2008 October

Today I posed this message to several of the LUG’s in South Africa. I am reposting it here without edits.

Hi Everybody,
Sorry for the cross-post, I promise it’s a once-off but this is a bit of a special circumstance.
In the grand tradition of GNU and later the Linux kernel, I am beginning with a mail to announce
my intentions, and a request for anybody who shares my vision to help out.
The interest in my CLUG talk about distribution creation some time ago left me thinking that
perhaps there are enough people out there (particularly here in South Africa) who may feel up to
the fun and work of helping to create something special. Having spent 5 years creating a
successful commercial distribution, I believe I have the skills for such a project to be workable, though this one is meant to be very different as you’ll see.

Starting in the next weeks I want to create a GNU/Linux distribution called kongoni. Kongoni is the
Shona word for a gnu (wildebeest) and this represents the origins of the system: firstly it is African,
secondly it is meant to be a truly free distribution of the GNU operating system.
The name in other words translates literally as: GNU Linux (I rather like the wordplay as well).

Fundamental to the design will be an absolute commitment to free software only. That means we will not
include in the installer, nor in the ports tree or any other officially distributed packages any piece of
software that is not under an FSF approved license.
Some degree of the workload can be shared by utilising (and contributing back to) Gnewsense’s list (and blacklist).

Development releases will have a kernel compiled with the no-taint flag – not allowing any non-free drivers to load,
which will be very useful for auditing purposes, where possible we will provide free alternate drivers.
UPDATE: I should have been more clear here. I mean ONLY development releases will have notaint, official releases will not restrict what users can or cannot load.

Where possible I want the system to actively contribute to high-priority free software projects like GNASH and Nouveau,
not least by providing automated scripts in the packages to allow even non-technical users to file automated
bug reports to the projects with usefully information for their needs. Thus possibly increasing the number of testers
exponentially, the improvements that arise will in turn benefit all free software users and developers.
The system will never be commercial, I have no problem with commercial free software (in fact I run a commercial free
software company) but this project would best benefit from being a true community project. If the need arises to
formalize structures, I pledge that it will be done by registering a charity organisation, or joining an existing one
– not by starting a company. If people some day want to start companies that sell services related to the system however
more power to them.

Now on to the initial technical details. First off, I don’t think there is any room in the market for yet another Ubuntu
respin. Ubuntu is a nice system in many ways, but the need is met – and Gnewsense already provides a fully free alternative
to fans of Ubuntu. Instead I believe there is room for new ideas and new thinking.
To this end I want to start with a slackware/bluewhite64 baseline initially targeting x86_32 and x86_64 platforms.
Slackware has many advantages as a baseline and offers enormous power of (easy) customization to give the system a real
unique identity while staying true to standards.
The biggest catch is addressing slackware’s number one shortcoming for desktop users: the limited package manager.
To address this, and also minimise the workload of multiple platforms, I intend to use portpkg to provide a ports tree
that is fully tracked for dependencies. Among my first coding tasks will be a full graphical frontend for portpkg as well
as a series of patches to portpkg itself to allow us to maintain our own ports trees as default. These will consist
of license-audited and dependency-mapped clones of the slackware/bluewhite64 repositories for upstream, and source-only
ports for 3rd-party packages. It is important to maintain our own ports tree since unfortunately all the default ports
available in portpkg include non-free software in their package lists. While we cannot (and should not) prevent users
adding those repositories and installing such proprietary packages – we should not give this action any official support.

The initial default desktop will be KDE4 with intention of including KDE4.2 (due in February) in the first stable release
if possible. OpenOffice.org 3.0 is on the standard packages list, and if the promised GNU/Linux port of Chromium is available by
release time it will be the default browser, otherwise one of the free firefox forks.
An absolute must is a powerful and complete system administration and configuration tool,
utilising things like darkstarlinux’s ALICE suite to complement a full kit for user-admin,
setting up advanced Xorg settings (like multiheads) and other common admin tasks. To ensure
seamless wireless and wired network roaming, wicd will be a default package (and madwifi with the new free ath5k hal for older cards and the newly GPL’d hal from Atheros as well).

It is quite possible that if we have enough volunteers and resources future releases could include parallel versions for
Gnome,xfce,enlightenment etc. and I am happy to include these in the ports tree if somebody helps create the ports.

