Older blog entries for mjg59 (starting at number 295)

On platforms

At some stage the seminal KDE vs Gnome paper vanished from its original home, and while it's still available in a few places (such as here) it set me thinking. What are the fundamental differences between Gnome and KDE development? There's lots of little differences (2006: Gnome parties on a beach. Akademy has melted ice cream in the rain) but they're both basically communities made up of people who are interested in developing a functional and interesting desktop experience. So why do the end results have so little in common?

Then I read this and something that had been floating around in my mind began to solidify. KDE assumes a platform and attempts to work around its shortcomings. Gnome helps define the platform and works on fixing its shortcomings.

It's pretty easy to see this across the platform. The developer of the Gnome Bluetooth support has multiple commits to the underlying Bluetooth stack, while nobody who's committed to bluedevil appears to. The main developer of the Gnome Networkmanager support is Networkmanager upstream, with the same applying to the Gnome power management infrastructure. And when Gnome developers find limitations in graphics drivers, those tend to be fixed in the graphics drivers rather than worked around in the UI code. KDE builds on top of what's already there, while Gnome is happy to flatten some mountains first.

I should emphasise that I'm not criticising KDE here[1]. These are both rational development models. One optimises for making things work and will compromise on functionality in order to be more portable to different underlying operating systems. The other optimises for additional functionality at the cost of being tied to a much smaller number of underlying operating systems that have to be completely up to date. But understanding that this distinction exists is key to understanding fundamental differences between the projects, and any argument about which is better or about how there should be more collaboration has to take these fundamentally different approaches into consideration. My personal belief is that a tightly integrated platform is going to produce a more compelling product in the long run than one built on top a series of abstraction layers, but we'll see what happens in the long run.

And then, of course, there's Unity and Canonical's gradual effort to turn Ubuntu into a platform distinct from either Gnome or KDE. But that's a separate post.

[1] Well, except for the melted ice cream at Akademy 2006. But I think that's fair.

Syndicated 2011-04-27 17:20:15 from Matthew Garrett

HTC are still incredible fuckheads

As has been discussed before, HTC have a somewhat "interesting" interpretation of the GPL that allows them to claim they don't need to provide source code until between 90 and 120 days after the release of binaries. It's probably noteworthy that the FSF (who, you know, wrote the license and all) disagree with this interpretation, as do the kernel copyright holders (who, you know, wrote the code that the license covers) I've talked to about it. Anyway, after a pile of screaming and shouting from all sides HTC have tended to release their source code in a timely manner. So things seemed better.

HTC released the Thunderbolt last week and we're back to the 90-120 day song and dance. It's probably worth remembering that by behaving in this way HTC gain a competitive advantage over any vendors who obey the terms of their license - HTC can incorporate improvements made by others without releasing their own until through a significant portion of the lifecycle of their phone.

As far as I'm concerned, every single Thunderbolt sold so far embodies a copyright infringement. Wilfully engaging in copyright infringement for commercial benefit is typically frowned upon by courts, especially if by doing so a foreign company is gaining commercial advantage over a domestic one. If you think Microsoft's patent assault on Android is a problem, just imagine what they could do if they hired one significant Linux kernel developer and used their copyrights to attack the overwhelming majority of Android vendors who fail to comply with the GPL. It probably wouldn't be industry ending (companies would merely have improve their compliance procedures) but it'd do a huge deal of damage in the short term. It's insane for companies to behave this way. Don't reward them by giving them your money.

I'll be talking about this at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit next month, along with an update on my study of the compliance of Android tablets. I'm hoping that there'll be further developments after that.

Syndicated 2011-03-23 21:33:34 from Matthew Garrett

Archos update

Archos confirmed to me that they don't have source code for their RK2818-based models at the moment, which means the 7" home tablet (version 2) and the Arnova range all appear to be infringing. For a company that is actually on the better end of the scale for compliance, that's somewhat disheartening. My understanding is that the Arnova and "home tablet" ranges (as opposed to the "internet tablet" range) are subcontracted or rebadging exercises, so there's probably less corporate oversight than for the internally developed hardware. This is, obviously, not an excuse.

Syndicated 2011-03-22 14:28:25 from Matthew Garrett

Archos tablets

Has anyone tried to obtain the kernel source for the Archos 7 home tablet V2 or the Arnova range (ie, anything Archos is shipping that's based on the RK2818 rather than the RK2808)? If so, what was the response? The source from their site only appears to be for the RK2808 devices.

Syndicated 2011-03-20 14:25:14 from Matthew Garrett

Further adventures in mobile Linux

I picked up a couple of cheap Linux devices at the weekend. First of all, a $99 Android tablet from CVS, made by Craig. It's a generic RK2818 device and of course it's lacking any kind of GPL offer in the documentation. As far as I know the only company that's released any Rockchip source so far has been Archos, and even then they haven't released the tools you need to actually build an image - they seem to be floating around the internet anyway. But it's straightforward to get it to run the Android market, and it runs Shortyz quite well, so fit for purpose from my point of view. I am, obviously, attempting to contact Craig to find out how they're going to satisfy their obligations but haven't got past their bizarre text-to-speech based support menu system that dumps you to answerphone after 5 minutes of being on hold. Next attempt will involve pressing more buttons.

