I have just recently sort of fallen in love with the visual appearance of urban lighting, with the “contrast”(?) of dark concrete/steel facilities, rusty installments to spread clear, clean, warm light. Does it look warmer at night when you don’t see the rust and the dirt?

Getting the tools ready

Given the fact that I’m on Ubuntu 10.04 beta on my everyday working notebook, though, running “Microsoft” .NET was not an option. Fortunately, there’s Mono, an open source / software libre project aiming to provide a compatible, portable implementation of .NET for platforms not supported by Microsoft (which is any platform other than Windows, actually). In my Ubuntu installation, as well as in most other GNU/Linux distributions out there these days, one is just a few moments of package manager interaction away from having Mono installed; I personally did so in a rather rude way – by installing MonoDevelop, an open-source IDE for Mono / C#, which subsequently pulls in most of the relevant core mono packages as dependencies. A few dozens of megabytes of package downloading later, things are there, set up and ready to go. So far, so good.

Solving a real-world problem, part 1: integration client

In order to, in our environment, make a legacy (and highly proprietary) document management platform behave well and communicate bidirectionally with other applications / platforms around, we ended up hand-crafting a small “middleware” structure to get this job done. Well, “middleware” is quite an exaggeration for something which basically is HTTP-POST along with a data transfer encoding resembling a lite, stripped-down version of JSON. It’s a pretty bare-bone and rather archaic kind of approach, but then again, it works, it is easy to handle even in this very DMS platform (written in an obscure language in which a more-or-less working TCP socket implementation is the best you probably can get for such a task), and it is a way to easily link many different platforms without having to worry too much about whether or not this approach is supported in the target platform (actually, even unix-shell and netcat eventually would do here… :) ). So doing a few proof-of-concept implementations on top of various languages / frameworks is a good excuse to try the same using C# / .NET. First things first, the easier thing: Building a client posting some data structure via HTTP and dumping the response recieved to STDOUT… Firing up MonoDevelop, if one is used to a Java IDE it takes some time getting acquainted to things, but then again, world’s not all too different here. Creating an initial runnable class is simple, core syntax just slightly different to what one’s used in Java.

So now how to deal with the client side of HTTP? Fortunately, there’s documentation at hand: Along with Mono, there comes “monodoc” which allows for easily browsing pre-installed Mono documentation, mainly of course API reference. monodoc offers a rather good search facility so figuring out that System.Net.WebRequest is what I need. Adding to that, there’s a vast load of documentation available as part of the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) library, which, in this special case, offers an almost fool-proof step-by-step guide on how to resolve exactly the kind of problem I need. So overally, getting the C# client to talk to both the DMS and the Java server side of our integration structure took about ten minutes, including figuring out how to, in C#, convert a String object into a byte array. Not bad, and pretty intuitive given the documentation and a good deal of Java experience at hand.

Solving a real-world problem, part 2: integration server

So far, so good – running the client code from within MonoDevelop, or even from the command line, wasn’t a job too tough (even though it feels strange running a .exe file in a GNU/Linux environment… :) ). Now, however, for the server part of things. Given quite a range of servlet containers or application servers (we use Glassfish and apache tomcat for our internal purposes) at hand, a Java developer has quite a concise kind of environment in which to expose HTTP(-POST) services: Extend javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet, override the doPost method, add your code, package a .war file, deploy things to your application server – done. The good thing about Java EE, in my opinion, is that this general workflow does always apply, no matter which application server, development environment, … you are running. But how to do that in Mono/.NET?

So far, I haven’t come across the idea of something like a “generic .NET application server”, akin to what an application server in Java EE is. However, I quickly found out about ASP.NET and mono-xsp(2) server, which I installed using my package management. Fine. Reading the tutorial was rather straightforward, now for some code.

To cut things short: It turned out to be not much more complicated than building the client. Browsing the Mono documentation, and from there the MSDN articles, I quickly came across System.Web.IHttpHandler, implemented it, filled its ProcessRequest method with meaningful code (using code completion in MonoDevelop prove to be a rather good way of exploring the – at least to me – unfamiliar C#/.NET API), running stuff with xsp. Done.

