It’s Only Software

I decided to post this as a public safety announcement, since I (surprisingly) didn’t see this blogged elsewhere. I have, for many years now, used the free/open source PDFCreator software for simple PDF generation and testing.

I recently updated to the most recent version (0.9.7) of the software (now hosted at pdfforge.org), and have made an interesting discovery.

The software is bundled with a browser toolbar component that has behavior which I would consider malware or trojan-like behavior. The notable difference is that it redirects certain types of browser traffic to www.searchsettings.com, which is a linkbait/parking-type site.

In Firefox, I noticed an extension called “Search Settings 1.2″ which, once removed, killed this behavior. After more research, I saw that IE had 2 Add-Ins installed (these were also removed). I did some more digging, and that’s when things got interesting.

There is a SourceForge Bug 2607106 “Remove trojan from download!” filed against this project. There’s the report at SiteAdvisor on pdfforge.org hosting this malware. There’s the post from an angry user on the pdfforge.org message boards.

To clarify, there are other “free” PDF creation projects that are questionable at best. However, I always took PDFCreator (sf.net) as a legitimate open source project.

The PDFCreator Toolbar is apparently implemented using “mybrowserbar”. As per their terms of service, they indicate:

f) modify your Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Mozilla Firefox browser settings for the default search engine, address bar search, “DNS error” page, “404 error” page, and new tab page to facilitate more informative responses as determined by The Toolbar;

mybrowserbar.com “Company Information” redirects to www.spigot.com, which claims to be “Coming in March 2009″. spigot.com is a proxied domain, so there’s no further information available.

I downloaded and investigated the source tarball for the PDFCreator project, and the source of the browser toolbar installer is nowhere to be found (indeed, the .exe included with the installer isn’t present). There’s a response from Philip, one of the developers, in the pdfforge.org forum which sheds a little light on the browser toolbar. I completely empathize with his desire to make some money from his open source work; however, I’d disagree that this is an appropriate approach, and at the very least, the toolbar install option should be more up-front about it.

It’s unfortunate to see a long-time, responsible open source project act this way, and I do hope it’s an honest mistake. I wanted to give people the heads-up who may not be aware of this.

Conveying a significant point about software architecture in 300 words is a challenge, particularly if those 300 words need to come from a software architect. — Barry Hawkins

Seen at TheServerSide. Read more architecture goodness at 97 Things. Which of these precepts do you like? Which have you heard before from architects or teammates?

Cross-posting in case readers here are interested.

Building a Collaborative Enterprise: Twitter (Part 1)

This post is to expand on some of the thoughts I posted on the SpringSource Blog in response to Rod Johnson’s excellent description of the SpringSource business model and its commitment to development of open source software.

Now that SpringSource has shown an ability to crank out new product releases on a seemingly weekly basis, I wanted to reflect on where Spring is positioned in the Java open source community, and how open the Spring Core project is to work done by the public.

The hypothesis of my experiment occurred to me when I happened to be reviewing Spring JIRA assignments one day. I was curious whether, following the bug assignments, the majority of development on the “Spring Core” projects (including Spring MVC and what we would consider “classic Spring”) is performed solely by SpringSource employees.

I decided to go about verifying this and would like to present my findings. Note that this is a purely objective study of a particular widely used open source project, and shouldn’t be construed as an opinion on the findings.

Edit Sept 22, 2008 Please note that although the publishing of this post by freakish timing occurred less than 24 hours after the announcement by SpringSource, I want to be clear that this article was drafted and published before I was aware of this news. As such, please don’t misread this investigation as a “response” to the announcement.

Since SpringSource is obviously a private company, I determined the list of employees by consulting publicly available information sources. Anyone is welcome to refute the claims in this article.

I have no direct working relationship with anyone at SpringSource; however, to verify the facts cited in my study, I did email an advance copy of the article to Juergen Hoeller, Spring Project Lead. Juergen kindly took the time to review it and clarify a couple facts that I wasn’t able to discern through public information. Juergen has always been friendly and considerate in the dealings we’ve had through Spring JIRA or the Spring forums, and I appreciate the help!

Read on for the analysis…
Continue reading “How Open Source is Spring?: An Analytical Investigation”

Cross-posting here in case any of my regular readers are interested. I made my first post to the Edgewater Corporate Blog on the subject of moving legacy applications to the web. It’s not really technical, but gives more of a high level view of some of the (many) considerations I (and others) have run into. I’d love to hear what you think of it!

“Why and How to Bring Legacy Applications to the Web”

… unix command-line tools, specifically for text processing. One of the most important learning experiences of my career was sitting down as part of my work at the CIIR and actually reading (cover to cover!) O’Reilly’s seminal book, sed and awk:

I followed up with a book on Unix shell scripting, and have literally used this knowledge countless times over multiple jobs and clients, in every imaginable situation. Every developer should take the time to learn these tools – the basics take only half a day – and then sit down and find something to use them on. You’ll wonder how you ever developed without them, and you can shock and amaze your Windows-loving colleagues with complex transformations and searches in a matter of seconds (of course, Windows-loving colleagues can always fall back on the venerable Cygwin suite).

What are tools that make you an efficient developer or designer? I’m not talking Eclipse or an IDE, but the stuff that wouldn’t immediately spring to mind. What esoteric (or not) learning experience has enhanced your productivity?