Information freedom for open source users.

Three cheers for Canonical, which is actively working to solve the netbook screen problem.

In a blog posted Tuesday, Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth announced that the next netbook edition of Ubuntu — version 10.10 — will have a global menu.

“In the netbook edition for 10.10, we’re going to have a single menu bar for all applications, in the panel,” Shuttleworth penned. “In the first few iterations of Ubuntu’s netbook-oriented UI, we concentrated on collapsing the window title into the top panel. In 10.10, we’re going to put the menu there.”

He noted this will be a feature of the netbook edition only.

Incidentally, the Netbook Edition of Canonical’s Ubuntu 10.04, which will be officially released tomorrow, features the “industry-leading interface for these smaller screens,” the company claims.

New user interfaces are essential because of the screen constraints of netbooks, Shuttleworth wrote.

“Netbooks are conventionally small-and-wide-screen devices. A common screen format is 1024×600. There’s plenty of horizontal space, but not a lot of vertical space. So we’ve been lead to explore options that really make the most of the vertical space.”

“This is important because the main thing people do with a netbook is surf the web. And most pages will fit horizontally in a netbook screen, but they require quite a lot of vertical scrolling. The more we can optimise the use of vertical space, the more enjoyable it will be to spend time on the web, with your netbook.”

When the next version of Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) ships tomorrow there will be hundreds of open source applications ready for it, Canonical has announced.

LTS versions of the software ship every two years and are often aimed at software developers. A full list of companies supporting the new release is available here. In keeping with the company’s habit of alliteration the new version is known as Lucid Lynx.

In addition to claiming leadership with open source desktops, Canonical’s aim with the new release is to make it more attractive to proprietary solutions. Adobe, IBM, and VMWare are mentioned specifically in the release.

As always, we at ZDNet are all over this. Sam Diaz notes the software will have new features supporting clouds. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is asking if the new software will lure the social crowd.

I’m most interested in ease of installation for the full stack.

I have a dream (a wonderful dream) that users could go to a single page, select the applications they want added to their distro from a menu, then download a custom stick through BitTorrent they might plug in to unbrick their box.

Gaining support for such a solution from small resellers would be swell. It would be great if an Indian entrepreneur can get some used hardware, take orders, load a stick, test the results and deliver it to customers. He’d have the whole world on a plate.

Maybe starting here, starting now, everything’s coming up roses.

Novell’s SUSE Linux has beaten Red Hat to an IBM alliance in the area of software appliances.

The two companies announced today that IBM is delivering a portfolio of “software appliances” under a variety of IBM brands, powered by Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

A software appliance is a quickly-deployed software stack which uses just those elements of the operating system needed for its own operation.

“They come to the customer ready to roll. In the case of IBM and Lotus Foundations, that solution can be up and running in 30 minutes,” said Josh Dorfman, director of alliance marketing for Novell.

Since launching its software appliance business two years ago, Novell has gotten 70,000 registered users, close to 5,000 independent software vendors, and built about 312,000 appliances using SUSE Studio Online, Dorfman said.

“You can use x86 and whatever the application requires. You can boot some of this stuff right off a USB stick. Lotus Foundations is in a flash memory drive. You don’t need the whole OS. You only need what your application needs. This provides customers what they need and not more than that.”

The result is a lower-cost deployment for the software vendor, a lower price for the customer, and relevance for Novell, which is helping build effective vertical market channels.

“There’s also a multiplier effect,” Dorfman said. Black Diamond Software, for instance, is building its Presto software appliance using IBM Rational Software with SUSE Linux. The relationship is profitable all around.

Software vendors can build appliances on new equipment, on used equipment, or onto USB sticks, for installation at a customer site, Dorfman said. “This is quick to value, in that you can get to value in 30 minutes.

“We’ve been recognized for our leadership in the market. We feel like we’re leading.”

Fedora’s selection of Zarafa as an open source groupware component in Fedora 13 is very interesting.

Zafara

The beta of Fedora 13, code named “Goddard,” was made available on April 13. The final version is expected in mid May.

Red Hat sponsors the open source Linux project and has toyed with the idea of integrating email and calendaring capabilities into its Linux stack from time to time. Novell, of course, promotes its own GroupWise but also endorses other open source offerings for its Linux distribution.

Customers and integrators have often turned to leading open source groupware offerings such as SendMail, OpenXChange, Scalix and Zimbra or proprietary solutions to fill their collaboration requirements.

