I recently found a laptop computer with the hardware caracteristics I was looking for and bought it to replace my old one. I’m very happy with the hardware, but ain’t going to provide free advertising here because I believe the manufacturer does not deserve it.

First task was to perform the exorcism. I removed the proprietary software that the stupid manufacturer puts inside and forces me to buy. Next, all labels and physical spam were detached, including the most important one: the original certificate of authenticity, the one that proves that you don’t care about people freedom, was replaced by a certificate of hacker authenticity.

Product key is made from hexadecimal ascii characters, and barcode contains the string “genuine gnu/linux hacker” encoded. Feel free to use or modify it (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license). The package contains a printable PDF file and its source SVG (made with Inkscape).

No hacker needs a certificate, but it was a fun parody which has a practical usage too as a way to cover some of the remaining spam that is hard printed and can’t be easily removed. The real Genuine Advantage comes when people is unchained from the evil tentacles of of the restrictive software.

It seems that the warranty of my laptop is now invalid as I rejected its EULA and removed one of its “inseparable components” (judge’s decision in a least one previous case here in my country). Who cares, I feel much better now, my freedom is more important than laptop costs. Fuck you stupid laws.

FAT not safer than MP3

It was widely known that FAT is patented by Microsoft, but unlike other patented algorithms, Microsoft was apparently not making active use of the patent against Linux so nobody was worried. Not anymore. TomTom gets the dubious honor of being the first manufacturer that is the target of a patent lawsuit that covers its embedded Linux with FAT support. Much like MP3, plans to remove FAT from Linux products are starting to emerge:

“The Linux Foundation is here to assist interested parties in the technical coordination of removing the FAT filesystem from products that make use of it today.”

Mer is a community project, free and open source. Initially seems much difficult that a project like this become an attractive target for a lawsuit (at least under my subjective point of view), but manufacturers can distribute Mer with their products, and they are encouraged to do that. Those manufactures are much more attractive.

Now what? Ignore patent threats? Put FAT packages and modules in a separate repository? Kill FAT forever?

The only thing that I’m sure is that reading Donald Knuth texts is always an enlightening activity: