This is important, because while the service as always required an ID to run, it was never a secret. In fact, the former developer’s access ID has been embedded in the Now Reading Reloaded script since the very beginning.

The change, however, requires the addition of another key, this one like a password, and it’s not supposed to be given out. Since Now Reading Reloaded is open source, that means anyone who wanted to could use my key.

As a result, I’ve modified the plugin to use two more fields in the options screen, one for the Access ID and one for the Secret Key: both of these are required to add books from Amazon, and you will have to get both yourself.

Actually, it’s easy to do: go to the AWS site and register. Then plug the two keys they give you into the appropriate spaces in the Now Reading options screen. Resume reading.

Up to this point, I’ve been hosting it locally, mostly picking at it whenever time allows.

I just updated it the other day to add a new feature (editable ASIN) and hopefully fix a recurring bug (CDATA error when searching).

In any case, I hope to make a push in the near future to clean it up and submit it the official WordPress plugin site so that its user can benefit from auto-update, etc. etc. My own much-atrophied skills as a PHP developer aside (I deal mostly with Java at work), I think that it will ultimately benefit everybody, assuming I can make it so that the updates don’t override custom templates (perhaps giving preference to Now Reading template files in the theme folder?).

Stay tuned. The plugin is now here.

Comments on this post are closed. For support, please use the forum feature of the official plugin repository.

The laws that protect the creation of content are manifold and complicated—even byzantine. America has copyright protection, which applies to concrete expressions of information, trademark protection, which protects distinctive symbols or verbiage associated with a legal entity, and patent protection, which protects “(1) processes, (2) machines, (3) manufactures or (4) compositions of matter” and is perhaps the least understood of all the various kinds of intellectual property protection (Guntersdorfer, 2003).

The explosion of the Internet in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has thrown into stark relief both the legal problems associated with protecting content in a digital age as well as the ethical issues inherent in the existing process for acquiring official intellectual property protection and the rights afforded involved parties in a redress of grievances. Copyright law specifically has come into public consciousness primarily due to the popularity of filesharing: for all intents and purposes, the advent of modern filesharing was the 1999 arrival of Napster, a program which allowed anyone to exchange digital copies of music online, for free. Legal problems eventually forced Napster to shut down (Ante, Brull, Herman , & France, 2000), but its legacy leaves not only alternative modes of filesharing, but a whole host of new web-based content creation engines that toe the lines of fair use.

The politics of copyright is, despite its complexity, relatively straightforward and beyond the purview of this writing. More relevant to the machinations of the world of business are patents, which tend to pertain to the inventions and processes that drive economic engines. While some companies, such as Coca-Cola, eschew the legal—albeit ephemeral—benefit of patents in favor of strict secrecy, the legal mechanism is still quite popular: the United States Patent Office grants between 175,000 and 195,000 patents every year (“U.S. Patent Statistics,” 2009).

Ideally, patent mechanisms act as a function of market efficiency: by protecting corporate or industrial investment in Research & Development, it promotes economic growth, protects ingenuity, and rewards success; most patent law even allows for the eventual “freeing” of the patent after set duration—now usually twenty years (Heisey, King, Rubenstein, & Shoemaker, 2006, pp. iii-v, 4-7). What has come to pass since the 1970s, however, is a new scope of invention—specifically, computer software—that the existing patent protection mechanism is ill-equipped to handle. The critical question this raises is such: to what extent can the granting of patents for software be considered ethical? Conversely, if this is not the case, to what degree is it unethical or antithetical to proposed ideas of market efficiency?

