Publishing Yet Another Linux Book

December 25th, 2006 • 4 comments General

A couple of years ago, I used to give various IT courses. I lectured PHP, Apache, Perl and MySQL, but my favorite courses have always been the Linux courses.

Although I’m wasn’t (and unfortunately still not) certified myself, I’ve lectured LPI and RHCE; once each. The main reason I did these two only once was because I never liked prepared materials, I never liked sticking to books that assume all students are equal.

Sometime back in 2004, I was given a chance to conduct a five-day course with NOSSTIA—an exceptional effort to bring brilliant ex-patriots back to their homeland. My course was the L in a full-fledged LAMP training.

The conditions were simple: Do your own thing, we need people to learn. And the best part of it was that I got to do whatever the hell I wanted, the course had to be written from scratch. So I ended up writing a small companion book: An Introduction to Linux.

Now this guy, the one who organized the whole thing, is Free Software/Red Bull junkie. Our discussion on whether I should publish the book or not only lasted a few minutes. The answer was obviously: “By all means!”

So without further due, here’s a draft of my book. It’s 90 pages, and little raw at the moment, mostly because I’m not an OOo Writer expert. But I’m going to start converting it to a wiki, and I’m hoping that those of you who like it can pass it around, and tell me what you think.

I have to apologize in advance for being busy during January. I’ll be trying to pass the first semester’s exams. Wish me luck.

A Fork in The Linux Community

December 20th, 2006 • 2 comments General

We’ll see Linux stick with the GPLv2, leaving GPLv3 loitering awkwardly on the fringes of open-source.

We’ll see the crack between free software idealist and commercial open-source pragmatists grow into a true gap.

Steven J. has a few interesting speculations on the future of Linux. He believes that “there are growing signs that the Linux community itself is forking.”

I feel uneasy about the growing number of heated, sometimes offensive, discussions about non-sense. Yes, there’s an ongoing separation between groups, and I’m not understanding it. Firefox vs. IceWeasel, Debian vs. Ubuntu, FSF vs. Linus, Novell/Microsoft vs. The World; that’s not going to do us any good.

But believe it or not, I’m pretty sure that both Linux and GNU will survive and do just fine. Market pressure doesn’t work on independent developers. It never has, if you put unemployment aside.

The majority of “prophecy” articles I find about Linux only touch on commercial Linux distributions. They usually mean RedHat, SuSE and now Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux. But let’s not forget that Linux was driven by a need, rather than by profitable businesses. A need for a stable, very cheap, and (ironically) well-supported UNIX.

Do you think community competition could hurt Linux’s growth or adoption?

ExcliberPC — Or How To Handle Customers

December 17th, 2006 • General

Thanks for giving us a chance to service you and bringing up your concerns with us! We’re always here to help!

Had I not received the above email from ExcaliberPC, I would’ve thought it’s just bullshit marketing speech, and that whoever sent this is just trying to win me over. To make matters worse, it was followed by “Thx!!”; can you believe it?! Who unprofessional “Thx” is?

If you were in my shoes, that unprofessional attitude is exactly what you’re looking for. You don’t want canned, filled-with-nonsense replies. You don’t want a false smile and a “Please come again” when you’re absolutely sure you won’t. And you certainly don’t want people 20-line signatures telling you what you can and cannot do with an email.

Allen and Steven from ExcaliberPC have followed up every step of my order. It was much less than a million bucks, and I personally don’t think it was worth their time. They usually responded within a couple of hours, and they wrote the responses themselves.

Anyway, I just wanted to recommend these absolutely fantastic guys. I apologize for being so late to post, but I was in bed for the past few days, and I rediscovered that I hate flu.

Support Windows ISVs Day

December 7th, 2006 • General

Jeff declared December 1st, Support Your Favorite Small Software Vendor Day.

He’s been an avid (dare I say expert) Windows users. I can tell by the software he writes, and his love for Visual Studio. What I find a little disturbing is that he is not a minority in the Windows community, but that goes unnoticed. There are thousands upon thousands of experienced people using Windows, and they do so with passion.

At the risk of repetition, here’s the list of stereotypes being casted on Windows users:

• Windows users like going with the market leader, the “safe” choice.
• Windows users don’t want to spend more for quality, so they buy crapware knockoffs of your idea instead.
• Windows users never upgrade.
• Windows users only use three apps: Word, IE, and iTunes.
• Windows users are afraid to install new software due to the massive amount of craplets and malware saturating the market

I think this list can be debunked by one argument: most people are just lazy. Not in a bad way though; I myself fall exactly under that category.

Windows has 80-90% market share, and a big chunk of it are customers who use whatever is pre-installed. These are people with money, and because they’re either new or still learning, they are very willing to put down the cash to get the best software. They’re not going with the “safe” choice, they’re going with the only choice they know about.

It also isn’t true that Windows users never upgrade, it’s just that many find it either difficult, or simply annoying. Windows hasn’t been particularly safe to upgrade. The slew of crappy shareware, combined with “press Next sixteen times” culture of installation and upgrade, has caused many users to ignore the whole procedure. This took away freelance developers’ appreciation, and left them with Windows’ reputation of being incompetence.

So what to do now?

It’s difficult for me not to mention switching to Linux here. But right now, I’d recommend Jeff’s idea of honoring the “little” unnoticed gems. You probably use them everyday and don’t know about it.

Two Opposed Views on Linux

December 6th, 2006 • General

I was going to write a lengthy response to this article—in which the author seems to think that Linux is in some sort of a war and that it has lost it—but I decided not to bore you with my zealousness and give you the knee-jerk reaction.

Author’s opinion strikes as plain odd. At first I thought the article was another humorous piece on how Linux is gaining grounds, but then it seemed that it was serious, and that the author really believes in the failure of Linux.

The arguments boil down to:

• WYSIWYG is superior to CLI, UNIX sucks, Windows rules.
• Linux has a UI war, and it’s lost it because the UI is a rip off.
• RedHat, Novell and Oracle are going to be bankrupt.
• ReactOS has a strong chance of replacing Linux.
• Eventually, everyone will switch from (the very UNIXy) Linux, to BSD, Hurd and Plan9. (Ironic, isn’t it?).

I’m assuming that when the author says Linux, he’s referring to Linux distributions, i.e. the collection of software based on Linux kernel, GNU tools and a desktop. In that case he might be right, we can’t argue that Linux is superior to, say, Mac OS X. But then again, that’s a subjective call.

Now I’m sure you know that Linux is NOT Windows, and it hasn’t been trying to copy it, not to the extent that many seem to assume. Most of the suggestions about Linux’s decline are either referring to revenues, or a certain company’s stocks. And the GPL’ization of huge projects like Java certainly has something to say about Free software.

What I think is, Linux cannot be easily defeated, mainly because it is backed by a “viral” license. Worst case scenario is cutting commercial support, and that certainly wouldn’t kill Linux. FreeBSD has survived major bumps, I think Linux can too.