El Mundo Libre

After the boring holiday season is over and best wishes to everybody and his dog are taken care of there's something fun to do again: that most famous gathering of hackers called FOSDEM. I think this was my sixth time there. The disadvantage of living not too far from the event is that I don't stay at a hotel and have to miss the Friday beer event. Then again, I can have Belgian beer any day of the week.

My first stop was picking up my T-shirt, which this year has "I'm a hacker" printed on it. After quickly checking out the few stands that were already set up I went on to the Janson room to get me a good spot. The opening talk was funny and asked the crowd's participation again for the amazing FOSDEM dance. Unlike last year we didn't have to do the actual dancing, but provided the "music" instead, by clapping and stomping. Great fun.

Next up was Eben Moglen, with a talk about politics and free software. He said that decentralisation of social networking and setting up mesh networks could better empower freedom fighters and demonstrations like those in Egypt, who now rely mostly on US-controlled services like Twitter and Facebook. Moglen that we need to implement those things in the very short term or we'll never be able to catch up with the big guys. That's why during his current sabbatical he's setting up the Freedom Box Foundation, to get organised to make an easy to use free software powerplug server for every home happen. To be honest, he sounded a bit dramatical to me, but he's a smart guy and a good speaker and probably right on a lot of points.

The following presentation was about LLVM, a toolchain that's supposed to be faster, more efficient, more modern and more user friendly than gcc. He showed some impressive graphs and user interface examples, but maybe a debate (or joint presentation) between him and someone from the gcc side would have been even more interesting. The one thing that struck me in this Apple employee's talk is that he said he's not allowed to work with any GPLv3 software (including gcc). He didn't explain it further, so I don't know what the reason for that is. Probably Apple being paranoid.

Lunch time presented a pretty good selection of (Belgian) beer, both from the near-monopolist and independent ones. The sandwiches were yummy enough (though I suspect vegans had to look elsewhere), with a wrapping of paper rather plastic. I don't know how fish-friendly the tuna was, so I avoided it alltogether.

In the afternoon I learned about Emacs' much praised Org-mode. I missed some of the details on account of being in the back of the room for which it sucks to be in the back of, but it seems very functional indeed. It looks like the kind of tool that would boost productivity at work significantly, but would not be allowed on the workstation because it's not called Entreprise Emacs Productivity Suite, Bells & Whistles Edition. Actually, it has outgrown the tool stage and is now more like a syntax, because it's also implemented for other tools (e.g. ViM) now. I didn't get a good look at graphical representations of the data, but speaker assured us that at least HTML and LaTeX output was available. I was a bit saddened to see more non-free software at this second GNU gathering I attended. In this case, the slideshow was done with a proprietary PDF reader on Mac OS X.

I don't remember if Dave Neary's Community Anti-patterns talk was filmed, but I recommend it to any aspiring community manager or project leader. His advice: try to make your community an open and friendly environment. That may seem obvious, but it is easily forgotten when discussions get heated. If you think your community is in a bad shape, think of Dave whenever you're in a hurry to click that Send button.

Back to the GNU devroom. The FSFE guys their organisation is up to and challenges ahead. They've had some good responses to their PDFreaders campaign (and not surprisingly some not so positive ones), with many still pending (goverments are pretty slow to answer). If you haven't done it already, make sure to declare your love for free software and don't miss Document Freedom Day.

On Sunday I mostly hung around in the Distributions Devroom (thanks for organizing, Wouter). I remember from those talks that the Turkish locale makes much software crash, that automated distro testing is something we should consider for gNewsense (though it seems a bit limited in scope), that we must have more collaboration between distributions (but that takes time many people don't have) and that a simple cross-distro installer written in Bash is unlikely to be adopted by many distributions.

I also took part in the keysigning party this year. Although announced to be indoors, it took eventually took place in front of the main entrance (like every year). That dude in his T-shirt was not happy about that, but unlike some people with coats on he stayed until it was done (after about 1.5 hours). I get the whole web of trust thing and see the use of keysigning, but I'm still a bit fuzzy on handling keys. Should I keep a key backup in a vault, a revocation certificate in a separate vault and the password in a secret locked down nuclear shelter? Can I conveniently leave my .gnupg in my home directory or do I keep it on an SD card which I sew into my skin? What's up with subkeys? How do I know if your otherworldly ID card or drivers license is real? In short, I think that the web of trust is not going to be ubiquitous any time soon.