In terms of project admin I wish to set up a suite of easy-to-use web-apps for contributing, auditing and approving
of ports (the first should be open to all, the latter two to trusted testers only). Designed to make the task
of contributing in this manner not only as simple as possible but to minimize the time needed as far as possible so
that those who choose to contribute their spare time to it can spend as much of that time as possible doing fun stuff
and as little as possible doing drudge work.

The focus of the project is home and desktop users, there are other distro’s aiming at this market but precious few
with a stated mission to be completely free, in both senses of the word.
After freedom, our second most important design principle should be one of “it just works”.

Now of course, as I type this Kongoni is vapourware, the first line of code has yet to be written (though I’ve done
significant amounts of research to make the decisions above, and I have written an installer).
Normally, it isn’t my style to announce something until the first pieces are written but in this case I
find it crucial to the very concept that other people be involved from the start. I have proposed a vision
(not an uneditable one technically) and I want to see who shares my vision and would like to contribute to it’s
realisation. I will be happy to fund hosting for the project and contribute much of my free time to it’s realisation
but I would like to have as many people helping as possible so that this is not just my vision, but our vision.
People who can suggest ideas and improvements, people who can help realise those ideas and help with the
large workload ahead.

If just a few people say “I’m in” – then that’s a go-ahead as far as I’m concerned.

The most useful skills right now will be:
*Web-app programming and web-design
*Ports builders and co-maintainers of the tree
*Graphic design
*Testers

These will likely get official lieutenants appointed on a first-come, first-serve basis.
There is much more to do so if you feel that you can contribute something please feel free to speak up.
If any of the mirror maintainers would be willing to host local mirrors of the ports tree and ISO’s when
we get to release time, please let me know as I have learned from hard experience how even a small distro
release can hit a server.

May I request that those who wish to contribute also reply to me directly as I do not want any
names to get lost in the noise as people discuss the idea.
Finally, I would like to suggest that those who are in Cape Town (once we have a list) meet up
for a face-to-face planning session. Perhaps over coffee on Saturday somewhere in Rondebosch ?

Thank you for reading this far
I hope to hear from you.

Ciao
A.J.

I finally decided last week to take the plunge and try the nouveau driver out. My feelings on proprietary drivers like nvidia’s are well known by now so I doubt there is anybody who will be much surprised except that I took so long.
RMS has said many times that the only time it is acceptable for somebody who believes in free software to use proprietary software is when (1) there are no usable free alternative and (2) you are also contributing to the creation of such an alternative. Thus the use of the proprietary only program is just a temporary stopgap – and you are making an effort according to your abilities to ensure it remains temporary.

Well there are four pieces of proprietary software on my computer (that I know about – if something else slipped through I haven’t found it but even gnewsense has trouble finding it all – and if I haven’t found it then the implications if that I don’t use it). The first is the BIOS, well there isn’t much I can do about that right now, opencore doesn’t support my motherboard yet, and since it’s not a dual-bios motherboard there is no way I can help fix this without bricking my computer. The second is java, which is not major concern to me since it’s 90% GPL’d already and the remaining ten percent will be GPL’d by April if SUN keeps their word.

The last two are the nvidia driver and the adobe flash player. So those two are things that I can start helping to get rid off, and I am doing just that. For flash, I am running gnash as well, my coding skills do not extend to what gnash needs but I can contribute bug reports and I am doing so as I have been for several years. Gnash is fast approaching a usable state. I see too many ‘opensource’ people cheering because Adobe finally ’saw the light’ and released the GNU/Linux flash-10 alongside the windows version. Wake-up people. They didn’t see the light, they didn’t do this because they are nice ! They did it because gnash is fast approaching a usable state for everybody (it already works for almost everybody) and they want to try and stop it’s momentum by cementing their position with an early release.
Please folks, if you care about free software, see through this piece of pure marketing strategy. Adobe didn’t do this to make it easier on new GNU/Linux users, they did it because GNASH represents a threat to them on Windows and on GNU/Linux, so stopping it where it is currently strongest is their best bet to try and prevent it replacing them on both.
I believe however that they will come to learn that the only way they really could have stopped gnash and made it irrelevant would have been to make flash free software.

