Robert Pogson

People still do not realize that The Year of GNU/Linux on the Desktop has already happened. In 2009 almost everyone in the world had seen or heard about GNU/Linux on the desktop. The netbooks made sure of that. Now it is only a matter of time. The smart-thingies also are introducing GNU/Linux to the masses but it is almost superfluous. People see great performance at a good price and recognize it.

I read this article which has the thesis that the smart-thingies may eventually lead to GNU/Linux on the desktop but not otherwise. The truth is GNU/Linux is already on many millions of desktop, notebooks, netbooks, smart-thingies and it is growing much faster than that other OS which has already bored most of the planet to tears. That other OS is losing share and GNU/Linux is taking it. It’s just a matter of time before you will find it everywhere.

Between now and when XP finally dies GNU/Linux will have a decent share of the desktop as well as the other spaces. I don’t know what that share will be. There is no telling the choices people will make. Some will like the price, flexibility, freedom, efficiency, configurabilty of it but they will know they have a choice and make it in the next few years. Soon the retail dam will crack wide open and there will be a flood of products running GNU/Linux on everything in retail. That could happen any time now. It is happening now in emerging markets in Asia, Africa and South America. North America is no longer a leader in IT and will take a year or two more to make the changes needed to give consumers wide access.

One other force that could cause rapid exposure at retail is anti-trust/anti-competition law. GNU/Linux is so successful that there are businesses whose growth is stifled not by product acceptance by consumers but by the retail road-block. There is already such a suit in British Columbia.

This affects more than $100billion in trade annually and could increase the power of China+Taiwan in IT. Taiwan may get access to cheaper labour as well as a larger market. China may make political points as well as getting more and better IT. It is all good.

Taiwan is pretty tight with M$. Mainland China is less so. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I expect China will be a huge market for netbooks and the lower the price, the better so ARM and GNU/Linux should do well. If netbooks drop in price, perhaps smartphones will too. Demand will increase which has the opposite effect but the Chinese can rapidly increase the number of consumers at lower prices. That is, cutting prices can multiply the volume and yield larger profits if the cost is less.

I hope this reduces tension in region, too. Korea, are you listenting?

Now that the matter is decided and we have slept on it… I feel that the supremes pulled a trick on us. On difficult issues before society, they tend to come down 5-4 and give society a decade or more to figure things out before the issues raise their ugly heads again. This time they came out 4-4-1 on the issue of software patents. They dodged the issue even though in the 21st century almost all business methods involve software and a lot of patents have been issued on software. Surely they knew this issue could not wait ten years.

The only way this issue can be settled promptly now is by legislation. M$ and its buddies will be lobbying fiercely to have the patent laws explicitly accept software. Unfortunately for them, all software, except perhaps in a controller where the software cannot possibly have multiple uses, is abstract. That is to say, programmes written in a high-level language do not even deal with bits let alone reality. They deal in variables and data-structures, abstractions in themselves. If the legislators allow software patents, they will have to allow patents on abstractions, something they will not do or cannot. That would throw our thoughts and all freedom under the bus. Indeed, one brief they did not reference was about freedom of speech as software. Patents cannot be allowed to restrict freedom of speech.

So the situation has changed quite a bit. As of yesterday business methods patents are still viable but the the tests of viability have shifted slightly. There is still a rule against abstraction and that cuts out almost all software as I know it. M$ and friends can try to patent “use of a computer controlled by software to do X” but they should not fool anyone. Doing X is still an abstraction. There are no patents on each of the 13245 uses of a screwdriver and there should be no patents on the billions of things we can do with a computer. Doing things may be patentable but doing them with a computer is out.

It is a dirty trick that the supremes were supposed to explain the law to us and yet could not agree amongst themselves what the law it, so they dodged the major issues by stating that previous rules were sufficient to deal with Bilski. Stevens knew that and he told us by criticizing the details of the 3 justices who concurred with Justice Kennedy. They decided Bilski was abstract without explaining how they knew that. There’s the rub. Stevens reasoned that business methods are not patentable because they are not processes.

M$ has a new business model. If they cannot make a good OS, they will make an OS designed to welcome spam. Crazy, eh? To avoid this phenomenon, avoid their OS. Avoid “7 phone” and you will be safer.

On a 1600×900 monitor, I can ignore ads. Would I want them on a tiny cell-phone? No way. Good luck selling those, M$.

TFA:“Toast allows advertisers to push ads onto your Windows Phone 7 smartphone whether you have an associated app running or not. The advertiser sends your phone an ad, your phone receives and displays it, you view it, and presumably you tap ‘n’ buy whatever…”

Is nothing sacred? It’s a phone for pity’s sake! Leave it alone, M$! I don’t get cell-phones, let alone smart ones, but I see no value in mobility in IT if it is used to keep in touch with advertisers. One of the joys of teaching in the North is that, if I want to be alone, the bush is a minute’s walk away. Who would want an ad-machine at such a time?

