Society

The Android developers seem to feel that they have been singled out for a level of criticism which few other embedded vendors — including those demonstrating much worse community behavior — have to deal with.

This is from Jonathan Corbet's coverage of the Collaboration Summit and matches my impression. I guess what some Google folks don't necessarily see is that they work for a company that has a big sign outside that effectively says “we are not Microsoft or Apple or Sony or the RIAA/MPAA” (implied: we're the good guys.) If you put up such a sign, and then disappoint people's expectations, you got to live with the consequences. (Google's marketing was once more successful with their recent actions in China. Get lots of good press coverage, get rid of quite a few critics, and pull out of a market where you didn't make big money in any case.)

The answer is probably “no way!” I like the way Jon Corbet put it (article will be free in a few weeks):

The SCO affair is kind of like a bad zombie movie; the plot is implausible, the acting is horrible, and, even though you know the good guys must win in the end, that obnoxious zombie just keeps coming back and ruining the party.

Realistically, what will happen? The judge in the Chapter 11 case has so far been quite interested in helping SCO succeed, so I guess there will be an appeal on this. The contract claims in the cases surrounding this are probably not very relevant, so I'm not sure how much press they'll get (although I'm sure Pam will continue to cover the issue — although I think the Apple vs. HTC patent cause should be the one that should be in the center of attention right now.)

And, of course, there's the Canonical vs. SPI lawsuit coming up. I find it very difficult to tell in what direction that will get decided, but I hope it won't take as long as the SCO case.

Maybe we could define the [ACPI] APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.
Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

Bill Gates, 1999, “the others” is Linux (Bill says so explicitly in this email, too.) Obviously, we find similar anti-Windows rethoric en masse on Linux mailing list, and obviously it's been a few years since — but I find myself asking if anything really changed in the top level of MS management, except perhaps that a few people realized that trying to make the Linux / FOSS crowd look like a ridiculous bunch of amateurs wouldn't work.

NZZ Folio, the monthly that comes with my newspaper, had this topic in its January edition, sparking a few thoughts about capital punishment.

Why am I against capital punishment? Primarily, because no justice system will ever be safe (make no mistakes, know no abuse.) Then there is the fact that life is something special and isn't ours to take away, but on the other hand, we assume that it's ok for us to judge that somebody should be locked in the rest of his life, and I'm not quite sure how big that difference is.

Ok, I one thought. Everything else I was going to write was just technical stuff on the execution of death penalty, which I have established I'm against. This engineer's brain can't stop thinking “yes but what if”...

I've just read Vincent Sanders' Bits from the kernel team. First, a big thank you to him: this kind of detailed information about what the team intends to do, down to a very technical level, is needed much more often on d-d-a. Debian is about producing a distribution, which in the end comes down on how to make independently produced pieces of software work together, so getting all the fiddly bits right is the most important aspect of Debian's work. (And it is also where I think Debian still does better than all other distributions I've ever used.)

What immediately sparked this article is (could it be otherwise? ;-) the part I didn't like too much about these Bits: “ ... was discussed ... ” ” ... was resolved ...“ ” ... further investigation ... would occur.” and right at the top “ ... a member of the release team ... ”

Of course the team should work together as a whole. Of course it isn't really relevant who of the release team was present. Of course, this information is contained in the minutes. But on the whole, these Bits read a bit like a press release of a large corporation where the spokesman reads a communique prepared for him by a marketing team responsible. I miss the personal touch that should in my opinion run in parallel with our promise of openness: it's not only that we don't hide bugs, it's also that we're not hiding behind a “corporate identity”, but that we're not afraid to name names (No, this is not in a foundation document as such. It's my interpretation of openness.) A start is simple use of active vs. passive: Why not “we discussed/decided ... ” instead of “it was discussed/resolved”? (It's used in a few places, I note.) I appreciate that naming names with each action item is probably better left in the minutes, but at least naming the release team member (he's not just a functionary...) and perhaps at the end a short paragraph about who was there would have improved the announcement.

Also: none of the items has an ETA — obviously Debian is famous for not having any ETA's but we're trying to change this, aren't we? So why not give at least a rough estimate which tasks would take a week, a month, half a year... to complete? I'm sure you discussed it (have yet to read the minutes), if only to guesstimate what is realistic within the timeframe of the squeeze release cycle.

Debian not only is no company, but it's also, and I hope I'm not the only person who thinks this is important, a Linux distribution where no corporate body has the power to force changes on the community. The single person is important, because it's the single person who in the end decides to implement a thing this or that way. It may be the outcome of a team discussion and a team's decision, but the work is done by individual people and not by employees impementing a corporate policy.

Alex Hudson noticed that i4i, the company that tries to ban Microsoft Word being sold in the U.S. seems to have a product that is somehow based on (Add-on or Plug-in) … you guess … Microsoft Word.

Please, please, please let this stand. Not only because it's incredibly funny to see Microsoft suffer from a software patent lawsuit, but also because perhaps this will finally get a serious discussion going about software patents (and why not about patents in general, too?)

I can just see it: the next lawsuit is i4i sues Microsoft for not selling MS Word anymore and thus destroying their product.

Just because I had this discussion a few times with various people... And because Heise pointed to an ongoing edit war on Wikipedia.

I tend to believe that nuclear power is effective as a countermeasure against global warning. I also believe that it may be possible to operate a nuclear power plant safely, that our (Swiss) experience is not just luck (looking at the disaster at Chernobyl shows a combination of engineering problems and political issues that I remain convinced will not happen here. To be fair: Switzerland only operates a few nuclear power plants. We import the nuclear fuel and we don't know what to do with our nuclear waste.) Also: nature as a whole deals quite well with radiation, so pollution by nuclear waste is not an environmental problem either. (That plutonium and some of the other substances that are involved here are also chemically poisonous can be safely ignored since the amounts are relatively small.)

But (and if you kept reading until here without exploding: thanks): If we take environmentalism seriously, we shouldn't just talk about global warming. Mining and enriching uranium is a very inefficient process both in terms of tonnage and in terms of energy, contributing to pollution of water and air, to the destruction of beautiful nature and to global warming. And it's not just about environmentalism either: While nature as a whole can cope with radiation quite well, human individuals can not (and an endangered species living only in a specific affected area probably won't be able to either.) In the long term, nobody can predict the political developments surrounding the operators of nuclear power plants and all the associated facilities (and we're talking of 50 to 100 years at least, not counting the several hundred to thousand years it takes for nuclear waste to degrade far enough so it can be “safely ignored”.) And, going back to purely economical thinking, it is said (again, sorry, I don't have a link ready) that the known uranium deposits wouldn't last 20 years once nuclear power would seriously be used to replace coal as a source of electricity.

To conclude: Nuclear power has too many problems, it shouln't be used. My issue is just that too often, in my view, the wrong reasons are brought up against it, leading to epic and unnecessary political fights that contribute nothing to solve the world's real problem: we use too much energy, and it doesn't really matter which energy source we're talking about.

Answers to comments:

Wind / Solar Power: While I agree that the energy is available in theory, it is improbable that wind or solar energy farms in the required scale will be built in democratic countries: the same environmentalists who don't want nuclear or fossil power plants to be built also want to protect the scenery. Building in the desert may be technically feasible but those countries often are politically unstable. Building on the ocean is currently too expensive. So in practice the available energy won't currently be harvested.

Nuclear accident Lucens: Yes, I knew that. Unlike Chernobyl, safety measures included building the plant in a containment, so only a small amount of radioactive gases escaped (Google finds quite a few accounts of the incident, see for example here.) Obviously, any escaping radiation is bad, but in contrast to dust, gases don't linger and are quickly diluted in the atmosphere to a level similar to the natural background radiation (which can be high enough to cause health problems, especially in the southern regions of Switzerland, btw.) I don't claim accidents won't happen in Switzerland, but I believe (and hope, too) that a combined failure of enough safety measures to cause an accident on the scale of Chernobyl is extremely improbable.

