Fedora radars

Last weekend the Baneasa Bucharest airport (BBU) hosted the yearly edition of the big air show of Bucharest. Aircraft and helicopters offered a spectacle in the air and thousands of people admired them. In addition to that, a nearby hangar was organized for an exhibition with booths and early in the morning, before the show in the sky to start, I gave a tour of the exhibition floor when a complex device in a middle of the Linux boot process caught my attention:

I quickly reached my camera to capture an image of the standard init, when the guy at the booth (for the air traffic systems, radars and such) told me to wait a bit for the system to start and get a better picture. I replied I was interested to see it booting Linux and we chatted a bit, apparently in the last year they migrated all the infrastructure to Linux, coming from Unix. In the meantime it reached the desktop and I saw for a fraction of a second it was Fedora Core 6 (complete with the DNA wallpaper) and when wondered why a 5 years old system is used, I was explained such an old system has all the bugs fixed.
When talking, a second display showed its desktop for a few seconds and it had the Fedora 15 stripes. I wondered about the combination of an old and a newer system and was advised to wait more and talk with an engineer. Couldn't wait, the things outside started to warm-up, but in the working radar system picture the legend is: on the left a Fedora Core 6 system, on the center and top Windows 7 systems and on the right a Fedora 15 system. I am not a specialist, so can't say what every of them is doing.

Sunflower wallpapers

It's been a while since my last post with wallpapers, is about the time for a new one and since last week-end I got into a sunflower field, today's theme is free sunflower wallpapers. Enjoy :)

But for this post not to be all photo fluff, here's a screen capture of my Fedora desktop struggling to edit the photos above, all while having open a few more apps (email, instant messenger and web browser: the borwser and photo editor fight for bringing the PC to a crawl).

#FREEBASSEL

Have you ever used the Open Clip Art Library or the Open Font Library? Both of those sites are powered by the Aiki framework, which was used with openclipart.org as its primary target. The main developer behind Aiki is Bassel Khartabil and he is in need of our help, being detained in Syria.

Bassel by Joi Ito, on Flickr

His friends launched #FREEBASSEL, a global effort to gather information and leverage that will help lead to his release, here's a quote from the campaign website:

On March 15, 2012, Bassel Khartabil was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus. Since then, his family has received no official explanation for his detention or information regarding his whereabouts. However, his family has recently learned from previous detainees at the security branch of Kafer Sousa, Damascus, that Bassel is being held at this location.

Myself, I have little faith (none at all in fact) in dictatorships like the Syrian one but I signed the petition, think is a worthy cause and invite you to join. Solidarity is the best thing we can have in such situations.

I didn't knew Bassel directly, we exchanged mails on the OCAL mailing list, but I used his work, both as an contributor and used of both OCAL and OFL. But even if I didn't knew him, for crying out loud, he was detained 4 months ago and nobody, not even his family, have any info. That's not acceptable.

Freedom

Software freedom is a luxury. I often talk here about software freedom, I advocate it, I fight for it, but let me tell you again: software freedom is a luxury, in order to enjoy it there are other things needed, like a democratic society, law, justice or freedom of speech, if there was a Maslow pyramid of freedoms, software freedom would be somewhere to the top, with those basic things as its base. You know, the things you take as granted in a country member of the European Union and for which people died in December 1989.

"wake-up Romania, your democracy is dying!" says a protester in Bucharest

Those things are now at risk in my country, Romania, where in the last few days the democracy imploded. The American embassy expressed concern, the German one did the same, the French government did the same, the EU Justice commissioner did the same, there are talks about suspension from the European council. If it sounds like hell, it is because is hell.
"Prime Minister Ponta, in 2 months you destroyed the democracy built in 20 years"

