This is superbly pictured in the piece that Vanity Fair run about the failure of AIG and the systemic crash, on the whole financial system, that come after. People get so fascinated, so distracted, with their own ‘little’ things, that everything else stops mattering, other than following ‘trends’,’ blindly trust the ’system’. As a result the system, which, per definition, is the sum of all those ‘little’ things, starts malfunctioning because the checks and balances that should had naturally happened, didn’t, because all the different hands at play didn’t fell the urge to understand what was going on, and why, outside of their small ‘kingdom’.

It wasn’t a matter of just greed, it was worst – it was a ‘culture’, that goes way paste the financial system, that simply took people to just trust on whatever was going on. As the access to a plain calculator, shouldn’t be an excuse to anyone to not have minimal math knowledge, also the availability of powerful computers, powerful statistic and data analytics software, shouldn’t be an excuse for anyone to ignore or not understand the fundamental principles of what goes underneath around.

In a sense, this is all about laziness, about managing complexity and entropy levels, about not relying just in ‘trending’, about just going up when everybody goes up, and as now… just going way down when everybody else is going down. In a strange way this blind trust in the ’system’, is relieving, one hasn’t to doubt, one hasn’t to question, one hasn’t to criticize or run against the tide, one has just to be slightly better/faster than the competition, but in the exact same way as them. the ’system’ ends working as a kind of global ‘intelligence’, one that dumbs, and normalizes, everybody. In AIG, and elsewhere, things gone wrong because simply, and in plain words, no one had seen the urge to ‘think out of box’.

Now, lets turn to software. Software (stack wise) isn’t getting simpler, and yet it never stop amazing me about how much time, money and effort is spent in hiding and abstracting all those complexity, instead of getting things simple, clean, transparent, and … introspectable. Amazingly, some are preaching this trend as a business model (very much as the sub-prime was), as while all those abstraction wrappers somewhat appear to simplify life at top of the stack, it makes the core so insanely cryptic and complex, that it acts as ‘natural barrier’ to external change, and so preserving existing ‘grass fields’. That this happens in closed shops and ecosystems as Microsoft’s, is no wonder, that this happens in open-source stalwarts is worrying. It is worrying because it, in practice, replaces the need for real insight (about what goes on at application level, and the relations of that application with the stuff it depends on, and that depends on it) by a ‘brute force’ approach, since as one is doing what everybody else is, then it must be safe…

Yes, there will be a post-{rpm,deb} world… the real question is if that is going to happen because some had learned something with the woes elsewhere, in advance, or if we, Linux world, as an ecosystem, we’ll ‘need’ our own ‘Microsoft like’ woes, to move forward again… in the layer that will matter most. Assuming we want the age of monolithic stacks over, what will get deployed, to tons of places, is a pack of lots of small pieces, developed asynchronously, by totally unrelated teams. Managing the lifetime of those deployments, in a sane, scalable and simple way, installing, updating, erasing them, understanding their inter-relations, is what (should) matter most in the end. Sooner or later, the ‘operating system’ concept will evolve somewhat to turn to be the distribution layer, the one that manages and deploys, the lifetime of whatever runs, locally or in the cloud, as both sides will turn into an extension of the other. It’s just a matter of time, and it is fundamental to do it right, and that, is why i still bet in conary.

I found when trying to run an update command in the terminal with Conary I got this message:
“Write permission denied on Conary database”

What about using sudo ?…

From true leaders one expects a capacity to unite, not to divide or fuel even more, already heated disputes, from leaders we expect them to achieve peace, not to come with war declarations. Murray Cumming didn’t show up as an uniter, or one able to get the best even from those he thinks are bad people, he just showed up in incandescent rhetoric as a far {left|right}¹ wing jihadist. That’s not, i think, the portrait we – gnome/open source community community – want to show to the world at large…

¹ your pick here.

Addendum.

It’s really sad seeing so many savvy people failing to see what – to me – is the bare essential in any kind of society – that whatever are our disagreements we all agree (with the other side) to disagree. No one, as fair i can tell, ever asked Murray Cumming to ’shut up’, all what, i and others, had asked was – plain and simply, for him to agree with Jeff Waugh in a very plain point – that they both agreed to disagree. And that would mean for them to keep two layers clearly separate – the personal, and the Gnome one. By mixing them both, Murray Cumming IMHO failed, and did a disservice to the community at large. Freedom is not about saying whatever comes to our mind, Freedom is knowing, and realizing, above all that our freedom ends just right where the freedom of the other starts. What differentiates us, as a species, is our ability to learn, to interact, to improve things, to make things better. We are too few, so let’s find, and fight, for all the things that unite all us, and not trying to get a race to find all the things which make us different, and… better.

When the GPL makes complete sense

Before I forget all about this software world, I wanted to put in a word for the GPL for a different reason that I have done in the past.

