Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

This short post is an absolute must read.  Quote:

Still, there’s a qualitative difference between letting people download your own work from your own site, and watching other people try to profit from it. But it is precisely this difference that strikes at the heart of the Free Software/Free Culture ethos. Part of choosing a Free license for your own work is accepting that people may use it in ways you disapprove of. There are no “field of use” restrictions, and there are no “commercial use” restrictions either. In fact, those are two of the fundamental tenets of the “Free” in Free Software. If “others profiting from my work” is something you seek to avoid, then Free Software is not for you. Opt for a Creative Commons “Non-Commercial” license, or a “personal use only” freeware license, or a traditional End User License Agreement. Free Software doesn’t have “end users.” That’s kind of the point.

Via Matt.

I came across this excellent blog post – “Recognizing and Avoiding Common Open Source Community Pitfalls“.  It’s very related to the short speech I gave recently over at 3rd Ubuntu / Fedora release party.  My angle was on how much good participating in an Open Source project could do to a college student.  I was talking more about how much practical stuff one could learn from existing projects – their tools, approaches, etc.

The blog post talks about roughly the same, but from a different perspective.  It’s more for those who are starting a new project, rather then joining the existing one.  There are plenty of ‘myths’ that go around about how is it is to do Open Source and how everyone can do it, and that all you need to succeed is to start.  That’s not so true, of course.  There is plenty of stuff to be learned and lots of work to be done.  If you are about to start your project or started one recently or just thinking about it, read the article.  It’s has roughly a paragraph about each of the following:

1. Built it and they will come.
2. Your community will help you build HARD DIFFICULT FEATURE X.
3. Directional fallacies.
4. Contributions are free.
5. Profit models.
6. Folks can understand your code.
7. Documentation updates.
8. Everyone using App X will give back freely and without your asking.
9. Contributors are like coworkers.
10. Resources grow on trees.
11. Cross distribution support is easy.
12. Users help users and it’s ok to just be a developer.
13. Cross-project collaboration is easy.

We upgraded our development server to Fedora 10 over the weekend.  Among other things, it runs RT3 – excellent support, issue management, and bug tracking tool.  Once the upgrade was over, we ended up with a semi-working setup of RT3.  The emails were going through just fine, but the web interface was giving out a blank screen with no content or errors or warnings.

Googled a bit, but that didn’t help a lot.   Went through server logs and found an out of memory shout from Storable.pm:

2325:Callback called exit at
../../lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into ../../lib/auto/Storable/thaw.al)
line 415.

Googled for that, but it turned out that quite a few people have the problem with this module running out of memory.  And not only in RT3.

So I left it where it was and had some good night sleep.  And it helped.  In the morning, englightment came in, and I tried reloading the page with cookies and cache cleaned.  It worked.  And then it didn’t work again.  Cleaning cookies was helping for a couple of page views.  So I dived back into the RT_Config.pm file to see my options.  There it was.

=item C<$WebSessionClass>
C<$WebSessionClass> is the class you wish to use for managing Sessions.
It defaults to use your SQL database, but if you are using MySQL 3.x and
plans to use non-ascii Queue names, uncomment and add this line to
F<RT_SiteConfig.pm> will prevent session corruption.
=cut
# Set($WebSessionClass , 'Apache::Session::File');

Once I enabled Apache::Session::File, the problem went away.  We are now back to work, enjoying the new web 2.0 round corners interface, pastel colors, and more.

Open source software activity usually bumps up quite a lot before and during Christmas.  This time around I am waiting for:

• Fedora 10, which should be released today.
• WordPress 2.7, which should be released “some time in November“.
• Firefox 3.1, which is approaching its second beta.

What are your waiting for this year?

There is a lot of noise going about these news:

The Foreign Ministry is migrating all of its 11.000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other Open source applications.

That’s good.  Both the noise and the news.  But it’s not the first time that we hear about this or that government office moving to Linux desktops.  It happened before.  What I am more interested in hearing is the “after” life.  Something along the lines of “Look, we moved to Linux desktops one year ago and we are doing better than ever.  We are happier and we also spend less money”.  How many of those moved roll back to what they had before?  Why did they roll back? How many stay?  How many of those who stay are more satisfied?  How much cheaper it is for them?

