Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde » Technology

Urbi is going open-source

Samuel Tardieu — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:39:38 +0000

Gostai just announced that its implementation of the Urbiscript programming language is going to be open-sourced in May 2010. Urbiscript is a prototype-based interpreted language inspired from a mix of Lua, Smalltalk, Ruby and Javascript amongst others with many features dedicated to parallel programming.

I spent the whole 2008 year working on Urbiscript at Gostai with several very talented people, and I’m really happy to see the project we worked on released as open-source. I have some ideas of where I could use the Urbiscript language in place of compiled solutions. The licensing model will be a dual one: a free and GPL-compatible open-source license, or at your option a proprietary one for which you will have to pay. However, if you want to contribute to the code, there is a catch:

We are very excited at the idea of working with talented contributors. There will be one constraint, which is to agree to transfer the copyright of the contribution to Gostai. This is the only way to both keep a clear ownership of the licensing rights, and to ensure a centralized reviewing process that we believe is good to guarantee a high level of consistency for Urbi and associated software.

Gostai is not the only entity to require copyright transfer to incorporate contributed code: the Free Software Fundation (FSF) does the same thing for most of its projects. The alleged non-traceability and missing ownership information prevented the FSF from merging back XEmacs sources into Emacs: a few years ago, I heard Richard Stallman (in a heated argument with a XEmacs contributor) say that some pieces of code in XEmacs could not be traced back to their authors, and that the FSF could not take the risk of accepting code from an unknown origin into its repositories. The SCO vs. Linux case a few years later proved Richard right.

However, asserting that copyright transfer is the only way [...] to ensure a centralized reviewing process is quite untrue. The Linux kernel does have a centralized reviewing process, where Linus Torvalds either checks the contributed code himself or trusts (possibly transitively) one of his appointed maintainers to do so after the code has been publicly reviewed. And Linus does not require any copyright transfer and is satisfied with the traceability now provided by the Signed-Off-By author information attached with every code change.

I am genuinely curious to see whether people will accept to transfer their copyright to Gostai so that the company can monetize their work, or whether alternate repositories with tainted free-software-only versions will flourish. In the Linux kernel world, “tainted” usually means that the open-source kernel has been contaminated with a proprietary (closed-source) module and thus cannot be trusted anymore. Here, “tainted” means that Gostai will be unable to incorporate the contributed code back into its proprietary version because those contributions might be labeled “open-source only”.

Anyway, I wish Gostai very good luck, and I am quite certain that the licensing situation will evolve in the future. I am eager to try the open-source version of Urbi on my hardware to benefit from its power and simplicity!

Edit 2010-07-20: Urbi is now open-source, and which a much better license than first envisioned and copyright does not need to be transferred to Gostai.

The OVH-Google XMPP mess

Samuel Tardieu — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:41:40 +0000

Beware: trying to move your Jabber (XMPP) server from one host to another may result in your users not being able to reliably talk to users using Google Talk or Gmail chat. It looks like one way or the other Google caches the SRV records of your Jabber server and do not consult the DNS anymore afterwards.

It has been several weeks since I moved the ejabberd XMPP server for rfc1149.net on a new host which kept the same name as the old one. However, connections with gmail.com users are randomly working, while all the other domains my users interact with seem to have no problems at all. I have found several server administrators who experienced the same issue, and even read a suggestion to send an e-mail to the address xmpp@google.com which could supposedly solve the problem. The result? No answer, no working connection with gmail.com users.

What is needed to get Google to reread the new DNS information?

Edit: I received an answer from Jonas, a software engineer at Google. It looks like they are having troubles linking with Jabber servers located on the OVH network (as is mine, and as Ploum also wrote in comments), and they have contacted OVH. In the meantime, I may try to add another port to my Jabber server, update the SRV record, and see if it brings me more luck.

Silent death of a LG Flatron monitor

Samuel Tardieu — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:39:17 +0000

My LG Flatron L1915S monitor decided that it was tired of working so hard: the backlight now turns off after a fraction of second. Of course, it happened right after the warranty period expired, so it is unlikely that I can get it fixed. A fair number of users seem to have the same problem, so I guess I will have to find another brand.

20 years later, I’m proud of myself

Samuel Tardieu — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:02:06 +0000

Back in 9th grade. My science teacher was explaining to the class why carbon monoxide (CO) inhalation was dangerous: carbon monoxide molecules attach themselves to the hemoglobin, preventing dioxygen molecules (O2) to do so. The carbone monoxide doesn’t dissociate from hemoglobin under normal pressure, making it a long-term problem (ok, this was a simplification, but it was ninth grade, don’t forget).

I remember myself asking the teacher: “Would it be ok to run a person’s blood through a machine that temporarily increases its pressure in the presence of oxygen?” She looked surprised and told me she didn’t know.

Two days ago, I watched an episode of House M.D in which Dr. House puts a patient into an hyperbaric oxygen chamber to cure a patient from carbon monoxide poisoning. Not quite the same thing as the derivation I was thinking about, but the same principle, increase the blood pressure in an oxygen-saturated environment. This reminded me of the question I asked when I was a child. Twenty years later, I’m proud to know that my idea was not that stupid.

The crazyness of DRM

Samuel Tardieu — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:27:58 +0000

First I hoped I had misread the web page. Then I realized I had not.

Networked disks are very useful. At home, they allow you to access your data from any computer on your local network without needing to keep a machine acting as a file server turned on all the time. But wait! You could use a networked disk to store songs and movies that you have illegally downloaded, couldn’t you?

