The Null Device

Remember BeOS, the super-nifty object-oriented operating system of the 1990s? Well, BeOS itself may be no more (apparently Palm bought it and then proceeded to not do much with it), but there is now an open-source BeOS-influenced OS named Haiku, which appears reasonably functional. There are images downloadable which you can play with in VMWare Player or similar. There's an article about it here.

(via Engadget) ¶ beos haiku os open-source operating systems retrofuturism [no comments]

Apparently Microsoft have promised to release the full specifications of their legacy binary Office document formats, making them available for direct downloading from their web site without the need to sign any agreements. Not only that, but to develop a reference application for translating them into a neutral format and release it under the BSD license. Cue a million Slashdot penguinheads trying to outdo themselves at saying "Hell has frozen over" in the wittiest way possible.

(via /.) ¶ dead media microsoft microsoft office open-source rights tech [no comments]

Sun has bought MySQL, maker of the popular open-source database system. Which looks like good news to all concerned, as Sun have a good reputation for supporting open source.

(via /.) ¶ business mysql open-source sun tech [no comments]

The source code of the classic urban-planning simulation game, SimCity, has now been released under the GPL. You can find it here. The code is based on the original, UNIX/X11/Tcl/Tk version of SimCity, with a few changes: (a) the game has been renamed to Micropolis (which was its original working title), as "SimCity" is an Electronic Arts trademark for their commercial urban-simulation games, (b) it has been ported to the OLPC XO-1 (the cute green laptop being given to children in developing countries), and (c) everything has been placed in a C++ class and bound to a Python interpreter, making the entire game eminently hackable and extensible in Python. Let a million hacks bloom.

(via alecm, Boing Boing) ¶ open-source python simcity society tech videogames [no comments]

Why is it, you may have asked yourself, that a technological civilisation that can put men on the moon, map the human genome and create the Nintendo Wii and the iPod can't make a standards-compliant web browser that doesn't leak memory like a sieve. Well, there's some good news on the horizon: the developers of Firefox have embarked on a memory leak eradication drive:

Aaron suggested having an "about:memory" page showing a breakdown of Firefox's memory use (bug 392351). When I pointed out the bug to Brendan Eich, he excitedly assigned the bug to himself.

Robert Sayre created a script to load random pages and see whether they cause leaks. The random URLs come from the Yahoo directory (biased toward older, top-level pages), del.icio.us (biased toward newer, geeky pages), and AltaVista (biased toward pornography).

Steve England tested the top 500 web sites, finding two leaks. Later, he tested the top 20 Firefox extensions and found leaks in several of them.

Could I suggest a test of a 10 minute session of scrolling and zooming around in google maps hybrid mode as something guaranteed to to eat over 1GB of memory?

Anyway, good luck to the Mozilla developers. Speaking as one in the habit of leaving lots of windows open in a session, I hope that this will lead to a browser that doesn't chew up all of the computer's resources if used for more than a few hours.

(via /.) ¶ ajax bugs firefox open-source tech web [1 comment]

Last night, I went to the London Open Source Jam, a Linux-themed show-and-tell hosted at the Google offices near Victoria Station.

They had various speakers who came in, bringing in variously interesting Linux-based projects, talking (very) briefly about them and then letting people poke around with them. They had some people from the One Laptop Per Child project, who brought along two prototypes of the US$100 laptops which they are going to build and distribute to children in the developing world. The machines are very well designed (they're full of innovative design features, they're reportedly almost indestructable, and they look desirably good); they're based on Linux and Python, look nothing like the machines used elsewhere, and are designed to encourage tinkering and exploration. They even have a key (labelled with a graphic of a cog) which, when pressed, takes you to the source code for the currently running program so you can hack and modify it. (That didn't seem to be working on the laptop I looked at, though that prototype wasn't working perfectly.)

Someone also brought along a Trolltech Greenphone; that's a new mobile phone, created by Trolltech (the Norwegian company that makes the Qt toolkit (a rather elegant GUI library) and the Qtopia interface for portable devices), and based entirely on open-source(ish) software. It looked much like a regular phone, albeit with some developer features. I saw no evidence of it containing WiFi, though, so it may be lacking in that department.

