Random Rants & Raves

The Government of India (GoI) has been lately revising a Draft Policy on E-Governance – which is all well and good. However, a number of clauses in this are quite concerning – especially the ambiguity and general mix-up between what is called “Open Standards” and “Open Source”.

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A few months back I had written a post on how FOSS might suffer during the period of recession. My point was that FOSS depends on contributions – whether in terms of actual donations of resources mostly on their free time (code, writing, design, etc.)  or in terms of money. However in this time of extreme recession the world over, contributors will probably have much more important things to do.

• If a contributor (developer, technical writer, designer) already has a job, he/she is probably going to work twice as hard to keep that job – maybe working extra time and taking on more responsibilities – reducing time to contribute to FOSS.
• If a contributor is out of a job (whether out of college or been laid off), he/she is going to be busy making ends meet and looking for other employment. In such a case, contributing to FOSS is probably going to be last thing on their mind.

Now, it seems that others are thinking the same – including A Sr. VP of Novell and ex-CTO of the Linux Foundation, Markus Rex. In an interview recently said exactly the same thing.

Q: What are the challenges you see for the business moving forward?

I perceive a challenge always as an opportunity. It gives us the opportunity to change to a better way from the way things have been done in the past.

The other thing is in both Europe and the US the rise of the unemployment rate is something that is rather unprecedented. The open source community to a certain degree is dependant on the willingness of people to contribute. We see no indication that anything might change there, but who knows? People need something to live off.

“Something to live off” is right. We’ve already heard about the stagnation in main stream products like OpenOffice.org. We’ll probably see more such things happen soon – a little sad I would say. A lively discussion on this is going on over at Slashdot on this topic.

SourceForge is considered as one of the largest open source repositories for open source software especially for Linux. Interestingly though, a look at the All Time Top 25 Most Popular open source projects here reveals some startling data. Here’s the list comparing the top 25 all time projects and their availability on Windows and Linux.

This actually shows that open source software is not only available but also more popular on Windows. Note that of the top 25, there were 16 projects available only for Windows and none that were available only for Linux. So do note that considering “open source” does not translate to considering “Linux” since Windows now has a ton of open source projects on it as well. CodePlex is another place where you can find open source projects for Windows exclusively.

While working on a recent project working under Linux, I had to copy a large (>8GB) file over the network from the Linux machine to another one. At the end of a long copy process (even on a gigabit network), I got an error message that there was an error copying the file. Clicking on the “Show more details” showed me this:

How can an error copying a file show details as “Success”? LOL!!! More reasons that open source software on Linux need information architects and copywriters to check their error codes!

On an ongoing project I need to work on a Linux machine to run some tools. Normally, I either use Putty to use a command line interface, WinSCP for copying files to & fro and TightVNC for a remote desktop into the Linux machine.

This is when my friend Anindya recommended using XMing – a X-Server and Launcher for Windows. As you may (or may not) know, the Linux GUI shell runs in a “client-server” mode. You can actually go ahead and use a client to run the components on the server and get the view pulled to your machine running Windows. Now, this has been possible earlier as well by doing things like installing GNOME or KDE for Windows, as well as other solutions. However,  these have been fairly cumbersome to use, screws up your Windows installation and generally painful.

XMing on the other hand,  lets you run these apps directly on the Linux machine with their graphical interface as a proper window on your Windows machine. And installing and using Xming is a breeze as well as a small install only. So, if you need to work with X-Windows from within Windows, then Xming is something you should use.

BTW, XMing works perfectly on Windows 7, including showing thumbnails of all the running apps and allowing you to do Aero Peek within them. Take a look at the screen below.

  
Using XMing to run a gnome-terminal and a revisor session from a Linux machine on Windows 7. Note that the thumbnails show the two apps properly and you can even “peek” between them.

Just saw a story on the heavily biased Slashdot about comments Miguel de Icaza was supposed to have made during his session at Mix which criticized the MS/Novell Pact. This is typical Slashdot/Linux FUD against anything Microsoft. I was there in the discussion and even asked Miguel specifically about these topics. I posted a reply to the article at Slashdot (quoted below since Slashdot has a way of making pro-MS comments vanish):

This is simple, absolute FUD - typical of Slashdot. I was there and Miguel never said any of those things in the _public_ presentation.

But if slashdot, you want to even appear fair you should also report the other stuff he said.

Things like "Linux on the server is boring", "We open source commies...", etc. In fact I asked him specifically about the GPL and its effect on the MS/Novell/SL/Moonlight stack. His comment was that the GPL is quite irrelevant since most Linux vendors are going to be fighting with each other (he gave an example of 'committee for freedom of  Judea' and 'Judea freedom commitee' fighting with each other instead of for the actal freedom).

There were enough comments from him to "prove" that he thinks Linux sucks royally (if you were there and saw his Termnial font change problem comment, you'll know what I mean). But we know he doesn't hate linux. So again, a comment made by him aobut the deal doesn't mean he doesn't agree with it and endorse it. He might have personal opinions which he puts out in a private group - that shouldn't be taken as him hating the deal.

Slashdot - at least report the full facts / comments and try to be fair.

Hopefully, (although I don't think so), Slashdot will correct their story. If any of you were there and want to add to this, please do so.

So sitting over at Mix '08 in Vegas, I've been seeing all the talks on SilverLight 2 and XAML and Ajax. But what really makes me very, very excited is actually two announcements that were made - a little too quietly then I'd have wanted them to be.

The first one was mentioned in the keynote in the part about SilverLight being available on mobile devices. That is of course a great step forward, but what really made me excited is the availability of SilverLight on Nokia Phones! Higher end Nokia phones running the Symbian Series 60 will be able to run SilverLight apps directly. Which means you can create rich web applications in SilverLight that will run on a good 80-90% of the phones out there. Since Symbian and Windows Mobile together will make up at least that much. The next place to go would obviously be the iPhone - especially given the opportunity now that Apple has basically discounted the nearest competitor to it.

The other major SilverLight impact would be the availability of MoonLight - the SilverLight port to Linux. This basically means that SilverLight can become an ubiquitous "standard" for Rich Internet Applications very quickly - and one that runs on an extremely vast variety of hardware and software platforms - truly a Web that can be thrown wide open!