Unlike the media that preceded it, the internet is interactive. We can determine what we read, and how we read it. We are the editors and the filters. The internet is hard to police, and harder to censor. Technology is redefining the possibilities for information exchange and the dissemination of ideas.

At the same time there has been a steady movement by governments and corporate bodies to use copyright and patent law as tools to lock down the ownership of ideas. And while the web is convenient and easy as a channel for communication and information, all that lies between us and our right to privacy and our ability to communicate is an ISP, a Facebook account or a Google database. The web may have facilitated the uprisings of the Arab Spring but governments can still censor what we read, BT was able to block access to the file sharing site Newzbin, and MPs could call for Twitter and RIM to be shut down during the summer riots.

In ‘The Economy of Ideas’, published in 1994, John Perry Barlow wrote: “Copyright worked well because, Gutenberg notwithstanding, it was hard to make a book… Counterfeiting and distributing counterfeit volumes were obvious and visible activities – it was easy enough to catch somebody in the act of doing. Finally, unlike unbounded words or images, books had material surfaces to which one could attach copyright notices, publisher’s marques, and price tags… All the goods of the Information Age – all of the expressions once contained in books or film strips or newsletters – will exist either as pure thought or something very much like thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the speed of light, in conditions that one might behold in effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but never touch or claim to own in the old sense of the word.”

Free software and the web have challenged conventional concepts of ownership – and, not surprisingly, the content and software industries have tended towards an opposite understanding of ownership, which extends from the appropriation of things as disparate as human genes and species of plants to the ownership of artistic concepts and ideas.

The means for extending ownership over everything and anything has been a judicial bending of patent and copyright law. A not untypical example was the patenting in 1986 of the Amazonian hallucinogenic plant ayahuasca, which led to a South American tribal council, representing more than 400 tribes and indigenous groups, visiting the US ten years later to protest against the decision. Antonio Jacanamijoy, a spokesmen for the Indians, observed that “our ancestors learned the knowledge of this medicine and we are the owners of this knowledge…” and this is not an isolated case. Many more such patents have passed unnoticed and have gone unchallenged because the cost is prohibitive and the protesters have no sentimental appeal.

Concurrent with the steady extension of patent and copyright law to include everything has been the adoption of laws, in both the US and in Europe, that infringe the rights of technologists to freely develop and interoperate with proprietary technologies. We only have to see how Apple and Microsoft have used patent law to impede the makers of Android devices.

And the developing world is being prised into the same mindset where everything on Earth is something that can be owned and sold, in what Herbert Schiller called “the corporate takeover of public expression”, where the software firms own the programmer’s right to code, drug companies own the right to traditional medicines, and entertainment industries own the musician’s right to play. But it isn’t really working. In the face of the onslaught of the web, the traditional media are taking a battering.

Ideas belong to no one. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possess the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

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ARM sub-architectural cleanup will see further de-duplication of code between the many different supported sub-architectures (variants) of ARM, and a continuation of the ongoing work to produce a unified 32-bit ARM kernel binary capable of supporting many different systems. Historically, having a single kernel image for ARM has not been a priority since these systems have typically been heavily vertically integrated embedded systems. But in the emerging space of general-purpose ARM-based computers and servers, it will be increasingly important that Linux vendors can provide a single OS image able to support a wide variety of possible installation target systems. It is likely that the initial effort will produce options for compiling a kernel containing support for many variants of the same sub-architecture, but this will become increasingly generic as code is refactored underneath.

Microsoft Hyper-V support is another area where there is likely to be some action in the shorter term. At this point, KY Srinivasen and the Microsoft team have been developing support for their hypervisor technology within the Linux ‘staging’ tree (drivers/staging within the source code) for some time. Greg Kroah-Hartman and others who are involved in maintaining the staging tree do so as a means to provide a place for nurturing new driver code not considered ready for prime time. Drivers generally land in staging, are improved over a period of a kernel release or two, and are then moved out of staging and into the mainline kernel. Except in the case of Hyper-V, which has been in staging since mid-2009. At this point, however, it seems that the code is finally ready for a general review by the many different subsystem maintainers whose parts of the kernel are to be affected by Hyper-V support being included. It has not been an easy ride for Microsoft, but it may be over very soon.

Development will continue to take place largely as it has done, in roughly three-month release cycles, punctuated with increasingly short ‘merge windows’ (during which disruptive changes are allowed) and subsequent periods of stabilisation. The linux-next tree built by Stephen Rothwell on a daily basis from the collected trees of many different developers will continue to be the central nexus for new feature development and testing prior to gaining approval for inclusion into an official Linux release, while the staging tree will continue to be the place for new driver development (it is hoped that linux-next will include the staging tree in due course to allow for testing of interactions between the two).

