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Mozilla CEO John Lilly on the number of fast, capable browsers in the market:

“The world is a lot different from a year ago, and we have three brand new browsers and there is a lot more competition and as a result the users are getting a lot more technology…”

“… I think it is uncomfortable, because our rivals have 2-3 times the magnitude of people and resources, and they are relentless.”

The state of the browser market pretty much proves that it’s impossible for an open source project to remain a popular front-end application for too long.

A successful open source project will see one of two trends:

- Commercial entities, each with its own USP will pick, modify and integrate portions of the project into their own products. This is what’s happening with Firefox. (Chrome, according to Google, used ” components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox”). Firefox as an open source project is likely to thrive, but its best features and technology will probably find their way into more popular commercially-backed browsers [1].

- It will see widespread adoption, but on back-end IT infrastructure instead of the desktop. Linux and *BSD are examples of this. I guess this is because after a point, the marginal cost of polishing the UI is more than what developers are willing to bear, and that end users demand more. Regardless, the core functionality of such applications is on par with/often superior to commercial alternatives, so a combination of this + low price point makes them an attractive choice for back-end deployment [2].

[1] Android was a commercially-backed open source project (based on Linux kernel 2.6) from the beginning, so I guess we’ll treat it like Chrome.

[2] This isn’t a value judgement on the quality of open source products, or the viability of the open source development model itself. The past couple of decades do seem to have proved, though, that end-user open source applications are tough to build and sustain in their original form.

Bryan Cantrill, kernel engineer extraordinaire and co-author of Dtrace, blogged his thoughts about reverse-engineering and patents in the context of Linus moving the Linux kernel souce code mgmt system from BitKeeper.

I (like many engineers, I suspect) view reverse engineering as a Natural Right. That is, I believe that we are endowed with certain unalienable Rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Understanding how the hell something works (or doesn’t, as is frequently the case). Perhaps perversely to some, it is my strong belief in the right to reverse engineer that leads me to my equally strong belief in the responsibility of government to establish a system of patents: if you use my product, you have the right to take it apart and understand its inner workings, but I have the right to protect my intellectual property by patenting the novel mechanism that represents a non-obvious advance in the state of the art. That is, it should be the protection afforded by patents — and not the obfuscation inherent in a running system — that prevents the rip-off artists. My belief reflects the fact that nearly all applications of reverse engineering do not in any way violate anyone’s intellectual property — and the act itself and alone can never violate intellectual property.

Quite right. Unfortunately, software patents today are ridiculous – there’s an article every week or two on Slashdot about some extremely obvious idea being granted a patent. I think we’ve already reached the point where any piece of decent software inevitably violates some or the other software patent. Software patents have now become a tool for companies to muscle their way into, or keep their stranglehold on, existing markets, using the principle of Mutually Assured Litigation. You use a patented idea of mine that doesn’t make a difference to me, that’s fine – but if it’s any threat at all to my market position, I’ll sure as hell sue you. So we’re now walking through a legal minefield wherever we go. In addition, there isn’t too much use knowing how a particular piece of software (Bitkeeper in this case) works unless you can do anything with it. If, for instance, Tridge did find out how Bitkeeper worked, he wouldn’t have been able to do much with it. It’d only tell him how not to design a new source code management system, since the existing process’ been patented. So although in principle, reverse-engineering ought to be allowed for patented software, from a practical point of view, it really doesn’t mean too much.

BMC does, however, consider that point of view:

I believe strongly in reverse engineering in particular, but it plays an especially critical role in the development of software: in my experience, when developing a layer in the stack of software abstraction, you always need to understand at least one layer below you and you often need to understand at least one layer above you — and reverse engineering is often the primary means to achieve this understanding. More generally, software is usually reverse engineered to work around oversights or blunders, or to simply understand a software system sufficiently well to interoperate with it.

So reverse-engineering for the sake of developing software elsewhere in the software stack, or for the purpose of interoperability, ought to be allowed. It also enables better quality software (in terms of bugs being found, or better interfaces being suggested). Therefore, using the simple principle of “many eyeballs make bug-finding easier” (or equivalent) by Eric S. Raymond, software ought not to be closed-source in any case.

So we’re at a stage where software patents are important (even a necessary evil, perhaps) to preserve competitiveness and encourage participation (indeed, there are many startups whose entire existence depends upon a patent or two!). But we need to draw a line when patents are granted. All too often, one crucial aspect of a patent – novelty and non-obviousness – is simply overlooked. And availability of source (which, actually, obviates the need for reverse engineering) is a necessary (but not sufficient! precondition for high-quality software.

I’ve been trying to get Beagle up and running on my computer for a while now. There’s so much information on my hard disk, I’d love something like Google Desktop Search for Linux, and Beagle seems to be just what I need – and more.

The following is only for those who’ve had some experience in Beagle-related matters. The rest, come back later… I’ll come up with entries that make sense to you – I promise. Now, scram!

OK – with Beagle, as you know, things aren’t that simple. Beagle requires d-bus, an inotify-enabled kernel (now optional), and mono. I have all of those installed, and working fine:

dbus – version 0.23.4 (the latest one, 0.31, requires gtk+ 2.6, and I’m still running Gnome 2.6).
mono – version 1.0.6 for SUSE 9.2
kernel – an inotify-enabled 2.6.8 kernel.

I launch dbus with
$ eval `dbus-launch –auto-syntax`

Then, beagled
$ beagled –fg –debug

This connects to the dbus session just fine, and begins indexing all of my data. I now launch best, the nice GUI to beagle. That loads fine too.

The problem is when I type in a search query. If I search for “rahul”, for instance, here is what I get:

The query for rahul failed.
The session bus isn’t running. See http://beaglewiki.org/index.php/Installing%20Beagle for information on setting up a session bus.

I have no idea what the problem is now. Why best can’t seem to detect that a session bus is indeed running, fails me. Someone on Ubuntu’s wiki here had the same problem, but a reboot seemed to fix that for him. I’m not that lucky.

Does anyone have a clue?

The first thing I consider when buying any piece of hardware, is whether it’ll play well with Linux. Yeah if you’re a Linux user, you know the feeling. The “extra” research you need to put in. Thankfully, the rather expensive digital camera I bought last week works excellently with the SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional on my Thinkpad.