The problem is, even if the current government isn't, we, in some parts of the country, are a modern European society, we don't have guns to take them in the streets to defend democracy. We have families and jobs to keep, the best we can do is to go out in the streets and protest. Then document everything online, since the traditional media is owned and controlled (more on that later). The moment was "well" chosen: the country practically melts at near 40°C, students go home for the summer break, parents are worried with their children in the middle of high-school graduation exams, people are planning summer vacancies away from the city - you know, what a normal society is supposed to to. Unfortunately, a corrupt government takes us from normality and make us go out in the streets. Even the computer geeks (especially the computer geeks, who are part of the progressist class of the country).
FOSS hackers and and IT&C students left their basements to defend the Consitution

So what happened? Let me get back in time for a few months: the year started with a heavy winter, with even below -22°C and a center-right government based on a weak parliamentary majority being hard on economy trying to keep the country economy stable and avoid repeating the Greek situation. Of course the austerity measures (they were in power since 2008, for all the global crisis) made them unpopular. Add some corruption, which seems to be a constant to all Romanian governments, some mistakes and a very good propaganda machine in the hands of the opposition, they were going for a big loss in the upcoming general elections, scheduled for this autumn. But then something happened: opportunists changed parties, seeking for a warm place and the parliamentary majority changed. The government changed, a coalition formed around the ex-communists got into power.
"Why do you lie to us?"

So far this is democratic play, it was all legal even if apparently dumb: the former government was unpopular and still losing popularity, more austerity had to come. The communist had nothing to do than just wait half a year and they were approaching a slam dunk, winning election with no effort. Yes, getting into power earlier gave them some advantage (a few years ago their leader, the current Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta declared after losing an election "we lost because their vote stealing machine was better than our stealing machine"), but also had disadvantages: in those months, despite their promise to raise salaries and pensions, they would have been forced o keep austerity, otherwise the country economy goes into chaos and they have their hands tied by the European Union and International Monetary Fund anyway. So why hurry?
protesters

The ex-communist party had the government from 2000 to 2004, when they lost election facing a wave of people angered by their corruption and anti-democratic actions, like free press suppression or using the justice to destroy political enemies. Then came as a hero the current president Traian Basescu, which they tried to impeach back in 2007 but failed, he was re-confirmed with a huge majority and was re-elected in 2009. The main promise of president Basescu was freedom of justice and this started to bring its fruits, after many years of delays the courts approached verdicts in some major cases, one of them being Adrian Nastase, former Prime Minister. They HAD TO stop justice. As icing on the cake, the current PM, Victor Ponta was revealed by the British magazine Nature as a plagiator in his PhD thesis, situation in which other politicians of the world had to resign their seats. That HAD TO be stopped too.
"Down with Ponta" and "Ponta is a plagiator"

The hard moves started last week, when the public television management was changed to be comprised only of government representatives (traditionally, it also had proportional representatives from all the parliamentary groups). In rural Romania internet access is limited, people get most of the information from television, so they assured to take control of the public television. They also had control of the biggest private media trust in the country, which is owned by Dan Voiculescu, a known collaborator of the secret police from the communist dictature and they have control over other smaller media companies. A second move was to move Monitorul Official, the paper where the laws are published before they are able to function, from the Parliament in the direct control of the Government, this way it can be used to their own purposes - the first use was to escape the above-mentioned media-mogul from an imminent judicial sentence. The second use was to dissolve the universitary ethical commission who would have recommended retiring the Prime Minister's PhD.
"We want a country like outside. Down with Ponta"

This week the things accelerated. First, the People's Advocate was replaced: over the summer the Parliament goes to a break, the government will pass "urgency orders" which are to be approved as laws after the parliamentary break in the autumn, but until then they have the power of laws and the People's Advocate is the only authority able to challenge them in the meantime at the Constitutional Court. Then the presidents of the both parliament chambers were changed, with government representatives - this is again against the law, since they were supposed to be replaced only with another members of their party. Then the government passed an urgency order which limits the Constitutional Court to oppose the impeachment of the president. Yesterday the impeachment procedures were started and tomorrow a law (or urgency order?) will be passed to simplify the procedures of dismissing an impeached president.
"Victor, when you will call the miners?"

