Mon, 23 Apr 2007
The Tea Has Arrived
I got tired of buying 50 gram packs of Jasmine Green tea in Albert (a local supermarket chain) - it has required a lot of effort from my side to remember whether I already need a new pack tea or not. So I have looked for somebody who can send me - say - 1 kg of tea as a wholesale.
Last week I have finally managed to search the web for the wholesale distributors of tea in the Czech republic. Unfortunately almost all of them seem to require that the wholesale customer is a company (with the company ID number, tax number, etc.). I have nevertheless mailed them with a request that I want to order 1-2 kgs of tea, and asked for discount prices. Some of them have responded (one of them with rather poor discount offer, which I have declined).
I have ordered about two kilograms of tea from Dobrá čajovna (they gave me access to their wholesale price list), and two from Teanet-CN (who offered a discount price). Teanet-CN is (as the name suggests) a shop for Chinese teas only. I have decided to order higher sorts of tea than plain Jasmine Green, and despite of that I managed to stay below the per-gram price of Albert for most teas. Nice. As an additional bonus, in a next year or so I will always have the tea I want ready, without having to remember to actually buy it.
Fri, 06 Apr 2007
OpenBSD in a GPL Violation
Remember how Greg Kroah-Hartmann got flamed by the OpenBSD people for offering to write a GPL-licensed driver for everything, based on an assumption that open specifications are better for general public than the open (GPL-licensed, in this case) driver? Well, my feeling always was that you need an overly big ego to create and manage a fork of a big project, like Theo de Raadt[?] did with OpenBSD.
Now guess what happens when somebody accidentally finds out that his GPL-licensed code has been committed to OpenBSD without even asking for relicensing under the BSD license. This has happened even though there are unrestricted specifications available for the hardware in question.
I find the whole discussion in the linux-wireless list
to be quite enlightening. Despite the bcm43xx developers
clearly stating that they are willing to relicense the parts of the driver
under the BSD license, provided that OpenBSD developers really ask
for relicensing, the Theo's resolution of the problem was to simply
delete the bcw driver in question and then to
moan
about Linux bcm43xx developers being evil and against a public good(tm). Which is the worst possible solution for both OpenBSD team and the OpenBSD users.
Also the interesting thing is that this case clearly shows the superiority of GPL over the BSD license in its fairness which is well balanced between the developers and the users under the GPL, unlike the BSD license.
Disclaimer: I own a laptop with a Broadcom 4306 wireless card
and I think it was quite a heroic effort on the bcm43xx people side,
to split their team into two parts which never communicate with each other
directly, one part writing a publicly available specs based on reverse
engineering the existing drivers and firmware, and the other part writing
a Linux driver as a clean room
design based on these specs.