Conclusions…

What to learn from this little trip?

• Well, first off, working with C#, Mono and MonoDevelop is not that much of a pain if you’re used to Java and, given at least this very use case, know what you’re about to want to do. There are tons of documentation available out there, and overally, I guess in most situations getting started with these things should be straightforward.
• As always, learning something new is a good thing, and in case of C#/.NET, I see a strong advantage in linking our existing server-sided environment with desktop-based clients – so far, Java unfortunately doesn’t do that good in terms of deep desktop integration (registering global desktop hotkeys, opening standard applications, …). Throwing in a little bit of local .NET code could ease this at the very least for Windows clients.
• I still have to see how to build a portable, self-containing application server using Mono/C#: Given the nature of .war deployment and the way application servers and JREs can be deployed, it is possible to simply make .zip file of JDK, preconfigured application server along with the applications deployed to it, unzip this file on a server machine, start the application server and have things running as desired – without the need to install additional software, configure system-wide services (apache and mod_mono?) and the like. Comparing this kind of deployment, Java EE still is way ahead of .NET/C#, Python and any other platforms I played with so far.

In the end, that’s what is left: I enjoyed my ride and liked what I saw. I still will be doing most of my work using Java, I still will enjoy working with P/Jython for most scripting things, but I figured out that, in practical use, C#/.NET/Mono is a rather smooth environment to work with, and, as pointed out, there surely are some problems I already imagine for using it… More to come.

Overall idea

In our backend we run a legacy document management system which is pretty much customizable / extensible, and a lot of this customizing does happen inside using hooks and the custom scripting language used in this platform. Given the idea of hooks in general, extending a Spring Java (web) application using features like this seems a pretty good playground for using AOP, doesn’t it? So, here we go…

Sample implementation

There is a sample project to be found here. You need maven2 and an up-to-date JDK for it – as the example uses JSR-223 (Scripting for the Java Platform), you will need a Java 6 platform to get goin’.

The project, generally, looks like this:

• There is a service interface (1) and a class implementing this service (2) mocking some “real” business functionality.
• An implementation of an advice/interceptor (3) takes care of actually running scripting functionality at times.
• There is some “servlet application infrastructure” (4), like a servlet exposing the business logic to an end user, and a ContextListener setting things up correctly on application startup.
• A WEB-INF/scripts/ folder (5) contains a sample script used throughout this application.
• And, of course, there is the usual mess of infrastructure, like a Spring context definition, a deployment descriptor and a welcome-jsp (6).

It is a maven2 project so you start best by downloading the file, extracting things, and start the application using mvn jetty:run. By then, browsing to http://localhost:8080/plugger/VisualizerServlet will leave you with a plain “hello world”, plus a bunch of log messages in your console you used to start the application. So far, so good.

What happens?

• Generally, the application is a maven2 war artifact configured to run with the maven-jetty-plugin. You might as well build a war file from it and deploy it to your favorite servlet container / app server if you prefer. Along with this, the project provides metadata to open and run it in Eclipse IDE, and NetBeans can work with maven2 projects out of the box as well simply on top of pom.xml.
• The application contains /WEB-INF/scripts/, which, on startup, gets copied to your temporary folder (System.getProperty("java.io.tmpdir")) from where it is used by the application. This copying is done on application (webapp) context startup by the ScriptInstallerContextListener registered in web.xml.
• With the webapp context starting up, there’s also a Spring application context started and a servlet (VisualizerServlet) registered with the webapp context. The servlet does access the Spring context using WebApplicationContextUtils.getRequiredWebApplicationContext(this.getServletContext()). In a real-world application, chances are you would eventually use Spring MVC or something like this, but for a test case as easy as this, a plain servlet is perfectly sufficient. Subsequently, the servlet tries to get a bean implementing the IIncredibleService interface from the Spring context and calling one of its methods.
• Spring context, finally, is configured to proxy the actual implementation of this service and add an interceptor, PluggerAdvice, implementing MethodBeforeAdvice and, so, being invoked whenever any of the methods in the proxied implementation is to be accessed:

In the end, looking at the log output after starting the application and accessing the servlet once, you see what happened:

1. First, there are log statements outlining that the servlet is being called and doing things.
2. Then, there is the PluggerAdvice getting its work done, and then, finally…
3. … the business component is being called.