Zarafa appears to be an interesting alternative, provided that its compatibility claims are solid. Zarafa is based in the Netherlands and Hannover, Germany and its Linux solution is said to be 100 percent compatible with Microsoft Exchange environments.

According to the European company, Zarafa integrates with Linux mail servers, and provides a Microsoft Outlook look-and-feel web access capability, as well as reliable sharing with Outlook email via its 100 percent support for MAPI.

Another major differentiator is its support for native mobile phones, the Z-Push open source project and Active sync compatibility. Z-Push, of course, provides real time push e-mail support.

Zarafa then offers support for Windows Mobile based devices, Apple iPhone, Nokia E-series, Palm Treo 650, 680, 700, Sony Ericsson P990, W950, M600 and Android. Android support is offered through a tool known as Touchdown. It also offers native support for Blackberry Enterprise Server.

Here’s what Red Hat had to say about Zarafa in Fedora 13:

“During its development cycle, Fedora 13 also featured for the first time an installable package of Zarafa, a drop-in groupware replacement for Exchange with full featured email, calendaring, and other collaboration tools for use by both Linux and Microsoft clients. A highly usable, comfortable, and familiar Web interface for users, and support for POP/IMAP and other protocols are included, along with tools for integration with existing Linux services.”

*Editor’s note: Reader informed me that it is the Fedora open source project –and not Red Hat — that selects the components for the Linux code. I regret the error.

I also regret misspelling Zarafa in the first version of this story.

Yesterday’s discussion of DOS windows was stimulating to me.

(I think One Trick Pony, released 30 years ago, is one of Paul Simon’s most underrated works. It was written as a movie soundtrack, and when the movie disappeared it was forgotten. Check out the 2004 remaster at Amazon.com.)

Your talkbacks pointed to a key difference between the era when Ubuntu was developed and the era we’re in now, and why Ubuntu has trouble cracking the mainstream desktop while Google feels so confident about Android.

That is the difference between applications and apps.

Ubuntu was built for applications. Open Office is an application. Firefox is an application.

Applications are usually large, general purpose programs that can do many different things. They were built on top of operating systems as tools people could use to have their computers do what they wanted. (Small applications are often called utilities.)

The complexity of an application means you need to learn stuff to get value from it. Its high value also means you may be willing to learn that stuff. Ubuntu is strong in many small language markets where the time bite of customization is made worthwhile by that high value.

An app is different.

An app has limited functionality. It’s designed to do one thing, not as a means to an end but an end in itself.

Pull out your Android or iPhone. Turn it on. Go to your main screen. Many of the standard apps you will see are small bits of what a Web browser can do. Stocks. Maps. YouTube. Weather. Messaging.

On a desktop you have one program to do all that. The browser can be whatever you want it to be.

On a mobile device the app is limited to what its creator wants to let you do.

That is why Android may well prove to be a more powerful, and successful, Linux distro than Ubuntu was, within its target market. (There are many successful Ubuntu server set-ups. Ubuntu really makes a neat server.)

Android is based on apps. You download an app, the icon appears in your tray, you press it once, and it does its thing. It’s a one trick pony. (Hence the image.)

When an app doesn’t load or dies you toss it. There’s no great loss. An application is different. When it doesn’t work you have a big problem. Your device can become a brick. It may take real expertise to get you going.

This is the way people approach technology in 2010. It’s not 1980 anymore. (And the iPhone is more powerful than any PC then on the market.) The hardware is cheap as chips, the software is a utility.

Most people are no more willing to muck around inside their devices than TV viewers were in 1970 to open the back of their sets. ( I worked in TV repair then. Most never even cleaned the cases. Many were surprised to see their yellow sets come back from my workbench white.)

It makes no sense to condemn users as idiots. You follow the market in business. You do what the market wants.

They want apps. Let them eat apps. Linux can give them apps. Android apps. Meego apps. Chromium apps. Apps, apps and more apps.

Not applications. Apps.

Anyone who is 40 or under and raised as a user, rather than an expert, is unlikely to even remember MS-DOS. Let alone command-driven Unix.

The point-and-click interface of Windows 3.0 dropped 20 years ago, and the mass market no longer knows any other way. (The picture is from CNET Crave UK, a story about monitoring power on Windows using DOS commands.)

Users (as opposed to experts) expect that if a point-and-click solution doesn’t exist on their hard drive, or can’t be readily downloaded, that there will be an online service that can diagnose and fix the problem somewhere. That’s how they roll.

Ubuntu has never had the financial scale to provide this. GUIs like KDE and GNOME are great while you’re in them, but way too often you’re not in them, and when that happens you’re lost.

