Category: Multimedia

We need Free Software Co-operatives, but we probably won’t get any

The recent GitHub craze that got a number of Free Software fundamentalists to hurry away from GitHub towards other hosting solutions.

Whether it was GitLab (a fairly natural choice given the nature of the two services), BitBucket, or SourceForge (which is trying to rebuild a reputation as a Free Software friendly hosting company), there are a number of options of new SaaS providers.

At the same time, a number of projects have been boasting (and maybe a bit too smugly, in my opinion) that they self-host their own GitLab or similar software, and suggested other projects to do the same to be “really free”.

A lot of the discourse appears to be missing nuance on the compromises that using SaaS hosting providers, self-hosting for communities and self-hosting for single projects, and so I thought I would gather my thoughts around this in one single post.

First of all, you probably remember my thoughts on self-hosting in general. Any solution that involves self-hosting will require a significant amount of ongoing work. You need to make sure your services keep working, and keep safe and secure. Particularly for FLOSS source code hosting, it’s of primary importance that the integrity and safety of the source code is maintained.

As I already said in the previous post, this style of hosting works well for projects that have a community, in which one or more dedicated people can look after the services. And in particular for bigger communities, such as KDE, GNOME, FreeDesktop, and so on, this is a very effective way to keep stewardship of code and community.

But for one-person projects, such as unpaper or glucometerutils, self-hosting would be quite bad. Even for xine with a single person maintaining just site+bugzilla it got fairly bad. I’m trying to convince the remaining active maintainers to migrate this to VideoLAN, which is now probably the biggest Free Software multimedia project and community.

This is not a new problem. Indeed, before people rushed in to GitHub (or Gitorious), they rushed in to other services that provided similar integrated environments. When I became a FLOSS developer, the biggest of them was SourceForge — which, as I noted earlier, was recently bought by a company trying to rebuild its reputation after a significant loss of trust. These environments don’t only include SCM services, but also issue (bug) trackers, contact email and so on so forth.

Using one of these services is always a compromise: not only they require an account on each service to be able to interact with them, but they also have a level of lock-in, simply because of the nature of URLs. Indeed, as I wrote last year, just going through my old blog posts to identify those referencing dead links had reminded me of just how many project hosting services shut down, sometimes dragging along (Berlios) and sometimes abruptly (RubyForge).

This is a problem that does not only involve services provided by for-profit companies. Sunsite, RubyForge and Berlios didn’t really have companies behind, and that last one is probably one of the closest things to a Free Software co-operative that I’ve seen outside of FSF and friends.

There is of course Savannah, FSF’s own Forge-lookalike system. Unfortunately for one reason or another it has always lagged behind the featureset (particularly around security) of other project management SaaS. My personal guess is that it is due to the political nature of hosting any project over on FSF’s infrastructure, even outside of the GNU project.

So what we need would be a politically-neutral, project-agnostic hosting platform that is a co-operative effort. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening any time soon. The main problem is that project hosting is expensive, whether you use dedicated servers or cloud providers. And it takes full time people to work as system administrators to keep it running smoothly and security. You need professionals, too — or you may end up like lkml.org being down when its one maintainer goes on vacation and something happens.

While there are projects that receive enough donations that they would be able to sustain these costs (see KDE, GNOME, VideoLAN), I’d be skeptical that there would be an unfocused co-operative that would be able to take care of this. Particularly if it does not restrict creation of new projects and repositories, as that requires particular attention to abuse, and to make good guidelines of which content is welcome and which one isn’t.

If you think that that’s an easy task, consider that even SourceForge, with their review process, that used to take a significant amount of time, managed to let joke projects use their service and run on their credentials.

A few years ago, I would have said that SFLC, SFC and SPI would be the right actors to set up something like this. Nowadays? Given their infights I don’t expect them being any useful.

Two words about my personal policy on GitHub

I was not planning on posting on the blog until next week, trying to stick on a weekly schedule, but today’s announcement of Microsoft acquiring GitHub is forcing my hand a bit.

So, Microsoft is acquiring GitHub, and a number of Open Source developers are losing their mind, in all possible ways. A significant proportion of comments on this that I have seen on my social media is sounding doomsday, as if this spells the end of GitHub, because Microsoft is going to ruin it all for them.

Myself, I think that if it spells the end of anything, is the end of the one-stop-shop to work on any project out there, not because of anything Microsoft did or is going to do, but because a number of developers are now leaving the platform in protest (protest of what? One company buying another?)

Most likely, it’ll be the fundamentalists that will drop their projects away to GitHub. And depending on what they decide to do with their projects, it might even not show on anybody’s radar. A lot of people are pushing for GitLab, which is both an open-core self-hosted platform, and a PaaS offering.

That is not bad. Self-hosted GitLab instances already exist for VideoLAN and GNOME. Big, strong communities are in my opinion in the perfect position to dedicate people to support core infrastructure to make open source software development easier. In particular because it’s easier for a community of dozens, if not hundreds of people, to find dedicated people to work on it. For one-person projects, that’s overhead, distracting, and destructive as well, as fragmenting into micro-instances will cause pain to fork projects — and at the same time, allowing any user who just registered to fork the code in any instance is prone to abuse and a recipe for disaster…

But this is all going to be a topic for another time. Let me try to go back to my personal opinions on the matter (to be perfectly clear that these are not the opinions of my employer and yadda yadda).

