#noapple

Steve Jobs

Posted on by tarus

I’m in Europe at the moment. I love visiting here, but the lack of easily accessible Internet access outside of my clients’ offices is frustrating. For example, this week I have the option of paying 5€ per hour for crappy hotel wi-fi limited to ports 80 and 443, or, thanks to my client, a somewhat okay connection via a Vodafone UMTS USB modem. Since I want to limit the amount of traffic that they get billed for, I only use it to check e-mail, and sporadically at that.

I just arrived at the office and learned that Steve Jobs has died.

I am saddened, of course. He was only 56, eleven years older than I am now.

I figured I’d try to capture my feelings while they are still fresh.

My first computer was a TRS-80 (model 1, ‘natch) which put me squarely in the camp opposite the Apple ][ fans. The reason I had a TRS-80 over an Apple was simple – there was a Radio Shack in my small town. I did have some exposure the the machine, and I especially liked the fact that the cover popped open and you could see inside it. While I spent a lot of time inside my TRS-80, I immediately voided the warranty when I did it.

My path did not cross Apple’s again for several years, when a friend of mine bought a Mac Plus. This would have been around 1986. He taught me how to use the interface, and I was impressed by the quality of the documents I could output from the machine. However, being a DOS/Windows user, I was often frustrated by the lack of a command line interface.

In 1988 I started working for Northern Telecom, which was a Mac shop. I think I had a Mac IIcx on my desk, but I forget the exact model. This was one of the first machines I used that was networked – not quite to the Internet but definitely to other machines within the company.

These were the twilight years for Apple. The machines were pretty, but they were expensive and prone to viruses. A friend of a friend was the Apple rep for Nortel, and I can remember that Terry came in one day to demo some new machines and he spent two hours disinfecting them.

Once I left Nortel, I didn’t work with Apple for a long while. I did date a woman with a (at the time) screamin’ SE/30, but I used it mainly to play games (Fool’s Errand, etc.).

Flash forward to January of 2003, and I started seeing all of these things called “Powerbooks” showing up at the local LUG. My company was doing well, so when the 12″ Powerbook was announced, I bought one along with an iPod.

I was hooked.

Here was a machine with a strong Unix base but an easy to use interface. Here was a machine that I could use to run all of my favorite open source software but I could also get a decent printer driver from the vendor. It even made me nostalgic for that old, original Mac, so when I saw one on its way to the dumpster, I rescued it and made it whole again.

Since then, I’ve been a Mac user and fanboy. None of this would have been possible without Steve Jobs.

He created great things, but what I like the most is that he showed it was possible for one person to make a difference. While my team doesn’t work along the dictatorial style he was known for, we are much smaller than the companies with which we compete. Steve showed that it was possible to successfully compete against giants. He took a company on the verge of bankruptcy and turned it in to the most profitable company in the world.

I couldn’t be honest with myself if I didn’t remind my three readers that I am parting ways with Apple. With its amazing success, Apple is moving in a direction that I don’t agree with. I am much more excited at the moment about the pending release of Ubuntu 11.10 (Onanistic Olifant) than I am about the iPhone 4S. I don’t like where Apple is going, but that should not take away from where they have been.

The best comment I’ve read so far is that Steve Jobs made it possible to have an emotional connection to technology. As I write this on a Macbook Air, I am not thinking about OS X or licensing, but I am imagining I am having a conversation with a few old, good friends about the passing of another. Steve, in part, made that possible.

I admire Steve Jobs, but despite his success, I would not have wanted to be him. Fifty-six is way too young. To quote Woody Allen, I don’t was to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.

So long Steve, and thanks for all the tech.

Lovin' Me Some SOGo (#noapple)

Posted on by tarus

I really want to thank “jm k” for sending me a note awhile back on the SOGo project.

One of my big complaints about Android has always been that one must rely too much on hosting your data at Google to get the most benefit out of it. I have a nonnegotiable requirement to be able to synchronize my contacts and calendars across devices, and for the moment Apple doesn’t force me to use iCloud. However, I want to move away from iOS, so some sort of sync solution is required.

