Open source is like cancer? Indeed, it is!

It seems that Microsoft is infested with a dangerous cancer; the cancer of open source. Just a few month ago they released the a part of the source code to their Hyper-V virtualiser. This came after allegations of GPL violations; apparently Microsoft used GPL code and was thus forced to free the source code to comply with the terms of the known Free Software License. Now the open source bug bit Microsoft again; a Windows tool, developed by a subcontractor, was using code licensed unter the GPL. Looks like someone thought he could go the easy way and just ‘borrow’ open sourced code.

Now I doubt that Microsoft (or anyone within Microsoft) deliberately used GPL code. Actually, I’m quite sure that they have strict rules against that kind of things. However, as Steve Balmer put it; open source is like cancer; it can appear any where, any time and there is no cure. Microsoft is heavily dependant on third-party developers. And would guess that not all of Microsoft’s suppliers have the same strict rules as Microsoft, so this kind of thing will probably happen more and more. Microsoft cannot audit all the code they receive from contractors, can they?

Now what are they going to do? Require their contractors to open source everything? Probably not, but we’ll see.

Futile attempts to crop freedom – why ACTA won’t work

The ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is a secret, multi-national treaty to “to the increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works.” In other words; it’s (amongst other things) another try to regulate Internet communication and stop so called ‘Intellectual property piracy’, e.g. unlicensed copying.

The first funny thing about ACTA is that our elected leaders are trying hide what they are doing. Now I might be wrong, but the first thing about democracy is transparency; if you don’t know who’s doing what, how else do you know whom to kick out of office? Fortunately, in Switzerland we have the possibility of a referendum, but still; what the fuck? Working in secrecy on international agreements and then trying to force it down our throats? Go die in pain.

The second funny thing about the ACTA is it’s futileness. Even if the big media corporations (who else do you think could have an interest in such an agreement) are successful in convincing our own governments to play kindergarden cop because they themselves are unable to cope with a changed environment, it will be a pyrrhic victory; the harder such laws are enforced, the stronger the opposing reaction. Governments forcing providers to cut off their own customers will just drive those customers into the Undernet. Anonymous encrypted peer-to-peer networks with network storage capability? Here we come. Trying to stop that will break the internet. And not even Big Media can afford that. Sure; bandwidth will be small, in the first few years. But hey; I remember a time of 5kB/s, I can cope with it again.

gnome-shell: first impressions

I’ve been trying out gnome-shell for the last week. My impression so far:

* As to be expected it feels very rough
* It needs more keyboard bindings (e.g. in the Activities tab)
* Why is the clock the only interface element in the middle of the top-bar? Put that space to use, for Darwin’s sake! What about putting the applications menu bar up there?
* Unusable without proprietary drivers, at least on NVidia hardware. Didn’t try it on AMD or Intel hardware

Now, that all sounds terrible negative. But in the end I’m quite optimistic. By being willing to break with the traditional desktop paradigm, the gnome-shell people are able to experiment with a plethora of new ideas. Finally workspaces are being put to use as a central metaphor not only as an afterthought. I also think that by using workspaces, MDI applications finally could get useful. I’m also looking forward to the integration of application notification and communication (through telepathy). The design document was very promising, I wonder how it all works out.

Five years of Ubuntu

Whoa, what a time. It seems like yesterday that the first release of Ubuntu (4.10, “Warty Warthog”) escaped into the wild. There was quite some buzz about that first release of the ‘Desktop Debian’ and I remember being very sceptical. Similar projects – Corel Linux OS, Lindows/Linspire – never lived up to the expectations and were quickly forgotten. But Ubuntu promised to be different. Ubuntu promised to be about Community and Participation, about End-Users and The Desktop.  No closed-door development like with Redhat Linux or SuSE Linux, no, a real community distribution. Five years late, Ubuntu has lived up to that probmise.

Yeah, right. It’s still not perfect. Yeah, Bug#1 is still open. And yeah, there are still a lot of lose ends to be tied up and some warts to be removed. Ubuntu is getting there. We are getting there.

As I wrote last year; 2008 was the Year of the Linux Desktop. And this was – to a big part – thanks to Ubuntu (and therefore Debian).

What an amazing five years. And what amazing times to come.

Here is to another five years!

Intel pushing Linux even further

ACPI has always been a problem for the Linux kernel. Be it suspend and resume, power management, screen brightness or any other function provided by ACPI; it never really worked for and with Linux. The reason for that is the immense size of the ACPI specification. And the fact that almost ever manufacturer has a private interpretation of said standard.

