December 24, 2009

Problems with Moonlight’s new covenant

Filed under: fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , — Alex @ 11:13 am

The new covenant covering Novell’s Moonlight is up, and unfortunately it looks like people who weren’t happy before still won’t be happy. In a lot of ways, this is the classic caught between two stools situation: one side wants to give up as little as possible, the other wants something as unambiguous as possible.

So, what are the problems? Jason from “MonoNoNo” gave his thoughts here. While I disagree with much of his analysis – e.g., the Media Pack issue is essentially irrelevant for free software users, and the GPLv3-hate is also basically not a problem – many of the points raised are valid. I don’t think they make Moonlight non-free itself, but they prevent people re-using the code, which is not ideal.

I also raised the issue on fedora-devel-list, and received a somewhat limited reply from Tom Callaway. The commentary on what lawyers are willing (or not) to do is relatively interesting, although I don’t think is entirely apropos. It would be simple for someone to say “these permissions are the minimum that we need” regardless of any specific license, which I haven’t seen anyone do with respect to patents. It’s not a huge step to go beyond that and check off whether each permission has been properly granted.

That all said, I think there are a few key issues here:

  1. Versioning. I haven’t seen anyone else discuss this, but the Covenant is issued for versions of Moonlight which do not yet exist as far as I can tell. So in one sense, all of this discussion is basically moot.
  2. End users vs. distributors. I don’t understand why the Covenant attempts to differentiate these cases, but it does seem to put people such as Red Hat in a situation where they are specifically not covered. Why? This just seems mad.
  3. End dates are not far in the future. This isn’t going to instil confidence in people relying on these agreements.

Unless those issues are sorted out, it seems pretty clear to me that Moonlight is not going to get into Fedora. Of course, there are plenty of people who do not want it in either way, so the effort that might go into fixing these problems is likely to be less than minimal.

It’s sad for a number of reasons: first, because it would be something that I think is easy to fix. Microsoft, if they are serious about Silverlight, could issue a covenant which covers Moonlight properly, without the silly restrictions and time limits, and prove to people that they want it to succeed so much they are willing to give up control of who can implement it.

Second, because Silverlight is technically extremely appealing. Free software players for Flash are not great, and the development tools are terrible. HTML5/SVG/JS etc. is in a similar position; the “players” (browsers) are much better quality (although the user experience is variable) but the development tools are non-existent. And Moonlight is not the only Silverlight implementation on the way: apparently Intel are also working on a completely different implementation.

I doubt anyone from Microsoft reads this blog, but they are the only ones who could fix this. I’m surprised they don’t see the value in doing it.

November 20, 2009

Fedora 12 & ChromeOS

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , , , , — Alex @ 10:59 am

It has been great to see Fedora 12 release this week. Apart from the major kerfuffle over PackageKit (which I understand, even if I don’t recognise the problem), it seems to have gone really well – especially since the reaction in the critical press has been surprisingly un-critical. Hardware support seems to be good, including graphics, which is slightly surprising given the huge amount of change in this area, viz.:

“So, of the four “major” distributions over the past month (Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010, openSuSE 11.2 and Fedora 12), the only one that didn’t crash, hang or otherwise misbehave on at least one of my laptop/netbook/nettop systems was Fedora.” – “Saving the ‘Best’ for Last“, J A Watson at ZDNet.

I think this is a tremendous accomplishment by the people working on this stuff, and the release team, given the short and punchy nature of this development schedule. Fedora 13 has a great base to start from, although it also has to live up to what seems to be a pretty good Fedora 12 release.

It was also interesting to see that news of Google’s Chrome OS hasn’t really overshadowed the release: yes, people are writing a bit about it, but it hasn’t really set the world alight in the same way Wave did a few weeks ago. And you know what – I think it’s because it’s really not a terribly hot idea. In fact, I would say that Fedora 12 and Gnome Shell (the preview of part of Gnome 3) is actually a better Chrome OS than Chrome  OS.

The stuff that Chrome supposedly brings to the table, I already have. My netbook unsuspends in 5 seconds flat, and it lives its life “on”. This fast boot stuff is basically worthless to me. The user experience of Chrome OS is surprisingly close to what Gnome Shell already offers; and of course I’m able to run proper applications not just web-based ones. And, actually, I think Moblin actually gets a lot of this stuff right already: particularly the deep integration between the desktop shell and web applications. If I’m honest, this just looks to me like another Google “re-invent the world and outspend the people already innovating in this area”-type project. If Google were not so fat on advertising revenue, there is no way they could make a play like this.

