theTechnophile

After my last post it occurred to me that the idea of open source software (OSS) might be worth trying to explain. My understanding is that the emphasis is on freedom rather than free of cost. The commonly cited phrase is that true OSS is ‘free as in speech, not as in beer’. The idea is that by compelling software programmers to make their source code freely available it allows others to use that code for any purpose they wish. In turn, if these ‘other’ programmers choose to distribute their new code, based on the original OSS, they are compelled to make it freely available too. This is meant to result in an environment in which there is freedom to innovate.

Unfortunately, as in all things there are practicalities to consider. Good quality software needs to be developed in a controlled manner and supported to offer any widespread appeal. Proprietary software has lived with this fact since its inception, with ranging degrees of success. Can OSS provide any competition?

• Quality: Small OSS project might suffer from a lack of professionalism, but many of the mainstream projects are developed by the same group of people who working in the industry by day. They use commercial quality development tools for controlling every aspect of the project including revision/version control, bug reporting and workflow. Coincidentally, a number of these are Open Source too!
• Security: Since the code is free for everyone to see, those naughty crackers (the term hacker is often misused!) will exploit this to render the OSS unsafe. There is a flip-side to this argument due to the fact that the crackers are not the only people free to view these vulnerabilities. The resulting rapid deployment of security patches frequency leads the commercial sector. Stick to downloading your software from reputable sources, and checking the security information provided, and you shouldn’t have any problems. However, it can’t be denied that up to this point the commercial vendors have been a much more attractive target for attack. This is in part due to their perceived market domination, but as the use of OSS grows it will probably have to face greater exposure.
• Support: My experience has been that the documentation accompanying major OSS projects is at least as good as that of any commercial package I’ve bought. Couple this with the fact that these projects have a number of highly active user forums and you are not going to find many problems someone hasn’t already solved. In my opinion OSS often leads the commercial sector in support.
• Rapid development: For the developer the main beauty of OSS is that the source code is available and you are free to manipulate it as you will. This means that if the code already exists to provide functionality you need in your application, use it! The increase in development speed attendant with not continually reinventing the wheel is extremely valuable. Sure your resulting source code will have to be made freely available, but you can still make money by selling your product and support. The likes of Redhat and MySQL do it all the time.

As you can probably tell I’m a fan of the OSS idea, in part due to the fact the I’m into freedom in most facets of life (there are limits though in case you were wondering). I have used both excellent open source and commercial software products and would always advocate using the best tool for the job. I suspect that the two approaches will continue to coexist, slowly merging into one another. Many of the large software companies, such as Microsoft and Apple for example, are showing more interest in the open source concept and you can bet it’s not because of a yearning for a freer world. They too can see where openness can usefully fit into their business models, can you?

If your interested you might want to look at these references, they were useful to me.

1. Brock, Simon and Wrigley, Ian (July 2005) ‘Open source defined’, PC Pro, Issue 129, pp. 226-228.
2. Open Source Initiative (2005), The Open Source Definition Version 1.9 [online], Available form: http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php (accessed 31 Aug 2006).

I was thinking about how much I’ve come to depend on open source tools since I first discovered the movement’s existence. This activity obviously resulted in a list of the projects I use regularly and those I intend to try in the future. Well this is a selection of a few of my favourites.

Mozilla Firefox.

This is my browser of choice for Windows and Linux, though I must admit that I quite like Safari on the Mac.

Mozilla Thunderbird.

For reasons of compatibility I use Thunderbird as my email client on all my machines.

Freemind.

This is an excellent tool I use to think ideas through, plan documents like this one and even organise my revision notes before dreaded exams.

Fedora Core (FC) Linux and all the goodies that come with it!

I’ve tried a few flavours of Linux over the years, but have come to settle on this one. It’s the Operating System (OS) that runs all my servers and I have recently started playing with it on the desktop. In my experience it is stable and well supported.

Apache HTTP Server with PHP installed.

Running on FC servers this is my primary web platform as it’s well supported by a large community, quick and easy to use. I am thinking of trying Apache Tomcat with Java soon, but will certainly continue to use this platform.

Wordpress.

This is new to me, as is this site built around it. A little early to tell how good it is yet… time will tell!

MySQL.

Where would my web applications be without MySQL providing the backend storage? Probably using another open source database, there are plenty to choose from! However, this is an old favourite and one of the industry standards.

OpenSSH.

I wouldn’t try and access remote systems any other way. I’ve used proprietary SSH applications, but this is easily as good given that it has to avoid proprietary cryptography algorithms.

Eclipse.

For simple XHTML/CSS work a text editor will do, but for more complex programming work I tend to use the Eclipse platform with a selection of suitable components, of which there are many.

Subversion.

Installed on my development server this version control software is powerful and, in my experience, reliable. It is well supported and has a range of tools for client access from any of the platforms I use.

Thanks to everyone involved in these projects. If I’d had to buy licenses for all this I probably wouldn’t have been able to do a fraction of the things I have over the last couple of years. I’ve learned a lot as a result of your efforts and it is greatly appreciated. I hope to be able to contribute myself in the very near future, but that is a story for another day.

I’ve been a fan of cycling for quite a while and the Tour de France is undoubtedly the highlight of the cycle racing calendar for me. Unfortunately, even if you aren’t into cyclesport the Tour may be familiar to you now. Over the last few years it has made the mainstream press as the subject of performance enhancing doping. Personally I think that has more to do with cycling undertaking more stringent testing than other sports rather than harbouring a greater proportion of drug cheats.

Whether this is the case is not the issue of this post. Being a technophile my interest is in the use of drugs to enhance human performance. This could easily be taken as an example of the dark side of technology, but that might be missing the point. Whichever way you look at it the decision as to whether or not a technology is good or bad is taken from the consensus view of an interested society.

It’s cheating.

Yes! When a sportsperson is claiming their performance to be entirely due to natural ability enhanced by hard work, whilst supplementing this with methods banned by the rules of their sport it is most definitely cheating. But this is due to the agreed rulebook not the methods in themselves. The technology is not intrinsically bad.

It’s dangerous.

This is less certain. Many of the banned methods and substances can be shown to be life threatening and damaging to the long term health of the individual. This is also true for a lot of other human activities, including the intensive training require to succeed in top level sport. Research periodically leads to accepted and legal practices being banned for this reason. Many banned substances are legal up to a specified dosage and this dose has not necessarily been historically static.

How to make sport fair?

This is where society has to play it’s part. There are two extremes with the usual spectrum of solutions lying between.

Extreme number one: Ban the use of all practices and substances! This would be difficult to accomplish since eating and drinking are kind of necessary for all of us and athletes are no exception. Therefore, this extreme would require the abandonment of all sporting activity. Yeah, right!

Extreme number two: Legalize the use of any methodology or substance. This is in fact the most practical approach since policing is not an issue. However, wouldn’t it compel aspiring athletes to adopt unsafe practices if they ever hoped to succeed? The answer is almost certainly yes, but sadly that might be the price of success take it or leave it. Remember though that sport doesn’t take place in a vacuum, yet… give it time, and wide acceptance of drug use might have unfortunate results for Society in general.

In between lies the current world of the doping arms race with scientists on both sides development measures and counter-measures. It’s good for the press and lawyers, so we should all be happy. Right?

But what’s really interesting for a technophile?

The biological and now genetic research involved in developing performance enhancing effects is impressive. It should also be remembered that much of the research is conducted for beneficial medical application. It’s a shame these talented individuals should have their work wasted on sport, but that’s money for you!

Formula One racing has become a development environment for the automotive industry, with only the driver remaining largely unchanged. It sets limits to reduce performance to ’safe’ levels and then the teams promptly develop new technology to push is back up to where they started. Could you also argue that todays F1 driver needs to be fitter than his equivalent of a couple of decades ago?

Maybe, in a similar manner, athletic sport is destined to become a prototype development ground for the human frame. Maybe it already is? The only difference is that we are not engineering a non-sentient machine. Society finds this fundamentally disturbing and may be it should.

Science fiction is full of mechanically, pharmaceutically and genetically enhanced humans. These people are capable of much higher levels of operational efficiently and of surviving plagues and huge levels of physical damage, which can be regenerated later of course! On the flip-side are terrifying mutants and eugenic wars, such as those in Star Trek.

Could this future ever be realized and would it be as good or bad, depending on who you read, as it is portrayed? There have already been wars fought on the basis of a belief in genetic superiority. In the end, as with all technological advance, whether it is beneficial or harmful is dependent not on the technology but our ability to sociologically develop at a rate that can keep pace.