Things People don't admit in Life

After a long hiatus, here is my rehash on life:

• People expect you to lie. Not sure if it is the satisfaction of dragging you down into the gutter with them and rejoicing over their new found company. Getting Credit cards, Government IDs, Loans, Sending your resume, Preparing status reports .. it's all out there.


• People expect you to be dumb. It's counter-intuitive, but more people appreciate it when you are just as dumb as they are. Nobody likes a smartass.


• People are hypocrites. That's right: I'm not a hypocrite. It's easier to tell you than to change myself. Sometimes, it slips from not being a total asshole.


• People expect you to be patient. You have to suffer enough until someone decides you can take up bigger, better things in life. It's a conspiracy from all the way down to all the way up.


• People expect people to be good. And by People I refer to everyone, and by people I refer to everyone except you. People won't be part of the change because you aren't going to change, even if people were to change.


• People won't tell you they screwed up, even if they did. It would be totally offensive to get someone to admit they did, and they were going to fix things up. It's always your problem if you get affected by their mistake, not theirs.


• people will blame you if you screwed up though.


• People will tell you you're not good enough, but they are just dumb and manipulative, expecting you to fall. Ignoring them and living well is the best revenge.


• People always play hard to get because it sounds more 'exclusive' than the easy-go people. Apparently there is no real value difference. And many people don't realize it this today.


• People are afraid of becoming a lost-cause.


• People always start with making you happy until they can get close enough to cut your throat.


• People always drive the inefficiencies in our lives.


• People always point at people's weaknesses. But it is a matter of time before they find they are no better.

Is Free Software really Free? (A case of Google Android and Java)

Update: Google has open sourced Android and I will take back what I said. If you still wish to read the post, you may do so.

A lot of people have asked me why anybody would want free software, because there is no support or commercial licensing usually. Let me define what free is supposed to mean: "The freedom given to a user to execute the program; to modify the source code, compile and execute the modified program; to be able to redistribute the modified source code and the modified program."

We are not here to discuss if everybody is giving you a false free software promise, or if being "good" is essential for our life, but only to discuss a particular false software promise by organizations like Sun and Google.

Let us take a classic example: the Java platform. While Sun has been (for years) trying to free Java, they still can't push in just enough to make it completely free. And when they did GPL their OpenJDK (which at the moment, is probably mostly unhindered except for the SNMP provider), Google decided that vendors should be given enough choice to "lock in" on their implementations, and based their DalvikVM off Apache Harmony.

Not that I don't respect Apache, but partially the reason they came up with their VM was because Sun wasn't really going to give away their Java without a fight from competitors. And when they sensed a threat, Sun were like, "we wanted to free Java for a long time. Freedom to the masses. Yay!". Nobody bought it. The real reason Sun didn't want to free Java was probably not because it wanted the community to fork, but because they wanted to keep it to themselves and all the monopoly that came with it.

Now it is Google's turn. While Google says it is part of an "Open Handset Alliance", it hasn't made the specification for the DEX format and source code for the DEX compiler open yet. And the vendors wouldn't be expected to reveal it, either. Google doesn't want to go the Sun way of JavaME either, although as of now, "PhoneMe" is supposedly a free implementation. So what does Google do here? "Lock in" Android applications from being accessed by everybody.

Is Google really going open in Android? I don't think so.

So when openness is a question, where do we expect to find the freedom we discussed above? And how do users expect to run applications in a closed platform locked in by vendors who claim to be "open"? The answers are: nowhere and there is no way.

One suggestion for users is that they should protest against these platforms and say: "Hey, we aren't going to buy your mobiles unless you tell us everything about it. Are you living up to your open promise or was it just false marketing on your side?"