Cost of Open Source

Recently there have been couple of news regarding Open Source, and it forced me into thinking about it.

Bill Gates, at some event said

"there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with." Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.

[full article]

Then there was a report saying

"Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA

[original news]

That's one interesting (up-side-down?!) way of looking at the phenomenon of open source. I never thought of it like that. Coming to think of it, it is absolutely true if you have a traditional businessman hat on your head.

Today one can fulfill all their computing needs - from web browsing to photo editing, from instant messaging to corporate email - by paying absolutely no money. For every computing activity there are free software tools available. One can argue, that if Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds (and countless other geeks like them) hadn't happened and everyone had written programs to make money, then maybe all of them would have earned those $60 billion.... Economics has never been my strong point, but I don't think economies run by so simple additions and subtractions.

Also there is another dimension to this argument. The above argument won't hold good if one looks back 50 years, instead of last 20 years. No one would have believed 50 years ago, that you could make big bucks just by sitting in your garage for few months, punching some keys and creating nothing but a photo editing program. But the advancements in computing showed that you can do that. The computing revolution opened variety of venues and making money by selling software was just one of them. For obvious reasons that became the most attractive route; and to some people (traditional businessmen) it appeared to be the only one.

If one expands the scope of this argument beyond just decades, then I think the phenomenon of open source is creating enormous amount of wealth that we may haven't yet recognized. Also I don't think anyone could have stopped it from happening. It happened because it was the very natural thing to happen with software. And if it was something as bad as mentioned in above quotes, then by laws of evolution it would have died by now. (Taking my own advice above, I shouldn't jump to theory of evolution based only on last 20 years. But we will see.) On the contrary, there are predictions (from reputed sources) that open source is going to thrive and will overtake the proprietary world in near future.

I think Bill Gates is an admirable personality who will be noted as one of the smartest businessmen in the history of world, but I don't think he or M$ has done much good to the history of computing (their recent tactics undoing whatever good they might have done in their early days). There is something about people who fit in M$ culture. Their achievements or visions sound so wrong to me, even before I know they are affiliated to M$. I had read about Ray Ozzie and his startup Groove in Jessica Livingstone's "Founders at work". Almost every chapter of that book inspired me one way or the other, but I didn't get Ray Ozzie's story. His approach to technology - described in sophisticated business lingo - just bounced off me (call it my incompetence, but that's the way it is). I wasn't sure about my gut feeling, until recently I found it echoing in Joel Spolsky's post (Yes, joelonsoftware fame). He describes Ozzie (who is now M$'s Chief Software Architect) as Architecture Astronaut, analysing Hailstorm project, or recent Live Mesh project. The whole article confirmed my views.

Just yesterday I read about this entrepreneur 'Nathan Myhrvold' on slashdot. This guy has come up with an innovative (?) idea of a company with bunch of smart people who just think about wildest ideas they can and patent them. His company doesn't plan to implement or manufacture them, but just accumulate patents and then sell them to other big companies. I was just stunned. The idea is indeed innovative ... a novel way of being as evil as one can imagine (in software industry perspective). Patent system is one of those systems that were conceived in the past for doing good in certain cases. But because these systems aren't revised with time, evil doers use them for doing anything but their original good intent (like the reservation system in India). Patent trolls are exploiting this system to the disadvantage of innovative startups. The above mentioned company is just an "uber patent troll". And yes... the guy is an ex-Microsoft CTO. What's interesting from yesterday's slashdot post is: there are links to two stories on same topic - one from NewYorker which cheers this new idea and another from an IP law firm which analyses the questionable intent. The contrast is noteworthy.

... so much for Microsoft bashing.

Check out an update to Altpublishr I released last week.

Lions for Lambs

I watched this movie last night on DVD. It is a must-see if you are/were an idealist. It is a reflection upon the present US war politics. However, the core theme is far reaching.

The story unfolds on three plots in parallel in a duration of 1 hour - a US military mission in Afghanistan, an interview of the US senator with a long-time reporter happening in Washington DC, and a one-on-one discussion between a student and a professor of political science taking place in some west coast university. All three events address the same problem, but it is shocking to see what one hopes in an ideal world, what actually happens in the real world, and how one justifies it in a bureaucratic(!) world.

Every character in these story lines is deep. But all of them have something in common. They all show how a young one starts a career with the fresh ideas in his/her mind and how the harsh reality dries them away. What disturbs is the seeming inevitability of all this.

I think the disillusionment an idealist suffers along the progress of his career is irrespective of the profession. In political or social contexts however they have grave consequences because they can cost people their lives.

... Do watch it if you like thought provoking stories.

Ubuntu reviewed

My home desktop is giving problems, probably because of some heat issues. So I cannot continue what I was working on over weekend. That gives me time to write about my review of new release of Ubuntu that I installed on my office machine.

Over a year I have been contemplating a shift from Fedora to Ubuntu. At the time of Feisty I took a step in that direction, but then I decided to stick with familiar Fedora little longer. Now I am more comfortable with apt and dpkg, thanks to Maemo. So I was eagerly waiting for Hardy release of Ubuntu.

As you can read everywhere else, Ubuntu 8.04 is impressive. I agree. I will rather write about two specific issues that were relevant to my environment.