And, to be honest, I’m not entirely sold on the people already innovating in this area already. I’ve written before about litl’s webbook – which ChromeOS seems to be aimed squarely at. If I were litl, I would be pretty deeply worried, since a web-based OS with Ubuntu underpinnings running on custom hardware is basically a rough description of both projects. And you can bet that Google (or, their hardware partners) aren’t going to be knocking these out at $700 a pop.

I’m deeply unconvinced by this “web apps only” approach, anyway. A browser is not the be all and end all, and files exist on disk for a reason: “it’s too complex for normal people” argument just does not stack up at all. What ChromeOS, and litl and others, are doing is saying “we can make a computing experience as simple as a television”, which is fine. But then you get a computing experience just like a television, with minimal interactivity and flexibility. I mean, custom hardware is great, but one size doesn’t fit all – you have to talk to cameras, printers, mobile phones, and all manners of other gadgetry. That needs OS support. Are Google going to come up with some kind of USB-to-website system so my camera’s photos can be uploaded via flikr? In what world of UI interaction does that even make sense?

What you end up with is an emasculated system where apps don’t talk to each other or share content easily (can you insert images into Google Docs directly from flikr?). It’s entirely retrograde, and a non-compelling view of computing which limits users to various hard-coded paths of functionality. For simple stuff like sending e-mail or browsing the news online, it’s fine. For “harder” stuff like attaching a document to an e-mail: well, you’d better hope that you use Google Docs and GMail and that those apps can talk to each other. Better hope, though, you don’t have a video camera and want to edit some clips – there’s no website for that yet, so you’re stuffed, bud. And even when it arrives, it’s going to take a while to upload those hundreds of megabytes of Little Eric walking for the first time, because that ADSL connection you have with 8Mb download has only a 512K upload.

It’s clear these “computers” are only going to have a very limited appeal. And this, to me, is where Fedora (and other free OSes) shine. You can have the Moblin interface, or a proper Gnome desktop. The hardware support is great; it will work on your netbook or on your full desktop. You can make the choice to cut down and simplify the interface, and not lose the ability to run the more complicated apps.

If I were to prognosticate, I would say that litl will be around for maybe a couple of years, but not much more. ChromeOS, Moblin and the like will find their place on cheap photo-frame-like touch PCs which people will scatter around the home, but there will still be a real PC in the corner.

November 12, 2009

First attempt with Gnome Shell

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , — Alex @ 2:54 pm

As part of doing some testing of the upcoming Fedora 12 release, I decided to put it on my EeePC 901 netbook. I had a feeling it would be relatively well supported, and indeed the installation was extremely smooth. I was going to also test the work Peter has been doing on the Moblin packages, but instead I got detoured into Gnome-Shell: my Fedora 12 laptop runs Nouveau (no 3D for me!) and my desktop is ATi but not Fedora 12 yet.

In a word: wow. For what is supposed to be a technical preview for Gnome 3.0 which, we should remember, is about a year away, this is a remarkably polished bit of software. The simple black borders looked a bit basic in screenshots but in use the understated nature of the interface actually looks a bit classy. The Applications menu and particularly the side panel are a bit rough looking, but I don’t have the side panel turned on.

The workspace metaphor is taking me a bit of time to get used to; it’s quite similar to the Gnome 2 system but has slight differences. I’ve had a bit of trouble launching apps in the way I want, but I keep discovering new features to it (e.g., dragging and dropping the app into the workspace) which give me better ways of doing things. Not being able to access applets from the Activities page is also a bit odd, but eh.

What is particularly praiseworthy, I feel, is that even though it doesn’t appear to be designed particularly with netbooks in mind – unlike, for example, Moblin – it does seem to work really well. I’ve put the Chromium browser on there as well, to save screen real estate, and the combination is much better than the relatively-stock Ubuntu I had on before.

