A website and blog by Peter Lewis
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KDE 4 begins
This post is somewhat delayed (given that I wasn't around much last week) but KDE 4 has now been released. The internet is now full of reviews and blog posts about this highly significant milestone in the development of KDE and free software generally. The KDE news post can be found here, and there are articles here, here and here. If you have a spare hour, I also highly recommend watching the release event's keynote speech, delivered by Aaron Seigo, President of KDE e.V, the non-profit organisation which represents the KDE project legally and financially. The video, available here, contains lots of nice demos of the new functionality, and also introduces the new frameworks (or pillars) upon which KDE 4 is built. It also shows early demos of KDE running natively on Windows and OSX, as platform independence was always one of the goals of KDE 4. This is a little contravertial, but also quite exciting as it has the potential to bring in many more users (and testers and developers).
I myself have installed the KDE 4.0.0 packages, available with Kubuntu Gutsy (see here), though haven't had much time to look at it yet. Hence I'm going to refrain from any real judgement or review until a later date. I will say, however, that despite a few of my concerns around Dolphin and the general move to dumb down much of the user interface, it does look very nice indeed, and I like the sound of where the project is heading. It's good to see a piece (suite?) of software which I use so much having so much effort and momentum behind its development. Personally, I'm going to be very interested to see the new Akonadi (named apparently after the Greek god of Knowledge) personal information management framework come into play in forthcoming releases.
As all the release statements and blogs say, KDE 4.0.0 is merely the beginning of KDE 4. The frameworks are now laid out and finalised, the applications are coming together. It is in no way yet suitable as a replacement for KDE 3.5, simply because the applications are not there yet (such as Kontact), but with a little time, I am certain that this will become an excellent leading edge desktop system.
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One of the most sensible things the government could do
As reported in the IMPACT legal blog and elsewhere, the UK government has launched a consultation on copyright exceptions. Perhaps unknown to many people, it is currently illegal in the UK to copy works, such as music and video, from format to format, device to device, unless explicitly permitted by the licence. Although many millions of people have probably copied music from CDs to their computer or music player, or from their computer to a CD to listen to in their car, this is usually illegal.
The proposals being consulted about, however, include the idea that consumers should be able to "make a copy of a work they legally own, so that they can make the work accessible in another format for playback on a device in their lawful possession". The aim of this exception would be to permit "format shifting", the "copying of legitimately owned works to different formats for use on different devices". The full consultation document is available here.
This seems to me to be one of the most immediately sensible and non-controversial things the government could do in the field of copyright at present.
But, restrictive DRM technology has been quietly, and not so quietly, weaving its way into people's homes and lives, on devices and in their music and video files. Current DRM technologies physically prohibit the kind of copying being proposed in the consultation, without reference to any national laws. How can these two ideas be reconciled?
Well, it's no secret that I am no fan of DRM, and would love this to signal the demise of such schemes which impose technical restrictions far beyond legal limitations. So, would this kind of DRM under such a new law be illegal? That seems an unknown at present, but even if not it seems unfair to criminalise anyone hacking such a DRM system in order to obtain their legal rights.
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Climate Change and Carbon Footprints
This Saturday, apart from being my birthday, is also an international day of action on climate change. There will be, amongst many other things, a demo in central London, which quite a few of my friends from a variety of different backgrounds are going to. There's more info on the demo and the campaign against climate change more generally on the website of the Campaign Against Climate Change.
The government here in the UK is now committed to some sort of climate change bill this parliament, thanks in no small part to the dedication of groups like Friends of the Earth, though as described, amongst other places, in George Monbiot's book Heat, most scientists appear to agree that far far more than what is currently on the table will be required in order to avoid starvation, suffering and migration on a scale never before seen in human history.
The government is also unfortunately, in my view, engaged in the diversionary tactic of passing the responsibility of action required back onto us. Of course it is vital that we all begin to understand our role in building a different kind of society, with an economy which is not reliant on high levels of carbon emission, and the government has an important role to play in this. However, though I hope to be proved wrong, it seems that initiatives like their television advertisements and "carbon footprint calculator" are droplets of change when compared with the carbon legacy ocean created by airport expansions, road building and support for expansions in fossil fuel extraction and new coal-powered electricity generation.
