SteveStreeting.com

Gartner haven’t exactly been the sharpest tools in the box when it comes to predicting open source trends over the last few years, vastly underestimating it until about 2008, by which time it didn’t exactly take a professional analyst to tell you that it was popular. Still, now they’ve woken up to its potential, occasionally they post something useful. In particular, I liked a recent blog post about how open source is “trending towards customer obscurity” – that is to say that while open source is incredibly important to producers of software, the vast majority of consumers don’t really care how their software is made any more than they care how their car was made.

I support this view, and it’s one I’ve subscribed to for a while (although the somewhat condescending tone of the article is typical Gartner, the point is valid). My own open source software is aimed squarely at developers, where I think it adds value; since the users of my software are themselves making significant development investment in products using it, open source has significant advantages – the openness and participation-friendly nature of the development, the fact that the software can never be taken away from them either by company policy or acquisition, the fact that absolutely nothing is hidden behind any curtains so there aren’t any nasty surprises. When you’re investing your own time building on top of a foundation, there really is no substitute for being able to see all the working parts, should you want or need to.

Developers can be quite a broad church too – enterprises for example often have a need to modify and adapt software and that’s why open source has been very popular there too, even if they’re not actually making products of their own for publication.

But there’s also a vast group of people who are more traditional consumers (personally and in companies) – and they have no reason to care about open source if they’re never going to modify the software. There is a group of people who are philosophically dedicated to using free software (more so than open source) even if they never modify it themselves, but they’re a minority in the grand scheme of things. Most people that use open source do so because they feel it gives them what they need as users. Even personally, I use Linux on my servers not because I’m dedicated to using open source over the alternatives wherever I can (although I probably do have more bias in that direction than the average), but because it does exactly what I want in a server – it’s reliable, unobtrusive, cheap, has low hardware requirements and plenty of good software. Conversely, I don’t use Linux on the desktop much because personally I don’t feel it operates better than the commercial alternatives in that environment. I decide on a case-by-case basis what works best for me, and so do all but the most fanatical of users.

Now, of course open source regularly helps developers make better products (by using mature, reusable and adaptable components), which in the end can result in more users using software made from open source even if they don’t realise it. But the important thing to remember is that open source itself isn’t a marketing bullet point except to developers and the enthusiast minority. Like any gathering of like-minded people who mostly talk to each other, we open source developers / advocates can often forget that our enthusiasms aren’t necessarily shared by the rest of the populace. We have to remember that the end result is everything – and while open source definitely has a positive knock-on effect on product quality, it’s often a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. It’s obvious really, but worth keeping in mind.

Git is picky when it comes to converting large, moderately complex Subversion repositories and so far the only option I’ve found that works reliably is using the very latest version on Linux. Forget about using 1.6.5 on Windows via msysGit, at least for the git-svn conversion it’s very, very unreliable. Similarly I found Git 1.5 on Linux very flaky for the svn conversion. This doesn’t give me the greatest confidence in Git but in order to properly explore all the angles, I’ve committed to making it work even if it means I have to monkey about a bit.

So, I installed a fresh Kubuntu 9.04 (and of course, 9.10 went stable a few days later) and tried to build Git 1.6.5 from source. The configure script is unfortunately a bit rubbish and doesn’t bother trying to detect the dependencies though, so for those that don’t want to go through the fail/retry build loop I went through, here are the packages you’ll want to install via apt from a clean version:

• build-essential
• curl
• libcurl3
• tk
• subversion
• libsvn-perl
• cpio
• zlib
• zlibg1-dev
• expat
• perl
• iconv

If like me you use the excellent wajig wrapper around apt, you can also do ‘wajig build-depend git-svn’, but that seems to install things that are not strictly necessary in the default build (but maybe are needed with some non-standard options).

sudo apt-get install curl
   41  sudo apt-get install libcurl
   49  sudo apt-get install tk8.4
   53  sudo apt-get install cpio expat
   55  sudo apt-get install zlib
   61  sudo apt-get install build-essential
   66  sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
   72  sudo apt-get install asciidoc
   75  sudo apt-get install xmlto

I’ve been pushing quite hard to get this done before I head off to Qt DevDays next week, and luckily it all came together in the last few days:

Some of the notable back-of-the-box (if there was a box) items:

• Upgrade to SpeedTree v5 – supporting all the great new features. See the SpeedTree site for more details on this release.
• More lighting options – Ambient Occlusion, Ambient Contrast, Specular Lighting, Transmission Lighting, Global Light Scalar, HDR.
• Improved LOD fading – LOD transitions are now implemented via less perceptible techniques thanks to SpeedTree v5.
• Dynamic soft self-shadowing via depth shadowmaps – (was also demonstrated on SpeedTree 4.2 in OgreSpeedTree 1.1.0)
• Improved alpha to coverage support – alpha to coverage rendering has been significantly improved and is now enabled by default (you must render with at least 2xMSAA to see the effect), resulting in significantly smoother foliage edges and smoother fade transitions.