Although there aren’t really any new features compared to Gnome 2, everything seems to be placed in a smarter way, and in particular I could see non-technical users using these workspaces and actually “getting it”. I suspect a lot of what’s remaining is really “small scale” stuff – the polish which really makes things sing. I noticed odd problems with windows not popping up when they should occasionally, and stuff like that – or clicking a link and having it appear on a browser in another workspace with no notification. These are the small fit-and-finish pieces which make an application great, though.

November 4, 2009

Whatever happened to the Chandler project?

Filed under: bongo,freesoftware — Tags: , , — Alex @ 1:03 pm

Years ago, Mitch Kapor invested large sums of money into the OSAF – Open Source Applications Foundation – to come up with a new personal information manager called Chandler. Having burned through the $8 million they got via various means ($5M from Kapor originally), most (all?) of their developers were cut loose early in 2009 as I understand it, leaving the Chandler project – and associated projects – somewhat in limbo.

On a whim, I decided to have a look at the current state of play: turns out Chandler 1.0 is pretty much dead, and the work is now concentrating on re-architecting the software for Chandler 2.0. Having been in a similar position myself with the Bongo project – though I like to think the work we’ve done has been more evolutionary than revolutionary, except where absolutely necessary (e.g., the Hula store not being able to handle concurrency – d’oh!). The pages don’t seem to say why, although I seem to remember Chandler suffering from various pretty severe performance issues (i.e., being unusable).

It also reminds me somewhat of the situation with Mozilla Messaging and Thunderbird 3. MozMess has had a few millions injected into it, and now their developers are on a spree of embedding “search”, databases, bizarre active folder systems, and “conversation view” into Thunderbird – literally every release in version 3 I’ve been using (and I use it as my main client) has been a step backwards for me.

Clearly the injection of substantial money isn’t any particular driver of success; indeed, on the other hand, it seems to have a negative correlation on those (extremely limited) data points. However, without resources to have people develop, it’s difficult to see how to build up enough momentum to make this stuff happen. It is something of a conundrum.

litl breaks cover – what to think?

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , , , — Alex @ 11:36 am

So, litl has finally broken cover – I had written previously some first thoughts based on the various tid-bits that had leaked, and I thought it might be interesting to follow up on this. Sadly, it doesn’t seem that I had missed anything particularly big: this is supposed to sit like a photo frame in various places in your home, can connect up to a TV but doesn’t really do any multimedia stuff itself, doesn’t have non-wifi wireless, and doesn’t have a touchscreen. In short, it’s a big Chumby, and very similar to both that and Joggler.

I still don’t get why they went to the effort to design their own hardware. Ok, moving parts are gone – that’s good (although, it has a CF drive? Aren’t those hard drives writ small?). Aside from that, this is just a bit of a bendy netbook. One hopes they didn’t spend too much on the design of that. And the controller: well, ok, it has a wheel and a button, and the Mac-like dispensation with other stuff probably makes it reasonably easy. But infra-red: oh dear. This isn’t like the Wii wand; you need line-of-sight.

The software interface is obviously a bit different to what’s on the market at the moment, but not that far a departure from the likes of Joggler. It’s built around channels, which is a familiar concept from TV. I’m not totally sold on this: the channel concept is beginning to die a death precisely because it doesn’t work in the modern era, and it reminds me a bit of early computer UIs which were designed around physical desks and files (which is partly why we still call them “desktops”). However, I’m willing to give it a go and see if it grabs me – the proof of these puddings is always in the eating.

What slightly scares me is the use-cases set out on the website. “View photos”. “View photos on your TV!”. “Get the weather”. “Get movie listings”. “Access the web”. Etc. Oh, and “plug it into your TV”. Ok, I can see some point (although, I’m not really feeling this). But not a word on the point I made previously: battery life. Being portable and light is great if you can move it around freely. Will the battery life keep up with that? How will it work? If the litl ends up being tethered to the mains for the most part, suddenly most of the appeal I can think of has flown out of the window.