As of today, what we know is that Microsoft acquired GitHub, and they are putting Nat Friedman of Xamarin fame (the company that stood behind the Mono project after Novell) in charge of it. This choice makes me particularly optimistic about the future, because Nat’s a good guy and I have the utmost respect for him.

This means I have no intention to move any of my public repositories away from GitHub, except if doing so would bring a substantial advantage. For instance, if there was a strong community built around medical devices software, I would consider moving glucometerutils. But this is not the case right now.

And because I still root most of my projects around my own domain, if I did move that, the canonical URL would still be valid. This is a scheme I devised after getting tired of fixing up where unieject ended up with.

Microsoft has not done anything wrong with GitHub yet. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, and not rush out of the door. It would and will be different if they were to change their policies.

Rob’s point is valid, and it would be a disgrace if various governments would push Microsoft to a corner requiring it to purge content that the smaller, independent GitHub would have left alone. But unless that happens, we’re debating hypothetical at the same level of “If I was elected supreme leader of Italy”.

So, as of today, 2018-06-04, I have no intention of moving any of my repositories to other services. I’ll also use a link to this blog with no accompanying comment to anyone who will suggest I should do so without any benefit for my projects.

Comixology for Android: bad engineering, and an exemplary tale against DRM

I grew up as a huge fan of comic books. Not only Italian Disney comics, which are something in by themselves, but also of US comics from Marvel. You could say that I grew up on Spider-Man and Duck Avenger. Unfortunately actually holding physical comic books nowadays is getting harder, simply because I’m travelling all the time, and I also try to keep as little physical media as I manage to, given the constraint of space of my apartment.

Digital comics are, thus, a big incentive for me to keep reading. And in particular, a few years ago I started buying my comics from Comixology, which was later bought by Amazon. The reason why I chose this particular service over others is that it allowed me to buy, and read, through a single service, the comics from Marvel, Dark Horse, Viz and a number of independent publishers. All of this sounded good to me.

I have not been reading a lot over the past few years, but as I moved to London, I found that the tube rides have the perfect span of time to catch up on the latest Spider-Man or finish up those Dresden Files graphic novels. So at some point last year I decided to get myself a second tablet, one that is easier to bring on the Tube than my neat but massive Samsung Tab A.

While Comixology is available for the Fire Tablet (being an Amazon property), I settled for the Lenovo Tab 4 8 Plus (what a mouthful!), which is a pretty neat “stock” Android tablet. Indeed, Lenovo customization of the tablet is fairly limited, and beside some clearly broken settings in the base firmware (which insisted on setting up Hangouts as SMS app, despite the tablet not having a baseband), it works quite neatly, and it has a positively long lasting battery.

The only real problem with that device is that it has very limited storage. It’s advertised as a 16GB device, but the truth is that only about half of it is available to the user. And that’s only after effectively uninstalling most of the pre-installed apps, most of which are thankfully not marked as system apps (which means you can fully uninstall them, instead of just keeping them disabled). Indeed, the more firmware updates, the fewer apps that are marked as system apps it seems — in my tablet the only three apps currently disabled are the File Manager, Gmail and Hangouts (this is a reading device, not a communication device). I can (and should) probably disable Maps, Calendar, and Photos as well, but that’s going to be for later.

Thankfully, this is not a big problem nowadays, as Android 6 introduced adoptable storage which allows you to use an additional SD cards for storage, transparently for both the system and the apps. It can be a bit slow depending on the card and the usage you make of the device, but as a reading device it works just great.

You were able to move apps to the SD card in older Android versions too, but in those cases you would end up with non-encrypted apps that would still store their data on the device’s main storage. For those cases, a number of applications, including for instance Audible (also an Amazon offering) allow you to select an external storage device to store their data files.

When I bought the tablet, SD card and installed Comixology on it, I didn’t know much about this part of Android to be honest. Indeed, I only checked if Comixology allowed storing the comics on the SD card, and since I found that was the case, I was all happy. I had adopted the SD card though, without realizing what that actually meant, though, and that was the first problem. Because then the documentation from Comixology didn’t actually match my experience: the setting to choose the SD card for storage didn’t appear, and I contacted tech support, who kept asking me questions about the device and what I was trying to do, but provided me no solution.

Instead, I noticed that everything was alright: as I adopted the SD card before installing the app, it got automatically installed on it, and it started using the card itself for storage, which allowed me to download as many comicbooks as I wanted, and not bother me at all.

Until some time earlier this year, I couldn’t update the app anymore. It kept failing with a strange Play Store error. So I decided to uninstall and reinstall it… at which point I had no way to move it back to the SD card! They disabled the option to allow the application to be moved in their manifest, and that’s why Play Store was unable to update it.

Over a month ago I contacted Comixology tech support, telling them what was going on, assuming that this was an oversight. Instead I kept getting stubborn responses that moving the app to the SD card didn’t move the comics (wrong), or insinuating I was using a rooted device (also wrong). I still haven’t managed to get them to reintroduce the movable app, even though the Kindle app, also from Amazon, moves to the SD card just fine. Ironically, you can read comics bought on Kindle Store with the Comixology app but, for some reason, not vice-versa. If I could just use the Kindle app I wouldn’t even bother with installing the Comixology app.