Overall this means that the established development workflows will continue to be the status quo in 2012 with little to no variation.

Further out, and perhaps lasting beyond the next year, there are likely to be some significant changes to the kernel if Linus follows through on his recent leanings towards merging Android patches. In recent mailings, Linus has acknowledged that the millions of users of Android devices should not be ignored by the kernel community. Many Android patches remain outside of the official kernel (instead, they are contained within the official Android kernel, which is maintained by Google). There have been attempts to merge specific sets of Android patches into the official kernel, with some success, but there is a long road ahead to reconcile all of the differences. We will continue to cover these changes each month in
this column.

Finally, some things may never change. The year 2012 will begin with the RT (Real Time) kernel patches still being maintained outside of the official Linux kernel and it will likely end in the same fashion, albeit with the set of patches progressively shrinking over time. There are many people now using the Real Time patches in production environments, both at the large (stock markets) and small (mobile phones) ends. The patches are well proven and reliable, but there is still a level of disruption there in terms of performance overhead imposed on those who do not want Real Time features.

Once there is an ability for compile (or runtime) zero-overhead disabling of the Real Time support, then the patches are likely to be merged.

Ongoing development
Linus Torvalds announced the latest 3.2 release candidate kernel “just in time for [the US] Thanksgiving” holiday, in one of his typically humorous emails beginning “Hey, since most of the US will be in a food-induced coma tomorrow, I just know that doing a new release candidate is a good idea”. The final 3.2 release may be out by the time you read this. It includes a number of new features (which will be covered in a future issue), the removal of many lines of old code that is no longer required, and fixes for some important bugs (such as a severe RAID regression that was present in 3.1 and should be resolved by an updated 3.1.z release by your preferred distribution).

This month saw the publishing of a ‘Plumbers Wish List’ for Linux. The core guts of any Linux system are often referred to as its ‘plumbing’ and those who work on such pieces of infrastructure are known as ‘plumbers’ (hence the name of the Linux Plumbers Conference). The Wish List, which was published by several prominent developers, includes both mundane and more exciting future features, all of which should combine to offer an improved user experience. On the list were finally providing a means to modify a FAT file system label without unmounting it first, changing the name of a process (argv) without playing with environ settings, and detecting if a process is running within a container (a separated namespace). The full list is available in the Linux Kernel Mailing List archives, which you can find here.

A collective decision has been made that a new TAINT_OOT_MODULE flag be introduced for out-of-tree (non-upstream) kernel modules. This will mark all loaded kernel modules that are not shipped with the kernel in such a way that any diagnostic kernel output (from an oops, say) will include the special TAINTED status. At the same time, a change to the kernel will no longer disable certain functionality – in this case tracing – when a TAINT flag is set. As the original author of the TAINT flag support notes, they are supposed to convey information, not determine kernel behaviour. If a system administrator wants to load a binary kernel module that is not compatible with their kernel, they have bigger issues to worry about.

Finally, Ted T’so and Ingo Molnar had an interesting debate in several threads focused on whether utilities and tools designed to work with the Linux kernel should be developed within the kernel source tree. Ingo’s work on the perf (performance monitoring) tools takes place in a tools subdirectory of the official Linux kernel source, something that he claims improves overall code quality because the development is so tied to that of the kernel. Meanwhile, Ted and others note that this close relationship between a tool and the kernel source could actually serve to be detrimental to maintaining a strictly compatible ABI (application binary interface) between the kernel and such tools across multiple releases. Others point out that there are limits to what can be carried in the kernel source tree. Perf utilities are one thing; a simple tool to manage Linux KVM virtual machines now being proposed may be quite another.

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The tragic, horrifically early death of Steve Jobs last year led to a media torrent, with commenters and journalists tumbling over themselves to get across what they had to say. At their most extreme, it came across as if Steve Jobs himself had invented the computer, and come around to each of our houses to sort out our media collections in person.

The more measured were more realistic. Jobs was a visionary. His timing, eventually, was superb. His eye for user interface and focus was inspired (even if he stood on the shoulders of others). And the computing industry will, and does, feel his loss.

But he had his faults. I’ve no urge to dredge through them here, as the media clamour inevitably distorted things good and bad. I’d just say that 56 is no age to die, whether head of a major company or a lonely hack sat in front of an ageing computer.

The Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman, though, had a point in his widely reported piece about the influence Jobs had on the world of computing, for which he attracted a lot of criticism. And I fear it got lost.

The delivery of his message could have been better timed, perhaps, and he’s not a man you’d necessarily want on a customer service support line. But his argument, in a follow-up post to his original words that led to such scorn being poured on him, read:
“Jobs saw how to make these computers stylish and smooth. That would normally be positive, but not in this case, since it has the paradoxical effect of making their controlling nature seem acceptable.

