It's a bee-in-the-bonnet weekend again, and having left the draft petition text up for a week for comments it is now live right here.

Sign it, tell other people about it, if you're on facebook or other social media spread the word, make your voice heard.

You know I have a bee in my bonnet when I blog twice on the same topic in the space of a scant few hours after a blogging hiatus of several months (well it's either that or I'm scatterbrained; your pick).

I don't want to let this slide. e-voting is too important. I'm not the Welfare Minister, but we live in a country where that person should answer to the people and perhaps we just need to shout loudly enough. So I have decided to draft a petition, and I need your help.

I have been making myself scarce on my own website of late; when you move back to your homeland after 12 years and pick up a very exciting new position with a place as cool as Rambøll Informatik, you'll tend to drop off the radar for a bit.

Thanks to Pinse I now have a long(er) weekend, and there is one thing I wish to piss and moan about. I want to call out the Danish Welfare Ministry.

The story goes like this. Eight Danish municipal authorities are moving towards e-voting and the Welfare Ministry (for byzantine reasons which with any luck will be tackled in the comment section of this post) is stakeholder in requirements definition and tender formulation. And the Welfare Ministry has warned the municipalities against mandating open source.

I was listening to Josh Berkus speak to Laporte and Schwartz about PostgreSQL versus Oracle on FLOSS Weekly, and a real bona fide gem emerged.

Josh relates the difference in product offering between a Sun supported PostgreSQL and a typical Oracle offering, and it isn't the price difference (significant though it may be) which is the real issue, it is the difference in expectation between Sun and Oracle.

Oracle need to sell the database as it is their primary product. At Sun, if the PostgreSQL business breaks even that is well enough since it wasn't the primary business: the platform is. PostgreSQL is just part of a stack making the whole platform look more appealing.

So as a commercial database consumer, you have a choice there, and the choice goes to the heart of vendor relations quality (upon which most other cost and performance factors can be demonstrated to depend). One of the vendors will want you to use the product because it will create a direct revenue stream for them, and the other has no direct commercial interest in you using the system, though they wouldn't mind it if you ended up liking it and looking at their other products.

Of course, this is over-simplifying matters a little. But when you're talking vendor relations management strategy, you're talking long term and when you talk long term, it's the broad brush that paints the clearest target.

I was very happy to see my article, The Free Software hardliner, the Corporation, and the Shotgun Wedding on linux.com a few days ago.

For one thing, it is obviously an honor to have articles you've written running there. For another, that article discusses some things I eeded to get off of my chest, and the comments section of the article indicate that there may be others who feel the same way.

And of course, it's nice to be paid for writing! (No, this little puppy isn't making anything other than €0.00 per copy yet...)

zypper update brought me a kernel update this afternoon, which gave me an intriguing prompt:

      Overall download size: 158.1 M. After the operation, additional 2.2 M will be used.
      Continue? [yes/no]: yes
      kernel patch license:
      This update can be used to install a new kernel.
       
      If you decide to use the kernel update, we recommend that you reboot
      your system upon completion of the YaST Online Update, as additional
      kernel modules may be needed which can only be loaded after the system
      is rebooted.
       
      In order to install this package, you must agree to terms of the above licencse. Continue? [yes/no]:

That I think is as close as one gets in an urxvt window to replicating the windows functionality of prompting for reboots after updates.

I'm not entirely sure how good an idea it is to make the suggestion to reboot in a license exhibit for GPL'ed software. It just doesn't work on so many levels...

One thing which I do miss from Debian is how unintrusive the package management is. Neither apt-* nor aptitude really make you feel like the system is under any significant load, which should be par for the course.

Now zypper on the other hand is the package management equivalent of Rupert Murdoch; must have it all and must have it now. At certain stages of even a simple operation like zypper lu, this box (which is a 1.8 Ghz 512 Mb lappie) slows down to a grinding halt waiting for Mr. Zypper to let system resources out of his clutches.

I've graphed the system load average stats for a simple routing zypper lu here; the result is pretty dramatic and speaks for itself.

Much like unjobs.org, eurobrussels.com is an excellent resource for vacancies in Europe with multilateral organizations and all form of interesting private enterprises.

Unfortunately, the site is still RSS-disabled and the process of looking on the site for new jobs is temrinally inconvenient. So what's a python programmer to do?

Out comes BeautifulSoup and PyRSS2Gen. A quick examination of the source code reveals that the geeks there are good enough netizens to use (relatively) reasonable CSS classes. A little bit of time, and you've got a nice screenscraper for your RSS generator.

Find the python script attached to this post.

From the qmail mailing list comes the observation that Dan Bernstein recently made a presentation stating that qmail will be placed in the public domain in November 2007.


From: Matthew Dempsky dempsky.org>
Subject: qmail in the public domain?
Newsgroups: gmane.mail.qmail.general
Date: 2007-11-04 04:26:57 GMT (13 hours ago)
There's a thread discussing Dan's ``Some thoughts on security after
ten years of qmail 1.0'' paper, but I haven't seen any mention on the
slides to the corresponding talk[1]. Namely, page 10 says:
2007.11: $500 -> $1000;
qmail placed into public domain.
Does this mean what I think it does? :-)
[1] http://cr.yp.to/talks/2007.11.02/slides.pdf


Amongst other reasons, this is interesting because the qmail redistribution clause has so far said that DJB's permission was required for redistribution of modified versions of qmail, which distro packagers might shy away from to name but one category of potential key user.

Way back in March it must have been, I had pinged Greg KH about the notion of building some simple and straightforward promotional materials for the Free Linux Driver Development Project. Many months later, the project is now getting rolling for serious and I've had a bit of time to draft a two-pager which can be fired off at OEMs as a way of generating initial interest and awareness.

Linux Driver Development Project Two-Pager (pg. 1)

Linux Driver Development Project Two-Pager (pg. 2)