Sony sent along a representative with a PS3 console, to show that it could boot Linux (and not only from special Sony-approved distributions, as the PS2 could, but from any distribution of your choice). Of course, the catch is that when the PS3 boots an untrusted Linux disc of your own providing, it runs it in a sandbox (under a Xen-style hypervisor), isolating it completely from the nifty graphics chip (so that game developers can't evade Sony's game-licensing fees by distributing full-featured games as bootable Linux live DVDs), and reducing it to a generic computer with a somewhat unusual CPU. They had a demo, which rendered a Mandelbrot set and let you zoom around on it; it was like a faster version of something I saw on a 386 PC in 1989. All in all, I found this demo underwhelming; when asked why anyone would want to run Linux in a sandbox on a PS3 when one could build a PC for less and get access to better graphics capabilities, the Sony rep didn't have a good answer; it was intended, she said, for people who already have a PS3 and, for some reason, are seized with the desire to run Linux on it. Though I suspect that, the fact that doing so doesn't involve breaking locks or using the hardware for anything more than it was designed for (the fact that the PS3 can be a mediocre Linux box is about as exciting as the fact that an iPod can be a mediocre PDA, or a mobile phone can be a mediocre MP3 player), will largely leach any such endeavour of any hack value it may have had.

¶ first-person google linux open-source tech [no comments]

For those looking for the ideal present for the hacker in their lives, Make has an open-source gift guide. This includes all sorts of nifty (in a rather geeky way) things, from a DIY TB-303 clone kit to a software radio transceiver that can handle all kinds of signals to persistence of vision displays for bicycle wheels, and a DIY game console (on which you can play and write 1982-style video games), a Linux-based pocket game console, and not one but two open-source mobile phone platforms, not to mention numerous controller and interface boards to build stuff out of.

(via Make) ¶ hardware open-source tech xmas [no comments]

Sun have announced that Java will be available under the GNU General Public Licence. Presumably because Flash/Python/PHP/.NET were eating their lunch. It remains to be seen whether this will prolong Java's life, or results in some of the nicer bits (such as the class libraries) being salvaged and bolted onto more vibrant platforms.

(via /.) ¶ intellectual property java open-source technology [no comments]

Hot on the heels of the TrollTech Greenphone, a company named FIC is releasing an open-source, Linux-based mobile phone. The OpenMoko won't have WiFi (as the GreenPhone will), but it will have a GPS receiver built in, as well as Bluetooth, USB, a MicroSD slot and a multi-touch touchscreen capable of understanding two-fingered dragging gestures. More importantly, it's not so much a mobile phone (which is to say, a locked-down proprietary appliance) as an openly hackable general-purpose computer with a GSM module and GPS receiver attached. (The radio components are, for regulatory reasons, closed modules; everything else, though, is fair game.) And apparently it will have a Debian-style package management system built in which can download new (or updated) software components on demand. And, also unlike the Greenphone, it will be released to the mass market (they say in January, which could mean sometime in the first half of 2007).

(via /., gizmodo) ¶ gadgets gps linux open-source phone [no comments]

It looks like the Rockbox open-source MP3 player firmware is starting to get noticed. After a few years of hobbyist hackers independently shoehorning it into running on various players, often in spite of the manufacturers, one player manufacturer, SanDisk, is reported to be negotiating officially porting it to their hardware and supporting it. Which could be very good news, especially if they contribute their port back to the project, ensuring that it can keep up to date with developments.

Unfortunately, being the product of a flash memory manufacturer, the SanDisk players are all flash-based, and peak at 6Gb (though do have SD-card slots, so you can add an extra gigabyte or so if needed). Now if someone made a 40-60Gb hard-disk-based player that ran Rockbox by design, I'd be interested.

(via /.) ¶ firmware open-source rockbox software [no comments]

Open-source messaging client Gaim is about to get a raft of new features, bringing it into the 21^st century. Main Gaim developer Sean Egan has been hired by Google, and part of his job is integrating Google Talk (and thus voice functionality) into Gaim; as part of this, the gaim-vv branch will be merged back into Gaim proper, also giving video/webcam support. Other changes in Gaim 2.0, expected in two months' time or so, will include less broken file transfers and a bunch of new IM protocols, one of which will be "Apple's Bonjour" (by which they presumably mean serverless chat with people on a nearby network).

Instant messaging on Linux is about to get somewhat less sucky (though, with any luck, they'll leave out the full-screen Flash spamming capability MSN is getting). And, with any luck, the changes will end up in Gaim-based clients for other platforms, such as Adium for OSX.

¶ gaim open-source software [3 comments]

Everybody Loves Eric Raymond, a web comic for penguinheads, involving Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Eric S. Raymond living in a shared house.

And then there's Buzz Aldrin's Conspiracy Smackdown:

(via bOING bOING, reddragdiva) ¶ buzz aldrin comics conspiracy theories eric raymond geek humour linux open-source [no comments]

The EU Parliament has thrown out a proposed software patent directive, by 648 to 14 (w00t!). The European Commission has said that it would not draw up or submit any new versions of the proposal. Which means that it is stone cold dead, for now at least; though as Cory Doctorow points out, there is too much monopoly rent waiting to be extracted for the pro-patent lobby to not try again.