Let me illustrate with the example of a friend who recently bricked a netbook.

The unit originally ran Windows. He downloaded Ubuntu to a stick, but tired of Windows’ insatiable demands for space on his c: drive, which “only” had 8 GBytes.

When loaded from the stick, Ubuntu told him his Broadcom WiFi chip set needed an outside module, which was not open source. It found it, and loaded it, then told him to reboot. When rebooting from the stick did not work immediately (Windows got in the way),  my friend tried again, and learned his hard drive was now completely full.

So in frustration, but confident of success (he listened to me unfortunately), he followed the stick’s instructions and loaded Ubuntu directly, erasing his Windows machine. When he tried to reboot, the WiFi was not found. A check of the Web found a solution, but that solution led directly to command line hell.

Yes, there were solutions. Yes, my friend made mistakes. Maybe you think he’s an idiot. But he’s a mainstream user, and mainstream users demand a more forgiving environment.

True, Linux is strong and getting stronger. But if your desktop users have to boot to the equivalent of an old blinking c:/ prompt, and then face the horrors of creating and running a make file, those who succeed will no longer be users. They will be experts.

Thus systems like Ubuntu will remain education and hobbyist environments. Until you can deliver the applications people need and use (a changing landscape) without leaving the GUI, users who buy your line will just be making bricks.

The great hope of Android and Chromium, of Meego and Symbian, is that they can deliver a user experience just like this. By breaking down functions into apps, which are simply downloaded, run, and work, these Linux distros could finally enter the 1990s and compete with Windows and Apple on equal terms.

A boot to the equivalent of DOS frustrates mainstream users. Fewer-and-fewer can tolerate it. If you can’t avoid it you can’t compete.

Despite all the efforts of Canonical and Ubuntu, desktop Linux remains a non-factor n the market.

Fewer than 1 in 100 desktops in the U.S. run Linux, and most are in the hands of developers, not consumers.

Application developers who want to support Linux are now getting the message and, reluctantly, dropping their support of consumer desktop applications.

On its blog, Songbird developer George Auberger called the decision to drop Linux support from the open source music player “painful.”

Some of you may wonder how a company with deep roots in Open Source could drop Linux and we want you to know it isn’t without heartache.
 We have a small engineering team here at Songbird, and, more than ever, must stay very focused on a narrow set of priorities. Trying to deliver a raft of new features around all media types, and across a growing list of devices, we had to make some tough choices.

Some analysts will be quick to call this the death knell of Linux outside the server, and when it comes to the traditional desktop — keyboard, big TV, mouse on the counter, box under the desk — they may well be right.

But Android phones run Linux. Chromium netbooks will run Linux. Meego phones are Linux. Handheld Linux is going strong, and those applications will filter into other types of devices over time.

It’s not just the dream of desktop Linux that’s ending. It’s the desktop era.

Google’s Android code will assume its rightful place in the Linux kernel — in good time, the company’s top open source guru says.

The Android code was stripped out of the last kernel release, version 2.6.33, after Google reportedly failed to provide necessary changes and subsystem code required by kernel.org.

This led some to claim Google had forked Linux, a charge that was debated in a long thread among developers.

Google’s top open source program manager Chris DiBona said he doesn’t think the Android phone operating system code is any more a fork of Linux than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Nevertheless, Google will be providing more code upstream to Linus Torvalds’ kernel.org going forward, he said.

“I would be comfortable saying that we’ll likely merge into the mainline in the next couple of years,” DiBona said in an e-mail response to this ZDNet blogger’s questions about the controversy. Android is “no more [a fork] than Red Hat Enterprise Linux or any other distribution vendor. All kernels are in some way a fork for some amount of time, the trick is keeping that delta small. We’re trying to do a better job of keeping a small delta.”

Controversy erupted after the decision to remove Android code from the latest Linux kernel.

DiBona, for his part, maintains that the Android code is a lot different than traditional Linux code and more time is needed before the mobile system is integrated into the kernel.

“For the work we do on our non-mobile systems (our production kernels and the rest) we stay pretty close to the mainline nowadays, but android is not the same as some server sitting on the internet, and thinking Linux on mobile is the same thing as Linux on the server or on the desktop is why, until android came along, Linux on mobile phones was nearly totally unsuccessful,” DiBona wrote in a thread defending Google’s position on Linux 2.6.33. “Also, this whole thing stinks of people not liking Forking. Forking is important and not a bad thing at all. From my perspective, forking is why the Linux kernel is as good as it is.”