The solution for Linux, up to now, was to stop being Linux and pretend to be Windows, e.g., emulate all the bugs and implementation details of Windows’ APCI implementation and hope that it somehow works. Most of the time it did. Sometimes it didn’t. And instead of blaming the manufacturers and Microsoft for not adhering to the standards, Linux was blamed for trying to implement the ACPI standard to the letter.

However; this is – hopefully – going to change. For Intel released a new firmware interface (providing all the functionality of ACPI), with a reference implementation for – you guessed it – the Linux kernel. And whereas the APCI standard (version 4.0 was released only recently) spans over 727 pages (http://www.acpi.info/spec.htm), the new firmware interface (http://simplefirmware.org/) needs only 9 pages in its current incarnation (draft 0.6).

Now SFI is not going to change the world overnight. But I hope to see SFI gaining traction within the next three to five years. I’m crossing my fingers.

The End of the Pax America?

As a read a report about the lastest BRIC meeting , I was wondering if I this might be the end of the Pax America.

Ready – Set – Fight

Now it’s official; for the first time ever Microsoft sued another company over patent issues related to the use of Linux. Now we’re really in the ‘Fight’ stage of Ghandi’s old saying: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Tomtom was sued for the use of the FAT file system in some of its devices. Apparently there are some patents related to the inherent filesystem-management of Linux. I’m curious how these hold up in court.

The tanner’s ugly daughter – or – Musings about a modern GTK+ theming

GTK+ may be called many things. I would call it ’simple’ and sometimes even ‘elegant’, referring to it’s foundation of pure, elegant C. But not everyone is compelled to use those terms, using terms like ‘clumsy’ and ‘unwieldy’ instead. Yes, there is a lot disagreement. But there’s one thing almost everyone would agree to: that GTK+ isn’t pretty.

Well, it is true. But why? Well, it seems that programmers and hackers don’t make good designers. But that’s not the whole story. Another reason is the current GTK+ theming. There are some things which just are not possible.
From a ‘old school’ programmer’s point of view GTK+ works nicely. It has all the widgets one needs to create decent and functional application. You can stick them together and the GUI you’ll get will work nicely. But the look of GTK+ has never been breathtaking and, to be honest, GKT+ is not as flexible as it could be. Animation is difficult and the layout of GTK+ applications tends to be very static.
In the last few years this weakness has gotten more apparent as other toolkits advanced more and more in the terms of eye-candyness: HTML/JS is highly flexible for creating innovative GUIs as the plethora of usable and unusable websites demonstrate. Qt provides a broad and deep platform which demonstrated its capabilities with KDE 4. If GTK+ wants to stay competitive, it needs to catch up. In other words; GTK+ theming is stuck and needs serious overhaul.

To understand the reasons, let’s first take a look at the current architecture of the GTK+ theming.

Focus lines are not possible in GTK+

GTK+ theming as of now

The look of GTK+, just as with all modern graphic tool kits, is defined by themes. Theming in GTK+ consist of three parts: Engines, Styles and Configuration. All in all it can be summarised as: “Themes provide styles, which can be configured and assigned to widgets”. But let’s start at the beginning.

GTK+ provides a set of drawing primitives: lines, boxes, arrows, and so on. Whenever a widget is drawn, these drawing primitives are used. The implementation provided by GTK+ is very basic and not very sophisticated, but it can be overridden.

That is where the theming engines come into the picture. The theming engines provide their own implementation of those primitives. You can even add additional configuration parameters. These are called ‘Styles’. Say, you don’t just want a foreground and background colour for your widget. Say you want a gradient? Easy, just add a configuration parameter for that style and tell the engine where to use gradients. This happens in the ‘.gtkrc’ file where every widget is provided with a set of configuration parameters.

But that only allows you to style the individual primitives. It is not possible to change the geometry of a widget. Say, for example, you want round edges for your buttons?  Well, the only way to do that is to hardcode this into the theming engine; whenever a button is drawn, just handle this in a special case. Query the widget ancestry and draw your round-edged button whenever needed. Problem fixed!

The drawbacks

… as long as you don’t want custom widgets. Drawing custom widgets can be a major pain with GTK+. You can draw custom widgets, GTK+ is perfectly capable of doing that. There are some major GKT+ application which provide their own widget implementations because the default GTK+ implementation didn’t suite their needs. The problem arises as soon as you want to mimic the look a certain kind of widget. Then you’ll run into problems.