Adding to this, when the application is running, you should see a folder “scripts” containing a “test.groovy” in your temporary folder, which you might want to edit and play along with to see things happening. Both the code and the logging statements are pretty straightforward, so getting started with this should be rather easy. ;)

So what?

It doesn’t really seem spectacular at first sight. What happened basically is that the application did load a piece of (Groovy) script off the local hard drive and did execute it in course of processing a business method. For my use cases, this is interesting for two reasons:

• Given the AOP / proxying mechanism used here is generic enough, this is something that can be applied to virtually every component declared and used in a Spring application, other than the servlet filter technology which can do similar things but just wrapping around an HTTP servlet, acting on a HTTP request basis while, making use of the AOP mechanism, every single method call can be intercepted and extended using custom scripting code.
• Indeed, it is scripting code loaded into the application at runtime off some part of the file system which doesn’t belong to the webapp context, so this seems a rather quick-and-dirty way of extending an application at runtime without having to redeploy.

I will by now spend some time playing with this implementation to extend it, see what else is possible, see where it can get me in “real-life” development. Not really talking about performance issues (checking whether on-disk files were updated by the user at runtime, loading them, …) or even security considerations (as this approach does pretty well compromise most of the Java/EE security concepts), it seems an interesting conceptual architecture, and I am curious to see what can be done with this. :)

References

• AOP in Spring 2.x
• Sun Article: “Scripting for the Java platform”
• Groovy-Tutorial on JSR-223 integration
• ContextListeners in J2EE web apps

I will keep myself from speculating aloud which of these projects might be continued and which ones might be stopped sooner or later, but rather want to come up with another thought on this: Product strategy. I know quite some people who chose the BEA WebLogic Java EE server for various reasons (including not depending upon a global “software super power”) and were quite happy with this. Some time earlier however, BEA also was acquired by Oracle, and even though Oracle product managers decided to discontinue their own application server in favor of WebLogic, these customers by then still ended up being customer of a company they never wanted to work with. Same way, some of the BEA products simply were discontinued, like some of the Oracle ones, in favor of having migration paths offered to alternate products virtually replacing them. This also might not always be desirable as, even though having a migration path available is a good thing, eventually one doesn’t want to migrate as product decisions also might have happened out of technical preferences for the product initially chosen – from that point of view being forced to migrate to something you didn’t initially choose for sane reasons doesn’t seem all too compelling.

So, after all: How to get out of this mess? How to be capable of doing sane strategic product decisions without having to worry that, sooner or later, your product might be discontinued in favor of another one after some company, service provider, … has been acquired by someone else? For that, I see just one solution really practicable: Go for Open Source software, and not just for sofware being open source but also for software being open source and maintained, developed, driven forth by some kind of foundation or consortium rather than just being a former product released under an open source license but still developed and maintained mainly by one single vendor. Examples for these things include:

• The ObjectWeb Consortium is an open source development and support community, a consortium with an impressive list of members, offering a wide range of infrastructure and development platforms like the JOnAS Java EE server (which by now also is Java EE 5 certified – maybe a likely replacement when and if Oracle might decide to discontinue Glassfish?), the XWiki Java based wiki application, the Orchestra BPEL platform and a bunch of other things.
• The Apache Software Foundation, maybe the most prominent of these communities because of the Apache httpd server, then and now one of the most widely used web servers, also offers a whole load more than this. Projects hosted at apache.org include the Geronimo Java EE 5 application server, the tomcat Java EE servlet container, the James Java based e-mail server project, an extensive set of technologies related to Web Services development, a fully-featured Java Server Faces implementation named ‘myfaces’, the ServiceMix ESB platform and really way more than that…. The ASF also consists of members representing virtually all companies important in software world. And, as an interesting liner note, even Microsoft at least partly is supporting ASF, for whatever this is worth. :)
• Important as well is Eclipse Foundation, hosting the Eclipse IDE and a bunch of other projects focusing both on IDE and on general Java application development, including the Equinox OSGi implementation, the jetty Java EE servlet container, the EclipseLink reference implementation of EJB3 JPA (formerly contributed by Oracle, actually…) or the SOA Tooling Platform. Eclipse Foundation obviously has a strong support by various commercial and non-commercial entities, contributing code and development effort as well as supporting Eclipse based applications or using them in their own (proprietary?) application platforms.
• Smaller than that yet too interesting to go unnoticed, there’s also Codehaus out there, a small yet creative community hosting projects like ActiveSOAP web services framework, the XSite web site generation tool, the xstream Java-to-XML serialization library or dynamic languages like Groovy (for Java/JDK) and Boo (for CLI/.NET).