What's next? The president will be impeached, a referendum will follow in about 3 months. In the meantime, his place will be held by one of the government coalition leaders, which got into this position (Senate President) just a couple of days before, he will have almost all President powers, including to pardon and put into liberty condemned criminals (hint, hint!). The last standing democratic institution is the Justice, which have leadership changed scheduled in September anyway, with the new leadership to be put in function by the government, parliament and the (temporary by then) president. And then this government will "organize" the presidential referendum and new parliament elections. In a country which will be no more a democracy.
Protester

What we do in the meantime? Protest. Today Bucharest is expected to held a big rally of democracy supporters, I will follow this matter on my photography blog. To end in a different, less gloomy tone, this is the sign I liked the most at yesterday protests in front of the government building:
"Hello political parties. The Higgs Boson exists. Let Romania alone."

"Pirates": SpringerImages

Lately we hear a lot about cases where corporations or greedy individuals misuse freely licensed software or content, such a case is related in a special report in Signpost, Wikipedia's community-written and community-edited newspaper: Springer's misappropriation of Wikimedia content "the tip of the iceberg".

SpringerImages, a website providing scientific images and part of the Springer global publishing company was caught by a professor publishing and selling Creative Commons licensed materials with no proper attribution. After being contacted and some talks with the professor, the publishing company admits there may be some flaws but call the accusations "blatantly false" and "reputation damaging".

After the Signpost's article, Springer published another response, this time they acknowledge "defects" and take measures like "we have manually stopped display of *all* images with MediaWiki or Wikipedia in the caption. These images will not be displayed again until we can reliably differentiate among those that have non-commercial restrictions."

The article notes how damaging for Free culture such abusers are, one notable example being the German Federal Archives, which donated 100.000 pictures to Wikipedia in 2008 and then stopped contributions after seeing mass-scale abuse of their donated content (like images with watermarks cropped and then sold on eBay as original)

In as interesting piece, read it all at Signpost.

Trends

Yesterday I passingly mentioned on a post that stats show the Fedora user base is shrinking (looking back, I probably should have said "seems to be shrinking"), which made for a later conversation with someone genuinely asking for the numbers, someone else challenging my conclusion and someone else not taking a solid stance either way.

First, I want to make it even clearer, I was not talking about contributors or project health, which can be measured with completely different metrics, but just about the users base, which was relevant in the context of my post (users will have to inflict UEFI with Secure Boot).

Second, there is no absolute way to count the user base for a Linux distro, you can't do it the Windows way by counting sold licenses or pre-installed computers (well, neither that is accurate, not counting the unlicensed installs), nor you can use web usage statistics (not every computer is online, Linux desktop market share is too small and easily affected by rounding errors), so the best way our community was able to come with was counting package updated via yum (the wiki statistics page has explanations about the methodology and its flaws).

Based on the plain, raw, data in the page I made a simple chart and then added a few annotations on top, to have a little context, is easier to read this way

Some observations:

• There was an absolute peak with Fedora 8, which is possibly attributed by the statistics page to a massive Amazon EC2 presence with images provided by various entities/companies. Community-wise, the distro was then at a Maximum, with everything opening left and right, people being enthusiastic. Is the time you will see past and present contributors remembering as "good old times".
• Another, much smaller, peak happened with Fedora 14, which can also be attributed to the Amazon EC2 presence.
• The chart shows a big dive with Fedora 15, the numbers where still have time to increase but not much, it will be EOL-ed in a few weeks.
• Fedora 16 is mid-life, until December when it will reach End Of Life, more installs will happen, is too early to tell if it will surpass F15 or not, we'll talk about that in half a year.
• Of course Fedora 17 is near the bottom, is a fresh release with statistics for after only one week, so far it shows, according with the statistics page, more yum connections and less direct downloads compared with the previous release.

Any more disclaimers needed?

Thresholds

A big flame does not end suddenly, it continues with echoes and as echoes go further away, the more ridiculous they get. You can learn, for example, why do Fedora needs signed binaries for UEFI with Secure Boot: because is too hard for users to enter BIOS and change a setting there.

