FOSS Hole

There has been some heated discussion on the Wikipedia Hans Reiser article. It’s about including a link to the ELER comic about Nina Reiser’s disappearance. Nobody there really seems to quite grok the strip.

Five months on and maybe this is a good time to explain that the strip isn’t about what a lot of people might think it’s about. It’s not actually about Nina Reiser’s disappearance, it’s more about the reactions to it. Immediately after the news hit, even with scant information provided mostly by sensationalist local media, there was widespread suspicion of Hans’ involvement. I doubt you’d find many people who didn’t have the thought cross their mind, however fleeting.

The strip doesn’t say what people think it does. Reiser isn’t showing any obvious signs of anxiety (no “umming” or “ermming”) and there are reasonable explanations for everything you see (Lime is used to speed up composting) yet commenters came from far and wide to complain about us suggesting what they thought we suggested.

As one clued-in commenter defended: “If you read accusations in to this comic, they are simply pouring out of the twisted depths of your own subconscious mind.”.

A guy called Rob Weir responded to Miguel de Icaza’s blog about the standardisation of the Microsoft Office Open format.

What amused me was Miguel’s response to this, and then Rob’s follow up.

Miguel writes:

I actually *wrote* a spreadsheet and I actually *know* how the formula implementations came to be.
…snip…
Other than trumpeting ODF, have you actually contributed *ANY* code to OpenOffice, or you are just another armchair general?

Rob responds:

I prefer to let my words and logic stand for themselves. A resume is a poor substitute for a sound argument.

But if you think it makes a bit of difference, I joined IBM as part of their purchase of Lotus, and over the past 17 years I’ve coded on SmartSuite, Lotus Components, eSuite, K-Station, Portal and Workplace, among some of the more notable projects.

Along the way I’ve done a good deal of file format work, with SmartSuite formats, with the legacy binary Office formats, with ODF and with OOXML. I also was part of the team that made the Xalan XSLT engine and contributed that to Apache. So I have some basis for my opinions, based on practical experience as well as clear thinking. You are free to accept or reject either or both.

This company discovered a new Internet Explorer 0-day vulnerability:

Our security research team has observed a new zero day exploit being used to infect systems. Coming from a porn website, this particular one is a vulnerability in VML inside of Internet Explorer.

This roughly translates to

During a marathon porn browsing session, our techies got owned.

What with the Hacking for Christ strip, I thought this was appropriate: Ubuntu Christian Edition Facts.

“If you uninstall Ubuntu Christian Edition, it will automatically re-install after three days.”

“In Ubuntu Christian Edition, EOF is replaced by AMEN.”

“On Ubuntu Christian Edition, only married processes can fork children.”

Matthew Garrett is being persecuted on OS News regarding a largely polite e-mail he sent to a disabled GPL violator. He cited section 3 of the GPL which states source code must be available. The breacher got in a huff and shut his website down.

Well, I was studying the GPL and he missed section 13c:

You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form without accompanying source code provided that your situation falls under one of the following:

• you have extreme difficulties doing the most basic of motor skills these days
• you dislike people that have forgotten what their parents taught them about manners
• you have a bad taste in your mouth
• your mother has various cancers
• bandwidth can be a bit expensive
• you find the diff tool quite complicated