Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Up at 6am, hiked to Preson Park, train to Gatwick, waited for delayed flight. Extremely impressed with the battery life on this new Duo (with SSD). Caught up with the news variously.
• Read Simon's excellent position on contributor agreements, with relation to the (potentially problematic) Project Harmony.
• Highly amused by an article in The Economist on 'the cost of weapons'. Learned an important new German term: Eierlegende Wollmilchsau or "egg-producing wool-milk-sow" (apparently this is the A400M specification) - could there really be engineering and business problems with a-priori over-specification ? Another priceless quote:

  In Iraq and Afghanistan numbers matter more than firepower. The same applies to warships fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia; a ship cannot be in two places at the same time. As Stalin reputedly said, "Quantity has a quality all of its own".

• Read a nice article on gcc with some helpful reminiscence on the egcs/gcc fork and its resolution.
• Arrived at the conference after paying a small fortune to an evil taxi driver that tried to kill me; with his fake (home-made?) 'meter' in the taxi; hmm - why does that always happen to me ?
• Met up with the lads, out for dinner in the evening; and back late for more food with Caolan, Thorsten & Kendy. Up late.

• Up early, breakfast, out shopping for misc. omitted party items, did some work, lunch. Out shopping again for vegetarian sausages - which live in a carefully camouflagued section of Tescos (in a freezer).
• Back for Miriam's party, barbeque mayhem, playing the guitar for various musical games (log-pot tragically failed in the portable CD player), trying to force feed the assorted children & parents, and so on. Good to see Sue, Adam & James too.
• Bid farewell to them all; Cheryl kindly dropped me to the station, set off - using the new Android device, which (now I'm not in the middle of no-where) seems to have some great Edge/3G connectivity, even on the train.
• Reviewed, merged, and pushed the next set of awesome bootchart2 work from Riccardo. Wondered how I can get an ESRCH (No such process) response from a pread at a valid address, on a memory map of a (live) process' /proc/<pid>/mem particularly when the process is still alive afterwards (with the same pid); most odd.

• Lie in, off to All Saints (NCC not meeting it seems). Max preached briefly, good to walk homw with Bronie & Robin (recently avoiding death in a falling ladder episode).
• Had Effie and Dee over for lunch, lovely to spend some time with them. Set too cleaning the house a little for the onslaught of babies tomorrow. Girls watched the lame children's movie: Stuart Little.
• Got accidentally swallowed by Hannah's bed-time story: the Lord of the Rings; stayed up deep into the night getting Saruman finished off properly.

• Up early, packed everything into the car, roof-box, etc. Off to see Sandra's to swim in the pool again - M. finally shed her fear of the water and started swimming lengths at crazy speed in her swimming ring, good.
• Picked some apples, had lunch, bid 'bye to the parents & thanks for their help, and set off to drive home. Three and a bit hours later (a very clear drive) arrived.
• Unpacked variously, fed the babes, read them stories. Started on the inbox, oh dear ... perhaps a mistake; but it's a bank holiday on Monday too it seems.
• Interested to read that Wheat has been tentatively sequenced:

  The wheat genome is the largest genome decoded to date. It is five times larger than the human genome and is known to be a very complex structure, comprised of three independent genomes.(BBC)

  Interesting - if you were astounded by having an ~identical genome to a chimpanzee, perhaps it is time to get a bigger-is-better inferiority complex going with your breakfast cereal; alternatively - time to start collecting base-pairs (or chromosomes ?).

• Everyone off to Fountains Abbey to admire the ancient ruins of the monastary there. Some spectacular construction and architecture by the Cistercians - apparently they started their first monestary in a swamp - on purpose to make it harder to live there: which as a side-effect made them experts in water management. Lots of wandering in the sun with the babes, admiring the mill's water works, and so on.
• Read the amusing literature, on eg. lead water pipes, something approximately like this:

  "The Monks used lead pipes for their water, but nationally we replaced our lead water piping forty years ago. There are three problems with lead piping - first, hair loss (not such a big issue for Monks), second - loss of short term memory, and third - I can't remember."

• Home in the evening, ice creams from England's (nominally) oldest sweet shop. Watched Howel's Moving Castle with the babes, fed them dinner, and left the parents to baby-sit them.
• Out for dinner with my wife - bliss. Swift pint beforehand, then really an extraordiarily good restaurant The Willow at Pateley Bridge - amazed to find such unusually good food. Back, bed late.

