not all change is progress
July 25, 2016
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00:01:07 News
00:33:34 Filling the Void
00:53:58 Feedback
01:11:15 Finding Solus with Ikey
The Free and Open Source Software world is notoriously poor at selling itself to Joe Public. Why is this, and could an existing organisation fill the outreach void? Plus, and after all of the news and feedback, we talk with Ikey Doherty, who has a very definite vision for what sort of operating system could appeal to just those potential users.
00:01:07 News
Skype for Linux Alpha and calling on Chrome &
Chromebooks
Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant
in the room
Feral Linux users should learn when to shut up
Microsoft Wins Major Privacy Victory for Data Held
Overseas
Bulk data collection only lawful in serious crime cases, ECJ
rules
Notice of security breach on Ubuntu Forums (again)
GNOME Maps Hits A Dead End, Can No Longer Display Maps
ownCloud Secures Financing and Expands its Management
Team
About
the future of Seafile
Statement about Stopping Cooperation with Seafile GmbH
SoftBank to buy UK’s Arm for £24.3bn
Android Nougat won’t boot your phone if its software is
corrupt
Cyanogen Inc. reportedly fires OS development arm, switches
to apps
The Superbook: Turn your smartphone into a laptop for $99
00:33:34 Filling the Void
With the FSF promoting their own rabid take on software freedom at one end of the spectrum, and the money-grubbing corporate lapdog that is the Linux Foundation at the other, is the FOSS/Open Source world in need of a sane, pragmatic voice in the middle to promote our shared goals and ideals?
00:53:58 Feedback
Thanks to Jim Salter for the PayPal donation, and to all of our Monthly Supporters for your continuing support. Thanks, guys!
Joe plugged his Twitter feed, on which he tweets fairly sporadically and eclectically.
Thanks to Stephen for putting us straight on Vietnamese pronunciation; and to Florian, for pointing us in the direction of a Crowd Supply project for the fully libre EOMA68 Computing Device.
Questioning whether telecoms ought to be treated as any other utility, Henry Sprog’s contribution prompted us to talk about whether access to communications technology really can be justified as a basic human right, as the United Nations seems to believe.
Jim Salter revisited the question of stale dependencies within dev-packaged software, which will no doubt become a frequently discussed topic as Flatpaks and Snaps become increasingly seen in the wild.
Comments from Ryan1729, Campbell Barton and Will prompted a little more discussion about Git, which dovetailed nicely with Rob Landley’s link to a talk about time-based released management. And we wrapped up with some positive points from Roger Light about DVCS’ and software quality.
01:11:15 Finding Solus with Ikey
So the pun doesn’t really work. But Solus itself seems to be shaping up to do so pretty well. We talked with Ikey Doherty about some of the longer term goals of the project, and how his vision had impacted some of his decisions about how to put an OS together.
Your theory about organizations taking self preservation as their primary goal was the theme of Clay Shirky’s TED talk “institutions vs collaboration”, which is the first of the “videos worth watching” I added to https://www.kernel.org/doc/ back when I controlled that.
I wrote about the history of the Linux Foundation (which I briefly worked for back around 2007) six years ago: http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#18-07-2010
More recently Eben Moglen explained the nature of the Linux Foundation (and that it’s always _been_ a trade association) at https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2016/apr/11/lf/
You might find those three informative.
Rob
Kind of a depressing news segment with the stories about GNOME Maps, Seafile, and Cyanogen (maybe it will keep going?).
I think I understand Paddy’s point about git now. I think the point is that for some projects it would be better to use a private centralized VCS rather than using git on a publicly accessible server. It so goes against my mindset of wanting everything to be open that I have to think more about the pros and cons of doing this for an open source project.
Regarding the over a pint discussion, what is the principled argument for the pragmatic worldview regarding software freedom? I think the reason that no organization represents that position might be because there isn’t a coherent set of principles to base it on. Personally, I use some proprietary software myself because it is very difficult not to do so, but I don’t feel good about it and I look for ways to stop using it. But I am just an individual trying to meet individual goals. How can an organization created to promote open source software condone/promote proprietary software and still work towards its mission statement?
Great interview. It was interesting to hear Ikey’s perspective on snaps.
In a recent show, you had been wondering about what Firefox would do beyond putting the UI and the page content into separate processes. Here is an overview of the current plans:
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-next-for-multi-process-firefox/
Thanks for this episode. You made me look into Solus and I’m thinking about switching from fedora.
