Ubuntu stability and UHR

I have been planning to port the Ubuntu Hebrew Remix remastering scripts to 9.04 for a long while now and I even started some related tasks but it seems to me more and more like this is not the right time. Ubuntu 9.04 is a shameful mess - with intel/nvidia, sound and other hardware devices having severe issues which, no doubt, will scare off new users and already made some Ubuntu users switch distributions.

Someone in Linux-IL mailing list said that Ubuntu just had bad timing(luck?) in releasing just before a few major software releases (XOrg1.6, OOo3.1, Pulsaudio(?) and new intel driver infrastructure).

I'll continue the porting effort (just to have easier job in October) and release the scripts with no ISO images. UHR will have to wait for 9.10 (hopefully 9.10 will be better). Users who need UHR for their grandmother/kids will have to manage with 8.04LTS for now.

A thought that comes to my mind: Maybe UHR should be based only on LTS releases. UHR doesn't seem to be a "big hit", but I received several thank-you notes which means it was useful to people other than me.

Why you probably won't see me on WINE

In Mark Shuttleworth's own words:

We need to make a success of our own platform on our own terms. If Linux is just another way to run Windows apps, we can't win.

link
/. link

I was trying to say similar(Hebrew-2004) things(Hebrew-2008) in the past but Shuttleworth did it better. Translation of my words to a user trying to run ICQ, Winamp and MSN Messenger on WINE:

.. You may not like the alternatives(The native Linux apps) but when you use Windows programs on Linux you use an alternative windows API to execute them and it's not only buggy and heavy on resources but eventually it will provide a really crappy user experience and you are expected to be "disappointed of Linux" real soon. I think you should consider trying the existing (Native) alternative applications in Linux. IMO you'll find them more usable than using WINE and sometimes even better than the Windows apps you were used to.

You can say the same thing about Mono but it might be an exception because currently both MS and Novel are behind it (until some s!@# will hit the fan.. I guess).

Anyway, here are two nice sites to add to your bookmark:
http://www.linuxalt.com/
http://www.osalt.com/

Sometimes the dog will bite: MS sued TomTom for using Linux

It seems that the war has begun - the same war that everybody said is happening only in my imagination. Microsoft sued TomTom over using the Linux kernel which implements, as MS claimed before(2007), some of MS's patents.

I really hate to be right this time.
Quoting Shahar's comment in my anti-mono post:

The "patent war" is fought by MS by making threats. MS is not, and will not be any time soon, be suing anyone. When MS start suing end users, you will know it is time to dump their stocks. Suing your potential customers is a sure sign of a dying company (see SCO, and that's not the only example).

Not being able to sue, all MS can do right now is threaten. Taking these threats seriously means giving in to MS's strategy. Rejecting free software for no reason other than some obscure future threat means doing what you claim they want you to do!

Shahar can be very coviencing and I respect his opinion. I even wrote another post saying that I might be wrong and maybe MS really did changed it's ways (but I was still very skeptical).

It seems that the patents in MS lawsuit might be over the FAT32 implementation in Linux.
FAT has existed for almost two decades, and the FS driver in Linux for quite some time as well. So it seems like MS waited for their FS to become a standard so they could sue. FAT is used everywhere today - digital cameras, flash memory. No company is safe.

Where are all those people now?
Those who told me that MS will never use the patent weapon?
... that registering software patents is just a strategic weapon?
... that Mono/.net is safe for use and implementation?

Well, guess what - you better reimplement your Mono apps.
Happy porting!

Installed Ubuntu 8.10, got sick of brown

I installed 8.10 last week and lost my theme settings (some packages mostly).
The installation went pretty well and so far I'm happy with it. Don't know why so many people are whining about it. Sure, Debian-stable is fine but Ubuntu gave my wife and my brother a great entrance into the Linux world.
I did get sick of the brown/Orange human theme thought, so I decided to modify it and this is how:

sudo apt-get install blubuntu-theme
sudo sh -c "for i in \`find /usr/share/icons/Human -type f -name '*.png'\`; do convert \$i -recolor '0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0' \$i ; done;"

To revert the icons back to brown/orange:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall human-icon-theme

I don't care that it's a butt-ugly hack. It works :)

Screenshot attached:

Moonlight debate gets hot on Debian mailing lists

I already wrote too much on this but if your following the issue it's worth to read the Debian-related follow-ups. As published this week on DPN, the debate on whether to accept Moonlight into the Linux world has reached the Debian mailing lists.
Seeing DDs thoughts and fears regarding this issue validates some my own thoughts.

have fun.

More thoughts about Mono

With the release of the version 2.0 of Mono I want to share with you my recent thoughts.
Right after my previous post here I had some chats with friends who claimed the following points (hope I didn't miss/forget anything):

• We already have Microsoft propriety technologies integrated deeply in the Linux distributions - like SAMBA for example. It seems that in the past MS people helped SAMBA and they even made some attempts to pull the patents trick again and they lost because you just can't give me something and the sue me for using it. (I didn't check the facts on that).
  
• My rants on the subject is exactly what fuels the MS FUD. They don't really want to sue. They just want people to be too scared of not using MS products.
  
• In Israel, where I live, there is no law restricting reverse engineering (actually, there's a law permitting it). So, re-implementing .Net in Linux is legal... In Israel.
• Microsoft spreads FUD even when you don't use their technology directly (for example, last year's claim of having 235 violations of their patents in the Linux kernel). So why bother with the potential FUD that could be spread after .Net is integrated in Linux distros, they'll do it anyway.

