Please protect the right to create public domain works

snap is a package format for faster release cycle on Ubuntu. Recently its snapcraft.yml description file has got license field:

# License for the snap content, based on SPDX license expressions.
license: <expression>

Which led me to discover corporate looking SPDX website that aims to set standard on package metadata. And this metadata doesn't allow public domain code:

https://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/Decisions/Dealing_with_Public_Domain_within_SPDX_Files

I expected that such project would be equally inclusive to protect the rights of people to release their code without copyright regulations. I would expect it to work with corporate and public services to enable this option, clarify its meaning and champion changes in legislation. But instead this Linux Foundation project decides that public domain code is too bothersome to deal with.

Most of my Python code is released as public domain. I like the total freedom of not being forced to deal with strings attached, and I want to give this freedom to people who use my code. I don't even want this code to be "my". I do not need copyright at all. Giving credits to people and supporting those who need support - this activity doesn't need copyright. Technology can make it automated. Being present in copyright header doesn't mean that people care. This problem copyright can not fix.

Copyright was invented before the internet, 300 hundred years ago, before git and Mercurial, and lawyers are still (ab)using it in their legal warfare, turning it against those who could show how we could use technology to build a better world, with less stress and more transparency. With the next generation mentality of the internet children, it is possible to create a next generation of ecosystem with cooperative gameplay and better ecological goals. We really need to ask each other personally - "What do you want? What do you need?" - and help each other grow internally - not externally. Collaborate on building better systems, better code, instead of squabbling on what's already been written.

Starting with myself - What did I want? I wanted recognition. I didn't want money. Copyright didn't help me to get recognition. Recognition came from my social activity, from interacting with people, building open source, collaborating together, trying to solve some problems in a better way. Many years later recognition came from inside. From mindfulness, and that was a huge relief - not trying to compete with people and show off to seem better on outside. Copyright didn't help me to get money - they came from solving problems for other people without adding new ones. Money came as a result of interacting with others over the things that I found challenging and interesting enough.

I've been paid money, because I can not survive without them, and my network was responsive to my need. I didn't write CV letters or applied to job fairs or went by advertisement in factories. Once I've become transparent to the network with open hands to be helpful, the money found their flow to compensate me for my time. In seven years I signed only one legal paper, one contract with NDA, and that was the only case when I was not paid after finishing the job. I don't want to live in your legal network - I want to be left in mine. In the network where we transparent and don't attack each other with long legal "electronic documents" that are just a scanned paper. I want to live in a netowrk where my will is a signed data structure on a public blockchain, where people are connected and understand what being a human is not easy, and appreciate our nature and support each other towards greater goal.

I don't mind people playing the copyright game. People need games to play. But I do not approve it. Suing programmers for their pet projects that got more popular than mundane office project, taking money for access to scientific papers and not paying scientists who produced them. I am tired, I am scared, because I am paranoid, and I want to opt-out from this system.

I needed support and I joined the Gratipay project. In Gratipay I didn't do much, but in the process I learned to support other people. People whose code I like, people I admire, or people who experienced difficulties, or just people who know how to have fun. I started contributing to Gratipay, because it was public domain and it was completely transparent down to the last penny - I could leave at any point and use the code that I learned in my other projects. I tried to make it better and contribute back. I learned a lot and the more questions I asked, the more interesting things I learned. About people, about economics, about financial gameplay. That was an awesome time and a great experience. I wish that everybody in their live could join a project like this. Helping completely open and transparent company. Gratipay could not survive in U.S., and now its public domain code is serving Liberapay in France.

Public domain was the only way to opt-out from copyright, and with the decision to abandon the fight for it, Linux Foundation closes the door for me to share my code with no strings attached. Treating public domain works "the same way as any license" is the worst decision the SPDX project could take. Public domain is in the "conflict of interests" zone of copyright lawyers, because it is about ignoring their domain, about the right not to care about their business and not being touched by their activities. The task for protecting public domain is for true legal hackers, the ones who go beyond compliance to see the people on the other end. Because there is always a person behind Twitter handle or GitHub account and the person means a little bit more than a "copyright holder".