Tom Goldstein on SCOTUSBlog has written his best estimate of who will write the decision on Bilski:

• Justice Stevens will write it
• the scope of patents will be narrowed, probably restricting software patents
• the court will be unanimous but possibly split on the scope of the ruling…

He bases this on the history and involvement of Stevens on law of patents. He has a history of narrowing patent rights. The court has a history of spreading the written decisions around and Justice Stevens has yet to write one this term. I think this view is consistent with the engagement of Stevens in the oral hearing last year.

That supports my belief that software patents will get the boot but courts often surprise. They could find a way to dodge the issue by deciding only on this Bilski case very narrowly. I hope we will know two days from now. The suspense is killing me. Cleared of software-patents, M$ is powerless to stop GNU/Linux by any legal means. I expect the stock price will drop on the news. If somehow the software-patents are allowed to live but with narrower rules, it depends exactly on what those rules are. M$’s patent portfolio could be shrunk. We shall see.

I think the court will rule that software-patents are a Pandora’s Box that should never have been opened. The mind boggles at the $billions that have been wasted as a result. It will be interesting to see all the repercussions.
Will previous settlements and cross-licensing agreements be rolled back? That would be difficult even if required. Certainly the patent fud from M$ should be toned way down. They must have earned a lot of enmity in the last year or two extorting money from smaller businesses to “settle”. Who will give M$ any respect if software-patents go down in flames?

“He who lives by the sword shall die by it” is an old saying and currently applies to M$. They have threatened the world with software patents and now Salesforce is counter-attacking them with claims of violations of “cloud”-related patents on things like .NET, AppFabric, Error Reporting, SharePoint (maybe an injunction will stop the ads!), and Live Delegated Authentication. The usual way that M$ gets out of these jams is to throw some of their ill-gotten gains from the monopoly at the suitor and call it cross-licensing.

I think that is getting tired. Everyone has seen M$ wiggle out of legal problems, dragging them on until they are irrelevant. Let us hope the supremes rule on Bilski on Monday so M$ can go to the dog-house. IT has no use for patent-trolls.

Salesforce claims it has been working on the cloud since 1999 and M$ came to the party late and used the technology without permission and in some cases after reading the patent claims of Salesforce.

Whatever the truth, we see once again what a foolish waste of time software patents are. You cannot patent logic and mathematics which is all digital computer programmes are. We cannot let M$ have it both ways: using software patents as a weapon while ignoring them because it can afford to fight prolonged legal battles. It is time for software patents to go to the waste basket and all the billions corporations have wasted on them, likewise. Shareholders should punish the fools who made the decisions to squander billions on this illusory pot of gold.

The wonderful ithingy we here about has a major bug. If you hold it in a fairly natural way the 3G signal strength drops greatly. A poorly designed antenna is the problem. Holding the phone loosely seems not to show the problem but if you were stressed in an emergency or while parachuting, you might squeeze it a bit, I figure.

So, while those guys were running about with the prototypes in disguise and not squeezing them they missed a fine testing opportunity. Too bad they sent the cops after Gizmodo or they might have had real-world testing.

Openness works, even in tech.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes gets somethings right and a few things wrong in “They exist now only in the minds of fanbois …”

• There’s a War Between M$ and Apple – He says there’s not but M$ is at war with everyone, even its partners, by taking the lion’s share of profits in IT. M$ and Apple have sued each other and made things not work for users of the other OS. Remember the blue “e” on MacOS? Where’s Office 2010 for MacOS?Where’s the ribbon?
• The Year of the Linux Desktop is Coming – He says it’s not and he is right. It is already here becoming widely accepted in 2009 thanks to Vista, netbooks and ARM.
• Open Source = Secure Code – He says everyone has bugs and he’s right but open source means they get fixed faster and you can check that your bug is fixed before you use the code. That is security. He also neglects the fact that if your code is public, you will make a better effort to make it right. If your work is hidden in a binary, it is easier to shrug off lots of details because no one will know about it.

Not a bad effort as blogs go, but I had to clear up a few things.

One of the side-effects of waiting breathlessly for Bilski at SCOTUS is seeing other things that the supremes decide.

A recent opinion slaps down rulings made by lower courts over decades that US securities fraud laws applied globally. There is so much assumption in the culture of the USA that the world should do things the way they do them: film, politics, copyright, software patents…

Here’s hoping the decision on Bilski comes out Monday with similar clarity and kills the evil of software patents.

Intel is one half of Wintel but they are not stupid. Everyone can see the writing on the wall:

• small things work
• that other OS is getting serious competition from GNU/Linux

The result is that Intel is investing in GNU/Linux, porting Android 2.2 to x86. This will re-open the door to netbooks for GNU/Linux and Java, two of M$’s nemeses. This is also a good plan for Intel to keep Atom vigorous by making the same software available for the ARMed netbook available on Atomized netbooks.

It’s all good. There is choice.

Read the comments on the Reg.

M$ is down to pre-”7″ stock values. So much for “7″ saving the company or Ballmer.

“Dell estimated the percentage of commercial PC users who have updated to Microsoft’s Windows 7 as still in single digits.”

That says it all. The most successful version of that other OS ever, is not being adopted by business who have no need of feature bloat and eye-candy that consumers lap up having few choices in retail.

