The Open Sourcerer

Digistan.org

Please welcome a new foundation to aid the cause of freedom and open standards: Digistan.

The Digital Standards Organization (Digistan) seeks to promote customer choice, vendor competition, and overall growth in the global digital economy through the understanding, development, and adoption of free and open digital standards (“open standards”).

I first came across the group via a post on Glyn Moody’s blog the other day which in turn led me to this piece written by a chap who calls himself Dennis Byron (I can only assume that he has no relation to the famous poet). To be frank, he must be either very stupid, or on the payroll of a large software company the world’s largest convicted monopolist. To make the comments he does shows such ignorance that it quite beggars belief…

Let’s start with the opening paragraph shall we? (highlight mine)

Another anti-Microsoft (MSFT) front group has emerged in favour of “free and open standards,” hyping what it calls the Hague Declaration and making some absurd connection to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The propagandists, partially funded by publicly traded companies, have a little trouble describing what that term “free and open standards” means (or even using it consistently), but the group has no trouble indicating its political stripes. Unbelievably it calls itself Digistan, apparently to identify with the fascist terrorists based in countries and regions using the Farsi-based suffix “stan.”

Honestly. Where the f*** did that come from? Stan means “place of” or “land” for pete’s sake. And “Digi”, well I’m sure you can guess. How you get from Digital Standards to Fascist Terrorists is really just too much for my simple mind to comprehend.

All of these front groups percolate around about two dozen individuals, mostly European. The vast left-wing conspiracy of George Soros works around the edges of their mostly web-site-only organizations…

So, let’s see. Dennis now draws what must be one of the world’s largest generalisations by tying all groups who support freedom and Openness to just 24 people and somehow manages to ink in George Soros and Left Wing (Socialist by inference) politics. Blimey, I must say, having read the Digistan Mission and the Hague Declaration I didn’t see any of those conspiratorial links at all! Just for the record I’m a Tory (Conservative, Capitalist) voter and supporter of free and open source software and open standards. I see no conflict there at all. And neither do the Conservative Party who are quite vocal in their support for Open Source software; unlike our current Labour (left wing) government. So how would I fit in with Byron’s analysis I wonder?

I’d also like to educate our very ignorant Mr Byron about Left Wing politics in Europe: there isn’t much of the kind he seems to imagine. Our socialist and left wing governments and opposition parties are, in the main, capitalist by nature and support free market economics: they wouldn’t get in the EU if they didn’t. This is unlike the Government of the USA for example who engage in and condone market distorting activities such as allowing convicted monopolists to go unpunished, or using embargoes and punitive import tariffs to hinder free trade with anyone who doesn’t pay the right homage to Uncle Sam.

And how did George Soros come into this absurd rant? From the Wikipedia we read:

“George Soros has made his mark as an enormously successful speculator, wise enough to largely withdraw when still way ahead of the game. The bulk of his enormous winnings is now devoted to encouraging transitional and emerging nations to become ‘open societies,’ open not only in the sense of freedom of commerce but – more important – tolerant of new ideas and different modes of thinking and behavior.”

Ahhh now I see. Mr Byron clearly feels extremely jealous of George’s speculative skills and also seems to hate anyone who is interested in protecting or advocating freedom and openness. (Who is the terrorist now Mr Byron?)

I love this…

If only these lefties could be time warped back to the last century so that they could ‘fight the right’ in Spain (or sit in the Les Deux Maggot and talk about fighting the right in Spain). Then the rest of us could avoid having our tax dollars wasted and our share values diminished.

I wonder if Mr Byron has ever been to Spain? Do you think he might like to ask some of it’s inhabitants about General Franco and whether they prefer fascist dictatorships to democracy, freedom and membership of the world’s largest free trading community? I like the “Les Deux Maggot” reference but can only guess as to what he really knows about it.

And why has Digistan got anything to do Mr Byron’s Tax Dollars? As for his portfolio, rather than bleating on about his dwindling share value in a tired and very last-millennia software company monopoly that is finally getting some serious competitive pressure from the left-field that is really hard to attack (since it is free), he’d be much better dumping his M$ stock and looking for the “new money”, especially in some of the highly successful and rapidly growing Open Source software companies.

