Category Archives: open source

adobe, flash, google, microsoft, open source, software development, Sun, web authoring

Google, Adobe, Mozilla: Open source war of words is all about owning the platform

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The route to dizzying riches in this industry is to own the platform. Look no further than Microsoft, which not only sells the operating system, but also dominates the applications which run on it, from Microsoft Office on the desktop, to server products like Exchange and SQL Server, and network management software like System Center. Anyone can build applications for Windows, and plenty of third-parties have done so successfully using its free SDK (Software Development Kit), but somehow it is Microsoft that profits most.

Microsoft is still doing its thing, but attention is turning to the next generation of Internet-based computing. I touched a nerve when I asked Google’s Dion Almaer about Adobe Flash: it’s not open enough for Google, he told me. I put this to Adobe’s Dave McAllister, director of standards and open source, who assured me that Flash is all-but open, excepting (ahem) the source code to the runtime. Then he surprised me (considering he is an open source guy) by accusing Mozilla of bad faith over Tamarin, the source code to its ActionScript 3 runtime and just-in-time compiler, and remarking that Sun’s efforts to open source Java had mainly helped its competitors. I wrote this up for the Reg.

The problem is that these companies want the best of both worlds: the widespread adoption and community contributions that open source can generate, but the control and profit that comes from owning the platform.

If you can’t own the platform, the next best thing is that nobody owns the platform, which is why IBM worked to hard to get Sun to open source Java, and deliberately muddied the waters by sponsoring the Eclipse tools platform and alternative Java runtimes and GUI libraries.

Why is Google wary of Flash? Simply, because it is risky to build your own application platform on a runtime that belongs to another company. It is not enough for Adobe to say it will never charge for the runtime, any more than it is enough for Microsoft to give away the Windows SDK. Google is watching Adobe, and seeing how it is building online applications like Buzzword which competes with its own Google Docs. Companies with their own platform ambitions (Apple also comes to mind) are more likely to be averse to Flash. Oh, and look who else is building its own alternative to Flash? Yes, Microsoft with Silverlight.

Like Google, Mozilla is trying to build a browser platform that has less need of proprietary plug-ins like Flash. Although I was surprised that Adobe’s McAllister said Mozilla was using its open source contributions in the wrong kind of way, seemingly missing the whole point of open source, I was not surprised to find tensions. I quizzed Mozilla’s John Resig on this exact subject one year ago, when I wrote that Adobe and Mozilla were on course for collision.

As McAllister points out, open source also has risks, particularly the danger of fragmentation and multiple incompatible versions. Maybe Flash is better as closed-source. Still, let’s not pretend it is really all-but open source. The real issue is who owns and controls the platform, and in this case it is definitely Adobe.

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google, microsoft, open source, xml

More OOXML than ODF on the Internet, according to Google

In May 2007, IBM’s Rob Weir made a point of how few of Microsoft’s Office Open XML documents were available on the Internet. Here are his figures from back then:

odt 85,200
ods 20,700
odp 43,400
Total ODF 149,300

docx 471
xlsx 63
pptx 69
Total OOXML 603

The ODF formats are those used by Open Office, Star Office, and Lotus Symphony. Now that Office 2007 has been out for a while, I thought it would be interesting to repeat his test, using the same methodology (as I understand it), a Google filetype search. I added the macro variants to the list as this seems fair, though they don’t affect the total much:

odt    82,000
ods    16,600
odp    26,100
Total ODF 124,700

docx    87,400
docm    1,440
xlsx    14,900
xlsm    738
pptx    31,400
pptm    1,300
Total OOXML 137,178

Let me say at once, I’m not sure this is significant. For one thing, I’m suspicious of Google’s arithmetic (in all search totals, not just these). For another, I reckon it is a mistake to put either format on the public Web: PDF, RTF, or even Microsoft’s thoroughly well-supported binary formats are more fit for purpose.

Even so, it is quite a turnaround. What is particularly odd is that the ODF figures appear to have declined. Again, it could just be that Google changed its way of estimating the totals.

Incidentally, I doubt that this has anything to do with ISO standardization, especially considering that the current OOXML implementation in Office 2007 does not conform. It has everything to do with the popularity of Microsoft Office and its default settings for saving documents.

microsoft, open source, software development

Developers: will you or have you signed for ribbon rights?

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This is the dialog you see when installing Delphi 2009 or C++ Builder 2009:

There’s a similar restriction on use of the ribbon controls in the latest MFC.

The license information page is here. The license itself has two provisions that you might care about. First, you agree not to use the Ribbon, also known as the Fluent UI, in “Excluded products”:

“Excluded Products” are software products or components, or web-based or hosted services that perform primarily the same general functions as the Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access software applications, and that are created or marketed as a replacement for any or all of those Microsoft applications.

OpenOffice.org – that’s you.