It is vital to illustrate the very important distinctions between copyright and patent when it comes to computer software. Programs consist of written code (called “source code”), usually in a high-level programming language, which is at least partially intelligible to a human reader: this code, like any other written work, is subject to copyright. When portions of the source code to Microsoft’s Windows® Operating System were stolen and distributed on the Internet (Lemos, 2004), the case was one of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, on par with selling bootlegged DVDs. All source code must eventually be “compiled” to create the usable form of software that can be run on personal computers; the compilation process turns source code into a series of 1′s and 0′s, which the computer uses to runs billions of mathematical operations per second. Abstractions aside, all computer programs are little more than large lists of math problems which produce a desired result. Software patents are, at heart, an attempt to gain a “monopoly” on this math (Guntersdorfer, 2003).

“Many politicians [...] don’t understand what software patents do. They often think patents are similar to copyright law [...], which is not the case,” writes noted open source software1 advocate Richard Stallman (2005). He proposes a hypothetical scenario wherein literary concepts can and are patented, and Victor Hugo is unable to write Les Misérables because some lucky entity has acquired a patent for “a communication process that represents, in the mind of a reader, the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and subsequently changes his name.” There exist, he insists, patents for such simple things as a progress bar, or accepting online payments via credit card.

To such opponents of software patents, the very nature of patents is inherently unethical in this area of creative content: rather than protect the ingenuity and effort of intellectual investors (so to speak), it rewards those who seek to manipulate the legal system in order to monopolize generic or overly-broad concepts.

In order to examine the ethical ramifications of patents, some working ethical precepts must be established. Specifically:

1. Economic efficiency is an ethical good insofar as it contributes broadly to the public welfare, within normative moral constraints (Schultz, 2001, pp. 12-14).
2. Intellectual investment, in the form of corporate research and development or personal ingenuity, can and should be rewarded with an as-yet unspecified right to profit from said effort. This, besides being an ethical good in and of itself, directly contributes to principle #1 (“Are Efforts”, 2001).
3. The right to personal property, including intellectual property within reasonable bounds, is unambiguous and unabridged.

In addition to the aforementioned points, several more may be offered which are relevant to the discussion of computer software:

4. The labor efficiency offered by computer software (as well as its attendant effect upon the overall economic good), may be assumed of equal importance to the economic good of content creators—i.e. interoperability, work efficiency, and accessibility of data is at least as important as the right of technologists to individually profit (Lenk, Hoppe, & Adorno, 2007, pp. 91-92).
5. The unencumbered public availability of processes or information previously under patent protection,whether by design (read: open source software or open specification) or expiration of patent), is considered an unambiguous public good (“Are Efforts”, 2001).
6. Patents which are overly broad—including those which infringe prior art—have an unnecessarily depressive effect upon both technological progress and the economy as a whole.

As Bessen and Meurer (2008) note, patent litigation has rapidly outpaced other business-related litigation since the 1980s, second only to copyright litigation, and that mostly due to more or less legitimate claims of filesharing-related infringement (p. 127).

Whether software patents are helpful or ethical at all is more to the point. Allison, Mann, & Dunn (2007) quote principal witnesses at a 1994 patent hearing: “Software should not be patented, not because it is difficult to do so, but because it is wrong to do so”; “[t]here is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, not a single iota, that software patents have promoted or will promote progress” (1581). The authors conclude that policy debate now shies away from the common idea that the patent system is broken and unfair: the hue and cry, especially from software companies who ostensibly rely on patents, is to require a technical contribution—that is, implementation aside from a theoretical business method (1621-22).

Early patent law recognized that software seemed inherently unpatentable because it was little more than structured math (Guntersdorfer, 2003; Klemens, 2006, p. 4); mathematical formulae, were they to be subject to such “protection,” would be prohibitive to innovation and damage the public good. Mathematics, fundamentally, isn’t subject to ownership any more than other means of describing reality, such as physics or chemistry. Because software patents can describe not simply a method for obtaining a result, but the very idea of obtaining that result—for instance, Stallman’s example of the patent for credit card payment, irrespective of the code used to construct the process—they have ceased to reward innovation and instead hamper technological progress, deny certain freedoms (to those, like Stallman, who aspire to such principles in software), and have a necessarily depressive effect upon economies and livelihoods, in contravention of principle #6.