The first time I plugged it in, it was recognised as /dev/sda1 (where’d that come from?), and mounted under /media/usb-Sony-SonyDSC:0:0:0p1. I’d actually prefer a nice /media/camera or something similar. Anyways, from there on, I could use it like a normal folder – add, view, delete files. The only hitch was that to use the camera multiple times between reboots, you had to unmount it cleanly before disconnecting it – and that involved opening a terminal window and typing “sudo umount /dev/sda1″. Most inconvenient, if you ask me. In the “Computer” window on the GNOME desktop, an entry for “USB Hard Disk” would appear a short while after the camera was plugged in.

GTKam, a nice application for downloading and importing images from your digital camera, refused to recognise the camera. This was a pain – I didn’t want to go through the elaborate ritual of waiting for the camera to be automounted, navigate to a complicated drive path, more layers of folders beneath, and then drag and drop them into a folder in my home directory. No, sir – what I want is to plug in the camera, fire up gtkam, look at a preview of all the pictures in the device, and transfer them to my photos folder with a single click.

I observed that most of the Sony camera models listed in the gphoto database had PTP mode in brackets appended to the model numbers. I wondered if there was a “PTP mode” for my camera. A little poking around in the fat manual revealed that I could, indeed, enable PTP mode. And voila! The camera works fine! it doesn’t show up as /dev/sda1 anymore in the mount listings, and GTKam lists images like a charm! Of course, the camera’s recognised as a DSC-F707V, which it most definitely is NOT (it’s a DSC-W1), but hey – it works, and that’s all that matters! I wonder how things are for Windows users.

In a couple of days, I’ll post about digital photo management software for Linux.

I moved to a new Internet provider today. These guys provide Internet connectivity via PPP over Ethernet. The same old story repeated itself:

Location: Dingy, cramped cableguy’s office. 6:30 PM.

Me: …so this connection of yours requires a connection tool?

Cocky ISP guy: Oh, yes, very attractive, animated wizard. We’ll only need to insert one driver, this raspppoe.inf. Sampat here (pointing to grubby, skinnny gum-chewing teenager) will guide you through the entire setup process! You don’t need to do a thing…

Me: So this thing is a Windows application? (redundant question, and I had no intention of allowing Sampat fifty feet near my apartment.)

CIG (with a look that said “Where’re you from – Mars?”): Well, yes… but all Windows versions! 95, 98, 2000, XP, NT, even Windows Server 2003! What do you have installed?

Me: SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional.

CIG: Ohh… Linux. (actually: “You #$^$#^&@%, why can’t you be normal?”)

Me: Yeah, but does your service have a web-based authentication interface? Or is there a Java-based client I can use? Then I won’t have a problem.

This conversation was already beginning to push the limits of his technical knowledge.

CIG: Umm… you want to take a look and find out for yourself? (actually: You $#%#$%&^&, why don’t you just go to ^%&^%&%*%$^ hell?)

I looked, and quickly concluded that this was PPP over Ethernet.

Me: OK. I guess I can handle this one. Just give me my user name and password, and I’ll get going. (I already had a LAN connection to the cableguy’s office, which would work.)

CIG: Sure! Cool! If you have any problems, do let me k… umm, on the other hand, seeya!

I could almost feel his hateful gaze burning into my back as I walked out the office. We Linux users are a pain to most normal people anywhere in the world. Sharing files? Oh, wait… I gotta get Samba working. Hey – why can’t you see my Yahoo! Albums invitation? What? You’re using GAIM? What in the dickens is that? Hey – why can’t you see my webcam? GAIM again? You freak! And now the cableguy.

Now to find a nice graphical tool for Fedora Core 2, so my parents don’t have to open up a terminal window and type more text than the email they want to send.

I didn’t remember seeing a graphical tool for any Linux distribution for configuring a pppoe connection. My parents’ computer has Fedora Core 2 installed, my ThinkPad has SUSE Linux 9.2. No amount of search on Google for a graphical front-end to pppoe on FC2 yielded any results. For SUSE, I didn’t even have to search. YAST is the answer to all your problems. YAST can do everything for a hacker except find him/her a date. (And with Nat Friedman et al at work at Novell, it’ll be able to do that as well.) After configuring your PPPoE connection through YAST, KInternet is a nice application that sits in your system tray and offers you nice context menu options like “Dial in” and “Hang up”. Cool! Just what I want!

I’ll be installing SUSE 9.2 Pro on my parents’ computer next weekend for sure! That’ll sever my last link with Red Hat-based computers.

Sun is mad at IBM. Sun’s President and COO Jonathan Schwartz even wrote an angry letter to our CEO Sam Palmisano last Friday. Understandably. This eWeek report from the 17th of January states that IBM’s refused to “test, certify and support its enterprise software applications on Solaris 10 for x86 platforms”. Which is strange, considering that IBM’s fully agreed to do the exact same thing for Solaris 10 on SPARC.

The ostensible reason from IBM is that they don’t anticipate customer demand for Solaris 10 on x86. An IBM spokesperson said that if and when Solaris 10 on x86 reaches “the required level of customer interest”, they’ll “review the matter”.

The argument does sound a little specious. If IBM begins this process of testing and certification only when customer demand does hot up, it might be a case of too late. Especially if other vendors can competing products, all certified. And IBM has time on its hands: Solaris 10 for both platforms will be available only in March, so there’s time for the certification process.

So, being the conspiracy theorists we are, let’s try to analyse the real reason behind IBM’s stubborn refusal. According to most analysts, IBM wants to thwart Solaris on x86 entirely. Solaris is an OS that directly competes with IBM’s AIX and Linux OSes. AIX currently runs only on the POWER platform, but IBM offers Linux on its entire range of Intel-based xSeries servers. With Solaris on x86, IBM loses an opportunity to offer a Linux-and-xSeries bundle, especially with the hype that Sun’s successfully built around Solaris 10. Novell might also figure in the calculations, now that IBM’s pumped in USD 50 million into the company to enable it to buy SUSE. IBM provides Enterprise Linux flavours from Novell and RedHat on its servers.

Also, IBM’d like nothing better than to replace a Solaris-on-x86 configuration with an AIX-on-POWER 5 one, for high-end systems. One pitch it could make to customers is that a complete IBM solution might be cheaper and easier to support than a bits-and-pieces Sun-and-IBM one. Indeed, according to the article, Scott McNealy was told by IBM’s CEO Sam Palmisano that “IBM no longer has to support an environment that includes Sun, even if it is one that is best for the customer.”

