Late yesterday afternoon, we very quietly went live with our first ever Indiegogo fundraising campaign. We did so with no advance warning, although Larry Cafiero…
FOSS Force
FOSS Week in Review
Normally, I’d race back home after a weekend event like LinuxFest Northwest in order to get back to what is commonly, maybe tragically (okay, it’s not really that bad), known as “life as usual.” But my darling daughter wanted to visit her friends in Seattle and Portland on the way home, which added two days to the trip. Getting to spend some time in those cities was a joy — the Seattle Public Library downtown is a gem, and I got to go to Powell’s in Portland for the first time this decade.
But upon returning to the redwoods, I’m so far behind it isn’t funny.
Hence, in continuing to catch up this week, this end-of-the-week wrap-up is going to be brief. You’re welcome.
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of April, 2015. 1. Windows Last Stand by Christine Hall. Published April…
Ho-hum.
That seems to be the response from desktop users and reviewers of Ubuntu’s latest and greatest, 15.04 or Vivid Vervet. The server and cloud crowd are all abuzz, tearing this baby down to see what it can do. But for the desktop folks — not so much. About all you read is that the new desktop is mainly cosmetic changes: that Unity’s color scheme is now purple, which isn’t quite true — to my eyes, there’s some orange in there too — and that a few things have been moved back to where they used to be. Other than that, everyone complains that this vervet is nothing more than lipstick on a unicorn, as Utopic Unicorn was Ubuntu’s last release.
A couple of days ago, I downloaded the newborn Ubuntu primate to evaluate all the fuss. I figured that since I have no practical experience with Ubuntu, I’d bring no expectations and fresh eyes to the release. I did the installation on our Symple PC, which came preinstalled with Ubuntu 14.04, my only other experience with the distro-that-Shuttleworth-built, and has a 2.8 GHz dual core processor and 2 GB RAM. Since many home users install Linux on old metal, I figured these specs would be perfect for seeing how the operating system handles under real world situations.
It was not exactly a clandestine handoff, as you would see in a spy movie. Emily Dunham told me she’d bring it with her to LinuxFest Northwest and, when we met in the hallway at Bellingham Technical College, I asked her, “did you bring it?”
After exchanging pleasantries and quickly catching up, she handed it to me: an OSWALD.
It’s the way of The Internet. What was once a raging firefight between two or more factions, is now a topic dead and forgotten somewhere on Slashdot or within other piles of forgotten Internetia. What was once a topic or cause over which to go to war, now only survives as fodder for The Oatmeal or other hip and funny sites. I’m talking about former the-tempests-in-a-teapot for such things as:
#systemd
#Mir
#it_is_GNU/Linux_you_luddite
Well, you get the idea…
It was one of you who first presented this cartoon to me a number of years ago. Along with the attachment was a simple question: “How does it feel to be famous?”
“I dunno,” I replied. “I’m still waiting for the limo that isn’t coming to pick me up which will not take me to the private Gulfstream that was not sent for me in order to go to a concert I will never see when Adam Levine does not invite me backstage to hang out with his personal groupies that I will never meet.”
You were warned: I wrote on Wednesday that it would be a good idea to get your badges at the Hampton Inn at game night…
FOSS Week in Review
Larry’s hanging out up near the 49th parallel, in Bellingham, Washington, for the LinuxFest Northwest conference. He’ll be filing reports over the weekend and possibly on Monday, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, I get to do the Week in Review — because the boss likes me best.
OSCON’s packing its bags
Speaking of conferences, OSCON’s making a big move. Although the annual conference presented by publisher O’Reilly Media started in my old stomping grounds of Monterey, California in 1999, the event has been held in Portland, Oregon every year since 2003, except for 2009 when it made a one-off stop in San Jose. This year OSCON will once again be held in Portland, on July 20-24, then that’s it, for at least a year.
Late last week, Rachel Roumeliotis reported in a blog on the OSCON website that after this year’s event, the conference will be packing up and making a move. In 2016, OSCON will unfold it’s tents in Austin, Texas, with the conference being held May 16=20.
Why Austin? Cited for reasons are the city’s many software communities, such as All Girl Hack Night and Google Development Group Austin, as well as Texas based tech firms such as Rackspace, Dell, SoftLayer, Continuum, and OpenStack. It doesn’t look like this move will be permanent, however. According to the post: “As with OSCON in Amsterdam…we want to explore these communities and offer those software engineers and architects the OSCON experience.”
Today’s the day that Canonical will release the stable version of Ubuntu 15.04, also known under the human readable name Vivid Vervet.
Like it or not, during the second decade of the 21st century Ubuntu has been the operating system to watch. This, despite the fact that its gathered a large base of followers who loyally despise it. While it’s true that much of this animosity is deserved, just as much is because we love to hate a big shot, and our jealousy over the success of others is made worse when success comes to those who don’t act according to our plans.
This would definitely describe Ubuntu. From it’s exchange of GNOME for Unity to it’s dropping Wayland for Mir, Canonical doesn’t seem to march to anyone’s orders but its own, something that’s been true since day one.
Perhaps we see that with the continuation of the Ubuntu desktop.
By now, we might expect that in the name of profitability, Ubuntu would be making plans to drop its desktop to concentrate solely on servers and the cloud, where money is undoubtedly easier to make. This is the path forged by Red Hat and SUSE, both of which long ago quit developing mainstream desktop editions in favor of “community developed” distros, which are mainly testing grounds for their respective enterprise stacks. Ubuntu doesn’t seem to be interested in going that route — not yet, anyway.
Why? Because the desktop fits neatly into Canonical’s plans.