Now I cancelled my Comixology Unlimited subscription, cancelled my subscription to new issues of Spider-Man, Bleach, and a few other series, and am pondering what’s the best solution to my problems. I could use non-adopted storage for the tablet if I effectively dedicate it to Comixology — unfortunately in that case I won’t be able to download Google Play Books or Kindle content to the SD card as they don’t support the external storage mode. I could just read a few issues at a time, using the ~7GB storage space that I have available on the internal storage, but that’s also fairly annoying. More likely I’ll start buying the comics from another service that has a better understanding of the Android ecosystem.

Of course the issue remains that I have a lot of content on Comixology, and just a very limited subset of comics are DRM-free. This is not strictly speaking Comixology’s fault: the publishers are the one deciding whether to DRM their content or not. But it definitely shows an issue that many publishers don’t seem to grasp: in front of technical problems like this, the consumer will have better “protection” if they would have just pirated the comics!

For the moment, I can only hope that someone reading this post happens to work for, or know someone working for, Comixology or Amazon (in the product teams — I know a number of people in the Amazon production environment, but I know they are far away from the people who would be able to fix this), and they can update the Comixology app to be able to work with modern Android, so that I can resume reading all my comics easily.

Or if Amazon feels like that, I’d be okay with them giving me a Fire tablet to use in place of the Lenovo. Though I somewhat doubt that’s something they would be happy on doing.

Tiny Tiny RSS: don’t support Nazi sympathisers


XKCD #1357 — Free Speech

After complaining about the lack of cache hits from feed readers, and figuring out why NewsBlur (that was doing the right thing), and then again fixing the problem, I started looking at what other readers kept being unfixed. It turned out that about a dozen people used to read my blog using Tiny Tiny RSS, a PHP-based personal feed reader for the web. I say “used to” because, as of 2017-08-17, TT-RSS is banned from accessing anything from my blog via ModSecurity rule.

The reason why I went to this extent is not merely technical, which is why you get the title of this blog the way it is. But it all started with me filing requests to support modern HTTP features for feeds, particularly regarding the semantics of permanent redirects, but also about the lack of If-Modified-Since, which allows significant reduction on the bandwidth usage of a blog1. Now, the first response I got about the permanent redirect request was disappointing but it was a technical answer, so I provided more information. After that?

After that the responses stopped being focused on the technical issues, but rather appear to be – and that’s not terribly surprising in FLOSS of course – “not my problem”. Except, the answers also came from someone with a Pepe the Frog avatar.2 And this is August of 2017, when America shown having a real Nazi problem, and willingly associating themselves to alt-right is effectively being Nazi sympathizers. The tone of the further answers also show that it is no mistake or misunderstanding.

You can read the two bugs here: ① and ②. Trigger warning: extreme right and ableist views ahead.

While I try to not spend too much time on political activism on my blog, there is a difference from debating whether universal basic income (or even universal health care) is a right nor not, and arguing for ethnic cleansing and the death of part of a population. So no, no way I’ll refrain from commenting or throwing a light on this kind of toxic behaviour from developers in the Free Software community. Particularly when they are not even holding these beliefs for themselves but effectively boasting them by using a loaded avatar on their official support forum.

So what you can do about this? If you get to read this post, and have subscribed to my blog through TT-RSS, you now know why you don’t get any updates from it. I would suggest you look for a new feed reader. I will as usual suggest NewsBlur, since its implementation is the best one out there. You can set it up by yourself, since it’s open source. Not only you will be cutting your support to Nazi sympathisers, but you also will save bandwidth for the web as a whole, by using a reader that actually implements the protocol correctly.

Update (2017-08-06): as pointed out in the comments by candrewswpi, FreshRSS is another option if you don’t want to set up NewsBlur (which admittedly may be a bit heavy). It uses PHP so it should be easier to migrate given the same or similar stack. It supports at least proper caching, but I’m not sure about the permanent redirects, it needs testing.

You could of course, as the developers said on those bugs, change the User-Agent string that TT-RSS reports, and keep using it to read my blog. But in that case, you’d be supporting Nazi sympathisers. If you don’t mind doing that, I may ask you a favour and stop reading my blog altogether. And maybe reconsider your life choices.

I’ll repeat here that the reason why I’m going to this extent is that there is a huge difference between the political opinions and debates that we can all have, and supporting Nazis. You don’t have to agree with my political point of view to read my blog, you don’t have to agree with me to talk with me or being my friend. But if you are a Nazi sympathiser, you can get lost.

  1. you could try to argue that in this day and age there is no point in worrying about bandwidth, but then you don’t get to ever complain about the existence of CDNs, or the fact that AMP and similar tools are “undemocratizing” the web.
    [return]
  2. Update (2017-08-03): as many people have asked: no it’s not just any frog or any Pepe that automatically makes you a Nazi sympathisers. But the avatar was not one of the original illustrations, and the attitude of the commenter made it very clear what their “alignment” was. I mean, if they were fans of the original character, they would probably have the funeral scene as their avatar instead.
    [return]

Fake “Free” Software hurts us all

Brian Krebs, the famous information security reporter, posted today (well, at the time of writing) an article on security issues with gSOAP library. I found this particularly interesting to me because I remembered seeing the name before. Indeed, Krebs links to the project’s SourceForge page, which is something to see. It has a multi-screen long list of “features”, including a significant number of variant and options for the protocol, which ends in the following:

Licenses: GPLv2, gSOAP public license (for engine and plugins), commercial non-GPL license available upon request (software is 100% in-house developed, no third-party GPL contributions included)

Ah, there we go. “Free” Software.