“Jobs’s death inspired a flood of articles lauding him for these very devices. That further increases their potential for harm, which is why now more than ever we must focus attention on it. We must not let secondary considerations about Apple or Jobs distract us from this threat until we have thwarted it.”

The threat that Stallman describes is a real one (whether you agree with his position on it or not), and the lack of focused consideration of the position of Apple in the computing world is troubling. After all, for the past decade or so, it’s got away with a lot, primarily because it wasn’t Microsoft, and because when it comes to branding, Apple has done brilliant work.

But how do we challenge what it’s done to impinge on the freedom of software? How can we possibly have a proper, reasoned and feasible debate, free of emotion and hard on facts? It might be my melancholic reading of the world, but I just don’t see that’s possible. I’m not sure it’s going to be possible for some time, either. I don’t see much thirst for it at all.

Stallman attracted criticism, and lots of it, for his words. And, truth be told, I’m wary of the response even these words will get. How can I be sure that what I’m writing won’t be construed as an attack on a man who left the world too soon? I know that’s not what I’m writing, and I’ve deliberately held back an extra month or two to be on the safe side. But am I part of the problem there? Honestly, I’ve no idea.

Right now, it seems safer for your online sanity to praise Simon Cowell than it is to debate the merits of free software. I’d love to be proved wrong…

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There were a total of five kernel releases (one of which changed the major version – from 2.x to 3.x – for the first time in the better part of a decade), long-term core kernel hindrances to scalability such as the Big Kernel Lock were finally removed, and exciting features such as transparent huge pages (that had been shipped by the Enterprise vendors) were finally merged into the official kernel. Along the way, we lost several great visionaries who had defined our industry (and UNIX in particular), had a massive security breach that disrupted kernel.org activities for months, and celebrated 20 years of working together on the most successful open source operating system the world has ever seen. Next year promises to bring many more surprises, but first let’s take a look back on the year that was.

The year began with the release of Linux 2.6.37. Its principal feature was an ability to build (in certain configurations) without the Big Kernel Lock, a massively coarse-grained software-locking mechanism that dated back to the earliest days of Linux support for multiprocessor systems, and the biggest remaining roadblock to overall system scalability. This combined nicely with other interesting scalability work, such as support for I/O throttling of groups of processes between defined bandwidth limits. A secondary feature of 2.6.37 was the final enabling of Fanotify, which can be used by anti-malware (and anti-virus) software to intercept certain file system activity and screen files prior to their access, in ways similar to that seen on other operating systems on the market today.

Linux 2.6.38 (released in March), added an extension to processor scheduling cgroups that became known as ‘the patch that does wonders’. This was in reality a small patch that would group all of the processes having the same session ID (ie from the same login, running in the same terminal for example) in the same scheduling entity. Therefore, this allowed an entire kernel build and all of its attached processes to be automatically handled as a unit, preserving sufficient remaining CPU time to retain an interactive desktop session that does not become sluggish simply because one builds a kernel.

Another exciting feature of 2.6.38 was the merging of transparent huge pages, allowing the kernel to automatically use and manipulate CPU support for huge pages (managing memory in much larger chunks and better utilising limited CPU TLB entries) without needing to modify applications. This is particularly useful for data-intensive workloads, such as virtual machines.

A slightly shorter kernel release cycle led to Linux 2.6.39 (May), which finally killed off the Big Kernel Lock in all configurations (with a patch entitled ‘That’s all, folks’), and added support for what is known as Transcendent Memory. Transcendent Memory is special in that it is highly volatile, of an unknown size, and writes to it may fail at any time. The underlying idea is, for example, to be able to provide running virtual machines with extra unutilised host system memory for use as a cache or for similar purposes. Since the memory may be yanked away at any time, the host is under no obligation and can freely reclaim the memory if it needs to provide it to another virtual machine or has more pressing commitments.

The 20th anniversary of Linux was celebrated slightly early with the switch to a new major version in Linux 3.0 (July). Unlike earlier major version changes, 3.0 intentionally did not coincide with a radically fundamental overhaul. 3.0 added support for running Xen Dom0 domains (ie running as a host system when providing Xen-based virtualisation) rather than requiring a set of patches, which had long been the case (the actual Xen hypervisor remains separate from the kernel). Most recently, Linux 3.1 added support for dynamic writeback throttling (to more precisely control when processes will write out data to disk) and also support for OpenRISC, a fully open source architecture that can be implemented using FPGAs or real silicon ASICs and should allow anyone interested in studying computer design to really examine all of the stages of new architecture implementation.

As the year comes to a close, it is clear that the state of kernel development is strong. Linus continues to provide good overall leadership and he is (just about) continuing to scale in line with the overall number of patches flowing into the kernel by way of his various subsystem maintainers. There are some challenges ahead as the growth in popularity of Android and continuing use of Linux in less traditional contexts pulls development in new directions, but the community should be positioned to handle whatever comes along.

