Pi With Proto Plus

Now I can blog straight from my phone I thought I'd post this picture of my Raspberry Pi, in its case with the lid removed and with my new Adafruit Proto Plus board in place.

The add-on board is well-designed, allowing you to easily tap the Pi's signals for use on the breadboard (an optional extra I couldn't resist) or for external circuits.

I have also bought a couple of Adafruit's Pi Cobbler kits, which will let me attach the fully-enclosed Pi to a larger breadboard. I am happy to say my soldering skills are returning despite a thirty-year hiatus.



Note: I am not impressed by the way editing a mobile blog post immediately requires me to insert paragraph separators in what until then appeared to be a well-formatted post.

Slap on the Wrist for Microsoft China

[EDIT:As Michael Foord points out in the comments, the actions described below were taken by a company with which Microsoft had contracted. Microsoft appear to have acted in good faith once the duplicity was discovered].

I'm not terribly happy with the "Evil Empire" theory of Microsoft. There's little doubt that when the company was younger it was an aggressive competitor up to and occasionally beyond the limits of the law, and there was a culture of "what's good for Microsoft is good for the world". The company has been known in the past to take information obtained from smaller partner companies and use it to build competing products and services, to the partner's disadvantage.

But I know quite a few people who work in Microsoft, and none of them are the kind of people who I would expect to indulge in any kind of ethically questionable behavior. I have assumed, perhaps naively, that as the company grew its culture would be molded more by the requirements of the legal jurisdictions it operated in, and less by the cowboy ethic of earlier years. Silly me.

The latest and most egregious example of Microsoft rip-off behavior comes from China, where the Microsoft subsidiary in November published a "Chinese copy" of Plurk Asia's micro-blogging service. Following the link will make it obvious this isn't just a cosmetic copy - the similarities appear to extend deep into the code base.

Given Microsoft's holier-than-thou approach to piracy issues, particularly with regard to the Chinese and other Asian markets, it makes one wonder who took the decision to go ahead with this project, and why heads haven't already rolled - or maybe they have? I hope (but alas sincerely doubt) that it costs Microsoft a lot of money to put this right, since it appears that money is the only thing that Microsoft understands.

Open Source Stands on GNU's Shoulders

It's nice to see Bruce Perens crediting Richard Stallman with being right about software freedom back in 1983. Stallman might be less than a diplomat, as he promotes his views uncompromisingly, but whatever you think of him persaonlly there's no denying that he is a man of vision.

I bought my first GNU t-shirt at the UK Unix User Group conference in (I think) 1988, and have supported free software and open source ever since. The dinosaurs can't see it but there is a groundswell of change that's growing and will, much sooner than most people anticipate, change the economic and social order of things.

Don't worry, the determined capitalists will find a way to steal it away and use it for their own gain. By the way, happy tenth birthday, OSI.

Subversive Activities

I have supported the EFF with everything except money since they opened for business, and they deserve wider support than they receive, since they are fighting to define important constitutional rights (even for us disenfranchised immigrants) in the USA. Time I gave then some money.

I also bought a GNU T-shirt back in 1980-something to support development of Emacs and the the FSF. So sue me.

Microsoft Strategy is Patently Ridiculous

A recent Fortune article, Microsoft claims software like Linux violates its patents, suggests that the Ballmer empire is about to start seeking royalties from users of open source software whihc, the company claims, violates 235 of their patents.

I don't think they have thought this through. The US Supreme Court has so far issued no ruling on whether software is even patentable, despite the Patent Office's ridiculous willingness to issue patents on techniques that fail even the simplest test of obviousness. When the most powerful software company in the world starts throwing its weight around to gain revenue from those patents it will force the issue somewhat.

The inevitable result will be a Supreme Court ruling that inevitably weakens, or even removes altogether, the protection that patents have been assumed to provide by those who have invested heavily in them. Microsoft senior VP Brad Smith claims, for example, that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents.ourse the joke is that nobody has any idea how many patents Microsoft products violate because, unlike the open source projects Microsoft complains about, the code that comprises them isn't available for public scrutiny.