The second provision is more troublesome (unless you are OpenOffice or Google Apps). You have to comply with the Design Guidelines:

Your Licensed UI must comply with the Design Guidelines. If Microsoft notifies you that the Design Guidelines have been updated or that you are not complying with the Design Guidelines, you will make the necessary changes to comply as soon as you reasonably can, but no later than your next product release that is 6 months or more from the date you receive notice.

So what are the Design Guidelines? Good question. This is where it gets silly. In order to see the Design Guidelines, you have to agree the “2007 Microsoft Office Fluent User Interface Design Guidelines Evaluation License Agreement”, which among other things is a non-disclosure agreement. Furthermore, you have to destroy them within 30 days:

3. RESTRICTIONS. The Design Guidelines are for reference only and may not be used in development. You agree that you will destroy the Design Guidelines within thirty (30) days after you first acquire them or upon termination, whichever is earlier.

I am guessing here, but I hope and suppose that if you agree the main license you no longer have to destroy the guidelines to which you are meant to be conforming. It’s not obvious that this is the case, since the main agreement refers back to the UI licensing page, and the only way I can see to get the design guidelines is by agreeing the evaluation license which requires you to destroy them.

I reckon Microsoft’s lawyers are getting carried away.

Lunacy aside, I’d presume that the guidelines are detailed and that conforming could involve considerable work. It is also unclear to me what would happen in the real world if Microsoft issued an edict requiring you to update your application to its latest version with 3D revolving icons, for example. If you are an external developer and your customer does not want to pay, what then? I suppose in theory you should insure against it, or sneak in a clause to your development contract that says the customer pays for extra work imposed by Microsoft in the event that it exercises its rights.

Pragmatically I guess it is unlikely to happen. Still, I don’t like unreasonable agreements. In any case, are we sure that if you did not agree the license, but still went ahead and used the Ribbon UI, that Microsoft could successfully pursue you? Call it a toolbar, and it’s been commonplace in software for years.

apple, google, internet, microsoft, open source, software, software development, web authoring

The new Google Chrome browser: a bad day for Firefox

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The Firefox angle is what puzzles me about Google’s announcement that it is is launching a new open source browser. We should get to try it tomorrow; perhaps we’ll see that Google is successfully reinventing the browser. In particular, this is a part of what is sometimes dubbed the Google OS: the client for cloud applications running on Google’s servers:

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better.

Google is using some proven technology in the form of the Webkit rendering component (as used in Apple’s Safari). I imagine it can do a decent job. But why? From Google’s perspective, the browser market was shaping up nicely already. Microsoft’s IE has a still large but declining market share; Mozilla Firefox is growing, has a vibrant community, and relies on Google for the bulk of its income in return for making it  the default search engine – a deal which has just been extended for three years.

Now Google appears to be going head-to-head against Firefox. It won’t necessarily succeed; Firefox has lots of momentum and will be hard to shift. Equally, I doubt that Microsoft’s market share will decline significantly faster against a Google browser than it would anyway against Firefox.

The risk is that this will split the open source community.

As for Firefox, this can only be bad news. It has the embarrassment of relying on a major competitor for its income, and the knowledge that it is driving traffic to a company that will push users to switch to an alternative.

Maybe Google Chrome is so good that it will all make sense when we get to try it. For sure, it is an intriguing development for web applications and I’m looking forward to seeing how well Google can substantiate its claims that it is “much better” for the job of running them.

microsoft, open source, software, Sun

Office 2007 ODF support: my guess is it will be good

More details are emerging about the ODF converter which will be in Office 2007 SP2, set for release next year. Doug Mahugh’s post outlines the architecture and explains how the converter will deal with compatibility issues.

I want to highlight the section that describes how the converter is implemented:

Word, Excel and PowerPoint have a Model-View-Controller design. The in-memory representation of the document, or Model, is designed to facilitate document revision and display functions and includes concepts which are never saved to the file, such as the insertion point and the selection.

The persistence code converts this in-memory representation to and from some sort of the disk file based representation. Office 2007 already had code to support a number of angle-brackety persistence formats including HTML and OOXML. When we built in support for ODF, we added it in that area of our code.

That suggests deep integration, and a converter that has good chances of working smoothly and quickly – unlike the clunky open source translator which Microsoft sponsored, which is based on XSLT.

Users also have the option of Sun’s plug-in, which is based on Open Office code.

It seems that Microsoft is aiming to make Office 2007 a good ODF citizen. Will that impede adoption of Microsoft’s own OOXML format? Well, I guess OOXML will still be the default, and will have the best support for Office-specific features. Another thing to bear in mind is that OOXML was designed with Office specifically in mind. Potentially troublesome creatures like very large Excel spreadsheets may well perform best with OOXML. Another point is that Microsoft’s server products, where they exploit XML documents, are likely to work best with OOXML. In other words, there are likely to be advantages in OOXML within enterprises that use Microsoft’s platform.