So when will the Android code make it into the Linux kernel?

In his online debate, DiBona said he expects to see it done by the time Linux 2.8 hits the streets. But in his email to this blogger, he was wary of framing it that way.

“2.8 is a concept that not all kernel developers embrace, so it may never occur,” DiBona wrote. “I would be comfortable saying that we’ll likely merge into the mainline in the next couple of years.”

“A better question might be ‘”Will we continue to work from the mainline for android?” and the answer is an unqualified, “Yes.”

In all the talk about New York financier Paul Singer’s plan to go all Gordon Gecko on Novell, one word has not been mentioned nearly enough.

Microsoft.

Microsoft needs a viable Novell, and Novell’s Linux business was on the verge of becoming viable when Singer’s Elliott Associates swooped in with an offer to break up the company, seize its cash, split off the old NetWare business, and auction off Suse Linux.

I doubt Microsoft wants to actually buy that business. Owning a Linux would be a real complication. Suddenly all those patent cross-licenses that claim Microsoft has patent rights to the software take on a different odor, and Microsoft is forced to go down the SCO road to prove its claims.

Microsoft has been doing well against Linux through bluff. What the Elliott move does is threaten to make Microsoft show its hand.

Even the due diligence process could threaten Microsoft. Singer is going to get a look inside that 2006 agreement.

It’s a prime company asset and, even though it’s protected by a non-disclosure agreement, things get out. Stuff leaks. Knowing exactly what Microsoft claims to own in legal documents would tell open source advocates what must be changed to eliminate the threat.

In the Wall Street ocean Novell has become a minnow and Microsoft remains a whale. (Singer’s a shark, and isn’t it gratifying this big GOP contributor now thinks there are greater opportunities here than the Congo.)

Feel free to advise Microsoft in the comments. For now I’ll leave you with Gecko’s greatest hit, from the IMDB database:

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

Just change Teldar Paper, the fictional firm at the heart of the 1987 movie Wall Street, to Novell. (And here’s a trailer for the sequel.)

I have a confession to make.

I’m a huge Matt Asay fan (right). Always have been.

Matt is the Anthony Bourdain (below) of open source. By that I mean he cooks better than most cooks, writes better than most writers, and he has made himself a big time brand. He’s also hungry for more.

One might compare his move to Canonical, the parent of Ubuntu, with Bourdain’s move to The Travel Channel. It means he now has a palette big enough for his talents.

This should not be taken as a knock against Alfresco. A content management system is an important thing.

But it’s a bit like Food Network. It’s about software, like Food Network is about food. And while Matt Asay can program, while he knows software, he has always shown — especially through his writing at C|Net — that he is about something more than that.

I believe what Matt is about is selling transformation. He’s also about putting things together, and then executing on that understanding.

This is what Canonical, and Ubuntu need. They have a great story to tell. Ubuntu is a big success. But it is a limited one.

Ubuntu sells itself as a desktop, but its money comes from servers. Ubuntu sells itself as universal, but its success comes from localization. Ubuntu is a wonderful dream, but a prosaic reality. It sells itself as the shining city on the hill, when it’s really just a small attractive village.

Matt Asay can change that. His new title is chief operating officer.

“As COO, I am tasked with aligning the company’s strategic goals and operational activities, the optimization of day-to-day operations, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions.”

Matt is going to try and make the trains in London run on time from his base in Utah. A neat trick.

But I think he’ll pull it off. He can give Ubuntu strategic, practical directions, and he has the operational experience to know when goals are being met and when they aren’t.

In other words he now has his own show, which he can take anywhere in the world he wants to go. No reservations.

One of the great mysteries of our time may be how slowly China has taken to open source.

ZDNet Asia blogger Frederic Muller, who has been promoting Linux in China for some time, says it’s about ownership and getting credit.

I believe there is something to that. (The picture is part of a screen capture from the U.S. home page of HTC.)

Chinese businessmen today don’t really bow to Mao or even Adam Smith. They take after Charles Darwin. Despite their intense competition, they are always looking for a way to differentiate themselves, to stand out, to get above the commodity rat race and have an easier time of it.

Open source does not offer that. You make a Linux box, you make the big effort to succeed with it, and your competitors can have the same box on the street the next day. On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog, but in open source it’s hard to tell your breed.

Ties to western companies with proprietary advantages that could assure a steady stream of orders were better business. Whether the advantage was that of a carrier, a technology or a brand mattered little. What counted was an assurance of regular checks with which to pay the bills.

