver you tried to make by trial and error, but which never did anything apart from cause 4 of your graphics card to stop working permanently is probably not doing anyone any favours. At least not without a lot of code comments and a big warning.

Which brings me a back to trying to pressure someone to open source something. In many cases unless the person asked to release some code wants to release the code to the world and thus is willing to take the time and effort to make sure the world would truly be able to use the code then getting the code released would probably be of little or no value. In fact it might just be adding to the noise making googling for actually useful code a little harder.

So in terms of Launchpad. I am sure it could be a useful tool for various people or groups if released, but release means more than doing ‘tar -cvf lp.tar /var/www/’. Thus unless one can convince Canonical that there is true value for them in spending the time and the money to prepare LP for a release and maintaining that release as a public project, then all achieved is probably getting a big tarball of useless crud put onto the net and at the same time have wasted developer time on an effort of little value.

In the meantime maybe effort should instead be spent on improving existing projects already available which has a featureset similar or close to what Launchpad offers.

Saw another article today where Balmer talks about the Novell/Microsoft deal. Once again he demonstrates in my opinion how extremely broken the whole patent system around software is and how companies are trying to abuse that brokenness.

While I have little love for organisations like MPEG LA at least they clearly define what they license out. If you take a license for MPEG4 for instance you will get a full list of patent numbers and nations which they apply to. If one would like to challenge or work around those patents one would at least be able to figure out what one are up against.

In the Microsoft case they are not licensing something concrete for a specific amount of money. Instead they are basically saying ‘we have a thicket of patents and we think a unquantified subset of them applies to you, pay a fee or you risk a lawsuit’. So if you want to do a risk assesment or try to work around these patents your only option is to dig through the global (primarily US) patent office databases for anything concerning Microsoft or companies bought by Microsoft and try to figure out if any of those patents apply to anything you do or have. The cost of such a move is probably prohibitive. Of course if you do find some patents which could apply to something you do, then the question of wether they should have been granted in the first place comes up. You then have the option to spend lots of money on trying to find prior art to invalidate the patent(s) in question. But the problem here is that most companies who do patent blackmail tend to make sure that their licensing fees are lower than the expected cost of getting their patents invalidated, so you are stuck in a lose/lose situation. You can give in to their crocked ways and license their patents no matter how bogus, or you can try to fight them and end up spending even more money. One could dream of a situation where the cost of any patent prior art research and litigation should be covered by the US patent office, as they are the ones who are primarily to blame for the current mess.

Not sure this situation can be fully remedied without the US doing a full rehaul of their patent system, but maybe a stopgap measure would be a law that forbids the claim of patents against a competitor without being specific about which patent and which application implementing it at least. That would put much more of cost on the would be attacker instead of the defendant.

Like most my initial reaction to the Microsoft/Novell deal was to wonder what it actually meant, and if could cause increased risk to the rest of the community. After reading various comments I have instead started to wonder if this deal is worth the paper isn’t written on in terms of the patent deals. Novell and Microsoft have tried to work around the GPL by signing a covenant not to sue over software patents instead of ‘licensing’ the patents in question. But if Microsoft use this deal indirectly as an excuse to sue Red Hat or Canonical I think Novell might find itself in hot water with GPL copyright holders, who probably will start taking them to court for violating section 7 of the GPL. So maybe Novell’s customer got peace of mind from MS patent lawsuits, but on the other hand I don’t think they feel the risk having their rights under the GPL nullified will be any less stress causing.

On ther other hand I would think Microsoft sees this risk and knows that taking down both Red Hat and Novell in one swoop would land them in deep water with anti-trust authorities again, so in essence this deal might mean nada.

On the other hand Novell might have handed Microsoft the best FUD tool since the SCO case. Time will tell.

A group of kernel hackers came together and wrote a position paper on the current GPL v3 draft. To which
Eben Moglen responds with a renewed invitation to join the process and the FSF replies by trying to smokescreen the issue by arguing semantics.

Moglen’s invitation is in my opinion pure bullshit. Being invited to partake in a process on terms where the rules are staked against you from the outset is next to valueless. The only thing those kernel developers would accomplish with accepting Eben’s invitation is to have their names used to legitimize the process while in effect not getting any real chance to change the outcome. The FSF have made it very clear in the public statements so far and their reaction to a lot of public feedback on for instance the DRM clauses that they do not intend to change this apart from maybe adjusting the semantics a little.

So Eben if you want to be taken seriously when offering invitations make sure in the future to be invitations to processes which there is realistic give and take possibility. Nobody like getting invitations to use and abuse setups.

Linus Torvalds remark about how explaining the problems with the current draft hit the mark with the FSF. Trying to discuss something with them tend to only lead to the typical FSF way of arguing; trying to derail the debate by arguing about semantics and the words used instead of the issues themselves.

I saw this article/blog on businessreview online which features an interview with the SGI CEO. One of the things he says is that OpenGL might be sold as part of SGI’s restructuring. Considering how we are putting all our eggs in the OpenGL basket currently, with projects such as XGL, AIGLX and Glitz I hope this gets picked up by a friendly entity, especially if there are some patents still attached to OpenGL.

Was scanning through the slashdot comments on the RIM/NTP
settlement. Scanning through the comments I noticed that the people trying to defend the NTP patent litigation where strangely repetetive in the arguments. Like bringing up the same points in the same order in various posts. Hard to prove, but the postings seemed to alike to purely coincidental. So the question is if companies and groups trying to preserve the current patent regime (and probably other groupings) are now paying PR people to advocate their views on Slashdot and similar forums? Or maybe my own feelings on the subject made me see a conspirancy where there was none. Time to put on the tin foil hat :).
But I think the free/open source software community have become enough of a financial and political force for such things to start occuring, no matter if they actually did happen in this case.

In an earlier blog entry I commented on the DRM provisions in the GPL 3 draft and why I felt they where empty grandstanding from the side of the FSF. A lot of people from various side of the fence seems to disagree. A moronic Microsoft employee muses that ‘With it’s anti-DRM provisions, …….., open source loses as proprietary software rushes in to fill the void left by GPL code.’. My only reply to that is; yes, as we all know all DRM related software today is using the GPL…..the void caused by DRM implementations no longer being possible to license under the GPL will be overwhelming……. If this is the kind of thinkers Microsoft must hire these days then they are in bigger trouble than I thought.

On the other side the Groklaw crowd is discussing if the current DRM provisions in the GPL v3 draft can be worked around. Yes, once again we see the belief that the amount of people spending energy on trying to do DRM systems under the GPL license is huge. To the Groklaw crowds defence they are also discussing the point the I was trying to make, that the DRM provisions might have uninteded side effects.

Fighthing DRM the only way it can be fought

Anyway I have come to terms with that most of the extended community at this point follows the policy that they are ready to fight something to their death as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them in
any way. So they spend their morning screaming online against the evils of DRM systems and software patents before going down to the local store to by a new DRM using DVD, sporting patented media formats.

Anyway I figured I should try to actually do something which will have a real effect if more people starts doing it. I signed up for a music store which sells DRM free music. emusic offers DRM free mp3 downloads of their whole catalog, which was much bigger and had more well known names than I had expected. They even give you the first 75 songs for free. True, I will not find the common radio hits there, so I have to live without Brittney and Madonna, but at least I get DRM free music.
To bad they don’t offer Vorbis downloads, but once again if enough free software people sign up and start requesting it then I think they are still small enough to actually listen to us. Anyway I am now listening to some cool music from a band called Ladytron. I also found some nice Frank Zappa songs there. I guess the lesson I am trying to teach is that action speaks much more than words; which maybe is something the Slashdot crowd should take to heart?