Any solution must be multi-platform. Most of the guys in the office have iPhones and MacBooks. Jeff has an Android phone and runs Fedora on his laptop. I run Ubuntu on my work desktop and, for the moment, OS X on my Macbook Air and the desktop at home.

Enter SOGo. SOGo is an open source “groupware” (how I hate that term) solution that enables one to manage calendars and contacts through a webUI, as well as desktop and mobile devices. The webUI also includes an IMAP connector that lets you access an IMAP server (a lá Squirrelmail – although one of the gotchas that hit me was that I couldn’t send mail unless the “To:” address was in my contacts).

For those that think open source can’t be beautiful, the webUI is very clean and attractive. It’s also all AJAX-y so you can manage your information as if you were using a native app (i.e. right click on a contact to bring up a menu that lets you update, delete, etc.).

But the real power lies in its sync capabilities. It implements both CalDAV and CardDAV protocols, which are becoming more widespread, and it is now possible for me to sync up most of my worlds.

Getting started isn’t super easy, however. Jeff did most of the work getting it installed on one of our Debian Squeeze servers (they supply packages) and while it is easy to get the software on the machine, getting it configured is another matter. It is pretty important to use LDAP for user management, and since we don’t have tons of LDAP experience there was a learning curve.

Being the boss has its benefits, so I pretty much sat back and complained a lot. However, I was able to help in getting the Apple stuff to sync, and especially in the case of the OS X Address Book the procedure borders on ritualistic.

In the hope that someone else will find this useful, here’s how I got the Address Book to sync.

Launch the Address Book, go to Preferences -> Accounts and add a new CardDAV account. Put in your server name, username and password and hit “Next”. This will cause the application to verify its connection to SOGo.

In our case, it failed. My belief is that it is due to the fact that the path the the SOGo DAV share doesn’t start at root.

After a lot of trial and error, I found a solution. After you create the account, look in the

~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources

directory and you should see a code for the account profile, something like this:

12B84577-CE41-4AB8-9CD6-91E2796E3A99

Descend into that directory and you’ll see a file called “Configuration.plist”. You’ll have to edit that file and make three changes:


        <key>haveWriteAccess</key>
        <integer>1</integer>
        <key>isSharedABAccount</key>
        <integer>0</integer>
...
        <key>servername</key>
        <string>https://sogo.example.com:443/SOGo/dav/tarus</string>
        <key>username</key>
        <string>tarus</string>

Make sure “haveWriteAccess” is set to 1 (true), “isSharedABAccount” is set to zero (false), and the “servername” string should be the fully qualified path to your user’s DAV share on the SOGo server (the port must be explicitly stated, even though one would assume the “https” tag would default to that).

And please use SSL for the connection – this is a lot of personal data you’ll be putting up there.

Anyway, hats off to the SOGo team as well as to Jeff for getting this running. Check out their demo if you are interested (username and password both “sogo1”). Now all that we have left is to set up a Firefox sync server for bookmarks and passwords and we should have synchronization covered.

Google and Motorola

Posted on by tarus

I was happy this week to read about Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile phone business. As a long time Apple fanboy who is now trying to move away from their products, I still desire their high quality. Since Google is the driving force behind the only serious competitor to iOS, by owning a handset manufacturer they will be in a better position to make hardware specially tailored to Android.

This doesn’t mean I’ll end up with a Google phone. I think HTC makes some nice gear as well, but my guess is that there will now be more choice.

I’ve come under some criticism for my #noapple decision. I’ve spent nearly ten years working in free software and that tends to cause people to develop a prejudice that I’m somehow anti-business or a communist. When I complain that Apple is making too much money, that their margins are undeserved, I’m told that this is just the way capitalism works.

Wrong.

Capitalism depends on the proper functioning of markets. Properly functioning markets demand easy entry and exit. When there is excess profit in a market, competitors move in, produce more goods which drive down the price until profit disappears. If profit should ever go negative, companies will leave the market, reducing the number of goods and causing prices to rise.

