Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2011

Having found Gammu usage in proprietary software and finding somebody who is actually having the source code, the only remaining (and the hardest) step was to make them publish it.

I started with explaining what actually GPL means, giving them links to useful documentation what they should do, but I'm probably not good enough in explaining the things.

All I was given is source of some parts of Gammu code they have used (it is available in our git repository since then). Any attempts on explaining them that they should publish full source code of the thing to comply with GPL have simply failed.

The problem with the sources they have given is that it is hardly to reuse in Gammu - it is hard to find on which version they based and more importantly, it really does not include much code which would be useful in Gammu these days.

I just got inspired by David Watson and will try the same challenge. I find it interesting to take and publish one photo every week, but I'm not really sure if I will last.

First week photo is from Sun Eclipse few days ago, though it is not much visible :-).

If you like phpMyAdmin and have web design skills, this is a chance for you. The question for new default theme has been opened for a while and in last weeks we've finally decided to rather make open contest than to stick with choosing from existing themes.

All you need to do is to submit theme (compatible with phpMyAdmin 3.4) till 13th February 2011. You can find more details on our wiki.

After finding that Sonim's software uses GPL licensed Gammu, the obvious step was to ask them for sources of the software. They quickly transferred their responsibility to company which made software for them - A&W (Anwsoft).

It took some iterations to explain them that I'm pretty sure that their software is based on Gammu and finally they gave up pointing to some external contributor for being guilty of this:

Due to the product was developed years ago, and the source code was bought from a SOHO programmer on the first beginning, so we didn’t notice it included some open source code inside.

The good thing in the same thing was that they were willing to cooperate:

We are willing to cooperate with you to follow GPL License and provide corresponding sources.

As it turned out in upcoming communication, they didn't have (and still don't have) idea what GPL license contains and what they should publish. But that's story for the next post.

The main part of the code was in Gammu for almost two months, but now it was finally debugged and confirmed working. For now you need to use version from git, but upcoming 1.28.95 will include it as well.

The support is implemented through m-obex protocol, which can be switched on from standard AT commands, giving transparent support for all supporting phones without need to change existing configuration. The code was heavily based on documentation and code created by samsyncro project, thought their documentation missed some important bits.

I'd really like to thank to Matthieu Patou for debugging problems of code I blindly wrote, because there were lot of issues (well it's hard to write code if you have no chance to test it).

As the communication in this case seems to be stuck and the issue is almost one year old, it's time to make bits of it public. The first post will just describe how I've discovered it, later will bring more details.

All started innocently with bug report on Gammu that it fails to work with some Sonim phones. We started to dig some information about what extensions does Sonim use and one of obvious ways was to try their software. I picked up software for Sonim XP3.20 Quest and started to look at it (if you are not going to install them, but want to look, you need unrar and unshield to unpack it). Actually all their software with exception of the one for XP2.10 Spirit is based on same code, so it does not matter that much which one you choose.

At first look the names of DLLs looked familiar to me and running strings on the DLLs just confirmed my suspicion - the phone which is not supported by Gammu bases it's official software on it. I was able to recognize at least seven DLLs derived from (GPL licensed) Gammu (they even use same names as Gammu modules had in that time):

• At.dll
• ATgen.dll
• Common.dll
• FBus.dll
• IRDA.dll
• ObexGen.dll
• Serial.dll

To make the thing more interesting they use several other components released under free software licenses, where they also should provide sources for them:

• ID3LIB.DLL - id3lib (LGPL)
• WbXmlParser.dll- libwbxml (LGPL)
• lame_enc.dll - lame (LGPL)

There might be more, but I did not want to spend more time on deep analysis, because I already had enough information.

Just for simple reason having all my blog posts in single place, I've decided to import all Czech blog posts from abclinuxu.cz into this blog. You can now find them in archives, all of them being tagged with Czech.

There is no intention to add new blog posts in Czech for now. In case I would might change my mind sometimes in future, all English posts are tagged with English.

I knew that xz (or lzma) provides better compression ratio than bz2 or others, but I never thought the difference might be so huge. Simply I was impressed after I've enabled xz compressed snapshots for Gammu - the bz2 compressed tarball has 5.4M while xz compressed on only 1.6M. Wow.

There seems to be a little bit of confusion caused by my new year blog post, so it's probably best to clarify that right now.

I'm not going to give up maintenance of mpd related packages right now.. I've even not yet asked for adopting and I clearly have no plans on orphaning the package completely if nobody will step up.

Anyway if somebody is interested help is always welcome (though most of time you will spent on these packages is forwarding bugs upstream) and I can of course still do package uploads when he is not a Debian developer. All sources are stored in public VCS, so ready for cooperation.

The book Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.3.x for Effective MySQL Management is already available for some time, but I still think I should promote a little bit in my blog so here it is :-).

The book covers all you might want to know about using phpMyAdmin. It really does not make sense to copy text from book description, so feel free to find yourself what all it does cover.

As every time, this book is written by Marc Delisle, who is for several years project admin, so probably the person who knows most about hidden features. Usually technical review of the book is done by some other developers and this time it was me doing this job (among other reviewers). I hope we did good job and you will like this book.

PS: As a nice bonus, the phpMyAdmin project receives money from every purchased book.