Etherplex

Back in 2004 I built my first AMD64 system over the summer, and I was thrilled.  I had just switched from Gentoo to Debian, and I think I even took a video of the process of building the machine.  I knew it would take years for the mainstream to start using 64-bit systems, and I was proud that Linux/BSD was first.  Later, OS X and Windows followed up with their own 64-bit versions.  But what was notable on all platforms was how hard it was to transition.

OS X did rather well just because of the nature of their hermetically sealed ecosystem.  Sure, there were casualties (the entire MacFUSE ecosystem comes to mind), but overall it wasn’t bad.  Linux has had its rough spots for close to eight years now.  More on that in a second.  Finally, Windows still struggles with driver compatibility and weird glitches in 64-bit mode.  It’s amazing it has been this difficult to make the switch, but it does give a good perspective on how the inertia of an open community can act as an anchor at times.  The entire Apple ecosystem is a dictatorship, and therefore is very efficient at making big changes.

The problem both Linux and Windows (and yes, even OS X) have had is that it is very difficult to force entities that won’t give up their source code to make a change.  The best example of this is Adobe and their ubiquitous Flash Player.  It’s the most polarizing technology on the internet right now, with Apple shunning it almost entirely, and Google embedding it directly into the browser (“keep your enemies closer…”?).  In many ways it both enables and hobbles the modern web; it has been a transformative force while violating all the original ideals the web was based on.

So, here I am, once again making the leap to 64-bit thinking “C’mon man, it’s 2011, they must have worked out all the glitches by now…”.  I am typing this on my shiny new Lenovo X201 running Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 1 in 64-bit mode, only to find out that Flash still doesn’t work.  At all.  So, I manually download Adobe Flash “Square” and push the binary-blob to the right directory so all my browsers will find it.  And it works…sort of.  The new Amazon Cloud Player and my Subsonic setup keep producing this weird metallic buzz in all the music, and it makes my services useless.

So, I spent about an hour searching for what the problem could be.  After a whole lot of testing and searching, I determined it must be the 64-bit Linux incarnation of Adobe Flash.  It turns out that it is, and no one can force them to fix their broken use of memcpy with something else because their project is still closed source.  If it were an open-source project, the changes would be made in under a day and a new version would be pushed out shortly thereafter. As it is, we have to wait for the dictator to do the right thing.

So, I suppose that means that dictatorships can either be the most agile or the most stagnant, and open communities are somewhere in the middle.  In any case, I think it is more fun to be part of a community than a subject to a dictator.