Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

WTF IS THIS SHIT?

Ok, that above would be what a newly-baptized “FOSS advocate-slash-zealot” would say upon seeing Federico Pascual Jr.’s PostScript regarding the FOSS bill. I suppose I could have said that myself a couple of lifetimes ago.

But, there is more than meets the eye. While I would like to think of myself as a “FOSS veteran”–believe me, I have still so much to learn about it–I would like to step into the shoes of such a person when approaching an article as sensational as Mr. Pascual’s. Despite what seems to be a most interesting article on the mechanics of government software usage, it fails to address the one particular bit that is just as important as the proposed bill itself: the real Free and Open Source Software.

Let me nitpick this article bit by bit:

FREE RIDE: A bill is being pushed in Congress forbidding all government agencies and state-controlled firms from buying and using any of the computer software sold in the market!

Alas, when I first heard of the FOSS bill sometime before September, I also had a bad impression of it. Perhaps I was just too politically allergic at that time (yeah right,) but I tried to adopt a `wait-and-see’ approach first and let the dice roll. Perhaps because this bill was to be introduced by a very visible congressman with alleged leftist ties made me feel uncomfortable, but then, so was (and still is) with the current administration. Or perhaps I just felt it wasn’t damn right to legislate FOSS as an end-all solution, preferring instead of presenting is as a process for reforming the local software industry.

Looks like first impressions definitely make a difference.

The proposed law – to be called “Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Act of 2006″ – commands government offices to use only information and communications software that are given away for free and have no restrictions as to their use.

The objectives appear to be to save money for the government and to encourage the making of free (non-commercial) software.

So? What’s wrong with these objectives?

FWIW, the early FOSS bill draft did seem to have such a Draconian section as forcing the government and allied offices to use, and use only, FOSS. IMHO that by itself ran against the very fundamental ideal of FOSS: the freedom of choice. Not Hobson’s choice, but real choice.

The current bill IIRC now allows this true choice; unless there is an extreme case where FOSS cannot be applied without becoming non-self-sustaining (not to mention self-liquidating,) agencies may implement their infrastructure using FOSS as their primary instrument, with the application of open standards (that is, open document formats, open communications protocols, etc) unifying the disparate components. Perhaps right now, this situation may seem kind of far-fetched, but its not really that far-off, considering what other nations and cities have done (or not done) with FOSS. Munich, Extremadura, Beijing… the list is not yet that long, but its bound to go a long way

Now, while the government may now adopt open standards and open-everything, does not mean that the `openness’ forgoes security, either; the government may opt to use well-known encryption protocols and even base their own security infrastructure on them. In fact, they are free to even look inside the source of these well-known standards, to study them, and to branch off new implementation that may even change the way these standards work.

In fact, even without this bill in place, the government can participate in the production and development of FOSS!!!

Wait a minute, wasn’t I supposed to defend this bill?

Eh, well. I suppose this bill is good and all, but like I said earlier, there are those first impressions made by the parties involved in the making of this bill which unsettles me. IMHO I would rather see applications of this first in key cities (the happy works in Munich and in Extremadura are no accident, believe me) which in turn, would allow both local the national government to see just exactly how this FOSS magic works. Then, when the observations have been made, the papers are in, and the workers get hired, then, maybe, we’ll have a nation where FOSS can be mandated as a very strong preference, but never a forced one.

Its all about growing up, really. I’m being reminded of Tom DeMarco’s The Deadline, where a newly-retrenched guy from a telco literally lands into the fantastic job of his life, managing an entire nation of software engineers and architects to develop several killer apps within a year (or so; raid you nearest Book Sale and be lucky Its a great experiment: when it succeeds, you’ll be the first to be present, but when it fails, you’ll be the first to be nowhere.

But I can also hear in the background a call to an unholy war against multinationals whose popular software run virtually all – maybe 95 percent? – of the computers of the world.

Now this is a low blow. Maybe partly because of the prevailing images of the advocates–geeks and leftists, my, what a c-c-c-combo!–is what drives Mr. Pascual to make this point. But really, multinationals are not the main concern. FWIW, FOSS is multinational in nature: it is even multi-denominational and multidisciplinary. FOSS is one of the things that make anonymous people like you and me Internet superheroes. FOSS connects the Internet’s tubes and keeps away the trucks. FOSS makes the Internet serious business, yet also drives them crazy.