And then, the big, big disappointment: litl want $700 for this. Assuming a decent exchange rate, that’s still £450 with the best will in the world. Plus they want an extra £10 or so for the remote control, which bafflingly is an optional extra. Looking at what that would buy me in on the High Street if I went out this afternoon:

  • £250 gets a 10″ Atom-based netbook with storage built in (yes, it’s a PC)
  • £450 gets me the same netbook but with added mobile broadband, so not only can I take it everywhere around the house, I can take it around the country and still access my stuff
  • £150 buys me a Joggler, which for my money does a lot of what litl does but has a touch screen and is even more portable. It’s not as flexible or powerful I guess, but I could buy three of these for one litl and I can text mobiles directly from it.
  • £140 buys me a Chumby – less portable, less flexible, more interactive.
  • £340 wins me a Fizzbook Spin. It’s ruggedized, the screen’s more adjustable as is the webcam, it has a handle and the orientation adjustment. It also has the important touchscreen.
  • £300 also buys me various TV media centres which play photos, video, browse the web etc. Sure, it’s stuck under the TV.

In reality, how many of these are actually in competition with litl? Probably not many directly, although Joggler comes very close. It depends what you mean by “in competition”, though. I know a couple of people who leave a laptop around in their living room for accessing the web, so I vaguely understand what litl are aiming at. I’m just not sure this is on target, though, and for all the nice design it’s missing (unless I’m mistaken, which I could be) a touch screen and wireless wand – both of which I think are crucial features if you want people to either pick this up or use it from the sofa. A keyboard is entirely useless in both those scenarios.

So, I’m inevitably feeling a bit disappointed. I believe they’re missing a trick: not because they don’t have a good idea; I think it is a good idea (in most respects, anyway) and it appears to have been executed well. However, I think also that times have changed since this thing was on the drawing board. One excerpt from the “software essay” on the litl site stood out for me:

“Let’s say you have a litl at home, a litl in your weekend home, and a litl plugged into your TV.”

Wow, what an assumption to start from. Are they really aiming this device at people with a second home who can afford to drop $2000+ on three netbooks? That’s not the economic climate I see around me today.

And, I think that sums up my problem with this device. What functions it has seem to be well designed. But, it’s a complete luxury device. It’s not enabling me to do things I couldn’t do before. It’s simple, yes, but when I think about it, simple isn’t the first word that springs to mind: the first word I thought of when I saw this was “decadent”. Decadence of design, of implementation, and of product. That’s not a good thing.

Update 12:45 – there’s a pretty enlightening interview with John Chuang up now too; and the absolute last sentence is probably the most revealing: “We can have a long-term view because we’re self-funded. We know we have a great device, and right now we want to make sure we sell it to customers who are buying it for the right reasons.”

Not just decadent design of a decadent product, but now decadent marketing. Buying a product for the right reasons?! Whoa. This just smells of multi-millionaire play-thing, a la Chandler, OLPC, to name but a few.

Update 13:40 - last update I’m making on this. Engadget, who leaked the hardware first, are not impressed by the price either.

The other point I wanted to make in this post but forget: the UI is very similar to the Palm Pre, for me, or the Nokia N900. Both of which devices will be a. cheaper than this and b. much more useful to me. But then, I guess I’m just not the right sort of customer :)

Last point – it appears possible this thing runs Ubuntu under the hood. The Crunchbase listing for litl has Canonical down as an OS service provider, and there’s a PPA on launchpad for “bfallik-litl” – bfallik on twitter has not tweeted, but is friends with Peter Teichman (of Hula fame) and other known litlers.

Given Havoc Pennington, ex of Red Hat, is the Director of Operating Systems or something at litl, that’s a bit of a surprising choice for me, but I guess the OS layer is likely to be pretty thin anyway – the stuff on top is Javascript-based somehow, possibly the whole thing is running in a Mozilla window much like the Pyro Desktop.

October 30, 2009

Corporate lobbying against free software

Filed under: fedora,freesoftware — Alex @ 6:11 pm

It’s not very often that there are genuine reasons for investigative journalism in the free software world; for the most part, the stuff that happens within the community is open and well-covered by the likes of LWN (who, if you don’t already subscribe to, you should). The stuff that happens outside the community – well, you rarely get to hear about what goes on. We know companies lobby, both against competitors products and against ideas their competitors promote, and that’s nothing new – that’s just competition.

It’s rare to find, then, a brochure produced with the intent of talking down free software as a whole. However, Wikileaks has turned up just such a document: the SirsiDynix brochure against “open source” library software, distributed on a restricted basis to certain customers. In particular, they’re raging against the likes of Evergreen and Koha. I should own up that I’ve known one particular Koha developer, MJ Ray, for a long while, but this isn’t an area I particularly have a lot of direct experience. If I were a Koha developer, though, reading this would be a bit smarting: they accuse it of many things, in particular of having priorities belonging in the 80s.

