From today (25th May 2007) Dell, the second biggest computer manufacturer on the planet, will start shipping Ubuntu Linux on some of it’s products.

Initially, pre-loaded Ubuntu machines will be available in the US only although it is widely anticipated that Dell will extend this to other areas of the world. Until now, Dell has only shipped Microsoft software on it’s consumer and non-server products. The free and Open Source operating system packaged by Canonical, has in just a few short years become the most popular Linux distribution ever. It’s ease of use and excellent hardware support has created a groudswell of support. Ubuntu Linux can be downloaded for free from their website, and now supplied pre-installed on Dell PCs. A quick look on Dell’s US website indicates that the units with Ubuntu are between $100 and $200US less than simiar products with Microsoft’s software. The PCs can be seen here: http://www.dell.com/…hs

“The interest and enthusiasm from customers who challenged us to deliver a consumer Linux solution have been matched within Dell and Canonical, the sponsor of Ubuntu, by a team of dedicated professionals who made this happen in a phenomenally short period of time,” said Neil Hand, vice president, Dell Consumer Product Group in a press release today.

This is brilliant news for the Open Source community at large. I can see several benefits to come from this:

• Driver Support - Dell have already started asking some of their hardware suppliers to improve (or actually build) linux drivers for their products. This should increase the availability of drivers for the community as a whole.
• Exposure - Dell is a BIG corporation and their backing of Linux as a desktop OS can add nothing but credibility to the platform in general.
• Usability - If Dell’s typical customers are what I think they are, then their feedback and comments will really help the community at large to improve the usability and friendliness of Linux on the desktop.

What an exciting day for Open Source. I want to congratulate Ubuntu and Dell for this MASSIVE step forward!

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If you haven’t yet tried Inkscape, you are really missing a treat! The title I used about time wasting is because I am NOT a graphic designer but, playing around with Inkscape is a great way to pretend that you are

Here’s a red ball I just drew…

It took me about 2 minutes…

I know it isn’t perfect, but like I said, I’m not a graphic designer.

But Inkscape is REALLY easy to use. It is an Open Source vector graphics editor which basically means that you can re-size your drawings without losing any detail [Here's a good description of vector graphics from the Wikipedia]. Some other big vector editors on the market are from Adobe (Illustrator) and CorelDraw; both cost a lot of money. Inkscape is FREE.

The standard SVG file format is quite interesting in itself - it is basically XML so you can edit it with any text editor and include things like hyperlinks within particular areas of the drawing. The file describes how to build the image, it doesn’t actually contain any bitmaps - just instructions.

Here is the SVG Red Ball #2 file which I just renamed to have a .txt extension. If you save this to your own computer and then rename it with .svg, my guess is you should be able to open it with Inkscape and see or even edit the image once again.

Did I mention, Inkscape is free! It’s an open source application that is available for Linux, Windows and Macs (In fact it is one of the most popular open source downloads for Mac OS/X).

The bit that has really amazed me with Inkscape is that it’s currently at revision 0.45.1. Yes, still a long way from being what the developers feel is a “finished” product, but it doesn’t crash, everything I have tried on it works, and the performance is terrific.

Now I have added some text to the ball (took about a minute). You can get the text to follow a path (in this case the edge of the red circle) using just one command. Then you can bend and move the text around at will. And get this - the text is still a text object so you can edit it letter by letter, change font size, style etc etc. All after you’ve wound it round your object.

If you aren’t a graphic artist, have time to spare (or waste) and don’t “do” games; try Inkscape - I love it!

I would guess that “proper” graphic artists will love this as a tool and really get the most out of it. Just take a look at some of the things that have been contributed by skilled users.

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It really does look as though the big “M” has just upset too many people for this thing to be ignored or go away any time soon. All over the Internet there are blogs, news articles, wiki pages and even legal analysis of their patent infringement claims. And guess what? Nobody seems impressed at all.

In the last day or two several “counter” campaigns have started. Here are my favourites:

On the Digital Tipping Point Wiki, there is a list of over 600 users (and growing by the minute), asking for Microsoft to come on and sue them. (Some very funny comments and clear signs of anger in the community)

Here, http://www.linuxworld.com/columnists/2007/052107henderson.htm, Tim Henderson invites readers to create their own Linux distribution and register it at Distrowatch.com. The premise being that if there are a million distributions Microsoft will have to file a million lawsuits! (I thought this was a clever idea - very much in the spirit of Open Source)

Jonathan Schwartz (President & CEO of Sun Microsystems), on his blog yesterday said:

“… Sun has what I’d argue to be the single most valuable and focused patent portfolio on the web (and yes, we’d use it to defend Red Hat and Ubuntu, both)…”

The saga continues…

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Well blow me down with a feather!

It appears as though Microsoft have really shot themselves in the proverbial foot this time….