Unfortunately, there are a great many industries that don’t have easy entry and exit. Take aircraft manufacture. There is a reason that there are only two main producers of commercial aircraft in the world – it takes a tremendous amount of money just to get started, and once invested, it is hard to leave. The deregulated banking industry in the US has created a small number of “super” banks that are “too big to fail” which causes its own entry/exit issues (if you want to get your bile up, check out Dan Ariely’s article on compensation of bank officers versus market cap).

As much as we’d love to think of the computer software industry as being a free market, software patents and proprietary hardware block easy entry and exit. Take the iPad. Apple designs a nifty little device that generates a tons of consumer demand. This creates excess profit, which causes Samsung to create a competing product in the Galaxy tablet. In a normally functioning market, this should both inspire innovation and lower prices. Thus the end users benefit.

However, in a world of software patents, Apple blocks the sale of the Samsung product in the courts. Consumers get no options, prices don’t change, and you either get to spend too much money on the Apple product or go without. This is in the best interest of Apple preserving its margins, but monopolies are the antithesis liberal market economies.

The Google/Motorola deal was north of US$12B, so I think it is safe to say that the mobile handset market is pretty hard to enter and exit. In a world of giant companies, only a Google can take on an Apple at this level. I don’t expect either of them to act in my own best interest, but Google has shown time and time again a willingness to err on the side of openness, whereas Apple is now working hard to consolidate and close its entire production stack (iOS, A4/A6 ARM processors, and the possible move to Sharp for displays, etc.).

I run The OpenNMS Group as a for-profit company. We focus on open source software not out of any zealotry, but because it makes the most sense for our clients. I’m all for making money, but I want to compete fairly in the marketplace. Luckily, the internet and commodity hardware make it possible for us to compete with products from much bigger companies. I don’t ever want to see that go away. I think Google’s move will better position itself against Apple (from both a product and patent perspective) and that will benefit everyone.

Choosing a Desktop (#noapple)

Posted on by tarus

Once again I have to apologize for the light blogging. That will change this week I believe. I have been busy with other writing projects as well as switching to a Linux desktop. It took longer than I thought it would.

As I mentioned earlier, I am working to move away from Apple products. While I wouldn’t classify myself as a rabid fanboy, I do self identify with the fanboy label, so this is a pretty big decision for me.

Before I go any further, I realize that the three people who read this blog are technologists and probably have some of their self identity, if not self worth, tied into their technology choices. My move away from Apple is a personal decision based on a number of factors, but I won’t be teasing or disparaging those who decide to stick with using Apple products. In addition, I’m going to discuss some even more controversial choices I made when it comes to using Linux, and again these are choices that work for me and do not mean that those who chose differently “suck”, to use the vernacular.

To recap, with the release of OS X Lion I’ve seen my beloved Apple move to even more strongly lock down the user experience than ever before. I believe this is in preparation to get rid of OS X altogether, and to move even MacBooks to iOS. As I have tied up a lot of information in somewhat proprietary Apple formats, I felt it was time to move, now or never.

I have two initial goals. First, I want to move to a Linux desktop environment, and I want to do it in such a way that I don’t give up anything I had when running OS X. This is important: I am working under the hypothesis that open source desktop solutions can compete with Apple feature for feature. Now I am not expecting to be able to upgrade the firmware on my iPhone 4 using Linux, but I want the same convenience I’ve come to expect from OS X, as well as a pretty and polished interface.

Second, I want to do this with minimal hardware changes. My target system is an early 2009 24-inch iMac with 4GB of RAM and an NVIDIA graphics card.

My plan was to remain on OS X Snow Leopard and just switch everything to FOSS applications. This didn’t work for a number of reasons. While the UNIX basis for OS X makes it possible to port most of the open source tools I want, they often don’t fit very well and seem to clash with the O/S, unlike the native apps. Plus, there’s the whole “in it for a penny, in it for a pound” aspect – if I am serious about changing, I should just do it.

