This is a disturbing trend in licensing of core technologies that we’re basing our lives on. It concerns me a great deal. :(

neo4j recently added a Commons Clause to their AGPL Enterprise Edition: https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/commit/6558e5eec59c5eccf866baaf70d1c215e5fa4398#diff-15abcf402afc68b67bc1f749fb6c7f82R681

This is especially amusing because this addition is actually already rendered null by the AGPL itself in Section 7: If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

neo4j have been made aware of this issue, and don’t seem to care. This is a very concerning time for software licensing. :(

The author made a massive mistake early on: voting software has never proven itself effective even against accidents. And planes and elevators definitely are designed to protect against intentional attacks. The entire first part of the article is flawed.

Also, the assertion that software is better than the mechanical machines they replaced is also wrong. A bunch of mechanical things in my car have been replaced with software, and none of the ones I care about work as effectively as the mechanical thing they replaced. :(

The rest of it goes on like that. The entire thing is ridiculous.

I think I understand where the author’s coming from, but I think some of his concerns are probably a bit misplaced. For example, unless you’ve stripped all the Google off your Android phone (which some people can do), Google can muck with whatever on your phone regardless of how you install Signal. In all other cases, I completely get why Moxie would rather insist you install Signal via a mechanism that ensures updates are efficiently and quickly delivered. While he’s got a point on centralized trust (though a note on that in a second), swapping out Google Play for F-Droid doesn’t help there; you’ve simply switched who you trust. And in all cases of installation, you’re trusting Signal at some point. (Or whatever other encryption software you opt to use, for that matter—even if its something built pretty directly on top of libsodium at the end of the day.)

That all gets back to centralized trust. Unless the author is reading through all the code they’re compiling, they’re trusting some centralized sources—likely whoever built their Android variant and the people who run the F-Droid repositories, at a bare minimum. In that context, I think that trusting Google not to want to muck with Signal is probably honestly a safe bet for most users. Yes, Google could replace your copy of Signal with a nefarious version for their own purposes, but that’d be amazingly dumb: it’d be quickly detected and cause irreparable harm to trust in Google from both users and developers. Chances are honestly higher that you’ll be hacked by some random other app you put on your phone than that Google will opt to go after Signal on their end. Moxie’s point is that you’re better off trusting Signal and Google than some random APK you find on the Internet. And for the overwhelming majority of users, I think he’s entirely correct.

When I think about something like Signal, I usually focus on, who am I attempting to protect myself from? Maybe a skilled user with GPG is more secure than Signal (although that’s arguable; we’ve had quite a few CVEs this year, such as this one), but normal users struggle to get such a setup meaningfully secure. And if you’re just trying to defend against casual snooping and overexcited law enforcement, you’re honestly really well protected out-of-the-box by what Signal does today—and, as Mickens has noted, you’re not going to successfully protect yourself from a motivated nation-state otherwise.

I’m surprised that the author managed to follow around 5000 (if I understood the article correctly) people on Twitter. it seems like the amount of noise on your feed would make it unusable at that point.

There is no technical content in that post :(

I love these kinds of things. Thanks for asking!

Right around Y2K, I worked as the “Technical Coordinator” at a “Regional Development Authority” in Cornwallis Park, Nova Scotia, Canada. I got to do what so many Silicon Valley folks have falsely claimed to do, and it was glorious: I got to make the world a better place, using technology.

An RDA in Canada is an organisation that receives money from different levels of government and has a mandate to promote development in the region. This takes the shape of providing free education, encouraging businesses to move there, assisting existing businesses with hiring additional staff, and related activities. Because of some other programs, my particular RDA (the WVDA) had an additional mandate to improve the lives of residents and businesses using technology.

I got to do what so many Silicon Valley bros have claimed to do, but never have: I made the world a better place using technology. Looking back, it was probably the best opportunity of my career, and I’ve had many.

The many projects that I worked on in that short time period is absolutely staggering, as I think about it now. I was the only person in my department for most of my time there, and for the rest I was the more experienced and skilled one of two.

• web applications (we didn’t call them that then) for local artisans to display and sell their wares, for restaurants to post information and menus, and for listing events in the local area
• provided tourist information, accommodation information and booking, and an online business directory
• free email accounts to the local residents, as well as web hosting and technical services for local people and businesses
• “wireless last mile” to deliver broadband to previously unconnected homes and businesses
• custom OS and software for touch-screen kiosks that were installed in libraries, tourist bureaus, and malls, which were many people’s only way to access the internet

I can honestly say that in my approximately three years there, I made the world a better place. There are still fingerprints of my work there in that place, and I miss doing work like that. I haven’t done work like that since, and gotten paid for it.