IBM has the advantage of being able to offer a wide product range, whereas Sun still remains very much a platform provider. IBM can use its middleware applications muscle to promote its platform further, and vice versa.

Two days ago, I’d wondered about Novell’s Internal Linux Move, on the sidelines of an article about such an announcement by IBM. In an interview with ZDNet UK, Novell’s MD in the UK told readers to watch out for announcements on that front at Novell’s Brainshare 2004 Convention in March last year.

Today, I hit pay dirt. Here’s an April 2004 interview with Novell’s CIO, Debra Anderson, (interestingly enough, also by ZDNet UK), which focusses almost entirely on this internal migration. Debra admits that a significant motivation for the migration was perception – Novell wanted to be seen as “eating its own dog food” – something that Microsoft is very proud of. Also, the migration strategy seemed to be to first use OpenOffice across the organisation – on Windows – and only later migrate fully to Linux. Novell also won’t be upgrading any Windows desktops they already have:

How is it working out winding up the Microsoft licences you do have – are they making that an easy thing for you to do?

It’s interesting you ask that — we just concluded our licences in March. That was our annual contract with Microsoft and we terminated the Microsoft OS and Office enterprise licence.

That was across the entire organisation?

What that means is that for all the OSes I have, I do not have upgrade rights. Now I still have perpetual use for the set number of Microsoft Office clients I purchased

I also stumbled upon a couple of March 2004 articles from Brainshare 2004 on – where else – ZDNet UK! Here’s an interview with Jack Messman himself ( Novell’s chief executive and chairman, for those not in the know). Jack also was in a particularly bombastic mood, declaring “We don’t need no stinkin’ Windows“! Remember, all of this was at Brainshare 2004, held at Salt Lake City between March 21-25 2004. It’s been over three quarters of a year since then. If Novell had indeed made significant progress on their promises, we’d be hearing from them a lot more than the stony silence we’re getting on this issue.

If IBM and Novell, the current flagbearers for Linux in the Enterprise, have both faltered on their own Linux migrations, they’re going to find it very hard to convince customers to do the same, either on the desktop or in the datacentre. There had better be some soundbites at Brainshare 2005 – March 20-25 2005.

Microsoft makes a big show of inviting customers to their Redmond campus to show off their internal usage of the latest in their product line. Gates devoted a large chunk of an entire chapter in his landmark “Business @ The Speed Of Thought” to this claim. Paul Thurrot, professional apologist for Microsoft, often touches upon this in his reports on his website. (Hey, to be fair, I admire his zealousness, and I recommend his website to all Windows enthusiasts!) It’s time IBM and Novell woke up to the need to not only do the Right Thing, but also to be seen doing so.

Well, I got SUSE 9.1 Pro on my shiny new TP yesterday! Works like a charm!

I had a DVD of this distro from Novell, but since my old PC didn’t have a DVD ROM, I never got a change to have a look at this supposedly cool distro. RedHat/Fedora has been my mainstay since the bad old days of Linux 2.0.

SUSE’s installation is about as easy to use as Fedora’s, but it’s certainly more powerful. The only gripe I have is their handling of multilayered dialogs – where one dialog/preference box leads to another – leavs much room for improvement. The NTFS resizer was a joy to use! IBM’s default partitioning scheme is to use a ~4GB partition (which they call PreDesktop Area) for recovery, and use the rest as ine large C: drive. In addition, when you first boot the TP, Windows converts this FAT32 drive to NTFS. I’m glad SUSE was able to resize this so well; Fedora and the rest MUST have this feature by now!

(I’d do away with Windows XP altogether except for the fact that I’d paid good money for this copy – and IBM doesn’t provide installation CDs! GRRRR!)

The installation is simple for a newbie – if he/she sticks with the (decent) defaults, and is sufficiently flexible for a power user to tweak. I picked almost all of the packages SUSE had to offer. However, the installation itself takes a very long time – 4 GB took 2 hours to install! This is unacceptable, guys!

Once I was done, though, the most adorable little chameleon greeted me at startup! This was a welcome change from the furious cascade of kernel debug messages I was used to in Fedora. Even RHGB – Fedora’s attempt at graphical boot, although professional-looking – isn’t as pretty as this. My first virtual console was in a nice framebuffer.

OK. SUSE makes the best KDE desktop in the world. Period. No arguments about this one. I’ve tried Mandrake, RHEL and Fedora, and no one puts as much into their KDE as SUSE. I’ll put up a screenshot of their default desktop sometime soon. YAST is very nicely integrated into KDE’s Control Centre. SAX2, SUSE’s X configuration tool, rocks. The menus are well arranged, lots of applications, sensible defaults. Two great-looking wallpapers.

Gnome sucks. I hope fervently that things have improved in the 9.2 release and in Novell Linux Desktop. It’s amazing that fonts that look so great in KDE can be so unreadable in Gnome. And don’t accuse me of not tweaking enough – I’m a Gnome lover too, and know a fair bit about using and configuring it. YAST isn’t too well integrated here – and it’s difficult for a user to run a pure-Gnome SUSE desktop , because all of YAST’s modules seem to have been written using the Qt libraries. Oh, well – SUSE did always tout itself as a KDE-centric distro. Wonder how Ximian’s changed that.

SUSE’s notebook support is amazing! I’ve yet to go over this in detail, but suspend/stand-by and hibernate worked like a charm! There’s this YAST module which is a front-end to kpowersave – and it’s the most intuitive way I’ve seen to manage a mobile computer’s power-handling features. I was advised not to try ACPI, and to stick to APMd. I’ve done that. There’s this nice piece on OSNews.com about SUSE 9.2 Pro’s power handling support. Hope to upgrade to 9.2 soon, will try that out. More on this as I explore further.

The R50’s scroll feature doesn’t work yet, but there’s a program by the name of TPScroll which apparently does a good job at fixing that. I’ve dowloaded it, will try it out tonight. More later.

OK – so that’s my first experience with Linux on a Laptop – and, as you’ve probably guessed, it’s been quite appealing!