When it comes to operating systems, the most “free” distro out there is Debian. I run Debian on more than half of my servers. Unfortunately, native Debian is a poor choice for a desktop, especially on proprietary hardware like my iMac. While I have no doubt that I could get things to a useable state with Debian, one of my stated goals is easy of use, and from the desktop standpoint Debian ain’t it.

So that left Fedora and Ubuntu. Both are projects controlled by corporate interests (Red Hat and Canonical) and most of my freetard friends prefer Fedora from a “freedom” standpoint. Also, Red Hat is just a few miles down the road from the OpenNMS offices, so I have a soft spot for them. I decided that my first choice would be Fedora 15.

Note: Before ya’ll start bringing up Mint and Pinguy, remember that I really want ease of use over time, and for this I am leaning toward distros sponsored by larger organizations than those two, even if they are based on Ubuntu.

The next thing I had to decide was which desktop option I should choose: GNOME or KDE. Fedora supports GNOME 3, but the last time I used a Linux Desktop (circa 2001/2002) I liked KDE. In reading about GNOME 3 vs. KDE 4, it seems that most people prefer KDE. Remember, I wasn’t vested in either, it is just that I had fond memories of using Konsole back in the day.

Getting Fedora installed was not easy. I believe most of my issues arose from the NVIDIA card, but by using the “basic graphics” option I was able to get the installer to run.

On a side note, I am a huge fan of the Apple Time Machine backup solution. It has saved my hide more than once, and I knew that I could futz around with the disk and partitions all I wanted I still get my system back.

The installer was pretty easy. I especially liked the option to encrypt a partition at install (versus trying to figure it out later). I set up four partitions – swap, /boot, root and /home. I figured having a separate /home partition will make things easier in the future with upgrades, etc.

Once I got Fedora 15 installed, I rebooted and saw a sight that would plague me for days: a little blinking “underline” cursor. The system would not even try to boot.

At this point I had kind of violated my “ease of use” goal, so I decided to drop Fedora and download Ubuntu. The problem was that Ubuntu wouldn’t even get to the installer part – it just sat at the blinking underline as well.

Between a lot of searching online and fiddling with grub options (specifically “nomodeset”) I managed to get Fedora to boot. I then uninstalled the nouveau NVIDIA driver and downloaded the proprietary one from the RPMFusion repository.

Here’s where I hit another snag. Fedora has recently upgraded to the 3.0 Linux kernel (although they number it 2.40). RPMFusion has yet to upgrade all of its packages to support this kernel, so I had to play around with the kernel modules that build on the fly versus the prebuilt options (akmod vs. mod).

Another side note: while at this point I was extremely frustrated, I was also having some fun. It has been awhile since I had to learn about the internals of my operating system.

Finally, I got KDE to boot. It was different than I remembered, but I picked things up pretty easily. Here’s where I hit two more snags.

I launched Konsole and the first thing that struck me was that it was ugly. The default font looked like something created by a 9-pin Epson printer from 20 years ago. I was so used to having beautifully smooth, anti-aliased fonts that it was a shock to see something so much worse, and it violated one of my rules that I shouldn’t have to give anything up to switch to Linux.

But I figured that would be a problem I could address later. My next task was to get my Apple Magic Mouse to work over Bluetooth.

This was pretty easy in KDE. There was a little Bluetooth configuration widget. It saw my mouse and paired flawlessly. In a minute or so I had a listing for my mouse and a little green dot next to it.

The only problem was that it wouldn’t do any of the sort of things that you expect from a mouse, such as moving the mouse pointer.

More searching seemed to indicate that the kernel upgrade broke Magic Mouse support. By this time my Screw It meter had pegged, and in a fit of pique I based the system and restored OS X. Then I went home.

I had spent a couple of days playing with this (making backups and restores taking up most of that time – luckily I had my laptop so I could actually get some real work done) and I was ready to give up.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it, however, and as I tossed and turned trying to sleep that night I decided that I hadn’t given Ubuntu a fair shot. I remembered that I had some issues installing 64-bit Ubuntu on Apple hardware in the past, so maybe I should try 32-bit. It violated my rule about giving things up, but I figured it would only cost me some time and a blank CD to try.