Incidentally, I just calculated my carbon footprint (to whatever accuracy can be determined in five minutes by a small flash animation with rather limited questions and answers). Apparently 9.84 tonnes of carbon are emitted each year in my name. Anyone know what 9.84 tonnes of carbon looks like? Sure sounds like a lot of pencils... Calculate yours here.
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A month with GNOME: The Verdict
I wrote a month ago a little about my experiences with GNOME and KDE, the two most popular desktops for Linux-based systems, and, being a long-time KDE user, decided to spend a month using GNOME. A month later, I will now relate my experience and opinions.
So... has a month using Ubuntu's default choice of desktop environment convinced me of the wisdom of switching more permanently? Have I been shown the error of my kways? In summary: No. For me personally, the difference between the two desktops is still stark, and GNOME has very little to offer anyone used to the functionality and configurability of KDE. Plus, in other places, I found that it just didn't work.
Firstly though, some positives. GNOME's default look has certainly been well polished. Its use of shadows, and choice of fonts are well made. The integration of compiz enables a fun and useful three-dimensional desktop, with very few glitches given how new the software is. Plus, it's easy to use (if a little confusing to configure). "GNOME looks better" is often the first comment people make when they realise that I'm a KDE user. They've perhaps installed KDE and played with it for a bit, but never long enough to want to customise its looks very much. And let's be honest, the default look of KDE (even the pre-release KDE 4) really sucks.
However, we are urged not to judge a book by its cover, and this is no exception. Firstly, because KDE's look and feel is so highly configurable when compared to GNOME (my KDE desktop is altered almost beyond recognition from the default), but also because looks aren't everything.
As ever, it's functionality that really counts. Now, GNOME's feature-set is fairly standard, and what it does do, it does relatively well (for the most part). It has a web-browser (either Epihany, or else Firefox fits in well), which does what it says on the tin, it has an email and calendar program (Evolution), a movie player (Totem), music player (Rhythmbox) and a file browser (Nautilus), all of which do what you would expect, but there are very few added extras. This was my initial opinion upon first using the system, and it came to be backed up over time.
For example, take Totem, the movie player. Upon firing it up, you have three buttons, play/pause fast-forward and rewind, plus the usual menus to load files and discs, and the beginnings of some playlist support (though the way this worked really wasn't obvious to me, and there's no "add to queue" option in any other application). So far so okay, but there's strangely no stop button, and the position of the seek bar doesn't seem to particularly relate to the current position in the movie, especially when used with the mouse-wheel, which sends the film backwards then forwards somewhat in an oscillating motion. Okay, so there's a couple of bugs, but that's okay, I'm sure they'll be ironed out.
I've alluded to the main annoyance I found with Epiphany and Nautius already, a real lack of context-sensitive options for files and links. Why the default option for mp3 files is "open in movie player" I don't know, but for files to be opened in either Totem or Rhythymbox there is no "add to playlist" option. While I can live without this for films, it's fairly useful for building music playlists.
Another program of which I've become a heavy user of over the last couple of years is yakuake, a terminal emulator which sits just off screen, ready to slide onto the screen at the touch of a button (rather like the one first used in Quake and still in many games). Doing without this has been the most clumsyfying part of the last month; I just don't like having to alt-tab through dozens of windows to find a terminal. And yes, I tried tilda, but it didn't really cut it.
Okay, so I'm going to stop picking at small annoyances now (which to be honest can be overcome), and deal with some more fundamental issues for me. These issues can be largely summed up as a lack of integration and configurability. Integration, something which KDE does so very well, is just not there in GNOME. Okay, so all the programs use the same "open file" dialogue, but there is a general lack of awareness between programs, exemplified by the lack of "add to queue" option already discussed. I dislike using Firefox under KDE since it is not part of the integrated desktop, and hence its context-sensitive options must all be separately configured by hand. Konqueror behaves much better, knowing how to deal with items from local directories, ftp servers or websites. Epiphany falls down here however, providing usually only a simple "open link" option, which behaves like a poor cousin of Firefox's.
