OSCON and Gnomedex Reflection

It's clear having attended both OSCON and Gnomedex that the excitement is coming back to the web and Open Source communities. The good news is that the irrational exuberance of the bubble has been replaced with rational exuberance. People are excited again. And for good reason – exciting things are happening. Whether you like the Web 2.0 meme or not (Tim Bray doesn't, while Tim O'Reilly does), it's clear that things are changing. It's still not clear where all this will end up, but it's great being part of the ride. On the conference note, the first LinuxWorld without an LQ booth in a long time started today. It's a shame we couldn't be there and I'm going to miss the chance to meet so many members at once. I remain hopeful that we'll be at LWE Boston and LWE London though.
–jeremy
OSCON, OSCON05, OSCON2005, Gnomedex, LinuxWorld

OSCON OSI BOF

I attended the OSCON OSI BOF last night. Overall I think it went extremely well and was quite encouraging. So encouraging that I've offered to do whatever I can (if anything) to help. One of the main topics discussed was License Proliferation. While no one on the OSI board or in the crowd had any solid definitive answers, they are starting to fully understand the problem and attempt to formulate a plan. I for one am glad to see that they're not just jumping into anything, but are trying to learn from the past and make a sound decision here. It's certainly not going to be an easy problem to solve. They also discussed the possibility of opening up the OSI to some kind of membership. The crowd was really into this BOF, which was great to see. After the BOF was over, a Brazilian drink of some kind was being made. Unfortunately I wasn't around long enough after the meeting to try it. I ran into Steve Mallet at the meeting (he's the OSI webmaster) and we ended up discussing quite a bit of stuff from Sun to Linux on the Desktop. Was great to meet Steve in person as we've discussed quite a bit online in the past. He's agreed to be a future LQ Radio guest, so stay tuned for that.
OSCON, OSCON05, OSCON2005, OSI

OSCON Tuesday Evening Extravaganza

Just got back from the OSCON “Tuesday Evening Extravaganza”. First, I'd like to congratulate Doc, who was the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award winner in the “communication” category. Actually, congratulations are in order for all the winners, as each one was well deserved. Next up was the State of the Onion, by Larry Wall. The main focus of the speech, which was extremely good, was Perl 6. One thing Larry underscored though, was something that I could not agree with more. In fact, it's something I've said both in my blog and on LQ Radio recently. There is currently a bit too much duplication of effort in the Open Source community. It's something I am very cognoscente of with LQ. We never start a new project unless there currently isn't a similar project in place, or we think we can do it differently/better in a significant way, or we've tried to work with a project and they are not interested. In all other cases we prefer to work with and strengthen current projects. A good example would be that we will not even consider doing a Linux News site. There is nothing we could do that LWN, LXer, LinuxToday, Newsforge, etc. aren't already doing. What we will do (and have done) is help those sites where we can. I know it's tempting to start something yourself, and in some cases that really is the best option. It's not always the best option though. Don't be afraid to contribute to an existing project.
The last speech I'll cover is What Business Can Learn From Open Source, given by Paul Graham. This was absolutely fantastic. He covered so much and said so many good things that I can't do them justice by covering them here. If possible though, I'll try to get Paul on LQ Radio. The first point he made is that MSM is trying to downplay blogs and blogging by saying that the avergae blog is not very good. They're right there – most of the millions of blogs out there don't have compelling content. But, most of the blogs out there aren't ready by anyone outside the bloggers family and friends. The MSM doesn't have to compete with the average blog. They have to compete with the best of the blogs, which have incredibly well researched, compelling and original content. Content that is better than most of what you'll see in the MSM. And unlike the MSM, who can control the channel and therefore control what gets read, the really good blogs rise to the top because of the content, not because of the medium. He also draws a parallel with Open Source. Most people are not using Firefox because it's Open Source, they're using it because it's the best browser. A team of unpaid but passionate people were able to produce a better product than a team whose day job it was to write a browser. The same is true for most blogs. The content isn't for pay – it's what the person is legitimately and passionately interested in… and that is extremely hard to compete with. That sounds a lot like free markets, doesn't it?
I am really looking forward to the rest of OSCON, and will post updates as I get a chance.
–jeremy
OSCON,
OSCON05

Firefox Tabs

Just wanted to thank everyone who contacted me about Firefox tabs after listening to the latest LQ Radio interview with Asa. It seems that the behavior I was talking about, where you only get the tabs context if you have a tab open, can be easily changed by going to “Preferences->Advanced->Tabbed Browsing” and unchecking the “Hide the tab bar when only one web site is open” box. While many people contacted me, the first one was david_ross.
–jeremy
Mozilla, Firefox

Interview with Asa

I just posted an interview I did with Asa over at LQ Radio. We covered a lot of ground in 1:21, although I wanted to get into the Linux on the desktop topic much more than we ended up having time for. He was already about 15 minutes late for a meeting as it was. I look forward to chatting with him about the subject at OSCON next week. Thanks for taking the time to do the interview Asa.
–jeremy
Linux, Mozilla, Firefox