SPDX raised an important point - Public Domain is not copyright. The right programmatic solution is it to add a separate copyright-optout: true field that is mutually exclusive with license, because this semantic is completely different from the paper based kludges and cargo cults of the past. It cleans up the space for the next generation of internet connected people to ask questions - how do we give credits and how do we support other people in the age of technology.

Please fight for Public Domain - it may appear more important for positive development of technology than we currently see, and it may provide a foundation for better bringing us together.

Open Source, Death, and Open Economy

Open Source is a great idea, great movement and a great boost to the progress of civilization. Open Data made transparent governments possible, which allowed people to regulate tough problems, not hide them. Open systems like Linux and Open Stack enabled building more useful software on top of more solid and stable basis (first for single operating system nodes and now for clouds and networks).

So why Open Source is dead? Because there is no such thing as software product - any software is alive as long as its code is live in the heads of its maintainers. As soon as maintainers leave, the product enters death spiral - new people enter the field to patch the product to the death. Open Source is dead, because maintaining Open Source software requires time, and every minute of that time you need to pay for food, for shelter, for the privilege to meet with your friends and be inspired. Open Source maintenance does not release maintainers from paying for all this stuff and doesn't bring them those payment tokens called `money`. So code in maintainers heads will have to die.

How come that current economy is so flawed? Does Open Source produce value? Definitely, yes. Does it solve problems for people? Yes. Do people feel grateful for Open Source? Well, sometimes (but that's also the question of consumer culture forced by current economy). And still open source developers leave their products to join (often meaningless) activities of reinventing things from scratch for other projects. Often doing things that they've paid for and not things they know and like.

How come that people with developed skills doing useful things have nothing to eat, and for food and shelter have to reformat their brain and became compliant with office slavery? Sometimes I feel like we should extend software freedom conservancy model from software to people and remove "people with money" from power part of this equation. Blockchain allows us to calculate personal values to remove this money-for-money gameplay. Gameplay that creates parasites out of people, parasites that are motivated to produce garbage, to consume and to battle each other for "market domination". Parasites don't like to be exposed, and they don't like to be parasites, so maybe Open Economy is an answer that can bring our focus back to the planet with depleting resources and increasing pollution that pushes our health and general feeling of the world down to the level of committing a suicide.

I'd like to believe, but I am loosing my insight sometimes. There are many good people who care about me in this world, and this letter won't be there if not them. But their lifetime is limited, and so is mine. I really wanted to boost progress to help with my health and global problems, but it seems I failed. This post is filled under a Python tag, which always was a part of that unconscious plan. I thought that I could enhance it to be an easier, and more intuitive tool to augment limited human abilities for automation, to help them concentrate on more important things. But it seems I failed. I still see things how they should be done, I still see that DX (developer's experience) need to raise to the top of people priorities. It is just that I am exhausted to compete for food and shelter and feel depressed over the need to reformat my natural intelligence network to do those (often meaningless) office things just to keep my body alive.

Reaction to Python development moving to GitHub

If you don't know, the Python core developers are considering move to GitHub, which I believe will abandon Roundup, Mercurial and a couple of other initiatives that some of us picked, because they were used by community and were useful to it. For example I added support for Jinja2 to Roundup, tried to add a new router component for it to enable adding new web APIs more easily, and now I am doing a release of new version, because that package is valuable.

Below is my post sent to https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/core-workflow as an immediate reaction to the PEP that addresses the migration. I think that people need to consider Python as something with much better potential than just "a product to execute computer scripts". I want people to think about it as about open process with all the involved complexity and dynamics issues, a place to study and learn about different culture than following the orders of your owner founder. Some want to see it to be isolated coding playground without all that disturbances and annoying people with external world problems. But it is unavoidable. There are already diversity statement and codes of conducts. It is time to stop being ignorant to economics for the balance.

