No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 22:18:00 +0000

The Linux Foundation has published its annual report today. LWN calls it glossy and yeah, boy, it is shiny.

So shiny that people that work in the publishing industry immediately see this has been produced with the Adobe toolchain which - unfortunately - is one of the big suites of software not yet available for Linux.

Checking the PDF file metadata reveals the keywords "open source, open standards, open hardware, open data". That is what the Linux Foundation is about. Good stuff.

The PDF producer meta data for the annual report PDF has been set to "Linux kernel 0.12.1 for Workgroups" and the PDF creator meta data element to "Sharp Zaurus XR-5000 (Maemo5) Edition". Somebody thought to better hide the real data and had some tongue-in-cheek ideas. Kudos.

But nicer would have been to use Open Source software to produce the report, not?

Running strings 2020-Linux-Foundation-Annual-Report_113020.pdf | grep Adobe | wc -l gives us 1229 lines and confirms the suspicion of the toolchain.

A stale /Title (Annual Report 2020) /Producer (macOS Version 10.15.7 \(Build 19H15\) Quartz PDFContext) has been forgotten in the document to tell us about the platform.

So, ladies and gentlemen, the Linux Foundation 2020 annual report has been produced on a Mac.

Running Adobe Creative Cloud on MacOS Catalina 10.15.7.

Which is proprietary software. Its kernel (and some userland pieces) are based on BSD. Not Linux.

The image on the front page also struck me as a bit odd ... using a ballpoint pen on the laptop screen?

Unbranded laptop. Unbranded cup in the foreground.

Kid in the background not paying attention to his tablet.

All of that cries stock image so loud it hurts.

Google currently finds ~560 uses of the picture and any editorial use nicely tells us that it is © Dragana Gordic / Shutterstock.

The image is "Smiling mom working at home with her child on the sofa while writing an email. Young woman working from home, while in quarantine isolation during the Covid-19 health crisis".

See the Daily Mail for a wonderful example of the working mum in context. I hope, if her laptop had been powered on, it would have run Linux. I mean, what else would still run on an old white MacBook with an Intel "Core 2 Duo" processor from 2008?

Continue reading "No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report"

Saving misc/jive

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 10:15:00 +0000

One thing I love about FreeBSD is the way the core team keeps the wider community updated about project news e.g. via their quarterly status reports. So while reading the FreeBSD Q4/2016 status report, I was quite surprised to find that a text filter converting English to "Jive speak" had been removed from the ports tree. FreeBSD Core members argue that "today the implicit approval implied by having it in the ports tree sends a message at odds with the project's aims."

Now this is bullshit as I'm sure FreeBSD core neither endorses Citrix (net/citrix_ica) nor Cisco (emulators/gna3, devel/libcli, graphics/py27-blockdiagcontrib-cisco and many more) but just hosts code to make living with them easier.

So the important thing here is:

Hosting is not endorsing.
It is a purely technical act and by definition agnostic to the hosted content.

In every sane jurisdiction there is the requirement to remove hosted content that violates a law. And that makes sense. It reflects the societal consensus what is still acceptable and what is not. This changes over time but there is a proven process in place for these changes to become relevant: political discussion and consequential law making.

There is very deliberately never a law against bad taste and/or offensive humor. Where such a law still exists, you're in a somewhat underdeveloped jurisdiction. Because the hosting (pun intended) society has not matured sufficiently yet. This may happen due to overly conservative or self-protective ruling classes, ideological or religious blindness. None of these are desirable for society as a whole and the scissors in your head are paving the way to go back to darker ages. So don't. Be welcoming, be tolerant.

Tolerance means accepting things you do not like. Not accepting just what endorses your personal taste, beliefs or state of mind.

Does that mean, FreeBSD should continue to host the "Jive" filter? No, it's purely their choice. But their argument that hosting is endorsing is wrong. Inclusion into a FreeBSD media may be, like Debian strictly differentiates between the main archive, which it endorses, and contrib or non-free sections which it does not endorse. But still hosts regardless. So hosting is not endorsing.

That said, here you go:

File	Function	sha256
jive-1.1.tar.gz	Source to the "Jive" filter	3463d80ad159a27d9fcf87f163a7be5eba39dbf15c5156f052798b81271523f2
ports_misc_jive.tar.gz	ports files to build the "Jive" filter under FreeBSD	47dc7b660d499d671daa18f992cdd348bd95c34e02874addd2bcf3e5c3f90b59
swedishchef.zip	mirror of swedishchef.zip	d0830b81aec6ad6a6ff824e1d80c9fa97d3a5447bad9f8a2b32dbd0dfb8df709

The last file above is a mirror of files hosted by John B. Chambers. He has a "chef" cgi running there allowing the conversion of English text to "Swedish Chef", "Valley Girl" or "Pig Latin". And the "Jive" variant that uses the same Lex/Yacc/Flex files as the misc/jive that used to be part of the FreeBSD ports tree and is conserved above.

If you are interested in the public part of the discussion that happened after misc/jive was marked for removal from the ports tree, check out the freebsd-ports mailing list thread.

P.S.: Valspeak is still in the ports tree as misc/valspeak ... just sayin'.

P.P.S.: apt-cache show filters # Debian & Ubuntu. Awesome. ♡

Daniel Lange's blog (Entries tagged as bsd)

No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report

Saving misc/jive