As well as the relatively malicious falsehoods being perpetrated against those specific library projects, there are also vague allegations about open source in general – from accusations of Red Hat being “proprietary” to the highly entertaining argument that the US Department of Defense “restrict the use of open source software for fear that it could pose a terrorist opportunity” (clearly, SirsiDynix are not exactly up-to-speed themselves with the state of the art in this area).

What does this document tell us about SirsiDynix? Well, first, it tells us that they probably have a product which is much better than the state of the art in the free software community: they are an incumbent, large business with offices across the world, and even though I’ve no experience of their product I’m sure it’s about one of the most featureful things on the market. But, this is the really interesting thing: someone in their position would not go to the effort of even writing a single side of A4 on the ills of free software were it not for the fact that this is a threat to them. So, for as much as their systems do, and for all the talking down of free software they do, they are obviously worried. Clearly Koha and Evergreen are getting something right.

And here’s what I think they’re getting right, and what customers of SirsiDynix should be looking at. The author of this paper – Stephen Abram – blogs extensively from his “Lighthouse” at SirsiDynix (which is actually, cough, open source Movable Type). And interestingly, this “leak” having hit Wikileaks yesterday (the 29th), he’s posted the same paper on his blog today (30th, actually just in the last few minutes!) in a posting entitled “It’s About a Respectful Discussion“. Note well that word, “Respectful”. While his paper warns customers to stay away from free software lest they end up in the dirty, proprietary hands of Red Hat, he freely admits they use it. It would be quite easy to take apart the paper on a factual basis and highlight the inaccuracies and blatant spin. But, I think there’s an easier way.

Simply read the posts at the Lighthouse. Read about the crucial role of communities and the technologies of the web that bring them together, or the difference in information production and consumption in information technology-literate users. It’s clear Stephen realises that the role of “creator of content” is played by a broad spectrum of people, and the role of a modern library is not simply to warehouse dusty knowledge trapped in paper for the locals to learn from. Libraries of the future will be as much about production of information as dissemination, and I think Stephen realises this – and that’s why his arguments against production of software in a community fall flat on their face.

October 28, 2009

First thoughts on litl’s Easel.

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Tags: — Alex @ 2:41 pm

I’ve been waiting for litl to break cover for what seems like forever. The people seem to be all extremely smart, and it sounded like they had such a great idea, even if no-one knew what it was. However, engadget have seen some FCC information on a new “Easel” product from litl – and I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed, because it’s a netbook.

Of course, it almost certainly isn’t. The FCC photos take the extremely strange step of photographing it standing on the top screen edge: a position many netbooks wouldn’t be able to reach (some do, but not many). That, combined with a strange rubber insert along that top edge and a conveniently located power button make me think this thing is designed to spend much of it’s life in that position. Much like a photograph standing on the mantlepiece, this thing is probably designed to sit in your living space and “do stuff”. I could be wrong; the IR detector on the front of the keyboard is presumably needed for something, but there could be another built into the bezel somewhere (the FCC photos appear to show one). Interestingly, it’s designed by FIC apparently – the same people from whom OpenMoko spun out of.

What “stuff”, I’m not sure. It doesn’t look like it has a touchscreen (and it has the keyboard attached), but it does seem to have a webcam. Presumably you can Skype or something through this thing, but to interact with it you have to pick it up and flip it over? I suppose one possibility is that it has insane battery life, a wake-on-wlan function somehow and doesn’t need to be permanently strapped into a power socket, but I don’t know – having an Intel Atom and stuff probably means it doesn’t do that.

Doesn’t seem to have DVD/TV even though it has an HDMI output, doesn’t have 3G, doesn’t have touchscreen, etc. If it’s supposed to do something like a Joggler that would make some sense, except that again it doesn’t seem quite so interactive. Can’t believe it’s any good for gaming.

So, I’m kind of at a loss. If you’re going to all the effort of designing your own hardware, there’s usually a reason – a la OLPC. But this doesn’t seem to have many interesting features, except that it’s totally legacy and peripheral free – it only has one USB socket. Presumably the software has tonnes of interesting features, but in these days of Maemo and Moblin I wonder how close to the state of the art this is, or whether it’s in a kind of Daikatana situation. If it turns out to be another Chumby – well, that’s nice, but again disappointing (Chumby already exists, after all).

