Software Free

Who's left standing at the altar? Windows users, that's who.

Windows has now become the only proprietary operating system without a free-software or open-source equivalent. Apple has Darwin. Solaris has Open Solaris. Unix has Linux and BSD. Even the extinct systems whose surviving fan base can count themselves in the triple-digits have a free alternative that they're working on. BeOS has Haiku, and Amiga has AROS. DOS has FreeDOS. CP/M has CP/M, after Lineo threw up its hands and released it. Ditto for Lucent and Plan Nine From Bell Labs.

And Windows has... nothing!

Yeah, sure, ReactOS. Look, I've been unfailingly optimistic, but even I'm ready to give up on ReactOS. It's never going to happen. They've been picking at it for 12 years, now, and the last time I tried it (less than a year ago) it couldn't stay going more than a few minutes without choking unless I left it completely alone. Linux is 17 years old, and at one-third that age had progressed farther than ReactOS has in its entire lifetime.

Alex Polvi, friend of Miro and a community marketer for Mozilla, has won a Vidoop contest called How do you identify? with a very cute video (see below). Vidoop is a company that takes a cool approach to internet logins, with an OpenID service that gives you one universal login and an option for image grid based identification (take a look). Alex is donating his $1000 prize to Miro and Vidoop is matching that. Thanks so much guys!

Here’s Alex’s winning video (with a shout-out to Miro):

An excellent speech by Clay Shirky about participation with culture: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. He begins with the point that the amount of effort that goes into Wikipedia is tiny compared to the surplus of free time people have.

“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.”

Why is this part titled "The Black Hand"? Well, because I started this series using a nations metaphor. Citizens of Windows who expatriate and immigrate to Linux will be "foreigners" in Linux. And, if you check that Wikipedia article on the Black Hand - an example of which is seen in the "The Godfather" movie series - you will know that Black Hands are just one of the intimidating challenges facing immigrants.

But back up: First, let's talk about culture shock. Have you noticed that the differences in major computer platforms really do seem to make them like different countries? The different ways we do things like run system tasks, open files, shut down and restart, have different file formats and character schemes and default fonts. These are very much like the international practices we have of eating with chopsticks or forks or driving on the left or right side of the road or each country having its own currency. The same barriers to switching countries apply to switching operating systems.

Going forward, I'd just like to point out that I don't claim to have all the answers. What I am doing here, is attempting to ask the right questions. How can we even hope to find the answers if nobody can ask the right, logical questions first?

This time I can fall back on a previously-written piece. In "Does Microsoft impose a prisoner mentality?", I speculated that years of using Windows seems to do something to people. Something kind of creepy. It seems as if it steals their intelligence, or their will to learn, or... something. At the end of the second part, after I took one commenter's questions and made a case study from it, I closed by saying, "Beyond freeing our software and our media, it will be useless unless we have free minds to go with it."

And so, many (but not all) Windows citizens now want to emigrate to either Apple or Linux.

I assure you, this situation is far, far graver than any of the rest of you seem to know. As much guesswork as it is figuring out who runs what, I'm going to take this recent Ars Technica article and give both Apple and Linux the benefit of the doubt. I'll hedge their numbers up to 4% desktop market share for Apple, and 2% for Linux. That leaves Windows at a mere 94%. These figures match our conventional wisdom pretty accurately.

Oh, sure! Hey, let's convert all the Windows users to Linux! Gosh, it's that easy, is it? Piece of cake!

OK, let's say every carpet-ba... ah.. I mean "Linux evangelist" gets their magical wish and *poof*, overnight, all of the Windows users decide to switch to Apple and Linux.

Here is the point that just about everybody seems to fail at: logistics. Let's start by illustrating the math a little more clearly. This infographic illustrates the relative sizes of the three platforms by user base:

Since Apple's story is the shortest, we'll tell it out of order.

Now, the three computing republics, Unix, Apple, and Windows, had different approaches to autonomy. In Unix, they teetered cheerfully on the edge of anarchy. There was only very little attempt to reign in the free spirits there. In Windows, no stepping out of line was tolerated, but it was necessary to maintain perfect order and the people there loved it. In Apple, however, there was a balance: things were "officially" controlled, but since it was so expensive to live there, the government of Apple chose wisely to occasionally look the other way if the people wanted to go off and do their own thing. After all, giving people what they wanted was what they had in mind.

