The Zero Room

Robin 'Roblimo" Miller has an interesting bit of flamebait over at Linux.com, talking about why it's so hard to switch operating systems or desktop environments withing the one operating system. His point seems to be that our deeply-held preferences are established by first impressions (or even chance), then entrenched by habit, no matter how vigorously we might argue that we have a rational basis for them.

I'm not sure I agree with him; GNOME is a better desktop environment than KDE; both are easier to use than the WIndows or Mac user interface; nano is a sensible choice for a programmer's text editor, because... ah... okay, maybe he's got me there. ^O ^X

I've been looking around the new features in Gutsy, and was interested in what's new with the "restricted drivers manager", the gadget that looks after any non-free software required to make unfriendly hardware work. Tried to launch it and was told:

Could these be the eight sweetest words in the English language?

Lugradio's Stuart Langridge (who must I'm afraid get used to the idea that he will probably never receive as much noteriety for anything else he does as long as he lives), after a laptop purchase which can fairly be described as a fiasco, asks the question "Which video card should I buy?" for his desktop PC.

Among the answers is a link to an awesomely useful page: http://free3d.org

The page uses the fairly rough and ready benchmark of the glxgears screensaver frame rate to rank different combinations of hardware and free software. I'm quite pleased with my 930 frames-per-second result (Intel Corporation 82G965 Integrated Graphics Controller, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz), and my masculinity is not at all threatened by the >6000fps results at the top of the table. With figures like this, and two out of the three major 3D hardware manufacturers (AMD/ATI and Intel) actively providing free driver software (not to mention in one case complete hardware specsifications!), it's time to bury the myth that free software operating systems don't do good 3D.

Bruce Byfield at Linux.com has done the world a favour by collating the many and varied hardware compatibility lists into one, highly bookmarkable article.

Like many people, I was saddened to see Eben Moglen leave the board of the Free Software Foundation, but pleased that he would be carrying on his work at the Software Freedom Law Center. If somebody were to ask me (for the record nobody did) who should replace Eben, I would have said without hesitation Benjamin Mako Hill, so I was thrilled when he got the job. One of his key achievements in my view has been kicking off the very important, and long overdue, work on finding a definition of "Free Cultural Works", which will serve the same purpose for other kinds of creative works that the Free Software Definition serves for software. His presense also helps the FSF board continue to meet it's all-important beard quota.

Linux.com has a profile of Benjamin here.

The copyright to CUPS, the printing system used by most free software operating systems (and a number of proprietary ones), has been purchased by Apple Inc., and the former copyright holder and creater of CUPS has been hired by Apple to continue working on it. He has stated that "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms".

Reaction to this has been mixed, ranging from congratulating Apple on supporting such an important project, to concern about possible ulterior motives, based on Apple's mixed track record on working with the free software community.

Back when OS X was released, I personally thought Apple was seriously moving in the direction of freeing it's software completely. This would have made perfect business sense, as the distinguishing feature of Apple's products at the time was the awesomely cool hardware; giving users the freedom to share and improve the software that Apple provided to run on it would only serve to make the overall product more attractive. Ultimately, of course Apple evolved into as much an entertainment company as a technology company, with a strong motivation to release software that was deliberately defective in ways that prevented you from doing things with it that the entertainment industry didn't like, and which was therefore licensed to users in ways that prevented them from fixing these bugs.

In this light, one comment on cups.org strikes me as intriguing...

This article by Rob Enderle, who less kind people than myself dismiss as a shill for a certain proprietary software company, claims that the aforementioned company has lots to celebrate about the new version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely-used free software license. I got caught up responding to this... ahem... provocative article, and since nobody's posted about GPL3 here yet, I thought it was worth re-posting my comment here, as it fairly succinctly sums up the justifications for a new version of the license:

GPL3 is not "different".

GPL3 does not represent the slightest change in the objectives of the license since GPL2.1, rather it reflects changes in the environment in which the license operates.

It's official: AMD (who bought ATI last year) are planning to release free (as in speech) drivers for their graphics hardware. This is a great victory for freedom, and a devastating rebuttal to those who have been insisting that we have no choice but to stop worrying and learn to love proprietary drivers.

Just noticed IBM developerWorks is publishing a series of articles under the banner of Speaking Unix. They're quite scholarly, but very useful for those who want a deeper and more meaningful relationship with the system which, if you're anything like me, you spend more time interacting with than any human being.

Only Microsoft Windows has a longer and less predictable release cycle, but the release of "Etch" is still big news for freedom lovers everywhere. It's not the ideal newbies operating system, but if you know what you want in a system, and want to customise yours precisely to your liking, Debian is a good place to start. Also if (like me) your livelihood depends on a stable, secure operating system you can't go past Debian. I've been using Etch since January on one of my web servers, and it's been running like a dream, precisely as you would expect from Debian.

Being included in a stable Debian release also confers an aura of trustworthiness over free software projects, and this release sees packages like OpenOffice.org 2, GNOME 2.14, KDE 3.5, PHP 5, and MySQL 5, enter the boringly reliable stage of their lives.

Also included in this release is the very familiar-looking Iceweasel web browser, thanks to the Mozilla project's misguided trademark policy, along with Icedove and Iceape.