Showing posts with label gnu/linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gnu/linux. Show all posts

11 November 2012

Ubuntu Users To Get To Vote With Their Wallets In Support Of New Features

Free software is famously close to its users, drawing on them for warnings about bugs (and sometimes fixes), as well as ideas and suggestions for future developments. But I don't think any project has previously gone so far as to encourage ordinary users to make financial contributions directly in support of new features they want. That's precisely what Canonical, the company that oversees the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, plans to do: 

On Techdirt.

07 December 2011

Open Source Total Cost of Ownership 2.0

Back in 2006, I wrote a piece for LXer called "A Brief History of Microsoft FUD". This ran through successive attempts by Microsoft to dismiss GNU/Linux in various ways. One of the better-known was a series of "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO) studies. By an amazing coincidence, these all showed that Microsoft Windows was cheaper than that supposedly cheap GNU/Linux.

On Open Enterprise blog.

25 October 2011

EU Politician Wants Internet Surveillance Built Into Every Operating System

"Think of the children" has become the rallying cry of politicians around the world trying to push for ever-increasing Internet surveillance powers. Since nobody wants to run the risk of being branded as soft on crimes like paedophilia, resistance to such measures is greatly reduced as a result. 

On Techdirt.

26 April 2011

Dell Does it Again

One of the first PCs that I bought was a Dell. It came with 8 Mbyte of memory, 230 Mbyte hard disc, and cost a mere £1479 (the HP Laserjet IV cost an extra £1030) - all excluding VAT. Sadly, it was running Windows 3.1, not least because at this time - 1993 - I had yet to discover free software (and GNU/Linux was, in any case, still pretty rudimentary at this point.)

On Open Enterprise blog.

07 February 2011

UK Cyberwar - or UK Cyberwallies?

One of the most embarrassing features of the dotcom era was a habit of putting “cyber” in front of everything to make it look hot and trendy (disclosure: I did it too, but I was 15 years younger then...). Don't look now, but it's back:

On Open Enterprise blog.

27 December 2010

Putin Orders Russian Move to GNU/Linux

This looks huge:

Глава правительства Владимир Путин подписал план перехода властных структур и федеральных бюджетников на свободное ПО. Согласно документу, внедрение Linux во власти должно начаться во II квартале 2012 г.

Сегодня стало известно, что премьер-министр Владимир Путин подписал документ, в котором описан график перехода властных структур на свободное ПО (СПО).

Документ называется «План перехода федеральных органов власти и федеральных бюджетных учреждений на использование свободного программного обеспечения» и освещает период с 2011 до 2015 г.

[Via Google Translate: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a plan for transition of power structures and the federal budget [to] free software. According to the document, the introduction of Linux in government should begin in II quarter 2012.

Today it became known that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a document which describes the timetable for the transition of power structures on free software (OSS).

The document is called a "transition plan of the federal authorities and federal budgetary institutions on the use of free software, and covers the period from 2011 to 2015.]

The key document with that timetable (in Russian) is here; Google's translation of the salient part:

1. Approve the attached plan for the transition of federal executive bodies and agencies of the federal budget for the use of free software for 2011 - 2015 years.

2.Federal executive agencies to implement activities in accordance with the plan approved by this Order, within the established government of the Russian Federation, limiting the size of their staff and budget allocations provided to them in the federal budget execution authority to the specified area of activity.

Prime Minister

The Russian Federation Vladimir Putin

The fact that Putin has signed the order for this project could be critical: there have been several previous plans for moving parts of the Russian government to using free software, notably in the educational sector, but in practice they have mostly failed to materialise because there has been insufficient political weight behind them. But if Putin says: "make it so", I suspect that a lot of people will jump pretty fast to make sure that it *is* so. And once that happens, other plans to roll out free software might well suddenly look rather more attractive.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

06 October 2010

Dr Microsoft: Time to Be Struck Off

A Microsoft researcher offers an interesting medical metaphor:

Just as when an individual who is not vaccinated puts others’ health at risk, computers that are not protected or have been compromised with a bot put others at risk and pose a greater threat to society. In the physical world, international, national, and local health organizations identify, track and control the spread of disease which can include, where necessary, quarantining people to avoid the infection of others. Simply put, we need to improve and maintain the health of consumer devices connected to the Internet in order to avoid greater societal risk. To realize this vision, there are steps that can be taken by governments, the IT industry, Internet access providers, users and others to evaluate the health of consumer devices before granting them unfettered access to the Internet or other critical resources.

