Community Matters

Most every year, as we prepare for the kernel summit, this topic comes up. How do we ensure Linux doesn’t turn into the old boys club. How do we attract new developers and get them to grow into bigger roles into the developer community.

It’s a typical application of the ten thousand hour rule. You start working on the kernel. It will take you about ten thousand hours to become an expert and be truly able to work on the next level, owning a subsystem, be truly a leader. According to research by Anders Ericsson that is a fairly consistent threshold how long it takes to reach true greatness in any art form. Music, painting, computer programming.

If you manage to spend 20 hours a week hacking the kernel that will take you about ten years. At which point you will no longer be perceived as “new blood”. If you are one if the few people willing and able to hack 80 hours a week you can get there in about two and a half years and be one of the very few brilliant newcomers we see. Maybe one or two every other year.

So the next time people ask about the new blood, I think we should turn around and ask them if they are looking at this the right way.

This isn’t a new idea. Joe Wilcox has discussed this in his BetaNews article a couple of months ago.

But spending a lot of time at OSCON last week made it clear to me how true this observation has become – with all its implications.

The developers of Android and MeeGo are quite actively playing “Internet” to Apple’s “AOL”. Instead of inviting innovation and content onto their platform, Apple is focused on controlling every aspect. All under the guise of delivering a better user experience. At the same time throttling innovation and freedom for their users. And just as with AOL, at first that seemed like a good idea. You know, a well maintained garden, everything is pretty, none of that pesky dangerous (or seedy) stuff that is out there in the unregulated Internet.

But it turns out that people want that. Whether it is free access to applications (thanks to the Library of Congress, there is some good news for Apple users – but if you have to “jailbreak” your device in order to get the software you want, maybe you are using the wrong device to begin with). Or whether it is the ability to extend functionality (tethering, anyone?).

A year ago everyone was looking at Android and was writing them off. Look at all the apps that the iPhone has. Look at all that mind share. Today, Android is activating about 160k devices every day, the app store is growing like crazy and the traction in the eco system (and the non-stop comparisons) are showing that the tides have turned.

How will Apple prove that they’ve lost touch? Here are my predictions. They will continue to show their contempt for their customers. New feature in Mac OS 10.7 (rebranded as iOS7 or something): applications can only be installed from the Apple AppStore. Adding an additional monitor to your Mac will require an app (that of course you pay for). The iPad will only connect to Apple approved wireless networks. They will continue to prohibit network sharing between devices. It’s just like dial-up.

And what will the Linux players do to counter this? They will encourage innovation and new ideas. They will allow people to hack the devices that they bought, to make them better, weirder, different.

Yes, it took a while for the Internet to drive AOL into irrelevance. And similarly, it will take time for the mass of the customers to realize just how Apple is taking advantage of them. And there will continue to be some fanboyz. Hey, I just this week got email from someone with an AOL email address (and the “real name” in the email headers was their AOL email address again, this time in all caps)…

This may seem like a silly problem to have – but I tend to hate pictures of myself. But with Twitter and many other social media services (and blogs, and wikis where you are supposed to introduce yourself) it turns out that having a good picture of yourself is very useful – first impressions matter.

I actually found a picture that I like – taken by James Duncan Davidson during my OSCON 2008 keynote.

Understandably his terms on Flickr restrict reuse of his work, but when I asked him he was kind enough to allow me to use a crop of this as my avatar. Super nice!

Today I had the pleasure of presenting about MeeGo in the mobile Linux track at LinuxTag 2010. The room was packed, thankfully I had a double slot so I had plenty of time to talk about the what and the why and the how of MeeGo. I talked about the origins of MeeGo and explained the governance model. I walked through the architecture and then spent a lot of time explaining how we focus on working with the upstream projects. Finally I dared to do an unscripted demo of MeeGo on a Netbook (for stupid reasons I had to show it on a somewhat bigger system, a ThinkPad X200s). I was able to show myZone, some of the apps (email, media), social media interactions and the breadth of additional software that is available.

Things went fairly well, if I can believe the comments on Twitter and what people told me afterwards in person.

The presentation is on the MeeGo presentation site

Lots of posts and happiness about the unexpected early availability of Android 2.2 aka Froyo for the Nexus One. But sadly the update fails if you have the AT&T version of the phone as it has a different build number (EPE54B vs ERE27).

So those of us on AT&T still have to wait with everyone else.

One of the hardest things for people to understand about MeeGo is the intersection between what wants to be a community distribution and what appears to be a distribution with a strong influence by its two major sponsors (Intel and Nokia).

In a community distribution the maintainers make the decisions. Today, in MeeGo those maintainers are employed by the corporate sponsors. So this causes confusion about who runs the project. No, it’s not the corporations. It’s the maintainers.

What can we do to fix that? Get maintainers that don’t work for Intel or Nokia. So as far as I’m concerned, this is our biggest challenge right now. Once we have a diverse set of maintainers the actions by the major corporations involved will no longer appear as the corporate overlords imposing their will, it will be significant contributions by major contributors. And that’s a much healthier view of things.

So this is NOT the mail program I have written about before. It is (for now, at least), squarely targeting geeks. You want to know how geeky? The current user interface for Notmuch is Emacs. Yes, Emacs.

Ok, if you stopped laughing, I’ll tell you why I am still quite excited. Notmuch is entirely search based. It tries to do one thing and do it well. Manage the tons of email that many of us get. Have you ever tried to manage several GBs of email, hundreds of thousands of messages with one of today’s “standard” email programs like Outlook, Evolution, Thunderbird or Mail.app? Don’t – unless you are a very patient person.