You may remember my post just a few days ago about the fact that Free Software to actually make a difference in society the way Stallman prophesizes needs a mediating agency, and at least right now that agency is companies and the free market. I argued that making your software usable by companies that provide services or devices is good, as it makes for healthy, usable and used projects, and increase competition and reduce costs of developing new solutions. So is gSOAP the counterexample? I really don’t think so. gSOAP is the perfect example for me that matches my previous rant about startups and fake communities.

The project at first look like the poster child for FSF-compatible software, since it’s licensed under GPL-2, and it clearly has no CLA (Contributor License Agreement), though the company provides a “way out” from GPL-2 obligations by buying a commercial license. This is not, generally speaking, a bad thing. I have seen many examples, including in the open multimedia cliques, of using this trick to foster the development of open solutions while making money to pay salary or build new Free Software companies.

But generally, those projects allow third party contributions with a CLA or similar agreement that allows the “main” copyright holders to still issue proprietary licenses, or enforce their own rights. You can for instance see what Google’s open source projects do about it. Among other things, this contribution method also disallows re-licensing the software, as that requires agreement from all copyright holders. In the case of gSOAP, that is not the case: as they say their software is «100% in-house developed».

They are very well proud of this situation, because it gives them all the power: if you want to use gSOAP without paying, you’re tied to the GPL, which may or may not become a compliance problem. And if you happen to violate the license, they have all the copyright to sue you or just ask you to settle. It’s a perfect situation for copyright trolls.

But, because of this, even though the software is on paper “Free Software” according to FSF, it’s a piece of proprietary software. Sure you can fork the library and build your own GPL-2 instead, as you have the freedom of fork, but that does not make it a community, or a real Free Software project. And it also means you can’t contribute patches to it to make it more secure, safer, or better for society. You could report bugs, including security bugs, but what’s the likeliness that you would actually care to do so, given that one of the first thing they make clear on their “project” page is that they are not interested in your contributions? And we clearly can see that the particular library could have used some care from the community, given its widespread adoption.

What does this mean to me, is that gSOAP is a clear example that just releasing something under GPL-2 is not enough to make it Free Software, and that even “Free” Software released under GPL-2 can be detrimental to society. And it also touches on the other topic I brought up recently, that is that you need to strike a balance between making code usable to companies (because they will use, and thus very likely help you extend or support your project) and keeping it as a real community or a real project. Clearly in this case the balance was totally off. If gSOAP was available with a more liberal license, even LGPL-2, they would probably lose a lot in license fees, as for most companies, just using this as a shared library would be enough. But it would then allow developers, both hobbyists and working for companies, to contribute fixes so that they trickle down on everybody’s device.

Since I do not know what the proprietary license that the company behind gSOAP requires their customers to agree with, I cannot say whether there is any incentive in said companies to provide fixes back to the project, but I assume if they were to do so, they wouldn’t be contributing them under GPL-2, clearly. What I can say is that for the companies I worked for in the past, actually receiving the library under GPL-2 and being able to contribute the fixes back would have been a better deal. The main reason is that as much as a library like this can be critical to connected devices, it does not by itself contain any of the business logic. And there are ways around linking GPL-2 code into the business logic application, that usually involve some kind of RPC between the logic and the frontend. And being able to contribute the changes back to the open source project would allow them to not have to maintain a long set of patches to sync release after release — I had the unfortunate experience of having to deal with something in that space before.

My advice, is once again, to try figuring out what you want to achieve by releasing a piece of software. Are you trying to make a statement, sticking it to the man, by forcing companies not to use your software? Are you trying to make money by forcing companies interested in using your work to buy a special license from you? Or are you contributing to Free Software because you want to improve society? In the latter case, I would suggest you consider a liberal license, to make sure that your code (that can be better than proprietary, closed-source software!) is actually available for those mediating agencies that transform geeky code into usable gadgets and services.

I know, it would be oh so nicer, if by just releasing something awesome under GPL-2 you’d force every company to release all their firmware as Free Software as well, but that’s not going to happen. Instead, if they feel they have to, they will look for worse alternatives, or build their own (even worse) alternatives, and keep them to themselves, and we’ll all be the poorer for it. So if in doubt, consider MIT or Apache 2 licenses. The latter in particular appears to be gaining more and more traction as both Google and Microsoft appear to be fond of the license, and Facebook’s alternative is tricky.

Some of you may consider me a bit of a hypocrite since I have released a number of projects under more restrictive Free licenses (including AGPL-3!) before I came to the conclusion that’s actually bad for society. Or at least before I came back to that idea, as I was convinced of that back in 2004, when I wrote (In Italian) of why I think MySQL is bad for Free Software (I should probably translate that post, just for reference). But what I decided is that I’ll try now to do my best to re-license the projects for which I own the full copyright under Apache 2 licenses. This may take a little while until I figure out all the right steps, but I feel is the right thing to do.

Free Idea: Free Software stack for audiobooks

This post is part of a series of free ideas that I’m posting on my blog in the hope that someone with more time can implement. It’s effectively a very sketched proposal that comes with no design attached, but if you have time you would like to spend learning something new, but no idea what to do, it may be a good fit for you.