Blender is a good example. 3D editor that every two years chooses a problem that is actual for community and makes a movie together with building necessary features in the editor. They discuss economics, try to address funding issues by working with funds outside of coding domain, bringing new initiatives, communicating and still staying open - not ignoring the issues and not trying to bring the same hammer on the new "nail". Why Python fails to follow the same route?

I don't know why it bother me that much. Probably because I am jobless and living in northern country where you can't live on street and need to pay rent, so "getting paid for the useful stuff that you do" is extremely important issue for me. But also I feel that my time is limited, and that it is very sad to spend my life behind the screen of computer, reinventing some code that was written numerous time for a company that can not support something that is already written.

I realize that with reduced exposure to a projects like Roundup and Mercurial it will be much harder (if possible at all) to gather critical mass of resources around people to experiment with sustainability models for open source, and doing these things is important, because we coming into the age of extremely powerful automation where people may not be that needed anymore. For me open source is the only way to gather data on what will happen, and maybe the only way to find the balance. Open source economics right now is when resources are limited, but there are many people how could use them, but if they use them, others (who probably can do better) may feel bad about this. This is a just a single problem that needs to be addressed in the process, and I wish that there could be that sustainable working process in the list.

Here is original mail sent:

C/C++ Must Die

It is a four hour forward only text. I am not in the mood to clean. reread, refactor, split or fix any mistakes right now, and I am not saying sorry for that, because it is how it is written with this limited keyboard interface that I practiced over my lifetime. I am sorry only if you won't be able to read or understand that, because it would mean I made it all worse. I am already at the point that I want to filter it straight to the subject, reread and fix all typos, obscure moments, digressions and words, but I've already out of time and it might happen that there won't be any time for that later.


My system background is [assembly] --> [pascal] --> [c] --> [php] --> [python], so C is not my favorite language, I am in any way attached to it and don't exhibit a feeling of nostalgia and deep sadness when thinking about what changed in the past 40 years that passed since its invention. What I really regret is that there is no a place like Bell Labs anymore that could prevent bloody enterprise from formatting people to the bloody business mindset. Formatting so badly that you even need a ton of startups to just produce ideas (not mentioning getting them right).

So, in the past 40 years, a new language appeared called Python. I don't think that Guido knew the words "usability", "user experience" or CJM when inventing it - it was just natural and human like, just because it was not engineered, but made through feeling of a human, who likes Monty Python and doesn't follow accepted rituals of human organisms in suits. I understand his desire to keep CWI copyright in place - it is a living reminder about another environment that made this thing possible. Unlike these bloody corporations that keep pressure on what you need to do and when to deliver. There is not much creativity and freedom right now. Those tiny groups of people who gather through the internet try to change the things. But the poor expressive power of non-native English language, time gap and invisible mood and attitude changes make it almost impossible to provide a stable communication channel that will not limit itself only to a narrow band of appreciation, joy and positive emoji. All negative emotions, drama, critics and depressions exists there for a reason - to express the importance of details and adapt them.

Accepted rituals of human organisms in suits. It is hard to be human. So hard that the rational part of us will never accept the idea that I, me, myself are limited. Humans had somehow devised the ethics, culture and rituals to deal with that. Implemented complex system of oppressing behavior and enforcing rules to make everyone the same and keep balance. Capitalist economy made it possible to compete, to make a gameplay to measure and estimate your value compared to someone else instead of just killing him, because his will to live just dampens yours. Money had been chosen as a universal way to solve conflicts and it worked for a few generations. Until a new generation appeared that didn't not care about conflicts and didn't see why would anyone should conflict if everything you need is money. We are still limited humans who fail to see the balance and yet we are trying to prove that we are the best, we need to be respected etc, etc. Whatever our rituals are, they are a shroud on on our eyes. The shroud that doesn't allow us to see how human really work, that our perception is not discrete and the expressive power of art is something we should explore as a discipline of human interfaces.