The rest of his rant continues in much the same vein. No research or facts to support his claims and little argument that makes any sense anyway.

But, having said all the above, I must thank you Mr Byron for introducing me to Digistan. I signed the declaration immediately after reading it and will now be contacting Digistan to see how my company can help to support and grow their campaign to fight for freedom and open standards.

If I were you Mr Byron, I think you probably need to retire to the golf course…

Starting VirtualBox VMs from an Icon or CLI

I get an amazing number of hits (relatively speaking) from Google searches for VirtualBox related information. One of the more frequently recurring search goals is for a way to start a Virtual Machine (VM) from an icon or shortcut as opposed to through the VirtualBox Management Interface.

Well, it’s pretty easy really – at least on Linux, and from what I can gather it’s similar on Windows too. The commands below are from an Ubuntu Linux host so case is important; and the quotes are too! I am not sure about M$ – don’t tend to use it much 😀 – but it will probably be a similar syntax just case-insensitive.

Basically the command you need is:

VBoxManage startvm "Your Machine Name"

On my system I have a few VMs for testing various things. I have one, for example, called “Ubunty Hardy” as you can see from this screen-shot of the management console.

(The machine name to pass to the VBoxManage startvm command is the text in bold)

To start the Ubuntu Hardy Virtual Machine from the command line I would simply use VBoxManage startvm "Ubuntu Hardy".

Similarly, to start the WinXP vm, I would need to type: VBoxManage startvm "WinXP".

So, it should be obvious by now that to create a desktop icon, panel button and the like to start a VM, or to start one automatically during boot-up for example, you just need to use the appropriate command-line instruction in your script, icon configuration or shortcut.

There are a great many parameters that can be given to the VBoxManage utilty. Running it without any switches gives a brief yet comprehensive overview. The VirtualBox documentation pages have plenty more details.

Hope this helps the many Googlers out there.

Day 1 of the OFE Conference

I am not accustomed to turning left when I get on a plane and today was no exception. It is a nice white plane with orange trim, the orange OLPC XO would look right at home here, but as my XO is green and would clash with the plane I took the Asus EeePC out of the bag first (yes airport security were a bit surprised when I took three laptops out of my bag) first thing I notice is that the EeePC is totally at home on this plane and not just because it is Easy easy easy. This plane is the perfect size for me, if Stelios himself had come and measured my femur before deciding the seat positions he could not have made it a more snug fit. Even so, the EeePC still fits comfortably on my lap or on the tray with the screen tilted back so I can see it and the keyboard is forward enough that I can touch type.

I took a taxi to the hotel, which I later discovered was unneccessary. Public transport is free to visitors and there are buses from the airport to the hotels. When you get to the hotel you are given a bus pass which entitles you to free buses and apparently free yellow boats on Lake Geneva.

The OFE conference is being held at the CIGC conference centre, just down the road from the hotel, but before heading over there I took a stroll down to the lake to see the spectacular Jet d’eau, Geneva’s huge water feature. A lady from the Geneva tourist board gave us a little introduction to the area and she told us that Jet d’eau takes the water from the lake accelerates it to 200km/hour and it rises to a height of about 140m. The pumps draw about a megawatt of electricity so it isn’t the most green of displays, but it does look impressive.

The conference I am speaking at is the Open Forum Europe conference on “Standards and the Future of the Internet” but that isn’t the only thing going on here. The ISO/IEC Ballot Resolution Meeting is somewhere upstairs in the building and we met up  with a bunch of the BRM delegates for a drinks reception after their day was over. They can’t talk about the details of the meeting, but they did seem to agree that the meeting was being conducted in a civilized and professional manner and Alex Brown the convener was doing a good job in difficult circumstances.

Dell’s Ubuntu Family Grows

Dell have added another Ubuntu powered laptop to their range. This time it’s the Inspiron 1525 which, starting at £299, looks to be a pretty good deal to me. It’s amazing what happens when you get rid of the Microshaft tax…

You can buy it in the UK, France, Spain and Germany now and the USA will get it later this month.

