Hardware outage affectiong osmocom.org, deDECTed.org, gpl-violations.org

As usual, murphy's law dictates that problems will occur at the worst possible moment. One of my servers in the data center died on March 20, and it was the machine which hosts the majority of the free software projects that I've created or am involved in. From people.netfilter.org to OpenPCD and OpenEZX to gpl-violations.org and virtually all osmocom.org sites and services.

Recovery was slow as there is no hot spare and none of my other machines in the data center have backplanes for the old SCA-80 hard disks that are in use by that particular machine. So we had to send the disks to Berlin, wait until I'm back there, and then manually rsync everything over to a different box in the data center.

To my big surprise, not many complaints reached me (and yes, my personal and/or business e-mail was not affected in any way)

Recovery is complete now, and I'm looking forward to things getting back to normal soon.

OsmoDevCon 2013 preparation update

OsmoDevCon 2013 is getting closer every day, and I'm very much looking forward to meet the fellow developers of the various Osmcoom sub-projects. Organization-wise, the catering has now been sorted out, and Holger has managed to get a test license for two ARFCN from the regulatory body without any trouble.

This means that we're more or less all set. The key needs to be picked up from IN-Berlin, and we need to bring some extra extension cords, ethernet switch, power cords and other gear, but that's really only very minor tasks.

There's not as much formal schedule as we used to have last year, which is good as I hope it means we can focus on getting actual work done, as opposed to spending most of the time updating one another about our respective work and progress.

Update on what I've been doing

For the better part of a year, this blog has failed to provide you with a lot of updates what I've been doing. This is somewhat relate to a shift from doing freelance work on mainline / FOSS projects like the Linux kernel.

In April 2011, Holger and I started a new company here in Berlin (sysmocom - systems for mobile communications GmbH). This company, among other things, attempts to provide products and services surrounding the various mobile communications related FOSS projects, particularly OpenBSC, OsmoSGSN, OpenGGSN, but also OsmocomBB, and now also OsmoBTS + OsmoPCU, two integral components of our own BTS product called sysmoBTS.

Aside from the usual software development, this entails a variety of other tasks, technical and non-technical. First of all, I did more electrical engineering than I did in the years since Openmoko. And even there, I was only leading the hardware architecture, and didn't actually have to capture schematics or route PCBs myself. So now there are some general-purpose and some customer-specific circuits that had to be done. I really enjoy that work, sometimes even more than software development. Particularly the early/initial design phase can be quite exciting. Selecting components, figuring out how to interconnect them, whether you can fit all of them together in the given amount of GPIOs and other resource of your main CPU, etc. But then even the hand-soldering the first couple of boards is fun, too.

Of all the things I so far had least exposure to is casing and mechanical issues. Luckily we have a contractor working on that for us, but still there are all kinds of issues that can go wrong, where unpopulated PCB footprints can suddenly make contact with a case, or all kinds of issues related to manufacturing tolerances. Another topic is packaging. After all, you want the products to end up in the hands of the customer in a neat, proper and form-fitting package.

On the other hand, there is a lot of administrative work. Sourcing components can sometimes be a PITA, particularly if even distributors like Digikey conspire against you and don't even carry those low quantities of a component that we need for our 100-board low quantity runs. EMC and other measurements for CE approval are a fun topic, too. I've never been involved personally in those, and it has been an interesting venture. Luckily, at least for sysmoBTS, things are looking quite promising now. Customs paperwork, Import/Export related buerocracy (both in Germany as well as other countries) always have new surprises, despite me having experience in dealing with customs for more than 10 years now.

Also significant amount of time is spent on evaluating suppliers and their products, e.g. items like SIM/USIM cards, cavity duplexers, antennas, cables, adapters, power amplifiers and other RF related accessories for our products.