• Off to find a suitable river to muck about in with the babes - to attempt to teach them what rivers are for - and to expunge the Townie "ooh my dress might get muddy"
• Much fun paddling and slipping about in a river, seemingly near an old Roman road. Suitable dam building exploits - fitting considering the rocky terrain. Training in the ubiquity of sheep, rabbit etc. droppings and the necessity of treading on them if you are to make any progress. Much successful de-townification.
• On to an abandoned lime kiln on the moors, and climbed up to an observation point over a huge limestone quarry - completely invisible from the road / nearby - with grass banks concealing and muting a vast pit packed with interesting looking machines. The girls took a great interest in the various mechanical monsters and their roles, but were disapointed by a lack of blasting.
• On into Grassington and through to find a pleasant spot near the river to have a picnic lunch;
• Home, to watch Jurrasic Park together; hmm. Then dinner and packed everyone off to bed.
• Amazed to see the British media reporting news like this

  Doctors with religious beliefs are less likely to take decisions which could hasten the death of those who are terminally ill, a study suggests

  . Odd that the converse is not the news: Doctors with no religious beliefs are more likely to take decisions which could hasten death ... etc. I hope my doctor has a high commitment to (at least my) life.

• Up early, J. app't with doctor. Off to Sandra's to swim again, swum the morning away happily - followed by some fruit picking and lunch.
• Off to Brimham Rocks in the afternoon - much clambering over rocks. Uncle John came over - really lovely to see him, wrecked precious SUSE Labs T-shirt, and one of few remaining intact pairs of trousers while attempting some ridiculous climbing feat with two children - succeeded, but at what cost ?
• Back together for lunch at Sandra's, running about with the babes in the garden - British (touch) Bulldog, Packed them off to bed late.

• Up early, booked an appointment for J. with the local GP, mercifully 20 metres from the house. Off to visit The Forbidden Corner apparently (The strangest place in the world) - discovered on arriving that it doesn't open until nearly midday (oh). Spent some time wandering the pleasant grounds, getting mobbed by hungyr ducks, and admiring a flock of swifts flying fast and close between us as we walked to catch some sort of insect near the ground.
• A snatch of lunch, and we set off to sample the strange-ness. And indeed, as advertised, it was really extremely unusual. a set of fine gardens, with an over-arching maze - some extraordinary follies, a labryinth of underground tunnels of unusual complexity, castle pieces, grotesque statues, and lots of IR controlled water sprays - everything a child could want, and more. Strangely E. was terrified by the relatively mild burping entrance gate, and not by some of the very tight underground spaces. M. sat out a lot of dark, underground twistiness with Grandma.
• Eventually back home, rather late. Fish and Chips dinner, put the babes to bed, and chatted with the parents. Bed earlyish.

• Up early, breakfast, off to Sandra's house; met up with the grandparents. Went swimming with all the family at some considerable length and with much amusement.
• Lunch, then off to visit some caves nearby on the hills. Back for dinner, watched DVD with the babes for a bit, and then enjoyed Runaway Jury with the wife: excellent stuff.

• Lie in, breakfast, off to local CofE Church. Fine puzzle painting experience in creche; discovered our next door neighbour Sue there, and had her over for lunch.
• Off to see Julia's Aunt Nickie, drove over some beautiful moors with the heather in bloom: lovely. Spent some time with her, admired the garden, tea & cake.
• On to see M&D at Sandra's house, wandered the field next-door to see the sheep, and try to spy rabbits; back late - lots of tired babies to put to bed late.
• Up late, finishing To End All Wars - a rather gripping true story of redemption in a Japanese prisoner of war camp building the Burma railroad.

• Lie in, packed the house up into the car; set off north. Good, clear progress up the A1M, lunch at C ... onwards. Arrived at Pately Bridge early afternoon.
• Discovered house still being cleaned out, unpacked the car, and managed to back it into the garage; 25.4mm spare at the back and 50.8mm at the front (Guiness Book of Records measurement-style).
• Took the babes into the high street (20 metres away) to shop, and wandered across the bridge - admiring the extra floodable meadow next to the river, and the water-proof wall around it - with the unfeasibly high depth measuring device in the river.
• Home, out again to buy bits, took the babes to the park, Grandma & Grandad arrived, played on swings and so on. Back for dinner, packed everyone to bed. Watched The Princess Bride until lateish: "When I was your age, Television was called 'Books'".