My IBM Thinkpad R50 has arrived:

Here are the specs:
1.) ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 64MB 128-bit DDR Video Ram Operating at 210 MHz.
2.) 14.1″ TFT Screen
3.) Trackpoint
4.) Touchpad
5.) ThinkLight at the top of the screen illuminates the screen in low light conditions.
6.) System and power status indicators:
Wireless status,
Bluetooth status,
Numeric lock,
Caps lock,
Drive in use,
Power on,
Battery status, and
Standby status.
7.) Function keys for screen brightness, full screen functionality, web browser forward and back buttons, (these are all hard-wired key functions, so their usage is not OS-dependent. However, a nice project called the TPB (ThinkPad Buttons) enables an on-screen display on Linux.
8.) Built-in microphone
9.) Volume increase/decrease/mute buttons.
10.) Centrino Mobile technology – wireless support built-in via”integrated dual diversity antenna built into the display”.
11.) 40 GB HDD
12.) DVD-ROM – no CD/RW!
13.) 2 USB ports
14.) Video-out connector
15.) Agere systems AC’97 Modem
16.) PC card slot – to attach modem, data storage, network, and SCSI connector cards.
17.) Built-in Infrared port.

Right now I’m doing a bit of research regarding the best distribution for install on this new machine.

Since I’ve got a nice licenced copy of Windows XP here, I don’t want to dump this one to install Linux… but the problem is that all 40GB here on my TP has been allocated to one primary partition. So first I need a distro which can resize my Windows partition. I hear SUSE can. I have a nice SUSE 9.1 Professional DVD here which Novell shipped me free of cost sometime back… and I think it’s got Ximian Desktop included (drool!). So that’s my first choice.

If I don’t like SUSE (I doubt that!), I’m going to use their installation program to resize this partition, and install FC3 on top. But I’m tired of RedHat/Fedora and I want a change.
Let’s see how this goes.

Update (January 22nd 2005): I’ve got Novell Linux Desktop 9 on my Thinkpad now; and got rid of Windows XP altogether! Although this is a great distro, I still want to give SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional a try. I’m attempting to dload all the 5 CDs (Five! How bloated can Linux distros get anyways?), and I’ll write about it when I’ve installed the bunch.

I found this thought-provoking article on the Web. It debates what continuous adoption of (often disruptive) technology, without considering the ends which they may help us achieve, is doing to us as a society. The author terms it our “hollowing out as human beings”.

The article’s been written some time ago, because it mentions the Heaven’s Gate Cult Suicide of 1997 as a relatively recent event. It’s scary that this “technology overload”, as it were, had its beginnings at least seven years ago. Imagine how much technology we’re bombarded with today. Why are we, then, almost unaware of this phenomenon? Have we adapted to this, are we now able to keep up with the pace of technological evolution? Or is this like a ticking time bomb – one fine day might we all reach a limit and collectively scream “no more!”?

It’s a topic about which I’ve lately thought about, too. It’s easier for me, involved in the computer technology industry, to realise the implications of what the author’s talking about. Maybe I’m a victim of this “hollowing out” also. Let me explain. I work exclusively on the Linux platorm at home. I’ve been doing so for the past 3 years. Now the Open Source Community churns out software updates at an alarmingly fast rate. This includes the Linux kernel itself, Linux distributions, development tools, productivity software, internet software, and the like. I like to keep my system populated with the latest versions of whatever software I use. These include browsers, email clients, code editors, music players, IMs, and more. I find myself spending a lot of (paid) Internet time simply downloading the source for these updated releases, compiling and installing them, and deleting the older versions. Then I start up the application again, confirm the newer version number, and get a warm and fuzzy feeling inside about “living on the cutting edge”.

But lately I’ve come to question the very purpose of doing this. I spent the last two weeks downloading Fedora Core 2 (a four CD set, now – see this article on OSNews about software bloat). I only get free broadband access on Sundays, so the last few Sundays (and today) have been spent downloading FC2 full-time, which meant that I had to cut down on my browsing. Now I’m thinking – do I really need FC2? What does it offer me over FC1? New software? No. I’ve already updated the programs that I run, so much so that they’re newer than those that FC2 includes. And why am I obsessed with running the latest versions of my applications? Take Gaim, the ubiquitious Instant Messenger for Linux, as an example. Now that I think about it, the only time I actually needed to upgrade was when Microsoft introduced a new standard for communication via its MSN protocol. I don’t even know (or even care) what new features Gaim’s introduced since then. I certainly don’t notice anything new. That goes for almost all the applications that I use. I’m just using up my Internet time and bandwidth with them, I guess. I have friends who are happily running Redhat 8.0 or even 7.3 – over 2 years old.

Of course, what I’m giving you is just the user’s perspective. What the original article talked about was the actual development of technology, from the producer’s point of view rather than the consumers’. In terms of Open Source, though, this kind of “technology for the sake of technology” is acceptable. After all, most developers of such software work on it during their free time (ok, so they actually free up some time for these pursuits, but the logic is the same) – they have a day job that provides for their families. The problem here lies with the users of such software. I’m sure there are scores like me – who upgrade for the sake of upgrading.

One of the oldest adages we learnt was “Necessity is the mother of invention”. I wonder if that’s even valid anymore. It’s more like “Invention begets necessity” these days. A new technology finds itself a use, rather than the other way round. But why does society accept, often blindly, new tools that become available with such frenzied frequency?

I’ll take mobile phones as an exmaple. Mobile phones now are so rich in features, like 32-bit color screens, wireless connectivity, cameras (some with zoom, for God’s sake!), “polyphonic” ring tone capabilities, and on and on – that it makes me wonder how many of these features we really use. In India (OK, in Mumbai, at least), owning the latest and snazziest mobile phone isn’t even a status symbol anymore – everyone’s got the best. But scan the list of features above, and think for a while how many of them are really useful – useful for the basic purpose of a mobile phone, which is communication. Perhaps we’re spending too many resources innovating in the wrong areas. Instead of polyphonic ring tones, how about researching smarter notification techniques; instead of 32-bit color screens how about working on smarter, easier-to-use grayscale interfaces? It’s been pointed out over and over that the one factor that will limit innovation in phone displays is the size of the screen – so how about working to overcome that? The dimensions of photographs taken with a typical mobile phone camera are way too small and awkward to find any practical use. I know there are phones with cameras that allow for full, 800×600 pixels or better resolutions, but they’re outrageously expensive, and that’s because the cost of the camera is far greater than that of the phone.

