Apple obligingly allows you to browse and download the open source software they use in OS X. Since they have listings for each version of OS X, I decided to take a look at how much software they were using that was only available under the GNU public license. The results are illuminating:

This clearly supports the idea that Apple is aggressively trying to remove all GPL-licensed software from OS X. While the removal of Samba and GCC got some attention, the numbers show that there’s a more general purging going on.

The 29 remaining GPL-licensed packages aren’t too healthy either. Lion apparently ships with bash 3.2. That’s from 2006. The current version is 4.2.10. Why no upgrade? Because Apple’s shipping the last version of bash that was under the GPL version 2.

The message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that?

There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.

So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?

I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

Apple’s Q4 results were its best ever. They even managed to claw back some marketshare from Android. This should be a loud wakeup call for Android device manufacturers. I’ve been an Android user for a couple of years now, but let me say that there are some areas where Apple wins hands down.

Choice

Too much choice is a bad thing. I like that Android has phones with and without keyboards, phones in a variety of sizes, and so on. Unfortunately, HTC, Motorola and Samsung seem to crap out a new phone every couple of months, most of them indistinguishable from each other.

HTC Amaze, Wildfire S, Sensation, MyTouch 4G, Evo 3D, Evo Design? They’re all keyboardless. Apart from one of them being 3G, I’d be hard pressed to decide between them, or even tell them apart in the store.

And yet, the amount of real choice is less than ever. The phone I want is nowhere to be found (see end of posting).

Support

If you get an iPhone, you know there will be OS updates for a couple of years. In contrast, Android handset vendors have screwed over customers so many times that I won’t buy a phone unless I know for sure it’s supported by CyanogenMod. People who don’t care about freedom so much will just take the easy option and buy an iPhone. Trust matters deeply when you’re not technically minded.

I want to buy a tablet. Right now, I’m waiting, because I don’t trust any of the vendors to actually ship Android 4 for their tablets in a timely fashion, even if they’ve promised that it’ll be here in weeks. (I learned that lesson from HTC with my phone.) Again, people who don’t care about freedom so much will buy an iPad, because at least they can trust that Apple will ship OS updates for a year or two.

Experience

Part of the reason why manufacturers say they have trouble shipping OS updates, is that they all insist on layering extra crap on top of Android. But that’s not the only reason to dislike the value-subtract which handset makers keep applying.

My phone used to have HTC Sense. Installing CyanogenMod was the best thing I ever did to it. Suddenly the address book worked properly and I could star favorite contacts. The launcher lost the horrible bubbles around the icons. The useless social stream app and the voice search that never worked were gone, and the phone search button did something useful again.

I went to T-Mobile to look at phones. The HTC ones still have Sense UI crap all over them, and it’s still ugly. I don’t want it. And if you’re one of the people who does want it, there’s nothing to stop HTC from offering it as an optional add-on exclusive to their phones, without forcing it on people.

Motorola have claimed that the carriers are forcing them to layer UI crap on top of Android, because otherwise they’d end up with a half dozen identical Android phones on their shelves. Well, yes, see “Choice” above. Screwing up the UI so your multiple identical phones will look different is solving the wrong problem.

My perfect phone

OK, so support and experience suck, but at least we have choices, right? Well, it doesn’t seem that way to me. Here’s what I want from a phone:

So many Android phones out there, and yet precisely zero of them seem to meet my fairly mundane requirements, even if you relax the demand for Android 4. In fact, right now T-Mobile has no stock Android phones at all. Yet it wasn’t too long ago that they were selling the HTC G2, a stock Android phone with keyboard.

Something is very wrong here, and unless Google and the phone manufacturers can do something about it, the iPhone might get back the position of #1 smartphone platform.

“‎I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” — Mitt Romney.

“I think all righthtinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not! And I’m sick and tired of being told that I am.” — Graham Chapman, Monty Python’s Flying Circus

I’ve come to realize that Ron Paul’s rhetorical positioning is extremely clever, in that it allows him to appeal to both sides of many issues. To put it another way, he is able to take a theoretical stand against bad things while advocating policies that would lead directly to them.

Consider racism, for example. Ron Paul believes that the Civil Rights Act should never have been passed. He thinks that companies and individuals should be free to be as racist as they like. Want to post a “No blacks need apply†sign? He thinks you should have the freedom to do that. And yet, at the same time, Ron Paul states clearly that he personally thinks that racism is a bad thing. It’s very unfair, no doubt about it. It’s just that he feels that we should wait until everyone voluntarily decides to stop being racist, rather than passing laws. It’s regrettable that giving people the freedom to be racist would result in a lot of racism, but what are you going to do, eh? It’s just human nature.

So his liberal supporters get to point at his statements against racism; and his neo-Nazi supporters at Stormfront get to point at his statements against the Civil Rights Act and his desire to repeal laws against discrimination. And he gets to shrug, grin, and dodge the issue.

Well, I think this is an ingenious position. Why don’t we try it with some other laws?

Sure, theft is bad. But we shouldn’t have big government forcing people to stop thieving. Instead, we should patiently wait until everyone voluntarily decides to stop. In fact, it’s the statists who cause theft with their legislation, dividing people into “have†and “have notâ€, “owner†and “not ownerâ€, and leading to people’s obsession with property, right? But you know, theft is really really bad. Making it legal shouldn’t in any way be seen as condoning it, OK?

Something I was thinking about the other day.

It was just another treacherous night in the big city when I opened the “LA Noire” case. You doubtless saw the headlines—big name publisher picks up well reviewed game from independent studio. There was another story I was interested in, though. According to the police files, there had been accusations of appalling working conditions, and the whole shebang had been deep sixed a few months later in mysterious circumstances. That left me with a few loose ends to tie up.

I sat back and pondered the cocktail I had been handed. A fifth of hidden object puzzle, a generous dash of choose-your-own-adventure, a touch of cover-based shootout, and I could definitely detect a hint of sandbox. It added up to something, but what? There was only one way to find out. I slipped the disc into my PS3.

The graphics hit me first, a one-two combo punch of lush environments mixed with uncanny valley facial animation. The story moved like molasses on a winter’s morning. Yet it wasn’t long before I was hooked, as hooked as the morphine addicts who were turning up dead on the streets of the city of angels. I wandered the lovingly rendered streets from crime scene to crime scene, chasing down perps who were seedier than a parakeet’s breakfast.

It takes a strong stomach to be a detective. When there’s a serial killer beating and slashing his female victims, someone has to kneel over the desecrated corpse and turn it over for clues. I won’t even go into my time working the arson desk; suffice it to say I’ll never look at a rack of ribs the same way again.

Maybe that was the hook, the unflinching attempt at realism. Maybe we all want to be heroes, or maybe I was won over by the delight of there being something different in the world of console adventures. Whatever it was, I’m glad I was there. The story may be more of an interactive movie than is good for it, but entertainment is entertainment as long as your expectations aren’t out of whack.

Would I recommend that you follow in my footsteps? Well, if you’ve got patience and determination, and pay attention to detail, you could do worse. Sure, the path’s as linear as the proverbial straight and narrow, and if you wander off track the illusion of freedom in a living city falls apart faster than a shanty town being hit by a tornado. But hey, those are the breaks. Me, I think it’s worth it for the chance to take part in a car chase in a Tucker Torpedo and a shoot out around the Spruce Goose.

Back in December, Jon Mitchell wrote a post about a week of jury duty. He posted it to his personal web site, posted it on readwriteweb.com, and posted it on Google+.

Around ten days later, he did a Google search for ‘Jon Mitchell jury duty’, and discovered that the Google+ postings of the article were being ranked higher than the ReadWriteWeb copy. For some reason this made him angry, so he wrote a posting on Google+ accusing Google+ of being sleazy.

Anyone familiar with how Google ranks pages could probably guess what was happening here. Google’s algorithm ranks pages higher if they are more recent, more frequently updated, or linked to from pages that are more recent or more frequently updated. As people shared and discussed the G+ posting, that was boosting its page rank.

I made a comment in reply to his whiney article that apparently pissed him off so much that it was featured in his new article about how Google+ is going to mess up the Internet. Not just the web—the entire Internet. Gosh!

His complaint starts with the following observation:

Page down, and you get to his repost of my comment:

That’s right—after complaining that Google+ is transgressing by not attributing content, he goes and reproduces my entire comment without attributing it in any way. No link back to the thread, no link to my profile, not even a name. Just “some guy”.

