3 days late, but in light of Microsoft’s abrupt statement that they hold a bunch of patents which are breached by Linux, Sun’s CEO wrote a very nicely worded thing about it on his blog: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/date/20070521

I finally had some time to sift through the thousands of unread entries in my RSS reader today, and came across some fairly interesting stuff. One of the things that really put me in an apprehensive mood was a post by Joi Ito (which in turn was posted by several other people) about 3 weeks ago, which can be found here. The post contains an image of a recently published book with the text (in Japanese) “Oi Nigger! Don’t be touching a Japanese girl’s ass!”, which was apparently about “foreigners committing crimes” in Japan. In fact, from what I can tell (I haven’t read the book or seen anything from it myself, except that one screen), the book is talking about the problem of foreigners committing crimes in Japan, with images and such.

The thing got a huge amount of attention, and the author of the book made a response to the international audience in Japan Today, here.

I’m not sure what to think of this all. I knew racism existed in Japan (against everyone not Japanese), and I do not have any illusions (like so many other people who are planning on moving there) on ever being seen as “Japanese”. No, I would rather be seen as “Kalle”, and I would rather see people as who they are as individuals, and to hell with belonging and becoming.

But this is just… wow. It smells and looks and feels like the racism of half a century ago. Where am I headed again? And why? I hate having to ask myself those questions when I’ve been set on this plan for over a year already.

My mother and I decided that the free “movie” tickets we received those months ago should not go to waste — you know the ones that require Windows? Anyway, since I do have a lap top with Windows preinstalled on it (I would rather assfuck a snail than pay money for Windows, pardon the french) we figured we might as well hook it up to my monitor/speakers and watch some movies.

So she came over and, cunningly, she brought her knitting… stuff, with her. For various reasons, the rest of this post is in bullet form. Enjoy!

1. I plug my wireless thing, my monitor and my speakers into my lap top and boot up. The wireless keyboard does not work. I use the laptop keyboard “for now”.
2. I give up on the “for now” concept, pull the wireless thingie, plug in my wired keyboard and mouse. Nothing’s happening. It died? I end up doing the “hold-it-fer-five-secs-m8″ trick to force a reboot. My mother is getting the hint, and pulls out her knitting stuff and goes at it. I admire her foresightfulness.
3. Computer finally gets back up, but that reboot took 10 minutes, what the fuck? Anyway, the wired keyboard + mouse work now at least, imagine that. I log in and start up Firefox and head over to sf-anytime.com.
4. *meep* They require Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or above. I knew that’d happen. I happen to have IE 7 installed. I try to start it up…
5. And then I try to start it up again.. thinking maybe Windows didn’t actually realize that when I clicked on that icon I wanted it to start — if I click it again, maybe it will get the hint.
6. And then I try to start it up again, thinking that it might, just might, have missed the fact twice.
7. Reboot. Or, attempt to. Everything’s frozen. 5-second-killer-c-c-c-combo!
8. Back inside, I decide to do a Windows Update. Ha! Thought I! Windows Update uses IE which, currently, does not work very mightily.
9. I cunningly decide to open Firefox, head to sf-anytime.com, and tada! There’s the “if you want to upgrade to IE, click here” link. Yeah, I want to upgrade to IE. Upgrade. Yes. Let’s upgrade ourselves, because upgrading ourselves to IE is such an upgrade. Anyway, I download IE via the functional browser, Firefox, and start up the installer.
10. It wants to make sure I have a valid version of Windows, for my sake, so that I may buy a legal version in case I was handed a dirty one. So thoughtful of them! Now it wants to reboot.
11. Okay, we’ve rebooted. That took 10 minutes. I log back in and it wants to delete the old version of IE. Fair enough, I prefer a clean upgrade. Ha.. haha. It takes 10 minutes to remove the old version. (What on earth? I’m beginning to suspect the hardware is fried on this thing, except that it works perfectly fine in linux, and while, as we all know, linux is superior in every single way, shape and form, it does not have the ability to magically use broken hardware.) It wants to reboot. Wow, this reminds me of when I was a little ignorant and exceptionally dumb boy who used Windows .. what was it? 95? I think so. Anyway, I quickly grew up. Moving along.
12. We’ve rebooted again. It wants to install IE now. Yay! Finally we’re agreeing about something. Well, sort of anyway. It seems stuck.
13. We’re waiting for it to unstick itself. I am beginning to recall my Windows l33t-ness which is a Zen-monk’s patience incarnate. Yes sir. Meanwhile, I’m explaining to my mother whose wide-eyed, incredulous stare has been glued to the monitor (all the while knitting away on whatever it is she’s knitting) for all this time that in Windows, it controls you, and you obey it. (She’s been using linux since she started using computers some 3-4 years ago. Exclusively. Windows scares her shitless, and believe me, it scares me shitless too.)
14. I decide to make some coffee while we wait. Suddenly my mother yells excitedly, “It’s finished! I think.” I look at it and, believe it or not, but the little shit rebooted! It didn’t even ask! What the hell? I log back in, and it starts doing some weird “Setting IE up, customizing your computer, optimizing the hyper drive”, whatever. I ignore it and drink my coffee. Afterwards, I am faced with a dialog telling me it wants to upgrade Windows. No, it needs to do so. Okay then, I let it.
15. 30 minutes later it’s done. We sat down to watch the movie at ~8 pm and it is now 10.30 pm. Will we finally get to see that movie? That remains to be seen.
16. I load up IE (it works this time) and head over to sf-anytime.com. Or I try. It seems Internet is down. Huh. I open up Firefox and go to google. It works in a flash. Hm. I close IE, reopen it, do not hit ESC to stop it from loading “blabla.msn.com” this time. Wait it out. It loads up fine. Try sf-anytime.com again, and this time it works. The wonders of Microsoft.
17. After installing a DRM thing (a little piece of my soul died when I clicked ‘install’), we finally got in, to see exciting titles such as …
18. … movies that were hip 20 years ago. That, and a few obscure titles from 2004. Is this a joke? The selection is pretty large, I give you that, but there’s literally nothing on there worth watching. My mother finally points out a movie (Zozo by Josef Fares) that she said I’d like, so we watch that one (super-condensed review: started out great, ended suckily). Or we try! Ha. Ha. Ha.
19. Or as Santa would put it - ho. Ho. Ho.
20. We are told that some DRM error occured. For some magical reason (I think it’s my ancient Windows intuition pinging me from someplace), I decide to upgrade Windows Media Player. I do so. I try again.
21. It works.
22. Except it’s now 11 pm.