Still, strong support for ODF by default in Office will be a significant boost for the OASIS format. Microsoft is protecting its very profitable Office sales against the risk of being dropped for lack of ODF compatibility.

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open source, software, software development

It’s not just free software that has poor usability

Jack Schofield at The Guardian links to Matthew Paul Thomas’ post on Why Free Software has poor usability.

For most of his points you could drop the free from his title.

Thomas makes the point about most programmers not being good designers:

Some programmers are also great designers, but most aren’t. Programming and human interface design are separate skills, and people good at both are rare. So it’s important for software to have dedicated designers.

True; but software can be over-designed too – I guess this happens more in the commercial world. Sometimes usability is sacrificed for the sake of good looks.

Mega-budgets don’t always help. How did Office 2007 get through its usability testing, when there is no indication that you have to click on the “Office button” to access essential features like New, Save As and Print? What about Outlook 2007, with one of the world’s most obscure and difficult UIs? Opening another user’s mailbox – how many clicks is that, and how would you possibly find it without being told?

Good code is hard; good design is harder.

linux, open source

Fixing wi-fi on Asus Eee PC 901 with Linux

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I mentioned my annoyance that wi-fi with WPA encryption did not work on the Asus 901 Eee PC with Linux which I am reviewing. I later found that even a WEP connection, while it worked a bit, tended to drop out after few minutes. Worse still, the Asus repositories are messed up so getting updates is tricky.

I’ve managed to fix it. For the record, here’s what I did; though I can’t promise it will work for you; try it at your own risk. I should think there will be an easier way to install an updated driver soon.

One of the irritations about the repository problem is that attempted updates fill up your /dev/sda1. I wanted as much space as possible (without removing the recovery partition) so I reset the system with F9 on boot. Then I went into /etc/apt/sources.list and removed the default repositories, replacing them with these two:

deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/upkg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/eeepcrepos/ p701 main

(This is probably not a good arrangement long-term; but having the Asus repositories enabled right now makes it hard to install anything).

Then I did:

apt-get update

apt-get install build-essential

I also installed ksmserver and kicker to get access to the full desktop; but this wasn’t needed to get wi-fi working.

Next, I downloaded the latest driver source for the 901’s Ralink wi-fi card:

http://www.ralinktech.com.tw/data/drivers/2008_0708_RT2860_Linux_STA_v1.7.0.0.tar.bz2 (Update: don’t use this code – see Update 3 below).

Extracted it; then edited /os/linux/config.mk and changed:

HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y

HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y – but see update 2 and update 3 below for the problems this caused.

I also removed –DDBG from WFLAGS

WFLAGS += –DCONFIG_STA_SUPPORT

In order to compile you need the kernel source. I adapted the instructions here. In essence, download the source from http://dlsvr01.asus.com/pub/ASUS/EeePC/701/Linux_Kernel_071127.rar, extract, install the deb, unpack the source in /usr/src, delete the .bz2 to save space, build the kernel with:

make oldconfig

make

(don’t actually install it), then create the following symbolic link:

ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.21.4-eeepc /lib/modules/2.6.21.4-eeepc/build

Now I was able to compile and install the ralink driver by switching to the RT2860 directory and typing:

make

make install

Wi-fi now worked with WPA; at least, it did on my second attempt after disabling native WPA supplicant support. I’ve also found it perfectly stable so far – much better.

Active wi-fi connection with WPA; a few numbers changed to reassure the paranoid

I’m happy now, but… what is Asus thinking?

I doubt the Eee brand would have ever taken off, except that the first 7xx releases made excellent use of Linux and open source applications to win people over; you did not even need to know that it was Linux.

Now we get this; the support for the 901 is dire; updates don’t work, the wi-fi doesn’t work properly, and the only fix I’ve found is a hack. Wi-fi is critical for a gadget like this, which is not much use without an Internet connection.

Together with short supply of the Linux version, this does suggest that Asus is keen to favour the Windows XP variant.

Update: I’ve made the binary (rt2860sta.ko) available for download here. Download includes RT2860STA.dat which goes in /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA. I guess we need an install script; I’ll have a go when I get a moment.

Update 2: Unfortunately I’m not quite there yet. If I compile with HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y then WEP works but WPA does not. If I compile with HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=n then WPA works but (I now discover) WEP does not. Weird. I’m going to seek advice. If anyone wants the binary that works great with WEP but not WPA, let me know.

Update 3: Thanks to Ralink tech support I now have a fully working driver. I’ve updated the download above. The new code defines EEEPC_SPECIAL_SETTING and has some edits in common/mlme.c. It now works OK with HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y. Interesting point: the code is dated 15th July; which suggests that the problem was both known and fixed 2 and half weeks ago; it’s a shame nobody shared this with the community.

