Safe as Milk

Quote on DRM

Yann Zitouni, présentateur Couleur3: “Le problème avec des protections anti-piratage, c’est que ça emmerde surtout ceux qui achètent la musique”

Address hunt

O lazyweb, O lazyweb… can anyone tell me where I could find the postal addresses of Vicente Fox, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Néstor Kirchner, Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez? These guys are heads of state, so it couldn’t be too hard to figure out where they live, but I have not found a postal address for any of them after a good while dossing off work^W^W^Wsearching on the internet.

770 adapter: update

Thanks to all who commented on how to get an adaptor for my 770 – several of you mentioned that the chargers are the sam as for the Nokia N70, N90 and others. So I got one of those, but can’t help but feel that I was a bit fleeced – I paid €15 for it. And that was after shopping around in a big department and 2 specialist mobile phone stores.

Thank you, O Lazyweb, thou art wise and knoweth all things.

770 power adapter

I recently lost my adapter/recharger for my Nokia 770 – anyone know where/how I can get a replacement?

Pet peeve

Why do Americans utilize the word “utilize”, rather than the less pretentious and simpler “use”?

Bad advocacy

To celebrate my recent addition to Planet Advocacy, I’m going to tell a little story about bad advocacy. In fact, it’s hard to call this advocacy at all…

About 6 months ago, the GIMP developers were contacted by a concerned citizen about a company called Luxuriousity, who was rebranding and selling free software on-line, via Ebay and on their website. The person contacting us believed there were shenanigans going on, and that we should unleash the lawyers on them, or something.

I contacted Luxuriousity via the email address on their site, and asked whether they were aware of the conditions imposed by the GPL on distribution of binaries. They were, and pointed me towards gimp.org as a way to get the full source code. I did ask if they had an FTP server where I could get their modified sources, but they didn’t have one, and said they didn’t need one, since they included the source code on the CD they ship with the binaries, and provide an offer of source code on a CD to anyone who asks.

So, there’s two issues here.

First, Luxuriousity are selling GPL software. That is fine. Nothing wrong with it, there’s no requirement in the GPL to give credit, they haven’t removed copyright notices from source files, if they’re making money out of it it would be nice to help out and sponsor things like <plug>the Libre Graphics Meeting</plug> but there’s no requirement to do so.

Second, there’s the trademark issue. Luxuriousity rebrands the original programs, so there is no trademark issue. In fact, some people (notably MySQL) have insisted that they not use their trademarks, so they now consciously avoid the issue by renaming everything. This is no different than Inkscape being a rebranding of Sodipodi, or CinePaint rebranding the GIMP.

Now, these are complex issues that I don’t fully understand myself, and many in our community have strongly-held and passionate misunderstandings of these issues that go far beyond my own. People feel wronged (hurt even) that someone is “stealing” something they hold so dear and making a quick buck out of it by pretending it’s their own work. But since the copyright notices are intact, there is no such pretense. The developers have simply allowed people to redistribute their work.

If you followed the link to the Luxuriousity site earlier, you will have seen “System is currently down”. If you look for their software on ebay, you won’t find it. If you try to buy software from some of the pages behind the front page which are now available, you won’t be able to. Our community, on the basis of a flawed understanding of our foundations, has collectively hounded the company out of business. Their Ebay and Paypal accounts have been cancelled, and their server has been subjected to multiple DDOS attacks. They made the front page of digg, and some of the comments on that story are shameful:

1:

He’s gonna get DDOS by a whole bunch of people. i just know it. i hope so at least.

2:

http://digg.com/security/Kicking_A_Spammer_In_The_Nuts_Daily_Turns_Out_To_Be_Effective

You know what to do.

3:

Get wget or soemthing similar installed and in your system path variable and put the following in a .bat file:

:up
wget http://www.luxuriousity.com/images/sidephoto.jpg
del sidephoto.jpg
goto up

then just run it and hope he enjoys the bandwidth bill.

This type of behaviour does not do any favours to us or to our community. It’s against the spirit of free software. In fact, it makes me sick to think about it. The free software community I know and love is a fuzzy happy hippy place where people do good for their neighbours for no other reason than it gives them pleasure to make the world a better place.

It’s clear that that community has grown fast, and not everyone has taken the time to understand the nuances of what we do – we have a huge job to educate newcomers about the freedoms which we give to people by using the GPL. We cannot tolerate this kind of behaviour, and the only way to prevent it is education. Let’s make sure the diggers and slashdotters know what it means to be part of the free software community – not just the benefits, but the responsibilities as well.

Things that make me smile

Tim Bray doesn’t need any help from me, but his report on ApacheCon made me smile – specifically, the section titled “The Rest”:

Covalent showed up with a T2000, which got a lot of attention. They had a little Thinkpad plugged into it and were running the ab benchmark to establish how many requests it could handle. Dan Price of the Solaris group decided he wasn’t satisfied with the numbers, so he buckled down and got to work on optimizing it.

By the time he’d finished tweaking, he had it cranking through around 25,000 requests per second, which is good but not that impressive; then we looked and noticed that the poor little Thinkpad was totally red-lined, I’m surprised it didn’t start to melt; plus we were pumping 290 megabits/second or so through the gigabit ethernet wire, which is not bad at all for HTTP traffic.

Alice and Bob

Andy: So I get the feeling the problem isn’t a real-life problem, but anyway. Since Alice and Bob are overlooking the same street, couldn’t Alice just take a picture of Bob sitting at the window showing her his watch?

Or Alice & Bob agree a protocol where they both take pictures of a given event every day (say, the number 7 bus going past, or nightfall, or the coffee-shop closing up), and use those to interpolate the series of photos for the day. That assumes both watches are linear, though. But that seems like a fair assumption.

Making passionate users

Following on from what Vincent said, here’s a link from “Creating Passionate Users” on featuritis – try to figure out where GNOME is on the curve. And another one on Easter eggs

Another post on “Creating Passionate Users” suggests that passion implies polarisation. And that got me thinking that Nicholas Petreley and Mango Parfait over at Tux Magazine are probably two of the best friends that GNOME has right now.

Look at the comments on their letters page – people hate GNOME. And they love GNOME. It’s great! In the last issue of Tux, half the published reader’s comments were on KDE vs GNOME, mostly GNOME users defending their desktop from the big mean TUXies.

Blog title

Apparently the Captain Beefheart reference in my blog title was too obscure (“Fast and Bulbous” recurs a few times during Trout Mask Replica), and some people thought it was rude.

So welcome to Safe as Milk, which lacks subtlety, but surely won’t have anyone calling me a pervert.