So, overally, what to learn from all this mess:

(1) Despite all dedication, keeping a little independence pays off from time to time: Using maven2 as build tool, so far we really did enjoy the clean, usable, straightforward tooling NetBeans offers for this tool, while at the same time making sure our source structures and projects aren’t tied to the IDE like, in example, they would be while using stock Eclipse projects. From that point of view, in worst case we even could go on doing development work with a tool as simple and straightforward as jedit comes the need. Likewise, keeping applications as compliant to Java EE standards (and as independent of a given Java EE implementation) as possible will, assuming worst case (which is not what you do as a technology enthusiast but definitely is what you gotta think about when you have to make strategic decisions) ease migration to another target platform. Both things aren’t on our list at the moment however, and hopefully they’ll never will. The Glassfish/NetBeans tool chain is way too convenient and powerful to be abandoned without a fight. ;)

(2) Generally, even though (in worst case) the Oracle/Sun merger might change things for people so far into using Sun-contributed open source projects, there still will be alternatives at hand, if they don’t want to go with the offerings Oracle by then will be providing to them. This is, of course, a good thing as it makes dealing with the uncertainty obviously caused by such a strategic (corporate) move a little easier. And, after all, being acquired by some “strong” company still might be the best to happen to Sun given the current business situation of the company in order to let at least part of its technology survive (I will contribute more time to using OpenSolaris from now on).

(3) Despite their brave moves in releasing a great set of technology under open source licenses, it overally seems Sun didn’t completely “do this right” in the end. I remember that, a while ago, another good Sun-based open source project, the JSF component collection labeled Project Woodstock, after a period of silence and uncertainty for its adopters ceased to exist, now “just” offering a migration path to IceFaces JSF library. For quite a while it seemed there was just an awful load of open source projects appearing on the scene, providing great technology yet leaving users unsure about the actual nature of its community: How many people are there actively developing it, how many of them are full-time Sun employees and how many are open source volunteers and/or employees of partnering companies, how many of them are enthusiasts and small-time developers? Who does make strategic decisions about project roadmap, new features, …? Who, overally, has to decide what to be done and what not to be done? This, in my opinion, is the worst to add to the momentary uncertainty about Glassfish, NetBeans, … despite the fact of these all being open source projects: Of course, being by its very nature open source projects, they don’t generally to depend upon a very company to survive, virtually anyone could to a fork and drive forth development on her/his own. But yet, at least to me it’s absolutely unclear what will remain of, say, Glassfish in case Oracle might decide to suddenly withdraw all Java EE developers in order to make better use of them in any of their existing Java EE related projects – will there be anyone left to keep up developing an “open source Glassfish” without Sun? From that point of view, there would have been a better way initially if Sun just had made, say, java.net an open source foundation similar to Apache, Eclipse, …, contributed all of its open source code to this foundation and aggressively invited third party corporate and freelance developers to contribute and participate. This, asides all other business implications (like matters of education and support offered for these technologies) at least would have made things easier by having these projects “safe”, their technical development and progress reliably outlined no matter what eventually would happen… Then again, maybe it’s not yet too late for… Apache NetBeans? Codehaus Glassfish? O’w2′penDS? What are your thoughts?