It wasn’t all roses: my bosses were absolutely rotten with corruption. One got fired for giving large contracts to his friends to do nothing. Another was getting invoices for services and products that were never delivered from businesses owned by their friends and family. Another was doing that, and also using her expense account to expense trips and conferences she never went to. Eventually, years after I left, the entire agency got shut down and each government decided to run their own smaller operation themselves because of these things. But it doesn’t mean that we didn’t do great things at the time.

I should really write more details about my experiences, because it really was something amazing, and I’m quite proud of it. Most of the web applications are still usable via the internet archive.

Don’t forget that performance enhancements, security enhancements, and increased hardware support all add to the size over what was done a long time ago with some UNIX or Linux. There’s cruft and necessary additions that appeared over time. I’m actually curious what a minimalist OS would look like if it had all the necessary or useful stuff. I especially curious if it would still fit on a floppy.

If not security or UNIX, my baseline for projects like this is MenuetOS. The UNIX alternative should try to match up in features, performance, and size.

When I moved to Malmö three years ago, I relieved heavily on mapping to get around and find things. I only used OSM, and my wife used Google Maps. Google Maps took us to the wrong place three times in the first two months. OSM was wrong once in the same time period.

I fixed the error in OSM right away, and it’s no longer wrong. Google Maps was still wrong last time I looked a couple years ago.

This is great news for RISC-V, and I can’t wait to see the next steps.

Just returning to $DAYJOB from vacation, and really not enjoying it. Mostly trying to do administrative tasks to push things around a bit. It’s also very boring in the office because I’m in Sweden and everyone’s on holiday.

Fortunately, the side hustle is really interesting and is keeping me entertained. I’m doing some work on quality measurement tools for C#, and it’s pretty enjoyable.

Finally, I had this idea to build a Cocoa-native Slack client using the RTM API, because I hate Electron so and there are a few communities on Slack that I really enjoy participating in. I am trying to figure out if I made such an application, if I would be able to sell it at all to other like-minded mac users to help offset the time investment I was putting in to it. (And of course I’d aim for *nix and Windows support via GNUstep.)

My current worries on this are a) I’d run out of steam after having invested some time in to it, b) Slack would screw me by disabling the required API support, or c) Marzipan would enable the Slack iPad client to be easily ported and eat my lunch.

This blog post: a case study in being a jerk to someone who is being a jerk, only since Linus is a “jerk” you get off scott-free. Unsurprisingly, this is written by someone who has never contributed to the Linux kernel and who was uninvolved in the discussion he’s picking apart.

The revised email at the end does lose information. Contrary to what hipsters write blog posts complaining about, 99% of Linus’s emails are cordial. The information that’s lost is the conveyance that this is more important to Linus than most subjects.

Interestring pivot for a GNU/Linux distribution, no?

Thanks for asking about this, I have so many things to say about. I’m going to explain the methods I use, and then the tools I use to accomplish them. Please skip ahead to the last paragraph to learn about a GTD tool I’m working on.

The TL;DR: I make use of all of the following techniques in order of importance: Getting Things Done, The Checklist Manifesto, The Pomodoro Technique, Eat That Frog, and Chain Calendaring (or Seinfeld Calendaring), and a regular Calendar. Without giving details, I’m just going to say: when I am at my best, these systems keep me at my best. When I am at my worst (I often call it “the dark place”, non-suicidal, thank you for worrying about me), these systems keep me alive and enable me to get back to my best as quickly as my brain will allow.

Calendar every time I need to be somewhere that is not my house or office, it goes in my calendar. I assume I’m at the office 9-5, and home otherwise. Everything else goes in the calendar. If it doesn’t make it to my calendar, I absolutely will not do it, or even remember that I was supposed to until days or weeks later.

Chain Calendaring keeps me motivated to do things every day that my brain would tell me I can just do tomorrow. That’s nearly everything that would improve my life and make me a better person, really. Sometimes I break all of my chains when I’m in a dark place: starting my chains back up is one of the first things I do when I turn the corner.

Pomodoro (do focused work without distractions for a set period, and reward yourself with a break after) and Eat That Frog keep me doing the things that I don’t want to do. Basically anything and everything about my jobby job, especially in times of darkness, but only slightly.

Checklists ensure that I will not forget to do things because I’m tired, in a hurry, or otherwise just not entirely with it. For instance, I have a checklist for my morning bathroom routine that includes “squeegee the shower doors and floor” because when I’m in a hurry or tired or cranky I will skip it, and it builds up. I have checklists for everything. Before I had a “boxing gym kit list”, I forgot one thing every training night and I haven’t forgotten a single thing since I started following the list. (Yes, I tracked this retroactively by looking at my chat histories with both my wife and my boxing partner.)

