Archive | that’s just silly RSS feed for this section

Free Software Foundation to iOS Users: “You Are Not Worthy”

2 Nov

image courtesy ezjester

Once again, the Free Software Foundation has done its best to put stumbling blocks in the path of getting GPL-licensed software onto the iPhones, iPods and iPads of some fifty million Apple customers. And while the last time—over a not-terribly-good app for playing the Japanese game of Go—was a tempest in a teapot, this one will have rather more impact, I suspect.

This time, the fracas is over an iOS version of the free software media player, VLC. A Paris-based software developer, Applidium, released a version of the application for the iPad and iPhone a while back, which has apparently achieved a little popularity. However, one of the developers of VLC, Rémi Deni-Courmont, has taken extreme exception to that, calling it a “copyright violation” and demanding that the app be removed from the iTunes App Store.

The discussion around this has shown that there’s a great deal of dissension over this issue. So, far—despite predictions to the contrary—the app still seems to be up in the store, and I personally expect it will be staying there for a while. Here’s why:

VLC is not a project which asks that contributors assign copyright, so strictly speaking Deni-Courmont only has a direct interest in those portion which show his copyright. Apple, however, doesn’t look at sources. Since the application say “© the Videolan Team”, short of changing his name, it’s going to be difficult for Deni-Courmont to demonstrate his own interest in it.

I’m figuring that Apple’s response to Deni-Courmont’s complaints is going to be, “If you’ve got a beef with someone, it’s with Applidium, not us. Go sue them, and when you win, let us know, and we’ll take the app down.” This would seem to be in line with a tweet from the official Videolan account, suggesting that Gizmodo’s claim that VLC for iOS was going away soon was “FUD”.

The FSF, in their ever-present haste to paint Apple as a villain whenever possible, has taken Deni-Courmont’s side in this, and weighed in on the issue with some very sketchy reasoning, both on their web site and on the VLC discussion list.

The reasoning given by Brett C. Smith, the FSF’s Compliance Engineer, runs as follows:

1. Apple’s End User License Agreement applies to all apps on the store. This is incorrect: in the absence of a specific third-party EULA from the developer, this is the case, but the developer’s EULA overrides Apple’s, if they conflict. Applidium could easily provide a EULA to circumvent this issue.

2. The App Store terms impose strict usage rules on all software. Perhaps, if they apply—but in any case, this is immaterial. To quote from the GPL v2, §0: ”Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.” [My emphasis]

The GPL does not cover “usage rules”, and explicitly so. In any case, the “usage rules” to which Smith is objecting are the restriction that a downloaded app “cannot be used commercially”, and that an app can be installed on no more than five iOS devices under a single Apple Store account.

Clearly, both of these “restrictions” exist solely to protect commercial developers and to protect their ability to make future sales. Neither of them has particular meaning in the context of a free (in the sense of “available at no charge”) application whose source code is available under a free software license. Smith is straining at gnats and swallowing camels to find problems here.

3. The GPL prohibits these restrictions. No, it doesn’t, and it says it doesn’t. The closest Smith can get is the inability to have the app on more than five iOS devices—a fairly unrealistic scenario to begin with—and one easily remedied by setting up an additional Apple Store ID to cover the 6th through 10th devices.

It seems clear that the FSF, Smith and Deni-Courmont are looking for excuses to press their own political agenda—Apple as freedom-hating villain—on the rest of the world, and over the apparent protests of many other participants in the VLC project. Jean-Baptiste Kempf has presented his own thoughts on why the reasoning presented is full of holes, and there’s been increasingly strident disagreement over this on the list.

It looks like the FSF and Deni-Courmont will keep complaining about this but—as of a moment ago—it was still up there, still freely available. This may turn out to be a watershed moment for the free software movement. It would have been a lot better if they’d found a way to work with the mobile space and with companies like Apple, but they’ve refused to. Next stop, irrelevance?

Great Moments in Apple History: Is 2000 a “Leap Year”?

