Bobby Johnson writes a nice piece here about pressure for U.S. trade representatives to consider countries using open source technology as enemies of capitalism. Here’s a great quote:
“I know open source has a tendency to be linked to socialist ideals, but I also think it’s an example of the free market in action. When companies can’t compete with huge, crushing competitors, they route around it and find another way to reduce costs and compete. Most FOSS isn’t state-owned: it just takes price elasticity to its logical conclusion and uses free as a stick to beat its competitors with (would you ever accuse Google, which gives its main product away for free, of being anti-capitalist?).”
I agree. Open Source is free choice and open markets in action. The reason it’s getting this sort of policy level attention is that it breaks the game that the the big-dollar interests have been playing with the “free market” system.
Disclaimer: I earn a living working on free software, as do a lot of people I respect who work for companies that ostensibly compete with my employer (Canonical) and with each other. The majority of them work for companies who get paid by other companies to provide good and services, who then pay their employees to do the actual labor of producing those, and we in turn spend that money locally just the same as anyone working in any other field. That’s pretty traditional capitalism.
I love discovering new tools.
Lately my work on Ubuntu Linux kernels has had me paying closer attention to the Intel open source graphics drivers.
I’ve come across a few tools that are handy to developers and people with more advanced troubleshooting skills. One of those is intel_reg_dumper, which (not surprisingly) dumps the values of a whole bunch of internal registers from the graphics card. This comes as part of the xserver-xorg-video-intel-dbg package.
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On November 6th I’ll be helping Dave Freese, W1HKJ make a presentation about fldigi to the Huntsville Amateur Radio Club. Fldigi is an amazing open-source cross platform application for communicating using sound card digital modes on amateur radio.
Dave is really knowledgeable about the encoding and error correction used for the various modes, and I learned a lot by helping him with a similar presentation at the Huntsville Hamfest this year. Our demo was cross-platform between Windows and Ubuntu Linux.
There are some really interesting uses being made of fldigi and some companion applications - sending digital files error-free by amateur radio. This is useful for emergency communications in post-disaster situations, when information must be accurately transmitted. Some of these applications do not use point-to-point connections, and therefore allow a file to be received by multiple stations at once. That way, if any station fails to receive the file correctly, they can get a “fill” from any other station who did get it.
It’s possible to perform these file transfers simply by holding the microphone on an FM radio near the computer speaker, and to receive them with a computer microphone near the receiver!
This should be a worthwhile presentation for people with any level of interest or experience in digital sound card modes. For more information see Dave’s excellent web site. Don’t miss his sights and sounds of digital modes page, especially if you’ve been listening to the sounds on the ham bands and wondering what modes they are.
The presentation will be November 6th at 7:30 at the American Red Cross chapter house, 1101 Washington street, Huntsville, AL. This is the regular weekly meeting place and time of the Huntsville Amateur Radio Club.
PPAs on Launchpad are an amazing way to get the latest crack builds, which is useful if you track or contribute to an upstream project, or test new code to see if it resolves a problem. That’s what I’ve been doing this week - I installed the latest Xorg crack on top of a karmic beta install.
If you visit that last link, you’ll find a description of how to install and use a package called ppa-purge, which will revert the PPA settings and restore the packages to the distro versions. This makes it much easier to restore the system, or even to bounce between the distro and bleeding edge versions and see what changed.
I just noticed a couple of new Linux amateur radio projects. The first is a D-Star compatible repeater - More info Here and the project page is here . I see no mention of source code or a license for the repeater code, but it is apparently based on Centos. The second project is an APCO-25 decoder, and is clearly available under the GPL.
