Alex Hudson

It looks like someone has been attacking Savane-derived hosting platforms. Recently Savannah has been down, and the page that has now gone up confirms that they had a security breach. Unfortunately, Gna! has a similar code-base, and their site now confirms that they are investigating an issue too.

This has a knock-on issue for Bongo, since we use Gna! hosting. Our download area appears to still be alive, and thankfully we have always signed the releases. You can check a release of Bongo quite simply:

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I don’t particularly like talking law on this blog; it’s boring and – for the most part – disinteresting. However, recent developments in SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Limited (as written up here – thanks to Cristian for bringing this up at FFII) deserve to be aired.

The basic story is that the Judge in this case is deeply unsure of the boundary of copyright. For those who don’t know, SAS is a statistical package which is both popular and influential, and to a large extent can be thought of as a programming development environment. WPL, the defendants, wrote software which could interpret SAS programs. There is no direct analogy in the free software world, but LibreOffice Calc interpreting Excel spreadsheets is close enough for the purposes of our discussion.

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It’s been a little while since I talked about SparkleShare; since then it has moved project hosting (here’s my fork) and there have been various changes – thankfully, updating the packages for the new version and to get it on Fedora 14 didn’t take too long. There are likely to be problems here and there with the packages – invitations don’t seem to work right now, but I haven’t tracked down that bug yet – but they should be mostly working. Please let me know if you’ve tried them and found any problems.

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It seems like everyone has had their word on the latest release, but like a fashionably-late party-goer, I’m going to waltz in at the 11th hour and offer my 2p 🙂

I think it’s well-known at this point that 14 has shaped up to be a very good release, but I’d like to draw attention to one point in particular: the version of Nouveau in this release is another big, big step forward. I have a relatively bog-standard Dell D830, and 14 is the first time that:

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If you haven’t read it already, Bradley Kuhn’s take on where Canonical are aiming is deeply interesting. There is bound to be push-back against the article, because it does connect a few distant dots, but I found it particularly interesting because it’s apropos of a recent discussion on Surrey LUG’s mailing list – which has no public archive so therefore I cannot link, but the gist of the thread was a discussion on the various approaches Canonical takes to getting income.

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For a number of years, the discussion amongst UK-based free software professionals has been about how to do more with Government. The most active discussions happened around the time of the UK open-source, standards and re-use policy was developed (around 2004; it has been updated since): it wasn’t great before, and it hasn’t improved an awful lot since.

In very similar ways people have bemoaned the accessibility of Government procurement processes for micro/small businesses, and it’s basically the same problem – the “big guys” tend to be pushing proprietary solutions.

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LibreOffice is a wonderful, welcome, huge step forward for what was OpenOffice.org. People are complaining about the name and stuff, but really, that stuff doesn’t matter: what does matter is that this now unfetters developers to do anything from the firing of drive-by patches to more fundamental work, and get the project going at the speed it deserves.

Lots of people have talked about the direction the project ought to be going in; I fear to some extent many of those people think that OpenOffice.org is a better app than it actually is. I’m a heavy user of it, and there’s a lot of it which is really hard to recommend to people. As an example, I’ve been working on a document that’s some sixty pages long over the past week: every time it saves, it takes an absolute age, and the entire suite – including spreadsheets or any other part of it you have open – just locks up entirely while that happens. And because it auto-saves every now and then (a necessity, sadly, because it’s not rock-solid) it means every ten minutes there’s virtually a minute of down-time while it saves the various files. And yes, this was an OpenDocument file – which should be the best performing backend (though I haven’t checked if this is actually true!).

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I don’t usually like to do a me-too post, but mizmo is right on again with her thoughts on jcm’s post. I raised a similar question at a town hall meeting earlier this year – basically, asking if Fedora is really suitable for day-to-day use as a primary desktop. My personal situation is much like some of those who answered, that it works for me but that I would find it difficult to recommend. There was one part of someone’s answer which particular rang true for me, which just happened be to be mizmo’s (how convenient!):

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Recently a new system has been added to people.fp.o, the ability to host yum repositories. It’s not an equivalent of Ubuntu’s PPA system by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s another useful facility to have available.

I’ve been testing this over the past few hours with a new package: SparkleShare. For those who’ve never heard of it before, this is essentially a little tray app that synchronises a local directory tree with one held on a remote server: you can think of this as being very similar to Ubuntu One, Dropbox, iFolder or similar. However, what’s interesting here is that this is built on top of git: so SparkleShare essentially automates the commit and pull/push process, handling it invisibly for you, while still giving you a pretty solid system underneath.

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It’s only been a couple of months since I last wrote about the future of Thunderbird, but I’ve been thinking about it again recently. The immediate issue which prompted me to write this was the disturbing news that a potentially bad crasher bug in Thunderbird has gone unfixed in Fedora even though a patch was submitted about a month ago because of sensitivity over trade marks. Although some users on the devel list appear to be dealing out their usual standard of hyperbole on this, it is an extremely difficult position to defend: who knows if the maintainer would have actually released an update by now, but the immediate problem is the mark.

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