VTR "Hola" y la licencia GPL

El proveedor VTR distribuye un programa "Hola" el cual es usado como SIP Phone por sus clientes, el cual lamentablemente no funciona en Linux.

Investigando como hacerlo funcionar en Wine, me "cayo la teja" que estan violando la licencia GPL. Como llegue a esto se preguntarán ?

Veamos el contenido "interesante" que queda instalado en el PC.

libgaim.dll
liboscar.dll

Ambas bibliotecas bajo licencia GPL, pero VTR no esta distribuyendo las fuentes del programa !

Las sorpresas continuan cuando se analiza el resto de las bibliotecas o ejecutables

owcrashreport.exe
owwebcam.dll

Y los logs de error:

(debug) 00:35:30 CWengoPhone::initFinishedEventHandler: WengoPhone::init() finished


huh, resulta que "Hola" no es mas que un rebranding del software "Wengophone" que actualmente lleva el nombre de "QuteCom" el cual esta integramente l bajo GPL.

VTR como distribuidor de esta aplicación tiene la obligación legal de distribuir las fuentes y sus modificaciones, cosa que no esta haciendo.

Pirateria de cuello y corbata. :-(

Need entropy ? Simtec Entropy Key + openSUSE to the rescue

A while ago, I saw the Simtec Entropy Key website, a small, relative unexpensive  USB device that produces random numbers and then fills the kernel entropy pool.

It sparked my geeky curiosity so I bought one, it arrived today, but it didn't had "out of the box" support in openSUSE, so I worked integrating its software to make it rock and roll :)

I will show you how to make it work in your installation, just FYI ;-)

• Setup the needed repositories and packages as instructed here
• Start the entropy key daemon (rcekeyd start) and plug your device
• Run ekeyctl list , that will help you to determine if the device is recognized
• Run ekey-rekey where serial is your device serial number and master-key is the secret string you find in a sealed letter inside the box.
• if everything goes right, you will now be able to $ watch -n1 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail and see how it fills with fresh random numbers.
• ohh, and do not attach your printed master-key to your monitor with a sticker please :-) 

Out of the box support for this hardware will ship with  SUSE products in the near future.

HTH. ;-)

Using Chromium with Thunderbird 3 in Linux

To make Thunderbird 3 to use chromium as web browser execute:

find ~/.gconf  -type f -name "%gconf.xml" -exec sed -i -e "s@/usr/bin/firefox@/usr/bin/chromium@g" {} +

Too bad there is no Chrome Mail Client to ditch Thunderbird too.

Joining the Czech packagers team

I have joined the Czech packagers team this week, Im looking forward to work with you folks :-D

Old blog died

Bad news, my old blog database wasn't in the "backup list" so, it is gone for good.

From now on, We will get in touch using blogger.