C/C++ is one such interface. It is a written language that no civilization from the outer world will be able to decipher. I didn't research this idea to far, so I leave it to you. It is a formal interface with brackets, asterisks and letter combinations that convey some ideas and concepts. It brings the former poor language of assembly to a whole new level. The level of more toys to play with and *exchange*. Every language invented after it was adding or removing these toys for humans to play with, but they still have hard time to combine all programming languages into the garden of toys as a whole. The garden that you can explore with the rest of your senses (further that arithmetic and text processor units in your head) to see how things work, tear them apart, which toys go well together and which just don't belong. There should be right toy for the game. It is in our mindset. We use the toy that we've used to, learned the first and like opiate, it instills us with the knowledge that this is the best tool in the world, in your world, because everything else if perhaps just worse. The nostalgic feeling brings us emotions, knowledge and experience keeps us in a comfort zone. Egoism. We want to world to be the same. But while we were playing with our toys, it changed.

Many toys appeared and vanished. Patterns made some of us high. UML - the art erased out of drawing - made slave drivers happy. These were adopted ways to transmit the knowledge, format the culture, and narrow the communication down to the limited capabilities of any human put into the bloody cage of enterprise machine. Bloody doesn't mean we can escape it. It is just bloody. I see it as squashing the humans into the cubes of comfort zones and I am afraid of it. There is no progress outside the cells of enterprise organisms and these organisms are still mostly parasites hooked on resources that they are extracting from ecosystem and killing the planet by their exhaust. If you think that Google is good - take a look to the streets - if there is any litter around - how do you think - could people from this Enterprise remove this litter with their bare hands? I think they could. It is easy and even fun. But will they?

C/C++ is not a litter. It is a tool and a toy. The world had grown a lot, but the tool and the toy stayed the same. In these 40 years we've learned that we can only have juggle 7 things in our head at a time. We have only 60 hertz in out heads compared to 3Ghz of modern CPU. 7 things is the most that can survive through the neural network while signal passes from one domain (limited 3D area) through the whole volume of absolutely parallel processing unit. The amount of thing that we need to keep in mind is bytes, chars and pointers, even for string processing. And as a humans we operate with strings. Even bytes in our heads look like hexadecimal and we are still constantly ignoring this. We are continuing to invent rational logical abstractions - new toys - instead of switching off the conscious part of our brain and concentrate on the part that scans things. In the past 42 years we've upgraded our interface from reading to scanning and nobody noticed that. The older people still insist on reading books, going through lengthy letters in mailing lists, and lots of articles. But we've invented movies, animation, visual arts, demoscene. The last one appeared and vanished - it was a sudden ray of warm and bright light - an excitement that was impossible to rationalize and explain, and that gave a birth to a whole generation of game designers out there.

C/C++ is not a game. It is a legacy, a hack, a combination of mysterious symbols that make impossible things possible. This combination has expressive power and concepts that will survive a whole new generations from now on. You will still need an instrument to manipulate memory on low level. An instrument to control hardware with high level concepts. But it is not C/C++ that needs to be used for that, because it doesn't make it optional. C/C++ doesn't help you scan programs faster, read operations behind combinations of asterisks, symbols and brackets to fill the 7 slots in your head with something that makes sense. It doesn't instill me with a sense of confidence, because the code once already written may leak in different places.

