Market Share

At the infamous Bug #1 discussion, someone compared Microsoft developers’ priorities to Linux developers’ priorities. Although this discussion is very boring lately, i felt compelled to reply and said that Microsoft’s only priority has always been getting Microsoft products to all computer users in the world.

And today i read an interview by the Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard, who says: “That might sound strange, but we are not that concerned about market share. [...] I’d like to make sure more fundamentally that the web is healthy.”

Free Software people are determined to make the world a better place and treat questions of market share in a “if you build it, they will come” manner.

Made Me Cry – Hague

A guy called Ian Hague gave US$200,000 to The Perl Foundation to help the development of Perl 6.

Well, it didn’t make me weep like Misha or The Walkabouts. But i did shed a tear.

Maybe it’s a tax writeoff and maybe he could give the money to the victims of the bad weather in Burma.

But he gave it to one of the geekiest and weirdest causes possible—development of a programming that possibly no-one will ever use seriously. But it could also happen that it will be the best programming language ever. And for whatever reasons he gave his money to it. It is almost a religious story: At least three of the leading developers of Perl 6 have been struck by bad health problems. And then an angel came, so this undertaking won’t perish.

The world is not lost.

Bop

Remember the nineties?

Remember a mega-huge hit song with very little discernible lyrics called MMMBop?

Look what became of it: Stop the bop.

Actually i would be honored if my song would be used for such a thing.

The Future

Where does the computing world go? I’m not talking just about Free Software, but about the whole industry. Even Microsoft is in trouble here.

What more can we do with computers? What will computers do five years from now that they can’t do today?

Writing documents and university papers can’t get much better than MS-Office, OpenOffice, TeX and DocBook. Each of them caters rather well to their respective markets (except some interoperability issues, which are really rather minor if you put the bizness bullshit aside.)

Music, Movies, Animation? You can’t improve this field much more in the home market, and the high-end market of professional artists and studios is rather narrow. (Although ideas expressed in Lessig’s Free Culture can make it wider …)

Business v1.0 software – databases, billing, CRM, ERP? It is a market of reliability, not innovation.

Websites, communications and social networks? True innovation in that area hit a glass wall long ago, if you ask me. Some websites make up nicer AJAX tricks, but that’s about it.

So i thought that the really innovative thing that can useful on a major scale may lie in the field of Linguistics (disclaimer: I am studying for a B.A. in Linguistics). Speech recognition, text-to-speech and automated translation – all of them are related to Linguistics; none of them can be done right without proper scientific Linguistic preparation.

Microsoft puts “improved” speech recognition into every version of MS-Office, but it is very far from doing it right. Xerox and IBM tried something in their respective (and respected) research labs, but it didn’t see the light of day (at least yet). Google are rumored to be doing something with statistics-based automated translation.

But no-one has anything finalized.

The first one who does it right will rule the whole market for years to come. Of the current players, Google seems to have the best chances to succeed, but it can also be a startup company created by an anonymous undergraduate Liberal Arts student in India, Nigeria or Ukraine. Or Israel?

(Originally published in Bug #1.)

It’s decreed the people rule

What do you know – my little campaign for free-as-in-freedom hardware bears its first fruits.

I sent a few messages similar to the one that i posted here recently to forums concerning Linux, gNewSense, Ubuntu etc. I have also posted a few comments^* to the post on Mark Shuttleworth’s blog, where he announces the first developer release of Gobuntu, the “radically free” version of Ubuntu.

Surprisingly Mark himself replied to me in the comments of Bug #1. That’s nice, but not too notable on a global level.

But today something bigger happened: Mark announced that he sets up an initiative to pressure laptop manufacturers into building the perfect free-as-in-freedom GNU/Linux latpop – one that can be used with only purely Free Software drivers. He didn’t mention me by name, but i really don’t need this.

So there you go: One of the good things about Free Software projects is the openness of the development and the project management.

Most Free Software projects have open access to their mailing lists and bug tracking tools. Every user of the program can, nearly anonymously, enter a bug or a feature request into the database (Bugzilla, RT, Launchpad, SF.net etc.) and then track its investigation and fix.

It is not a requirement of any license; it just makes sense! For most users this is even more important than being able to read or modify the source code. Even a reply like “Duplicate bug” or “Works for me” is far better than nothing.

I’ve never seen anything like this in the proprietary software world.

Sure – you can send an email with a bug report to Microsoft, Oracle, CA, HP etc., but it is unlikely that you will know where did it go, unless you have a personal service agreement. It’s just “fire and forget”. And you surely won’t get a personal reply from Mr. Gates.

Yet in the Free Software community the user has the full power to influence the project planning of the core development team.

So – thank you, Mark, for this initiative.

---

^* Some people that read them badly misundestood what i was trying to say. I have made some mistakes too; i really should have known that being sarcastic in writing is much harder and more dangerous than when speaking in person. Joshua Gay, Andrew Fenn, if you are reading this – please accept my apologies again for any misunderstandings.