Klemens (2006) points out that the very worst patents are often cited as an argument against the ethicality of all software patents: his favorite example is a patent granted in 2002 for three short lines of JavaScript code, a language available for use since 1995 (p. 2). It would be unfair, however, to judge all software patents, or the patentability of software, based upon a portfolio of errors by the United State Patent and Trademark Office. Is there any ethical good that may be derived from software patents broadly?

It is necessary at this point to consider principle #4, which weighs the ambiguous claim of programmers or businesses upon a technology or technological idea against the immeasurable claim of other businesses and the consuming public to interoperability. This piece is being written in a file format called Open Document Format (compare to Microsoft’s “OLE2″ format, used in its popular productivity suite, reflected in “.doc” and “xls” files), in a free program called OpenOffice.org. This program also has the ability to open, edit, or create documents in Microsoft’s proprietary format; were OpenOffice.org not under the protection of the large software vendor Sun Microsystems, it is likely that the developers of the program would be sued for patent infringement, since Microsoft has a number of patents which ostensibly pertain to the OLE2 document format.

The chilling effect that such a legal situation has upon development of third party programs which can interoperate with Microsoft’s file format is well-known in software development circles. It effectively means that Microsoft is remunerated twice: one stream of revenue comes from the sale of its productivity suite (the quality of which directly affected the ubiquity—and market force—of OLE2 files), and the other—due to patents upon the data structures of OLE2—from companies which choose to license the specification rather than risk legal battles.

There is little question that Microsoft deserves the first stream of revenue, which is related to a copyrighted product (a “physical” good) that it sells; that some portion of the sales may have to do with the ubiquity (read: business necessity) of its file format is aside from the point. The fact that the company’s patents effectively prohibit competition by making interoperability cost-inefficient is, while a net economic good for Microsoft, an ethical downfall for everyone else. Lawrence Lessig, a well-known proponent of more “open” practices pertaining to intellectual property, insists that although official case law has yet to demonstrate the validity of the previous statement as measured by favorable judgements, common sense and observation indicate that these kinds of patents primarily serve as a way to keep “early innovators” safe from later, third-party progress (Babcock, 2005).

Assuming some unquantified validity to Microsoft’s patents upon its OLE2 format, how does that compare to a public need for unfettered access to interact with that format? Rawls argues unequivocally that justice “does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many” (1999, p. 3). In the tradition of Omelas, so Rawl’s sense of justice is inflexible (or so he supposes) when it comes to the inalienable rights due every man. Interoperability and the public good, Rawls may argue, are important, but should never be sacrificed if the right of the programmer/inventor to profit from his intellectual labors is to be infringed.

The hypothetical dystopia described has no boundaries: it is essentially a view of a communistic system in which the right to personal property is negated in favor of public benefit from shared resources. Though a different argument entirely, such systems have failed to produce thriving communities achieving a critical mass in the lengths to which it will go to redistribute wealth. However, the argument against software patents is not, at heart, a call for intellectual property to be redistributed to bolster a common good. Even if the dense calculus of utilitarianism was shown to be unarguably true, no ethical principle mandating the forcible forfeiture of IP is likely to be justified by any mainstream ethicists. The argument against software patents is that they do not represent intellectual property at all, but rather a manipulation of the legal system to achieve particular economic ends; it is possible, since the criteria do not require implementation, to patent software which hasn’t been written (Klemens, 2006, pp. 3-5).

The question initially posed was the degree to which patents are ethical or unethical. Assuming that Rawls’ theory of justice as morally paramount—as embodied in principle #3—is significantly correct, and understanding the particular vagaries of software and its algorithmic nature, certain conclusions may be drawn.