After a rather lengthy initial import of your email (this can take a few hours, depending how fast your disk is and just how many gigabytes of email you have), most every operation is really snappy. Think someone sent you an email about kittens to your home address? Something like notmuch search tag:tome and subject:kittens will find this email in no time at all. And you can get arbitrarily sophisticated here – after all, these are all just tags. notmuch search tag:unread and tag:lkml and from:torvalds@linuxfoundation shows you the emails that Linus has sent to LKML that you haven’t read (assuming that you’ve set up an lkml tag in your filtering of incoming emails). The possibilities are endless.

So set up some rules on your incoming email. Classify depending on sender, subject, mailing list, topic, almost anything you can think of. And you can search for any combination of these tags – and of course a full text search of the mail bodies. Instead of looking at mail folders you now simply looked at saved searches – you can give names to them and treat them just like folders – except of course they are virtual and near-instantaneous.

Sounds complicated? Try “incredibly powerful”. More so than Gmail. And on your local machine, not somewhere in the cloud with someone else in control of your data.

Notmuch is at version 0,3.1 as of this writing. And there’s still a lot of work that needs to go into it (and especially into a more non-geek friendly UI) – but what is there already is so powerful that I have switched to notmuch as my mail application – and have dusted off my emacs foo to use it within emacs. And even started hacking elisp (and the backend, written in C and C++) to contribute.

Give it a try. You might be surprised.

I like the idea of little “servers” (and I use that term lightly) that are quiet and cool. I have replaced one of the Mac Minis that I used as a server at home with a fanless little system based on an Intel Atom Z530 CPU (a Portwell WEBS2120). 2Gigs of memory, a small SSD and you have a completely quiet and reasonably powerful system. Definitely works as a little web / mail / openvpn / DNS server for your home network. Cheap, cheap to run, flexible.

I expect we’ll see a lot more of these kind of systems used by all the web hosters. These are great little dedicated servers – and since they barely get warm they should keep operating costs low.

It seems that many of the low cost hosting companies have started to offer Atom based dedicated servers at VPS prices. So far these seem to be Atom N270/280 or even new N450 based system. But I’m sure the Atom Z5xx based ones can’t be far behind.

Look at that – there’s a new project out there, doing client Linux for devices, mobile and otherwise. With a focus on phones and netbooks and cool things like connected TVs and in vehicle infotainment (i.e., nav systems that can also play DVDs and surf the web – preferably not by the driver, while driving… but I digress).

So MeeGo has just been launched, the website is still under development and has quite a few spots that are waiting for content, but what is clear is where the project comes from and where it is going.

maemo and Moblin have been around for a while. They are both shipping on products; maemo on phones like the Nokia N900, Moblin on a bunch of Netbooks from Dell, Samsung, MSI and others – delivered through OSVs like Novell or Canonical. They both have track record as solid and competent and innovative. And they are actually quite similar in many of the underlying ideas. Which is a good sign, if you think about it.

But why merge them? Aren’t major mergers always a bad thing (cue the music from the Daimler / Chrysler horror movie). Well it’s not the corporations that are merging. It’s the open source projects that are combining forces. And that’s a good thing. There are too many projects doing the same thing over and over again. Having two of them that are well aligned get together and take the best from both sides to create something that’s even better is promising.

What will this mean in detail? Well, there’s a lot more that will have to be published by the Moblin and maemo leadership teams, but it seems that we will see a base OS that is largely built around the Moblin infrastructure, including fast and flicker free boot, non-root X, connman, etc. And the Qt-based application development environment that maemo has been migrating to. Add to that the experience in building operating systems for phones and netbooks and many other new devices and you have an interesting mix.

The first actual release won’t happen until the second quarter, it seems. But I guess we need to give the teams some time to actually get the details figured out. I’m excited.

My usual disclosure: I work for Intel, so some might conclude that I’m biased. But this is my blog, not an Intel blog. So what you read here are my thoughts, not those of my employer.

I know that most people will shake their heads and call me crazy. I mean, seriously – even the Nexus One (which has one of the bigger screens among phones) has only a 3.7″ display. Tiny.

But stay with me for a moment. The reason I never bought an ebook reader is that I don’t want to carry yet another device with me. I have way too many already. So I instead carried paperbacks. Silly, I know. A kindle would have been smaller. But another several hundred dollars? Plus content from only one monopolist (and we know what that does to prices).

A few weeks ago I tried reading a book on my Nexus One and was positively surprised. The AMOLED screen is great for reading – no backlight! And the best thing about reading books on your phone? If you are anything like me, your phone is always with you. So you can read your book wherever you are, wherever a sudden break comes up.

Yes, the screen is tiny and you flip pages a lot. But it’s not as painful as it sounds – give it a try. I’ve now completed three books on my phone and I think I’m hooked – which makes me feel very sorry for our neighborhood bookstore…

The thing that finally won me over is that there’s a surprising amount of choice when it comes to reading books on an Android phone. You can read Mobipocket books (via FBreader – and Calibre if they are DRM infected). You can read books from Diesel ebooks, ereader.com and of course Barnes and Nobles. The latter is somewhat surprising at first since they explicitly don’t support Android – but it turns out that the free ereader Android app reads Barnes and Nobles ebooks as well. The download from your library somehow fails with the Android browser (still need to figure out why). But download to your computer and manually transfer to the eReader directory on your sdcard and the eReader app will find them and display them just fine. Turns out eReader is a subsidiary of Barnes and Noble and they use the same DRM technology and keys.

With all these choices, most books are available. And you often find wildly differing prices. The book I’m currently reading (Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly) I found in every single one of the stores mentioned with prices from USD 9.99 (Barnes and Nobles) to USD 27.99 (Barnes and Nobles subsidiary eReader.com). Go figure.