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FOSS Force

Is the End Of the Windows Era At Hand?

By Christine Hall on July 10, 2012 |

Business

Sometime during the summer of 2006, the main computer at the shop where I worked suffered a motherboard meltdown. Since I’m not much of a hardware person, I took the box to my friends at Dragonware Computers. After diagnosing the problem, owner Michelle looked around the back room, came up with a used motherboard that would get the job done and installed it while I waited. Michelle always took care of me.

In those days the folks at Dragonware were very Windows centric folks. They hosted their own website on a white box running Windows, and they knew every trick in the book about configuring Microsoft products. It wasn’t surprising then that Michelle’s husband, Phillip, had a pre-release install of Windows Vista loaded on a box in the back room. It also was no surprise that he was in love with the soon to be released OS. Microsoft wrote the book on computing as far as he was concerned.

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Red Hat & Ubuntu’s UEFI Solutions Not Good For FOSS

By Christine Hall on July 6, 2012 |

Distros and Hardware

The FOSS community is understandably upset with both Red Hat and Ubuntu for their planned ways of implementing UEFI Secure Boot. Indeed, both companies plans are unacceptable for a variety of reasons. Free software isn’t free if it requires permission from an outside source before it can be loaded onto a new or used computer. This is true even if the permission comes from a well-meaning bureaucratic regulatory agency. It’s doubly true if that permission must come from a self-serving monopoly with an anti-FOSS history, like Microsoft.

In early June, Red Hat came under fire from the FOSS press for their way of getting around Secure Boot. Their solution, which will also be used by Fedora, involves joining Microsoft’s developer program in order to obtain a key to be used to load a “shim” bootloader which will then load GRUB. In a post on Red Hat’s web site explaining the move, Tim Burke, Vice President of Linux Engineering, seemed to be dismissing these critics in a terse two sentence paragraph near the end of the post:

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Megauploads, WikiLeaks and Independence Day

By Christine Hall on July 2, 2012 |

Internet and Politics

Wednesday is the Fourth of July, the day when we in the U.S. celebrate whatever we perceive to be the vision of our founding families. This would seem to be a good time to wonder what the framers of our constitution would think about the way we’ve been applying, or not applying, due process to the Internet.

There are two cases in the news these days that are quite disturbing. For starters, there’s Megaupload.

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Google’s Nexus Tablet; Maddog’s Blog; Patent News & More

By Christine Hall on June 29, 2012 |

Business, Hardware and Patents

Friday FOSS Week in Review

Lot’s of stories of interest in the FOSS world this week. Patent issues, of course, dominated the news. In addition, however, a travel site got outed for a OS bias and a hardware manufacturer discovered the hard way that ignoring open source can be costly.

We’ll start with the patent news…

The Patent Wars Continue

I don’t know what we’re going to do about the patent situation. The sensible thing would be to simply change the law and make software unpatentable, but there are plenty of reasons why that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. Banning patents wouldn’t only effect the trolls, those snakes that don’t make anything but monetize their patent portfolios through the courts. If it did, we could probably get it done tonight.

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Windows vs. Android: Does Desktop Linux Win?

By Christine Hall on June 27, 2012 |

Business and Mobile

Every tech writer on the Internet seems to want to be the one to crack the code and figure out what Microsoft plans to do with Surface. I thought I was one of them until I spent three days trying to write this article. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t really care what Microsoft’s plans are or if they’ll pan-out for them. They bore me. They’re irrelevant now.

I suspect we’re getting ready to see if they’re nimble enough to completely reshape their business model, much like IBM had to do more than a decade ago. Who knows what they’re going to do, now that they obviously recognize the-proprietary-operating-system-as-a-billion-dollar-property model has reached its sunset years?

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Occupy Diaspora

By Christine Hall on June 26, 2012 |

Reviews and Social Networks

The first and last time I visited Diaspora was back in 2010, when the social destination was still in it’s Alpha release. Although it had a reputation, as alpha releases do, of being buggy, I was surprised at how well it worked. It was impressive, a lot like Facebook but also quite different in its design. The problem was, there was nobody there. It was like entering an eighteen story highrise apartment building in which all the tenents had been evicted, hollow and filled with virtual echoes. So I ran back to the noise of the crowd on the virtual party that is Facebook.

