Out of Internet...

While I've been out of Internet for some time, someone has dropped me the following to the mailbox:

The girl gets irritated with the smoke and says to her lover:
"Can't you see the warning written on the cigarette packet,
Smoking is dangerous to your health?"
The boy replies back:
"Darling, I am a programmer, we don't worry about
WARNINGS, we only worry about ERRORS!

Playing with /dev/urandom

I've just encountered some interesting matter to write about. Consider:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/out bs=1024 count=10240
which gives us 10Mb of random binary junk. Lets try to compress it:
bzip2 -k --best /tmp/out
gzip --best /tmp/out;
zcat /tmp/out.gz > /tmp/out # to get original back

Now lets see whether such files worth compressing:
ls -la /tmp/out*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10485760 Sep 7 16:34 /tmp/out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10533366 Sep 7 16:32 /tmp/out.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10487382 Sep 7 16:32 /tmp/out.gz

As you may notice, compressed files are bigger than the original, probably due to added dictionary.

After all, we can see that /dev/uranom produces pretty random data :)

Another free software related business model

Recently I've discovered Knowledge Tree project (document management system). It claims to be open source and licensed under GPL. On the first look, everything looks very nice. The problem is that documentation is not available for free!

Yes, you've heard me well - the code itself is free and open, but documentation is not! Why anyone will want to start off with something new without having it documented?

Such business model reminds me old joke: "We give cars for free! But without steer wheel, pedals and arm brake handle - for those you'll have to pay."

The problem is not about selling documentation. The problem is about stating things. Before open source era, such companies were fully commercial. Now, since their product is written mostly in scripting language, it is hard to protect their code anyway. Then one day someone came up and said - "Hey, customers have access to our code anyway - lets make money of it!". And now they start waving with various "open" and "free" slogans.

Successful software companies sell proprietary software and give documentation for free. Less successful do the reverse.

Update 15.01.2006:
KnowledgeTree guys posted comments, saying that they have publibshed project manuals for free download.