• Poked mail, code reading. Amused to see SanDisk (a company whose products I rather like) doing the age old trick of creating a new market space to lead in: in this case seemingly a rather contrived space; tut tut.
• Bought the Fluendo DVD player, goes against the grain, but it works nicely seemingly (at least for The Pricess Bride - and after all what more do you need ?).
• Drove Thomas & Becky to the station.
• Dinner, packed babes to bed & read stories. Back to work, fixed an Evolution crasher, dug at bootchart2 netlink oddness around error handling with Kay's hand-holding; seemingly MeeGo fooled me by dying at the first hurdle: on socket (PF_NETLINK, SOCK_DGRAM, 11); - pushed a clean fix to bootchart2. Some nice patches coming in from Riccardo Magliocchetti (xrmx) gave him git/push access.
• Packed for the next weeks off on holiday, backed up the laptop, filled out Clarity for the future.

• Mail, news, Clarity, fluff. Lunch with Jill. Filed misc bugs with traces. Chased an Evo. bug for a while, some odd combination of threading, gdbus, glib signals taking a gstrv, and some unpleasant memory corruption.
• Boggled at Intel buying McAffe - what a strange acquisition, attempted somehow to detect an underlying strategy ... there is clearly a missing piece somewhere.
• Enjoyed Richard Fontana's Copyright Assignment slides from LinuxCon - particularly the conclusion slide which I reproduce:

  • Formal contribution agreements are Bad:
    
    • No real legal advantages
    • Signals basic lack of legal confidence in FOSS
    • Negates social/technical advantages of FOSS
    • Ethical concerns
  • More justifiable if assignee is nonprofit fiduciary
  • Otherwise, best policies are informal, pure FOSS, documented

• Dinner early, conference call late; awaited Tom & Becky who clearly were enjoying themselves too much in Cambridge.

• Prodded mail, moved OOoCon flights to arrive midday 31st, looked into some Evo / Camel reference leaks. Lunch.
• Fixed some bootchart2 bugs for Kay; boggled generally at taskstats not giving data for some processes (or am I just not asking for it somehow). Jared's staff meeting.
• Thomas & Becky arrived late, dinner, and sat up enjoying their company for a while.

• More mail, conference calls, wrote LXF column, synched up with Pete, worked late. Interested to see fires' Open Source car.

• Prodded mail, contemplated copyrights, caught up with JP fresh from his vacation. Drove home got babes packed into bed.

What Copyrights

By now so many, apparently well informed, commentators have noticed and written off the Oracle Java Copyright claims as applying to the open-source implementation, documentation etc. That of course seems weak: how likely is it that Google would have cut/pasted code or documentation into their Davlik implementation, given the intense scrutiny they knew would come eventually. Page 2, Clause 11 of the complaint gives some background:

Oracle America owns copyrights in the code, documentation, specifications, libraries, and other materials that comprise the Java platform. Oracle America's Java-related copyrights are registered with the United States Copyright Office, including those attached as Exhibit H.

And as we go on (Page 8, clause 38) we get to the real grist:

38. The Java platform contains a substantial amount of original material (including without limitation code, specifications, documentation and other materials) that is copyrightable subject matter under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.

39. Without consent, authorization, approval, or license, Google knowingly, willingly, and unlawfully copied, prepared, published, and distributed Oracle America's copyrighted work, portions thereof, or derivative works and continues to do so. Google's Android infringes Oracle America's copyrights in Java and Google is not licensed to do so.

40. On information and belief, users of Android, including device manufacturers, must obtain and use copyrightable portions of the Java platform or works derived therefrom to manufacture and use functioning Android devices. Such use is not licensed. Google has thus induced, caused, and materially contributed to the infringing acts of others by encouraging, inducing, allowing and assisting others to use, copy, and distribute Oracle America's copyrightable works, and works derived therefrom.

'Code' is to my mind only an insignifiant and pointless piece of the picture here. An interesting piece to me is the specifications: is it possible that by simply implementing (and perhaps documenting) a new implementation of parts of the Java spec - you infringe Oracle's copyright ?