For few years I have been managing the storage of my desktops using LVM. It's very handy for me. Unfortunately Ubuntu's Live CD installation method doesn't support logical volumes - something that Redhat/Fedora supported so easily. Probably, ubuntu's target audience would prefer minimum click installs to advanced tweaking of the system. The alternate CD discovers logical volumes, but it's very tricky. I don't remember exactly, but last time I tried it, the installer froze on me until I figured - by jumping to adjascent terminals - that scanning of each volume was taking too long. But this time, I found an easier way of using LVM while still using Live CD. As per the instructions, I installed lvm2 and inserted dm-mod into the Live CD kernel. But the article guides you on how to create logical volumes from raw discs and then install Ubuntu on them. In my case I already had volumes. The instructions given in above link are not sufficient if you want to reuse the volumes that you created with your old linux installation. However it is very simple, if you do it right.

• Make sure you use "sudo" while doing pvscan, vgscan, lvscan. If you don't, these commands will exit silently, giving you the impression that they haven't detected your LVM setup.
  
• If you create new volumes as mentioned in above instructions, you will be able to see them as device nodes under /dev/mapper or /dev//, you can use them as targets of your favorite mkfs. utilities. However your already existing volumes won't show up that easily. If you want to see them, use "vgchange -ay". This will activate all your volume groups.

Apart from this, rest of the installation is a stroll in the park.

Now a days, it's common to have dual monitor setups in workplaces. I have one too (I mean two :). I needed to use some nvidia specific utils to get dual monitors working. If you search for terms like "dual monitors ubuntu nvidia twinview" you will get lots of posts. I found and followed all those too. But all of them told me to do Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace to reload X, to test the changes in my x.org file. That just made the display more and more horrible for me. The resolution dropped to 800x640, nvidia's twinview utility was no where in sight. ... until I rebooted the box. Maybe it was little dumb of me to not have rebooted after I installed nvidia's driver. I don't know which of the changes found in all those posts worked for me, but I think the important thing is to reboot the machine after you install nvidia's drivers.

Monday didn't seem so boring because a brand new system was waiting for me at work today. I set things up to suite my needs - nis, automounter, users, firefox sync, mail setup .... Firefox 3 beta 5 is pleasant. Fast as advertised. But I still couldn't find compatible google extenstions that I am so used to (browser sync, notebook, toolbar). There are compatible versions available for Firefox 3, but for some reason they didn't want to get installed on my beta 5 build.

But a major change I did was with my mail client, which wasn't planned. I don't remember if I had used Evolution any time in the past - not seriously for sure. But today I decided to give it a try, as it's the default mail client that comes with ubuntu. And within few minutes, I was a convert. I have stopped using Thunderbird. The biggest turnoff with thunderbird is its lack of calendar utility. Lightning is far behind alpha quality. That had forced me into using Korganizer on my Fedora 7 desktop. But this time I decided to give a shot to Gnome's PIM tools integrated into Evolution. Evolution has almost all the good things that thunderbird has (most importantly fast search), but in addition it has a functioning calendar program. I haven't tried to sync it with MS Exchange, but I doubt if any non M$ client will reliably work with MS Exchange calendars. I am happy with setting up my events and reminders manually, as long as basic functionality is there. Furthermore it was easy to import my mail folders from Thunderbird to Evolution, thankfully both use a standard "mbox" format to store the mails. Filter rules aren't compatible however, I will have to manually write them.

Fedora 9 is coming out in May. If you try it, let me know. I will skip Fedora this time though.

Flickr uploads from n810

Finally I am done with new version of publishr for Nokia n810. Check out the demo video.



You can install from here. Check out the project page.

Cringely and Paul Graham

I had decided to dedicate a post on the list of my favorite writers/columnists. But today I read two great essays written by two of them in last week. Here are some favorite quotes of mine from the article.

I read Bob Cringely's weekly articles. He is certainly not from my generation. But he is a rare commentator of technology who is venerable and contemporary at the same time. Read his recent column.

This emerging world will be very different in many ways. How many of these kids expect to someday earn a pension? Surveys show that few of them expect Social Security to even survive until their retirement -- if they can ever retire at all. Where we went through a couple career changes they'll go through half a dozen or more in a life that will outlast ours by 20 years. Growing up is changing from becoming what you will be to becoming what you will be for a while, and that has a huge impact on the educational requirements placed on our society.

... His comment on what "education" really is, is just perfect.

Part of any answer is figuring out what education is for. We use it for paying dues, for passing time until a certain level of maturity is reached. We use it for networking and finding mates. We use it for acting goofy at the expense of our parents. And we use it, to some extent, to learn what we need to know to get by.

The question that has so far gone unanswered in this series, then, is how will we learn in the future?

Do read the rest.

I can't say enough about the influence of Paul Graham's essays on me. Sometimes he just gets it. Last week he wrote about his list of heroes. Here are some inspiring quotes:

About Leonardo da Vinci...

His most impressive work, to me, is his drawings. They're clearly made more as a way of studying the world than producing something beautiful. And yet they can hold their own with any work of art ever made. No one else, before or since, was that good when no one was looking.

About P.G. WodeHouse...

But Wodehouse has something neither of them did. He's at ease. .... But Wodehouse didn't give a damn what anyone thought of him. He wrote exactly what he wanted.

About Isaac Newton...

You only get one life. Why not do something huge? The phrase "paradigm shift" is overused now, but Kuhn was onto something. And you know more are out there, separated from us by what will later seem a surprisingly thin wall of laziness and stupidity. If we work like Newton.