We only have around a week to wait to find out apparently, but I’m kind of left feeling “what’s the point”? If this is really just a netbook for accessing web content, I don’t understand it at all. You don’t need custom hardware for that, and people already know how to use web browsers. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s vastly underwhelming so far.

October 20, 2009

RMS, KEI and ORG tell DGC “No” on ORCL MySQL

Filed under: fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , , — Alex @ 8:26 pm

A horrible, horrible headline for an extremely interesting story: RMS is amongst one of those who has signed his name to a letter to the Commissioner for Competition and Director General Competition of the EU that the Oracle-Sun merger should not take place due to the harm that it would do to MySQL. I saw this via Joe Brockmeier’s posting on the subject, in which he reads the letter as essentially saying that the GPL is not good enough to protect MySQL – which I think is inferring the wrong idea from what’s written.

What’s interesting here is that this is, definitively, the best exposition of the difference between “software license” and “business model” that you could get. The letter is not saying the license isn’t good enough; it’s a commentary on the business model. Secondarily, it’s a commentary on the difficulty of moving from a GPLv2-only license to a GPLv3 one, but that is treated somewhat as the lesser issue (or, at least, one with greater effects in the future rather than now).

Of important note, and I think the main way this is being misread, is that this letter isn’t about GPL’d projects: this is specifically about MySQL. What they are saying is that MySQL as a business has worked on a “dual source” model – that’s how the development has been funded, that’s how the community is set up, and those are the social norms. If that “dual source” model is shut down, that means MySQL needs to transition to some other way of funding the development and/or reduce the development occurring. This letter rightly points out the risks that development would slow/stop, and the fundamental change to this model risk killing the project.

Joe says, “Asking that a governmental body preclude the sale of a company to another because it will cease or curtail its development of a Free Software project seems unreasonable”. I somewhat agree, but again, that’s not what the letter is actually asking – it says “should block Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL”. The EU have the power to do that, and I think it’s a sensible measure. MySQL is a business which can survive on its own (at least on past performance; although many key people left during Sun’s period of ownership), and Oracle quite clearly pose a competitive risk in this area. I think the letter elucidates why brilliantly.

Update: Simon Phipps (of Sun) has posted his thoughts on this letter too, and I think makes exactly the same mistake Joe did: conflating the issue of freedom with success. The things which make software free are not the same things which make development rock or a product successful, and vice-versa.

Of course, it is true to say that an unsuccessful but free project is of very little help to the community, but saying “lack of dual-licensing dollars will hinder MySQL development” is not the same as saying “GPLv2 protection is not enough to make something free”. The issue is one of commercial success, not freedom – but of course, this does help put to bed the lie that if you are pro-free software (staunchly so, in RMS’ case) you are ignorant of or ambivalent toward commercial realities.

Update 2: Matt Asay also weighs in, and somewhat predictably also confuses the issue of freedom with success.

October 15, 2009

Asay and Tiemann, mano a mano.

Filed under: fedora,freesoftware,green,proprietary — Alex @ 8:24 pm

Matt Asay has written another entertaining blog piece on his particular theories of open source economics, and Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann and he have engaged in what is superficially a bit of “Is not!” “Is too!“. Looking a bit deeper, though, it’s not really the pragmatics vs. the Stallmanites, even though that’s how Asay frames it.

Fundamentally, Tiemann is right on the money: a simplistic “supply and demand” view of how prices are set in a market place completely ignores the value that Red Hat offers to its customers. “Subscription” versus “box price” is not simply a semantic difference – indeed, that’s essentially labelling their customers as brand tarts unwilling to risk CentOS / Scientific Linux, and reduces the business decision to a simple money figure. That’s not how business works; the difference between “cheapest” and “best value” is huge.

Asay also bizarrely labels Red Hat a “distant second to Canonical” in the purity stakes. This is Canonical with the proprietary server management, proprietary file sharing, proprietary application store, etc.? I don’t even vaguely understand the argument here: either Matt is badly misinformed, or is just being very selective – the only thing I can think that Red Hat withholds is permission for others to use its trade marks. Which Canonical also does.