Back in a days we were playing with reversing the software. You choose the entrypoint and then try to figure out what software does. Most of the time you had to work with assembly, follow the jumps and procedures, you were writing tools to help you deal with the complexity and automate the journey. The process didn't change since. What changed is that you don't need to think about memory allocations anymore, algorithms can tackle strings more efficiently than humans, so this slot is freed too. You can concentrate on your DNA handling logic, on algorithm, on final result that you need to achieve and this result will make sense for ordinary humans,  not for people with computer science camp behind. Python made this possible by providing this interface for humans when hardware allowed that. Python adapted itself to humans who now scan things instead of reading them. You don't need a whole usability discipline to note a small nifty things to make improvements like these, but when you have this whole new usability and ux buzzworld emerged, it is somehow wrong not to take an advantage of that. It is quite natural and right from the point of standard human specie, but wrong from the point of augmented human that needs tools to be evolved to allow more freedom. Evolution in Python led to the Zen of it. It is not a speccy, not a book, not a long text in a foreign language. It is an artpiece - a thing that could only be born among people who value the artpiece of Monty Python, and appreciate irrational culture of humans and play that. Without the art squeaky PyPI will be remove and the new warehouse will be built, welcome sign will be replaced with patent paranoia, you will have to sign a paper and undergo passport scan to pass through. People attempt to save things that are important to them if they can see them. You can't see the irrational, you can't explain it, especially things that came naturally. Humans are limited in understanding things, in expressing things, complex associations and irrational thoughts that came out of their emotions, knowledge, fears and beliefs. They are limited in their ability to share this information with others, they don't have time to pass info anymore, can't communicate so fast and this is where the progress stops. Humans are limited, they can not deal with the complexity, and they naturally developed arts to deal with that. Arts communicate on different levels of perception and education, they are waiting for you to get there to feel them or came down on you rapidly right away. It is a way to look for answers, to explore, express and communicate them. It is about at least some kind of freedom in dealing with paralysis of complexity. But this is about C/C++ and I need to finish this.

C/C++ is insecurity, but at the same time it brings trust and freedom. At least it was many years ago. It is the last piece of freedom that makes hacking of the systems possible. It was fun and you don't want to kill the fun once you're there. It is not hackers, it is humans, sometimes among them, who kill the fun. Paranoia, fear, social engineering techniques that make talented hackers kill themselves. It is not fun anymore to hack things in this world of fight of limited species over limited resource. Perhaps the backdoor needs to close. I feel deep sadness and sorrow by thinking about that, but who cares anyway. There is a huge demand for a better readable human interfaces for controlling new technologies and devices that will be born to augment humans and while we are messing with bytes and pointers leaning of some memory scattered over the table, we skip the cosmos of possibilities and things that shine in depths behind our necks. There is a place for better coupling between human intention to care or not care about low level details, better interface between the though to operate on some level and the tools that make the thoughts real. It is important to keep it human oriented, because the picture that one human drawn should be intuitive and clean for other human to comprehend. If that second human is familiar with concepts, it should not undergo the long training in decyphering glyphs just to get into details. We've already seen that this is possible. Just need to experiment with this a little bit more to pave our way in the way art does it. Art is the ultimate hack of all times after the science.

And for us, for new generation of coders, C/C++ must die to let evolution continue.

Python C API/ABI compatibility report

UPDATE: There is now an official thread on python-dev.

Upstream Tracker is an open source (GPL) tool that allows to track API/ABI changes between releases of C/C++ libraries. I asked Andrey Ponomarenko, who is the main maintainer of the project, to add Python to the list and here is the result:

http://upstream-tracker.org/versions/python.html

Hope you like it.

Program config as a DNA strand

This is a technical followup to the post about mind-altering programming languages, which concentrates, iterates and extends on the abstract DNA part.

Do you know how DNA looks like from the point of view of Python programmer?
DNA is a list. Of genes, and fillers in between.

    [ GENE, GENE, GENE, None, GENE, STUFF, GENE, .... ]

By the analogy with software, one GENE is one option. Here None or STUFF is something that is not recognized and not used in the process right now, but may be used later even in a different place for a different purpose. This leads to very interesting properties of configuration described as a DNA strand.