I wonder why Dell are releasing into Europe first this time? Are they having better sales success here. Perhaps even the UK public is buying into FOSS more than our Government would like us to…

My Dad, after seeing a liveCD of Ubuntu, wants me to come and install it on his computer for him. He said “It’s better than Windows isn’t it?”… Not bad for an 81 year old.

Linux: Is 2008 The Year Of The Desktop?

It’s right about time; and the time is about right…

It really does appear as though we are approaching that point of critical mass, where something other than Windows could become a dominant desktop OS.

Apple have just recorded their best ever quarter and so have the legions of converts to OS X. As there is almost no condescension about their slick and user friendly Operating System. Oh yes, the core of OS X is Open Source, built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5. But you still have to buy a MAC to run it so it is not the least expensive alternative and let’s not forget we have hundreds of millions of Intel/AMD i86 compatible PCs out there.

But now we have that bastion of conservative enterprise solutions, IBM saying

In an announcement this week at the Lotusphere 2008 conference in Orlando, IBM said that it will provide full support for Ubuntu Linux with Lotus Notes 8.5 and Lotus Symphony using its Open Collaboration Client software, which is based on open standards.

Antony Satyadas, chief competitive marketing officer for IBM Lotus, said the Ubuntu support for Notes and Symphony were a direct response to demand from customers.

Support for Ubuntu. From IBM. Just think about that for a moment…

“We’re doing pilots with customers now,” Satyadas said. “Some of the requests came from big companies” with as many as 100,000 users that are interested in moving to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop.

100,000 users moving to Linux on the desktop – wow. Just how much will that save MegaCorp Inc.? Who knows, but I bet it is a pretty sizeable truck load of cash.

IBM have endorsed Ubuntu. This is, actually, really big news. For a firm the size of IBM they don’t do things like this lightly or “just for fun”. This means there must be serious demand from their enterprise customers for a change; and it’s a big change. Their own press release for this entitled “IBM Accelerates Desktop Customer Choice With Support for Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell Software” just shows how far we have come. Three alternative Linux operating systems. All with support from IBM.

“All the stars are lining up,” he said. “Everybody has been saying that since 2001 except IBM. We never said that, but we are saying that now.”

In the past, IBM has said Linux on the corporate desktop wouldn’t happen until the operating system was good enough to allow companies to have all the functions they need to run their businesses. At the same time, an adequate supply of critical business software that would run reliably and efficiently on Linux would be needed.

“We are putting our money where our mouth is,” Satyadas said. “We think now the time is really [here]” and the needed business applications are available to make it work for corporations.

“Linux is cool now,” he said. “We use it ourselves. We are able to offer a secure, rich and cost-effective Microsoft alternative.”

We also have seen reports of very large scale deployments happening all over the world where tens of thousands of desktops are moving to free and open operating systems. Here’s a recent one from India. This is a really good read and shows just what can be done with OSS in the enterprise, and at some speed too! I especially enjoyed his comments on the complete non-issue that anti-virus and malware problems are since their migration to Linux.

…A year later, Umashankar and his team had moved 30,000 computers and 1,880 severs belonging to some of the state’s schools to Linux — creating possibly the largest Linux rollout in India.

And here’s the very simple “why” this made so much sense:

The decision to migrate to Linux was driven primarily by cost. It was hard to escape the cold figures before Umashankar: Elcot saved Rs 5 crore¹ on every 20 servers it set up with Linux. And they had over 1,800 servers.

In addition, Umashankar says that the shift saves them about 25 percent on any general hardware purchases — and as much as 90 percent on the high-end servers.

Umashankar says that his office uses the Openoffice.org suite. This saves them close to Rs 12,000 on each desktop, he says.

“We buy Intel dual core desktops with 19″ TFT monitors for Rs 21,600 including the Linux OS. If we bought a proprietary office suite at Rs 12,000 for each desktop, the cost of commissioning infrastructure would go up to Rs 33,600 — a 55 percent increase,” he says.