And what does that last point indicate? Simply that too much innovation obscures the fundamental purpose for developing that technology in the first place.

There’s another side to this argument, though – and it would become another essay in itself – that we do not have any idea of future uses for today’s outlandish research. The vast majority of the public thinks that research into subatomic physics, into deep space astronomy, and into putting mega-pixel digtal cameras into ever-tinier mobile phones (!) is a collosal waste of time and money. Also, research into technologies such as cloning, and high-tech weaponry, is downright dangerous and should be Stopped At Once. These things are viewed as “Technology for the sake of technology”. But we can gaze only so far into the future. We have no way of finding out if today’s research into what appear to be useless/dangerous fields, actually turn out to be the base for some tremendously useful technology, one that solves a major problem, or makes life unimaginably richer. Are we stifling our future by limiting such research? Are we denying a possible better life to our future generations by insisting that today’s innovators solve today’s problems?

That’s one debate that’s far from being settled.

In the last quarter of 2002, LG Electronics and a few other computer makers introduced a line of PCs into the Indian computer market. Nothing new – except that these PCs came pre-installed with Linux. My initial reaction was one of delight and euphoria! Perhaps 2003 would indeed be the Year of the Linux Desktop – and that India was where the seed of that revolution was being sown!

But sadly, these PCs have failed miserably, in every possible aspect, to make any sort of impact on the massive Indian PC market. They came and went without so much as a whisper. Why? In this essay, I react to this market failure. Using a couple of reports that appeared in some Indian online tech magazines, I discover a few shocking facts about Indian PC manufacturers’ attitude towards Linux.

It isn’t very surprising that LG’s MyPC failed to make any significant inroads into the Indian market. It’s not just cost alone which is going to make users shift from Windows.

LG has been bundling Red Hat 7.3 along with it. A default install of RHL 7.3 would make any linux newbie cringe. It isn’t even as good as Windows 98 as far as looks and ease of use is concerned. (Not that I’m blaming RH for the whole thing.) They ought to have tried Mandrake 9.0, ELX Linux, SuSE 8.whatever, Xandros, even RHL 8.0 (but Bluecurve’s got too corporate a look for the home desktop user). But RHL7.3?!

It just seems to me that this entire exercise of Linux-based PCs was a failure because of complete and total lack of planning. Short sighted opportunism on the part of LG and Champion Computers led them to introduce such PCs into the market. No one is going to shift to Linux just because it’s cheap – least of all the individual home desktop user. He’s got to have compelling reasons to do so.

More than anything else, I find the reactions of the managers of these firms particularly disgusting :

Manikandan, deputy general manager, LG Electronics India said,

According to Kapil Wadhwa, who is the director of Champion Computers,

True, but weren’t efforts lacking on your part? You need to bundle a better OS than RHL 7.3 (at least, a better-looking OS ) if you want to realistically compete with the pirated Win2K -WinXP market. 99% of your target market uses their machines essentially as a games and entertainment machine. Ever thought of the fact that users wouldn’t be able to run these games? Ever thought of bundling Transgaming or some other such software along with it and using this fact as a marketing ploy?

Wadhwa said that it is only after educational institutes begin teaching Linux, that users will begin feeling comfortable with it.

To say that people will start using Linux only if educational institutes start teaching it is ludicrous! Surely people don’t use Windows just because it’s been taught in school?! Did people start to use Windows simply because institutes started teaching Windows, or was it the other way round? MS has spent billions of dollars into user-interface research just so that any ordinary person can use their systems. What about the 40yrs+ generation? They use computers at home and at work without them being taught any of this in school. Computers are easy enough to use without them being taught. Don’t blame the consumer for your faults. You will alienate your market faster than you can say “GNU!”.

What about the visibility factor? This is what Kapil Wadhwa of Champion had to say:

And who, dear sir, is going to create this visibility, if not you? If you want your PCs to sell, and if you know that Linux’s visibility is low, is it not up to you to create it? I would never have known about this LG MyPC thing if I had not been flipping through an obscure channel by the name of TMG Enter where this was a 1-minute report.

Basically, this comment sums it up for me:

said Manoj Kumar of Champion Computers.

These are people who care nothing at all about the real advantages of Linux. They neither know, nor do they care, about GNU, the Free Software and Open Source movements. For them, Linux is nothing other than a cash-saver. Free as in speech, control over software, means nothing to them. That is why they will eventually fail. If they use their marketing skills and money power to highlight the correct aspects of Linux, then they will be able to convert even those who have been using pirated Windows for years.

What about support? How about manuals, guides, included simplified documentation, always-available helplines? What about marketing? Linux-based PCs came and went, leaving quite a bitter taste in the mouth as regards India Inc.’s views on Linux’s advantages.

Mr. Sanjiv Mathur, Head of Marketing, Microsoft India, had his viewpoint on Open Source Software in Governments published in the November 27 issue of the Economic Times. Here is a point-by-point rebuttal of his claims made in the article.

And you can do a *lot* more with free software than you can with commercial software.

Oh, really? Does the Samba team charge for the excellent software they provide that involves reverse-engineering Microsoft’s networking standards and providing interaction between UNIX and Microsoft-based products? Does the OpenOffice.org team charge for its revolutionary office suite, which according to a poll on linux.com satisfies the needs of nearly all MS-Office users? Do the KDE and GNOME teams charge for the superb desktop environments they’ve built? On a larger scale, in case he’s referring to distributors, does RedHat charge for the entire 3 CDs worth of RedHat 8.0 that they’ve put on their ftp site for download? Do any of the other distributors? Wrong, sir, wrong. Most companies that develop applications on Open Source platforms do NOT charge.

And by the way, where you draw the line between “basic software” and the “applications developed on it”? Because Linux is essentially a huge set of applications ranging right from the kernel to the desktop environments, working together to produce an OS. There is no “basic software” anywhere in the UNIX world. All are applications. Mr. Mathur is still stuck in the Windows world where you have a “basic” Windows product and then have to buy additional applications that run on it.

To suggest outright that the pricing structure of Open Source Software is similar to commercial software is flawed. Unless a company specifically approaches a Free/Open Source Software vendor for support as regards initial installation, further support and training, there is no obligation upon that company to pay the vendor. Such charges as mentioned by him are not mandatory, and indeed, several companies moving to Free/Open Source Software do not opt for support from the vendor.