Explaining the advantages of freedom for software in a business setting was always a difficult excercise. Reading a manifesto makes you look like a bomb throwing anarchist most of the time. So in fact we focused on the free as in beer, as opposed to the free as in freedom when it comes to corporate america.

But place yourself at the point of singularity. In 10, 20 or maybe 200 years, man and machine will merge. Increasingly we will use software to control functions of the body.

In that world, you want to have “free software” as in “freedom”. Money wont really be the issue, freedom to run and modify will be. You want freedom to run the software that backs up your memories, you want the freedom to modify the HUD software in your field of vision. Imagine waiting for “human service pack 3.1″ to fix bugs, it can’t be. Imagine your software shutting down because you haven’t paid your subscription dues. Un-imaginable.

The notion of “free-men” will take on a new dimension. It will come to signify those that are running free software in their bodies and are fully in control of that body software. The GPL makes complete sense in that perspective.

Mark my words, or something.

As usual, your feed back is welcome.

They even hired Debian’s founder and, previously, Linux Foundation CTO, to coordinate their software and OS strategy but ultimately that won ‘t be enough. The first public declarations of Ian Murdock, in his new role, touch all the right spots – starting with the arcane and simplistic packaging tools that solaris provides, so why do i feel pessimistic ? Well, short answer is because Ian is debian’s founder. Long answer is a bit more complex. Both the debian and rpm packaging systems are ‘fine’ enough to serve the current biggest distros around but truth is that they are truly dated. Ian Murdock seems to think that given Solaris inherent superiority, it would be enough having decent tools as RedHat or Suse or Ubuntu, to compete. If he and Sun management really think that, then they are for a surprise, because they are wrong, RH is wrong, Canonical is wrong, Suse is wrong. This is no more just about the stack – it is about what the flexibility you could get from it.

Let’s be honest – Solaris is late at this party. In order to really compete they must not match the competition but simply outdo them. To that they need to look seriously at packaging, at new distribution models, at something that makes solaris ‘invisible’ the the eyes of a linux user (Sun doesn’t talk much about that but they know how many x86 solaris boxes they sell and how many will end running linux, like here) yet compelling. Nor rpm nor debian would allow for that, they would allow Sun to be equal, not much better or different. In fact the majority of current packaging models simply won ‘t scale. They need, the whole at large needs a paradigm change, one that allows to be evolutionary while revolutionary.

I’m afraid that given Ian’s past he would not be brave enough to look closely at something so disruptive that sooner or later will put debs and rpms as footnotes of story – conary. Yeah! really. A way to give ISVs a way to abstract above the OS, a way – the only way so far – to really shine above the water.

Then again, maybe he likes the old ways of doing things. Foresight, the leading conary based distribution, was recently reviewed by eWeek. We were already put in the same league as Fedora, OpenSuse and Ubuntu (and we are only in the beginning) but one thing was not said – we have, for sure, way less than 1/100 of their manpower. The secret sauce ? conary. Why ? because it scales! Yeah – it’s really that disruptive.

If you feel confortable with Foresight, you are fluent with conary, and you are brave and willing to help make Foresight even better and stabler than what it already is, please consider to test drive it a bit, by just following the instructions here.

This is the first kernel we’ll ship that actually should have a working suspend and hibernate for the vast majority of laptops around. Fill any issues you may encounter here or just ping us on #foresight on irc.freenode.net.

(19:12:40) doniphon: [19:11:29] [175] metacity:source - Failed while building: Error loading recipe metacity:source=/conary.rpath.com@rpl:devel//gnome.rpath.org@fl:devel//
reloaded.rpath.org@fl-alpha2:gnome/2.16.3-3[~builddocs,desktop is: x86_64(~3dnow,~3dnowext,~nx)]: Could not locate driver for backend 'sqlite' args: (('/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/conary/_sqlite3.so: undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS4_AsUnicode', 'sqlite'),) < < dugan, mkj - any idea about what can be causing this ? (rMake on rpl:1 system rMooking rpl:devel stuff)
(19:15:04) smithj: doniphon: add strictMode True to your rmakerc
(19:15:06) elliot: doniphon: you need to use strictMode True in your config

… from 0 to 100 in less than 3 minutes.

From: Linus Torvalds
Subject: Re: GPL only modules [was Re: [GIT PATCH] more Driver core patches for 2.6.19]
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.kernel
Date: 2006-12-14 16:52:15 GMT (1 hour and 28 minutes ago)

On Thu, 14 Dec 2006, David Woodhouse wrote:
>
> But I would ask that they honour the licence on the code I release, and
> perhaps more importantly on the code I import from other GPL sources.

This is a total non-argument, and it doesn’t get any betetr by being mindlessly repeated over and over and over again.