I encountered myself Linux users who didn't entered BIOS before but they need it for the install to change boot order. In such cases I google myself a nice tutorial and point to that. If they are not able or not willing to follow such simple instructions, then I recommend them to continue using Windows, pay for a specialist to solve their problems or take a computing course. And I don't think I am wrong in doing that, by definition, Fedora user base is defined by voluntary Linux consumers who are computer-friendly and likely collaborators. If they are unable of doing such a little work or unwilling to learn such a simple thing, they will be more pain than useful contributors.

There is this illusionary dream in the Fedora community to gain massive market share (the stats show we are shrinking) by attracting an audience of "girl scouts" type of users, for which we removed usability, lose features day by day and may reduce the freedom in the near future.

From the beginning, being a Free software user required a balance between freedom and convenience, and every of the people involved has his own threshold, but Fedora as a project has a stated mission "to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community" and "freedom over convenience" was part of our marketing message since the four foundations were defined and even before that.

Back to anecdotes and personal experience, time teaches me is not worthy to invest in people who are not willing or not able to learn: you teach them at first, some will learn and grow into valuable contributors, some will refuse and suffocate you with babysitting requests. Filter ones from the others and your life and work will improve.

Luana wallpapers

When everything looks doom and gloom in the Free Software world is time to remember there is life beyond it, like the last week-end when I had the chance to explore a magic land full of stories and legend, but also beautiful sceneries. I returned from there with a lot of pictures to send later for Wiki Loves Monuments (I am busy these days making the contest work, with sponsors, trademarks and such), but also with beautiful images to share as Free wallpapers. Enjoy.

Less freedom is no freedom

I wanted to write about the Linux boot and UEFI from a while now, but I figured out is better to learn first more about the issue and take a deep breath before taking a position. In the meantime, many faces of the debate were talked in various places, so I think I have a better grasp.

From the beginning, when people started talking about Secure Boot some warned about the treat to Free Software, but they were pretty much dismissed by many as a bunch of hippies following the smelly RMS, we'll surely find a way around when will get to it. Now, after mjg wrote a long technical pieces about the struggles of making Fedora boot on UEFI with Secure Boot enabled, we can the alarmists were right and Microsoft managed to give a fatal blow to Free Software on the desktop with the help of many hardware manufacturers.

The problem is Free Software won't be able to co-exist with Windows and keep its freedom, people will have to make the choice: break-up totally with Windows (really hard in the computing landscape of today) or give away one of the fundamental freedoms granted by GPL (modify and distribute the software). Sure, this is not a problem in the server world, where you can safely turn Secure Boot off and live happily (boot malware does not affect Linux) as this is not a problem in the enterprise desktop in the places where the game is Linux-only. It is a problem in the hobbyist space, where people play with different stuff all the time and is a problem with adoption, when new potential users will have their computers locked to Windows. It is also not a Linux problem, is a Free Software problem, if you give away freedoms, you can still run Linux.

I can see how people wanting to run Linux and Windows 8 (let aside me not understanding why anyone would want to use Windows 8, it's a turd, from the same category with GNOME Shell, a tabled interface shoehorned into a desktop) will enter BIOS(UEFI) at every boot and change the Secure Boot flag according with the OS they are going to start (time wasting and annoying). And you will have to turn it off, don't expect things like drivers or kernel modules from RPM fusion or similar sources to receive certificates, after all they distribute software with legal restrictions in the US, the home of the certification authority.

So short term disable Secure Boot, keep Windows 7 if you have to dual boot, put your own keys inside BIOS(UEFI), pay, there seem to be some solutions. How about long term? I expect "pirates" will crack Windows 8 anyway and make it boot without Secure Boot. Then, in one or two releases Microsoft will change the logo specifications, Secure Boot will be mandatory with no BIOS option to turn it off - we must defend ourselves from evil pirates and malware writers and over 90% of the computers, "designed for Windows", will be unable to run a Free Software operating system (Linux desktop is busy chasing windmills with user interface experiments, so it won't gain significant market share).