You see; styles are hierarchical. You cannot draw a ‘button’ style if you don’t derive from GtkButton. You have no way to tell the theming engine to draw your widget like a button.  So the only thing you could do is to use the drawing primitives to draw something that at least resembles a button in most themes. But as you may have guessed; this is a very difficult task and not very funny.

Knowing about this problem, some theme engine developers have taken special care that some of the more popular applications get drawn as intended; they include special clauses to check for some known custom widgets.  But that only makes matters worse, for you cannot know every custom widgets. So user interface design with GTK+ in the last few years has effectively been a choice between using only GTK+ widgets or having custom widgets look either crappy or out of place.

GTK+ also makes it particularly difficult for themes to draw widgets spatial dependant. Suppose you want three buttons to be drawn, side by side with the outer edges of the first and third buttons lightly rounded? Well, currently it is not possible; the theme engines are lacking spatial information and the application developers have no way to tell a theming engine when and how to treat a widget in a special manner. Well, that’s not completly true; there is a way to pass ‘details’ to theming engines. But the nature and definition of those details has apparently never been documented and got lost in space and time.

To make matters worse, theming isn’t isolated. It touches many other issues, like animation, layouting of widgets (which is nowadays fixed for most applications) and also platform integration.

The silver lining on the horizon

These drawbacks of the GTK+ theming architecture, the basic design, goes back to the very beginnings of GTK+. There were some changes to the theming system during the last major version bump (1.2 to 2.0), but it has stayed always stayed the same, more or less. And people noticed. Now some  GTK+ developers organised a meeting about the future theming of GTK+, lovingly called ‘Hackfest’. And their plans are impressive; to provide the basic architecture of a future GTK+ theming and rendering infrastructure. This wouldn’t be half as spectacular if only GTK+ developers were invited. But if you take a look at the schedule, you’ll see that Qt and Mozilla developers are also participating. If this results in an easier integration of third party applications into GTK+ and thus the GNOME desktop will remain to be seen, but it certainly looks promising. Having Mozilla/Firefox and Qt applications look /exacly/ the same as GTK+ applications might finally be possible.

The ‘hackfest’ has been going on since Monday and the first results are already spilling out. The new theming API, it seems, will focus on Cairo and and CSS. Now Qt has had CSS-style theming for quite a while and interoperability on that layer suddenly seems possible. Maybe we’ll even get a unified theming configuration language for GTK+ and Qt! I’m quite curious how they bring all these pieces together; theming, layout, animation, integration and odd-shaped widgets. But let’s wait and see.

References:

Aaron Bockover’s complaint about theming in GTK+
Thomas Wood’s comments to GTK+ theming
Documentation of GTK+ theming on http://live.gnome.org
New theming API entry on http://live.gnome.org
GTK+ Theming hackfest announcement
First feedback from the GTK+ Theming Hackfest

Application development with Vala – First Steps: Getting the Vala feeling

Thanks to undeconstructed from #vala at irc.gimp.net

In the last few weeks I’ve been playing around with Vala, and enjoying it. “What the heck is Vala”, you might ask, and of course you will get an explanation. Not only because Vala, though still in its infancy, hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.

Vala is, in some sense, a new programming language. It’s syntax and structure leans heavily towards C#. As Jürg Billeter, the mastermind behind Vala, likes to put it; Vala is an amalgam of different C inspired languages, mostly C++ and C#. An though there is no mercury in this mixture, you’ll find many a gold nugget in Vala.

“Why another programming language? Aren’t there enough out there yet?” might be your next question. And of course this also deserves an explanation. Yes, there is an awful lot of programming languages out there. But what makes Vala special is it’s unique combination of high-level programming and low-level interface. You see; even though Vala supports modern programming language features like objects, foreach-loops, generics, annotations, memory management and exception handling, Vala is very slim. It doesn’t require a virtual machine. Indeed; Vala compiles are binary compatible to C. You can use C libraries from within Vala, you can even use Vala libraries from C. That’s because Vala, at it’s core, still builds upon the foundations of C. But more on that later. First, let’s take a look at a piece of Vala code.

int main (string[] argv) {
        stdout.printf ("Hello, World!\n");
        return (0);
}

Well, that does look familiar, doesn’t it? All control structures (for-loop, while-loop, switch/case, if/else, …) behave like their C counterparts. Vala is very much like C, although there are some peculiarities. Like that string-datatype, and that stdout-whatsit.

Having stored this piece of code in a file called hello0.vala, it can be compiled:

valac hello0.vala

No rocket science thus far. The resulting binary can be executed and will result in following output:

$./hello0
Hello, World!