The Linux distros that I have worked, am working, and continue to work on, are all multinational: Debian and Ubuntu. People from all over the world, from all 7 continents, participate and work on what would arguably be the biggest software distribution the human world may ever produce, freely, regardless of motivation or goal. I suppose all the folks involved have only one common goal, and that is to see a work created for the benefit of the community by the community.

I suppose the background howl comes from somewhere altogether, but its hardly just from FOSS. FOSS is the epitome of what is truly multinational, and one thing that is not truly controlled by any one single person, corporation or not.

Following up, I have found a solution in a related bugreport against initramfs-tools that needed a one-line edit and the above spell for 610 GET.

My reward: Gomen Cat. Its a Caturday.

There was no power again at the office today (thanks to my boss for sounding me while I was laying in bed so I had a pretty free day today. This is the first of my Unexpected Series of Events (although, in retrospect, this is somewhat expected since we did lose power at the office yesterday, giving credence to Clair’s story…)

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I was at the UP Engineering Theatre at Diliman to join in the worldwide Software Freedom Day celebration. I was supposed to be there earlier, but due to new work (and some new stuff to learn too I woke up rather late that day. So, I found myself there in UP at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, rather tired and sweating (note to self: walking around the campus and looking for the venue at that time is not a good idea) but also looking forward to have some FOSS fun with fellow FOSS enthusiasts.

I found Dom, Jerome, Paolo, Dong, Charlton, Ian Dexter, and Doc Mana there at the theatre listening on the technical seminars that were held by PLUG as part of the celebration. This time, the TechSem was particularly interesting, due to the new `student project presentations’ by UP Engineering students, covering areas as diverse as Embedded Linux and SMS-to-Speech technology. I missed the special video from Richard Stallman though, as it was shown earlier, but I was able to grab a copy thanks to Dom :D. In between presentations, there were also mini-matchups of Frozen Bubble, which drove the (mostly geeky) crowd crazy with the rocking music and players’ itches.

Representative Teddy Casiño of Bayan Muna also dropped by later that day, to observe the goings-on as well as to bring his filing of the draft FOSS bill to the public fore. This bill has been much talked about in the PLUG list, where the especially cynical posters (me more or less included had been taking their time nitpicking many of the details on the draft (especially on the section where it essentially says `all your base are belong to us’ Turns out that RMS also saw some things that he thought needs improving (towards the end of his video, he took some time reflecting on the proposed bill,) and he wanted to see more emphasis on promoting FOSS to the education sector.

Ubuntu CDs were also given away, as well as custom SFD/UP stickers. I also finally got to meet the UnPLUG hackers who, with PLUG, jointly organized this year’s SFD.

I feel a bit sad. Is FOSS really just going to be an alternative forever? Or can it break out of the trappings of alternatives, and make a world a better place? =)

Instead of posting this to BiOS, I felt that it would be better posting it here; feel free to comment, feel free to ignore

Get a grip on reality. Even windows is an alternative to us FOSS loving peeps. Saying that FOSS is an alternative IMHO is a good marketing/advocacy tactic to get potential new users to get their feet wet on FOSS.

And now you are risking yourself to sounding hostile.

At the risk of sounding like a bad guy, I have been shifting in between the planes of Ubuntu and Windows via cold water over the past few weeks; wala lang, I just wanted to be reminded of how it feels to be `shackled’, so to speak. But really, I’m doing this because I can, and as a result I’m having a rocking time appreciating the subtleties of both Windows and Ubuntu So I guess I’m not so far removed from reality as you seem to portray.

Now, let me play the simpleton, who’s really an astute participant. If a FOSS desktop, say Ubuntu’s Gnome, is supposed to be as easy as Windows, then why should I bother learning it at all, when I can simply transfer my old Windows skills to Ubuntu without much a problem?

Another question: why should I be motivated to switch to FOSS at all? Perhaps you can dismiss this as FUD, but you are none the wiser when your reasons for switching to FOSS is only because that it is an alternative, that it is cheap (hard to get cheaper being free), and that its mandated by the local government. Among other things petty and cruel.

