Community Matters

I think I’ll call it “Jon Williams’ Law of Open Source”. But maybe that wouldn’t be fair as others have pointed this out before (including R0ml)…

Basically the point Jon was making at the end of his keynote was that the only way customers will continue to pay for open source software if the open source project that they are paying for doesn’t mature. Or in other words, if your company has an open source based business model, keep breaking the software and people will keep paying you.

Depressing

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I’m at OSBC this week; maybe the only open source conference that I attend that has on it’s invitation email the note “business attire requested”. It’s an interesting conference, one that really tries to focus on the non-techie aspects of open source. Lots of execs and manager types in the audience - and the only true geeks and developers than I ran into so far are speakers (so am I - I’m part of a panel on the future of operating systems later this morning).

Matt Asay opened the conference with a good dose of the usual (all kinds of statistics that show just how much the industry embraces open source) and a bit of the unusual (a video spoof that he did on his Mac trying to show the inevitability of open source’s success - note to Matt: video editing is really hard - that’s why people get paid a lot of money to do it… also, did you have valid license to use the music and images / video clips? After all this conference has lots of lawyers in its audience…). But don’t get me wrong, it was a good opener and it got people in the right mindset for Red Hat’s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst who gave the opening keynote.

It’s very interesting to hear a non-insider speak about the open source industry. Jim was the COO for Delta airlines before he joined Red Hat at the beginning of this year. Lots of what he says is the standard marketing fair that you are used to from Red Hat execs (his predecessor, Matthew Szulik, spoke here last year). But if you pay attention, there are a few new topics tipping up. When he talks about service he seems a lot more comfortable with the model and much more focused on the customer needs. That’s expected. What surprised me was his explanation of how customers are actually participating in the development. His logic? 75% of all software is written as in house apps. So almost all big customers have plenty of developers. And for many of them it makes business sense to have a few developers on staff who participate in the community building the software that they actually use.

Makes perfect sense, but it’s the first time that I heard an open source CEO speak openly about the power of community in this context - not the “anonymous developers” out there whose work they leverage, but their own customers as part of that community. Very interesting.

Yeah, I know. There is no hard drive. So there’s no way you can hand the defective drive to a recovery service in order to have them recover your data in case of a catastrophic failure. This may seem irrelevant on an eeePC (after all, the SSD in the eeePC is far less likely to break than a regular hard drive). Yet to me this turned into an interesting question when my 8G SDHC card suddenly died and I was trying to figure out how to recover the data that was on this “hard drive”…

The symptoms were very similar to what you get with a defective hard drive. Some sectors can’t be read, access times out, the file system is corrupted, things come to a halt. e2fsck didn’t help at all. Linux simply refused to mount the file system.

Thankfully the amount of irreplaceable data on the drive was small (an encrypted file with passwords and a few keys for my VPN). Linearly reading the partition and walking the directory tree by hand (I love having the source code to my OS - that made it really easy to figure out where to look) quickly got me to the right blocks and they were all intact - no data lost after all. But it was an interesting reminder that data loss is extremely annoying and can create a lot of extra work. I’ll promise myself to be better about backing up my laptop drives from now one - even those that aren’t spinning.

It’s fun to be misquoted and misunderstood. Trust me, I know - in my SuSE days I had the 50 percent rule… if 50 percent of the interviews in a week got 50 percent of what I said right, I considered that success. But especially Linus’ quote on Mac OS X last week at linux.conf.au has quite a few people upset.

Here’s what he said:

On the other hand, (I’ve found) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary. I think OS X is nicer than Windows in many ways, but neither can hold a candle to my own (Linux). It’s a race to second place.

Ok, let’s ignore the obvious flame bait comment on the “race to second place” and focus on the file system issue. HFS really is crap. Here’s why.

First, by default it doesn’t distinguish upper and lower case. Yes, there’s an option to turn this on (mind you, it requires reformatting your file system), but that causes all kinds of pain with software that assumes that case doesn’t matter, including the OS itself; so turning this on on your boot device is not recommended.