This is clearly not a new idea, as I posted about something very similar over eight years ago. At the time I was looking for a way of encoding audibooks coming from audio CD in a format that was compatible with the iPod Classic. Since then, Apple appears to have done their best to make the audiobooks experience on iOS the worst possible, to the point that I don’t really use my iPod Touch as my primary audiobook player any more.

As an aside to the free idea, which can probably give a bit more context for you all, let me describe the problems I have with the current approach to audiobooks by Apple. A few iOS major versions ago, they decided to move the audiobooks handling from the Music app to the iBooks app; this would be reasonable, given that they are books, and it was always a bit strange to have them in a separate application, but it also meant you lost the ability to build playlists with them.

Playlists with audiobooks are great, because they allow you to “stitch” multiple books of the same series, so that you can play them for hours on end, for instance if you need them to sleep. I used to have a playlist for the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy radio series and one for the books, one for Dresden Files, and one for the News Quiz, including both the collected editions in CD by BBC, my own “audiobooks” built out of the podcasts, and the more recent podcast episodes that I have not collected into audiobook files yet.

So what is the idea? There are two components that, as far as I can see, are currently heavily lacking in the FLOSS world. The first is a way to generate audiobook files, which is what I complained eight years ago. Indeed, if you look even at a random sample on Project Gutenberg, the audiobook is actually a ton of files (47!) each with a chapter in them. A proper audiobook file would be a single file, with chapter markers, and per-chapter metadata (chapter title, and in that case, the performer).

It’s more than just a matter of having a single file to move around. While of course the hardware improvements made a number of these points moot, the original reason to have a single big file over multiple small files was to avoid having to seek to a different point in the disk in-between chapters. It also allows the decoder to keep going, between chapters, as there is no “end of stream” but rather just a marker that at a given point in time some different metadata applies. Again, as I said this is no longer as relevant as it used to be, but it’s also not entirely gone.

The other component that is currently lacking, is a good playback solution. While VLC can obviously play those files right now, and if I’m not mistaken it also extracts the per-chapter metadata correctly, it lacks two features that make enjoying audiobooks possible. The first is possibly complicated, and relates to the ability to store bookmarks and current-playing time. While supposedly VLC supports the feature for resuming from last playback, I have heard it’s still sometimes unreliable (I have no idea how it’s implemented), plus it does not support just bookmarking a given time in a file/book. Bookmarking is particularly important when listening to non-novel audiobooks, as you may want to go back to it afterwards, to re-listen to advice or take a reference to further details.

The other feature is basically UI heavy, and it involves mostly the mobile UI (at least the Android one) and is the ability to scan backward and forward in the file. You have probably seen this in other players including Netflix’s own app, that allow you to scan back 30 seconds — in audiobooks it’s also useful to scan forward 30 seconds, particularly when considering the bookmarks above.

As usual for Free Ideas I have no time to work on this myself. I can give the idea details out, and depending on things I may be able to contribute to a bounty on it, but otherwise, no code I can share about this yet.

The overengineering of ALSA userland

This is a bit of an interesting corner case of a rant. I have not written this when I came up with it, because I came up with it many years ago when I actively worked on multimedia software, but I have only given it in person to a few people before, because at the time it would have gained too much unwanted attention by random people, the same kind of people who might have threatened me for removing XMMS out of Gentoo so many years ago. I have, though, spoken about this with at least one of the people working on PulseAudio at the time, and I have repeated this at the office a few times, while the topic came up.

For context you may want to read this rant from almost ten years ago by Mike Melanson, who was at the time working for Adobe on Flash Player for Linux. It’s a bit unfortunate that the drawings from the post are missing (but maybe Mike has a copy?) You can find the missing drawing on the Internet Archive as well, but the whole gist is that the Linux Audio API were already bloody confusing at the time, and this was before PulseAudio came along to stay. So where are we right now?

Well, the good news is that for the most part things got simpler: aRTs and ESounD are now completely gone, eradicated in the favour of PulseAudio, which is essentially the only currently used consumer sound daemon. Jack2 is still the standard for the pro-audio crowd, but even those people seem to have accepted that multimedia players are unlikely to care for it, and it should be limited to proaudio software. On the kernel driver side, the actually fairly important out-of-kernel drivers are effectively gone, in favour of development happening as a separate branch of the Linux kernel itself (GIT was not a thing at the time, oh how things have changed!) and OSS is effectively gone. I don’t even know if it’s available in the kernel, but the OSS4 fanboys have been quiet for long enough that I assume they gave up too.

ALSA itself hasn’t really changed much in all this time, either in the kernel or as userland. In the kernel, it got more complex for supporting things like jack sense, as HDA started supporting soft-switching between speaker and headphones output. In the userland, the plugins interface that was barely known before is now a requirement to properly use PulseAudio, both in Gentoo and in most other distributions. Which effectively makes my rant not only still relevant, but possibly more relevant. But before I go into details, I should take a step back and explain what the whole thing with userland and drivers is, with ALSA. I’ll try to simplify the history and the details, so if you know this very well you may notice I may skip some details, but nobody really cares that much about those.