Prove it. This doesn’t make sense. As mentioned by R. Gopalakrishnan, secretary to the chief minister of MP, the TCO of Free/Open Source Software is anywhere between one-half to one-tenth of the equivalent commercial solution, even when accounting for your “hidden costs”.

Reducing choice?! The fact that the Open Source community has over 3 high -quality equivalents for every major commercial offering, speaks volumes for the proliferation of choice in the Open Source market. Instead the very nature of GPL is what encourages and fosters Open Source products of high quality – because everyone gets to make use of the best code contributed by the most talented developers.

But price is what Microsoft is harping about; the Open Source community has always stressed upon the “free as in speech” advantage that Free/Open Source Software offers. And while Microsoft brands the Open source philosophy as “communist” and “anti-American”, listen to their Head of Marketing speak – “supported by a strong regime for intellectual property protection”. This kind of “regime” is exactly what fosters monopolies. If Microsoft is really interested in advancing technology, then the best way to do so is to make public your best technologies, so that others can extend them. The best implementation shall win. Those that don’t make the grade will lose due to lack of market acceptance.

Same flaw – Same argument. See above.

He mentions integration costs between various components. The best part is that a lot of the integration is done by the distributors themselves. Then again, the integration part isn’t as hard as Microsoft makes it out to be – excellent sites like Linuxfromscratch.org describe how to get a complete Linux system, using nothing but the source codes of various software. Imagine doing that with Windows 2000 components!

From a larger perspective, the UNIX philosophy isn’t even about the kind of integration that Microsoft (and the Windows world) are used to. UNIX is all about tools, tools which each achieve one fixed function, and then to combine these tools in almost infinite ways in order to achieve your end. This is what gives UNIX its fabled flexibility and transparency.

As far as integration between components goes, if each one of those components follows clear, open, simple standards of communication (as opposed to cryptic, closed, binary-based standards) , there shouldn’t be any problem.

This argument is now beginning to bore me – Open Source software being more vulnerable to security just because its source code is available. How does Microsoft explain the fact that in spite Windows NT/IIS Web servers making up a small fraction of web servers on the Internet, as opposed to UNIX/Apache-based ones, the former are the ones which are most frequently hacked? Indeed, UNIX wouldn’t be such a hit on mission-critical servers (such as web servers) if it were so vulnerable just because its source was available. Go check out NetCraft.com for a rating of the longest-running web servers; all of the top ten run BSD, a free variant of UNIX. I quote “Applied Cryptography”, Bruce Schneider, John Wiley and Sons, Inc, page 3, speaking about the public key-private key encryption algorithm:

“All of the security in these algorithms is based on the key (or keys); none is based in the details of the algorithm. This means that the algorithm can be published and analyzed. Products using the algorithm can be mass-produced. It doesn’t matter if an eavesdropper knows your algorithm; if she doesn’t know your particular key, she can’t read your messages.”

Or, even more relevant, to “Practical UNIX and Internet Security”, Simson Garfinkel and Gene Spafford, O’Reilly and Associates, pages 40-45:

“… This is especially true if you should find yourself basing your security on the fact that something technical is unknown to your attackers. This concept can even hurt your security.”

Scary, isn’t it?

Good attitude. But having said that, don’t use your financial and political clout to undermine other offerings, whether closed-source or Free/Open Source. History is rife with examples of how Microsoft has used non-technical means to further its interests.

The form of R&D that the Open Source community puts in, is far more than any commercial offering, both in terms of quantity and quality, since those who develop Open Source Software are committed to the code they produce, the fact that they are at all coding the software bears ample testimony to the fact that they put in an amazing amount of time and research into their product. The beauty of the whole ecosystem is that developers do not *expect* to be compensated for the work they put in. Compensation is the fact that they gain a higher standing among their peers. To a true developer, this is the highest form of reward.

Well, then by all means do so. It will be immensely beneficial for all, not least you.

He misses the other side of the coin – If anyone can copy your software and market it as their own, remember that they have to make it available under the exact same licencing terms that it was available to them. Thus if they can make unlimited copies of your software, so can you, of their product. Whatever modifications the “third party” makes to your software to make it better, you can view those same modifications and use it in the next version of your software.

Thus in a process that builds upon itself, the software in question keeps getting better and better. The vendor who in the end markets his product better, will win. But customers always have the option to switch to the other alternative(s) available. In the end, the customer benefits. Those are the new rules of the game. No one has, or can, decree that vendors have to keep making vast profits the way they have always been doing. If, in the interest of producing radically better technology, vendors find that they cannot do businesss the way they have traditionally been doing, then that’s too bad. New business models will evolve to fit the new trend in technology. All Microsoft is doing is stifling this evolution towards better software by branding it as “onerous”.

And finally a contradiction. When he started this article he said that in the end, Open Source software in the marketplace is not much different from any commercial offering. So how will attempts to render software free “ultimately undermine the software industry”? The software industry as we know it today will undergo a sea change in the future. Software today is looked at as a product, rather than a service. That will eventually change.

Clearly Microsoft has a fundamentally different viewpoint on software than the Free Software/Open Source Software community. They shall go their way and we ours. May the best man win!

A reporter from I.T Nation Business Review sent me a questionnaire regarding their cover story for next month’s issue, “The popularity of Linux in India”. I’ve reproduced my answers to their questionnaire here:

Well, I have seen RedHat Linux installed on nearly all Linux PC s that I’ve seen. Mandrake Linux seems to be the only other distribution that has any sizable user base. There is a disturbing perception here that “RedHat” means “Linux” and “Linux” means “RedHat” . Whenever users refer to the version of Linux they’re using, it’s always something like “He’s using 7.3 still, even though 8.0 is out”, referring to RedHat Linux 7.3 and 8.0 . I even saw a poster of a training institute that said that they offered courses on “…Windows 2000, Linux 7.2, Solaris…”. What Linux 7.2?!

The government, tragically, seems to be taking a very narrow view of Linux and free software in general. It considers only the “free as in cost” aspect of free software, saying that India is a poor country and thus Linux has a very strong case in India…

But free software is much more than that. Indeed, the “free as in freedom from licencing issues”, and access to source code, is a much more important aspect of free software. The Government needs to understand that by adopting free software, it is achieving control over its software and data, that its software systems are owned by itself and not by some third company.