Anyway, after writing all this text, what are my personal conclusions of this? For now, I will keep sticking to “business-as-usual” of course, keep on promoting the use of NetBeans, Glassfish and related technologies. From my point of view, they’re way too valuable to be ignored and abandoned without too much ado. Especially relating to NetBeans, there’s quite a clear road ahead, with 6.7 development nearing its end, providing an impressive list of changes and other things noteworthy compared to its predecessors. Along with this, we’re also at the moment trying to, as seamlessly as possible, take the NetBeans Community Docs project to a new shape, structure and performance, hopefully making this a resource valuable to the NetBeans community as a whole. As for anything else… time will tell. Maybe “being prepared” never is a bad thing, being prepared both for keeping everyday business going and, given this might be necessary, participating in one fork or the other…

Update 2009-04-22: As there are quite some people (obviously) dealing with this issue, I have decided to collect some of these resources that seem worth reading to me here:

• Oracle folks themselves have put up an FAQ collection[PDF] addressing some of the questions for sure to arise from this merger. Not all questions are left answered, though, and one might eventually see the absence of the term “open source” throughout the whole of the document…
• Masoud Kalali, Jave EE developer, technical writer and author of an upcoming book on Glassfish v3, has done an interview with opensourcereleasefeed.com on Glassfish and NetBeans in light of the Oracle/Sun future perspective.
• As to be expected, there is a whole load of coverage relating this issue on java.dzone.com, most notably a rant basically outlining Java EE on its way to ‘Java Technology Museum’, a collection of responses on the Sun/Oracle deal throughout the web and of course a set of personal opinions mainly related to what’s in the Sun/Oracle deal for Java as a language and platform. Worth reading, most of it.
• There’s a lengthy yet interesting analysis of the implications of the Sun/Oracle deal to be found on redmonk.com as well, outlining a few options of what might be up next.
• Also an interesting statement by Cay Horstmann on this. Some of his predictions surely seem reasonable, though, then again, still not more or less vague than others of course.

While generally being sufficient, as soon as something like VirtualBox comes into play, you start reaching certain boundaries… ;) Though initially I thought about simply running VirtualBox making use of the disk images living in my Linux file system, I had to learn that even though there are ways to make OpenSolaris know the ext3 file system, one of them is read-only (thus not a real option here) and the other one, which is likely to be the “official” OpenSolaris ext2/3 driver one day, obviously requires a complete OpenSolaris development workspace set up and running in order to get built – an approach I have to postpone until I do have more storage dedicated to my installation. Locating a virtual machine on my external USB drive also is out, at the very least simply because of the disk image file size (try fitting 10 GB into FAT32…). In the moment I helped myself using a remote machine somewhere in our network (pkg install SUNWrdesktop) for starting and using the remote support software our company uses (which unfortunately is Windows-only). This is a minor annoyance however which is likely to be resolved by simply dedicating more disk space to OpenSolaris.

Asides this, I stumbled across two hardware related things today: One side, though being identified correctly using svn_91 kernel build, my audio controller (Intel ICH7) is not capable of generating any output, the mixer is disabled once and for all. Digging around I see people sharing the same problem yet still have to discover a solution to that. Reminds me of early Linux days trying to get the most exotic sound and multimedia hardware to work. Not that annoying, though, as at work I am not supposed to listen to music and/or require audio output devices, anyhow.

A little more annoying is that, shutting down the system from the terminal using halt, the system (a) doesn’t completely power off but shuts down, waiting them to manually be powered off, and (b – worse) this procedure sort of happens “invisibly” – at some point the X desktop just freezes but stays there, and the only way to tell whether or not the system has stopped yet is to manually monitor the hard drive activity lights and see whether or not there’s still something happening. Ideally, this does matter just once a day, but I couldn’t help noticing. ;)

That aside, so far still no difference whether working with Ubuntu or OpenSolaris. More or less starting to get used to the command line tools for doing process management that somehow differ to Linux (I am missing htop but prstat is at least next to it in the general idea…).

more days of this week:

• day #1
• day #2
• day #4
• day #5

…
Es folgt, dass die Naturwissenschaft sowie die von ihr abgeleiteten Technologien nicht wertfrei sind. [...] In einer Gesellschaft, deren Werte hauptsächlich vom Streben nach Reichtum und Macht abgeleitet sind, sind sie entsprechend gestaltet. Die Werte der Wissenschaft, eingebettet in eine vernünftige Gesellschaft, würden vernünftig, also human sein. Dann würden die von ihr abgeleiteten Technologien nicht mehr dem Tod dienen, sondern dem Leben.
…