Google is rapidly changing this. We talk about Google in terms of its relations with the government and its search engine, but its Android and Chromium projects have tapped into something different.

That is, Android offers the hope of proprietary advantage. Tweak Android in the right way, offer the right mix of features, and you too can become a brand name. Anyone even know who HTC was before their Android phone came out?

Chromium holds the same promise. Tweak Chromium in the right way, with the right mix of features, and you can become the next HTC. That means climbing up the value chain, becoming a brand, grabbing a bigger piece of your product’s value add.

Ubuntu lacked the muscle needed to push Chinese manufacturers toward this realization. Google has it, thanks to its dominance in search. Google is a brand. Google has now proven it can build Chinese brands.

But the Chinese success with Google is only half the story. Replacing the carriers and Apple with Google won’t bring Chinese manufacturers the heaven they seek.

That comes when you start digging into open source repositories, looking at software from the user’s point of view, becoming their advocate, and delivering what they want, with your name on the front of the device.

Once Chinese manufacturers realize that open source can give them independence, not only from Apple but from Google and every other foreign entity, China will embrace open source.

OpenLogic has signed a deal with Germany’s Credativ to provide third-level support to its open source support customers.

When you call a company for support, that’s first-level support. When they escalate it to a supervisor that’s second-level support. If you really need an expert, that’s third-level support.

OpenLogic is selling this as a push into Europe for its third-party support services, but the view from Monchengladbach (current home of USA Soccer star Michael Bradley) is quite different. (Go Junter.) I got a taste of how different this morning, chatting with Credativ CEO Michael Meskes and his U.S. unit president, Joe Conway.

Credativ’s business model is built around project committers. Both Meskes and Conway are committers to PostgreSQL, for instance. It reminded me of the model Marc Fleury had for JBOSS “back in the day,” which is to say 2004.

It’s all about giving back, said Meskes. “When we find a bug in a distribution and fix it, we will report the bug and patch or in most cases we will simply commit it because we already have someone who’s a committer on that.”

Last week, for instance, Credativ held a coding event for Debian Linux in its German offices. Half the people there were from inside the company, the other half were outsiders.

Credativ only entered the U.S. market last fall, so right now the U.S. office in El Cajon, outside San Diego, is mostly Joe and some people he’s transitioning to full-time support work. It’s the infrastructure of offices in Germany, England and Canada that lets Credativ seem bigger, and enables deals like the one with OpenLogic.

But Meskes has big dreams. He envisions a global enterprise that can deliver top-notch open source support anywhere in the world. Conway took a call from New Zealand last week, and another from the Caribbean.

He returned both. That’s good, because OpenLogic remains a competitor. It’s who can best sell and manage support that will decide the winner between these frenemies.

With the tech press queuing up at its equivalent of Super Bowl Sunday — an Apple launch — it’s a good time to ask again why open source marketing is so bad.

Open source offers great value, it has tons of developers, it has dedicated followers, even political support. But its marketing, and thus its mind share, still lag behind.

In this Ubuntu is Exhibit A. You can sell a server operating system like Red Hat through speeds and feeds, facts and features. This is not true in the mass market.

Ubuntu’s continued failures at cracking the mass market — Canonical’s failures on Ubuntu’s behalf — make one worry if open source has a chance.

Over at TechRepublic, Jack Wallen says they’re at it again. Ubuntu Version 10.4 is going to have something like iTunes in it, he writes. “When this boxed operating system is placed on the same shelf (selling at $19.99 or $29.99) as Apple OSX and Windows 7, people are going to give Ubuntu a look and many people will purchase Ubuntu.”

Sorry, but I’m getting that Wile E. Coyote feeling again. One reason is the price — you don’t know what it is? Another reason is further down in Wallen’s piece, where he talks at length about depending on “the community” for marketing.

This has fail written all over it. Marketing is not just a creative, inherently proprietary process. It requires money and a coherent strategy to work. By its very nature it’s top-down, not bottom-up.

Open source fails this test because, as I’ve written here many times, there is a price lower than free. The best price includes cash to push the product through the channel — identifying prospects, delivering them the message, supporting the retailer with collateral, and front-line support.

All these things take a coherent strategy. Everything you do must sing the same song in the same key. People want to know that if they’re putting their hard-earned money and time into something new, that there’s not a bunch of cats being herded just behind the curtain.