The lack of configurability of menu options doesn't make it any easier. Take Evolution, GNOME's flagship email and calendar program. As with most GNOME apps, it does what it says on the tin, but no more. In KDE, one consistent feature is that you can right click on a menu bar and configure which buttons it has. I find this most useful in KMail, where I replace the single "reply" button with three: "reply to author", "reply to all" and "reply to mailing list". All three have very different but highly useful functionality. I could not find a single way to achieve this in Evolution. The most it allows me to configure the menu is to decide whether I want text next to the icon or not. Evolution's threading support also lacks features to the extent that it makes a large folder of threaded messages difficult to handle, but I won't get back into small grievances...
This post was not intended as a blow-by-blow review of GNOME or KDE, and as such I will not cover every feature and gripe I have with each. There are enough websites around which do that already. Instead, I hoped to simply point out a few of the possibilities which are available, but which GNOME's lack of extended functionality prevents users from perhaps even realising exist. GNOME works, don't get me wrong. But Windows XP also works, as do Windows 98 and AmigaOS. When moving from Windows to Linux for the first time, it suddenly seemed that my computer would behave how I wanted it to, rather than me having to conform to the paradigm provided by its user interface. The feeling has been comparable but contrary this last month. KDE certainly gives the user more control over their interactions with their computer than GNOME does, and has more functionality. I believe that GNOME's restrictive "user friendly" design approach is bad for the cause of free software, which should encourage people to think about and use their computer in new and imaginative ways (such as IMAP resources for contacts, session management and consistency between handling of files wherever they are based), rather chaining them to what the designers think they want. Open, extensible and configurable functionality is the only way for this to be an option for the vast majority who are not prepared or able to dive into the code themselves.
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University removes right to freedom of speech on campus
I was just about to blog about this, when I realised that my friend Zeth has already done a fantastic job of summing up the recent changes to university policy in this post. Thanks to the joys of the Creative Commons Licence, I can make his comments available here...
I often receive emails from various online services saying there has been a change in their privacy policy, which almost always means you have less privacy than before, and they are now going to share your personal information with another third party. So the real purpose of privacy policies is often to take away your privacy rather than to give you privacy.
This time I received a controversial email from my University that had been forwarded from the centre down eventually to my little corner of geekdom. The email explained that there had been a change in the 'Freedom of Speech' policy (I didn't know we had one), so now anyone from outside the University must be given written permission to speak on campus. So the 'Freedom of Speech' policy now restricts freedom of speech.
Without a lot of careful steering, Universities always tend to drift into ivory tower mode, now we are pulling up the drawbridge too. Here is the email:
Colleagues,
I have attached for your information and subsequent action the revised policy on the Code of the Practice on Freedom of Speech on Campus which was approved by Council on 19 September 2007 to be implemented from 30 September 2007. The Authorising Officer for Freedom of Speech is [Senator McCarthy], Director of [Big Brother] who has nominated me to act on his behalf.
I have also attached a PDF speaker request form which includes a section from the policy regarding conduct of meetings on university premises to be given to people making an application for an outside speaker. I would be grateful if all requests were made on this form with immediate effect.
The Code of Practice defines Outside Speakers as persons who are not students, employees or other members of the University, who are invited to speak on University premises on occasions other than as a normal part of an existing academic programme of study authorised by the relevant budget centre, or as a normal part of a regular careers exhibition or similar event.
I would be grateful if you would cascade this policy and new speaker request form within your School to staff and students who are involved in booking outside speakers.
If you require any further information please let me know.
Thank you
[Corporate Drone X]
So it is a classic bit of Orwellian doublethink where 'Freedom' of speech requires an application form to be submitted three weeks before to obtain permission from a central bureaucrat, thus not actually being free any more but a privilege handed down by a neo-monarchy.
I'm sure the changes to the (un)freedom of speech policy comes from people with seemingly good motives, i.e. to protect us all from those dirty and scary common real people outside the campus gates. Like the British Empire was created with seemingly good motives or those who set up Guantanamo Bay had seemingly good motives. The problem with the British Empire, like a 'Freedom of Speech' policy, is that it is paternalistic.
