FSF Brand Ambassador

I remember seeing a quotation on the red hat installer splash screen; I don't remember who quoted it though. The quotation goes like this "Would you buy a car with hood welded shut?". The quote emphasized the importance of open source software. It implied the user power; power to fully control the computer they have payed for.

There are two applications that I would like to call the Brand Ambassador of the Free Software Foundation. They are GCC and Linux Source. GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection, and Linux source includes the Linux headers and source files. These are the tools that pop open the hood. Without these, a distribution behaves like a welded hood car; removing the user power.

Earlier, all the distributions had these packages as part of default installation. A successful Linux distribution installation meant that you have a working compiler. The next step was kernel source and headers. User had the compiler, thus could compile the latest kernel or extra module to customize the Linux installation. Then Linux kernel matured; driver support was good, so people forgot about compiling their own kernels and just used the distribution provided kernel. As a result GCC and kernel headers were dropped in the package priority.

Now we see a lot of distributions that have neither of these two brand ambassadors. I feel sad about the current state. Has the open source community become what they were fighting against? Or making a distribution is so easy everyone is making a distribution without even knowing the core principles? Or users only know pre-packaged software distribution mechanism?

The latest and greatest package of your choice is released by the developer in source code format. And if you are not having the brand ambassdors, you have to wait for the distribution maintainer to release a packaged binary.

Some distributions don't provide these packages on the installation CD and have them in the repositories. They argue that additional package installation is just a matter of few clicks or one command. Consider the car analogy here. Would you like to go a few extra miles to fetch the tools (for opening the car hood) for your car? Majority of them will prefer to stay clear from the tools if such a situation arises. A toolkit is a vital component of any automobile. You just cannot keep the ambassadors away from the distributions.

We need to realize the importance of FSF brand ambassadors. We need to create awareness amongst various distribution maintainers about these ambassadors. The community should raise its voice and make sure that these brand ambassadors are always included in their distribution of choice. Only then we will be able to see FSF prosper.

Road of Open Source success - III

This is the third installment for this topic. Here you can find first and second posts.

OoBE
OoBE is as abbreviation for Out Of Box experience. I would like to quote "You never get a second chance to make a good first impression". I don't remember who said this but this is something that I firmly believe in.

OEM is a key player in this field. What goes inside the system is dictated by an OEM, and there are a lot of people who don't bother to look for alternatives and just stick to what the OEM has provided.

If you take windows as an example, Vanila install can not play flash, does not have a JRE installed, can't read pdf files, can't play DVD, can't play formats other that mp3, wma & wmv. Only with windows XP, users were able to view compressed files, and the compression format was limited to ZIP. If you give this vanila installed system to a new user, s/he will certainly say that M$ is worthless.

The problem is not only for home desktop users, its also prominent for corporate users. Corporate users try to avoid this problem with the use of custom images. Someone from the IT department is given the responsibility to install windows along with all the required applications, on a single machine. Once this installation is complete, a full image of hard disk is extracted. This image is then copied to the rest of the machines.

Now coming to the open source world, the same issue comes up. The reason for this is not technical but political. Almost all the major distributions, in order to avoid litigations, stay clear from proprietary code. In order to attract more users towards open source, a better out of box experience is required. And nowadays it means that a user should be able to browse the internet without any issues.

I remember my first encounter with Linux, It was with Redhat 5. It really gave me a hard time to bring up the GUI. This was long ago though, and things have changed since then. But the automatic GUI configuration is still important. All the new displays are LCD and there are more coming in the form of a wide screen. Some advanced users have already started using dual monitors. But, still no distribution correctly configures wide screen or dual screen monitors correctly, even after enabling DPMS .Moreover, in case the installer automatically create an xorg.conf, a lot of distributions tend to prefer 16 bit depth instead of the better 24 bit.

The next point is the network connectivity. For majority of the computer population, it means wireless. iPhone comes with Wifi, even the nikon S6 that I purchased 2 years ago had Wifi. Giving complete driver support for wireless cards is a daunting task as manufacturers do not release the required specifications. Even then, distributions should make sure that users get their WiFi up and running without any hassles. I am not a big fan of Ubuntu, but it really excels in this field. Slackware along with zenwalk, on some machines, are the worst; they even have problems with ethernet.

Last but not the least are applications. Firefox solved a big problem in terms of "easy and robust platform" required to access the wild wild web. There are a lot of good addons and users feel at home with it. Next problem comes with plug ins. JRE, flash, acrobat reader, quicktime are required to provide a flawless surfing experience. A lot of of distributions still have some problems with this.

One more aspect comes to my mind and that concerns aesthetics and ergonomics. Some distribution dont provide a custom theme and when some do provide, your eyes pay the price. Distributions have to also consider themes as part of the initial install.

