The Faux-pen Source Fundamentalists

I was just reading Linux-Mag's interview with Linus Torvalds with regards to Microsoft's latest GPL'd contributions to the Linux kernel.

In it, I found this fabulous quote from Linus which I think echoes David "Lefty" Schlesinger's latest blog posting about the The Real FLOSS Community and the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists":

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.

There are ‘extremists’ in the free software world, but that’s one major reason why I don’t call what I do ‘free software’ any more. I don’t want to be associated with the people for whom it’s about exclusion and hatred.”

It is good to see such prominent FLOSS contributors speaking out against the "Faux-pen Source Fundamentalists" that go around attacking the real FLOSS community members, even going so far as trying to get FLOSS developers/contributors fired.

These zealots may think they are "helping" the FLOSS community, but they are only having a negative effect. A destructive effect.

These people are not interested in improving Linux, they are only interested in stroking their own egos. They want power more than anything else. Power over other people. Power to destroy anyone or anything that does not do what they demand.

These people claim that they are protecting our Freedoms, but they are only trying to become dictators. They have no interest in Freedom unless it is their own version of Freedom, where they reign as supreme dictator and where anyone who disagrees with them is labeled as a "shill" or otherwise demonized.

As Linus puts it, these people are about "exclusion and hatred."

This is not Freedom.

Re: Let's All Say It Together.

I wasn't at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009, so I'm learning about this second hand from people like David Schlesinger, Natin Yellin and a number of people I know personally who attended the conference. It is important for us to respect all of our peers no matter their skin color, their religion or other beliefs, their gender, or any other factor. And that goes for respecting people outside of our community as well.

Because of this, I am casting my vote:

STOP sexism by Casey West. License:

"I want the [...] open source [...] communities [I participate in] to be a dignified, respectful, inclusive, and welcoming place. … We’ve all been witnesses to off-color jokes, misogynistic back channel chatter, questionable imagery and unnecessary, trolling comments. I pledge to do better to stand up and call this behavior out when I see it in conferences, online and other public settings. I don’t expect it to go away but I’m not going to tacitly condone it any longer."

(From Nick via Luis via David)
Update: As Natan Yellin has commented below, he was not actually at the conference - it was my mistake in thinking he was.

I am not afraid

Making GMime Even More Awesome

I've started working on GMime 2.6, which unfortunately will need to break API with 2.4 in order to achieve the next level of awesome.

If you use GMime (or are thinking of using it) in your project and have some suggestions on how GMime can improve, don't hesitate to fire an email off to gmime-devel-list@lists.gnome.org (preferably after subscribing to the mailing-list first).

These are my current plans:

• Replace all uses of g_signals with my own event stuff. None of this needs to be public and my events are a lot more performant. [ DONE ]
• Need to add a Changed event to GMimeHeaderList so that GMimeMessage can listen to changes in the toplevel mime_part's headers. When they change, we need to unset the cached header stream on the GMimeMessage. (see the "Note:" comments in message_write_to_stream and message_get_headers, while this hack works, it'd be nicer if we did it based on event callbacks)
• Get rid of GMimeSession and replace it with GMimePassphraseRequestFunc or something. See GpgMe's passphrase request callback signature for ideas. [ DONE ]
• Consider optionally using GpgMe so that we can support S/MIME?
• Consider GCancellable and GError for GMimeStreams and GMimeParser
• Add GIO-based GMimeStream and bump glib dep to 2.16 [ DONE ]
• Add a g_mime_part_get_best_content_encoding()? [ DONE ]
• Rename GMimeBestEncoding enum to GMimeEncodingConstraint? This might be a better name for the enum to reflect what it's actually meant for. Maybe also move it from gmime-filter-best.h to gmime-encodings.h?
• How about a g_mime_part_get_best_charset()? This one could be awkward since it depends on the content being UTF-8 text
• Should either rename g_mime_filter_best_encoding() to get_encoding() or else make sure that GMime.metadata 'fixes' the method name to be GetEncoding so that it will appear as a C# property getter.

Follow me on twitter

Over the past few months I'm having an even harder time motivating myself to actually make blog posts due to the convenience of microblogging on twitter.com, so this is just a note to say that if you are interested in the things I do or say, you might want to consider following me on twitter.

Building GMime in Visual Studio

Installing the Necessary Dependencies

First, install GNU's iconv library for Windows. You can get a nice msi installer from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/libiconv.htm. Unfortunately, they only offer a Win32 installer, so hopefully that's the platform you intend to target.

Next, you'll want to grab the GLib headers and libraries for Windows. The easiest way to do that is to go to http://www.gtk.org/download.html and download the All-in-One pre-built bundle for Win32. Once downloaded, extract the zip file (the docs suggest not using WinZip due to a bug) and place them wherever you want (I put mine into C:\Users\jeff\Documents).

Configuring Visual Studio

Now that the libiconv and glib headers/libraries are installed, you'll want to configure Visual Studio to know where to find those headers and libraries.

First, go to the Tools menu and select Options...:

In the Options dialog, expand the Projects and Solutions tree item and then select VC++ Directories.

Make sure Win32 is selected in the Platform option menu and then select Executable files under Show directories for:, like so:

Scroll to the bottom of the listbox and add the bin paths for your installed libiconv and Gtk+ bundle just like in the above screenshot.

After you've added the bin paths, you'll need to add the #include paths. Select Include files under Show directories for: and, like you did for the Executable paths you added above, add the paths to the include files.

Next, you'll need to ad the library paths. Under Show directories for:, select Library files and add the appropriate paths to the bottom of the list.

And that's it! You are now ready to start building GMime!

Note: I've been using Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition which you can download for free from Microsoft.

GMime Ported to Windows

The other day someone asked me about GMime on Windows and I didn't have anything to tell her other than that I thought people had built it successfully on Windows but beyond that, I didn't have any sort of VS project files or anything.

Then, last night, she poked me again asking for advice about some of the problems she was having building on Windows (which were mostly removing extraneous unistd.h includes from files that didn't need them and dropping source files that required them).

After a short while of back and forth, I decided I'd just boot into Windows myself and she helped me get my system setup (installing GNU Libiconv, grabbing the Gtk+ Windows dev packages, configuring VS to know where to look for those headers/libs, etc) so that I could more easily get instant feedback as to whether my source changes fixed the compile errors.

After a few hours of #include fixage and slight reworkings of some unix-specific code, we had a successful build of GMime.dll, woohoo!