First, existing copyright laws do well to cover a content creator’s claim to his or her labor; these laws cover—and are perfectly sufficient for—the assertion of ownership over computer programs, which are themselves physical expressions/implementations of content. In this way, the right to personal property, intellectual or otherwise, is unabridged.
Second, the application of this principle into software written under the auspices of business allows proper remuneration for investment, and contributes to overall economic efficiency and therefore a public, moral good.

Third, within this ecosystem of software, patents are extraneous, serving no apparent purpose other than artificially extending the existing copyright protection to cover content which has not been written, cannot be written, or can be written in different ways (and properly so).

Unambiguously, then, software patents are unethical, serving to abridge the rights of content creators to implement general principles in software code, to enter into competition with existing market constituents and improve the market, and to raise the overall quality of the software ecosystem—and, by extension, allow the public benefit from these improvements.

References

• Allison, J. R., Mann, R. J., & Dunn, A. (2007). Software Patents, Incumbents, and Entry [Electronic version]. Texas Law Review, 85(7), 1579-1625. From Business Source Elite (25978301).
• Ante, S. E., Brull, S. V., Herman, D. K., & France, M. (2000, August 14). Inside Napster. BusinessWeek, 112-120. Retrieved March 15, 2009, from Business Source Elite (3394425).
• Are Efforts to Extend Patent and Copyright Laws Good for Business or Good for Society? (2001, July 4). Retrieved March 17, 2009, http://knowledge.emory.edu/article.cfm?articleid=363
• Babcock, C. (2005, April 7). Stanford Law Professor Raps Patents As Barrier To Innovation. InformationWeek. Retrieved March 26, 2009, http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160502321
• Bessen, J., & Meurer, M. J. (2008). Patent failure. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Guntersdorfer, M. (2003, March 21). Software Patent Law: United States and Europe Compared. Retrieved March 17, 2009, http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2003dltr0006.html
• Heisey, P. W., King, J. L., Rubenstein, K. D., & Shoemaker, R. (2006, March). Government Patenting and Technology Transfer. Retrieved April 13, 2009, http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err15/err15.pdf
• Klemens, B. (2006). Math you can’t use: patents, copyright, and software. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
• Lemos, R. (2004, February 12). Microsoft probes Windows code leak. Retrieved March 19, 2009, http://news.cnet.com/2100-7349_3-5158496.html
• Lenk, C., Hoppe, N., & Adorno, R. (2007). Ethics and law of intellectual property. Burlington: Ashgate.
• Patent Asserted Against JPEG Standard Rejected By Patent Office As Result Of PubPat Request: Public Interest Group’s Review Results in Broadest Claims of Forgent Networks Patent Being Ruled Invalid (2006, May 26). Retrieved March 16, 2009, http://www.pubpat.org/Chen672Rejected.htm
• Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice. Cambridge: Hardvard University Press.
• Schultz, W. J. (2001). The Moral Conditions of Economic Efficiency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Stallman, R. (2005, June 20). Patent absurdity. The Guardian. Retrieved March 17, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/jun/20/comment.comment
• U.S. Patent Statistics Chart Calendar Years 1963 – 2008 (2009, March 26). Retrieved March 27, 2009, http://www.uspto.gov/go/taf/us_stat.htm

I decided to do some quick and dirty benchmarks to track the progress of LZMA/7-Zip over time. I went back as far as Igor supplied binaries, including one from the very old 3.x series. Rather than test every single release between then and now, I used only “stable” releases, with the exception of version 4.65, which is the latest version of any sort, as well as 4.66, which uses an alpha version of Igor’s new LZMA2 codec (and, as you’ll see, provides definite performance improvement).

I used Igor’s Timer utility to time the process (global time was reported). The corpus in this case was the Linux kernel source, v2.6.28. I conducted these tests on a RAM disk to eliminate hard disk latency issues (especially for decompressions, which improved by about 25% from my initial HDD-based tests). My rig is a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 [2.4Ghz], with 4GB of RAM (one dedicated to the RAM disk), running Vista SP1 x64.

