The Poets of Software Libre

(2009年07月04日) Published by JRoller

In a couple of recent posts Roman and David summarise some of the issues of running stupidly conceived wanna be OS (interesting article, especially when they say that "it is not only possible to execute Windows 1.0 binary programs on current versions of Windows to a large extent but also to recompile their source code into an equally functional "modern" application with just limited modifications", which is basically true, and you can really feel this when using windows!).

Yesterday I was at work, and needed to send to mauve a patch to fix an invalid test case. So far so good…

Because I basically gave up on using evolution as mail client, because it does everything but let you read the mails nicely (especially if you‘re over imap), I started to use thunderbird. To my great surprise, although I consider thunderbird generally better than evolution, I stumbled upon a funny bug. When copying-paste code from some other application in the main text area while writing mails, somehow randomly but quite consistently, thunderbird segfaults.

Now, that was a pity, because in the end I had to retype the Changelog manually in the mail client, with all the paths and whatever, and I‘m usually a lazy guy, so this extra work was a bit disappointing indeed… So yesterday going home I decided to dedicate to this issue few minutes, and downloaded the sources, downloaded the debuginfo package, started thunderbird in the gdb, made it crash, and fix the problem, it took me just few minutes, and while thunderbird was compiling I could go to do some little shopping at the grocery around the corner. Of course, I even filed a bug report (but not upstream, but I know the devs at Red Hat will push the patch upstream once they can confirm the behaviour). The bug is fun because it seems they cannot reproduce it, so what I fixed may not be the real problem, but the fix is enough for me to keep using thunderbird and be happy.

So where is the whole point, other than being quite selfish ( like one random guy on the apache jcp mailing list that knows nothing about me thinks) in telling you how cool I am? Well, the main point is simply: try to do the same thing with a closed source windoze application...

Keep thinking about those blog posts, there is a point that probably passed a little unobserved, the fact that companies are usually happy in not giving users freedom and choices. Having a codec update that leaves you with tons of toolbars from yahoo, google, whatever in your firefox, and those all drive money to the respective companies with some adds you don‘t really care, it‘s a good example.

On the other end, the dynamics that lead me to spent some time and contribute to fix thunderbird (no matter if the fix is valid, confirmed, accepted or whatever) are quite interesting, and can be extended to many aspects of our lives, not only this nerdy thing that software is. I should probably leave the discussion of those implications to my brother and to Marlise, because they study humans behaviour and they will be more accurate in depicting the shapes of those interactions, also with beautiful words, where I can only do with feelings. But we should think about those things a little more, either. Even from a pure commercial point of view, the boundary between consumer and producer has become so blurred now. The result is a social structure with more faces, corners and rounds areas than before, more complex and interesting, more connected, and worth living.

I like to think that any big process of social change should be started by poets and artists, and when this is in fact the case, the society changes for good. I like to think that this specific process was indeed started by poets and artists; pretty much like the Beat Generation was crucial in the 60s (I chose this because I‘m close to this artistic movement, but you can count back in the past for countless of similar movement-driven-changes), and it just started from the book of a guy telling stories of his journeys On The Road. Since the invention of the Internet, those Free Software Hippies are really changing the way of thinking about the society, deeply and irreversibly. And this is beautiful.

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