ProgProg

It is very sad news when a project you like has been abandoned/orphaned. This hasn’t been confirmed for BasKet yet, but it’s the current situation:

BasKet Note Pads has no developer anymore. Without new developers, I’m afraid the project will have to be stopped (and unavailable on KDE 4).

I am a big fan of BasKet—it is excellent for free form note-taking. Amongst other things I use it for my highly bastardized version of GTD.

I’d love to help out, but my C++ is really rusty (crummy excuse, I know).

My current plan is to pick up C++ again, and if by the time I get somewhat decent at it no one has picked BasKet up, I will see if I have the C++ moxie and enough time to do what I can for an excellent piece of software I’ve come to love.

So, the new version of Amarok is out¹. It’s an incremental release, so not so many new groundbreaking features. What is cool though is the addition of a music store. Now, Magnatune’s selection of music may not be too vast, but the store has a lot of things going for it:

For fans:

• No DRM. While not named so, this is the kind of digital music that deserves names like “PlaysForSure” or “FairPlay”.
• Offers lossless formats. Even to the extent of bandwidth-sapping WAV, which is sort of redundant since they offer my favorite (lossless) codec: FLAC
• You can listen to the complete albums in MP3 format before you buy
• 128k mp3s are distributed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license, which allows sharing and derivative works, so things like sampling the songs or remixing them are perfectly legal, as long as it’s not for commercial benefit.

For the artists, it gets even better:

• 50/50 revenue split
• Non-exclusive relationship

I want Magnatunes to take off. I really do. And hopefully exposure through Amarok will get them more customers. Anything that provides a viable, free as in libre alternative to iTunes.

I hate the iPod/iTunes². Its success has essentially proven that there is a huge market for music that is DRM encumbered. For music that is lossily compressed (true, this does not affect most popular music because they are engineered to sound good on the radio). For a device that can’t even play music gaplessly.

So the tactile feedback of the clickwheel is brilliant, the smooth exterior is very slick, the combination of iPiT creates an unparalleled user experience, yada yada. But you are talking about a digital audio player and a music store. The issues I point out about are flaws with what should be its core competency, its primary function.

Okay, truth be told, the iPiT hardware can handle gapless, as the Rockbox project proved. And if I am not wrong, iTunes 7 can finally do gapless playback. But all this just goes to show that the listening experience is not the main priority. But gee whiz, ya sure can choose the songs to listen to darn well, can’t ya?

Worse still, with the iPiT, artists find themselves making even less than before.

Check out other insider viewpoints on how the major labels work:

• The Problem With Music by Steve Albini (producer of In Utero)
• Courtney Love Does The Math. A stunningly eloquent speech. This is what she’s capable of when she’s lucid? I never would have guessed.

If growth in major label digital music sales continues to outstrip growth (if that) in CD sales, there will be a time in the not-so-far future when the Red Book audio standard may simply be phased out. While the weedy speech of EMI chairman Alain Levy is premature, it does describe a terrible future—one where music is neither DRM-free nor CD quality.

And that’s the direction the labels want to head. Selling digital music crippled with DRM is a wet dream for them now that they’ve overcome their initial technophobia. It is a product with no marginal physical cost of production that can be sold again and again (you have to buy the same song for each DRM platform you use if you switch, new firmware may not be backward-compatible, etc etc).

Every purchase of an iPod is a X-hundred dollar vote for DRM. Every purchase of a song through iTunes is a dollar vote for DRM. By casting your ballot this way, you are supporting the wrong side in our downhill battle.

The ever-increasing flood of dollar votes for DRM has to stop now before it is too late.

¹ So I’m a couple days late with this, but give me a break – work is busy and I usually only get to catch up with news on weekends.

² I will constantly refer to the hardware DAP and the store as a single entity. They go together like Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office go together, ie a symbiotic relationship of mediocre components.

So, Mark Shuttleworth was in my part of the world¹ yesterday, and how could I pass up the chance to meet a fellow geek, and a pretty damn successful one at that?

The event was the Edgy Eft release party, and it was a blast. Maybe 400 people cramped into a small conference room, standing room only. Mark started off by giving a quick speech on why FOSS is better than the proprietary alternative, and then gave a brief introduction of new features in Edgy. All this was old hat to me, but it was definitely an experience to hear him speaking about it in person—hearing the passion and drive in his voice.

It was interesting for me to compare Mark’s presentation to the last FOSS leader I got to see live – rms. Both are very charismatic, persuasive speakers. But where Mark appeals more to your brain and your sense of logic, rms appeals more to your heart and principles – your sense of what is just.

The subsequent Q&A had lots of interesting questions, which I shan’t go into too much detail about here. Some of them resulted in answers I knew already, ie how Mark got rich, etc, but I enjoyed listening to his delivery anyway. He can tell a story pretty well.

One blight on the session – someone abused his shot at a question to launch into an edict of what he wanted fixed in Ubuntu right now. Reading from a prepared list, at that. What a jackass.

As time went on, I was worried I wasn’t going to get my own question in – I was all the way at the back of the room, and deemed it undignified to wave my hand around wildly or jump up and down each time the chance came up. So when I finally got my chance, I projected my voice across the room to ask, “Suppose you have 3 years to turn someone into a core Ubuntu developer at Canonical. What would your training plan be?”

His tripartite answer (coincidence, or did he mishear my question as “3 steps”, I don’t know) was:

1. Get a job in a company which uses Linux.
2. Explore forums, wikis, IRC, etc and learn how the community works
3. Decide on a small project for yourself, and implement it, getting help from the community if necessary

Straightforward enough. I think a series of broad goals is much better than a road map of details like “Spend 3 months reading kernel source, then write a device driver, followed by…”. Often journeys are more fun when they aren’t planned and you’re feeling your way as you go along.

The evening ended, sadly, with many fanbois asking for and getting photo opportunities with Mark. I saw this as rather pointless, although the starstruck people with autograph books and camera-phones in tow probably waited all night for this chance. My take on this: the guy is not famous for his face², he is famous for the gray matter behind it. If it was Jessica Alba I’d ask for a photo – not attempt an intellectual conversation. Conversely, I spurned the chance at a photo with Mr Shuttleworth to engage in a quick back-and-forth instead. Nothing too brainy, just a short conversation on Canonical and Ubuntu which drifted into music at one point. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be any longer, lest the autograph hunters behind me in line had to go home with their dreams shattered .

I had actually planned to write about Edgy and my experience with it thus far earlier, but decided that this would make an excellent precursor to it. Definitely one helluva night for me. More on Edgy Eft to follow!

¹ 39°54′20″N, 116°23′29″E

² No insult intended of course

Who better to comment on the current controversy than Ian Murdock himself?

He agrees with a suggestion made in a comment on his page:

I think Debian’s stance should have been to distribute epiphany and move Firefox to the appropriate *verse repository.

Ian’s reasoning is as follows:

Best of all, it maximizes freedom—namely, the freedom of users to decide whether or not this is an issue worth switching over.

I agree with this – it is the most practical choice. Both groups of developers got too focused¹ on their own project and failed to consider the bigger picture and ask themselves “What is best for open source?” And while disagreements take place frequently in the open source world, I don’t think they are a bad thing – as long as they are resolved with a net gain for the community as a whole. I’d rather have passionate developers arguing for projects they believe in than a bunch of yes-men constantly trying to please everybody.

¹ I can never remember whether to spell “focused” with one ’s’ or two, so I put it on GoogleFight to check. Results were overwhelmingly in favor of one ’s’, which I personally favor because it is more aesthetically pleasing.