A bit of History

Despite all the interest (or apathy) stirred up by the standards wars of yesterday (OpenXML vs. ODF) etc. There are plenty of older, interesting pieces that have perhaps been forgotten. Looking back to before the dawn of time itself (1997), some interesting things crawl out:

Java ISO standards battle rages

Sun Microsystems achieved one thing of note - it was the first ever, and only corporate submitter to the ISO PAS process (this is rather like the quick-on-ramp 'fast track' that ECMA enjoys eg.). There is a great contemporary write-up from b-net here which seems surreal in its contemporary flavour:

Last November Sun Microsystems won the right to become a standards submitter over the fierce, and sometimes mud-slinging protests of competitors such as Microsoft, Intel and Digital Equipment Corp. Microsoft, in particular, challenged the right of one company to serve as the submitter of an international standard, claiming that this approach offered unfair market advantage. ... if the Java platform is accepted as the international norm ... it will become tied into the government procurement process.

Despite the opposition ISO accepted the first ever, and only corporate PAS submitter (Sun Microsystems) to ISO. During the process we got all these great quotes from a Microsoft standards strategist consultant Mr. Willingmyre, that could have been written about OpenXML / ODF only with some company names swapped:

Mr. Willingmyre wants to see Sun Microsystems "follow the rules of the international system. If they will not, they undermine the credibility of the system."

Or try Microsoft Program Manager (Charles Fitzgerald):

The problem with the Java process, to date, as Mr. Fitzgerald sees it, is that "Sun has been clever in using the PAS process to get the sanction of ISO (for its product), while keeping full proprietary control. Why do we care? There is a potential marketing advantage for a competitor. ISO is getting in the business of endorsing proprietary technology."... "If Sun is really the generous, altruistic charity they present themselves to be, then why are they not playing by the process?" Mr. Fitzgerald asks. "Sun has done more to clinically exploit the standards process than any company alive."

Of course in 1997, the whole right-thinking world was on Sun's side - clearly Microsoft had some embrace and extend wheeze going, which was per-se 'A bad thing'. Why should another company be able to get changes into Java that benefited their platform ? After all - in those days - Software Freedom was an idea with far less traction than it deserved: the concept of being allowed to hack about the code as you wished without getting strangled was alien. Anyhow, this struggle set an interesting precedent. As CNET of the time wrote Sun wins Java ISO approval:

Giving a single company submitter status is unusual for ISO. Normally. such status is given to trade groups or consortia. Similar status has been given to X-Open, DAVIC (Digital Audio Visual Industry Council), VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association), and IrDA (Infrared Data Association).

The real question is Why ? - why go to all that effort and fight to get something that no-other company has ever wanted or needed ? What was the purpose ? why not form a Java trade association, or use an existing submitter ? What was going on ?

Now we have it, lets not use it: abandoning PAS

My grasp of the details are sketchier here; but by May 1999 they had abandoned the PAS submission process:

As expected, Sun Microsystems Inc. will use ECMA as its route to the standardization of Java at ISO. In this way Sun hopes to be able to retain control over the future development of Java which it would have had to give up under new rules adopted by ISO's JTC1 committee and applied to the PAS process that Sun has now abandoned.

So - because they couldn't retain ownership, control, and make it an ISO standard they switched track to ECMA. Interestingly (in the same article), the year before Microsoft had shot down another ECMA standard, the Public Windows Inititaive (PWI) - preventing it from becoming an ISO standard - why ? was there some amount of loss of property ownership implied by making it a true standard ?

"The PWI was a Sun effort to get Windows APIs put into the public domain...

And, thus we see in another parallel sphere these (strange) ideas of ownership of APIs (the hot currency of the era) being protected. Thus it was odd that Sun - who fought at length to become the first ever corporate PAS submitter, never submitted a standard, and let that capability lapse; such that they lost it. The good news of May 1999 was this:

"Sun's already submitted a Java 1.2.2 specification to ECMA which will be presented to a meeting of the group's general assembly in Kyoto, Japan on June 24. ECMA is expected to vote on the spec in December. Then it goes to ISO for fast track adoption."

There are still optimistic sounding traces of this around -

This announcement ... fulfills the company's pledge to achieve ISO standardization of the Java technology.