The Government still needs to do a LOT more as regards its “new initiatives” with Linux and free software. To cite a crucial example, in our school computer syllabus, students are taught that “A computer consists of 2 parts, hardware and software. Hardware means either a Intel 486, or the newer Intel Pentium processors, and software means MS-DOS or Windows.” Further, the syllabus goes on to teach them MS-Word. Thus we have a generation of students, who have been insightful enough to opt for computer subjects in their schools, but who end up learning just about Microsoft products. These students wrongly believe that Windows is the only OS that a computer can have installed, and that only Intel makes processors. They do not teach word processing, but rather MS-Word. This is a shocking scenario and needs to be rectified very soon. Imagine the chaos when the industry moves to Linux and Linux-based products, and our students are still learning this stuff!

Further, the Government has to stop falling at Bill Gates’ feet every time he visits India, and not treat him like a head of state. For more of my views on this please refer to an article I wrote to the Linux India Mailing List, which can be found on my website at http://www.geocities.com/tuxonline/writings/ossingovt.txt (Update – this link is outdated – Rahul)

Still , these initiatives taken are a positive step, better than none at all. Let us hope that Linux companies can take advantage of these initiatives, particularly in Government computerisation.

In India, as well as worldwide, prices of computer hardware are falling rapidly and regularly. In contrast prices of Microsoft products are rising, examples being MS-Office and Windows XP. Thus, the price of software is increasing in terms of percentage of total computer costs. There will come a time when this percentage will just be too high to be acceptable to users.

We are also seeing OEMs in India offering PCs preinstalled with Linux. For instance, LG is offering its MyPC with RedHat Linux 7.3 preinstalled, Compaq is also introducing a similar package. However, these same vendors, in their advertisements regarding their other models, they put up a sign that says “Compaq/IBM/LG recommends Microsoft Windows XP” . This confuses prospective buyers (one of them was my aunt, so I know!), who are attracted by the costs of this Linux PC (almost Rs. 7000 less), and on the other hand they see this sign about XP. These vendors should define very clearly the intended audience for the Linux PC s and the XP ones.

Further, what about the after-sales services? Are there technicians who have enough knowledge about Linux that they can tackle most problems? There still exists this huge fear complex in the minds of most small-time computer vendors about Linux. About a year ago, My speakers developed some problems. When I contacted my vendor about it (he’s a medium-sized assembler) he promtly sent over a technician to investigate. The moment he found that I run Linux, he not only refused to help me, he even terminated my warranty, saying that I had violated his terms, that they did not support Linux, and, to top it all, that Linux had caused the problems with my PC!

The version of Red Hat Linux that LG is supplying with the MyPC is pretty old now, and can hardly be considered for desktop use as a replacement for even Windows 98. So it is hard to imagine any organisation that would switch to the MyPC. Software also needs to be provided along with these machines. For instance, Linux does not have the number of games available for Windows, but one can run most Windows games on Linux using special software. This software needs to be bundled with the PC.

There are excellent desktop Linux versions available today. The first one that comes to mind is Xandros 1.0 (http://www.xandros.com) . This version of Linux, which unfortunately sells for as much as $99, is a very very advanced Linux distribution which can safely be declared a competitor to Microsoft Windows XP.

Another distribution is Lindows (http://www.lindows.com), which a lot of stores in America (Walmart, for one) are already offering as preinstalled. Among the traditional ones are Mandrake 9.0 (http://www.linux-mandrake.com) which has for long been consistently providing high quality desktop software. Sun Microsystems and RedHat are working separately on a distribution of Linux specifically aimed for the corporate workspace. These distributions are being watched closely, as both Sun and RedHat are touting it as the “next-generation” Linux.

Finally, India has its very own desktop Linux distribution, ELX Linux (http://www.elxlinux.com)! This distro has received rave reviews from various sections of the computing industry, and is on par with Xandros and Lindows.

There are some very obvious steps that all of us Linux advocates should take. The first one is to maintain relationships with various OEMs and resellers, to encourage them to start providing good desktop versions of Linux preinstalled on their PC s. This will immediately cause mass awareness about Linux. Next is to work collectively to remove all the FUD (Fear, uncertainty, doubt) that ordinary users still have as regards Linux. I was invited in October to deliver a seminar on this very topic: Linux on the desktop. Right after this, I was flooded with calls on how to obtain Linux, how to install it, and so on. So, given enough correct information, people are certainly willing to switch to Linux.

We also need to drop the mindset of “Linux is cheaper than Windows”, because as more and more is expected from Linux and free software, developers and software vendors will have to put in more resources. This will cause the price of most free software products to rise. So we must be prepared to pay.

The biggest advantage that Linux and free software enjoys over commercial software, is the control that it grants to the end user over the software. Issues such as access to the source code, freedom to modify and redistribute it, and other such principles are crucial in the long run. No software vendor will be allowed to dictate terms to the user. These freedoms also encourage multiple software developers for the same product, leading to the proliferation of choice for the end user. These are the issues we need to be talking about to people. This is the argument that’s going to make them shift to Linux.

Free software is released under a number of licences, chief among them being the GPL, the BSD Licence, and the Netscape/Mozilla Public Licence (MPL). The Linux kernel itself is under the GPL. The major features of each licence are :

• GPL: the GPL does not allow you to make your modifications private. If you modify a GPL-ed product and redistribute it, you must do so only under the GPL.
• BSD: the BSD licence allows you to make your modifications private.
• MPL: This licence has special provisions for the developer. It allows Netscape, for example, to re-licence the modifications the you’ve made to its software.

The tricky nature of most of these licences is meant to preserve the free nature of the software. However, traditional software companies who are used to working with commercial software, find these impossible to work with. The solution to this is to rethink your entire software philosophy. Refer to Eric S. Raymond’s seminal work on this subject , The Magic Cauldron, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron.html

Most of the “major IT companies” in India are solutions providers, and are willing to use Linux only if the client requests it. I spoke to a marketing executive from Wipro in July last year, and asked him this very question. He replied that Linux is gaining acceptance as an alternative to traditional UNIX servers, but clients still find it too risky to try Linux on their workstations. When asked why, he said that they thought Linux was still not ready for desktop use, and that there weren’t enough applications to run on that platform. He did, however, concede that their own developers found Linux an excellent development platform.