I found groklaw a few days ago which started out tracking and discussing the SCO vs IBM lawsuit, many years ago - yes it is still on going. [I knew I should have studied law]

I am not a lawyer but the contributors seem to know what they are on about and this latest twist in the tail sounds about par for the course. The “vouchers” which Microsoft bought from Novell to resell as a ‘we won’t sue you if buy Linux with one of these’ pledge have no expiry date! This means, according to Eben Moglen that:

“the minute someone turns in a voucher after GPLv3 is in effect, Microsoft will be granting a patent license to everyone, not just Novell’s paying customers”

Ooops. Or should that be OOo‘ps?

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I wanted to write up something about my recent experiences of migrating my every day computing platform from Windows XP to Ubuntu.

Background:

I have been using Windows and Microsoft as my primary work PC software for years - in fact since before Windows 3.x. In my current computer(s) storage I have lots of tricky Excel spreadsheets with array formulas and multiple workbook/worksheet linkages, loads of images (not what you’re thinking BTW!) hundreds of Word documents, as well as PDF files and HTML files too.

Before I go too far, I should explain that I have also been using Linux for ages too. Using and developing server applications (mainly for the LAMP stack). I learnt most of what of I know about the OS by doing the fantastic Linux From Scratch, and subsequent Beyond Linux From Scratch, projects. In fact I still follow their mailing lists and contribute from time-to-time. So as a user of Linux I am happy to build source code, patch it, edit files by hand and use the command line, Bash especially. But, until recently, I had not found a total Linux “experience” which i felt would allow me to do everything I needed/wanted to happily. (Although that doesn’t mean I was happy with Windows most of the time, especially when it crashed or just hung for no reason…)

I had played with Ubuntu a few times and the recent releases looked very good indeed, so, last month I finally decided enough was enough. Time to go ‘Redmond free’.

Ubuntu installation:

My main PC is nothing special; a home built AMD 64 3200+ with 1G DDR RAM and a couple of Hard Disks (1 x 80G SATA II and 1 x 200G SATA I) and a DVD-RW and a DVD-RAM. Being used to Linux and partitions, the disks were heavily partitioned anyway so I just found a spare 6G slot and installed Ubuntu 7.0.4 from the Alternate CD (this gives you more control over how things are done IMHO and is faster as the UI is text based). I kept Windows where it was, on the first disk (/dev/sda on Linux), and installed Ubuntu on the 2nd drive in partition 11 (/dev/sdb12). As I already had grub installed on the 2nd drive I didn’t let Ubuntu over-write that. I just added a new section to the menu.lst file for my Ubuntu installation.

title Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty)
root (hd1,11)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb12 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img

Email:

Because I like “clean” systems with minimal crud on them I did not get Ubuntu to copy over my Windows account and it’s data. I dealt with that manually. On my Windows system I was already using Mozilla’s Thunderbird for my mail/news/rss reader and Firefox as my main browser. So I just used the synaptic package manager to install Thunderbird and removed the default mail client which is Gnome’s Evolution. I also installed NTFS-3G - a userspace NTFS filesystem driver.

Now I could safely mount my Windows NTFS D: drive (where my Docs & Settings folder and all my data lives) in read/write mode. Using the initial command thunderbird -Profilemanager I told it the profile (along with all 12,000+ of my emails) location was on my old Windows partition. It worked flawlessly (and still is actually). It also found that the add-ons I had set-up in Windows, such as the Webmail extension for accessing Hotmail and Gmail accounts, were correctly identified too. I had to change the port settings to be above 1024 but this is well documented in the mailing lists etc. The neat thing about this solution by the way, is if I have to go back to Windows (for some weird reason) I can, and my all my email accounts and folders will still be active and up-to-date as both versions of Thunderbird are using the same store!

(more…)

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What a few days it has been!

The largest software company in world makes a couple of public statements regarding their business and claim unfair competition¹ from the Open Source community (which is, for clarifications’ sake, pretty much anyone and everyone; from students to individual hackers to small and very large corporations world-wide).

What their true intention was, no-one seems to be clear, even Microsoft won’t explain. But the resulting comments from the industry have been nothing short of astounding:

• Novell distances themselves from Microsoft as much as possible,
• Industry experts say their claims don’t hold water.
• Sun’s CEO explains to the would-be litigants why they are heading for meltdown,
• Linus Torvalds tells them to put up or shut-up,
• The author of a report which Microsoft used to start this whole fiasco says they got it completely wrong and about face!

And the list goes on, and on, and on…

From my own perspective I have found a great deal of humour and common sense in the many hundreds of blogs and news articles that have been posted in the last couple of days. There is a real sense that Open Source is gaining ground exponentially and that Microsoft don’t really have an answer.

The publicity this is generating for the Open Source movement as a whole is fantastic. For Microsoft, it must be a total PR disaster.