On the issue of Cyanogen Mod/Inc/OS. I’m running Cynanogen Mod nightlies for quite some time (updating every few days). There are some minor issues now and then, but nothing severe which keeps me from using my phone (which is a nexus 5x). But I can understand your point of view. You’d want some stable and tested releases every now and then. Cyanogen Inc however is responsible for Cyanogen OS (which is “just” a distribution of Cyanogen Mod if I’m not mistaken). See also: http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/cyanogen-inc-and-cyanogenmod .. so maybe the it’s not that bad at all.
Cheers,
Andreas
Instead of using proprietary voip solutions why not be
independent? I have been running a telephone exchange on
a Raspberry Pi for years now. One of its features is
conference call. Yes, you’d have to learn how to set up
the Asterisk system via the FreePBX interface, but I
think you’d find that very interesting and the facilities
your own PBX can afford could prove very useful.
http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/
B.t.w. I am VERY pro-EU. It isn’t the markets that I am
bothered about, I’m sure that’ll sort itself out in the
end, even though we’ll have to go through a lot of
unnecessary suffering and loss to our savings and
potential income. It is the stealing away of my European
Citizenship and my rights under it. It is also the fact
that I really like to mix with tech people from other
parts of the EU on my home ground. It is good for
relations between countries and that makes war less
likely. The EU has done so much for as all and people
have just taken it for granted because it doesn’t shout
about the good things it does – but Mr. Murdoch and the
rest of his tabloid ilk feed extremely biassed anti-EU
propaganda to the masses on a daily basis. If I was young
I would leave this country now, without hesitation, and
get away from all these inward looking ‘leave’ people.
48% don’t want to leave the – just remember that!!!
I hate those who are taking my rights way from me!
Call me crazy, but I find that Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome / Chromium when it comes to memory management. I also find that unless I am using a streaming video service, I am using Firefox for everything else. It just works better on lower memory machines to include using Google Office. I really think in the last year or so Firefox has bound far past Chrome as a solid browser.
That said I hope that members of the Mozilla Foundation listen to your show as you have some really great points on what they could champion.
Last year there was a good ELC panel describing the Android bootloader signing stuff and why they did it:
http://elinux.org/images/b/b2/Android_Verified_Boot.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfWFmhucWlg
The tl;dr is that (especially post-Snowden) they’re worried about the “Evil Butler” problem where somebody gets ahold of your phone for 5 minutes and reimages it with spyware that puts it in 24/7 speakerphone mode ala “Person of Interest”. So they made reimaging your phone as obvious as possible: anybody can add a key to the bootloader but only Google’s key avoids a Big Fat Warning that it’s not a factory image. If they let developers disable the “Your phone has been reimaged!” boot warning, then the NSA can trivially do it to everybody too.
So they’re not trying to STOP anybody from doing it (although individual phone companies might), they’re just trying to make it impossible to hide that it’s happened. It’s a bad solution to a hard problem.
Another great episode.
Question on future shows.
Guys I would like some ideas on personal knowledge
software.
With the sea of information available to all internet
users, what are they and you using? I would like to see a
review of Zim desktop as an example. Org-mode seems to be
the champ for the emac, programmer crowd but what would
be a good fit for the average linux user. Average in my
mind is a student or any one that uses the linux desktop
to get regular work done (non programming).
Thanks: I am hoping for some ideas on how to tame some of
the information available to us instead of drowning in
it.
Jack
Hi Jack — just to let you know that we’ve added your suggestion to the list of topics to address in a future show. May be a while before we cover it, though. Best, Paddy.
Ikey makes the case for having a middle-man to package a curated set of applications, while there are indeed advantages, theres some issues with it too.
Something I think distro-maintainers overlook is that up-stream needs to be in contact with multiple distro maintainers, following each of their (slightly different) rules for how the package should work.
Theres also a problem for new projects, how to become included in a distribution when nobody has even heard of you.
Case in point – recently me and some other developers
ported OpenToonz to Linux (Studio Ghibli’s 2D animation
software), even though the initial open-sourcing of this
software caused quite a bit of buzz in the FLOSS
community, there are still no packages for Ubuntu/Fedora.
Even though its been building and running for over a
month and has been more recently included in a release
[0], Linux users can’t get it, unless they want to build
it from source.
I ended up uploading a compressed TAR for the latest
Ubuntu, which is now quite out-dated.
The point is – while you can overlook universal packaging for most common applications, there _are_ times small teams release software but don’t have the reach to be able to get it included in many distributions.
[0]: https://github.com/opentoonz/opentoonz/releases/tag/v1.1.0
tsk, my TAR file is out-dated, not the latest Ubuntu :)
Cyanogen laying off staff? Looks like it’s time to switch to Ubuntu touch…
I’m running it on a nexus 4, runs great, just lacks apps. Could we have a usable system with more Ubuntu apps?
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