Milan Zamazal's Weblog

Not having millions of dollars/euros on your account? Not backed up by dozens of lawyers? Not having guts to kill inovation and to blackmail your competitors? Never mind, you can still play the Software Patent Game!

I've noticed that European Commission starts a new round of the Community Patent project that can lead to legalization of software patents in the European Union. E.U. citizens and companies have opportunity to fill-in a Commission questionnaire on the issue till the end of March.

If you are concerned about the European patent system and/or the danger of legalization of software patents in the European Union, please look at the FFII pages about the questionnaire.

I made my first small contributions to the OpenStreetMap project. I think making free maps is important and it's a lot of fun. When you buy or use a proprietary map, it's usually limited in its use, imperfect and you can't customize and improve it. A free project can change this.

My first impressions about OpenStreetMap in Czech Republic are positive. A lot of work has already been done on it and it contains a lot of data. It's still quite away from completeness of proprietary maps, many entities are missing and quality of data is variable. But we've already got reasonably complete data ready for further improvement. I think anybody can help a lot by improving areas he knows or visits, e.g. by adding missing tracks, names, points of interest and checking accuracy, correctness and completeness of current data. Great opportunity to spend a lot of time and fun outdoors, on trips and, of course, in front of a computer.

If you'd like to join, you should start with looking at OpenStreetMap Wiki.

I tried to make OpenVPN working in a Linux-VServer environment about a year ago. I couldn't find a straightforward HOWTO nor answers to all my questions. So I described what I had done and sent my questions to the VServer mailing list. I expected that I get answers to my questions and then other users trying to run OpenVPN with VServer can find fine instructions at least in the mailing list archives.

My mail has bounced because non-subscribers (I read most mailing list via Gmane NNTP gateway) were not allowed to post to the VServer mailing list. Considering my effort of writing the mail and the possible benefits of sending it I tried to temporarily subscribe so that I could send the mail. The subscription address didn't work. So I wrote to the postmaster about the problem but haven't received any answer. I got discouraged and gave up.

All the result was my wasted work of writing the mail and trying to send it. I made OpenVPN working some way and I haven't managed to return to my original problems to describe them on the wiki or so.

I really don't like closed mailing lists. Closing a mailing list is a cheap solution. You don't have to set up spam filtering. You won't get rants from readers about spam coming from the mailing list. And you annoy legitimate users and miss contributions.

Do you know which PC chess playing engine became the second strongest one in the world after Rybka this year? It's Stockfish, a free chess engine distributed under the GNU General Public License.

It may look surprising that a hobby program with publicly available source code can beat all the proprietary engines with their secrets and hard working full-time developers. But it just proves that cooperation, open development, sharing (Stockfish developers make just the playing engine and don't have to care about user interfaces already provided by other programs) and making things for fun may lead to excellent results.

I had an opportunity to watch Garmin nüvi GPS equipped with CN maps while travelling by a car some time ago. I was curious about how good those maps are compared to OpenStreetMap. By my observation the Garmin maps are worse. They tried to navigate us through fields (despite unpaved ways were disabled in setup) or through a dead end street. Sure, OpenStreetMap contains errors too, but it has been making great progress at least in our country. While I wasn't much certain about using OpenStreetMap for car navigation a year ago, I've completely relied on it this year on my occasional trips, even when going abroad. And of course I fix errors and apply changes I discover. I'm not going to use proprietary maps for navigation anymore, despite their prominent support by proprietary GPS devices. OpenStreetMap is a nice free product and it's worth to contribute to it.

Well, we've got a nice free map. Now I'd like to have an outdoor navigation with a documented interface so that OpenStreetMap can be used on it without problems. What do you think, Garmin?

I've never been successful in keeping really useful and up-to-date diaries and todo lists. Well, one can think: "If it's really important I won't forget about it and the other things don't matter much." But if nothing else then family life can cause semi-chaos making really difficult to get anything done. Nevertheless an important change has happened to me last year.

I used to use KDE PIM suite as my software organizer (indeed, there are some important things one can forget of). Last summer I had to upgrade my desktop and got exposed to the infamous KDE 4. I hadn't been very comfortable with KDE PIM before the upgrade and it got only worse afterwards. I think I needn't explain much, KDE PIM simply wasn't among the few excellent and already completely working KDE 4 applications (believe or not there are some).

By chance I met Emacs Org-mode at that time. This wasn't for the first time I've seen it. But previously either Org-mode wasn't mature or I didn't really understand its concepts (perhaps both). This time I found a mature product with interesting concepts and features. After some exploration I decided to move from KDE PIM to Org-mode.

What's so good about Org-mode? The basic idea of simplicity and flexibility. You can just write down anything that comes to your mind and put it into plain text files using simple markup. And then you can use available tools to manage all the information. Easy, isn't it? Actually it may not be that easy, it requires some mental change when abandoning GUI tools designed to drive you and moving to a plain text organizer designed to be driven by you. But once you get it you'll start to like it a lot.

You can simply start writing anything you want in your editor without having to use menu commands and to navigate through fields and buttons of predefined dialogs – you define how information is organized. You can keep related information in a single place – no need to split a journal entry containing a calendar item, a short todo list, a contact and some note into five different locations in five different applications. You can structure and organize your information as you like, it can be anything from a single big file to a directory tree containing many different files. In any case you can use the presentation tools to retrieve and combine required information. And you can customize it as you like, it's Emacs after all.

In the result KDE PIM wasn't the only set of applications I abandoned in favor of Org-mode. Think, you can put a lot of things into plain text files: notes, tasks, events, anniversaries, journal, bookmarks, passwords, contacts, vocabularies, clocking, documents, source code, commands, ideas, this blog entry, etc. There are many contributions to Org-mode, putting some kinds of specialized applications into obsolescense due to their limitations, low flexibility and lack of integration.