Steve Jobs mastered this art over three decades ago, while I was still in college. I compared him to Springsteen in another blog post because, like The Boss, he’s still working, it’s still the same act, yet it’s better than ever.

Marketing a device or operating system is an exercise with a lot of moving parts to it. There are lots of publics you need to relate to — the press, the developers, the retailers, the buyers. All of them are taking a risk. All must be convinced it’s a risk worth taking, that it’s not really a risk at all.

This requires centralized budgeting, it requires a big, scaled investment up-front. You have to build an army, a bandwagon, everyone moving forward as one. When it works, no matter the industry, it’s a beautiful thing.

It’s something open source has yet to master.

I wonder if Google can do it?

Open source evangelist Jeremy Allison was in New Zealand yesterday, where he issued dire warnings of Microsoft launching a patent attack against open source to win back mobile market share. (Picture from Wikipedia.)

Allison, who famously quit Novell after it announced its patent pact with Microsoft, told a Linux conference in Wellington that Microsoft has to go to court or Windows Mobile is dead. He called a patent fight its “nuclear option.”

Such threats made sense a few years ago, when Microsoft was Mordor and open source the Shire, but Microsoft now has a ton of open source development going on, its opponents are not small companies but Google, and recent patent decisions have shown the GPL to be just as enforceable as a Microsoft EULA.

If there is an open source Frodo out there he’s probably got his Windows PC in a Microsoft backpack.

While making these predictions Allison apparently wore a Samba t-shirt and agreed that Microsoft’s relations with the open source interoperability project have been good.

A second story in the same publication, APCMag (where Microsoft is a big advertiser) gave another reason why Allison’s crystal ball may be cloudy. An analysis of kernel contributions by LWN.net founder Jonathan Corbet showed 75% of the code contributions during 2009 were from corporations, not individuals.

A sizable number of companies helped build the kernel last year, he said, and reverse engineering is required for drivers a lot less often because their owners often share information on them, or there are alternatives available.

So if Linux is going corporate, and Microsoft is benefiting from open source, why would the company drop a legal nuke that could well turn out to be a dud in court?

We should ask Allison that when he gets back.

Never kick a man when he’s down. Unless he’s already down. And there are four of you.

It’s an old soccer proverb, usually pulled out when the press is getting on a manager who is due to be fired anyway. It applies today in Linux Foundation head Jim Zemlin’s victory dance post about Windows Mobile.

(Charles Schultz has been gone nearly 10 years now, but Snoopy still rakes in the simoleons.)

Jim’s right on as far as he goes..

Microsoft’s problem here is that its business model gives everything to Microsoft and very little to carriers or manufacturers. Linux versions offer a better deal. You can brand things your way, arrange them your way on the screen, point people to the resources you want them to use.

Of course if that’s all true why is Apple still in the game? Why is the iPhone, not Linux, the dominant mobile platform?

I would argue it’s because Microsoft has never committed itself the way Apple has, that it was late to the party, that it has compromised itself into this corner, unwilling to risk enough to make a breakthrough.

At this point a Microsoft-branded mobile phone needs to be better than an iPhone, it needs a ton of marketing behind it, it needs its own name and identity, and it needs Microsoft listed as the manufacturer.

Microsoft’s position here is like the President on health care. Windows Mobile is the Joe Lieberman of mobile phones, and the only thing in the middle of the road is a yellow line.

Apple stands for something. You may not like what it stands for — and as a good Linux leader I know Jim doesn’t — but it does stand for something. Apple has made itself the Republican Party of the smart phone world.

My point is not political. It’s not about soccer. It’s not even about cultural touchstones from the 1960s.

My point is about the commitment needed to make a proprietary platform a success. You have to get ahead of people, you have to brand like crazy, you have to take a risk. You can’t be the chicken who laid the breakfast egg. You have to be the pig that gave the bacon.

Microsoft is committed to the desktop. Microsoft still beats Linux on the desktop. It crushes Linux on the desktop. I can hardly find a Linux netbook online anymore, even though Windows is slower than the Arctic temperature rise on a netbook. Watching the Windows hour glass on a netbook is like watching ice melt.

Point is while the mobile Linux victory dance is fun it’s just gotten you through the semi-finals. Linux has strengths, and it still has weaknesses, as a platform and as an ecosystem. That’s a fact worth remembering.

Now dammit Jim, will someone please make me a Linux netbook that boots fast, that runs clean, that has everything I need on it, that’s rugged and doesn’t cost over $300?

Do you want Windows XP, can’t afford it, but don’t want to pirate it?