So, we're talking about computers "compromised with a bot": now, which ones might they be? Oh look, that would be almost exclusively Windows users. And why would that be? Because no matter how diligent users are in installing endless security updates to the Swiss cheese-like applications known as Windows, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office, there are always more critical bugs that pop out of the proverbial digital woodwork to lay them open to attack and subversion.

So, where does that leave us when it comes to "improving" and "maintaining" the "health of consumer devices connected to the Internet"? Well, it means that by Microsoft's own logic, the solution is for everyone to junk a system that is still insecure, despite promise after promise after promise that this just was some minor technical detail that Microsoft would fix in the next release.

For Windows has manifestly not been fixed; moreover, Windows will *not* be fixed, because it's just not a priority; Windows may even be *unfixable*. The only sane solution is for people to move to inherently safer (although certainly not perfect or impregnable) alternatives like GNU/Linux.

For a researcher at Microsoft to attempt to avoid this inevitable conclusion by pushing the blame for this endless series of security lapses onto end users this way, and to suggest they, rather than Microsoft, should be thrown into the outer darkness. is beyond pathetic. (Via @rlancefield.)

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

24 September 2010

Why is Dell UK Making it so Difficult?

Remember IdeaStorm – “Where Your Ideas Reign” – Dell's brave venture into the scary world of crowdsourcing? Amazingly, it's still going, although it doesn't seem to be the hive of activity it once was. One of the reasons why IdeaStorm was so important was that it allowed people to voice one of their key requests to the company: to be able to buy GNU / Linux-based systems. To its credit, Dell listened, and started selling them.

On The H Open.

01 September 2010

Ukraine to Create is Own GNU/Linux Distro

I've been writing for a while about Russia's on-off idea of creating its own GNU/Linux distro. It looks like Ukraine is following suit. Via Google Translate:

its purpose is to optimize the expenditure of budgetary funds and the solution using unlicensed software in state bodies.

According to estimates from officials, the savings of switching apparatus to free software can be 87%.

Among the expected outcomes of the program - improving the legal framework of research on creation and use of open software infrastructure for its development, creation and dissemination, and coordination of state infrastructure using open source software in the bodies derzhvlady, a basic set of localized distribution, adapted to the needs of public authorities.

Let's hope it doesn't get so bogged down as the Russian one.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

28 June 2010

Microsoft Attacks, By and With the Numbers

There's a nice piece of work by Charles Arthur in The Guardian today that puts a fascinating post from one of Microsoft's top PR people under the microscope. It's all well worth reading, but naturally the following numbers from the memo and Arthur's analysis were of particular interest:

On Open Enterprise blog.

07 June 2010

Grokking Green IT - and why Open Source Helps

One of the pardoxes at the heart of computing is that for all its power to improve the world, in one respect it is doing the opposite, thanks to its apparently insatiable appetite for electricity. As we are becoming increasingly aware, most electricity produced today has serious negative consequences for the environment, and so the more we use and depend on computers for our daily lives, the more we damage our planet.

On Open Enterprise blog.

22 March 2010

Free Software's Second Era: The Rise and Fall of MySQL

If the first era of free software was about the creation of the fully-rounded GNU/Linux operating system, the second saw a generation of key enterprise applications being written to run on that foundation. Things got moving with the emergence and rapid adoption of the LAMP stack – a term coined in 1998 - a key part of which was (obviously) MySQL (the “M”).

On The H Open.

25 February 2010

Open Source Re-writes the Rules for Mobile

It is well known that an old PC, underpowered for ever-more greedy Windows versions, will generally run GNU/Linux without a problem. This means that hardware can be kept for longer using open source, saving money and sparing the environment.

One consequence of open source's rapid spread in the world of mobiles is that you can now do the same in that market:

Have an old HTC Tilt, Polaris, Niki, or Vogue laying around collecting dust because you can’t stand using Windows Mobile? Well, according to the XDA Developers forum you may be able to get a little more life out of your old device by hacking it to run the latest version of Android.