… aus “Grenzen des Wissens – Wir gegen die Gier” in Erinnerung an Joseph Weizenbaum (08.01.1923 – 05.03.2008). Vielleicht sollten wir öfter innehalten und zur Disposition stellen, welche gesellschaftlichen und politischen Konsequenzen die Wirkungen unserer Technologien haben…

Und für den ersten Kandidat muß man gar nicht so weit suchen – hier reicht es dieser Tage eigentlich schon aus, eine beliebige Nachrichtensendung in einem beliebigen TV-Programm einzuschalten: Der Begriff “Jugendkriminalität” fällt garantiert in den ersten fünf Minuten, und fast durchweg in Ausführungen, warum wir strengere Gesetze, “härteres Durchgreifen” oder auch mehr Überwachung brauchen.

Dumm in dieser Hinsicht, daß in Deutschland dieses Jahr die eine oder andere Wahl ansteht. Damit sind die Konsequenzen vorhersagbar: Das Problem wird für den Wahlkampf thematisiert in einer Art und Weise, die ich persönlich ausgesprochen eklig und abstoßend finde: Gar keine Frage, Übergriffe wie jener gegen einen Fahrgast in der Münchener U-Bahn kurz vor Weihnachten 2007 sind kein Spaß, und daß die Menschen angesichts derartiger Entwicklungen in Sorge leben, ist berechtigt. Somit sollten Aktivitäten mit dem Ziel, derartige Dinge perspektivisch zu unterbinden, zunächst begrüßenswert erscheinen.

Was mich indes (abseits der widerwärtigen Art und Weise, wie in der Kampagne des Herrn Koch Stimmen gesammelt werden, indem man die Angst in der Bevölkerung konsequent schürt und dann die Lösung in der Forderung nach deutlich härteren Strafen anbietet, um die Masse der Wähler hinter sich zu hoffen) an dieser Diskussion am meisten stört: Wieso denkt eigentlich keiner darüber nach, wie man (angesichts der Tatsache, daß wir hier über Teenager, teilweise noch Kinder reden) konsequenter dafür sorgen kann, daß aus jungen Menschen gar nicht erst Gewalttäter werden? Diese heranwachsende Generation ist die Zukunft unseres Landes, unserer Gesellschaft, und strenggenommen würde das Land ihre Kreativität, ihre Energie, ihre Inspirationen und Ideen dringend brauchen. Woran hakt es also? Fehlende Chancengleichheit schon im Schulsystem? Eine zunehmende Zahl von Kindern, die auch im grundsätzlich reichen Deutschland in Armut aufwächst, einschließlich aller Konsequenzen für Bildung, Gesundheit und Anerkennung in einer Umgebung, die auf materielle Aspekte nicht eben wenig Wert zu legen pflegt? Chancenverlust im Schul- und Erwachsenen-Alter, weil aufgewachsen unter Dauerberieselung statt Begeisterung für Dinge, Stärkung der kindlichen Neugier zur Erzeugung von Interesse an Wissen und Bildung oder allgemein einfach nur Förderung durch Eltern und Familie?

Sicherlich sind all dies keine ausschließlichen Gründe oder gar Rechtfertigungen für Gewalt. Aber es sind genau so gute Argumente wie die immer wieder gern zitierte Aussage, daß das Strafrecht eher Täter- denn Opferschutz betreibt, oder eben die Idee des Herrn Koch, durch harte Strafen und Abschreckung Gewalttäter von ihrem Tun abzuhalten: All das sind pauschalisierende, sträflichst vereinfachende Argumente und Ansätze, die kaum imstande sind, einen komplexen Sachverhalt hinreichend zu erklären oder zu behandeln. Hier wünscht man sich einfach, daß zu verantwortungsvoller Politik auch differenzierendes Denken und Kommunizieren gehört. Und das sollte, auch in Wahlkampfzeiten, über das plumpe Bedienen stupid-populistischer Thesen ohne Sinn und Substanz hinausgehen.

