Entries by Sam Geeraerts

LWN reports about a recent talk by FSFE president Karsten Gerloff. I didn't see this one, but I know from other occasions that he's a good speaker. He can explain digital freedom issues in a way that makes sense to the technically inept/disinterested. I'm glad he can spend much of his time talking to Europe's politicians. They're just as much as any consumer confronted with advertising about how software and appliances make our lives better, and they get big money lobbying on top of that, so they're often not aware of the issues or the gravity of them. However, I'm always amazed when I see that lack of understanding persisting with software developers after these matters have been explained to them. Worse, many who do understand choose to sustain the problems.

LWN reports about a recent talk by FSFE president Karsten Gerloff. I didn't see this one, but I know from other occasions that he's a good speaker. He can explain digital freedom issues in a way that makes sense to the technically inept/disinterested. I'm glad he can spend much of his time talking to Europe's politicians. They're just as much as any consumer confronted with advertising about how software and appliances make our lives better, and they get big money lobbying on top of that, so they're often not aware of the issues or the gravity of them. However, I'm always amazed when I see that lack of understanding persisting with software developers after these matters have been explained to them. Worse, many who do understand choose to sustain the problems.

Op 4 mei is het anti-DRM-dag. Het is een dag waarop we extra aandacht vragen voor digitale toegangs- en kopieerbeperkingen, en meer bepaald de onrechtmatigheid ervan. Die aandacht vragen we door erover te schrijven of door op een andere manier actie te ondernemen.

De Free Software Foundation legt dit jaar de nadruk op e-boeken. Ik heb er zelf geen ervaring mee, aangezien ik nog wel even verder kan met papieren exemplaren. Voor de rest staat mijn aanschaf van digitale media ook op een laag pitje. Dat heeft vooral te maken met DRM. Waarschijnlijk zijn de meeste cd's nu weer vrij van DRM en rootkits, maar mijn vertrouwen in het medium heeft permanente schade opgelopen. En aangezien ik liefst tweedehands koop, blijft het aangewezen op mijn hoede te zijn. Dvd's zijn dan weer geen haar verbeterd ten opzichte van een decennium geleden. Ze zijn nog altijd beperkt met CSS, regiocodes en stukjes die je niet kan overslaan (oftewel user operation prohibition). Afgezien van een aantal uitzonderingen waarvan ik weet dat ze deze beperkingen niet hebben, laat ik ze nu links liggen. Dat scheelt ook nog eens een hoop geld en tijd. Met de komst van Blu-ray en HDMI is het allemaal nog een kwadraat erger geworden.

Ik heb jaren geleden wel een tijdje aan de verleiding van populaire video toegegeven. Met als resultaat dat ik nu een (kleine) verzameling films en (incomplete) series bezit met de genoemde beperkingen. Het is ietwat hypocriet om dat in je kast te hebben staan als je zulke beperkingen verderfelijk vindt. Ik bedacht dat de schijfjes nog nuttig gebruikt zouden kunnen worden als campagnemateriaal, bij voorkeur op niet-destructieve wijze. Mijn idee is om de dvd's op een online tweedehandsbeurs te koop aan te bieden. Dat zou op zich nog veel hypocrieter zijn. Het verschil is echter dat in de omschrijving van de advertentie duidelijk moet gemaakt worden dat de dvd's beperkingen hebben en dat de meeste andere schijven niet anders zijn. Als er dan ook nog instructies bij staan die vertellen hoe je ze kan afspelen met vrije software, dan wordt het al moeilijker om verwijten te maken. Met een beetje geluk lezen veel mensen de advertentie en diegene die dan toch nog een bod doet weet dan op zijn minst wat ze mag verwachten. Het geld kan dan naar Defective By Design geven om er echt campagne mee te voeren.

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.