(via bOING bOING) ¶ copyfight eu open-source patents [2 comments]

I have been thinking about the homebrew-console-games-vs.-manufacturer-DRM issue recently.

New consoles with new capabilities come out, often containing powerful CPUs and graphics chips, and hackers and hobbyists want to have a go at writing code for them and getting them to do things other than consume titles. The manufacturers, of course, design the units so as to prevent unauthorised code running on them, primarily to protect their business model. The video-game console business model typically involves selling the consoles cheaply (often at a loss) and collecting a cut of the price of each game sold. Of course, for this to work, console makers have to strictly control what code will run on their machines, and ensure that they get a cut of every item released for them.

It's a stiflingly regressive reality, though it appears to be stable and is unlikely to go away any time soon. The alternative model (open game machines, sold at above-cost price, with anyone able to develop code for them) has been tried and failed; witness the Tapwave Zodiac PalmOS-based game machine, for example. Customers are more likely to buy cheap consoles and more expensive games for them later, in instalments, than to buy a more expensive console with cheaper software. Of course, this makes game consoles somewhat stagnant platforms (compared to, say, PCs or handhelds), though the game market seems to be able to cope with this well enough for it to be the best current business model for that kind of business.

(This ignores mobile phone J2ME games, which anyone can write and run on any compliant mobile phone without the manufacturer's blessing. Mobile phones are heavily subsidised as well, though they are subsidised by phone companies who make the money back in network usage; besides which, J2ME is a fairly weak gaming platform (for one, the low-power CPUs used in mobile phones often mean sluggish response times for navigating the internal menus, let alone games). Perhaps this will change in future.)

Nonetheless, that does not change the fact that hardware such as the PSP and Nintendo DS is tantalisingly attractive to tinkerers. When it was discovered recently that certain early Japanese PSPs could be made to execute code off a Memory Stick, a hacker community cropped up, with games, demos, utilities and ports of old console emulators popping up like mushrooms after a rain; the more recent firmware has closed off this hole, and anyone running a recent game on an old PSP will find themselves upgraded against their will.

What if, instead of locking out the hacker culture, game companies worked with it, whilst still preserving their business model? Imagine, for example, a device sold by the console manufacturer which costs about the difference between the retail and cost price of a game machine and enables it to run homebrew code. It could be a disc, a hardware dongle, or even a special cable. Unlike homebrew hacks (such as the Nintendo DS passthrough cartridge), it requires no soldering and no fabrication of circuit boards, allowing those who don't have a fetish for that sort of thing to get involved. Perhaps it comes with development tools and documentation (the GNU toolchain would be a start), or even membership of a community web site, where users can share their code. From time to time, publishers could release compilations of the best such titles, perhaps in a magazine format, doing the necessary licensing to make the releases run on standard machines.

Sony once tried something like this with their PlayStation 1; they called it "Net Yaroze", and apparently it wasn't a stellar success. I wonder whether it could be done better.

Of course, if the console makers don't throw a bone to hobbyists, makers of third-party extensions (of various levels of legality) just might; and these would be less concerned with protecting the makers' profit margins.

¶ architectures of control business drm economics homebrew open-source videogames [5 comments]

In Australia, unemployed hackers can now fulfil their work-for-the-dole obligations by contributing to open-source projects.

(via /.) ¶ australia open-source [1 comment]

The Rockbox iRiver porting effort is making some progress. They now have it booting on an iRiver H140 and presenting the file browser that will be familiar to Archos Rockbox users. Not only that, but someone has coded a GameBoy emulator plug-in, which the iRiver is powerful enough to run.

Now all they need to do is make it play sound; unlike the Archos, the iRiver has no hardware MP3 decoder, so they need to graft an entire codec API onto the system. With such a big step, of course, come plenty of possibilities; already there is talk of having the unit play tracker modules and Commodore 64 SID chiptunes, not to mention lots of lossy and lossless audio formats.

Hopefully they'll get it working on the H3xx series (that's the newer one, with a colour screen and two USB ports) too. It'll be less annoying than the stock iRiver firmware.

¶ iriver open-source rockbox tech [no comments]

A man in London was jailed for using the Lynx text-mode browser to make a donation to the tsunami relief fund. Anti-fraud monitoring interpreted the unusual browser signature (i.e., not Mozilla or IE) as the sign of a hack-attempt and the police went in in a SWAT-style raid, smashing his door down and arresting him. Which goes to show that it does not pay to use unusual software.

