Number of GPL violations still rising

Over the last couple of days I've again verified a number of GPL violations. It's a real pity that those companies still don't get the message.o

It hurts especially, that there are two cases (Netgear, Siemens) where companies with whom we already had a amicable agreement published new devices that again don't comply with the GPL (Netgear WGT634U and Siemens M740-AV). Apparently they don't really care despite the fact they should know better.

Also, we have another number of cases where companies signed an agreement with us, but failed to fulfill that agreement only a couple of months later with exactly the devices mentioned in the agreement.

I'm sick of those cases. What the hell is so difficult to put the source code and the GPL license text on a CD-ROM that has 500MB unused and ships with the device anyway?

Preparing the 21st Chaos Communication Congress

As every year, the Chaos Communication Congress takes place in Berlin, Germany.

For six years, I'm part of the team that takes care of audio and video recording and streaming. Since this year I've become head of the a/v documentation project, I decided to use a 100% Linux based solution instead of the Apple Quicktime stuff that we've had for the last couple of years.

Thanks to the great ffmpeg software, we can even encode four different streams on a off-the-shelf Pentium IV.

Today, I've been with the technicians at the congress center who set up the PA and lighting. This was to make sure everything really reflects our demands, and we have the correct audio signal delivered to the appropriate place, etc.

Setup of the congress will continue over the holidays. Especially the NOC (Network Operations Centre) will have a hard time setting up the internal network for about 3000 attendees, certainly each bringing more than one networked device on average.

ffmpeg is undocumented, ffserver broken

I've been experimenting a lot with ffmpeg and ffserver over the last couple of days. The fact that ffmpeg is very little documented is a pity, but not exactly a problem for someone experienced with free software and C development (use the source, Luke).

However, the ffserver program seems to be horribly broken in a number of ways. Independent of the kind of configuration, it regularly segfaults, glibc complains about double-free's, and valgrind or Electric Fence have numerous complaints.

All information you can find after browsing through mail archives, is that it's apparently broken for a number of years. Maybe I'll spend some time at it and fix it at least partially. So I spent about two days to familiarize myself with the source of libavformat, libavcodec, ffmpeg and ffserver. It's not exactly easy to understand, but I think I now got a good understanding of what's going on where.

Another fundamental insufficiency of ffmpeg seems to be that it cannot put the output of one codec into multiple output files. So let's say I want to encode some MPEG2 video and AC3 audio. This is to be written to a .vob file and at the same time sent as a transport stream over the network. The only way you can achieve this now is to encode the input data twice - which I cannot afford due to CPU limitation.

So I was pondering something like streaming the output over multicast RTP plus running something like rtpdump on the same machine to create the local file.

As a summary, I think it's a pity that there is good encoding software like ffmpeg, and that nobody volunteered yet to fix the remaining issues required to turn it into a good streaming and recording solution.

More and more cases

Today has been a sad day with regard to gpl-violations.org. I just ordered five potentially infringing devices from three different vendors. Apparently the message has not been conveyed to all respective parties yet...

So let's see how they will react if someone actually is in a position to ban their products from all-important pre-christmas sale.

This really sucks. At some point I want to start coding on a day without having to have information in my inbox about yet another gpl violation case.

linux-bangalore 2003
I've just returned from lb/2003, the major linux conference in India. I've had a great time there.
Besides giving two presentations (one about SMP effects in kernel programming and another about the netfilter internals), I've done some travelling to Mysore and Mumbai.
Thanks again to the lb/2003 organizers. They did a great job comforting the speakers in any possible way.

Shopping in Bangalore

Today I went shopping in Bangalore. The first thing I had to learn, is that you need a lot of travel through the heavy traffic in order to get to the respective stores.

Secondly, buying/finding a Sari (Including the blouse and the Petticoat) is not as easy as buying women's clothes in the western world. The choli (blouse) is made-to-measure, and they require more information than the usual under bust / over bust / waist measurements. So I only bought one this time, let's first see how it fits Elisabeth before I buy more items that in the end don't fit.

Getting Hindi learner books (apart from the usual Devanagari alphabet training) in Bangalore turned out to be more difficult than expected. Students tend to get the books from the Schools, and the local language is Kannada. But finally we managed to get them, too.

Finding Bollywood DVD's is obviously the most easy task ;) I got a stack of 8, and I'll probably be buying more of them once I get to Mumbai on Tuesday.

Linux Bangalore is Over

The three-day lb2004 is now over. About 80 presentations from all areas of free software, ranging from hardcore technical subjects to user-experience.

One of the interesting parts was that one developer managed to port the "DotGNU Portable.net" framework to the Simputer in only three days during the conference. Apparently this spawned a lot of media interest.

In the end, the conference went really fine, if it wasn't for the strange rules and regulations of the IISC that tried to undermine the event.

Oh yes, than there is the air condition to which I probably owe catching a cold last year - and this year again :(

Day one of Linux Bangalore 2004

So today lb2004 started, but unfortunately there are lots of problems, some of them really outstandingly ridiculous.

The less problematic issue was that even though the zd1201 driver now works, the access points would not actually get a link to a switch, independent of the kind of cable. So the whole wireless network idea was basically abandoned.

As for Internet access at the conference, there was none. There's not even CDMA reception on top of the roof, and even though that the auditorium is part of the Indian Institute of Sciences there is no connection to the IISC LAN within the complex. Also, they IISC apparently has so little bandwidth, that it's insufficient for their own purpose, let aside connecting some conference.

Then the really interesting thing came up: Because of about 2800 attendees, there was an 500 seat additional auditorium built. Apparently the IISC gave permission to build the auditorium tent on their ground, even charged money for using the ground - but they informed the lb2004 organizers that they were not allowed to use it. They've only given permission to build the auditorium, not to actually use it to give any presentations in there, or even use it only as a lounge.

Believe it or not, it became worse. Someone wanted to fetch food from the catering to the speaker lounge. He was stopped by a security guard, stating that in the room officially designated as speaker lounge by the IISC, there was no food permitted, and a fine would apply if anyone actually tried to do so.

Oh yes, and they suddenly introduced a new rule, active on 1st of December, that as soon as there are more than 25 cars parked on the grounds, another fine would apply.

This is just incredibly ridiculous. This is the Indian Institute of Science, and the conference is held in exactly the same premises for the third time. None of those issues came up in the previous years.

Also, this is the same IISC which boasts himself to have denied an event with Dr. Kalam (India's president and one of the biggest promoters of Free and Open Source in India) at the J.N.Tata Auditorium.

It's very hard to understand that they just want to sabotage that kind of event in any possible way. It makes me feel sick and sad. Somebody should organize a demonstration. Call off half a day and make a 3000 attendee protest in front of the office of the director of the IISC.