hesa’s blog

Comments on quality and comparing Free Software with proprietary

Monday, November 17th, 2008 | Free Software, Software | 2 Comments

In an aricle (Swedish only!) in a swedish computer mag a lawyer (refered to as an expert) says that proprietary programs are better in quality than free ones.

Let’s analyse the article a bit.

– Det krävs en morot för att man ska anstränga sig ordentligt. Om den stora inkomstkällan står och faller med kvaliteten på koden tror jag att man anstränger sig mer, säger hon.

In English the important thing would be something like.

… If the main income is depending on the quality of the code I think one strains more.

Is money the only incentive? A happy customer sure is an incentive for me. Well, well, let’s pretend it is. OK, what does this have to do with the type of license? She explains:

Öppna program brukar nämligen ofta vara gratis och de företag som utvecklar sådana satsar i stället på att dra in pengar på kringtjänster som support, utbildning och anpassning. Det leder bort fokus från själva mjukvaran.

Which would translate into (stripped down):

.. foss companies usually get their money from support, education and adaptions. This leads focus away from the software itself.

First of all, I would say that most companies make money from support, education and adaptions. Regardless of the license of their product. But let’s look at her argument for a while. Why would this lead away focus? There’s no answer to that.If I have a crappy product out there (under GPL and publically available) will notice some one will notice and they will either fix the crappy code and patch the product or they will provide an updated and forked product. If the product was proprietary no one would have known about the crappy code. If that’s her argument, that no customer will notice about the crappy code, she’s right in advising people to close their products. But looking at it from an end user point of view, I sure like to see the source code and have the four freedoms. But she speaks about code quality. No, I don’t understand from what she draws her conclusion.

…. well well well, time to go to work.

But before I leave I must say it’s kind of funny that the journalist points out that the second person in the article is working for an “Open Source” company. A bit like saying he is biased. In the article it doesn’t say that the lawyer used to work for Microsoft or that she’s also a member of Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt (SFU) as is MIcrosoft.

btw, she never says hoe she measures code quality, but I guess she is backed up by a research Perhaps by one of them Swiss reasearch institutes that research in shampoos.

New GNU releases Ocotber 2008

Friday, November 14th, 2008 | Free Software, GNU, Software | No Comments

This is a compilation of the GNU software releases as
announced during October 2008 on the mailing list:

http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu

glpk 4.33 / 2008-10-30
GLPK (GNU Linear Programming Kit) is intended
for solving large-scale linear programming (LP),
mixed integer linear programming (MIP), and
other related problems.
http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/glpk.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00016.html

Libidn 1.11 / 2008-10-29
Libidn is a fully documented implementation of the Stringprep,
Punycode and IDNA specifications defined by the IETF
Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) working group, used for
internationalized domain names.
http://josefsson.org/libidn/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00015.html

Binutils 2.19 / 2008-10-29
The GNU Binutils are a collection of binary tools.
The main ones are: ar, ld
http://www.gnu.org/software/binutils/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00014.html

GNU Gama 1.9.06/ 2008-10-29
GNU Gama is a project dedicated to adjustment of
geodetic networks.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gama
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00013.html

GNU CLISP 2.47 / 2008-10-24
ANSI Common Lisp is a high-level, general-purpose
programming language.
http://www.gnu.org/software/clisp/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00012.html

GNU SASL 0.2.29 / 2008-10-22
GNU SASL is a modern C library that implement the
standard network security protocol Simple
Authentication and Security Layer (SASL).
http://josefsson.org/gsasl/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00011.html

bzr 1.8 / 2008-10-17
Bazaar is a distributed version control system that Just Works.
http://bazaar-vcs.org/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00010.html

Gnash 0.8.4 / 2008-10-14
Gnash is a GPL’d Flash movie player and browser
plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00009.html

GNU ed 1.1 / 2008-10-14
GNU ed is an 8-bit clean, more or less POSIX-compliant
implementation of the standard Unix line editor.
http://www.gnu.org/software/ed/ed.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00008.html

Gnash 0.8.4 / 2008-10-13
Gnash is a GPL’d Flash movie player and browser
plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00007.html

GNU swbis 1.0 / 2008-10-13
swbis is a software administration system for GNU/Linux systems and
systems that are UNIX system-like
http://www.gnu.org/software/swbis/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00006.html

GNU M4 1.4.12 / 2008-10-11
GNU M4 is an implementation of the traditional
Unix macro processor.
http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00005.html

pspp-0.6.1 / 2008-10-10
PSPP is a program for statistical analysis
of sampled data.
http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00004.html

GnuTLS 2.6.0 / 2008-10-06
GnuTLS is a modern C library that implement the standard
network security protocol Transport Layer Security (TLS),
for use by network applications.
http://www.gnutls.org/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00003.html

coreutils-7.0 / 2008-10-06
The GNU Core Utilities are the basic file, shell and text
manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system. These
are the core utilities which are expected to exist on every
operating system.
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00002.html

glpk 4.32 / 2008-10-03
GLPK (GNU Linear Programming Kit) is intended
for solving large-scale linear programming (LP),
mixed integer linear programming (MIP), and
other related problems.
http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/glpk.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00001.html

GNU Ball and Paddle 0.8.0/ 2008-10-01
Ball and Paddle is a ball and paddle game with
blocks, a ball, a paddle, and some powerups.
http://www.gnu.org/software/ballandpaddle/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00000.html

If you have any comments or questions regarding this
compilation, contact Henrik Sandklef hesa@gnu.org

bzr - Cannot lock LockDir

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Free Software, Software, geek | No Comments

After some time I realised what most people would realize directly. The var partition on my hard disk is (was) full.

A little apt-get clean did the trick

GNU Xnee, Xvfb and Xephyr …. and evdev?

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | Free Software, GNU, GNU Xnee, Non GNU, Software, geek, swinput | No Comments

In an attempt to automate (read cron) the Xnee tests using swinput I did the following:

• Start Xvfb (Xvfb can’t read any keyboard and mouse)
• Start Xephyr inside Xvfb (using evdev as input)
• Attach the swinput devices to the Xephyr display only

Still the faked user input (mouse, keyboard) from swinput was ‘written’ to the console. Uh oh. Bad!

So, I will now with a new computer (with more than the 500MB of RAM I have on this) test Xnee in a sandbox, probably using qemu for both x86 and ppc. Doing this I should be able to:

• Run every test case and report using the new coverage stuff in gnulib. All tests and builds can be done in x86 as well as ppc.
• Verify that cross compilation to ppc works

Can’t wait….. but I have to.