Then you want Ylmf, a version of Ubuntu Linux with the XP interface tacked-on, and Wine added so you can run Windows programs.

Google translates the name Ylmf as Rain Forest Wind, which may be the most creative piece of today’s story. This is a bit like a gust of wind in a rain forest — ephemeral, strange, but of little real moment.

So what are we to make of Rain Forest Wind?

You can see this as good news. Geek.com says it’s getting harder to run a pirated Windows in China.

You can see this as bad news. Softpedia calls the new software willful infringement of Microsoft’s user interface copyrights.

Or you can see this as no news at all. Linux Insider notes that Ylmf emerged just a few weeks after Phrank Waldorf posted a similar hack. It’s very possible some Cantonese entrepreneur just translated some commands on the software Waldorf himself said he didn’t recommend, calling it a script written as a programming exercise.

What this story tells me is that the entrepreneurial search for a quick buck remains alive on the Chinese mainland.

There were many Americans back in the 1980s anxious to clone a user interface, stick their name on it and try to download a few bucks from the wallets of the unsuspecting. If this “author” can scam just one small manufacturer with an “OEM deal,” he’s going to be a happy bunny.

But this story also illustrates something important about the Internet that gave birth to open source. Things like this are easy to do, they’re easily discovered, and (assuming there is a legal violation here) easy to close down.

If our Chinese friend’s mark has Internet access, and I’m assuming he does, and if he has more than two brain cells to rub together, and I’m assuming he does, then he won’t be taken in by this scam.

If there was one word that could get Open Source readers more passionate than Microsoft in 2009, it was Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is not the most profitable Linux, and it’s not the distro with the biggest penetration of any major market.

But partly due to its commercial arm Canonical, based officially on the Isle of Man but actually located in London, Canonical’s charismatic CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, and to its desktop ambitions, it is the Linux distro you most liked reading about.

I was only dimly aware of this at the start of the year. But I learned.

Ubuntu 9.04 to be available for download Thursday – Here is one place I learned. Paula’s story on the approaching release of Ubuntu 9.04 was the 12th most popular story of the year.

Paula’s story quoted heavily from the Ubuntu Web site. She has a talent for hitting important stories just when they hit the Web. It’s probably one of the reasons y’all like her. I’m a fan, too, as previously noted.

Will Ubuntu remain a minor player — I wrote this soon after returning from Taiwan, where Windows was ubiquitous and Ubuntu barely seen. I was frustrated by the software’s lack of presence in the channel. In a way I felt I’d been had.

You responded to my frustration with 386 talkbacks, a rating of +19, and by turning this into the 5th most popular post of the year. Some were short, some were long. My favorite subject line was probably “Linux is the OS of the future and always will be.”

Ubuntu Karmic Koala launches – I snuck in ahead of Paula on the release of Ubuntu 10, and was rewarded with 174 talkbacks and 54 votes, making this the 3rd most popular post of the year.

One thing that jumped the numbers was that I jumped the gun. I hit publish based on an early version of the release, and when the time came but the software wasn’t there immediately the desk took over.

They issued multiple corrections until the software was posted, mentioned the story in the newsletter, and basically cleaned up after me.

After 5 years at this desk the editors have learned a few lessons too.

One of the least remarked-upon scams of the last decade has been the rise of what I call racket ware.

As in protection racket.

Expert users don’t seem bothered by this. Expert users can avoid the racket. They fix their own registries and change their own oil. To the extent they have contempt for the user on the street, I say they’re in on the racket.

We all know how it works. Windows slows down for no reason. You go online to check it out. You’re told, “try this free, it will fix you up right” and you download it. You load it. It runs, and then it says “you have hundreds of problems here that must be fixed right now. But it’s going to cost you.”

Nice bits you got there. Shame if something happened to them.

The user then faces a choice. Buy the software — buy it now — or lose control of their machine to malware.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

There’s always a new kind of scam coming along. There’s always something that the products you own don’t pick up, but this new piece of junk will. Or will claim to.

Malware locks into Windows like barnacles on a ship. If you’ve ever watched Windows load you know why. It’s messy. There are a ton of .dll files and hot key entries where malware can hide.

I’m not just talking here about viruses. I’m also talking about ad-ware and the messes legitimate programs make in registries and on hard drives, all the software dust bunnies Windows lets developers toss into systems.

The developers of Chrome OS talk a good game about fixing this. Our own Ryan Naraine at Zero Day has been on this like white on rice. Too lazy to read? Watch the video.