1 Nov

In addition to Steve Jobs’ irrational hatred of pixels, and Keith Stattenfield’s approach to soliciting input, the occasional “expertise wars” at Apple could be entertaining.

Back in late 1999, when we were working on the upcoming release of Mac OS, a sort of strident “discussion” broke out during a meeting in my VP’s office with the EVP of software. Apparently a friend of his “alerted” him to the fact that 2000 was showing as a leap year, and, “of course”, leap years are any year that’s divisible by four unless they’re also divisible by 100! “What are you people, a bunch of idiots? Don’t you know this stuff? Why am I getting calls from my friends to correct your work?”

“We know it,” I said, “it’s your friend who doesn’t. The rule for a leap year is any year that’s divisible by four, unless it’s divisible by 100, unless it’s divisible by 400 as well. 2000 is the exception to the exception. Tell your friend to check his ‘facts’.”

The EVP stared at me for about fifteen seconds. Then he said, “What are you, some sort of calendar expert?”

“Try me,” I replied.

He stared at me for another ten seconds, then stared at my VP, who shrugged. “He is,” he said. The EVP then got up and stomped out of the office. That was actually the last we ever heard on that particular “issue”.

Linux on the Desktop? Dead? Alive? Or Maybe, Simply Irrelevant?

20 Oct

or “The Dawn of the Day of the Living Undead Desktop Platform”

Even in death, life goes on invisibly. (Image courtesy of Sarah Caulfield)

This seems to be the week for either stating that Linux is “dead on the desktop” or for insisting that it’s not. Being a believer, as I am, in the Taoist Theory of Management, I know a good parade when I see one and am therefore impelled to try to get in front of it. (Thom Holwerda over at OSnews, believes it’s moribund, Katherine Noyes at PC World feels it’s not yet “pushing up the daisies”…)

Is the “dream” of Linux of the desktop “dead”?

The Honest Truth

Well, no, not really “dead”: it is, however, most certainly “pining for the fjords”, as it has been for many years. If it ain’t dead, for the vast majority of users of computing devices, it might as well be, and they’d never know the difference. Linux-based desktop OSs—as opposed to use in servers and the like, where they’ve been quite successful—are strictly a niche product, appealing to a small cadre of technology geeks and “free software” fans for the most part.

The market share of Linux in the desktop space seems to be no higher than about 3%, and that figure seems on the generous side. Wikipedia’s article on usage of operating systems given a median share of 1.08% for “mainstream Linux” (i.e. excluding Android)—in a range from a low of 0.53% to a high of 1.57%—versus a median share of 1.40%—based on estimates ranging between 0.99% and 2.38%—for iOS, which runs strictly on mobile devices manufactured by Apple! And OS X, itself rather a niche product, clocks in at a median of 6.82%, with estimates ranging from 5.03% to 11.59%.

In spite of all of this, the main “marketing efforts” (again to be charitable) have been couched in suggestions that “Linux is just as good” as Windows or OS X (and, for many purposes, this turns out not to be quite the case in practice). There’s no recognition that users have an investment in learning to use a system, and to ask that they abandon that investment and undertake a whole new learning curve (especially when there’s no clear advantage to it—”just as good” isn’t a strong selling point) is completely unrealistic. As a result, most efforts at promoting Linux-based desktop system have been most effective at persuading existing users of such systems that they’ve been doing the right thing all along, as opposed to actually gaining new users.

So, What Happened?

Free software partisans routinely blame Microsoft for their own failings: it can’t be that the message is completely off the mark! Microsoft must somehow be clouding people’s minds and keeping them from hearing something which is so logically obvious!

“Free software” started out as a model railroading club at MIT, and in terms of its ability to create appeal among average users, it’s never moved very much beyond that point. But the goal of making Linux a “mainstream” desktop choice has a bigger problem.