I went into the office on Friday, downloaded the 32-bit version of 11.04 (Naughty Nightnurse) and booted to it.

Same blinking cursor. Grrrr.

When I downloaded the image I noticed one labelled “alternate” on the website. Upon searching I found that this was an alternate installer that might address my graphics card problem. I downloaded the 64-bit version and lo and behold it worked.

The Ubuntu installer is different from the Fedora one, especially in the disk layout section. Whereas Fedora just has a checkbox next to “encrypt this volume” Ubuntu requires you to first create the partition and then create another encrypted volume that ties to it. Once I got past that part I found that Ubuntu adds the option to just encrypt your home directory on a per user basis (a la FileVault) which is cool, but since I had already chosen to encrypt the whole /home partition it yelled at me about the fact that swap partition was unencrypted and that was a security risk (as passphrases could be cached in swap). So I hit the option to also encrypt swap and moved on.

When I got to the part about installing grub, I couldn’t remember which partition was /boot, so I back tracked through the installer to see where it was. Unfortunately, this caused the newly encrypted swap partition to get corrupted, and nothing I could do through the installer would let me delete it. I couldn’t delete the partition itself without deleting the encrypted volume, and it wouldn’t let me do that due to the corruption.

Arrrrgh.

At this point I put the iMac under my arm and went home. Using an older Fedora boot disk I was able to remove the Linux partitions (I tried booting back to OS X but the Apple Disk Utility has serious issue dealing with ext 4 partitions). I then redid the Ubuntu install, choosing just to encrypt my home directory, and it completed without incident.

Reboot … and I’m staring at a blinking cursor once again. Not giving in to despair this time, I added the “nomodeset” option to grub and voilá, I was looking at an Ubuntu Desktop.

It complained about 3D not being enabled and thus this “Unity” interface could not load, but it was extremely easy to install the proprietary NVIDIA driver from the additional hardware installer, which also removed the nouveau driver. Crossing my fingers, I rebooted once more.

Let me say this, Ubuntu is freakin’ gorgeous.

Once I had the proper hardware driver, Unity came up in all of its glory and I really liked it. Remember, I don’t really have a horse in the race of KDE vs. GNOME, and the Unity Launcher reminded me of the OS X dock. The purple and orange theme was easy on the eyes while distancing itself from the muted pastel blues favored by Apple. The fonts were beautifully smooth, and I loved the fact that it was extremely easy to install new software, and the fact that when installing something like Thunderbird it came with a theme that fit in well with the rest of the system.

I still had a weekend worth of work before I could even come close to having what I needed to make Ubuntu my working desktop, but after spending four days playing with installing a Linux desktop I was so extremely happy to have something I could live with, and something that I could use for the basis of testing out the rest of my #noapple hypothesis. I am still running OS X on my MacBook Air and my iMac at home, but I think I’ll wait to 11.10 Onanistic Oliphant is released before upgrading those. It’s only a couple of months away and that will give me time to get real comfortable with Ubuntu.

I’ll write more about individual issues and applications later.

Moving Out

Posted on by tarus

Thanks to everyone who commented on my pending divorce from Apple, both here and on G+. I’ve decided on aiming to be Apple free by July 4th, 2012, as Apple won’t announce its plans for iOS on Macs until next summer (I’m thinking WWDC) and this should give me plenty of time to get ready for it.

I do want to stress that this is an issue with irreconcilable differences between me and current Apple policies and does not mean that Apple sucks or that you suck for liking your Apple products. People get very attached to their technology choices and from some of the comments on G+ it seemed like people were taking my breakup with Apple a little too personally. I expect Apple to get most of our friends in the divorce.

Here is an incomplete list of things I use on my Mac for which I need replacements, in no particular order. My plan is to implement an immediately embargo on OS X-only software and preferably to find FOSS replacements. Then as I move closer and closer to being Apple-free to switch my desktop and base O/S to Linux. Finally, I want to part from my iPhone.