Uranium mining inefficiency: I do distinctly remember having read the claim that the total EROI (see comment #9) of nuclear power plants (including all related processes) is close to 1. But Google can't find the reference and it seems to be far, far away from generally accept1ed reality, so I've taken it out of the main article above now. I wonder if what I've read was some journalist's simplification of a study similar to the one ScienceDaily is referencing.

Environmentalists and Wind Farms: The usual two arguments are that windmills are bird killers and that scenery shouldn't be cluttered with wind turbines (the latter argument also applies to solar power.) I have no idea how far the first argument is valid, but in (densely populated) central europe concerns about cluttering the landscape are making large wind power plants impossible. Yes, a non-democratic form of governments would have some “advantages” here....

While reading Benjamin's recent article about FLOSS, and thinking about how I use it in my commercial life, it occurred to me that the worst experiences have always been with what I call Pseudo-OSS.

Pseudo-OSS is software which is licensed under a genuine free license, but there is no actual community of developers, but instead a company which releases a “community edition” mainly as advertising to sell a non-free extended edition. Since a developer community does not exist, customers get none of the benefits of FLOSS while the vendor gets the publicity bonus of being an FLOSS friendly company. I've seen this pattern a few times with groupware packages where it is apparently difficult to attract real community developers. Special purpose Linux distributions (vendor provided Linux packages for embedded boards, for example) also tend to fall into this category, sometimes including heavily patched versions of gcc and binutils with non-identified snapshots as base versions so that it's basically impossible to isolate the vendor specific patches...

Are there metrics for “community supported” projects? Number of different mail domains on emails containing patches? Number of companies hosting project infrastructure? Others?

I can't stop shaking my head about the let's-buy-an-iThing™-and-then-try-to-use-it-with-FOSS style of energy waste that's going on. (Yes, in immediate response to John, but I see it happening again and again.) Yes, Apple's devices are shiny, nice things. But I think that company is at least as good at customer lock-in as it is at design, marketing and engineering. It certainly is better than Microsoft (MS users use Windows and MS Office because they are lead to believe that there is no alternative. Apple makes their users want to use their stuff — obviously they can't go the MS road since it's obvious that Apple users could just use Windows like “everybody else”. Linux advocacy should learn more from Apple there instead of always working against MS!) So: why, oh why, do people, especially Debian people who on average care a bit more about freedom than others, keep using devices made by a company that again and again proves that it believes it needs tight control over what customers do with their products?

(Examples, some from history: Apple not allowing foreign hard drives in their old Macs; Apple using proprietary connectors and protocols wherever it could, from keyboards to printers to displays in hardware and in things like iPod synchronisation in software; Apple tightly regulating what kind of applications are legal on the iPhone; Apple regulating what kind of hardware their OS can be installed on. I think Apple might be more or less Microsoft minus the market share, although their products are usually better.)

Did you know that most pan makers recently were forced to increase their prices because their pan lids (covers?) have the handle on the upper side? The reason is that the maker of our recently purchased pan lid has patented the innovative “this side down” technique and is now busy collecting license fees from pan lid makers who didn't previously have this idea.

(Yeah, sorry, the picture is crap, I didn't pay enough for my mobile phone. But if you doubt me, please have a coffee at my house and admire this high-tech implement.)

A reply to Tore, who is probably partly wrong. I don't claim the U.S. system is good or bad, I don't know it. But I don't think public (which he seems to imply means free) health care is as easy as he suggests. I'm starting at his assertion that

Very few people break their legs intentionally to stay at a nice hospital. [Health care] is not a resource likely to be wasted once people are given free access to it.

The case of a broken leg is easy. What about chronic illnesses, especially those difficult to diagnose (some kinds of back pain, psychological problems, ...)? What about bored old people who spend their days talking to doctors about how bad getting older is? Easily available (cheap or free) health care has lead to hospitals being swamped with people with minor issues to the point where people with serious problems died because hospital staff didn't get to them in time. And, because the state's budget is not infinite, hospitals become badly run institutions with always-overworked staff leading to even fewer people wanting to work there etc. This has happened in the UK, for example (I think the system I have been reading about ages ago has since been replaced by a different one.) Switzerland doesn't have this problem (to this extent) because we really care about (this means, here: throw money at) our health system, but the result is that the mandatory health insurance becomes insanely expensive. There is talk about half the population needing state subsidies to pay for their health insurance within the next few years. Which, of course, will just move the cost from the whole population (via mandatory health insurance) to the whole population (via taxes) so I don't quite see the point...