But I’m not writing this to point out the blatant hypocrisy; I’m writing because he apparently didn’t understand my comment. He could have asked me to explain it, but that would have meant actually carrying on a conversation on Google+ where I might see it. Instead, he wrote another article about how evil Google was, and set out to mock the comment there.

Thanks, Jon. I thought the reason for the two words was pretty obvious—I was a reader of your article, and I’m a user of Google+. I was commenting from the point of view of someone who wears both metaphorical hats. My comment would not apply to someone who read the article but didn’t use G+, or who used G+ but didn’t read the article. Hence my use of both words.

No, Jon. Hoops like having to register on yet another fucking web site. Reading the article was certainly no joy, but the thing about Google+ is that I use it. Therefore I can reply to something posted on Google+ simply by typing my reply and hitting the submit button.

If I wanted to reply on ReadWriteWeb, I would have to jump through the following hoops:

And that’s given that I’ve already used Disqus at least once and that I’m willing to link an existing ID to it; otherwise there are additional steps to link an ID to Disqus or create a new one. That kind of hassle is why OpenID hasn’t taken off, according to ReadWriteWeb. It’s why I confidently predict that Jon Mitchell won’t reply to this article on my web site.

In fact, the fact that all the comments on ReadWriteWeb are invisible without JavaScript is likely one of the reasons why G+ discussions are being ranked above ReadWriteWeb pages. Again, anyone familiar with how search engines work should have realized that.

Actually, no. It’s nowhere near as good as Usenet conversations were 20 years ago, from a functionality point of view. I could easily come up with half a dozen improvements that could be made to Google+. There are other sites I use, like Reddit, that I’m pretty much equally happy with. I use G+ to share links to things because it’s convenient, supports discussion, and respects privacy reasonably well. (And, alright, because it’s not Facebook.) I’d really rather we were all using something decentralized like Diaspora, but so far hardly anyone has followed me over there.

And yes, I’d be more interested in a Reddit posting of a Jon Mitchell article than the copy on ReadWriteWeb, for exactly the same reasons mentioned above—I already have the account set up, I’m already logged in, I can join in a discussion with zero hoop-jumping required.

So basically, there are a number of big obvious points that Mr Mitchell apparently hasn’t grasped.

Firstly, conversation about something on the web is far more interesting than sitting back and being a passive reader of it.

Secondly, friction matters. People are lazy, and will engage in conversation wherever it’s most easy and pleasant for them to do so.

Thirdly, friends matter. People will tend to converse on sites where their friends converse.

Because of these fairly obvious human tendencies, if you expect people to register just to comment on your web site, you are likely to be disappointed. If you expect people to pick your web site for their discussion in preference to systems they are already using, like Google+ or Reddit or Facebook, then you are even more likely to be disappointed.

This is exactly why I re-post the things that I write on Google+: so that my friends can discuss them without having to deal with OpenID-type registration hassles or learning yet another threaded comment system. I assumed that was why Jon Mitchell posted his stuff on G+, but apparently not.

There are other points in the article I could criticize, such as the ridiculous idea that it’s Google’s fault when the crappy iPad browser crashes trying to render Google+; my iPad crashes on Facebook too.  Sure, the G+ app on iOS isn’t as nice as the Android one; but given the way Apple has treated Google in the past, I think iOS users are lucky they’re getting an iOS app at all.

While writing all this, I noticed that two G+ postings about Jon Mitchell’s jury duty are once more appearing above the ReadWriteWeb article in the search results, so now he can get angry all over again. Or perhaps he’ll quote me anonymously and without attribution in another article complaining about being quoted anonymously and without attribution. Wouldn’t that be ‘darling’ of him?

With the current focus on Ron Paul’s newsletters and his claim that he was unaware of their content or did not approve of it (yeah, right), I thought it would be educational to take a look at quotes from articles explicitly written by Ron Paul himself.

Ron Paul defends a gay person’s freedom — unless it’s the freedom to get married, in which case he thinks federal interference in your personal life is just fine:

Ron Paul supports state governments in their attempts to criminalize sex acts between consenting adults, saying that the state has the right to enforce sodomy laws:

Ron Paul is strongly anti-abortion:

Ron Paul believes government should actively promote religious beliefs:

As for the Civil Rights Act, that was a bad thing, because the right to post “No coloreds need apply” signs and run whites-only businesses and clubs was infringed:

In fact, Ron Paul goes further, claiming that people who attempt to promote diversity within organizations are the true promoters of racism:

Got any more good ones?

