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Posts in 2009 March
Don't Force Purity in Companies
A recent ComptuerWorld article argues that open-source-based companies are just not going to be able to make as much money as their commercial counterparts, and, thus, should open themselves up to supporting the open-source versions of their software, too. I disagree.
These companies are already providing an incredible service to the community by licensing their code as open-source. True, they may get help from the community in developing the software, but they still need a way to make money. Compared to some of the alternatives, only supporting the commercial version doesn’t seem too bad, and, if it helps the company hire more developers to improve the open-source side, everyone wins.
Though it would be nice if every company was based around pure open-source, it may not yet be realistic, at least until someone comes up with a better business model. For now, let a few concessions slide – you can’t ask too much of company that has to make money.
When Dell first announced Ubuntu-based computers were going to be available, it was undoubtedly a trial, which is why only a very limited selection of computers were made available with Ubuntu. At least to some extent, Ubuntu probably still is a trial, but why on earth would you offer Ubuntu on every machine in an entire line, except for one.
After learning that Dell quietly added a better screen to their Inspiron Mini 10 netbook, I was considering praising its feature here, since it is seeming more and more like the netbook that has everything.
Unfortunately, I was annoyed to discover that the 10″ version is only available with Windows, though both the 12″ and the 9″ are available with either Windows or Linux.
Perhaps this is just a mistake, but it is strange and somewhat annoying, since it seems to be almost random which comptuers get Ubuntua nd which don’t.
A couple of days ago, I criticized Microsoft’s new “laptop hunters” ad, largely for the line “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.” In my interpretation, this seemed to almost be a reference to the status icons that Macs have begun. As someone once said to me, if you have a Mac, it doesn’t matter how clueless you are, everyone assumes you’re technologically competent.
Many other people looking at the ad, though, have seen it a different way, the way Microsoft probably intended the comment. Rather than suggesting that Macs are cool, many see the side of the ad that suggests Macs are only for rich, arrogant people who can afford them, though most people have not worded it quite so strongly.
While I certainly agree that this was Microsoft’s intention, I question the effectiveness of such an ambiguous ad, especially when you can walk into any coffee shop and see that usually at least half of the notebooks there are Macs, being used by ordinary people.
It is certainly true that buying a Mac usually means buying premium hardware, but this ad might not have been the best way of explaining that. Then again, I have never liked Microsoft’s advertising style. (The parodies sure are great, though.)
Brilliant Brainstorms #53 – Convert The Wallpaper
Brilliant Brainstorms is a (usually) weekly summary of some of the best/most interesting brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site as well as various other Brainstorm-style sites.
KDE, K Desktop Environment and the KDE Logo are trademarks of KDE e.V..
Similarly to how Nautilus works, Dolphin displays links to some folders in the left sidebar. These links usually point to things like your home folder, your documents folder, and your pictures folder, but why not change these links automatically based on what folders you commonly visit?
Let’s play identify an advertiser:
“I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”
Who is paying for that ad? Microsoft.Yes, Microsoft.
I’ll give Microsoft some credit for trying, but they just can’t seem to get an ad right. In fact, their last few ads have looked more like parodies than real ads. This one is no exception.
The ad above is intended to make fun of Apple’s premium (to put it nicely) prices, pointing out the better value you can get with a PC. That’s all fine and sounds like a good idea in the current economy, but I think they could have done a better job than telling all their viewers they’re not cool enough for Macs.
Regardless of what you think about Microsoft and Apple, the subject of this ad makeas a lot of sense; however, unfortunately, the implementation was not quite so smooth. Next time, don’t tell everyone they’re not cool enough.
Every six months without fail, a new release of Ubuntu arrives, carrying a number of new features. At the moment, this is great. Ubuntu improves at an extremely impressive speed and, each time, the release is a little better.
How long can this last, though? Certainly there are a lot of great features that could be implemented, but projects of Ubuntu’s size have to start worrying about feature creep, or the tendency to introduce too many features, making the product less useful and too complex.
While this may not be an issue that Ubuntu runs into for at least a few more years, it is something that almost every piece of software must eventually deal with. Hopefully Ubuntu will continue to introduce only useful, important featuers and not stray into bloat land.
Can The Games for Linux Argument Apply To Applications
Many independent game developers have been arguing recently that porting games to OS X and Linux is a good idea, not because you will sell a lot of Linux copies, but because you get a lot of free advertising which leads to more sales on all platforms. Can this argument work with general applications, too, though?