GTD is the big one, and this is the one that keeps me sane. Or at least, lets me allow myself to slip into dark mode periodically. When I’m at my best, GTD means that I’m always doing the thing I should be doing when I should be doing it and forgetting nothing. When I’m at my worst, I go into limp mode, and every thought I have goes into my inbox for triaging when I’m not at my worst anymore. Sometimes after turning the corner, I have a thousand items in my inbox. Sometimes I have two months of unopened mail in my physical inbox. (Right now my digital inbox is hovering around 300 items, and I have three weeks of unopened mail, but I’m starting to turn the corner.) Getting the thoughts out of my brain and into an inbox means I can get through my dark times faster and without spiraling out of control because I know that when I’m ready to deal with it, those things will all be there and I won’t have forgotten anything.

Now, tools. I deliberately left this for the end because the methods are the things that keep me sane. The tools come and go, and I’m currently switching mine up anyhow, but I have good news on that. My calendar is synced to my devices via nextcloud, and I use native applications on all of my devices. For chain calendaring, I currently use a paper calendar and draw in different coloured sharpies. I use my phone’s timer for Pomodoro. My checklists nearly always go on index cards because they’re the most durable, and I put the checklist where it needs to be: one’s in my gym bag, one’s in the bathroom on the shelf, most are next to my chair.

But, I’m replacing all of those with custom tools I’m building myself on Nextcloud because that’s the world I want to live in.

For GTD I currently use Nirvana, and a physical inbox. I don’t like it, and I hate that it’s hosted and owned by someone else. So I’m making my own GTD system (and other tools) which are backed/synced via Nextcloud. My GTD app is called FocusFrog, and I hope to have the MVP finished some time before the summer is over. One of the things that it will prominently feature is an inbox aggregator, so you can give it API keys or credentials for GitHub, Trello, Jira, your IMAP server, etc, and get a single view of all of the many inboxes in your life. Because I lean on my systems for everything, if you make positive noises about FocusFrog here, you’ll get an individual item in my “Launch FocusFrog MVP” project that says “tell username on losters about FocusFrog MVP” with a link to your comment. Because that’s the only way I can function in life.

I currently self-host Nextcloud on a Debian VPS. I primarily use this for Contacts, Calendars, and getting Files between my various devices. My wife also uses the same installation. We haven’t yet used the “document sharing” stuff that’s integrated with LibreOffice, or similar. But I look forward to doing that.

I pay someone else to host my mail, but I’d like to host that myself: I’m just not ready to do that again yet.

My intention is to build all of the “self hosted” stuff around nextcloud: I’ll use Passman, I’m building a GTD application, and a budgeting application, and a few other things. Nextcloud gives me a nice platform for syncing and sharing, and I don’t really care about implementation language otherwise.

This week I’ll merge a branch that removes over 4000 lines of duplicate code from the test framework at my jobby job.

I’ve also begun making our builds reproducible by porting our custom scripts from groovy that only runs on our Jenkins machines, to MSBuild tasks that will run anywhere.

This post follows the rule of headlines perfectly: when a headline asks a question, the answer is always no.

I am not completely convinced that the article’s stated reason is “the reason”, or that the solution is “the solution”. But it’s a good start. And it’s one of my specific pet peeves, so I’m going to share. My general pet peeve is when people of all stripes behave as though they’re unique snowflakes and the rules that govern all other work does not and can not apply to them. My specific pet peeve is when programmers play this “we do black magic and therefore need to be treated specially” game.

It drives me nutty.

The solution presented here is a good start. We should all endeavour to implement this.

“ In a normal market the supply of pork chops can go down, and people can start to go hungry, but in a software market we can never be in a state where the market contains less produce than it did before. The supply of things can only get more and more abundant, the pile can only get larger and larger - things can only get better and better for everyone.”

That part isn’t true. It ignores quality where people won’t want pork chops that are rotten, taste bad, or discolored from bad suppliers. Most open source software is crap because it’s someone’s fun, side project that goes unfinished, barely-documented, or unmaintained. It’s a tiny portion that’s even useful.

From there, the things only get larger and better seems false given effects of software maintenance. Certain dependencies, proprietary or FOSS, are always changing. This creates breakage for components depending on them. On minor end, it might need a recompile or something simple. On major end, a company switching ISA’s might need media codecs’ fast paths rewritten for a different SIMD style. The software is still there where you can do what the author says if you only use specific hardware, OS, software, and all the right versions. It’s just most aren’t going to do that in practice, esp if we consider bug/vulnerability fixes or discontinued hardware. So, the right model seems like the pork chops and other products do have ups and downs with some disappearing outright from parasiting.