I’ll be updating this list as well as my #noapple progress over time. I’m moving the list of “solved” alternatives to the bottom.

Time Machine

This one product has saved my butt more times than I can count. The ability to almost completely restore an old Mac image to a new Mac is more amazing than I gave it credit for at first. Part of this can be addressed with disk layout (store all data on one volume and the O/S on another) but I really need a good way to restore a machine from bare metal if I have to.

Keychain

Another great “under the covers” feature, the keychain stores all of my passwords in an encrypted fashion and other apps can leverage it. Since most of them are for websites, much of the functionality can be had with Firefox, but it would still be nice to have it at an O/S level.

Encrypted Disk Images

Huge privacy nut, especially when Apple refuses to return defective disks they replace under warranty, so I always use FileVault and encrypted disk images for sensitive information. I know there are open source alternatives to this, as I encrypt a volume on my Debian server at home, so this at least should be easy.

Mail.app

I like Apple’s Mail.app. I used Thunderbird many years ago, but it used to crash on me in a very evil manner. But still I think it is the leading open source mail application, so I’m going to give it another shot.

iCal

With thunder comes Lightning. Haven’t used it yet.

Address Book

I love the Apple address book, especially the ability to put in pictures of people.

iPhoto

Speaking of pictures, I guess the next big thing to replace will be iPhoto. Not that I use the functionality much, but I do need a simple photo management system. Don’t suggest Picasa, since the Linux version isn’t really maintained. I’ll probably settle on Gallery, which I like for a server based solution.

RSS

I like NetNewsWire, but I believe Firefox has a built in RSS reader. I would like something that syncs with Google, since I read my feeds from multiple systems.

IRC

I assume xchat is still around. I use Colloquy at the moment.

Terminal

I use iTerm versus Terminal, and my only requirements are tabs and select to copy.

Stickies

I don’t use stickies as much as I used to, so I can probably find an easy replacement using a text file.

Quicktime

I tend to use VLC more than Quicktime, so that should be an easy switch as well.

Photoshop

The Gimp is the only real option here, I believe. Time to start climbing that learning curve.

iTunes

I hear decent things about Rhapsody and Banshee. Any preference?

iWork

I love Keynote and the rest of the iWork suite has a simple beauty about it, but I’ve been forcing myself to use OpenOffice/Neooffice/LibreOffice for some time now. Leaning toward LibreOffice but I was having problems printing envelopes last time I tried it, so I’m back to Neooffice for now. Still having issue with how ugly the interface can look compared to Apple (the same graphics rendered under keynote beautifully look pixelated on the others). I am hoping that when I switch to a Linux desktop perhaps that will improve.

Which brings me to the final issue: which Desktop? There are only two real choices, Ubuntu and Fedora. While I think Debian is the most freedom loving of the major distros, squeeze doesn’t move fast enough to keep up with the changes happening there. Jeff likes Fedora, but I think I’m going to start by given Ubuntu a go. Shuttleworth seems to understand Apple and he is trying to bring the Apple experience to the Linux Desktop, so it seems like a great place to start.

Solved:

Safari

Already switched to Firefox and Chrome, so no worries there.

IM

Already an Adium user, so no problems there either, as I can easily just use Pidgin.

Suggestions on app replacements are welcome.

Apple: I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee

Posted on by tarus

Apple my love, we’ve been together many years. You’ve brought a little magic back into my life and made me fall in love with design again, but with your new Lion dress on, I don’t recognize you any more. You are not the company I fell in love with.

It wasn’t love at first sight. When we were both young I was across the hall with my TRS-80 and you were over there with the Apple ][e. You had color, and a lid that just popped off so you could see the magic inside, while I was in drab black and white, with tamper evident screws to keep anyone from opening me without voiding the warranty.

But then we both grew older. In college I saw you again, this time as a Macintosh. What an amazing little machine, and I could put System 6, MacWrite, MacPaint and MacDraw on one 800K floppy disk with a little room left over for files. And that was good – because I couldn’t afford to buy you and needed to borrow you in the computer lab (although by this time, strangely, the PCs I did buy had color).

