Wed, 01 Oct 2008

I'm done

I'm well aware of the irony of becoming a bachelor after getting married.

postet at 11:07 into [Debian/other] permanent link

Tue, 23 Sep 2008

Slightly dramatized...

You know, that you did the right thing, when you leave the company building on your last working day, and the first thing comming to your mind is: Free at last!

postet at 20:04 into [Debian/other] permanent link

Thu, 04 Sep 2008

Debian not complying to licenses

Daniel Baumann writes, that Debian wouldn't comply to some licenses due to embeded copies of syslinux binaries in its debian-cd package. To be exact he wrote: [..] if debian-cd is embedding a syslinux binary with a different version, it must contain the sources for it [..] (accentuation by me).

And -- since both debian-cd and syslinux are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licences 2 (as statet in its copyright file) -- he is wrong. To comply to the license it is completely okay to Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, [..]. (Section 3b).

To the best of my knowledge we do archive all sources of all uploads (even if not public accessible, ask an ftp-master for details about source-morgue). So we do comply to the license.

Update: source-morgue doesn't guarantee all sources to be present. But all the syslinux sources mentioned by Daniel are present.

PS: Of course that doesn't mean embeding a binary is okay policy wise...

PS2: In future it's planed to have snapshot.debian.org for that; don't know about the state of that, yet.

postet at 21:07 into [Debian] permanent link

Fri, 29 Aug 2008

How to code... not!

The other day I had the "pleasure" to debug some PHP code. It always showed the very useful error message Database Error.

As it turned out, this error message is printed out at over 38 (!) different places of the PHP script I had to debug. It also included several other PHP scripts, which printed the very same error message.

Please, if you are to lazy to print useful error messages, at least make them unique, so the poor soul who got the task to debug your stuff knows more or less where the error happens. Even numbering all your Database Errors would have helped a bit...

postet at 16:39 into [Debian] permanent link

Tue, 19 Aug 2008

Why free is better than open

You might have noticed, that the latest issue of the Debian Project News was delayed. It where ready - more or less in time (thanks for those helping us), but for some reason it didn't passed the spam filters of our listserver.

Today listmaster explained we why. The reason: I mentioned and linked to a Debian birthday party, which was celebrated virtually in second live. It took place on their free and open Island which has the URL www.freeandopenisland.org.

Noticed anything? I'll write it down again: www.freeandopenisland.org.

That's why free is better than open ;)

PS: The pictures of that party look kind of cool. A virtual party in a virtual world where virtual people wear virtual Debian T-Shirts...

postet at 22:28 into [Debian] permanent link