Property One: Everything is Optional and Configurable

Usually it is a tough choice what to include into your program config, because an option a day keeps users away. But with DNA config it doesn't matter - you can encode everything - every bit of flexibility you wanted, every feature-creeper, forward-thinking matter. Don't bother yourself with restrictions - include everything.

Property Two: Indefinite Logical Groups and Namespaces

To make sense out of tons of information in a DNA strand, you need to concentrate only on the parts that are relevant to you. This is done by "masking" (or marking) parts of the DNA code according to your current task. When you apply a mask, all GENEs of DNA that are not used are cleared. You can have multiple masks for different programs. An awesome feature-creeper would be to figure out mask automatically during the program run (program explicitly marks sequences what it reads and what it skips).

Property Three: Non-linear Option Identification

Because DNA is a list, you may think that you need to know option position to access it. This is not necessary. Index in a DNA is the most straightforward way to lookup an option value, and mask is a tool to help explore and identify its position. But the true power comes from the fact that a option can be identified by just analyzing content. Option can be a single GENE in specific format, or it can be identified as a sequence of GENEs that pass some validation logic. This makes is possible to write generic configuration analyzers, which can read these sequences to detect configuration problems, patterns and meaningful values to produce nice visualization out of them.

Property Four: Application Types

In real world™ DNA is packed in chromosomes. Humans have 46. Potatoes possess 48. Zombies are somewhere in between. In a virtual world of coding it makes sense to use one chromosome per application type. For example, every Python web framework has a lot of common parts, common features and minor details in these features, so a variety of such frameworks can be encoded with a single DNA strand.

Exercise

It may sound too abstract, but try to think how to build a shared DNA strand for two or more mini web application frameworks in Python. Just remember that DNA code includes both hardcoded application features and modifiable configuration options. And as usual look at BoxCar 2D for an inspiration.

Python based VNC client in browser

What I really like in open source is when people reuse existing stuff to bring up something new. Today Arkaitz Jimenez brought up a way to connect to VNC server with browser using hybrid solution from Python, JavaScript, gevent and WebSockets.

The exciting thing that this project uses patched version of python-vnc-viewer written by Chris Liechti that I've uploaded to Google Code, because it had to be updated to work with modern versions of required libraries. It is nice to see this effort brought up something cool today.

Yet another CVS to SVN transition

Some time ago I've compiled a short comparison of CVS vs SVN. It should not be hard to get the idea from it that SVN is better - easier to understand, easier to setup and to use. While there are many new decentralized systems around like Git, Darcs and Mercurial, SVN still has the best windows working clients that are even able to transparently authenticate against domain proxies. That's why SVN is the most accessible way of getting sources.

Many projects realize that and make switch to SVN to expose their public repositories to a wider audience even if some conservative developers are unwilling to change their habits and tools. Still the convenience that brought by SVN worth the efforts of rewriting tools and moving legacy codebase over to new rails. CVS deserves to be honored a special award in the history of software development, but perspective open source projects realize that evolution never stops and time comes to replace legacy CVS with tools that value developer's time. Here is a list of such projects that made the decision to help with yours:

• May 5, 2005 - KDE
• June 7, 2006 - pygame
• September, 2006 - ArgoUML
• December 14, 2006 - SWIG
• January 1, 2007 - GNOME
• January 24, 2008 - phpBB
• June 2008 - FreeBSD

To migrate from CVS there is cvs2svn tool written in Python hosted on tigris.org that can move CVS repository as big as Mozilla or FreeBSD to SVN or Git.

Bloodless partition backup

Sometimes it may happen that a system blackbox arrives at your desk together with a person begging to do something to make it work again. It may have been hardware failure, power outage, virus or just a prank that made this panicked person pull the plug out of the outlet and shamefully accept that "I am afraid to turn it on after that!!" What should be the first reaction? Backup what is left. There are tons of backup software available, but most of it just copy files from one place to another on a regular basis. What you need in this situation is to copy a whole disk to network drive without booting the system preferably on the same hardware to avoid mounting HDDs. This is a task for disk cloning tools.