Road of Open Source success - II

In my last post I tried to explain package manager as one of the key ingredients for open source success. Today I would like to discuss about Control Center

Control Center
Control Center is an application used for configuring all the aspects of your operating system along with the user applications installed on the machine.

If we consider windows, user has a Control Panel. But all the configurations are not concentrated over there. Some configurations are accessible by MSC, whereas user applications follow a completely different approach. Sometimes the user applications add a control panel applet; sometimes they store the information in a registry and options are accessible through Tools>Options and sometimes special ini files are used for configuring the applications.

In *nix, all the configuration options are accessible through a single repository /etc/. Different applications have their dedicated configuration (*.conf) files, which are text files and can be easily edited using an editor of choice. This is plain and simple. But for a new linux convert, this might be a daunting task. It is possible for him to mess up the configuration file.

Recently, wizards have set a benchmark in configuration. They are almost foolproof and extremely user friendly. And it's really easy to create a wizard to generate the required configuration files. Redhat has a couple of disjoint applets that allow to configure some applications. Ubuntu is also coming up with a screen configuration applet.

But user needs a unified mechanism for configuring all the aspects of machine. Something similar to yast or drake and recently smart. The Control Center is a small software that will make windows to open source transition easier for a newbie.

Ubuntu is unofficially the #1 but lacks a unified control center.It surprizes me how the #1 distribution can be without a control center. The next two distributions; PCLinuxOS and openSuSE both have it though. There are a lot of distributions out there and majority of them lack a Control Center, some have re branded KDE control center but none of them is complete. We need more and better more Control Centers to excel Open Source.

Stategy - Battle vs War

A month ago I had to convince my wife regarding a hair shampoo (imagine a geek discussing shampoo). So, the problem was that my wife was suffering from an acute hair loss ; she consulted the doctors, changed her eating habits, applied a herbal conditioner, and did all sorts of stuff ,but, all in vain. One thing that she did not do was "changing her shampoo". It struck me, and I discussed this with her. But she had been using the same shampoo for several years, hence she was in no mood to change .

I tried to switch her to shampoos that are known to help hair loss. I even forced her to aisle containing shampoos and showed her 'X shampoo stops hair fall'. I made it a point to make her notice the shampoo ads, whenever we watched TV . But everything went down the drain. She was "My shampoo is the best and nothing else matters".

So I had to rethink my strategy, I had to try something different; something that will force her to change her shampoo. After thinking a lot, I figured out that when I was persuading her for a different shampoo, I was pointing here to a shampoo that was of my choice. That might be the reason for her not switching. So I changed my strategy and asked her to just try any other shampoo except for the one she is currently using.Though there was a risk that "just any other shampoo" might make the hair loss worse; but I was ready to take the risk.

On our next trip to the grocery store, she picked up a different shampoo, and things were never same again. The new shampoo reduced the hair loss and she concluded that her long time favorite was actually causing the problem.

So what can we derive from this experience?

I am a long time BSD fan and can take the flame wars to any extent. On the other hand, I really really hate M$. I am fed up with their monopoly and their disregard for standards. I want people to jump off the M$ brand wagon and try open source software. Thus, if someone comes to me asking for Linux help I will provide all the aid I can, just to make sure that s/he converts.

I have seen a lot of flame wars, a characteristic of open source; forking different project because of zeal/ego of developers. The mergers also actually happen, but they are rare. There are distro zealots who go to any extent proving that their distro is the best and nothing else comes even close to it. To some extent I agree, different distros were made with different visions and there is no such thing as "One size fits all". And recently there has been a lot of distro bashing for distributions who joined M$ patent agreement.

But amid all this, the open source community should stand united against M$. It should make sure that people leave M$ bandwagon and join the open source revolution. Whether it is Freespire or SuSE , it should not matter. The community should be focusing its efforts to spread awareness amongst people.

To all the purist who say that distributions that made agreements with M$ betrayed them, I would like to ask them about GNU/Linux. Everybody knows that linux is just the kernel, and there are other kernels as welll; solaris, bsd, hurd etc. In making a distribution a lot more than a kernel is required, and that "lot more" is actually what GNU has provided. Even the compiler used for building the kernel is provided by GNU. Linux cant exist in isolation, it requires GNU support. Then why is it that Linux is named in isolation; why don't we accept "GNU/Linux" as suggested by RMS and supported by Debian. Don't you feel that Linux betrayed GNU by not putting their name?

It is most important that we "the community" should stand united in our war against M$ . Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS and OpenSuSE are the top three listed at distrowatch, but I have my own criticism for each of them. The criticism is so extreme that I literally hate them. But that does not matter, if they are able to pull people out of M$ bandwagon.