Levanta's Linux Management Appliance

When I first saw the Levanta Intrepid M, I thought it was an extremely nice device. For those of you who remember LinuxCare, what remained of that company was renamed to Levanta about a year or so ago. The Intrepid M has an impressive list of features, including bare metal provisioning, the ability to capture state, the ability to snapshot and then put that snapshot on any device, the ability to help with migrations, the ability to deploy patches and packages and even the ability to track any change on any machine. It supports Red Hat, Suse/Novell and Fedora. It seems to do everything Red Hat's RHN Satellite does and more, with the added bonus of supporting multiple distributions and coming as a preconfigured hardware device. All this for the low price of $7,495.00. The bad news? That only includes 10 client licenses. Surely if you need a device like this you have 100 or 1000 machines though. Extra licenses are $250/each and there is no mention of volume pricing (although I'd guess some kind of discount would materialize at a certain level). That means 1000 machines would set you back a quarter million. That seems a bit excessive. For comparison, Satellite is $13,500 which includes the first 50 client licenses and then $3,500 per 50 pack after that (which comes out to about $70/each). Net price for 1000 machines would be $80,000. Don't forget that this is all on top of the cost of the OS – $349 for RHEL ES, $0 for Fedora or $349 for SLES. Needless to say, it looks like a great package, but the combo price of $600 per box for RHEL/SLES and an Intrepid M aims it very squarely at a specific market. Price aside, it looks like a absolutely fantastic product and I wish Levanta the best.
–jeremy

OS X and the x86 Whitebox

This article gave me a thought (why the article made /. today when it was published two weeks ago, I have no idea). I don't think Apple will (or should for that matter) just release OSX for generic x86. They have a lot of benefits as it is now to controlling both the hardware and the OS. The can optimize to their exact setup and they don't have to worry about buggy third party drivers (which is one of Windows biggest stability problems) or supporting a billion random devices. Also important to Apple is that they can control the design of all OS X products. Apple surely doesn't want to be in the OS business and releasing OS X for any x86 would put them in that business. BUT, what if say 12 months or so after they work the bugs out of the Intel switch, they let a very select OEM or two produce a pre-approved and vetted non-Apple Mac. It would have to be a high end company that understands quality and design. Names like Dell don't strike me as plausible, as they'd lose their sweet Windows licensing deal. Maybe someone like AlienWare would be ideal though. I've not heard any specific rumors on this front, but wouldn't it be interesting? Apple would get to chip away at the Windows market share, make some additional money on OS X and broaden their reach while still getting to maintain a good amount of control on the quality and aesthetics of the hardware the OS X runs on.
–jeremy
Apple, Intel

OSCON Bound

A little late (my procrastination once again astounds), but I am indeed OSCON bound. LinuxQuestions.org is once again a proud OSCON sponsor. If you'll be attending and would like to meet for whatever reason, drop me a line. See you in Portland.
–jeremy

Are Windows Users Are Idiots?

According to this article, Windows users are idiots. I have to disagree, for a couple of reasons. First, I'd have to say that lacking knowledge about a computer in no way makes you an idiot. I'm sure there are plenty of geniuses that are completely computer illiterate. But it goes beyond that. People are lazy – it's a fact of life. Most people don't want to have to understand computers. I don't blame them really. The problem is that 1) Windows comes insecure by default, 2) Windows comes preinstalled on almost every desktop machines sold and 3) Windows makes it too easy to not have to learn anything to change those defaults. There is no user education. The outcome is an army of spam spewing zombies. I think it's our responsibility, as the 10% of people who want to and do understand computers really well, to lead the other 90% in the right direction. Don't just tell someone “Oh yeah, Windows sucks” – that makes you look like an idiot IMHO. Explain to them why installing Linux or buying a Mac is in their best interest. Make them understand. They don't need to be able to compile a kernel or write a device driver. They need to be educated on why the alternatives are superior. Belittling them helps no one.
—jeremy

A Brief Look into LQ Visitors

LQ is in the “pretty big, but not huge” category, as far as web sites go (ie. 10M views a month < LQ < 100M views a month). While many members are extremely new to Linux, the average visitor is certainly more technical than the average visitor at most sites. After all, they are taking the time to research Linux. I thought it would be interesting to give people an idea of who visits a site like LQ – what OS are they using, what browser? The following data is from the last month or so:

As you can see, on LQ, Windows only has slightly above half of the OS share. That puts us way outside the normal for typical non-technical sites. But notice how much of a lead FF/Mozilla has. That goes to show that regardless of what platform people are using, their browser of choice is often FF/Mozilla. A good example of this is Mac. Mac comes with Safari but just under half of the Mac users seem to be using FF (The number of people who use Mac and don't use one of Safari or FF is very small). Note that unknown for the OS is either a spider or an occasional RSS reader that doesn't report it. A lot of interesting info can be gleaned from those two tables, but I'll leave some of the fun up to you ;)
–jeremy
Linux, Windows, Apple, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, Konqueror