Google’s work will be conducted against a solid wall of skepticism. Bruce Schneier has already condemned it, calling it 2+2=3 impossible. Others, more cynical, insist this is all just a plot to impose Google adlware on us.

Maybe. But starting with a clean sheet of paper, and limiting access to the operating system, is not where Windows started. Windows started with the idea of enabling, not preventing. And Google starts with a Linux kernel — all the Linux geeks here love to talk about how secure that is.

So we’ll see. And I’ll have my fingers crossed.

The daily competition between Google and Microsoft becomes ever-more direct this week, with Google hosting a demo of its ChromeOS tomorrow, right after Microsoft’s Professional Development conference.

ChromeOS is Google’s version of Linux for netbooks, much as Android is its Linux for handhelds. It is a version of Bill Gates’ nightmares from 15 years ago, as Netscape was rising, visions that led directly to the case of U.S. vs. Microsoft.

Microsoft got through that crisis unscathed in a corporate sense, but its image was transformed from that of a user-friendly upstart to that of “an implacable force for evil,” as one comedy show said recently, exemplified by the famous Boardwatch cover of Bill Gates as a member of the Borg, the Star Trek bad guys.

The fear, old programming hands will tell you, was that Netscape would turn its Mozilla browser into a full-fledged operating system that, because of its dominance of the browser space, could beat Windows in the market.

Chrome is a lot like that. It is centered on the browser, which abstracts the complexity of Linux from the user. And it’s designed to load fast, a real Achilles Heel for Windows on a netbook. An early version could be available for download next week.

When you’re paying $300 for your machine, you don’t want to wait 10 minutes for the thing to start, and you don’t want to be paying a lot for your software, either. ChromeOS is designed to fix both problems, so I am looking forward to it.

The hope is that the industry which supports ChromeOS will make up in services what it loses in up-front fees. And Google will be able to tie all its online services to ChromeOS, increasing its market share in areas like Mail where it is not yet dominant.

So, Mr. Bill, is resistance futile?

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It’s really just another demonstration of what Linux can do.

It started with a BBC story and quickly became an Internet detective piece.

(If you recognize this picture you’re either a middle-aged Brit or a trivia expert. The lady at the center is the entry point for what follows. She is shown in her mid-1960s heyday hosting the BBC children’s show Blue Peter.)

According to the BBC former children’s presenter  Valerie Singleton (center at right), now running a Web site of discounts for seniors, got together with a small computer store chain recently to offer a PC for older folks who’ve never touched one before.

On start-up users could first see a video from Ms. Singleton, demonstrating the basics, then face six big buttons for applications that are all built-in.

A BBC reviewer called it both patronizing and expensive, but the 80 year-old computing newbie he brought with him appreciated the gentle learning curve. We all know so much, even kids know so much, about computing, that going back to a time when it was all new is hard to conceive. But for some that’s reality.

Then came the detective work. I wanted to verify what the BBC was saying, after all.

• Singleton’s Discount Age makes no mention of the offer on its home page — you have to go inside.
• The man credited by the BBC as the designer makes no mention of the offer on his own blog — he’s drinking in sorrow over turning 42.
• The computer store is a billboard site.
• The help site referenced in the story makes no mention of the offer.
• There is a Linux called Simplicity, which released a new version last month, but it’s apparently no relation to what Singleton is trying to do.  (Simplicity Linux focuses on making old hardware useful.)

Turns out all this is a sales channel. Valerie Singleton, her site, the computer store, the designer, they’re all acting as a channel for Eldy, an Italian outfit which offers a Linux interface based upon Linux Mint, focused on the needs of old newbies.

Which means our detective story has become A Christmas Carol.

Let’s say you have a grandma, or grandpa, here in the U.S., who has never used a computer, claims not to care, but whom you know is just blustering because they don’t know the first thing of what to do.

Check out Eldy. They have a nice slide show on their home page demonstrating the features and benefits of the software.

Then, if you like, download Eldy to whatever hardware you have, load it on an old laptop, and spring it on them for your Christmas visit, sitting by their side as they learn it.

They won’t have Ms. Singleton, but your American grandma likely doesn’t know Valerie Singleton from Adam’s Off Ox.

Once grandma gets the hang of things, they can turn off the Eldy interface and have a solid, basic Linux to work with. They’ll be programming rings around you by Easter.

Who says Santa Claus has to have a long, white beard, or that he only cares about the needs of children? We’re all children — you, me, Valerie Singleton, and your grandma — inside.

Help one this Christmas.