Emitter/Schtinker

There’s a word in Hebrew – schtinker. It probably comes from Yiddisch and it means informer, snitch (“stinker” appears as an English word in Babylon dictionary, but not in Merriam-Webster). I do it.

I inform the Ministry of Environment (nonstandard) about people who throw garbage from their cars (mostly cigarette butts) and pollute the air with stinking black smoke from their exhaust pipes. I “schtink” on them, which may be not so nice, but the stench of what they do is worse.

Mr. Naphtali Cohen, who is responsible for air pollution in the Ministry of Environment called me before Passover and told me that my reports are really good. He has less than ten air pollution inspectors for the whole country and he depends on volunteers like me. That’s right, less than ten inspectors for a country of more than six million people. In the end he wished me happy holidays:

— “Happy holidays, teimani.”

— “Happy holidays to you too…” I wasn’t sure what was the last word he said.

— “Ha-ha! I am also teimani! Well, happy holidays.”

Then i got it: He saw my address – Giv’at Yearim. It is a moshav which was founded by teimanim – Jews from Yemen but is now pretty mixed.

My car was tested for polluting emissions and passed (the red frame at the bottom). Now i know that while i am informing the authorities about other polluting cars, i am not a hypocrite.

Notice the emblem of the Vehicle Testing Facilities Union of Israel at the top right square – it looks quite a lot like Square and Compasses and also like the coat of arms of Communist East Germany.

Zoë

Or neighbor, a dog-lover himself, found this cutie (no, not Sandy Bar) when she was about a month old. He said that he really liked her and called her Zoë, but couldn’t take her home, because he was his own grown-up German Shepherd will mistreat her. Her eyes were irresistible and we took her.

Taking care of her proved harder than we had naïvely thought, as she is much more playful than the average puppy. After a few days of futile search for a new home Hadar’s uncle took her. He probably cared for her pretty well, but after about three months he gave up and gave her back to us.

Her first night back at our home was very hard. She really hated to sleep alone and kept whining all night, but Hadar didn’t want her in her bed. At three o’clock i took a sleeping bag and went to sleep in the kitchen. She immediately fell asleep with me in the sleeping bag.

The night after that she was already quiet, but we nevertheless didn’t want to make her miserable by leaving her alone every day and started looking for a new home for her again. It was very easy this time – Hadar somehow found an adult Soviet-born lady who took her. Maybe my Russian skills helped.

It’s hard to see how cute she is at these pictures, because she is too black and way too playful to be photographed.

Cross

Yesterday i helped a hedgehog to cross the street.

Maqaf

There’s a hyphen in Hebrew, which doesn’t look like the regular hyphen. It is called “maqaf” (מקף) and it is aligned with the top of the line like this: ־.

It appears in Torah scrolls and in most printed books and newspapers, however it doesn’t appear on keyboards, so most Israelis just write a minus instead when they type. So בית־ספר (beit-sefer, school, lit. book-house) becomes בית-ספר or even בית ספר. The rules for using the maqaf are not taught in schools, so many people – me too – use it inconsistently and often omit it altogether.

Apparently it has issues with Unicode – according to the Unicode standard, maqaf should be used as the hyphen for Hebrew, and proper implementation of Unicode will process it as a right-to-left character unlike the minus, which is a left-to-right character and should be used only with numbers. However, most popular implementations of Unicode (read: Microsoft Word and probably most web browsers, including Firefox) are not really correct. They make life easy for Israelis and treat the minus as the right-to-left hyphen, so it is easy to write this:

החנות פתוחה בשעות 09:00 – 16:00

(The shop is open 09:00 – 16:00)

The problem is that it disregards traditional Hebrew typography and few people seem to care. OpenOffice.org is correct as far as Unicode goes, but most Israelis think that it is just stupid that they can’t write the usual way and throw centuries of our printing tradition to garbage.

On my laptop i made a keyboard mapping that includes the maqaf and i try to use it whenever i can in email and documents. I use it in handwriting too. Some people on the Hebrew Wikipedia use it, although it is controversial. Some free-thinking Hebrew bloggers use it in their blogs (see Digital Words). And that’s about it.

But today i was pleasantly surprised. The maqaf appeared in an article about American junk-food on YNet (i wrote talkback 25). YNet is Israel’s number one online news source. I don’t think that all the articles use it – probably the author of this article was a crazy type like me, or maybe he used some auto-conversion software. I think that i’ll send an email to YNet asking them to use it everywhere.

Please tell me if you want the keyboard mapping with maqaf that i made. It is for Windows. If you use Linux, BSD or Mac, you are probably clever enough to find it on your system by yourself. If you have a server on which i can host it so the public will be able to download it, you’ll make me joyous.

People are a problem

Making the world a better place is hard. In the last few days i sent OGG files of our music to two people with simple instructions on downloading the OGG codec and both of them said that they couldn’t hear them.

People don’t like downloading codecs. That’s why porn sites often say something like: “There’s no need to download any codecs to watch our videos!”

People don’t realize that they can be sued for using MP3.

Now what can i do about it?