Marein reviews fan-made Uru Ages in anticipation of open sourcing. Parts 1, 2, 3.
March 4th, 2010
February 3rd, 2010
Paul ‘chip’ Querna: Facebook & Open Source: Community is just as important as the Code
When you create an open source project, you gain almost nothing but a PR hit if there isn’t a community built around it. [..]
Just look at the massive community that has exploded around Apache Lucene and Apache Hadoop — Yahoo could of kept this infrastructure project internal, and sure, it might of fulfilled their original goals, but they wouldn’t of ever received the thousands of external contributions, which has turned the Lucene/Hadoop world into one of the most diverse and thriving open source communities of late, giving Yahoo a thousand times return on their investment in Hadoop.
Paul discusses the importance of letting company-created open source projects thrive by fostering a vivid community, and encouraging their use in competitors’ products against what might be considered common business sense.
Consider the contrast between two of Apple best-known open source projects: the earliest, Darwin, never took off the way Jobs had promised (and perhaps hoped for) back in 1999. Projects such as OpenDarwin (which eventually shut down), PureDarwin, GNU-Darwin have always lacked proper leadership and interest and suffered under opaque, unclear, apparently inconsistent policies on Apple’s part.
On the other hand, there’s WebKit: once given a proper website with a public blog, issue tracker and repository and allowing external reviewers, its success exploded — and in spite of the fact that many of Apple’s competitors now use it, Apple, too, reaps rewards. The sum of the contributions simply exceeds the initial loss of control and propriety by a wide margin.
Perhaps this kind of success is only possible with a limited amount of projects, but as a company, you have to be willing to take that risk.
January 23rd, 2010
This week, YouTube announced its HTML5 beta, based on an earlier demo at Google I/O 2009. Vimeo swiftly followed suit.
Compared to their Flash-based predecessors, these new video players have various downsides: no full-screen mode, no embedding on third-party sites and, at least for YouTube’s, no play/pause using the space bar. Other than that, this is great: it’s great because we no longer rely on a proprietary mechanism of Adobe’s that was originally designed to display animated vector graphics, not provide a UI and codec to play movies; it’s great because a standards committee (and an experiment-friendly sidekick) have created this technology, and will hopefully drive it forward; it’s great because, in fact, this has benefits in performance (far lower CPU usage; higher likelihood of GPU acceleration), accessibility and other areas.
And it works, right now, everywhere, without limitations.
Ah, who am I kidding.
It in fact works in the newest versions of Safari and Chrome (including Google Chrome Frame for IE), and, if you’re on Linux, Opera. It doesn’t in IE, and — here’s the sad, perhaps surprising part — not in Firefox either.
You may be misled into thinking that the HTML working group standardizing a <video> tag implies them also agreeing on the formats used by such videos, mandating one or more video and audio codecs and container formats to support. In fact, you’d be right that the original proposal looked exactly like that, requiring Ogg Media as the container, Ogg Theora for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio.
The big benefit of Xiph.org’s Ogg-branded series of codecs is their liberal approach — no patents, open specification, no cost, BSD or BSD-style licensing. In other words: pretty much anyone gets to use them if they want. Contrast that to the increasingly common H.264 video codec, which costs money to license and has patents. You’d think the choice is pretty clear: for the consumer and the developer, Ogg Anything means bliss and sanity.
It’s not quite as clear-cut. Apple and Nokia objected to HTML5 requiring browsers to implement Ogg Theora, citing difficulty of hardware acceleration (plenty of chips that specialize in H.264 decoding already exist). Apple added that, even though it is claimed Ogg Theora doesn’t have any patents, there’s no guarantee. Google doesn’t want to switch YouTube to Theora, in part because Flash already supports H.264 (so that’s what much of YouTube’s existing library uses), and because the latter achieves better quality at the same bitrate.
As such, the requirement was dropped from a later draft version of HTML5. Safari 4 ended up shipping supporting whatever codecs your installed QuickTime comes with (which includes H.264, but doesn’t include Ogg Theora unless you install it yourself
), Firefox and Opera with only Ogg Theora, and Google Chrome with both. I said Opera only supports Ogg Theory; as I understand it, Opera on Linux is a special case: it behaves similarly to Safari in that it supports whatever GStreamer happens to have (including, where available, H.264), whereas on other platforms, they instead bundle Ogg Theora.
So here we are: a <video> tag and plenty of confusion as to what it means to the end user. Will my browser play this? Will it not?
Controversial quality comparisons aside, one cannot deny H.264 is very widespread. Apple has been pushing it big time, Blu-Ray mandates it (and the late HD-DVD allowed it), and Adobe Flash has supported it since version 9. For pretty much anything “HD”, it has become the preferred format; the Windows Media-derived VC-1 never quite took off the same way, and Windows 7 even finally ships with it. If smartphones, portable video players, etc. do video, chances are they do H.264. The same simply cannot be said for Ogg Theora.
But perhaps ubiquity isn’t the point?
If you ask Robert O’Callahan, it’s not. Licensing a patent-encumbered, non-free codec is a difficult matter, but that’s not even the big problem. The alternative of having the operating system’s media framework provide the codecs (as is the case with Safari/QuickTime and Opera/GStreamer) doesn’t appeal to him for a number of reasons, including a support nightmare and code maintenance headaches, but most of all this:
Even if a volunteer produces a patch [to make Firefox use Windows's extensible media framework DirectShow for video codec support], I would not want to ship it in Firefox in the near future; let me try to explain why.