I occasionally reflect upon my hatred towards Microsoft Windows. I mean, people do use it, and there has to be a reason. Sometimes, a friend of mine decides to switch over to linux, saying they’ve “had enough!”, and I help them out. But inevitably, they will come to a point where they think “Dude, this is just too much work. I’m thinking of installing Windows again,” and I always tell them the same thing: “Yeah, do so. You should use what feels best for you.” One thing is abundantly clear, however, and that is that I personally cannot use Windows. It’s following a philosophy that I can understand, but never agree with. The philosophy of “handling stuff for me”. This philosophy works great for an absolute beginner, but not so great for a person with a tiny bit of adventurism in them. Try to “play around” with Windows and you will kill Windows. And I’m completely ignoring things such as virii and worms and trojan horses and whatever have you. The way I see it, those will come to linux as well, when linux has a big enough player base. What I do believe though, is that it will take an idiot to get a virii in linux, and it will be more about fooling people than it will be about brute-forcing one’s way into another person’s operating system, as is the case with Windows.

Security holes exist in both places, and I remember one time when some Windows advocate said in response to an article, “Where are the linux people now?” Well, my answer to that question is, “We’re somewhere else, not giving a shit,” because the blown-up “security holes” mentioned in that article were for specific pieces of software. It’s a much bigger deal when a security hole applies to every single computer running a particular operating system (i.e. a kernel flaw), and you will find very few of those in linux. Unpatched, that is.

In any case, there you have it, my Windows experience for the year. And believe me, I am not looking forward to a second one. Those movie tickets I got (I have like 6 of them) will remain unused. If you find something at sf-anytime.com that you’d like to see, let me know, and I’ll get you a code, but you better hurry — they expire on new years, GMT+1.

I read a FAQ earlier about intellectual property (by the pro-IP lads), in which a question was exactly similar to this:

“Q: Is it legal to say the word ‘foo’ while chopping another human being to little pieces with an axe?”

“A: No, it absolutely isn’t!”

I mean… I can say that anything and everything is illegal if I word it right and quote the wording just so.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/19/us_space_policy/

Space = the 51st state? Lovely. Want some fries with that megalomania, Mr. President?

