Category Archives: Uncategorized

monotone – a free distributed version control system

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I would just like to draw your attention to monotone, a very interesting version control system. Linus Torvalds already noted it a few months ago.

It is a fully distributed system, so you can work and commit stuff offline. Without hacks, just by design.
You can have multiple branches in the same db, and just work on the ones you want in different directory trees.
It handles branch merges cleanly and can make the resulting graph nicely visible. Excellent!

monotone works with certificates (public key encryption); this may sound like overkill, but the advantages are clear:

  • You can set up QA procedures that are enforced by monotone.
  • You can require approval for a committed patch from a specific person before merging into the main branch.
  • You can track the origin of code accurately – this can be important for preventing or resolving IP (copyright) issues!

Now, the system is fairly new and thus requires some maturing, but it sure seems to be on the right track. How does software mature? Unlike wine, not by sitting on a shelf…. so please, do help this excellent project by using it for your own development work, and also build more handy tools around it. That will help build critical mass.

NoSoftwarePatents.com finalist for CNET award!

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NoSoftwarePatents.com & The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) are listed as finalists for the CNET Award 2005 in the category Outstanding Contribution to Software Development.

Software patent sillyness – and a better definition of what should be patentable.

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This could be a very nice and clear definition of what should be patentable and what not:

Software Patents Don’t Compute – No clear boundary between math and software exists
First of two articles on software patents, by Ben Klemens

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/jul05/0705inve.html

[…]

In 1936, Alonzo Church proved that that stuff is mathematics. Church created lambda calculus, a formal means of writing mathematical expressions and also a tool that can be used to program a state machine. That is, any program written in a language such as C is a trivial translation of a set of purely mathematical lambda-calculus expressions.

So where is the line drawn between software and mathematical expression? Based on Church’s and Turing’s work, there is none. Any legal attempt to force a wedge between pure math and software will fail because the two are one and the same. A patent on a program is a patent on a mathematical expression, regardless of whether it is expressed in C, Lisp, or lambda calculus.

BUT WHILE DEMOLISHING the distinction between software and math, Turing and Church’s work offers a natural division between patentable machinery and unpatentable mathematics-exactly what we have been looking for. Let the devices that implement state machines-physical objects such as computers-be patentable, and the states to which they are set-information such as programs and data-remain unpatentable. The distinction meets the goal of ensuring that pure mathematics is not patentable while letting those who design faster and better computing devices patent their inventions.

The distinction is clear, and it offers no slippery slope down which the courts could slide. An innovative field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a state machine and so would fall on the patentable side of this fence, while code loaded onto the FPGA would be an unpatentable state to which the state machine has been set.

Book “Free Software for Busy People”

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This looks like a good read: Free Software for Busy People.

BoingBoing.net writes:
“Free Software for Busy People is a new book from Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, a Bahraini MD who is on a mission to help information-civilians understand why they should use free/open source software.
The book tells the story of six people from six walks of life (government administrator, MD, corporate exec, entrepreneur, Arab teacher, primary school teacher) who adopt free software.
The book simply and clearly states the case for adopting free software and provides equally clear and simple explanations of how to switch and what to expect when you get there.
You can buy a printed and bound copy of the book, download a PDF, or read it as a hyperlinked html file.“

NoSoftwarePatents.com’s Florian Mueller makes it on to VIP list

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This is cool: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020645,39210059,00.htm

Florian Mueller, who started NoSoftwarePatents.com and campaigned tirelessly against the adoption of software patents in the European Union, has been recognised as one of the most influential people in the IP (Intellectual Property) world by a magazine for IP lawyers.

Good on ya, Florian!