Alex Hudson

Now, I’m not a huge one for using web applications as a means civic communication – I tend to believe that communicating with your representatives is much better done in a public space rather than a private one like Facebook. However, this story (on the face of it) is quite disturbing.

Transport for London recently announced the removal of the N213 night bus service between Croydon and Sutton. For many people, particularly young people going out of a night in Croydon, although this service wasn’t overcrowded it was important. A number of people on Facebook started a group to protest this, and took to the streets of Wallington last night.

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As I drove to a business planning session (a.k.a. entrepreneur funday) this morning, I heard on the radio that Google had announced their intention to release a consumer operating system. This was interesting news, albeit too brief, and being at this event I wasn’t able to check the news until I got back this evening.

Pretty much the first thing I read was Andrew Savory‘s take on this. Wow, how disappointing.

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It has been interesting watching the debate around Mono over the past few months. As essentially an independent observer – albeit one who has used Mono and can almost code C# – I couldn’t help the sneaking feeling that somehow, some of this was being orchestrated behind the scenes.

Particularly on the “anti-Mono” side, it has been pretty clear that an agenda of agitation has been in effect, with various distributions being prodded into making statements either way and various “users” kicking up stink on mailing lists – not least a certain infamous blog writer being caught red-handed whilst goading people on to write angry letters. I don’t know if speeches like Stallman’s were co-ordinated – I suspect more likely happenstance – but it all seemed very well timed.

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Mike McGrath asks a pertinent question: why didn’t you vote? Although I did actually take the time to vote, I can totally understand why someone wouldn’t.

For one thing, as others have said, a lot of the candidates were quite similar: they said many similar things, and I don’t doubt any of them could do the job competently.

Personally, I tried to vote on issues where possible. I voted for people who had a clear view of what “Fedora” means to them, and sided with those who had a specific vision (that is to say, not those who take a pluralistic all-things-to-all-men approach). I tried to vote for bettter communication (though most candidates were pro- that), and for those who had a track record of commitment: these various “posts” don’t really have much in terms of power, so I mostly am interested in a. what the person would bring in terms of time and resources, and b. the attitude of the person.

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I read with interest the various Twitterings about price of disk space – in particular, about Bitfolk, but it applies to any other service really. Andy’s take on this is really worth interesting, although I personally think he’s defending Bitfolk’s pricing unnecessarily.

My basic philosophy on this is that price isn’t an issue; things cost what they cost. What is really at stake is the value of the service: is what I’m paying for worth it? Of course there are plenty of businesses which are effectively discount-merchants – the Ryanairs and Tescos of this world – but they don’t offer an awful lot of value. Trying to compete on price caters for a certain type of customer, but it’s a limited market.

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I’ve hit across this problem a couple of times and always end up having to look up the magic incantations, so I’m going to store it here for posterity and in the hopes it may also aid other people.

Problem: Windows Vista / XP machine on a wireless network behaving extremely oddly. You can often browse to Google, for example, but basically nowhere else – it’s like other websites just time out.

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I did promise Lance that I would blog more on Bongo, and I’m going to try to stick to a post a week at least – however, this first one will only tangentially be about Bongo.

Since the project was initially released, the autotools build system was what you needed to create Bongo. There are a variety of benefits to using autotools, and it’s an extremely well-tested and mature system. However, it’s also relatively difficult to understand and not particularly quick. Over time we accreted more and more things into our build which no-one understood fully and that would occasionally blow up in our face.

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It’s been great to see Fedora 11 released, even with a couple of small delays it didn’t seem to me like a terribly problematic release.

As Rawhide, I’ve been using it on and off for a while now, and to be honest aside from the few things I ended up filing, there hasn’t been an awful lot wrong with it. One thing I’d particularly like to call out are the small improvements arriving in virt-manager, which is slowly improving release by release into a really tasty piece of software.

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apComms is an all-party group interested in various technological issues, and they’ve just announced that they’re starting an enquiry effectively into ‘net neutrality. I would link to something useful if I could, but surprisingly(?) their website is well out of date. Paraphrasing the specific questions they’re asking, though:

1. When should ISPs be filtering/blocking traffic?
2. Should Govt. intervene over Phorm-like services?
3. Do we need new initiatives to protect privacy online?
4. Is the global approach to kiddie porn working?
5. Who should pay for traffic, and should Net Neutrality be enshrined in law?

If you want to respond, you need to write not more than four pages and submit it via email to the admin user at the domain apcomms.org.uk – you have until the 22nd May 2009. I’d be interested in people blogging on this topic, particularly their responses.

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So, the news is out that Sun are being bought by Oracle. Personally, I didn’t see that coming – didn’t see Oracle wanting to get into the hardware business, but maybe they will literally just chop those bits out and sell them off. Or maybe they do want to get into hardware.

This has some interesting implications for free software projects, though:

1. Java. Clearly Oracle are huge fans of Java and will want to continue the development. Will it stay entirely free software? I would imagine so – I don’t see what there is to gain by closing it up again. They pretty much have control of the development process thanks to Sun’s nature, and it’s not really like anyone is going to be forking it at this point. Probably not much danger here.
2. Solaris. Oracle’s DB software runs best on this platform, so again it’s likely to be continued – at least, in the short term. Longer term, I don’t see Oracle wanting to commit development resources to both Solaris and Linux, and this could be the key time to start to merge the two. Not necessarily great news for Solaris fans.
3. OpenOffice.org. Erk. Traditionally, Oracle have never been slow to stick it to Microsoft, so at first glance you could see this going great guns under Oracle as Larry tries to sink another Bill battleship. However, it doesn’t really look to me like this would fit terribly well into the Oracle product line-up, and Oracle have traditionally been a bit luke-warm about OOo – for example, their stuff doesn’t really integrate with it at all, whereas it does with Office, understandably. Indeed, search their blogs for talk of OOo and you find basically nothing – and Oracle aren’t even involved in the OASIS technical committee for ODF, which seems to me to betray a complete lack of interest in this area. OOo is potentially in trouble with this news.
4. VirtualBox. Not sure much will happen with this; I imagine it would continue but I don’t see Oracle being particularly interested in driving it hard. Probably it would merge with Oracle VM, although the latter is Xen-based. Both could continue with the idea of aligning them in the future, which would probably happen naturally.
5. MySQL. Erk again. Oracle already own the developers of InnoDB, and in fact the BDB developers too, but don’t expect to see MySQL being in a position to compete with Oracle’s database any time soon now. However, much of the interesting MySQL development now appears to be taking place in the community, so maybe this doesn’t make much difference.

Compared to IBM, on the face of it Oracle doesn’t offer a substantively different story with regards free software. They contribute when and where it makes sense for them, and not in ways which could possibly compete with their software. However, their software is also essentially all extremely high-end enterprise process stuff, which is generally relatively bespoke and requires armies of trained monkeys consultants to install. In that scenario, free software offers a much lower threat and doesn’t even come close to touching many of their markets – so it can perhaps feel a little more relaxed about its contributions. The Oracle OSS page is relatively happy reading,

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