Pensieri di un lunatico minore

The DTrace kerfuffle

There’s a ginormous¹ amount of vitriol floating around the Interwebs right now about Apple tweaking the behavior of DTrace. Various people have called it either “no big deal” or “the end of all humanity”, give or take a few Valium. The truth is, as always, somewhere else, and largely an unknown, and undesirable quantity, for the zealots that roam the Interwebs looking for something, nay anything, to get their panties in a twist over.

Here’s the deal, as one geek to another: Apple likely² disabled it to meet the various draconian contracts they’ve had to sign with the various music companies in order to ensure their ability to sell movies, music and the like to people. This agreement, and the absurd DMCA require that Apple make a “good faith” effort to keep crackers away from the internals of the system. There’s your motive, ta’da! It’s not the evil machinations of Steve Jobs in his attempt to breed mutant babies to take over the world and wipe out humanity. It’s just a bunch of stupid legal mumbo-jumbo, and if you know lawyers, you’ll know how much they love mumbo-jumbo.

Now, did Apple do their voodoo with the minimum of goat sacrifices? Probably not. They made it honor an already existing setting on processes. It seemed the obvious and simple way, and I suspect no more thought was given it than any other apparently trivial decision. Now, after all that, it does mess up the DTrace numbers, but how much?

If you’re running iTunes while trying to trace an application’s issues—and who doesn’t run iTunes and 20 other applications to ensure the absolute uniformity of their system’s behavior—then you can have some pretty weird results. If you don’t, then maybe the results aren’t too far off maybe they’re only off by 0.2%, which is a small amount.

Yes, Apple could have done better. Yes, Apple should probably document this somewhere, though I don’t know for sure that they didn’t. Yes, we all wish that DRM didn’t exist. Yes, record companies are evil. Yes, “open source” is the “way, the truth and the light”. Blahty blah blah. Get over it. You will never have total and complete freedom to do anything you want until you write your own code, with your own hardware design, built in your own fab, etc.

Life is full of trade-offs. Is Apple perfect? Nope. Is Apple always acting with my “best interests” in mind. Are my “best interests” the same as everyone else’s? Hardly. Apple could have just not provided DTrace at all. That would have also made this point moot. Is 90% of a chocolate bar less satisfying than 100%? Yup. Is it more satisfying than a kick in the head? Yup.

Let’s not ascribe nefarious intent to Apple, Microsoft, or anyone else where there’s no demonstrable evidence. Conversely, don’t assume that Richard Stallman and Linus aren’t acting with just a wee bit of self-interest and ego. Let’s try to keep some perspective, shall we?

¹ This is somewhat more than a metric ass-load.

² Do I know for sure? No, but I believe in Occam’s Razor.