Stodge.org

In the world of Linux, there are few issues that arouse more passion than Gentoo (e.g. AdTI, SCO). Depending on who you ask Gentoo is either the best and most elegant, or the stupidest and most time-wasting Linux distribution on the planet. While there are no shortage of fans (I count myself as one), the anti-gentoo crowd also have some valid points.

* Gentoo is for Ricers: This site is dedicated to exposing the stupid writings of Gentoo zealots. The author compares the average teenage gentoo-user to the sort of boy-racer who annoys the hell out of everybody with his souped-up death mobile.

* Mandrake Expatriate Syndrome: The central thesis of this site is that Gentoo is rather pointless because it combines features from FreeBSD, Debian and Mandrake but provides the worst features of all.

Personally I kind of like Gentoo, but not for the reasons suggested by either of the sites; I dont optimize all that much, but I do like having access to packages that other distros would consider unstable. I also like the community spirit, where everybody seems to be more than willing to contribute eBuilds, fixes and generally help out. I also like the elitism of it – not everybody can get their heads around installing it. Most people who use it will be commited in some way to Open-Source software, plus be at least as technical as me.

On the whole I find working with the Gentoo boxes more satisfying than Mandrake or Redhat. In general, the box that gives me the most trouble in my daily work is a Mandrake 9.1 box, and is actually the machine responsible for serving this page to you.

Imagine for a moment if I had an electronic lock on the front door of my home, and suppose that one day I damage my only key. I call an emergency locksmith to find a way to force the door to open but he has to refuse my request; by-passing the security controls of this door require require gaining unauthorised access to the lock’s control system. Even though I own the lock (and the house), I cannot get in because the DMCA would make it illegal to tamper with the lock manufacturer’s access controls.

This may seem like an absurd situation, and fortunately not one that could happen (under present law) in the UK, however in a rather cynical move, US data storage company storagetek has managed to prevent another firm from servicing hardware made by them because to do so would violate the DMCA.

The DMCA makes it illegal for Americans to by-pass access control restrictions placed in hardware or software. In this case access to the debugging system is restricted to holders of the access code. Storagetek do not provide the service codes to anybody other than it’s own staff, so if you want to get into the control panel of your own Storagetek archive you will need to find some way to hack into your own hardware, and that act is spesifically against the law.

My impression is that big-business is quite happy with this law, and no matter how absurd they seem it is unlikely that they will ever be cancelled; The only recorse is for companies to avoid buying any hardware that features this kind of lock-in, or better still use open-source systems wherever possible.

Allow me to add another message to the growing forum of discontent. (I also posted this in the iRiver Discussion Forum).

I am an owner of an H140 a portable music player made by iRiver – at the time I bought it, it was clearly one of the most ambitious players on the market. Unfortunately it had some very obvious well-documented problems, nearly all related to firmware. In January of this year iRiver sought to re-assure it’s customers by publishng a schedule of firmware upgrdes that promised to fix the H-Series’ shortcomings and push the platform ahead of rivals.

In this letter I propose that failing to deliver the firmware as planned may have saved iRiver some money in the short term, but in the longer term is already driving customers away and harm their brand and business.
(more…)