If Dell hangs its hopes on a revival of the Wintel monopoly soon amongst customers who have choices like GNU/Linux and MacOS, they need to develop Plan B immediately. Dell’s competitors will have a shot at the same growth, if it ever comes. Now, Dell needs something to differentiate itself from its competitors like promotion of GNU/Linux as the best and most efficient platform for IT in business. Business is about making money not providing money to M$ and Dell. Business is looking for more cost-effective IT and if Dell does not give it to them, someone else may, perhaps a competitor.

More than 50% of business still used XP and they will continue to use it as long as possible. That could be years yet and GNU/Linux is already being chosen by many. The longer business looks a the cost of replacing all their IT infrastructure to go to “7″, the less likely that will be to happen. They can get like-new performance from most older equipment by re-purposing it as thin clients and only upgrading the servers and network. For all but the smallest of businesses this is obviously the best approach. Do the maths:

• save $50 on each hard drive not bought,
• save $50 on gigabytes of RAM not needed,
• save $100 or more on licenses for software,
• save $hundreds on lower cost of maintenance,

and multiply by thousands of seats. Even if they go to “7″ on terminal servers, M$ still charges per-seat license fees, eating into all that saving. Dell will lose revenue in the long term by the migration to thin clients but in the short-term, the supplier who gives the customers lower costs will win. Dell needs a larger share of that lowered cost of IT to maintain profitability. They cannot get it by sticking with M$.

Speed is probably the most important thing in IT for me. I want what I want when I want it. Newer hardware helps. More efficient algorithms help. Google has made some developments that will help the speed of web browsing, a bit here and a bit there.

They have done some work on the TCP stack, HTTP headers, their browser, of course, and DNS. What has M$ done to help you get things done faster lately? Nothing, except to slow your PC so you rush out and buy another with newer hardware and a new licence fee for them.

Way to go, Google!

Provoked by one of the resident trolls I was inspired to fix another PC, one brought in by a relative of one of the teachers who is pretty smart and uses GNU/Linux on his new PC in class.

The machine arrived in a garbage bag. I have seen that in inclement weather but the day is fine. It turned out to be one of the most dusty machines inside and out that I have ever seen. I recognized the dust. It comes from the gravel/dirt roads here. It is clay, essentially, and comes in through open windows in the hot weather and tracks in on boots any time. I wiped the exterior with a damp paper towel and opened it up to find much the same inside. I borrowed a cleaner’s vacuum and went to work.

The machine is a middle to low end machine from a few years back (2001?): AMD Athlon XP 1800 (1.5gHz). 256 MB DDR266, 40 MB Hard Drive. I was suprised to find XP Pro SP1 on it (much like what was on PCs at school when I arrived in November). There were updates on it but no SP2 or 3. Perhaps dial-up and updates do not work well together. I do not have much experience with dial-up since my 486 died of a collision with a runway.

XP did seem to work but I stayed in “Safe Mode” just a bit to poke around.

My Debian Netinst CD was badly scratched (got stuck under a PC I moved…) but I lucked out and the installation went smoothly. There was a dial-up modem so I installed KPPP and made it work by identifying the modem with a link to /dev/modem (ln -s /dev/ttyS1 /dev/modem). I found the serial device by dmesg|grep tty. It is a 3Com 5610 and it works perfectly with Linux.

I installed a raft of games, vlc, xawtv, sound-juicer, childsplay, gcompris, ktouch and google-chrome as well as the default stuff for an XFCE4 desktop. A webcam from Logitech worked and I left a self-portrait on the desktop… I expect the owner will change that quickly.

It’s now a pretty useful machine on or off the web and it should not have so many problems as people have with XP.

I kind of like this machine. Everything worked with GNU/Linux: YouTube, webcam, dial-up modem, mouse (not with XP, though, for quite a while). Who cares if it’s older. It works, quite well:

boot 60s to login screen
login 12s to usable desktop

Folks argue incessantly about whether it is less expensive to use GNU/Linux or that other OS on the desktop. I have found irrefutable proof that GNU/Linux costs less: RedHat, one of the leaders in making money from GNU/Linux does not believe it is likely to be a money-maker for them… Think of it. If RedHat, which takes in nearly $1billion annually on GNU/Linux subscriptions, etc. thinks customers have no reason to pay for GNU/Linux on the desktop, it must be because users of GNU/Linux can help themselves and get it at a very low cost. That makes sense because you can still get free and legal downloads.

Why does RedHat still provide tools for GNU/Linux on the desktop in individual installations or huge roll-outs? Their customers demand it. If RedHat did not provide the service, then someone else would and might siphon off the lucrative server/services/training business… Ah! There’s the thing. GNU/Linux on the desktop is not a huge money maker for them but it does work for the customer and RedHat gets money for consultation/setup.

End-users decide. If GNU/Linux costs so little to have and to use that a successful entrepreneur cannot make money from it by licences/service subscriptions, the end-user is getting the best deal possible. The end-user gets the benefit, not some global corporation. Priceless.

“Whitehurst says Red Hat will continue to develop and support its desktop Linux offering but the company has no plans to make a major desktop Linux push. The reason: Whitehurst sees plenty of demand for desktop Linux but he has no idea why customers would actually pay for desktop Linux.”