Ok, it’s time to finally start own personal blog. You will find here (hopefully) a mixture of political commentary, ranting against stupid laws and of course - some nice photos.

During the three next months, the apartment will be deserted. We used the weekend to move the most important things out to the undisclosed locations. If everything goes alright, the renovation should be ready for the May Day. I’ll be posting pictures from the process here.

In other news: eWeek has today a nice interview from E-Trade’s Vice President of Architecture Lee Thompson. They are not just using open source but also trying to learn how to apply the best part of the methodology for their internal software development:

.. have a very large code base with a large number of committers, and [there is] the probability of conflicting change occurring. We have a very complicated application—nowhere near as complicated as a project like Microsoft’s Longhorn, but complicated enough that you’ll have, say, our stock options business, which is an employee benefit. They have some developers there who can make a change, and then somebody in our cash transfer business puts a change in, and they conflict, and we have to resolve that conflict in our build process. The way the open-source project does that is that the guys who are submitting the change for the employee benefits site would submit a patch, and the other team doing cash transfer would submit a patch, and the committers would look at both and go, ‘You know, that might conflict. We should probably do one versus the other

Oh, I updated the blog with a new style sheet - comments are welcome..

It seems that the discussion about forthcoming GPL v. 3 is going to be blistering. First we had Linus dissing the new draft. Now John Caroll, who works for Microsoft, joins the chorus with his strongly-worded column:

» The offer you can’t refuse - John Carroll:

…People may wish to rethink that premise, as the GPL is incredibly important to the open source movement (though Eric Raymond has advocated doing away with it), and Stallman has just thrown down the ideological gauntlet. The question is whether those same developers who followed Stallman down the GPL garden path will continue to follow as he leads them over the edge of a cliff..

..GPL version 3 isn’t going to help the cause of open source and free software. With it’s anti-DRM provisions, it’s more likely to inspire a civil war, and if the Stallman side wins (which he might, given interdependencies between various GPL products and the fact that Stallman has convinced so many to give him arbitrary control over the licensing terms covering their code), open source loses as proprietary software rushes in to fill the void left by GPL code.

It will be interesting to see if FSF will address this criticism.

SFgate has today interesting article about personal finances of Oracle’s chairman Larry Ellison. Instead of selling Oracle’s stock, he has taken loan from different banks. A LOT of loan, to be precise:

…Getting back to the scary days of 2000, when the tech stock market was imploding, a list of Ellison’s debts as of July 13, 2000, showed that he owed $1.022 billion to five banks: JP Morgan, Bankers Trust, CMB, Merrill Lynch and UBS. At that time, those loans came from credit lines that had a combined limit of $1.35 billion, putting Ellison a mere $328 million from maxing out.
By 2001, when Ellison made the stock sales that triggered the lawsuit, that debt was up to $1.22 billion.

This puts my personal apartment loan into a slightly different perspective but of course, I’m not worth of $17 billion.

In other news: CNET.UK has interviewed Alan Cox, who thinks that draft GPL is quite reasonable:

The majority of it looks very sensible, such as letting copyright information be displayed in an About box, rather than relying on command line instructions [as is the case in GPL 2]. Some of the more contentious stuff has sensibly been made optional. One of the other nice things is the work to make the GPL compatible with other licences. That’s really important — it will allow people to share more code.

Also SUN is apparently seeing GPL v.3 as something positive. As Jonathan Schwartz wrotes in his blog:

..We also recognize that diversity and choice are important - which is why we’ve begun looking at the possibility of releasing Solaris (and potentially the entire Solaris Enterprise System), under dual open source licenses. CDDL (which allows customer IP to safely comingle with Solaris source code) and under the Free Software Foundation’s GPL3…

It seems that very interesting battle lines are developing for GPL v. 3. EWeek has more coverage on the topic

Last but not least: New Open Source discussion/event forum - Open Tuesday - has been launched:

We have created OPEN TUESDAY for ourselves and other open minded people to connect together around the world on a monthly basis to meet, discuss and to find ways of collaborating and taking action on the opportunities of the open future

It’s Friday afternoon.

We’ll be looking after Mikko’s kids tonight. I’m scared - luckilly Pauliina is more expecienced in baby-sitting.

The week has bring few surprises. Tieturi’s open source day was nice but did not have that much novel content. The most interesting news there was the problems pertainging Finnish spelling for open source programs. Hopefully that will be solved soon since fully working all-around speller/thesaurus is one of the missing key components for desktop use.

In other news: If Richard Stallman was a pacifist (i.e. ban military applications with GPL..), The R-gator from iRobot wouldn’t be possible:

“an intelligent UGV ground vehicle) that can autonomously perform dangerous military missions, including acting as an unmanned scout, ‘point man,’ perimeter guard, [and] pack/ammo/supply carrier for soldiers, marines, and airmen.” The R-Gator can be shifted quickly between remote operation, autonomous, and manual modes, a feature that lets military personnel evaluate unmanned vehicle technology in “numerous operational scenarios,” the company says...The R-Gator’s control, navigation, and obstacle avoidance systems are based on LynuxWorks’s BlueCat Linux, which features a 2.6 Linux kernel.

Yle has published the radio show, in which I argue against Antti Kotilainen of TTVK fame. It was actually quite fun to tape because we had plenty of time, quite narrow topic and - of course - totally opposing positions. Jaakko has already blogged the show:
digitoday.fi - Tekijänoikeuslaki

Do I really sound like Pekka Tianen?

