Linux Development: Audio, SpectMorph, BEAST,…

Since I have a job next month, I can afford investing some money into the projects I work on. If you have contributed anything to a project I work on (BEAST, Rapicorn or LibSydney) and want to do some paid development, drop me an email. Its good if you either know something about music or coding, but its not a requirement – basically anybody can do something useful, like reporting bugs, writing documentation, designing sounds or writing songs and of course coding.

The results of the Hamburg election are these: people do care about clean air, clean water and life. Thats why 9.6% of them voted green. They also care about economics, finance, employment, and so on. Thats why over 42% voted for the current majors Ole’s CDU. Now even although nobody at the green election party on Sunday was too eager on negotiating with the CDU, I am wondering if we will finally see a black-green coalition in Hamburg. Its the coalition I favoured since I started reading Heiner-Geisslers (CDU/CSU) books on politics when I was in school. Will it happen in Hamburg? I think for fighting against climate change or sorting out inter-religious differences that make migration harder than it ought to be, a CDU/Green coalition would be the right thing to do. So please: do it!

To help people contributing content to Beast and Rapicorn, Tim has installed a Content Management System (Drupal) on Testbit.Eu. It has already some content on Rapicorn, Beast, FOMS, Freerompler and other related stuff. Feel free to get an account and contribute :-).

I had a discussion with Lennart about the maintenence of LibSydney, and his position is that since he started the project, he would like to remain maintainer and have me only as developer contributing patches. Thats great, because then he will be able to use all the knowledge and contacts he already has to promote the use of LibSydney, while he will get some help from me. Being involved in KDE as well, that will ensure that the Linux desktop of the future will simply work as expected, when it comes to sound. In the same discussion, we also talked about PulseAudio, and I offered to help there. Having all the experience from aRts, I think its a good project for me to join, and I also believe that PulseAudio does a lot of things right already. However, it has its problems (not the least of which is that its implemented in C, which is suboptimal if you want to do object oriented programming, simply because the language does not support it). Also, the IPC of PulseAudio could be improved if BEASTs SFI object system is used. So there is a lot to do, and I am looking forward to contributing the first patches.

The FOMS 2008 is over now (2 days), and I think is was very efficient. I participated in the discussions on how to fight patents (mainly get rid of FUD by counter actions like documenting why we think that a particular open source software is not affected by software patents). I also became maintainer of libsydney, a cross platform audio library for linux, windows and mac. We also discussed the last API details, so I hope to produce a first release soonish.

The australians became independant some years ago, and I was in Sydney this weekend. There was spectacular fireworks with music and lots of ships parading in the harbour in Sydney. Back in Melbourne I was out a day at the beach, and did some swimming, got a minor sun burn, and got to know some people from all over the world.

Yesterday I attended the KDE4 release party in Hamburg. I was there at approximately 23.00 – the party was almost over. However, I managed to meet Harri Porten, who had invited me to the Party. Most people were already leaving. Well if you haven’t checked out KDE4 yet, try it. Its certainly better than almost every Windows or Mac OS X Desktop out here. Finally I was with Harry Porten, Frerich Rabe and Benjamin Otte in a nice spot having something to drink and sharing News about the recent developments in BEAST, Benjamins Free Flash reimplementation and the stuff Harri and Frerich have been working on (a commercial product called Froglogic Squish).

Spam is one of the internet problems that I see on a daily basis in my inbox and if you’re using mail, you probably know the problem. I think one project that is getting far too little attention is Hashcash. The idea is very simple. Email senders put a stamp on their email (which takes a lot of cpu time to compute). Email receivers can validate that stamp (which is cheap), and if there is a stamp, the email is unlikely to be spam. When enough people are using hashcash, mails without stamps can simply be filtered more aggressively. Of course this depends on people using hashcash at all 🙂 – I took some time to install it recently, which was relatively easy with my Debian/mutt setup. However, things could be made more simple if mailers and distributions came with builtin support.

Usually when it comes to releasing music or movies the answer of some of the companies that create the content appears to be: “its not possible to do this without resorting to proprietary formats, players and security by obscurity / trusted computing”. And lots of problems arise from that. I know several at least two developers working for some content provider and the amount of support you need to give even for the proprietary “solutions” seems to be massive. Worse, you lock out free software completely, and often lots of old devices, too. The whole idea is causing these problems. The more people you tell a secret, the weaker your protection gets.

My proposal would be this: the companies argue that DRM provides a way for the customer to track whether he owns music or not. It does so automatically, so if you’re a honest person, you can track whether files are owned by you, much in the same way you can now look which CDs are in your CD shelf. Also restrictions such as “you can listen to this file, but only until December 2007” can be added and tracked automatically by software. If this is what the customers want to do, then I propose shipping a media ownership file with each song/album purchased, looking somewhat like:

	Album:           [album name]
	Song:            [song title]
	File:            [foo.ogg]
	Size:            4820573
	SHA1:            [sha1 sum of the file]
	Owner:           [some content provider with some unique url]
        Restrictions:    [like: expires 20071231]
	Customer:        [your name]
	Customer Mail:   [your email adress]

To make the system work, this file should be signed by the owner (some company that produces music or movies), with a PGP/GPG signature or something equivalent. So then, whereever you go and whatever you do with your music, you and your software can validate that you own it. For the honest user, this should be great. Even if you copy the files to a friend by accident, the software will still be able to catch it, and tell your friend: “this is not really music you bought”.

So I think for honest customers this system will work, because it is based on the idea that you want to compensate artists, and DRM is only a convenient way for you to track that you do it. Its also not easy to attack the media ownership file idea, because if a content provider owns a piece of music, he and only he should sign such files. So by looking up first who owns the music/movie in a global database, and then verifying that the right signature from the right person for the right customer is there, its possible to effectively avoid that somebody else hands out media ownership files for music/movies he doesn’t own.

By now, many people, especially those developing software, know the advantages of free software. But what about the music you listen to? Often, we’re used to listening to music that comes with lots of restrictions of what you can do with it. On the other hand, if we were used to listening to free music (which would be free to copy, modify, redistribute, perform, and so on), rather than music which comes with lots of restrictions,

* obtaining music would be easier (no DRM required anyway)
* studying music and reusing musical ideas would be easier, especially if artists started to publish the data files required to make the music along with the music (where possible)
* sharing music would no longer be illegal
* artists could base their work freely on the rich musical culture they live in, like it used to be some centuries ago, where nobody had invented non-free music yet

I bet that almost everybody who reads this blog entry can remember at least ten song titles of non-free music that they like. How many titles of free music do you know? If someone asks you about a great piece of rock music, pop music, electronic music, dance music or whatever you listen to, would you refer them to non-free music or free music?

So, if you like the idea of free music, here are two sites where you can start exploring some of it:
* Jamendo – provides music under various more or less free licenses, search by license is possible
* ccMixter – collaborative site where musicians share creative commons licensed songs and samples