Sun drops ISO Java Standards Effort for good

Unfortunately, the fulfillment of that pledge never actually happened. CRN has a nice write-up from Dec 1999 here

During a meeting last month with an ECMA technical committee, Sun pulled specifications for Java off the table after copyright issues surfaced but was scheduled to resubmit last week.

What !? - copyright issues ? how can you have copyright issues around an open specification ? Who would want to retain copyright to an open specification ? and why ?

The speculation bit

My suspicion is that Java is protected by fairly weak patent protection. Ultimately Java - though it is some nice mixing pot of features, bundled up with a lot of tech marketing with great deployment, is perhaps not incredibly innovative. Those who see parallels between Java and .Net and run around like headless chicken proclaiming immediate patent death around Microsoft and Mono - take note.

Why fight so hard to get Java standardised, and then withdraw it, just before it has to be submitted ? the official answer is obvious, summarised: Only Sun is brave and good enough to create the perfect Java - a standards body would just kill it, or worse let Microsoft, HP, Intel and others have some real say in its development. Of course - there is some truth here, sole control of it means Java could move quickly, comittees tend not to produce beauty etc. We have some great quotes from the time from Scott McNeally (as above)

"There are times when . . . things have to be moved at the speed of light and there are times when we need flexibility. We're not moving Java forward in a secret way, in a non-participative way." ... The company is actually losing money on Java, he said.

The idea of Java moving at the speed of light seems slightly laughable now, but perhaps a nugget of a hint as to why they really don't want an open standard is there. Personally I get a bit sick of this generic "pauper's defense": We are not making money, therefore ... anything goes here ... whether it is not contributing to the engineering or adopting malevolent legal approaches - it is sadly still popular today.

Some alternative explanations might be more convincing; with Java's weak patent protection, and general lack of novelty - a really important piece to allow control (ie. so you can't implement, and then extend this specification), and more importantly to allow monetisation of Java by Sun was, perhaps, copyright. Copyright around the API specifications and associated implementation choices (also, conveniently, critical to compatibility). Surrending Java to be a full ECMA / ISO standard - would mean that the opportunity was lost to monetise all the fairly random decisions Sun made in the Java API via copyright licensing. Thus - the submissions were pulled at the last minute. Oh, and bad luck if you travelled to a standards meeting half way around the world, at which no standard arrived. My suspicion is that this plays into the reason that today we have a copyright and patent lawsuit against Google by Oracle.

Copyright assignment and the 'community' process

Normally companies don't like to actually look that bad, so they come up with some twisted process to 'improve the optics', and thus we do (apparently) get a standards body in the Java Community Process (JCP). Clearly it is necessary to put feel-good terms in the name: 'Community' eg. Nothing could be bad with such a friendly name right ? One notable feature of the JCP (apart from its relative dysfunction) is that you need to sign a hefty assignment before you can take part (oh, and pay money to Sun if you are a company). This of course has heavy-duty copyright assignment language (cf. the toxicity of such things in general). There is also out-bound copyright licensing conditioned on passing the TCK (which is itself tightly tied up with proprietary bailer twine).

Interestingly for those that point to percieved weaknesses in the Microsoft Community Promise around .Net (incidentally big chunks of .Net are ECMA standardized, thus reducing the potential for standard / copyright licensing based aggression) - there are great clauses in the JSPA2 around patents that do the CP's necessary claims language to shame:

"For the purposes of this Section 5.B, patent claims covering the Specification shall mean any claims for which there is no technically feasible way of avoiding infringement in the course of implementing the Specification."

But you can't copyright APIs

Indeed, hopefully not. Having said that, the Java API docs that you can see eg. here have a license that is rather similar to the other terms floating out there - particularly those necessary to join the JCP, and the outbound Java licensing text. Hopefully Sun have published their APIs without a similar license at some stage in the past, but presumably lots of care and thought has been put into this out-bound licensing. Is there anyone that hasn't accepted those terms ?

Conclusion

Quite possibly I am deranged; copyrights around Java APIs, specifications, and documentation are not a real issue, they cannot be enforced, and the Sun drive to retain copyright ownership, and impose onerous out-bound licenses on their specifications was a pointless exercise, unrelated to Java's commercial exploitation. Quite possibly Oracle just wants to go on a wide fishing expedition inside Google with their copyright claims - who knows.