Unfortunately, I doubt it in most cases. There are already so many great Linux applications that a new application, closed or open source, doesn’t really make much of a splash unless it is already well known, which largely defeats the point of gaining the PR from the port.
For example, look at the recent releases of commercial, closed-source comic and book organization software for Linux from RadicalBreeze. As much as I would like to see these applications succeed, they haven’t gotten a huge amount of attention, despite being something of a test of Linux as a target for commercial development.
As a counterexample, though, Dropbox seemed to get a fair amount of attention for porting their software to Linux. The difference in their case, I suspect, was that they had enough attention already to really be noticed, but not enough that they didn’t benefit from the port.
While for some companies porting applications to Linux may yield a big PR spike, most companies are, unfortunately, probably either too big to care or too small to be noticed.
Due to all the attention that is put on Ubuntu releases, it is often easy to miss what is going on in another distribution, such as Fedora. Fedora, too, though has some interesting features coming in Fedora 11, which should be out in May.
20 Second Boot Times It seems that everyone is suddenly realizing that their boot times are too slow. Windows, OS X, Ubuntu, Fedora, and, undoubtedly, countless other Linux distros are also at work reducing start times. Fedora is targeting 20 seconds, but that will, obviously, be very hardware-dependent.
EXT4 As Default File System Despite the EXT4 filesystem, which brings improvements in speed and reliability, only being released a little while ago, Fedora plans to make it the default filesystem for new Fedora installs.
Improved, Graphical Fingerprint Reader Support Fedora 11 will be featuring an easy-to-use GUI for configuring fingerprint scanners, unlike previous fingerprint software, which usually required that you run it from the terminal, which is not exactly the most user-friendly way for new users.
Windows Cross-Development With the help of Wine, Fedora is hoping to help eliminate the need to run a Windows machine just to write software for it. Pretty soon, you should be able to write and test a single set of code from a single computer and release versions for all operating systems.
Transitioning to Linux – OEM Bulk Install Style
Transitioning someone to Linux on an individual basis is one thing, but what happens when OEMs start installing Linux out of the box? No longer do you have one person helping another person transition to a new operating system, but rather thousands of people transitioning to Linux without individual help.
A recent CNet review of the HP Mini 1000 Mi (customized Ubuntu) concluded this:
“HP has added a Linux-based OS to its popular Mini 1000 Netbook’s Mi edition, dressed up with a glossy, sexy front-end, but many users will still want the flexibility and familiarity of Windows.”
Ignoring the flexibility part (when we start talking about Windows being more flexible than Linux, something is messed up), it is true that many users will still opt for the familiar option – and I don’t blame them. How can that be changed, though? The only real option would be to include Windows and Linux side by side (obviously not on today’s netbooks, but on regular notebooks and desktops). That sounds like a great idea, but why would an OEM bother with this? The main advantage of Linux to an OEM is the price tag: free.This is not the only advantage, though.
The OEM doesn’t care what OS their customers use in the short term, but in the longer term, OEMs should be trying to get their customers to switch away from Windows to any open-source or custom operating system.
The problem is that the Dell’s and HP’s of the world are dumb hardware makers. Hardware gets cheaper, margins get smaller, customer support gets worse, customers get mad, customers leave, prices have to drop, margins get smaller, and so on. It’s a downward spiral that they have to break to survive.
Pretty soon Apple may well be killing Dell, since they control both the hardware and the software, thus giving them greater ability to innovate, add value that keeps the margins higher, and, ultimately, survive.
OEMs do, in fact, have a vested interest in transitioning to software that they can control. Whether to make a proprietary OS from scratch or start from an open-source operating system is a choice they will have to make, but I think I can predict the outcome.
Brilliant Brainstorms #52 – Less Pretty
Brilliant Brainstorms is a (usually) weekly summary of some of the best/most interesting brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site as well as various other Brainstorm-style sites.
KDE, K Desktop Environment and the KDE Logo are trademarks of KDE e.V..
Desktop effects, can be both very cool and very useful, but when they get in the way of what you are trying to work on, they are simply annoying. To help solve this problem, there are already ways of easily enabling and disabling desktop effects, but you have to do it manually. Why not automatically turn them off when an incompatible application is running and re-enable them when it closes?
KDE 4 is quite beautiful and there are tons of themes available for it, but why not make it easier to make more? An application that allows users to fairly easily create their own plasma themes would rapidly expand the number of themes out there and, hopefully, introduce some more true works of art.