The command line setup was an approximation of the 7-Zip GUI’s “ultra” settings: -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on, letting the archiver auto-choose the number of threads to spawn.

The Data

The Analysis

Without conducting a more thorough battery of tests on a variety of different configurations, it’s difficulty to say with certain just where the performance improvements came from, be it better using of threading or multiprocessors, general algorithmic improvements, or something else. I also don’t know if the performance increases we see reside in improvements to LZMA itself as Igor was finalizing it, or just the code quality of 7-Zip, which implements LZMA.

In any case, the improvements since 3.13 are very clear (remember that lower is better), at least for compression, and for “ultra” settings. Decompression remained largely similar, which surprised me. Some of these results might be directly tied to the number and type of files that were compressed in the case: 4.66, for instance, improves decompression speed for uncompressable files, but no such files exist here since it’s source code.

Hats off to Igor Pavlov for his steady improvement on both a really great compression standard and one of my favorite pieces of software for Windows.

It’s been close to two years since I wrote GNOME Audio Player Shootout, a visual and textual comparison of some the best available audio players for the GNOME desktop.

As is usually the case in the world of free software, a lot has happened since then (and yet, in a strange way, things have stayed exactly the same). I decided to revisit some of those players and see how they’ve progressed. Some of them listed last time haven’t seen any appreciable development, and have been left off.

I realize that I am totally ignoring the daemon-based players (read: Music Player Daemon, XMMS2); this is by design, since those players open up a whole new can of worms. Suffice it to say that if you’ve decided on and XMMS2 or MPD-based player and successfully configured it, you probably don’t need any advice on choosing software.

The following programs will be covered in this review (development versions):

• BMPx (0.40.14)
• Rhythmbox (0.11.6)
• Exaile (2.99.1-svn)
• Banshee (1.4.1)
• Quod Libet (2.0)
• Decibel (1.00)
• Songbird (1.0)
• Listen (0.6~svn1044)

All of the testing was done on a fresh install (and update) of Ubuntu 8.10 in VirtualBox, using a small representative sample of my music collection (some modern, some classical, in Vorbis, MP3, and FLAC).

In his latest article, he pontificates that the recent economic downturn is a death knell for community-supported or community-built programs/sites/&c.

So how will today’s brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 “free” economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc., Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism… The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

There are really two broad fallacies that need addressing here. The first is Keen’s use of the word “open source,” which here is a misnomer. He never mentions Linux, Apache, or other open source programs which always have and will continue to have a dedicated base of programmers, most of whom work on it in their spare time, without any remuneration except personal pride and the esteem of their peers. It need hardly be noted that an economic downtown is likely to increase interest in open-source software, as it likely reduces operating costs for businesses.

No, what Keen means when he says “open source” is free-as-in-beer services, often serving liberally-licensed content; Wikipedia’s content is not open source (there’s no source to open), but it is available under the GNU Free Documentation License, which is something like a liberal Creative Commons license. Perhaps Keen has a sheet of words vaguely associated with Web 2.0 and just likes to throw them around in case his readers are too stupid to know better.

But then comes the bigger fallacy—i.e. in an economic depression, the things that motivated people to contribute to social sites and content servers will vanish entirely. Nevermind the fact that most of these services don’t necessarily imply the forfeiture of copyright; or that many already include ways to monetize one’s content. No, Keen fundamentally misunderstands why people contribute to things like Wikipedia. This isn’t a recent phenomenon borne on the largess of the Web 2.0 bubble; people didn’t start contributing to Wikipedia simply because they were so rich from their day jobs that they felt like giving something back. No, people like being a part of something. They like attaching their name to good work, free or not.

This is all a very roundabout way of saying that Keen couldn’t be more wrong; he apparently is crass enough to believe that anything one does can and should be tied to monetary compensation. I imagine he gets paid for his articles for Internet Evolution (if he was doing them pro bono, it would certainly speak volumes about his argument); perhaps he overestimates the value of his labor.