Out of all the comments and views expressed on-line, those that have been supportive of Microsoft’s stance have been almost non-existent. They don’t look to have many friends right now…

1.Someone PLEASE explain how a company like Microsoft can argue unfair competition? How many times have they been (and still are being) hauled before the courts? How much have they paid out for their patent infringements on others?

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What a day today has been for FLOSS news! The ‘net is buzzing with the article published in Fortune Magazine this morning which explains how Microsoft is claiming Linux and other Open Source software products violate no less than 235 of their patents and that they could claim royalties from distributors and users!

The news appears to be that Microsoft are not asking for anyone to cough-up - yet, but that this is a FUD or scaremongering tactic to get the corporate world to sign up to Microsoft’s version of FLOSS (using Novell’s SuSE linux in particular) or go back to good old Redmond code.

I’m not sure if this is going to hold much water to be honest. Reading many of the commentators today, there is a general consensus that this is a kind of “Custer’s Last Stand”…

The feeling is that Microsoft must be hurting and have no real alternative:

• They are losing customers to Linux, and OpenOffice.org, Mozilla and others and are having a hard time trying to get them back by being nice.
• They shout and throw their toys out of the pram, cry fowl-play, and by doing so upset lots of their current customers and lose even more to FLOSS.

Either way it is hard place to be right now. There are three main problems with Microsoft’s stance:

Firstly, although the patent infringement claims themselves may be real, it sounds like it will be very hard (if not impossible) to defend most of them (recent court rulings in the US have thrown doubt on the validity of many software patents).

Secondly, Microsoft could end up in a “patent war”… Of the few that may actually stand up to legal scrutiny, what’s to say that IBM, Oracle, SUN, Red Hat et al don’t have software patents themselves which Microsoft may well be infringing? The Open Invention Network (OIN), holds thousands of software patents on behalf of the open source community and believes that it is “highly likely” that Microsoft infringes on some of theirs.

And finally, the Open Source community has repeatedly asked Microsoft to detail which patents are being violated and how, and have said that any claims with substance will be dealt with. And the speed of development in the FLOSS world means many of the “fixes” would surely happen before the ink dried on any legal paperwork.

Although most watchers seem to be in little doubt that, at the end of day, Microsoft won’t end up getting much out of this - It will spread some FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) for a while, especially in the larger Enterprises where they could potentially have a lot to lose. Do some digging around on the ‘net and get your counter arguments straight. There are lots of links you can follow (if you’re quick) from our FLOSS News page at the open learning centre.

CNN have reprinted the original article which can be read here: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm

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Whilst working with my friend and colleague, Alan Bell, to set up our new business providing Open Source training and consulting, I have found the most amazing levels of enthusiasm and cynicism surrounding the Open Source phenomenon.

Some of the proponents extol the virtues of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) as if it will bring the world to complete evangelical salvation, whereas the other end of the spectrum seem to believe it is a communist led conspiracy to do away with free markets and economic growth.

My personal opinion is - as you’ve probably guessed - somewhere in the middle. Open Source is great: It’s [mostly] free! It works! Proprietary software is [usually] expensive. It [almost always] ties you into one vendor. Some of it is very clever indeed and worth every penny; but I haven’t got any pennies to spend…

I read an article today on an Australian “IT news” website that read like it came from an “industry expert” (or at least someone who had done their research). Little could be further from the truth however… It’s title is “A cynic rips open source.”

The concluding argument of this article says:

” A cynic might suggest that the people writing open source software are the ones who are making their daytime living working for a proprietary-solutions vendor and spend their nights tearing down the very house they live in. And that if open source replaced proprietary solutions, these people would not be able to make a daytime living that supports their night time hobby.

A cynic would be right.”

Now, I do not want to sound like one of the evangelical FLOSS brigade, but anyone with a modicum of intelligence would be able to do 10 minutes digging around the ‘net to find that this conclusion is completely and utterly wrong.

Take the recent and very extensive report commissioned by the EU which found that of the 131,000 man years worth of effort, and €22bn worth of EU investment in FLOSS, only around 10% of the participants who write Open Source software work for proprietary software companies. The vast majority work in the Enterprises which the author so cynically believes are using FLOSS purely to beat down the cost of proprietary systems.

There are many other reports and statistical data being produced which confirm that Open Source Software is becoming a mainstream tool in businesses everywhere. Even in mission-critical application areas such as ERP. We have some statistical data on our (still work-in-progress) website at http://www.theopenlearningcentre.com and a feed from Google News for all things happening in the FLOSS world.

The original article that ‘got my goat’ can be read here: http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;810329453;fp;4;fpid;1968336438 (but note there is no option for public comments).

The EU Report on the impact of FLOSS can be obtained from here: http://flossimpact.eu/

Me thinks that the cynic is hopelessly wrong…

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