¶ crime lynx open-source security tech [no comments]

IBM have turned over 500 software patents to the open-source community. IBM will continue to hold the patents, though have pledged not to assert them against software distributed under an OSI-approved open-source licence. (It's legally binding, too, so there's no possibility of a change of guard at IBM reneging on it.) They have, however, reserved the right to assert them against anyone suing open-source projects for patent infringement; i.e., those who don't get with the programme may find themselves out on a limb.

"The 500 patents include U.S. Patent number 5,185,861, registered in 1993, which covers technology that helps microprocessors use their memory caches efficiently; and U.S. patent number 5,617,568, registered in 1997, for allowing non-Windows based systems to act as file servers for Windows-based clients, according to IBM Asia Pacific spokeswoman June Namioka. Other examples include patents related to handwriting recognition, she said."

"There's little argument that over the past dozen years, the world has come to view things differently: free software is one aspect of this; globalization of trade is another; both have been profoundly influenced by access to the Internet and the Web, and the easy access to information they provide. Knowledge is, indeed, power. As the models change, people who are stuck in the older mode, like Gates . . . look increasingly like Pope Urban VIII and rms looks more like Galileo: despite 'common knowledge' the world was moving. IBM's freeing-up of patents is another step toward proliferating knowledge."

¶ ibm open-source patents [1 comment]

It looks like the people behind the Rockbox* MP3 player firmware/OS (which runs on Archos Jukebox series hardware) have started preliminary work on porting it to iRiver devices; they're starting on the (discontinued?) iHP-1x0 series, but hopefully that'll lead to an H-3x0 version as well (assuming that they're based on a similar architecture).

* not to be confused with Rocbox, a MP3 player brought out by rap record/fashion label Roc-A-Fella. (Hang on, aren't they part of Def Jam/Universal? If so, I wonder if their corporate parent knows that they're putting out a MP3 player.)

¶ iriver mp3 open-source rockbox [no comments]

Not all that long after voting to adopt software patents, the EU are moving to legally require currency detection code in all image-processing software. This looks likely to either (a) be utterly ineffective, or (b) be mostly ineffective whilst effectively outlawing open-source graphics software. The precedent it sets is not a good one either; how long until paracopyright enforcement is mandated to be built into anything processing audio or video data, or indeed any copyrightable data?

Meanwhile, British Telecom have taken steps to block access to child pornography websites. A laudable sentiment, though one worries that the site-by-site censorship infrastructure required to implement this could easily be extended to blocking other things (overseas news sites publishing things violating the Official Secrets Act, for example, or MP3 download sites that piss off the local recording industry). One brave step towards the Singaporisation of the internet.

Meanwhile, the RIAA's latest campaign to defend the foundations of capitalism from the enemy within will involve putting fingerprint readers into music players to ensure that nobody who didn't pay for music gets to listen to it. Welcome to the Digital Millennium; make sure you've paid your way.

¶ architectures of control censorship copyfight currency open-source riaa surveillance [no comments]

And the latest entry in the annals of hobby operating systems: MenuetOS, an OS whose main feature is that it's written entirely in assembly language. The product of an intrepid cabal of European hackers/masochists, it has a GUI that looks sort of like Windows XP would look if it didn't have proper widgets and was limited to one pixel font, and all the apps anyone in the target audience would need (i.e., it has an IRC client, a NNTP newsreader, MP3 playing/streaming capabilities, a chess client and a Doom-style 3D engine demo), and fits onto a single floppy.

¶ menuetos open-source operating systems tech [no comments]

Video Toaster, the classic Amiga video-editing system, has been released to the open-source community. Mind you, since what made it so useful is dependent on the Amiga's video chipset, it's more a historical curio than anything else.

¶ amiga open-source retrocomputing video video toaster [no comments]

Hewlett-Packard declare war on copyright violation, commit to integrated policeware in all HP products. Perhaps they're hoping that this gets them the sort of legal protection from cheap, usable imports that Microsoft has; since MS have embraced "trusted computing", the Microsoft OS monopoly has gone from being a problem to being an essential part of global economic stability (in fact, it's only slightly far-fetched to believe that, if it crashes down and the world goes open-source, the powers that be will declare capitalism to be irrecoverably wounded and bring out the cobalt-tipped fireworks). Could HP be angling for legal restrictions on non-compliant computers to stem the flow of customers to cheaper no-brand Asian imports?

Meanwhile, new versions of Photoshop have filters that detect images of US currency and refuse to load them; this CPU-intensive operation is performed every time image information is imported from outside the application. However, honest, patriotic citizens won't mind their CPU cycles being used in this way, as we all must put in to fight terrorism; don't you agree, Citizen?