Indeed, these are the questions people ask to us FOSS people, even long after the good shows (OSForum, SFD, LinuxWorld, etc.) have their run. As a matter of fact, I keep asking this to myself everyday, for the past 3 years of using GNU/Linux everyday. And every single day ends with an answer: “I use FOSS because it empowers me to {surf,chat,email,program} with relish.” For many other people, unfortunately, they don’t even get around to use a FOSS system, much more a CLI; thence they just make do with “I use Windows because that’s just what I have.”

But I don’t want to force people to switch (or even just use) FOSS because of those reasons. I want them to use FOSS exactly because it empowers them, allowing them to get their jobs done effectively and efficiently.

FOSS isn’t out there to deceive, as you so imply, maybe unwittingly. Well, perhaps, sometimes it is, but more often than not, its there so as to convey a deeper truth: that you can do things with it, while at the same time feel empowered, and FREE, with it.

Once they get their feet wet, it would likely be a natural progression for these users to realize the benefits that FOSS can offer (full-fledged, stand-alone and yet cooperative at the same time, approach to solving real problems). The key here is to just even entice the user to try, to take it for a spin, that would be a big step towards FOSS land.

Yes, getting feet wet is a good thing, it has its purpose, namely, for a person to acknowledge that he’s stepping on water, and preparing for a plane shift But from the point of view of a swimming instructor, getting feet wet is not good enough; it is better to get a person wet his head into the water, because that’s the time you know that he’s ready to learn how to swim, even if he doesn’t feel he’s ready.

The same is true for newbies wanting to dive in like in that Linux Crash Course. It is not good enough that a newbie be exposed only to just one interface, just one true way (yeah, that coming from an Emacs guy I do not want them to slave away moving the mouse to and fro, doing some stuff under a GUI when they can just do the same thing in less time by just a few keystrokes. Perhaps, most wouldn’t be ready to use a CLI immediately to do some hand-hacking, but, like air in the planet, its always there, even when you don’t have an immediate need for it (air, however, is something we always have an immediate need for And neither do I recommend learning the intricacies of the shell, whether be it Bourne, Korn, or Peanut shell. Indeed, there’s nothing wrong about being at least bilingual; I want my audience to learn just a little bit of everything

I want them to be aware, that there’s more to FOSS than what we’re just showing them. I don’t want them to deny the freedom and potential of looking what’s within a GNU/Linux system, unlike the usual situation of getting a brand-new PC with just Windows in it, with not a clue as to how things work within it. It’s like showing what’s under the hood of a car, but unlike the casual driver who only knows just how to drive it, the FOSS user is much more free to tweak whatever pleases; yeah, the danger of overheating is there, but with care, that could be addressed.

In short: I don’t like this kind of false FOSS advocacy, when you’re effectively denying the chance for other people to improve and empower themselves, just so because CLIs seem to be so complicated to be taught in a single day No; I don’t think a shell has to be complicated and convoluted and inscrutable, like governments, among other things; rather, they are their own kind of fun, like finding a sleuth solving a case in a whodunit, or winning the World Cup.

I’m no longer wanting to be in the business of long, impassioned, flamewars (is this thread one?) so I’m stopping here. Like I said earlier, it’s a speaker’s call to make adjustments on his presentations so that it reaches its target audience effectively and efficiently, just as it is a call for a FOSS user to use a GUI or the CLI to solve a problem.

Besides, I have a swimming class to teach tomorrow Dive in!

It begins like this:

1. Charo posts; gets syndicated on Planet Ubuntu-PH
2. Some bloke notices it, and eventually gets into rant mode talking about `freedom of choice’.
3. Same bloke posts something really stupid:

you’ve completely diverged from the topic. the original question is why this individual is advocating non-free and proprietary toolchain in a group that is supposed to advocate free software. Freedom is subjective and we will not be able to end up this topic when we go to technicalities and social relevance.

Um, I’m having a difficult time parsing this. See below:

I guess what the Geekette should do next time is fix her drupal to categorize her blog and have only those free stuff aggregated to the community site then let her non-free stuff just stay here and its case closed.

Or get a better feed reader that filters out what you want to filter out. Be as persnickety as you can be. Go figure.

You’re free to do the above, just as the Geekette is free to blog what she wants to blog, in whatever category she feels like posting in. After all, its her blog, and definitely not yours (or mine either.) Which is why I chose to post this as my post, not as a comment. Feel free to be an ignoramus.

