Things That Matter

10th November 1998

1. Open Source

When programmers on the Internet can read, redistribute, and modify the source for a piece of software, it evolves. People improve it adapt it, extend it and fix bugs. It turns out that this rapid evolutionary process is not only faster than the traditional closed model, but actually produces better software. The evidence is there for all to see: Linux, Xfree86, emacs and gcc are among the highest profile examples.

See http://www.opensource.org/ for some very readable commentaries on the open source movement, pointers to some related organisations, and some discussion about the enemies of open source software. (Yes, it turns out that this primarily means Microsoft, but they are by no means the only villains in this story.)

Open source software is the world's best chance of avoiding tie-in to corporations motivated only by profit and not by the desire to produce the best possible product. It deserves your support.

2. Web Interoperability

Another initiative with very similar aims is the ``Best Viewed With Any Browser'' campaign at http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

3. Quiet Software

For example, if I download a tar archive from the web and need to unpack it on my Unix box, I type tar xf filename, and it does its job without generating any output. Quite right. It doesn't need to generate any output. It doesn't need to tell me anything, unless something goes wrong.

As a counter-example, if I download a zip archive and need to unpack it on my DOS box, I type pkunzip filename, and it says the following:

	PKUNZIP (R)    FAST!    Extract Utility    Version 2.04g  02-01-93
	Copr. 1989-1993 PKWARE Inc. All Rights Reserved. Registered Version
	PKUNZIP Reg. U.S. Pat. and Tm. Off.

	o 80486 CPU detected.
	o EMS version 4.00 detected.
	o XMS version 3.00 detected.
	o DPMI version 0.90 detected.

	Searching ZIP: filename

Another counter-example, from people who should know better, is the GNU implementation of date, which is fine until you want a Usage message -- for example, because you've forgotten the format for setting a new date. On my system (RedHat Linux 4.1), the output of date --help is a preposterous 51 lines long -- yes, more than two whole pages of good old-fashioned 80x24 text -- so I have the ludicrous situation that when I need to remind myself of the date-setting format, I end up typing:

	date --help 2>&1 | sed 10q

It doesn't have to be this way.

4. Why Can't Someone Make a Half-Decent Web Browser?

You don't know the kind of thing I'm talking about? Well, the best of a bad bunch that I've seen is Netscape, so that's what I use on my Linux box. (Disclaimer: I'm not necessarily saying it's better than Micro$oft's Internet Exploiter -- I've never used that because I don't have it for Unix.) Here are just some of the stupidities in Netscape:

• Appalling performance in areas where there is no excuse. Specifically, going back to the previous page should be an instantaneous operations, and indeed it was in older Netscapes. In my current one (4.05), it can take an age (why?) and can even result in a new phone connection being forged (again, why?) There's no excuse for that, is there?

• Netscape can run multiple browser windows simultaneously, but because it doesn't do the multi-threading properly, if one windows hangs, they all hang. Worse, it seems to do synchronous connect()s, read()s, etc., so that when any window is downloading anything, it does so with a sequence of short sleeps, so that scrolling in any other window is slow, jerky and unpredictable. The result is that the time-saving benefits of parallel browsing are enormously reduced.

• Worse still, because all Netscape windows are maintained by a single process, if one dies, they all die. This happens with distressing frequency -- I seem to average one Netscape bus error about every other day. Which is really painful if I have eight or ten windows open on pages that it's taken some time to find.

• The pallette management stinks. On my 256-colour X server, once Netscape has grabbed all the colours (for example, to render a complex image), it never releases them even when the images have been disposed of -- so none of my other programs can get the colours they need.

• There's also its appalling insistence in filling my home directory with any amount of old nonsense at the drop of a hat. For example, merely starting Netscape creates a (thankfully empty) nsmail directory.

• Because we connect to the net via a caching proxy, I run Netscape with a zero-size disk cache. I never send or read email via Netscape, and I never read news. Yet my .netscape directory weighs in at a preposterous 3475 Kb. Yes folks, that's three and a half million bytes. To store a bit of configuration information. That can't be right, can it?

• And of course, it doesn't bother checking whether write() succeeds, so that if for example you try to download something onto a full filesystem, it will happily sit there for half an hour downloading the bytes and pouring them away, finally finishing and continuing as though nothing had gone wrong, leaving you to find a zero-byte file when you later go to look at it.

• And the horrifying corollary to this: it blithely writes back preferences to a full $HOME filesystem, thereby zero-lengthing the files and throwing away vital configuration information about proxies, cache-sizes, font defaults and more.

• Oh, and did I mention that it takes an age to fix this because the preferences dialogues are extraordinarily, horribly, preposterously, inexplicably slow to come up or change?

How hard can it be?

We can only hope that with the release of the source code to Netscape, some of these bugs will get fixed by beneficient hackers. (See the section on Open Source above). In fact, if Netscape does get fixed now that it's gone open, that will be a great advert for the open source concept.