Ultimately though, closed-ness doesn't pay. It seems Oracle are now reaping the harvest of the lack of trust and open-ness that sadly characterised Sun's approach to most of its 'Community' engagement. That of tryingto have your cake, and eat it too. To have an ISO standard, but not surrrender ownership and control to others. To open source something but go around spreading license FUD and demanding proprietary licenses behind the scenes, and so on. Sadly this sort of attitude continues today, and not just in Oracle but many other companies. Would it have been so terrible if some of Microsoft's weirdo extensions to Java had become part of the Java standard, and been implemented / deployed everywhere ? would they even have won a vote in a TC if they were that bad ? Having said that - I have deep sympathy with the view that the political and semi-technical sphere of a standards TC is not a great way to drive product direction.

Of course - many in the Free software community approach problems based on their love of the underlying technology - de-coupled from a love of its current commercial owner. As such, we would advocate decisions that were good for the product, potentially at the expense of its current owner. So - what does this mean for people like us ? Guard your heart ! - try not to fall in love with a technology, and give yourself to developing and improving it, if a single company owns, and controls it. As a corrolary - try to avoid assigning your copyright to companies that might use it to harm you later. And finally - try to choose to support, and use good Free Software that grants wide patent and re-use rights under licenses like the GPL.

• Lie-in, somewhat interrupted by parent's alarm-clock, and Radio 3. Breakfast, out to St Lukes - really good to see lots of old friends there.
• Back for Father's 74th birthday-lunch, lots of friends and relatives over (although missing Barbara & Colin sadly). Fine food, company, etc.
• More movie watching goodness, Rob & Ilona left, sat up with Thomas, Becky & parents until late.

• Breakfast with Sue & Clive, packed the tente eventually and went for a walk & blackberry picking. Pleased to see the linuxtoday editor's note:

  How often do we hear "Someone needs to...." market Linux, fund development, make OEM deals, lobby government, and so on? What they're saying is someone else needs to. For FOSS to succeed it needs a strong, genuine, active grass-roots base, and that means you, me, and every Linux and FOSS user. If we abdicate, then the suits take over and it becomes just another strategic element for big business, and we get locked out. Of course that is ultimately self-defeating for businesses, too, ... If Free/Open Source software supporters are serious about how wonderful and valuable FOSS is, a lot more of us need to get off our buns and figure out how to become contributors.

  I like Andy Upgrove's comment there: "What people look at as community property should be put into non-profit foundations." Amen - though Upgrove's analysis of the copyright issue is I feel naive - can (C) subsist in APIs ? we will see no doubt; that is the crux of that issue.
• Drove to my parents' unpacked everything; feeling pretty awful - sinus wise; watched some of The Sound of Music - caught up with Robert & Ilona, Thomas & Becky.
• Robert - having bought a new shirt in town, discovered later that he had also purchased a free bulky electronic tag, including ink as well; and what with the shops being shut had few options for removing it. Tragically on-line you can buy a simple key to remove thus; after some wrapping with a bag, removing the long handle, and hack-sawing through its centre-line from that direction it eventually yielded (and no ink anywhere in evidence) - fun.

