Good to see that the Indian government is distributing free CDs that contain localized versions of popular open-source applications. From the article:
The government has started distributing CDs containing Tamil-language versions of various open-source applications, including the Firefox browser, the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and the Columba e-mail client. It plans to freely distribute 3.5 million copies of the CD to Tamil speakers worldwide
Eventually, the government plans to release CDs in all of the 22 official languages of India. The great thing here from my point of view is that “cost” does not seem to be the main driver for this decision. The ability to modify the code, in this case to do UI changes to suit a different culture and do localizations, was the deciding factor here. The fact that we are seeing more and more Open Source adoption for reasons besides “it's cheaper”, to me means that many Open Source apps are indeed ready for prime time adoption.
–jeremy
Archive for May, 2005
We often hear the question “Is Linux ready for the desktop. Robin 'Roblimo' Miller asks a different question. What do you think 
–jeremy
Chatted with Doug Kaye from IT Conversations a little today about the audio quality of LQ Radio. He had given me a few tips in the past, and I just purchased the same audio processor that he uses for ITC to use for LQ Radio. I'll be using his suggestions for knob turning for the next Podcast. If you've never heard the quality releases that Doug does at IT Conversations, I encourage you to go take a listen. Thanks Doug.
–jeremy
Podcast, Podcasting
I mentioned Simula Labs in the latest LinuxQuestions.org Podcast, but looking a little closer at the article, this is not exactly what I thought it was at first. From the article:
The business model Simula intends to set up with these planned ventures is very similar to that of Gluecode. Companies will employ the important engineers behind an open-source project and sell subscription services for support, training and more functional products based on the open-source code.
Simula executives will take an active role in company creation, acting as co-founders and providing expertise.
This means, they aren't looking to do what a traditional venture capital firm does (ie. give money to a team of entrepreneurs who have a good idea in the hopes they will eventually turn a humongous profit or get acquired), they are looking to start the companies themselves and hire members of the projects they decide to use. This invariably will mean less money for the people from the projects (as opposed to if they started the company) but also, of course, much less risk too. Not sure how I feel about this one quite yet, but it's a much different thing than I thought at first.
–jeremy
As Jeremy points out, Google is on the slippery slope to “Portaldom”, despite what CEO Eric Schmidt says here. The thing is, I don't really see anything wrong with this. They say that the clean search-only page will be the default and until they prove otherwise, I believe them. Somewhere along the bubble, “portals” became bad. But I don't think they are bad, they were just done poorly and over-hyped (to say the least). A clean, well thought out, page where you can see a bunch of different things that interest you and access a bunch of tools you use just makes sense. It's great for the vendor too, since if you use their portal you are more likely to use more of their services. The battle here continues to heat up, and the winner is us.
–jeremy
Looks like it happened again. While Microsoft employees were off in one direction (in my opinion the correct direction) and doing something good, an exec goes and says something completely opposite and contradictory. This seems to be happening a lot lately. It's hard to argue with the fact that Gates and Ballmer have lead the company to huge successes, but one has to wonder – are the two holding Microsoft back at this point? Their vision and need to dominate are really stopping Microsoft from changing, and change in some areas they need quite badly. What was at one point one of their biggest strengths may in the end turn into their biggest weakness.
—jeremy
Looks like Michael Dell has commented on the Red Hat investment I blogged about a little while back. From the article:
Dell played down the investment, however, saying that while he meets with MSD's management once every couple of months, he is not personally involved in its investment choices. “I didn't know they had made this investment,” he said. “That's not the sort of thing we talk about.”
That news sure hasn't slowed down the stock, which has gone up considerably in the last week. Whether or not he knew about the deal before hand, I still see the investment as an affirmation of the business potential that Linux holds. As I mentioned earlier, I thought the acquisition rumors were a bit far fetched anyway. This is still good news.
–jeremy
Just posted an interview with James Turner and Dee-Ann LeBlanc, who recently stepped down from Sys-Con. The levels came out much better this time and the content was very good. We also have a BitTorrent tracker up now, which should help with the bandwidth issues. I'd like to thank both Dee-Ann and James for taking the time to be on the show.
–jeremy
The LQ Wiki has been upgraded. Let us know if you notice any problems. Remember – we are trying to build the largest free general Linux knowledge base on the web and you can help. All content is licensed under a creative commons license. Thanks goes to david_ross once again.
–jeremy
I blogged about this here and we also discussed it a bit on the first LQ Radio show. Here is some information that will hopefully clear things up. Seems my first assertion, that this thing was being blown a bit out of proportion, is indeed true. Good to see that since the article the Wecore and KHTML folks have discussed how code could be shared easier. Due to the differences in implementation (X11/QT/KHTML/Konq vs. OSX/Aqua/Webcore/Safari) it's clear that not all code will always be able to go back and forth, but open discussion is a fantastic start IMHO.
–jeremy
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