Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Compare and contrast. I sympathize with Mako’s basic argument (we should use shitty free software, despite the pain, because it is more moral) but the reality is very few people are willing to put up with all the issues Matt outlines, for the fairly basic reason that very few people are actually convinced that non-free software is morally wrong. It is insufficient to be morally better- everyone likes the unselfish code philanthropist, but we’re not at the point where any significant number of people think that code hoarders are bad per se. Pragmatically, I don’t see any way to change that part any time soon, so we’ll have to do what we did when we competed (successfully) with Windows 95 and 98- beat them on quality, usability and stability. For Open Office, that looks like it is a long way off. In the meantime, rumors are that Apple will complete their office suite with a spreadsheet tomorrow. Depressing that they continue to outrun us.

On the plus side, now that RH is finally willing to ship mono, maybe we’ll finally be able to get our act in gear and move to a more modern language. I’m still uncomfortable about placing our balls in Redmond’s hands, but I’d rather have my balls in Redmond’s hands than have us forking and creating a 3rd, 4th, and 5th desktop instead of the already lousy situation of creating a 3rd and 4th.

Saw Corpse Bride last night. Fun. Not Nightmare Before Christmas, but then, what is. Definitely still recommended if you enjoy things outside of the realm of the normal visual experience.

Relaxed today- got out and enjoyed some beautiful (if chilly) sunlight, did some errands with Krissa, and then watched some football and basketball.

Have been avidly following the Gizmodo and Engadget coverage of CES- lots of fun stuff. It worries me, though- free software has gotten pretty far because we’ve been able to piggy back on open, standardized PC hardware. There is lots of cool, closed, unstandardized hardware out there, and because that is what people want, there will be more- ipods, phones, and now possibly iMacs integrated into TVs. It is not coincidence that free software is most competitive in spaces where we use open standards (apache, sendmail, firefox, etc.) and least competitive where we have to deal with these kinds of things. So… as a user, I’m excited, because there is cool stuff happening, but as a free software bigot (and someone who cares about the generativity of open platforms) I’m sort of depressed.

Mentally long day, even though I left the office by 4:45. It isn’t coincidence that I left Novell in January, I think, nor that the previous February and March I thought hard about doing the same. The lack of sunlight has definitely been getting to me the past few winters. This winter is no exception. So tonight I finally bit the bullet and bought a high-intensity full-spectrum light for use in the mornings. (It includes a timer for dawn simulation.) I have no idea if it will have anything other than a placebo effect; the literature I’ve read seems to imply that there is still some controversy over the effectiveness of light treatments, and the blue light treatment which is likely to be most effective coincidentally uses light at a wavelength which probably causes macular degeneration. Oops. Sure wish Apollo Health (who sells the blue lights) would ‘fess up to that little problem on their otherwise well-researched web site.

[Tangentially: if you're selling a medical device, and claiming that a report justifies your technology, you might want to (1) correctly spell the last name of the doctor (2) correctly identify the journal and (3) get the month of the publication correctly. This page fails on all those counts. To their credit, they seem to correctly represent what the paper says, but... it certainly is not very professional.]

The biggest compliment I can pay Olav is that using stock bugzilla (like I do at work) sucks now. I hope he and the upstream folks can get together to get a lot of the UI improvements upstream for 2.24.

Am going to do one of those horrible ‘here was my holiday’ extended diary/photo blogs, but can’t seem to get the photos off my camera because of my knuckleheaded insistence on using a development distribution. Oh well. In summary, it was a very relaxing break, but I’m excited to get back to work- we’ll be welcoming Jason Callina on board and hopefully soon start the hiring process for the windows position I’ve been advertising for. Not too late to get your resume on my desk :)

Had the pleasure of using bugzilla a bit tonight; Olav’s work on it really does rock. Suggested that the new points system needs to have a degradation function built in, since apparently I still have the second-highest point ranking, despite not really doing much in the past year. Used launchpad too. It is getting a lot less painful, though it is still rough around the edges.