That’s what I’d like to hear.

I have recently upgraded my laptop to Fedora 9.  Those of you who come often to this blog or follow me on Twitter, know that I’ve been waiting for this release like for nothing else.  Two technologies in particular – KDE 4 and Firefox 3 – were the center of my focus.  Of course, I could updated them separately and tried them earlier, but I wanted to follow the path of the distribution.

The upgrade itself went fast and easy.  But starting with the first reboot, I was getting more and more negative towards the new release.  While booting for the first time, I got two messages, notifying me that wpa_suppclient service and CUPS daemon failed to start.  While I don’t care much about printers, wireless connectivity is vital for me, so that was a bit discouraging.

The login screen.  It was changed quite a bit, and I didn’t like it much.  Logging in.  Somehow I ended up in Gnome, even though my desktop environment was KDE for the last 7 years or so.  Logout.  Switch into long awaited KDE 4.  From the first look it was beautiful, even though not quite for my tastes.  Surely, I’d need to reconfigure and change a few things. Not a problem for me at all – even more fun so.

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Quoting comment in Slashdot discussion:

The truth is both a blessing and a curse. It takes a lot of work to realize the truth and most people will not challenge themselves. Once you learn the truth, however, you are cursed with trying to explain it to others.

This clearly explains the high density of Open Source advocates, as well as many experiences of my own.

By the way -  happy birthday, Open Source!

With the recent news of Sun Microsystems buying MySQL AB for one billion dollars (insert Dr.Evil’s evil laugh here), I hear plenty calling Sun the largest contributor to open source. I beg to differ.

Sun is doing a lot for open source, there is no argument about it, and whatever they do is much appreciated. But calling them the largest contributor to open source, is a little bit too far fetched, I think. First of all, let’s see what we are talking about. Here is the list of open source stuff from Sun (according to their open source initiative page):

• Solaris Enterprise System / OpenSolaris
• Linux from Sun
• StarOffice / OpenOffice.org
• NetBeans
• OpenSPARC
• Java

That’s something, but doesn’t qualify for the number one contributor. First of all, these are mostly Sun’s own offerings. Secondly, some of these (Java and OpenSolaris) have been opened to be saved. They were open when it was pretty much obvious to everyone that if they are not, they aren’t going to last very long. Or, at least, they won’t prosper as they should. Thirdly, the effort that was put in some of these (StarOffice / OpenOffice.org) by Sun isn’t all that impressive. I mean, yeah, they bought and opened StarOffice. People jumped on it and started to improve it. And it improved a lot. But it’s still huge, bloated, and clunky, after all these years…

As I said, it’s still appreciated. There is plenty of good in Sun’s open source initiative. But I think there are companies that have done more good to open source than Sun did. I think that IBM did a great deal more. And it did it before anyone else, when open source needed help the most. Then, I think Google has done plenty and is still doing a lot. And, I think it’s not fair at all to forget Red Hat. These guys made a lot of money on open source software, but they were more than willing to share and invest those money back into the community.

Somehow I ended up connecting to the Undernet IRC network today and joining #cyprus channel.  Last time I did it was a good 10 years ago.  Maybe even more.  Back then IRC was a huge thing in Cyprus and all Internet clubs were full of kids chatting for hours.  I remember, it was so packed, that I had to buy a club membership to get some priority in queue for my HTML hacking.  And, of course, I did IRC too.  What was happening back than on #cyprus channel?  It was exactly as it is now.  Here is a screenshot for you (I won’t go as far as posting a log of this noise).

What is different about it now?  Well, it looks like they use a tiny bit less of colors.  And they have their own web site now.

Me? I’m living on the FreeNode these days.  That’s where most of the open source fun is happening (#fedora, #wordpress, #perl, #php, and others).

Slashdot runs an excellent discussion on the topic of “What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?“.  If you want to learn more about what people on the Web had changed their minds in 2007, try this Google search – plenty more there.

What did I change my mind about in 2007?  Short answer: Google.  Continue reading for the long version.

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