The “Desktop” is, for more and more people, becoming less and less relevant in their day-to-day use of computers and associated technologies. People are increasingly more likely—as is already the norm in many places outside of the US and the EU—to surf the web from their phones rather than from a desktop system, and to perform functions that were once squarely within the province of the “desktop” within a browser, “in the cloud”. I’ve said many times that the desktop computer is like a Swiss Army knife: it can be used as a stand-in for a variety of tools, but it’s not a terribly good example of any of them, and that certainly applies here.

And while the Linux kernel may benefit from its inclusion in efforts such as WebOS and (perhaps) Android, that’s not going to help mainstream desktops like GNOME or KDE, much less the GNU Project or the FSF, in the slightest degree. (Ironically, it turns out that the terminology “GNU/Linux” finally has some actual utility, although not at all what the FSF had in mind: rather than distinguishing “GNU/Linux” from “GNU/HURD” or “GNU/something-else“, it’s useful to distinguish “GNU/Linux” from “webOS/Linux” or from “Android/Linux”, which uses a different fork of the Linux kernel entirely.)

The best hope for mainstream community efforts, at this point, is MeeGo, which leverages many community projects, but which is giving every appearance of being deeply in trouble as far as actual phones go. A single OEM, Nokia, is offering a fairly half-hearted level of support on a single device at this point, and the main proponent of the MeeGo platform there has just departed to join competitor (and promoter of the competing WebOS platform) HP. It’s very unclear that MeeGo stands any chance of gaining traction as a consumer mobile platform.

How Did Things Come to This?

There are a lot of reasons for this. The core ones all stem from a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of those who would promote Linux to those not currently using it: hardly anyone selects an operating system based on its price, and even fewer select one based on its “freedom-enhancing qualities”. People want a platform they can use to do the things they want to do, and they’re not willing to spend a bit of extra effort unless there’s some tangible payback to it. Linux-based OSs—even the best of them, like Ubuntu or Linux Mint—don’t provide that so far.

Linux-based OSs are smothered on what remains of the desktop—and that is surely going to be increasingly supplanted by ever-more-capable phones and tablet devices—by Windows and OS X. They’re smothered on phones by Android and iOS; I expect webOS to be taking an increasing chunk of this as well in the coming year or two, thanks to the much-deeper pockets and much-broader product line of HP. On tablets and netbooks, mainstream Linux is going to be facing an uphill battle against not only iOS, webOS, and Android, but Chrome OS as well. “As good as” isn’t going to be nearly “good enough”, I fear.

Mainstream community Linux platforms had their best chance at actual relevance going on four years ago now, with the announcement of the “GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative”, which captured a lot of attention at the point at which it was initially unveiled. Sadly, that was about the last bit of positive and productive work that ever got accomplished there.

For the next two years, the particular GNOME Board member who’d asserted control over the entire project—who will remain nameless here, not to protect the guilty, but since anyone to whom the name would mean anything already knows exactly whom I’m talking about—managed to make himself both a stumbling block in every single critical path, as well as completely inaccessible and unreachable by any normal means.

Various efforts were half-begun and stalled thanks to this individual’s unwillingness to either cede responsibility in some area, or actually do something to move it forward. This went on for two years, with a rising level of frustration and complaints to the GNOME Board. These pleas that something be done went completely unheeded for two years—the Board kept saying that we should “give things a little more time”.

By the time this person was both relieved of responsibility for GNOME Mobile, and also thrown entirely—bodily, as it were—off the Board, it was too late: Android phones were already shipping, rather than a coordinated effort on “GNOME Mobile”, we had MaeMo, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and Moblin, all of them going in vaguely different directions, none of them ready for prime time, and none of them “consumer-ready” by the remotest stretch of the imagination.

So, when people say that the dream of Linux on the desktop is dead, they’re just saying that they woke up to the actual reality of the situation: Linux platforms started out as a hobby, and those most involved in their development and direction have—sometime knowingly, more frequently unthinkingly—worked very hard to ensure that they’ll stay that way.

Newer Entries →

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.