• Up early, thoroughly dripped on by condensation in the night: the down-sides of warm, wet ground and no ground-sheet. Breakfast.
• Read mail; and news. Wow !
  • My optimism around Oracle's general sanity, and Free software friendliness totally evaporated - or is my under-slept mind making things up: Oracle sues Google over Android
  • Does this explain James Gosling's departure ? the world should know. Is it a sign of virility and the promised financials from the Sun acquisition ?
  • Possibly he will be compelled to take the stand to litigate his patent. IANAL, and have not read the claims, but the abstract sounds totally obvious in the light of the extensive, rather similar ELF .plt relocation scheme (section 5-12 of the System V ABI spec (by some irony copyright 1990-96 SCO) - 1996 being the filing date of the 'Method for resolving data references in generated code' patent.
  • Quite apart from the merits of the case, it is an outrage that Oracle is using Software patents to attack the most complete and functional Free-Software phone stack out there (yet).
  • Then again, perhaps this is non-news: it seems the whole handset market is in some kind of patent maelstrom with Apple suing HTC around Android, and Nokia around Symbian & presumably MeeGo, Nokia counter-suing Apple (at least twice), Microsoft signing a patent pact with HTC, and now Oracle suing Google.
  • Eventually all these suits will have to settle. The -real- question is - when they do, for the open-source users, will they settle for everyone ? ( which means by definition, no per-unit cost ), or only for themselves ? ie. will Google settle for all of Android, or will Nokia settle for all users of Qt - or just for themselves and the proprietary version ?
  • Amusingly, one of the rumours I have heard is that Java is not that well protected patent-wise, mostly relying on copyright - hence aborting the ISO standard just before birth, and using the unhelpful JCP to protect those rights. Thus I would imagine the copyright part to be the greater part of the suit.
  • Of course, the by now (somehow) socially acceptable way of grating patent rights only to 100% conformant implementations should be seen as the dangerous thing it is. Whether you are suing for 'compatibility' reasons, or not it is completely un-acceptable to be a software patent aggressor in my view. Lame arguments about 'defending' standards are just that.
  • It is sad to see MoFo's Michael A. Jacobs - having done a great job defending us all (for Novell) from SCO's copyright aggression - to now be representing Oracle in this business idiocy.
  • Full disclosure, I happen to use Google services every day, and am just beginning to enjoy the Nexus One they recently gave me to play with. For a more in-depth write-up Miguel's write up has more grist.
• Poked at glib for much of the day; with more and more reading, and discussion with davidz finally understand most of the concepts; filed misc bugs around the place in glib. Bashed a nice test case into place for the EAGAIN issue, hopefully we can come up with something unutterably beautiful in the end.
• Watched the rain pouring at speed onto the lawn, and the river beside the house accelerating, it's good to be in England.
• Slept in the tent for the final night; less being dripped on, and more crying of children to punctuate the night.

• Up; early. Personally I love the model of servant leadership. Primarily, because (at least in the Church) it is a command:

  "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant"(NIV)

  Pleased to see Miguel flying the flag for that leadership model.
• Got mail under control quite quickly - why does it ease off at the end of the week ? worked through business cards from the incredibly crazy to the more humdrum.
• Got stuck into GSocket - really nice to have acleaner socket abstraction than the GIOChannel of the past; packed babes, tent etc. into the car and set-off to Sue & Clive's at lunch time.
• Call with Aaron, chat with David, Ryan, HP etc. wrt. GDBus, did some idle handler cleanup in passing.
• Erected new monster tent in the garden, in the rain, only to discover we are missing tent pegs, and have only the fly-sheet; fun. Patched something together with Sue's pegs and ground-sheet; put babes to bed, dinner, bed ourselves.

• Prodded mail, wrote long overdue status-report, Clarity. Continued prodding at Evolution master wrt. oddnesses in gdbus; is it right that by default g_bus_get_sync gives you a connection, that when broken - does a raise (SIGTERM); on you ? sounds sensible enough for server processes that live for the bus, but less so for clients; but perhaps session bus death is so terminal and unlikely these days that it is reasonable.
• Fixed Evo search/selection ergonomic problem. Nick and Joni over in the afternoon. Back to work after dinner - lengthy and interesting conference call. Admired J's painting of the house - another two doors down (first coat).

• Slept in, antibiotics for prolongued sinus / chest infection nastiness; prodded at gtk+ - still loading the xim input method routinely, and parsing the huge X Compose file, filed a bug, and prodded at it a bit.
• Poked at Evo startup, doing a ton of ui builder work on every start (why?), I should cut that down a lot. Lunch.
• Discovered that the X Compose issue is hidden on Fedora by having the xim module in a different package that is not normally installed: sounds like a good approach to me.
• Found that 25% of the evolution startup time was burned loading configuration dialogs that are often never shown; re-factored that into factory functions instead. Dismayed once again by seeing libtool burn my CPU doing crazy numbers of 'grep's and 'seds' re-linking things on make install.
• Worked late.

• Wondered if the depth of cynicism in the modern world is not too bottomless to overcome with motivational videos.
• More grist for the heuristic mill on app stores, thus far, the whole OO.o madness of: "don't integrate useful features into the device, push them to the app-store - to drive traffic there" seems not to have got into full swing. No doubt it will become more pernicious with time; ultimately, having lots of good, built-in software and a less capable app-stor-y seems a great direction for free-software.
• Discovered that symlinking Gilouche to my Gnome 3.0 prefix was enough to fix the unfortunate default gtk+ theme. Lunch.
• Prodded at this and that, a listless afternoon, topped off with a very long discussion and some bad news; sad.