Planets, for those of you playing at home, can be thought ouf as just fancy RSS aggregators on the Web, especially for those who don’t have the luxury of a good RSS reader (or those who choose not to read via RSS, like me.) The Ubuntu-PH administrators could in theory impose some Draconian criteria for selecting which blog posts from persons to show, but in practice, they just don’t, probably because they feel that contributors are smart enough to be able to judge for themselves what they want to blog.

I can understand this bloke’s pain, since our Planet is, after all, a “window into the world, work and lives of Ubuntu Team Philippines community members.” However it should also be obvious that the world is not so perfect, since even if we do get to use Ubuntu freely, we also get to have the choice to use some shackled software for some end. Freedom may be subjective, but it is definitely also self-referential too; you may have the freedom to not have a particular freedom to do something, and vice versa.

A little Matrix philosophy is in order, care of the Oracle: “You’re not here to make a choice, for you have already made the choice. You are here now to understand the choice.”

Now, figure me as stupid. I’ll just move along DhIconCacheChanges, help my fellow cadet in the X-SWAT, fix Debian Bug#360950 (despite lacking an amd64; readers, care to donate one? and continue to give my love for FOSS…

This past couple of weeks saw a lot of Debian and Ubuntu work from me in (hopefully) equal measure.

For Debian, I whipped up new versions of robotour, xshisen, libmemcache, and gtklp; robotour finally installs in /usr/games as it should be; xshisen acks NMUs and finally has a sane source package (well, a little bit tipsy still, but at least it’s now fixes the NMU source b0rkage;) libmemcache’s -dev now installs its headers to the right location; and gtklp bumps to a new upstream, with touch-fu replacing AM_MAINTAINER_MODE for seamless build. Thanks a lot to my wonderful sponsors Margarita Manterola, Sylvain Le Gall, and Andreas Metzler for the uploads!

On the other hand, opendchub has migrated to testing, and its initscript failed (not to mention missing a manpage) I’ve fixed the latter, but I still have to figure out how to fix the former; I’ll probably have to consult the reference and add an unprivileged opendchub system user and configure the daemon to use that, or fix the source and allow flexible redefinition of opendchub’s working/configuration directories (currently hardcoded to $HOME/.opendchub). Either way, I have to touch the source and make patches; and I would appreciate it very much if my dearest readers can help out

On the lighter (or heavier, depending on your POV) side, I noticed that Steve McIntyre posted an RFH for cvs, and I’ve decided to help out a bit. Seeing the source, I was pleasantly surprised as the age (and design) of this package, and it would be a blast for me to study this (and fix bugs, prepare patches, and release new versions while at it. It would also prepare me better for NM as well.

As for my Ubuntu work, I’ve upgraded my Breezy Badger desktop to Dapper Drake last Monday (just in time for Flight 4,) and I’m quite amazed at the new features of this release. Like many folks I just loved xchat-gnome’s notification feature (especially when you’re moving in between workspaces very often) and was very much pleased with the speed of Gnome 2.13.91 (so much so that I’ve departed from my normal Ion3 desktop without regretting it.

But of course, since Dapper Drake is the latest development branch, there were some snags that I got to encounter. One particular bug was with masqmail, because the 0.2.21-1ubuntu1 version created a /var/run/masqmail directory, but since /var/run is mounted as a tmpfs in Dapper, masqmail will complain the next time it restarts. Another (probably cosmetic) bug(?) was with tuxpaint, since it placed a couple of launchers in the Gnome Applications menu, one on Education and the other on Graphics. I’ve yet to see if tuxpaint’s is a genuine bug or just a design decision, but I’ve fixed masqmail’s, and 0.2.21-1ubuntu2 should be on Dapper now, thanks to Daniel Holbach.

So far I’m loving the new Ubuntu release, and with FeatureFreeze finally here that means I’ll have to drag my desktop box again to the local internet cafe to do yet another aptitude dist-upgrade. Gaah, I need a laptop!

Bad weather.

Bad stomach.

Lost cellphone.

All in one morning.

ARRRRRRRRGH!!!!!