I personally think the friendly rivalry between the open-source Webkit engine (which powers Safari, among other things) and Mozilla (the Gecko engine, actually) is one of the best things to happen to browser development in years. The constant one-upsmanship can only lead to better browsers. Well, Internet Explorer will constantly be the limiting factor, but we can dream, can’t we?

The latest thing to hit browser source repos is javascript engine improvement based on something called “trace trees”: essentially, javascript gets translated into native bytecode. The Webkit engine made the announcement a few months ago, with code codenamed “Squirrelfish,” promising massive improvements. That article’s also got a pretty good writeup.

Open Source being what it is, it was only a matter of time before Mozilla announced their own version of a trace-tree-based javascript engine. John Resig has a good writeup, as done Brendan Eich.

So, disregarding for a moment all talk of trace trees and JIT, what the hell does this all mean? I am entirely in agreement with Jeff Atwood about the importance of javascript in the contemporary web. Whether you’re using rich sites like Netflix or GMail, or you’re working with Flash files, or you’re getting into the RIA arena with Flex or similar technologies, you’re essentially relying on javascript and javascript engines to get anything done. Good HTML specs get the browsing experience much of the way there, but a truly compelling web technology relies on client-side scripting. Even in the last 3 or 4 years, javascript has gone from superfluous UI tricks to the heart and soul of the user’s end of a web experience. It’s a bit unfortunate, really, since javascript (properly “ECMAScript”) is an old technology that’s single-threaded and doesn’t scale very well. That browser-makers have managed to squeeze this much performance out of it is a testament to geek creativity.

There’s been a lot of reason to switch away from Internet Explorer in the last few years. Microsoft made big steps with IE7 to improvement performance, rendering quality, and security, but Internet Explorer is still the bastard child of the browser world, dog-ass slow compared to its brethren. If the difference between user experience in the javascript-heavy web becomes so great that a Webkit browser or a Gecko browser or Opera provides an entirely different level of satisfaction, then maybe we’ll finally see a real shift in browser usage.

Mozilla, particularly, is posed to reap some real reward. These JIT trace tree improvements will start showing up in 3.1 (I think), and much more so with the new Tamarin engine schedule for Firefox 4. The only viable Webkit browser in Windows, meanwhile, is Safari, which looks and feels alien in Windows, as Apple has a strange insistence upon keep the OSX look, regardless of platform. I don’t know offhand the market slice that Safari for Windows occupies, but it must be infinitesimally small, even compared to Safari on Mac. Firefox, then, is the only truly compelling browser on the Windows platform to take advantage of this right now.

About 2 years ago I wrote a piece called Five things that Desktop Linux really needs, attempting to air out my five biggest grievances with Desktop Linux. If you follow FOSS news, every year is heralded as “The Year of the Linux Desktop,” although such a thing clearly hasn’t happened yet. Now, two years later, I thought it would be interesting to revisit those five problems and see what kind of progress has been made in two years.

Linux needs a good CD ripper

When I last wrote, the favorite CD ripper for the GNOME environment was grip, which had the benefit of being extremely customizable, even if its ripping was plain-Jane cdparanoia. Grip is still used, I imagine, but the default ripper with the GNOME desktop is Sound Juicer, which is a gstreamer-based ripper/encoder that abstracts everything quite heavily and gives damn few options.

The good news is that the semi-abandoned cdparanoia project at least saw a maintenance release that fixed some bugs; the bad news is that the promised further revisions have failed to materialize, meaning that there’s still no compelling cd ripper available for Linux. The Exact Audio Copys and the dBpoweramps remain Windows-only tools.

Also in these past two years, however, a new ripper has emerged: RubyRipper, a Ruby/GTK2 program that tries to emulate EAC’s approach to ripping; that is, it reads segments multiple times and compares them using Ruby’s checksum matcher. While there are some audiophiles at HydrogenAudio who insist that this isn’t a perfect approach to ripping (of course it isn’t), it’s still far more than any of the desktop-standard rippers can come up with. Ideally, it will eventually feature AccurateRip support, though this is tentative.