55% uplift on every desktop. Just for your Office Application suite. If only more people realised this…

When you realise the kind of savings that are to be had, and knowing that there are now several free and excellent Desktop alternatives such as:

• Ubuntu and it’s derivatives (I have heard very good things about Mint recently),
• OpenSuse,
• Fedora,
• And many others. See Distrowatch for a up-to-date list of what’s hot and what’s not.

it really makes me angry that our UK government are so blind to the opportunities.

With all of these Linux desktop distributions come, literally, thousands of free applications which provide an almost total replacement for available commercial products, and also offer many more that are not present in the commercial domain at all.

We now have top quality products that fulfil most of the mainstream business requirements. I’m thinking, Firefox, Thunderbird (or Evolution), OpenOffice.org, The Gimp and Inkscape. There are multiple offerings in back-office and network/desktop management solutions, again, free and open and there are numerous excellent development environments, libraries and integration tools to enable unlimited customisation.

There are now plenty of big companies like Novell, IBM, Sun HP, and even Oracle, providing Linux desktop products and enterprise level support services. For the smaller business there are now companies that provide the support services, knowledge and skills that suit the SME sector (like our own business, The Open Learning Centre), there are huge numbers of students leaving University having worked on and engaged in the Open Source community which should help to round out the support side. And of course there is the Open Source community itself. I know of know other place where I can drop a quick email about a problem I’m having, or a question about configuration for example, which gives me consistently, fast and accurate assistance. Bugs are generally caught, logged and fixed with frightening speed and courtesy too.

Is Linux ready for the Desktop? Undoubtedly yes.

Will 2008 be the year it really takes off? I don’t know but I really do hope so. The only reasons it might not are fear and ignorance. Two issues which are easily surmountable.

Fear? Just show them, or better still give them a copy and don’t forget to tell them that they are free to copy and redistribute it too.

Ignorance? Just tell people about Open Source…

“Ignorance is bliss” the old adage goes. I think as far as OSS is concerned, that should be “Ignorance is expensive”.

1 According to the Wikipedia a Crore denotes 10 million http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crore and you get about 40 Rs to the US dollar. So they are saving a huge amount of money however you look at it.

Going Dutch

Just how cool can they get? Our Dutch compatriots are once again leading the way:

The Dutch government has set a soft deadline of April 2008 for its agencies to start using open-source software — freely distributed programs that anyone can modify — the Netherlands Economic Affairs Ministry said Thursday.

Government organisations will still be able to use proprietary software and formats but will have to justify it under the new policy, ministry spokesman Edwin van Scherrenburg said.

Van Scherrenburg said the plan was approved UNANIMOUSLY at a meeting of two parliamentary commissions on Wednesday.

[Emphasis mine]

Now there’s a marvellous announcement. I’m especially heartened by that UNANIMOUS vote. That can only mean one thing; the Dutch government have not been bought by Microsoft – unlike our own shady group of American puppets who still seem to be living in the dark ages and are apparently ignorant of the benefits (or even the availability) of Open Source Software.

There is some good humour in the announcement too – from the Redmond based owner of much of the world’s Intellectual Monopoly:

… he said the company [Microsoft] was worried about and opposed other aspects of the Dutch policy, especially the provision that agencies should prefer open source.

“We think it’s not in the best interest of the wider software market to single out one model for endorsement like this,” he said.

HUH? What is the “wider software market” he is referring to? Oh, of course it’s theirs… What complete twaddle. Why can’t they just say ‘we don’t like it because we are going to lose business’. Or even better, make improved products that compete on a level playing field? Why spin their message with such meaningless drivel that it only exacerbates our bad opinion of them?

Open Source encourages competition and is inherently free of the encumbrances which lead to the closed and non-innovative scenario of Intellectual Monopoly. No one is saying they MUST use OpenOffice.org, or KOffice or Symphony, or even Google Apps. They are specifying Open Source so that the tax paying public are not restricted in the way they can communicate with their Government by having to use proprietary, expensive and patent encumbered software products.

Ik wens alle Nederlandse volk een heel prettige kerstdagen en een Happy New Year!