Hmm,

it seems that Linus is backing from his previous hard line position. From Linux-Watch: 

…the specific section that Torvalds has trouble with reads:

“Complete Corresponding Source Code also includes any encryption or authorization codes necessary to install and/or execute the source code of the work, perhaps modified by you, in the recommended or principal context of use, such that its functioning in all circumstances is identical to that of the work, except as altered by your modifications. …”

According to Torvalds, this “is the one that seems to disallow digitally signed binaries (or rather: you can sign the binaries any way you want, but you have to make your private keys available).”

If this section is removed, then Torvalds believes that, while practically speaking it may be difficult to bring Linux under GPL 3 due to the sheer number of copyright owners, the kernel might yet be moved to the new GPL.

Full story:

Torvalds hasn’t ruled out GPL 3 for Linux

Uuuf.

This week will be rather awful. The main reason is that EFFI is currently too popular i.e. different govermental actors want our opinions from various topics - this week’s saldo is 2 position papers (for LVM and OPM), one parliamentary hearing (TaV) and discussion event (SuV) and KTM’s hearing on patenting in EU. And, I have to take care of working normal work days at the same time…

I’d really like to participate also to the acute discussion about the Islam and freedom of speech. Unfortunately, a decently detailed post about this topic would take right now too much time to write. The very short version: The Islamic countries are free to get offended but as should we, too - next time somebody is stoned to death or arrested for criticizing the goverments , let’s arrange some riots in Helsinki (figuratively speaking).

I guess I have new favourite minister to dislike: Susanna Huovinen. She seems to follow SDP’s “legislation does not need to be reasonable or effective as long as it appears to make things safer” mantra a bit too well. Well, her position on copyright is good but that’s the case for most of the ministers from LVM.

From STT’s feed, via Verkkouutiset:

KRP käynnistää esitutkinnan Muhammedin kuvista

Jeezus! (pun intented). This will just meant that Suomen Sisu will get more attention and popularity. The Internet is already saturated with the pictures and nobody would really have cared about one more obscure page. Now this will be in the International media and it will become yet another “cause célèbre” for fundamentalist in both sides. Besides, it’s not really pictures which have caused the riots. A very good summary can be found from “Rantings of Sandmonkey”:

Now while the arab islamic population was going crazy over the outrage created by their government’s media over these cartoons, their governments was benifitting from its people’s distraction. The Saudi royal Family used it to distract its people from the outrage over the Hajj stampede. The Jordanian government used it to distract its people from their new minimum wage law demanded by their labor unions. The Syrian Government used it to create secterian division in Lebanon and change the focus on the Harriri murder. And, finally, the Egyptian government is using it to distract us while it passes through the new Judiciary reforms and Social Security Bill- which will cut over $300 million dollars in benefits to some of Egypt’s poorest families.

I’m watching curling (FIN - UK), which is surprisingly interesting - perhaps because for once Finland is leading. The sport is slow enough that there’s time for surfing, too. As a result, here’s quick review of interesting stuff around:
Raymond T. Nimmer considers open source licensing profileration:

“..But we can get to that realization only by recognizing FSF and OSI as part of a broader theme. In that broader context, other options and approaches are important and valuable, even if they do not fully conform to strict FSOS doctrine. It is in that broader context that the “movement” and the “community” need to be understood.”

In practical terms, compatibility is very essential so I don’t totally agree with Nimmer.

In related news, the licence checker we are developing in OSSI is developing quickly. Check it out here. Comments and even patches are more than welcome!

David Benjamin, EE-Times raports from 3GSM:

“David Birch of Consult Hyperion, a U.K.-based independent IT consultancy, reminded the panel of mobile operators, device-makers and standards developers that the telecommunications industry is at least 15 times larger than the Hollywood “content” industry. Yet, Hollywood is prevailing in its demands for embedded technologies designed to prevent illegal sharing of music and video by mobile phone users.

“Why are you such a bunch of big girls?” asked Birch. “Why don’t you tell the content owners to just get stuffed?

This is not the first time this questions is asked. For example, Cory Doctrorow has made the same argument before in his famous DRM-speech. Still, the tone and place was interesting but the same cannot be said about the answer by Willms Buhse:

“..the imbalance between Hollywood’s size and its power was a matter of glamour, and its effect on public policymakers. Citing the comments of an unnamed professor, Buhse said, “With any politicians who make laws, you’re going to do much better with Christina Aguilera than you are with a handset.”

There’s a bit of commentary in EETimes, too.

There’s lot of development related to Apple’s new Intel-based systems. First of all, Linux has been ported to system (no big suprise here) On the other hand, Apple has been using DMCA to shut down sites, which are used to discuss methods to porting OSX to non-Apple PCs. Apple is even using poetry to fight against this (inevitable?) movement:

The embedded poem reads: “Your karma check for today: There once was a user that whined/his existing OS was so blind/he’d do better to pirate/an OS that ran great/but found his hardware declined./Please don’t steal Mac OS!/Really, that’s way uncool./(C) Apple Computer, Inc.”

Speaking about inevitable events, the first OSX worm and virus has been found. They don’t present any real threat yet but work as a healthy reminder that no OS is totally safe against clueless users.