Update 4: I suggest you delete the old copy of rt2860sta.ko in /lib/modules/2.6.21.4-eeepc/rt2860 (if it exists).

PS: I’ve posted instructions for the binary install, with download links, here.

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apple, internet, linux, microsoft, open source, software, software development, ubuntu, windows

What’s new in Subversion 1.5

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The team behind the open source SCM (Software Configuration Management) tool Subversion released version 1.50 last month. Karl Fogel, president of the Subversion Corporation, says:

Measuring by new features alone, Subversion 1.5 is our biggest release since version 1.0 became available in February 2004.

I am a contented Subversion user, so took a look at the changes. Top of the list is “merge tracking”, though it is described as “foundational” which means that although the basic support is there, there is performance and feature work which remains to be done. From the user’s perspective, the difference is that branching and merging is just easier than before, as explained by Ben Sussman:

Notice how I never had to type a single revision number in my example: Subversion 1.5 knows when the branch was created, which changes need to be synced from branch to trunk, and which changes need to be merged back into the trunk when I’m done. It’s all magic now. This is how it should have been in the first place.

Other changes include sparse checkouts (when you only want to grab a small part of a repository), and changelists, a client feature which lets you tag a set of files under a changelist name and work on them as a group. There are also improvements aimed at making Subversion better suited to large-scale deployments using multiple servers. Subversion is still a centralized rather than a distributed SCM system, but 1.5 is better suited for use in a distributed manner. No doubt the Subversion team is aware of the increasing interest in Git, a distributed system. There are also numerous bug-fixes and performance tweaks. The changes are described here.

I want to move to Subversion 1.5 but it is not that easy. Compatibility is good, in that older clients work with 1.5 servers and vice versa, the main proviso being that you cannot mix several versions of the Subversion client with the same working copy. That is not likely to be a problem for most users.

The difficulty I encountered is that mainstream Linux distributions still have older versions of Subversion in their stable repositories. Ubuntu, for example, has version 1.4.4. My most-used Subversion repositories are on a Debian server, which also has an old version. I don’t want to switch the server to sid, Debian’s development distribution, and mixing packages is often problematic. I could do a manual installation I guess; but instead I will be patient.

I did install 1.50 on Windows, for an intranet repository. I used the Collabnet download. All I needed to do was to inform the installer of the location of my existing repository, and then copy a few lines from the old Apache 2.0 configuration file to the new Apache 2.2 configuration file. Everything works fine. I also updated TortoiseSVN on the Windows clients.

One of the advantages of Subversion (or any SCM) repositories over synched folders like those in Microsoft’s Live Mesh or Apple’s MobileMe (as I understand it) is that you get version history. I regard this as a key feature. The problem with synchronization is that you might overwrite a good copy with a bad one. It is easy to do; it might be caused by user error, or a bug in your word processor, or a failing hard drive. Automatic synch (un)helpfully replicates the bad copy all over. Versioning means you can just rollback to the good one.

adobe, open source

Real-world book authoring

Lengthy but worthwhile post on what is it like to write a technical book, from O’Reilly author Baron Schwartz.

Two things that particularly interest me here. One, it is a good account of how much work is involved in writing something worthwhile. Two, the discussion of authoring tools is fascinating: bugs and inadequacies in Open Office and Word.

I have done a couple of quick books; they were low-budget affairs and the process was simpler, but they were still a considerable labour. The first was well received and sold remarkably well. In the second, I misjudged the readership and it bombed. I’d like to do more but I need to block out a large chunk of time, as well as coming up with a winning idea and execution. I’m happy to take a chance on the latter, but finding time is the biggest problem.

For my books I used Pagemaker, and although there were a few annoyances, it never skipped a beat. I’d be quite inclined to use it again, even though it is deprecated in favour of InDesign. Pagemaker’s long document support is excellent. For collaborative authoring though, DocBook might be better.

linux, open source, software, software development, virtualization, windows

Wine is 1.0

Congratulations to the Wine community which has released Wine 1.0:

The Wine team is proud to announce that Wine 1.0 is now available. This is the first stable release of Wine after 15 years of development and beta testing.

Wine is a compatibility layer that enables Windows applications to run on Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like systems.

Although in beta, Wine has been used in numerous commercial applications over the years. Two I can think of: WordPerfect 9 from Corel, and the Kylix IDE from Borland. More accurately, Kylix used Winelib, which uses the Wine API at compile-time rather than at runtime.

Another notable example is Google’s Picasa for Linux.

Despite this landmark, Wine seems less significant now than it did a few years back. For one thing, it is easier to write a cross-platform application. For another, web applications have grown in importance, reducing the number of native applications we need to run. Finally, virtualization is now a better, more compatible route to running Windows apps on Unix in many scenarios.

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