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The point-and-click desktop as we know it has been around since monitors had flickering green screens, although the average laptop has disk, RAM and graphics capacity that was undreamt of a few short years ago. The approach of free desktop developers has been to find ways of taking full advantage of the expanding technology, the versatility of Linux, and the limited spatial characteristics of mobile devices. In doing this they have to satisfy the conflicting demands of users.

KDE 4 introduced Plasma and widgets, and made extensive use of the ‘sweet spots’ of the screen, the “edges and corners, which are easier to aim at”. GNOME 3 is based around the GNOME Shell, and Ubuntu is pushing off in another direction with Unity. The justification for the KDE developers was that “desktop computing has changed radically in the last 20 years, yet our desktops are essentially the same as they were in 1984. It’s time the desktop caught up with us.”

Usability is a delicate balance between utility and practicality, simplicity and aesthetics, and is inevitably subjective. How do you maximise both the potential scope and the usability of the desktop? Should the desktop be an end in itself, or should it be nothing more than a framework for accessing applications and data?

UNIX users find usability in transparency and a multiplicity of choices. Mac users prefer one-click solutions and couldn’t care less where their data hides. KDE is a popular choice for the Linux desktop because it is aesthetically pleasing and offers configurability and transparency. Likewise, many Linux users who have arrived at Linux through hearing about Ubuntu have liked the experience precisely because GNOME has aimed for simplicity and ease of use.

Usability is too often defined by familiarity. Critics talk of intuitive behaviour, but what we mean by intuitive behaviour is coloured by our familiarity with the recognised way of doing things. What we call intuitive behaviour when talking about computer desktops is neither intuitive nor natural, but depends almost entirely on learned behaviour. It isn’t intuitive to sit in front of computer and click a mouse. It isn’t intuitive to send an email to the other side of the planet, and it isn’t intuitive to tap out words on a keyboard, but all these behaviours become second nature because we know that this is the way it’s done.

Predictable behaviour and a minimum of choice is desirable for infrequent users who don’t want or need to learn new behaviours. Familiarity dictates that once we learn a way of doing things it becomes intuitive. It follows that if a certain set of behaviours become second nature, we don’t like change, because change necessitates a different behaviour.

So changes to the behaviour of interfaces don’t always go down well, especially where they’re done for the sake of change, or to “add value”. We know that if GNU/Linux is to break into commercial environments on a large scale there has to be continuity and consistency.

At the same time the desktop cannot afford to ossify, and the developers cannot be expected to ignore the potential that the technology offers. There are different users to please. Compiz has been massively popular with certain classes of user. Its popularity has little to do with utility or functionality. Nobody needs wobbly windows or spinning cubes to get their work done, but aesthetic pleasure, which Compiz provides for some, is as much a part of the usability equation to some users as the transparency of the file system is to others.

The KDE developers ran into problems with KDE 4.0 because, of necessity, changes to the applications lagged behind changes to the framework. As the new environment matured and the relationship between the applications and the desktop environment become more transparent, attitudes changed. Some users have been converted, and some have reverted to the lightweight window managers that do just enough and do it well.

It is early days for Unity, but the response so far has been at best ambivalent. Mark Shuttleworth’s declared aims are to unite design with free software, to blur the line between the web and the desktop, to create an intuitive GNU/Linux desktop that is a thing of beauty, and to make Ubuntu and free software popular among the kinds of user who have never heard of free software before.

As with KDE’s 4.0 release, GNOME 3 has attracted many complaints and negative publicity. While KDE aimed to keep their interface essentially the same (although failing to reach feature parity for at least another two years), the GNOME community decided to make an even more radical change. Did they do the right thing? I think they did. While incremental changes can get you far, by their nature there’s a limit to how far they can stretch. KDE bumped into those barriers four years ago and set out to create a future-proof infrastructure. GNOME 3 did the same a few years later, recognising that the way many of us use computers has changed radically.

Yes, if you’re a kernel developer, you probably work in much the same environment as you did ten years ago; but for us mere mortals, Facebook, Gmail, iPhones and Android have radically changed what we expect from our UIs. Even Microsoft has made invasive changes in the recent past with the Ribbon, while the upcoming Metro interface is optimised for tablets. And for good reason. Most of us use computers differently compared to a decade ago. Where we used to open a file manager and navigate to folder with ten files, we now have our data online. We share and like our files and Tweet and Digg our way through the internet in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.

