Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Back to the fight; MBR tweak testing, Moblin team meeting, Legal training session.
Amused, and saddened to see Miguel slammed all over the place, yet again.
- One of the things I like most about Miguel, is his courage in taking on the ill-informed, and his relative impermeability to crazies. Having been deeply involved with the OpenXML / ODF saga, I'm highly convinced that Miguel has a fairly correct perspective - de-coupled from the immediate noise, smoke and mirrors - and he has the benefit, as does Jody, of actually knowing something first-hand about the topic, having worked in the field for some years. He also defends a key principle: of fearlessly voicing his technical conviction amidst an argument demeaned by naked, pseudo-technical, second-hand politics and heat. I find it frankly laughable that the pundits pretend to know more about spreadsheets and their file formats than say Jody & Miguel. Seemingly they only know what they want to be the case.
- I also tend to think that engaging with Microsoft and cautiously encouraging them to step closer to the light is better than sticking with the familiar, stark & lazy "goodies and baddies" games that children so enjoy. Of course, do so with caution, but to use an analogy - I suspect trying to cure a bully by endless beatings, regardless of what they do, is unlikely to be constructive.
- I also loathe software patents, but that doesn't stop me filing for them - for defensive reasons, and it doesn't mean I go flaming eg. Fluendo for providing legally sound, patent licensed versions of (open source) codecs; indeed I'm glad to be able to simultaneously respect the law, while trying to change it, and listen to my music.
- I tend to think that if you believe Sun's statistics on how much of 'their' code is in a GNU/Linux system (and yes, personally I still tend to call it GNU/Linux, for some strange reason), it could be called a Sun/GNU/Linux system - or perhaps a Sun/RedHat/IBM/Novell/Intel/non-GNU-volunteers/GNU/Linux system or whatever. That the "GNU/" initiative failed to inspire is hardly surprising. My joke at the time was that the FSF should change it's name to the GNU Slash Linux Foundation to reflect it's new core goal. It's not that, as a community, we didn't break our jaws trying to educate people on the Hackers vs. Crackers distinction - so as to have some idea that this was a loosing battle; it is a shame that wiser counsel on messaging did not prevail here.
- Either way - it is difficult to think of people who by their productivity, example and sheer charisma have winsomely persuaded so many people to contribute so much to Free software; and have still stayed in touch with the keyboard, actively writing code. If Miguel is a traitor - I guess I aspire to being one too.
Made grub able to chainload an ext3 partition tagged as a recovery partition; why not ?

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2009-09-30: Wednesday.