My prevision is even more grim: by that time Windows will move to allowing installs only from the "app store" and Free Software applications will be out (remember, apps like Firefox, LibreOffice or even GIMP have the bulk of the users on Windows). By that time Free Software will be dead and buried, wanting a Microsoft alternative we will have the choice of Google Chrome with everything in the "cloud".

Quite negative so far, right? There should be a solution I see... yes, I think the Free Software world should refuse Microsoft's proposal for Secure Boot. Some FOSS developers argue having a secure boot process can be a good thing, while they may be right, here is not the case, Microsoft proposal is broken by design, we should not endorse it, join the opposition and get the anti-trust regulators to make something, all while teaching people how to change BIOS settings and generate and install own keys. I don't see any important player endorsing the FSF petition: Fedora is not there, Red Hat is not there, Debian is not there, Canonical is not there, Ubuntu is not there, Mint is not there... not any distro is there. And this is a bad thing.

Search by images

Even if visible in plain sight, the feature to search by images in Google is less known and it can be incredibly useful and a good alternative to some other less accessible services. Let's have a look at using it.

Start at the Google image search at http://images.google.com/. Did you know you can drag images from your desktop or URL from other windows into its search box?

Or if you are less accurate with dragging, the search box has a photo icon which you can use to copy/paste URLs or upload images? Good to know on both accounts.

When researching the feature, my first idea was to try a picture of the supermoon I recently shoot in Vienna. The result is accurate, Google identified it as a full moon (technically, a supermoon is a full moon), offered good links, including a Wikipedia article and some similar images (is the moon, it looks alike in all photos).

Then I wanted something different, so tried an image with the old Mozilla Firebird logo I had lying around from another recent article. Yet another success, logo recognized correctly as a logo, as Mozilla's, good links, etc.

Of course is not all roses, when trying with another picture which is 1.) harder to identify and 2.) not available on the Internet, the result can be funny (and totally off - I don't think I am a horse)

But still, for pictures not available online, it can be quite good and still useful, here it identified pretty accurately two person in black dresses (or at least two black things) doing something together.

Fun, fun, but I said it can be useful, let's do something useful, like searching for stolen inappropriately used/licensed images. After the supermoon above, my second try was a photo with cherries which a while ago I used as my desktop wallpaper and also posted in a few places (the cherries season is close!). Yet another success, Google identified it not only as cherry, but as sour cherry, which it actually is, probably based on the content of the pages using it. A good description taken from wiki, a relevant first link and a bunch of related pictures and then a link to my photography blog hosting the image. Not bad at all.

Now let's look further: the image can be found in a few Wiki pages, which is normal, I uploaded it to Commons myself. Then the fun begins (the image originate from my blog with a CC-BY-SA license or from Wikipedia, also with a CC-BY-SA license).

There are pages where the image is hotlinked directly from my server (so I could have detected its use from Apache logs or even could have blocked external referers, but that would have been evil). Of course, no links back, no credits, no nothing. The fun part: I can see with my bare eye another cherry picture on that page which is taken from my blog.

And there are pages hosting their own copy of the image, some with edits (like adding some text on top) and some at large resolution (those are taken from Wikipedia instead of my blog).

I won't police those sites, the picture was up for share (albeit under a different license, not at Public Domain) and this article was not intended to whine about copyright offenders, but to show the use of an image search tool. Have fun with your own searches!

Kindergarden Linux

I get approached with the classic question "will Fedora X (16 in this case) run on my PC?" Sure, why not, the user has a P4 class computer with enough RAM. Then the next question, equally classic "what should I run, 16 or Ubuntu 11.10? or any other alternative?". My honest answer is as a Fedora contributor I obviously prefer Fedora, but the best distro may depend on the user's needs. Time to learn he does Ruby programming and some internet navigation. Then I guess trying a live image can't hurt and the ultimate choice, as as a desktop user, would be drawn from the desktop environment: Unity/Gnome Shell/KDE/Xfce.

