sourcefrog

Ian Lance Taylor on OSI

Ian Lance Taylor wrote an interesting post on governance of OSI, the Open Source Initiative.

Several years ago I agitated strongly about the lack of any semblance of democracy or transparency in the OSI. I stopped when I realized that the OSI didn't really matter. Since then the OSI has some to matter somewhat more--e.g., sourceforge.net looks to it to ratify licenses. But it still doesn't matter very much. And it is also still completely undemocratic and only slightly more transparent (the increase in transparency is thanks entirely to Russ's efforts to increase communication from the board). These are strange, indeed nearly incomprehensible, characteristics for an organization which claims to represent the community (compare to the FSF, for example, which makes no claim to represent anybody except itself).
The OSI also completely lacks any formal mechanism for correcting errors. Thus the argument that one should judge the results makes no sense; by the time there are results, it is too late.
Personally I think the OSI should drop any claims about representing the community, and instead describe itself as a group of self-selected experts who periodically issue opinions about open source licensing-- i.e., more or less the same as any NGO. I think that would be more honest and more helpful.

posted Fri 26 Aug 2005 in /software/opensource | link

I'm in love with lftp

I've recently been delighted by lftp, a multiprotocol text-mode client. One very nice feature is that you can append & to commands to run them in the background, just like in a Unix shell:

lftp> get index.html&
[0] get index.html &
lftp> jobs
[0] Done (get index.html)
        4060 bytes transferred

lftp will automatically open new connections to continue the command while you continue to do other work. It will also reopen connections if they drop or timeout, without losing any user-visible state.

I saw a cool instance of that today: one of our servers hosting the bazaar-ng website was upgraded to new hardware while I was asleep. I still had an lftp session open to maintain the web site. When I typed ls the next day I could continue working just as before, without ever needing to know the whole server had changed. Truly a remarkable program.

posted Fri 19 Aug 2005 in /software | link

lca2005 papers available

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere yet, but the linux.conf.au 2005 papers and slides are now available on the web. If you heard about a good talk but couldn't make it, or want to refresh your memory, there they are.

Don't forget to remind your favourite free software hackers, users, and evangelists to submit a proposal for lca2006 in beautiful Dunedin.

posted Thu 18 Aug 2005 in /conf/lca2005 | link

20 days to go for LCA paper proposals

The Call for Papers for LCA2006 closes on the 5th of September. Now would be a good time to submit an abstract for a talk about a cool open source project. We welcome talks from either project developers or people using Linux.

A couple of people have asked what technical level is appropriate for talks. The range is pretty broad: we have some number of kernel hackers, and some people who are just starting to use Linux. The CFP form asks what level of experience the audience will need to understand and appreciate the talk.

We also have a tutorial stream, which is for interactive sessions lasting two hours or more. If you're considering this (which is great) you do need to consider that just talking for two hours is going to be tough on both the speaker and the audience. To work well they really need a fair degree of interactive lab work.

The single most important thing for the abstract is to give plenty of detail about both the content of the talk, and your credentials and experience as a speaker. Mention tantalizing content so that people will want to come to the talk. The majority of submissions are too short, rather than too long -- we can always trim them later, but if you don't tell us your strong points we (probably) won't know them.

If you have questions please feel free to mail me, mbp@sourcefrog.net

posted Tue 16 Aug 2005 in /conf/lca2006 | link

Two nice Linux tools

lftp: amazing text-mode client for http, ftp, sftp and others. Does job control within the client so you can start a transfer of a file and keep doing things inside that client. Automatically reconnects as needed.

file-rc: replacement for the standard init program on Debian and Ubuntu. Rather than a mess of symlinks you just have one simple /etc/runlevel.conf file which shows in one place what programs should be run in what state.

If you make a little shell script called service containing

/etc/init.d/$*

then zsh will automatically tab-complete service names.

posted Sat 6 Aug 2005 in /software | link

bzr in brazil

I haven't posted here for a long time, which is bad. It's funny how many people got through phases of just not wanting or getting around to blogging.

bzr (aka bazaar-ng) is coming along pretty well. We just passed 1000 commits onto the mainline since it started self-hosting in March of this year, and we're regularly pulling in changes from contributors branches using bzr.

The emphasis has changed a lot since I started. At the time it was meant to be a research prototype to explore ideas to move back into systems based on GNU Arch. Since then, bitkeeper has exploded, and many people have started picking up the pieces, and the original schedule looks rather leisurely in retrospect.

One important consequence is that we're trying to get bzr to a finished state in its own right.

The core versioning/branching functionality is there and working: branch, push, pull, merge, status, diff, add, commit etc. Some are rather nicely polished; some less so.

I'm trying to define some specific goals for the next few months, and focus on getting them done. Near the top of the list are more compact storage and smarter mesh merging.

One outcome of the research side is modules to do the fundamental vc algorithms of 3-way merge and weave in pure Python. A few people have suggested that merge3 in particular might usefully be contributed back into the Python standard library; after a bit more maturation I'll look into that. These have practical use in allowing it to be installed and run without any extra dependencies like GNU diff; this is moderately important on windows.

I've been in Brazil for the last couple of weeks with other folks from Canonical.com, mostly doing architecture-ish work on Launchpad, our application set for building and supporting a free software distribution. Not so much bzr hacking for now.

Perhaps the most immediately interesting of these is Rosetta, a web-based software translation system that already used by a thousand translators. (If you consider the pool of people who are fluent in at least two languages and work on translating free numbers then a thousand is a pretty large number.)

There are some other good concepts in there — a bug tracker that really deeply understands the way code (and bugs) spread across different free software distributions and packages. They're going to need some UI love before it's easy to understand what's happening inside, but I think that will happen.

The other very cool thing is getting to spend time with Mark and other bright people here.

posted Wed 3 Aug 2005 in /software/vc/bzr | link