Secondly (and far worse), it doesn’t deal correctly with umlauts in file names. Instead of dealing with them based on their UTF-8 encoding and the locale setting that a user is running (like other file systems do) it uses Apple’s own proprietary transliteration. That’s not cross platform compatible. And it breaks simple things like locale based sorting of file names. Swedish sorts ä after z. German sorts ä with a. English sorts it according to its UTF-8 encoding after all letters. The Mac always sorts it after a. That’s broken.

In a way it’s fun to see how much attention the quotes get. And sad how many people get it wrong when trying to parse what he was trying to say.

Open source is all about many people being able to work together on creating better software. Intel has long been providing open source drivers for all its graphics chips, but today we finally were able to provide the other part of the equation that really enables an active community: Intel released the Programmer’s Reference Manual for the latest 965 series of graphics chipsets.

The documents are on X.org’s server as well; they contain information on all portions of the hardware necessary to produce and maintain a complete driver, including accelerated media encoding and decoding, 2D and 3D graphics.

Initial response by the developers appears to be very positive - tons of “diggs” for the announcement, and very nice feedback on LWN. I expect that many more of them will use this opportunity to create the best open source graphics driver, ever.

Let’s show the companies that are still unwilling to release documentation just how much community matters.

This year at LCA the OLPC folks are handing out literally dozens of XOs to randomly picked attendees - with strings attached, so to speak. Basically they tell you “do something amazing with it” - and if you think you don’t have the time or skill to do that, they ask you to pass it on to someone else who does.

I think this is a brilliant way to create an active and innovative developer community around the XO - linux.conf.au certainly brings together a lot of the top Linux developers and the implied social contract when you get a free XO will certainly get many of the recipients thinking about what to do with them.

This is an interesting contrast to the way Asus is handling innovation around the eeePC. They needed some help to stay compliant with the GPL, they use a proprietary launcher and an in-house developed and maintained variant of the Xandros Linux distribution. All not exactly signs of embracing and understanding open source and the community around it that could help them be successful. Still, I see a lot of people here at the conference with eeePCs (obviously the list includes myself). It’ll be interesting to see how these different approaches work out for both sides…

Instead of enduring the cold, rain and even snow in Portland, I am in Australia at Linux.Conf.Au. 24 hours of travel suck. Days filled with great talks and a chance to connect with lots of friends and many new people, all working in open source. Worth it.

I brought both the Mac and the eeePC. Surprisingly, the eeePC seemed a lot better at hanging on to the wireless connection - it keeps dropping on the Mac at times. I need to Mac to be able to access work email and connect to the VPN, but for everything else, so far, the eeePC was actually the better solution. Smaller, easier to carry around, no problem to just put it down (it’s solid state, after all).

It’s not great for kernel builds, though. Or for editing source files. Darn.

Ok, this isn’t brand new, but I just found it… and haven’t even had the time to try it. But I have to give it extra points for coolness.

Dan at UneasySilence has figured out how to run Mac OS X on an eeePC. So after the default Xandros Linux, Fedora Linux, Debian, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu and of course Windows XP and even (Yikes!) Vista, the list of OSs to run on the eeePC is pretty complete now.

I’m still using the default Xandros install and Fedora, installed on an 8GB SD card, and switch between them via the BIOS… it’s still impressive that it’s possible :-)

Given the mess that SCO is in (due to their own doing) and the mess they have created for the Linux community, I keep lose tabs on what they are doing. So I was thrilled to see another sign of the speed of innovation over there. The top news item on their home page doesn’t talk about their failed lawsuits or their Chapter 11 filing - no, it’s about a FREE (their caps, not mine) update to SCO Unix that fixes the daylight savings time issue. Great thinking and innovating, guys. One minor nit: that happened LAST year (my caps, not theirs).

I’ve been playing with a cool Wordpress plugin. AJAX’d Wordpress allows you to add a number of features to your site - what I really like was the ability to do in-line comments and commenting.

Pretty slick…