Once upon a time...

Hold on here. I'm going to simplify the story down to three operating systems. Is everybody cool with that? I know all about GNU/Linux, GNU/HURD, Minix, BSD (Free, Open, Net, and PC), Solaris, Plan Nine From Bell Labs, Darwin, OS X, BeOS, Amiga, Tandy, OS/2, Xenix, and so on. For the sake of fairy-tale brevity, we're temporarily pretending that there's three operating systems, or computing republics upon the desktop. We'll slide some of the others in in their due time. Just wanted to make that clear. Start the projector!

Once upon a time, there were three computing republics. Apple, Unix, and Windows. They spread out to cover all of the land until the map of the world looked like this:

This will be a seven-part series.

Introduction:

It's about time I tackled this ugly task. I've been promising a follow-up to Ubuntu is not Linux. Because the broad point that I'm trying to make needs to be hammered down, I will explain it again and again and again, more and more clearly each time.

Why is this idea so apparently hard for others to grasp and so nose-on-my-face evident to me? Perhaps I'm more socialized than my geek peers. I took a psychology course once. I've always been fascinated by sociology and culture studies. And I worked a couple years in my youth as a taxi driver. You find out all kinds of things about people that you wouldn't otherwise. Perhaps it is this forbidden fruit of knowledge of human nature that puts such a gulf between me and the geek world. I balance my computer knowledge with my people knowledge, while other geeks stay more exclusively computer-knowledge.

I’m heading to Hong Kong next week, and I’d love to meet with anyone who has an interest in Miro or is working on related projects. I’ll be in Hong Kong from Friday, May 9th through Wednesday May 14. Please let me know if you’d like to meet up or send me email intros to relevant people. My plan thus far: conduct business, meet people, eat dim sum.

My email is jessep [at] pculture.org.

We have a great Summer Team in the works, and are excited to announce that we have space for 1-2 additional marketing / outreach interns. These are unpaid positions, but offer great experience with one of the most popular open-source programs in the world and a unique, fast-growing non-profit.

PCF has an office in Worcester, MA, but most of our staff works from home around the world and we expect the same will be true of our interns– you don’t have to live in Worcester. We will expect you to work 30 hours a week for at least 9 weeks and to file a weekly progress report. Following your internship, we will happily serve as job references and provide written recommendations.

Members of the summer team will focus on some of the following:

So, the solar panels are now installed, and heating. We're getting the water in the tank heated to around
50 C on these grey days; (there is also an electric immersion coil to heat to 60 degC as necessary, at night-rate electricity).
They heat a 300L tank in the utility.

The panels are grant-aided by Sustainable Energy Ireland,
and we reckon they'll pay for themselves in 5-8 years, depending on water usage with three kids. Time now to see
what the actual savings are.

Tags energy-saving, solar-panels, house, green, power-consumption

Well the reason why I had to resurrect my old and unmaintained blog is that apparently, I have been nominated for the “Great Indian Developer Awards” in the “Top Committer” category.

I had no idea about this until now as I have received no communication from the organisers regarding the awards and I have no idea how I got nominated.

And I think this is completely Bullshit.

I don’t see any reason how I can get nominated even though I haven’t been active in the Free Software community since the last year or so.

I think there are many other people who deserve this much more than I do. Hell I don’t think I would even feature in the list of top 100 Indian Free Software developers.

To name a few, I would rather nominate the following (in no particular order):

A lot of the anti-DRM discussion tends to focus on how much of a pain in the ass DRM is when customers buy content and want to use it on different computers or other devices. But an even bigger problem hits when a company inevitably decides to switch to a different DRM system, goes out of business, or discontinues a service. last100 has a great post about 5 Companies that Sold Customers Down the DRM River. It’s a word of warning to anyone considering buying content with DRM.

The new Miro Non-Profit Co-Branding Service

We launched the Miro customization and co-branding program earlier this year in order to give video producers a tool for simple, integrated distribution of many podcasts. We’ve had interest from lots of non-profits looking for simple ways to distribute video content online and we’ve always wanted to offer the co-branding service to them for free. These have included both public broadcasters and organizations that do independent media and activism.