We parted ways for many years, but then at my local Linux Users Group you showed up again as a Powerbook. And you were running something called OS X. It was the Mac interface crossed with Unix, and what a lovely combination that made.

My business was doing well, so a bought a 12-inch Powerbook the day it was announced. I never looked back. OS X Jaguar was perfect – a great UI and UNIX under the covers. A wonderful marriage of proprietary and free. Through the fink project I could still play with all my old Linux friends but on a sweet piece of hardware. The upgrade to Panther was the easiest O/S upgrade I ever did.

Then you started to change. You brought out the iPod, which was amazing, but then your shifted your gaze away from computers and into mainstream consumer electronics and all the hype and fashion that entailed. Then came the iPhone – a revolution to be sure – but gone were the days when freedom and fashion could play together.

I stuck with you because you made things easy, but at what price? I found myself getting tied tighter and tighter to your world. I couldn’t replace the battery on my iPhone without a lot of hassle, but then you even made that more difficult by adding pentalobe screws. You had to double check and second guess everything. If I wanted to play outside of your sandbox I had to jailbreak my phone and potentially void my warranty. But I overlooked that since a phone is not a computer. I consume information on my phone – I create on my computer.

But you got too greedy. You moved the App Store onto OS X to position yourself to get a cut of every software sale for the platform. You want all music, movies, book and software to come through you, and only you, and you are even suing people for using the term “app store”. What, $76 billion isn’t enough? We all can see the writing on the wall. The lion is the king of the jungle – the top, the chief, the end. The next OS release for the Mac is going to look a whole lot more like iOS than OS X, because then your hegemony will be complete.

Don’t deny it – you’re even locking down the hardware by making it that much harder to do simple things like replace a disk drive. You are so focused on controlling the user experience that you’re stifling play, smothering wonder. Instead of a lust for learning you are replacing it with a lust for consuming. You use to be the outsider, the underdog, now people buy you just because you are cool and fashionable. They think that they can buy happiness, which is the worst part of consumerism.

Hey look – I know you have stockholders to please and if I was driven solely by money I’d be doing the same things you are. But that’s not the Apple I fell in love with. This isn’t the Apple that used to encourage people to look inside the box. You’re more beautiful than ever, but oh so cold.

I feel that if I don’t leave you now, I never will be able to – it’s hard enough already. I’ve grown used to things just working, and working well together, but if the price for that is my creative soul then it’s too high. Plus you have given those in free software a lofty target for which to aim, and several are coming close.

I don’t need you to share my memories. I don’t need you to read a good book. I don’t need you to enjoy a beautiful day outside. You forget that it’s our interactions with people that make memories, not our interactions with things. And you have forgotten that when you let people work together to make things, that’s where real magic happens.

So go play with the cool kids. I’m going in a different direction. I’ll always love you, but more for what you were than what you have become.

Oh, and here’s some dog poop for your shoes.

Terror and the Cloud

Posted on by tarus

I’m finally finding time to write a little, and I’ve had this post queued up for a some time. It has no OpenNMS specific content, so please skip this one if that’s why you read this blog.

I spent a couple of weeks in Europe at the beginning of the month. Part of it was for the third annual OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe, and part of it was for a holiday.

After the conference, we left Frankfurt for Dresden, where we spent several days with some good friends. Many years ago, one of my friends hosted a foreign exchange student for a year. She was from Dresden, and we got to know her and her family. They treated us like royalty, and I enjoyed lots of dark beer as well as Eierschecke, a wonderful three-layer cake that is a specialty of Saxony.

From there we took a train to Prague. Prague is an extremely beautiful city, but I found it a bit crowded with tourists and the people I met a little cold (even when I struggled with my Czech – I studied Russian for a year and there are some similarities, but obviously not enough). I’m not judging the whole Czech people by this experience, I probably just didn’t make it to where the nice people lived and worked, but it wasn’t the experience I was expecting.