You'll note I don't propose solutions either. But I think it's important to acknowledge that health care is a difficult topic because, in the end, it always comes down to the question How much money should be spent on this person's illness? which is a very, very bad question. We try to sidestep it by only taking about statistics etc., but no matter how you look at it, you either do 20'000€ per week medications for 80 year old patients who will die soon anyway and get a system society can't pay, or you don't and you get a system where the rich are better off than the poor. Or you delegate the decision to the doctor or the insurance or ... and try to minimize the number of people who “deserve” (can you see it, the hard question didn't get away!) treatment but don't get it.

Update 20090508 - Response to comments I'd like to thank you for commenting. I didn't know (and — sorry about that — didn't care to research) that the U.S. system is even more expensive than ours, since my main message is just that health care is about hard decisions. Some people always will be left out. Elaborating a bit on the 20'000 € a week medication: partly, I agree with Adrian and Tore: patent-supported monopolies on medication plays a part. Partly, because I stipulate there will always be rare illnesses where a few cases per year worldwide will have to “pay for” all the research and production of the medication. Of course, the cost can be distributed so that the patient (or his insurance) doesn't have to pay it, but society as a whole will still pay. So the hard question won't go away easily, now it's just become Do we fund research for this rare illness with fewer than five cases per year worldwide? Of course, now we're not speaking of people anymore, but already just of cases, and we're not cutting treatment for an actual person but we're just cutting budget on research, so it may be easier on the conscience, but it's still fundamentally the same question. Conclusion? Health-care will always be a difficult topic, and it will never be free. The cost can just be distributed in different ways.

As funny as these stories are for reading, any hard data is absolutely lacking. Are there similar stories which actually cite sources? OTOH the fact that even cheap main stream devices like USB sticks and WLAN routers routinely have “compatible with Linux”, often even giving a kernel version, printed on the package tells me that the stories are not that far off. Even so, I'd be curious who these Icelandic Microsoft Certified Partners switching to Linux / Free Software are (first link, the quote below also originates there).

Microsoft Access, the only database software on the planet that’s better at printing mail-merged stickers than it is at storing data.

A blog entry I wanted to write quite some time now... Depicted on the right is a liter carton of organic whole milk of one of the two big retailers here in Switzerland. At the bottom is the red area again, enlarged. For those who don't read french, italian or german: it's an indication of the ingredients (“Ingredients: whole milk”), and a warning for people with allergies (“Contains milk”.) No doubt information like this is an essential contribution to lowering health costs by making people chose healthier foods and being aware of what they eat.

The best way to get me to read a blog entry you've made is to apologize about it in the next one ... So I've gone and clicked on the link to Amaya's previous entry. Getting a warning that I'm about to be presented with a page that may contain material only suitable for adults. What the hell, Amaya is an adult and so am I, so let's just confirm this. I was truly shocked to see her entry that indeed did contain the extremely dangerous word “love” in it (can't imagine what else may have triggered the filter.)

Together with Youtube's apparent tightening of their filtering (I'd not have noticed except that Illiad commented on it) it seems the Intarwebs are now being converted to a happy teletubby-land. So I'm forced append this disclaimer now: Attention please, the text you've just read may have contained strong words, opinions, sentences, punctuation characters and all kinds of dangerous information only suitable for inhabitants of a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.

Ok, it's not that bad. But according to LWN (Subscriber-only content at this time, Debian developers can get a free account, though), there is a possibility that the OpenStreetMap data set will be relicensed (from CC-attribution-sharealike) and that the new license will be contract based, which would mean at least a click-through license. There is, thankfully, also a group of people who think that BSD or even Public Domain-style licensing would be better. Personally, I think the latter is very much preferrable; OSM has (I think, and hope that's not too optimistic) become big enough that it should be able to out-gun every vendor trying to take away OSM's work: the vendor with his few people will just not be able to keep up with the sheer number of OSM contributors.