ex tempore

The world, as we get used to know it, is changing fast, and we got ourselves into the middle of a crisis, a global one, that some dare to compare to the ‘great depression’. In short, hard times. Some things didn’t change, or didn’t changed (yet) enough, and one thing that didn’t change is the ’speed’ with which everybody ‘analysis’ everything. In this Internet age, people expect and demand answers and analysis in real time. And the answer the world got for the mess, in the high end financial world was that all could be summed in a bunch of buzzwords – ‘lack of regulation’, ‘executive pay’, ‘greed’. This kind of ‘reasoning’ may be good enough to please the masses, specially when baked together with heavy doses of demagogy, but long term, won’t do much to avoid new messes. This, because the real root of the problem lies somewhere else, and is much more general. Is that in a increasing complex world we tend to focus and specialize on the small things, while missing, ignoring, trusting (pick your choice) everything else that surrounds.

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.

[am@rMake101 ~]$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
428 rmake
82 cd
51 screen
51 cvc
49 yes
48 emacs
45 vi
38 ssh
30 ls
30 (cd


I ‘m in the US, the next two weeks. This week i’ll participate in the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit, at Austin, Texas, and next one, i’ll be in North Carolina, where conary, rmake and… Foresight was born. While in the LF Collaboration Summit i’ll be in the Desktop Architects Meeting – talking a bit about Foresight in the ‘State of the Linux Desktop – Linux Distros’ panel, next wednesday, 9th. I’ll also be at the LSB meetings. Ah, and relating to LSB – one last thing… the LSBsi 4 (Linux Standards Base, sample implementation (v4) will really shine.

My ‘lightning’ talk, at this year’s FOSDEM, about the concepts behind, and around, Foresight Linux is already available online here. Hope you enjoy and find it informative

Someone decided to post a review about Foresight Linux 1.4.2. Even managed to get it on Linux Today’s frontpage. So far, so good. The review isn’t specially fond about that particular Foresight release and – yes – raises some valid points (which hopefully are, or will be very soon, solved in our current fl:2-devel tree) but then i read…

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 ?…

The news are out. Now let’s just hope that in the future we get better interoperability between the Qt ecosystem and the GNOME one. As a GNOME packager i just want to have the same kind/extent of integration of Qt (and in some extent KDE) applications in GNOME as i have of Qt in Windows and Mac OS X (and vice versa), hopefully under the freedesktop.org umbrella. That would be the best, and only, way for Nokia to preserve past, and future, investments, do not alienate significant parts of the open-source community, and dissipate any worries.

Sad, really sad. Utterly dumb, too. ‘An Open Letter to the OpenDS Community and to Sun Microsystems‘

I just come across this entry, i hit via the Planet Gnome feeds. As a Gnome user, and packager, i come ashamed of it. Murray Cumming may have had all the reasons of the world to be mad with Jeff Waugh, but he lost them all, by writing what he wrote, the way he wrote it. If he does not act quickly – showing him as a grown up, and apologizing – he just ends painting himself as bad, or as worst, as he painted Jeff Waugh. Open Source is not a religion, Open Source is a process, a process where there should be no place for certain types of behavior, and for certain types of language. I don’t know for sure if Jeff Waugh is a good fit for the Gnome foundation, probably there are way better choices, but one thing i know now for sure – Murray Cumming is a catastrophic one. Jeff Waugh got democratically elected before, and, good or bad, i’m sure he did his best. There are better choices – great! – that is what periodic elections are for.

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.

It’s really sad that SUN Microsystems, who produces such great hardware is systematically unable to grab to its own ranks someone as gifted to manage and oversight the software side as Andy Bechtolsheim is in their hardware side. Some time ago, in the beginning of April, i wrote here that if Sun wanted to really have a chance with the ‘opening’ of Solaris they needed to think really different. Well, yesterday, Ian Murdock sort of responded. At a first glimpse it may seem that he have finally seen the obvious – that it is packaging the key technology that allows a distro, an operating system to truly differentiate from the crowd. A second, more careful, re-reading, shows that Murdock seems to have inherited all of SUN’s past sins – after all, now that there is a problem, because they – Sun – identified them, that will mean a SUN specific solution. So much for openness. There were so much things they could do, and yet it seems that SUN management will try to reinvent the wheel yet again, delaying their global efforts for another year at least. Meanwhile conary is ready, alive and kicking. It’s a shame when self proclaimed innovators just play on the defensive – Microsoft like – just because they are afraid of new approaches and paradigms. Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, Sun, just like Microsoft before them, may have (had) some success delaying the future, a decentralized one, but have no chance of avoiding it…

(click for full image)

Marc Fleury, of JBoss fame, who is – he says – ‘retired’, he’s enjoying the millions he packed from the JBoss venture. When not playing on a PS3, he writes some fairly interesting stuff. Like the post bellow, written yesterday.

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.

Under some rare circunstances, on your Foresight Linux instalation, the Foresight System Manager (rAA) update process may not work correctly, claiming it is trying to update the same trove (kernel) twice. In the same way running sudo conary updateall from a command line may also fail. There is a simple workaround, already pointed by ken at our frontpage – just run sudo conary update conary –resolve; sudo conary update group-dist; sudo conary updateall from a terminal.

As usual, your feed back is welcome.

I really like SUN hardware, i even sympathize with their CEO efforts, but saying something good about the software side, is usually hard, very hard. Let’s look at Java – on paper SUN freed Java, and Java’s JRE/JDK distribution. So, on paper all is good. Of course Java6u1 is out for weeks but here – the official place – all we get to package in Foresight Linux is the previous version. A bug is, off course, open, since April 19. Still no action. Tomorrow SUN will again do a big splash, it’s JavaONE after all. What about Jonathan and Ian, of instead too much talk, and fanfarre, getting this little things solved ? A community and an user base, after all, is built not of marketing, not of thin air, but of concrete, deliverable, things.