So, I’m happy to report that some progress has been made in this area, though Linux is still a second-class citizen when it comes to CD ripping.

Linux needs good and consistent font rendering

You wouldn’t think it, compared to issues like multimedia codecs, but font rendering is awash in legal issues. Be it Apple’s patent for BCI (byte code interpreter) or Microsoft’s patent on TrueType (both of which are legally dubious), it’s legal threats and not technical problems that keep the default font smoother for most distros from producing nice, clean, antialiased fonts. The code already exists in the upstream source code for TrueType, but it’s disabled by default. Ubuntu finally made the decision to enable it by default in their distribution, for which I applaud them. Packages exist for many other distributions, which is still a damn sight better than the typical “compile it yourself” response, which always strikes me as utterly absurd.

In my previous post, I highlighted the discrepancy between various types of programs in Linux when it comes to font rendering. I can say without hesitation that the situation has improved since then, though I’m not entirely sure where the responsibility for the fixes lie.

What you see is my blog in Firefox 3.0, some source code in Netbeans 6.1, and the template picker in OpenOffice 2.4. Notice that the font rendering is pretty similar in all three of them. I can tell you that Netbeans looks that good because I’m running it with the Java 6 JDK, which finally added decent font antialiasing. Running it with Java 5 produces some pretty obnoxious font quality. As to OpenOffice, they either fixed font rendering on their end, or else OpenOffice benefits from the larger system font smoothing included in Ubuntu.

Linux needs better inter-distro compatibility and less dependence on repositories

My choice of Linux is Ubuntu; this decision is spurred largely by some æsthetic choices, and the truly orgasmic package management system. If it were not for this, I might very well be running OpenSUSE, which has greatly improved its package management with v11.0. One of OpenSUSE’s more compelling features is that they’re more willing (and the community is more willing) to add new software to the repositories. It’s significantly easier for me to get the latest and greatest software for openSUSE, often by dint of either Pacman’s wonderful repository or the openSUSE build service, which Ubuntu has responded to with the Personal Package Archive (read: build service).

The one benefit of the Ubuntu’s approach is that packages tend to play nicely with each other, whereas with openSUSE and it’s build service, there are sometimes overlapping dependencies.

But there are still a bunch of different package types and packages managers; even among package types, there are incompatible versions. And because of the shared nature of Linux libraries, each distribution’s release will likely have a narrow slice of software versions that will work for that particular library. Say what you will about the Windows approach, but when I install the latest FileZilla on Windows, I don’t get bitched at by my system for needing newer wxWidgets libraries (and therefore necessitating that I either compile my own version or wait 6 month until somebody does it for me). Similarly, installing new graphics drivers doesn’t mean I have to also set up the latest kernel headers and reconfiguring my display configuration file so that it doesn’t fail spectacularly when I reboot.

Initiatives like LSB, FreeDesktop, and PackageKit have made bold steps to make Linux play well with itself. But there’s no middle ground with Linux: you either let distributions do all the work for you, and limit yourself to the particular software, and the particular versions, that they feel like offering you, or you can do everything yourself, compiling and installing your software manually.

Linux needs better multimedia

OK, multimedia on Linux still sucks, and it still sucks hard. Even providing that you’ve enabled extra (legally dubious) repositories for your installation and downloaded all of the plugins and codecs that are available to you (after, of course, you’ve decided to use either GStreamer or Xine as a video engine), you still have the unfortunate issues of video in Linux being slower and of an inferior quality to video on Windows. Is there a reason that rendering with Totem-GStreamer is blocky and awful, and rendering with The KMPlayer is picture-perfect? Even xine is far from perfect.

