April 2005 Archives

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April 28, 2005

What is with the anger?

A question that I find I'm asking myself more and more. Everybody seems to have an opinion and everyone seems to have to ventilate this opinion as agressively and widely possible. I know that by writing this I myself ventilate my opinion, but judging fromt the amount of pageviews I could just as easily be talking to a wall and usually I pretend I am.
The most explicit example of this aggresive opinioniating is the murder on Theo van Gogh of course. Actual violence. But though it does draw a lot of media attention, it's actually not that interesting. There have always been violent idiots and they will always be there in the future. No, I'm talking politics here, friends, public discussion forums. People are outraged about the management of their country. Even the management is outraged about the management. Everybody seems to have the answer as to what should be done and how we should achieve this. What surprises me is that we all seem to listen to these people. Apparently we have grown so accustomed to a culture of discussion and negotiation that we think it's normal. Let me tell you. It's not. As recently mentioned in the satiric Dutch TV program Kopspijker: "We live in a democracy. And the definition of a democracy is not that everyone is allowed to make discissions. It is that everyone is allowed to elect the people who should represent You to make the best decission for you".

Politics and leading a country is not a simple task. It's not meant to be simple. It's not always as fun for the people as the people would like it to be. Sometimes the world economy sucks and you need to make decissions that will help the country and not directly the people living in it. Politics is something that should be thinked about in the terms of decades, not in single day one-liners. That's why a random referendum is such a dangerious form of making important decisions. If a referendum is a frequently occuring thing than its fine since people who don't know a thing about it, will often refrain from voting at all. But if it's only once every 4 years or something, then people will use it (their power) to ventilate their opinion about everything regardless of what the actual voting subject is.

Unfortunately the European Constitution (which isn't a real constitution but rather a specific set of treaties that we have already got largely in place) will be decided upon in such a random referendum.
And a lot of people voting are the people opposing the European Union as a whole. People are scared. Scared about the Euro. Scared about the progress that is being made. Scared about the rules that are supposedly laid upon them with them not having influence upon those. And almost none of these people understand what they are saying.
The EU constitution will actually bring more direct power to the people whom reside in it. The balance between the different participating countries will be more equal then it is now. The environment will be more protected etc etc etc. Besides the constitution is much more flexible then our own constitution. It's not like these laws are set in stone. They will be a work in progress and without doubt be changed many a times in this century. Why do people work together on Free Software, Open encyclopedias and the Internet in general, yet don't understand that all those recently very popular concepts are very much based on unification, cooperation and the adventurous spirit that Europe as a whole has always had?

Basically there is only one argument against the EU and that is being opposed to unification. Being opposed to globalism. What people don't see is that this will come regardless. It's either unification or anarchy, and both still won't last forever. Personally I prefer Unification. You see a continuing trend at the moment where people seek the safety of the fifties and the early sixties of the previous century. People are afraid of the next BIG thing. For the first time in a hundred years we don't really know what is coming next. It explains the growing interest in religion and religious movies, TV, books etc. It's a longing for a safety zone, something that you have seen and that you cherish. However, that is gone. It will never return in that exact same form. The future is always in flux. Fashions come and go and hopefully the fashion of voicing your opinion on every chance you get will too.

I still believe in the striving towards Utopia. You may call me naive and that is fine by me. I know that we will never get there, but perhaps, just maybe, the road towards Utopia is even a higher and more admirable concept than Utopia itself. Star Trek, Free Software and a Free society here I come, anyone who wants to can follow us, if not well then that is your Freedom of choice just as much (you see i still win :D ). Just don't bother me with that opinion everytime.

Posted by The DJ at 01:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Random

April 10, 2005

VLC and people who don't quite seem to get how Open Source works

So several things came to my and other developers attention recently. For instance the company Broadcast Avenue. They install VoD, TV and radio systems in businesses and hotels and stuff. Software, servers, cabling, plasma TVs, everything. Now several things indicate that this company uses VLC for large parts of this.

1: 2 VLC developers, titer and fen used to work for them for a short period of time. Both developers said that the experience was less than satisfying. They were promised a lot, but didn't get very much at the end.
2: The capabilties specification clearly shows that the decoders are likely using ffmpeg.
3: This posting indicates they implemented a VIA hardware decoding module for VLC, but they never contributed it back to the project. When one of the VLC developers informed about this, he was flatout ignored.
4: This posting again indicates that they are using VLC and that they have implemented private modules, but no one from this company ever contributed anything back.
5: Their OD-player is flash based and uses a mozilla module for displaying the video. It also works on OSX. The only Open Source player that has a mozilla module for OSX is VLC (though it is in a dorment state atm.)

This all reeks like GPL violations, but we cannot be sure untill WE buy their hardware and ask for a copy of the GPL'ed source.
Still, the least they could have done for US, is to give an acknowledgment on the website that they are using VideoLAN code. It's not a requirement, but it would have shown they are of good will and at least recognize the VideoLAN project to be very important to their bussiness. It would have shown that they understand the meaning of Open Source. You get something, you give something back and together we go on to create better and cooler software.

Someone else that is doing weird stuff is VIA Arena. They fork linux players so they can run in combination with their closed source X11 drivers for hardware decoding. They have already released fork'ed versions of Xine and mplayer and are looking into a VLC fork as well.
A bit of a shame truly. There is no need for that at all.

Posted by The DJ at 02:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Open Source

April 06, 2005

Software Patents

I have just added a "anti software patents" banner to the VLC webpages. With this we join efforts from FFmpeg, Mplayer and many others. Please read this VideoLAN page.
It is really important that we all wake up and get this issue solved.

Posted by The DJ at 06:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN