If you look at the Intel whitepapers from their recent development conference, they openly tout their willingness to share graphics APIs with the open source community. That’s a milestone.

If you look at the rumor that Dell was a major factor in Broadcom’s recent Linux driver release for their NICs, that’s a milestone.

Enough of the distro wars, already. My eight-year-old is quite happy with Ubuntu except for the @#$%!! Doze games, and it just works for him. Me, I’m more happy with its total available software availability/compatibility than I am sad about its weird root user structure. I also love the documentation section in the package manager, a real help and a first to my knowledge.

And, yes, my 5 year old Inspiron quite happily runs Ubuntu 8.04, although I haven’t tried getting Dell’s latest drivers et al for it. I run Folding@Home on it 24×7 and it’s almost as responsive as my new four-core minitower with Doze. (and THAT’s much happier as a FreeBSD 7 server!)

Kick ASCII, guys! We got ‘em on the run!!!

[part extract of Wiki text starts here]
Marked “Microsoft confidential”, they identify open-source software, and in particular the Linux operating system, as a major threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the software industry, and suggest ways in which Microsoft could disrupt the progress of open source software.

These documents acknowledged that free software products such as Linux were technologically competitive with some of Microsoft’s products, and set out a strategy to combat them. The documents were embarrassing largely because they contradicted Microsoft’s public pronouncements on the subject.

… Together, these documents demonstrate Microsoft’s continued awareness that its open-source competitors are a potential threat to its livelihood in the software industry.

… the documents show that while Microsoft may be dismissive of open source software in public, it considers it a serious competitor in private.

While discussing ways of competing with open source, Document I suggests that one reason that open source projects have been able to enter the market for servers is the use of standardized protocols. It then suggests that this can be stopped by “extending these protocols and developing new protocols” and “de-commoditize protocols & applications.” This policy has been nicknamed “embrace, extend, extinguish”.

Document I also suggests that open source software “is long-term credible … FUD [fear, uncertainty & doubt] tactics can not be used to combat it,” and “Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence … that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by OSS projects.”
[end of part extract of Wiki text starts here]

So, while I’m a great fan and user of Ubuntu (ie my primary OS), I think the five things needed right now are:

1. Preserve file dates on ‘file copy’ to/from ALL volume types. Copying within nix-native volumes (ie EXT2, EXT3 formats) works fine, but if you copy files to/from NTFS-formatted volumes (eg USB drives) Ubuntu can still re-date the files to the current date. If you have many TB of data, it is crucial that file dates not be fiddled with… At a low level, OS needs to understand that adding permissions is NOT changing the contents, and hence a ‘copy’ of same content must retain same date as original (or the world falls apart). This is a very simple/obvious bug but I’ve seen some techs on Ubuntu forums argue it is a design feature!?!

2. Get WiFi working ‘out of the box’ 100% of the time. Utilities like ‘WiFi Radar’ are hopelessly under-featured. Most Win WiFi utilities will ’scan’ and show you wireless routers in range, or auto-connect if non-encrypted. The Ubuntu util requires you to specify the DNS, SSID, … analogous to a paper-tape boot loader program of the 1960s. [Similarly, auto-detecting other wired-network available PCs could be made more intuitive.]

3. Install CD should have an easy way to re-install GRUB. Currently setting up a dual-boot WinXP-Ubuntu works like a charm, until you have to re-install the WinXP partition. M$ trashes the dual-boot, and unless you’re real expert, you end up trashing your Ubuntu install, simply to re-establish the dual-boot function. It would be so easy to have boot CD simple able to detect this problem (working Linux partition but GBUB removed) to re-establish GRUB.

4. Keep true to the idea of data vs program separation. Make it that if you backup everything under /home/ you will have backed up ALL of that user’s information. Currently, all documents, music, video etc is captured, but email files are off buried deep in program directories (a la M$ practice). The Mozilla Thunderbird crew claim this is ‘platform standard’ without seeing the parallel that documents are not stored under OpenOffice folders, but in user area. Settings for using the software (eg configs) ought be buried with app, but primary user data should be in user area (or at least one ought have a simple install-time option to put it there). Converting a user to Ubuntu OpenOffice is EASY compared to migrating that same user’s email to Ubuntu Thunderbird… and one is almost assured of losing address book data, as again that is kept buried in a non-configurable location.

5. WINE or VMware should be made far easier to ‘fire up’ a Windows app….

Having had those complaints, I must say that Ubuntu is otherwise fantastic, in terms of install ease etc. If you got me documenting the failings of WinXP-SP3, you’d see that Ubuntu is far superior. For one thing, in MSDOS 1.0 of 1981 removable media was ‘removable’ without pre-advising the OS of your intention to remove it. If you just waited a few secs after writing to a diskette, you could remove the diskette safely. Still now in Win-XP-SP3 27-years later, M$ does not flush out masterfile table (mft$) changes to removable drives when CPU cycles are available after writes, to allow hot-removal of such removable media. That approach is lame! Still more interesting is that while EXT3 and NTFS are supposedly both ‘journaling’ file systems, if you get a power failure under WinXP-SP3, you stand about a 10% chance of causing major corruption to the masterfile table. M$ then prompts to use its ‘CHKDSK’ utility, which doesn’t fix cross-linked files, but simply wipes data. The PC will then no longer boot to WinXP. And if you put that drive into a drive enclosure and try to mount it on another working WinXP system, you cannot recover any data (though you can use third-party commercial data recovery software such as GetDataBack for NTFS or Acronis). Yet mount that same failed NTFS volume on a Linux system and the data is all recoverable (copy it off then reformat). So the NTFS driver in the free Linux world outperforms the NTFS driver in the latest WinXP, even though NTFS is the native file system for WinXP (and an exotic one for Linux)!