This was simply not possible with older, proprietary mobile operating systems, because you couldn't hack them to work on different hardware. With Android, that all changes, opening up a whole new world of mobile re-use. As the same post rightly points out:

This story shows me once again how important Android is to the mobile OS space. The idea of taking older phones and using a free, powerful OS to breath new life into them is the promise of open source software like Android.

Indeed, and another instance of where free software really does give you new and useful freedoms.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

14 July 2009

I Fear Microsoft Geeks Bearing Gifts...

Look, those nice people at Microsoft Research are saving science from its data deluge:

Addressing an audience of prominent academic researchers today at the 10th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft External Research Corporate Vice President Tony Hey announced that Microsoft Corp. has developed new software tools with the potential to transform the way much scientific research is done. Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench allows scientists to easily work with large volumes of data, and the specialized new programs Dryad and DryadLINQ facilitate the use of high-performance computing.

Created as part of the company’s ongoing efforts to advance the state of the art in science and help address world-scale challenges, the new tools are designed to make it easier for scientists to ingest and make sense of data, get answers to questions at a rate not previously possible, and ultimately accelerate the pace of achieving critical breakthrough discoveries. Scientists in data-intensive fields such as oceanography, astronomy, environmental science and medical research can now use these tools to manage, integrate and visualize volumes of information. The tools are available as no-cost downloads to academic researchers and scientists at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/tools.

Aw, shucks, isn't that just *so* kind? Doing all this out of the goodness of their hearts? Or maybe not:

Project Trident was developed by Microsoft Research’s External Research Division specifically to support the scientific community. Project Trident is implemented on top of Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation, using the existing functionality of a commercial workflow engine based on Microsoft SQL Server and Windows HPC Server cluster technologies. DryadLINQ is a combination of the Dryad infrastructure for running parallel systems, developed in the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab, and the Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) extensions to the C# programming language.

So basically Project Trident is more Project Trojan Horse - an attempt to get Microsoft HPC Server cluster technologies into the scientific community without anyone noticing. And why might Microsoft be so keen to do that? Maybe something to do with the fact that Windows currently runs just 1% of the top 500 supercomputing sites, while GNU/Linux has over 88% share.

Microsoft's approach here can be summed up as: accept our free dog biscuit, and be lumbered with a dog.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

23 June 2009

GNU/Linux Tops TOP500 Supercomputers Again

The fact that GNU/Linux totally dominates the top 500 supercomputing list is hardly news, but the fact that it has managed to *increase* its market share yet further is.

Here are the results for June 2009:


GNU/Linux 443 (88.6%)
Windows 5 (1.0%)
Unix 22 (4.4%)

and here are the figures for six months ago:


GNU/Linux 439 (87.8%)
Windows 5 (1.0%)
Unix 23 (4.6%)

Notice that plucky little Windows, from that small and hopelessly out-gunned company up in Seattle has bravely managed to increase its share by precisely 0%: an impressive result considering the millions of dollars it has spent trying to break into this market.

Snarky? Moi?

Update: More details about the top 20, and GNU/Linux's dominance here.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

08 June 2009

China's Censorware: What about GNU/Linux?

News is breaking that the Chinese government will insist on censorware being shipped with all PCs:

China plans to require that all personal computers sold in the country as of July 1 be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites, a move that could give government censors unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet.

The government, which has told global PC makers of the requirement but has yet to announce it to the public, says the effort is aimed at protecting young people from "harmful" content. The primary target is pornography, says the main developer of the software, a company that has ties to China's security ministry and military.

There's more background information and discussion about the quaintly-named "Green Dam Youth Escort" here, including a link to the software itself.

This turns out - surprise, surprise, to be a Windows executable, which raises a question: what will the Chinese government do about GNU/Linux? Will they simply ignore that platform, or insist that a GNU/Linux version be developed?

And what happens if one day the use of that software becomes mandatory (it seems voluntary at the moment - but we all know how these things are the thin end of the wedge)?

How will the authorities in China - and, ultimately, elsewhere - cope with the freedom built into GNU/Linux? Will GNU/Linux one day become illegal in those parts of the world benighted enough to mandage online censorship?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

28 May 2009

Why It's Better With Windows...