Bringing these concepts to the desktop just makes sense. If your are working in Google Docs, having a file browser which only shows you local documents just doesn’t cut it any more. Chat is not something you might use now and then any more, it’s a basic part of a modern workflow. And sharing files is something which should be as seamless as possible. GNOME 3 attempts to do this with the heavy integration of chat and microblogging in the shell and new applications like the ‘document browser’, which brings local and online documents together in one place. Likewise, KDE’s Plasma Active project integrates Share, Like and Connect buttons directly in their tablet shell and uses the NEPOMUK semantic framework to connect local and remote resources.

Xfce does not, which is fine – if you are a kernel hacker, but if you’re more like the average home or office user, your needs have evolved. While Xfce might offer a familiar interface, it doesn’t offer the most efficient UI any more. That said, while GNOME Shell and KDE’s Plasma Active attempt to create more effective environments for us, they’re not necessarily ready – a lot has happen, but there’s still more work to do. Both projects will have to experiment to find out how to get it right, but they’ve started and must be applauded for that.

As a final note I should stress that I don’t think change for the sake of it is good. If reality changes, however, you have to be prepared to change with it. GNOME and KDE are doing that at the cost of their users adapting to new environments and new technologies. The long-term net result should be high productivity with a short-term hump in the road as we get accustomed to these new ways. Since both projects already offer ways to customise your environment (GNOME through its ‘Shell extensions’ and KDE via Plasma technology), I really think it’s time we all joined the revolution!

I’m all for progress, and was a very early adopted of the DVD format, gratefully taken full advantage of the improved quality of movies over their VHS counterparts, along with the added storage of the discs themselves. DVD was an answer to a question people were actually asking, which makes it feel like something of a rarity in the modern technology world.

DVD, of course, made lots of people a lot of money, and soon hit saturation point. This led said people to find new ways to keep making lots of money. They’d enjoyed making it, and were always on the lookout for more. It was clear that DVD margins were gone, and open source had even gone and provided a lightweight, free alternative to the otherwise costly software alternatives.

Step forward Blu-ray, then, and I was a less keen, albeit eventual, adopter of it. With many high definition movies, combined with a decent telly, I see a difference I’m happy with, although the cosmic jump from analogue to digital this was not. Nonetheless, on board I clambered. And the DVD software companies breathed a sigh of relief, able once more the impose a £50+ charge for a piece of software that does the same job as a similarly priced piece of hardware. That’s one of the many things I always struggled to reconcile in my head. I think I’m getting old and miserable.

Now, of course, the latest thing we’re being sold is 3D. I wasn’t aware I wanted 3D, and that’s because I don’t want it at all. But, looking at the press release that’s greeting me now, it’s talking about 3D as if it’s the breakthrough the world has been waiting for. I’m also informed that over 250 million copies of this particular piece of software have been sold worldwide. There’s a thought.

Sony has worked a trick with the Blu-ray format, of course, that means it’s now seemingly illegal to even take a screenshot of a Blu-ray movie. The reason for this is that for you to take a screenshot, you’d need to crack the copy protection first, and if you do that, then the whole of Sony will implode. Thus, the firm will have little choice but to try and sue your ass off.

And, one consequence of lockouts such as that, is that if you want to be able to play a Blu-ray movie back on your computer, you need to pay for a piece of software for the privilege of doing so.

Oh, but hang on. You can’t, can you? Not if you’re a Linux user, because Sony has decreed that Blu-ray and Linux are not to get on, else you’d be in violation of some ancient order, etched on tablets, that would the firm would get custody of your children, or something. I might have misread that bit.

Every time I feel that the open source movement is making major inroads, and it evidently has, then an example of the old status quo is never that far away, sadly. And I don’t blame Corel. But I do see increasing examples of people clinging to the way things were with all their force. And from what I can make out, they have quite powerful fingertips…

Download Only
The problem with Blu-ray protection may not be corrected by the time downloads fully take over. Not for nothing are content producers swarming around services that lock anti-consumer limitations around their work. It harks back to the days when the government wanted to outlaw you keeping recorded programmes on video tapes for more than three weeks, for my money…

Linus Torvalds himself noted in another context, when rebutting arguments against open source by Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s senior vice president in May 2001, “I wonder if Mundie has ever heard of Sir Isaac Newton? [Newton] is not only famous for having basically set the foundations for classical mechanics (and the original theory of gravitation, which is what most people remember, along with the apple tree story), but he is also famous for how he acknowledged the achievement: ‘If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.’”

Newton’s remark was intended as a derogatory comment in the margins of a letter to his diminutive contemporary, the scientist Robert Hooke, and was not an original observation, but tells a wider truth, that the creative process and the discovery of ideas is very seldom the product of one man’s work in isolation, but an accumulation of what has gone before.

Much of modern intellectual thought has defined itself by questioning the rites of authorship, authenticity and identity. This paradox lies at the heart of the debate about ‘Intellectual Property Rights’ and the ‘ownership’ of ideas – a debate in which the Linux and free software movement has found itself embroiled, directly through the patents crisis and the convolutions of copyright law, and less directly through its relationship with the Net.

Free software has been successful way beyond the expectations of its proponents and its detractors, appealing to a far wider audience than might have been predicted, but as Richard Stallman is quick to remind us, there is still some way to go: “The only reason we have a wholly free operating system,” he has said, “is because of the movement that said ‘we want an operating system that is wholly free, not 90 per cent free.’ If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.”

By its very nature free software challenges modern conventions of ownership, and its continuing existence and the blossoming of ideas that free software represents, is directly threatened by the extension and proliferation of trivial and contestable patents over the last two or three decades.

Software uses language as a means of interacting with the millions of on and off switches that comprise a computer. The sets of instructions that are contained in a computer language, or any other computer program, rely on basic structures that are common to all computer languages, and have evolved over half a century of shared development.

The most famous expression of this truth was provided by Bill Gates in a Microsoft internal ‘Challenges and Strategy’ memo, dated May 16,1991. “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents”, he wrote, “the industry would be at a complete stand-still today.”

Rather more revealingly, Gates concluded that the “solution” to the problem of patents was “patenting as much as we can… A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.”

Just one of the many compelling arguments against patents for software, as in other parts of our lives, is that invention and innovation in software is cumulative, and depends entirely on the efforts of others who have gone before – and that this will continue to be the case with every small development in the field of programming. Good programmers invent new processes every day, and other good programmers use these processes to make further inventions. That is, and always has been, the nature of the job. To assign patents to these small inventions, which are effectively expressions of speech, is to stop innovation in its tracks. This matters because code runs our lives. As Lawrence Lessig puts it: “These machines run us. Code runs these machines. What control should we have over this code?”

If necessity is the mother of invention, patents are its delinquent offspring, providing stumbling blocks to innovation and progress, inhibiting the free exchange of ideas, and restricting our knowledge of how things work.

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I’m not talking about companies like Red Hat or SUSE. They depend on the communities behind their products. But that’s not always the case. Some companies build community around something, but drop it on a whim. At a MeeGo meeting in Tampere (Finland), Aaron Seigo told the attendees to man up. If you want something, you simply have to make a plan and do it. If a big company wants to help, fine. If they don’t – that’s fine too. Aaron explained that this is how KDE’s Plasma Active project is set up. By building on both openSUSE and MeeGo and partnering with five or six smaller companies, their project will continue, even if some partners back out.

MeeGo teaches us the same lesson as the OpenOffice.org debacle did. You need an independent entity if you want to make sure your community lives. Unfortunately, the Linux Foundation is a collaboration of companies and has clearly proven not to be a community-owned organisation. If you are involved in a community, think about continuity. If your community is crucial for a company, you’re reasonably safe. They might make decisions you don’t like, but so do other community members sometimes. If you depend on a company which has no real stake in what your community does, however, things are different. You need to start thinking about the future!

So what’s next for the MeeGo community? They can of course keep working on MeeGo. The Linux Foundation has said it will stay around for a while longer. But it’s not in the interest of Tizen to have a vibrant and active MeeGo. It probably won’t be. So either the community finds a new place (with or without forking the MeeGo codebase) or MeeGo will disappear.
As I love MeeGo and what they do, I asked the MeeGo community to join openSUSE. We’re a community much like MeeGo – young, flexible, innovative, open. Continuing to build MeeGo on top of openSUSE would be possible, especially now there is an openSUSE ARM project (started after the openSUSE Conference last month).

We did build MeeGo on openSUSE before, with Smeegol, and MeeGo uses the Open Build Service as well as openSUSE tools like Zypper. A perfect match, I would say. I’m sure our work on an openSUSE Foundation would be reassuring for them as well. But I’d also be quite happy to see the MeeGo community build their own place and openSUSE would be happy to work with them wherever they go.

I just hope they’ll find a place where they can keep doing the awesome work they have done in the past years!

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Unlike other DSP ports of Linux, Qualcomm’s Hexagon is fully featured: it has support for SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) and uses a built-in hypervisor like many other newer chips (the Tilera Tile comes to mind as a recent example). But even more interesting than the Hexagon perhaps is the fact that Linux 3.1 will be the first shipping kernel to support the OpenRISC open source CPU architecture. Those who enjoy playing with FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) can build an OpenRISC computer at home and run a stock Linux 3.1 kernel on it without making modifications.

The security troubles with kernel.org have certainly had an impact on the overall Linux 3.1 development cycle. In addition to being unable to post some development trees (due to corporate policies requiring some to use kernel.org), many had their workflows upended by the loss of fairly critical infrastructure.

