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.

Kudos WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com

Why is it hard for people to understand that there is nothing called "Free Lunch"?

Somebody was concerned, that adblock is ruining their revenue by blocking the ads (shown on the website). And at the same time, not providing the website owners, the ability to block adblock users. They created a site (if you are using Firefox you will not be able to see the website; use IE tab extension or any other browser to see the site.) The site tried to put up a genuine concern. They were targeting Firefox because it abetted adblock.

Now today I see a childish blog. David Peterson tries to counter the points put forward by whyfirefoxisblocked.com. He tries to give some apple and orange comparisons as well.

Now, how hard is it for people to ponder on "Free Lunch". Basically there is nothing called a free lunch. You have to pay for it. What you pay or how you pay is a different ball game all together. Its because of people like David Peterson, Richard M. Stallman came up with the phrase "Free as in Freedom and not as in Free Beer". I have a little advice for people who believe in Free Lunch and Free Beer. Why don't you guys open up a small place and provide Free Lunch and Beer to everyone? Or coming to more technical terms; why don't you guys open a site which boasts about ad free internet? I even dare Mr Peterson to open a website, and maintain it without serving any ads and without charging any subscription fees. Mr Peterson, does not himself serve an ad free blog, then how come he objects to something that he himself believes in?

Put your efforts where your mouth is. If you believe in ad free internet, stop serving ads on your blog. And even further, people who say that quality content generation, without incentive, can be sustained in the long term; I would like to point out safari. Safari is the ultimate resource, but with its own set of limitations. Safari does not include all the books published by O'Reilly, it also has a high subscription fees and after all this there is a limited set of books to keep in your shelf. Why doesn't O'Rielly allow free unlimited download of all the books?

How charming the concept of Robin hood might seem, but the concept is not everlasting. Robin hood was there to bring a balance amongst people, once the balance is restored, there is no room for Robin hood. People will make fun of one, who wants to be a Robinhood in a balanced society.

Coming to the freedom part, Freedom is not selective. Freedom is freedom for everyone, for every single human being, for every single living form. If Freedom was selective, i.e. freedom for some and not others, then what is the difference in freedom and tyranny? Adblock provide users, the freedom to see ad free pages, and robs the website owner with his/her freedom. Doesn't it sound like dictatorship?

The problem is not with Firefox, but the problem is with its promotion of adblock. If Firefox and adblock both existed independently there was no problem. And let me remind you, that if M$, instead of arm twisting OEMs, had promoted netscape, the web would have been a completely different place; there would have been no internet explorer as well as no Firefox. We are seeing these things happen because M$ chose to promote internet explorer.

Lets look at the scenario from Firefox's perspective. The default web page for firefox is google. This is because google pays Firefox; what google is actually paying is revenue generated through ads. Why doesn't Firefox make wikipedia as its homepage? It seems to me like Firefox pockets the ad generated revenue and then asks adblock to stop revenue generation for other small players.

The internet is fueled and made interesting be actual living people. And humans have a family to support, they have bills to pay, how can these people live without any incentive. I would call it even, if with the ad revenue I am able to pay the net connection bill, but adblock is not even allowing me to do this. The current status of Artificial Intelligence is not so good that it can keep generating quality contents without human intervention. Even if it was, computer hardware needs to be bought, and somebody needs to pay to the net connectivity and electricity consumed!

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.

Road of Open Source success - I

One of the main ingredients for open source success is OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) support. A lot of companies are doing really well in this regard. Ubuntu has partnered with Dell to offer preinstalled desktops. SuSE & Redhat offerings are already available with HP and Dell, though its only for the enterprize server segment.

Apart from the OEM support, there are three more ingredients which attribute to the open source success, namely package manager, control center and out of the box experience.

Package Manager
Package management is not so easy in linux. The original packages or applications were distributed in the form of source code. There was a lot of chaos in the way packages were built and then everything converged to three command step; 1. configure 2. make 3. make install. But even this was not enough. People wanted prebuilt packages, thats when three big giants of linux distribution started, Slackware, Debian and Redhat.

Everyone was having its own type of package management; slackware had tgz, debian had dpkg and redhat had rpm. All three were incompatible. All stood the test of time, but in my opinion only dpkg succeded. Apt is another way to install and configure applications and also contributed the success of ubuntu.

RPM was good initially and also became the industry standard for linux packages; all the enterpize applications started distributing their application in RPM format. But updates are really hard in RPM and we have to deal with package dependency like hell. People are recently moving away from fedora and towards Ubuntu. One of the reasons I see is package management.

Gentoo introduced protage, and it seems to be panacia; it offered great promises. The user has the ability to compile the package with the optimization s/he chooses. Its really great to run dedicated servers or personal workstation on old machines. But it did not find any place in enterprize application. Recently there has been good efforts in form of pacman. Pacman seems promising.

When can the open source agree for a single package manager, or even provide interoperability between packages?

Consider a single scenario, I am using applicaiton X on Centos and feel it is really great. My wife comes over and wants the same application on her ubuntu machine. So what do I do, the best shot that I have got is to download it from one of the ubuntu repositories. If I find it there, its good, but if I don't, I have a bit of trouble. Considering Debian as Ubuntu's godfather and knowing the fact that Debian has the biggest repository of applications, I search it there and find one. But now I am unable the install the same application as that it seems to be incompatible with ubuntu.

So, considering my geek status, I would download the source package and try to install it. This option might not be available for average joe. Now Ubuntu does not provide build tools and kernel headers by default, so I have to install these in order to install the application X. I will feel a little bit frustrated but consider that a linux newbie comes to me and I explain all this to him, he will be petrified by the complexity.

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.