Wednesday, May 13, 2020

The need for some sort of a general trademark/logo license

As usual I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

The problem of software licenses is fairly well understood and there are many established alternatives to choose from based on your needs. This is not the case for licenses governing assets such as images and logos and especially trademarks. Many organisations, such as Gnome and the Linux Foundation have their own trademark policy pages, but they seem to be tailored to those specific organizations. There does not seem to be a kind of a "General project trademark and logo license", for lack of a better term, that people could apply to their projects.

An example case: Meson's logo

The Meson build system's name is a registered trademark. In addition it has a logo which is not. The things we would want to do with it include:
  • Allow people to use to logo when referring to the project in an editorial fashion (this may already be a legal right regardless, in some jurisdictions at least, but IANAL and all that)
  • Allow people to use the logo in other applications that integrate with Meson, in particular IDEs should be able to use it in their GUIs
  • People should be allowed to change the image format to suit their needs, logos are typically provided as SVGs, but for icon use one might want to use PNG instead
  • People should not be allowed to use the logos and trademarks in a way that would imply they are endorsing any particular product or service
  • People should not be allowed to create and sell third party merchandising (shirts etc) using the logo
  • Achieve all this while maintaining compliance with DFSG, various corporate legal requirements, established best practices for trademark protection and all that.
Getting all of these at the same time is really hard. As an example the Creative Commons licenses can be split in two based on whether they permit commercial use. All those that do permit it fail because they (seem to) permit the creation and sales of third party merchandise. Those that prohibit commercial are problematic because they prevent companies from shipping a commercial IDE product that uses the logo to identify Meson integration (which is something we do want to support, that is what a logo is for after all). This could also be seen as discriminating against certain fields of endeavour, which is contrary to things like the GPL's freedom zero and DFSG guideline #6.

Due to this the current approach we have is that logo usage requires individual permission from me personally. This is an awful solution, but since I am just a random dude on the Internet with a lawyer budget of exactly zero, it's about the only thing I can do. What would be great is if the entities who do have the necessary resources and expertise would create such a license and would then publish it freely so FOSS projects could just use it just as easily as picking a license for their code.

Monday, May 11, 2020

Enforcing locking with C++ nonmovable types

Let's say you have a struct with some variable protected by a mutex like this:

struct UnsafeData {
  int x;
  std::mutex ;
};

You should only be able to change x when the mutex is being held. A typical solution is to make x private and then create a method like this:

void UnsafeData::set_x(int newx) {
  // WHOOPS, forgot to lock mutex here.
  x = newx;
}

It is a common mistake that when code is changed, someone, somewhere forgots to add a lock guard. The problem is even bigger if the variable is a full object or a handle that you would like to "pass out" to the caller so they can use it outside the body of the struct. This caller also needs to release the lock when it's done.

This brings up an interesting question: can we implement a scheme which only permits safe accesses to the variables in a way that the users can not circumvent [0] and which has zero performance penalty compared to writing optimal lock/unlock function calls by hand and which uses only standard C++?

Initial approaches

The first idea would be to do something like:

int& get_x(std::lock_guard<std::mutex> &lock);

This does not work because the lifetimes of the lock and the int reference are not enforced to be the same. It is entirely possible to drop the lock but keep the reference and then use x without the lock by accident.

A second approach would be something like:

struct PointerAndLock {
  int *x;
  std::lock_guard<std::mutex> lock;
};

PointerAndLock get_x();

This is better, but does not work. Lock objects are special and they can't be copied or moved so for this to work the lock object must be stored in the heap, meaning a call to new. You could pass that in as an out-param but those are icky. That would also be problematic in that the caller creates the object uninitialised, meaning that x points to garbage values (or nullptr). Murpy's law states that sooner or later one of those gets used incorrectly. We'd want to make these cases impossible by construction.

The implementation

It turns out that this has not been possible to do until C++ added the concept of guaranteed copy elision. It means that it is possible to return objects from functions via neither copy or a move. It's as if they were automatically created in the scope of the calling function. If you are interested in how that works, googling for "return slot" should get you the information you need.  With this the actual implementation is not particularly complex. First we have the data struct:

struct Data {
    friend struct Proxy;
    Proxy get_x();

private:
    int x;
    mutable std::mutex m;
};

This struct only holds the data. It does not manipulate it in any way. Every data member is private, so the struct itself and its Proxy friend can poke them directly. All accesses go via the Proxy struct, whose implementation is this:

struct Proxy {
    int &x;

    explicit Proxy(Data &input) : x(input.x), l(input.m) {}

    Proxy(const Proxy &) = delete;
    Proxy(Proxy &&) = delete;
    Proxy& operator=(const Proxy&) = delete;
    Proxy& operator=(Proxy &&) = delete;


private:
    std::lock_guard<std::mutex> l;
};

This struct is not copyable or movable. Once created the only things you can do with it are to access x and to destroy the entire object. Thanks to guaranteed copy elision, you can return it from a function, which is exactly what we need.