Now that we have made ourselves a little bit comfortable with the Vala tool chain, let’s take a look at some of the more interesting features Vala has to offer. That string data type, for example.
In our main function, we’ve defined a single input parameter. string[] argv; an array of strings. But other than simple C arrays, this is not only a block of continuous memory. It’s an object by itself and thus has properties we can inspect. It’s length, for example.

int main (string[] argv) {
	stdout.printf ("Argument vector length: %i\n", argv.length);
	return (0);
}

There is more. Using the foreach-loop we can even iterate over this array.

int main (string[] argv) {
	foreach (string arg in argv) {
		stdout.printf ("Argument: %s", arg);
	}
	return (0);
}

Neat, isn’t it? But Vala has even more to offer. Like Classes. Everyone likes classes, so let’s make some! Animals are always good for examples, so I’ll use them as well.

public class Animal {
	public string name;
	public bool can_fly;
	public bool can_swim;
	public bool can_walk;
	public string noise;

	public string make_noise () {
		return (this.noise);
	}
}

int main (string[] argv) {
	Animal dog0 = new Animal ();
	dog0.can_fly = false;
	dog0.can_walk = true;
	dog0.can_swim = true;
	dog0.noise = "Whuff";

	dog1.can_fly = false;
	dog1.can_walk = true;
	dog1.can_swim = true;
	dog1.noise = "Whuff";

	stdout.printf ("dog0: %s", dog1.make_noise ());
	stdout.printf ("dog1: %s", dog1.make_noise ());
}

This little example already shows some features of Vala. Obviously there are classes, with members and methods. But this example isn’t very sophisticated. Let’s try something more interesting. For example, let’s replace those booleans with a bitmap, bring in some generics and inheritance.

public enum Locomotion {
	NONE =  0,
	WALK =  1,
	SWIM =  2,
	FLY  =  4,
	EVERYTHING = Locomotion.WALK | Locomotion.SWIM | Locomotion.FLY
}

public abstract class Animal : Object {
	public string noise		{ public get; construct; }
	public Locomotion locomotion	{ public get; construct; }
	public string make_noise () {
		return this.noise;
	}
	construct {
		this.locomotion = Locomotion.NONE;
		this.noise = "";
	}
	public abstract string introduce ();
}

public class Dog : Animal {
	public string name { private get; construct; }
	Dog (string name) {
		this.name = name;
	}
	construct {
		this.locomotion = Locomotion.WALK | Locomotion.SWIM;
		this.noise = "Whuff";
	}

	public override string introduce () {
		return ("My name is " + this.name);
	}
}

public class Finch : Animal {
	construct {
		this.locomotion = Locomotion.WALK | Locomotion.FLY;
		this.noise = "Tchirp";
	}
	public override string introduce () {
		return ("Buggeroff");
	}
}
public class Fish : Animal {
	construct {
		this.locomotion = Locomotion.SWIM;
		this.noise = "Blubb";
	}
	public override string introduce () {
		return (this.noise);
	}
}
public class Bass : Fish {
	public string name { public get; construct; }

	Bass (string name) {
		this.name = name;
	}
	public override string introduce () {
		return ("I am " + this.name);
	}
} 

int main (string[] argv) {
	List<Animal> a_list = new List<Animal> ();
	Dog wulfie = new Dog ("Wulfie");
	Finch bert = new Finch ();
	Bass bob = new Bass("Bob");
	a_list.append (wulfie);
	a_list.append (bert);
	a_list.append (bob);

	foreach (Animal a in a_list) {
		string loc = "i can";
		if ((a.locomotion & Locomotion.FLY) == Locomotion.FLY )
			loc = loc + " fly";
		else
			loc = loc + "'t fly";
		stdout.printf ("(%s)\t%s: %s, %s \n", a.get_type ().name (),  a.make_noise (),  a.introduce (), loc);
	}
	return (0);
}

As you can see, Vala supports all features you’d expect from a modern programming language. Classes, abstract classes, inheritance, generics, method overloading and so on. And still there are many features I didn’t touch in this essay, like interfaces, signals, exceptions, namespaces, access level modifiers, lambda functions and packages. And most important; Vala provides memory management, freeing the developers of most the hassles usually associated with low-level application programming.

So with all those fancy features, how can Vala still be compatible to C? It’s because valac, the Vala compiler, uses the GLib type system for its underlying framework; Vala code is translated to plain C code with hooks to GLib and (if one uses GLib.Object as superclass) GObject. This generated code in turn is compiled by GCC. Vala applications thus are native binaries, requiring neither an interpreter nor a virtual machine.