In the last presentation, Jonathan Corbet showed us that the Linux ecosystem is very meritocratic. As in every other kernel development talk I heard, the speaker said that anyone willing and able to work on Linux can easily get a job. I still wonder how many of those offers are about free software develpment. Still, I wish I heard that more often for other areas of free software (e.g. GNU). The job corner had mostly Web development offers, with the majority of those for using free software tools to create not-really-free software or software as a service.

A few days after the event I saw that they pulled my name out of a hat for a one-year Linux Magazine subscription (again). I stopped reading computer magazines over a year ago because there are too many ads in them and because the "Linux" magazines can't make up their minds about whether they want freedom or convenience. At least I'll have something to read until the next FOSDEM. See you there.

Sinds enige tijd verstuurt de Christelijke Mutualiteit terugbetalingsoverzichten via e-mail. Prima initiatief om de papieren afvalberg te verkleinen (of toch minder te doen groeien). Het overzicht wordt in bijlage toegevoegd in PDF, een grotendeels open formaat dat ondersteund wordt door verschillende vrije programma's. Helemaal geschikt voor alle computergebruikers in Vlaanderen dus. Het spijtige van de zaak was echter dat de CM haar leden aanmoedigde om desondanks to niet-vrije software te gebruiken:

Dit document wordt u bezorgd in pdf-formaat en is te bekijken met Adobe Acrobat Reader. Deze gratis software kunt u downloaden op http://www.adobe.com/nl.

Enigzins aangespoord door de recente actie tegen niet-vrije PDF-lezers van FSFE besloot ik CM te contacteren. Ik legde het belang van vrije software uit en verwees naar pdfreaders.org, met het verzoek om op zijn minst deze link toe te voegen aan hun e-mails en bij voorkeur de verwijzing daar Adobe Reader te verwijderen. Ik kreeg een positief antwoord waarin ze zeiden dat ze de link zouden toevoegen. Niet het perfecte resultaat, maar zeker wel een duidelijke vooruitgang. Na nog een kleine suggestie van mijnentwege staat er sinds kort dit in de e-mails te lezen:

We bezorgen u dit document in pdf-formaat. Het is te bekijken met Adobe Acrobat Reader of met een ander programma dat pdf-documenten kan lezen. De software hiervoor kunt u gratis downloaden op http://www.adobe.com/nl of op http://pdfreaders.org

Als dit een indicatie is voor de succesratio van de brievenactie van FSFE dan zijn de voortuitzichten voor de campagne zeer goed.

The Blender Foundation have brought their third Open Movie Project (working name: Durian) to a successful conclusion. The production is a short movie called "Sintel. It's available as a free (in both meanings of the word) download and as a DVD.

As usual, those pre-ordered in time got their name in the movie credits. Unfortunately I failed to pay attention, so I was not one of those people. I did pre-order, but a few days too late for the official credits. Still good enough to get my name mentioned, though. The DVD case contains 4 discs and provides the movie in several formats, commentary tracks, a documentary, tutorials, all source material and "much more". All without CSS of course. It's a shame that most of the extra videos are not in a free format (e.g. Ogg Theora). A slight annoyance about the movie DVD is that the menus aren't as readable as they could have been: white text on a glaring background has not a lot of contrast. But that's peanuts compared to the pesky unskippableness of big production company DVDs. Also, I don't see the use of the 40 seconds of black after the credits.

The movie itself was not what I expected. The original setup for Durian was "100 % action, 0 % story". Yet the story turned out to be pretty good. I've watched it almost a dozen times now and I was still touched the last time I saw it. The storyline does leave a bit wanting here and there, but the documentary and commentary tracks partially make up for that. Everything looks great, apart from a few details (the falling board at the start and the walking people in the marketplace spring to mind). The music is awesome, sound effects are very nice, Sintel's voice suits her, but could have done with a bit less of an accent.

The documentary is certainly one to watch. It follows the creation process of the movie, with project member interviews and a look behind the scenes. You'll have an extra appreciation of the movie once you've seen it. It's a bit of a shame that not all project members are in it (an Angela gets mentioned a few times, but we don't get to hear her talk). The commentary tracks also give some information about what was involved in making the film, but some are more useful then others (I find it hard to concentrate when the comments are not actually about the scene that is displayed). I definitely recommend listening to the one about the music and sound. The rest of the extras and data are interesting, but not really my cup of tea, as they are more targeted to Blender users.

