This is a good interview with Marc Miller, AMD's open source evangelist and all around good guy. He talks about open source development, and generally the whole idea of why a software company would give their "property" away to the world. I think he could have gotten a little bit more into the idea of the GPL and how it protects copyrights - the interviewers lead him down the path that open source basically releases companies from protecting their property, and Marc said nothing to refute that. Its unfortunate that the impression in the software world that open source equals abandonment. The truth is that having open source code in the world demands even more vigilance enforcement.

What gets missed is that the GPL protects the copyright by providing specific conditions for use in exchange for giving up various rights in terms of distribution. Nothing about the GPL says that the company cannot aggressively protect their copyright if they need to. In fact, the success of the GPL as a whole demands that all copyright holders (both corporate and personal) actively defend their code against abuses. Its an interesting juxtaposition that the same companies who fight tooth and nail to protect their closed source software IP seem to be the ones who most often ignore abuses once it gets open sourced.

I'm back home now - feeling a bit worse for the wear thanks to the usual closing party on Saturday night, and the airplane rides home on Sunday. I declare OLS to be a moderate success - our talk was very good (but I am biased), and hopefully it will open up new doors for LinuxBIOS and AMD. Other then that, I generally thought that the talks this year weren't great. Not terrible, but not much that really got me excited, with the exception of cpuidle, which is directly applicable to OLPC and Geode.

As usual, the social aspect was nice - we met lots of folks, and got connected with people, especially Ron and Stefan from LinuxBIOS, and some of our other AMD brethren from around the world.

My favorite OLS moment was definitely when Marc announced during our talk that he had been an open source developer for 50 days, and the crowd responded with a round of applause. Very cool.

First off, I'll try really hard not to make any jokes about being in Canada, though I did watch the South Park movie on the flight up here, as tradition dictates. I'm in Ottawa, where I am, believe it or not, at the Ottawa Linux Symposium (funny how that works, isn't it?).

Today is Thursday, and Marc and I are speaking later on today. I do have to say, this is some place in my career I had always hoped to be, but also secretly feared making a big fool of myself on a very large stage. Kind of like Paris Hilton, only, you know... smarter.

I'll post a bit more on the conference later - maybe also some pictures of various folks I meet. I've already been stopped a couple of times in the hall and recognized as a "Geode guy". That sometimes freaks me out - I came so late to the Geode party, yet here I still am, stealing all the left over booze from the bar and bothering the hostess for more of those little hotdogs in cocktail sauce.

A quick update on the ongoing bluetooth-alsa experiment (don't worry - I still love it!). I got rhythmbox/gstreamer to work by directly hacking the gconf thusly:

system -> gstreamer -> 0.10 -> default

Key audiosink should be alsasink device="plub:pcm.headphone" or whatever device you have specified. It is important at this point to not ever use gstreamer-properties again, because it will over write the value for you. I've posted a Gnome bug complaining about the inability to specify a custom device for Gstreamer. I'll keep you updated... :)

From the always smart ZDNet Hardware 2.0 blog comes this.
From the article:

Despite what you read on websites and blogs, newspapers and magazines, people on the whole aren’t all that dissatisfied with Windows. There are millions of users out there who just get on and use their PCs without any real difficulty.

From time to time, I fall utterly in love with a open source project. Sometimes its because the project solves a specific problem I have, other times because it makes my life way easier, and other times just because it rates high on the cool scale. Today, its a project that does all three. Read on to hear about a project that does all three: bluetooth-alsa.

I just installed Ubuntu on my work laptop. Back in the dark ages, when it ran Gentoo, I was relegated to using hibernate+suspend2 to save power (since this thing has a buggy ACPI that just doesn't resume from a S3 correctly). I wanted to do the same on Ubuntu, but I had heard rumors of disk failure and other scary bugs. Luckily, I came across this article which inspired me to install uswsusp. It works like a champ, and the scripts integrate well with HAL to make gnome-power-manager and the shutdown dialog just work. Yay!

Ok - so, this is either brilliant satire, or very scary hate mongering. Either way - it is hilarious!

Talk of hardware drivers in Linux has been on everybody's lips lately. First, kernel uber-hacker Greg KH posted an offer for free kernel development on the LKML late last month. Needless to say, that re-opened the old wounds of flamewars past. Then, somebody at work sent this out which does a magnificent job of detailing the arguments from the hardware vendors. Obviously, as a pure software developer working for a hardware company, I have a strong opinion about this - that we should sell the stuffing out of our hardware, and give the drivers away to anybody who wants them. In fact, thats why I choose to work for a hardware company - its the only way I feel I can truly justify myself to my employer. If I happened to work for a software only company, its much harder for me to argue that we should give my work away. Of course, working for a hardware company has its disadvantages too - software folks are usually in a lower caste, and our necks are usually the first on the block when things go bad. But thats fine - I think its worth it to do what I believe in, and get paid too.

My new home workstation is finally up and running, and I couldn't be happier. The star of this show is a brand new AMD Athlon X2 4800+ - that is one newer 65 nm parts meaning this bad boy runs cool and silent. It can crank up to 2.5Ghz on both cores, but right now its just quietly ticking along at 1Ghz, thanks to cpufreq. The core temperature sensor (new to linux 2.6.19 - a big shout out to Ruik from #linux-sensors on freenode.net for a most excellent k8temp driver), shows that the core is currently at 53.6 degrees (which is the highest I've seen yet). If that was the temperature outside, it wouldn't even be shorts weather. So, all in all - a big thank you to the good folks at Outside Loop computers. If you need a computer - give them a ring, they'll treat you well.
Like the recently installed web server blade in the basement, this boxen is running Ubuntu, which means that I've officially put Gentoo in my rearview mirror as my distro of choice. I'm still happily using XFCE (its really the best window manager - it gets out of my way and lets me do what I want). Ubuntu goes for broke on the graphics front, so this is easily the best looking desktop I've ever had, especially since the Nvidia chipset is running well, so the graphics are pretty seamless. If you're willing to put your head down, and do a bit of configuration, Linux can make a pretty nice little desktop.
The only problem is that Fritz lost his sleeping spot in favor of a new LCD, so he's been roaming around lately giving me lots of dirty looks. I guess thats the price you pay for being at the leading edge of the technology revolution.