The British did not trust the 'natives' to run their own affairs; even though the native cultures were thousands of years old, they did not have the signs and symbols of the Western world, so therefore they must be inferior and Western control and Western signs and symbols must be introduced. Likewise, even though dozens of events involving the public have been held on our campus, on almost every week for over 100 years, the Council does not trust academics and students to run their own events involving 'outsiders'. Common sense and good manners must be replaced with the signs and symbols of bureaucracy.
I find it very unlikely that all our academics and students are secretly harbouring subversive ideologies; I find it very unlikely that our academics are secretly communist revolutionaries, Islamic fundamentalists or members of the national front (though I hear the Masons do quite well here). Perhaps even if a minority are, then engagement is surely the correct policy. If the universities stop believing in the power of free thought and open discussion, then why is society funding the universities at all?. If there were radical elements on campus who refuse to discuss with rational academia, then we would need to do a lot more than email a couple of PDFs to combat them.
The most bizarre thing is that the people tasked with implementing this policy are not academics, but the department that deals with accommodation, gardening, postal services, cleaning and so on. I have no idea who [Senator McCarthy] is, but we could (in theory) have someone who started as a gardener or porter telling professors and lecturers who can and cannot speak at their events. University cleaners are the latest recruits in George W. Bush's war on terror.
Even if we put the censorship issues aside for a moment, the required three weeks notice is just not practical for many of the events, including the most dynamic and interesting ones, so it either means the policy will just be ignored or outsiders will be invited onto campus less often. There is a grandfather clause for some existing events, but in general this extra layer of red-tape means the University becomes even more cut off from the public who fund the whole University. British Universities are almost exclusively financed by the tax-paying public. There is an elaborate dance of quangos and bureaucrats between to help burn a bit more cash, but it is the tax-payer who foots all the bills. Research Councils == tax-payers. HEFCE == tax-payers. The grants and subsidised loans that students use to pay their fees == tax-payers.
So in return for all their support, the public, who are paying for the whole thing, need written permission and at least three weeks notice to open their mouths on campus. Charming. Even though I benefit a little from all this tax-payers money, I find this lack of respect for the public somewhat tasteless.
Recently someone was found to have gambled away 4 million pounds of the University's money, i.e. tax-payers' money, no one in the senior administration resigned or lost their job over it; even though the senior administration was responsible for overseeing and reforming the structure that allowed this to happen. If the university's senior administration and council would spend a bit more attention on their core role as custodians of other people's money and therefore know where this money is, then maybe they would have less time to waste on censoring invited guests who speak at University events.
Thanks, Zeth. Though I'm really not surprised. I'm not quite sure what exactly the problem is, which they are attempting to solve with this new policy, but presumably it has something to do with the odd person who came to campus and made them feel a little uncomfortable. However, Albert Einstein quite famously said that for every problem there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong, and I'm convinced that is what's going on here.
Similarly, I've also recently become involved in the Young Greens, an environmental group on campus, affiliated to the Green Party. One of our planned activities for the early part of this semester was to have a stall on campus, handing out some free food as a bit of a gimmick, along with fliers about some upcoming events. However, even to carry out this innocuous activity and even though we are all students, required three week's notice. We were also handed regulations requiring the brand names of all food on the stall to be submitted to the university authorities, along with written recipes. We were also prohibited from using any nuts or eggs. Now, I have a bit of experience of the relationship between university administrations and students, and rather than based on anything useful, this appears to me to be nothing more than an attempt at disincentivising students from carrying out such activities.
But, as a previous senior university colleague of mine frequently used to remind those with whom he came in contact, universities in the 21st century are businesses. I'm extrapolating now, but as such, mustn't any activity which might potentially have a negative impact on the efficiency of the multinational-company's-graduate-training-programme-participant-production-machine be discouraged, shut down or banned? Operating within its current market environment (the inevitable outcome of the sadly unstoppable move towards ever increasing tuition fees in higher education - the issue which first motivated me to get involved in politics by the way), can anything else be expected of universities? University administrations are, I would argue, caught between the rock of failure (and therefore replacement of the management) and the hardplace of their current approach.
The answer? More to come later I guess from me on that, but a refocus on the role of education in today's society at the very least...