When I signed up for my new ISP, I received 3 movie tickets as a thanks. That’s pretty nice. However, the movie tickets turned out to be movie tickets for “viewing movies online.” I.e. a movie industry move to tackle those pesky downloaders.

Unfortunately I don’t have Windows.

Unfortunately for them.

If they expect a consumer to support their business (i.e. not download stuff from the ‘net) and purchase their products, they had better try harder than this. The movie site which provides the movies (sf-anytime.com) dismisses its linux users indifferently, saying DRM technology is unsupported on the platform and thus, the linux users can go fuck themselves. Using their hard earned movie tickets, perhaps. The same, by the way, goes for the Mac users. Yessir, you wanna be legal and watch movies from home, you better be using Microsoft Windows. “With all the doubts of crystal clear,” as Peter Murphy puts it.
So I contacted my ISP, saying I would like reimbursement for the 3 tickets I got. They did reimburse me, a whooping $2 US or similar. (Though in their defense, those tickets are still valid — I just have to go to some funny friend who’s dumb enough to run Windows.) Gotta give it to them, though. I definitely didn’t expect them to give me anything at all.

Conclusively, the message from the Music and Movie Industry is clear. Download stuff online, as you have no other option. “Buy the DVD,” you say? Well, sure, but that, too is borderline illegal. The encryption algorithm for DVD playback has already visited court on one occasion, and who knows when that whale resurfaces. “Buy Windows,” you say, and I shall steeple my fingers and snicker.

Update (2006-08-20): I emailed my ISP telling them that my mother is in the exact same situation, and she, too, got the $2. Cute. (But to be honest, it’s actually not $2. It’s $1.39 according to the current exc. rates.)

- “More than a decade of hard lobbying by two powerful trade groups, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has convinced U.S. lawmakers and law enforcement officials that it’s worth using America’s muscle to protect movie and music interests abroad. Now, lawmakers are calling the trade groups, asking what else Congress and the government can do for the entertainment industry.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/14/AR2006061402071.html

Allow me to repeat that. It is worth using America’s muscle to protect movie and music interests abroad.

Allow me to clarify that. By “America’s muscle”, we cannot presume anything other than “American military power”, at best used as a threat, and at worst used to murder people. Taking lives over movies and music.

How hilarious is that? It’s quite hilarious, lemme tell ya.

Right up until they start dropping nukes over my head. After all, I committed the mortal sin of being in the same country as some guy who has an unhealthy obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, 24, or whatever else there is (or was) the so called entertainment industry spews out these days. (Speaking of that, this gives a kind of Romanesque, Gladiatorish meaning to the word entertainment, doesn’t it?)
I’ve kind of felt that this whole thing has been steadily ascending toward war. War, over movies. What’s left of us in the future won’t know whether to laugh or cry when they look at the dumb shit being produced today and compare it to the devastation that will befall us over that same, dumb, mass-produced shit.

Richard is mad. Richard is very, very mad. Why? Let’s get to why in a moment.

Richard owns a store chain with shops worldwide. It’s an immensely popular store because Richard has managed to obtain a worldwide monopoly on the distribution of bananas — don’t ask the narrator how, or why, Richard managed such a feat, but he did, and here he is — mad, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.

Richard’s many many stores contain boxes and boxes of bananas of various flavor and sorts, for Richard indeed has the monopoly to distribute all kinds — African bananas, Kenyan bananas, American bananas, Swedish bananas, big bananas, small bananas, and so on.

Richard’s customers were at first satisfied with his service. The bananas were out in clear sight and the customers could pick and choose the best and the fresh. However, this lead to a very annoying issue, at least in Richard’s eyes…

The rotten fruit remained. The bad fruit remained. Even the bananas with such a simple flaw as a little fur on the edge remained. For many a day, Richard pondered how to counter this problem, and how to manage to sell the rotten fruit also, for, in his eyes, the millions he raked in on the fresh fruit nigh on outweighed the losses he made for the rotten fruit he had to throw away!

And one day it came to him — and the very next day as customers trickled in to get their bananas, they were met with quite an extraordinary surprise…

The bananas were boxed! Each bunch was in a separate, non-transparent, plastic-wrapped box labeled with its origin and flavor. Now customers suddenly couldn’t pick and choose between the individual fruits anymore. They had to go for the flavor and origin that they thought might suit their tastes and then hope for the best.