The license on the code you released talked about “derived works”.

Not “everything I want to”.

If a module owner can argue successfully in a court of law that a binary driver isn’t a derived work, then the GPL simply DOES NOT COVER IT!

In other words, people CAN “honor the license” and still not be required to put their code under the GPL.

And no, including one header file in order to compile against something does not automatically make something a “derived work”. It may, or it may not. It really isn’t up to you to decide whether it does (and notice how I’m not saying that it’s up to _me_ either!).

For example, all the same people who clamor for free software get absolutely RABID about “fair use”. Guess what “fair use” actually MEANS?

Think about it for a moment. It expressly _limits_ the right of copyright authors to claim “derived work”. So if you argue that anything that ever includes your header file (but none of your code) and compiles against it is a “derived work”, then you are basically very close to arguing that “fair use” does not exist.

Do you really want to argue that “everything that has touched anything copyrighted AT ALL is a derived work”? Do you feel lucky, punk?

THAT is why I think this discussion is so hypocritical. Either you accept that “fair use” and copyrights aren’t black-and-white, or you don’t.

If you think this is a black-and-white “copyright owners have all the rights”, then you’re standing with the RIAA’s and the MPAA’s of the world.

Me, personally, I think the RIAA and the MPAA is a shithouse. They are immoral. But guess what? They are immoral exactly _because_ they think that they automatically own ALL the rights, just because they own the copyright.

That is what it boils down to: copyright doesn’t really give you “absolute power”. This is why I have been _consistently_ arguing that we’re not about “black and white” or “good against evil”. It simply isn’t that simple.

I don’t like binary modules. I refuse to support them, and if it turns out that the module was written using Linux code, and just for Linux, I htink that’s a _clear_ copyright violation, and that binary module is obviously a license violation.

But if the module was written for other systems, and just ported to Linux, and not using our code, then it’s very much debatable whether it’s
actually a “derived work”. Interfaces don’t make “derived works” per se.

Now, is it something you could sue people over? Sure. I actually do believe that it’s very possible that a judge _would_ consider such a
module a derived work, and you can sue people. It probably depends on circumstances too.

But don’t you see the problem with a black-and-white technical measure?

Don’t you see the problem with the DMCA and the DVD encryption?

Those kinds of things REMOVE the “reasonable thought” from the equation, and turn a gradual process into a sharp “right or wrong” situation. AND THAT IS WRONG. We simply do not LIVE in a world that is black and white.

So if you think somebody violates your copyright, send them a C&D letter, and eventually take them to court. It’s been done. Companies that mis-used the GPL have actually been sued, and THEY HAVE LOST. That’s a GOOD thing.

I’m not arguing against that at all. What I’m arguing against is the “blind belief” that you or I have the right to tell people what to do,
just because we own copyrights.

It’s not a blind belief that I’m willing to subscribe to. Exactly because I have _seen_ what that blind belief results in – crap like the DMCA and
the RIAA lawsuits.

Linus

In the meantime, and coming back to Java – hats off to Jonathan Schwartz and… well done Sun! Thank you, too.

As a side note, the xen image will work on top of any xen dom0 but with this kind of support only a masochist would want to run it on top of anything not conary based

Just do…

sudo conary update beryl-core=@fl:1-devel[bootstrap]

sudo conary update beryl=@fl:1-devel

and after that start beryl by calling beryl-manager from the comand line. This will work out of the boxes for Nvidia users, and users of intel oss drivers. Users of drivers not yet AIGLX aware (such the ati ones) will need to install Xgl as before (see my previous posts, bellow) , beeing that beryl may or not work well and stable for them. Once things settle down beryl will be a standard option in fl:1, for now it sits in our testing branch fl:1-devel. have fun!

P.S. For reference take a look at my xorg.conf file.

I can’t finish without nothing that this release would haven ‘t been possible without all the help, feedback and support from our incredible user community. For all of you – a big thanks!

P.S. New Install images (CD, DVD and VMWare) are being cooked as i write this. They will be available in the standard place in the next 12 hours.

One last thing… i just committed a bleeding edge emacs to our repository. Now you can use your favorite text editor with full gtk2 support, from theming to font anti-aliasing (thru xft) to pango internationalization. just do sudo conary update emacs=@fl:1 on your Foresight Desktop and put alias emacs=’emacs –enable-font-backend –font “Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-8″‘ in your ~/.bashrc, in order to enjoy it.

[Adendum - August 11] This report from Information Week sets, and gets, the facts straight.

As seen by the Germans:

As seen by the French:

As seen by the Italians:

As seen by the Americans:

As seen by the press:

and now…

As seen in the Middle East

As seen by the japonese:

On the other hand… the french secret service ‘real’ video footage shows things as they happened (Chirac style)…

via The Register

(updated 15/07)