Note: If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off.

Personally, I just have to say that this is outstandingly disgusting. Recently, I have seen many pictures in my photo stream which have been “safe-greyed” by default even though, looking at them, I couldn’t find anything making “censoring” these shots even slightly reasonable. I consider censorship to be one of the worst and most stupid things an information system can come up with, since censorship proves that people are not capable of dealing with “free” information but instead want information to be “cleaned” by “filtering out” things which aren’t “convenient” or just hurt our own narrow ideas of “morality” or “ethics”.

Let me put it this way: Then and now I’ve been a happy flickr’er even when flickr sold its soul to Yahoo!. My flickr professional account used to be my sisters and her boyfriends gift for my 30th birthday earlier this year, and right now I still am enjoying all the options and possibilities this thing provides compared to the “basic” account. However, as soon as censorship becomes a common practise in flickr, I am ready and willing to, as soon as my professional account has expired, to completely and ultimately terminate my flickr membership and move my pictures elsewhere. I feel happy there because of the community, of the freedom of exchange of creativity, inspirations, thoughts. I would not feel happy there anymore given there are some “mechanisms” trying to tell us what is “safe” for us and what isn’t, given that Flickr is ignorant, stupid, narrow-minded enough to keep up this rude practise of censorship. Flickr makes, please start thinking!

[/english]

[german]
Hübsch… seit einigen Tagen ist flickr, der möglicherweise immer noch beste Internet-Fotodienst, mehrsprachig und global. Und, ganz nebenbei, hat man ein Feature eingeführt, welches eigentlich alle Ideen des Internet, alle Ideen freier, offener Kommunikation vollständig konterkariert:

Benutzern aus Deutschland, Singapur, Hongkong oder Korea zeigt Flickr laut FAQ Fotos, die als “moderate” (“mittel”) oder “restricted” (“eingeschränkt”) markiert sind, nicht mehr über die Suchfunktion an: “Wenn Sie eine Yahoo-ID aus Singapur, Deutschland, Hongkong oder Korea verwenden, können Sie aufgrund der dortigen Geschäftsbedingungen die sichere Suche nicht abschalten. [...] Die Filter für die sichere Suche greifen auch dann, wenn Sie sich auf Flickr bewegen. Wenn Sie beispielsweise auf ein Foto stoßen, das nicht in Ihre Einstellungen passt, werden Sie dieses Foto nicht sehen.

Aha. Genau das ist es also, was man offensichtlich braucht. Flickr-Nutzer sind demnach keine eigenständigen, denkenden, intelligenten Personen, sondern nur naive Dummchen, die der Kontrolle eines Filters bedürfen, der definiert, welche Informationen (in dem Fall Bilder…) für sie “gut” / “sicher” sind und welche nicht… Ich will es so sagen: Aus meiner Sicht ist Zensur immer der ärmste, schwächste, dümmste Weg, mit Informationen umzugehen, wenn wir zu faul, zu starr, zu ignorant sind, uns auch mit unbequemen Inhalten auseinanderzusetzen, ohne dem Irrglauben zu verfallen, Zensur würde mehr tun, als diese nur vorübergehend auszublenden. Ich halte das, was Flickr derzeit tun, für völlig indiskutabel. Derzeit verfüge ich über einen Flickr-Professional – Account, ein Geburtstagsgeschenk von meinem Schwesterchen und ihrem Freund zu meinem 30. in diesem Jahr, und ich hab’ mich echt darüber gefreut, weil ich, ungeachtet all der Dinge, die geschehen sind etwa in Folge des “Seelenverkaufs” von Flickr an Yahoo!, diese Plattform geschätzt und gemocht habe als Ort des Austausches, der Kreativität, der Inspiration. Wenn Flickr dies selbst jetzt durch Dummheit, Kurzsichtigkeit, Ignoranz demontieren, werde ich, sobald mein Geburtstagsgeschenk seine Gültigkeit verloren hat, meinen Flickr-Account umgehend löschen und mir einen besseren Platz für meine Bilder suchen.