Fix those few problems and we should get far more hardware manufacturers rushing to Ubuntu!!!
Graeme (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu)

M$ is almost ‘giving away’ Vista and insisting hardware manufacturers ‘compulsorily bundle’ Vista (in all markets where they are likely to get away with such illegal actions) for two reasons:

1. The Emperor’s Clothes’ Rationale - if M$ can claim X hundred million copies were ’sold’, then everyone ‘must’ believe it is a good OS, right? You won’t hear them brag about the number who ‘were sold’ Vista but then rolled-back to WinXP on new hardware, even though those numbers are also available to them by virtue of on-line confirmation of ‘downgrades’.

2. Standard M$ Practice: In competitive wars M$ has been in (eg browser war), the convicted felon M$ has been found by courts to have misused its market share power in existing monopoly product lines to cross-subsidise offerings in the competitive sphere to the point of nil prices (or almost nil prices) purely for so long as is necessary to drive such competitor to ruin or to leave that market. Indeed the courts discovered documents that established that it was M$’ intent to behave in that manner.

We need to congratulate Dell for standing up to the pressure… But the tables have turned a bit now. Ten years ago a hardware manufacturer lived in fear that M$ would give it less favourable pricing than its competitors, leaving the manufacturer in a real pickle. Now, there are fewer hardware manufacturers and M$ needs them ALL. Besides Vista licences are now so cheap (as everyone knows M$ needs to give it away) that relative pricing of M$ OS licences (vs competitors) is no longer a major concern for hardware manufacturers. What the Dells of the world need to realise is that if they let M$ regain absolute dominance, they would again be ‘appointed’ or not to sell very expensive OS licences in the future (ie a return to past practices)… so it is in the hardware manufacturers’ interests to ‘commoditize’ OS licensing… which is precisely what M$ is fighting to prevent.

But I think enough people are jack of the past practices, and eventually everyone is realising that ‘total cost of ownership’ is the important measure, not initial licence fees. And as long as Linux can remain more stable, less buggy, less viral, easy-to-install, easy-to-use etc, it should gradually win via (amazingly) successes in Africa etc with OLPC and other broad low-cost roll-outs.
Graeme (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu)

I just loved the earlier post:
“Has ‘multiple convicted felon Microsoft’ really got that much power as a ‘protection racket’? Now, I think I comprehend why ‘multiple convicted felon Microsoft’ fears the Open Source movement so much! We can break their hold on our society, our governments, our schools, and our charities! To quote the great Mahatma, M. Ghandi, I AM the change I wish to see in the world!”

It does come down to breaking that M$ stranglehold. No US Federal Administration will do it. The US believes in anti-trust, but only so far as it does not affect ‘US interests’. (Can you imagine a judge saying he disagreed with crimes unless he was a beneficiary?) As soon as M$ points out what breaking its monopoly hold on the OS+Office market will do to US balance of payments, Washington goes lame-duck. The EU correctly found that M$ was operating a ‘racket’, and fined M$ accordingly, but to little avail. The courts take years, and the competition war is working on another front by the time of any decision. Netscape was dead-in-the-water by the time Washington and Brussels determined that M$ acted illegally in the ‘browser wars’… and by then the war was over ‘open source’.

The challenge now is to get hardware without being forced to also purchase an OS licence. It’s not about just Linux either, as consider all those WinXP users happy to migrate an existing WinXP licence from one box to another and who do NOT want Vista (at any price). Why should then be forced to ‘upgrade’ to Vista just because they were buying new hardware. Dell needs to be encouraged, and asked to roll out the program to other countries. In Australia one cannot purchase a major brand laptop without a Windows licence, even though that is clear evidence of a breach of the Australian Trade Practices Act 1973 (’forced bundling’). The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is a mere ‘watch-puppy’ and remains silent despite being requested to investigate.

If people were forced to THINK about what OS they wanted to buy (or obtain for free) then we’d get a fair market. Vista was sold just a year ago for nearly $1000, yet now if you ask most retailers (in Oz) how much you’d save if you take Vista out of the package, they’ll tell you it won’t affect the price. So M$ is either continuing to act illegally or the product is truly ‘free’ (wholesale price of zero) in which case we have the same issues as the browser wars, where unfair use of dominant market share is being used to shut-out competition.

The reason M$ is fighting so hard to get users onto Vista is because it knows how unliked that OS is. The reason it is extra cheap in the third world is because M$ knows how suitable Ubuntu is for these countries (which otherwise love M$ software piracy). The reason it is so ‘tightly bundled’ in the first world is because M$ has market power over the hardware suppliers, and M$ knows that most users will never bother changing OS after they’re initially set-up and working. We need to break that market share abuse (anti-trust) issue and force people to make a separate decision to pay a fair price for the M$ rubbish, or be offered a good free solution as an alternative. Similarly, those who are first set-up on (say) Ubuntu seldom decide to switch to Vista, and M$ execs would also know that statistic. There are some (dubious) parallels to the days when cigarette companies offered free sample packs of cigarettes to people to get them started, because the subsequent income stream to the cigarette companies easily justified it, as once they were customers, they were likely to remain customers for life. [But I freely admit that there are no negative health consequences arising from use of M$ products.]

Let’s keep up the pressure for a free and fair battle over the OS of the future. American and OECD countries’ school systems are also ‘poor’ when it comes to capex, so the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ and ‘Asus EE-PC’ type developments with Ubuntu all Wi-Fi pre-configured and operational should have a third-world to first-world reverse-rollout effect… where school systems in the richest countries realise that a secure, stable, non-viral OS is cheaper to maintain than a glossy, expensive, buggy, use-by-date OS from M$.
Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu)

Ideas are welcomed

You build your own garbage?