Then there’s the age-old problem of the X server and the graphics stack on Linux being shit to begin with. Compiz is great, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time watching my windows wobble and painting fire on my screen, but is there a reason that emulators perform so much worse in Linux? Is there a reason that I can’t switch tabs in Firefox with a several-second delay before the page contents are written to the screen? Is there a reason that the X server breaks at the slightest provocation? Is there a reason that the graphics stack offers so little to developers when compared to DirectX on Windows? Is there a reason that all the good-looking audio players on Linux can’t offer me anywhere near the same functionality that foobar2000 does on Windows?

I see individual programs making great progress, but there are fundamental flaws in the Linux approach to multimedia that aren’t going to be solved no matter how many widgets we give our apps. Multimedia on Linux still has a long way to go.

Linux needs disk image mounters

I’m pleased to report that since I last talked about this issue, there have been a couple of programs written to provide just this functionality. Programs like Daemon Tools or Alcohol 52% on Windows provide a way to mount virtual copies of CD or DVD images, allowing the computer to interact with them as though they were physical discs sitting in the drive.

On Gnome, there’s the Furius ISO Mount; on KDE, there’s AcetoneISO, which is also gaining burning support a la Alcohol 120%. Both of these programs function pretty much exactly how you would expect them to. Of the five issues I highlighted last time, this appears to be the most completely resolved; unfortunately, it was also the least important of the issues, and has gotten even less important to me personally since my previous writeup.

Conclusion

My biggest problem is that although the open source community continues to produce extremely compelling software, it suffers from the same fundamental flaws it did years ago: its X server and graphics layer are slow and difficult to work with, which is why you’ll find much better software emulators, games, and video playback on Windows than you will on Linux; its distro-centric repositories are both a boon to the end-user and a version lock-in that eliminates the “Go to the vendor site and download an .exe” ease of Windows. Linux is still a “Do It Yourself” operating system, meaning that despite all of the work being done, there’s not necessarily a complete and versatile environment for developers to program against. Certainly, there isn’t a consistent environment, and things are constantly changing in the world of Linux.

But I admit to being troubled by his recent post. I might think it to be an April Fool’s Day joke, except the post is dated 31 March 2008. After quoting a couple of Linux upgrade horror stories from a software-engineer-turned-club-owner, he concludes:

I can’t fault Jamie’s approach. A clean install of an operating system on a new hard drive — for kiosks running controlled hardware, no less — that’s as good as it gets.

Apparently, Linux is so complex that even a world class software engineer can’t always get it to work.

I find it highly disturbing that a software engineer of Jamie’s caliber would give up on upgrading software. Jamie lives and breathes Linux. It is his platform of choice. If he throws in the towel on Linux upgrades, then what possible hope do us mere mortals have?

I see a couple of mistaken assumptions here. The first is that kiosks are a simple platform for Linux to work on. In fact, I have no idea what hardware is in these kiosks, and have no idea if there are proprietary hardware bits in them that aren’t supported well in Linux. The second poor assumption is that the only necessary step here is simply installing the new O/S. In fact, the engineer does a lot of custom configuration to his kiosks, and it may be that which is causing the crashiness; or, it could be bad hardware. I simply don’t have enough information to know.

Atwood places the blame squarely on Linux’s “complexity.” If Linux was that awful, or if Windows was that great, why hasn’t Jamie simply gotten the kiosks to run Windows? I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing they might be just as crashy. And certainly more expensive.

Finally, as many commenters on Atwood’s entry have pointed out, a good software engineer != a good sysadmin. And using Fedora Core is not a good path to stability. And more importantly, that anecdotes from one guy, however smart, do not a comprehensive criticism make.

After 6+ months of steady development, WordPress 2.5 has finally been released, with a number of new features, including a media library and the first administration panel redesign since 2.0.

In addition, the main WordPress website has been redesigned to match.

Congratulations to all the hackers, testers, and volunteers who helped it happen.