Dreamwidth is an offshoot of LiveJournal that a lot of people moved to in search of a censorship-free blogging platform. A recent hagiographic biographical sketch of Denise Paolucci coincided with a posting from someone I know offering Dreamwidth invites, and it occurred to me that there are still a lot of people who don’t know why they should be wary of Dreamwidth. So, here we go, one more time.

Let’s start with the Dreamwidth Diversity Statement. It has received a lot of praise. It certainly sounds good:

Stirring stuff. But if you read the Terms of Service they are practically the same as LiveJournal’s. What’s more, section XVII of the TOS says:

That’s right; Dreamwidth explicitly state that their Diversity Statement, Guiding Principles and other promimently posted documents are not in any way binding on them. So that Diversity Statement is really just cheap feel-good platitudes, exactly the garbage that it says is cheap. The cynicism is breathtaking.

You might want to believe that the founders of Dreamwidth nevertheless believe in freedom of speech, and that even though they won’t be bound by their principles, they still plan to uphold them. Well, here’s a wonderful quote from Denise Paolucci, co-founder of Dreamwidth, which describes exactly how committed she is to freedom of speech:

Got that? Freedom of speech simply isn’t applicable to privately held companies like LiveJournal or Dreamwidth.  And if you don’t like that, Denise Paolucci politely invites you to fuck off.

Why did Paolucci make such comments? Simple. She was in charge of LiveJournal’s infamous Abuse team for five years. Curiously, she doesn’t mention this in her Dreamwidth staff profile. In fact, she gives a long list of jobs she performed, but doesn’t even mention the one she’s best known for: head of decency enforcement during the whole “nipplegate” mess. As user yonmei recalls:

She was also the person who banned me and deleted my journal because I posted public information; something similar happened to Alexander Lucard and to user yellow_finch, so it wasn’t an isolated incident.

Here’s a nice piece of doublethink from one of Denise Paolucci’s nipplegate e-mails:

So it’s not that breastfeeding is dirty, shameful or obscene, we just don’t want people seeing nudity and violence in public. We support your right to make your own parenting choices, we just think that other people’s parenting choices are more important.

Of course, Paolucci herself used a user icon showing a sports bra with visible nipple. Rules don’t apply when you’re the one enforcing them, after all.

The Dreamwidth Diversity Statement ends “Come dream with us”. If you believe what’s written in that document, you are indeed dreaming.

Mark Steel is a UK comedian and a committed socialist. In “What’s Going On?” he describes his world falling apart. His marriage is collapsing, and at the same time he’s coming to believe that the Socialist Worker’s Party will never be an effective political organization. (Yeah, I know.) All that, and mid-life crises too:

I’ve had similar experiences. With the Iraq War now finally over (again, for the time being), it was interesting to read Mark Steel’s recollection of the anti-war protests in the UK. The whole nightmare still seems vaguely surreal to me. There were anti-war protests so huge that you couldn’t see the edges of the crowd, and yet the next day you’d read in the media that everyone supported the war. Now if you look back at poll numbers, even in the US support for invading Iraq without UN approval barely rose above 50% at its peak. And that was after the majority had been confused into believing that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Within a few months of the war starting, the majority said it had been started under false assumptions and was a mistake. And yet here we are, a trillion dollars down, having caused somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 civilian deaths—we’ll probably never have an accurate figure.

Meanwhile, the super-rich trashed the world economy, and are now trying to squeeze the poor to bail themselves out. People are so angry they’re sleeping in protest camps in cities around the world. But Mark Steel takes a step back to ask the even bigger question: How did we get to the point where it seems universally accepted that profit is the only reason you can possibly having for doing anything? Could we not have proper TV news, not in order to make money (it won’t) but just because we need to have an informed population? Rather than encouraging people to take out student loans to get a college degree so that they can get a better job to pay back the student loans with, couldn’t we go back to encouraging people to go to college because education and knowledge are generally good things, even enjoyable?