The creating function is simply:

Proxy Data::get_x() {
    return Proxy(*this);
}

Using the result feels nice and natural:

void set_x(Data &d) {
    // d.x = 3 does not compile
    auto p = d.get_x();
    p.x = 3;
}

This has all the requirements we need. Callers can only access data entities when they are holding the mutex [1]. They do not and in deed can not release the mutex accidentally because it is marked private. The lifetime of the variable is tied to the life time of the lock, they both vanish at the exact same time. It is not possible to create half initialised or stale Proxy objects, they are always valid. Even better, the compiler produces assembly that is identical to the manual version, as can be seen via this handy godbolt link.

[0] Unless they manually reinterpret cast objects to char pointers and poke their internals by hand. There is no way to prevent this.

[1] Unless they manually create a pointer to the underlying int and stash it somewhere. There is no way to prevent this.

Monday, May 4, 2020

Let's talk meta

In my previous blog post about old techs causing problems in getting new developers on board. In it I had the following statement:
As a first order approximation, nobody under the age of 35 knows how to code in Perl, let alone would be willing to sacrifice their free time doing it.
When I wrote this, I spent a lot of time thinking whether I should add a footnote or extra sentence saying, roughly, that I'm not claiming that there are no people under 35 who know Perl, but that it is a skill that has gotten quite rare compared to ye olden times. The reason for adding extra text is that I feared that someone would inevitably come in and derail the discussion with some variation of "I'm under 35 and I know Perl, so the entire post is wrong".

In the end I chose not to put the clarification in the post. After all it was written slightly tongue-in-cheek, and even specifically says that this is not The Truth (TM), but just an approximation. The post was published. It got linked on a discussion forum. One of the very first comments was this:


This is what makes blogging on the Internet such a frustrating experience. Every single sentence you write has to be scrutinised from all angles and then padded and guarded so its meaning can not be sneakily undermined in this way. This is tiring, as it is difficult to get a good writing flow going. It may also make the text less readable and enjoyable. It makes blogging less fun and thus people less likely to want to do it.

An alternative to this is to not ready any comments. This works, but then you are flying blind. You can't tell what writing is good and which is not and you certainly can't improve. The Internet has ruined everything.

Meta-notes

Contrary to the claim made above, the Internet has not, in fact, ruined everything. The statement is hyperbole, stemming from the author's feelings of frustration. In reality the Internet has improved the quality of life of most people on the earth by a tremendous amount and should be considered as one of the greatest inventions of mankind.

"Ye olden times" was not written as "þe olden times" because in the thorny battle between orthographic accuracy and readability the latter won.

The phrase "flying blind" refers neither to actual flying nor to actual blindness. It is merely a figure of speech for any behaviour that is done in isolation without external feedback. You should never operate any vehicle under any sort of vision impairment unless you have been specifically trained and authorized to do so by the appropriate authorities.

Meta-meta-notes

The notes above were not written because the author thought that readers would take the original statements literally. Instead they are there to illustrate what would happen if the defensive approach to writing, as laid out in the post, were taken to absurd extremes. It exists purely for the purposes of comedy. As does this chapter.

Saturday, May 2, 2020

You have to kill your perlings

Preface

This blog post deals only with the social and "human" aspects of various technologies. It is not about the technical merits of any programming language or other such tech. If you intend to write a scathing Reddit comment along the lines of "this guy is an idiot, Perl is a great language for X because you can do Y, Z and W", please don't. That is not the point of this post. Perl was chosen as the canonical example mostly due to its prevalence, the same points apply for things like CORBA, TCL, needing to write XML files by hand, ridiculously long compilation times and so on.

What is the issue at hand?

The 90s and early 2000s a lot of code was written. As was fashionable at the time, a lot of it was done using Perl. As open source projects are chronically underfunded, a lot of that code is still running. In fact a lot of the core infrastructure of Debian, the BSDs and other such foundational projects is written in Perl. When told about this, many people give the "project manager" reply and say that since the code exists, works and is doing what it should, everything is fine. But it's really not, and to find out why, let's look at the following graph.

Graph of number of people capable and willing to work on Perl. The values peak at 2000 and plummet to zero by 2020.

As we can see the pool of people willing to work on Perl projects is shrinking fast. This is a major problem for open source, since a healthy project requires a steady influx of new contributors, developers and volunteers. As a first order approximation, nobody under the age of 35 knows how to code in Perl, let alone would be willing to sacrifice their free time doing it.

One could go into long debates and discussions about why this is, how millennials are killing open source and how everyone should just "man up" and start writing sigils in their variable names. It would be pointless, though. The reasons people don't want to do Perl are irrelevant, the only thing that matters is that the use of Perl is actively driving away potential project contributors. That is the zeitgeist. The only thing you can do is to adapt to it. That means migrating your project from Perl to something else.

But isn't that risky and a lot of work?

Yes. A lot of Perl code is foundational. In many cases the people who wrote it have left and no-one has touched it in years. Changing it is risky. No matter how careful you are, there will be bugs. Nasty bugs. Hard to trace bugs. Bugs that work together with other bugs to cancel each other out. It will be a lot of hard work, but that is the price you have to pay to keep your project vibrant.

An alternative is to do nothing. If your project never needs to change, then this might be a reasonable course of action. However if something happens and major changes are needed (and one thing we have learned this year is that unexpected things actually do happen) then you might end up as the FOSS equivalent of the New Jersey mayor trying to find people to code COBOL for free.