Some customers came home with a box filled with only 3 or 4 good bananas and the rest simply went in the trash. Some came home with a single banana that was fresh and all the others bad. Some even came home with boxes filled with rotting, decaying fruit. Needless to say, customers were upset, but what could they do? They had the choice of no bananas, or Richard’s bananas, and, banana-loving folks as they were, they swallowed their pride and went on with it.

Years passed, and Richard raked in the big bucks. More shops opened all over the place, and the banana prices soared. Customers with all-bad boxes were given the option of returning their boxes — presuming they hadn’t removed the protective plastic covering the box that is, and while some of the more daring customers accusingly pointed out that there is no way to check the state of the bananas without opening the box, and no way to open the box without removing the protective plastic wrapping, most of them seemed content with this obvious robbery. The bananas weren’t that expensive, anyway, and they could always try again tomorrow and hope for a better, fresher result that time.

However, a most unpleasant circumstance had developed. All over the world, illegal groups had started buying bananas, planting the seeds and producing their own bananas. And worst of all, they gave bananas away for free, to anyone who wanted one! Not only were they planting banana trees illegally, but they were planting banana trees of every single kind, and all of these banana trees were directly derivative of Richard’s own harvest. Since Richard owns a monopoly on bananas, this thus was a most illegal endeavour; thievery in fact, and thus the reason for his anger.
These banana-pirates producing their own bananas off of his are causing his winnings to drop substantially. Of course they are! If people can get bananas for free, why would they buy them? The only thing keeping Richard afloat is the fact most people don’t know where to go to get illegal bananas, but Richard knows it’s only a matter of time before his industry collapses in upon itself and falls apart.

But he, being the fighter he is (I mean, he managed to get a monopoly on bananas, for crying out loud; you bet he’s a fighter for pulling such a feat off — sort of like patenting “water”), won’t give up without a fight. So he calls to the aid of the governments of the individual countries, preaching to them, pouring his entire soul into charismatic speeches about property rights; and the governments, teary-eyed, set it upon themselves personally to invest some of their police force’s time into finding these banana pirates, “and to hell with the unsolved murder cases!” one of the prominent ministers exclaim with unabashed excitement, his enthusiasm not at all colored by the shiny bills that found their way into his pocket somehow.

So a few years pass, but Richard realizes that the illegal banana business has only increased in intensity. The police investigations are for the most part fruitless (pardon the pun), as the illegal banana pirates are cunning about covering their tracks. So Richard decides it’s time for the bigger tools. He calls again upon the governments of the countries of the world, preaching throughout the night about the need for surveillance and the need to ensure that citizens behave themselves — and to ensure that no illegal bananas plantations take place, as an afterthought.

The government leaders, mightily impressed with this for-humanity, for-the-world exclamation, realize that Richard’s foremost wish is the good of mankind, and solemnly they agree. And to hell with integrity.

This story is obviously not real, but it’s reflecting a very real situation that is occuring in the world right now. It is hopefully a humorous story that will make you think about what is going on, especially with the Record Industry of America, persecuting the very fans whom are the foundation of the industry they are attempting to protect.

How many times haven’t you bought a movie or a music album which turned out to be incomprehensibly, unthinkably, unbelievably bad? To the point where you, for the remainder of your life, will even be embarrassed about the fact you made the purchase in the first place? The rampant, illegal pirating of movies and music out there began for a reason — and it’s not exclusively “people are cheap thieves”. I may be wrong, but I am of the firm belief that humans prefer to not break the law. They prefer to be law abiding citizens, paying for their cartons of milk and their loaves of bread, paying their taxes and being in general on the light side. But despite this, more people download stuff illegally than not. And while this occurs, many artists, from whom the products being stolen originated, are making statements about what THEY think, which seems to differ greatly from what the record label companies think.

My take on things is that there are a lot of things wrong with the music and movie industries right now, and these wrongs have a truckload of side effects. One of these side effects is the intensity of illegal sharing of music and movie products.

Update: Coincidentally, the next post in his blog contains a quote from a person named Richard. Judging by the content, it should be clear that it is not the same person in any way, shape or form.