But back to the topic at hand, there is one project out there to try and create a free replacement for nvidia’s proprietary driver and I am now running it. At this stage you will need to have xorg1.5 installed to make the most of it, the 1.4 3D and compositing support requires the gallium driver for it which is … very broken. But not long ago, all of nouveau was pretty broken. It’s impressive how the driver has come along in a short period of time. Already it outperforms the nv driver a hundred times over on my system.
I will be upgrading to xorg 1.5 as soon as it’s practical to test it on that (particularly it’s 3D support) but I can vouch that if you follow the wiki instructions for installation nouveau works pretty well for 2D on most setups. There are some quirks which I will post on more fully as I discover them, but well done to the nouveau folks, I have already offered them what help I can give because contributing to this is the only way I can rid myself of a driver that has proven unstable, badly designed and thoroughly proven that proprietary software always comes back to bite you in the ass sooner or later.

Microsoft made headlines yesterday with it’s global anti-piracy day ‘celebration’ – a kind of Microsoft version of a hallmark anti-holiday (if you’ll excuse the anti-pun). Tectonic has a very well written article on just how much the marketing blurb by the BSA in South Africa ignores (short version: all the actual facts) and the register had two stories on the anti-event and it’s associated black-screen-of-call-the-customer-a-thief WGA deployment.
WGA shall apparently standing for: Witch-hunt, Gossip and Accuse.
Update: or even better – Windows Guilty by Accusation

Of course as tectonic points out the picture is rather more complex than the BSA paints it. More eloquently I would say the BSA painted a stick figure with one ear (xckd style) and wants us to believe it’s the famous Van Gogh self portrait. Please note that I am NOT trying to suggest any association between XKCD and the BSA – and that I am just using a metaphor with well-known imagery, if anything the BSA’s drawing is rather crude by XKCD’s actual standards.

One particular quote stood out for me in the register articles:
Rob McKenna, Washington State Attorney General, said the trade in counterfeit software was “killing American jobs and suffocating competition”.

He claimed a third of all installed software was pirated and that a ten per cent reduction in the trade over four years would “create $41bn in economic growth and 32,000 US jobs”. McKenna said buying fake software was not like buying a fake scarf or handbag because you could not know what damage it could do to your computer.

That last line actually made me laugh out loud. Is this guy suggesting that when you buy a real copy of windows you do know what damage it will do to your computer ? Well aside from installing windows ? No you don’t. It’s closed-source proprietary software. Heck MS has a record of including malicious software in their proprietory products (of course they don’t call it malicious but that’s what I call WGA and other privacy intruding programs that phone home). They have a history of deliberately obfuscating processes to prevent non-MS applications that compete with their own from working well (how is this not harmful to end users who may prefer the non-MS application ?).
And that’s just what they did so far. FUD takes on a whole new level when Microsoft can get a bleeding Attorney General to pretend that pirated copies of Vista could cause potential harm to your computer – in completely denial of the fact that any proprietary software whether obtained legally or not has harm as a guarantee !

How about the fact that MS has update servers you cannot disable ? The ones they use to update WGA among other things. When RedHat/Fedora’s package servers were exploited, they shut down updates, came clean and made sure users knew how to protect themselves, and users were able to shut updates down themselves at any moment. If Microsoft’s update servers get pwned… well I guess every windows user out there is fsck’d … oh wait, windows doesn’t have that command – I guess they are just plain fucked.

The only way to get software that won’t harm your computer is to use software which can be and are independently audited (by other people, by you or by people you employ to do it for you). That means free software. Anything else is basically giving up your privacy, security and other rights to an untrusted party with nothing to gain from respecting it, and a habit of leaving glaring holes where other malicious (but rather less ambitious) parties like virus writers, crackers and phishers can get access to your most important private data for such uses as emptying your credit card. Of course, that’s exactly what Microsoft hopes to achieve so like I said, the others are no more malicious, just less ambitious since they don’t try to get every credit card from ever computer user in the world.

Still, here’s hoping that Microsoft stops just talking and actually starts getting a bit more heavy handed on piracy (italics because I don’t like the word). Their tactics pissed of Ernie Ball enough to switch his guitar string company (the best in the world) to GNU/Linux several years ago. The worse they get – the more people will start telling them exactly where they can stick their EULA’s and switch to something that doesn’t try to control you or rob you blind.