The ALSA project was born back when Linux was in version 2.4 — and unlike today, that version was the version for a long time. Indeed up until version 3.0, a “minor” version would just be around forever; the migration from 2.4 to 2.6 was a massive amount of work and took distributions, developers and users alike a lot of coordination. In Linux 2.4, the audio drivers were based off the OSS interface, which essentially meant you had /dev/dspX and /dev/mixerX, and you were done — most of the time mixer0 matched a number of dspX devices, and most devices would have input and output capabilities, but that’s about all you knew. Access to the device was almost always exclusive to one process, except if the soundcard had multiple hardware mixer channels, in which case you could open the device multiple times. If you needed processes to share the device, your only option was to use a daemon such as the already named aRTs or ESounD. The ALSA project aimed to replace the OSS interface (that by then became a piece of proprietary software in its newer versions) with a new, improved interface in the following “minor” version (2.5, which stabilized as 2.6), as well as on the old one through additional kernel modules — the major drawback from my point of view, is that this new interface became Linux-specific, while OSS has been (and is) supported by most of the BSDs as well. But, sometimes you have to do this anyway.

The ALSA approach provides a much more complex device API, but mostly for good reason, because sound cards are (or were) a complex interface, and are not consistent among themselves at all. To make things simpler to application developers who previously only had to use open() and similar functions, ALSA provided an userland library, provided in a package called alsa-lib, but more often known as its filename: libasound. While the interface of the library is not simple either, it does provide a bit of wrapping around the otherwise very low-level APIs. It also abstracts some of the problems away of figuring out which cards are present and which mixer refers to which. The project also provided a number of tools and utilities to configure the devices, query for information or playback raw sound — and even a wrapper for applications implementing OSS access only, in the form of a preloadable library catching accesses to /dev/dsp to convert them to ALSA API calls — not different from the similar utilities provided by arts, esd or PulseAudio.

In the original ALSA model, access to the device was still limited to one process per channel, but as soundcards with more than one hardware channel became quickly obsolete (particularly as soundcard kind-of standardized over AC’97, then HDA) the need for sharing access arose again, and since both arts and esd had their limits (and PulseAudio was far from ready), the dmix interface arrived — in this setup, the first process opening the device would actually have access, as well as set up a shared memory area for other processes to provide their audio, which then would be mixed together in userland, particularly in the process space of the first process opening the device. This had all sorts of problems, particularly when sharing across users, or when sharing with processes that only used sound for a limited amount of time.

What dmix actually used was the ability of ALSA to provide “virtual” devices, which can be configured for alsa-lib to see. Another feature that got more spotlight thanks to the lowering of featureset in soundcards, particularly with the HDA standard, is the ability to provide plugins to extend the functionality of alsa-lib — for a while the most important one was clearly the libsamplerate-based resampling plugin which almost ten years ago was the only way to provide non-crackling sound out of an HDA soundcard. These plugins included other features, such as a plugin providing a virtual device for encoding to Dolby AC3 so that you could us S/PDIF pass-through to a surround decoder. Nowadays, the really important plugin is the one PulseAudio one, which allows any ALSA-compatible application to talk to PulseAudio, by configuring a default virtual device.

Okay now that the history lesson is complete, let me see to write down what I think is a problem with our current, modern setup. I’ll exclude in my discussion proaudio workstations, as these have clearly different requirements from “mainstream” and most likely would still argue (from a different point) that the current setup is overengineered. I’ll also exclude most embedded devices, including Android, since I don’t think PA ever won over the phone manufacturers outside of Nokia — although I would expect that a lot of them actually do rely on PulseAudio a bit and so the discussion would apply.

In a current Linux desktop, your multimedia applications end up falling into two main categories: those that implement PulseAudio support and those that implement ALSA support. They may use some wrapper library such as SDL, but at the end of the day, these are the two APIs that allow you to output sound on modern Linux. A few rare cases of (proprietary, probably) apps implementing OSS can be ignored, as they would either then use aoss or padsp to preload the right library to provide support to whichever stack you prefer. Whichever distribution you’re using all of these two classes of apps are extremely likely to be going out of your speaker through PulseAudio. If the app only support ALSA, the distribution is likely providing a configuration file so that the default ALSA device is a virtual device pointing at the PulseAudio plugin.

When the app talks to PulseAudio directly, it’ll use its API through the client library, that then IPCs through its custom protocol to the PulseAudio Daemon, which will then use alsa-lib through its API, ignoring all the virtual devices configured, which in turn will talk with the kernel drivers through its device files. It’s a bit different for Bluetooth devices, but you get the gist. This at first sight should sound just fine.

If you look at an app that only supports ALSA interfaces, it’ll use the alsa-lib API to talk to the default device, which uses the PulseAudio client library to IPC to the PulseAudio daemon, and so as above. In this case you have alsa-lib on both sides: the source application and the sink daemon. So what am I complaining about? Well here is the thing: the parts of ALSA that the media application uses versus the parts of ALSA that the PulseAudio daemon uses are almost entirely distinct: one only provides access to the virtual devices configured, and the other only gives access to the raw hardware. The fact that they share the API is barely a matter, in my opinion.

From my point of view, what would be a better solution would be for libasound to be provided by PulseAudio directly, implements a subset of ALSA API, that either show the devices as the sinks configured in PulseAudio or, PA wants to maintain the stream/sink abstraction itself, just a single device that is PulseAudio. No configuration files, no virtual devices, no plugins whatsoever, but if the application is supporting ALSA, it gets automatically promoted to PulseAudio. Then on the daemon side, PulseAudio can either fork alsa-lib, or have alsa-lib provide a simpler library, that only provides access to the hardware devices, and removes support for configuration files and plugins (after all PulseAudio already has its own module system.) Last I heard, there actually is an embedded version of libasound that implements only the minimal amount of features needed to access a sound device through ALSA. This not only should reduce the amount of “code at play” (pardon the pun), but also reduce the chance that you can misconfigure ALSA to do the wrong thing.