I’m just really, really glad to have got this done. SpeedTree v5 was quite a big change to handle, but hugely worthwhile, the guys at IDV have done a great job. I made the choice from v1 to do a ‘deep’ integration (ie all objects are first-party Ogre objects, everything uses Materials and RenderQueues properly, etc), which made the transition considerably more time consuming than using the higher level pass-through interfaces, so this took some effort. I like it this way though, it means it’s a ‘real’ integration as far as I’m concerned, not just a simplistic bolt-on.

There’s still more to do, not least of which a demo that’s more interesting than just a technical performance test But at least I can tick off one of the major things on my TODO now. I’d been putting in quite a few extra hours to try to handle this, and my Qt presentation preparation, and Ogre, and consultancy, and it has taken its toll a bit – I’ve been spending more time at the desk and think that was a contributing factor to me straining my back at the gym last weekend. Hopefully that’s just temporary, I’ve been a lot better these last few months.

Hope you like the shots anyway. I know, I’m pimping them all over the place in my Twitter, here and on the Ogre site, but a guys gotta make a living, right?

Sony’s PR machine has been rather contrite of late, after some really quite stellar gaffes a few years ago, but comments from Kaz Harai in an interview recently are a firm return to the ‘what in Gods name were you thinking?’ school of PR. Ignoring the fanboy-baiting predictions of who’s going to ‘win’ (given the expansions in the game industry, does anyone have to ‘win’?), the bit that got my attention was when he talked about the (many would say unnecessary) complexity of developing for the PS3:

“We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that [developers] want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?”

I had to read that twice to see whether he’d really, actually said that – it’s a pretty big insult to developers.

Developers are a problem-solving breed. But here’s the thing – unless you’re a student, or just hacking around on your own time for fun, you have deadlines. Time is money, and professional developers have people breathing down their necks for results, and having spent N times as long as estimated to utilise / optimise something doesn’t tend to go down too well. And as developers mature and become more savvy about the environment they work in, rather than just being geeky hackers, they generally start to look less for pointless puzzle boxes, and more for things that make them productive.

So what would they do with the other 9 1/2 years? They’d probably spend it on making new and exciting actual products rather than decoding an esoteric design.

Anyone can design something to be complicated. The real genius lies in making something powerful, and at the same time making it easy to access that power. You honestly shouldn’t be proud of a design that’s difficult to use – the layman’s way of looking at it might be “Hey, but developers will be squeezing new stuff out of it in 7 years time!”, but the more informed way of looking at it is “Developers would have been getting that power from day 1, if some idiot hadn’t buried it under so many layers of obscurity”.

Kaz, I’d advise skipping the GDC this year, or if you do, best to wear some projectile-proof clothing of some sort.

I’m on the Qt (owned by Nokia now) mailing list since I have a commercial license for a client project, and I got a very interesting email today, telling me that on its release in March 2009, Qt 4.5 will be available under the LGPL.

This is really big news. Up until the current Qt 4.4, your only licensing options are a per-seat and per-platform commercial license (which adds up if you have multiple developers and multiple target platforms, which you will do if you’re using Qt anyway), or alternatively the free option which means you use it under the GPL – meaning all your own code has to also be GPL, with an exception that allows you to publish / use software under other open source licenses too, but nevertheless it all has to be public. There’s a pretty big chasm in between these two options that in my experience a lot of projects fell into.

So, offering an LGPL option from Qt 4.5 is a major development. Qt is a really excellent library, the best cross-platform, native code widget set I’ve seen, but the licensing cost often put people off; this changes everything. I’m actually quite surprised they’re going this far – I think just changing the commercial licensing structure to be a little less multiplicative would have made a lot of people happy, but the LGPL option really turns things upside down. Essentially it means that you get all the cost benefits of the GPL version, except there’s a ‘fire break’ of open source responsibility between Qt and your application, meaning a lot more people can consider it. Nokia’s stated aims are:

• facilitate wider adoption of Qt across industries, desktop, web and embedded platforms
• establish Qt as a de facto standard for application development
• receive more valuable feedback and increased user contributions to ensure that Qt remains the best-in-class, cross-platform framework
• extend Nokia’s existing platform commitment to the open source community

I’m pretty sure this move will achieve all of those goals. It may well take a little wind out of the sails of wxWidgets, which in my experience never seemed quite as polished as Qt, but the licensing was much more favourable – although of course the wxWidgets project is still a lot less ‘corporate’, so will continue to have an appeal from feeling a bit more open.

Interesting times anyway!