...because it hasn't got that horrible unfamiliar environment, which has all those bizarre features like:


* freedom

* zero cost

* stability

* security


Much better to stick with the proprietary, expensive, unstable, insecure operating system you know and love....

22 May 2009

Should OQO Have Chosen GNU/Linux?

Remember OQO? It was a really innovative machine, well ahead of its time. Essentially it was a netbook before they existed, but it made one big mistake: it ran Windows XP rather than GNU/Linux (even though it was quite capable of running the latter).

This meant that it needed higher specs than a GNU/Linux machine with similar performance, and a licence from Microsoft (not a cheap one either: this was well before the GNU/Linux netbooks persuaded Microsoft to cut some deals on Windows XP). Both factors pushed up its price. That, in its turn, meant that this neat little machine never really took off - unlike the Asus Eee PCs.

The final result?


"We are sad to report that due to financial constraints, OQO is not able to offer repair and service support at this time. We are deeply sorry that despite our best intentions, we are unable to provide continued support for our faithful customers. Please accept our sincerest apologies"

It would, of course, be overly simplistic to lay to blame for OQO's problems exclusively at the door of Windows XP; but it's an interesting thought experiment to imagine a GNU/Linux-based OQO launched at Asus Eee PC price levels back in 2004. Would it have pre-empted Asus's move and cornered what became today's burgeoning netbook market? Would OQO have become one of the computer giants? We'll never know....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

21 May 2009

GNU/Linux's Secret Weapon: USB Drives

I've always been a huge fan of live CDs/DVDs: effectively, they let you try out distros before you install them - and try out multiple offerings. This is something that Windows can't do, of course. It hadn't really occurred to me that live USBs might be even more powerful, but this story about schools switching from hard disc installation to live USB drives makes sense:

The Kremser Bundesgymnasium uses this system since two years on all computers in the computer science classrooms. Now they decided to switch from local installations to live systems on USB sticks. The advantage: The pupils can carry their system around with themselves. They can use it at school, at home or at any computer they want. About 50% of all pupils uses the system regularly at home. It seems like especially the young pupils using the system quite naturally and have no reservations. Further Rene Schwarzinger explains: “We don’t want to encourage our pupils to create illegal copies just to be able to work at home with the same programs as at school”. Of course the natural solution to avoid this is to use only Free Software at school and pass it down to the pupils.

In autumn they want to introduce netbooks together with the GNU/Linux USB stick to the pupils.

I really like the idea using USB sticks instead of normal installations on hard disks. Live systems are nothing new but I think it makes much sense in this scenario. With the USB sticks the pupils can work with their systems and their data wherever they want without having to convince their parents to install a new operating system at home which could be quite challenging, both technically and philosophically.

As well as the natural advantages this system offers, described above, there is also the bonus that Windows simply can't compete: you can't transfer Windows to USB drives and hand them out to all and sundry. This seems to me to be an hugely important aspect: instead of fighting Windows where it is strong - on the desktop - GNU/Linux should be deployed where it offers unique solutions, and unique benefits.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

23 February 2009

Dell *Does* Deliver (with Netbooks)

There's been a lot of sound and fury flying around about the split between GNU/Linux and Windows XP sales on netbooks, and what that means for the larger desktop sector. Some have used low figures for the former to suggest that GNU/Linux *still* stands no chance with the general public. But maybe what we need are more datapoints - ones like this, perhaps:

While MSI told us a few months back that Wind netbooks running SuSE Linux saw 4x higher return rates than that of XP machines, Dell has had quite the opposite experience with its Inspiron Mini 9 offering with Ubuntu. “A third of our Mini 9 mix is Linux, which is well above the standard attach rate for other systems that offer Linux. We have done a very good job explaining to folks what Linux is,” says Dell’s Jay Pinkert.

Dell attributes part of the Linux growth to competitive pricing on the Ubuntu SKUs. “When you look at the sweet spot for this category it is price sensitivity, and Linux enabled us to offer a lower price entry point,” added Dell senior product manager John New.

The key point here is that the manufacturer must make it clear what the customer is getting for the super-low price. Kudos to Dell that they seem to have managed that.

Oh, and could we please have less whining by other netbook manufacturers about their GNU/Linux sales, since it might well be your *own* fault, not that of free software...