Apparently Paint Shop Pro does this too, or so I heard. Mind you, The GIMP doesn't, and even if it did, you could change the source code to bypass this check and compile it yourself. Though, if Adobe and the Paint Shop Pro people put this "feature" in because of government pressure, it's not unlikely that there will be attempts to criminalise the distribution of source code that could be compiled to make a non-compliant image processing application. (There are precedents, in the FCC Broadcast Flag amendment, which effectively outlaws entire classes of software-radio applications that could be used to access copyrighted HDTV content.)

¶ architectures of control drm hewlett-packard open-source photoshop [4 comments]

One of the Gaim developers claims that Gaim users may not be locked out of MSN/Yahoo when the two companies change their protocols:

"Upgrading" is as simple as changing a version string. We already have it updated in Gaim 0.69. This was a no-brainer easy-to-fix thing, as was MSN.

If any Slashdot staff are watching, please, please refrain from posting articles related to IM unless you consult someone who knows what's going on. Too many trollish comments occur, and we get too many questions in Gaim support, all pointing at Slashdot as their source for the inaccurate information as to what's happening in IM.

Though wasn't it implied that from October, MSN's servers will require clients to produce a license certificate of some sort, which identify the client as a Microsoft-approved one, prior to connecting?

(If you don't want your IM network to be at the mercy of a profit-oriented corporation whose management may at any time decide to maximise profits by asserting control over your client, there's always Jabber, an open, decentralised, XML-based messaging system. Though nobody seems to be using that; I know of only one person on Jabber. Maybe if someone came up with some cute smiley themes for it...)

¶ gaim im lock-in microsoft open-source yahoo [2 comments]

An interview with Richard M. Stallman, the head of the Free Software Foundation. In it he states his opposition to the Intel/Microsoft "Trusted Computing" system (or "Treacherous Computing", as he calls it), calls for web browsers to automatically send complaints to webmasters about Flash-based web pages (which, when you think about it, is not such a bad idea), and reveals that Debian has fallen out of favour because they tolerate the existence of a ghetto of non-free software. As well as the usual broadside at the Open Source movement (who, in rms's view, have more in common ideologically with Microsoft than with the Free Software movement). (via Slashdot)

¶ drm flash free software gnu open-source richard stallman usability [no comments]

After 9/11, governments quickly pulled formerly public information and restricted areas of scientific publication to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. Now DARPA, the US Department of Defense's research funding body has cancelled funding for OpenBSD security research because open-source software could help terrorist nation-states. Is this an isolated incident, or the start of a governmental purge of open standards and open-source software, and the start of a "national security"-driven shift towards proprietary standards kept on a strict need-to-know basis? After all, if Cisco, Microsoft and TRW hold the keys, the reasoning goes, Saddam Bin Laden can't use the technology to kill us. And replacing publically documented standards and open-source software with secret black-box technologies has numerous other advantages, from surveillance hooks to catch more terrorists, paedophiles, tax cheats and miscellaneous troublemakers to tremendous "peace dividends" such as end-to-end copyright enforcement and whistleblower-proof rights management for documents; not to mention handsome dividends for the shareholders of the keepers of the keys.

¶ open-source paranoia secrecy security terrorism the long siege [no comments]

I just downloaded and compiled Sodipodi, after seeing a link to it from a Slashdot forum on SVG. It looks like a fairly promising vector graphic editor for Linux; and about time too. (KDE's Kontour is slow and bug-ridden, the new KDE Karbon requires KDE 3 which doesn't play well with Debian yet, so I haven't had a chance to try it.) It's still a bit rough (it prints lots of diagnostic messages on stdout, and lacks a few things, such as a "select all" option), but it's looking quite promising.

¶ linux open-source svg [no comments]

Software for reading Canon RAW image files under UNIX, and converting them to PNM files.

¶ canon dcraw image processing open-source photography software [no comments]

Guido van Rossum wins a FSF Award, for developing Python. And well deserved, too.

¶ open-source python [no comments]

Good stuff: The BBC are experimenting with streaming programmes in the Ogg Vorbis format, an open-source, completely free format available on virtually all platforms (and not encumbered by licensing agreements, patents or other proprietarian evils); what's more, the Ogg developers have taken a stand against the copy-prevention trend. The BBC appear to be the first major broadcaster to use this format. Use it (and if you do, write in to let them know you do) before Bill Gates has a word with Tony Blair and it gets squashed by a directive from on high. (As happened with non-Microsoft systems in most parts of Britain's government.)

¶ bbc copyfight ogg vorbis open-source [no comments]