I’ve been a long time away from my blog, doing lots of stuff here in Daet and in Manila, and only now do I reserve myself the opportunity to sit down, write a post, and flood my syndications yet again

Midterms and SFD

First, I left Daet last September 9 so that I can take my Natural Science midterms at the UP Open University the next day. On September 10, after my midterms, I went to PUP to attend the Software Freedom Day 2005 celebration to meet Clair Ching, JM Ibanez, and other geeks. In that event I got to chat with Jerome Gotangco of Ubuntu, who brought his Toshiba Tecra M2 along which I borrowed later for my presentation on FOSS games (we downloaded wesnoth and penguinracer during this, thanks to free Wi-Fi!) It seems that the most interesting issue posed in my presentation was the question of running popular and Windows-based MMORPGs on a GNU/Linux system, starting with Ragnarok Online. Little do I know that I will be posed with the same question in the upcoming days, especially during LinuxWorld.

LinuxWorld

Fast forward to September 14, where I moved myself from my Tita Baby’s flat in Malate to Ninang Chi’s condo at Greenbelt. Although I could have availed of hotel accomodations by the organizers, I opted to stay at someplace more familiar Anyhow, I went to Dusit Hotel Nikko to attend the first LinuxWorld Philippines conference and expo, and as I stated earlier, to talk about Emacs and LaTeX.

The first day went fine, and I listened to my fellow speaker’s talks; at the end of the day, I got to borrow a ThinkNote s223ii2c (provided by TQM) from the organizers. Originally, it had DSL as its OS, but back at the condo I replaced the OS with a fresh install of Ubuntu Hoary, and Hoary found everything out of the box, I even got Wi-Fi access from Meridian (aka Smart Wi-Fi; unfortunately ’tis locked).

While I was lucky with the laptop, I was unlucky with my pair of leather shoes, for one of them lost its sole due to the wicked weather (baha somewhere near Greenbelt, and I had to walk my way through those waters)…

Had to wait until the next day (September 15) to go back to the hotel and hang out at the PLUG booth where free (and usable) Wi-Fi was so I could get Emacs-CVS and TeTeX. During the day I met Jijo Sevilla of free.net.ph who would (at the next day) later show to both Clair and to me the benefits of the Dvorak keyboard layout. I also got to meet fellow blogger Rogelio Nocom, Jr. from Pinoy Tech Scene. Before lunch, I had to sneak out of the hotel to get myself some new leathers…

After lunch, Dominique Cimafranca who earlier talked about the Ubuntu workstation, referred some people from a company specializing in systems migration to me so we could talk about getting Ragnarok Online to work on GNU/Linux. As I wrote earlier, this was going to be an extension of a forgotten two-year-old experiment (the original HOWTO carefully preserved, thanks to Sacha Chua). I’ll save writing about this in a later post; suffice to say for now that I’m working at providing an accessible solution to this problem, and, hopefully, in the coming days, I can put up a wiki on this and other MMOs…

Finally, I got to do my Emacs talk, which was attended mostly by the people I know (and the people I know probably already knew a thing or two about Emacs, hehe ;). However, it was by far the most interactive presentation in LinuxWorld (as Dom had said), and it ended late (around 7 p.m.). In retrospect, I think my Lisp still needs improvement, lest I be misunderstood, and I should have set up a more realistic ~/.emacs setup (one that can allow me to read my mail, browse the net, and chat on IRC, and more

I’ve not much to say about the last day, except that I regret returning the ThinkNote Photos of the event are available at Ian’s, Dom’s, and Mikhail’s.

Big day

And, oh yeah, last September 22 was my birthday. I’ve been good enough this past year Is anyone willing to donate a laptop?

I’m almost done in packaging the new upstream version of ecb for Debian. I’ve managed to kill three open bugs, and I think a couple of the remaining bugs are assigned to the wrong package. I’ve yet to test the last bug as I seem to be hitting a snag when I byte-compile ecb upon installation, forcing me to abandon using the supplied Makefile and adapt from the old emacsen-install script using batch-byte-compile instead. Ucf doesn’t seem to work too, since it doesn’t install /usr/share/$FLAVOUR/site-lisp/ecb/ecb-init.el to /etc/$FLAVOUR/site-start.d/55ecb-init.el; maybe I’m missing something.

I hope I can post an RFS for this on debian-mentors tomorrow…