The other one was a Sharper Image Literati e-reader, $49 from Macy's (on clearance, obviously). This one's interesting by virtue of not being an Android device. Instead it's got a fairly recognisable Busybox-based Linux environment that's even got udev and dbus running. It brings up a framebuffer and just dumps a QTE-based reader (from Kobo) onto it. Other than being woefully underpowered and slow, it actually seems very competent. There seem to be several versions of the hardware - the one I got has an ARM SoC from SiRF on it. SiRF make GPS chipsets, and it turns out that their Atlas 5 platform is actually intended for Linux-based GPS units. The embedded world always seems to find a way. What surprised me more is that it's probably the most polished looking Linux I've bought for under $300. No bizarre kernel spew. echo mem >/sys/power/state works. Standard backlight interface.

Oh, and no source. Obviously. But an interesting device regardless.

Syndicated 2011-02-28 23:46:21 from Matthew Garrett

LCA 2011

I'm both back from LCA 2011 and also over the associated brutal jetlag, so if you sent me mail and I still haven't replied then it's fallen down some sort of cliff and you should probably shout at me until I do something about it. LCA was, as usual, excellent. Especially given that the original venue was the same distance above the river as the now somewhat misleadingly described dry dock on the opposite bank.

I did a bunch of talks this year, and they're now all online, so without further ado:

Enterprise power management - a discussion of power management with a focus on enterprise users, given at the plumbers miniconf. LWN did a writeup here, and every time I say "Tera" you should pretend that I'm saying "Giga". I have no good excuse.

Linux license compliance - about the poor observance of the GPL's conditions by vendors, given at the business miniconf. A useful example presented itself in the form of a GPL-violating Android tablet that I bought in literally the first store I went into in Australia this year. Probably also the last appearance of my Knuth t-shirt, because it appears to have several holes in places where it shouldn't.

Making laptops work in Linux - talking about identifying how laptop-specific functionality is wired up, with an emphasis on reverse-engineering ACPI methods to figure out how to make things work. This one was my presentation at the main conference.

The organisers and volunteers deserve incredible gratitude for the way the conference was managed, especially considering that the CBD was underwater a week and a half earlier.

Syndicated 2011-02-09 19:50:21 from Matthew Garrett

Hardware vexation

My laptop (an HP 2530p) gets quite a lot of abuse. It's been with me enough to have done the equivalent of going round the world 4 or 5 times, and it's typically just thrown in a bag without any particular care or attention being given to its care or wellbeing. It's been dropped a couple of times with the only damage being some corners that aren't really as even as they should be. All in all, it's survived amazingly well. But it recently started refusing to boot, merely flashing its LEDs. After finally finding a list of what these mean, I narrowed it down to the memory. Taking it apart and putting it back together again got things working for a while, but then it happened again. And again. So, since I have one memory module and two slots, I decided to just move the RAM in the hope that there's something physically wrong with the slot. It worked! Until I got to the BIOS splash and it informed me that Intel AMT requires that there be memory in slot 0. And didn't give me an opportunity to continue without AMT.

My hardware is conspiring against me.

Syndicated 2011-02-07 20:34:21 from Matthew Garrett

Open embedded GPUs

Luke: It's great to see open code for the 6410, but I'm pretty sure that that chip uses Samsung's own GPU design rather than being anything PowerVR based. What makes you think it's an SGX? The listing here implies that it's an unrelated part.

Syndicated 2011-01-22 05:39:34 from Matthew Garrett

LCA 2011 has moved

I haven't seen this widely publicised yet, so just to help make sure people know: Linux Conf AU 2011 is going ahead in Brisbane next week, but due to the flooding it's been moved to the QUT Kelvin Grove campus about 4KM north of the original venue. There are good bus links between it and the CBD. More details here.

Syndicated 2011-01-18 19:43:46 from Matthew Garrett

In other news

I'm thrilled to discover that GNU-Darwin, which carried the bold claim that "GNU-Darwin aims to be the most free software distribution", distributes copies of the XNU source code with Apple's additional license rider of "The rights granted to you under the License may not be used to create, or enable the creation or redistribution of, unlawful or unlicensed copies of an Apple operating system, or to circumvent, violate, or enable the circumvention or violation of, any terms of an Apple operating system software license agreement", which certainly sounds like a restriction of use to me.

Free software's awfully like sausages - wonderfully tasty, but sometimes you suddenly discover that you've been eating sheep nostrils for the past 15 years of your life. The typical direction is realising that you've build your entire business model on something that you're actually legally obliged to give to your customers and now they're actually trying to assert their rights, but sometimes people make assumptions about freedom that don't hold. Apple last released a free version of their kernel source in 2006. Everything since then has been encumbered by additional use restrictions.

Still, much better than Microsoft - huge portions of the OS source code are available for anyone to download, examine, modify and rebuild. Apple's to be commended for dropping so much code to the community despite it having bought them almost nothing in return. But if anyone from Apple's reading, I'd love to fix up the thermal handling on your hardware under Linux. I suspect we're doing something horrible to your machines, but I don't really know what yet.

Syndicated 2011-01-15 03:13:34 from Matthew Garrett

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