Utopian vision is already broken to be replaced with a mix of capitalism and utilitarianism.

“In a software market uniqueness is the first thing required for there to be demand, and often the more specialized and novel, the better the product.”

That starts with claim that supply is only reason for competition in most markets. That’s totally wrong. They compete on features, convenience, style/image, status, quality, safety/security, ecofriendy, national origin, and especially customer service. I might be leaving something out. People who buy or use software often rate those pieces of software along those attributes. The number of competing, similar products in many areas of software contradicts his belief.

The product that is unique does get the First Mover advantage with most of the market. Some other players usually differentiate on that. Often a flurry of activity with market settling down into a handful of players in an oligopoly-like setup. That’s how almost everything works. New, niche players will also show up usually doing one thing a whole lot better. So, that’s the model that we need to start with. It’s a much better one, too, since it gives more hope of creating profitable products.

Utopian vision is definitely broken now with additional angles beyond pure supply and cost of one, unique product. It isn’t utopian. It is doable, though, for utilitarians paying close attention to what markets are complaining about in existing offerings. They can make alternatives that solve their problems with paid FOSS models. Problem solved. :)

Although foundations are incorrect, rest of the article might still have some decent ideas. Let’s check. (Done skimming.) The author appears to make common mistake of thinking it’s all DRM-ed proprietary vs GPL that doesn’t pay. The current markets already have paid FOSS models that should be in the analysis. That includes licensing GPL software to companies, the open core model, SaaS model with FOSS as side effect, consulting model doing same, VC startup FOSSing components that aren’t competitive advantage, and so on. Support last since it is a commodity companies like to minimize that barely covers development costs. It should’ve never been primary, business model. There’s also getting big companies to contribute paid developers like IBM does with Linux but I’m trying to avoid that one where possible. It has significant risks.

I say anyone worried about getting FOSS folks paid should look at the already-established methods of doing it that were sustainable for significant projects (not Red Hat or other outliers). Then innovate from there mixing and matching. Paid, shared-source proprietary with an expiration of paid part into FOSS license after amount of time in contract is another interesting idea I heard a while back. FOSS version is always behind. Yet, I was cool with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, VS6, Halflife, and Starcraft on Win 98. I could probably do something useful with a FOSS version of them even 5-10 years later. ;)

“Giving software away as a gift does not mean a bigger pile for everyone - it means those savvy enough to make use of the software market will use the chance to take more and give less - to lower their net contribution. “

This is true. Even more reason to do what I just said. Don’t operate with utilitarian, virtue-oriented expectations in a capitalist system full of freeloaders. It won’t work most of the time. Try business structures and licenses that are capitalist in nature supporting the utilitarian or virtuous goals. That provably works in some cases. I can’t say more, though, until more people try it.

Before I got a regular ol’ jobby-job, I used to conference fairly frequently. I love conferencing. In general, I recommend conferences in the 100-300 person range, in a topic you have an interest in. Smaller conferences (fewer than 100) people are excellent if it’s a topic you are very interested in.

Since you mentioned it, Strange Loop is one of the ones that I wish was convenient for me to attend, but it’s in the US and traveling to the US is just such a hassle. I have heard only great things, and I wish it was more convenient.

FOSDEM is the one that I (since moving to Sweden) make plans for every single year. I missed it this year (work-permit related travel restrictions due to my former employer being incompetent dickbags), but I plan to never miss it again.

I have a story about my love for FOSDEM which I’d like to tell, but maybe it should live in another comment, or maybe it should live on my own blog.

I’m going to be honest: most of my energy this week will be spent waiting for this week to end.

Finally finished and merged a large improvement to our massive integration test system last week, and found out today that it uncovered a rather critical error. We now realised that we don’t actually know how the integration test system ever worked before, and it definitely doesn’t work right now. (An obvious bug was uncovered, and has been present for at least two months.) So I’ll be fixing that and cleaning up that mess this week.

I have an absolutely fantastic junior programmer who I’m mentoring, he learns fast, has what I consider to be the right approach and opinions, and a wonderful attitude towards learning. It’s keeping me sane at my jobby job.

Still struggling with what my new job was supposed to be, vs what it actually is. Made some realisations about this over the weekend that help me frame the problem, but actually make me feel worse about it. I don’t know what I’ll do about this.

Managed to get precisely zero hours logged on my GTD application for Nextcloud last week: really hoping to turn that around this week, but I’m not hopeful at this point. By the time I get home from work, I can’t manage to do much more than veg out in my lounge chair and read the internet. :/ I hope to turn that around now that the sun is still out by the time I get home from work.