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A month with GNOME
As any regular reader of this blog will know, I'm an every day KDE user. After a history of using SuSE and Gentoo, my Linux distribution of choice for the past year or so has been Kubuntu, the KDE flavour of Ubuntu. Well, after a few discussions at this month's Birmingham Linux User Group meeting, which coincided with the new release of the Ubuntu family, the Gutsy Gibbon, and having spent quite a bit of the evening strongly advocating KDE, I've now decided to give GNOME a try.
For those not up on the particulars of modern Linux-based desktops, GNOME and KDE represent two quite different approaches to a fully fledged desktop system. The UNIX world has always been modular, and though the graphical windowing system itself is provided by X Windows, much of the look and feel is provided by the particular window manager or desktop environment you choose. The two most fully featured and mature desktop environments are KDE and GNOME.
A bit of history is probably in order here. Many people moving over to GNU/Linux based systems spend a while wondering why there are several different options, and why the community doesn't just pool its effort into one really good system. There are many reasons why that doesn't always happen in open source development, but the KDE/GNOME case is particularly interesting.
KDE was begun by Matthias Ettrich in 1996, in an attempt to create a consistent and easy to use desktop environment for UNIX systems. It was immediately a very popular project and gained developers fast, the software progressing quickly. However, many in the free software world (including myself) had concerns about KDE, since it was based on the proprietary QT widget libraries, owned and developed by the Norwegian company Trolltech. Of course, the GPL does not allow free software to be linked with proprietary software, and hence the GNU project could not support KDE. Debian subsequently dropped the system from its distribution.
A number of responses came about from this move. Listed in no particular order, the first was an attempt to create an alternative, free version of QT, called Harmony. Secondly, many keen KDE people created the KDE Free QT movement, an attempt to persuade Trolltech to relicense QT under a free licence, and subsequently to guarantee its availability should Trolltech disappear or abandon QT. Thirdly, the GNOME project was founded; an attempt to create an alternative desktop environment from scratch, free from any involvement with proprietary code or reliance on commercial developers.
Those who know where I stand on free software would expect that I would have been a supporter of GNOME from the start, and back then they'd have been right. I was doing my undergraduate degree at the time, and the university computers included both GNOME and KDE. So, I used this early version of GNOME for a while on both them any my own PC.
GNOME has always felt different to use than KDE; a bit like the difference between AmigaOS and Windows 3.0, both of which I'd been used to switching between previously, so after a year or so of using KDE, GNOME took a bit of getting used to. My initial reactions were quite positive; it looked good and was quite fast, though much of its functionality appeared to exist in framework documents rather than the software I could see on my screen. Still, it allowed me to achieve a consistent look to the desktop (something previously lacking on Linux really) and the look was highly configurable. It looked better than KDE.
However, over the next couple of years, to me, GNOME stagnated. KDE, on the other hand, came on leaps and bounds. KDE's file manager (kfm back then) and subsequently its lightweight web browser (konqueror) appeared technically superior to Netscape Navigator, which the GNOME systems hadn't been able to supplant. But by far the best feature of KDE back then was the interoperability of the applications. Items could be dragged and dropped between virtually any application, and they would know what to do with them. Even the early implementations of what is now known as 'kparts' technology allowed programs to be run inside others when Microsoft Office was still struggling to achieve this properly.
Then in 2000, the freedom issue seemed to disappear. Trolltech released QT under the GPL, resolving the issues about distributing modified code, which their own QPL created. By this point, an agreement was also firmly in place with KDE to ensure that if Trolltech folded or abandoned QT, then the code would be released under a BSD style licence.
By this time, both GNOME and KDE were progressing very quickly, though KDE remained consistently a year or two ahead of GNOME in terms of features and stability. Since the new millennium, both systems have been very usable, though each retaining a distinct look and feel. At this point I was already very comfortable with KDE and its ever expanding suite of programs. I found GNOME a bit like KDE before I'd upgraded it. Added to that, GNOME lacked (perhaps still does) a uniform way of doing various tasks (such as right clicking on a menu bar to configure it). Its file dialogs were chunky, and it just didn't have as many features as KDE. I stuck with KDE.