Don’t worry, your networked disk will make sure you comply with the law and much more . Did you intend to store music that you legally downloaded from Jamendo and let your spouse and children access it? Too bad, since it may infringe someone else copyrights, Western Digital seems to think that it is best that you do not share it at all, just in case:

Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the following file types cannot be shared by different users using WD Anywhere Access.

If these file types are on a share on the WD My Book World Edition system and another user accesses the share, these file will not be displayed for sharing. Any other file types can be shared using WD Anywhere Access.

As a friend send to me, “sure, sharing 1 tera bytes of text files looks very appealing”. This post could have been titled “how DRM (Digital Rights Management) can hurt the world even when they are not used” or “we assume that you are a criminal”.

Using IPv6 by default with wget

Samuel Tardieu — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:05:37 +0000

I was surprised to see that wget chose to use IPv4 over IPv6 when downloading a file. It looks like it is on purpose (I would call it a bad design choice). You can tell wget to prefer IPv6 over IPv4 by putting the following line

prefer-family = IPv6

in either /etc/wgetrc (system wide) or $HOME/.wgetrc (user settings).

Looking for a non-intrusive personal email ticket tracker

Samuel Tardieu — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:50:03 +0000

I am in search for the perfect non-intrusive personal email ticket tracker system. Many people send me email which require me to do some things before I can either answer them or provide them with a definite solution. Right now, I put those emails in a “avoir” (“to see” in French) folder which grows continously as I easily forget to remove things from them when it’s done. Also, it is now so big that I have trouble navigating through it.

I am in the need of a real ticket tracking system which would allow me to prioritize such requests, set deadlines and so on. This system would need to be non-intrusive as I do not want people to have to do anything but reply to emails from me; in particular, I don’t want to change the subject line nor ask them to use another email address. It would also have to work if several people are in copy.

I already keep archives of all my incoming and outgoing emails. The idea would be for me to bounce an email which requires further processing to a known-only-by-me address which would open a new ticket. Any email following this one in the same thread, even if it has arrived on my system already, would need to be added to the newly created ticket. Using the In-Reply-To and References field should be enough to get anything related to the starting email (which may not be the first one in a thread).

In order to achieve that, I would need to record, each time an email arrives, its Message-Id as well as its parent Message-Id. Each time a mail arrives, if it is a direct or indirect successor of a mail that has been used to open a ticket, it would be added automatically to the corresponding issue. A web interface would allow me to prioritize and operate on tickets (e.g., close them).

Is anyone aware of such a beast? (in the Free Software world of course)

Accidentally distribute your files with instant messaging

Samuel Tardieu — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 11:46:46 +0000

Some days ago, I was trying to get in touch with a friend of mine. I checked my instant messaging client and noted that he was online. I sent him a “Hi” and immediately received an offer to download a large .zip file with a business-related name.

The explanation? He was doing a drag-n-drop operation on his desktop when my message popped up on his screen right under his mouse. The drag-n-drop was interrupted and the file was dropped on the message window. His IM client recognized it as a voluntary “send file” operation.

Reading a DVD with VLC or mplayer is now illegal in France

Samuel Tardieu — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 17:38:29 +0000

Starting tomorrow December 31st 2006, reading a DVD protected with CSS (as most DVD are) is illegal in France when it is done with a software allowing to circumvent the protection, such as VLC or mplayer which can both use the libdvdcss library. Today’s Journal Officiel (where laws and executive orders are published) says that you may be fined 750€ (around $985) for doing so. This includes watching any DVD that you have legally purchased.

Edit 2007-02-21: the fine is 750€, not 135€ as I wrote earlier! Thanks to the two people who pointed at this mistake in the comments.

Collaborative work on deliverables

Samuel Tardieu — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:39:07 +0000

In my job, I often participate to multi-partners projects which get public (European or national) funding. In those projects, we are required to produce deliverables that show the progress of our work.

The final deliverable is edited by an editor (how surprising) who is in charge of coordinating inputs from various partners and make them consistent. This can be done in several ways. I will describe two of them.

The old-fashioned way

The editor sends a template, usually in a proprietary word-processor format, and participants fill in the template with what they’ve done so far. It is common to have people in charge of various subparts (such as work-package leaders). Then the editor integrates everything in a big document which is sent to all partners. Partners then submit their changes by modifying the master document and the editor tries to integrate them all into a new version.

Let’s face it: this is a nightmare. More than often, some changes are not integrated because they were lost during a document merge, and conflicting changes cause headaches to the editor who needs to talk with the authors and so on.

You have probably guessed that I don’t like that.

The improved way

I had to participate to the elaboration of a large document with several partners to propose a new project a few months ago. Luckily, the project leader is a free software shop that happens to develop a wiki named XWiki.

The project leader created a structure on the wiki and each partner edited his own pages. Each partner was also able to fix typos and obvious mistakes on other pages. Thanks to the history preserving features, no change was ever destructive and any version of any page can be retrieved if there is a need to.

At one point, the project leader, acting as an editor for the final document, asked all partners to read everything that had been produced and to make the final changes if any. Then he took the content from the wiki and produced the final document to be sent to the potential funding authorities.

Working this way was really pleasant. There was no need to exchange any document by email. Everyone worked at the same time without conflicts. By being able to see what other partners were doing, we ended up with a very consistent document with much less work than when using what I called the old-fashioned way.

The result? Our project was funded (link in French) and will begin shortly.