As far as support from hardware companies is concerned, yes, there are a few hardware vendors who have Linux drivers for their products ready for download on their web sites. But these are few and far between. Another area of concern in the free software community, is that these drivers themselves are closed-source, and proprietary. The community complains that this is against the spirit of free software, and I would tend to agree with them.

Microsoft muscle power is certainly a big obstacle in the adoption of Linux in the Indian industry, and so is the high piracy level in India. That is why I said earlier that it is not the “free as in cost” aspect of Linux and free software that we should be harping upon; rather, it is the “free as in speech” part. Do users want control over their systems or are they willing to give these freedoms to some company? As Benjamin Franklin put it so beautifully, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Microsoft’s chief income comes from large organisations who deploy Windows-based systems. These are the entities that Microsoft is targeting in its anti-piracy drive. It knows that individual home users in India cannot afford to buy genuine copies of Microsoft products, and on top of that, upgrade them whenever it comes out with newer versions. It is probably in Microsoft’s interests, to not target the individual market, to let them continue to use pirated copies. Why? To achieve what is called product “lock-in”. If, right from the onset, if the only thing that users use are Microsoft products, naturally, they will be most comfortable with these poducts in their workplace, leading to adoption of Microsoft products in the workplace too. They probably realise that this rampant use of pirated software is actually creating a “Microsoft Generation”.

Linux companies will probably target the menace of Windows in a very simple manner : to produce software that it technically superior to Microsoft’s products. But what they really need is a fantastic marketing organisation, to convince users, both individual and corporate, that their products are indeed better. Microsoft’s forte has never been developing the best products, but to make users think that these are the best.

I don’t think that this is an individual issue to be addressed. Once the user base for Linux achieves a certain critical mass, hardware vendors will be under tremendous pressure to make sure that their products are Linux comaptible : take the recent announcement from chip-maker AMD that it will make sure that its chips are well-supported by Linux. Software support for Linux will drive the hardware support. This is already happening. To give you a really significant example, two years ago, a number of groups, including the NSA (National Security Administration), HP, Immunix, approached Linux Torvalds, The creator of the Linux kernel and now the lead maintainer of the Linux kernel development team. Each wanted its solution to be the approved security mechanism for Linux.

I feel that once resellers are convinced about the advantages of Linux, lack of training will be no problem, as they will start spending as much on gaining Linux expertise as they do today on gaining Windows expertise. More and more training institutes are offering courses based o Linux, primarily system administration and network adminsitration courses. This is a good think, bacause sysadmins and n/wadmins get to know a lot about the inner working of the OS. Once enough people get trained at these institutes, such complaints will disappear.

Basically it is important to remember that the world has been using Microsoft technologies for the last 20 years at least. It will obviously take time for a new technology , however good, to gain general market acceptance. It is compounded by the fact that computers today play a critical role in all walks of life. For many people, moving to a new technology presents a certain risk which they may not wish to take suddenly. For Linux, it is sure to be an evolution rather than a revolution.

But that’s where you’re wrong! There are more people willing to try out Linux as an alternative to Windows than ever before! You see, Linux has been garnering a lot more press attention than at any given time in the past, and nearly all of it has been positive. So when the average user reads about so many companies adopting Linux, and reads about the CEO/CTO of that company extolling the benefits that his company has gained from Linux, he thinks, “If these guys find Linux so cool, why not get it on my computer?” Because users are fed up with the unreliability of Windows (especially Windows 98, which most use), but they continue to use it because of lack of any other alternative. It’s like “passive acceptance” of whatever faults Windows has. Now they have an alternative.

Pros:
Most free software products tend to be very flexible, and that’s true in the Linux world too. The desktop environments for Linux are much much more customisable than Windows. An average desktop user used to the Windows GUI will be absolutely delighted at the amount of customisation that is possible. Then there is the advantage of choice. For every software that Windows can offer, Linux has 3 or more high-quality alternatives. More of my views on this at http://www.geocities.com/tuxonline/writings/whylinux.txt (Update – this link is outdated – Rahul)

For developers, Linux is a programmer’s paradise. Most programming language compilers and interpreters are installed along with a typical Linux installation. The GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) is one of the most sophisticated compiler suites in the world. There are fantastic text editors such as Vi and Emacs that make code writing easier. IDEs such as Kdevelop, Kylix, Anjuta are also available.

The one disadvantage that I can think of is the lack of games for Linux. It’s like major games developers are just ignoring Linux while developing games. The market for games is enormous, and whichever platform runs the most games, will have a great advantage in the individual desktop home user segment.

Areas which used to be major problems, but are now as good as gone, are difficult installation procedure, poor hardware support, lack of applications, lack of finish in the graphical desktop environments available, etc. These are no longer practical issues.

These questions ought to be answered by the commercial vendors themselves. It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg question. After sales services will improve only when there is a large enough user base, but such a user base will develop only when assured of good after-sales services.

Channels will find their margins reduced substantially. (as if they weren’t low enough already!). But they’ll have to adapt or die. As more and more people start to move to free software, control will pass from vendor to consumer. Consumers will dictate terms in the new market. Channels will make profits, no doubt, but they’ll be razor-thin, as they adjust to the new market.

Linux has had to battle the huge market share of Microsoft in the Operating Systems and platforms space, so Linux companies are starting out with huge odds against them. Then, just as corporate interest in Linux was beginning to grow, the dot-com bubble hit, and so did the global recession. So it hasn’t been the best of times for the market in general, and certainly not for any industry that’s just finding its feet in the market. So take it as a positive sign that in the face of such huge disadvantages, Linux has taken such giant strides.

I don’t think it’s advisable for Linux to become standardised in the first place. The beauty of Linux is that there is so much choice, so much variety available. Current users of Linux would hate to see that choice disappear. It’s enough if all vendors of Linux agreed upon common minimum guidelines to follow, so that Linux doesn’t end up going the UNIX way, i.e, into fragmented, incompatible versions. I don’t think that this will ever happen, largely because of the free nature of software. And such standards are coming up : we’ve had the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for years now. SuSE, SCO, Connectiva and TurboLinux have formed between them a consortium called United Linux, for cooperation in development, and to ensure that packages made for one distribution are guaranteed to work on the others.

I’d say that Linux development needs to follow a middle path – not become too standardised like Microsoft Windows, and on the other hand, not fragment like UNIX.

Oh, Yes!