10
Jul 07

X.org 7.2 memory leak

Sigh…

One of the things I really like about the Ubuntu family of distributions is that you get a good solid chunk of the stability you see in stock Debian Stable installations, but with the release cycle being so much faster, you get more up to date apps. Which is fine for a desktop to be honest. Let’s face it, for a server you want Debian (hell, for a *really* critical server you probably want OpenBSD); but for a desktop you just need it to run for ten to twelve hours between restarting X, and if you get a month’s uptime before a reboot, that’s perfectly acceptable (more time for either, is of course better, but those times are what you need, not what you want). And Ubuntu can do that and give you the cool bells and whistles to silence the iBook-and-Vista-wielding critics (Leopard, you say? Multiple desktops, eh? Vista, you say? Cool spinning desktop changing you say? Hmmm. Have you seen Beryl yet? Old project I know, been doing this for a few years now, but … 😀 )

Unfortunately, sometimes the great idea doesn’t work. Right now I’m looking at X.org 7.2 (without Beryl, which doesn’t like my three screen xinerama setup yet 🙁 ), and it’s using up 342Mb of RAM.

I mean, that’s just daft.

Granted, three 24-bit colour, 1280×1024 screens. Fine. But that’s only about 90Mb in total – and when X.org starts up, sure enough, that’s what it takes up (well, slightly over that). And granted, X.org does swipe memory that’s not in use for caching to speed things up (which is a good thing). But it’s not giving this memory back, and after a few days (or a really heavy Firefox session with forty-odd tabs open), I can be looking at over 700Mb of my 1Gb being used, and the machine is swapping just to open an rxvt shell.

It also seems like I’m not alone in this. And since there have been memory leaks in earlier versions of X.org, I’m looking forward to finally updating to Gusty to get away from this.

(ps. it’d be really nice if Gusty’s version of Beryl supported the whole three-screen xinerama setup too…)


06
Jul 07

GoPHP5!

And about time too!

Support GoPHP5.org


05
Jul 07

Joomla licensing

From the Joomla announcement :

Can I release an extension under a non-GPL license?
It is our opinion that most extensions are derivative works of Joomla! and must be licensed under the GNU GPL. It is possible that an extension could work within Joomla! and not be considered a derivative work according to copyright law but this would have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If you believe your extension is not a derivative work we strongly recommend that you seek professional legal advice.

My emphasis in there. Basicly, the Joomla core team has decided that their interpretation of the GPL means they can require all developers writing code to their API to use the GPL. Not only that, but they can make that call for any existing body of work developed for either the 1.0 or 1.5 versions of Joomla. Ignoring the argument about how companies could be “scared off” by this (frankly, unless you’re talking about very small companies that can’t handle service contracts and maintenance, I don’t think that’s an issue – service contracts net more profit than retail does for this sort of user base), the thing that’s most annoying about this is that frankly, they don’t have that right.

Yes, Joomla is a good body of work. It’s not by any means the only open source CMS out there, and there’s a lot of people who’d argue over the assertion that it was the best. But if you put in place a restriction on how third-party software can be developed for it, you’re going to limit its growth and from the core team’s point of view, that’s shooting yourself in the foot.

Clearly, the Joomla Commercial Developer’s Alliance agrees. From their statement:

Whilst we appreciate the clarification made in this statement we deny that extensions that are designed to work with Joomla can be considered derivative simply by their nature. Our advice and research indicate that there is plenty of legal argument that supports this view

Never thought I’d think a group of for-profit companies would have a better grasp of the GPL than a group of open source developers!