The choice of desktop system by the main Linux distributions at this time was fairly evenly split. Many had no obvious bias, whilst Redhat used GNOME, SuSE favoured KDE, and both contributed heavily towards the development of their respective desktops. Debian now included KDE again, and a host of other systems lay on each side.
Then, in 2003 Novell bought SuSE, and subsequently also brought in GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza and his company Ximian, who were responsible for a large chunk of GNOME development. It was no great surprise, therefore, when Novell's SUSE (note the large 'U') announced that GNOME would be the preferred desktop for their Linux distributions, with which they hoped to compete with Redhat in the enterprise market. Luckily, SUSE still do contribute towards KDE, though the announcement did send ripples across the KDE world. Controversially, Miguel has now led the charge on Microsoft compatibility through the Mono project, and despite the guy having done great work on pushing open file formats in recent years, I've heard frequent criticisms of his style of "starting" projects, only to leave others to pick up the pieces and make the thing work.
Arguably the most popular desktop Linux-based system today is Ubuntu, itself a remodelling of that stalwart of the Linux world, Debian (rather excellently named after its founders, Deb and Ian). Ubuntu however, was also firmly behind GNOME, and despite the fact that KDE and XFCE based flavours of the distribution were later released, the lion's share of development and use remains focussed on GNOME. With all this extra focus, surely GNOME has now caught up.
Given the number of distributions now preferring GNOME, its no surprise that its user share has also increased. A hunch tells me that more people at my Linux User Group use GNOME than KDE, and this month we were treated to a demo of GNOME-based Ubuntu's latest features. It looked good. Ubuntu, being primarily developed for GNOME, tends to be slightly quicker off the mark with new functionality for the GNOME flavour than the KDE one, but how much? So, as someone who has now used KDE since version 1.0, and only dabbled with GNOME occasionally, perhaps it is time for me to take a closer look.
So, my "project", if you will, is to spend a month using GNOME rather than KDE on my home PC. I've installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon from a fresh install, and there isn't a KDE application in sight. I'm going to attempt to get to know the GNOME way of doing things. I aim to compare GNOME and its applications' approach with the good KDE functionality I know I like. I also hope to discover some new stuff too.
In a month's time, I will write about my experiences, and whether it's tempted me to make a more permanent switch.
After all, KDE and GNOME (contrary to many mailing list debates) are not enemies, just rival siblings, willing each other to do well. And it's good to get to know your friends better, right?
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Bad Apple
At last, it seems that the mainstream media are beginning to provide a more accurate view of what Apple is all about, rather than contributing to the bizarre belief in their position as some kind of cool community-driven, anti-monopoly company. Welcome to the real world.
I can't help thinking that all the effort that goes into things like this in the Free Software community, whilst appreciated in the current scenario, would be better spent somewhere else. But, until we are able to stop this kind of back-filling, we will always be held back.
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Happy International Park(ing) Day!
Today, 21st September, is International Park(ing) Day. I just came across this, thanks to TreeHugger's post. The motivation behind the day, which originated two years ago in San Fransisco, California, is that so much of our cities' space is given over to vehicles, so why not, for a day, reclaim a bit as a public park. The idea is therefore pretty simple: find a parking spot, and turn it into a park for a day.
I didn't search for long, but the only example of the day being observed here in the UK was in Manchester last year. It'll be good to see if this grows this year. One in Birmingham would be great, and if I'd have found out about this earlier, I might have been quite up for helping to organise it.
This reminds me of a Reclaim the Streets style party which we held in Leicester a few years back, occupying part of Evington Road and moving in with barbeques and music. That day was a huge success; over a hundred people surprised themselves by joining in, bringing food, music and sofas out onto the street. It was actually kind of weird to see everyday people just stopping and chatting, having a free bite to eat, meeting new people and going away saying what a good idea it was. One local shoe shop owner even spontaneously suggested that we hooked up a sound system to his electricity supply to keep the thing going rather than use a generator.
Anyway, I'm all for the kind of thing that keeps public spaces for people. So, if anyone knows of a local effort or feels like doing this next year, let me know!
(Photo copyright Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. Thanks Scott!)
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