I stay on Facebook for the same reason everybody else stays on Facebook – because all my friends are there. We’re not talking about the folks I hang with in Winston-Salem, who I can see anytime I like over at Washington Perks or Krankies. Nah, we’re talking about people that go way back, people I knew back in the 1970s when we were trying to ignore the coming of disco and, worse, Kiss, and pretend that we could keep the spirit of the 60s alive, like forever man. We’re talking about brothers and sisters who were gone forever from my life, who I was sure I’d never see again and who were already planted in the ground or turned into ashes as far as I knew.

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Ubuntu Works On Green Server, Bad Times At Nokia, Good News On the Patent Front

By Christine Hall on June 22, 2012 |

Hardware, Mobile and Patents

Friday FOSS Week in Review

Gawd, but it’s been a long time since our last FOSS Week In Review. Many might be wondering where we’ve been and what we’ve been doing. Well, it’s a long story. I intend to tell you about it in another article in the next week or so. In the meantime, here’s a few things that caught my eye this week…

Ubuntu working with HP on low power server

We learned this week that Canonical is one of the partners on Moonshot, HP’s efforts to develop a new breed of green, low powered servers. The Redstone Server debuted in November as the first Moonshot server, with the newest server chassis, Project Gemini, being announced on Tuesday. This server utilizes a new Intel Atom Centerton x86 processor. According to Sean Michael Kerner writing on ServerWatch, this new server is quite energy efficient:

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Welcome To Ubuntu’s Penguin Bar – How Can I Help You?

By Christine Hall on June 21, 2012 |

Business, Distros and Hardware

Android on tablets and smartphones may have primed the public to be willing to try a flavor other than Windows on their PCs and laptops, but this means next to nothing in the current computing environment. Consumers are going to buy what’s on the shelves at Best Buy, or what jumps off the screen at them on Amazon.com or Dell’s site. None of these venues are going to feature Linux boxes, at least not where you can find them unless you’re specifically looking for them. Why? There’s nothing in it for the retailers or manufacturers; it’s a zero-sum gain situation.

If an OEM started actively marketing Linux, for the most part they’d just be pushing people who are already buyers from one OS to another, nothing more. Except for those of us who’re already part of the Linux installed base, and our numbers are relatively few, they wouldn’t be selling any more machines or making any more money. They would only be creating more logistical problems for themselves.

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Microsoft Tablet Plans ‘Surface’

By Christine Hall on June 19, 2012 |

Hardware and Mobile

It wasn’t much of a surprise Monday when Microsoft announced their new tablet, called Surface, at a press event in Los Angeles. For about a week, media pundits had been speculating that the folks in Redmond would use the occasion to unveil a tablet. What caught many by surprise, however, was that this will be a Microsoft branded device instead of an offering by the likes of Dell or HP.

Surface has all the features the public has come to expect in a tablet, like a 10.6 inch high-def touchscreen, cameras front and rear, and a small form factor. However, it also has some innovations that will help distinguish it from the crowd, most notably a removable keyboard that also serves as a “bookcover.” According to the Associated Press, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Surface is intended to be an entertainment device “without compromising the productivity that PCs are uniquely known for.”

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The Time Is Right For Desktop Linux

By Christine Hall on June 18, 2012 |

Hardware

Nobody seems to want to talk about the desktop anymore. It seems that the trend followers have jumped to the next biggest thing. The glamor now isn’t in desktops and laptops, machines that do all the necessary grunt work, but in gee-whiz tablets and smart phones. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but desktops and laptops aren’t going to go away soon – not as long as there’s work to be done.

I mention this because it seems that many of the folks who write about Linux have all but given up efforts to increase the penguin’s share of the installed base. I find this curious, because I think we’ve never been better positioned to get folks to make the leap to Linux.

Continue readingThe Time Is Right For Desktop Linux
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