Probably most important: we want to focus our energy on promoting open unencumbered codecs at this time.
That was half a year ago. He has reiterated it since:
Users just want video to work. You Mozilla people are such idealists! Yes, that is the reason for Mozilla to exist.
As far as “existing” goes, this may be right. Were it not for idealists, Mozilla may not have survived as long as it did without a successful product. Firefox 1.0 shipped November 2004; Mozilla was open-sourced March 1998. There’s a variety of reasons it took so long (including the questionable decision to rewrite), but there’s little disagreement that idealism helped keep the dream alive.
But the article is less about Mozilla and more about Firefox, and I’d wager to say people in this context read “to exist” as more as “to have succeeded” than “to have been created in the first place”. And in that, I couldn’t disagree more.
“Free software idealism” may have played a big role in those initial six years of not much visibly going on: alpha geeks enjoyed tinkering with the bits and pieces of code, and tried various approaches (particularly Seamonkey), and eventually settled for something far simpler (which evolved from m/b through Phoenix and Firebird into Firefox). That wasn’t what brought Firefox to the masses, though. The masses don’t care about the license. They don’t care to take a look at code. They do care that it’s free as in gratis, that it works, and that it works better than what they were used to. And what they were used to was awful, because it was IE 6.
Firefox 1.0 was the fortunate (and this is part of what significantly accelerated development those days) situation of IE 6 having a deservedly horrible situation and no proper competition, aside from alternatives nobody cared about, and ones even fewer people cared about. A combination of beta geeks1 — those folks who fix their friends’/neighbors’/relatives’ computers — and the media made Firefox a huge success, and they had IE 6’s suckiness (particularly in the realm of security, or lack thereof), Microsoft’s refusal to provide new versions, and Firefox including cool features with it as good arguments.
In short, Firefox was a free and for the most part far superior alternative, and people had their beta geek friend to help them set it up. That is why it succeeded. I consider it foolish to believe that free software idealism pushed Firefox to the masses. It merely helped ignite its beginnings.
And therefore, we must ask ourselves which is more important: more idealism that may or may not make a difference another six years from now, or a solution right now that users will be pleased with?
I’ll take Pragmatic Choices For Consumers for $500.
January 5th, 2010
As judged by anecdotes, as well as by going through the various demo videos (yes, this means I haven’t held one in my hand, so my knowledge is limited):
Things I’m jealous of:
Things I’m not so jealous of:
Android has been developing at a rapid pace, which puts some wonderful pressure on Apple to hopefully make a nice leap with iPhone OS 4 and beyond, but it’s nowhere near the point where I’d even consider switching.
December 13th, 2009
Do you hate museums? I used to think I do.
I’d be there, perhaps with a class, or with family, and think to myself “okay, this is great — can we go home now?”. I’d have a hard time focusing on what was right in front of me, and it wasn’t because my mind was already looking forward to the next painting, sculpture or other form of creative expression. ‘No‘, I had been convincing myself, ‘it must be that I’m simply not a museum type person, period!’
How wrong. Such failure to capture the true issue.
The xkcd strip “The Problem with Wikipedia” is one of my favorites because it feels so me. I’ll come up with all sorts of peculiarities of life I, all of a sudden, wish to look up in the most random of moments. The iPhone is almost like an evil enabler in this, since it lets me do that even while in the most public (e.g. the tram) and most private (your imagination will have to do) of settings. I come up with one term, and my mind won’t stop craving answers, and Wikipedia, combined with its partners-in-crime on the World Wide Web, will deliver much more than I should care to know, but do care to.
It is in that context that not liking museums makes little sense; clearly, my intellect loves its very own kind of stimulation.
But there’s excuses for that.
Browsing Wikipedia can be done in the bathroom1 or in other comfortable ways; exhibits, on the other hand, tend not to offer many (if any) options for seating, even.
With the Web, I can click from one link to another faster than a blink of an eye; an art gallery, on the other hand, assumes and expects much more attention to each individual piece.
There are constant chicken-out options of closing the tab or window or even shutting the laptop’s lid, and boy, do I ever make use of those. Alas, for that, no-can-do at the Anne Frank house.
Those are valid reasons. They play a real role in my subconscious decision-making processes. For a long time, I had fail to question whether they were, in fact, sufficient reasons.
But they miss the real point: what do I do while and after finding random stuff on the Web? I share it. I pick out random quotes that are, in their self-contained brevity, weird or fun or interesting or possibly educational. I pick out amusing stuff and make it fit into this month’s Internet meme. Or maybe I just link and wait for someone else’s comment. I do those things.
In short, I give others my piece of mind, for whatever it may be worth, and ask for theirs in return — at the risk of blowing this out or proportion, it’s an exchange of thoughts leading to a greater common understanding. It’s a miniscule role by itself, but it adds up fast.
Based on my experience this week, that is what had been missing whenever I went to museums. Someone I could discuss things with as I saw them.
It certainly seems like an opportunity I’d like to have more often.