The thing that really caught me off-guard are the German laws on inventory accounting. Basically there is no threshold for low-quantity goods, so as a company on capital (GmbH/AG) you have to account for each and every fscking SMD resistor or capacitor. And then you don't only have to count all those parts, but also put a value at them. Depending on the type of item, you have to use either the purchasing price, or the current market price if you were to buy it again, or the price you expect to sell the item for. Furthermore, the trade law requirements on inventory accounting are different than the tax laws, not often with contradictory aims ;)

In the end it seems the best possible strategy is to put a lot of the low-value inventory into the garbage bin before the end of the financial year, as the value of the product (e.g. 130 SMD resistors in 0402 worth fractions of cents) is so much lower than the cost of counting it. Now that's of course an environmental sin, especially if you consider lots and lots of small and medium-sized companies ending up at that conclusion :(

So all in all, this should give you somewhat of an explanation why there might have been less activity on this blog about exciting technical things. On the one hand, they might relate to customer related projects which are of confidential nature. On the other hand, they might simply be boring things like dealing with transport damage of cavity duplexers from china, or with FedEx billing customs/import fees to the wrong address...

Overall I still have the feeling that I was writing a decent amount of code in 2012 - although there can never be enough :) Most of it was probably either related to OsmoBTS, OpenBSC/OsmoNITB or the various Erlang SS7/TCAP/MAP related projects. The list of more community-oriented projects with long TODO lists is growing, though. I'd like to work on SIMtrace MITM / card emulation support, the CC32RS512 based smartcard OS, libosmosim (there's a first branch in libosmocore.git). Let's hope I can find a bit more time for that kind of stuff this year. You should never give up hope, they say ;)

Back from FOSDEM 2013

As (almost) every year, I attended the annual incarnation of FOSDEM. It is undoubtedly (one of?) the most remarkable events about Free Software in existence. No registration, no fees, 24 tracks in parallel, an estimated 5000 number of attendees. I also like that it brings together people from so many different communities, not _just_ the Linux or Gnome or KDE or Telephony or Legal people, but a good mixture of everything.

I have to congratulate the organizers, who manage to pull this off, year after year again. And as opposed to many other events, they do so quietly and without much recognition, I feel. I'd also like to thank the many volunteers working tirelessly before, at and after the event. Last, but not least, I'd like to thank the local university (ULB Solbosch) hosting the event.

What made me truly sad though, is the amount of littering that surprisingly many of the attendees did. This was particularly visible in the Cafeteria. Imagine an event run by volunteers, who put in a lot of time and effort. Imagine an event where food and drinks are sold by volunteers at such low prices that there can barely be any profit at all. And then imagine people eating there and leaving all their rubbish around, as if they were in some kind of restaurant where they are being served and where somebody is cleaning up after them. It really makes me feel very bitter to see this. Don't people realize that those very volunteers who are creating the event will then have to put in _their_ spare time just because those who just enjoyed their coffee or lunch didn't have the extra 30 seconds of bringing their trash to the trashcan? I feel ashamed for members of our community who behave this way. Please think next time before acting and show your respect to the people behind FOSDEM.

Talk Idea: How to write code to make later enforcement easy

During FOSDEM 2013, I spoke with some fellow Free Software developers about how my knowledge on copyright and specifically legal aspects of software copyright has influenced the way how I write code, and particularly how I design architecture of programs.

This made me realize that this would probably make a quite interesting talk at Free Software conferences: How to architect and write code in order to make later [GPL] enforcement easy.

Of course there are all the general and mostly well-known rules like keeping track of who owns which part of the copyright, having proper copyright claims and license headers, etc.

But I'm more thinking in the sense of: How do I write code in a way to make sure people extending it in some way with their own code will be forced to create a derivative work. If that is the case, they will have absolutely no choice but to also license that under GPL.

This is particularly important in the case of GPL licensed libraries. The common understanding in the community is that writing an executable program against a GPL licensed library will constitute a derivative work and thus the main program must be licensed under the GPL, if it is ever distributed.