From Prague we went on to Budapest. My grandfather was born there, so perhaps that it why I found it so enjoyable. If you ever get the chance to go, stop by any convenience store and buy a bar of Túró Rudi. This is a chocolate and cheese confection that is simply wonderful, but alas it is not available outside of Hungary.

While in Budapest we visited the House of Terror museum. Despite its kitschy name, it is an amazing place: one part museum, one part art installation, and one part memorial.

This building was home to the secret police under the Nazi occupation (part of the Arrow Cross Party) as well as the secret police under the Soviets. It has three levels, and chronicles the various methods the government used to control the populace. One room that stuck with me contained three tables representing a farmer, a member of the middle class and a member of the bourgeoisie.

The farmer’s table was plain with a single electric bulb above it. On the table was a dissident’s pamphlet that was very simple, with just a few words. The table of the middle class was nicer, with a better light fixture above it, and a more complex pamphlet. The wealthy table was very fine, with a chandelier above it and a tightly worded, nicely written pamphlet.

Members of all three classes were imprisoned, tortured and killed.

The basement housed the cells and execution rooms. One cell was so narrow that the person could only stand. Another was low so they had to crouch. Still another could be partially filled with water in which the prisoner was forced to stand for days.

One of the most profound parts of the exhibition was a video where women who were interned in a prison camp were brought face to face with the woman who watched over them. While the women had recounted many horrible experiences at the hand of this supervisor, she, to this day, believes she did nothing wrong. One of the issues still debated in Hungary is the fact that many of the Hungarians involved with the persecution of dissidents are still alive and have never answered for their actions.

The whole museum deeply affected me.

They display lists of the members of the secret police, judges in the show trials, and their supporters, and I was happy to see the name “Balogh” was absent from them. It was a little more sobering to see Laszlo Balogh as one of the victims who died there.

So, what does this have to do with open source software?

When I returned from my vacation and caught up on the news, there were two main stories that caught my attention. The first was the story of (ex) Representative Anthony Weiner, who was involved in a scandal involving explicit pictures and Twitter (Seriously? Weiner? You can’t make stuff like that up).

The second was the announcement by Apple of the creation of iCloud. While almost all of the reviews were positive, I found the whole idea extremely frightening. Putting all of your mail, contacts, documents, music, etc. into one central repository where you have no control over who has access to it chills me to the bone.

Throughout the House of Terror are little alcoves containing antique telephones. If you pick one up and dial, you’ll hear actual phone conversations recorded by the secret police, some of which were used to detain citizens. One exhibit featured the equipment used to record those conversations. When you see what could be done just by tapping phones, I can’t imagine the potential for misuse that a service like iCloud represents.

Yes, I am writing this on a Macbook. Yes, I own an iPhone. I haven’t switched to Android because I can’t find a way to sync my information without going through Google, which is just as bad. I doubt I’ll end up using any Apple technology that requires iCloud, but there is a good chance I won’t be able to get away from it.

I’ve always viewed the Internet as the great equalizer – a tool for democracy in its purest form. It is very frustrating to see that perverted; to see people freely give up their privacy to places like Facebook and Twitter. When I see people go through the TSA lines at the airport with nary an outcry at this abuse of the fourth amendment, I see a populace that has already been conditioned not to question authority in the name of convenience, and it is only going to get worse.

So what should we do about it? I think that the Open Source Way imposes a moral obligation to fight this. As more information moves from personal computers to handheld devices, it will be harder and harder to control it, especially since there doesn’t really exist a truly free handheld operating system.

We should keep pressure on Google to open up more and more of Android to outside control. I would love to see open source alternatives to iCloud – the technology is cool, especially if you can control or firmly trust the servers on which it runs.

And please, please someone point me to a project that will enable us to sync contacts and calendars from our desktops to an Android phone without involving Google.

As the Weiner debacle demonstrates, we can’t expect our government to understand the technology behind the Internet. We can’t expect them to understand enough about our online privacy to want to protect it. It is up to us.

Alexis de Tocqueville is credited with saying “In every democracy, the people get the government they deserve.” I think we deserve the best, and it is up to us to create it.