Inspirated

(Or: Things still make sense.)

Last week — just as Wayne Rosso stopped comparing RIAA to Stalin — M$ did its own volte-face and not only stopped calling GPL a “cancer” but decided to release some 20,000 lines of code carrying the plague itself. Pigs started flying. Some of the open-source evangelists started fantasizing about Microsoft as an ally suddenoutbreakofcommonsense and the cautious ones — who suspected some ulterior motive behind the move — were declared by them to be paranoid and rabid haters.

The storm didn’t last long though, as it was later reported that the change of heart was prompted by a GPL violation in Hyper-V. Some see this as a win for GPL. Some see this as a perfect backdrop for FUD against open-source (“it’s so goddamned viral it even infected us when we wanted interoperablity”) while some see this as a failure at M$’ part for not honestly explaining the reasons behind the code release. Whichever category you belong to, it’s nice to know that swine still have their feet firmly on ground.

After trying out TrueCrypt for a day, I decided to migrate all of my encrypted data from BestCrypt to its containers. A number of reasons compelled me to transfer 30 GB of data spread across various containers, some of which included:

• TrueCrypt doesn’t load a plethora of kernel modules whenever I load the main one in memory. I despise seeing about 10 modules, one for each supported algorithm, whenever I tried to load the basic one (bc).
• Similarly, TrueCrypt doesn’t bloat my bin directory with redundant bc* files.
• It also saves me the trouble of even (un)loading the modules as the application automatically takes care of it.
• TrueCrypt has nice wizards for its command-line application. Which spares me the trouble of remembering all those switches involved with the bctool command.
• It also provides some useful features which aren’t present in BestCrypt e.g. key-files and volume header backups.
• Unlike BestCrypt, TrueCrypt can be run without root privileges on Linux.
• One reason to rule them all: it’s free and released under GPL.

For those of your who’re wondering what exactly is TrueCrypt: it’s a disk encryption software which can create virtual password-protected ‘encrypted’ drives on your PC; it’s easy-to-learn and has excellent documentation for beginners. Just head over to the official website and download a version suited to your operating system (and have my sympathies if you’re using a Mac).

Nowadays, the general perception of media about open source is that of an efficient development model which is rapidly gaining user base. (more…)