Nachtrag: alltagskakophonie.de hat einen umfangreichen Überblick über Reaktionen aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum auf die Vorgänge im Hause flickr, gleichermaßen im Hinblick auf Blogs wie auch News-Seiten, und verdient daher Respekt ob der gründlichen Recherche.
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• Wird ein wirklich sehenswerter Film oder Beitrag angekündigt, bei dem man ein Mindestmaß an Tiefe vermuten mag, dann kann man vorher wetten, daß dieser entweder für arte oder 3sat angekündigt wird. Schlecht für jenen, der mit Zimmerantenne unterwegs ist.
• Auf ARD und ZDF kann man “richtige” (Kino-)Filme getrost vergessen. Hier dominieren lahme Eigenproduktionen (im Falle von ZDF ganz offensichtlich mit einer Hand voll omnipräsenten Akteuren besetzt, die immer nur die Rollen tauschen – was übrigens verwirren kann, wenn in zwei aufeinanderfolgenden Krimis dasselbe Gesicht erst den Kommissar und dann den Mörder gibt…). Dabei dominieren entweder “kurzweilige Beziehungsgeschichten” (oh mein Gott!!!) oder, im Falle des Zweiten, mehr oder weniger sehenswerte Krimis. Hier scheint die Fantasie der Drehbuchautoren zwar grundsätzlich auf “Mord” als mögliches, verfilmbares Verbrechen beschränkt zu sein, aber dafür wird dieser dann auch ganz gern in allen Facetten, Formen und Stilrichtungen verfilmt, was Killerspiele eigentlich fast überflüssig werden läßt. Spätestens wenn dann ein Privatdetektiv, der mindestens schon in den Siebzigern ist, durch das Programm “hetzt” (oder stolpert…), mit seinem Alfa durch Frankfurt bügelt und immer noch das sportlich-jugendliche Sex-Symbol zu mimen glaubt, weiß man nicht, ob man lachen oder heulen soll.
• Das MDR, regionalbedingt mein “Heimats-Drittes”, hat schlicht und ergreifend nicht das Format von anderen Dritten. Punkt. Zwar hat’s auch hier gelegentlich sehenswerte Reportagen (erstaunlicherweise insbesondere am frühen Sonntagmorgen), aber das Wochenprogramm zwischen Volksmusik und eigenartigen Mitmach-Showformaten ist eher, nun, fragwürdig.

Fazit dieser verworrenen Ausführungen: Warum muß das so sein? Ich bin nach wie vor ein Freund von öffentlich-rechtlichem Fernsehen, aber angesichts dieser Zustände frage ich mich immer wieder, wofür ich eigentlich Gebühren zahle. Es zahlen alle, solidarisch, aber das Programm wird (der Einschaltquoten wegen) auf eine (existente?) Mehrheit abgestimmt? Das kann’s doch wohl nicht sein… Wo bleiben die Sendungen, die die Fans dunklerer oder extremerer Musik ansprechen? Wo ist das Format für den professionellen oder hobbymäßigen Technik-Freunden, als Alternative zur Inflation an gesichtslosen Fernseh-Köchen? Wo sind wieder einmal bessere Comedy-Sendungen wie SketchUp (mögen sie in Frieden ruhen), die hinausreichen über pures Standup-Geblödel?

Ach, was soll’s… Ich schalte lieber aus.

Technically, I can understand this as indeed maintaining two ways of access authentication might be painful (even though one should consider this a pain that easily might be addressed at a very low level given a good software architecture). However, there also has been extensive criticisms on flickr being part of Yahoo! because of the way Yahoo! more than once (ab)used pictures posted by flickr users. I am not sure about this. Likewise, I haven’t really been that much enthusiastic about all the “Camera Guide” / statistics around flickr recently simply because I think talking about imaging and photography should be about pictures and works rather than about tools and equipment. By now, I still enjoy hanging around at flickr simply because of the fact that so far this has been the only site explicitely providing me with a fine-grained choice of CreativeCommons-licenses for my pictures.

Anyhow, by today I also signed up for an account at zooomr, which so far seems to be rather promising – let’s see what will grow out of this. Probably services like this might attract quite a bunch more people now that flickr is ‘Yahoo!ed’ even a little more…