[Thu Oct 30 09:14:02 CET 2008]

Datamation carries an article titled Is Ubuntu the Barack Obama of Linux that makes an interesting read. After pointing out that Ubuntu has surpassed other better esstablished Linux distributions (Fedora, Debian...) in popularity, the author reflects on the reasons:

Obama's popularity stems from his ability to inspire both a smaller group of ideological partisans —what Howard Dean calls "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party— and a broad mass of mainstream voters. This is in contrast to a figure like, say, Congressman Dennis Kucinich. As an ideological purist, Kucinich's liberal bona fides are unquestioned. He introduced a resolution to impeach George W. Bush, supports phasing out all nuclear and coal-based power, and wants to withdraw from NAFTA. (For extra points, he's also a vegan and he claimed he saw a UFO.) Kucinich might be called the gNewSense of politics: ideologically he's all the way to one side, so in the Democratic primary he received something like 14 votes.

(On an related side note, Richard Stallman endorsed Kucinich for US president.)

Obama's policies, in contrast, are essentially centrist. Tax cuts for the middle class, a scheduled withdrawal from Iraq, more regulation of financial institutions, help with healthcare —it's all right down the middle of the road. In Virginia, for instance, he runs TV ads touting his support for gun owner's rights and clean coal. These latter two positions don't thrill Democratic partisans, but, again, Obama's platform is about reaching out to the other side.

Which, when you think about it, is oddly similar to how Ubuntu has achieved its leading position.

Over the last few years a legion of newbies have flooded into the previously tiny fiefdom of Linux, drawn by Ubuntu(much as Obama drew in a robust legion of new voters). These Linux newcomers have swarmed to Ubuntu. And just as Obama's rapid success created massive resentment —the Clintons in particular grumbled long and hard— Ubuntu's magnetic appeal created deep resentment among some Linux partisans.

(...)

And how did Ubuntu attract its many fans? By reaching out to the other side, by realizing where the mainstream was and moving toward it. Ubuntu embraced the traditions of diehard Linux users and moderated them, creating a distribution capable of reaching a mass of users.

I totally agree. Unlike Fedora, Ubuntu clearly aimed for the regular home user, the mainstream market. Also, unlike Debian and other diehards, it stood for a pragmatic approach to software, betting on open source but willing to compromise and live in a world where proprietary software matters too. In other words, a middle of the road approach. If Linux still has any chance on the desktop, it's precisely with Ubuntu's strategy. {link to this story}

[Thu Oct 16 17:49:01 CEST 2008]

RedMonk published a blog entry defending the idea of online desktops that I've always found quite appealing:

It's simple, and Adam Bosworth told us this years ago: the value is not in the application, it's in the network. Putting it in practical terms, Havoc says: "without an Internet connection I don't even bother to turn on my laptop". Amen, sir, amen.

My own laptop, shiny as it may be, is more or less a brick without connectivity. I could write, I suppose, but I don't have access to my sources and I'd have to go back and insert links. Music's an option, but I'd much rather listen to new stuff on WOXY than what I have. Even gamers are loathe to disconnect, with multi-player games the rule now rather than the exception.

It's the network's world, and we're all living in it.

Or at least it should be. The operating systems most of us use today, however, haven't quite adjusted to that reality —open source or proprietary. We still work in computing environments that treat the network as an afterthought rather than application lifeblood.

Much has been made —and rightfully so— of the way that Microsoft had a corporate epiphany, and "got" the internet overnight. Apple, meanwhile, has practically been canonized for its hardware and software combination aimed at network enabled music services. But are the dominan desktops really leveraging the network, or just bolting it on tactically?

A year ago, as an example, I asked the simple question: why can't Flickr be my wallpaper backend? Calvin seemed to think that was a good idea, so he went and hacked it up, and someone's apparently had the same idea over on OS X.

But go further. Could Facebook reach into and replace my local identity store? Could del.icio.us tags be applied to local filesystem assets? Or how about Google Apps blending seamlessly into the local client, as in this GNOME SOC project? And so on.

The difficulty here, of course, is that this advantages the network application providers at the expense of the operating system providers, which might be a good thing for users but is decideddly less so if you make money selling operating systems —as do both Apple and Microsoft. They are financially committed —chained, even— to the notion that it's the application that enables the network, not the reverse.

Which is why I think the disruptive opportunity here is in fact for open source competitors, like the folks from GNOME. As history has demonstrated quite conclusively at this point, you cannot out-Microsoft Microsoft. As Google has demonstrated quite conclusively, however, there are tremendous disruptive opportunities still on the table. But you don't catch up, as Bart reminds us, by going slower than they are.

Yes, sir. A truly network-centered desktop is where the opportunity to disrupt the whole industry lies. I totally agree that old-style operating systems have done nothing ut to force the network in there somehow using an extra layer in the design. That's all. How about an online service where I can keep my files, permanently backed up and all? Yes, sure, there are privacy issues to work out, but I'd say plenty of people might sign up for something like that. Heck, it may even offer some extra cash for the beleaguered ISPs. It's just an idea of many. {link to this story}

[Sat Oct 11 18:09:39 CEST 2008]

I ran across an interesting article about Usenet just a few days after I had been talking to a good friend of mine precisely about good old news versus the concept of the wewb forum, far more popular these days. I fully understand people are far more familiar these days with the web browser and reverting back to an old newsreader wouldn't certainly be a welcome move by most people. Still, I do think there is something to say in favor of the old Usenet approach. Sure, it wasn't so graphically oriented. Downloading pictures and other binary files wasn't nearly as easy as with a browser or a P2P application. On top of that, why launch yet another application to deal with news posts when we already have a browser window open? After all, let's be clear, people are moving towards the browser-as-the-center-of-the-net paradigm. Not only do people visit websites through their browsers these days, but they also manage their email account, access IM, communicate with other people using social networking services, etc. Still, as I say, I think Usenet had a positive feature that web forums simply cannot compete against: it consolidated conversations in a clearly organized hierarchical structure. The introduction of web forums had the opposite effect: where everybody interested on a given topic might meet in a particular Usenet group in the old days, we will now find the same information and the same discussions spread throughout thousands of different forums all over the web. I'm not sure this is a step up, to be honest. {link to this story}

[Fri Oct 10 17:24:26 CEST 2008]

Just a few days ago I read an article published by The New York Times about how to learn to "tolerate" Vista that made think about the sorry state of the software industry. Basically, after letting us know how frustrated he felt after running into obstacle after obstacle while running Windows Vista on his own computer, the author comes up with an astonishing list of suggestions to improve your Vista experience that include turning off the user account control feature that was supposed to provide the OS superior security compared to earlier versions of Windows, to add more memory to your system because "Vista is a memory hog", to use a flash memory device as additional memory cache to improve overall system performance (!?), to disable all the applications that are configured to start up by default and, finally, to turn off Aero and return to the classical Windows GUI. In other words, what the author is asking us here is to run Windows XP instead, right? Needless to say, this begs the question: why upgrade to Vista then, if in order to have a usable operating system I have to turn off every single feature that was sold as the reason why I should upgrade to Vista in the first place? Which, in turn, brings up yet another question: how can a company do this and get away with it in a free market? Well, that's precisely the problem. It's not much of a free market when it comes to operating systems out there. In any case, regardless of what anybody thinks about Microsoft, Vista and everything else, coming across an article where somebody recommends disabling all the new features of a new and shiny OS as a way to "tolerate" it just to discover that he truly means it and is not intending to imply any sarcasm or irony is quite pathetic. As I was saying, it reflects on the sorry state of the software industry. {link to this story}