Misconfiguring ALSA is probably the most common reason for your sound not working the way you expect on Linux — the configuration files and options, defaults and so on kept changing, and since ten years ago things are so different that you’re likely to find very bad, old advise out there. And it’s not always clear not to follow it. And for instance for the longest time Adobe Flash, thinking of doing the right thing, would not actually abide to the default ALSA configuration, and rather try to access the hardware device itself (mostly because of nasty bugs with dmix), which meant that PulseAudio wouldn’t be able to access it anymore itself. The quickly sketched architecture above would solve that problem, as the application would not actually be able to tell the difference between the hardware device and the PulseAudio virtual device — the former would just not be there!

And just to close up my ALSA rant, I would like to remember you all, that alsa-lib still comes with its own LISP interpreter: the ALISP dialect was meant to provide even more configurability to the sound access interface, and most distributions, as far as I know, still have it enabled. Gentoo provides a (default-off) alisp USE flag, so you’re at least spared that part in most cases.

Update 2020-05-08: Adobe appears to have “archived” (or rather deleted) Mike’s blog from their site, some time in 2017. I’ve updated the link above to point at the Internet Archive (to which I recommend donating, if you can). While doing that I even managed to find a copy of the drawing that was missing when I originally wrote this post. Score!

On the conference circuit

You may remember that I used not to be a fan of travel, and that for a while I was absolutely scared by the idea of flying. This has clearly not been the case in a while, given that I’ve been working for US companies and traveling a lot of the time.

One of the side effects of this is that I enjoy the “conference circuit”, to the point that I’m currently visiting three to four conferences a year, some of which for VideoLAN and others for work, and in a few cases for nothing in particular. This is an interesting way to keep in touch with what’s going on in the community and in the corporate world out there.

Sometimes, though, I wish I had more energy and skills to push through my ideas. I find it curious how nowadays it’s all about Docker and containers, while I jumped on the LXC bandwagon quite some time ago thanks to Tiziano, and because of that need I made Gentoo a very container-friendly distribution from early on. Similarly, O’Reilly now has a booklet on static site generators which describe things not too far from what I’ve been doing since at least 2006 for my website, and for xine’s later on. Maybe if I wasn’t at the time so afraid of traveling I would have had more impact on this, but I guess (to use a flying metaphor) I lost my slot there.

To focus bit more on SCaLE14x in particular, and especially about Cory Doctorow’s opening keynote, I have to say tht the conference is again a good load of fun. Admittedly I rarely manage to go listening to talks, but the amount of people going in and out of the expo floor, and the random conversation struck there are always useful.

In the case of Doctorow’s keynote, while he’s (as many) a bit too convinced, in my opinion, that he has most if not all the answers, his final argument was a positive one: don’t try to be “pure” (as FSF would like you to be), instead hedge your bets by contributing (time, energy, money) to organizations and projects that work towards increasing your freedom. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to hear Cory name, earlier in that talk, VLC and Handbrake — although part of the cotnext in which he namechecked us is likely going to be a topic for a different post, once I have something figured out.

My current trip brings me to San Francisco tonight, for Enigma 2016, and on this note I would like to remember to conferencegoers that, while most of us are aiming for a friendly and relaxed atmosphere, there is some opsec you should be looking into. I don’t have a designated conference laptop (just yet, I might get myself a Chromebook for it) but I do have at least a privacy screen. I’ve seen more than a couple corp email interfaces running on laptops while walking the expo floor this time.

Finally, I need to thank TweetDeck for their webapp. The ability to monitor hashtags, and particularly multiple hashtags from the same view is gorgeous when you’re doing back-to-back conferences (#scale14x, #enigma2016, #fosdem.) I know at least one of them is reading, so, thanks!

Report from SCaLE13x

This year I have not been able to visit FOSDEM. Funnily enough this confirms the trend of me visiting FOSDEM only on even-numbered years, as I previously skipped 2013 as I was just out for my first and only job interview, and 2011 because of contract related timing. Since I still care for going to an open source conference early in the year, I opted instead for SCaLE, the timing of which fit perfectly my trip to Mountain View. It also allowed me to walk through Hermosa Beach once again.

So Los Angeles again it was, which meant I was able to meet with a few Gentoo developers, a few VideoLAN developers who also came all the way from Europe, and many friends who I have met at various previous conferences. It is funny how I end up meeting some people more often through conferences than I meet my close friends from back in Italy. I guess this is the life of the frequent travelers.

While my presence at SCaLE was mostly a way to meet some of the Gentoo devs that I had not met before, and see Hugo and Ludovic from VideoLAN who I missed at the past two meetings, I did pay some attention to the talks — I wish I could have had enough energy to go to more of them, but I was coming from three weeks straight of training, during which I sat for at least two hours a day in a room listening to talks on various technologies and projects… doing that in the free time too sounded like a bad idea.

What I found intriguing in the program, and in at least one of the talks I was able to attend, was that I could find at least a few topics that I wrote about in the past. Not only now containers are now all the rage, through Docker and other plumbing, but there was also a talk about static site generators, of which I wrote in 2009 and I’ve been using for much longer than that, out of necessity.