Linus was able to continue to post changes to his kernel tree newly hosted on github.com, taking the version to release candidate 3.1-rc8. There were a few automount and USB issues, but generally Linus said “it really is getting quite calm”. The bigger issue was how to handle the impending merge window (the period of time following a release during which Linus allows disruptive changes that will make it into the next release) without the regular kernel.org facilities.

In the end, Linus decided that he’d like to avoid doing a merge window without the availability of kernel.org systems, electing to postpone the 3.2 merge window until after he returns from a vacation in the hopes that at least core infrastructure such as git.kernel.org will be available upon his return. That’s something everyone is hoping will be true at this point, though some are also beginning to point out that the slipping of the merge window will likely mean a lot of churn is happening right around the time of next month’s Kernel Summit in Prague. That might make for a rather light merge window as far as getting patches from kernel developers who are disconnected during travels.

Finally this month, the latest util-linux 2.20 was announced, featuring the removal of support for Discordian dates (ddate). This generated more traffic on distribution and kernel mailing lists than one might reasonably have expected, leading Valdis Kletnieks to wonder if there were actually any Discordians left, “or did they all go corporate and had their discordianism surgically removed?”. Kernel developers are an amusing bunch sometimes.

The x32 ABI
The 2011 Linux Plumbers Conference took place in Santa Rosa this month. This is an annual gathering of Linux developers working on core ‘plumbing’ of the overall systems architecture within modern Linux systems, including kernel developers and those working on user-space software interacting with the kernel.

Among the talks was a very interesting presentation on a new ABI for Intel64 architecture (x86-64) systems, the ‘x32’ ABI. This work was presented by some of the team from Intel that are trying to get the work merged into the kernel.

All architectures require a strongly defined ABI, or Application Binary Interface, that codifies how applications will interact with the kernel (and other applications) at the binary level: which registers will be used for function arguments (parameters), what is the minimal stack alignment required when calling into a function, and so on. The existing ABI in use on these ‘x64’ systems is well understood, having evolved over many years to the point it is at now. It is, however, not always as efficient as it might be. Being a pure 64-bit ABI built upon the original AMD 64-bit extensions added to the x86 architecture means that 64-bit registers are always used for function arguments and pointers, even if the application doesn’t actually need to use more than 32-bit data values and memory addresses.

The ‘x32’ ABI addresses a need for certain applications to have access to the full 64-bit instruction set available on modern Intel processors, including all of the added registers (as compared with the older 32-bit design) but without the performance hit of requiring 64-bit data and memory addresses.

By allowing for these to be 32-bit quantities, better utilisation can be made of limited size caches and so forth. Of course, if this sounds great, you’re probably wondering why it wasn’t done sooner, or what the catch is. The catch is that x32 is an ABI that is incompatible with every pre-compiled application available for Intel systems today (including legacy 32-bit apps). It can be used on the same system as the conventional x64 ABI, but it requires new libraries and a new set of kernel system calls in a new kernel.

Therefore, at the moment, it is mostly of interest to embedded developers who are willing to rebuild the entirety of their applications for a certain amount of performance gain. Everyone else is likely to stay with the existing ABI for the foreseeable future. For more information, head on over here…

Jon Masters  publishes a daily Linux kernel mailing list summary at kernelpodcast.org

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Litigation has become a highly profitable way of doing business. Big money can be made for a relatively small outlay and litigation predicated around the “ownership” of ideas, patents and copyrights requires minimal investment in staff, research, manufacture or the trading of hard goods.

In fact all these activities have become superfluous in some areas of industry where possession of “Intellectual Property” has become the primary objective of trading. Pick the right target to make a claim against and the chances are that they will pay up before it gets to court. Throw enough patents at the competition, and you can slow them down. Make a patent stick and you can make a lot of money.

In theory, patents are granted only after strenuous tests of originality and appropriateness have been met, and should only be conferred on inventions that are entirely original, are not obvious, and have the potential to radically transform the way things are done. In practice, the bar has been lowered to allow a proliferation of trivial and contestable patents, especially, but not only, in the area of software and business method patents.

Patents, copyrights, and trademarks are lumped together under the misleading term “Intellectual Property” which, in the words of Richard Stallman, “is at best a catch-all to lump together disparate laws” under the umbrella of an “analogy with property rights for physical objects”, which is “at odds with the legal philosophies of copyright law, of patent law, and of trademark law… These laws are in fact not much like physical property law, but use of this term leads legislators to change them to be more so.”