And while it seems logical to think about Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost on the second thought they are not really great when you need quick burn-and-use ISO image that they are unlikely to provide in their downloads section. So the best way is to check what open source has to offer. There are several tools:

• Clonezilla


• FOG - Free OpenSource Ghost


• g4u - Ghost for Unix


• G4L - Ghost for Linux


• LRS - Linbox Rescue Server


• Mondo Rescue


• PartImage


• Trinity Rescue Kit

The list of 8 product seems enough to choose one. Let me remind that we need ready-to-run Live CD capable to save partition or disk image to a remote network location. Throw out Mondo - it doesn't provide Live CD. TRK 3.2 also goes to the shelf - this very nice Boot CD doesn't include tools to backup/restore partition to a network drive. A pity. Linbox Rescue Server - free GPLed version can't backup NTFS partitions - won't work. FOG - project named "Free Ghost" doesn't have Live CD! and even with such promising name is designed solely for distributing the same disk image to multiple workstations over the network. Removed. So what is left:

• Clonezilla


• g4u - Ghost for Unix


• G4L - Ghost for Linux


• PartImage

After browsing these sites for a bit the first intention was to get rid of tools with ugly web-pages and short feature list. And it is where g4u beats them all. How can two floppy images in total 3Mb long compete with the raw power of 90Mb image of Clonezilla? Well, let's see. It was very easy to download and run g4u 2.3 from VirtualBox. Boot message gives almost all necessary information to go on except it doesn't say that you need user "install" on your FTP server. FTP is the only supported method for upload/download, but it's ok. Because of simplicity this tool had all the chances to be the chosen one of this review. Even in Windows you can easily setup FTP server given Far Manager, Python and this plugin. g4u is a tool that does the job of backing up partition, whole drive and compressing it via GZIP, but!:

1. There is no command history - and you have to retype whole command every time you've made a mistake
2. There is no anonymous FTP login option - extra hassle to setup "install" FTP user
3. Empty password is not allowed
4. No progress bar with total MB/percentage completed, not speaking about estimated time
5. Rather obscure GZIP option, which basically means compression level (default is 9 - the biggest)

To end up with g4u - an ideal approach for this awesome and minimal tool with limited usability would be to grow its ISO to 10Mb disk image by including Python and provide some wizards in .py

Next is Clonezilla - wizard interface. No FTP. Only SSH, SAMBA or NFS server that needs to be mounted for an image file. For folks without Linux experience the most complicated stuff is probably to understand "mount clonezilla image directory" dialog which basically means to attach "share" where image files can be stored (sorry for the lame comment). Saving partition image worked like a charm - not only it displayed progress window, but also detected space in use! and saved only used part. Magic! I just wonder if I'll be able to restore image manually in case Clonezilla fails. In directory with image file there are text files with disk and partition parameters, but image file itself is in custom format. In case of NTFS system - in ntfsclone 2.0 To conclude - Clonezilla version 1.0.9-10 CD is nice and usable, but a single mistake during wizard requires to start the process anew. Let's skim over alternatives.

Ghost for Linux - doesn't have its own web-page - only standard SourceForge project template, but provides ISO image for downloads. The project itself is similar to g4u - the same FTP upload method with compression, but much better interface. Version 0.24 is GPLed and Linux-based. In comparison g4u is BSD-licensed and NetBSD-based. Ok, about the contents. Multiple boot options varied mostly by linux kernel. Weird. I do not want to try every one to find out which of them will do the job. Good reference is shown right after startup documenting two options, but lazy one would prefer only the first - to enter "g4l" at command line to start wizard interface. This preferably could be just one line reminder before the system proposes shell. The nice thing about g4l wizards is that they allow to go back to correct options. Nevertheless, the real test failed on VirtualBox, because there was no default 'img' directory on FTP, and even though g4l created it, it hung afterwards. After manual restart and mkdir 'img' on FTP the process successfully completed. It can be FTP or VirtualBox bug - no idea, but with this minimal correction the test passed. Resume: setup is minimal and intuitive, though partition selection doesn't give any info about partition type. Ideal for FTP backup, but for other network access types I would still prefer Clonezilla. g4l like Clonezilla includes ntfsclone utility for NTFS backup, but its version is slightly outdated and should be selected explicitly. If you remember - there is no partition information displayed.