Vala provides (very) complete mappings to many important Unix C libraries, such as stdlib, D-Bus, Cairo, SDL, Poppler. And of course, with its roots deep in GLib, Vala also supports the Gtk+ framework and all related libraries. The excellent libgee, also developed in Vala, provides array lists, hashes, sets and collections. Use of the pkg-config system makes using libraries very easy. And as soon as GObject introspection is in place, bindings to all kinds of scripting languages come with the package for free.

Vala, now at version 0.3.4, is still under heavy development. My first experiments have already uncovered some bugs, which got fixed immediately. Vala might still need some time to come of age, but already it is picking up momentum, as the first projects start to use it. Especially developers with an aversion towards C++ might find Vala interesting, for it links the solid GLib type and event system with an elegant syntax, providing all the necessary tools for rapid application development on a stable foundation.

Links:

Vala (Project site)

Why 2008 Will Be The Year Of The GNU/Linux Desktop – seriously. I mean it. Really.

Don’t take this article too serious. I had a lot of fun writing it. I do believe that GNU/Linux is coming to the desktop in 2008, however.

When I first started to work with GNU/Linux, now almost eleven years ago, I’d never would have guessed that it would become such a large part of my life one day.  I liked the idea; communal developed software. Collaboration on a whole new level. Software not developed by a company, but by enthusiasts. It had something rebellious and subversive. I just fell in love with it.

Back than, GNU/Linux (and the BSDs also) was merely a toy for me. Something fresh, something new. Something completely different. But after I had set up my first servers, had started using October Gnome as my desktop environment, I started digging deeper. Into the internals of the system. Into the Source.

I always considered myself to be a fairly good coder. Not excelling, but competent. And because of that I recognised the quality of that code. I realized that that those little pieces of code were the works of mad genious artists. Pure, elegant C, honed to perfection.

I was convinced that it would – one time – rule the world.

Yet I always fooled myself about GNU/Linux’ problems. Back then, getting X to run was a task of days, at least on the hardware at my disposal. The desktop environments were clumsy and counter-intuitive, the applications limited and ugly, for they were written with either CDE or Tcl/Tk. Most didn’t even have a graphical user interface and were limited to the console. XMMS was okay for playing MP3 files, but even watching a move was a daunting task. Those were the dark ages, when the Knights of the Light only had started their quest for freedom and equality.

Even back then there have always been Prophets of The Dawn. Reiterating the old prophecy that this, yes, this very year would come to be known as the Year Of The Linux Desktop. I always used to simile at them and give ‘em cookies. They were cute, somehow. Breaking the Mighty Power of the Forces Of Evil would be the task of a generations. The desktop market was fixed in the hands of Microsoft, a convicted monopolist. An unpleasant necessity. Breaking that power would be a task for giants.

While I was promoting GNU/Linux in my surroundings, providing installation setup, first private, than commercial, the Amazing Power Coders were out there. Doing good wherever they could. And one by one, Linux’ weaknesses were being addressed, scrutinized, judged and attacked with the fury befitting a wildcat.

Things have changed. GNU/Linux has changed. X.org, KDE, GNOME, Linux and all the other pieces of software composing the free software desktop have ripen well. It’s functional software, mostly slim and elegant, sometimes even beautiful.

Today I saw an advertisement for the Asus EEE PC, printed by a large consumer electronic store (Mediamarkt). This is the first time, that a GNU/Linux product has been advertised by that company. A company that has no ideology whatsoever. Besides making money. In the last few month no week passed by without the announcement of yet another GNU/Linux desktop/consumer product. Mostly ultra-lowcost ultraportable. Because these are the areas where GNU/Linux shines like a twinkling star.

And there is more. In two weeks there will be an anniversary. The anniversary of “GNU/Linux preinstalled on the desktop machines of a major hardware vendor”. It’s almost been a year since Dell announced to ship desktop and consumer products with Ubuntu pre-installed. HP followed shortly thereafter. And although neither Dell nor HP are making huge profits by selling GNU/Linux machines, both still provide the option. Even after a year.

With the rise of those consumer machines GNU/Linux got a lot of advertisement. And suddenly people I never talked to before about GNU/Linux start asking questions. They ask for support, for guidance and help. Some even offer to pay. Finally.

And the disbeliever, the skeptic inside, is falling silent.

So, now hear my prophecy, as I am joining the ranks of the Enlightened; The GNU/Linux desktop is coming. 2007 saw the end of the beginning. 2008 will feel the torrent.