Misuse of these laws has taken effect in the smartphone industry, where Google and Android have been the particular target of a pincer movement between Microsoft and Apple, aided and abetted by Oracle and others, the primary purpose of which is to inhibit users and manufacturers from using Android phones. There is a lot of money at stake, and legal action isn’t limited to Android or Microsoft or Google. Samsung and Apple are suing each other. Lodsys is suing Apple’s app developers. Nokia and Apple have made a settlement. Apple has applied to trademark the term App Store to describe a store that sells apps. Microsoft is suing Motorola and Barnes and Noble in a by-proxy argument with Google over Android. Apple is suing HTC, and Oracle is accusing Google of bringing down the world around Java. Google has bought Motorola, because Motorola owns more patents on phones than any other business.

Nobody seriously believes that any of the companies or individuals accused of infringement has practised industrial sabotage or stolen the ‘property’ of anybody else. The purpose of these actions has been to make a fast buck or to inhibit competition. Ownership of software patents is not about innovation or originality. The cost of fighting a patent infringement case, searching for prior art and the recruitment of lawyers, is prohibitive and a distraction, so in many cases a settlement is made without recourse to the law and the validity of the patent is never contested.

It follows that many patents are claimed for no other reason than protection against litigation by other patent holders. Robert Barr, the patent counsel for Cisco Systems, told the hearings of the US Federal Trade Commission in 2002 that: “It makes more business sense to assume that, despite the fact that we do not copy other company’s products, and despite the fact that we do not derive solutions to problems from the patent literature, we will be accused of patent infringement. The only practical response to this problem of unintentional and sometimes unavoidable patent infringement is to file hundreds of patents each year ourselves, so that we can have something to bring to the table in cross-licensing negotiations. In other words, the only rational response to the large number of patents in our field is to contribute to it.”

Patents are a protection racket, and the options are to pay up, cross-license, or get out of the business. The effect is to protect the incumbent monopolies and cross-licensing cartels against innovation and competition from others. As Bruce Perens once noted “there are simply so many software patents, on so many fundamental principles, that no non-trivial software program could exist that was licensed by all patent holders with claims reading on the algorithms used. This is regardless of whether it is proprietary or free software.” Software patents have little or nothing to do with the enhancement or protection of innovation.

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The GPL encourages freedom by granting the user a number of rights and responsibilities. The user has the right to use the software, to have access to the source code, and to change, copy and give the code away. As every Linux user knows, the only restriction imposed by the GPL is that the user must preserve the licence, and pass on the same rights, unimpaired, when the software is sold or given away to others, which means giving reasonable access to the source code, and any changes that have been made to the code.

The Linux kernel is free software and belongs to no-one, and free is hard to compete with. Since the beginning opponents and competitors have raised scares around Linux and its ownership, and have sought to question the legitimacy of the software and its licence.

Recently Android has moved into the spotlight. The reasons are clear. As Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond,  puts it: “Android is on fire. More than 550,000 Android devices are activated every day, through a network of 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers.” Android is a serious competitive threat to the iPhone and Windows 7, and the response has been a “hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.”

At the same time claims have been made that cast doubts on the GPL and its implementation by Android manufacturers, suggesting that ‘thousands’ of device manufacturers may not be complying with GPLv2′s injunction to make the source code available, and that this lays them open to future legal claims by the thousands of developers who have contributed code to the Linux kernel or relevant sections of the Android ecosystem. The effect of these claims is to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt among users and manufacturers about Android and the efficacy of the GPLv2.

There is a theoretical logic to these claims. A rogue developer could claim that his or her code licensed under the GPLv2, and included in the Linux kernel, has been misused because the source code has not been made available, and might hope to get this through the courts, assuming a manufacturer has been unwilling to comply. In practice, this is not going to happen. There have always been compliance issues with OEMs and the GPL, and they have usually been resolved without much fuss, and the evidence that any major Android device manufacturer has not complied has not been produced.

The relevant section of the licence says “You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.” The claim is that any failure to have complied with the licence will automatically terminate the right of the manufacturer to use Android. In practice, the solution to non-compliance issues is usually a phone call (to or from the Software Freedom Legal Center) away.

As a Slashdot contributor noted, “in order for this to be ‘proven’ in a court of law, a GPLv2 licence holder would have to sue a company that used Android, failed to comply with the GPLv2, then came back into compliance and then started releasing Android again without said licence holder’s consent,” which is an unlikely sequence of events in any court of law.

Edward Naughton, the lawyer from whom these claims arose, has form. He made other claims against Android and GPL compliance in March this year, and has  worked with Microsoft in the past. On that occasion, Eben Moglen of the software Freedom Law Centre, and a former columnist for this magazine, remarked “I would say that the issue is a little less complex and a little less dire than it might seem on first acquaintance, while the facts are not quite as simple and therefore the narrative not quite as compelling as one might be led to believe.”

The same may be said of the more recent claims. Meanwhile, the Free Software Foundation  points out that the problem would not exist if the kernel developers had retained the option to update the kernel licence framework to the GPLv3.