PartImage doesn't have its own Live CD, but seems to be the tool of choice used on PING "Backup and Restore Disk Partitions" Live CD and on SystemRescueCd. PING 2.01.10 is even more simple than Clonezilla, includes wizard interface, for network storage supports only SMB shares and requires that a predefined set of directories is already created in the destination share. This predefined set is only described on official site and that's strange, because Clonezilla manages to create all required directories automatically. So PING is not an option for burn-and-boot solution. Another annoyance is that Alt-Tab pressed within VirtualBox ends PING session prematurely. Too bad. Let's see the last one. At last!

SystemRescueCd is a whole bunch of useful tools for plumbing works. However, even with the nice help displayed at startup knowledge of *nix and the tools is still required. If I haven't used Clonezilla or g4l I had no chance to know that I needed ntfsclone. In addition I must admit I still do not remember what cmd I have to type to mount SMB share. SystemRescueCd may be the best Rescue Live CD, but it is not as convenient and intuitive as more specialized tools. As a typical lame windows user I've failed to use it properly. I.e. for backup, but there is still awesome utility named 'gparted' for disk partitioning that I would recommend to everyone. In fact there is a very awesome project that combines SystemRescueCD and Clonezilla Live CD in one disk. Grab it here - you won't regret. =)

The verdict.
To backup your disk or partition via SSH, SAMBA or NFS use Clonezilla. For convenient backup to FTP use g4l.

That's all. Enjoy!

Far Manager goes open source

Far Manager of File and Archive Manager - is text mode file manager for windows originally developed by Eugene Roshal.

The news are that from version 1.8 Far Manager goes open source and Unicode! While the project is still in development on SVN it is possible to try this new alpha from http://farmanager.com/farbugs/Far180.b300.x86.rar

Project release

Something to care about when releasing open source project to the public.
How to make it visible?

Every project solves a problem and the first thing people would like to know is not a coolness degree of the project, but where the problem is. There are of course professionals who do not need anything to explain, but for major part of an audience this might be an issue. Why would you care? Perhaps because people might not be interested in your project right now, but they (or their colleagues) can stumble upon the same problem in future and they will have better chances to remember your project if you will interest them enough.

Try to figure out what assumptions your end-users might not have about the problem (they may not realize that this is a problem that needs solving). If possible, explain the problem in terms that even a beginning programmer could understand. Consider your audience though.

Next, how does the package/project uniquely solve the problem? This is something that most documentation lacks. For example, there are many template engines. All of them solve the same problem, but none of them do it in the same way. A block-based template engine does not have any logic at all, whereas a template like Smarty defines a whole new template language. Some template engines compile their templates, others don't. What is unique about your package? Can someone who has never seen the code get a good idea of how does it solve the problem?

In the end (and this is rather obvious) every publicly accessible aspect of the package must be thoroughly documented. If your package/project is a re-usable class, document every method that users should expect to use. If your package has public constants, document their meaning and where they should be used. Document any interfaces that users must use, such as a database DSN, command-line arguments for applications, configuration file contents, or any other non-code elements.

Include at least 2 code examples: one simple and one complex. This is obvious, but projects and packages are designed to be used - show your users how to use them! :) An ideal approach would be to provide a CookBook with recipes for intended meaning and not just testcases, so that users can contribute some.

At last, proofread your documentation. If possible, have someone else who is not as familiar with your project take a look at the documentation. They will catch assumptions that you have missed. This is probably the most important step - to get a test look from outside.