Modify Colors
Posts in release
Open-Source Applications Drawing More Attention
Microsoft and Apple have PR people and marketing budgets to get the word out about new software, but open-source projects, for the most part, don’t. They rely mostly on word of mouth (or blog) promotion. Apparently, at least for OpenOffice and Firefox, this works.
As many people already know, in the first 24 hours of Firefox 3’s release, there were over 8 million downloads. More recently, and without any special event, OpenOffice 3.0 got 3 million downloads in the first week. Perhaps people just really like the number 3.0, but I think there is something going on here: people are really getting excited about these major new versions, even outside of the open-source software community.
As I mentioned before, there are no PR companies or advertisements to promote the launch of Firefox 3. People learn about it largely through news articles and word of mouth. This would be expected within the Linux community, but to get 3 million, or 8 million downloads, you need a lot of Windows and Mac users, in addition to the Linux users. So what these numbers really show is that the popular open-source applications are becoming mainstream enough for millions of people, using all the different operating systems, to go out and download them. This is definitely a good sign for open-source software.
Whenever a new major distribution comes out, I am always curious to see how they handled the release announcement. These sorts of announcements are almost always followed by some form of feature list. In some cases, this consists of something like this:
- Linux Kernel updated from 2.34.23.23 to 2.3.43.4.3
- OpenOffice.org updated from 43.43 to 343.2
- Bug #4344059450 fixed
- Blah, blah, blah
Obviously, I am exaggerating some, but, unfortunately, not very much.
In other cases, however, the “feature list” is a straight forward explanation of what is cool or interesting about the new version. This later case, of course, is what I far prefer. Instead of pushing away new users, it pulls them in and tells them why <insert name of distro> is the OS they should be using.
I am very happy to say that OpenSuse did a great job with their anouncement. The technical details are still there, just down a couple of pages. At the beginning is an explanation of the cool new end-user features like Compiz Fusion, complete with screenshots.
It is true that there are some references in the beginning to GNOME, KDE, and Xfce, but they are fairly well explained and OpenSuse has never really seemed to target the “average joe” Windows user anyway.
Overall, I am very happy to see another distro doing their release announcement the right way. Good job OpenSuse!!!
Remember, live review of OpenSuse 11 this Friday at 3:30 PM EDT.
Fedora 9 is here and it is one stinky release. (Sorry, stupid joke. Fedora 9 is codenamed Sulfur.) Seriously, Fedora 9 looks anything but stinky. Of course there are plenty of new features in the new release (see here for details), but the one I am really the most excited about is not really even a feature at all.
One of the things the Fedora distribution is best known for is the incredible themes that come with each release. Fedora 6 has the DNA theme, Fedora 7 had the balloon theme, and then Fedora 8 had a much simpler and flatter theme that, in my opinion, was not quite up to the standard of Fedora 6 or 7. It was fine, just as good as most other distributions, and also brought a cool new feature where the background changed based upon the time of day, but I always felt that it was just not quite as great as before. Now, with Fedora 9, I am happy to say that the theme included is once again very impressive. This, perhaps more than anything else, is why I am planning on playing with Fedora 9 as soon as I can.
As I have not yet had time to install Fedora 9, I don’t have much more to say, but I suspect I will be posting more about it later on.
Syncing Distribution Releases
I was interested to read a recent post on The Open Source Advocate suggesting that all distributions sync their release dates. The idea is that every distribution would release on certain dates, allowing schedules not only for distributions, but also for upstream projects (projects that create software that is incorporated into distributions, for example Firefox) to be in sync.
I think this idea is great, because not only would this make sure that all projects are released at convenient times for other projects, but it would also be great in terms of publicity and unification. Let me explain.
If there were two days per year when hundreds of distributions were released, news sites would look stupid ignoring those two days. It is easy to ignore the release of any one distribution, but how can you ignore the release of 100s of distributions?
Additionally, rather than take away from smaller distributions’ publicity, I think it would help them. Let’s use this site as an example. When there is a major distribution release, I always mention it, but I usually ignore smaller distributions and even medium sized ones if I don’t see much interesting about the release. If all the distributions were synced, I would write a small amount about all the interesting new distributions coming out and I suspect I am not alone.
Another advantage of syncing distribution release schedules is giving Linux more of the appearance of being one unified thing. One common criticism of Linux is that there are too many distros. Syncing all the distribution releases would make it easy for new users to see that Linux distros are not chaos, but rather different people working on different goals while working together at the same time.
I really only see two potential issues with syncing release dates. First, some distributions release every 6 months while others release every couple years while still others have no set length of time between releases. For this reason, distributions should not necessarily release on every release day. Some might skip one or two between releases and others might skip an unspecified number between releases. As long as there are enough distributions that do release every release day, it will still be fine.
The second potential problem is making Linux seem too dictator-like. I don’t want it to look like there is some ruler of all Linux distributions, so instead of having one group that specifies when all distros must release, I say it should just be all the Linux distros that want to getting together and specifying a date. Again, as long as most of the major distros do follow the schedule, if a few little distros want to go by their own schedule, that’s fine.
I am certainly interested in seeing what you think, but right now I am thinking that syncing the distros would be great!
Today Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was released! You can download it or read about the features on the Ubuntu website.
I am sure I will say more about 8.04 in the future, but for now I don’t have much to say. I have been running the beta for a couple of weeks now and it has been great! The only problem I have had is with Firefox 3 Beta 4 messing up some sites (including mine), but the final has Beta 5, so I hope the issues are resolved. Other than that minor issue, which is a Firefox bug not an Ubuntu bug, I have been very impressed the release. If you had let me use the beta and not told me it was the beta, I would have thought it was final. Also, the artwork is great!
I would encourage everyone to upgrade or at least try out the new version now that it has been released.
Good job Ubuntu on yet another great release!