All in all, it was a fun conference and meeting my usual conference friends and colleagues is a great thing. And meeting the other Gentoo devs is what sparked my designs around TG4 which is good.

I would like to also thank James for suggesting me to use Tweetdeck during conferences, as it was definitely nicer to be able to keep track of what happened on the hashtag as well as the direct interactions and my personal stream. If you’re the occasional conferencegoer you probably want to look into it yourself. It also is the most decent way to look at Twitter during a conference on a tablet, as it does not require you to jump around between search pages and interactions (on a PC you can at least keep multiple tabs open easily.)

When (multimedia) fiefdoms crumble

Mike coined the term multimedia fiefdoms recently. He points to a number of different streaming, purchase and rental services for video content (movies, TV series) as the new battleground for users (consumers in this case). There are of course a few more sides in this battle, including music and books, but the idea is still perfectly valid.

What he didn’t get into the details of is what happens one of those fiefdoms capitulates, declaring itself won over, and goes away. It’s not a fun situation to be in, but we actually have plenty of examples of it, and these, more than anything else, should drive the discourse around and against DRM, in my opinion.

For some reasons, the main example of failed fiefdoms is to be found in books, and I lived through (and recounted) a few of those instances. For me personally, it all started four years ago, when I discovered Sony gave up on their LRF format and decided to adopt the “industry standard” ePub by supporting Adobe Digital Editions (ADEPT) DRM scheme on their devices. I was slow on the uptake, the announcement came two years earlier. For Sony, this meant tearing down their walled garden, even though they kept supporting the LRF format and their store for a while – they may even do still, I stopped following two years ago when I moved onto a Kindle – for the user it meant they were now free to buy books from a number of stores, including some publishers, bookstores with online presence and dedicated ebookstores.

But things didn’t always go smoothly: two years later, WHSmith partnered with Kobo, and essentially handed the latter all their online ebook market. When I read the announcement I was actually happy, especially since I could not buy books off WHSmith any more as they started looking for UK billing addresses. Unfortunately it also meant that only a third of the books that I bought from WHSmith were going to be ported over to Kobo due to an extreme cock-up with global rights even to digital books. If I did not go and break the DRM off all my ebooks for the sake of it, I would have lost four books, having to buy them anew again. Given this was not for the seller going bankrupt but for a sell-out of their customers, it was not understandable that they refused to compensate people. Luckily, it did port The Gone-Away World which is one of my favourite books.

Fast forward another year, and the Italian bookstore LaFeltrinelli decided to go the same way, with a major exception: they decided they would keep users on both platforms — that way if you want to buy a digital version of a book you’ll still buy it on the same website, but it’ll be provided by Kobo and in your Kobo library. And it seems like they at least have a better deal regarding books’ rights, as they seemed to have ported over most books anyway. But of course it did not work out as well as it should have been, throwing an error in my face and forcing me to call up Kobo (Italy) to have my accounts connected and the books ported.

The same year, I end up buying a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition, which is a pretty good tablet and has a great digitizer. Samsung ships Google Play in full (Store, Movies, Music, Books) but at the same time install its own App, Video, Music and Book store apps, it’s not surprising. But it does not take six months for them to decide that it’s not their greatest idea, in May this year, Samsung announced the turn down of their Music and Books stores — outside of South Korea at least. In this case there is no handover of the content to other providers, so any content bought on those platforms is just gone.

Not completely in vain; if you still have access to a Samsung device (and if you don’t, well, you had no access to the content anyway), a different kind of almost-compensation kicks in: the Korean company partnered with Amazon of all bookstores — surprising given that they are behind the new “Nook Tablet” by Barnes & Noble. Beside a branded «Kindle for Samsung» app, they provide one out of a choice of four books every month — the books are taken from Amazon’s KDP Select pool as far as I can tell, which is the same pool used as a base for the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and the Kindle Unlimited offerings; they are not great but some of them are enjoyable enough. Amazon is also keeping honest and does not force you to read the books on your Samsung device — I indeed prefer reading from my Kindle.

Now the question is: how do you loop back all this to multimedia? Sure books are entertaining but they are by definition a single media, unless you refer to the Kindle Edition of American Gods. Well, for me it’s still the same problem of fiefdoms that Mike referred to; indeed every store used to be a walled garden for a long while, then Adobe came and conquered most with ePub and ADEPT — but then between Apple and their iBooks (which uses its own, incompatible DRM), and Amazon with the Kindle, the walls started crumbling down. Nowadays plenty of publishers allow you to buy the book, in ePub and usually many other formats at the same time, without DRM, because the publishers don’t care which device you want to read your book on (a Kindle, a Kobo, a Nook, an iPad, a Sony Reader, an Android tablet …), they only want for you to read the book, and get hooked, and buy more books.

Somehow the same does not seem to work for video content, although it did work to an extent, for a while at least, with music. But this is a different topic.

The reason why I’m posting this right now is that just today I got an email from Samsung that they are turning down their video store too — now their “Samsung Hub” platform gets to only push you games and apps, unless you happen to live in South Korea. It’s interesting to see how the battles between giants is causing small players to just get off the playing fields… but at the same time they bring their toys with them.

Once again, there is no compensation; if you rented something, watch it by the end of the year, if you bought something, sorry, you won’t be able to access it after new year. It’s a tough world. There is a lesson, somewhere, to be learnt about this.