• Up in the night for mamouth battle of wills with E. eventually resulting in the desired outcome: dry all night. Got everyone onto the task of cleaning the house before Mother's return with a good will.
• Off to NCC; sad to hear that the ten Christian workers helping Afghans that were killed today, were good friends of a relief worker that we know there. A few interesting points:
  • Though the Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility (apparently owning a Bible in the local language is enough cause to take someone's life) - the police claim it was bandits: though why you have to kill the Christians (and the driver(s?) survive) after robbing them, remains unexplained.
  • It is apparently acceptable to have a law that forbids sharing the reason you are there (to help people in need independent of their race, creed, etc.) If Islam is so attractive, why forbid conversion from it ?
  • The noble Taliban are so brave and cunning, that they can even attack, and kill the un-armed and defenceless, on a medical mercy-mission: that really takes guts. Particularly since they were allowed to operate in Afghanistan when they ruled the land.
  • The love that drives people to trek with pack-horses up mountains to find the needy, and tend to their medical needs in Afghanistan, is apparently not God's, after all it must be weak and foolish to love even those that hate you.
  • It is of course brave, good and strong to simultaneously claim "that Truth stands out clear from error", that there is no compulsion in religion - but just in case, to beautifully harass and kill those who happens to disagree.
  • How ugly and tragic.
  • Now of course, there are large numbers of Muslims who don't appear to subscribe to the more dangerous interpretations of these texts; just as there are vast numbers of Christians who don't believe the Pope can speak infallibly - and who present little danger to modern man, regardless of the merits or otherwise of their personal faith.
• Back home, J. returned eventually to much 'Mummy!'ing. Lunch. Out for a bike ride onto the race-course in the afternoon. Bed early, after sorting and tagging lots of photos.

• Up in the night dealing with E. fed & dressed everyone. Breakfast, read stories, fought battles of the will with E. who has developed an acute aversion to parental obedience; why does potty training co-incide with the terrible twos ? won battles serially, easier each time.
• Trampoline use in between rain; lunch. Off into town to buy a present for E. for general excellence yesterday; who chose a suitably inexpensive pink handbag. Played in the park. M. who had moaned incessentaly about coming ('I want to watch the computer'), now complained about leaving the playground: dis-satistfaction guarenteed.
• Babes watched iPlayer at some length. E. fell asleep, and unhappy when woken. Cooked chicken dinner - much appreciated by babes.
• Bath & packed them all off to bed. Pottered around tidying up - have no idea how J. manages to do this every day; played with the reprap a little.

• To work, prodded mail, played with Evolution master; set about fixing bugs. Out for lunch in Cambridge with dwmw, aph, Ralf Baechle and a number of other interesting people. Apparently, as well as an endless discussion of documentation licensing, rumour has it that the GCC team have decided to turn on --fomit-frame-pointer by default, if true gdb (at best a mendacious and precocious beast), looks set for full deprecation in favour of fprintf.
• Interested to read Richard's article on copyright assignment, and pleased to see Morten's useful XML fuzzer.
• Fixed an annoying Evo signature bug. Tom Tromey reports that in fact gdb works today (at least Dodji seemed to suggest something similar), and (more to the point) that it is worthwhile filing bugs these days: which is exciting in itself; go gdb !
• Presumably though, if you don't have debuginfo installed (or didn't compile with gcc -g) unwinding stacks becomes just impossible. Are we really about to obsolete all those 'crash reporters' that rely on server-side stack annotation unwinding / symbol correlation to get detailed traces; or do we just have to throw the whole stack(s) over ? I wonder what the impact is on hard-to-reproduce bugs - if everything has to be reproduced again with not just relevant debuginfo installed, but -all- debuginfo for anything that might be on a stack frame. Will we see debuginfo become installed by default across all systems ? (presumably not if there is some size penalty for really-correct debuginfo). Interesting.
• Update: Hah - for top marks in total-wrong-ness, I read mjw's nice write up on stack-unwinding. Apparently, I'm just paranoid - .eh_frame does it all: good, and even better if you use -fasynchronous-unwind-tables, apparently.
• Louse arrived, and J. set off with her for a retreat to Quiet Waters.