Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 2, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

1% Linux, 99% to go

I know Linux makes a great desktop. You may know that it makes a great desktop. But, most people wouldn’t know Linux from a hole in the ground. Things are finally changing though. According to one survey, Linux finally has crossed over the 1% of the Web client market.

Net Applications, a Web site analytics company, just published their April 2009 Web users survey, Market Share, and they found that “Linux usage share on client devices has surpassed 1% for the first time in our tracking. Linux has been successful primarily as a server operating system, but client usage share has not kept pace with server share Linux has reached this important milestone on the client as Linux-based systems have become more functional, easier to use, and pre-installed on computers from vendors like Dell.”

It’s about time!

Desktop Linux has faced an uphill climb. It’s had to face Microsoft’s Windows monopoly on the desktop. It’s had to deal with its undeserved reputation for being hard to use. But still, slowly, ever so slowly, it’s made gains.

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April 30, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

The Windows 7 ‘give away’

If Microsoft likes anything more than making money, it’s completely dominating a market. After years of uncontested desktop operating system rule, the combination of the Vista flop, the growing maturity of the Linux desktop, and the Mac’s growing popularity, Microsoft was losing its grip. So now, by giving away the Windows 7 RC (release candidate), which won’t expire until June 1 2010, Microsoft is now in the free software business.

Mind you, Microsoft isn’t making Windows 7 free in the sense of truly free software, where the real freedom is the freedom of thought and open-source code, but free as in ‘free beer.’ This actually goes further than my own suggestion that Microsoft owed its poor, benighted Vista customers a free upgrade to Windows 7.

It’s a good deal for Vista users. I’ve been running Windows 7 both on PCs and netbooks. There’s no question in my mind that Windows 7 RC is already better than Vista SP1.

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April 29, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Has the GPL out-lived its usefulness?

There have always been two schools of intellectual property thought in free software/open-source circles, and boy have they had their flame wars over the years. Things have been calm lately, but recently, Eric S. Raymond, co-founder of the OSI (Open Source Initiative), has thrown a match on the gasoline again in an essay entitled, The Economic Case Against the GPL.

Raymond argues that open source is a more “efficient system of software production.” Raymond is using the term “efficiency’ here in the precise sense economists use it. Of two systems of production, the more efficient is the one which produces more units of output for a given input of factors of production.” As Black Duck Software recently revealed in its study that showed that open-source software is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, the facts are on Raymond’s side.

But, Raymond doesn’t stop there. He believes that the GPL causes FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) and that, in turn, this “slows down open-source adoption.”

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April 28, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Are there too many desktop Linuxes?

I like choice. I like being able to pick just the right operating system for the right job. But, when I look in the mirror, I don’t see an ordinary user. I see someone who regularly uses no less 7 different Linux distributions; 3 versions of Windows, and Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, and I’m not even going to mention the server operating systems. Most people want to use 1 (one) operating system and that’s more than enough for them. And, that may be one of the reasons why desktop Linux has had fits gaining market share.

In a recent feature, Neil McAllister asks whether desktop Linux is too fragmented to succeed. He comments, “Unlike Windows or Mac OS X, each of which is the product of a single vendor, Linux comes in many different distributions that target the desktop, and each has its own look and feel. Some are based on the Gnome desktop environment, while others use KDE, and still others let the user choose between both.”

Again, for people who love choice, that’s great. But, how many people are there really who can tell you the differences between something as ‘obvious’ as KDE 4.2x and GNOME 2.26 desktop interfaces. Perhaps a million in the whole world. That’s not many compared to the hundreds of millions who use Windows on a daily basis.

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April 27, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

How many billions is open-source software worth?

Open-source software is big business. For example, most of what Oracle is getting for it $7.4-billion purchase of Sun is open-source software. Thanks to a Linux Foundation study, we know that creating the Fedora 9 Linux distribution would have cost $11.5-billionin conventional software costs. So, given all that, what do you think OSS (open-source software) as a whole is worth? How’s about $387-billion?

That’s the number that Black Duck Software came up with. Black Duck isn’t an open-source ISV (independent software vendor). The Boston area company started as an IP (intellectual property) risk management and mitigation company, but has since grown into an open-source legal management firm.

Since Black Duck was founded in 2002, the company has been tracking all known open source on the Internet According to their research, there are over 200,000 open-source projects representing over 4.9 billion lines of code. To create that code from scratch, Black Duck estimates that “reproducing this OSS would cost $387 billion and would take 2.1 million people-years of development.”

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April 27, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Microsoft is doing something half right

Ever since Bill Gates stepped down and Steve Ballmer took over his role, Microsoft has been getting one thing after another wrong. Vista continues to be a disaster both for users and for the company’s bottom line. And Microsoft’s ad campaign last year, starring Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, is already a model of how not to do television advertising. Somehow, though, after years of stumbling around like a drunken college freshman after an NCAA basketball win, Microsoft is getting its act together.

First, Microsoft has reluctantly — oh how reluctantly — brought back Windows XP. Officially, Microsoft has cut XP support. Unofficially, hardware vendors such as Hewlett-Packard aren’t going to let XP die anytime soon. You’ll still be getting new PCs with XP on them well into 2010, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see fresh copies of XP appearing in 2011.

Microsoft finally got it. No one with two brain cells wants Vista.

What’s more amazing to me, though, is that Microsoft finally figured out that after Vista, no one wants a long, drawn-out rollout of a new Windows operating system. So, instead of orchestrating its traditional years-long series of pre-announcements and announcements, Microsoft is just focusing on getting Windows 7 — a.k.a. Vista Lite — out as fast as possible, with as little official fanfare as possible.

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