I'm glad I pitched in again to make the Open Movie Project happen. I'm a bit less happy that when the DVD release was announced I had forgotten that I'd already ordered it and so ordered it again. That resulted in great enthousiasm when I found 2 Blender Institute envelopes in the mail, which quickly subsided upon discovering I had also paid for it twice. I'm sure they'll use the extra money to achieve more greatness. Now I'm figuring out what to do with my spare DVD case. The two options I've come up with so far are: donating it to the local library or making it a (gNewSense) bug bounty. Other ideas are welcome.

This week (on GNU's birthday no less) gNewSense got a new website. It's green, it's shiny, it's rounded, it's powerful and the information on there is still freely licensed. The latter is because that information didn't really change, it just sits on top of a new backend now.

Why did we need a new website? Well, the old one was based on PmWiki. It had the advantage of providing an all in one solution: wiki (with separate www and wiki sections), forum and bug tracker. Text-based storage is nice and it supports pretty powerful wiki markup. But after a while it started to strain under the weight of our data. Our freedom verification efforts (which created a wiki page for every file in Linux) probably had something to do with it. Eventually we lost search capability and a few weeks ago the forum also collapsed.

By that time a new wiki system (MoinMoin) had been chosen and work was under way to migrate everything over. After an embarrassing attempt of myself at writing a migration tool, the awesome Michael Fötsch took over to produce a work of art.

The implementation went something like this:

1. Patch PmWiki to produce XML instead of HTML, so as not to lose the semantics of the wiki syntax input.
2. Write a script (yay, Python) to convert that XML to MoinMoin wiki syntax.
3. Patch MoinMoin to accept PmWiki's password hashes.
4. Install MoinMoin and run the migration script.

The actual process was a bit more involved, of course. It resulted in a compleet move of the website, including all revisions of all pages. Quite an accomplishment if you ask me. A few things we didn't migrate:

• Kernel freedom verification pages: nobody worked on it anymore, partly because it's utterly boring work, partly because Linux-libre exists now (although we don't use that in deltah).
• Forum: PmWiki's forum was very basic and we probably could do something similar on MoinMoin, but migrating the data would have been too much work (the forum used a special feature that was not implemented in Michael's script).
• Bug tracker: we've been using Savannah for some time now. While PmWiki's BTS module could arguably called a bug tracker, MoinMoin's way of tracking bugs just sucks.

Now go admire the new website. If you hadn't done so already, create an account (old accounts can still be used with no effort on your part) and start adding documentation, translating or editing typos. If you see anything weird that you think might have been introduced with the migration, please let us know as soon as possible.

A new age of Web video is dawning. Google has released an efficient video codec (VP8) and accompanying file format (WebM, a Matroska subset) under a Free software license and (even better) a royalty-free patent license. This means that there's already a libre implementation of it (being integrated into browsers as I type this) and that Free software projects don't have to worry about getting sued over patents. Google is already using the codec in the YouTube HTML5 demo section. It's only a matter of time before it will be the standard codec on the popular video website.

When that happens Microsoft and Apple can only follow suit and implement the codec in their own browsers. I'm sure they're not too happy about this, because as far as I know they're still pushing for H.264 to become the (de facto) standard video codec for HTML5. Apple has a finger in the MPEG patent pool, so they're making some money off of it. I believe Microsoft didn't put any patents in it, but it still consists of hundreds of patents owned by many companies. Microsoft's VC1 might be infringing on a number of those, which could be the reason why we don't hear about it a whole lot and why MS bought into the H.264 deal. Seeing such an investment go to waste stings.

But it's almost inevitable that VP8 is going to gain a majority market share in Web video. Apart from Google it's supported by Adobe and many other big names. Support for it in Flash is good in the short term, but I hope it'll be mostly used in conjunction with HTML5 in the long run. Speaking of which: HTML5 (and the video element) has seen fairly slow adoption so far and my understanding is that the video codec issue is for a large part to blame for that. The main problem some companies have with Theora is that, although it's patent-free in theory, patent trolls could potentially pull some submarine patents out of their sleeve to screw everyone over. Neither H.264 nor VP8 is safe from that, but they have the advantage of corporate backing. It also helps that all of Google's patent license grants are automatically revoked for anyone sueing over the codec or file format. That leaves only patent trolls to fear, but not real companies.

As much as I like this new development, it also confirms my worries about Google that the company is becoming way too powerful. It will greatly change the Web's implementation in the following months, whereas the Free Software Foundation and Xiph have barely managed to scratch the surface in the last few years. It's doing this by buying a company that develops and owns the technology (On2, the ones that brought us Theora), cherrypicking from an existing format, slapping that combination onto its website nobody can ignore and making everybody else an offer they cannot refuse. One of the most powerful companies in the world just got more powerful.