A very important part of Org-mode is its excellent documentation. When you've got a flexible software, good documentation is essential because the software is much about general concepts and personal preferences. It's interesting to see that e.g. KDE PIM pages present just feature lists and completely omit the important areas. Org-mode is equipped with a complete user manual, tutorials, presentations, FAQ and other documentation that help you learn how to manage things. It's software with intelligent community around it.

I can confirm the Org-mode way works. I was able to reasonably organize my things soon after I had begun to start using Org-mode and this is for the first time I'm able to keep my agenda in order. Org-mode has impressed me a lot. Not because it's perfect (it's not) or because of its feature set (it offers much more than I need while some things are missing), but because of its excellent concepts that solve the right problem, in a right way and for a useful purpose.

Well, this is not an introduction to Org-mode nor a feature overview. If you'd like to know what Org-mode actually is, look at Org-mode home page where you can find explanation of its concepts and everything else about it.

A famous businessman has died some time ago and the whole world has praised him as a hero who changed the computing. Well, there were some more realistic views (e.g. rms), but those exceptions were hardly noticeable. We like celebrities and we prefer listening to heroic myths rather than to unpleasant truths about less or more successful attempts to enslave users or to make an artificial monopoly. And the true heroes remain unnoticed. How many of the upstream media have mentioned recent deaths of the highly respectable men, Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy, who have (really) contributed much to the computing and moved it forward?

We should pray for our enemies but we shouldn't accept their apples. Thanks to visionaries like Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds we can enjoy software freedom on desktop computers. Not everything is perfect and there are still many white areas but we can use, share and modify a complete operating system including numerous applications on our PCs and we can use computers for real work, education and entertainment without artificial restrictions. We have been fighting for it for many years and we have won the battle. But there are areas where we are in danger to be thrown back to the beginning and becoming relevant only as blunt business units.

Tablet computers and smartphones are very popular nowadays. In theory they are capable of being general purpose personal computing devices but they miss something. I can't call something that can't run my everyday tool, Emacs, nor most of the other applications I use, a personal computing device. It may serve relatively well as a toy or a single purpose platform, but not much more.

What's the problem? Most contemporary tablets are devices of two sorts: Either the popular apparatus on which you can't install without vendor's permission even software you write yourself, or the Google Android devices. I can't take the first category seriously at all (I don't use shareware). And Google Android is a semi to fully proprietary system incompatible with GNU/Linux and X Window System, i.e. excluding most PC applications (unless one is willing to experiment and at best to go through the limitations of chrooted VNC environments). Sure, it's Google's business and they can produce any operating system they like. The strange thing is that hardware vendors prevent us from installing other operating systems on their devices. Either they try to prevent installing them at all or they demonstrate a strange split behavior, e.g. when a certain vendor suggests installing GNU/Linux on their devices with a clear warning that this action will void your warranty. What does the installed software have to do with hardware warranty? Well, at least HTC has promised to officially permit booting other operating systems, we'll see what happens.

Other strange area are e-ink readers. I've been watching them a bit for a few years and I wonder why they remain basically single purpose closed devices. Sure, e-ink displays aren't well suitable for running applications in traditional ways. But what the e-ink devices offer in their "firmware" (an euphemism for a proprietary operating system) is far below my expectations and imagination (and prevents me from buying any of those devices). At best you receive some semi-supported SDK to create your own applications while not being able even to fix what you already receive. I can understand delivering a few pieces of primitive and buggy software is initially simpler and cheaper than cooperating with community of users and third party developers. But it's sad the crowd effect or whatever else discourages everyone from becoming a niche leader by producing a reasonably open device.

There are other categories of devices such as routers, phones, media players, etc. which suffer from the same problem. You can look around and to see how proprietary software extends, regardless of the fact that many of the systems are based on the free Linux kernel. We should do something (more) about it otherwise we return back to where we were some twenty years ago.

People don't like paying for music and they don't like paying for software. It is not easy nor common for an individual or a small project to gather any significant money for free software development, i.e. to get real compensation for some work and to make living of it.

But fundraising for this SBCL work on threading improvements by Nikodemus Siivola was completely successful and the first fruits of that project are already available. SBCL is a free Common Lisp compiler and Nikodemus Siivola is one of its respectable developers. Common Lisp community is somewhat special, SBCL is popular and some people use it for their private business. Maybe these facts explain the success of the campaign, who knows. Interesting.

I've been a free software advocate for nearly two decades. Supporting and promoting free software hasn't been easy. Some effort and actions were more successful, some less. But we've achieved a lot during the time and we might get satisfied with the results.

But after continual raise and success of free software in the last years we are probably in a period of its decline now. While new free software still gets written and improved, proprietary software strikes to push it into irrelevance. Although free software is common on PCs now, most other devices like phones, tablets, routers, multimedia players, GPS units, e-ink readers, TVs, printers, etc. are basically proprietary software devices (despite the fact they are often built on top of free software products such as Linux and BusyBox), without possibility to replace the proprietary environment by a free operating system. DRM is still not dead. The patent wars continue. And even our basic PC software freedom can become inconspicuously stolen by proprietary software hidden in the form of some software as service products. We are in danger to be thrown back to the beginning.

So I started the new year with increasing my yearly donations to Free Software Foundation and donating to its current fundraising campaign. I believe that what Free Software Foundation does makes sense and supporting it financially is in some sense the simplest thing to do. If you care about the future of free software, please help FSF to reach its current fundraising goal as well or try helping free software in any other way.