But it seems me saying "contributor" triggered a "last question", "what means being a contributor to Fedora?" and then I expand, talking to various types of contributions, from packaging to programming or administration, drop a link to the join page and so on. After we clear the part about money (Fedora is Free project based on volunteering) I get another one, about the age limit... and learn my interlocutor is 13. Well, he can be a contributor, we had and have other underage contributors, but he has to understand the consequences of using a Free license and his parents must allow it. He things translations may be a good starting point. And may do some design, based on previous experience with Illustrator and Photoshop.

After a short "what is better, Linux or Windows?" (it depends on your needs, freedom versus Diablo III) there is one more issue, the actual install, even if is just running a live image (he prefers CD over USB, despite my arguments for the contrary). So I have to give an explanation about what a live image is, how a device will be booted and won't affect the installed system, even what BIOS is and how you change the boot order (he never entered the BIOS setup before). All while insistently asked for my phone number, which I refuse to give away.

Fast forward one day, it seems like trying Fedora 16 Live was a failure: he gets a wallpaper and a mouse cursor, nothing else. I am showing a random screenshot from the web, trying to understand if he has a normal GNOME Shell empty desktop or is a deeper problem and this drives me to a large explanation on what GNOME, Unity, KDE, Xfce, LXDE are (and a statement of my desktop preference). I am asked again about my phone number and ignore the question. Then he wants to give Ubuntu a try, I don't have a problem with that but he has: the same empty desktop with no panel, no right-click menus, no nothing. If is not the display, then it may be video drivers (ATI), so I recommend either a newer Fedora (F17 RC1 is online) or VESA parameters for boot (me blaming AMD).

But this will happen another another day, today he has an important math test at school. Not before being asked again for my phone number (no, I won't be available this evening and in the week-end will be away in a photography trip) and since the download folder for F17 RC1 isos have two files, Desktop and KDE, I am supposed to recommend one. I can't, so I am ambiguous. To be continued.

Speaking about phone numbers, is not wise to give them easily... I gave my number recently to an another possible contributor under promise it will be used only for emergency (he's slightly older, at the age of 16, and a bit more experienced, with actually having run Ubuntu and Fedora before) and now I am called even for spam alerts or Deep Freeze problems, no matter the hour or the day.

PS: I am not even an Ambassador

Freelance / Storyboard

I am doing a lot of photography lately but I also didn't forget about graphics, the latest project I was involved lately was doing freelance work on a proprietary commercial project for creating storyboards). While is not Free software, it allows to leverage my experience from my old Fedora webcomic and even build upon some of the assets I developed as a follow-up. From a technology point of view, the project is cool as it uses SVG for its files, so once installed you can extend it easily with self-made graphics or with images from the Open Clip Art Library, for example.

Unfortunately the app is Windows-only, made with .NET, so I can't easily provide screenshots (I use Inkscape and Fedora for my part of the work), but here's an example image from the Storyboard That website (probably people will recognize the graphics style):

Vienna wallpapers

When dumping a set of photos from Vienna I promised I optimize a few of them as wallpapers, today is the time do deliver. You can use them freely. (click for full-size view)

Bonus: Supermoon

Also while in Vienna I encountered the supermoon (the big full moon, 14% bigger, which happens very rarely), I caught a picture with the best my gear can deliver (70-200 lens with an X1.4 zoom adapter on an APS-C sensor) at 100% zoom level, free for re-use.

Bonus: Graffiti

While wandering around Vienna I saw this anarchist graffiti which I think is meaningful and more applicable in those days: when a system is broken so badly, there is no chance to repair it, then nuke it from the orbit.

PS: unrelated, when preparing the pics above, my Fedora desktop gave a "Windows moment" - the mouse cursor changed the shape to "wait", trying to make that go away and get a normal "arrow" pointer, I closed a very busy web app. As nothing good happened, closed GIMP where I worked on the pics. Then the entire X.org sesion crashed to a black screen (together will all my open apps) and the desktop restarted itself.