Interesting article (found at boingboing). It does make you wonder, though. Personally, I’m doing surprisingly little piracy compared to most of my friends, and their friends, and theirs, and so on. This has more to do with me using linux since a decade ago than anything else. I do wonder though. Will the entertainment industry and the common man meet at some point, and find a common ground where both benefit from the resolution, where neither party feels compelled to become a criminal. Noone likes being a criminal. But almost everyone is. I’d like to see comments on this blog from anyone reading it, who has never ever committed software piracy in their lives.

What?

Contributor License Agreements — or CLA’s — are a fairly new phenomenon in the Open Source world. IANAL, but I am going to make an attempt to explain what a CLA is, and why it is necessary today, where it previously was not.

The most commonly used CLA is that of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), and the purpose appears right at the top of the agreement:

“In order to clarify the intellectual property license granted with Contributions from any person or entity, the Foundation must have a Contributor License Agreement (”CLA”) on file that has been signed by each Contributor, indicating agreement to the license terms below.”

The agreement continues to in great detail explain that the person signing the document must both be the author (or hold rights or permission by the author), and be the copyright owner of the contributions they are planning on making to the project in question. It is clarified that the rights to use the contributions will always and forever remain with the contributor, and that the CLA simply extends this right to the project as well.

In other words, if you submit stolen code, you are breaking the CLA, but if you refrain from such follery, nothing’s changed. You’re still the copyright owner of your submissions, but you grant the other party these rights as well. Simple enough.

In the past, this has been a presumed agreement between the involved parties. If I help you out and patch up your code to make it run better, or submit documentation that makes your code more useful, or whatever, you and I both presume that I didn’t steal the code from someplace and handed it to you in evil. This presumption is no longer enough, for good or worse.

Why?

CLA’s became necessary as a direct effect of the SCO vs. Linux court case(s), which, summarized, are about: “SCO claims a bunch of contributors to the Linux source code stole that code without permission from SCO, and that thus, SCO is now the owner of Linux and may at their whim request that all users of Linux pay a royalty fee.” Pretty scary, huh? Be that as it may, the court negotiations are as of this writing ongoing, but things are looking bad for SCO (for what it’s worth).

But regardless, SCO’s claim was a bucket of cold water in the face of the many maintainers of and contributors to various Open Source projects out there, as a legal matter was suddenly making things a tad more complicated. What if someone helps you out and gives you a bunch of really good, professional code, and what if that code is ripped out of some commercial, copyrighted very-much-not-open-sourced product somewhere? How would you know? How could you possibly know?

A quick Google search on “contributor license agreement” shows 1.6 million hits. Obviously, a great deal of Open Source maintainers and organizations do care, and CLA’s are obviously the answer to this legal matter.

In the end, I think the majority of those who’ve followed the SCO vs Linux court case agree that it is exclusively a matter of halting the progress of the rapidly evolving Open Source world. Microsoft, the father of FUD, assuredly caught onto the dick-grip SCO had on Linux in particular and Open Source in general, and decided to sponsor SCO by handing $12 million dollars to SCO, “to purchase UNIX-type licenses so Microsoft customers can run UNIX-type applications” (this was in the year of 2005, and was reported by Business Week). In the end, though, did SCO win? Have they hampered the development of Open Source software?

In my uneducated opinion, yeah. They have won. They have won a fraction of what they aimed for, but yes, I believe SCO got if not the whole cake, they got a taste of it. But I also believe that what they won, the Open Source movement will ultimately benefit from. Ultimately. Eventually.

From personal experience, I know what a CLA can do to the quantity of contributors. A lot of people feel that they want to help a project out, but when they’re handed a big, scary paper which may be interpreted as giving up the rights to something you give away for free, they hesitate. And rightly so. Everyone should hesitate when prompted to sign legally binding documents; everyone should read the fine print and ensure they know what they’re getting into. But this, naturally, proffers a wholly different stage than the good old “wanna help out? just chuck yer code at me and I’ll eyeball it and if it looks good I’ll plop it into the svn tree, m8″ type of development.

In the long run, though, Linux and Open Source have been children until now, and it’s time to grow up and face the big crowd, and the big crowd usually wields lawyers like children wield wooden swords, and the difference is that more than a few bruises and tears are at stake. That SCO will ultimately lose to Linux I have no doubts of. And in a way, I am grateful that the world will get to see Linux prevail in court over the devil, and I believe companies worldwide will see this as a trigger to examine Open Source alternatives closer, au contraire to the belief that companies will shy away from it, due to its “run-ins with the law.”