Well, in this post I just wanted to present the other side. The arguments are "kind of" logical but I still can't help smelling something fishy in the whole thing.

Mono 2.0 implements C# v3.0 which has some neat features like the LINQ, for example.
Well, I don't have any issues with C#. The language is standardized and legal for reimplementation. There's an interesting interview with it's creator in here.

Mono 2.0 also includes a debugger for the first time.
It's getting more and more usable and I have a feeling that it might take over the whole RAD development in Linux (if you can call it by this name) currently dominated (IMO) by the dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, PHP ... FPC/Lazarus? (*ducks*).

The thing is that I think Linux could use more good RAD tools and it seems to me like Mono is going to do it where the others have failed. I'm just saying that it will be a darn shame if we realize later that it's legally unusable in half of the world (US and others?).

I think that other people in the FOSS community started to feel the need for RAD tools and today you can see cool projects like Vala and Lazarus come to life/resurrected.

Why you probably don't want to get Mono/Moonlight

Previously on "FOSS Holly Wars":

Last month a big Linux/FOSS conference was held in Israel. You know, the usual stuff - some interesting sessions and geeky activities but this year was a little different. This year Microsoft was one of the sponsors (this is somewhat not surprising if you monitor recent MS activities).

Some Israeli community people made a big fuss about it and did their best to prevent this from taking place but eventually Microsoft not only had their logo printed on the official conference T-Shirts alongside the cute penguins, they also got session time to propagate their shiny new friendly face to the FOSS world. In this debate I took the side that agreed to allow MS have a word. I think it's important to at least listen before you judge something. But that's not want I wanted to talk about.

Amir Shevat of Microsoft spoke and demonstrated Microsoft's superior Silverlight technology and tried to convince the audience that the war between MS and FOSS is over and we should learn to work together. He claimed that Silverlight is cross platform and can be easily used on Linux (which turned out to be false). He tried to convince the audience that it's Free for use. I tried to get to the bottom of the use of the "Free" word again by asking Amir a simple question :
"Do you grantee that if I use Mono and the .Net implementation, I won't eventually be sued by Microsoft?". In a personal talk I asked him another question: "Is it redistributable?".

Attack of the Lawyers

The answer was "Let me check with the company lawyers". Later on, when Amir was confronted with the same question again, this time by the press(Hebrew), he replied "I'm a programmer, not a lawyer ...". Two weeks ago Amir had sent me the "lawyer's reply" presenting this link (AKA "The CNS" - Covenants Not to Sue Downstream Recipients). I promised him that I'll keep my blog readers up to date with whatever the answer is.

I think that in the F/OSS business each of us must be just a little "lawyerish" and be able at least to understand what the GPL3/GPL2/LGPL/BSD/CC means when we use and share code and content in our projects. That's why I think that reading this document can be done by someone like me (who is not a lawyer) and as you will see, reading it and noticing the important stuff is not a brain surgery.

So, Let's see what we have here ...

The user of Mono/Moonlight is allowed to be a "Downstream Recipient" who may use it, but ..

"An entity or individual is not a Downstream Recipient when such entity or individual resells, licenses, supplies, distributes or otherwise makes available to third parties the Moonlight Implementation."

Which means it's NOT RE-DISTRIBUTABLE!

Moreover, the CNS talks about "Downstream Recipients of Novell and its Subsidiaries".
And what if I'm not a Novel client?
What if I use Ubuntu, Redhat or Debian?

And what about this part in the CNS:

"Microsoft reserves the right to update (including discontinue) ... "

Microsoft can discontinue the CNS whenever they like to. So I'm asking - what does this CNS really worth? I guess not much because right now it's a good time for MS to collaborate with Linux and FOSS because they need every developer they can get to beat Adobe's Flash in their own game. But this might (and probably will) not be the case in the future.

Can this all be true? Is this the document that "allows" me to use Mono/Moonlight on Linux? because it sure doesn't sound like it. Did Amir mistakenly send me the wrong link?
(I'll go on with this post assuming it's not the wrong link, but you may correct me in the comments if you find other legal references and I'll do my best to update this post accordingly)

I wondered what Miguel de Icaza had to say about this and stumbled upon this link in which he says that he knows about these legal issues but at least implementing the VM is no danger and Sun is in the same threatening position as Microsoft. To this claim I can only say:
1. Sun never sponsored(2007!) a raging patent vendetta(2007!) against Linux in the past. (notice the links, this happened only a year ago).
2. Sun started releasing code licensed under the GPL3 (GPL3 carries with it an explicit patent grant). If they keep moving in this direction, the above MS-Sun comparison is truly void.

To conclude the way that I see all this: Microsoft picked a clever strategy in which they can make the omelet without breaking eggs. They get more developers on one hand (who are not lawyers and some don't understand the implications) and They still maintain full control and they WILL sue when their technology will beat the competing technologies (Flash) in popularity.

Practice what I preach

This information is very alarming considering the fact that Mono is already integrated and installed by default in Ubuntu, one of the major Linux distributions out there. But at least for now it should be easy to remove - only two application rely on it: Tomboy and F-Spot. Finding alternatives should be easy enough but we should act NOW to remove it from Ubuntu.

On the Personal level, as a Local(ized) Linux Distributor ([1], [2], [3]), I will remove Mono from the next version of Ubuntu Hebrew Remix and find alternatives for these applications.