Then comes the claim that “The bulk of the best, most widely used open source is funded by proprietary dollars.” – followed by a call of thanks for the likes of IBM, HP, Intel. No doubt those companies do contribute a reasonable amount, but to credit them with the bulk of the best: that’s really stretching it. If you look at the actual factual information of who contributes what to projects like Linux, corporate interest is large, but “funded by proprietary dollars” – haha. What Asay is basically implying is “proprietary sales are underwriting the development of open source” – presumably some kind of mass corporate hallucination that has turned these businesses into charities, and pragmatism be damned.

Of course, the reality is these businesses would never underwrite development of software which wouldn’t make the money back, and indeed IBM’s vaunted “$1 billion investment” was apparently recouped in a single year. According to Matt, we should be thanking IBM for doing this: to my mind, IBM should be thanking the community for the contribution that has enabled it to recoup its investment so quickly (since 2002 presumably it has been making good money, too).

What Matt doesn’t seem to get is that this split-personality marketing of “we do all this open stuff, except for this scarce bit we’re charging you for!” is a prize example of a house divided unto itself. You can’t sensibly talk about the benefits of open source without contradicting yourself completely when it comes to the paywall behind which your proprietary software sits: basically you have to fess up that the open source bits are the bait.

What Michael’s post illustrates nicely is not just a clarity of purpose, but a 100% commitment to what they tell their customers: no ifs, no buts, but a single compelling story. Customers understand the value they offer, and that’s why they make money.

[Edit 20:24: just for clarity, my comparison of Canonical to Red Hat is not to denigrate Canonical: merely to illustrate that claiming Red Hat are a 'distant second' to Canonical in the purity stakes is utter nonsense. Also, my reference in the comments to "proprietary application store" should be parsed as "a store that hosts proprietary applications", not "an application store that is proprietary"]

October 14, 2009

WikiReader – “Project B”

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , , — Alex @ 10:02 am

Let me start this by saying that I really, really want OpenMoko Inc. to be a raging success. With Android, Palm Pre and other “Linux phones” showing pretty how not to do things (jury’s out on N900 for me still), the properly free smartphone is an idea whose time is very definitely here. Sadly, with the freeping creaturism of the phone market and the need to develop both a hardware and software stack simultaneously, that didn’t seem to work out so well, so OM are now going to their backup plan: “WikiReader“.

Now, I’m a huge fan of Simple. I don’t particularly like the look of this device, but I respect the design: the reduced form factor, the insane battery life, the readable screen. Not sure on the wedge shape (presumably necessitated by the choice of AAA power supply), not sure on the buttons (surely it could have just been one touch screen?), but those are design choices. It has obviously been designed, and that’s excellent.

However, although it has been designed, who has it been designed for? The wedge shape makes it less pocketable, and most adults I know already have phones which beat this device into a cocked hat. So I’m pretty sure it’s not really designed for me. Because it’s essentially an offline device, presumably the people it is designed for are mostly/entirely offline: however, if they’re offline because they can’t afford it, it’s difficult to see how/why they would pay $100 for one of these things. I’m also deeply sceptical of any project which attempts to address the “IT needs of the developing world” in a fashion which involves shipping basic devices that no-one in London or New York or (other “not developing world” place) would actually use.

So, my conclusion is that this device has been designed for children, and probably children in families who have a pretty high income. But, here’s the thing: if I was designing it for children, I would not make a device that was black and white, had no pictures / illustrations / animations, had no music / sound, etc. I mean, this thing is boring. And is adult wikipedia actually suitable for children? I don’t know what the reading age of the site actually is, but I’d imagine you’d have to be into your teens to understand most of it (particularly without diagrams and stuff).

I hope I’m the one who’s dead wrong about this device. I’m thinking of excuses, right now, I can use to buy one. But, it doesn’t have any kind of connectivity: I couldn’t hack it to store contacts or calendar appointments, and putting stuff like a wifi card into the micro-sd slot (assuming that would even be possible – does it have in-built flash? think not..) would effectively kill the battery life. I have this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that this is a brilliantly designed device implementing a wonderful idea that no-one actually will want. And that would be very, very sad.

“Free hardware” seems like an obviously winning idea. Has anyone actually successfully executed it yet though?

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