However, in reality there is of course no precedent, and in some particular cases, the legal framework, depending on the jurisdiction, might come to different conclusions if it ever ended up in court. The claim of a 'derivative work' would be particularly weak if the main program is only using a set of standard function calls whose function declarations are the same in many versions of the GPL licensed library you link against. So let's assume there was a GPL licensed standard C library for stuff like open(), close(), printf() and the like. I think it would be very difficult to argue in court that a program written against those functions and linked against such a library would constitute a derivative work of the library. As in fact, there are many other implementations providing the exact same interface, under different licenses, and the API was not even drafted by the author of the GPL licensed implementation.

So I think there are some things that an author of an (intentionally) GPL licensed library can do while writing the code, which will later help him to establish that an executable program is a derived work.

The same is true to some extent for executable programs, too. I very intentionally did not introduce a plug-in interface for BTS drivers in OpenBSC, even though while technically it would have been possible. I _want_ somebody who adds code for a different BTS to touch the main code of the program instead of just writing an external plugin. The mere fact that he has to edit the main program in order to add a new BTS driver indicates that he is creating a derivative work.

So I'll probably try to submit a talk on this topic to some upcoming conference[s]. If you think this is an interesting topic and want me to talk about it at a FOSS related event, please feel free to send me an e-mail.

Why I hate phone calls so much

The fact that I have more than 20 missed phone calls on my land line telephone after only half a day has passed triggers me to write this blog post.

It is simply impossible to get any productive work done if there are synchronous interruptions. If I'm doing any even remotely complex task such as analyzing code, designing electronics or whatever else, then the interruption of the flow of thoughts, and the context switch to whatever the phone call might be about is costing me an insurmountable amount of my productive efficiency. I doubt that I am the only one having that feeling / experience.

So why on earth does everybody think they are entitled to interrupt my work at any given point in time they desire? Why do they think whatever issue they have rectifies an immediate interruption in what I am doing? To me, an unscheduled phone call almost always feels like an insult. It is a severe intrusion into my work-flow, and has a very high cost to me in terms of loss of productivity.

Sure, there are exceptional absolute emergencies (like, a medical emergency of a family member). But just about anything else can be put in an e-mail, which I can respond to at a time of my choosing, i.e. at a time I am not deeply buried into some other task that requires expensive context switching and the associated loss of productivity. And yes, a response might be the same day, some days later, or even a week or more later. There are literally hundreds of mails of dozens of people that need to be responded to. I can never even remotely answer all of them in a timely manner, even if I'm working 12-14 hours a day up to 7 days a week.

Right now I'm doing the only reasonable thing that is left: Switch off all phones. And to anyone out there intending to contact me: Please think twice before calling me on the phone. Almost anything can be put in an e-mail. And if you really want to have a phone call, please request a scheduled phone call in an e-mail containing a very detailed agenda and explanation of the topic.

Strain of bad luck

From roughly September to December 2012 I seem to have had a quite unusual strain of bad luck and set-backs. I don't want to go into the details here, as most of the issues are of quite private nature.

This has kept me quite distracted from a lot of my other activity. Projects like the various Osmocom sub-projects, gpl-violations.org are in desperate need of attention, and I have severely neglected my responsibilities in the Chaos Computer Club Berlin e.V. :(

I don't even want to talk about actual paid work, where customers also had to put up with repeated schedule slips and lack of availability.

I let down friends and colleagues at a number of occasions, as I was unable to keep up with anything that remotely resembles my typical work schedule.

Last but not least, I regrettably have also not felt much of an urge to write many blog posts here.

My sincere hope and expectation is that things are going to improve quickly in 2013. At least most of issues from the last half year have been resolved. Now I need to work through a considerable back-log of work and find more time for my volunteer projects in the FOSS and hacker worlds. However, this will need some time and I would like to ask for some patience. I do intend to be up to speed with things just like before.

In this spirit, I am looking forward to a productive and exciting 2013. Happy hacking und Viel Spass am Gerät